skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Author here.

I am assuming the worst possible situation here. I do firmly believe that OS X will eventually be just like iOS, and we are seeing a lot the industry adopt methods that Apple has pursued previously. My worry is that Microsoft, if they happen to release an App Store themselves, will go down the same path. They have done this with WP7 and the Marketplace.

It's a slippery slope releasing an App Store IMO because I don't want to own a Mac that will eventually be locked down like the iPhone, and since that method will "most likely" still be a success, other companies, including MS, might be curious to adopt this.

Is an App Store bad? Hell no.

Is the way they are being implemented in our every day technology bad? Hell yes. Even on Android phones with AT&T you can't install from unknown sources. Granted, Android phones in this respect are not the norm, and thankfully so.

In short, let's all proceed with caution.
This meets your fancy? http://lpg.ticalc.org/prj_tiemu/
Stuck On A Sudoku? Google Goggles Will Solve It For You [video]
Why I’m not switching to the Verizon iPhone: Need for speed
This page demonstrates a true hacker ethic: playing with interesting phenomena to find out how they work. Aren't we lucky that you don't need electronics to hack!
Anyone know if there is anything like this in New York? Either open to all or invite only, pay or free?
DOE Revamps Website
How to make your shopping cart suck less - The Oatmeal
How we interviewed engineers
Ok, so I'll ask the question. If they're making so much money, why do they need to raise a billion dollars?

"Because they can" might be the answer..
> The relationships we made while running 9rules are priceless. Almost every good thing that's happened to my career since 2005 I can attribute directly to 9rules or recognition that 9rules brought me.

This goes for me, too. As a former member, I'm grateful for the work you guys put in to build the site and especially the community. I met a lot of awesome people.

Thanks for writing this breakdown. It was an interesting read. I was always curious about what happened when you guys went your separate ways.
DDG is built on Yahoo BOSS, (Build Your Own Search Service) Yahoo's white-label search engine API. DDG adds spam filtering and some custom indexing on top, but the bulk of their data comes from Yahoo's index.

AFAIK BOSS is still Yahoo technology, not bing. There may be a plan to migrate BOSS to bing.
Also- see http://feefighters.com/square-calculator if you haven't... pretty good calculator to see if it makes sense to switch to square... Surprisingly it actually makes sense for a lot of small businesses - if they can capture the long tail of the market that's pretty cool
Maximising Serendipity
That is a very good question. Are there any hard numbers to back this up?
I'm not a big fan of that headline style - it tends to look a bit cheesy in my opinion. I think it's mor of a US newspaper thing - the NY Times do it, but guardian.co.uk doesn't. To be fair, neither does the washingtonpost.com
Caltech does have a kind of affirmative action (or at least it used to). For instance, when I was there they were trying hard to get more women. However, they did not do it by lowering standards for women compared to men.

Rather, they sought out qualified women and recruited them, much the way other schools recruit athletes. For instance, they might send someone to personally go visit the woman to try to sell her on the benefits of Caltech, and pay for the woman and her parents to visit and tour the campus.
No. In any router with different-speed interfaces, buffering is necessary on the slow interface. On any router with more than two ports, buffering is needed to absorb possible congestion.
Dan Bricklin' story (and many others inccluding interviews of the founders of 37 signals, apple, adobe, yahoo, flickr etc) is featured in "Founders At Work". Great inspirational read, but there is no trace of an old trembling man with a cheque though :-)
I'm probably the wrong person to reply here...

As someone who never uses "desktop" or "background" images, I actually do think the example images are beautiful and enjoyable.

I'll admit there are probably very few idiots like me who refuse to use background image decorations, but let me explain why as well as what.

The background image I use on X is called the "root weave" and although it is horribly ugly, it is exceedingly useful. The "root weave" image is designed to help you detect errors in display rendering. If there's something wrong in your display drivers, display settings, or even cable connections, the refresh makes the root weave look like it's moving and can show other very obvious signs of corruption.

I got into this function-over-fashion mindset many decades ago when it was very easy to destroy a very expensive display by configuring or driving it the wrong way. Modern displays typically have safe-guards to prevent destroying equipment, but my ancient habit is still very useful for debugging.

The X.org and XFree code base includes the rootweave and a few other similar images designed to help identify display problems. You might have fun incorporating the ideas behind these test images into something more beautiful to look at?
> The article is biased and full of negative stereotypes and a thinly veiled attack at ... dare I say, racial, ethnic and sexual minorities themselves.

Could you give an example of how this author could have criticized the practice of affirmative action without attacking racial, ethnic and sexual minorities themselves? I agree that the author clearly has an axe to grind, but I see nothing in the text which attacks a minority. Honestly, it seems like you're accusing him of racism based only off the fact that he opposes affirmative action.

ADDED:

>SAT scores or grades are hardly any measure of the 'smartness' of academic credibility of the student. For example, as a commenter above pointed out, in computer science, a person who has average grades but more research work and open source experience is probably more motivated to learn than a student with just good grades.

The author uses SAT scores because they are the best objective measure we have of academic quality. Most other measures (GPA, high school research experience) are going to be strongly effected by where the student is from. Nowhere does the author suggest that research experience shouldn't be considered. And, in fact, using this measure would benefit the rich, white, and privileged students, as they are much more likely to have such research opportunities than poor minorities.

>Secondly, the data[1] proves even that though minority students who make it with affirmative action might graduate with average of below average scores but perform as well as their colleagues in their professional life.

The data as you describe only confirms that well-known fact that top-tier schools add negligible value to the professional prospect of its students. That is, after controlling for SATs, familiy income, etc., future success doesn't depend on what school you attend. (I can pull the study if you want.) That data says nothing about the how lower admission standards for minorities impact the schools academics. And, as you say, their grades are weak both in high school and college.

>Thirdly, contrary to what the author might want us to believe, the politically charged atmosphere in the Universities during the 70s was good for the society.

This isn't the main thesis of the article; the author is just giving you his perspective on where the situation originated.

>Why should a student who is obsessed with and excels at track-and-field be penalized for his obsession?

No one is suggesting that athlete's be penalized. The author is arguing that they shouldn't receive the (massive) boost in admissions.
Previous meetups have gone to 9:30 and later, though you can cut out at any time.

If you do make it out to the meetup, I'd love to chat. I used to play the Sunday night open mics at Four Courts back when Brad Pugh hosted them.
I'm admittedly not an expert, but isn't that a very different scenario?

In other words, ZFS operates on blocks at a block level - it can't make any assumptions about the contents other than "this block is the same as this block" or "this block is not the same as this block." It can't (based on my understanding) realize that "this block is almost the same as this block" and shift things accordingly, because then it would be messing with application data that might be corrupted by the changes.

If the application is making those shifts on the other hand, it would work just fine because the application could be smart enough to shuffle and unshuffle things in the most efficient way it knows how, but the file system doesn't have the luxury.

If I'm still missing something, please let me know. Anyway, it'd be pretty straightforward to properly test this so maybe I'll do that.
Welcome Abroad
I guess the price Google was offering wasn't astronomical after all. Good for groupon either way.
When you're CPA is significantly lower than your NPV you raise a billion and start buying media.
The problem they face is that their technology is simple enough and they have no real barriers to entry. If their model proves successful expect to see a lot of other competitors with similar hardware all competing on rates with them. That will seriously drop the margins.

I like them as a company and wish them well, but I could also launch a competitor to them if I felt so inclined. And that has to be a problem for them.
Since they closed the last bug report I had to open a new one to provide the dbus-monitor logs:

http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/browse/QTBUG-16529

These logs prove to a level of mathematical certainty that the bug is somewhere in qdbusviewer rather than the original bug report where it was merely obvious....

If they still insist on "QT only" bug reports (a bit contrary to the spirit of DBUS), I may have to ask for help from an experienced QT programmer.
From Apple's perspective, Btrfs has worse licensing than ZFS.
I heard the same intro speech during 2007 and 2009. It's their stamp to show their diversity statement
Good catch:Ram Shiram, the prime mover behind Sherpalo, is also on the board of directors at NextJump.
I read the email in footnote #5 a few weeks ago when it was sent out to the list and had a good laugh. Jobslist has an awesome smattering of startup ideas but also lots of what seems to be delusional business students who have "the next big idea" and "just need hackers/coders".
This is just semantics. Affirmative action, in this context, means favoring certain minorities in the admissions process.
Check out particle filters if you want crazy mathematicians. Fun stuff.
Hasn't Mail.app been using maildirs for years? They should be pretty Time-Machine-friendly.
I think you've got the article exactly backwards. As I read it, the point is not that you have to put making money above all else. The point is that your chances of making money improve dramatically if you consider first what people are willing to pay money for.

I find that the other approach is more likely to invent the kind of annoying and harmful revenue strategies you're criticizing. A product that has a built-in market of customers waving money does not need to stoop to that level to turn a profit. You can focus on making a product that your customers like and making sure they know about it.

How you prioritize making money is up to you. The OP is a helpful tip on getting it if you want it.
Sage is probably quite useful if you are a pure mathematician. The reason I couldn't use it is that it didn't behave well as a library, but they seem to have improved library support since then (http://www.sagemath.org/doc/tutorial/programming.html#sectio...).

But the project has definitely produced at least one A++ bit of code: Cython. That is very much worth learning and complementary to numpy (e.g. Cython/numpy integration: http://wiki.cython.org/tutorials/numpy).
calling him an idiot? I'm sure this happens a lot, but as you said nobody wants to talk about it for fear of receiving the welcoming carriage that this guy received.
I used to do the same thing, but a little differently. I used SleepWatcher as well, ( http://www.bernhard-baehr.de/ ), but set it up to run the following script, which uses isightcapture ( http://www.intergalactic.de/pages/iSight.html ) to do it all in the background:

NOWDATE=`/bin/date +%Y.%m.%d-%H.%M.%S`
/usr/local/sbin/isightcapture ~/login_images/$NOWDATE.png
/usr/bin/scp -o ConnectTimeout=5 ~/login_images/$NOWDATE.png me@myserver.com:~/login_images

Where I have an SSH fingerprint for me@myserver.com installed. This let me back up the images to a server, for convenience and security.

Edited for code formatting.
I went to Caltech recently, and I feel I should weigh in on this.

The author of the article spends an unfortunate amount of time talking about SAT and AP scores, as if that's all that Tech cares about. Having served on an institute committee to decide the direction of the Admissions office, I can assure you that this simply isn't true. Caltech's sky-high SAT and AP scores aren't an end in and of themselves, they're simply a side-effect. Caltech looks, more than anything else, for a demonstrated passion for math and science. Near-perfect SAT and AP scores are just a check box on the way to demonstrating a true passion and ability for math and science.

And that's really key, because a perfect GPA, SAT & AP scores, and great teacher recommendations isn't enough to get in. There has to be something more. Usually that 'something more' is independent work in a research lab, science competition, personal projects, or somesuch, and so the incoming class at Caltech is never just people who know how to get good grades and do nothing else, but a crowd of voracious achievers, many of whom have spent their lives figuring out how to push themselves harder and faster towards their passions than allotted for by whatever system they were raised in. To characterize them otherwise is a mistake.
> Just seeing LaTeX (well, Knuth's 'Computer Modern' font) has the same effect on a paper that a suit does on a businessman - the author rises in my estimation without any real effort.

Superficial much?
Happy to test this in the SF community -- looking forward to meeting at least one of you next LunchTree :)

Everything about the signup seems very fluid, up to the final sms confirmation. If you could, keep us updated on stats for number of signups, geo distribution, feedback after the first couple lunches, etc. Good luck!
I remember visiting Caltech years ago when I was in high school (I never applied).

My impression was that non-diversity of interests actually extended to a complete lack of interest in theoretical math (my intended major). Everything was extremely rigorous but nothing was going to go beyond a certain theoretical level.

It indeed seemed unique in the sense of producing the most noticeably uniform group of students I saw in my different campus visits. It seemed like they did make a nod to English by having some breadth requirements and so it seemed it would actually have been even harder for a Caltech graduate to take theoretical perspective within an engineering field than it would have been for them to appreciate a sonnet on their off-hours.
I've used chrome for about a year now. I've gotten so used to the seamless and silent updates that every other piece of software seems like nagware.

I'm sure I'd be singing a different tune if it broke my browser during a silent update.
Ya, I seriously did. Reason being is basically what you said actually. Their primary target is gamers, and it will probably stay just for gamers, and even if Microsoft releases their own store with games, it probably won't be better than Steam.

But that is also what makes me not bring up Steam. It is not an "app" store. It's a game store, and a very damn good one at that.
The OP is focusing on the very-top-tier research Universities in the US. Most of these are private and much smaller than the large public schools which dominate NCAA championships.

For example, Princeton has only 4,500 undergrad so, as the author points out, athletes favored in admission make up an suprising large fraction of the class.

Likewise, legacy admissions has a big impact on the quality of Princeton admits, but probably not as much at the University of Oregon.
An old CEO of mine once said:
"The worst time to raise money is when you need it. The best is when you don't need it."

Funny thing is he's one of the VCs funding groupon...
It can be, and there is nothing wrong with that. But if you focus only on academics you foster students that are only good at one thing. I might be cynical, but getting good grades in a class does not mean you are good at the subject material or can apply it anywhere beyond the classroom.

How many people make 6 figures for studying for and taking standardized tests every day?
And if not the cut then the developer license fee.
4 Things You Should Know About Your Customers
Angry Internet Dude
That looks pretty amazing.

Check out Fracture - http://www.fractureme.com/ - I bet they would look unreal printed with their tech.
Rottweiler Training Made Easy
I make a lot of mistakes, but at least when I do them by hand I know who to blame. Saying that people "should never" log into a production system is a tad dogmatic.
I was acknowledging that not everyone agrees that wealth disparity is necessary. I did not state my opinion on the matter, merely that it is difficult to see how it could be avoided should we want to. I was trying to point out that a glib "Nope" doesn't bring anything new to the table.

Moving on to my personal opinion, I think it's more productive to think in terms of how much wealth disparity is part of a reasonably robust and functioning economy. We've all seen the numbers that show a steady trend upwards over the last 3 decades. That does not seem to be a good thing.
When A Game Designer teaches a College Course: No Grading, just Levelling Up
I am a "minority" and I 100% agree with the author. If you don't qualify you don't qualify. How is it fair that you get admitted just because you are black or a latina or can throw a football?

I want my kids to go to caltech but only if they qualify and are smart enough.

Like the author said, the Olympic team doesn't take players because of their race but because they can play and win. The same should apply to academic institutions.

Maybe someone should sue the NBA if they don't let him in for being vertically challenged.
> MSFT haven't banned GPLed software from their platform

Apple didn't ban GPLed software from their platforms. Apple has terms of service for their software distribution mechanism that conflicts with GPL'ed software. I agree the terms are restrictive and disrespectful towards the users, but I am not sure why are you implying that Microsoft is doing much better. Have you read any recent EUAL from them?
That is pretty much the solution I had for the first week before I switch to photo booth whos main advantages were:
- I could compose a photo with objects and or just remember to be in frame and smile
- I could easily delete a bad photo with just a click.
- I could take several photos right there and then if I wanted.
I didn't make it all the way to the end (insert irony here), but an initial reaction is that there's uninformed meta and then there's informed meta.

Or perhaps I should change that to "informing".

A little of either goes a long way. The former, as a sand trap. The latter, towards insight, efficiency, and pleasure.

I'm suddenly reminded of Larry Wall. Perhaps I might treat "meta" as a potential offspring of laziness. (E.g. if you don't enjoy repetitive, rote tasks.)
Non-academic diversity should never be "rightfully ignored". Universities are a wonderful tapestry of people, and students benefit by being exposed to students from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds.

My undergrad university in the UK (Bristol) was/is widely regarded as an "Oxbridge reject" school, full of those from the upper-classes that were expected to go to Oxbridge but failed. The private schools (called public schools in the UK) were outraged when Bristol announced that they would start offering placements not on academic achievement but on potential, so a straight-A student from Eton would be evaluated about the same as a straight-B student from inner-city comprehensive schools where the teaching was noticeably worse. It was a great idea.

It is wrong, if not dangerous, to evaluate universities by abstract metrics such as research or academic performance. Universities are much, much more. They are the student newspaper, the radio station, the sports teams, the activists, the hackers, the politicians. Students undoubtedly benefit from exposure to all.

(Disclosure: I'm a white middle-class Englishman who went to a Top 10 univerisity in the UK and now I'm a PhD student at the University of Californa, Santa Cruz)
Malcolm Gladwell's books are becoming the new Freakonomics...
Oh I agree. The moment you go on a killing rampage to rescue your daughter from the cartels, you justify other people taking action against you to protect themselves. The thing is, there needs to be someone that resigns their rights and does the right (so to speak) thing. Someone needs to keep the terrorists at bay. Someone needs to protect the citizens from the gangs. Morally objectionable? Maybe. In the eyes of a few. In the eyes of the rest, these people are heroes.
Okay I got taking a photo with automator to work.
I launch photo booth then used a mouse click macro to trigger a photo capture. Then I quit it.

jones.freeshell.org/TakePicture.zip
Pros and cons of Time Machine vs. CrashPlan for Mac backups
Steven Jobs Introduces The Original iTunes (2001)
Great tip! Note that for this to work, you need to edit /etc/ssh/ssh_config and set
PermitLocalCommand yes

There's no way to change profile from the command line using gnome-terminal, unfortunately, but there is "roxterm" which is very similar in functionality and lets you do the following to change the color scheme of the current terminal window:

dbus-send --session /net/sf/roxterm/Options net.sf.roxterm.Options.SetColourScheme string:$ROXTERM_ID "string:NAME_OF_COLOR_SCHEME"
Land rush. There may only be room for one coupon site in the minds of people and if groupon doesn't get to a nation first, they will lose it forever[1]. This will require marketing expenditures.

e.g. Facebook lost Russia.

[1] in internet time.
Because they think they've designed a money machine, but it needs priming, maybe? Their business model relies on a ton of sales people. Hiring and training a ton of sales people all over the world is going to cost a ton of money.
If I had a nickel for every time a coworker used "-9" for no other reason than being in a rush and not grok'ing what a bad idea it is.
Ooh, thanks for that link. I've been meaning to get one printed for quite some time. I'll definitely check them out!
Or that 'ninja' isn't used by people who want to recruit at MIT.
I think you underestimate the complexity of the payments space. It's pretty heavily regulated by the federal government (OFAC, AML), the payment card companies (MATCH, PCI) and local governments (MTLs, tax laws). Going through the audit process for PCI in particular is pretty rough. On top of that, designing, building and mass-producing a physical device affordably is pretty tough to do.

All that being said, you should definitely give it a shot. Working on payments technology is a blast.
This is exciting. MongoDB (and the suite of libraries building up around it) has made prototyping web applications an order of magnitude easier than using SQL. Lack of single-server durability, however, is a showstopper in production, before you've grown enough to justify scaling the database beyond one machine.

In my case, that meant going back to MySQL once our schema was finalized (sadly). Looks like that won't be necessary in the not-so-near future, which means MongoDB is usable in new projects without worrying about replication before otherwise necessary.
Very cool. I will try to remember this when I start using my laptop more often.
Paying for Grades Isn’t Easy