skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believed in the middle click, too, and lots of other special clicks... until I switched to a MBP. The I customized the touchpad using the Better Touch Tool and I haven't looked back since! :)
Hence the - in the -$7bn
You have to do what you dream of doing even while you’re afraid.

- Arianna Huffington (@ariannahuff)

http://startupquote.com/post/3164615317
"I don't know, to me it looks like the bit about Americans of Scandinavian stock is just a throwaway line that has nothing to do with the point they're actually making"

Then why go out of your way to use such a contentious statement? Why mention this later on: "race is a far more accurate predictor of murder, imprisonment and infant-mortality rates"? What does this have to do with the "cognitive elite?" This is just "fuck niggers, heil nordic ubermensch" stated in different terms.

Both the agendas of that article (racism and classism) can much better be explained by the growing gender divide:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-...

Women are better in the knowledge economy than men, and sex is a much better predictor of murder and imprisonment rates than race.
Theater tech - light design. You knock yourself out for a couple of weeks, doing the day job in prime shift and then setting lights after hours, and you get a little burned out. But on opening night, when I'm sitting in the darkened control booth, you should see the smile on my face when the audience spontaneously applauds a creative light change at the beginning of a dance break.
Out of curiosity, how did people who had already studied philosophy find this book? Nothing in it struck me as particularly revelatory, and I'm wondering if maybe I just wasn't the intended audience.
This is hard to pull off - but I think part of the solution is in somehow not competing with the average employee that you can get on the street.

For example, you can provide a skill that is not otherwise generally available on the market. Or perhaps by doing consulting but on a closed source product (by doing a per project sale instead). It will be great to brainstorm other such ideas and approaches.
No, it seems like they want to ship major releases more often and don't want to think hard about what version increment the new release's features merit.
Awesome. In case you missed it, The key is that these magazine-style layouts automatically look great on all devices.
Very wordy review of a very good book.

My favorite take-aways from the book are that 'Good is a noun' and the concept that not all questions may actually be formed properly and thus may not deserve an answer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)#Cultural_referenc...
Last.fm moves to subscription-only radio
I long time ago I was playing bridge with a genius named Arno Hobart. I asked him what he was up to, and he told me he was in the vending machine business. "Oh?" I asked, surprised that such an intelligent man would work with such mundane products.

"One of the things I like about this business," he explained, "Is that I make money while I sleep." Yes, he really is smarter than the average bear.
The New Gizmodo
heh I don't take them serious anymore until FF 4 comes out of beta..
This post is a bit old (November) but I think it's really interesting and still worth discussing. Loved this line, as my latest app is just as described: "a bunch of empty divs, with a big wad of JavaScript."
I love the ring of "An exquisite..."
Just ask world-renowned David Prowse.
The 386 didn't have virtual machine support (you may again be referring to the MMU).

ctdonath might be referring to Virtual 8086 mode that let multiple real mode programs run in isolated virtual machines.
There's also Disk Inventory X ( http://www.derlien.com/ )
That's a good point that WMs aren't everywhere, but maybe they should be?
I'm a Math/CS major and I can relate completely to this. In my upper level math courses, we're given about 4 hard problems every week to struggle through together. The problems always use the theorems from class in new and interesting ways - you have to really get the theorems to do the homework. Exams are almost always take-home proofs. It makes us feel like we're really doing math!

In my CS classes, I too often feel like I'm just memorizing things to fill in the blanks and gaining a breadth of vocabulary that I can google if I ever REALLY need.

I think this may be partly because people who become CS professors are not the people who love to make and deploy software.
Wonderfully done. Thanks!
If anyone’s interested, there are 64bit Windows builds at the bottom of https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/late...

The usual proviso apply of course: these are nightly builds and come with no guarentees, nor should they be used as an indication of the quality of the release going forwards.
To only thing that is missing is a small example application that uses your library and showes all the things working in works with each other.
I just spilled coffee all over myself
Promiscuous sniffing of 2.4GHz wireless devices
Thanks, but that actually addresses how they will be moving the whole version numbers up even faster than before, not how they've chosen to use whole version numbers to represent fairly minor milestones, in contrast to established practices.
"If you're a web designer for local business, they would not be fine with it."

That's kind of the definition of "clients that are not worth having."
> I think the author of this article has no experience with consulting companies.

Jason has extensive experience with consulting companies, as you would know had you taken the 20 seconds necessary to read his bio before starting your argument with ad hominem. Congratulations on following it up with a straw man argument that replaces 99% of companies with the 1% that he blatantly wasn't targeting.

sigh
Buy Gawker would definitely ensure that they are covered in most, if not all, blogging genres.

They also own Engadget, though, and I would love to see how that would comply with owning Gizmodo.
I suppose a lot of the content might not be entirely theirs to license, and it would be difficult to sift through it all and determine.
Chrome is a pretty spankin' good browser, but it's version number system has bugged me, like theyre only doing it to seem like they make advances quicker than other browser vendors.
What I do with data at 37signals
I've always been a fan of having information about many aspects of how your business is running. Not having detailed information feels like driving blind.
Seems like they caught a serious case of version number megalomania: every release is a major release!
That's why Microsoft called the new Xbox "Xbox360" instead of Xbox2, because it will _seem_ a less powerful machine in front of a PlayStation3
4:28 video of desandro showing it off about a month ago http://screenr.com/vIt

Glad to see it finally out!

Direct links to demos:

http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/basic.html

http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/sorting.html

http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/images.html

http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/filtering.html

http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/relayout.html

http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/infinite-scroll.html

http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/adding-items.html

http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/layout-modes.html

http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/elements-partial.html

http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/elements-complete.html
One of the biggest problems Meetup seems to have is that they have a 'one size fits all' model, which shows again here. And most of it is geared towards smaller groups.

I'm one of the organizers of a Meetup with 4300+ members. Many things that work with 10 members, don't work with 4000. And they don't seem to filter any of it: After a year or two they send us an email: "Congratulations, you'r 2 years old. Most groups then pass the 50 member mark!". We had about 2000 or so.

We have events every 2 months (with about 400 attendees). If we don't plan one for the next month, they email us "It's important to have regular meetings, plan one now!". We spend months planning our events, they cost a ton of money, and would like to decide for ourselves, instead of having automatic meetup suggestions.

Unfortunately I don't know any good competitors (meetup has a lot of features, especially around waiting lists/RSVP's). And the switchover would be a pain, as there is no way to export your members :(

</rant>
Amen. FF4 final was supposed to be released at the end of last year. Now we've had 10 betas? C'mon.
I appreciate the heads up. Trying to get it up and running now.
A computer science degree should be a bit theoretical and broad in it's topics. It's your internship(s) during college and even perhaps your first job out of school that will start to solidify all of the pieces.
Chrome currently has 16.5 percent global usage share, IE has 45 percent. FF's share remains stable at 31 percent. Chrome gained ten percent points in the last year, while IE lost ten percent points. At its current growth rate, Chrome will pass FF in 15 months.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-201002-201102
http://www.fontspring.com/fonts/exljbris/museo-slab which is the link from fontsquirrel gives an alternate pricing of $16 fixed + $8.50 for unlimited websites @font-face. Font-squirrel itself is free (hence their banner) and they link to other fonts that are free for commercial use but their link in this case (and others) shows a clear price and license terms.

Considerably better rates than myfonts.com but still not free-gratis nor free-libre.

Their license is here: http://www.fontspring.com/fontface. You are required to use an alternate rendering of the font with all open-type parts removed that has been subset to the usage required on the site. This makes it quite easy for them to check if you're infringing they just download the font from your site and make sure it meets the license requirements, if not then they can sue you with impunity.

They can probably argue that if the domain holder on whois isn't the licensee then you're also infringing (see license term 6).

In short I don't think the copyright holder for Museo Slab offers their font/typeface for free and suspect anywhere that is offering it or using it is infringing copyright.

I chose Museo Slab as an exemplar, this is probably also true of the other fonts on that site.
Late last year, the U.S. economy experienced a surprising decoupling. As stocks boomed, the wealthy bounced back.

Isn't this completely predictable? When the government invests hundreds of billions of dollars into the market, by way of dumping money into the financial and automobile industries, and that money's source is loans backed by the people-at-large, then of course this is happening.

The government is transferring money from the taxpayers to those invested in the capital markets. Anybody who believes that the government (not just the GOP but the Democrats as well) is working for the little guy, is a sucker.
Sn0wbreeze 2.2 plays pacman while jailbreaking
Sure. but the goal is to get an archive of it first, we can deal with putting it online at the right moment.
Is Your Low Social IQ Dooming Your Blog?
I have yet to buy his book (still intend to), but I've been scouring the blog for while. This format is exactly what I needed to make sense of it all. First time I've seen a SocratED course. Very impressed.
Marketing is about reaching the most people, now ask yourself which way reaches more people, Facebook which has millions of users already or some web site your company threw together?

If its any mystery to you then you probably fail to understand the point of advertising.
Staying ahead in the marketing game through research & experimentation
I'm looking at a live App Engine console for the Clojure app I'm working on right now, and I see cold-start JVM times varying from 3 to 10 seconds. Although this is a lot, with the latest App Engine, you can (1) pay $9/month to have 3 JVMs always running, and (2) your app receives warm-start requests which will cause a new JVM to start before it's needed.

In other words, your users should (almost?) never pay the penalty for a JVM cold-start. A single JVM stays around to serve requests as long as App Engine detects sufficient load to justify the resource usage.
"Correction, the vast majority of users will not be able to explain that they feel a responsiveness issue, but they do indeed feel it."

That sits well with me. Upvoted! It is true that "clunkiness" is a valid complain, but i've always attributed it to a combination of all latency-inducing factors.
Educating B Students
When you pay $250 an hour for a major consulting firm, you get $50 worth of consultant, and $200 worth of "Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM/Accenture/CGI/Thoughtworks."

This is not a joke. When it isn't your money, your incentive is to make a decision that cannot be second-guessed. Imagine you do five projects. Accenture come in and have a big heavyweight process and they follow the process each time, and four of the projects are ok but cost 2x what they could have cost, and the fifth project is late and over budget. Well, the fault clearly lies somewhere other than your decision to hire Accenture, they have a process and a brand name! So you blamestorm a bit and it turns out that there were unknown unknowns that couldn't have been foreseen and so on, and you keep your job.

But if you decide to hire BoutiqueCo and things go wrong, your head is on the block. If you do this five times and four times you save money but the fifth time things blow up, you're fired. BoutiqueCo don't have any credibility when blaming unknown unknowns with their "agile process" and what-not, and nobody remembers the fact that you saved so much money on the first four projects you could fund the fifth and sixth projects with the savings.

Small boutiques cannot get gigs with the companies that can afford to pay the rates of the big firms unless they manage to create a very unique brand or find other markets.
I'm using Chrome on the latest Ubuntu. It's not a performance problem at all, the transitions are smooth and beautiful (and on this laptop, they had better be!)

The issue seems to be that the transition occurs only at certain scroll points on the page, and there is zero feedback where those are - so it's scroll, scroll, scroll, and suddenly, bam transition to the next page. It doesn't help that the intervals between the pages seem to be ridiculously long.
Yes. :) I also really need to find time to record a screencast.
Accenture's revenue per employee is only $113206, or about $56.60/hr on the basis of 2000 working hours per year.
I wonder if this was inspired by http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/bloat/ ?
A wordpress cache plugin will probably help. I got 25k visits in one day last week on puremango.co.uk which is hosted on a cheap-as-chips dreamhost shared server and AFAIK it didn't blink. Cache FTW.
First look: Debian 6.0 Squeeze
Do You Need An MBA To Be A CSO?
Last time I checked, GrandPerspective was pretty busted on Snow Leopard.
Copyright as a Fundamentalist Religion
I had read some philosophy before reading ZAMM, but it didn't seem connected to my everyday life. It seemed to be about abstruse, academic arguments that had been going on for centuries about things which really didn't seem very important to my life.

This book put philosophy at the right place in my life - or me in the right place to understand philosophy.
Darpa seeks security expertise from the hacker community
one program, CRASH, is based on the human immune system and will make it less likely that computers will spread cyber infections to other networks

If I had a dollar for every time I've heard that... I mean, I can recall hearing this at least 18 years ago.
I failed at my first attempt to read this. I'll have to try again someday.
This article generalizes too much.
Top Indian IT giants are consulting companies and they are making a ton of money.
And clients, by and large, are fine with it; it's just a cost of doing business.

Only because they don't know better. When I was working for a language/IDE vendor, we saw project after project that was 3 to 10 times larger than it had to be. (The project that actually needs more than 12 people in a language like Smalltalk is very exceptional.) Why is it like this? Because they are structurally motivated to waste the client's money.

Such companies facilitate a transaction. (Charging hourly for a consultant.) They siphon a little money off of this transaction. Naturally, they are motivated to hire as many consultants as possible. Basically, big consulting company sends people who give off the right competent business-suit vibe. They talk their to the customers, who are usually suits themselves and know almost nothing about making software first-hand, into thinking that their problems are deadly rocket-science and that they are just the uber-competent people to solve the super-hard problem. Then, they turn around and hire the cheapest resources they can (often fresh out of school) herded by a few politically adept managers, and hire them out for the highest mark-up possible.

I've also worked at a software product company that actually made most of its money from body-shop consulting. I know it was body shop consulting, because most of their people were hired (by the hundreds and housed in several football-field sized floors) out of local podunk community colleges and didn't know any better than to rewrite doubly linked lists every time they needed a collection. Yes, the product had probably hundreds of doubly linked list implementations in it. It was so bad that one client's IT group wrote what they called "super-link" and heroically rammed it through against amazing amounts of push-back from their management and from the body-shop vendor. What was this controversial thing? A linked list library.

[cue dramatic music]

Paying for junior programmers to fix their newbie linked-list implementation dozens of times -- this is "the cost of doing business?" I think there's opportunity to disrupt an industry here. On the other hand, the fact that it's this bad indicates that there are very powerful forces maintaining the information asymmetry.

EDIT: Let me put it this way -- what if someone tried to bill you big company hourly consulting rates for a dozen newbies repeated debugging their linked-list programming project?
'Code' is also a great book to give to your non-coder spouse. Honestly, that book should be the text used for the "computer literacy" class in most colleges. Great book. Can't recommend it highly enough.
Pure Genius
By this logic, Windows developers would have stopped developing for Windows in ~2004 and moved to doing only OS X apps (or even linux apps in 1996).
The author of that article runs a consulting company.
Google +1 is already here. Its right under our nose.
Is it possible to run some test suite to independently confirm that the performance are superior?

Just think harder about that question. It raises all sorts of philosophical questions about machine, intelligence, language and meaning.

Of course, there ARE benchmarks, at least one bundled with each classifier tool ;-) but there couldn't be one ideal benchmark, no.

This might give you a start though:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.38.4...
Eric Schmidt’s "5 Exabytes" Quote is a Load of Crap
Signup for the PoundWire beta
Yeah, but it was another encouragement for people to buy homes when they probably shouldn't have.
Jeff Jarvis on Why Aol Bought The Huffington Post
Running some code over War and Peace from Project Gutenberg gives these numbers for sentence length. I cleaned the text of non-alpha | {sentence terminators}.

Then I discarded any sentences with less than 4 characters under the assumption that they were spurious (ie, artifacts from the boilerplate PG text).

Text with artifacts assumption:

STDEV: 95.0115812751

MEAN: 74.4095505188

N: 26681

Text without artifacts assumption:

STDEV: 82.3010550235

MEAN: 76.425092356

N: 30805

Looking at the high point of the first standard deviation of the artifacts-removed text, we see that it is at 169 characters.

Same point for the text with artifacts, we have 158 characters.

So assuming that the translated War and Peace represents a reasonable sample of English, 160 characters is fairly close to the length of a sentence.

edit: formatting.
I'm not particularly pro-union either. But, the article's author attempts to distinguish between two things: U.S. manufacturing output (its productivity in terms of the value of goods made); and, the absolute number of manufacturing jobs. By doing so, he's trying to counter some of the popular perception that "U.S. manufacturing is gone."

We are still a manufacturing powerhouse, but we are no longer adding manufacturing jobs. In fact we can make the same or greater amount of goods (by value) with the same amount or fewer manufacturing employees.

So the perception is that U.S. manufacturing is in decline, because the number of manufacturing jobs stagnated from the 1950s to the 2000s. But those are only absolute numbers. The real story is that by the 1970s already U.S. manufacturing was perceived as being in decline. I'm speculating that we could understand the provenance of that perception by looking at two more graphs: percentage of workforce in manufacturing, and percentage of workforce in (industrial) unions.

Why do these two graphs serve as good indicators of the nation-wide perception of manufacturing decline? The first because the relative share of jobs held in manufacturing is just as important as the absolute numbers in terms of social weight, clout, and awareness. The union chart more specifically would show the decline in political-economic clout held by people in the manufacturing sector, most precipitously (I would speculate) in the 1980s. Without fresh members, closed shops, local chapters, and substantial union bloc voting, the socio-political place of unions in the day-to-day fabric of American life begins to fade into the background.

So, whatever one's politics toward organized labor (present or historical), I think such a chart would be illustrative of why there is a popular perception that "U.S. manufacturing is gone."
Awesome. I'm developing my first Android app and this should prove to be very helpful.
I think that "web designer for local business" has finally become doable. I have a few customers where I just resell Wufoo + Weebly or Word Press, at a 25-50% markup. There's no custom code to maintain on my part, and if they ask for features which these platforms can't do, I just say no.
Not a vi user, then :P
Isn't it completely counter-productive to feed a troll?

BTW, your project looks so... web 1.0-y. Please upgrade to year 2000 design practices. That didn't work? OK, Geocities called, they want their website back :p

Edit: "Error: Can't handle this url!" Apparently, submitting stories (such as this) is not possible.
Ask HN: Adapting to corporate culture after being acquired
After my last post about being acquired, big company and us are moving forward into the process. I've become aware that their culture is far more corporate that what I'm used to (having worked for myself, contracting, or small companies). I'd love to hear any stories/advice on adapting to corporate culture while taking on the process of integrating your product/business into the acquiring company.

(Previous post: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1985552)
Where are the boutique agile companies doing cut-price SAP implementations? They don't exist...
This just made me very depressed. Very, very depressed, because it hit so close to home.
If you go back to the homepage, he's offering the plugin for commercial use for $37. I like this idea of monetizing the use of plugins, especially ones so well-built. (He's also offering direct support for $17, another interesting idea.)
You're right. But they have been making a simultaneous push toward the Jetpack addons (as opposed to the traditional extensions), which are apparently less of a hassle to deal with in terms of versioning and compatibility.