skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm 19 and I got my first cell phone last year. I never expected to text much, and in the beginning I didn't. However over time I've been using it more and more to the point where I have entire conversations via texting. The simplicity is ridiculous. It's like instant messaging, but anywhere. In addition far more people have a phone capable of SMS than they have an MSN/AIM (or equivalent) account.
Hehe.

You know the old saying "always darkest just before the storm"?

How's about: "always highest revenue just before the bubble bursts"?

Huge numbers of consumer leaders or consumer suckers have, in the past few years, bought lots of this line of products. Either a large number of them and non-buyers agree "Well, that was worth it" or, the opposite.

Place your bet.

(I'm not saying "droid wins" or "MSFT wins". I'm saying "the category of products is suspect for sustained growth ... Apple is just accelerating the rate at which we find out.")
There are a few libraries around (like clj-stacktrace) that significantly improve the quality of stack traces. There was some talk about integrating a library like that into clojure.core, but I'm not sure if any progress has been made on it.

It's a known issue, and definitely up there on the priority list to fix.
It loads eventually if you leave it. Does TC actually let people know before they feature them?
Speaking of which, when's the next Boulder drinkup?
With all the philanthropy he's involved in, I would say the developing world would have a lot to lose also.
I wonder how much detail the book goes into about those simulations. It would be interesting to be able to run them yourself, and tinker with the parameters.
Pretty sure at this point video is the most likely reason a site people actually visit have Flash... I'm out of the loop these days but I don't even remember the last time I saw a pure-Flash site.

In terms of video the web at large will never migrate just as they didn't care about the various versions of HTML, the rise of "standards matter" etc, but I thought the largest sites that really matter made themselves compatible ages ago?
bit.ly hackathon (NYC 10/20) and API contest (win a MakerBot)
A Rails Rumble project that proves even geeks can be douchebags
Semantic Markup or Death? Part I
Mostly #1, but agreed with all. Especially so as to leverage a managed topic domain into a transferable form of domain knowledge.
They are all mapping functions, though. You have a key 'k', which is accepted by d and will return a unique result. Why should I have to care whether d is a collection, object, or method? In fact in many cases it's pretty easy to implement all three.

class months(object):
def __init__(self):
m='jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec'.split(' ')
n=range(1,13)
self.__dict__.update(dict(zip(m,n)))
def __getitem__(self, key):
return self.__dict__[key]
def __call__(self, key):
return self.__dict__[key]

d=months()

print d['jan'] # 1
print d('jan') # 1
print d.jan # 1
It's important (we rarely accept applications without them) but the things you're worried about aren't what matter.

This level of quality is enough: http://scotchi.posterous.com/private/wIYDQvTIRI
Women are the Masters of Social Gaming
What would be the consequences of the “bubble bursting”?

I’m asking because there is really no way you can respond to a statement like that. What is your specific prediction? Will Apple be bankrupt in the short or long term? Will their iPhone sales decrease? Will they plateau? Will they grow slower than the Smartphone market? Are you only talking about the iPhone or maybe all iOS devices? Maybe the Mac, too?
That's definitely the reason, but I'm not sure it's always worth it. The fact that someone can earn $1m in the private sector doesn't automatically mean that they'll provide $1m worth of value to any university that hires them; the skills aren't identical.

Might be less true in areas where being prominent is a ticket to bringing in a ton of grant money; some famous medical researchers essentially pay their own salary out of grants, in which case from the university's perspective they're free.
Also, the alternative to a commit history in Git is not "no commit history at all", it's a CVS with a read-only filesystem.
Peter notes in the LWN comments that committers use merging in their personal repos regularly. The restriction only applies to commits to the master. Many people share their individual repos and branches to git.postgresql.org (and GitHub).

The point is to keep our commit history clean while we figure out best practices for the project.
You'd be surprised. :)

I'll post a note term sheet that I raised money on last year once I find it but notice the prepayment clause here: http://startuplawyer.com/convertible-notes/convertible-note-...

When you're raising on a convertible note, you're essentially taking a loan from the angel. You're promising to "pay them back" at the next financing by converting their money into stock equal to the principal + interest they've accrued on that note. If you really wanted to (and the term sheet doesn't preclude a payback), you could pay them back for only their principal & interest instead of converting them to stock.
To be honest, each time Apple has a record quarter (which has been quite often lately) folks doubt that they will sustain that growth, but they’re almost always proven wrong.

Where is Apple slowing? In Macs, which see only modest increases year over year, and iPods, which are in decline. But both of those categories are not losing to competitors — they are being cannibalized by Apple itself, who is busy selling incredible numbers of iPhones and iPads.

If you’re wondering whether Apple’s customers are happy, Apple just earned the highest-ever score in the American Customer Satisfaction Index, in large part due to the iPad:
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100921/ipad-boosts-appl...
In case the title doesn't make it clear, the API contest is open to everyone (not NYC only!)

More: http://blog.bit.ly/post/1307062006/its-a-bit-ly-api-contest
24? 30 for stones.
This shows some nice polish. But like a lot of the <audio> tag sequencer projects I've seen, the timing is too inaccurate to be useful. You have to mix your own buffers to do it properly and right now that's only possible in the FF4 betas. I just announced a HTML5 audio project today that's based off the FF4 extensions, and I'm going through Kickstarter to fund its timely completion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1805091
The only thing I'd be careful of is in using terms like "simplicity", "creativity", and "elegance".

Sure, that is my perspective because it is the code I tend find compelling but yes they are matters of subjective opinion.
Yes, PostgreSQL supports major version releases for five years so preserving the full history is critically important. Developers regularly back-patched bugfixes as far back as 7.4 (released November 2003, and just EOL'd this month).
Again, not an expert here, but isn't the option to pay off my debt one of the major reasons I prefer convertible notes over straight equity? And isn't it why I incentivize the angel with the option buy shares cheaper than the VC?
What happened to OCaml?
I seem to hear so much on HN about most of the other "popular" FP languages, but haven't heard much about OCaml lately. Haskell, Clojure, Scala, CL, Scheme, etc. all get their due, but OCaml has always been my choice.
> "Hi, I’m Tyler. Loved computers from an early age and have been coding since the 4th grade. Internships include helping IBM, develop an automation system written in Python, and a real-time wafer data mapping program written in Java and Python. Graduating from the University of Rochester, I wrote a personal power meter. Working with Matt on SpeakerText for over a year, and I’m pretty proud of our latest version, which was built from scratch in three months by three developers."

I don't think that removing "I" from a sentence improves the sentence if "I" is still implied and the sentence just becomes ungrammatical. I tried to imagine someone speaking like that and it sounded like they were just making a list. I think that your point is good, but your example is harder on the ears than the original.
SharePoint and Exchange have now decidedly embraced the cloud.

SharePoint has embraced the cloud? As a means of delivering its boneheaded, pre-web vision of the internet as a directory of Microsoft Office documents?

Microsoft does not "embrace" any new thing. They shackle it to their last vision, so the new thing limps along dragging their old vision along with it. This way they can pretend they aren't left behind.

SharePoint killed every possibility for reasonable documentation at my company. The nontechnical employees in the company have embraced it, because it's like email they can't accidentally delete, and email attachments were their preferred means of communicating and storing documentation all along. So you upload something to SharePoint... and it's like attaching it to an email you send to the whole company! Except nobody yells at you! Now there's no going back. (They thought the wiki was too hard. Of course, if Microsoft replaced all their keyboards with a device requiring them to fart in Morse code, they would all learn it in an afternoon, and if it seemed a little unnecessarily difficult or uncomfortable, they wouldn't dare say so.)
I think the main page of the site has too much information. It is difficult to find out what is the main purpose of this site?

The site have stats and recent activities sections where only one user keeps reporting some values. These sections should be removed as it makes me think does this site has only user? Such sections make sense when site has enough activities to report, otherwise new users would think no one is using it so it is not worth signing up.

Basically the website looks more like old-styled corporate website than call-to-action website. You may have to hire professional website designer to get any mileage. Alternatively put only one thing which you do the best and remove everything else.
OK. I get what you're saying, but I think it is BS myself. And to be perfectly honest I think Steve thinks its BS too. And they'll be working on it until the day he says, "A lot of people have said 'Steve, a 7" tablet would be great'. Well today we have something a lot better than great".

Anyone who thinks you can't do a differentiated multitouch 7" UI is either lying or incompetent. Steve is clearly not the latter. My prediction is that within the next 18 months they release a 7" iPad. Sooner if a 7" Android tablet takes off.
The 21st century guide to platform trolling: Windows edition
> Join a startup

"I liked how Adam D'Angelo suggested that people should join a startup that a) has a great team that is still small, and b) has traction, and c) lets you learn a ton of stuff."

This is a really big challenge for me. The decision to join a really young team versus running off and doing your own thing is really hard, especially when you see lots of awesome startups that actually have a lot going for them. For instance, if I wasn't so caught up in my own world, I would instantly want to join airbnb. I'm sure they're going to be huge.

The question is: Does being a founder outweigh the opportunity of being an early employee at someone else's startup?
Or if one of the choices is Actionscript.
I would be embarrassed to be the the CEO of a company with unlimited money that put out Vista.
It would actually look rather egotistical for him to come back. Even in Jobs case I think there's more a series of serendipitous events that rewarded intuition. Apple's success is a product of hard work and competitive complacency in the market.
Backstory, if you missed it earlier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803407 It's been flagged dead! This has really gotten out of hand.
Has anyone tried fuzzing out content further from the mouse pointer -- perhaps with semi-transparent images or new CSS/canvas capabilities -- so that users have to move the mouse near what they're reading, thus making mouse position (for testing purposes) better model gaze?
The CEO must push/sell the technological vision, but he must not make it. Not in a company the size of Microsoft.

I won't miss Microsoft, but their inability to define a vision, communicate, and execute it is voyeuristic to observe.

That said, Ballmer needs to walk, and do it quickly. It's over.
Thanks for the input. It's really good to hear.

On the production app, you can now change the tone of the alarm (it was a later alpha-phase function).

I do agree that the TTS engine on the phone is horrific, we're working on a deal with Nuance to use their TTS engine. Their engine sounds amazing.

We're also working on calculating what the novelty of a piece of information is to a specific user. The User Experience of the application will be something like "here is a list of information sources that I want to hear from" then we'll let you know what we think you find the most important (novel).

As for the reformulation of text into short headlines, are you more interested in the general concept of the headline or a general summary of the article?

I'm going to try to convince some people that the calendar should be free, because it's a major "I need to know this stuff, this is why I'll start to use you" feature.

We'll try to never present Plain Old Ads, we're trying to engage users with brands. We believe there could be a real connection between a user and their material world. Radio-style shout-outs are just too irritating.

The "moment of alert," at the moment (pun not intended), is really more of a future thing. We're envisioning that if your wife emails you, Zazu will chime in and let you know that there is something you should check on; or if a meeting gets canceled, Zazu will let you know that you now have time to head home (there's traffic on your normal route, so you should take the backroads) and catch a movie with your family. As cheesy as that sounds, we really believe that people could find some utility in being up to date without having to explicitly look for whatever information you need to know. The current manifestation of that idea is a glorified alarm clock -- with the moment of alert being when the alarm goes off. Yes, I do realize that we are creating a moment of alert for our users, but what better time is there to plan your day than at the beginning of it? --, but we're just testing out the waters.

This feedback is great, I really appreciate it. Thanks!
Microsoft in the recent decade, has tried to indulge itself on different domains of IT. Obviously, it has failed on all of them, as stated by the author of this article.

IMO, on contrary to the author, MS should stick to desktop/laptop Operating Systems. Desktop usage might have decreased but laptop is not going anywhere. There is so much market untapped in the world, I can't see the end of desktop OS.

I don't see not using my laptop fo at least a decade. And yes, I don't want to use iOS or Android on my laptop. I like the old school Linux, Windows or OSX.

Microsoft is not in trouble until they make products like Windows 7.
I havent personally although i recently became interested in social innovation. So i find this topic of interest. I do know someone however that does marketing and social media and they use that to go out the work about their own area.
That's not entirely true, your Facebook UID always maps to your real name, gender, and your locale (country ie: en_us etc). That information in the hands of someone clever is more than ample to make some pretty decent guesses as to your identity, especially when you can pair it with other data that you may or may not have collected in your own app. In a previous job I held where we dealt with this sort of stuff facebook ids were generally thought of as PII.
Anecdotally, Apple has a lot of repeat customers. I know lots of people that have purchased Iphone, iphone 3g, 3gs, 4g, ipad, macbook pro (often one work and one personal.) Once you get into the apple ecosystem, things are nice. interoperability is another issue altogether (and dont get me started on the old apple tvs)
I just find it fascinating that there are SO many project management services, but none work for our team.

That's why there are so many. I bet that is what each developer was thinking when they came up with their product.
It's also worth mentioning that it's sometimes critical for open source projects to be able to identify all authors of a particular part of the code. There were several cases in the past when a project had to go through a painful process of tracking down all the contributors in order to ask for their permission to relicense the code. Without version control history this would have been much harder, if not impossible.

Besides that it just doesn't sound right to throw away potentially valuable historical information just to avoid a manageable amount of work. After all the conversion has to be done only once. No to mention that if you don't migrate the history, there is a significant probability that you'd regret not doing that when it's already too late.

There is also a precedent to the contrary. When Linux migrated to brand new Git all the historical information was discarded. Probably the reason was that the metadata was stored in a proprietary Bitkeeper repository and obviously there were no migration tools available at that time.
It's just hard for me to see what value a 7" iPad would bring. Just as Steve said, I can't pocket it, so I still have to have a smartphone. And if I'm going to use something other than my smartphone (which Steve went out of his way today to say that most iPad buyers already have), why would I want to use something only slightly bigger? If anything, the 10" iPad is too small.

The concern isn't that Apple couldn't make a variant of iOS run well on a 7" tablet: it's that the product itself doesn't really have a purpose for being, and that it's asking too much for app makers to target (well) three different sizes that are so close to each other.

(Now, is the current iPad too heavy? Yes. I strongly expect the next iPad revision to be 9.7" and 1/3rd lighter.)
This is not a database -- it's a cache.
What about your increased cancer risk due to daily (assuming you're a pilot) exposure to ionizing radiation? Does that matter to you? Remember that risk is proportional to cumulative radiation dose. I think it's perfectly reasonable for a pilot to refuse to be irradiated daily as a required condition of employment.
A clear path is good...until there's a roadblock.

I just left a company that had a pileup of engineers at the end of the Junior 1-Junior 2-Senior 1-Senior 2 track. The next step up was Principal Engineer (or something like that) and there were only so many of those allowed. And those guys weren't quitting anytime soon.

I figured there were only so many bumps they could give me before I hit the ceiling and stayed there for a decade, so I bailed.
Add Hover Effects To Your Image Maps
I think defensibility is one reason why companies have their pay secrecy clauses.

People don't like confrontation, in general, and asking for a raise is one kind of confrontation, so people are slightly defensive (and thus slightly irrational).

If they're then made to defend those choices, they have to give clear reasons on WHY they gave the aggressive negotiatior whose not great at coding a raise, in lieu of the star performer who does badly at human tasks. Since there's no nice way to do so, they'd rather just avoid the situation altogether.
I am :)

I would be very interested if you could post that doc.
I was actually working fulltime at Powerset and doing GitHub on the side. I spent a lot of time coding, but it's what I love. Working on GitHub was how I expressed the creativity that I couldn't when I was doing tool support at Powerset. It was something I could call my own, and it was a way to unwind after a long day in meetings. Money wasn't a problem. I was getting a good salary at Powerset.

I found my cofounders via local Ruby meetups. I was by myself when I was doing Gravatar and it sucked. Having two cofounders with GitHub has been one of the best decisions I've ever made. They provided additional manpower in the early days when velocity of development matters most, and they acted as a safeguard against bad decisions. It's extremely motivating to have other people that are depending on you to produce great work. I would highly recommend against single founder startups for all of these reasons and a thousand more.

Gravatar did become hard to run towards the end. I was spending a few hundred dollars a month on servers and there was no good way to make money with it. It seemed a bit hopeless. I never gave up though. I put in the hours to make it work and eventually sold it to Automattic. To me, that was a success. I created something of value and sold it to someone that had the resources to take it to the next level.

It's hard to explain how I judge my startup ideas. It's a lot of intuition based on years of experience with the internet and with a lot of examples of things that I love and ton of examples of things that I hate. All this adds up to a feeling that something will work out. Once I have that feeling about an idea, I jump in 100%.
I would be really really interested how Gazehawk is doing the webcam eyetracking. Last year I decided to pivot my usabilitytest.com business to do exactly what they are doing now. I have been testing / researching / combining different eye-tracking and head-tracking algorithms/APIs etc. I must say for an engineer it was an ultimate challenge. However, after 3 months of working on it I realized this is too much for me and I called it quits. I managed to get eye-tracking working using 2 webcams (one front to monitor head-movement and one small near the eye to monitor eye movement). Unfortunately, because of the nature of eye reflection I had to work in complete darkness and use IR light to illuminate the eye - you can't call it non-intrusive method.

So I am very happy that guys at GazeHawk cracked this and launched the service that I really wanted to do and offer people low-cost eyetracking method.
But the OP says MS will abolish the role of CSA.
Microsoft is not in trouble yet. They still make huge amounts of cash so they can keep trying to gain share in these "disruptive" markets. Though they have failed time and again they have the money to keep trying and they just need to be successful once and that cash and brand can solidify their postion.
I've worked in a company where they avoided negotiation altogether. The CEO set raises based on 'input' from the department managers. That manager then passed the raise on to the employee. The employee didn't even know when this process would occur, but it was always before the annual review.

Big shock, that company also didn't pay well.
You're right (have an upvote); I was warning more against rash misuse of the concept of entropy, which I see quite a bit.
> review is more, than welcome.

You opened the door, so here is my feedback:

- You never have to explicitly define any of the super globals as global... you can delete any line that says "global $_SESSION;", for example

- The database interactions look like they are heavily dependent on global state. It is also a tightly coupled dependency

- Use __construct for constructors instead of the class name: http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.decon.php

- Foreach is better than a for loop for iterating over arrays

- Single character variable names only make code more confusing. You write code once, you read it a dozen times.

I challenge you to rewrite this with only using classes (no global functions) and to write unit tests for your code. Remember, if you have to jump through hoops to test your code, you need to rethink what you're doing.