skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I've come to believe that entrepreneurs putting away some money to protect the downside is largely a good thing. It allows them to take bigger risks and play for more upside."

One of the best rationales I've encountered to support the recent trend of entrepreneurs selling some of their shares in later funding rounds.
Does this observation have some relevance, or is it just for shock value?
What were the recent Heroku issues? I must have missed this.
Good luck with the whole poetry thing in a language with no ambiguity to it.
At one point this was correct, @ahi. But then the Civil War happened.

Confusing the employment contract with the employee isn't just bad accounting, it's flat-out delusional in a market that is largely at-will.
My guess would be a babel fish. It only picks up on subconscious frequencies, so outside noise will not get in the way. It also proves the non-existence of god.
It's just a name. They could call it wifi router and still charge you $20.
Let me get this: you pay $5 total for 2 gigs data and $LARGE_NUMBER voice minutes and SMS's? Can you give more details.
Hm, the consistent story I've heard is SO initial traction = founder's influential friends/contacts in the programming community.
I can already tell without buying it that this is awesome.
So, Apple AND Microsoft are both wrong.

Trademarking a name like "Food Store" for a grocery store would be ridiculous. Just as "App Store" is equally ridiculous.
How can Eduardo's shares be accurate if that info wasn't ever released?
I'm working on something like that as well. http://alpha.beepl.com:8889 using the http://nrds.co.uk engine. jan(at)beepl.com
"The fact that the scientific community at large suspected or outright rejected the bogus study from the beginning sure is inconvenient, isn't it?"

No, because this is why the anti-vaccine movement started. Had they actually debunked the research in an open and transparent way instead of 'suspecting' it then vaccination rates would probably be a whole lot higher today.

"I'm baffled at people who seem to think the entire industry is committing fraud instead of just the very small number of people have supported Wakefield's paper."

Well, there is the fact that the pharmaceutical industry now tops not only the defense industry, but all other industries in the total amount of fraud payments for actions against the federal government under the False Claims Act.

http://www.citizen.org/hrg1924
or go to http://www.kame.net/ and see the dancing kame!
A Case Study in Enterprise Soul Smashing
When a list of engineering schools ranked by recruiters does not have Caltech in the top 25 (or even on the "next 20"), but does have Cal Poly, something is seriously screwed up.
Pilot only waited 12 minutes and could probably make some/all of that up in the air. But you are right, 2 hours waiting in line is bullshit.
4. Google promotes the mediocre over the exceptional. WebM encodes are and will remain lower quality vs. H.264

If Google gets their wish and consumer video cameras switch to WebM, we all end up with lower quality recordings. Thanks! :(
Just tried it, works only for the English-Spanish pair right now, but the reliability is pretty good considering that they're calling it an Alpha.
I'm rather of the opinion that the translations should be sandboxed scripts, rather than strings.
We have got to stop talking about VistA. It casts a cloud over the whole conversation. Look at what's coming out of the Regenstrief Institute. They built some of the original VistA components (like CHCS) and have built other systems from the ground up, like OpenMRS.
My younger child is 11; he hasn't had much interaction with physical storage media for music.
I definitely agree - access to production data would be a huge help in most development jobs. It has never been clear to me why database anonymization isn't more frequently used to give developers ready access to "pseudo-production" data in order to troubleshoot. So many companies will maintain separate production and test databases but let the test databases get so out of sync with production that it's very difficult to ensure that a fix in a test environment will work in production. The way I see it, the test database should simply be an anonymized mirror of production, and then everybody wins.
Using AWS CloudFront's Custom Origins, the Accept-Encoding header is passed and cached separately on the same filename.

$ curl -I http://statics.sodahead.com/js/generated/sodahead/utils/main...
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 04:34:51 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.11 (Unix)
Last-Modified: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 02:11:26 GMT
ETag: "14d09-4999cb7e48f80"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 85257
Cache-Control: max-age=5184000
Expires: Sun, 13 Mar 2011 04:34:51 GMT
Content-Type: application/javascript
X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from images.sodahead.com:80
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Age: 53417
X-Cache: Hit from cloudfront
X-Amz-Cf-Id: 493c86c13ceff5001d1a55c596153dca84009e4f34c67a565fd329760f8418f6b3fc35d1ac2980cb
Via: 1.1 squid.wap-lax-106.sodahead.com:80 (squid/2.7.STABLE7), 1.0 b67f54b549c6579a21be3a5a67642d7a.cloudfront.net:11180 (CloudFront), 1.0 cc184e2737613cc16ea7b900e5384df1.cloudfront.net:11180 (CloudFront)
Connection: close

$ curl -I --compressed http://statics.sodahead.com/js/generated/sodahead/utils/main...
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 04:34:37 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.11 (Unix)
Last-Modified: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 02:11:26 GMT
ETag: "14d09-4999cb7e48f80"-gzip
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Cache-Control: max-age=5184000
Expires: Sun, 13 Mar 2011 04:34:37 GMT
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 26799
Content-Type: application/javascript
X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from images.sodahead.com:80
X-Cache-Lookup: MISS from images.sodahead.com:80
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Age: 53439
X-Cache: Hit from cloudfront
X-Amz-Cf-Id: e1c3dc2910370a51bdd8ffb9b590cbdd4c7e4f155d381b3783c09649b7cd2b8517eb2746e2d783ed
Via: 1.1 squid.wap-lax-106.sodahead.com:80 (squid/2.7.STABLE7), 1.0 squid.wap-lax-104.sodahead.com:80 (squid/2.7.STABLE7), 1.0 b67f54b549c6579a21be3a5a67642d7a.cloudfront.net:11180 (CloudFront), 1.0 107edf28374a08a9e88792cfd1fdd16b.cloudfront.net:11180 (CloudFront)
Connection: close
Keep in mind this freelancer is probably from overseas where the cost of living and wages are very different from the US. If this person is from India they would make a lot less working for McDonalds there.
Here's an example of one of Facebook's MySQL tools: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/21/facebook_online_sche...
Rejection notes for landmark CS papers
Scheduling is the new Virtual Assistant
How to See the World Like Malcolm Gladwell
I like this a lot. I've used cotweet and hootsuite exclusively for the tweets scheduling feature (everything else is bloat to me) and always thought that somebody should turn this feature into a minimalist product.
>> PHP Fog was formed last year by Lucas Carlson, a PHP developer over the past eight years who is also described in the news release as one of the world’s leading developers of the Ruby programming language.

Am I the only one who finds this ironic?
What's in a (venture capital) website?
This is almost moving Kurzweil's prediction from "mostly correct" to "correct".

"Early 2000s

* Translating telephones allow people to speak to
each other in different languages.
* Machines designed to transcribe speech into
computer text allow deaf people to understand
spoken words."

Every time he notches another victory, I pay closer and closer attention to his other guesses that are 10 - 30 years out.
It doesn't make it any less protected, but it does change whose rights come into play here. Apple owns the App Store servers, and thus you're violating its property rights if you hack them. I own my computer, so the one with property rights to protect is me.
Do NOT give to the Red Cross. They are horribly inefficient with money. Nothing you give to them right now will get to people who need it, it's for the NEXT emergency, maybe, if they don't spend it on furniture for the offices instead.

Find smaller, local charities. I know it's not easy but it will actually help people rather than just making us feel better.
http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_CA/ca/pressroom/ca-pressrele...

The rules are changing, its less annoying for American VCs to do business in Canada with the removal of the Section 116 stuff in the most recent budget.
There were 8 NOPs on the x86 - XCHG AX,AX was 1-byte 0x90. XCHG BX,BX etc were 2-byte 0x87 0xXX where the 2nd byte selected the general-purpose registers.

Very strange for a frequency-encoded instruction set to let such short opcode sequences go to waste.
I certainly did misread; thanks for that!
Remember that "Software Engineer" also includes a ton of people designing internal-use VB enterprise bloatware to specifications written by people who think Excel is a database. Not very inspiring work, but good pay and good job security, and well within the median programmer's capabilities. When averaged in with the small number of pressure-cooker startups and the slightly larger number of fast-paced tech-focused companies, it's surprising but not unreasonable.
This one's a bit different. They provide dedicated AWS boxes. So there's no free plan (though beta testers get a generous free credit) and there's no five-second or so delay getting a response to a request on an app that has been turned off due to inactivity.
They do not measure stress directly, but base it on a rather narrow rubric of objective factors such as physical demands and travel.

http://www.careercast.com/jobs-rated/2011-jobs-rated-methodo...
Yes, I don't disagree that this is a step backwards, and that there are legitimate users being caught out. My point was mostly about the falsehoods that are being spread.

I found some figures by the way, 90% of T-Mobile customers don't go over 500MB, and "a single digit minority uses 30% of the bandwidth". I worked out that if 91% of their customers use 500MB, and 9% use 3000MB, this change reduces their overall bandwidth usage by 31% (assuming all those 9% switch to using only 500MB... if they jump ship, TMobile save 37%), but only pisses off 9% of their customers. I'm sure financially it's a net win... PR-wise... not so much.

(Most of that 91% are "well below" the 500MB line, if we assume 250MB average then the savings are over 50%! I can see why they wanted to do this)

Edit: Noticed while searching for figures that they have backed down! "There will be no change to the data packages for existing customers for the duration of their contract and we apologise for any confusion caused"
Circuit-level (layout) problems I'd guess make up a decent portion. I heard (from a guy who worked on it) about a bug in a prototype version of a processor from a major company that didn't cause any correctness problems but was a major performance problem: one of its four cache ways simply didn't have its power rails connected.

Some CPU verification code I wrote on an internship a couple years ago discovered a few bugs in a certain fairly widely-used processor, though I'm pretty sure they were all logic-level problems (i.e. RTL bugs, not circuit level ones)...

- The L1 D-cache tracked clean/dirty status at half-cache-line granularity, and if you did a store (with just the right timing) to one half of a cache line you had just explicitly cleaned with a cache-clean instruction, the dirty bit wouldn't get set on that half line, so as soon as the cache got flushed the data written by the store was lost.

- The prefetcher would shut down sometimes as a power saving technique, but if you laid out the right sequence of cache operations and branches in the last 32 bytes of a 4KB page, sometimes concurrent TLB misses would cause it to not get re-enabled, meaning the processor would lock up, stop fetching instructions and just sit there dead in the water until an interrupt came in (assuming interrupts were enabled).

There were a couple more, but I thought those were the more interesting ones. Granted, these weren't bugs that were likely to be encountered in normal usage for various reasons (in addition to being extremely difficult to reproduce sometimes -- i.e. on one in particular you could run the exact same sequence of instructions from system power-on and sometimes it happened, sometimes it didn't), but bugs nonetheless.
The main form of stress for actuaries that they measure is deadlines. There might be a bit of travel if they are a consultant, but otherwise job security tends to be quite good, salaries reasonably high, there's a continuous intellectual challenge, peers tend to be friendly and clever(er than oneself) and so on.
Thanks! I used Hootsuite for a long time and I really enjoyed using Sharefeed too, but there came a point when I thought it could be more streamlined and that's when I had the idea for Buffer. I'm still at the fairly early stages, I launched this at the very end of November for the Startup Sprint, so I'd love to hear any suggestions or feedback you have.
Writes are limited to 1 per second, so HRD is not a good match when high usage is expected.

This is per entity group, and it's not a strict limitation, it's an expectation of performance.
thank you so much... I still have a lot to learn about this! :)
Your argument here — against the parent's position that the ideas you're advocating are poorly thought out and impractical — appears to be "I am allowed to have poorly thought-out and impractical opinions because I'm not in the government."

That's not really much of a defense of your position.
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply this is the last generation of consoles (that would be ridiculous), just that there isn't one looming in the horizon despite it being the usual 5 year point.
You are correct: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2097326
> Can you get Spotify on iPhone?

The problem is not the iPhone, it's that you can't get it in the US.
World is ripe with examples of technology being replaced by a challenger due to non-technical factors. The rise of MP3 and other lossy standards in favour of CDs is an obvious example. Early LCDs were not as good in terms of image quality as contemporary CRTs. It doesn't have to be better, it just has to be good enough technically and attractive for other reasons.
To Groupon or Not to Groupon: New Research on Voucher Profitability
When MySpace Goes, What Happens to the Data and Privacy?
I think 80 characters per line is perfect, the same as my command prompt window. I found plenty more opinions on the subject here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/131468/what-is-a-sensible...
See also: Detours library by MSFT research(http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/detours/). It doesn't require you to recompile your binaries to add NOPs.
T-Mobile: "There will be no change to the data packages for existing customers"
Care to share details of (early) success? Are you getting signups? How are you promoting the site?
Sorry for the late answer, I was busy today and didn't check hn until now, long after it went from the front page.

Lindberg was going to be fired because of complaints from the employees -- but he got reinstated, by Bodström himself! That was a few years before the big scandal.

That is well known and has been in the major media. Google gave me this link. IIRC, I originally read it in DN or SvD.

http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/1.1862998/lindberg-raddades-...

>>I december 2002 skickade polisfacket i Uppsala ett brev direkt till justitieminister Thomas Bodström där de krävde att Lindberg skulle avgå.

>>– Från justitieministern fick vi inget svar över huvud taget, säger Gunnar Elrud, som då var ordförande för polisfacket.

(And being at -3 in the original comment for posting well known facts, while that simple questioning got +11, is really funny...)
Tablet roundup at CES
in brazil we have unions (sadly mandatory because of labor laws). it never had a single say on my salary.

but for professions abused by the industry, they did set up a minimum wage they would agree to accept, raising the overall pay among the entire profession.

and i have no idea what charts 16 does to help you point.
$400 - $1600 - $3200 per 6-8 hours?

No one can say without knowing about the specific app, the advert implementation, and the amount of users you loose because of the implementation. I'd guess something around that much though.
I believe each person should have the opportunity to rise to the limits of their own ability for both practical and moral reasons. If this program works, I am in favor.

That said, people aren't equal. Evolution wants diversity in human offspring to ensure survival of the species in the face of an unknown future. Until science can remove this diversity, the poor will always be with us by definition. Even if we could make everyone "equal", there's no good definition of "equal", and a monoculture would very, very bad for our species over the long term.
Stretchable Electronics (nanowire)
A Day in the Future
Odd horizontal scrolling on properties under funnels. (Doesn't work for me in Chrome)
At what point is this false advertising? I see it more like this:

Unlimited[1] Internet, at blazing fast Xmbps[2] speeds!

1: Subject to a cap, don't worry it's large[3]

2: We did the math, and it's theoretically possible, but you can get 60% of this speed[5]

3: 'Large' being defined as 'we won't tell you how big it is, or what happens when you go over. Trust us.'

4: Only at 3am when nobody else is on, with a brand new computer, fresh install of Windows, speed determined by loading http://google.com/

5: Subject to interplanetary alignment, some other conditions may apply.[4]
I remember that from the 6811s we programmed in school. BRN also takes more cycles to complete than a standard NOP (or 2 NOPs) since it performs some branching calculations before it ends up doing nothing.
I'm probably not a typical user, but I average 10GB per month on my phone. So being able to use non-throttled data for 2 days doesn't seem like an attractive offer to me. That said, if AT&T forces me to go onto a tiered plan(I still have the unlimited now) then I'll be looking for a new phone company.
Carrier Wars Reborn
And this is to say nothing of the near impossibility of finding a commercial translator who would know even simple Perl.

Dammit, there has got to be a way for me to make money there.
you have excellent points and i agree with every one of them.

i said unions AND labor laws. i also do not agree they should mix. but the former should try it's best to influence the later.
Strange, works just fine for me on 10.0.634.0 (Windows)
Predictions made by Ray Kurzweil:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwei...
Yes it most certainly does. How many articles have been on the front page about Zappos's insanely over the top customer service. No it doesn't having anything to do with coding, but it has everything to do with starting a company.

If don't think that customer service stories belong here you don't really get all aspects of starting a company.

Everyone here should aspire to have their employees go above and beyond like this

"As my husband walked down the Jetway with the pilot, he said, “I can’t thank you enough for this.”

The pilot responded with, “They can’t go anywhere without me and I wasn’t going anywhere without you. Now relax. We’ll get you there. And again, I’m so sorry.”
After roughly 8 years, how do DJB's predictions/comments hold up on ipv6?

http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html
Likewise on .NET, the HTML Agility Pack: http://htmlagilitypack.codeplex.com/
If you were willing to ship just H.264 and flash fallback for Firefox/Opera, why wouldn't you be willing to ship H.264 and flash fallback for Chrome?

Because it means I'll have to recommend that people use Internet Explorer.
One of the hallmarks of successful people is that they can derive useful lessons from practically anything. "Is there a lesson in this story?" is a terribly low bar for what should comprise hacker news; it excludes practically nothing.
Also I'd love to be able to see a graph of my funnel conversion rates over time.
Create Motion Charts in R with the GoogleVis package
It's pretty rare that I see a startup demo'd here that I think is actually useful as opposed to just being a fad/gimmick that will disappear in a month or two. This is a really great concept and the execution really draws me in.

Congratulations on your launch. I hope you're wildly successful.
Or even CSS. Nokogiri lets you use both, even on badly formed pages.
No. The ruby community just attracts more language snobs than most languages, and unfortunately, tolerates them. In reality the people who make sweeping negative generalizations about PHP developers are a vocal minority.

In reality, most rubyists acknowledge that there are plenty of good PHP developers and plenty of bad Ruby developers.
I think he was speaking a little too soon... obviously thats a too engineering focused response.

There is so much thought going on in this area, the next year is going to be very interesting in healthcare.
We had a TI-99 with a tape drive-a standard tape player that you would set next to the Mic input on the computer, get the volume just right, and hit Play.

My dad and his friend used to send programs to each other late at night via HAM radio. One would hold the mic keyed next to the tape player playing back the ASCII and the other one would hold the speaker up to the computer's input and load the data.

This was in the early 80's. I think maybe they invented PACKET or something.
What does Mixpanel think about adding statistical significance where appropriate? Take the Fbconnect and nonFbconnect users vs song engagement in the video. The chap in the video was fairly certain there was no significant increase, but visually it looks as if there in fact was have a slight, but significant difference between the two patterns of engagement. Impossible to tell without some sort of statistical analysis. There are probably lots of cases like these if your offering is fundamentally sound.

If I was the guy that championed and implemented FBConnect in my app and one of my co-founders thought that based on that graph there was no significant difference I'd be pretty pissed off.
Do not complain about a two-hour security line for a domestic flight. Do you want the terrorists to win? I will wait 15 hours and submit to a TSA full body cavity search if it makes the flight safer.
Word, Office, and Publisher I'll give you - but Outlook and Access?

A Trademark isn't intended to be a made up word - it can be a common word as well (see Apple). A trademark isn't supposed to be descriptive, it's just supposed to be unique.

In Access and Outlook's case - imagine they didn't exist - I'd be hard-pressed to to think of how they could conceivably relate to databases and email.
I'm horrified to have upvoted this by mistake. Your comment is the kind that makes me glad I've been avoiding HN for the past few weeks.
It's a mixed bag. For example, I thought Chrome was very well designed.
My point was he spoke as though there were no efforts on open source EHR.

The fact is, that there is a lot of work going on - what is needed is actual leadership.
Yet Jenny McCarthy continues to parrot his agenda, even in the last few days.
People pay for something you can do with 'at' and 'curl'? I wish I was an entrepreneur.
Is this using the NYT lib released yesterday?
It is relativity, but the problem is that most people here don't understand that the parties are center right and far right relative to most other developed countries.
But doesn't the counter always follow the numeral in a non-declined manner in Japanese? That is, a pattern like "%n-satsu book" would work, right? I thought of Japanese, too, but I think maybe this is a pattern that is the inverse of the problem discussed.