skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A couple of years ago, a couple of prescription drug addicts stole some lawn tools and GPSes from our unfortunately unlocked garage. The local police (we live in a relatively affluent suburb) ended up coordinating with other local police departments and eventually caught the thieves. The police office I worked with thought that these same two guys were likely responsible for over a hundred similar property crimes. One is now in prison, and I'm not sure about the other guy. Unfortunately, my specific loss was not one for which they were prosecuted. Otherwise, I think I could make a claim against the 37 cents/hour (or whatever) those guys are paid in prison.

I'm told that the 80/20 rule applies to petty crime -- a handful of semi-pro thieves are responsible for a majority of the thefts. Given this, it seems that catching a few people who steal laptops, bikes, purses, etc. would actually have a significant impact on local crime levels. A problem with my particular case is that the thieves had already gotten rid of most of the stuff they had stolen, so proving in court that they had committed the crime would have been difficult. How viable of a start-up idea it would be to create "bait" laptops? The company would offer a turnkey service to law enforcement agencies. A special laptop would be provided to the police. It would appear normal at first glance but would record audio (and video?) and transmit GPS locations via a cellular connection. The police would place this laptop in an unlocked vehicle and leave. When the laptop moved, they would be notified via services provided by the start-up. From there, the police could either apprehend the thieves quickly or wait to see where they took the laptop (to get probable cause for a search warrant?). The back-end system would then produce court-ready evidence for the prosecution -- printable maps of activity, times, etc. Perhaps audio/video snippets ready to be played in court?

I did some quick Googling and could not find such a service. I wonder how one goes about selling to law enforcement agencies? Would they be able to make a purchase without 17 visits from a sales rep? Is this even a viable product? Thinking about my own community, I would love to hear about my police department working to reduce random crimes like these. There have been a couple of murders since we moved here a few years ago, but those have both been committed by family members of the victim. My greatest local crime risk is petty property theft.
I actually fear that the introduction of this 'full screen apps' feature is going to cause the death windowed usage on the Mac as well. The number of people I've wanted to slap for saying 'what's the point of having a big screen if you can't maximize your windows??'
If their idea was so easily replicated then they probably shouldn't be creating the business in the first place.

But, just for fun since some people can't answer the question, let me throw some curve balls that might entice someone away from their current startup.

1. Maybe you're approached by a stealth startup in the same space as you, but still different. Their approach to the same market is one you hadn't thought of and you can see the value of the team behind the product and your addition strengthens your over-all endeavor.

2. The person approaching you has a huge network and an interesting product idea. You can replicate it, however, you know their support network and media connections can help drive the success of the application.

3. The person approaches you with enough money that you are willing to give up your product idea.

4. The person offers you a salary and although you can replicate the idea on your own, the salary acts as a way to cut your risk of engaging a new startup.

5. Not all developers are visionaries. They may be able to take an idea from a simple concept and write an application, but it takes more than a well developed application to make a successful product. Industry insight, market expertise, sales experience, these are all valuable skills that drive success.

Feel free to comment if any of these would put you over the tipping point.
OK that makes sense. Fortunately for MS, this is the least of their WP7 worries right now.
My mother taught me never to take out valuables, especially money, in crowded public places. Isn't this a common teaching, such as "never cross the road without checking for cars"?
There's Zepto.js.

For desktop browsers, use the Google CDN and your users probably won't download a thing. And for free, you get sane DOM interaction, and an enormous body of work papering over the differences between browsers.
I think those limitations are from the way WP7 restricts access to the live camera view. I hope they fix that soon. A lot of cool scenarios can be unlocked if they do.
Is there a version of Poe's Law for pedantry?
This is scary thought. I am a facebook developer. We invest lot of time, sweat and money creating apps. If there is something not right, you contacting the the developer to give them some time fix the issues sounds reasonable. but pulling the plug is sure a scary thought. Everybody wants the users to have good experience. It is face books users. Not ours. While agreeing to that you need some balance. It's the apps made facebook what it is today.
I think it holds true for major US cities (though usually you're just being panhandled instead of conned). The exception to this is generally people asking for directions This seems much more common if you're on a bike, which if you think about it is pretty clever. I wonder if there is a tourism book out there somewhere that advises you to ask bikers for directions over other people.
> But, the rule is, if somebody doesn't have anything better to do than talk to you, they're probably after your money.

That could be a rule in popular tourist spots, other than that I prefer to think that most of population of the world doesn't want to hurt me.
We should definitely make this clearer in the infographic but the 1% and 4.5% numbers represent the conversion rates for those two variations. They are not the INCREASE in conversion rates. Hence going from 1% to 4.5% is an increase of 350% and that's why they get $4,500 in sales instead of $1,000 in sales. Does that make sense?
From the post, I'm assuming one of the victims is limedaring who just a week ago launched her site http://www.weddinginvitelove.com/, which was covered in this item with almost 500 points: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2227770
The drive would have to either be a device that's already supported by Apple's EFI or it would have to include an EFI option ROM.
The signal is weak but extremely detectable.

It's exactly like the signal for a positive response; in general, click through rates for various things are around one or two tenths of a percent. If Ad A is getting a tenth of a percent and Ad B is getting two tenths of a percent, Ad B is clearly way better.

If 99.5% of people give negative feedback for Ad A, and 99.8% of people give negative feedback for Ad B, then Ad A is clearly way better.
Body Language Lessons for Office Leaders
The difference between male and female entrepreneurs
Awesome! Let us know what you start writing for inPulse...

- Eric from inPulse
It used to be an optional upgrade.
Innovations in Sandy Bridge are due to Intel, not Apple. All PC vendors use the same Intel processors. CPU/GPU "fusion" sounds like a great idea until you realize that it necessarily involves a weak GPU, which negates any benefit of the close coupling.
I don't really get this viewpoint, you can load JQuery once then it's cached. Is a barely noticeable load time difference really worth the extra power and time saving you get from JQuery?
Well, that sounds great, but how do I do that?
I have the dell 3007wfp, which does not have display port, the 3008wfp does.
[edit: read that you said it was removed in the 5th edition. makes the rest of this comment invalid, I guess]

You delivered! Thank you for the effort.

This what that section says - "The dollar sign ($)
and the underscore (_) are permitted anywhere in an identifier. The dollar sign is intended for use only in
mechanically generated code."

This seems contradictory. Do they mean to say that $ (only $, not $x) is intended for use in mechanically generated code? Doesn't that make variables $0 [and so on] actually valid? And if not, then doesn't that makes $0 an invalid variable.
Finally, why don't javascript interpreters throw an error when you try to name a variable $? Is there a reason they're ALL (v8, nitro, spidermonkey) lax to the ecma standard?

All a little confusing, but trivial enough to ignore, I suppose...

[Also, this somewhat validates my choice of using underscore.js + mixins for my code. sweet.]
(Think MTV's Real World, but for geeks.)

Oh, boy... The idea of some TV executives out there, champing at the bit to create a reality TV show about entrepreneurs is either f!#@ng scary or LOL funny.

I can just see it now... "Survivor: YC" or "The Entrepreneur: Paul Graham Edition." Even better: "Entrepreneur Death Match: Paul Graham v. Steve Case." And the inevitable "VC Revenge Stunts, hosted by Sean Parker."

"Mark Zuckerberg Goes Back To College" might be entertaining though.
Like this kind of stuff would never happen in NYC, LA, Detroit, Baltimore...
I think there's a problem that this is trying to solve but I don't think it solves it very well. The problem I have is that it's hard to share hardware between computers. What I want is to be able to plug all of my monitors, storage, printers, mice, keyboards, etc. into a bus along with my computers and then be able to decide via software which pieces to connect. This makes the situation better because you can hook all of your peripherals together and then plug one cable into a computer to use them all. If it were a switched network instead of only allowing chaining I think this would be great, but maybe the technology for that isn't cheap enough yet.
PostgreSQL Performance Analysis Example - Small Table
jQuery is not 238KB in any form that you would ship to a user. It is a 29KB minified and gzipped - which is a world of difference and perfectly acceptable for mobile use (likely smaller than most images you'll be using on your site, for example).
If it were wireless 10Gbs throughput that could be useful.
This definitely solves the problem of slow, inefficient external hard drives. Especially with Firewire dying. USB2 is extremely slow for today's computing if you think about it...
This is going to kill me to say this because I have been using freebsd since 2.x but the lack of commercial support from the likes of Dell really hurts. Recently I couldn't find the cli utility to manage a raid card because the ports system had an out of date location for the source. I was reduced to shutting down a production server just to flip some configuration bits. Freebsd is absolutely rock solid as an OS. The support from certain hardware vendors is a different story.
10W power to devices downstream!

What voltage does Thunderbolt run on?
Might be good if you're cash-strapped.

There are absolutely legit CPA offers out there, and sometimes it's a good deal. I don't know tapjoy personally, but I do some CPA deals online for brands you're familiar with. If the customer isn't known/predicable they get the absolute bottom of the barrel ad inventory until we know whether it converts at all. If it doesn't convert at all, we cut you loose. If it does, I squeeze every penny I can out of you, and hopefully everyone's happy.

If you can, it's worth investing time/money to learn the market yourself.
Not to mention that any developer worth his or her salt already knows to install Firebug, and everyone else doesn't need to.
These are off-prints of published papers, not his original notes - so why don't I just go top the library stacks and photocopy the original journal ?
I downloaded the minified version yesterday: 88kb. 1/3 the size of what you're claiming. You shouldn't be using the development version for production uses (no reason).
12 steps to 12 zeros
ATTENTION ALL HACKERS!
IF YOUR LOOKING FOR A NETWORK THAT HAS ENDLESS REVENUE POTENTIAL, THEN ITS TIME TO WORLDTIZE.
EMAIL ME YOUR RESUME AND ILL BE INVITING ONLY THE BEST OF THE BEST TO ATTEND A PRIVATE CONFERENCE DETAILING THE LAUNCH. 250,000 LOCATIONS LINKED TO THE SAME POOL CREATES THE MOST PROFITABLE BUSINESS MODEL IN EXISTENCE, GREATER THAN OIL. THE MEETING WILL TAKE PLACE IN SAN JOSE. GOOD LUCK TO ALL - GTV

Gstacks00@aol.com (zero zero)

PS - New York alone has over 30,000 potential hubs..keep in mind 250,000 is a small piece of the pie
It'll be great for pro video, but then USB 3 would be too and I have yet to own any of those devices. I hope it does better than Firewire, whose ad-hoc networking potential was never fully exploited.
Startup Weekend Delhi
Whole drive encryption (e.g. TCG Opal) has many drawbacks. Most importantly: it's "whole drive". There's no way to segregate individual user data and still get the benefits of hardware accelerated encryption. For systems that need segregated users (or even something like an unencrypted system volume with a single encrypted user), you need to toss encryption hardware into the upstream IO pipeline for any benefit. Sticking such hardware into the drive is too restrictive, and also raises the cost of each drive.

Furthermore, many chipsets (such as Nehalem and Sandy Bridge) have integrated AES acceleration that offer significant encryption/decryption performance improvements. While encrypted reads/writes will never match the performance of standard reads/writes, Nehalem and SB very much mitigate the performance hit and will still give multi-hundred MB/s throughput on fast SSDs.

If I were Apple, I'd ignore TCG Opal and focus on distributing Nehalem and Sandy Bridge throughout the product lineup. (Or, in the case of iOS devices, toss custom ASICS on the upstream IO pipeline.) Then you can offer true encrypted user segregation (or one encrypted user and an unencrypted OS volume) while still buying standard HDDs and SDDs in bulk. Win-win.
Startup Weekend Bangalore
My experience with 7 was that it made the clutter worse, not better, especially in the Microsoft Office programs (not part of 7 I know, but first time I'd used the most recent one coincided with the first use of 7. But I'm thinking of things like how the buttons and toolbars are laid out in the UI rather than drop shadows.

Didn't know that about dragging stuff to the top of the screen to maximise, that's a good tip, thanks.

How does Win 7 perform with multiple monitors? Good? Bad? No change?
Ah, good ol' At Ease. The crippled app-launching interface it provided seemed to be entirely responsible for the nearly universal hatred of Apple computers by students at my high school. Compared to Windows 95, At Ease gave the impression that Macs were only capable of performing simple tasks. Everyone was thrilled when the Macs were replaced with cheap Windows machines.
Wow, impressive! And based on actual data, as opposed to numbers I made up :-)
All this has happened before: Nvidia 3.0, ARM, and the fate of x86
Brent, US crude slip further on rumors Gaddafi shot
This is practically useless for my semi-rural location. The listed speeds are so wrong it's hilarious. Yes, Verizon is a service provider here, but the only option is Mobile Broadband which peaks at about 1.3Mbps on a good day. The site makes it look like everyone out here has FiOS.

And they broke the back button when you navigate to the 'Engage' page.

Edit: And I'm really trying to find a way to confirm or refute the info, but I see no 'yes' or 'no' icons it claims are there.
I currently run a free amazon micro instance with FreeBSD and haven't received any surprise charges. As long as you respect the boundaries of the free instance, you should have no problems.
Not quite keep customers from seeing ANY competitor ads. The amount of inventory that retargeting networks can bid on or buy from is limited so not all ad spaces that a potential customer sees are available to bid on. Also doesn't make sense for most networks to do so if they are getting paid on a CPC or CPA basis and buying on a CPM (as most do).
This service is well known in car theft investigations except the cameras are supplemented with the ability to remotely cut the engine. Follow the car until it's safe to storm it. Boom goes the dynamite. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_car
There's things you can make with will power and desire, there are things that need insane amounts of money and influence to make. This is the latter.
Some case studies of how people increased their traffic/conversions/growth would be awesome :)
This was predicted:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jesse_schell_when_games_invade_real...
NoSQL Handbook
The x41 had a basic performance problem - they switched to the smaller, iPod-like hard drives, as compared to the regular laptop hard drives that the X31 had. This was unfortunate - when I had the X31, I immediately replaced the stock drive with a 7200RPM drive, and the X31 screamed for years. Then, I got the X41, found out that the same surgery is unavailable, and promptly got rid of it.
Bummer. I worked at Accenture for 10 years and can understand the difficulties in claiming expenses, lost a lot of money over the years because it was just too damn hard sometimes.

Regarding the pay, the first few years I earned minimal salary but then it went up very fast. Very few people last that long though ;)
I'm wondering if "break-even" in this case means "typical VC 10X expected profit on investments"
True. I wouldn't say that it's because of the number of things built into the language though, it's more that Rubyists tend to care about software engineering, and so they'd rather do something the right way with full tooling than just throw up one page spaghetti scripts.
Care to elaborate on this trick? Google doesn't seem to find anything.
The article is specifically about buying advertising such as Daring Fireball RSS Feed Sponsorships and Google AdWords. They aren't saying "don't spend money" and definitely not "don't do marketing", in fact they're saying the opposite! They're just laying out that the ad market has changed and buying ads is no longer the deal it previously was.
It's valid to discount the Mini because when you buy a Mini you are paying for several very significant features that are lacking from a typical desktop. If you want to make a fair comparison to the Mini, look at home-theater PCs that will be similarly small and quiet.
Well, for laptops and mobile devices, it's a nice alternative to a docking station. Connect one wire into your monitor from your laptop. Then all your stationary stuff: external disks, Ethernet, audio, and legacy USB devices all connect through a hub on the monitor.
Google Invades Microsoft Territory, Integrates Google Docs With Office Products
as my friend Chris Johnson said: What they don't tell you is that their claim of 10 Gbps is faster than any cutting edge SATA3 chipset can handle. They also don't tell you that Intel delayed the release of USB3 chipsets on their motherboards until Thunderbolt (Intel made it) was ready so that the marketing geniuses could tout Thunderbolt as a superior option because the advertised speeds on the shiny packaging are higher. "Corporate collusion to force the Apple lemmings to another proprietary standard" at its finest.
So, honest question, would you not trade the internal CD-Rom for better battery life, more ram, lighter weight or some other tangible advantage?

The only situation where I could imagine an external CD-Rom to get in the way would be for watching DVDs on the go. But afaik even for that most people copy the movie to the harddrive beforehand - to prevent the drive from sucking the battery dry while watching.
Thanks.. I'll check out the vid.
This data is not accurate, at least for me.

After calling AT&T and Verizon just now (both listed) they tell me I can't subscribe because they don't offer service here.
CPython now in Mercurial
Safari does fullscreen just fine from my own testing.
I've watched a few episodes of the "Bait Car" show on cable and should have mentioned it above. The Wikipedia article suggests that my proposed scheme would not constitute entrapment. I wonder how much time would pass, on average, before a criminal would take a laptop from an unlocked vehicle in a "nice" part of town?
Shouldn't it be the Stanford of entrepreneurship :)
Possible, but not great. The Matrox and Diamond solutions have always been a bit hacky - USB simply can't push bits fast enough and there are lots of cases where you will max it out and stutter.

This is actual support for dual monitors, without compromises.
I believe the title is a bit misleading. Nowhere in the article was the name Facebook mentioned except in title.
you're right, that reminds me to sign up for that sex change operation. With the +400 vagina modifier, I should be able to stay at the top of hackernews all day. amirite? This is aimed squarely at the reparation voters btw. Tech is a meritocracy with exception to half the population. And I'm not even sexist, just kinda peeved at the hypocritical double standard. Women have it hard in startups. BULLSHIT. Everyone has it hard in startups. Women get all the attention in an attention economy, which is worth more than money.
The transfer rates of platter hard drives, even some SSDs, is still below the speed of USB 2.0, is it not?