skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IMHO, some arguments can be highly productive, but I think it takes a certain amount of rapport to effectively argue with someone. I've had discussions with friends where we began with one set of positions, and by the end had swapped positions! Those sorts of arguments are enlightening and memorable, but they require a certain amount of openness and ease with the other person, where you can feel free to toss around ideas without necessarily having to defend them. If you don't have that, then indeed, confirmation bias will kick in.

In cases where I've felt that happening, I've found it helpful to try to pinpoint fundamental assumptions or values that are (by definition) inarguable. Unveil these, and you'll either resolve the debate with "well, you value X and I value Y, and no amount of arguing will change that," or "we both assume/value X but have reached different conclusions, Y and Z -- what would it take to falsify Y or Z?" My girlfriend and I have somewhat opposing political views, so I have some practice at this.
How to be 100% sure your startup idea is good
Thank you. My intent was not actually to beg for a code so much as snarkily (sorry!) point out my annoyance at the need for one -- but I appreciate the gesture and will check it out.
>Eventually we'll all be paying metered fees, broadband or wireless.

I'm cool with that. The real cost of bandwidth is far far far far below what I COULD use over my current equipment and connection vs the fee I pay my end of line provider.
I think this sentiment applies to more than just startups, but really any organization where there's a tendency to say "that's not my job" or "oh, if I don't do it someone else will". I think a lot of organizations could be more successful if more of their members -- employees of a startup, volunteers at a nonprofit, members of a club -- were willing to pitch in above (and below!) and beyond their title, experience, or pay.
You are right. Most PC's have the license sticker on the back. I get free windows products so didn't really remember using them when I do a fresh install.
Fully agree - we've got great libraries in Pgh. My main complaint is the very limited hours they have. I'd be there 9-9 everyday if I could. I always thought we should bring back the days of libraries as community centers - not just books. For instance, why isn't there a community workshop in or part of the library system - that's a big part of education...
http://hnhackers.com/
Just on first blush, the title of this post does not make me want to visit the site.
I wonder if this would have been perceived differently if the CEO was a woman.
And they're paying into the library too with their taxes, poor or not.
Ask HN: Review Compound Time.
It's a motivational tool for music students (and their teachers).

http://compoundtime.com

Thanks, Michael
There are some interesting opportunities for functional languages in modern settings, but they seem to be mostly for things in the ML family. For example, Mirage (http://deeprecursion.com/cloud-computing-on-the-metal http://research.cens.ucla.edu/events/?event_id=263 )
The only thing I could want, in addition to what the Kindle already has, is nested collections. I guess I'll have to wait a bit longer for those.
Three things: If you submit a bug and it gets fixed, verify that it was indeed fixed, and mark it as such. Close the loop.

Related to point #5, if you do file a bug, don't just file it and walk away, even if you do provide lots of helpful information. If it's a particularly tricky bug the person working on it will probably ask you for more information, especially if it's only occasionally reproducible.

#10 is important whether you're using an open source project or not, but it's especially true if you aren't going to do #9. It might be enough to keep the author working on the project.
Useful Web Services, Tools and Resources For Web Designers
I'm no fan of Oracle and Java either, my bet is on mobile-web (JS/HTML5). Microsoft technologies are a dead-end in the context of mobile/cloud technologies. It would be impossible to argue that Microsoft is going to win iOS and Amazon AWS converts to the Windows phone and Azure platforms. Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but there are no situations where I can envision any of Microsoft's mobile/cloud technologies are going to succeed in the future.
It's running a little slow here too. It might actually be the amount of traffic hitting our website right now.
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” -- F. A. Hayek

The best thing that the US government could do to help start-ups (and other American businesses, for that matter) is to stop trying to help and get out of the way.

Everyone is influenced by incentives. The primary incentive of politicians is to get re-elected and the primary incentive of government bureaucrats is to protect their jobs and increase their power. This is natural and does not make either group evil; they are simply trying to do what's best for them. However, there's very overlap between these incentives and those which promote wise economic policies.

Even if we assume a selfless government guided only by some desire to do what is best for the economy, there is no reason to believe that government can wisely guide the anarchic and Darwinian process of market competition, and much reason to think that they can not.

For a profound analysis of the underlying knowledge aggregation problem which dooms attempts to guide the economy, see Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html).
I couldn't stand the old Skype for Mac. Were it not for the fact that I prefer Skype to all other instant messaging services, I would have ditched Skype long ago.
OP complains about the "sixes" in his organization, but how would others (customers, vendors, investors, employees) rate him?

Sure, the "sixes" may be holding your company back, but just as likely, the "nines" and "tens" may be bailing because you're a "six".

OP sounds kinda like a high school jock rating girls in the hall, "She's a 6." But the analogy fails in one critical area: OP has the opportunity (and responsibility) to turn his "sixes" into "tens". That's his fucking job (if he wasn't a six himself). I've lost track of the number of times I've witnessed mediocre employees become great with a change of management.

That person with great references and potential you hired didn't suddenly turn into a "six". Something you or your organization did changed them. On the other hand, that disgruntled, under-performing employee didn't suddenly become great when the new manager restructured his job and paid attention to him.

Like most stories, this one has two sides. Unfortunately, we often only get to hear the boss's side because when things to wrong, no matter whose fault, he's the one left standing.
That's a caricature of the article. Here are some salient excepts. Which parts of them do you disagree with?

[...] The logistics of a food establishment that seats between 20 and 25 people (which roughly corresponds to the definition of "cozy") are such that the place will stay afloat—barely—as long as its owners spend all of their time on the job. There is a golden rule, long cherished by restaurateurs, for determining whether a business is viable. Rent should take up no more than 25 percent of your revenue, another 25 percent should go toward payroll, and 35 percent should go toward the product. The remaining 15 percent is what you take home. There's an even more elegant version of that rule: Make your rent in four days to be profitable, a week to break even. If you haven't hit the latter mark in a month, close.

A place that seats 25 will have to employ at least two people for every shift: someone to work the front and someone for the kitchen [...] Budgeting $15 for the payroll for every hour your charming cafe is open (let's say 10 hours a day) relieves you of $4,500 a month. That gives you another $4,500 a month for rent and $6,300 to stock up on product. It also means that to come up with the total needed $18K of revenue per month, you will need to sell that product at an average of a 300 percent markup.

[...]

[...] the coffee [ed: with its acknowledged killer margins] needed to account for all of our profit. We needed to sell roughly $500 of it a day. This kind of money is only achievable through solid foot traffic, but, of course, our cafe was too cozy and charming to pop in for a cup to go. The average coffee-to-stay customer nursed his mocha (i.e., his $5 ticket) for upward of 30 minutes. [...].

Since the article both starts and ends with the observation you've tried to damn it with (that the owner of this coffee shop didn't know what he was getting into), I don't think that alone is a compelling response.

Finally, your analysis assumes that the coffee shop market is divided between "Starbucks" and "Independents". It is not. Other chain coffee shops account for nearly 30% again as many shops as Starbucks does.

PS: Respectfully, I'm not sure the guy who starts a thread with "coffee shops are pretty much the opposite of money losers" and "coffee shops have a 10% failure rate" gets to write smugly when his own revised math reveals his numbers to be wildly off, or his primary data point about coffee shops to be a single study from an industry marketing organization that included Starbucks in its numbers.
It was when we started to get calls from angry bloggers about Twingly not working I first realized we were on to something. It feels really good to have someone you never met care enough to be angry with you.
Clojure: from concurrency to parallelism
How many of your users are actively using the site?
That is a great idea. Eventually we'd like to have a keyword search...
Open Data: Empowering the empowered or effective data use for everyone?
> The only justification for using -Os in a speed benchmark is "I tried it both with and without the flag, and it was faster this way". I don't see any such assertion.

Really? It seems to me that this is quite enough:

> I’ve just re-run the C benchmark without -Os (only -O3) but the results are the same.
But is it insured/protected/care about by the airlines at all?
Diving into HTML5 with WebSockets and Perl
Airline baggage fees are good for you! Here's why: They are the a la carte portion of your ticket.

If consumer groups succeed in limiting airlines' ability to charge such fees, airlines will need to figure out other ways to monetize your travel, some that may be more difficult avoid.
If the jobs are truly pointless, they're not destroying wealth. Rather, they redistribute wealth. And even if they do destroy wealth (and you need to provide examples of specific positions and why they are counterproductive and not just unproductive) the destruction may be evened out by keeping them in the working mindset and being a normal member of society.
I'm trying to figure out the advantages of this over a regular IDE, etc. Simply the fact that it's all on the cloud? What problem are you trying to solve? (I don't mean to sound interrogative, I'm just genuinely curious about your motivation behind this). It certainly looks neat and will check it out for myself.
Texas Instruments unveils quad-core OMAP 5 SoC
You seem to be confusing "fair" with "equal". Treating everybody the same is not necessarily fair. It seems fair to me to have the most common characters be shortest. I don't have any evidence, but I would guess that Latin characters[1] are used most commonly.

[1] "Latin characters" is the proper term, not "American characters"
up-voted because of nice comparison of performance of atom and p4 cpus, but 35W is what cpu eats alone (vs ~110 for P4 cpu may be?). How much atom-based nettop will consume watts in total?

And what about I/O throughout, is nettops compared to desktops?

I think about either reusing existing old desktops or buying one of these nettops for:
1) home network server, which will act as media storage and as VPN gateway for home network.
2) media server for my tv
Have you heard of golden handcuffs? While there are certainly anti-employee versions of that business trope, there are certainly pro-employee ways to do that. Profit sharing that goes up by year is a good one, as is benefits increases.

Even just increase pay over time past what they'll earn elsewhere. They'll keep doing their highly specialized job because no one else can hire them at a competitive rate.

Find areas they can flex their brains that don't cost you much. Say, publicity stunt woodworking (I'm sure you could make things that get you press), novelty items you can use as gifts to prospective clients, etc, completely designed and done by these skilled tradesmen.

Or hell, just give them stupid amounts of time off. It's very hard to leave a place that has 20-40 days of vacation.

Or even make a community oriented approach. Have them teach a class on X etc to the community, mentor at risk kids, etc.
Of course we are comparing implementations; languages do not have a speed. My language (purely hypothetical, unfortunately) language at builds on 'Principia Mathematica' may need a 10000 page program to compute 1+1, but its compiler could, in theory, produce the same executable as C (or Fortran, or whatever) would from their one-liners that do the same thing.
Does it have source control integration? I've got to believe it does, otherwise you would not have so many users, but I found no info about it...
For the introverted moonlighting hacker who doesn't get out much except for the coffee shop, libraries are great for getting a ton of stuff done.

However, for social interaction and meeting people once in a while the coffee shop is a good change and/or alternative. Taking breaks more often works and being strict with your time management works well, but you have to be strict when your in the coffee ship from my experience. Meet lots of new interesting people too.

I like both, it will depend on my mood too. I say use both if you can. Where I live the coffee shop (not a big chain), is much more convenient though and mostly filled with students from the local university.
Yahoo BOSS Will Now Cost You
That's exactly it. He motivated me to take the initiative, and now, years later, I'm in a position where I can pass that on to my team.
If you are such an expert on what makes a benchmark representative of "real-world" problems, you're welcome to make a contribution to the Shootout. I'm sure they'll be glad to accept it, and everyone will be relieved to find out all the other benchmarks are worthless and everyone has been wasting their time.
The headline should read, "If Groupon has 3,000 sales reps, and each rep calls 40 businesses a day, every day, then by the end of 2011, Groupon could have called every business in the United States." Not quite as catchy, but much more accurate.
Bingo! This blog post just hit me right in the middle of my stomach.

I'm fighting with myself for months trying to determine if my idea is good, how to implement it, how to secure my business, how to leverage market, how to get time and money to implement it, how to proceed, what is the minimum viable product functionality subset, ... while not doing anything concrete and real.
Here's the first one, then. It has some flaws, but I think the new UI is an improvement. And definitely it has been for my mom. Her reaction: "This is so much easier, I didn't understand what the other window was for."
Currently IMO, the best world would be to allow the ISPs to charge Netflix properly for the total cost of providing it

How is that better than charging customers directly for the bandwidth they use? The problem with the recent Canada fiasco wasn't (IMO) the concept of metered billing itself, but trying to charge hundreds of times the actual cost.
what do you think will be a robots job in 15yrs from now?

my bet: barbers, healthcare of elderly, ... whats yours?
I think there are some interesting upsides.. I already really love collaborating with GitHub.. the opportunity to take things a step further, pair-program remotely, or fix a unit test from a computer not running a full development environment might be pretty cool.
There are also state laws to consider in the US.
Clickable:

http://compoundtime.com
I agree with you; tech companies with few enough staff as is can't respond to every complaint.

However, note that the first post in that thread was Nov 4, 2010. That's over three months ago. By this time, they definitely should have at least posted something indicating they've heard the user response.
How did the 2011 Super Bowl affect the price of parking?
Yeah, I agree that this place feels too formal at times, and I hate feeling like I have to be a master of rhetoric just to comment here.

In fact just yesterday I got sucked into another thread that went the same way. I've come to the conclusion that that some people take counter points and play Devil's Advocate just because the enjoy argument and debate. Personally it's not my thing. I'd rather dash off a quick comment and get back to work.

This thread has gone crazy, hasn't it?
MPAA Files Copyright Infringement Suit Against Hotfile
Why is there a lack of women in tech and a lack of females founders?  
Is it because maybe tech companies see women as being incapable or unwillingly to use new technology?? like all things change takes time i think it is important to encourage everyone, regardless of gender,to embrace technology for their work and just generally in everyday life
I was under the impression that the only way to use "broad" non-pejoratively is in reference to the actual breadth of something.

That being said, sometimes it's safer to study abroad from afar.
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Not at this time. This is top priority in 2011.
vow, another pittsburgher. I once used the North hills library and it was really productive. Will have to check out the moon library.
Google Official Rebuts Microsoft's Cloud Critiques
Politely discussing issues with people can be very productive.

Arguing on the internet is pointless.
I'm a full-time web editor at a metro newspaper.

My take?

There is plenty of cheap, low-grade, evergreen content out there (think Associated Content), and only low-grade media companies want it.

What decent news outlets want is high-grade, local, exclusive, timely content -- and I can't see a freelancer who is capable of producing that type of content using a platform like StoryMarket, rather than dealing directly with the media outlet. Similarly, I can't see assignment editors using StoryMarket to find that type of content. Assigning editors like to deal with freelancers directly, for a whole host of practical reasons.

My prediction? StoryMarket is going to find itself with a lot of content, and not a lot of people willing to pay for it.
Perl 5 and Perl 6 are two different languages, and an implementation of Perl 6 is out already.
i dnt think its really the problem with tech companies, its women that might not be interested in technology!! but thats just my thought!! but i do agree that they should encourage women to be in tech!! :))
I knew somebody would check my work. Notabot.com is the only domain in that list that is available only as a premium domain name ($1,888.00). All the rest are up for grabs.
That'll vary a lot by library and surrounding community. I've been in central libraries that were clean and didn't have anything worse happening than children being told to shush.

It'd probably worth visiting and checking one's local library out if you need a remote place to work. Spend a couple of hours - leisurely find some books, read a magazine or two - and see whether you're comfortable there. If so, then try coming in with your laptop.
My Kindle was priceless in Canada. It has free 3G web browsing, even internationally...so, when I was stopping for the night, I'd do a search for "free wifi (city-name)", and punch the resulting address into the GPS. The Kindle browser is completely unusable for normal browsing (it's like browsing from 1994), but it's acceptable for that one query.

I've found that rest stops with WiFi are rarely in working condition. I'm not sure why it's so hard for public hotspots to be kept operational, but apparently it is, as I'd say 75% of the ones at unattended locations are simply not working. I've learned to never expect WiFi to work, even if it is advertised on the sign or on the website or whatever. The same is true of campgrounds, 80% of which claim to have WiFi but only about 40% of which actually have usable speed and reliability. I'm tempted, being a nerd, to just go around fixing campground networks, free of charge. But, usually, I just use my 3G/4G modem. I'm getting 500kbps-1Mbps here in the desert, which is completely usable.
I definitely agree, especially with the idea of getting your employees further invested in the company, even if it doesn't mean a job/title change. I don't get compensated the way I might somewhere else, but it's awesome to work somewhere where I have influence and my ideas have a shot at being implemented.

Perhaps give your employees stock or the responsibility of making decisions in their specialty areas. Or, give them something like 20% time where they can be creative. Perhaps they'll create some beautiful, original woodwork that gets you press on your blog. Or, perhaps, it just enriches their lives and keeps them happy.
Much better! If your customer service is as responsive as your hn presence, nothing can stop you.

[The almost NSFW ads at the bottom of the page were a nice little perk for a drudge-work Tuesday, too.]
Hardware engineering can easily be 12 months out of 18. There are a sundry of reasons:

a) Moore's law. The technology your school is using for hardware design is easily 5-6 or 10 years out of date. This makes it easier to teach and cheaper to work on, but the "real world issues" like heat, leakage current, etc just aren't addressed at the same level.

b) Intel has its own RTL that is not taught in schools. Some technology companies also have proprietary in-house technologies (like Cachet, or Wasabi).

c) Ripple effects. Analog components might change/fluctuate and this impacts the entire design. Or a new antenna placement might merit new design, etc.

d) Scale. An undergrad in hardware engineering typically builds a 5 stage pipeline processor that supports 2-4 hardware interrupts and a memory controller. This is enough to run linux on an FPGA. You've engineered a computer! But a Core 2 Duo has 23 pipeline stages. Vector units. Out of Order execution. 96% accurate branch predictor. Each one of those things I've mentioned could be the focus of a masters or PhD thesis. Getting hired, you'd be expected to pick up the logic of all of them in about six months.

e) Minimization. More systems are being done by less chips. This is what is called System-On-A-Chip design by some. Previously, you'd need to know how to design a CPU. Now you need to know how to integrate a CCD into the CPU.

This is off the top of my head but i'm sure you get the point.
Random suggestion: I think it would be awesome if your landing page let me write code.. Knowing how it 'feels' to write (and run!) a Hello World without registering, etc. would be awesome. Kinda like the MongoDB shell that's on their website. Love that thing.