skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In over a decade of patronage, I cannot recall ever having a single successful conversation with a staff member (other than "These books, please.")

The problem with big box booksellers is that they can't possibly win on customer service, because their customer base is too diverse, and no single employee can begin to satisfy the customer service needs of such a broad range of tastes and needs until they've spent years both learning the store's inventory and building a mental model of customer types and their preferences. But it's a retail job and the rewards are meager, so there's little incentive to become this ideal bookstore employee, though they do exist; the employee you do end up with is either a thwarted English major who despises you (this was once me, I'm sorry to say) or the avid reader of bestsellers -- and if that's not a good fit for you, too bad.

The achievement of Amazon is that they've actually done a decent job of automating what an ideal generalist bookseller does.

(Specialty bookstores are another story. In those cases, you can more readily assume that the preoccupations of the bookseller and the customer will align.)
That's just a matter of having money to invest and connections.
This post by The Last Psychiatrist is an excellent breakdown of the article (and WHY it was in the WSJ in the first place).
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/01/why_chinese_mothers_a...
The main problem with WebM/VP8 vs. H.264, especially in the face of the mobile internet device explosion, is hardware acceleration.

Once devices start coming with native WebM acceleration, it won't be an issue. Given that Android is so popular and Google is looking to abandon H.264, it's inevitable that hardware acceleration will come to phones, probably in conjunction with H.264 acceleration (just like H.264 and H.263 right now) At that point, any ARM platform with a H.264 acceleration will include a WebM acceleration, and it would be more than trivial for Apple/Microsoft/whoever to implement WebM in their mobile browsers.

A more interesting day will be when Google says "Android 3.x phones must have WebM acceleration"
Do you have a use-case in mind?

I think that most of the things i find interesting on social networks wouldn't fit into my defined buckets of keywords...
Sometimes, the restrictions come at being underfunded, or with a lack of time, which takes less discipline to enforce than self-restriction.
Yes. Ecards are based on the vcard, and that's what you will be able to save directly to your phone, or export from the website. What we add is a visual layer and other metadata like social networking profiles.

This counts for phone to phone sharing, but also for sending your card to an email. Recipients will get your visual card, and a vcard as attachment.
For reference:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2090678
Thanks I read this a while ago and was trying to find it - this is exactly what I was looking for :)
That sounds like a fantastic idea, but after brief look at the T-Mobile website it looks like the Even More Plus plans don't come with any minutes. Can you buy minutes as a monthly add-on, or do you have to pay the crazy $0.45 per minute call rate?
Without googling, I'd say most Android manufacturers have less diversity than GM, or a typical car company. It should also be noted that each car model has about 3 different trim levels, meaning each car company probably has 50 or so combinations at any one point.
Even 1 GB just for completing is worth it, if it isn't too difficult.
Why doesn't Google release the source code of the flavor of Linux that it uses after earning tens of billions basically leveraging Linux code?

Google open sources things that are not central to it's business, just like every other company out there.

MPEG-LA cannot be a patent troll let alone a known one, because it's a loose organization of companies that agree on a standard to prevent fragmentation of video and let people deal with one entity instead of a thousand. Those individual companies could be trolls.

>fights for open standards like HTML5

Really? Then this move to remove support for H.264 will get Flash even more entrenched because it would be the easiest way for content providers to get WebM video working on IE9 and Safari. Flash has already announced upcoming support for WebM.
Ambiguity seems, to me, to conflict with the desire for clarity and reliability. Any language which allows a typo in an assignment statement to create a new variable name binding silently is insufficiently safe for my purposes.

I don't claim that Ruby and Python have security holes form this behavior, but people rightly criticize PHP's register_globals for similar reasons.
Sure. And Emacs is way better than Vi.
That's hyperbole. Daring Fireball, Asymco and Arment are advocates for Apple, no doubt. That doesn't prevent them from being able to provide an interesting perspective from one side of the argument. There are plenty of Android advocates out there making the opposing case, and they also get linked on HN.

Also, if you're talking about Ryan Paul of Arstechnica, then I certainly wouldn't regard him as neutral. He's an advocate for open source software. I disagree with his stance on many subjects. Doesn't stop me reading his articles though.
Actually, recoiledsnake's scenario has already happened. The VP8 "spec" isn't a spec at all, it's just copy pasted C code. Unfortunately, they also chose to reuse the same code for the encoder and the decoder. This means bugs in either one can propagate into both. There was already one of these bugs found, fixed, and had a patch applied to the source tree. Google came in and reverted that patch because too much video had already been encoded with the bug in the encoder. This is exactly what happened with IE6, where bugs in the product become de facto requirements on the web.

Maybe the H264 spec drones on and on but at least it's a spec. The VP8 "spec" is just a mandate from Google. A shitty one, at that. I'll take the small risk of patent litigation among only the biggest players for an open specification and standard any day. Of course, there's also the fact that H264 is way better than VP8 which it seems like no one cares about.
Since when in the USA there is a thing of too much choice?
So your complaint is really that you have to install stuff to get better defaults in Perl? :-)

Sorry, but that is hard to take seriously.

>>I shouldn't have to explicity declare a variable lexically scoped

Are you saying you don't like strict? Without that, you're fscked if you spell a variable name wrong in the same way, twice... (I really don't get that not all scripting languages have strict.)

I've avoided threading in scripting languages as the plague, but I tend to agree with you as far as I've read. :-)
Not ethically problematic at all, economically problematic for Borders, certainly. As another poster pointed out, Borders offers the same products as online bookstores except with a substantial markup. Markups need to be justified with some sort of value-add, what's the value-add for Borders? Quick access to books? That's a dubious advantage in the age of Amazon Prime and e-books, especially when weighed against the disadvantages of physical bookstores such as time wasted waiting in line, time wasted making a trip to the store to pick up a specific book that it turns out they don't have in stock, etc.

Borders is a retail store heavy company, and they haven't made any significant changes in their store in response to competition from online stores. That's a huge red-flag and is nobody's fault but theirs.
Yes, x is a lexically scoped variable, and you're using a code block, which is not in any way like a function. And?
Your app is simple enough that you don't need video -- you can show the same interaction in a list format with screenshots. This seems like more important stuff to show new visitors than "connect with anyone", etc.

But honestly, I think it's a terrible concept. (I don't like to say so, because I like entrepreneurs, and want to encourage you, but I also care about giving the best feedback I am able.) Business cards have an important function in the world, and they're very low-hassle relative to how useful they are. Meanwhile, they're very entrenched: the physical card is a strong social convention, and it's very hard to change that. I would not use this product because I suspect that many of the people I would meet would find it unprofessional.
Making Time for Excellent ROI - Real-world Hack
You're right that you could make the same argument for other gadgets, and he does mention tablets at the end of the article , but it's really true for almost all consumer goods today. If you really want to understand this argument better, I highly recommend The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. He argues that the abundance of choice in today's world is making us less satisfied with our decisions.
I'm actually curious about the differences in the formats. Is H.264 a better format? If so, does that mean that the web will always choose "free" over quality, if so, is there any incentive to create better embedded technologies, if a "free" albeit technically worse "knockoff" is available regardless of how open the other tech is, simply because it wants to be compensated when used by commercial entities that plan to profit off their work. For example, if they had non-commercial, GPLv2 and commercial licensing options.
Orion - web based IDE from Eclipse
There is some mixing of data sources, and in my opinion that is the 'core value' of the software. By aggregating item data from many sources I can generate a much clearer opinion of what an item is - and whether or not it fits with a specific kid. Not all of this is visible in the UI however, and a lot of the code was just me being a CS Nerd and probably won't materialize into the visible portions of the site in the near future.
> As far as scoping goes, I shouldn't have to explicity declare a variable lexically scoped - and I can't think of any other language where I do.

Really? I can think of a few: How about C, C++, Java, Lisp, and Javascript? (Yeah, technically javascript is function scoped if you declare it with "var", but you have to do that to prevent it from being global).
I don't find those examples natural at all.
And Apple products lead to too little. Am I destined to forever be stuck in Nokia land?

(really, is it too much to ask for an SD card slot and a standard usb connector on an iDevice?)
From http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/25/google-chrome-flash/

Google Chrome Now Comes With Flash Built In

391

View Comments
Robin Wauters
Jun 25, 2010

Last March, Adobe and Google jointly announced that Flash Player would soon come built in to the latter’s Chrome browser, eliminating the need for users to download, install and update it separately.
" ... without even a scintilla of value-add"

I get tremendous value from being able to flip through a book, check out the index, get a feel for the quality of writing. I love being able to wander around and randomly bump into things I might otherwise never know about.

I like browsing the magazines, seeing what's out there.

Whether that justifies the increase in cost is another matter, but there is tangible benefit to the physical B&N.
I'm selling my geek dream house to put money into our startup
I clearly remember my technical screening with facebook back in 2008. We did live code (similar to etherpad) and he asked me to write out a explode() function, and to write a Person object that held an array of friends, and to write a simple algorithm to find friends within 2 degrees.

It was a straightforward technical screening but the reason I remember it was because of the verbal emptiness from the interviewer. As I coded for him live on the spot I swear to god he was doing his own work or doing something else. Often I would ask him questions, comment, or walk him through my code and he showed absolutely no interest and often got lost saying things like "hey wait a second, what did you say?" as I heard him typing away at his keyboard, lol.
If I'm not mistaken this is the default setting in thunderbird.
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.

You've learned to speak "Google". The majority of the world hasn't. My mom, for example, would search for "how to bake apple pie", rather than "apple pie baking" or any other such set of key terms.

In fact, your approach reminds me of the approach that I used with AltaVista (back when it was the premier search engine). The reason I used this approach is because I was taught to do this by one of my teachers. Back then, it was recognized that search engines don't recognize human language and that search queries had to be carefully crafted to return optimal results.

Of course, very few people think about that now. No one spends time crafting a search query - they just type their question into the Google box and click search. As Google search results decline in quality we might see a resurrection of the old way of thinking about and crafting search queries to return the optimal result set.
Afraid? Perhaps. But even so the American job market and economy is far more dynamic. A lot of people over 30 do quit their jobs and start their own companies.
I find articles like this on how to date a female / male geek very aggravating unless they are meant to be satirical or in plain jest . Analyzing some of the things mentioned in this blog post:

"As opposed to their male counterparts, many female geeks are into hygiene and looking nice for public viewing. But that’s where similarities end."

Really? What is similar between geeks regardless of gender is their geeky interests and hobbies. Some kind of sad generalization
about appearance and hygiene is just pathetic.

"Female geeks have very particular needs, and if you can’t meet them, consider yourself pwn3d."

The usage of pwn3d makes it hard to take the author's advice seriously.

"Tell her she’s pretty"

Hard to grasp how the author managed to figure out the golden mantra to woe all female geeks.

In conclusion the person who wrote this blog post needs to change the title to : "How to date me".
Hey all, if you know anyone looking for a house in Sydney Australia that suits a startup or geeky family, or IT person that likes working from home, would be grateful if you can pass this on.
We've run out of savings with our startup after moving to the US, and will use what's left (after the bank takes most of it for the mortgage) to put it into keeping us afloat!
Be kind! :)
If LockMart is shadowing anyone, they're probably doing a poor job of it:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/04/littoral-combat/

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=115

http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?documentid=4588&...

http://conservativeamericannews.com/free-republic/f-35-penta...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-33

Google can find many other problems.
Loved the E. E. Doc Smith reference :-) in one of the comments. A whole series of books where a major plot point was unforgeable credentials. Don't meet many people familiar with the series though, so I'm always surprised when I see a reference online.
MikeOS is an operating system written in assembly language
Great points, but what system does have a notion of expertise? Wikipedia maybe? Google has many issues with SEO hackers and they've had a hard time filtering out the gamers. Hacker news requires up and down votes. I agree there is noise in any system and solving that is also a challenge to consider. Thanks for the comment.
This paradox of choice is very real.

The situation is no different than with laptops. You can expect certain quality standards out of Macbook's. You might be able to get something far cheaper, with more features from others, but there is clearly a market for Macbooks..

I don't know if users of Android care whether Android is open or not. Now there will always be geeks who will run nothing by Linux or *BSD, but most others don't care.
Unfortunately, Facebook's hacker cup also starts back up on Saturday.
Personally I'd pick a nice Scottish malt, but either way: the only time during which it is "too early" for whisky is between when you woke up at 11:30am.
They do, they mirror the contract plans exactly, but are $20 less a month. They took all the "Even More Plus" plans off their website, the information you see is related to pre-paid, and not Even More Plus. You can only get that information by walking into a store, it's really unfortunate, but they don't want to cannibalize their contracts.

Picture of plan and flyer: http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadgetmobile.com/media/2009/10/...

http://www.t-mobile.com/templates/generic.aspx?PAsset=Pro_Pr...
Agreed, but there are a ton of different social graphs out there. If you are looking for data about a person who is only on one or two social sites, the data won't likely be very valuable, but if you are looking at a group of people that all have a many social graphs like on linkedin, twitter, hackernews, quora, that all vary from each other appropriately with the aim of the particular sites, I can see being able to pull out some valuable data. One of the keys is that the users you are interested in actually participate in the different sites differently and have different followers and friends on those sites. If they automatically friend everyone, and crosspost everywhere it makes the social graph useless.
1) login vs register are confusing (I assumed it had two login windows, until I looked at the button difference)

2) clicking on any message causes new window, terrible. No way to click back, but to close a window.

3) opened messaged -> tried to reply -> no indication that it is waiting to post the reply (maybe disable the 'send' button and rename to 'sending, please wait')
Thank you for the first point, but more importantly, the second.

We know about the important function of paper cards in the world. When people ask us who our competitors are, we respond with 'paper cards'. The only we we will solve the business card problem is by playing well with these paper cards.

What you see on E today is the basic system we've designed to handle contact information with an additional visual layer. Features to handle paper cards - and mimic paper cards for that matter are things we're working on passionately. We know what it feels like to get a great looking business card, with a nice choice of paper, excellent typography, etc. But I'm convinced in time we will find an equally attractive solution - though it will not be overnight. The transitions from vinyl to cd to mp3, or printed books to ebooks have also take years.

Our added benefits however (stored geolocation of meetings, synched notes, etc.) are features we're getting great feedback on.
What the humble fruit fly is teaching the powerful computer
Obj-C wrapper for the Chipmunk physics engine
There is a such thing as bad publicity, but there's a reason we say there isn't: Because it's mostly true. Sounds like the book is doing way better than it ever would have on Amazon without this little kerfuffle.
I always top-post "comments inline below" to avert this problem. Works great.
I wonder if there's any article with more details on the internals. From reading some of the other stuff it seems they have competing models and Watson picks the answer from the model with the highest confidence. But I haven't found anything more detailed than that unfortunately.
Alcohol. It sells. Brand recognition helps as well.
The reason Apple "prefers" proprietary standard formats managed by standards bodies to open source codec projects is that the former actually have a chance at widespread industry device and software support, while the latter do not.
> How about C, C++, Java

You do realize they all default to lexical variables, and if you want something else, you have to declare accordingly, right?

>Lisp

Is a beautiful language, and primarily a play-toy for academics with a handful of real-world applications. While we're at it, which Lisp? Ansi Common?

> Javascript

I believe it is exactly this quirk in Javascript's scoping that is a major complaint of many developers - although I don't know much javascript and can't speak with authority here.
I was promptly disqualified for unspecified reasons.

In my experience, most teachers really don't like smart-asses. Devil's advocate will say that the accelerations you submitted your imaginary passengers were way too strong.

My story in that vein was in PE: we were to run 20 minutes at the most constant pace to practice our endurance. The grade was taking into account the regularity of your pace (13 points out of 20 if you hit the exact same time for all but the fastest and slowest laps) as well as your average speed (the remaining 7 points).

Not being the most athletic guys, a friend and I went on our way to run 4 laps of exactly 5 minutes to insure a decent 13 out of 20, where a lap should have been in the 30-45s range. Obviously, our little stunt was not really appreciated. :)
Being a non-developer, I was always curious what kinds of questions big companies ask potential employees to test their skills. Thanks for the post!
As will Safari on Mac (it supports theora if a codec is installed).
The way the youtube videos load up on the page is really hot. Is that Apture?
There's no evidence for it. It's wrong to believe a claim without supporting evidence.
IANAL.

#1 C Corp.

#2 Trademarks can be complicated. A lawyer is highly advisable. You will want to file a registration, possibly more than one.

If you're going to raise money you're going to want a lawyer. Try to find one that will defer expenses until you've received your first check. Above all make sure the lawyer has been involved with startup financing before. This is critical.
A lot depends on habits, sure. One can develop expensive or inexpensive habits. Ours were mostly inexpensive, I suppose, but I never thought of them that way. Practically nobody I knew had a brand new car, so it didn't seem unusual that we had three old cars instead.

(Five of us kids had braces, by the way; and five of us had glasses, and one had hearing aids. I know none of those things are cheap.)

...Anyway, I seem to have dragged you into a rather off-topic discussion. Sorry about that.
"Any language which allows a typo in an assignment statement to create a new variable name binding silently is insufficiently safe for my purposes."

Um...Perl has exactly this problem. The only difference is that it's worse because the variable in question gets created as a global variable of the local package - which is naturally visible to anything else that wants to see it, btw.

This is exactly why they created "use strict", and underscores the "Perl philosophy" in an elegant nutshell - instead of fixing the underlying problem, just create a hack around it and expect everyone to "know" that they should use it as a best practice.