skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What Perl has always done: allow novices to program effectively without forcing undue ceremony while enabling adepts to write great programs in the fashion they deem most appropriate.

Seems odd to me to criticize a language for allowing people who haven't learned it to get things done, but there you go.
Hubble telescope detects the oldest known galaxy
Harvard Med.
Really enjoyed the last PlusConf, and I'm impressed you put together another one so quickly. Great job Ben!
Better yet, just fit a phone inside a USB earpiece and put a tiny dialpad on it (or perhaps shrink a rotary dial, turn it sideways like a volume roller and stick it in there). You should double purpose the roller as a selector for a minimal oled display showing just a couple lines of text so you could at least keep a phone book.
My experience from being part of the undergrad recruiting team at a strategy consultant with a "women initiative": Men go hunting, women go picking berries.

Many women don't want to make the time investment strategy/banking/startups require as taking a job as accountant, HR manager or university researcher leaves more time to invest in finding a suitable mate and get children.

IMO in Western culture we go overboard in trying to equalize everything. Many woman seek men earning more than them, and men like being the provider.
Thanks, I missed that totally.
Rhino makes sense given "Rule #5: The Kitchen Sink" and "Rule #6: Multi-Platform."
Chrome should stick to its true nature, do one thing well, and leave the DNS stuff (refetch after..., the weird anti-nasty system explained in the post) to a DNS cache daemon. Google could include one in Chrome OS, and don't turn Chrome (the browser) into a big pile of bloat.
Ugh, I'm always surprised when I meet people who still SMS text. It's weird. I think I know two people who do it. Everybody else just emails each other.

(in 2010, I received and sent 6 txt messages, 3 people texting me, and 3 responses from me telling them to email me instead)
For the record, it sounds like you haven't made the transition from introvert to extravert. You've made the transition from shy to not shy. :-)

That said, my advice is to hit up various meet up groups or go somewhere like noisebridge. Find someone who's interested in what you're working on, and then... Just ask. It's really not totally different from asking someone to go out with you if you think about it.
Deutsche Bank
Your comment may have given him the rejection he was looking for.
How would you even begin to collect the data necessary to make an informed decision on this?
Managing passwords across groups with KeePass and Dropbox
No one here works at Apple? No wonder iTunes is so bad on Windows.
Wow, wrong again. The article is total BS and the title is nothing more than link bait. Every successful startup founder I know list a passion for the domain as one of their keys to success.

Basically what this article boils down to IMHO is "when shit gets hard just run, or better yet just dont do it because it might get hard"

And as for the 6 solutions she proposes... well those are dumb to. If people focus on how much work a startup is then they are much more likely to talk themselves out of it. I rather follow the advice of people like Steve Blank (customer development) and PG - How to start a startup (http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html)

Maybe we should take another piece of advice from this lady that obviously knows nothing about successful products and just forget passion to "Follow the Money" as she put it.
TinyPrints
...but also Windows 7, Microsoft Office/Exchange... etc
Thanks for the info foxy lady.
> There is a huge leap from "more and more fringe" to "as well-respected today as it was 100 years ago".

Okay, I suppose it depends which circles you travel in.

> Which is clearly not the case.

Debatable. The religious influence on politics in the US has harmed many. The influence of fundamentalists around the world has harmed many.

> We currently discriminate against people we consider insane.
Sure, but the trend is to make the effort not to. People like John Nash https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/John_Forbes_N.... receive recognition despite their problems, or for overcoming them.

Yeah, but he wouldn't be allowed to say join the military, or to become a judge.

In any case, I'm not for blacklisting scientists. Many great historical scientists had bizarre ideas that are less well remembered than their main discoveries.
Wow, thanks for posting that quote. This and the parent post assuming the title was a typo is really making my day.

To add to the discussion, the first pages of the book are a photograph of a hand over an ear, overlaid with the words "...the massage?"
Hmm, I wonder if the "hot girl" analogy breaks up, i.e. he should also test trying to strike a conversation with random beautiful women.
> Right - I meant if I don't need/install Netflix for example, the DRM plug won't be on my phone.

There is no "DRM plug". "Pluggable DRM framework" means Google just provides an architecture to implement their actual DRM, instead of forcing developers to use Google's own DRMs. Nothing more, nothing less. Your declarations hardly make sense.
For people that insist on SMSing me junk, I give them my Google Voice number instead and tell them don't expect me to respond in a timely fashion.
I’m worried about the proliferation of so many different themes. There was never an Android device I picked up and felt immediately familiar with and Google now seems to encourage this by making Honeycomb again look entirely different. I don’t really understand that. Couldn’t they just dial up the visual attractiveness without going so far away from how Android looks on Phones? The behavior is probably (mostly?) unchanged which is good but crass visual changes can be disorienting.

(I’m also personally not a fan of the aesthetics but the iPad’s frequent kitschyness is in my eyes in a different way but equally ugly.)
I wonder if this is more a symptom of having few women in the field of computer science / software engineering

Women -- girls -- with talent and potential mostly leave the STEM track when they're twelve to fifteen years old. Looking for the cause of different quantities of company founders in factors that affect thirty-year-olds isn't going to address the biggest difference.
Yes, I would. Although it depends on your definition of "making money". Financial software, for instance, makes a lot of money. So does any software that contributes to the oil giants. Or any number of other industries.
Is there a reason that web browsers these days don't do hyphenation? It's not like the algorithms to do it are at all new, and while I can see it adding some amount of time to the rendering process, my intuition is that time ought to be small given the amount of computing power we can throw at it.
Where can I get the original? I would DJ this out.
I am almost certain that non-web software brings in much more revenue than web software. There is a lot of niche WinForms stuff out there from no-name vendors that rule a given industry and companies pay a lot of money for that, and that's not even counting revenue from office suites, operating systems, financial management, and other desktop software that sits in every business.

There are a few glaring exceptions like Google, but for the most part conventional desktop software sells much better than web software. Many web startups have no real monetization plan and are going nowhere fast, some inspired by attitude embodied in The Social Network's telling of "I don't even know what it is yet, how can we monetize!" I've actually had a friend tell me that his startup is not going to do anything to make money at first, because "like Facebook", they "just want to see where things go", or something like that. I think this attitude is pretty dangerous and misguided.
> If knowledge is power, then sharing your knowledge empowers others.

Yeah and in my nieztschean perspective I don't especially want others to be empowered.

Either you have to work hard to beat them, either your competitors are weak enough. Ideally: both.
I'm aware of one side of the equation, many millions of dynamic websites.

My wager would be that websites and web related stuff (also intranet) now makes up the bulk of the software written but that the money is still made on the other side.
(Literally) Drawing the HTML 5 Logo in Canvas with Javascript
Lol... there are more startup founders than startup employees. A lot of 1 person startups out there?
IPhone App Lets Soldiers Map Their Battlefields
FaceBook Creating Their Own Currency - Will it Catch?
Bluetooth keyboard support! About time!
I'm in that boat.
I had a phone interview with a recruiter (not an interview-interview) and then decided not to apply.
I've taken the last few months to really brush up on some CS theory, but I'm finding that I don't really want to do that stuff all the time either.

I'm looking at starting up a small business, then if that fails (which it damn well won't), I can always look at working for Google (or whatever the next Google is) at that time.
I agree with your assessment.

And wish your friend much good luck for when - not if - he will try to find a job again.
What programming language is that not the case for?
I misread fflick as flickr... I was starting to get excited.
How StartupDigest Got 100k Startups To Join Its Newsletter
I work for a non-web IT services company in the midwest. I hack a couple of side projects, and would like to get back into software development. Is there anyone else here that's in the midwest, or is it all coastal?
I don't see how my comment on the lack of substance to yours was any more "petty" than your flippant dismissal of Amy's article. If you disagree with the article, a good response would either be to explain how it was wrong and offer an alternative view or to ignore it. But just saying "I disagree" is about as relevant to the OP as saying "I like pizza." Neither is a commentary on the article — they're both statements of your personal feelings.

Anyway, that's the last I'll say about this. I just wanted to make it clear that I didn't mean to personally attack you — and I'm sorry if it sounded that way — just your comment's lack of content.
Downloading 10,000+ contacts in 200ms
All I want, and it's not too hard, is to separate free from paid apps, then apps from games, then be able to rank them by number of downloads or average rating.

For search, AppBrain seems to have that pretty nailed down. (Actually the AppBrain app is miles better than the crappy one from Google).
http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/451

more info.
Alright, another RTP person. Do you attend the RTP Hackers & Founders meetups?
What if a book is just a URL?
Aside from the idea of competition & killing, but also related to NYC, there is an interesting Quora thread gaining attention,"How can New York City use technology to serve citizens?" http://www.quora.com/How-can-New-York-City-use-technology-to...
Mozilla Labs: Towards Browse-Based Browsing with Home Dash
Greplin (YC W10) open sources 10-15x faster protocol buffers for Python
App Stores revenue to grow 1000% between 2010 and 2014
Most people are nice. Most people are glad to help. Most people don't like wasting their time. Most people don't want to be taken advantage of.

Given those conditions I think this article makes good sense. Approaching people with those conditions in mind usually has good results. Most people are happy to give advice because it is free [lawyer joke here] and the giver feels like they are helping. It is much harder to ask for money because the giver is likely to have a greater sense of being taken advantage of.
The funny thing is that we're not the first nation to try an IP-based strategy towards monetizing its scientific know-how. Post-World-War-II Britain had all sorts of stuff going on: the first passenger jet aircraft (the de Havilland Comet), lots of early computer work (the Manchester group in particular invented index registers and the most reliable RAM technology before core; the LEO was the first machine actually used by a business), and even Watson, Crick, and Rosalind Franklin doing DNA. But rather than trying to foster businesses built around these innovations, the government instead pursued a strategy of trying to monetize licenses for them.

There's a book from MIT Press which describes how this went in the computer field in particular. It's a very dry read, but it's one of these things where the title tells the tale: "Innovating for Failure".

MIT Press page here: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=6166...
If you are not comfortable just saying "not interested" (which gets much easier after the first time), say that you have picked up another long term project, which requires your full attention. If they keep insisting and saying it would only take 5 minutes of your time, counter with "I don't want to get involved in something that I cannot dedicate enough attention to". If they keep further insisting, then they are either dumb and not getting the hints or they want to take advantage of you. In either case the next thing to say - "not interested, bye".

Don't fret, just say how it is. Start politely and escalate as needed.
How to reliably limit the bandwidth your room mate or bad office colleague uses
"With tech founders, on the other hand, you have to earn every ounce of trust and work hard for every single email"

I disagree, as a startuper who doesn't find it so easy to find good quality, relevant content - I'm happy to sign up to something thats going to give me good quality info, local info, free.

Had they done this at $1 a signup, then I'd be real impressed.
Multi national company
Yeah, one of the major differences relative to Beacon is that Beacon brought your activity on other sites into Facebook ("gammarator bought 'Bourne Ultimatum' tickets on Fandango.com!") Here it's taking check-ins and likes that the user has personally posted within the Facebook ecosystem.

That said, I expect all-caps viral status messages about this in about two weeks.
Where does a university development position fall within this realm?
Considering the volume of email these authors must get (especially Dan Ariely), it's remarkable you got a reply so soon, or even at all. Very cool.
Most people I know would say that's easily solvable by abortion. What I'm thinking she means is that she might suddenly decide that having a kid is a good idea. In which case the question is justified.
Ohio State
That may be true:) Although I test this with new people I meet, and they label me as an extrovert:) Especially, people who know myers-briggs label me an extrovert now. I liked certain aspects of being shy. There is a very subtle satisfaction from being isolated deep into one's mind. A very, uhm, masturbatory satisfaction. kinda like coding;)
If size is really all that matters to you, consider the Motorola V3 RAZR. They're still possible to find if you look hard enough. I had one for a few years. Great hardware, solid build quality, tough as nails, but disappointing software.
> I really just want to speed up CSS development...

Meyer's reset is not supposed to speed up development. On top of ensuring basic consistency, Mayer's goal is (was?) to avoid taking default styles for granted, think more about document and re-create all those styles for it:

http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/04/18/reset-reasoning...

If you just want consistency, but don't want to spend extra time re-creating basic defaults, then unbolding of strong, unitalicizing of em and few other such resets don't make sense.
Okay, cool!
Though (and again I'm sorry for continuing to blab about this, but I don't often get the opportunity) I think it's actually a bit more tricky. When it was published, EPR showed that action by contact (the separation principle) and the _completeness_ of QM can't both be valid. At least, this was Einstein's intention with EPR - in letters to Schrodinger he expresses his chagrin with the way Podolsky, who wrote the paper, buried Einstein's main point in technicalities.

Now, when you say he derived conclusions he didn't believe were true, that's kind of wrong, since all he derived was a dilemma (completeness or separation, not both (but possibly neither)). He took this to show that if we maintain the separation principle, then QM needs to be viewed as a statistical account of objects with properties it can't describe (but he never took that to mean hidden variable theories like Bohm's were the answer).

So, my point is, he believed in the correctness of QM (just not in the completeness). He believed in QM being true - just not that is was the whole truth. He believed in the correctness of the EPR derivation and in the correctness of the dilemma at the end. When you say he used a theory he didn't believe was correct, I think that's wrong - he just didn't believe it was the finished article. And when you say he derived conclusions he didn't believe were true, I think that's wrong too, since he derived a dilemma that he very much believed in. In the end he chose the wrong side, but that's not relevant here.

You say Einstein believed this was a reductio ad absurdum - but that's flat out wrong I think. EPR relates to the completeness of the formalism (if the separation principle is taken to be true), not the correctness.
D'oh! Thanks :)
A top 10 medical school's surgery and genomic sciences departments
An advantage you have is people who are already invested in your site. If they have a good ranking going or some friends on the site they won't be very interested in packing up and going elsewhere. You could try and make the site as viral as possible (wall integration, send to a friend, etc) to try and snowball your users into more users.
You're not alone.
In all the circles I know (minus one pal who's worked at Yahoo and now at Facebook - who actually rejected Google) applying to Google is a big deal, and most people are afraid to do it because it's such a big deal.
I have one friend who got flown down to one of their California locations but didn't get hired. She said the process wasn't anything special, except for being asked the complexity of doing long division.
Yes, as a wannabe male founder, worries about pregnancy are pretty low on my priorities list even though I would have to make cutbacks to support her. But I didn't think even pregnancy worries should prevent her from enjoying her life, or being a founder as she mentioned that the paranoia is stopping her.

Heck, wouldn't it be a great inspiration for a female founder's project getting major traction while pregnant?
Directs design technology, I suppose. ducks
How many male English majors are founding companies?

I would think being an English major is the first problem, you need more women in CS/Engineering first.
There's a reason we don't have those anymore. I remember in '01-'02 there was a small war between manufacturers to get their phones smaller.

What came out were ludicrously small phones that made dialing and usage a pain.

There's a limit to how small phones can get before they get downright unusable. I remember back then some even had voice dialing to compensate, which was - and still is - just a plain bad idea.
Oh, and no luck at meetups. Nobody so far seemed smart or passionate enough to build something great. Perhaps I'm missing the good ones.
Am I the only Australian that looks at house prices in Detroit and dreams about buying an entire suburb and creating a gated utopia?
My thoughts exactly, and that works out of WinForms as well. Not sure how many here realize how many places rely on tools such as BMC Remedy, .Net etc!

Funny point: the non-web companies I do freelancing for are totally ok with me using MongoDB, Ruby, JRuby or whatever does the job. They mostly don't care (in my case at least).
University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Ask HN: A founder with a criminal record
I was reading an article, though I can not remember where, that said that Angel and VCs will pull out of a company where the founder has an undisclosed criminal record.

Is this the case for most VCs? Is there any way to get around that?
If you are just honest, maybe not at first, but when you get to know the VC, do you think that would help?

In this case the conviction was when I was a teenager, though over 18, and it was a felony that involved theft. I have since then, over 16 years, held many jobs that require trust, and have not done anything wrong at all.
The latest version of Weave (now "Firefox Sync") also uses J-PAKE for exchanging keys between devices.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_Authenticated_Key_Exch...

Earlier versions required you to type a 30-character encryption key on each device that you connect to your sync account. Since your encryption key is never sent to the sync server, you had to transfer it manually. Now you can do the same by exchanging a much shorter (12-character) code, with a UI similar to Bluetooth pairing.
We had a discussion about this several months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1669436
A Semiconductor company (mxim)
There's also Internet Explorer...
If they had a Vancouver office, I'd apply.
It is not just about hyphenation. Even with good hyphenation you will still leave rivers of white space unless you are intelligently managing word spacing.

Unfortunately, browsers are not the only offenders here. Almost almost every word processor in existence is brain-dead when it comes to justification. To my knowledge, there are only a handful of programs that get it right: InDesign, Quark, and Word (but only if you turn on a "Compatibility" option called, "Use Full Justification like Word Perfect"). I am deliberately excluding dinosaurs like Word Perfect and Pagemaker, which also get it right. Oh, and TeX. I am excluding TeX. Tough cookies.

What do I mean by "right"? That there should be more than one tool in your line-breaking toolbox. Hyphenation is one tool. The other is minimum word spacing. This means that instead of only allowing space between words to grow, you also allow it to shrink, up to a set limit. In almost every word processor (Including OOo and derivates, Pages, Mellel and Nisus on the Mac, etc.), no attempt whatsoever is made to reduce the spacing between words to allow another word to fit, or a hyphenation break to occur at a better location.
"In part due to low usage, the proliferation of excellent property-search tools on real estate websites, and the infrastructure challenge posed by the impending retirement of the Google Base API (used by listing providers to submit listings),"

Whatever happened to wanting to make all the world's data searchable?

Reasons 2 and 3 are pure cop outs.

Google has a real problem in that they seem to not be able to produce a best-in-breed class of software for highly competitive areas. If somebody came out with better search tomorrow would they just drop it?
> websites and web related stuff (also intranet) now makes up the bulk of the software written [...]

Are you going to measure by line or byte or syntax-tree node or similar? Are we going to include throw-away scripts? What about zeroth order functional programming (i.e. spreadsheets)?

Anyway, I'd also wager that there's more money made outside of the web. (Though, how do we classify, e.g. Apple app-store sales?) For the wager about for what the majority of software is written, we'd need some clearer vision of what we're talking about before.

Let's agree on some definitions (and an arbiter), then we can put up some odds and money.
What's the difference between 'Non-web company' and 'Other'? Is Microsoft a 'web bigco'?
Good analysis. No `lol' necessary, though.
It is a travesty that I have just now realized and understood the meaning behind the use of the term "periodic" in the title of Mendeleev's table. I feel dumb. Thank you for this article and for pulling out that excerpt :)
Click the redraw button a bunch of times while it's still drawing for an interesting effect.