skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"According to a White House report, new manufacturing jobs might be as close as your nearest drive-thru." is somewhat telling, as is the message in the report that if you agree you are a manufacturer, you get tax breaks.

It's had an effect in what has been since classified as manufacturing. Here's a slide show regarding McDonalds' operations in India.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/27447277/MC-DONALDS

Procurement of raw materials:
•Vegetables from Ludhiana (Punjab)
•Chicken from Mumbai (Maharashtra)
•French fries from USA
•Valla Mine fish from New Zealand

PROCESS
The food manufacturing process at McDonalds
is completely transparent and the whole
process is visible to the customers.
I was skeptical when Google Instant was going to "change the way people search" -- but in early retrospect, I think it really has for me. I now click on one result maximum (and often zero), relying instead on rapid search-term tweaking.

Even just a few years ago I'd expect to click through several results, or heaven forbid to the next page, for what I felt was a difficult query.

Between google instant and other improvements, I am increasingly trained to look ONLY at the top several results. When google doesn't deliver, the results seem worse then they used to when they aren't. I think we're forgetting how we used to have to search.
I wish I had known about this while I lived in Tallahassee (05-10).

Congrats on what you're doing! I'd be interested in moving back to the area to work, so if any of you lot need a web developer...keep me posted. I was offered a job with the DOJ doing the same thing I'm doing now, but the salary was a little off base. Just finally sold my old place in Killearn a few months ago.
I think the issue here is that for you the correct results set would be reputable domain name providers, whereas for many other people, the howto articles are in fact what they're looking for.

Without having personal search switched on, they need to hedge their bets. (note: not having tried it I don't know how effective the personalized search is)
In general these populist algorithms may tend to skew the results against techies, or those who 'know what they want', in favour of overall increase in perceived quality.

As far as I know there is a human component, and there is definitely significant weight these days towards CTR as determining quality. These would likely just reinforce the populist ranking factors.

One of the underlooked aspects of Google is the sidebar - using the 'fewer shopping sites' and time-based queries can be a huge help to relevance. I've for years used search modifiers (+, .., - etc.) in my initial queries with an expectation of what Google might expect. A search like "Buy Domain Names" still retains a lot of semantic ambiguity that their algorithm has to wrestle with. You have the tools to fix that yourself.

As such I tend to agree with Matt on this. We've just forgotten how bad it was.
I've been using Convore for a bit over a week and it's great so far! Keep it up guys
What I never understand about the "more exposure will dilute our membership quality" is that it's a social voting site. If you're going to share something with a community that has open registration, and gets exposure by sharing links to other networks (such as Digg and Reddit), this sort of thing is inevitable. I'm glad it's received the exposure it has because it's become such a great content generator. I don't really see the harm in this growth.
That depends on how many platforms there are. If it's just Android and iPhone then the native apps just need a few perks to make it more attractive. On the other hand, if there are 5 reasonably balanced platforms that all support HTML5 well, then you are automatically cutting your market size by 80% which is a tougher call.

> And the fact is, the effort necessary to make an excellent mobile browser based UI that integrates seamlessly with multiple platforms is more work than simply rewriting the app for multiple native platforms.

Today. But HTML5 will steadily improve, standardize, and develop a rich open source tool ecosystem. This will never happen with proprietary native platforms. Sure Apple can go the Microsoft route, and sink an incredible amount of money into it's dev tools in order to create a superficially better experience, but if web development is anything to go by, developer tools are something that thrive on open collaboration; very few people would say that .NET is generally superior to open source web development frameworks for example.
Why WikiLeaks Should Win the Nobel Prize
I agree confidence is key. I will be india for a month let's see how that goes.
Maybe Nokia will do a Windows Phone 7 deal, after all
Palm Pre 3
The right way to ask a developer to help you with your startup
The link does work... usually. The CRTC's site is pretty slow. Thanks for providing an alternate.
The HP TouchPad
I only wish the real Textmate followed up on the huge list of todo's and feature requests people have been submitting. I think a core update is long overdue.
It's certainly convenient, but then the authorities can track where you were/where you're going. I don't know if they do the same when manually checking the passport, but I'll assume they don't?
Probably not that much. I would say it's like shaving your head to disguise your hair color. Most people don't have shaved heads but enough do that it wouldn't make you stand out too much.
The writing is better than many of the things that end up on the Hacker News homepage. The starting paragraph, for example, is a great example of a lead that sucks you in to the rest of the story.

Nowhere does the article accuse Y Combinator of discriminating. The closest it gets is the throwaway line about "pretty much a den of 22-year-old guys". I'm part of the YC Winter 2011 class and while the average age is older than 22, less than 6% of the founders are women - so that throwaway line actually holds up reasonably well (though I agree that the article would be better without it).

I'm quite annoyed that this article didn't get more votes, the topic it covers is very relevant to hacker news.
This is great for static copy, but how is the performance? This could be an awesome plugin for something such as real-time edits to pages on a community site.
I think to be successful, Palm would have had to offer both a PDA and a smartphone. I think the problem was that Palm didn't have the resources to do both. Even when you look at something like the Palm Pre 2, you can kinda see that Palm hasn't been able to keep up. At a time when only the really low-end devices have 320x480 screens and 3.1" screens, the Palm Pre 2 gets introduced with those specs.

Apple has shown that there's a decent market for modern PDAs like their iPod touch. However, it's a bit harder to make something like an iPod touch due to the lack of subsidy. The iPod touch lags behind the iPhone because of that. The new iPod touch's display doesn't have IPS, it's rear camera is a paltry 1MP, etc. I'm guessing Apple's margins on it are probably lower too. Plus, I feel like I should point out that the iPod touch starts at $230, more than 50% over your $150 mark.

I think the smartphone space is a logical place to start. There's a reason why HTC, LG, Samsung, and Motorola have all created great Android smartphones and have left the PDA space to Apple. I'd love to see more devices without a monthly recurring charge. However, I think the smartphone space is a lot more profitable and I don't think that Palm had the ability back then to move against Apple's iPod touch. With HP backing them (and if HP is willing to risk it), they probably have the resources to try.

*Palm also hitched their wagon to Sprint which was, at the time, haemorrhaging customers. Verizon customers waited for the Droid line, T-Mobile customers already had Android devices, AT&T customers already had the iPhone, and Sprint customers probably knew that Palm wasn't going to create a second platform against Apple when Apple was on a more popular carrier and was, well, Apple. If Palm had been non-exclusive before the Droid, Droid Eris, and Hero came out, they might have done a lot better. But they thought they could do what Apple did and force users to a specific carrier - with the exception that Apple was forcing customers to the #1 or #2 carrier depending on the quarter while Palm was trying to force customers to the #4 carrier (based on net adds before their devices came out).

EDIT: Think about it this way: Apple is charging $200 for an iPhone with contract. They're charging $600 without a contract. There's a $400 difference there that AT&T is covering. Now, one could argue that Apple was trying to charge more for the no-contract phone, but really Google is selling the Nexus S no-contract for $530 so there's still a $330 difference. Anyway, a 3G radio isn't costing them $300-400 to add to the iPhone. The economics of high-end smartphones are more appealing than PDAs and that's a big reason why the Android manufacturers aren't paying much attention to it compared to what they're doing for phones.
Something like this is perfect when using Chrome OS.
Lisp inventor John McCarthy on human progress and its sustainability
Congrats Matt et.al. Been following your steady progress. Good luck in the days ahead.
Why Current MeeGo and Symbian Strategy is Right for Nokia
http://browserling.com

This will also let you interact with the website in the given version of a browser.
Check your local credit unions. The competition between them and banks has been amazing.
Just How Rich Is Hosni Mubarak?
I don't get people who say Google is getting worse myself. If any of you know search engine building so well and aren't working for another search engine (like DuckDuckGo) why not take your expertise to Google and help fix the problem?
The YC W11 class has been using Convore nonstop. It's pretty amazing.
I think Groucho Marx could sum up this article as "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"

I didn't keep a record of my searches from 2000, but I do remember that I was extremely impressed and satisfied with google back then. That is no longer the case. I am frustrated on daily basis by the results of many searches.

It's not really your fault though. I blame it on mono culture. Google has such a huge hold of the search market that it's probably not even worth SEO peoples time to bother gaming other search engines. There is a whole industry feeding off your success and we all suffer for it.

After the china attacks earlier this/last year google put out a decree that they would phase out windows machines among their employees. I thought it made sense. Windows is too easy a target because of it's success. The same is true in nature and the same is true in search engines.

The best we can hope for is a new search engine that will be insignificant enough in terms of market share to avoid the scammers. As long as google is the dominant search engine it will never get better.
How to Scale the 4-Hour Startup
Ebay is a deceptive example; auctions inherently have powerful network effects. I think Amazon might be a slightly better example: tons of competition but still a lot of money to be made. There can be many winners in this market, and Groupon will probably be the biggest winner.
This Robotic Dragonfly Flew 40 Years Ago
A million page views isn't cool. You know what's cool? New material ;-)
Android is (very) slowly starting to pick up. My apps have just started to bring a little more than $10k/month, from ads alone, while I have friends with million-dollar apps on the iPhone who haven't passed the $30k mark on the Android with the same PAID apps after a whole year.
On Android, you have to build trust, even a user base (if you're not Angry Birds) before launching a paid product. Quality must be top-notch from day one, and god-forbid your app doesn't work on one device and some upset user "rewards" you with a first 1 star-review. I've seen countless apps being pounded for small issues at launch.

Long story short, if you want to make money with Android, you need to have loads of patience :-)
Very cool, I wasn't aware that of the PhoneGap Build project.

I was looking at PhoneGap pretty heavily last year but abandoned it once I had started with Appcelerator Titanium, but I have recently been revisiting it as Titanium has lagged in their support for blackberry.

I don't suppose anyone would want to send me a beta key.
> “The home-made e-book market will continue to exist as long as the copyright situation isn’t dealt with and people cannot find books they want in electronic format"

Sorry this is a bit unrelated, but out of curiosity, are there any legal ways to buy Japanese books in an electronic format? I have been trying to start reading books in Japanese but I don't know enough kanji to make it enjoyable.

I actually came up with my own way around this.. I bought a physical copy of the book, opened it to a random page, did a quoted search ("たとえば") on google for a full, unique sentence and found some plain text copies. I wrote a script to quickly format this in html and used rikaikun/chan to make reading easier (just put the mouse over words I don't know and it looks them up). The problem is that this limits me to reading in a browser on a computer (with chrome or firefox installed).

I've actually been interested in doing some sort of app like this (probably for free). Then adding the functionality to add words I don't know to a word bank that I can practice on my own later. If anyone is interested, please let me know. The biggest thing stopping me is that I don't see any way to get legal content for this (and the fact I do not have a lot of spare time). Does anyone know if some Japanese books/stories are in the public domain?
Winners received an investment. More info about the whole process is in Seedcamp's FAQ: http://bit.ly/hn54dj

What do others got? For example: http://bit.ly/g7qKKv

In the end - nobody lost ;)
Winter is not a disaster.

The point of the article is valid, but hopefully humanity can come up with a better solution than population control through an unnatural equivalent of predators.
We worked hard to make sure it wasn't making lots of HTTP requests. The way the client library works is it runs a background polling thread and syncs to the Copycopter service every 300 seconds (this number is configurable), caching all the edited copy locally in the Rails app.

https://github.com/thoughtbot/copycopter_client
"those that can't access the store"

...such as?
There is a chart at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/02/business/20110... that shows the average annual return for an investment in the stock market broken down by year of the start and end points. The returns are high if you invest early in a bull market and sell before the next crash, otherwise the returns are rather low. The conventional wisdom that holding stocks for several decades and getting annual returns of 7% or more seems wrong.
Gawker redirects IE6 to their (crappy) mobile site, for what it's worth.
It won't affect production performance. It syncs copy in the background, so no requests to copycopter.com are performed during requests to the client application.
what ESR says about Microsoft being unable to make revenue from Windows Phone is true, but Microsoft might want to invest in it anyway to prevent another mobile OS's ecosystem from getting so big that it threatens to spread to other markets -- like they invested in a video-game platform to prevent another video-game ecosystem from getting so big as to threaten Microsoft's personal-computer ecosystem.
Here's what I do, and hence my advice:

* Maximum contribution percentage to a 401k, whenever possible.

* Maximum contribution to a Roth IRA. The 401k reduces your AGI, allowing this until you reach quite a nice income level. Even during unemployment, I contribute to my Roth IRA.

* Reduce fees! 0.25% interest is wiped out by a single $9.95 fee. I've moved to Charles Schwab for personal money, since they have no balance fees, decent investment options, and they fully refund all ATM fees around the world. I've rolled over old 401k's into a Vanguard IRA, since Vanguard has the lowest fund management fees in the industry.

* Don't be jumpy. If you're like me, you're actually horrible at individual stock investment. So, stick to mutual funds, and only look at them and reinvest once or twice per year. I suggest looking at targeted retirement funds (like the Vanguard 2040 that I use), and index funds.

* Keep 1 - 2 years of cash on hand. Everyone used to laugh at this figure, since who would be unemployed that long? That cash means that, instead of sitting at home, waiting for the market to improve, I was able to sell my stuff and spend extended periods traveling.

Most of you on HN are quite young. The younger you are, the more valuable it is to begin investing right now. Hell, if you're 17, do everything you can to throw $500 into an IRA. Even if you're working at McDonald's and dreaming of a startup, you can use an IRA contribution to cut your taxes.
If you're an expert in the field, your expertise may be needed for the business, but you may not need the product.

For example, many of the big name financial companies have a higher premium because of the service and knowledge of the financial experts (or at least perceived knowledge).

There are many financial firms that offer less expensive options but have less customer service, etc... So I expect many Morgan Stanley and Fidelity financial analysts to have a portfolio from a different company.
As we approach HN's fourth birthday, traffic is now around 90 thousand unique visitors and 1 million page views on weekdays.

Funny, before jacquesm retired from hn last week: 90,001 unique visitors and 2 million page views per day.

http://jacquesmattheij.com/Tell+HN%3A+So+Long+and+Thanks+for...

(just kidding - we miss you, jacquesm. ping us sometime)
How Nokia Can Get Its Mojo Back
Walt Disney’s Creative Organization Chart (1943)
Do people dream in a specific language? I can think in more than one language, but my dreams are abstract, rather than verbal.
Looks awesome, well done!

I created an entrepreneurship group here to test it out: https://convore.com/entrepreneurship/
The day before Verizon iPhone day? Poor timing IMO.
when I lived in Ireland I had such stickers in irish in my kitchen (they were already there). I still remember a few words, so I believe it works. Too bad you seldom use "fork" or "drawer" in normal conversations :)
Even without a job, I contributed what I could to an IRA. The $1500 I contributed in 2009 was roughly equivalent to $3000 contributed in 2007...
Whats a good book on the fundamentals of Computer Science
I know its a general question, but I just want to find out if there a book out there that deals with stuff like automata theory, concurrency control, algorithms, Dependency injection, optimistic locking, lazy loading, searching, sorting, exceptions ... just good ol' CS concepts.

I have a decent Computer Science background but wasn't a CS major (I did Computer Engineer but gravitated to programming and networking courses) so I feel like my fundamentals are not as strong as they should be.

I have been programming professionally (C#, PHP, Ruby/Rails etc) for years, but want to become much much better at the fundamentals.
Need Motivation to Exercise? Try Earning Rewards With EarndIt
I'm not sure how accurate your assumption that new users are voters on the homepage is.

As a new user, most of my votes are on the "New" section rather than the homepage. I vote up the things that I think other people should (on New), rather than what everyone is going to see anyways because its up on the front page.

I do think that some sort of weight system for upvotes would be an interesting feature.
Anyone else notice the very "Apple" presentation style?

No mention of price yet? I kind of take that as a bad sign.

I'm very glad to see this space expand. I have a couple elderly relatives that I have considered buying a tablet/slate to replace their computers.
The comments about the reality of urban housing in Japan has made a lot of things in Japanese media make a lot more sense. In particular, the soundscapes make more sense. I understand why the sound of trains passing seems to much more prevalent in Japanese media: so many people live in small flimsily built urban apartments with little acoustic insulation. In the states, there's more of a mix due to older buildings. (Even more so for Europe.)
In that context it really does make sense
A high school friend of mine's dad made an entire career out of buying the crap from those storage contract defaults and re-selling it. Has his own furniture business and everything now.

One time he got a corvette. Dissassembled, inside a storage shed.

Apparently the way it works is they open the door and let you look in, but you can't actually go inside and see what's in the boxes or whatever. So it's kind of like gambling, bid on a room and hope you find something good to resell.
I agree the new features are really useful but would also argue that there is an Evaporative Cooling Effect (http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...) taking place - there is hardly any noise on Convore at present. Even with a carefully maintained follow list on twitter I still get so much noise in my stream that I no longer check it regularly.
Facebook Privacy Settings Tips
How Mashable maintains superior performance w/ 40M views/month
I have 3 full bookcases in my house right now, all of which I bought, new, for under $25 each. And one I got for $5 at a rummage sale. When the Kindle goes to $25 (and opens up the SDK), I'll be ready with my money in-hand. Until then, I'm waiting until they lose some of the insane vendor lock-in.
> 3.1 Only invest in company 401(k) to get the match.

Why? The advice I've read is, "invest at least the amount that your employer will match." (i.e. free money) But I've never heard anyone recommend not investing more than that in a 401k.
Office Space - Short-Term, SOMA, below market rent, available immediately
Awesome, creative building - great for a start-up of 6 to 12 people.

Location: 330 Townsend St, directly across from CalTrain Station
Square Feet: 1,313 SF, open-layout, one private office
Rent: $26 PSF, full-service
Possession: Immediate
Term: Through July 31, 2011

If interested, contact: Shannon Dolan 415.445.5105 sdolan@ccareynkf.com
Mary Gates and Karen Zuckerberg Weren't Tiger Moms
Ask HN: What service are you using for display ads?
I'm actually fishing around specifically for alternatives to OpenX and Google DFP.

OpenX (at least the hosted version) is riddle with security vulnerabilities that I have experienced first hand, and Google's DoubleClick for Publisher's is javascript only (meaning, no ads in email newsletters, which is a dealbreaker for me).

What are people using these days? I've seen http://www.isocket.com mentioned a few times around here. It looks like it's still in closed beta though. Everything else I've been able to find via Google appears to be really rinky-dink.

Thanks for any tips you guys might have.