skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly. It's not that diseconomies of scale don't exist, but this study doesn't really show them. Every company in the S&P 500 is big enough to suffer from levels of bureaucracy unheard of in smaller companies; virtually all of them are as unwieldy as they are large.

This isn't showing Walmart is less profitable per employee than thrifty independent retailers and small, focused chains. It instead illustrates the unremarkable fact that Walmart is less profitable per employee than Goldman Sachs.
Rate my webapp - Poplytics
I posted on HN yesterday and got some feedback about my web app. Most people hated the design of the UI and copy. I am a bad designer but i decided to work on it again. I would love to know if the UI and copy is better.

Please highlight any specific area that needs work. Thanks!
Facebook does have a very clear, distinct hierarchy. It's user centric, and oriented around relationships.

-Homepage: Big wall of stuff

--User page, another wall

---Info

---Pictures

--Your profile

---Pictures

etc

At no point do ever look around in Facebook and think "where am I? How do I go somewhere else?" Other users exist on Facebook. Discovering them is straightforward. If I want more friends, I know how to get them.

Tailoring the experience to your personal profile is the correct choice. Quora just isn't doing it correctly. What you're saying makes a lot of sense, though, in that Quora is treating questions and topics like people. It seems like using a screwdriver to make an omelet.
I see it similarly--not really looking for VC investment. I don't really focus on 37S; my goal to create a product that has sufficient value that people/users (at least some) will pay for it. Short-term, of course, it's more challenging to bootstrap, but in addition to coding, I've thought through a fairly solid revenue model. We'll see what happens.
Eh, I don't see it as any worse than any of the other miscellaneous distractions that've cropped up over the year I've been posting here (admittedly I don't know much of what it was like before then). Sometimes they're the top thing for a day or two, but not that big a proportion overall. We had 2 or 3 weeks where for some reason fitness/exercise/weightlifting was a big thing here ("hacking your body"), then there was a flurry of articles on dating and pick-up artists ("hacking dating"), etc. And generic politics/economics threads date back a few years, from what I can tell in the archives (a million rounds of libertarians v. social-democrats).

edit: As just one example, here's a 2007 HN debate on unions, with a mixture of good discussion and political acrimony, and a side thread where people debate whether this kind of debate belongs on HN, or should stay on reddit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20249
The reasons for some of these behaviours:

3) Imagine you have 10,000 more or less identical CVs, how do you propose to filter them in a cost efficient manner ? - GPA is a quick and dirty solution. Sure you might miss out on some good people, but that's always going to be the case with whichever criteria you use.

4) Sending an extra person for the day will cost a company around $1500. The handfull of students who aren't willing to hang around for a bit aren't worth that extra cost.
Rate my hackathon hack gone startup, rooster.am - the smart alarm
So, a lens is a mechanism for doing a significant amount of computation. All this does is move some of that computation from optics to software.

If you take out some of the optics from a real lens you get a blurry image too. That doesn't mean the remaining lenses aren't doing something useful -- or that the output is bad. It just needs further processing.

Post-processing, you end up with interesting images.

More examples: http://www.refocusimaging.com/gallery/
Starbucks' CEO invests in Groupon
I would love to build one of these myself.

Anyone up for building a photography research lab??
It might help to alter your wording to deal with this reaction. This is just off of the top of my head, but maybe calling it a profile isn't the best choice. -People seem to feel like they should own a 'profile' of them.

Maybe you could call it an 'assessment', 'evaluation', 'appraisal' or something along those lines, -something that infers that the ownership is not in the subject's hands.
The two are probably linked. A hot company for hackers is one where there are other hackers that are great. Once you reach the point where your company isn't only staffed with only great hackers but also merely good developers the company seizes be as hot as it was.

It's a hard problem to solve. Especially if, like Google, you're a publicly traded company that needs to grow constantly to appease investors. Growth means hiring more people.
The day before Tunisia dictator departure, he made a talk to the Tunisian people. (It's good to note here that in 13 January no one is calling to his departure, but just angry population due to the situation).

The president made some good decisions: lowered the prices of food, removed Internet censorship (yes, even Wikileaks worked), said that we can protest freely, promised to sue the snipers....

After the talk, I didn't feel like that something has changed [1]. Actually, me and my family and my friends, nothing has really changed and it's like he had said nothing. I was happy with YouTube uncensored, not more. The day after that one, Tunisians walked in masses asking for his departure.

What I wanted to say here is that the scenario is quite different. ZBA (Tunisia old president) worked on his last talk to lower the tensions. It hadn't worked out. Now in Egypt, the leaders are rising the tensions (asking the protests to go home and actually not giving anything). I'm seriously afraid about tomorrow that the current government still has plans to flow more blood.

[1] I noted my feeling because some journalists that day said that the talk is revolutionary (like opening the doors for opposition). I think, and from experience, after 23 and 29 years of the life under such regime, what the population wants is the leader and his party to go and not jobs, money or freedom.
For the systems I log in to, each SecurID code is only valid once. If you want to log in again, you need to wait until a new code is available and use it.
Straight from the github readme:

More advanced stuff

This plugin is meant to be a very light one. If you need to do more advanced things, I suggest trying jeresig’s plugin jQuery.hotkeys. That can handle things like key combinations and more
Internet Explorer 9 goes live
I think the word "voluntarily" is missing from the title.
I have ideas and experience. We've met IRL...
This is just "hacking politics" :)
Ask HN: Can't get .com or .net, what's the next best extension?
Working on a startup and can't get the .com or .net of the company name. Which extension is best: .me, .ly, .co, or something else?
Bingo. The most open device is going to win this race, and it won't be any vendor that locks developers into an "app store" or any specific language/runtime.

Most people forget that the reason the PC took off like it did was because a developer could do whatever they wanted with the machine. It was a blank slate that could run multiple operating systems be used with many different languages. Many vendors today are purposefully taking a very open architecture and locking it down tight, which is a very anti-developer stance to take, and contrary to (what history shows as) the path to success.
I would consider open sourcing the tool then selling your time as "the" expert. Resig's never hurting for jQuery consulting work when he wants it, I'm sure.

I wouldn't consider open sourcing it a net negative at all. You will get it out there, and as more "advanced" users start to use it and sing its praises, you will have more than enough to keep yourself busy helping out those who are too pressed for time or just have money to burn, or just can't figure it out on their own.

By not releasing it open source, you will have a much harder time branding yourself as a "proven" performance expert.

Compare these two "resumes":

"Original author and lead developer of the PerfPlus open source project, used by thousands of developers worldwide to benchmark and improve their applications."

vs.

"I'm a new college graduate with a few references and a custom tool I wrote that's worked well in a handful of cases."

I can tell you which one I'd be more willing to hire (if I had money :-)
A lot of HN users are also Redditors, and personally I think Reddit (perhaps r/worldnews or r/worldpolitics) would be a more appropriate forum for this type of thing.

That said, this particular ongoing incident is really really big. Like Tiananmen Square or Berlin Wall big. Once in a while something is important and far reaching enough for us all to shift focus for a moment.
There are people who fear the Egyptian electorate and want to discredit the protesters. Those people are hoping it gets as violent as possible so the television footage scares Americans and prejudices us against any government in Egypt that represents the people. I'm sure there are many individual CIA agents who share that bias.

That said, I imagine the leadership of the CIA has better sense.
Surely you don't get the same level of organisation (particularly hierarchical) by having everything in one file? And doesn't that mean you are constantly scanning up and down the file?
This is the whole point. A support/service culture requires constant communication. (And a cheery environment. If you've ever entered a phone support center, you know the cloud of dread, dullness and desparation that's normally there).

37signals needs serenity and calm to be able to think.
I am a Mongo fan in some respects, but I agree that every benchmarking I do with any significant data involves the painfully slow bulk writes to get it started -- not a good first impression. Can some Mongo people help explain this?
> anyone know of a credible ORM?

Node devs tend to take a different approach to Rails/Django in this regard, there's no single ORM with lots of database backends (ala ActiveRecord). This is probably related to the fact that Node devs tend to use tools like Redis, Mongo and Couch rather than traditional relational databases like MySQL and Postgres which all have similar SQL interfaces. There are some really nice libraries and modeling tools available but they're not database agnostic SQL ORMs, for example recently I've been using Mongoose: http://mongoosejs.com/

I've come from the Django world so I empathise with the "How do I do [insert Django/Rails feature here]?" mindset, but a lot of the time the Django/Rails just doesn't work well Node. Node.js is a single-threaded, event-based, non-blocking server; it really is a totally different paradigm so you have to be prepared to rethink the modus operandi for developing web applications.
You're probably missing an *7 in there.
Poll: scribd or not scribd
When a pdf link is submitted, the title links to the original document and HN gernerates a scribd link.

What are your thoughts on scribd links?
Never use scribd links
Always use scribd links
Wish scribd would go away
Wish scribd would rule the world
And also, Paypal only allows transactions without CVV for US and Canadian accounts, so if you're in another country Paypal + Spreedly isn't an option for recurring billing. Took an hour on the phone with Paypal to find this out.
Recruiting to open team for Summer 2011 funding
www.BrandNewBusiness.CO
Have a skill and no team to help you? https://secure.bettermeans.com/projects/1144
Choose another name, not another extension.
Once for the Instapaper subscription, once to buy the app from the third party developer (if it's not free)
"We are continuing to work with various ad providers and will add them to the list as they sign the terms..."

I hope them working with the various providers would make sure that the information they recieve about each user isnt gathered or resold in some way, or heck even allows a user to opt out from having their information logged but in the end a little bribe never hurts to have facebook look the other way.
I got away scot-free. Good times.
Interesting.. Can it call the U.K?
FastCustomer Waits On Hold For You
In fact, I'm even working on some of the super-low-budget stuff we talked about at FOO East.
Depends - .me for personal services, .info for information, .ly if you want to appeal to the hip crowd ;)

Kidding aside, it might be worth thinking of a different name. .com is the "default" internet extension, and getting people to use a different TLD is a bit of an uphill battle
You have to prove yourself in that period. If they're hooked they will let you do anything. Also of course you have to be lucky to find open-minded managers.

In my experience if they see that you are a valuable resource management accepts A LOT.
> "serving entrepreneurial hackers "

well, one can make an argument how revolution is a social hack, and vice versa - hacking in software industry has frequently been a particular manifestation of general phenomena of people not wanting to just go with the flow of the established system, and wanting to change it instead. Open source movement ~20 years ago or WikiLeaks today seems to be very illustrations of it.
Five Key Design Decisions That Affect Security in Web Applications
As years go by, we discover that even Nicholas II had his good sides, and his regime was certainly better than its replacement. And the last czar was much more of an autocrat than Mubarak ever hoped for.

In any case, what I'm taking issue with is that the media show huge bias by immediately jumping on any rumors of Mubarak's resignation (self fulfilling prophecies, anyone?), that all anti-government protesters are portrayed as noble heroes (even though a significant proportion are certainly West-hating Islamic radicals), that all of Mubarak's supporters are paid thugs etc. This is a huge political morass and something that doesn't belong on HN.
> Perhaps the problem is that there isn't really anywhere that serves that niche.

The problem is that politics is poisonous for most sites. It really quickly degrades into the same rehashed arguments and name calling and other garbage.
Layout and Presentation Advice for the UX Designer
This is probably the best advice you're going to get on this.
Did they give him HAL 9000's voice or am I crazy?
btw, contact me, i've got some Ruby/Rails projects/work every now and then. kmc16sq@tempalias.com
Amazon closing Texas facility over tax dispute
For the downvoters, zeteo is referencing a logical fallacy used by the parent comment to his: http://www.fallacyfiles.org/loadques.html
I agree. Using the truthiness of non-boolean values has always seemed questionable in any language (Javascript is possibly the worst offender). For many statically typed languages this is caught as a syntax error, which is nice for those of use prone to occasionally typos.
Yeah, this is very true. Probably the route I'm going to go, just need to finish my thesis and clean the code up beyond "academic grade" :)
This is an interesting question because as-is, I don't think anyone can really understand what it means to be someone else. For this purpose, I can say my consciousness is something that exists currently and has memories from before, but there is no way to verify that the memories were recorded by the same consciousness. There could have been a different person that no longer exists.

Perhaps a good alternate angle is to consider the “copy” (rather than “replacement”) proposition someone else mentioned: let's say a perfect copy of you could be made (i.e. the entirety of a consciousness is somehow material). Are the two consciousnesses linked somehow? Or are they completely separate despite thinking exactly alike, having the same memories &c.? If they are separate, what happens if the original is killed? Then, the next logical step is to ask how that is different from a consciousness transplant.

It's wild stuff. Or seems like it to a thus-far (presumed) single consciousness.
Concrete Mathematics by Don Knuth. If you want specifically graph theory, I'd suggest Introduction to Graph Theory by Doug West.
Thousands of New Stars Emerge in Glowing Nebula
The first real command I learned was how to find and replace in a file:

:%s/oldWord/newWord/g

Since then I haven't looked back.
GoSave starts taking invite requests for new online shopping portal.
I'd say a developing grass-roots democratic revolution in the middle east is of supreme interest to most people here, as is evidenced by the stories being atop the front page.

Don't worry, we're not turning into reddit. This is just some momentous shit (pardon my french), and it would be pretty silly not to have breaking developments up here.
Just got my example call, that rooster call is horrifying.

But very cool, what service are you using for the calling? It sent the example phone call within seconds to Toronto.
Then Graham is wrong. I appreciate the effort he puts in and that his heart is in the right place, but the metrics I've seen from him aren't compelling (for instance, /classic, compared to just comparing front pages with archive.org and --- particularly --- which threads generate the most heat).

And, sorry, but I've been watching conversations like this one for something like 3.5 years now, and this is a real issue.
Twitter is used by techies, and the media/PR.

I'd say it's safe to say a large amount of people have tried twitter, but their retention rate is abysmal.
Its not actually a wedding planning site, its just a collection of their existing tools packaged together as a something you can use to plan your wedding. Nothing new here but interesting marketing strategy nonetheless.
Evidence? Yes, some of the protesters have been using Facebook and Twitter, but were they a large proportion of the total, and how could this have been significant when the Internet itself was shut down over there? Don't confuse the fact that you found out a lot about the protests on social media, with the social media having a lot of influence upon the Egyptian events.
Not yet. But probably soon. Right now it is our friends who want intros.
There may be a correlation between porn and social anxiety
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It seems just an incorrect reappropriation of “theism”, really.

I could make a similar argument, though without a religious undertone, about a belief in a greater-than-whole (or struggle for one, if that sounds better).
From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1921576:

I think it's iniquitous that people here on HN, in all good
faith, provide links to PDFs, and then scribd purloins the
content. The original authors may never know that another
site is providing their content without their permission.
The result is that although scribd claim to honor take-down
requests, such requests rarely materialise, even if the
content originators would prefer it not to be there.

This is one aspect of HN that genuinely makes me feel grubby.
Hooray flashblock.
Its all done via twilio: http://www.twilio.com/
Everybody thinks the things they are passionate about are important enough "for us all to shift focus for a moment".
Virtual Pet Daemon
"...heading off the Rails..."
From a 2007 story in the Washington Post, "Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10... :

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in
Lafayette Square last month.

"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college
senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the
hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little
helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

"I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer
said. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that
mechanical, or is that alive?' "

That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar
sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some
suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools,
perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.
People tend to have much stronger opinions/prejudice on politics than on fitness.

It's interesting to read non-hacking discussions in HN when they are from a perceptive (vs. judgmental) standpoint. As it is now, there isn't really much difference between Egypt threads here and in Reddit (yeah, I know we're not supposed to compare. HN isn't Reddit yet, but HN geo-political discussions are)
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For those who are interested, here is my pitch at the November NYTM: http://meetjennings.com/uncategorized/rooster-am-presentatio...
This current round is not officially over AFAIK. Dave wants around 10 accelerator companies in this batch.
Is that from the same people who brought you AllInOneClass?
I would upvote you 10 times if I could, if only because your comment should be pinned at the top of this thread. The fundamentals of this study are very flawed, and anyone reading the article should know as much.
I am reading through the entire article, pausing every other paragraph to tell myself "This would make a kick ass movie"
This is interesting. I'm in the process of getting a merchant account from BNZ in New Zealand, they are a subsidiary of NAB. They are the only option here for billing in USD but at least they have an actual product for it called CurrencySelect and it seems like this is a workable solution and nobody is too confused by it. The fees are pretty high though - starting at 8.1% per transaction and only going down starting from $25K in volume.
Obama pitches plan to free 500MHz, raise $28B, and bring 4G to everyone
I was confused about that as well. It feels as though Engadget just found a video of something superficially similar and tagged it on, because it seems irrelevant to the technology they're describing.
Rails WAS configured to accept the token OR a custom header, relying on the fact that custom headers can't be created cross domain. The patch fixes this, by requiring BOTH. Hmmm... So how do they know what the custom header is? Are they typically static?
Hands-on: Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate
He doesn't assume all that much. In his book The Singularity Is Near Kurzweil looks at the physical limits of computing, to determine how long we can go before Moore's Law comes to an end. He concludes that we've got another fifty years, or possibly seventy if certain technologies prove feasible. As I recall he doesn't count on quantum computing much, but does think we'll manage reversible computing to solve heat dissipation issues.

That's just computation, but computation drives much of our other technology, and will even more once computers get smarter than people. Kurzweil estimates the timeframe for that based on a range of estimates for the computational capacity of the brain.
I agree with you on that. AI has advanced beyond rigid structures and scripts. Using a system that operates with fuzzy logic or building a neural network and teaching it, 'till you the programmer can't make heads or tails of its computations and derivations is a wonderful thing indeed.

As an aside: like Penrose chose quantum physics (a mysterious thing) to explain consciousness (another mysterious thing), and therefor didn't succeed to convince others, so we should guard against using a fuzzy, complex, black-box, dynamic system (a mysterious thing) to explain (or fully model) consciousness and human intelligence.

We just replaced the wonder with another wonder :)