skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's $300 more than an iPad. Sticker shock? Really?

It has USB ports. It runs Windows 7. For guys like me who are all Windows, this doesn't seem high priced at all.

Sure, it would be nice if it were $699, but it has Windows. For me, it's like having a tablet with all the comforts of home. All my programs (apps), all my browsers, all the control! (yay)

It requires a stylus too - which some of us big fingered dudes really miss.

EDIT: I've never touched the thing or seen it live, just checked out the tech specs. Maybe there's better / cheaper stuff out there.
Ok, I tried it with my Twitter login.

I think it's a good idea. Some quick thoughts:

The Compare and Feedback tabs on the left are overlapping the text in the main window. I'd say just get rid of them. For a site like yours I doubt you are going to get much feedback in that way. I'm not sure what compare is for.

Don't give me a blank screen when I first login. Show me some films at least. The top ones, the latest ones, anything and ask me to like or dislike them.

Read people's Amazon wishlists or purchase history (is that available?) and get all the films they've bought or want. Do the online movie rental sites like lovefilm, netflix have APIs? Connect to them and pull in data.

Use markbao's http://threewords.me to describe movies in three words or something like that. Talk to him for ideas.

Pull in youtube clips of the films listed.

List movie soundtracks.

To get traction early, you might have to pick one aspect and turn it into a sort of game which can spread (like threewords). Favourite scenes? Famous oneliners turned into jokes?

You could try a completely different UI, say something like http://thesixtyone.com.

Basically, this is a huge space. Ideas are plenty, just keep churning and you will hit on something.

Next time you post on HN, link directly to your site (not an Ask HN post).

Oh and this is probably not the best forum to ask for advice regarding this. Find some movie buff forums!
Where Network and Systems Management is Headed Next
In Utero Fight Club
Thoughts on Performance Reviews for Designers
What he may be getting at is that your description of intern duties implies a violation of the US Federal labor law prohibition against interns doing work that provides immediate benefit to the company/institution.
Exactly, only I'd suggest checking for the actual number (your example is missing the exponent part) as well as for the non-scientific representation. In my apps, I simply checked for the first 12 digits (ignoring the point) only, worked pretty well. And I don't believe it's necessary to null the value, prefixing it with something that prevents casting it as a double should be enough (assuming you don't negate this later in your code).
>As someone once said - the entire premise of capitalism is based on overpaying the first few years and underpaying you for the next 20 or 30 years.

Someone with no understanding of the term "captialism", apparently.
503 - Service unavailable
Questions for the Lanyrd team (Simon & Natalie):

1. Do organisers contact the "tracking" members when it's getting nearer to the date of the event?
2. What's the breakdown between attending vs. tracking? Do these change over time?
3. What other data are you planning for and making public?

Something that could be interesting is following the tweets for an event alongside the provided slideshows and videos.

Thanks. Keep up the great work!
You raise an interesting question, that the article (or perhaps a followup) could address. How do you ramp up without becoming just another PR vehicle?
FamilyFinds Acquires Chicago-Based Mamaloot
Show HN: Review Vogue, my web dev tool that uses nodejs and socket.io
I wanted to learn some nodejs. So I built a handy tool over the weekend, called Vogue.
Vogue watches your website's CSS files. Whenever you save changes in your editor, Vogue tells all browsers currently using those stylesheets to re-download the CSS. So each browser visually updates, without having to reload the entire page.

It's near instant, much faster than switching between browsers and reloading manually.

This page has more info, including a 2-minute screencast show Vogue in action:
http://aboutcode.net/vogue/

The source is here: https://github.com/andrewdavey/vogue

I'd love to get some feedback (on the code, the website, anything) from the HN-crowd. Thank you.
Fact and folklore in software engineering
If the apps are available but difficult or impossible to use because they require a keyboard and mouse, what good are they?
Another "cherry picked" phrase from on-topic is "That includes more than just hacking and startups". Note also that I have now quoted more of the On-topic guidelines than I have left out.

As for the TV thing -- were you sure to bitch about the topicality of the iPhone release based on this guideline? What about the "stolen" iPhone? How about anything wikileaks related? All the stuff posted here about academia? Do math papers count -- they are not actually about hacking, just about maths, frequently with no direct relation to hacking.
Ads that say that are routinely flagged off of Craigslist for age discrimination.
Next-Generation iPhone Parts Caught on Video?
Wow, Microsoft still doesn't get it. Most people don't want stock Windows on a tablet! This is the reason MS has failed in tablets for a decade already; they refuse to change the OS to fit the tablet form factor.

Sure, there are a few devs and nerds who'd like Windows on a tablet, but the casual user definitely does not. That's why iPad won so early: nobody would have bought one if it ran stock OS X. The buttons would be too small and the whole thing would feel clunky.

The price of this thing doesn't matter, really. It'll fail as a mass-market device, while it'll probably sell a few to businesses and nerds.
Disney owns ABC and ESPN. I vaguely remember plugs on TV in the mid-90s that mentioned go.com when referring to ABC or ESPN. I think this was the time period when most people were used to hearing AOL keywords instead of actual URLs and domain names when websites were advertised.

So yeah, it's probably legacy.
I have to say that sometimes the sense of entitlement among developers here gets to pretty absurd levels. There's an attitude that developers are the only ones that matter, and anything that adds any kind of accountability is oppressive.

$90k+ salary, guaranteed max of 40 hours per week and a few % equity at a startup? if a sales rep or manager asked for something like that in an interview they'd be called pompous. For example, if a startup has raised $500k in funding, this would mean not only would they be spending 20% of their funding on a single developer in the first year, but they'd give up a big chunk of equity and get someone who has 3 other projects on the side they're working on. That's seems fair? that doesn't smack of an entitlement complex?

p.s. I'm a developer and run a startup.
I just logged in to add the Founder Conference and see whether this site would help. Oops, it was already listed! Good job in seeding your database :-)
Also, in this very blogpost:

That’s why we actually don’t mind having several versions of every question, where there are variations in wording or circumstances. The more chance that someone types a question into Google and finds their exact question already answered, the better a job we’ve done.

This seems to run contrary to most of the rest of his blog post. At this point, I was a bit confused.
I think this is the real thing. iPhone 5 is coming.
Why did they not at the least, confiscate the weapons, bank accounts, and forged passports?
That was AWESOME.
ABC paid a lot of money for Go.com back in the bubble years, but yeah, it is pretty weird that that property has persisted for so long. They must have some reason to believe that it is beneficial.
You don't wanna be in the Uncanny Valley - Minecraft is cute, because it's not real - hard from real.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
Funding Lessons from a Successful Kickstarter Campaign
> Don't ask how many ping pong balls would fit in a school bus unless your business is directly related to filling buses with ping pong balls.

In job postings? Do you have the following in mind?

Send applications to X@ballbussers.com where X
is the number of ping pong balls that it takes
to fill a standard yellow school bus.
Sure, I would characterize the exorbitant fees on a "per interaction" level. As another commenter mentioned, a large deal can have huge fees associated (and much of this is about how big the term sheet is and how many minute details are involved). Some of this can be mitigated by requesting a very simplified term sheet from the VC/angel firm you are working with, but what bothered me more was the costs for small asks.

What I found was that with some lawyers, every email and every phone call (no matter how short) will add hundreds of dollars (emails are rounded up to 15 minute increments). Thus, whenever I can, I try to negotiate a fixed fee to get a particular item done (incorporation, fundraising etc) and then I don't have to worry about every minute of time and what that translates to in dollars.
You could set up a spoof/parody messkit review website/blog. It would take a few hours to write up a few fake articles. Even more points if the date on the blog posts are dynamic, showing to be made in the past few hours at any given day. Or no dates at all, which might make it look like it's being actively developed and keep the joke up. It also has to be clearly over the top. Example posts could have titles like "Apple Messkit 4 Leaked in National Forest Near Bay Area!", "Titanium - The sexy new metal we all love", "Open source messkit plans seeing early traction", "New Boy Scout regulations hurting the industry?" etc. Throw on a few affiliate links to actual mess kits on Amazon, if they make any money then it's just gravy. You could also put up free ads to whatever other site you have. Tell some people in your social network to check it out for a laugh and see if it spreads at all. If you're good enough at writing parody content (or if the college temp you hire to do it is), you could have a short viral hit on your hands.
If you are doing any comparing of Unicode strings, or anything beyond the simplest manipulation of them, I recommend running them through the appropriate-for-your-task normalization process: http://unicode.org/reports/tr15/

You should understand what the normalization forms are. Which I say despite having only a bit of a vague idea myself. But I feel bad about it. (And actually plan on fixing it soon for one of my projects anyhow.)
So the test would be:

if(substr(str_replace('.', '', $val), 0, 11)=='22250738585'))

Feel free to post the test you do.
I'm just sad this wasn't about the language Logo.
I think most HR departments are afraid to add those types of benefits that can be blatantly abused when they can go with the default "no-frills" and with default "abuses" for which we all know you can be measured. Didn't show up to the office? Easy one. Didn't give your 100% when at the home office? Who will ever know?

While the work output may be better, but HR usually is a little lower level in their analysis, at least in my limited experience.
Anyone on HN using Kickstarter? I have this crazy simple hardware accessory idea that I keep thinking of every time I see a Kickstarter story.
How to Quickly Check Domain Availability
If they complain loud enough, it might be possible to get them to reverse their stance. From my POV, the problem is that only technical people are complaining, and no one else cares.

I'm guessing that people will respond the same way most people in China do to censorship - with relative apathy. They have better things to do than worry about whether the internet is censored or not.
Tracking doesn't actually do much at the moment, but we have a bunch of features planned that will use tracking to help keep people updated about new information about events.

We haven't looked at tracking v.s. attending trends yet, that could be really interesting - thanks for the query :)
Karate expert wanted, 7 years experience (not 3).

More than 2 * more libraries used, 2 times more projects, seen the language evolve, worked with 2 * more people, etc. Domain knowledge is a massive help for people doing things. The 7 year person has likely used far more things than the 3 year person. However if the 3 year person knows how to use a gun, and the 7 year person only knows how to use a knife - then the 3 year person wins[1]. Of course, many times the gun turns out to be a water pistol - or the 7 year ninja can fart in their general direction[2], wait for a flinch... and then throw the knife!

1 - don't bring a knife to a gun fight.

2 - monty python reference.
> but in general Windows 7 is far more powerful than iOS or Android.

Not in this context it's not. How's the built-in support for multitouch gestures for things like maps, image editing, zooming, etc? How is the support for app discovery? How do users find new trusted apps that are designed for the device? What about built-in support for accelerometers and compasses? And does Windows have a GPS application to show your location on a map?

Maybe it does have all of those things and I've just never heard about it. But I doubt it.

Regular old Windows 7 seems like a poor choice for a tablet OS.
> I haven't ever seen an Atheros-powered laptop, which is a much larger market.

My Asus Eee 1005P has an ath9k chip in it, and my 701 before that had an ath5k. If it's the netbook market they're going for, that would seem smart.
The problem is that a lot of these suggestions are very superficial and don't consider the underlying reason companies are doing what they currently do.

For example if you specify a salary you end up anchoring the negotiations, if a candidate is not quite up to the level you're looking for but you want to hire them anyway, the candidate is much less likely to accept a job offer where you offer a salary below what you stated in the ads, even if they would have accepted it otherwise.

Furthermore you need to consider the impact disclosing salary levels has on current employees, if the market is tough you may have to offer a salary above what current employees are earning, which can be very damaging to morale and can make your staff feel hostile towards the new hire from the start.
I am the only one who sees the growing number or cores as proof that transistor density growth is sigmoid and not geometric? At least, not anymore.

The fact that we have entered the sigmoid stage is kind of depressing.
"Hirelite is on a mission to put headhunters out of business. We host speed interviewing events using video chat where 20 job seekers talk to 20 companies for 5 minutes each..."

Hey, what an awesome idea!
Time to try out WhisperSystem's android app? http://www.whispersys.com/

Odly enough, I heard about this thanks to the US government! It is developed by Marlinspike, who was recently detained at the US border, and was mentioned in the Wired article: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/11/hacker-border-searc...
Are you referring to http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm by any chance? Because that applies to unpaid internships.

"Interns in the “for-profit” private sector who qualify as employees rather than trainees typically must be paid at least the minimum wage and overtime compensation for hours worked over forty in a workweek"

We do all of that.
For those who are scratching their heads -please read the ParentPost in the manner that it was meant - carefully crafted and worded satire. Only on HN will it get the audience it deserves. Upvoted. "It requires a stylus too which some of us big fingered dudes really miss" :-)
I immediately thought of "Microserfs", but you might be right about it being dated. Coupland also wrote "JPod", which was also about programmers. I would not recommend it (or any of his books since "Microserfs") at all.
Eee slate: 12.1" 1280×800, 2GB ram, Core i5, 32G SSD, Windows 7 home premium: $999

Eee pad MeMO: 7.1" 600×1024, 512MB RAM, dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm ARM, 4GB Flash (?), Android 3.0 Honeycomb $499

Looks about right to me. What about Sony Vaio Z sticker shock - costs 4x as much as Vaio M netbook?
How to Design Programs (book, 2003)
Using the free plan isn't abuse. If your business model cannot support a free plan, don't have one.
The problem is not a lack of revenue, but a lack of restraint on spending. More tax incomes will simply mean comparatively more spending; a drunk will keep on drinking if he suddenly receives a reprieve in the form of a new liver. If we take away the ballooning costs of the wars, foreign bases, surveillance and the bailouts, the US budget would just about have been balanced.
And at the same time - Starbucks raises the prices of their Venti sized coffee. for real.
A tweak could be to prevent answers to closed threads to give any reputation points, even if the answer has been posted before the thread was closed. This way if the question is obviously duplicate but not yet closed, reputation-hunters are not incentivized to post an answer.
I am approaching an entity that might be interested in doing such a thing...so as informal market research, I setup this poll to help quantify what I have been seeing on HN for the last few years. So any additional details you can provide would be greatly appreciated.
WoW! Thanks.

Those are fab ideas. I will come back to you once I implement them. Thanks again.
Exactly. And what's really sad is all this talk of "Windows on ARM" when they've already got a new ARM-based OS that's quite nice for phones (WP7). I just don't understand why WP7 isn't their flagship "mobile" OS (phones, tablets, and beyond). It just seems like a no-brainer.
By, 'the original poster,' I meant the poster whose question Rob was answering. I guess that was unclear. I know he's a veteran!
Reminds me of a story I read today about nodejitsu -> http://blog.nodejitsu.com/development-branding-and-4am-deli-...
I'm a teacher – around 70% of kids have their iPod's jailbroken purely to use pirated apps. The reason? They don't have a method to pay for apps (so can't even download free apps), and their parents don't trust them to link their cards.

The point being that the sales in these cases aren't lost sales, they could never have been sales.
Back in the dot-com days I wrote a lot of businessplans, both for my own things and for others. I excelled at the whole hockey-stick curve and the "we will enhance shareholder value by doing x" (I always put in this Cryptonomicon quote to see if anyone noticed - noone ever did). The businessplans I wrote were flashy, followed the agreed format (index, executive summary, etc. etc.) and sold the product well.

What I see now, but didn't then was:

1) The more shiny your businessplan is the more clueless investors you'll attract. (Clueless investors say "oohh that's amazing growth you show in that graph", good investors say "yeah so what, where are the assumptions?" Dealing with clueless investors takes up a lot of time, knowledgeabe investors will back you with a plan written on the back of a napkin if the think you can pull it off.

2) As mentioned in the article, a businessplan isn't a business. I would start to believe my own hype and act like we were all already riding the hockeystick to startup fame.

3) Businessplans tend to get stale, and (bad) investors will expect you to do what your businessplan tells you to do. Even when conditions have changed, which they always do.

Now I see businessplans as shallow shiny objects that don't really deliver any value. A one page strategy plan and an excel chart tracking numbers is sufficient, at least in the early stages. Time spent writing a businessplan is much better spent writing code or getting customers.
Earlier in this thread you estimate that GTalk and Facebook have 10% of the instant messaging market. Does IRC have more users than 10% of the instant messaging market?
Well, I did say "and twitter account if any". Looking at someone's twitter stream who's poking at some new library or talking about some code they wrote tells me a lot more than "1 year of php development" on a resume.

It may be arbitrary, but github+blog+twitter has worked well here.
I respectfully disagree: there's plenty of room for NoSQL, even if your users are next to none.

For example, at times, it is just more convenient to store data in a schema-less database (while still being able to query said data relatively easily). One such thing are my logs: I parse and tag them before storing them, and the relational model does not lend itself to that kind of storage.

Document stores, however, work beautifully. I can store entries like this:

{
program: { name: 'sshd', pid: 1234 },
date: { year: 2010, month: 1, day: 5, ... },
useracct: {
mehtod: 'pubkey',
source: '::1',
port: 45678,
service: 'ssh2',
username: 'user',
type: 'login'
},
message: 'Accepted publickey for user from ::1 port 45678 ssh2'
}

Obviously, some of my log messages won't have half of the properties from the example above, or have other kinds of fields. Storing that in SQL, while maintaining easy queryabilty would be a huge pain in the backside, to say the least.

With a document store, it's a piece of cake.
Lots of talks from last Chaos Computer Club conference available as video.
True. I wasn't trying to take away from your post. I just thought I'd add that, because it ought to be relevant to a fair number of the hackers here.
Selecting proper priors is quite a contentious issue, mainly because there does not seem to be one perfect answer. Though there are a few guidelines one can follow. One of them is what you pointed, building up a tower of hyperparameters. Hyperparameters have the same feeling as "turtles all the way down" but aren't so bad if you have sufficient observations. Then one can prove that any bias because of the priors will disappear in the limit. But for one off decisions that is not very useful.

In the legal case example, maybe some clarity maybe had in considering what does the prior mean. A answer is: say you have to bet a million dollars on whether the person is guilty or not without knowing anything about the person how would you distribute your million dollars between the two events. Yes it is subjective and personal, but it is hardly ever going to be 50:50. One can push the $1,000,000 analogy further. One can fix a cost for a mistake: whats the cost of a wrong conviction and whats the cost for setting a guilty man free. Then the final decision can be based on reducing the financial risk based on the likelihoods.

One may bring the socio-economic status in forming the priors but one may not consider any information source that considers the accused.
The copying from the 80-bit register to the 64-bit memory cell is causing the result to be corrupted. When we use volatile it tells the compiler not to apply the optimisation which in this case was putting it in a register.
I think John Gruber nailed it in a recent Talk Show podcast: The problem with Microsoft is that they went from a "Microsoft everywhere" philosophy to a "Windows everywhere" one.
I make fairly heavy use of scsh. At least half of the sysadmin scripts and utilities I've written over the past 5 years are scsh programs. However, it does have its problems:

http://www.lysium.de/blog/index.php?/archives/215-Why-I-dont...

Also, I wish it were still maintained.

Despite the problems, I love using it.
Even within the OHA it seems that some companies get Android before others. Didn't Verizon get 2.0 first, HTC for 2.1, and Samsung for 2.3?
Using Social Networks To Profile, Find and 0wn Your Victims
well it was the second? alpha/rc, and I also tried the latest 6.x version.
IRS Tax Package Mailing to End Following Growth of e-File
That's awesome, congratulations.

Did the client say they will buy your product? If they said "it's interesting and there must be a market", that's probably a red flag.