skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If your idea is going to change the world for the better and has zero economic value to you, perhaps you'd like to share it with us...

If it's world changing, has no conceivable means of profit and has a cost (even a cost of your time) you can ask for donations. If it's world changing and doesn't, then it's win-win.
This is a friendly reminder that before you throw a ton of money into China, you should probably discuss this with a financial advisor. The WSJ isn't really the best place for advice as they don't know your individual risk tolerance, and listening to advice on a startup-focused forum may not be the best decision either.
Investing in rubles ops.. yuans is very interesting proposition. Especially when inflation rate is skyrocketing and there is housing bubble of enourmous proportion.
And China's economy is very much connected to US economy: if dollar collapses and yuans unpeggs, China's economy will suffer.

As always, great advice from WSJ: I will have one million dollar in my account in 5 years - if I start with two millions.
That's true, the best C programmer I personally know is an electrical engineer by profession.
Looks like the site hasn't been updated yet.

"djangocon US 2011 is September 6-8 at the Portland Hilton and Executive Towers http://bit.ly/dohjCC "

http://twitter.com/djangocon/status/6717838614069248 this says 2010, but it is clearly a typo
At the time, AOL's facilitation of people going online was a pretty big exception, too. After a short while, it was time to move on, and those who showed the way ahead were those who had already been critical of AOL.
Are you capable of implementing an IT infrastructure where it is impossible for a user to lose mission critical data?

Impossible? Why is perfection the standard? At a minimum she could have bought a $50 external drive at Best Buy, used the back-up software included in the OS, and the probability of this outcome occurring drops substantially.

This is basic stuff that anyone doing cancer research should understand. The fact that she admits to feeling guilty is an indication that she knows better.

Blaming the IT department, in this instance, would be like not brushing your teeth and blaming your dentist when they start falling out.
Call me dumb, but I never realised they weren't affiliated.

I originally learned HTML and CSS from the W3 specs, but when I needed a quick reference page W3Schools were usually on the top of the Google search results. I usually spent about ten seconds clicking the link, reading the page, then leaving with the info I needed. Sure, I knew what W3C stood for, vs just plain W3, but I never even thought about the name.

I actually feel pretty bad now: I recommended W3Schools as a beginner PHP tutorial for a non-coding friend, after a StackOverflow thread recommended it. I just used the PHP manual myself, but she was after something friendlier. Don't suppose anyone knows a decent alternative beginners' tutorial which promotes modern PHP practices and will steer her away from shooting herself in the foot?
Please use Comic Serif!
Please Review My New Site
Correct. That is what I think. Incidentally, breaking into a physical mailbox is a much bigger deal, which makes zero sense to me.
In some cases. But I've seen environments where this wouldn't even begin to be possible.

I used the word "contractors", but I could also apply the description to direct employees located in different countries.

This also keeps the source from being located (other than a page at a time, as it were) in those jurisdictions. (Also, potentially, sensitive test data.)

My experience may have been an anomaly, but after tackling duplicate systems and builds, attendant source control issues, latency in rich client development tools, blah, blah, there was a growing push to bring everything back and keep it "on the mothership". One step was having people essentially remote in to local hosts via Citrix.

Webification was happening initially for project management tools, but eventually, if they could give everybody web pages and be done with it (except for those directly maintaining the infrastructure), Management and IT would have been very happy.

A lot of these aspects may be, initially at least, "big company" problems. But my -- admittedly limited -- perception is that, in those environments, they are on a lot of people's radar.

(I'm suddenly reminded of the recent tussle that IBM went through with the Russian government, to ensure that they could use encryption/security IBM deemed sufficient/necessary on development environments for developers located in Russia.)
Two others and I just launched http://gopollgo.com a few days ago and its starting to pick up a bit of steam! There are two parts to it: There is the free, consumer side of the site for anyone to use. People can create, vote and comment on polls. Think of giving your Twitter followers a poll to vote on rather than getting a bunch of @replies. All polls can be embedded as widgets where javascript is allowed. If anyone from Twitter is reading, we'd love to be able to embed polls that slide out pane as well ; )

Soon we will be launching a premium, paid version ( http://gopollgo.com/images/marketing/analytics.png ) where you can dive into your votes and segment data on a variety of mediums. The screenshot shows the USA, but we're collecting data for individual cities, counties, countries and will also have the ability to segment by arbitrary areas like political divisions, zip codes, or sales regions. Think of it as PollDaddy on steroids. I built this site because I was so fed up with PollDaddy. We hope to work with big brands on Twitter and websites with large amounts of traffic: Think FoxNews, CNN, and large technology/media blogs.

I also hope to release an API at one point so that websites can easily integrate polls into their websites.

All suggestions, comments, feedback, criticism more than welcome. I also would love advice for how to get this more publicity and users. Everyone seems to like it, but I just am having trouble getting it in front of people. I would appreciate it if you liked it, that you tell your Twitter / Facebook friends.
Build a Augmented Reality app on the iPhone? Doit through kickstarter
There is only one John D. Dvorak.
How does buying an index fund mean giving a stock broker more money? It's your money, invested. You're certainly free to keep it under your mattress if you prefer. Historically, money invested has drastically outperformed money kept under mattresses :)
You know, there are things to worry about, and things not to worry about, and unless you are printing a book, whether or not people use 1 or 2 spaces after a period really isn't something you need to worry about.

I was taught to add two spaces after a period, and I have no plans to stop doing so. If people really want to complain, I suppose I can show them the latest edition of the APA style guide, which made two spaces the recommendation again, or MLA, which suggests one but notes that "as a practical matter, however, there is nothing wrong with using two spaces after concluding punctuation marks".

Of course, maybe the author isn't as dumb as he sounds... He found a way to get paid to complain about spacing, after all.
Perhaps in stocks, but the value of the currency is kept fixed by the Chinese government and wasn't available for purchase until very recently. Even if all of America's hedge funds spent all of their money on Yuan, it wouldn't get any more expensive unless the Chinese government intervened.
I'm just making it clear that they didn't take him to court for clearing his browser cache; they went after him for breaking into the email account, but did so hamhandedly.
Worked as expected. Only thought would be shortening the "shortened" URL? I'm making some assumptions about what you're doing here but having 10 chars, assuming only A-Z, 0-9, (36 possible chars), gives the capacity for an unnecessarily large number of snippets.

Unless I'm half-awake at the moment, a 5 char string still yields more than 60 million possibilities, and shaves 5 chars off the URL for twitter etc.
Show HN: Tweet a photo every time your mac wakes up with a simple hack
Over time, odds are this stock will do poorly compared to if he'd had a more diversified portfolio.

How are you calculating these odds? I'd naively assume that the average performance would be the same but the volatility would be much higher. Dollar cost average into it and you reduce this somewhat. I've never really understood the magic of diversity either, unless it's just to insulate against risk of ruin.
I'm no expert in this, but if the estimates I am seeing for their ad budget are correct, then their customer acquisition cost has to be gigantic.
Fuck Dialogue, Build Shit
ConnectU was launched after Facebook. Their original idea, as explained in the movie is that "Harvard Connection" was a dating site for Harvard students.
Facebook is actually the logical end-point of what AOL should have become

huh??

he seems to advocate never using a new thing.
US to End "Virtual" Fence on Mexican Border
Thanks for agreeing, however I must point out that since your blog post does not accept comments, nor you rectified the content, this is misleading information that will stay on the internet for virtually many years to come.
I agree with the benefits you've mentioned, I think right now I'm just bitter. I would think a liberal arts school, particularly Clark, would offer a significantly different experience than the one I received. As well, I think I would enjoy a practical program like the one your wife is going through. That is clearly learning tangible skills valuable in the real world.

I think my largest frustration is that the purpose of school, in my humble opinion, is to educate students. To get information (a liberal definition of information capabilities, skills, networks, etc.) from textbooks and professors and extracurricular programs, and cram into the students head in a way that leaves them capable of using it in the future. The purpose of an education is to educate. It killed me to find out that this was hardly the first priority. Somethings are done right, many more wrong, but the bottom line and priorities of the school I attended seemed off. (I was at McGill University by the way)
They mentioned that at some point, they hired professional developers to upgrade / update the app. I think this point was glossed over. When did they hire that additional developer? Why did they hire that developer if they didn't need him/her to begin with? And what were the quality / functional differences before and after the update? Could have used more discussion there.
Yes, well that's an edge condition. Hard cases make bad law.
Alt. summary: "because I'm a professional curmudgeon, and my non-facebooker status will offer me an easy (hopefully provocative) blog post."
Or when the local town planner adds extra restrictions to your property, so the value goes down and they can snap it up for a bargain.
Weird that he says Geocities was part of AOL. AFAIK, they were never corporately connected.
That should be the name of the article.
He makes the point that it's a closed system, then goes on to argue that if he ‘want[s] a personal webpage with all sorts of information about [himself], [he'll] go to Wordpress.com and make one.’ He has completely missed the interaction part of Facebook—the one part that attracts people, seeing as how people are social by nature. He mentions Wordpress as an alternative to the closed nature of Facebook, but he doesn't seem to realize that Wordpress is also a third party who would then have his data.
HiJack in full case reminded of square. https://squareup.com
Steam has a policy of "purchase once, play anywhere". EA likely doesn't want to give the mac version away for free for those people who bought the PC version.
I'm afraid this brothers may lose all their new found money in legal fees. They signed the settlement, they should get over it. Take the money and get a life, hack something we want to use!
Mike Jones’ Kiss-Off Letter To Laid Off MySpacers
I would certainly say a lot worse face to face :)
Or you can split the difference and look into ETFs comprised of Chinese assets.
[insert Arc joke here]
A subway ad on the DC metro, maybe?
Here's a site with pictures from a motorcyclist who went through Chernobyl:
http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html
Most tradesmen have leeway in buying the tools that suit them best. This doesn't work in a corporation, as the amount of work IT would have to do to support every different computer that wanders in would be insane. Look at a college that has this laptop purchase program: students get a choice between Mac and a Dell laptop, and unless you're a fine-arts major you don't get the Mac option.

More likely, employees would be forced to buy the one computer that IT specifies. And, knowing how much VB.NET code is running out there now, it'll end up being a top-of-the-line enterprise Dell laptop, crippled with XP and all of their network policies.

Somebody who's forced to buy a laptop and then give all control away won't be a happy body.
Reading Dvorak posts is like watching the slow-motion trainwreck. I thought to myself, "I wonder what idiotic thing John Dvorak is going to say this time?" And did I click? Yes, Yes I did.

It strikes me that you have to be a pretty serious egotist/narcissist to think that Facebook is all about publishing, as opposed to all about connecting with people in your life.

And, that mental profile would also suit someone who is happily, aggressively, FREQUENTLY wrong about technology, but doesn't mind making a career out of writing about it.

I'm still going to read his occasional missives, though, I just can't help myself.
One person's blight is another person's economic development opportunity.
http://www.whoishostingthis.com/beerby.com
Because it never ends:

1. You don't invest? Let me help you start. (give guy money)

2. Good, you invest. Let me help you diversify. (give guy more money)

3. Good, you are diversified, but you need to diversify more (give guy even more money)

4. You have too many stocks. Let's get you into more bonds. (give guy money)

5. Hmm... you don't have any exposure to Far East currency, but we can't take away from your Euro position. Give me some more money so we can buy this new Chinese currency. (give guy money)

6. ...

That is my point. Investing is a scam.
Me too. I have an account so that people stop asking me to create an account. However, I've disabled most of the features in the privacy options (my account doesn't even have a "wall") and the only information for visitors is my "about" box asking them to send me an email instead of a Facebook message.

I currently read mails about once or twice a day, because using things like email notifications just interrupts me during work. Regularly checking Facebook updates would be too much noise to me.

I have tons of interesting content that I want to read (but I don't have enough time), so why should I read uninteresting Facebook updates instead? And to socialize I'm happy to get away from my computer, instead of spending even more time before the screen.
Facebook seems more about connections and communication. AOL is all about sending me CD's everyday trying to get me to sign up for their service.
even a broken clock is correct twice a day...
There are various reasons why that may not be the case. For example, the employee may have had the misfortune of recently having been made redundant and subsequently spent their savings and accumulated debt whilst searching for a new job.
It's not tough to write 2000 words or so on the subject. It's just difficult to write 2000 words or so on the subject and still end up with so little substance.
Design for lowest common denominator, but create for the power user.
Dear HNers who upvoted this article, this is EXACTLY the kind of crap which makes this place suck. Please use the flag button, not upvote on trolls.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Note the alternative presented: "Citrix gives staff a stipend and they then buy the computer of their choice."

That would work for me (as an employee).

However, if I ran a despotic company where employees were apt to act out against "the man" I'd be pretty nervous about letting Pandora bring in her own box, so to speak.
I disagree with all of that, but I doubt my opinion matters here.

Hardly ever use globals, never use patterns, I think in code , dynamically...

The whole point is to make passing in functions hard. Passing functions everywhere leads to spaghetti code.
It's not always about profit and revenue. By your definition, Apache and Linux could not be considered successes.

Personally, I think gaining 10-15% of the browser/smartphone market in a couple years is pretty good. And while the direct success of Chrome has been nice, it's also been a kick in the pants for the entire browser industry, which has responded with better, safer, and faster browsers for everyone.
If you suffix every other sentence with "... because I have no friends." it makes a whole lot more sense.
This is a bit disingenuous.

1. It did not pass Angry Birds, but Angry Birds Seasons Free, which is a relatively new app.

2. The Free app list is more volatile in general.

Still, congrats to the developer on becoming so visible so quickly.
Once upon a time, AOL was a BBS. What drives a BBS is community. They worked really hard on that aspect and even had messaging between users, forums, games, and more.

Then, they decided they were an ISP instead and started claiming such. People forgot all the other services they offered and focused on the millions of frisbies they gave out.

Facebook is all about community, with messaging, forums, games, event planning, and more.

So yeah, it's what AOL should have been, but wasn't.
Charlie Wolf: Verizon iPhone Will ’Suck the Wind Out of Android's Growth'
Perhaps then, there should be wider sentencing leeway?

Incidentally, breaking into a physical mailbox is a much bigger deal, which makes zero sense to me.

So far, most people think that physical incursions into a person's private things are more serious than virtual incursions. Perhaps it's the physical safety aspect of it that they think is important.

For what it's worth, I think virtual privacy should be treated exactly the same as physical privacy, and sadly the law hasn't quite figured that out (I think we're in agreement on this)

But I disagree with you that punishment should always be severe. I think data shows that severe punishments do little to prevent crime, and end up just costing everybody lots of tax dollars in incarceration costs.
I wrote the "why don't you build a better version" text as a response to "Internet Culture," which mandates that if you want to point out that something is bad, you actually have to build a better alternative yourself.

If I ride on a boring, crappy rollercoaster, I don't need to open up my own theme park in order to air my frustrations.

A lot of the people who worked on w3fools spend a lot of time helping actual other human beings who need support in building websites, and encounter the errors from w3schools regularly, and we invest our time in those and other endeavours. W3schools said "we're going to spend OUR time on building an entry-level reference that everyone can use," and we want

a) the community to be well-aware of its caveats
b) it to improve
Just because something is popular in the mainstream doesn't mean it's not bullshit. As far as calling himself a well paid, well educated troll; well, you can't take a tongue-in-cheek comment like that completely at face value.

Rather than calling his thinking on technology a crap shoot, I'd call it a brutally honest personal assessment. In the case of his supposed bullshit call on the mouse and ipad, I'd call him exactly correct.
Knuth TAOCP, Volume 4A Arrives. Pre-Order Your Copy
There is immense incentive within the state of Alaska --- where Palin is extremely unpopular (in Wasilla, her hometown, her memoir is shelved at a bookstore under "Alaska Fiction") --- to charge Palin with crimes. She has been under near continuous investigation since assuming statewide office.

The only people I see suggesting that this email spool contained evidence of wrongdoing are partisan armchair legal theorists. And, for the record, I think Palin is a genuine force for evil in our country.
Video Tutorial: Android Application Development - Main Building Blocks
That's all well and good, but I'm one of the owners of Beerby and I can tell you for sure it's on Amazon EC2 :)
Just look at the top stocks 30 years ago and see which ones are still in business today, and of those which have beaten the market average. No stock will outperform the market over the long term. Nor will any mutual fund!

For medium time horizons it's not impossible but exceedingly unlikely.

For short time horizons it's still not remotely easy for firms to accomplish, and many do not.
... which is just another example of that which has long been implemented (and sometimes long been patented) still managing to attract protection. However, at least when there is a significant pre-established publication of the idea the 'try to' becomes rather more significant than the 'sue' and they can be got rid of rather more easily.
The CMoS is hardly a final authority on the matter. It is just one common style, and is optimized for a particular presentation and publication style. It is also used by teachers to get students to write more words when their requirement is a page count.
"I think that djb redo will turn out to be the Git of build systems."
I know I'm not an average Java programmer (I hate IDE's, hate patterns for example), but I've never seen anything as an AbstractHammerFactoryInterface.

Seems like you're confusing Java the language, with how some people choose to use Java.
I've working in small tech companies and have used my personal laptop as a work machine, so in theory I'm not opposed to it. But if you want to mandate it, I get to choose the OS and I get root.
Health Information Technology: When Technology Isn't the Answer
yeah, love it, but won't use it without a mobile version :(
The article somewhat misrepresents Netscape's attempted rewrite. I was at Netscape at the time, although I never worked on the rewrite.

>The solution Netscape found was to rewrite the whole browser from scratch, in order to create a new code base that would be easier to evolve.

It is true that the Navigator codebase was hard to work in, but the rewrite had another big motivation: it was in Java. One of Netscape's strengths was that Navigator was cross-platform: Win32, Win16, MacOS, and various Unices. The problem was that it was getting hard to find anybody to work on anything but Win32--in particular, MacOS was perceived as a dying platform, and developers were fleeing. So the idea was that Javagator would let us move forward with just a few specialists on each of the minor platforms.

(Of course, looking back, expecting reasonable performance out of Java that decade may have been pretty stupid. There was a project underway called Electrical Fire, which I think became, or fed into, Sun's first JIT; but we probably shouldn't have assumed it would succeed.)

>In the case of Netscape versus Microsoft, Netscape gave up all the development advantage they had.

This is just flat-out wrong. For it to be true, Netscape would have had to have essentially everybody working on Javagator; we definitely didn't. I think it was something like 5-10 people at most.
It doesn't drain the battery any more than listening to music does :) Really cool project!
Well thank you, if I even need advice on how to fit in my acupuncture and pedicure appointments to my busy day, I'll remember to look this up.

Sheesh.
Parallel framework shoot out
Yes, I definitely need a desktop site.

Thanks for finding my typos!

Refynr is pronounced like refiner... It refines your Social Network feeds. Does that make sense?
It depends. There are two layouts for Bulgarian keyboards - "Standard" and "Phonetic", and I believe phonetic is more commonly used. With iOS 4.0 the phonetic layout disappeared, to be back in 4.1.
jdk
textmate / jedit / nano
ant

What else do you need? :/