skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Insider selling itself isn't a warning sign that the company is overvalued. Many directors and execs get a large portion of their compensation as stock grants, and they have to sell to fund their lifestyles. Heck, many tech CEOs take $1 salaries - you don't actually think they live on $1/year, right?

Insider buying is almost always a sign that the company is undervalued in the market. People inside the company are usually overweight on their employer's stock, because they receive it as compensation and usually will get enough of it that it's by far their biggest holding. If they want more of it, despite the risks to diversification that this entails, they must have a pretty good reason to believe that the company is doing better than the Street thinks it is.
why is there an "An"?
While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Sales of Cheese
More on What No Xserve Means
Anatomy Of A Hacker-News Story
Sorry, but why it's in HN at all?

Note: I'm an Indian and I know what Diwali and how auspicious it is. But don't see the point here in HN. Is it because it was in a startup, design.. blog?
There are about 435,000 annual deaths from smoking. This is about 1 in 5.

Plus another 50,000 deaths from second hand smoke. Plus another 85,000 deaths from alcohol and alcohol-related fatalities. Plus another 7.5-10K from NSAIDS. Plus another 20K or so from illicit drugs. Plus another 106K from prescription drugs.[1] That's about 29.4% of the 2.4 million annual U.S. deaths right there.

Plus IIRC most of these categories are undercounts because they are looking mostly at the proximate causes. (Smoking- and alcohol-related deaths are the obvious exceptions.) So they aren't necessarily considering someone who takes accutane and dies of liver failure 20 years later, someone who gets AIDS or Hep C from drug use, someone who gets MRSA after getting sent to prison for drug use, etc.

And that's completely ignoring people who die because they weren't taking drugs they should have been taking, which is the other side of the same issue-- making poor decisions about drug use. Now I think we would need to be really conservative in any calculations we made here in order to for the fact that individuals can make decisions that we wouldn't personally make but that are still acceptable, but there are still a lot of blatantly obvious cases like people refusing antibiotics for staph infections and such. Plus all of the above is only counting mortality and completely ignoring morbidity, which is obviously much greater.

[1] Lazarou J, Pomeranz B, Corey P. Incidence of adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients. JAMA. 1998;279:1200-1205.

Suh DC, Woodall BS, Shin SK, Hermes-De Santis ER. Clinical and economic impact of adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients. Ann Pharmacother. 2000 Dec;34(12):1373-9.
I have some experience with both SML and OCaml, though it is quite limited.

Perhaps it's either my background writing a lot of fairly mathematical code or simply my own ignorance, but I always found little things like having to distinguish * and *. operators in OCaml rather awkward. Granted, it beats M.times(a).plus(b), but it's the sort of slightly clunky blemish that puts me off, and it betrays a certain lack of power in the underlying model. (Haskell almost has the opposite problem, with a type system that seems able to do almost anything, but also having all the complexity that inherently comes with that.)
Check out the Setup's "Community" page, linked from the top: http://usesthis.com/community/ - it includes a list of links to people who have answered the questions on their own blogs.
> As Dr. Clark put it: "The idea of letting addicts die to make drugs scarier is reprehensible."

Yes.
The second link is munged, s/b

http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/doc/hopl.pdf

("The Evolution of Lua")
It's kinda explained here: https://github.com/krainboltgreene/learn-you-an-ruby-for-awe...
If your major expense is people who know what they're doing, then Oracle is not even the most expensive platform... During any web boom I bet LAMP guys were billing higher hourly rates than people doing Oracle!
maybe its not cut with it, but a by-product of the manufacturing.
You'd most likely still see Android winning. Android outsold the iPhone by a 2:1 ratio last quarter. AT&T has something like 35% of the US customers. I imagine they cover at least 90% of US customers very well (probably only Verizon is better).

It is certainly possible that 25% of all Android users are not getting an iPhone simply because of carrier. I find this really hard to believe though.
I like how why's (poignant) guide to Ruby kicked off the trend for quirky programming language books, and now we're back to writing quirky programming language books for Ruby. (Though the poignant guide may have been a little too quirky.)
Awesome! Glad to hear the feedback :-}
So you mean Apple has no way to find out the number of iPhones activated per day since they make no distinction?

No, that's not what I mean at all. What I am saying is that Apple thinks of the iPhone, iPod, and iPad as three different containers for the same thing rather than as three wholly independent product lines. I don't see how that's controversial or unusual, and the existence of Android media players and tablets is evidence that this thinking is not unique to Apple. It's not clear that Schmidt's 200,000 activations/day figure excluded such devices, either, nor do I think it should.

Analysts want to compare the number of Android phones vs. the number of iPhones sold. Apple is intentionally withholding that data because it makes them look bad and is instead talking only iOS numbers.

Nonsense. The quarterly sales figures for the iPhone were stated twice in the very same call (the transcript linked above). It's also very hard to believe that Jobs is afraid that the iPhone being out-sold by the sum of all Android phones makes Apple look bad when he even said so himself in the same call:

"[...] Android is our biggest competitor. They out-shipped us in the June quarter as we were transitioning to iPhone 4. They out-shipped us for the first time according to Gartner's numbers, which we think are pretty accurate."
"How do you differentiate between dr. mr., 2004. jun. , and valid sentence-enders?"

Fun fact: there exists a convention stipulating a double space after a period that ends a sentence. Not that I'm advocating relying on this for any serious purposes
A REST interface to Erlang's mnesia
If you're a CLI kind of person, and want serious control over everything involved in the accounting process, check this out:

https://github.com/jwiegley/ledger/wiki/

It's an open source CLI accounting program, which works on text files in a simple, easy to write/generate format. The original program is in C, but the file format is also supported with python (beancount) and haskell (hledger) implementations.

The documentation leads you through the basics of accounting, and is available here:

http://cloud.github.com/downloads/jwiegley/ledger/ledger.pdf
A quick search turned up this great quote from a research psychologist: "Procrastination is not waiting and it is more than delaying. It is a decision to not act."

I see that he has a new book: http://books.google.com/books?id=L4BDQxrME0IC&printsec=f...

Of course, I probably won't get around to reading it. :-)
Ok, sorry I don't think you made it clear before you meant /all/ drugs - legal/prescription/illicit/etc.

In that case then yes - I can believe that some form of drug use is related to 1/3 of deaths - but since this story was about illicit drugs, I'm sure you can see where the confusion stemmed.
Ask HN: What value do you get from tech meetups that are startup-founder-heavy?
Living in the Bay Area, one of the great benefits are all the tech meetups that you can attend every week.

One thing I have found, though, is that as much as I like the energy at these meetings and talking to other startup entrepreneurs, after a while, it begins to feel a bit pointless. That is, even though I like getting feedback when I describe my startup to other meeting participants, when the majority of the attendees at a tech meetup are other entrepreneurs (i.e. not investors), at the end of the day, all the feedback in the world from fellow entrepreneurs is not as impactful as feedback from a seasoned investor. It seems everyone is there pitching their own startup and not really interested in your startup. So the chit-chat and exchange of ideas is great, but most often leads to nowhere.

I can see some potential benefits from such meetups, even if everyone else is there promoting their own startup:

* If you talk to enough companies, you may find some synergies between your startup and someone else's, and so you can pursue some collaborations

* If you talk to enough people, you'll find someone who knows someone who would be interested in working with you or investing in you.

* You get to meet people, and after seeing them at enough events, get to know them, so in the future, if you are looking for someone to hire, or some company to work for, this could be a good route to find one.

Do you guys see other benefits that I'm missing?

What's your experience with meetups that are very startup-founder-heavy? What value do you derive from them?
Better: contribute to something open source so people can (a) see your work and (b) see that you can work with someone else's codebase, which is harder than just dealing with your own.
Cloud Computing Conundrum
Ask HN: Question for the PBX/Phone Geeks
Given a caller, Alice, an intermediary, and a recipient, Bob, is it possible for Alice to call the intermediary and be connect with Bob, while charging Alice for the call(s) and showing Bob only the intermediary caller ID?
I agree that this has no place on HN. I am Indian and I'm currently enjoying a wonderful four day weekend courtesy of the festival. The only way this would be useful is if a majority of the folks here at HN have an interest in cultures around the world.

For those who don't know about Diwali, you can think of it as the Indian equivalent of Christmas. Though it's a Hindu festival, almost everybody in the country celebrate it, and there's this general spirit of happiness and prosperity all around you.
But an app written on top of MySQL, even though it connects over the wire and a JDBC driver, has to be GPL – why, simply because MySQL decreed it so; they did it because it would make it commercially convenient for them.

So says the internal email. I don't usually see this much confusion packed into such a small space.
There is no patent license in the GPLv2.

Their decision to keep it on GPL v2 is very very explicit.
Glad I'm not the only one. I couldn't understand a thing.
They have "drug experts". How do these people learns about the drug trade?
Which model of computation is "the best"?
You can! Take the format and post it on your own site, and I'll link to it on the community page (http://usesthis.com/community/). Easy.
Turns out, it's the same as the best way for a CS major to obtain credibility as a programmer. All you have to do is major in CS to know how much variability in talent there is among CS majors.
If you are working for someone, yes there will be always someone on your back. Just get it done. Quick and dirty.

A good place for a programmer is founding or co-founding a startup. The deadlines will be self imposed. Self imposed deadlines are a lot more achievable and realistic. However being a part of a startup brings with it the headaches of generating revenue and/or wooing investors.
Intro to Semantic Web E-Commerce
Apple is trying quite hard to get the biggest market share

I'd argue that the key difference is priorities. Traditionally, consumer-electronics companies (Dell is a great example) have pursued market share first, and then looked for ways to translate that into profitability. Apple, in recent years, seems to reverse that: first they aim for a good profit margin, then they try go for market share.

We've seen this with their various lines of laptops, with the iPod, with the iPhone, etc., and judging from their quarterly statements it seems to work.
I'm a white guy so I do find this interesting from the aspect of wanting to know more about Diwali. But I agree, it probably shouldn't be here.
If you're going to go with Emacs, any of these options are suddenly much brighter ;-)
Yes, I was surprised the article did cite this obvious incentive. I wonder why the executives selling their stock are not openly stating this motivation, even if it is not their primary one.
I wish CodeLesson did a better job showing you what a course of theirs is like. If you have taken one before could you share what it was like?
Why is this? You don't walk free if you shoot but miss. Why do you walk free if you try to put somebody in jail for a long time and ruin the rest of his life too?
My personal red-flag phrase is "You just need to ..."

Favorite occurence: "You just need to build a state machine." Yeah, saving the whole browser-side state (did I mention third-party GUI components?) of an application and reestablishing the server-side session state to match it is really easy with this piece of sage advice.
Ditto - good Lord, I couldn't make it through the first paragraph.
Ask HN Leaders: What has your point score been worth to you?
Curious to know how much value your score has had in business or in general for you.

Ofcourse, its hard to know whether a certain email or sale came about as a direct result of your high score on HN. But from what you can gather. What do you think?
nc is simple and I know its syntax. rsync is more powerful, but I need to look up its options half the time.
What I find hilarious is when people say in the same sentence that it's not fair to compare Android numbers to Apple's because iPhone isn't on multiple carriers, then in the next breath say that comparing Android to iOS on all devices is fair and balanced. You can't have it both ways.
>>the media was giving the phone company a lot of heat because almost all of the managers and executives were white males. So, he explained, promoting me would only make things worse.

Adams mentions that this experience was repeated in both the large corporations that he worked in.

Clearly, this excuse wasn't used to stop the overwhelming majority of executives who shared his skin color and gender. So perhaps, it might have been instructive for him to think about why he was being singled out for this excuse.
I rely on both, plus a generous helping of muscle memory, sense memory and random chance - I sometimes roll a die and go by the result.
I could not find a proof but I remember reading that they tried to simplify site a number of times but these changes lead to reduced revenue.
Trivia: Deepavali is not that big a deal among the Hindus of Kerala. For us the fire-cracker day is Vishu.
I'd put it a little more strongly: while the example of scripting languages is a new one to me, none of the reasoning here is new or surprising to someone who's read Christensen.
To Create
You're not using an effective captcha
=> Confirm Human: 2 + 2 =
Consider a more powerful implementation like http://www.captcha.net/
They only cost that much if you don't get an unlimited plan.
Pirate Copy: What managers can learn from Somali pirates
This article seems a bit misleading to me. First, it starts on the premise that working from home or Starbucks is what a lot of bootstrap companies do and think it's good and keeping costs down.

Then it leads into why building a company is this environment is bad. Your employees are going to start looking for other startups, you don't have enough whiteboard to map things out.

It seems to me that the reasons for needing "30,000" square feet of office space are applicable to a financed company, not so much a bootstrap. I don't think the argument that's being made here is supported by the arguments for it.

From my own experience at least in building random projects out, Starbucks works really well for me. I bring headphones, so the distractions of the "annoying person on the phone" don't really apply. It helps me focus because it does get rid of the distractions of home, without adding any distractions.
I concur. I spent 5 minutes reading through the site and I have zero idea what this Kik thing really is. If it's yet another closed service I'm expected to sign up for, no thanks.
I once had an Inspiron 4100 and it was by far the most ergonomic (for typing) laptop I've ever used.
I thinking being hacker is a culture. And m interested in other cultures. (though this'd be my own)
Things to ponder... Could Apple be trying to throw a wet towel on doing Java development for other platforms (Android in particular)?

No, because Android already distributes an SDK for Mac, and can easily deploy whatever Java stuff they need along with it: http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

* Of course if they're wanting more of a closed system, they're probably also aware that some of the more popular peer to peer apps use Java too. (Limewire / Frostwire, Vuze / Azureus). Between not being allowed on the store, Java probably not being installed by default soon, and questionable robustness of future Java options, they've thrown a wet towel on the sharing apps too.*

Transmission, the best BitTorrent client, runs natively on Mac.
This is by far the best quote I've heard about reasons people liked these technologies before Oracle but not anymore:

"So unless we want to pay large and increasing amounts of money to Oracle, which is a mathematical certainty because it involves Larry Ellison and Money, we should move out of MySQL. Do we want to work hard to ship more and more money to Oracle?"
Which people and where?
The "Learn You A Haskell" link that points to a page for Learn You Some Erlang is what got me. (though I don't mean to make this a thread for criticizing the author)
carlos interested in talking on side jobs? I'm into the business side of things, maybe we should talk?
Decriminalisation, and to some extent regulation (addicts can take pure drugs in certain clinics as part of a process to stop taking drugs), is currently providing some improvement in user and crime rates in Portugal: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.ht...
This is an interesting wikipedia article on the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_faster_than_the_wind

In particular, iceboats can sail at up to 5x the speed of the wind, according to this: http://iceboat.org/elements/faq/apparentwind.jpg
My non-techie friend just replied. Here is exactly what he said:

"Free messaging between iPhone BB and android users, faster. Once everyone is on it we can reduce SMS plan. It is great."

So the kik guys have apparently done a great job messaging their benefits to users. ;)
Wait, generics support co/contra variance through the 'extends' and 'super' keywords. e.g. Collection<? extends Foo>
Technically cocaine is already regulated and legal. It's just that the regulations are such that it's very difficult to get unless you're an ophthalmologist or ENT doctor.
Looks pretty cool, also looks pretty dangerous. Dunno if I'd give up public transport for this.
The Learn You A Haskell, and Learn You Some Erlang links both point to Learn You Some Erlang. Some folks may become confused. :)
what if someone dont have access to internet or dont care wnough because nothing like this has ever happened to them before?

checking google for tryptomine no where clearly suggests that its a sleep drug, let alone "dont drive while taking".
Nobody reads the TAOCP, at least cover to cover.
There have been whimsical book covers before but it does seem like a quirky Renaissance.
It would be great to see Fedora using it too, but I don't know if that will happen.

RHEL is not likely to use it, IMO, because it's not network-transparent. And f RHEL won't use it, Fedora probably won't use it.

That said, what's setting Ubuntu apart is the fact they're moving away from the traditional stack (X -> GNOME). This is significant enough IMO. Other distros might follow, and in that case, there will be two kinda of distros: those that use X, and those that use Wayland.
Cord-cutting continues: Cable loses subscribers again in 3rd quarter
I keep running into Music majors that are very good programmer.
Then I might suggest you start with this, much smaller, more focused book. You can probably read the entire thing in about an hour or so:

http://www.amazon.com/Procrastinators-Digest-Concise-Solving...

The authors of both books are good friends and Pychyl wrote the forward to Ferrari's book.
Google points finger at Facebook hypocrisy, blocks Gmail import
Well configured doesn't mesh into a "just buy that one" mindset. As others have stated. If you are picky about a product this isn't the service for you but if you just need something of X where X is a microwave or toaster, you normally just one one that works well.
You can do the modern "hey I can do this!" by getting a program you wrote onto an app store (confirmation provided by good ratings and sales).
Just change it now, the internet will catch up. The sooner you do it, the better. Obviously only do it if you really want to change the title.

(FWIW I don't really like the "an" either, sorry!)
No I do not believe in a god, I also do not believe in blind faith of which you blatantly have in the non-existence of god. I'm sorry but blind faith is still blind faith whether you're worshiping a deity or the non-existence of a deity.

I fail to see Dawkins as anything but an Atheist Pope. He speaks politely, he's literate and well read, he's a class act. Except they both command blind followers and make no attempts to educate or direct them.

Sorry, but the parallels are way too disturbing for me. I'm not atheist because I don't believe in god, I'm agnostic because I believe those behaviors of blind faith are what is destructive to our society and our sciences.

Blind unquestioning loyalty has led to nothing good. Dawkin's provides incredible literature on evolution, but I intend to be a logical person and question him, his motives and his work to no end, just like I have questioned the religious, their motives and their works to no end.

I'll remind you that the Scientologists fit the definition of an Atheist religion, and that is definitely the company I don't want to keep.
Lol, yeah only kidding - I don't write minified code. No, I just skip that layer entirely and type pure gzipped data.

edit: but seriously, yeah I use tonnes of whitespace and bucketloads of comments. No point making things harder than they need to be. Also commenting helps you solidify your understanding of the code.

I tend to write like this:

while(foo) {
code;
}

rather than

while(foo)
{
code;
}

I use newlines to separate tasks in the code. Example:

// do the foo check
if(foo){
removeFoo();
}

// now perform the bar operation
if(shouldDoBar) {
performBar();
}

// now return
return fooBar;
Let's hope sometime it would be possible to make such a wing VTOL-capable and have some kind of airbag safety device for use at low altitudes. Before that happens we're left with paragliding and ultralight trikes...
Video: http://video.au.msn.com/watch/video/9raw-rocket-man-soars-ov...

Swiss inventor and pilot Yves Rossy has successfully flown a new version of his jet-powered rocket over Lake Geneva with a total flight time of 18 minutes before landing.
Box: Simple secure sharing
web 3.0 design is gonna be more of predictions
designers will move closer to scientists n psychologists
mapping moves before they happen
cleaner designs will be required like never before and color will be a big player
Even real life texture, reflections etc. will find major acceptance.