skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. It's just that for most cases, it's not a matter of improving. It's a matter of being stubborn about your own idea. Look at twitter's app for example, they keep their design very close to the standard UIKit's HIG while improving some aspects(pull to refresh is a great example)
Rackspace Cloud switching CDN from Limelight to Akamai
Technically you could then share the connection using your computer, but that requires you to use a computer and have some knowledge. Right from the phone is a definite step up.
English -> Chinese might have been a more apt analogy, particularly as China are pushing heavily for royalty free standards (and will simply take your patent if you try to hold up the standard) as part of their plans for world domination.
1.) Don't. In your use case, I think you'll end up hating Android.

Or.

2.) Keep the iPhone around, buy your desired Android handset and use the hell out of it during your 30 day grace period.If you still prefer it great. Keep it. If you don't, return it and go back to your iPhone.

The Captivate is garbage and you will hate it. I got to play with a Nexus S (EDGE only on AT&T, but wasn't a huge deal) for a month and it almost made me want to switch, but for dependability, battery life, and elegance the iPhone is still king.

Many apps are much much better on Android though, because of its enhanced capabilities.
Wow, very nice intro to Processing, and a nice demonstration that human-generated random numbers aren't very uniform. I absolutely love the C-like syntax. Anyone have any tips on integration with R?
There's good stuff here, worth the read, but I don't think the claim of "ineffective marketers ask for the sale too soon" is applicable to the vast majority of us. The opposite is more often the case: not asking for the sale at all, or not loud enough, or not often enough.
This could be a monster screwup, my phone contract has 1GB data limit, for an extra 5GBP (7.5USD) per month I get boosted upto 3GB, the ability to officially use my phone for tethering and a proper HSDPA+ data rate. Since I go off site and work in Police facilities where the odds of me being able to connect to their network is NIL this is an important feature for me.

Apparently (this is unconfirmed properly) I may well find the FUP limit for me being dropped to either 1GB or 500MB depending on who you ask. While most months I don't get near to the FUP if I'm doing a lot of work onsite then it's likely I'll bust 500MB but I can't see 1GB being all that likely. TMobile FUP isn't too bad as when you break it they don't hit you with excess data fees but I'm hacked off with this and will move when my contract is up in April (It doesn't seem worth the hassle of arguing)
For folks with an Android phone they were forced to get the 3GB upgrade which was by far the most generous of the UK networks recently. Most networks previously have grandfathered you until the expiry of your contract (or you renew) which is at least fair.

It's not entirely obvious if this means that tmobile have accidently broken the contract with a lot of android phone owners who can now walk away from tmobile and get a cheaper deal elsewhere (I happen to think yes). I've had no notification yet of this change so I wonder if it's been put on hold while the lawyers rethink it.
And yet from my point of view there is a world of difference between, We have bugs that cause problems that we have decided we don't care about and We have bugs we are not yet aware of, but we are responsive when you find them.

Even though I may encounter more bugs in the latter situation, I feel less pain when I encounter them. And I have the satisfaction that I'm somehow making the world a better place.
Enterprise Level Competitive Keyword Research
By the time you will end up reading this post, you should be able to do competitive keyword research on a website with over 1 million web pages in less than 60 minutes or so.
Clickable link: http://blog.forkly.com/post/2341870004/a-viral-launching-soo...
Society attributes value to them for having taken the risk, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was a risk worth taking.

I would ask if there are moral implications of selling what you believe you can do (to employees/customers/investors) as if you actually can/have done it.

Also, someone doing it with their own money and doing it with someone else's money mean two different things.

This will probably seem like I'm throwing cold water on your founders, but that's not my direct intention. These are the issues that I think about when thinking about how to build a company.
It's a function of stability: I want to limit the number of variables that can impact my company. If things go south between Oracle and the rest of the open community, it will cause distraction as the dev community switches to the open VM (with no guarantee it is 100% compatible thanks to no compatibility tests) and I switch over to the open VM (with no experience as to its scalability and stability).

There is no doubt that a year later, all would be fine, but in that year, my pain was increased (potentially, obviously). Would I re-write code for this potentiality? Not a chance. Does it factor into my decision for a new architecture? Absolutely.

The short of it is that I don't trust Oracle. I haven't for many years, but I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt when they purchased Sun in hopes Sun's culture might impact Oracle's. They have proven they are going to behave exactly as I expected them to. My company won't have infrastructure from companies I don't trust.
Being stuck at home in snow days seems to inspire a certain kind of creativity ;) Here's some macbook camera timelapse stuff I hacked together during a blizzard last winter: http://niryariv.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/time-lapse-photogra...
And then you realize that your shiny custom font rendering assumes left-to-right and also that subsequent characters don't modify preceding character glyphs (cursive font).
Tools and services I couldn’t live without in 2010
My, what strange NOPs you have!
No. 1 Commandment as far as I'm concerned:

- Research your advisor before you enter a Ph.D program.

Because that's the only control you have as a student over the first 5 commandments.
After having worked in the 'real world' for the past couple of months (back in school to finish up my degree now), I can only agree that this is the unfortunate reality of the world. However, I wish that Greene didn't choose such a left-hand path interpretation of influence.

A word and concept, that only showed up once in the entire article, empathy, seems to be a much more reasonable way to deal with the social politics that we all face.

"I make the point that you are not going to get far unless you are the kind of person that knows how to think inside the other person's mind."

The difference between that and empathy, the difference between the left-hand and right-hand path to power and influence, seems to be how genuine the intent is. Thinking inside the other person's mind is one thing, but putting yourself in their shoes, understanding and validating their feelings has a completely different intention. One is to manipulate, the other, to understand.
Most of his investors did not lose 65%.

During 2008, he gained 59% in the first 6 months, lost 40% during the second 6 months, and so was only down about 4.5% for 2008. He then lost another 25% during 2009. The fund is down 65% from it's peak (Jun 2008), so investors only lost 65% if they bought into the fund in July 2008 and pulled money out in Dec 2009.

An investor who got in on Jan 1, 2008 is only down 30%, and an investor who got in in 2002 has gained 12%/year.
The regulator for adverts is the Advertising Standards Agency, and several years ago they decided that this sort of thing was OK. A key part of this was because "most" people would never get near the limits.

The judgment is at:
http://www.asa.org.uk/ASA-action/Adjudications/2008/9/Vodafo...

Of course the number of people affected was a figure provided by Vodafone, and by getting this adjudication in early Vodafone were able to get the precedent set before higher mobile broadband use was common.
> your internet continues to work on your phone

> streaming video and other data heavy activities will not work

I fail to see how those two things can both be true.
If your entire business model is such that you can basically force people to use affiliate links, it isn't too bad.

Assuming 1000 piggy banks at $10/week allowance puts your monthly take at 40k. Virtually all of that money eventually gets spent.

At the lowest level of amazon commissions (4%), you're looking at $1600 per month. If you were at the highest level (8.5%), you're at $3400 per month.

It's not awesome at 1000 users, but it pays some bills.
Facebook, Google, Yahoo commit to ‘World IPv6 Day’ trial
Show HN: Fight The Floods - site to organize volunteers for Aus floods
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/aliens.php#The_Fermi_Parado...

I think those three laws state that case pretty well. And I think it's pretty bleak if that case is, in fact, correct.
Can you elaborate on this a little?

Let me put it this way...

If you gave me a page of your code and asked for feedback, I would return it with 50 red marks on it.

If you gave it to me a second time, there would still be 50 red marks, but most of them would have you changing it back to the way it was in the first place.

The point is that any programmer can give endless feedback to any other programmer based on a sample of code. In my experience, 90% of that feedback was flat out wrong, and the other 10% was a waste of time.

I prefer learning new things the way I have for years now. When I see something cool, either as a user or by looking at the code, I figure out what was done and how I'd like to do it (rarely keeping 100% of it), and then incorporate that into my own style.

Having others look at my code has never delivered much value. This may seem like ego, but it's not. It's just a matter of what works best.
Then you don't know many investment bankers.
Thanks for the clarification. Damn context always gets me - in real life too!
This has been a big issue in the Rackspace Cloud user community. There has been no support for CNAME, SSL, or invalidation, so lots of customers (including me) have looked to other providers. I moved all of my projects to Amazon Cloudfront for this reason. Hopefully with the move to Akamai, Rackspace can play some serious catch-up feature-wise.
$6.5 million per year buys a lot of pants where I come from.
Lastly, it's really, really hard to use 3GB of data on a mobile phone

I've just been looking at an upgrade and found that I've been using about 1GB a month. This is mainly through streaming radio as I travel to work, and if my commute was longer (or it wasn't half underground!) I could easily use 2-3GB on radio alone.

Incidentally, I used to use FM radio for this but since I got an iPhone this isn't an option!
As a fellow HFT programmer I sort of think of HFT as another asset class: eventually (as more divers go for the gold) the returns will be on par with alternative asset classes. This is the beauty of capital investment and the free market--if an industry produces outsized returns, then capital/resources/effort will be poured into that industry until the returns diminish.
> Instead, lean on the powers of incremental improvement and the Pareto principle (80/20 rule). Spend time each week looking at a specific parts of your design, and iterate on them. It will get better if you put in the time. And then for finishing touches, e.g. nicer images (the last 20%), outsource via 99designs/freelancers/etc.

This is great advice. Not only because it is free you up from hiring but design/ui/ux is integral to most web apps and should have a frequent focus of the founder.
Link to the referenced blogpost?
Require helmets with at least 2 inches of shock absorbing foam around the exterior of the shell of the helmet. But then the players will just butt heads even harder.
As an alternative to waiting for this official release, jailbroken iPhones have been able to do this for a while now, with no tethering fees from your carrier.
Silo-free everything
In the places I travel to in the Midlands and Lincolnshire, I've always found T-Mobile to have the best 3G network. In comparison to O2, Vodafone and Orange anyway.

I'm on T-Mobile PAYG and I currently buy a £20 booster once every 6 months which gives me 1GB of data per month. So effectively £3.33/month for 1GB of data. Which I thought was brilliant. I wont be happy if this drops to 500MB (although it's not obvious it will), but it's still a pretty good deal relative to other networks...
http://www.coolmaterial.com/ is a website dedicated to affiliate referrals. While they do use a bunch of affiliate programs, it seems like Amazon is their primary source of income.

Unfortunately I don't know anything about their conversion rates, but it looks like they've got pretty good numbers on compete.com (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/coolmaterial.com/). Maybe someone on here knows?
I think he meant technology knowledge rather than skill. For example rejecting a candidate with 10 years of java experience because they need a programmer who needs 10 years of python experience.
Thanks for the correction. May I suggest sending it to the editors of the article? I got the "almost 2/3" line from their first paragraph.
I'm in brisbane at the moment (suburb on higher ground), and after being sent home from work when the CBD shut down I really wanted to help others with the flood. Particularly as the suburbs surrounding mine were going to be affected. However all my friends were in OK suburbs so I don't know anyone. Driving around is discouraged so I didn't know what to do.

I figured a site like this would be good, as if I needed help sandbagging my house, or moving my possessions, or a place to sleep I could post a request and others can register their interest in volunteering and helping those around you. I threw it together quite quickly (30 hours since I came up with the idea) so it's not polished, but hopefully it will do the job.

Please don't enter data unless you are actually in brisbane, but i'd love feedback on small things I can fix to improve the usability of the site.
I ate QBasic for breakfast for a couple years. Rewrote SNAKE.BAS with SCREEN 13 graphics. Wrote a slot machine program based on the one in "Absolute Beginner's Guide to QBasic" (IIRC - Google is no help, but I remember it had a neon green cover with a safari adventure guy). Rewrote a loan amortization program that my dad had originally written in Wang BASIC (and even then he only had a printout).

I have a soft spot in my heart for QBasic. As DOS-based procedural languages go, it has of the best editing environments, fantastic integrated help, and hits that sweet spot of making simple things easy and hard things possible that never outgrew my learning curve. Contrary to popular opinion, I never had to "unlearn" anything once I graduated to modern languages.
Well to me the most valuable things are knowledge, practice and discovery. After all that is how progress is made. And we study hard to be able to make discoveries and do things which will change the world.

And I firmly believe that almost all studying is at its core autodidacty. You get out of college what you put into it.

That is to say, self-motivation is necessary to acquire knowledge in and out of a formal academic setting.

But clearly where you are and who your peers are, is a huge influence on the human social animal. And because you might love learning but hate the rather heavy hand of authority at the pre-college education level, you might still want to co to college.

Specifically, potential to change the world may be intimately related to an almost pathological love of reason and hatred of unreasonable rules, methods, approaches and behavior.

I believe Caltech wants students who will do great things. But I may be wrong? That may not be the goal, actually I am quite certain that is not the only goal.

The way Caltech evaluates students is by using a proxy of academics. There are other proxies but clearly formal schooling is a main component of the evaluation proxy.

I will not go into the proven dangers of optimizing the proxy instead of the thing that the proxy is proxy-ing for.

School prior to college is well known to not just impart knowledge but also things like arbitrary rules and enforced discipline over agreed upon cooperation, etc.

College has some of that as well, although much less so then pre-college education.

Assuming someone has proven both a disdain for formal schooling and also a love of learning, knowledge, and scientific discovery, we could speculate that is a person with an extreme love of logic and hatred of lack of logic, who might to well in an environment with more knowledge and less B.S.

We all know anecdotes about great geniuses and the trouble they got in at school. Beyond that there is a lot of formal work done on "gifted" children and learning environments.

So an argument could be made that exceptional academic success at the pre-college level is a bad predictor of truly exceptional success in changing the world.

But I don't think formal academic success is just a proxy for Caltech. I think Caltech is specifically looking for kids who will work well within the system.

Caltech's filter for students proven to do exceptionally well within the academic systems is I suspect a goal in itself.

Actually I find Caltech's laser like focus on proven academic success refreshing. Because it is honest, open and complete.

Other schools make use of the same proxy but don't do it as well as Caltech.

So in my opinion, Caltech is pursuing a low risk/high reward strategy of potential Nobel prize winners who don't make a lot of trouble in school and don't tax their advisor's schedule too much.

There is an alternative slightly higher risk which might have a better chance of picking up real-far outliers.

tl;dr: Does Caltech value academic potential over intellectual potential?
UP was strange. It was like two different movies that never quite came together. I like slapstick, but man, slapstick and cancer doesn't work. It's like there was a great and weird (good) movie in there but it got cheapened by the clowny Disney mascot kid thing.

I couldn't stand the kid and the bizarre dog voice, but I haven't thought enough about it to see a solution.

Wall-E had some nice moments -- mostly when it was trying to be Star Wars. The Eco-story and human characters were ludicrous.

I want to see what Brad Bird makes next. Incredibles and Ratatouille are by far my favourite Pixar movies.
It's nice to compare lists like this to the constant wailing and gnashing of teeth in places on the internet where software careers are discussed.
The good news from the propogandists point of view is that it seems you only need to pay people very small amounts of money (50 cents) to encourage them to engage in propaganda. With the budgets available to governments this should permit them to scale their human operations quite well.

In a totally unscientific sampling, I've seen plenty of stuff in the last few years in terms of news articles and YouTube videos which certainly look like explicit propaganda. The problem is that propaganda may often be subtle, with no easy method to clearly identify astroturfers from genuine opinions.
"There's no surefire way to get into Harvard, but it certainly helps to have every advantage you can get." --A Harvard faculty member on why 2/3rds of the white students are Jewish.
What it means to be an entrepreneur. (Gaping Void)
But isn't this only an industry standard because it has gone unchecked? Unlimited literally means without limit. Imposing a limit is the antithesis of unlimited.

Legal or not, it speaks volumes about what that company thinks of it's customers.
I also worry (with some incidental evidence) that improvements in helmet tech have actually amplified the problem. If my head is "safely" encased in space age materials, I'm much more likely to use it to whack on people.

I remember reading somewhere- can't remember where, maybe the Dr. Z book- that the rate of concussions has gone up as helmets have improved. The concussion rate was pretty low back in the days of the leather caps (of course, guys got their faces smashed in on a pretty regular basis). The rate started going up as soon as they attached face masks to helmets and has continued to go up as the face masks have gotten larger. The same goes for pads. As the equipment improves, players increasingly use it as a weapon.
Interesting idea, the first thing that jumped out at me was that you might want to consider making a page that US users redirect to.

In your sample, you have the date listed as 31-7-1965. This is not how Americans display dates. Americans use 7-31-1965.

I generalized only saying American's use 7-31-1965. That may be a standard date convention for all of non-Europe, but I have no idea. Don't want the important message to get lost in any confusion.
That's excellent advice.

I always tell students that they should do two or even three independent studies in their first semester as a Ph.D. student.

It's critically important to find the right match.

/post co-author
I agree, this had was showstopper for a previous project. We had briefly looked into a stop gap solution of a SSL proxy but that really negated the CDN features. I'm glad we choose to go with Amazon, because they have continued their lead in the cloud services space.

I am very glad to see Rackspace (and others) continue to expand their offering into this market.
biasLogic runs in//across azure, amazon and also local remote servers depending upon need and technologies used. We focus on integartion across the cloud and cloud PaaS/SaaS and Developer API's - We make it easier for a developer or enterprie to move to the cloud and provide a way to avoid vendor lock-in at a cloud/IaaS level and are designed to work with existing PaaS platforms even though we are a PaaS in a way ourselves. (yes you can run locally inside your network if you want..) drop me a line personally at: scott.worley@biaslogic.com --> we are coming out of stealth in the next couple months.
This article feels like a call for more calm in the running of a startup. Perhaps it's just me, but I usually feel a rather frenetic urgency from most articles posted here. Iterate. Pivot. Yesterday might be too late. Go big, or go home. When he says:

> We need to build x, y and z, ASAP. Before you've figured out distribution? What evidence do you have that x, y and z, once built, will make customer acquisition any easier?

It feels like he's saying, "Whoah, let's not just go off half-cocked." And when trying to convinces us to spend the our own time on graphic design It feels like he's saying, "Easy, there. It's OK to take longer on something you're not as good at," which is counter to the conventional wisdom around here.

What's interesting, is the advice is still paired with, "Iterate, iterate, iterate." Feels like the message is less "Hurry" and more "Thoughful iteration." This was refreshing.
Thomas Thwaites: How I built a toaster -- from scratch
6 Things I Have Personally Learned From Using Social Media
Wow, a blog post that doesn't blame me for something. That's a first. :)

He has a point about this code being used everywhere though. When we figured out what caused this we did a quick search to see how other people who use this same code deals with this issue. And for the most part they don't. The version in Spidermonkey, for example, is a newer version, but very similar. Dropping the Spidermonkey version into PHP produces the same problem. The one saving factor here is that 32-bit x87 hardware is going away pretty quickly, so this particular annoyance is getting less and less important.
If anyone is interested, The Pixar Touch by David Price is a pretty fantastic look at the early history (both from a business standpoint and from a technological standpoint) of the company.

http://www.amazon.com/Pixar-Touch-Vintage-David-Price/dp/030...
In context, and with the slightest amount of deductive reasoning, I don't see why they wouldn't.