skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a book lover, I'm happy in either store, but Borders has always been my preference. They always seemed to carry more titles and somehow feel to me like less of a big corporate store. (I'm a little biased, having spent quite a bit of time around Ann Arbor and the original store even before it moved.)
Ditto C#.
From my experience at CMU, I'd say that isn't likely:

The administration is very cautious and conservative most of the time, and if they had been involved, this would have,at the very least, taken weeks to happen.

That said, the CS department head may have given him a thumbs up (probably even literally), knowing that legal will be forced to back them up, if he asked anyone at all before hand.
Getting rid of flash is more difficult then getting rid of x264 since its obviously used all over the web. Dropping support for x264 now will prevent a similar issue in the future. Its a great first step.

Having a company like Mozilla pay a royalty on each user would cripple Firefox and any new browsers that may come along.
"It’s a popular notion these days Google has lost its “mojo” due to failed products like Google Wave, Google Buzz"

Really? Taking a single one sided tech crunch article (that is in contrast to several other recent TC articles marveling at innovations produced by google such as the real time translation) as popular belief didn't make me want to continue reading.

But I did. Some interesting points about the vertical results being important, but the implication that the core results are a wasteland that google has ceded seems pretty unsubstantiated.
Why would you not use TAP?!

It is easy, powerful, has lots and lots of support (I'm going to add Hudson integration tomorrow for some stuff.)
I agree, but its more because of the frameworks and libraries than the language
There's a better way than a star of David, that gets you exactly 4 triangles in 2d using 6 matchsticks.
Selling a Theme by the Thousands: What Thesis Teaches Us
Even lower battery life: The next mobile arms race
Not really. People tend to spend more on their hobbies (holidays, geek toys, etc) but it's not as if everyone's expected to spend their evenings snorting coke off expensive strippers.

From my experience people working in the financial sector are much more likely to be putting money into savings or investments than people outside the sector.
Borders (noun) Bor'-ders - a coffee shop where one previews books they'll buy online for 40% less.
I wonder if there is a simple medical test that could identify the caffeine intolerant?
Yeah it's convenient to not mention the massive successes like Chrome and Android...
that was my favorite line as well. now that startup pursuits have become semi-mainstream, i think you'll see the next generation of parents less inclined to push their kids down a carved out path.

if parents really want to see their kids "make them proud," they won't push them towards a law degree...but rather encourage them to change the world.

one of these days, these law students will figure out that there's just not as much work as there once was and we could really use their expertise to move the ball forward instead of slowing things down.
On June 8 Google, Facebook, Yahoo & Others Will Road Test IPv6
How to get your startup on Hacker News
Amazon should buy them. Then you'd be able to go to your local store, browse and buy right there. Also you could ship your order directly to the store for free the same way walmart does.
Fingers still need somewhere to go when holding it. It's not just the button that defined the size of the border. However there's no reason to expect the border couldn't be a bit more narrow without a button. They could also possibly do something tricky with touch zones extending beyond the screen and into the border so perhaps they could detect when fingers are wrapped around near the edges and filter them out.
Borders regularly emails out coupons for 33% off of a single item. That brings their price closer to Amazon.

http://www.bordersmedia.com/coup/20110111sa33.html?cmpid=SL_...
Part is also what counts as spam. Google doesn't count a lot of index-type pages as spam, so if you search for a conjunction of a few programming terms, [scala foo bar baz], you often get a page that indexes blogs on a topic, in this case Scala. The post titles on that page will use all of your search terms, but often in different post titles, effectively erasing the conjunction operator in your query.
Guy earns $20,000 in a year hunting bugs in Chrome
Woz on innovation (video)
I played LSL as a kid and assumed that "lubber" was another name for "condom." I got the joke a decade later while sitting in traffic (if you haven't played the game, the clerk was Indian).
Tim Ferriss on tolerable mediocrity, and the advice he gives startups
New Models for Investing in Innovation
But, where is pattern matching? Or what's the color of your socks?
Wozniak: Voice recognition is computing's next frontier
I am not a Google fanboy, actually I've been using duckduckgo for a couple of weeks as my default search engine. However, I've done it for the privacy features of ddg, not because I think google search "sucks" more than it used to.

Maybe I'm blind. Maybe I don't pay enough attention. Maybe I just use my search engine differently than most (or at least than those who seem to complain a lot lately) but I fail to find a concrete example where google (or ddg for that matter) gives me results that are obviously "wrong" (whatever that means).

I think we've all learned to speak "google". When you query a search engine you don't speak english. You don't ask (or do you?) "I want articles concerning java on the android platform on the hacker news website". Instead, you say "site:news.ycombinator.com android java". And most of the time I get what I want. Maybe I'm more easily satisfied than most. At any rate, these days it's important to learn this language to effectively use any search engine.

In this particular article, the author states that searching for "iPod Connectivity" doesn't yield much results that "actually answer your query". My question is: as a human being, what kind of results do you expect when you search for "iphone connectivity"?

I'm not playing dumb. Is there one good way to interpret this query? Are you shopping? Are you looking for specs? What kind of connectivity are you looking for anyway?

I did the query just now. The third link targets apple.com, the fifth amazon.com. The rest is a bunch of websites doing reviews or selling iphone parts. I can't really judge if those site are legit or not, some do look fishy. But at any rate, why do you say they are "bad answers"?

I do have my gripes with google. Expertexchange used to be a huge pain in the ass, but it's mostly gone these days (probably more thanks to stackoverflow than google, that's for sure). Google has also _never given me any results on google groups even if it will gladly give me some ad-ridden usenet mirror. I think Google has effectively contributed to destroy usenet that way.

It seems people want google to answer queries such as "What phone should I buy?" and have google give the right answer in the first link. It seems some people took the church of google a little too literally. The day Google knows how to answer that it will probably follow up by sending a mechanical Schwarzenegger clone back in time to kill bill gates' mother.

To sum it up: of course Google may want to fight even more the various adfarms out there, but before you criticize the answer, ask yourself if you've asked the good question.
Google is putting its foot down to ensure that web video isn't hijacked by a codec that is owned by a notorious organisation, and they're doing it at great cost to themselves- in terms of the blowback from this, and the amount of money they spent on On2, and the patent litigation that is almost certainly coming if webm gains any significant adoption. Mozilla and Google are fighting for your and my right to produce fully compliant browsers without having to pay somebody else. They're fighting for your right to fork.
By "in flux" I was intending to vaguely refer to the problems with the protocol which has led Firefox and Opera to ship with WebSockets disabled. I'm guessing we're probably going to see some changes to it in the future. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

I honestly don't know a thing about the version of the protocol that they've implemented. It looks like one that they (Microsoft) have submitted - http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-montenegro-hybi-upgrade-hel....

That's cool you're seeing so many clients with WebSockets enabled.
> Never having done OO doesn't make someone a bad programmer

Well given the current landscape of programming, yes, it does make them very bad programmers. If you haven't explored the most common programming paradigm, you're a bad programmer, or a 1st year student.
I think that's a totally fine and reasonable thing to say. However, I would then say 'I can't find any Perl programmers with the skillsets and domain knowledge I need', rather than 'The general level was shocking ... Sad state of affairs indeed.
Granted I'm only 28, but my relatives along with several friends are amazed at the fact that I make it a point to not drink coffee. I hate the notion of having to rely on something(y'know, aside from food and water and oxygen) specifically designed to give me a mental boost. I always figured if I was falling asleep midday it was because I was wasn't sleeping well or something of the sort.

It's hard because I also want to get the benefits described in these studies, but don't want to become dependent on caffeine to get through the day.
Likes can be faked, but what if Facebook only counts likes in my circle -- or weights them heavily?

The real problem is that likes on pages aren't used enough for them to be useful.
Realtime threaded conversational web app
fluin.com
Suggestions? Comments?
Thanks
Palm, Blackberry and Google already went with no buttons so Apple is the one lagging behind here.
Ironic that the final rebuttal to "Perl looks like Java" is method chaining using periods :-) But hey, that looks very nice--glad to see Perl finally "got the dots." It's been years since I used Perl, mainly because I was squarely in the mindset of the OP. I'll have to give 6 a look.
Pragmatic Network Latency Engineering   Fundamental Facts and Analysis
I think it's a nice allegory of the struggle that many programmers feel when considering to switch to a more sophisticated language. How would you explain your struggle to someone who doesn't know about programming?

Why it's sexist? The sexes could be perfectly inversed. I guess the programming languages are depicted as girls because the author is male but it would apply as well to boyfriends.
Harvard Undergrads Launch Newsie To Find News About Your Friends
The article could easily have been titled "Analysts Predictions Wrong: Blame iPad" and still drawn hits because it contains "iPad."
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
The iPod nano could be seen as a prototype for an iPad without a home button. It still has physical volume and sleep/wake buttons, but everything else is gestured.
Ribbon Microphones: Audio Icon You Can Build in Your Garage
Do you mean a box with an x through it? I guess the rules never said the ends of the matchsticks had to match up either. I'm definitely enjoying all these different answers which explore (exploit?) the imprecisely specified problem.
The gesture is remarkably natural to use. I was surprised.
I find it interesting that the OP mentions Jeff Bezos as someone who has "a deep attachment to books and the people who read them".

My understanding was that Bezos chose books for Amazon after writing a list of things people could carry in one hand, and decided Books was the biggest market on the list.

In trying to find my source for that on Google, I came across plenty of other explanations for why he chose Books as the topic to sell - they may discount my previous belief, but none of them make the case that he loves books or that books led to the business. All seem to claim that the need to create an internet business came first, books were a means to an end.
Typically I do work flow UI drawings for high level design. Then do what ends up looking like a dictionary of class names and descriptions of their responsibilities|interactions but only at a high to intermediate level of the program.
> One of the persistent rationalizations for not creating new software in Perl is that it's difficult to find great Perl developers.

One of the persistent rationalizations of Perl mongers is that Perl still has that much of an edge.

If it's difficult to find great Perl developers, that's because less great developers flock to Perl (if at all, maybe current great Perl developers are people who have learned Perl some time ago). It is that simple.

Perl in its days used to be a great language for those who looked for a "creative" one to learn, and allowed to do things other languages didn't. PG has said Perl was a language for hackers.

Nowadays, there are way more options if you are looking for a learning experience, and I dare to say that many alternatives are way more rewarding than learning Perl, and have a much better effort/learning ratio. In the same time you are memorizing what value every standard function returns in what context, you could be composing functions in Haskell or building massively concurrent Erlang systems. Heck, even the humble Javascript allows you to perform mind-bending dynamic feats. Other languages offer multiplatform support (native, Java, .NET) which Perl lacks.
A few years? Strongly disagree. Months, tops.

It's key that you do have people who are already good with the language on the team for them to learn from, but if that's in place, a genuinely good developer is going to be able to pick up on the new paradigm pretty easily.
Very true. And with the Amazon iPhone app, you don't even have to leave to finish your purchase. Just scan the barcode, purchase, and continue enjoying your coffee.
Since the 90s, Borders had a staff policy of referring to 'product', not 'books'. It was all marketing theory, and management became actively hostile to people who like reading for its own sake.
Try something like meditation, exercising, taking 30 minute holidays... other non-addictive and well tested methods.
actually I think in France, Germany, and the other top countries in europe are just a bit better in this regard, but they are still very very far from US. Still in Germany or France there is a market for online advertising that is something like five times bigger the one in Italy, so for sure starting an online business there is simpler.

However there is clearly not this explosion of european startups, regardless the fact that the inhabitants and wealth of europe is comparable to the one of the US. So clearly europe have a problem with innovation and technological startups.

> and latests news that come from there, about national debt and such, draw rather catastrophic image of their nearest future.

This news is always the same as in the latest 50 years ;)
Honestly I doubt that something bad will happen, at least in short time, as in Italy there is a solid net of small business, and a lot of money in the banks.
Congrats to them. It's one of the best services I use on the web. It's changed the way I travel. I just hope Concur doesn't f it up.
blush Thanks, I totally missed that.
I now add to my list of reasons NOT to outsource overseas (time zone, language, culture, currency, work ethic, lag, import/export restrictions) this new item: data security standards.
I've thought that since Borders originally partnered with Amazon. But that would give Amazon a local presence and eliminate their advantage of not having to collect sales tax. If the "internet sales tax" was ever imposed, brick-and-mortar Amazon stores would make more sense, but still not a sure thing.
If you like Helvetica, you should watch Objectified. It's by the same director, and is similar to Helvetica, only about Industrial Design (Dieter Rams, Jon. Ive, etc.).

It's on Netflix instant streaming.
3-D Brings a Wow Factor to Printing
I think this is good advice and HN would be better off if more people followed it. Besides, "Review my startup" posts are my favorite type of post and if this brings out more then I'm all for it.
Not true. I shop at Borders, Amazon, used bookstores and small local stores in about equal proportions.
> whatever that means.

Let me put it this way. You're looking for a new CEO for a fashion outlet. You have two top candidates: one who has an encyclopedic knowledge of shoes, dresses, designers, and how to spot a knock-off from the genuine article. The other guy ran a very successful chain of grocery stores.

Now, on one level, selling clothes is just like selling anything else -- groceries, toothpaste, power tools. You have your marketing, your in-store experience, etc. But your grocery store guy will lack the one thing the fashion guy has: namely, an intuitive sense of what makes an otherwise rational consumer spend far too much on some shirt just because it says "Armani" on the collar. Your fashion guy knows who his customers are, who they talk to, what they read, and what motivates them to open their wallets. That does not mean the fashion guy will do a better job, but he does have a distinct competitive advantage over the grocery guy.

What happens when you don't have a guy like that at the top? Well, Apple nearly tanked after they pushed Steve Jobs out the door in 1986. Jobs' replacement, an ex-CEO of PepsiCo, simply didn't understand the Apple customer the same way Jobs did.

Hence "book people." People who understand why people buy books, and how books are different from socks and celery.
I'm not so pessimistic about advertising, but I am pessimistic about Yahoo's stewardship of Flickr. After all, Yahoo deep-sixed geocities, and would have turned off delicious if they'd been able to get away with it.
> europe have a problem with innovation and technological startups.

My guess is it's not so much a problem with innovation, as with the startup portion of the equation. Lots of people do interesting, cool, creative things in Europe, they're just not always as good at turning those things into businesses.
Are you implying or insinuating that these facts are linked, or just mentioning 'em together?
I've thought about making a lightning gun that way, before. Unfortunately, a CO2 laser powerful enough to cause dielectric breakdown of air over a useable distance is inconvenient to carry; and then making sure the electricity gets grounded through the target instead of the gun's wielder is tricky too.
Ask HN: Is anyone else sick of reCAPTCHA?
So they're meant to distinguish humans from computers. But 30-40% of the time, the text is unreadable. Or are we just turning into computers?
Agreed. You can learn a lot by reviewing other people's startups, and by seeing what points other people have about the startups being offered. Much like in other forms of "art" like writing or singing or painting, there's a lot to be gained from "critique groups".
This similar story is also related to programming. The B-Tree is a "skip the water" idea. Instead of using complex algorithms to balance the tree, it's the tree itself that autobalances, splitting nodes when they're crowded or joining them when they're too empty. That's one of my favourite ideas in programming.
It's called an opinion. Apologies for the lack of footnotes*

*Not really**

**This is called sarcasm.[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm
I shouldn't even attempt to recap the story, but it's really interesting to look at how Bezos selected books. He wanted something with a lot of unique products/SKUs that was cheap enough for people to try buying online for the first time. Books and CDs were two of his front-runners.

I wonder if back then he realistically considered the possibility that either or both could someday be delivered electronically?
A tangential matter, where community-driven support may not hurt you, but providing your own support gives an advantage: If you're dealing with all the issues as they come in, you get a good feeling for how people are using your product, how they expect/wish it would work, and how they're mis-using and breaking it.

I think of it as similar to top-quality brands that offer lifetime warantees (MEC in Canada, similar to REI, offers it on everything in their store). This way, if anything ever breaks out in the real world, the customer is likely to bring it back. While they are fixing it, they can examine it, and if they see a rash of broken straps of a certain design, they know to beef up that strap on the next spin.

That's all before the advantages of customer loyalty, building a brand image/voice, or whatever other reasons.
i'm super-impressed by the strategic decisions that facebook has made that keep them heading higher...but can it really last forever?

outside of the status updates, their data is getting stale. who updates their info? who spends time to remove items? that's just not the focus of the site like it used to be.

tying in with the social graph was the most important move they made to ensure some sustainability that usually alludes social networks. still, i maintain that a social network can't last forever (unlike a resource like wikipedia which will always be valuable)
Simple: because I end up creating a number of small scriptlet tools to pass around to other devs on the team, most of which know little about perl, and I want the scripts to just work, on various crufty computers, rather than fall into a dependency hell.

Now, if I were building an application in a defined environment, that would be different.

Maybe I should demand a better working environment? I took the money instead. (I make considerably more than the $30/hr quoted elsewhere in the comments) This means I have to cope with a lot of crap, but it does provide for a family...
What's the difference between a Project Manager and a Product Manager?
A small but vital correction is that the "biased" estimator will approach a population's std dev as the sample size increases. This is clear since the adjustment is N/(N-1) which tends to 1 with large N.

It's not often a huge deal, but I'm unconvinced that biased estimators deserve such a derogatory name. Using a unbiased estimate does not actually mean you've got a better estimator. I think this is part of why there seems to be no intuitive description of why the N/(N-1) factor removes bias. You instead need to invoke the powerful, abstract ideas of sufficiency and completeness.
TECS - The amazing CS course
Ah true, I'd forgotten about the firefox and opera hoo-haw. Hopefully they sort that out ASAP It's a great shame really.
I hope anyone tempted to comment on this story will first stop to consider whether their opinion would still be exactly the same if the parties were reversed.

To me? It seems a little harsh, but it's probably a good reminder to others that rifling through and publishing someone else's personal data is a serious offense, not a prank.
First, it looks like we've hit max depth on this thread, I can't reply to Nicks post (this is probably a sign that I should shut up now :))

Sorry, I was not very clear in my first post. The job was advertised clearly being on a web system, looking for experienced developers. I don't have a copy of the ad any more, but I'm quite sure it specifically stated OO as wanted experience.

My main point with the first post was to highlight the disconnect between the level they graded themselves at, and the level at which they actually were. If I'm talking with someone claiming to be an experienced Perl web developer, I'd expect, among several things, they would have OO experience.

(If anyone's interested in the end of the story -- we gave up on trying to find a senior person, and instead went with a guy who did not have much experience at all, but came across as very keen to learn. It worked out very well).

edit: oh, now I have a "reply" link under Nicks post. oh well, too late.
I sincerely doubt that. It would be essentially identical to SONY vetting a professor's online posts/research results.