skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree with the author's general points, the examples were very general and vague; for example, he uses the bike design seemingly to show a designer who was uncoupled from engineering, yet I would bet this bike design was created by engineers, as hubless wheels are an engineering fascination.

Also, using Google circa 1999 as an example of great design through engineering is way behind the times. Look up what Douglas Bowman had to say about his tenure as Design Director at Google, and you will find quantification outrules design qualification at Google – if they can't measure it, it's worse by definition.

Today, Google is a UI mess, as they haven't changed with the times, and keep adding content to their once clean design. (Even KISS sites need to be refreshed).

Finally, he missed the opportunity to dispel another Engineers' myth about design, by lauding the addition of the Google logotype as exemplary design – as if slapping a new logo onto an engineer's layout somehow transforms a Plain Jane site into high design. We're not in 1999 anymore, and the bar is higher.

Overall, the assertions are correct, however, I feel that the author could have taken the time to come up with better/deeper examples to help prove his points.
Android Tablet Makers: You’re Doing Pocket PC Again
My economics study ended in high school, but I doubt it would be beneficial to bring it down to $0.
Are you sure it's a 125 kHz device ? Maxwell has never failed me before.
Digg Founder Kevin Rose Launches Private Newsletter Called Foundation
Will CityVille Be First To Blow Past 100 Million Monthly Active Users?
Interesting take from ZeroHedge :
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/goldman-creates-facebook-he...
MySQL Optimizations for Faster Queries
This is a fantastic, precedent setting move and a response to the political sector's irrational laws (see: Sarbanes-Oxley). It was presaged by the DST style investments over the last few years, and we can only hope that more companies follow suit.

If you want to reduce speculation and uninformed trading, at least one way to do that is to give companies rights over who trades their shares and under what circumstances. You're not forced to sell your house to anyone, so why should you be forced to sell your company to anyone -- particularly day traders who will just introduce volatility and aren't in it for the long haul?

A long overdue organic reaction to the silly laws passed in the wake of the last financial crisis. No doubt we will see similar workarounds for the work of art that was "FinReg", though those workarounds may take the form of debuting on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange rather than the NYSE.

It's a little known fact, but Google also made use of certain legal workarounds to avoid going public for as long as possible (among other things, they split the company into two units of 499 people apiece, or so I recall).
They're not giving invites to registered users, but they sent me one a few days after I signed up.
I had an adwords represenative tell me "traffic school" (and various other keywords) is not a relevant keyword to an online traffic school for traffic tickets. One can only hope that Google Search is more sane.
Chrome sends keystrokes typed into the address/search bar directly to Google.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/microsoft-goog...
Getting back to the original blog post, this is where an adjustable type-strictness system would come in handy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto
Bufferbloat in 802.11 and 3G Networks
The Entire Text of The Cluetrain Manifesto
Letters from The Giving Pledge
How much time did you spend creating the layer styles before you started selling them? It sounds like you put a lot of effort into it and I'm wondering if you considered yourself done once you launched the site?
You are correct, in this case the person does make a little bit of money from photography, some from friends and some from stock photography sites. He did speak with a tax expert and is apparently in the clear as far as the IRS is concerned. I think his "income" is somewhere in the $100/year range.

My point was just that there are a lot of activities that most of us might be doing anyway for fun, not considering the tax advantages of organizing a business. e.g. amateur photography, helping people with computer and website issues, personal services, blogging, etc.
I know this isn't exactly what you meant... http://thor.duckduckgo.com/?q=regexp+/(.*)/+ddg

Edit: Looks like yc cut off my link there--copy and paste the full thing.
During our beta we have only a limited crawl/index, 3 billion pages. Very specific technical queries and queries with a lot of words seem to suffer most.

Would you like to be an editor for the /ruby and /rails slashtags?
The guy who wrote Ruby - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto
I am not suggesting that Google intentionally cripples its algorithms, just that it doesn't rush to "fix" something you or I might consider a problem.

Google's reputation is intricately tied up with the quality of the results it gives.

I think the problem here is the question of whether an adsense-adorned page with scraped content is judged "low quality" by the people doing the search.

I'm no expert in other domains, but judging by the "I CAN HAZ CODES" programmers out there, if they type a programming question into Google and they get a page with scraped content from StackOverflow, will they care?

My guess is that if the scraped content has the answer, they're happy. They aren't interested in doing more research, looking the author's SO reputation, or anything else. They get their answer, and maybe they click an AdSense link if it catches their eye.

JM2C!
The measured effect of I/O on application startup
http://www.astrolog.org/labyrnth/algrithm.htm#perfect says that both the Aldous-Broder and Wilson's algorithms will generate "all possible Mazes of a given size with equal probability". But neither meets your criteria of "efficient", since neither is even guaranteed to finish. I'm curious, too, whether there is an efficient algorithm with the same property (generate any valid maze with equal probability).
Announcing Super URL Builder
If your company registration date is 2 months ago, you will be at a disadvantage in negotiations about price, up-front payments, and other similar things.

OTOH, if you build a compelling product that satisfies your customer by extinguishing his hair on fire (which you should do anyway), then the rest of this is just details. If a prospect will cut of his own nose to spite his face by negotiating price or terms based upon your incorporation date, then maybe that's a customer better off not converted.

There may be good reasons for registering a business now, but this isn't one of them.
I heard that during the Vietnam war, all agents were issued the same Rolex watch, which was designed for the purpose of agents bribing their way out of trouble, should the need arise. The taxi drivers figured this out and started just taking agents to the CIA safehouses without needing to be told where they were.
Although the SEC considers itself the "investor's advocate," it usually steps back and allows "accredited investors" and "qualified purchasers" (terms it uses for "rich investors") to invest on their own. So if Goldman Sachs and its clients are truly rich and sophisticated, I don't think the SEC will view protecting them as a good use of its time.

That being said, Goldman Sachs and its investors will likely insist on financial disclosures from Facebook and maybe even some governance rights that, while not quite public company-strength, will lead to Facebook disclosing more information to more people than it had previously.
New Podcast "Foundation" w/ Kevin Rose (guest Jack Dorsey)
If I spend N thousand dollars on my credit card per month and pay it off every month, does my contribution to revolving debt show up as $N thousand, $N/2 thousand, or zero?
Not only do I think the "project management" aspect is interesting, I think it is essential!

I develop s/w in an R&D environment. My users are very specific about how they use information, but know almost nothing about s/w development. Likewise I know little of their specific domain, but can develop whatever tools they need. While I can craft and code algorithms that should dazzle them, if it doesn't solve their problem they won't use it. For me, design has to account for the users' experience as well as developing clever and efficient algorithms to solve problems.

I really love the original question, Reg. It was fun.
Diode Circuit Transfer Function
FYI, one major website which relies on subjectAltName which many of you will be aware of is github. The CommonName is ".github.com" which means it wouldn't be valid for https://github.com/, but they also have "github.com" in the subjectAltName field.

https://www.cacert.org/ also lets you generate certificates for multiple domains using subjectAltName. My website at https://secure.grepular.com/ has a CN of ".cardwellit.com", but then has three values in subjectAltName, "cardwellit.com", "grepular.com" and "*.grepular.com"
Where to look for Essay Editing Help
In the process of writing essays, students will sometimes fail to notice the errors incurred. These errors if not corrected will result in a significant grade being lowered from the essay written. Therefore, students are recommended to obtain essay editing help.
Totally!
I applied for /rails last night, I'll apply for /ruby too :)
"I'm smart enough to discount my own bias"

I am genuinely interested, how did you establish that you have the ability to correctly compensate for your biases?
UGG Bailey Button Bomber Chocolate hot sale
Consulting case database
The only thing that's really left for one of these private share vehicles to do is pull a reverse shell merger with an OTC listed firm and let joe retail investor start day trading the result. Now that's the bubble I remember.
I think early investors always appreciate taking out a good chunk of their original investment if they can leave it with no downside and all upside
The comment system here has munged the above. Anywhere you see an opening double quotation mark followed by a full stop, there should be an asterisk inbetween the two.
Ruby overuses []. It is used in Array literals, but it is also an operator (i.e. a method with odd syntax) on several classes: Array, String, Fixnum, Bignum, Proc. In a language with dynamic typing, we should avoid having methods (or operators) with the same name and different function since calling nonexistent methods is how we catch errors.

The [] operator on Proc was new to me. I don't like the [] on Fixnum and Bignum, which is a bit operation: x[y] := (x << y) & 1. Hence my fixes to Ruby would be:

$ irb
001> add = lambda {|x,y| x+y}
=> #<Proc:0x0000010089ef30@(irb):1 (lambda)>
002> add[1,2]
=> 3
003> 1[2]
=> 0
004> class Proc; undef_method :[]; end
=> Proc
005> class Fixnum; undef_method :[]; end
=> Fixnum
006> class Bignum; undef_method :[]; end
=> Bignum
007> add[1,2]
NoMethodError: undefined method `[]' for #<Proc:0x0000010089ef30@(irb):1 (lambda)>
from (irb):7
from /usr/local/bin/irb:12:in `<main>'
008> 1[2]
NoMethodError: undefined method `[]' for 1:Fixnum
from (irb):8
from /usr/local/bin/irb:12:in `<main>'
009> (100**100)[1]
NoMethodError: undefined method `[]' for #<Bignum:0x00000101116f50>
from (irb):9
from /usr/local/bin/irb:12:in `<main>'

I'm also tempted to remove [] from String, but the usefulness probably outweighs the occasional confusion from thinking a String is an Array.
They've said on various finance calls that they want it available to make some large acquisitions and do the big parts contracts.
My unused CA S-Corp has been the bane of my existence lately. From the $800 fee to the documentation required to stay in good standing (small, but easy to forget when the company does nothing), it's more pain than it's worth.

If you're someone with lots of ideas and lots of peaks of excitement, it actually might better to postpone incorporation until you can't responsibly continue without some sort of limited liability.
One thing he doesn't mention is how much "significate profits" is.. Would 1k be significant? 10k?

For example, how much would I save by incorporating if I make 1k versus 10k versus 100k a year?
Mike makes it clear why he thinks everyone wouldn't add the flag:

If Google comes across a large website that has a tonne of "original source" content which lots of other sites are claiming "original source" for, then they can automatically identify it as a scraper site and penalise/flag for manual checking.

(I disagree with him that this would work, but that's clearly his line of reasoning. The most obvious failure mode is if a site mirrors all of SO's content, but nothing else, and puts the flag on it, in which case the flag doesn't help you distinguish which site is the source.)
C as a Portable Intermediate Language
These days many people put a twitter followers counter or a "this many people liked the page on facebook" link up.

Why? Social proof[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof]
The MOS 6502 and the Best Layout Guy in the World
Deal values Facebook at $50 billion
Probably just a fad. ;)
What we really need is for some people to turbocharge ghcjs (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1818820), so that we can get optional static type checking in Javascript.

Haskell is great at parsing[1] and great at type checking. So how about it parse the relatively simple JS grammar[2] and do some static checking on JS code?

You could augment existing JS code with an optional accepts/return syntax to provide type annotations:

foo = function(x) { return [x+1,x+2]}
foo.accepts = Numeric
foo.returns = [Numeric, Numeric]

This is similar to Collin Winter's typecheck for python (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/typecheck/), which has some nontrivial bugs but which is conceptually interesting.

[1] You could use Matt Might's new derivative parser if you want to have some fun while doing this (he has a Haskell implementation to boot!)

http://matt.might.net/articles/parsing-with-derivatives/

[2] Real World Haskell has a good JSON example that should be easily extensible to the full syntax: http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/writing-a-library-work...

EDIT:

Doctor JS by Mozilla is a (very) good start here -- maybe it already does everything we need...

http://doctorjs.org
Mongo Machine already has dedicated plans, and MongoLab's are currently alpha.

Thanks for mentioning it! I added the dedicated plan row to the comparison table.
Just to put a number on it Facebook was spending an estimated $50 Million a year just to lease space for its data centers in September (http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/09/16/faceb...).

Assume that more than doubles due to the cost of moving into other countries and their rising userbase. In that context $500 million doesn't even get them to through the IPO (Zuckerberg has said he won't even consider an IPO until 2012 at the earliest)

Again that's just space. Not employees, hardware, etc...
Several months. I probably spent too much time on the product, and not enough on the site. I originally launched with just the wood and marble styles, the metal and glass ones came later. I'm still not done, I have a bunch of other style packs in development.
Yes, it is really fair. Both the N1 and the WP7 phones have the same screen resolution and the same first gen snapdragon SoC.
Show HN our weekend project: an email based productivity log
> I can't sell you my marriage or my breathing, but they are certainly valuable to me.

There's nothing intrinsic here which prevents a sale from happening. It's just vanishingly improbable that I could offer terms you'd accept.

> The above single-sentence description of the Haber-Bosch process would have made it possible to manufacture ammonia artificially from air, starting a century earlier than it actually was possible

...if it were known to be true. In this case, the idea's not valuable. If there's value anywhere here, it's determined by how much the problem you end up solving matters, not the process itself, much less the description of the process. The problem that matters isn't "how do I make ammonia?" It's "how do I make artificial fertilisers cheaply?" or "what do I do when I can't make enough gunpowder?"

> "Scarcity in your favour" is just a way of controlling who the net use-value flows to. It doesn't contribute to creating the value in the first place. Often, in fact, it decreases it.

No, setting up a situation where there is "scarcity in my favour" is arranging for there to be demand for something which I can supply such that the market value makes it worth my while to do so. "Value" itself doesn't exist without demand, which is why scarcity is important.
They have $25B in cash or short term investments sitting around ($11B in cash or equivalents): http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:AAPL&fstype=ii

They have invested pretty heavily in facilities/equipment, growing from $2.8B to $7.2B over the past four years. I'd imagine that's stuff like their giant new data center and partnership agreements in their Asian operations. Where they really bulked up is "Long Term Investments". None four years ago, $25B today (and just $10B last year). Unsure what that would entail...
But facebook recently dumped it for inbox feature and began using Hbase instead. Not sure if Sequoia backing Riptano is supposed to be a bug or a feature?
smalter, peng, and I put this together to scratch personal itches and help us keep our new year's resolutions.

Any feedback is welcome.
I think they have closer to 50B in the bank. They were definitely north of 40 all of last year.
Membase is the one to watch. I saw a presentation by AOL @ Hadoop World re: their use of Membase. Incredibly impressive technology.
Ahhh, ok. Somehow the only japanese i know is the creator of Mario :p
Thanks, anyway.

I can't imagine, i'm the only one, who didn't know.
While I get your point about volatility, I'm not so sure I agree with the idea that large companies ought to have absolute control over who owns their shares. That's fundamentally contrary to the idea of open markets, and sets up too much potential for abuse. It's not hard to envision a marketplace where pervasive use of this technique concentrates wealth even further than it already is.
I'm seeing a trend in the comments re RVM and other suggestions.

There are essentially two issues at hand here and we would all do well to remember the difference between the two.

1. Ruby as a good citizen in a distro
2. Ruby as a development tool for programmers

#2 is mainly achieved via RVM for sure. I program both Ruby and Python and as well as some JS and Erlang. I LOVE RVM for ruby/gem management and actually prefer it to Python's virtualenv (just a preference! Don't bite my head off ;) )

#1, however, is what we should really be talking about as it is what the original debian maintainer was complaining about. Matz is more talking about #2.

I use Ubuntu as my development and deployment platform. I could never imagine if Python was not available, stable and usable as a base package on Ubuntu without me having to do some RVM/Virtualenv incantation each time. Sure, there could be a chef/puppet/script installation approach, but why? And for those who think this is trivial, think about all the packages that are in fact written in Python that are part of the desktop or base system. Python is literally embedded in everything!

One of the greatest things about Debian/Ubuntu, and why I think it is the premier development platform, are things like: sudo aptitude install build-essential

All that being said, this is a very hard problem to generally solve. I would hope that Ruby would be more Pythonic in the distro, but I don't see it being a priority for Ruby folks anytime soon....

Side note: go look up the transition from Python2.6 to Python2.7 for upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 to see what is involved in such a transition. It is non-trivial to say the least but Debian/Ubuntu maintainers are doing a stellar job with it...it is a complex issue and much care is needed...

And as another aside...anyone remember the Ubuntu rolling releases issue? At is core with rolling releases was things like Python2.6 -> Python2.7 transition...not something you can easily achieve in true distro rolling releases and again, just an example of why this is a complex problem and things like RVM are not appropriate for discussion of #2 as it stands.
Take some time off, say 1 month to relax and recap about the learning in writing.

Afterward, go with plan B
The Dataists predictions and hopes for data science in 2011
Jeff Atwood hopes Google buys stackoverflow.com?
Please don't apologize. It's pretty clear hypocrisy.

And please do something about the StackOverflow problem. This is clearly an issue with Google, which is highly visible to ALL programmers. I couldn't imagine a worse problem to have for a company that is interested in hiring the best engineers.
currency is built on debt
Microsoft had a similar problem, but they solved it by creating an Online Services Division.
Unless Apple lied in their SEC filings and in doing so risked jail time for high level executives, I think you're mistaken. There are different designations for assets, but the "Cash and Short Term Investments" portion is $25B. Cash makes up $11.2B of that total. They have a little over $75B in total assets, which counts some less liquid assets like property and long term investments.
You're right, it does depend on people's perception of quality.

I can only recall being frustrated with the scraper sites when they don't have the answer I need, because when I go back to the Google results and try another page I find that they have the exact same scraped content. Out of the first ten or twenty results there are only a few unique pieces of content.

Perhaps if Google eliminated redundancy from their results I'd never even notice whether the content was scraped or not.
Yes, Goldman's private clients are getting snookered.

This is exactly how Goldman managed to be so successful in the subprime crisis. When they decided to unload their holdings, they were sold to their clients. There is a strong conflict of interest at Goldman between shareholders and clients.

My understanding is that Goldman can do two things to make money here: 1. charge fees on transactions and 2. decide when and how to sell/buy shares for themselves.

Whether the clients should be protected by the SEC is another matter.
On the plus side, the majority of the national debt is owed to people and bodies within the country; in essence, the government representing the people has borrowed from those people on behalf of those people.
Startup Swami asks: Can the honor system work in business?
Best Android Applications For Personal Finance Account | InfoMov.Com
Google Will Become an AI Company
Let´s see when the next Web 2.0 FB challenger will come out and then the over $1.5 billion investors have plugged into FB will be gone with the wind :-)
This sounds like the approach taken by Membase (www.membase.org). And it is an incredibly powerful system. Not a bad model to follow.
I'll remember that. Thanks!
Cool. Any idea if there are more browsers supporting UCC certs than those supporting SNI?

If your domain list is quite static/stable, this is great.

Otherwise, as I believe it still suffers from the problem that you must create a new UCC cert ($$++) each time you want to add to the domain list, I'd be happier with SNI and one cert per domain. ($$--).
Whitelabel - do it now.

This would be an easy sale to large companies, HR SaaS apps and especially the gambit of job search sites (Monster, etc). The job search sites can instantly turn this into an up sell.

I want this. I'm in Toronto. If you don't whitelabel, I may never be able to use this :)
No, they aren't. TCP DNS is 10-20ms slower than UDP DNS against large DNS servers, and probably much worse against slower DNS servers.

I don't know what Dan did to generate this result, but whatever it was, it appears to have been wrong.

(Heading off a silly argument: the test I just did to confirm this did not make new connections for each query; the 3WH was amortized over all the requests).