skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks. Although I was riffing off a long tradition of geeky humor ripping on clippy.

On a more serious note; a marketing service that put it's customers brands in front of people who didn't yet know that those products were what they were looking for would be an awesome startup from a business perspective and a somewhat creepy one from a human perspective.
I've also seen clueless managers at some stores (cough cough TARGET) take the people in the back of the lines and redirect them to the newly opening lanes. Pisses me off to no end when I'm the guy that's been waiting the longest and grandma in front of me pulls out her checkbook....
"Compute!'s Gazette", actually, which I mention because if you use that term to Google you'll find a lot more stuff than just "Gazette".

I hesitate to endorse what is technically piracy, but I would observe that there is a torrent of the entire run of the magazine. (However I find the odds of anybody ever releasing back issues of the magazine for profit to be negligible and the public's interest in archiving history wins in my judgment.)

How strange to think back to all the articles I remember reading, the games I would never play, the hardware I would never own... and of course now it's all so archaic you couldn't hardly pay me to use it. And if I wanted to, I'd emulate it, and the emulator would be lucky to consume 1% of the machine sitting on my lap's resources.
Lisp Porn (2002)
LA is okay. Probably is between 3rd-10th position of tech hubs. If you really like the culture, weather, nightlife, or have ties to the city, then you'll do fine staying. You could probably start a decent company. USC, UCLA, and CalTech have fine CS depts. The entertainment and aerospace industries are strong here. That's why MySpace (originally social for musicians) and SpaceX (a new space-vehicle startup) work well here.

I have worked at two companies here (one big, one startup) for four years. Job scene isn't as dense as SF/SV. See for yourself on careers.stackoverflow.com. Do a 40-mile radius search on San Francisco. Then do one for LA. You'll notice that SF has 84 jobs and LA only 9. (For completeness, NYC has 98 jobs, Boston 40, Seattle 20, Chicago 11, Boulder 10, Portland 9, Minneapolis 1, San Diego 1).

But I'm having an itch to go hit a home run in SF/SV. Maybe you do, too. If you want to maximize your chance of success, then move to SF/Silicon Valley when you graduate. And do summer internships (or work on your own projects and network) there in the meantime.
Self-checkouts could easily be both faster and friendlier than they are now. If they were treated as express lanes, and took only one form of payment—some sort of loadable store-only debit card, that would also serve as your store loyalty card—then the process would simply become "scan, scan, scan, swipe" (or alternately, "insert, scan, scan, scan, eject iff sufficient funds", in card-lock fashion.)
...and incredible, painful winters.

Minneapolis is really really nice... from May to September =).
I wish that there was a universal credits system on the internet, and that I could purchase books by the page.
I would love to read more articles about how mature companies are reinvigorated and revived. It is easy to point the finger at what went wrong and why companies often aren't sustainable but what about the counter-examples that we can really learn from?
A problem that affects all software companies is how they manage their legacy. In a startup, everything is new and you are blazing frontiers. Once established, the legacy code just keeps growing and a bureaucracy is put in place to manage it. Developers are leaving Google for Facebook so they can get things done. You can then imagine where Amazon sits in this journey. Joining a startup is like rewriting everything from scratch.
I long for the days when grocery lines are unnecessary, self-checkout lines are unnecessary, and you can just scan-to-buy items as you go. Enforcement might be an issue, though. Heh.
Do you have scientific evidence in 140 or less characters to back that claim up? -Bot
+1 for Minneapolis i live here and love this city, lived in other cities with better tech scenes, but imo this town has alot to offer.

yellowblkpk i'm assuming you live in the twin cities too, do we have good meetups tailored to an HN like community here? i haven't found anything good yet.
See... startups in the Mission
How to make a flash screensaver with music
This tutorial will show you how to create a flash screensaver with music so that you can show off your animated flash gallery screensaver and protect your display screen meanwhile. Then you can sharing with friends and family or share it on your Facebook. I bet you'll be agree with me if you see the flash photo gallery.
I don't think so,

The task you are splitting has to be sizeable enough that the setup costs of parallelization (in this case, going to every cashier to put your stuff and then going and picking it up) don't outweigh the potential benefits from parallelization.In this case, unless you are buying the whole store, it just doesn't make sense to bother splitting your shopping cart like this.

Further, if all the cashiers are busy at all the times being useful (ringing customers), you cannot possibly get a gain from splitting any further. There's no way you could improve the throughput of this system when every processing unit (cashier) is at the top of its utilization.
When I lived in areas that had a lot of snow, I enjoyed the workout of shoveling snow. Always felt fantastic doing it and afterward, so much so that I'd often fantasize about shoveling the entire neighborhood if I had enough time.
If there's one thing I've learnt, is that once you pick a lane, stick with it (goes for driving too).
Zed did a great job on this book. I hope that he does do the C version and eventually (don't kill me) a Ruby version.

Thanks, Zed!
In high school, when my algebra teacher found out I was attending a semi-formal that he was chaperoning, he said "Really? You're taking a girl? Good for you."

I showed up and when he saw who I was with, his jaw literally dropped. I had one of the hottest girls as my high school sweetheart. We won a "cutest couple" award that night. We dated for 3 years.

I know a lot of hackers (of either sex) with attractive partners. It's not hacking that's unsexy. My girlfriend encouraged me to play on the computer so long as she got the attention she needed too. She loved it when I built her a computer (it was completely purple in the 1990s, a rare machine). She even played a few Quake 2 death matches online with me.

But sometimes hackers are unconfident. That's a universal turnoff. After I dated that girl I went years without finding another girlfriend because I'd totally lost confidence in myself. Get some confidence, and even a computer programmer can get an attractive partner. I thought this was thoroughly documented in The Game :-)
In the case of groceries wouldn't you only be as fast as the slowest line?

Your comment only applies if all lines are equal, which they almost never are. So you can't assume perfect load balancing under this circumstance.

I think the best store queueing system is to have one main queue that distributes customers to the first available cashier. People with larger loads take longer, but this has little effect on the main queue.
Try a screen guard then. Some are sold with the cases in the link I provided. You could even get one to reduce the glare.
Yes, the Nielsen Study they are citing is US only.

Global market share for Symbian in smart phones is around 30-40 depending on the source. (44% in 1Q10 according Gartner: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1372013)
I would argue that has already happened (here in the US). Of course, then again, I'm cranky.
Apu may have specified younger single depressed guys. I couldn't find the video clip anywhere still available to get the actual quote, so I'm going from memory.
Ok, so the kids are not programming but they are getting started with both development and business at a very young age and that's great. Getting even just a few years of a lead over the other kids their age really helps in the long run.

Keep in mind that in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (http://goo.gl/VC2FC) it shows that just getting a head start makes a huge difference.
I'd be happy if mine looked anything like that :)
Listening to Suster, I'd evaluate a bigger differential so that control can better survive dilution. For example, at 65/35 a single person could maintain control through 20% dilution. For YC a split of 57/43 would guarantee control through their investment.
Same here. I used to do a lot of Python programming, but moved to Ruby because of Rails. When I had to work on a machine learning paper, I spent weeks looking for a equivalent to NumPy or Matplotlib in the Ruby world, but nothing comes even close!
Definitely going outside is required. The gym does not give you the same benefit, imo. Its definitely also about connecting with nature.

Editing now to clarify, thanks!
Effects of Anti-Psychotic Medications
vancouver WA (US) or vancouver BC (Canada).

Anyway, forget about them both, there's nothing in those cities. Vancouver BC has lots of small (but weird) "social media" startups that probably died within 2-3 years.

Lots of "online gaming" (I mean gambling) companies.

All talents either move south of the border or to the East.

We have 3 good schools: UBC, SFU, and UVic.

Lots of people who want to enjoy life.

I don't mean to be negative but it is what it is.
Raw material
Pittsburgh is beautiful. It has a decent startup scene and lots of tech talent (pitt, cmu). Rent is extremely cheap here, so you can't get more ramen profetable than here. We also have our own startup incubator, alphalab. Seriously. Pgh has all the qualities needed to become the next major startup community.
Thanks for all the advice, since we don't use the blog for a source of revenue we don't have to have ads. I would like to have it customized better, so the next designer for my site I will probably have them customize the blog to match the site or just do Posterous.
Who tracks down and shoots people for arguing with them? (very serious question, I really didn't get what you meant to say here)
Holy crap. Fix the styling on that page. I can barely read it with the red underline grey text links.
see also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1866952
To be fair, Singapore doesn't really have high taxes to deal with the cleanups. Our main strategy is to import a lot of low cost labor to do these sort of work.
Obviously they weren't taught well enough to know that iOS 4 would slow things down, too :/.
Things You Should Know About Apple’s Design Culture
This is the calculation I use and it seems to work out more often then not:

Observe the lanes, every person is assigned 1 point, elderly (60+) +1, buggies over 70% full get +1, smokers get +1, welfare recipients +2. Add up the totals and the line with the smallest sum is usually the fastest. Obviously you can't always tell who is on welfare or who the smokers are, but the obvious ones are usually the ones that take the most time anyway.
It's most certainly not a fair comparison and I'm most likely trolling here, but at the moment I considered it a (somewhat) interesting point.

(Edit: And Microsoft supports downgrades. I can't defend my own argument. In fact, on anything newer than an iPhone 3G, it is literally impossible to downgrade, while a 3G is just "difficult".)
Lately I've found the best way for meto consistently exercise is to incorporate it with hacking and work. I've started using my bike as my primary mode of transportation when I leave the house to program. So instead of driving to a coffee shop or library, I ride my bike. Its made a noticeable difference in my energy, creativity levels and ability to focus.
People forget that technological development isn't linear but an exponential curve. Once we get to a point where machines can design themselves the sky is the limit. Right now all human knowledge doubles every 2 years. Look back at the technology 50 years, or just 20 years ago and see how far we have come. It's impossible to predict where we will be even just 20 years from now.

In the 20-30 year time frame everything from immortality to artificial sentience could be possible.
Foursquare is thinking further than Facebook Places
I would be interested in a banking service with an API. What kind of service are you building?
I agree and disagree with him on Boulder (where I live now). I've visited SF and the valley many times, and moved to Boulder from the midwest 4 years ago.

A couple of his cons are way out of left field though:

The weather: Its never been 10 below in the 4 years I've been here, and only been below zero or single digits at night. Only about one or two days in each of the winter months is it cold, and there's as many winter days with highs in the 60s as there are days below freezing. It's very rarely cold more than a couple days in a row, unlike the midwest winters I'm used to where it won't get above 40 for a month. It'll snow 20" here, and be completely melted 3 days later. But I guess compared to SF and Seattle, he hasn't experienced enough really cold weather to know that what Boulder has isn't cold.

Real estate prices/rent is about the same as downtown of any major city not in California. Denver is about 30 minutes up the road, and condos are about the same price. As for getting to Denver, its easy enough, there's an express bus.
Of course, but many people will never switch. And even if they do, you will be in a line that is shorter than others.
That's no excuse. You can always set the svn:mime-type property.
Whenever someone talks about how dirty SF is, you know they confined themselves to SOMA, TL, the Mission and maybe North Beach. The rest of the city is about as clean as any big city in the US. There's nothing particularly dirty about the Sunset, Richmond, Pac Heights, Cole Valley, Parnassus, Diamond Heights, West Portal, Forrest Hill, Russian Hill, Glen Park, or the other neighborhoods that make up most of San Francisco.

In contrast, I now live in NYC and while there are no distinct "human poo" neighborhoods as there are in SF, the entire city is covered with a layer of grime and garbage from Manhattan all the way out to the furthest stops in Brooklyn and Queens. This was simply not the case where I lived in SF, on top of 17th street.

The same applies to the weather. Anyone who thinks SF has great weather has never spent much time west of Twin Peaks. It is foggy and cold most of the time.
The biggest factor for speed is the competency of the cashier. Many cashiers are tired and slow and don't care much about their jobs, you need to get in the line with the energetic smiling cashier who is moving things along.

Also, the self checkout lines can be incredibly fast or incredibly slow. If there is a problem you have to wait for a cashier to come fix it, and if the person in front of you gets confused it can take forever.
SEO changes all the time, practically every month. Its more of an art than a technical study. You might get more out of experimenting immediately.

SEOMoz is a great resource as mentioned.
Installation of the PIL pre-built packages on OSX is notoriously difficult, since it relies on system c libraries to do some processing.

Moving your development to a linux machine will clear up all of those issues.

Also 'easy_install' should get you all of the packages you want.
Both of these things are true. I work in SOMA and live in Glen Park and the city's dysfunction seems to be strongly correlated to the nice weather.
Yes; in particular, Matlab's restriction of ONE outside-callable function per file is a huge pain.
No talk of Boston and just a mention of New York?

It does not make much sense to compair technology/startup cities and totally leave out the East Coast.
San Francisco is an echo chamber in many ways. There are days when it feels less like a city where shit gets done and more like Disneyland for rich white people. That said, it's a pretty great place to live.
Related discussion: Ask HN: Best Startup City - Outside the USA?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1565375
Ok, so overlooking that SPPI are a notorious denier hack site, how do you explain the correlation between surface temperature records and satellite temperature records, both of which show an increase? Also, how do you explain the strong correlation between the temperature trends (ie. increase in temperature) between urban and rural areas? See http://www.skepticalscience.com/surface-temperature-measurem... and http://www.skepticalscience.com/urban-heat-island-effect-int... for details/pretty graphs.

Btw, that argument is #6 in the list of common denier arguments http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php

> In the field of science a healthy level of scepticism is required

Scepticism is fine, but the level of scepticism needs to be in proportion to the level of data available. The bulk of the data available strongly indicates that global warming is real, and is caused by humans. Which is why people who don't believe in global warming are now called 'deniers' - they're not really skeptics.
My friends that have gone to CMU all say the same.

What are the ideal neighborhoods for someone coming from SF or NYC? I'm thinking with bars and restaurants and a general nightlife-ish, walkable vibe.
Armageddon in Retrospect Kurt Vonnegut
Thanks, that helped.
For folks that are outside of SF or didn't vote, we had a measure up for vote to prevent sitting or lying on public sidewalks. This is principally targeting the homeless problem.

Luckily, it passed!

Go to this link and go all the way to the bottom. Its item L. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/11/03/...

Edit Additionally, it looks like Ron Conway was a big contributor to this. http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/San_Francisco_Sit-Lie_...
After going outside and walking in the sun for a couple of hours, I'm too tired to get any work done the rest of the day.

As far as I can tell, everything said about exercise is lies. Or perhaps mileage varies. Just remember, mileage varies, and also, you're not alone.
Wouldn't the Data.Graph.Inductive representation of a graph satisfy this (It might not be O(1), but it's pretty close)? I must admit that I find it hard to see what a zipper for a graph should look like, though.
The climate change debate isn't a debate anymore. It's just a yelling match peppered with a lot of ad hominem attacks and the solution is always cap and trade.

The solution goes nowhere though because China and India tell us we caused the problem and so we must unilaterally cut our consumption of greenhouse gases. Meanwhile Russia is building a big oil and gas network stretching into China totally outside the reach of the would be international climate regulators and cap and trade financial superstructure. Besides, cap and trade is just a way to pay corrupt politicians in developing countries to shut down industry and impoverish their citizens and better yet, starve their citizens by tearing up all their farm land and building inedible ethanol crops.

The irony is that the left are the ones who are super-enthusiastic about enacting draconian climate change legislation which dramatically increases the cost of energy for those in the lower income bracket and seriously handicaps the development and improvement in living standards of any developing country foolish enough to go along with the already smugly developed world's agenda.

BTW, Technology Review has really become quite ideological lately and is much less of a science magazine then it used to be.
Or you could just leave your cell phone at home when you're going on clandestine missions.
I live in Boulder. These two things really hit me:

> I really yearned for hardcore technology while I was in Boulder. A lot of the technology scene was very much focused on creating consumer applications. I’m a big infrastructure, big data, big scale kind of guy and often felt out of place in that scene.

I concur, except for the part about feeling out of place. I'd rather feel out of place more often so I can get more exposure to "big data, big scale".

> I didn’t like Boulder at all due to the cold climate and small size of the city.

I've heard this before, but hearing it from Joe Stump (the sentiment, not the reasons given which I'm well aware of) feels different. Not sure how I'll feel when it sinks in.
I have two blogs with Posterous, one of which is a daily picturial blog (Daily Tagxedo http://daily.tagxedo.com). Posterous is very easy to use and most of the time I just do it through email. If the comparatively limited functionality of Posterous fits your need (vs a full-blown blogging platform), I would recommend it highly because of the ease of use.
It is hilarious that this is probably the 5th time, at least, I've seen this story on HN and it just made the front page.

The second time, no less, from "jenny8lee":

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1850670

Not that it's not relevant, it's even a fairly good value and I hope somebody looking for an "in" realizes how exceptionally cheap $500 is and what a powerful intro it is to donate to a good cause as your ticket in :)

But kind of illustrates how completely random it is for something to make front page due to the very broken "new stories" section (assuming this isn't just a voting ring pushing it up).
it is incorporated into HN, as an opt-in option (see the script above)
It's an interesting topic, but if you look at the challenge questions, most of them raise issues with the idea that reality is digital. But from the little I know, modern quantum theory is analog. The polarization state of a photon is expressed as a point on a unit circle. That's analog. It takes an infinite number of decimal places to precisely express the state of the photon. In that sense, it represents an infinite amount of information.

But the paradox is that if you try to store information in the photon state and then read it out, you can only store 1 bit. How much sense does that make, that you have a state that takes an infinite amount of information to represent, but in practice you can only store one bit? Why would there be such an infinitely information-hungry infrastructure, to support such limited, information-poor storage?

To put it in terms people around here might appreciate, imagine if Google required an infinitely large cloud computer to store just one bit. They wouldn't stay in business long. That's no way to run a universe.
I'm a huge fan of Bell's (and am currently missing it terribly), but to be fair I feel there are better breweries out there - granted, not many, but they do exist.
If you miss, dremel, you might be interested in BigQuery ;) It is essentially hosted Dremel. Check it out: http://code.google.com/apis/bigquery/
SF's weather is good when it isn't raining. Man, winter's coming and its going to get cold and raining till March. We're having a few good days of weather left, so enjoy it while you can!
ye dude, 'modern switched networks' can still be sniffed. see arp-flooding etc.
I import it from the Midwest to San Francisco. Currently having a Two-Hearted, and I've got a bunch of Oberon in the basement.
This is awesome. Someone finally figured out a clever use for the camera feedback loop.
Startup Quote: Alan Kay, Computer Scientist
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

- Alan Kay, Computer Scientist

http://startupquote.com/post/1476650485
I hate image dropping in comments, but this picture of Apple's flagship products 10 years ago and today seems relevant: http://i.imgur.com/KhDWo.jpg
Check out MinneBar (http://minnebar.org/) and the other stuff organized on that website. Plus there are a ton of user groups, Ruby (RUM), Groovy (GUM), Python (PyMNtos), Wordpress, PHP, ObjC, Flash, .NET, JS, Startup ones, and more, lots more. If you are so inclined, RUM & MinneBar/Demo are great places to start networking. In fact, FanChatter, a 2009 YCombinator startup if from Minneapolis and Luke Francl helps organize the MinneBar/Demo stuff.

We are here, come find us:)

I organize PyMNtos
Great, now all I think when I use my iPad is How cold the screen is. I'm going to have to jailbreak it and run distributed.net in the background.