skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
a no-hierarchy version of the Windows Start Menu

Nonsense. LaunchPad does in fact have hierarchy in the form of user-created folders and pagination. Even if it didn't, comparisons to the Start Menu are odious. The main reason the Start Menu sucks is not "too many programs", but that it relies on notoriously unusable submenus[1]. And then it insists on nesting them. And then most of the items in the Start Menu are not actually applications. Even Windows 95 shipped with at least two ways of avoiding the use of the Start Menu as a launcher, and subsequent versions added at least two more. Search works well, but search has its own problems. For instance, you can't search with a mouse.

[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering_law

Windows Vista and 7 have the ability to search the start menu because of it.

Mac OS X likewise has the ability to launch applications from the system wide search. (As does iOS, for that matter.) Why does this somehow stop counting if they add an additional feature?

I loathe default-full-screen programs. I like to have the option available

That's what this is: an option. There is no indication that any application now launches full screen by default, or any reason that couldn't do that now if they chose to.

It also basically torpedoes a lot of Apple dogma from previous years with no true ability to fully maximize program windows.

Not really. Full screen mode still does not replicate "maximize" behavior. Even on Windows the two are distinct. Microsoft Word, for example, has a separate full screen mode which behaves differently than simply maximizing the window.
I've been using a Macbook Air 2nd gen 1.86Ghz/2G/128GB SSD for 2+ years as main station along with a 23", then 27" screen. It has not slowed down my productivity at all but instead increased it! Being so portable let's you work anywhere, I carry it everywhere, even on the eliptical walker it's great to catch up on twitter feed or watch a video!

With a higher rez screen, greater battery, more memory & larger permanent storage, I can only imagine the new ones are even more suited to become your main development machine (and you won't be going back once you tasted it ;)
God Dammit! (Sorry...but) I cannot believe that a business such as this is not able to fund itself! I own and operate a highly successful, bootstrapped, Web based business, and when I see funding that comes in in the millions I'm sometimes shaking my head.

Really.. two hundred million? If you haven't made it now, I can't imagine you'll make it in the future unless you drastically change your business model. drastically!

My position is if you can't monetize your business soon after coming out of the gates, you are just living a dream.

It appears there is absolutely no real concentrated approach to monetizing Twitter's business model. This seems analogous to AT&T providing free SMS's to all customers, and then trying to figure out a way to monetize SMS's.

Thank God I don't have to even think about funding, much less multiple rounds.
I've used F# at work.

It does have a sort-of REPL, you don't have to put one line functions inside a dummy class, and the async monad and queues are pretty handy.

It doesn't benefit from adding yet another set of collection types to the .NET API (which already has two semi-competing sets) but that is unfortunately beneficial, partly due to the next point.

The balkanisation between the .NET typesystem (class at a time, overloading ok) and the ML typesystem (sequential and no overloading) is a constant source of irritation. How to make a short name alias to the System.Console.WriteLine variadic function?

It's REPL unfortunately doesn't tie into the otherwise impressive VS intellisense and is a pain to attach the debugger to.

It hasn't proper closures (you cannot mutate variables you close over).

It's not a coherent platform, but a mishmash.
"Guys" is gender-neutral, "guy" rarely.
The values prescribed to things by economists and environmentalists rarely align.

From my understanding (admittedly, limited) both ocean trawling and aquaculture are both unsustainable.

Over-fishing isn't sustainable, but that's what we're doing at the moment. Aquaculture uses 'earth' resources to farm fish, which includes fossil fuel expenditure for feeding and transport (based on current energy networks). It also produces waste products in the form of environmentally deleterious nitrogen-rich effluent which is out-flowed into the wider ecosystem.

An economist might label that a better proposition. Generally less depleting of a finite resource... more 'taming' a resource and using other resources to enable that.

An environmentalist would label both destructive (and while they're at it, the farming of methane emitting grain-fed animals for food is equally destructive compared to just eating the grains instead).

Me personally? I'm going to continue to eat meat. Irrationally (from an economists perspective) I don't think I can enjoy eating ocean caught fish anymore though... it seems like we're really approaching the limits on harvesting that resource more than any other today.

Farm-raised fish seem somewhat on the same scale of "bad for the environment" as eating steak (so I'm 'selfishly' ok with that).

The fact that these fish don't have Omega-3 oils or are described as 'the tofu of fish'? ...makes me think we should probably just eat tofu instead.
that pipes to python can grow to became a good visual IDE for programming
Lets say your boss gives you a list of ten name/email address pairs every morning at 10:00, and you have to give him a list of the three most professional candidates, in order, by 11 because your competition will hire them or something.

What script/Google search query/yahoo pipe/metrics could you use to automate this task?
Jay-z is a man who made his money ruining the lives of ... millions by being a horrific influence.

...?
IPhone Jailbreak Tool Sets Stage for Mobile Malware and Rootkits
I hadn't heard of this, but it looks really interesting. Do you have any experiences with it you can share?
>> Ubercab operates much like a cab company but does not have a taxi license.

^ Why is the taxi license process so difficult to go through? Why does it take 10 years or so?

>> Limos in U.S. cities usually have to prebook an hour in advance, by law, while only licensed taxis can pick someone up right away but Ubercab picks people up right away (again without a taxi license).

^What is this but protecting special interests? Viva creative destruction.
Is it fair to say a mutex is just a special case of a semaphore that only counts to 1?
Not to mention Node v0.3.0:

http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/2...
Python Gazette
Well, yes, this was obvious from the very beginning. However, all these pieces are nothing more than a glimpse into what was non-encrypted, semi-private data that probably has no monetary value. In any case, all of it pales by comparison to what people willingly give to Google by using GMail. That would be one's entire digital (personal) and financial life, an no one has a clear understanding of how that data is analyzed and used now, or in the years to come...
That was about ten years ago. For a while there, we did pretty good: hovering stable at around 10 employees, mostly custom web projects for advertising agencies. One day we took on a very nice-sounding project for a local manufacturing company. One company-year flowed into the project, we did almost nothing else. At the end, the project was canceled and they wanted their money back because they were on the brink of bankruptcy (a move that despite our contract was OK'ed by German courts).

It all went downhill from there, but I still hung on for a few months. Didn't want to fire anyone. I took out crazy loans to keep this lead balloon afloat, but there was really no turning around. And it pretty much ruined my life.

It's a cautionary tale, really. I should have allowed this company to fail at a time when I still could have walked away without some serious damage. The company was done. It had no product, burned-out employees and no prospects. I wouldn't make that mistake again today. The lesson here being that desperation is never a good sign. When you're doing a startup, what you want is hunger and euphoria. Not desperation.
I'd say that this is still meaningless without context. Who is your boss? Who are you? Who are the potential hires for? Where did the names come from in the first place?

If I'm reading your reply correctly, you're actually looking to write an algorithm for an automated "find-a-hacker" engine?

In which case, I'd say the first bar to surpass is from another comment here - the guy who said his website is pretty crummy but it comes up first when you google "PHP programmer edinburgh"
This type of questions, don't bring anything up, those who want to become game programmers, will become game programmers by they own initiative. Beginning with the language they would find at first step better for them, through the experience of time, those spirits would hand out and discover, what languages and technologies match better with the project they are currently working.
Today I could say C/C++ are my best conclutions, thanks to pointers, memory access adresses, offsets.
But who knows tomorrow?
Without putting my linguist hat on (in the middle of a hack day) my gut feeling is the 'newspaper'ness of the title. "Entity Verbs Noun" is fine if it's an impartial style report, but "Entity Verbs My Noun" is only good if it is a continuous verb.

"TFL Kill All Hopes Of Timely Service", for example, would be OK.
Oh no I understood the point of the link. Taxi operations in SF really is mob controlled. The thing is, UberCab was never meant to be a replacement to taxi cabs, it's a way to provide people with expedited black car services.

Ubercab operates much like a cab company but does not have a taxi license.

This is incorrect. They operate much like a sedan limousine company.

Limos in U.S. cities usually have to prebook an hour in advance, by law, while only licensed taxis can pick someone up right away but Ubercab picks people up right away (again without a taxi license).

This is also incorrect, the pertinent statues in taxi and limo commission law is this:
...assuring that affiliated vehicles and the drivers of
such vehicles provide transportation only through pre-
arrangement made with the base station and do not accept
passengers by street hail or other than by dispatch by the base
station

Using the phone app is by definition a pre-arrangement. The black cars are not picking random people off the streets, they're picking a preset customer in prearranged fashion.

but rather that it is impossible for it to be licensed as a taxi

Why should they? They are not a taxi company. Not only that, but they don't actually own the cars either, it's an affiliate program basically. They are a layer for independent private chauffeur services and limousine services companies to have ability to make their prearrangements on the phone.
You can't base world travel on the Atacama desert. I mean, I'd love to go there, but it's one of the most hostile places for life on the planet. I'm all for avoiding people for a break, but there are places with a bit more life and colour without being party town.

No disrespect meant to your preferred lifestyle. Just saying that when you do next pop out you might try somewhere less hostile like the Galapagos or Easter Islands. Kind of a moot point, as the next place more hostile than the Atacama is probably the Moon.
"I sell ice in the winter, I sell fire in hell. I'm a hustler baby, I sell water to a well."
The difference is that instead of a yellow car, you get a black car. What is a limo service but a luxury version of a taxi service? The distinguishing factor is that one can pickup passengers on the street and by hail and the other is only made by prearrangement and is considered a PRIVATE luxury service.
Who provided the agreements this person signed, and structured the company for you? You have been in existence 3 years, you say, and going by the numbers you mention the company is capitalized to the tune of about $2 million. I find it hard to believe you don't already have an attorney, and that said attorney would not have given you a professional referral if some unforeseen circumstance made it impossible to advise you. Or that you have run the company for this long, and had serious problems over the last 2 months, without being aware that this is the sort of stuff lawyers do for a living.

It can't be a cash question, you could get an hour of excellent legal advice for $1000 even in a big city.

Also (and this applies to all legal 411 queries on HN), where is the firm incorporated/located? Rules vary across different US states, and there are lots of HN folk who are not in the USA at all. I'm only guessing you're American when I mention 4 numbers, for all I know you could be in Uzbekistan. Even if I was a lawyer, how would I know which rules govern your case, or whether I was close enough to offer assistance?

And why don't you have a throwaway email address in case someone can give you an exact answer or refer you to a report of an identical case? Depending on the nature of your business, it might even be appropriate to involve the police based on the story you tell.

the "right" thing to do is to suit them, but that is not our DNA, and would jeopardize the company we have now

I'm having trouble taking this seriously.
A mutex is more than that. That's the entire point of the article. A mutex implementation needs to deal with issues like priority inversion, where higher-priority threads continually interrupt a lower-priority thread holding a naively-implemented mutex, starving any other thread (even a high-priority thread) that needs the resource it protects.
> UberCab is pre-arranging a limo/professional chauffeur/personal driver service with valid license and insurance policies required for private transport services to pickup a customer at a select location.

The limo/chauffeur/driver has a valid license to operate a limo service, not a cab service. They are operating as a cab service when dispatched by UberCab, and so if they do not have a cab license, it would seem that they are operating outside the law.
No, she's not an evil genius, but let me spin you a yarn.

She's a homeless woman, so she was perhaps raised by a demanding and misogynistic father figure, from whom she learned to act helpless. Then she figured out in high school that acting dumb makes boys like her. She sort of fell into the identity because it was easy -- her family, friends, and society at large fully expected her to be a dumb slut, so it was easy, even for her, to believe she was, plus she liked the attention.

That's a pretty common thread, and people are WAY more complicated than that. I've found people have rich and varied experiences, even dumb ones. That you couldn't glean anything from this girl other than that she was "stupid" maybe says more about you than about her. She has thoughts and feelings that maybe she either can't express in a way you understand, or that she doesn't care to express to someone who is clearly an outsider.

I'm just saying that people surprise me, and I have a hard time believing some girl is just irredeemably "stupid" and that's all there is to know about her.

There are plenty of people who think I'm whatever they think
OK! OK I get it already.

Sorry I like simplicity when I'm not dealing with my banking and medical records.
I'm not so foolish to have spent money at any of those sites. But I do stand by my statement of calling you a crook. I don't believe that I will be able to convince you, but I do hope that I'll be able to convince others.

Let's give you the benefit of the doubt for a moment that you are actually honest. We'll say that you aren't running bots, fake identities, etc. That's fine. My basis in calling you (and those that run businesses like yours) a crook is not founded on that (though I have no doubt that other companies are doing as much, if only to boost the value and bidding on an item, but I digress).

Try to remember that the fundamental operating principle of your business being profitable is your selling the vast majority of your customers absolutely nothing. They aren't getting a good or service for any bid that doesn't win (which still costs them money). They get nothing.

The money to purchase those items must come from somewhere. If you are breaking even (as you say you are), it's not coming from the people who are "winning", it's coming from the people who are losing. If/when you are making a profit, it's not because the "winners" are necessarily paying that much more for an item (they won't have bid enough plus paying for the total value to pay for the item itself), it's because you've got more losers who are putting money into something without getting anything in return.

Your business is breaking even, and may eventually be profitable because of all of those who come in buying $24 worth of bids, failing, and leaving. Any business that requires it's customers be ignorant in order to make money is fundamentally a scam.

Also, your conflating countries making homosexuality illegal with countries making illegal a business that bases it's operations on exploiting the ignorant, is a fundamentally flawed argument. One is based on basic human rights to be who they are and behave in ways that causes no harm to others. The other is one that profits from people who don't know any better. One is a human rights travesty, the other is the outlawing of an enterprise with margins that organized crime wishes they could have (in the case of a "successful" site like Wavee and others). Trying to claim their equivalence, or that based on "my reasoning" they are equivalent, is dishonest, and really, troll-like behavior. That may fly in some forums, but it doesn't fly here. Try again.
thnx.

We're using something we created on our server to stream to the site and our iphone app. Using Google's free 411 type engine would be awesome though; yet not sure if you can mix music into the background of the voice with theirs.
> I ultimately decided, no, that's not really the right path for me.

Did you continue to start/continue a business, or was the path you decided on a non-entrepreneur path?
Startup Quote: Ben Huh, founder, Cheezburger Network
Ofuscacion de codigo
OpenNebula virtualization toolkit 2.0 released
I’m always throwing out ideas, so it’s not creativity, it’s just volume.

- Ben Huh (@benhuh)
Rewriting Reddit (2005)
I think the other answers can be useful as ideas that can be bounced around and will perhaps lead to other ideas, but certainly one should consult a lawyer before actually acting on any of them.
the thing about the "get a lawyer" advice is that this does not necessarily mean you are going to court. A lawyer is essentially a professional negotiator. I mean, if I was in that situation, I'd find a lawyer who was comfortable negotiating on my behalf.
The title is a little yucky with the "15", but the extensions mentioned are legitimately useful to web devs.
Google leads charge to dismiss Paul Allen's 'scattershot' lawsuit
More, please?
There are various interesting things in the various functional worlds in the very early phases of being interesting, but unless you are the sort of web programmer who routinely just programs up their own frameworks I couldn't really recommend any of them right now if you're not already a pretty good functional programmer and you're actively interested in participating in such early experiments.

Possible exceptions would include Seaside, which I've never used but has been around for a while and from what I can see has a genuinely different approach to web development that actually does exploit Scheme, and Erlyweb (and to some extent the Erlang frameworks in general), which naturally exploit being on the Erlang VM which has interesting consequences for certain types of web apps. I suspect neither would look particularly mature next to Ruby on Rails, but if you happen to have a need that matches those they may still be a win.
Absolute Spatial Representations of Time in an Australian Aboriginal Community
It's an unlicensed cab, roaming around taking what work it can get. Historically, the name probably arose from the similarity to Gypsies, who roam around, taking what work they can get.
That's funny. It totally jumped out at me that the OP kept using "they".

What's even odder is that Paul used "they" for the lawyer, apparently intending to be gender-neutral, but failed to notice that the OP had done similarly.

I don't mean to be making a huge deal out of this. It's just something we could probably all stand to be more aware of, myself included.
What page are you talking about?
I've only applied this round so far, but if I don't get in, I plan to keep applying (with better ideas) until I get in. ;)
That's some of the best advice for anyone getting into espresso. Good grind consistency is really key to an even extraction. A good rule of thumb to follow is up to $400, spend as much on the grinder as you did on the espresso machine.
Esthetically, it definitely is a notch below Coda, another native IDE I use.

It really doesn't look very Mac-like. It's tolerable, or I wouldn't use it, but that's as kind as I can get in describing it.
I really detest his writing.

Daniel Lyons writes about technology as an expert explaining the tech world to a common non-techie. The problem is that he explains things in a way that don't make sense, are false, or in this case just a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.
There are some Gigabit USB adapters that you can buy. They are apparently Mac compatible. Of course, with USB2 peaking at less than half GB ethernet's speed, it's still just an OK solution.
Which is identical to a binary semaphore. If the low priority thread which decremented the semaphore does not allow others to work while it itself is interrupted - ie, it does not increment when blocked - it has the same problem.

The difference, as I've seen it, is that mutexes more often have code to account for lock escalations and shared locks, and sometimes other potential problems, which are deemed unimportant for semaphores because they're used where such things are not needed. It's entirely possible to create a semaphore which does account for these - trivial, even, to make a binary semaphore have everything a mutex has. Similarly, a mutex does not need to have such capabilities to be considered a mutex.

All of which is simply meta-behaviors, not things which are part of their definitions. Debating about current implementations is useful only in terms of current implementations, not in defining something's inherent capabilities.
UGG Bailey Button Triplets
If anyone else developed an app store for Apple that took 30% of developer profits it would fail miserably, regardless of how wonderful it worked. I'm sure Apple will do fine with this new model, but it kind of amazes me people will go for it.
Can be choppy, depends on what you're doing. I tend to put palettes and low priority stuff on them. In that regard, the real estate still has value to me.
I wasn't mentioning that as an example of world travel, I was mentioning it as an "experience", which the article suggests are more useful than possessions. My point (which I didn't convey properly) was that by most accounts, that expedition was quite an "experience". I certainly don't regret going (The gallery show when I returned was pretty well-received), and it was nice to traipse around South America with my friends, but I'd have been just as happy sitting at home by myself for a couple months (and would have saved myself a lot of money).

As to Galapagos or Easter Island, I have zero desire to visit either. I find nothing interesting about the natural world (which sounds awful, and I don't mean it to).

I just got back last week from taking my girlfriend to the Dominican Republic for her birthday (which was a much more traditional vacation). I didn't take my laptop (something she was keen to require); but our hotel had Wifi. I found myself using my iPhone 4 to keep up on things as much as I was able. If it had been up to me, I'd have sat in the hotel bar reading RSS feeds all day.