skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't they not forced to sell their shares to anyone? once they pass the 499 shareholder mark they have to disclose financial information, at which point most companies go public, but if they have enough interest from private investors, I don't believe they have to.
I started a hardware company at the age of 23 and it was insanely difficult. Everything that could go wrong did.

The challenges of designing production capable hardware and software, manufacturing, testing, packaging, shipping, supporting, handling failures (hardware or software problem? let the fighting commence!), managing inventory and cash flow are immense. So much so that I never want to ship hardware again.

The problem here is they are probably not making any money in the low volumes they are producing this at. Any cash they do have is probably tied up in inventory, and in a startup it's really hard to predict what sales will be 3 months from now. Guess too high and all your cash is tied up in inventory and now your empty for payroll. Guess too low and you might have a 3 month backlog. (sure, that's a 'good' problem to have, but it's not all good in the hardware world because now you need cash to buy the parts to build the hardware. Banks won't talk to you without years of operating experience under your belt, and you had better hope your investors are willing to help finance inventory growth)

My advice: Find a niche market who will appreciate this device and quadruple your price. Perhaps this more expensive version comes with 3 months of a 'sleep expert' (who is an actual person) who analyzes my sleeping patterns and 'customizes' a wakeup/sleep plan just for me (i.e. allow 3rd party experts to improve the experience and thus add value). Or maybe there is margin built in for 'sleep doctors' to sell to their patients/customers.

Could the microphone detect and track severe snoring? Sleep apnea affects 6% of our population.. that's a big number.

The problem here is people's lives are only being marginally improved, and for $60, too low for any profit after you factor in warranty, support and failures, they are expecting something more. These are not good customers for you.
Thanks. So it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Rose_Bowl_Hoax

You know, I actually read it, but still...
50B in the bank? They must be buying Facebook.
Change in Focus: Playability to Profitability
Will the Real Column Stores Please Stand Up?
Show HN: I built a simple QR Generator for Android Apps
Ask HN: What are the best job postings you've seen?
Trying to find good examples that people enjoy of job listings. What entices you as an engineer and designer? What details do you care about most? My hope is that there's enough opinion here that it influences job postings to be better (enough startups pay attention to HN).
From a purely technical standpoint I believe the answer is "Yes". Whether or not it makes sense from a performance and cost standpoint is another matter.

I find the idea really intriguing though. We already have a general strategy of trying to spread our infrastructure between different providers even if it's just as simple as pushing backups of our Rackspace hosts to S3.
Agreed in general. But PythonCard takes a certain amount of the pain out of doing a GUI in Python.
Microsoft restores access to Hotmail inboxes
That has happened to me all the time, too, though, not after the most recent OTA (I'm not on gingerbread yet, I don't think).
this is a good question. why is there a bunch of fun challenges/books for python, and a bunch of fun books for ruby, but with php everybody just laughs at you?
ASK NH: Can you show me a web developer bio example?
I need to send a prospect my bio. I have a cover letter and my resume. I just have never seen a bio.

Can you please give me some tips or show me an example?
So you save a whole dollar and 51 cents. Big deal. I'd just as soon order it from Amazon, who in general has much better prices than direct from O'Reilly.
I know there's not a lot of love for Kevin on HN, but I think this is a great fit for him. For better or worse, Kevin is pretty well-connected in the tech scene and thanks to Diggnation, has a pretty strong personal brand. Doing something like this allows him to leverage both his connections and his personal brand in a way that doesn't require him to also have a great product sense, which I think is where Digg went off the rails a little.
How to Practice or Learn any Language or Framework
Just to clarify (its in the comments) too but as the law stands, FB does not have to go public anyway but only disclose financial results. http://www.sec.gov/about/laws.shtml (Corporate Reporting)
I hope you don't implement any discounts for past purchases! People buying that without complaining means they value your product highly. Their valuation of your product probably increased after they used their first pack.

You should take this into consideration and beef up your try-before-you-buy marketing - given the data, I think your bundle is probably supremely undervalued right now.
Feels like an attempt to remain relevant after Digg became a case study about how to destroy a community.
I agree with this. How-to articles showing ways to use the layers would increase the value.

The short tutorial on your support page is nice - maybe you could expand that further and make the link more prominently say it is a howto/tutorial.
> It's not hard to envision a marketplace where pervasive use of this technique concentrates wealth even further than it already is.

Don't see how that follows. If you are restricting the market to only a fixed number of sellers, you are leaving a potentially significant amount of money on the table.

You're doing that to prevent the abuse of your company's shares by investors, who generally have more money than you do.

Imagine if you didn't have the right to turn down a VC who only wanted to put in money once you got hot, and then came to your board meetings as a shareholder and caused problems. Or to be criminally responsible if an accountant somewhere in your organization makes an error. That's what it is to be a public company in the post-Sarbox/Finreg US. This is about protecting the entrepreneur, not about protecting the old money.
Groklaw: Don't go home, go big
It would be an interesting day if someone could make regular expression searches over a large data set as fast as keyword or phrase searches against a sorted and indexed database.

They also need to make sure they use an implementation that doesn't suffer from exponential time[1] regular expressions.

[1] - http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html
Yahoo works pretty well for me. Occasional false positives and negatives, but it's generally about right.
Everything about this comment is horrifying.

Start with AES-CTR (which wouldn't have been an option in 1979; counter mode hadn't been invented): you can't use TCP sequence numbers as counters; among other things, multiple segments can be sent with the same sequence number, and while the byte described at the stream offset of those sequence number (usually, but not always) agrees with every other packet, no other guarantee exists about the nature of those segments. Reuse of a counter in CTR mode is a devastating flaw.

Running DH over an unsecured connection with no previous trust anchor is also a recipe for disaster; attackers don't even need a fully-functioning man-in-the-middle to break it; they just need to be able to inject two segments, one in each direction, to fixate the derived key.

Everything else you propose to layer on top of this DH + AES-CTR connection is handwaving; if you have to run "application-layer" TLS, what's the value of hardcoding (broken) crypto into the TCP layer?

Sorry for the rabid response to a well-intentioned comment, but wow I couldn't disagree with you more strongly.
I have a PS3 that hasn't been received the update to remove the "Other OS" option(and I'm damn glad I waited...). Does this also provide access to the PS3 Hypervisor? I remember reading, a long time ago, that that was one portion of the PS3 that was restricted from running Linux. On the same token, I wonder if that could mean better performance... I found that running Yellow Dog Linux on it was awfully slow.
to a good extent, creativity == (ability to generate alternatives && identify / pick out the best)

and i believe 'ability to generating alternatives' is one of the most important issue here, as often times, most / all existing solutions to a problem have failed or are poor, and it is then required of a 'creative' person to come up with alternatives - obviously the bonus is when the best is picked from these alternatives.
I don't think it's "all of a sudden," rather that as the web continues to grow up, more and more people are becoming aware that what they do or say on the web isn't as private as they might once have thought. As an aside, I think it first really clicked for me a few years back with the whole Netflix Prize situation, where even though the data was anonymized, smarter folks than I were able to demonstrate how you could personally identify a subscriber's profile from it.
Greplin (YC W10) hiring Python hackers in San Francisco
Do you eat, sleep, and breathe Python? We're processing tons of data with Python, and we'd love to have you on the team.

Contact us at jobs@greplin.com
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I just recall reading articles that made it sound like executives or board members were tearing their hair because of it. Must have been the journalists' mistake.
"If the candidate uses up all of the interview time trying to obtain perfect requirements, we have a problem. In the software development I do, the requirements are never perfect. I don’t demand that a candidate try to create an agile, iterative process on the spot, but I look for someone who knows when to say 'close enough, let’s move forward.'"

I think this is a great reason why most interviewing techniques fail. The interview is not a reliable model of the work environment. This is especially true given the fact that people love "gotcha" interview questions which are essentially brain teasers which require you to know some arcane trick to get the question right.

I have seen great candidates spend a lot of time trying to understand a simple problem in an interview. These are people who under normal working conditions would never waste tons of time trying to get a perfect spec before starting work. But, because of the types of interviews people try and pass over as being "reliable indicators of future performance" candidates get stuck trying to find the trick in each question. If you have a candidate spend their entire interview trying to tease out a spec it sounds like a better indicator of the low quality of the interviewer rather than the candidate to me...

When people start heading that direction in an interview, be sensible and say, "Do you feel like you need a complete spec before going on? I promise there's no trick I'm trying to get you to fix" and you'll get the response you're actually looking for.
Here is a summary of the 71 20-year holding periods on record.

color return occurs chances

red <0% 8 11.3%

pink 0-3% 18 25.4%

beige 3-7% 31 43.7%

light green 7-10% 14 19.7%

dark green >10% 0 0.0%

Here is the 20 year growth multiple at various returns.

return multiple

-0.02 0.67

-0.01 0.82

0 1.00

0.01 1.22

0.02 1.49

0.03 1.81

0.04 2.19

0.05 2.65

0.06 3.21

0.07 3.87

0.08 4.66

0.09 5.60

0.1 6.73

0.11 8.06

Optimistic conclusion:

If you hold a diversified portfolio of large domestic stocks for 20 years, you will likely double (and maybe even quadruple) your spending power.

The chances of ending up with less than your original spending power: 11.3%.

The chances of quadrupling your original spending power (exceeding 7% per year): 19.7%.

The chances of achieving 6.73 times your original spending power (the elusive 10% per year): It hasn't occurred yet.
Technically they exist, but I think it's an oxymoron because it must be bound to be usable. To be honest, I still can't figure out a reason you'd ever use one.

Do you have an idea of when they're useful?
New year's daily resolutions, let's crush it one day at a time
And yet that majesty and serenity only really exist when we can see it and access it. As others have said it would be bad to turn it into a theme park but simple exploration demands some "invasive" measures.
pretty much this.

be a shark. sharks have no necks and can't look back. necks are for sheep.
I might pay $3.99 to hear him talk about that
Given that the number is incorrect, basing investment strategy on it would not be the wisest idea around.
Cool. One other point that would be interesting is what infrastructure they use - if they're all EC2 then price/support is going to make the difference.
Online Services has consistently lost money but their solution was a one-time dividend of $3/share to all shareholders or $32 billion dollars.
You're missing my point. The SEC protects non-accredited investors by forbidding companies from selling them shares. Goldman doesn't trade for non-accredited investors. If you are a Goldman private client, you are by definition outside the purview of those protections.

Starting a big long thread about how Goldman is a vampire squid or whatever Taibbi called them is a waste of time, because I'm not arguing that Goldman is a good company or a bad company or that its interests are aligned with its clients.

I'm saying that the logic that assails Goldman's Facebook vehicle is nonsensical; Goldman is doing nothing more sinister than creating an ad-hoc venture capital fund and using it to invest in Facebook. Does every California public employee also count as a Facebook shareholder if CalPERS is an LP of a VC that invests in Facebook?

(Answer: no.)
Well that's been true for a lot of people. The inflation driven boom drove up the prices of a lot of things including labor. Prices need to come back down.

That said if suddenly no one wanted programmers I'd be in a lot of trouble :)
I can only second this.

What makes the Newsletter great for me is that I often discover articles that I wanted to read but didn't get the chance to at that moment and then forgot. The selection is excellent.

Great work Kale, I appreciate it.
I think moving to SSL as a default is a good move. What difference does no logging on the receiving end make when your ISP can log everything you search for?

In particular, GMail initially had SSL configurable, but then moved it to the default: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/default-https-access-f... . Apparently they don’t think the latency is a problem—or if they do, that it’s worth it to get the security benefits of HTTPS.
Goldman can't sell shares of a Facebook investment vehicle to non-accredited investors.
50 blogs all write original content, and all put "original source" attributes on their content. 1 website comes along and copies all of the content from these 50 websites.

Google knows where the original content came from and can rank accordingly.

Now, that site which copied the original source content notices dropping down the list so lies and states that they are the original source instead. Google can automatically detect that they are doing this because they have lots of data that exists on lots of other sites which has conflicting "original source" data. Google now de-lists the scraper site, or penalises further.

Also, it becomes impossible for scraper sites to say that what they're doing is ok, and is good for users, if all of a sudden they're publishing lies that they are the original source for content which they're not.
No one can agree on how to make tea
Do StartSSL issued free 1-domain certificates valid for all major desktop and mobile browsers? Can anyone confirm this? Most cert providers claim almost always 99% and above comptability but they dont claim any percent value on their website.
This might not be a bug iin their Messaging app per se. I've noticed a similar problem with ListViews in general: often times what you appear to be clicking on and what you're actually clicking on are different. I've deleted the wrong contact and called the wrong person many times because of this. I've noticed that it happens most often during updates to the ListView (e.g. while it is loading); this leads me to believe it to be due to lack of thread synchronization.
well, you wouldn't really, or it would be the same code as presented here without the login information. oauth credentials are pulled from constants, a security file, or the environment, so it is just a different paradigm, but the code is actually just a little simpler, it is devoid of most login logic other than passing the keys.
The target repo itself isn't owned, but your connection is. The point is that you only think that you are talking to the correct repo, when in fact you are cloning whatever git repository the attacker would like you to.

It's obviously a focused attack as are all MITM attacks, so you can assume the attacker is familiar with the install script. So when the script then continues and performs it's next action on the contents of the repository, you will execute an arbitrary payload.

Edit: It wasn't clear to me that the problem had become apparent in the parent post. Probably just pre-coffee thinking on my part, but hopefully this will help clarify it for anyone else reading along who also missed it.
I don't see any contradiction, even if sites like 'facebook-login-help.com' are exactly the kind of clutter Markham would prefer did not rank at all.

One complaint is wishing that the search results were better. From the perspective of one person, that might or might not ever happen – one person outside Google has very little influence on overall search quality trends.

The other action is living in the world as it is. If cynically-optimized results are going to dominate the top spots, and being in the top spots is a way to make a living, even people who would prefer cynical-optimization not be rewarded have to engage in it. (I'm sure there are lots of good people creating awful content for Demand Media and other mills; they're just responding to bad incentives.)

It's the same for anyone who's had to twist their original web writing/design/structure in a way that was solely directed at search engines, rather than primary users. Yes, lots of SEO advice is making the web more usable for people, as well. But not all of it, axiomatically.
A chain of command that's savvy enough to really want him despite that is one you'd actually want to be in, though.

Absolutely. But if they were the savvy type, would they have been pwned at nearly every security layer like that? If you haven't seen it, the video says it better than I can.

So probably if he were hired, it would be with mixed feelings of some of his uppers. At best, he probably "wouldn't fit in with the team" as they say. Someone like him would need to be either in charge of the whole freaking platform direction, or not there at all. (now there's an idea) Seriously, IMHO Sony's best move would be to fire the guy responsible for reneging on Linux and hire someone with a clue instead. Microsoft would have the guts do something like that.

It's ridiculous. I bought a PS3 (by coincidence) the other day. Guess what?! It doesn't play PS2 games! PS2 plays PS1 games (so I thought). Our Wii plays GameCube games. Xbox360 plays Xbox games. What is a PS3 if not a PlayStation? I didn't have my heart set on it anyway, but the kids tracked down some PS2 games they wanted. They specifically wanted the older PS2 versions because they didn't like the PS3 versions!

In fairness, Gran Turismo 5 and Little Big Planet are beautiful and fun games and they have only crashed a few times.
Really? Hmm, maybe it's because it's a very old address, but my Yahoo spam filtering is terrible.

For example, I get a few very similar Canadian pharmacy junk messages every single day. Even though I usually mark them as spam, they continue to appear in my inbox. It never learns. Additionally about 1 in 4 order confirmation emails ends up in the Junk folder.
Just to give the full number the average Californian owes $132,655 with National Debt, State Debt and Consumer Debt (including mortgage, car, etc...)

U.S. Debt: http://www.usdebtclock.org/index.html

California Debt:http://www.usdebtclock.org/state-debt-clocks/state-of-califo...

Consumer Debt: http://www.youngmoney.com/get_out_of_debt/california-leads-n...

(Though that doesn't include the estimated $1,012,540 per citizen in unfunded liabilities)
Vogue auto-reloads stylesheets whenever CSS files are saved
I entered a term in the search bar, hit enter, and got an error message...
Freakonomics: The Swimmer's Dilemma
Companies have different usage guidelines for their trademarks. For example, here is Microsoft's:

https://www.microsoft.com/About/Legal/EN/US/IntellectualProp...
Will 2011 Be The Year of PE-Backed IPOs?
I think the joke was that Online Services pretty much burned up all of their extra money.
Mid to high end mobile devices can use these chips with a switchable external GPU that can be turned on for graphics-intensive applications and off when it's not needed in order to improve power consumption - Apple is doing this with their MB Pros, and as far as I know it has been an effective configuration.

I can imagine a similar setup in desktop machines to reduce their power consumption.
This is a great article. Every now and then Matt can really knock one out of the park.

Of all the tech that we talk about on here, there are only a few items that really catch my attention. Christmas tree machines are one of them. Auto-drive cars is the other.

These two inventions, when complete, will massively change things. Good luck guessing when they'll be complete, though. Could be a decade. Could be a couple of hundred years.

If cars could become more like rooms that automatically go places, instead of complex machines that require constant care and oversight, vast amounts of productivity and leisure opportunities would open up.
Got Passion?
Additionally, manual compilation works great for your Apple Macbook that you develop on or your podunk website that runs on one machine (the commonality here is that you have one machine), but is a nightmare for any serious deployments where you're getting millions of hits a month and have a a non-trivial number of machines to manage. The last thing you want to do is configure a manual compilation via something like puppet, chef, or cfengine.
Something about the typography on your site just makes my eyes glaze over. Line-spacing, maybe? I think that's it. Too much line-height, not enough space between paragraphs.

Try:

.entry p {
color: black;
line-height: 140%;
margin-bottom: 15px;
}
Kudos to DDG. Finally a good alternative to the big G.

What scares me the most sometimes is when I think about how ubiquitous Google's ads network and analytics network are. Most of the websites I visit use AdSense and/or Google Analytics. Some are using Google's copy of popular javascript libraries like jQuery. This means that when you are moving from site A to site B to site C, there is a good chance that even though A or B or C does not know about it, Google knows your full browsing path and even how you move from one to another. I am not saying that Google is actually doing it, but it is scary someone has the capability to do it and to know more about you than the government and your mother do. It is important a significant portion of the website and our browsing activities are outside of Google's networks.
Yes, when I said 'the remote repo', what I meant was 'the one that I see.

Thanks for the extra explanation, guys! Makes a lot of sense.