skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this is a great post that adds a lot of great tips to the discussion for parents. it really moves the discussion forward. Thanks for writing it.

I agree that commutes, meetings and starbucks runs are out of the question for folks with limited time to dedicate to their startup.

I see people doing two 20 minute Starbucks runs a day and I'm like how can they waste 40 minutes a day/200 minutes a week/$50 a week on Starbucks.... then i realize they don't have to get home by 7:30 to put their kids to bed and wake up at 6am to feed them breakfast.

I'm uber efficient these days.... even my email list was designed to make my life more efficient.

I don't need to go to networking events, read blogs, recruit developers, do PR, do SEO or do any kind of social media or marketing.

I simply pull my thoughts together in 30-60 minutes and hit the send button. 20k+ folks get it in their email box, 250k get it on the web as folks discuss it and forward it around and 1,000+ responses wind up in my inbox.

Many of the responses I get are from entrepreneurs who want:

a) me to angel invest (so i get deal flow!)
b) developers from outside of the major cities who want to break in to the internet industry ("well hello! please meet my Director of Technology who will fly you in for a recruiting/cult meeting")
c) investors who want to hear about ThisWeekIn.com, LAUNCH.IS or Mahalo.
d) press who want to re-run the piece
e) partners who want to leverage Mahalo's 20m+ uniques.

Efficiency wins..... efficiency and leverage can be found anywhere--you just have to be open minded.
According to China Daily, "China's greatest danger is that US policymakers face economic and national security crises they cannot solve.

That's really scary that China's media narrative is pumping fear of the US into the populous.

If this worldview is followed to its logical conclusion, war between the two powers over influence or resources may be inevitable.

_shutters_
http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/13412205.h...

"On the other hand, Dye and Reck's meta-analysis (1988) revealed that limited variations of undergraduate GPA (e.g., GPA for the last two years, or for courses in the major field) can be more valid predictors of performance than overall GPA. In addition, Colarelli, Dean, and Konstans (1987); Wise (1975); Harrell and Harrell (1974); and Weisbrod and Karpoff (1968) all found positive relationships between grades and performance. "
At default zoom level, 1 px should be 1 pixel except on "retina" displays where it is 2 pixels or printers where it is 3-5 dots. http://webkit.org/blog/55/high-dpi-web-sites/ http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#length-units
Ask HN: Anyone been acquired by Google who can talk about it?
Has anyone here been acquired by google who can talk about their experiences after it was all said and done?

I am curious and I'm sure a lot of others are as to the experiences to a company merging into google's current work force vs joining as a single employee.
In the UK we are getting more PhD candidates than there were 10-20 years ago because the stipend that a student is paid is actually a living wage. It used to be that the PhD stipend covered the university fee only, and that to continue as a PhD student you needed some other income.

It's now seen as a reasonable career move - boost your skills, do something interesting, travel the world and get paid at a rate that most undergraduate students consider luxurious.
yup, great points. the biggest difference between machine and human scaling is evident here. You can spawn up ec2 instances fairly fast to accomodate for machine bottlenecks ie-20k more users. Spawning up the support staff for that is nearly impossible, you'd just drown.
There is nothing approaching even a single order of magnitude in improvement in random I/O with conventional HDDs over the last, say, 20 years. Not even a 2X improvement. You're under 500 IOPS per HDD, period, use them wisely.

Moore's law doesn't apply to RPMs of spinning disks.
They also use Windows...
Leaving ego's aside, while the reasons for this are obvious to anyone who learned programming with binary and old school stuff like that, there is a whole genre (class) of programmer that has learned what is needed to build web sites and unless you have large scale issues (which you solve by hiring someone with old school CS skills) you can happily be competent and successful without every knowing about how languages implement floating point math. I think it is wrong to belittle these people because I have worked with them and sometimes, I have found, it is their skills that are more often more influential in the success of a product that the CS guy in the back room tweaking the slab allocator. Times have changed. It's no longer crucial for every one who deserves the title 'developer' to know about these kinds of language nuances.
It makes me laugh, people who won't write a single keyword to specify the type of a variable, but will write a hundred lines of unit tests to make sure it's always what you want.
While this is undoubtably true, it's important to consider the absolute razor thin margins that fierce competition and huge volume production creates.

This interesting article on the manufacture of microSD gives a small glimpse; http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918
The second to last paragraph is particularly interesting.

Once you remove standardization all kinds of hidden costs creep in, from not being able to order such large volumes of components right down to hardware testing.
That's not true either; you can just do what big API apps do and generate access tokens. Amazon Web Services don't rely on HTTP-Auth.
The Death of the Web?
"I second violin"

:)
In other words, HTTP Authentication is useful in the same sense as FTP is useful: it's outmoded but sometimes convenient.
I watched the last panel where the Django core team talked. It didn't sound like it would sooner/faster than I thought it would. It will happen is about all they said.
I wonder if the split between pro/anti unit testing comes from folks in traditional developer positions vs startups (since there is a decent mix of both here).

As a pure developer working on an established codebase, the benefits of automated testing are quite clear, especially if you have paying customers and the cost of failure is high.

But as a startup, every extra line of test code you write slows you down from launching, and the most important thing at this point is launching and figuring out whether you actually have a market for your product.

After all, what's the point of having 100% test coverage for a product that no one wants to use?

It's also entirely likely that you're going to end up throwing large sections of your codebase out as you pivot towards something else.

Here's the way I see it:

It's rather pointless to have 100% test coverage of a product that no one is using, but it's also dangerous to have 0% coverage of a product with live, paying customers.

Intelligent developers will have the find the right balance between the two (as it shifts over time).
http://g.raphaeljs.com/

http://www.highcharts.com/

http://www.jqplot.com/

http://plugins.jquery.com/project/gchart

http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/

http://polymaps.org/

http://code.google.com/p/flot/
In terms of someone gaming the system, this was sort of said in a previous comment, but having a value associated with a skill sets a level of expectation. If you say you're at 777 for a skill, then it would be valid for an interviewer to ask you a very tough question on it. It doesn't resolve the fact that you shouldn't have gotten to the interview stage, but you can be thrown out earlier in the process, like during a phone screen instead of an in-person interview.
I still have a problem with using a VM on a phone and having GC on a phone. (I also have a problem with Objective C's function call overhead.)
To the downvoter - curious what exactly you disagreed with?
For some schools, average GPA can vary widely with major as well.
Well for one thing, $18.33 an hour is pretty bottom-barrel for qualified front-end work. $35+ up is where the decent price range _begins_ for reasonably skilled development work in any non-trivial category (which definitely includes front-end).

So in a sense, you made a simple mistake (in aiming too low for a price point), got an immature / low-integrity counterparty to deal with as a result -- and so now you get to chalk this up as a learning experience, and the $550 as your "tuition."

And also, sometimes we just get burned, and all we can do is take our lumps and move on. A $550 loss sucks (especially if this was a personal / pet project) but it's not nearly as bad as other things that can happen to us.
...Okay. IE9, which supports HTML5, is still in beta. WP7 has already been released, and I'm sure the folks in Redmond is working on the next release/updates. Do you get it now?

...Okay. It's not an easy job to align products and release cycles. Microsoft was already late on WP7. They probably missed a cycle and Android kicked in. Microsoft doesn't want to be late anymore. Meaning, they probably couldn't wait for IE9 for mobile to be released (which wouldn't be a HUGE job if you have a working, stable, and RC version of IE9).

In conclusion, Microsoft is being smart that they release the phone and let people dive/absorb/digest earlier instead of waiting for full featured phone OS with a HTML5 supported browser, which is still in beta for desktops. However, this just means..the next release of WP7 will be very interesting. Remember, Android and iPhone OS (which wasn't iOS at the time) weren't closed to feature complete with their first release. I'm an Android user, and I can remember when I first bought my Droid, it went through so many updates software updates. Companies just have to cut things if one or two things will block the entire release.
i'm a little surprised steve blank is so low. his blog entries are usually a great read
Although there is clearly a grade inflation, the correlation between student selectivity and average GPA should also be noted:

"As a rough rule of thumb, the average GPA of a school today can be estimated by the rejection percentage of its applicant pool:

GPA = 2.8 + Rejection Percentage /200 + (if the school is private add 0.2)

Non-selective public schools (typically with 15 percent rejection rates or less) with GPAs in the 2.8 range or less tend to have only modest grade inflation. Some have none."
i went to complain but the first comment already called him out for the negative letter spacing. it burns!
California's web icons reshaping Seattle's technology job market
In discussions about "NoSQL" systems, I've found out that some of the developers complaining about RDBMS performance didn't even know what indexes were.

Usually they learned how to use MySQL from thirdhand PHP & MySQL tutorials off somebody's blog or something, and thought it was representative of all RDBMSs.

Not saying everyone using "NoSQL" is poorly informed, just that sometimes peoples' impressions of performance aren't very accurate. It makes me suspicious when somebody's benchmark only uses MySQL.
HTTP Authentication is sessionless. In any scenario where you want to protect something without establishing and maintaining a session, it's useful.

The only large public website that I know of which still uses HTTP Authentication though is http://www.123-reg.co.uk/
Open HN: The Default is Social
Zuck said it best

"The new default for the web is now Social."

Facebook for years has been working to be the identity provider for the web. As the web becomes less of an escape and more the default way we live our lives, it's becoming more and more important for us take our web identities with us when we visit other websites.

I feel like maybe hackernews should join that list. There are things I would like to contribute to the larger web, and I would like that to link back to my HN profile.

I thought I would use the Open HN: tag as a way to discuss how HN might be more open with it's data in general, or how HN users can participate in external content with their HN identities. As hackers we should feel that data should be open to browse, and HN should be no different.

If HN supported OpenIDs, then as other hackers build products to support the HN community we could login with those identities into apps that host StartupCraft tournaments, Spreadsheets, and other tools.

Our OpenIDs are not just login tools, they are Identity tools, that allow us to relate the work and efforts we do, back to a community that identifies us and validates us.

PS. this is the sort of stuff I dream of working on for companies, and the sort of stuff I want to talk about on Monday at Facebook's OpenID summit.

http://plancast.com/p/2lpp

How else can we make HN more open?
Stop. You're overthinking this. The purpose of a resume isn't to sell you as an employee; it's to sell you as an interview candidate. Two very different things.

Keep your resume concise, send it as a PDF (if you're working with a system that doesn't allow PDFs, chances are you're targeting the wrong system at your prospective employer), make sure it gracefully includes the right keywords, groom your work history so that it sells your suitability for the role instead of trying to tell your life's story, and put the balance of your energy into a cover letter.

Then tear the cover letter off, turn that into an email, send it to the guy who's actually going to manage the role they're hiring for, and attach your simple PDF resume to it.

Done, move on to getting ready for the interview.
Yeah we never do stuff like that here.
Your graphs don't back up your headline.

Fred thinks his returns are trimodal, and that he plays mainly in the middle. Looking at your chart, he seems to be 100% correct. He's got one exit at 70% annual returns, but he makes the bulk of his money in the middle of the range.
The only operating system that moves fast enough to add support for [flash caching] in that sort of timeframe is Linux...

Solaris already has L2ARC, Vista had ReadyWhatever, and arguably if Apple had started working on it in 2006/7 (and hadn't been distracted by iOS) the feature would be done by now. But yeah, it looks like a lot of flash caching code is coming to market too late to do any good for desktop/laptop users.
Pancreatic Cancer Develops For 20 Years Before Killing
What's the browser app scenario in which having a session is a liability, but having a stored HTTP Auth credential isn't?
I wish I knew a little more about the law, but it seems to me that requiring payment in order to exercise your rights under the law is just not proper.

Basically the DMCA is saying that you cannot have protection under this part of law unless you pay money to them... if you sent them a letter, certified mail, informing them of your contact information, but did not include payment, they couldn't claim that you didn't notify them.
The fact that Windows Phone 7 doesn't support HTML5 may not be intentionally strategic, but it affects Windows Phone 7's strategic future nonetheless.
>Obviously, if you do the math $500 per day isn't a huge income for a family of three living in a relatively expensive area like Pasadena, CA

Just a little perspective, median income for a family of 5 in California is $66,106, so $500/day may not be huge but it's certainly large.
Diaspora won't because it doesn't emphasize reputation stats. OpenID doesn't either. OpenID is good for a site knowing you can log in, but not for knowing whether the last 3 times you sold something you didn't follow through, or that the last 6 times you bought things you paid promptly. I had somehow missed "Accelerando" and like Stross, so thanks for that one.
The climbers are only a small part of an expedition. I would imagine this will benefit the locals, who works with the expeditions but can't afford much access to a satellite phone. The project is part of a larger one to provide mobile coverage to 90% of the population. The company also gets experience in deploying stand-alone cell sites in "harsh environments". The actual use on the mountain itself may just turn out as a public relations stunt and some extra bandwidth for media, but that's not the whole story.
Opera 2.10 — Dec. 09, 1996. Features: […] Zoom: proportional full page scaling from 20% to 1000%

http://www.opera.com/docs/history/

IE was 10 years late to the party.
This is a great idea, too bad it's chained to an obscure OS: http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=swapcache
The rise of the Tea Party movement in the US has most countries worried about the consequences. China, with its state media, is in a better position to influence its populace along the lines that it considers beneficial to its foreign policy.

While the same isn't true for most of the other large/powerful countries, it is a fact that even the free press in these countries take quite an alarmist view over the growing influence of Tea Party thinkers in the US.
Jay should be a startup ninja for halloween.
Gevent: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly
You can buy a Dell R715 today with default configuration and 256GiB RAM for the low, low price of $26,231.
the applicant would much rather you were in the dark about it

This is most certainly not true in all cases. I don't pile my resume full of buzzwords just for the heck of it. There are only two reasons my "skills" section is not carefully organized to give an accurate impression of my level of expertise in each area.

First-- sometimes it's hard to know how good at something you really are.

Second-- I don't have room on the resume to differentiate between "I use django all the time and love it more than life itself and read books about it for fun on the weekends" and "I did one deep technical dive on django for 2 months, 2 years ago" and "I use django daily but mostly just make simple content and minor feature changes". You are probably already bored and I'm only on the first skill.

The reality is that I have a lot of experience and have used a lot of different technologies at varying levels of skill, any of which might be relevant to an employer, but I don't have time to write a novel about my last 10 years of work experience describing every skill in the proper context. Hopefully, the summarized experience history and accomplishments will give the employer a reasonable idea about how the skillset maps to expertise and if they have any further questions, they'll make the time for an interview, phone call, or email exchange.
Related to this is the amusing phenomenon of concentration of measure. Take a ball of dimension d and distribute points uniformly at random by area. Take any patch with an area that is half of the total. A hemisphere is a valid choice. Consider its boundary. If you chose the northern(southern) hemisphere, this would be the equator. Strangely enough almost all points will lie within a distance of O(1/sqrt(d)) from that equator. As d grows this defines an incredibly thin band, but it contains almost all the points.

What it means in terms of programming is that if you are searching for K points (chosen uniformly by someone else), you may as well just search over that thin band and you will find almost all of them there. That ratio can easily be in the high 90s.

To give an intuition to why this happen, note that earth's equator is modestly larger than say a 60^degree north latitude. But as you crank up the dimension d this gap grows exponentially fast. So in comparison to equatorial circles, the other latitudes have almost no space at all, even when almost all of the smaller ones are taken together.
Yep, maybe it should just be within your major, last 5 years or something similar.
Those are "fake" PCIe SSDs (really just a bunch of SATA SSDs attached to a RAID controller), not "native" which are theoretically supposed to be cheaper.
How Do You Stop Sea Captains From Killing Their Passengers?
If Panic and Omni find that all they have done is reduce their revenue by 30% then they won't stay long. I'm not at all sure the extra volume will be enough to offset the cost, especially if the store becomes full. It is going to be interesting.
Try 1998, when DOM didn't exist. That was pain.
The company who should fear this turn is Adobe. This is the exact opposite of "market validation" for Flash.

This is a competitor signalling that they are no longer betting on a Rich (binary) environment in a browser. They see that as a dead-end, and have undoubtedly spent considerable time, money, and effort coming to that conclusion.
Makes me wonder if Mars is a bit more hospitable than it's made out to be.
Silverlight is really just a pared-down, more portable, and somewhat decruftified version of the .net framework. They probably figured it would be valuable to have such a thing even if the initial "browserplugin" usecase didn't pan out. And in fact it has been.
Where Good Ideas Come From, identifying influential documents
The article doesn't say much as to the concessions on either side to push this deal though... I wonder if Verizon will have more control of the handset than AT&T did and be able to pre-load it with all of their 'V' branded software.
You have a point, but at the same time MS have no obligation to pander to these hyper-conservative corporations in a way that makes no business sense for them. Perhaps they should promote usage of Chrome on XP ;-)

(http://techie-buzz.com/tech-news/using-chrome-for-hotmail.ht...)
First Photo Of A Human Being?
You mean that you purchased an AVR board....boring....next subject.
The mac app store is the end of an era. For a while the mac was the most user-centered AND developer-centered platform that existed. When I bought my first mac apple was actively recruiting developers by having free conferences around the US.

Apple has decided to go more in the user-centered direction then the developer-centered direction. This is definitely the right move for them. However it makes me a little sad, its the end of an error. Now I see linux as the developer centered OS with OS X as the most user-centered OS. Its a hard call to make.

Mostly I think I am harboring some resentment. "Back in my day we had to write our own licensing code, host a web payment code, and host autoupdates. All the kids these days do is launch the darn app." I think I almost believe its not fair.

I guess at the age of 24, I am running into one of the first big changes that I have to accept if I want to stay relevant. I knew this market changed quick, I just always assumed it would be in the way that I wanted it to change.
We were able to use the spacetree to create an organizational chart for our employees which makes it easy for employees to find other employees. This is a great library.
This should really be titled something like "App Store will replace/compliment (or already is replacing/complimenting) some components of the Web"

No where near "Death of the Web"
same here. failing this would mean finding an actual job. Will await for good news.
95% of the web pages out there (I totally made that number up) use 'px' to specify font sizes. Had we designers/developers been more sensible and popularized 'em', I wouldn't mind this.

But I think this greatly undermines accessibility, and accessibility is way more important than pixel-perfect layouts.
Microsoft is really the last company anybody should be looking for guidance on Internet technologies. Their strategy has historically been to make web development as difficult as possible, so as to delay the eventual replacement of the PC as a computing paradigm. Microsoft only stays in business if the PC paradigm lingers, and lingers...
/me ducks after seeing his license plate on there!
Only because it's semantically important - did you mean 'end of an era' or 'end of an error'?