skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Humm I'm not to sure if I want to tweet who should make coffee in our company (or any other task like that). I can't imagine using this with friends either (who is the designated driver today, for instance) as I see no point in posting that to my stream. But hey, I hope there are people that like to post such nonsense in public :)
Financial apps are a different story. I interned on Pay.gov in college, and then spent the first 2 years of my career at a financial software startup. The standards are much different when you're handling money (or avionics, or medical devices, or anything that's "mission critical"). And even in the finance world, the standards vary a lot depending on whether you're doing analytics or transaction processing.

But while that software will never go away, it becomes a smaller part of the whole software industry. Much of the interesting growth is in areas of software that have nothing to do with money, other than being able to make it. It's silly to apply the same standards to software that processes $10M/sec (as one program I once wrote did) as to software that lets you throw virtual sheep at each other.
Though the design may be minimalist (though arguably, hipmunk is just well designed, minimalist or not), I seriously doubt that is their formula.

The success and buzz around hipmunk is that they have provided a better way to search for flights. That they've done it with a cute logo and minimalist design is maybe a small part of the success, but their ability to create buzz and to create great products can't be overlooked.
The Groupon Paradox
Why would the thief suing be a hard sell? If it’s really becoming a problem for him paying a lawyer some money to file the necessary paperwork would be no problem.
How is it different than all of the other services that do essentially the same thing?
You wouldn't steal a vaacum cleaner, but you might be inclined to download and print one.
The source and type of funding you get often determines what kind of creature your company is.

If you get valley funding from super angels who know the IPO market is dead and their most likely exit is strategic acquisition, then creating product, growth and becoming a credible threat or opportunity is key.

If you are self funded or raise money from your biz school professor or an angel who built a profitable business, then your focus is going to be on building what the author calls a "company".

The nature of funding in the NE vs the Valley has a huge impact on the kinds of businesses that are built there.

Outside the States the difference in approach is startling - in most countries funding is never an option. Most business is designed to provide a living wage and "failing fast" is not a mantra because it means starving quickly.
The recording was done by the thief himself. I guess distributing someones video could be a copyright violation, but wouldn't be criminal. However activating camera/microphone remotely might be considered a wiretap.

Another thought: suppose the thief sold the laptop immediately, and the person recorded is guilty of buying a used laptop.
Error sends Facebook traffic through China
SICK New Logo for Tech Startup
Another sign of a bubble: QQQQ Becomes QQQ Again
Slightly off topic but still relevant: There's actually legislation in some states that would permit the police to chase you if they see you purposefully trying to evade a DUI checkpoint. It differs by each state(or municipality?), but New Mexico seems to have enacted that:

http://www.albuquerquecriminallawyerblog.com/2009/09/uturn-t...
DataStax Shakes Up Hadoop with NoSQL-Based Distro
I might be using the term "passive safety" incorrectly, but I wouldn't call a design "safe" if, even after criticality ended, there was still enough heat/pressure to cause explosions that subject nearby people to high levels of radiation.

There's no doubt in my mind that Fukushima is far better designed and in much better operating order than Chernobyl (a terrible comparison for a number of reasons) was.
Serotonin-lacking male mice not picky about sex of their mates
Agreed. Though I don't find it too surprising. The UK is merely a fifth of the size of the US, has localization requirements, and has a conservative populace in relation to tech issues (where's the UK's Reddit, Facebook, or Y Combinator that has gathered serious traction or name recognition?)
Who Is Research In Motion's PlayBook For?
I'm really new to this game, but it just cannot image how going around talking about an idea could be remotely productive. I've got a lot of ideas - so what? It seems to me that if you fall into that category, then this is probably good advice. On the other hand, it's probably not a bad idea to set out some sort of target for a prototype or whatever so you don't spend all of your time and resources in development. It just seems like a better conversation starter to say something like "Look at this!" rather than "I've got this great idea!"
"The best part is that the person currently in possession of Bao's machine has no idea that the victim has access. For now, Bao's just having his "lulz," and doesn't seem terribly concerned with reclaiming his property."

This is not true.

The thief has offered an "apology" of sorts: http://bostinnovation.com/2011/03/23/dont-steal-a-computer-f...

And Mark Bao has his laptop back and "plans to sell the returned Apple and donate the proceeds to the Red Cross Japan fund." http://blogs.forbes.com/kashmirhill/2011/03/22/to-catch-a-co...
Amazingly, MySpace’s Decline Is Accelerating
Pearls of Money Wisdom
'Hypocrites'? I'm shocked, shocked that you would make this kind of digital judgment without first obtaining proof beyond a reasonable doubt!
Ultimately, the same sort of self-help Mark has used for recovery could be used by criminals for identity-theft against others.

How? Preload a cheap laptop with software to let you monitor it. (This could be made way more sophisticated, and hard to eradicate, than a online backup subscription.) Leave it somewhere to be stolen. Monitor its later use for information that could allow stealing many times the initial laptop value from its later users. (Those later users may in some instances be the laptop thief, but could more often be others who thought they were buying a cheap used laptop.)

This is a good reason to beware deals that seem too good to be true, when purchasing used computer goods.
"may indicate" usually means "lets wildly speculate without evidence"
Avie was responsible for a lot of the Darwin code. Bertrand for a lot of the Aqua and AppKit code from when it was still NeXT Workspace. He also ran the OS X team after Avie left Apple up until today.
reddit is not about minimalism, it's all about community, respect and "treating users well".
I've seen some of them posted on-line in the past. Do you know if Stanford still do that?

thx
Getting In Shape For The Sport of Data Science
Original iPads still selling well
Video:"The Pentagon Labyrinth" 10 essays to get you through it
Woah, slow down here. Optimizing for grades is NOT a bad or stupid strategy, especially when you're young. By doing well academically, you put yourself in a position to do well in the future. Sure, pursue your interests and shoot for real accomplishments--so that when you're applying to college with those real accomplishments you don't need to explain why you didn't get good grades. It's just putting yourself in the best possible position to be rewarded for your work.

Don't short change yourself. Do your best in school, but be pragmatic and work hard outside of it too.
Theme nokia 7230 Facebook
The word "hypocrites" would only apply if Mark Bao had done something that the legal system would do, like send the guy to jail.
Aren't controller level tests called functional tests? I'm still new at this, but I thought unit tests are to the model as functional tests are to the controller. And integration tests mimic user behavior.
I program quite a bit in C#, which I like, as well as in dynamic language such as PHP, Perl, Python, etc.

I avoid the use of DI in C#; it's not a "limitation of a static language" but it's a choice that people make. I find that wonderfully concise and maintainable code can be written in C#. Some of the benefits of DI can be had through careful use of the static scope in desktop applications and of the request scope in ASP.NET applications. There are all sorts of tricks you can do to improve testability in a system of this sort.

Testability is a good thing, in and of itself, but you've got to weigh the cost of bulking up your code. In a case like this it may make sense to make the unit of testability larger.

I see everything in a program, including lines of codes, methods, classes, files, tests to be a liability. Each artifact is like a puppy, you not only have to create it but you're committed to maintain it in the future. I've used automated unit tests to create systems that I could never have built otherwise, but there comes a point where the benefit of tests exceeds the cost and when the artifact count increases dramatically (as when you create mock objects) that it's time to consider the economics.
Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day
(it took me awhile to realize that OP was probably joking. sorry)
Because the wealthiest 10% paying a larger share of the total taxes is compatible with each of those wealthy individuals paying a relatively small individual percentage of their income in taxes...

Did you read the linked article? It measures the ratio (% of taxes paid) / (% of income earned). In this US, this ratio is 1.35%. In Norway, it's 0.95. Inequality would increase the denominator, not the numerator. With a flat tax (at 35%, 47% or 59%), this ratio would always be 1.

Perhaps you are confusing overall tax burden (taxation levels) with progressivity (the derivative of tax rate w.r.t. income)?

As for positional/signalling goods/status (e.g., a Porsche that no one else owns), they are always a zero sum game. There is no avoiding this. The most you can do is equalize incomes and allow status to be unequally distributed via other mechanisms (good looks, athletic ability).
Yeah, after you posted a video of the guy on YouTube, you're the one who's embarrassed. You hate publicity that much, huh? Does anyone else not buy this?
To Break a Bad Habit, Be The Lion.
The fact that a lot of of Serlet's work also appears in iOS renders that line of reasoning largely unintelligible.
Sets are unibags (E.W. Dijkstra)
It does not bother me that my unit tests can't tell me the power just went down or my graphic card is going up in flames. That's not their job at all.

So that's not an issue at all, that's not relevant. The best thing tests can do (and what they should do) is ensure your code behaves "correctly" in the face of invalid or corrupted data, which an unexpected JSON structure would certainly be.
Disclaimer: FF user turned chromite

I enjoy the speed and simplicity of chrome. For development work, I actually prefer the webkit DOM inspector to firebug. I was never a heavy plugin user to begin with, so firefox never tempted me much there. I think that if you're not planning on using plugins, the core browser features of chrome are more polished (again, this is just my opinion). If you're a heavy plugin user though, ff or opera is the way to go.
It would be a hard sell to a judge or jury. A prospective lawyer will know this, and may not want to sink time (and/or money) into it. You can sue someone for just about anything, but that doesn't mean you'll win.
That is no indication... wouldn't someone who was trying to sell a stolen computer try to wipe it first? Not all thieves are totally stupid.
How One Group of Startups & Investors Traded the Elevator Pitch for the Ski Lift
This is why you write a business plan, no matter how rudimentary - to think through these questions.
You don't have to tweet the decision/outcome, but if you do the tweet is an @reply to the person chosen for the task, not a public tweet.
if you put enough hard work and with dedication , anybody can make anything. remember nothing is impossible
Are we starting to see a reversion to the paid model as the best way to sell software and software services ? Personally, I hope so.
Strength isn't in numbers
It's hardly fair to compare Bitcoin to credit cards in terms of "instant gratification", unless you turn back the clock to when you said, Oh, there are such things as credit cards? Cool, how do I get one? I'm confident that the difficulty of acquiring your first bitcoin will compare favorably to the difficulty of acquiring your first credit card.
9 Reasons Why The Killer Tablet App Is The Browser
The loss of Intel compiler support is really telling. IA-64 leans very heavily on its compiler to get good performance -- it's almost as much a compiler project as a silicon one.
You're telling me that if you take my camera out of my back pocket while I'm not looking, take a picture of yourself with it, then give it back to me, I am not allowed to publish that picture? Under what law would you sue? In the US you may have a claim under a libel law or similar, but it would be hard to convince a jury or judge that I was libeling you with a picture you took with stolen property.
Long-Neglected Experiment Gives New Clues to Origin of Life
3 idiots on a roll for the picture is better than Bollywood
I think people need to just get over it. It's a free service. Almost every good, free service on the internet has some amount of annoying advertising.
But why? That would never be the case in Germany. A personality rights violation is a personality rights violation. A thief doesn’t lose those rights just because he is a thief.

I cannot for the life of me imagine that the US judiciary is that unprofessional.
Knowing the business. If we ask a bunch of questions and they have the answers at their fingertips because they understand the domain really well, that's a good sign.

An old boss of mine is a design judge for a student engineering competition. Often times he will ask a team for a specific piece of information about their project, only to have the team pull out a giant binder and start shuffling through looking for the answer. At this point he tells them "If I ask you to tell me your girlfriends phone number and you pull out your phone book and start searching for it, you're probably not in love"

I think the same sentiment applies here
Hardware. I have a small device that reads digital sensors and outputs data via RS232 serial. Made first dollar (actually about $100 of them) with first sale.
It would be fun use hebrew this way, in a talk about dynamic languages including tuples.

I don't know enough to take it on though, just thinking of that numerology scene from Pi.
I'm embarrassed because this is the second time that I did something that, to me, was trivial, and it gets a bunch of press and hits Hacker News.

I'm embarrassed because there is a disproportionality between {interesting things that I do} and {dumb things that I do that somehow get a ton of press} and I feel like doing the stuff in the latter category (and getting publicized about it on HN) bins me in a category of people who do trivial and noninteresting things.

And I'm embarrassed because an article about PG is currently second to this one.

I don't hate publicity. I only do when it's for stuff like this and it's on HN, which I think should be for more intelligent news than this.
"We receive about 100 status updates per day". 5 years later, the average number of tweets per day is 140 MILLION.

(According to http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/numbers.html)
"pedantic", not to be pedantic
I can understand Microsoft and Red Hat, because it takes actual work for an OS to be intimately aware of the architecture. But for Oracle wouldn't it just be running a cross compiler and testing on another set of boxes?
Quotes are not supposed to be paraphrased.
Sigh. I wish someone would solve this problem already. I mean, some startup to do to payments what heroku did to rails deployment.

All the recurring-billing systems only solve half the problem: the logic for recurring-billing, but it is still fairly problematic to get the other pieces in place. There should be a way to collect payments on your site without having to setup a merchant account, et. al. Does anyone know what the regulatory hurdles to something like this are?
Everything I've learned about casual podcasting for MetaFilter
And yet craigslist seems to have done a fair amount of world-changing...
I don't think this is what he meant. After all, PG does have a PhD. I think he's referring to those multiple-masters degrees grad students, or the 10+ year grad student and still no PhD...
USPTO Gives Google Patent For Doodles
Why is it #1 HN entry? It's a sincere question.
Not necessarily. My friend and cofounder is one of the smartest people I know, but even when he talks about things I know he is an expert at (as demonstrated by his skill), he's often a bit verbose.

Personally, I can generate concise statements (and I'm good at it when I try), but the first couple of times I verbalize an idea I'm usually somewhat verbose. I make an explicit effort to figure out a concise way to say things once I've noticed that I'll probably be expressing the same idea again (and when I write). Perhaps other people become significantly more concise over time without effort, but I'd estimate my baseline compression rate is only something like 10% (whereas when I explicitly compress I can often get 30% or better).

I think the difference is that some people think very verbally and linearly, whereas I tend to think more visually and abstractly. A lot of the time, I have to translate the ideas in my head from these somewhat amorphous concepts or visual ideas into English (or German, or code, or whatever).
It was mostly word of mouth and inbound marketing. I also reached out to plenty of book bloggers in the early days of the site.
I agree. In the long run Detroit has potential. But before they can make any economic strides they need to fix their bloated corrupt city government.

If you want to make a real 100 year bet on Detroit, buy some real estate now, it has never been cheaper. In some places you could buy an entire city block for a few grand. You could will it to your grandchildren. I've considered it, but haven't convinced my wife... yet.
sweet / but I keep on loosing my Twurns..
This isn't in support of Chrome or to down FF at all, but for ad blocking I've always just blocked ad networks' DNS addresses from resolving. Just point my router to a vps running DNSmasq and pull down the latest entries from easylist every week and bam - global ad blocking on your network. It has the advantage of allowing blocking on all browsers/systems. Good if you have non-technical peeps using your network too, as it'll save bandwidth and deliver nicer looking pages.
Why is the tendency to introduct concepts, and often leave out the insight? Why don't professors start with insight and generalize concepts?
Advertisements don't necessarily have to devalue a product that's free to the end user. It depends on how and where those ads are displayed.

Twitter is a good example of a product that could certainly use less obtrusive ad placement (i.e. no "dickbar"). However, it's possible to have noticeable advertisements that do not impede the user experience. Google, Bing, and Facebook are all great examples of this.

I realize the article is about more than just advertisements in free software. The common outcomes of free that Ryan speaks of are spot on in my opinion. However, I do feel that free, based on advertising, and good are not mutually exclusive.
i had chained api before, and removed it for shortness.

your point on api name is good. which name would you suggest ? something standard and readable and im sold :)
Well I think there is a major difference, you can be a perpetual grad student but get good stuff done. Usually you end up as a post doc for a while but never get a real prof position for whatever political reason. I know a lot of good grad student that are in school after almost a decade (in grad school).

So the ineffectual part is a major difference.

There also people like me, sticking around universities for a while, using public funds to code cool projects that wouldn't happen anywhere else because it's not something that would be commercializable. I wouldn't call myself ineffectual ;)
Could you define middle class, just so we know what you are talking about? I'm not particularly worried about a lack of middle class jobs if the primary cause is merely inflation of the definition of "middle class".

Also, I'd be curious to see stats on time variation on income mobility.
This is great news. Security experts have been trying to beat everyone over the head with how fundamentally broken and untrustworthy this system is. Now that the theoretical has been proven, maybe we can take a more serious look at moving on to something that works.
Sorry I thought the owner remotely started the video camera - but accessing the recording remotely could still be considered wiretapping
Time Scales
I work from home so I like using both, dual-screen setup in "office" and laptop for when I want a change of scenery. I'm definitely slower on the laptop but it's worth it to get away from the damned desk when I want to & Dropbox + mercurial takes care of all my sync issues.
This is remarkable, even to me. The main point: if you're doing a startup, things take a long time. Longer than you'd expect. And overnight success is anything but.
Measuring Radiation With Dots And Sound (xkcd on NPR)
Freemium is an excellent model to get healthy returns, but it is somewhat limiting. Twitter clearly wants to the next billion dollar ubiquitous company, a la Facebook and Google, not just another barely profitable mid range company like Skype or Flickr.

Of course, that is a gamble (MySpace had the same dreams at one point), can lead to suckier products, and Twitter isn't exactly nailing the execution, but I can see why they don't want to charge.
Unfortunately, that story has a rather bad ending[1], but I guess most people don't read that far.

"Finally, and most disturbingly, Jeff was not heard from again. I personally e-mailed him for permission to run his story on ZUG, but after an initial response, I never heard from him again. All of his Web sites have come down, and he is nowhere to be found."

[1] http://www.zug.com/pranks/powerbook/index04.html
My guess is that there are (possibly sizable) chunks of Oracle that are written in assembly and have to be maintained for each platform.
Personality rights. How the image was taken is not relevant to whether or not it can legally be published, especially if you do so for commercial purposes.
You are comparing assets to cash. The total assets in the US are about $188 Trillion, of which the Forbes 400 only own $1.54 (0.8%).

http://rutledgecapital.com/2009/05/24/total-assets-of-the-us...
How Carrots Became the new Junk Food
I think this is true, but I don't think it's the whole story.

What I see is that the best entrepreneurs understand that it's ok to leave 70% of the potential value on the table in order to have a business that's more explainable to investors and customers.
So, why are you not going for it? It doesn't sound like such a long shot to achieve that (yes, and I know, even with that it's still a big jump from a comfy corporate job).
Yahoo Introduces Search Direct.
Ask HN: Getting started with BOSH and XMPP
Hi everyone,

I would consider myself an intermediate to advanced PHP programmer. In my own projects, I would like to get started using XMPP to do some real time features, including showing online/sleep status to users on the site.

I'm wondering if someone could point me in the right direction (links) as to how I go about doing this. I have ejabberd set up on my Linux server, and as far as I understand, it has BOSH built in. My problem lies with managing sessions.

If my site is built in PHP, how can I connect that session to the BOSH connection? I don't want them to sign in to the XMPP service separately- I'd like to have it operate like facebook's chat.

I'm failing to find resources on Google, because I don't know the exact lingo, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!