skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
knowing something doesn't mean it's immediately actable upon.

I stand by my claim that pretty much everyone knew by the end of summer of 2008 that bubble was deflating.

Hedging can turn on yourself. Southwest was very successful at hedging rising oil prices until they weren't rising anymore, then their hedges almost bankrupted them.
Cringely made a similar point last week. http://www.cringely.com/2011/02/metternich-and-mubarak/
I really liked the site, congratulations. Just because I am a stack freak, can you tell us more about your technology stack and how fun (or not) was to develop this?
Off the topic: I really recommend you to write your CV in Latex. it'll take some time, but looks much better than a MS-doc-look CV.

Some templates here: http://www.cv-templates.info
This is it. With so few people providing genuinely intelligent, impartial advice, often you end you going to someone like Gruber who provides intelligent, partial advice and then balance it with similar voices on the other side of the argument.

I like Gruber but I know that some things are going to come with a certain spin.
Diet and health
Looks impressive but doesn't work in RockMelt browser
Thanks for letting us know, we have indeed never tested it on that browser. Will look into it.
Interesting resource. Another related site would be DanielBMarkham's http://www.hn-books.com/ ...
The other side of the coin: I've seen frequent indications (even on HN) that there a hordes of programmers out there that know about almost nothing outside of their web app server, HTTP, and their database of choice. This isn't to say such specialists aren't valuable. Specialists are valuable, but if I see a medical specialist, I want them to have a good grounding in general medical knowledge. Likewise, I would prefer all of my computer colleagues to have basic general knowledge as well. Sometimes such knowledge can avert a disaster.
Perhaps you should put a note about this on the result page, as currently it looks like it's random.
> Winmo has been a complete failure so far.

I don't expect WP7 to immediately take the market by storm. If anything, Microsoft showed what they do with the Zune; they don't care for market dominance, just a share of that market will do them just fine. WP7 won't be the dominant phone, but I can see it being the new Blackberry and finding a great niche of paying customers.

> Android has shipped a lot of handsets, but the users don't seem to like to pay for apps.

This is the attitude I cannot understand. People won't pay money for things that don't provide value, regardless of platform. Choosing Apple because "iPhone users pay for stuff" is like opening a McDonalds by a public school because "they've got the money to buy things". The Android market isn't perfect, but it's getting better and better and people that make good apps for Android will likely be rewarded by great sales.
Not to be a downer, but this brings to mind Fred Wilson's warning the other day about bridge-technology startups: "Most of the time they do really well while the transition pain [from old- to new technology] is high but once most individuals and enterprises have made the change, their business slowly disappears." http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/02/bridge-technologies.html
> Mind you, I took the high deductible route since I'm only concerned with catastrophic illness at right now. Also, the moment anything serious comes up, they can cleverly drop me, since they have ludicrous things on their forms like, "have you EVER received ANY medical treatment not listed on this form."

So, you are saying that you are paying expecting to never receive anything back?
Realistically a CEO isn't going to have time for more so you have to ask yourself would you rather have this or nothing. How many other CEOs even engage at this level?

The man has a company to run and some personal stuff to deal with. Yes I wish we got more detail but I'd rather this than nothing.
The game season 4 episode 8
the game season 4 episode 8
say goodbye, I say the whole video now! To watch free, Kelly tries to keep relevant, since the reality show of his struggle, Malik mission to eliminate the problem.
the game,season 4,episode 8
When will you publish the results and where ?
Hipmunk for iPhone
An early look at Firefox 5
Hopefully, not quite like 1848, as those revolutions didn't go anywhere. Things are different now (more religious issues, more communication, ...), and they seem to go faster. Hopefully, people there get what they want (and remember, it might not be what YOU want).
Going to a dentist on your holiday would be a casual example.
May want to throw a [nsfw] on that (of a sorts), video throws up the guys background first.
Thanks! See http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2249639 (I will blog more about that later on as well).
Looks great guys, I could use this yesterday. When do you think you'll open out the beta? I understand an exact date won't be possible, just an idea of timescales (days/weeks/months).

Also, I signed up for the newsletter and got the following message:

Cheatin’ huh?

Is that what I should expect?
Yes I know about Daniel's site, which was released while I was working on hackerbooks.com. I decided to keep working on it anyway, but it took me a fair amount of time to release.
Giveaway: $5 Amazon Gift-Card
We tend to network at events where we feel comfortable. Unfortunately these events are rarely places where our customers are.

I wish someone had shared that insight with me years ago.
Oracle says Google derived code from specs for hundreds of Java files
Fastest Way To Lose Weight - Why Purchasing Diet...
Similar reference to 1848 here: http://www.amconmag.com/blog/dont-party-like-its-1989/
10 things you should never do with SQL Server
Grow up java proposing java desktop
One other interesting thing about private health insurance in Australia is that once you reach a certain income threshold, if you do not have any extra private health insurance, your income tax rate goes up a percent or two.

That wasn't intended to argue the point either way, though, I was just saying :)
Anything Joss Whedon calls Firefly, I'll call Firefly.

The cast made the show, to be sure, but they did so on top of Whedon's words, and Whedon did the casting. He's proven over and over again that he can put together a compelling, poignant show (or comic book) no matter the premise.

I've scoffed at every single show he's ever put out:
- Re: Buffy; Who's gonna watch a remake of that movie? It's gonna suck.
- Re: Angel; Spinoff? Really? Vampire in sunny LA? Dumb.
- Re: Firefly; A space western? What? Stupid.
- Re: Dollhouse; Wow, that's abstract, even for Joss Whedon. How are we supposed to care about characters that have no character?

Every time I've ended up happily eating my words, and while I still consider Firefly to be the best science fiction TV show of all time (personal opinion), I have no qualms about somebody trying to resurrect it, so long as that somebody is Joss Whedon.
I can use that since last year or so.... :-D

one cool feature to add would be the ability to popup dialogs with little html in it, this way, not only we could video chat but one could show a topic list or diagram if needed.
The Seven types of hackers
My favorite strace story: trying to get at the underlying causes of some "Unexpected Error" messages in ArcGIS, and it turns out it's writing helpful and useful (albeit two decades old) logging + error messages to the Windows equivalent of /dev/null.

shakes fist @ ESRI HQ once again
NoteSlate /// intuitively simple monochrome paper alike tablet device
okular is pretty good (http://okular.kde.org/)
No, sorry about that.

I think I have it fixed, it was a problem with the mailchimp plugin. Thanks a ton! For reporting!
The ten commandments for c programmers
Thank you so much for submitting that. I'm creating a Django application that has the potential to store and work with even more data than Disqus, so I've always been worrying about how to scale this to such a huge scale. Thanks to your submission, I'm no longer as crazed about it.
How do I develop logic?
I'll give it a good few weeks, say a month, and then get the results together. It depends on how popular it is, if I'm still seeing results come in and how much time I can grab.

I'll post them to my blog (http://morethanseven.net) and I'll post the link on here too.
a diversified one :)
Ask HN: How does an hacker (you) write his notes in the notebook
Apparently a notebook and a pen is the most loved gadgets of hackers.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2245560

I am not surprised with this, in fact I love making notes about everything.

But how do you guys organize these notes? Does your notebook has sections ? Does it have an index?

Do you write in plain English or have you developed your own shorthand ?

I liked the book "Personal Software Process" and my note-making is largely inspired from that.

I have an Table of Contents, Timelog, Sections, Plans for the week-ahead, review of last week and a running counter which tells me how much time I am spending on each activity every week.

What about you guys ?
There's a kind of hidden sense of superiority in this statement. Plus, it's wrong.
No, that's just hysterical. This is completely safe for work.
Disqus is a classic case study when it comes to scalability.

If there is one thing I learned from Disqus it is the power of keeping a lightweight stack. Disqus keep it simple, and prove that all the myths that "Django/SQL/whatever doesn't scale" are obscene.

Even for an app with requests per second in the 5 digit range - they do pretty damn good with the basic Django stack with no more than some small tweaks.
Have you thought about freelancing? It's a bit scarier, the learning curve is much steeper, but ultimately I think it's a lot more fun and you learn a whole lot more than being pampered at some internship.

You also earn more.
The "revolution" in Denmark in 49[1] got us our constitution which kept the king, but removed almost all his power and made him a ceremonious figure head.

[1] it's not much of a revolution when the king simply signs the damn agreement, but is a lot less bloody and there would have been much violence if he hadn't.
How My Smart Phone Contributed To Getting Me Out Of A Speeding Ticket
Recruiting? Don't be boring. Be different & you get Ninjas.
gender and orientation! what's the use to browse the opposite sex persons if they won't be interested in you!
Submeter
EKM Metering provides reliable, accurate, low cost meters and submeters.
Oops, I think I misread the article. I stand corrected.

Even if it is true, I'm not sure what the significance would be. I would be surprised if you couldn't pick out many subgroups in the US which do better in the US than in their places of origin, without it supporting an argument about the quality of the overall system.

Very true. To actually make the argument you are trying to make, you'd actually need to do a carefully controlled study. But most such studies (which include ethnicity, rural living, diet, etc as predictors) actually show no significant relationship between marginal changes in health care and health outcomes.
In the UK paid internships are the norm for software developers, quite a few people are hiring, your best bet might just be to grab a list of UK startups and just go through their websites to see who's looking.

Most tend to advertise internships on twitter as well.
When I studied modern history in High School our text book was called 'Frankfurt to Fra Mauro'. Fra Mauro was a landing site on the moon (where Apollo 13 was headed, iirc); Frankfurt referred to the convention in 1848 which attempted to combine the German-speaking principalities and nationalities into a unified 'Germany'.

While it didn't create that outcome (it took 23 more years), I guess the book saw that event (and similar European attempts in the same time period, with less alliteration) as being a key starting point. Of course, I'm not convinced current uprisings are comparable, (or aren't comparable for that matter, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2239018) but it's an interesting discussion.
Why not just do more iPhone apps? Fund yourself that way?

Alternately, all the iPhone developer job ads in my country demand someone with an actual published iPhone ap, which you have, so you already have a leg up on the competition.

And if you turn up for an iPhone job looking like a dirty hippie (read as: artist type) that may actually work in your favour as it is expected :D
At a fundamental level Amazon take written content, pay the owner of the content money and sell it on at a mark up based on reformatting it in a way which adds value to the consumer.

How is that different to the way that Readability take written content, pay the owner of the content money, and sell it on at a mark up based on reformatting it in a way which adds value to the consumer?

The key difference between Readability and an RSS reader, is the RSS reader hands no money to the content creator.

I don't like this as I like the idea of Readability but I can't dispute that what they do is basically the same as what Amazon do.

One thing I would say is that I think Readability get a lot of credit for the fact that they will distribute payments to small content creators.

While this is obviously great, I'd be really interested to know how much of what they pay out goes to bloggers and how much goes to the usual suspects. I'm guessing that in reality it doesn't end up supporting the small guys as much as we'd like simply because most of what is read comes from the big providers - that's why they're big in the first place.
Wicked cool!
Regarding the other question, we'll start with a private beta which will be available to those registered at betacandy.com

We want to get it out as soon as possible, but the timescale will be x-months.
does it have google docs integration like echosign?
> Relativity describes the real world.

Any theory describes real world to some degree.

> You seem to want to talk about theoretical ideas that have no evidence.

:-/
We can test my ideas in your laboratory, of course.

> You quite misunderstood that article, it's not the vacuum that produces the particles, it is the massive energy they are beaming that produces them.

Do you really read article? Of course, energy is necessary, because two vacuum particles will cannot escape each other and will annihilate. But you cannot produce particle using just energy.

> The stuff in the wikipedia article is just ideas that may work mathematically but have little bearing on the real world. At least for now. Maybe someday we'll figure them out, but for now it's just ideas.

Some far galaxies are traveling from us much faster than speed of light because of space expanding. Thus theory of relativity will work correctly for distances less than 1B of light years, but it is not correct for larger distances. Are you agree?
A good article, but intimidating, in a way. And I see this quite a bit in terms of budding programmer advice. It boils down to "you need to read this, and then read that, and then read this," and then the comments section will have even more suggestions for reading.

As I get older, and have kids, I find my ability to sit down and read all of this, and somehow retain it, decreasing. I've recently decided to "get back into" coding (won't go into the history as it isn't tangential to the discussion). I've been having some fun with very, very tiny beginner level programs in Ruby. When I build a list of jobs I would want with Ruby involvement, I find I also need to brush up on my Javascript and learn JQuery. I need to get a full understanding of Git/Github. I should also learn Rails and Sinatra, VIM, and get reacquainted with CSS.

On top of that, it really does seem that C is a requirement to really understand what is happening in Ruby. It seems a lot of things that _why_ wrote for Ruby, he wrote in C.

Then there is all the additional readings, such as in this article, and comments section. All of which seem incredibly legit, but leave me feeling like I will never actually find the time to write code due to all the reading I don't have time to do.

Is there an order of importance with all of this?
Any script in a world with a significant existing fan base could pre-sell dvd copies of movies before production, to generate capital and provide proof-of-support-of-concept. Why don't franchises like Marvel or Star Trek do this? Or do they already?
If you create a completely real company with the driving intention to get yourself health insurance because you can't or won't do it as an individual, it won't matter how real the company is. The insurers will decline to pay out.
I wonder if functional programming can escape the traps Object Oriented programming fell into? For one thing, the barriers to entry are seemingly higher. How much half-baked functional programming is out there?

Most of us don't write industrial-scale code twice, and even if we did, we couldn't do it with the same team and starting from the same knowledge base in both cases.

Big companies are pretty short-sighted. Above a certain size threshold, companies should implement much of their critical user-facing software at least twice. Basically, they should be engaging in A/B testing. Why? Isn't this wasteful? I don't think so. From my experience, both inside companies and as a customer, software can have an impact on employee effectiveness well beyond a factor of two. There is always room for improvement. The best way to discover places to improve is through experimentation. Not doing this, is to leave these potential improvements on the table.

Perhaps a level of granularity below that of an entire application would be better.
The Art of the Facebook Page Design
Everyday more and more businesses around the world are creating presences on Facebook. Some companies opt to bring users directly to the page wall or other tabs (e.g. info, photos, RSS/blog, discussions and links) and use product images or company logos instead of more elaborate landing pages. Regardless of where a user lands when they first arrive, something needs to capture their attention.
It doesn't even need a timer. It just needs to heat when I tell it to heat, and stop heating when I tell it to stop.
Yes, absolutely.

If you like House (for the medical mystery aspect rather than the snark), you may also like Berton Roueche's writing. _The Medical Detectives_ is a pretty good collection.
Point to non-existent videos?

$ curl -I http://files.sqlbits.com/event7/10_things_you_should_never_do_with_sql_server/10%20things%20you%20should%20never%20do%20with%20sql%20server%20cut%205_c_500.mp4

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Cache-Control: max-age=900
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:02:19 GMT
Expires: Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:17:19 GMT
Server: HSS (lax001/2860)
Content-Length: 345
A FIFO might work. Do you know how big the buffers associated with FIFOs on OSX are?
Amazon Prime Now Includes Free Instant Videos
Read the article and there are a few times he compares php to rails - I didn't realise php was a web framework.

There are certainly things to dislike about PHP. but I think he's trying too hard in a few of the ones he cites.
9 Incredible HTML5 Canvas And Javascript Experiments
Xoops there it is a cms for the masses
You make me happy :)
A “Comprehensive" Guide to Mobile Statistics
Actually, Goldman does make money by being a broker. A big chunk of their income comes from this. They also very often take on risk during transactions - examples you've probably heard of include Facebook and ABACUS.

Goldman and many others make money off prop trading. Goldman mostly does market making (trying not to hold positions for a long time), others take longer positions (Lehman, Paulson). They do a much better job of speculation than in the past - as an anecdote, Warren Buffet claims value investing based on technical analysis is almost impossible these days. I.e., there are far fewer undervalued companies than there used to be.

I have no strong opinion on microfinance/payday loans. They seem to fill a consumer need, and as far as I know they didn't exist in the past. (I also really wish people would stop being inconsistent about it - if you think Grameen bank is good but EZ Cash is bad, at least explain why Bangladeshi poor deserve it but US poor don't.)

...structured products almost put us in the Oklahoma dust bowl about 18 months ago.

You'll have to educate me on this one. Structured products cause topsoil depletion?
It's build on Chromium so I guess it matters a little.

Btw. works beautifully on the iPad, very cool.
The History of Computers 1938 to 2010 [Infographic]
First off, thank you for the informative and balanced response.

Second, I agree with your reasoning chain, but I don't subscribe to the initial idea: accessors being about future-proofing. To me sprinkling accessors all around is more about focusing on the (safer, easier) `known unknowns' and satisfying kLOC metrics. And the assumption of being able to freely exchange code underneath as long as the objects stay the same.

So no, I haven't missed the whole accessor/mutator business -- I consider them special cases, to be used sparingly. And as such, I see no point in optimizing for them.

To keep it short, lemme commit the Argument to Authority fallacy here: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?YouArentGonnaNeedIt http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AccessorsAreEvil and http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LawOfDemeter

But then again, perhaps one day I'll learn better, remember your remarks and start making better use of accessors :)
Awesome. I recently ordered the well-grounded rubyist as I've heard great things about the book (though its on page #2 on your site). How long did it take you to complete the project?
There are other quantum-bio efficiencies being studied - such as this one for best-path photosynthesis reaction chains:

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/41632
How the rich became the über rich
That's a great suggestion - note taken :)
Many years ago I did a CS degree as a 4 year "sandwich" course which involved 1 years industrial experience. My college had to pre-approve my choice of employer/employment and required regular reports (EDIT I know, I wrote one of them). I would be astonished if your college was any different and I strongly doubt that writing iPhone apps would suffice. I found that 1 year period the most valuable of my whole degree, choose wisely.
The opening paragraph of the article (since you just read the headline on hackernews apparently):

"Each revolution must be assessed in its own context, each had a distinctive impact. The revolutions spread from one point to another. They interacted to a limited extent. … The drama of each revolution unfolded separately. Each had its own heroes, its own crises. Each therefore demands its own narrative …"
Thanks for this amazing initiative. Looking forward to more features.
Love it! Nice clean and simple without the clutter of non-hacker type books!
Didn't work for me (in chromium/fedora 14), I just saw the talking head and when the speech suggested I should be seeing something happen, nothing did.
http://cmdt.co/w/christchurch-earthquake-2011
Nice idea. If I wasn't leaving my current role (selling mostly web-based data services to a niche b2b audience) at the end of the week I'd certainly be using it when it's finished...

The demo experience is disconcerting without audio - at the beginning it looks like I'm just getting a screencast with no ability to exit it. It would be better to see mouse movements and browsing right from the start so people instantly get the idea there's something much cleverer going on.

Which raises a second point - a big red "stop" button to end the session on the user side would be nice to have, as well as a "now guiding you through our site" text.

The current version doesn't appear to work on IE7 - are you intending on covering this (and even IE6) in future? Assuming it's technically feasible, the pain is probably worth it since I'm guessing a lot of the people calling on tech support are using antiquated browsers.