skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks to me like it might be a mnemonic text compression scheme, not encrypted text. I've known one person who used pictograms as mnemonic memory aids. I think this man was using the first letter of words as mneumonic aids to each word in his note. Therefore, each letter has a context sensitive meaning that reminded him of the text of his note. However, don't assume he could spell -- he may have heard the wrong sounds for the beginning of words and therefore may misspell even the first letters of a word. While most people get at least the first letter of a word correct, I know a few who that seem to have an auditory equivalent of dyslexia and make mistakes there too.

In that vein, the key will be the numbers and related letters around them, especially the repeated ones. The numbers are likely not encoded since the meaning of the rest of the text is obscure.

For example, "E 71" "E 74" and "E 75" on page 1 might mean Interstate (or "Enterstate") 71, 74 & 75. Then the trailing "NCBE" could mean "nice camping by interstate (enterstate)" or "no collecting by exit" or, well, practically anything. Without knowing a lot more about the man and his life, it would be impossible to even begin to guess.

Final insight. Page 1 is organized and formatted nicely, and appears like it might have been done on lined paper. It is probably a copy of some original notes about things important for him to remember. If this is really a mnemonic compression scheme, then this page will be the rosetta stone. It would be interesting to know whatever became of page(s) 2 and later of his transcribed notes (nobody denotes a page as page 1 unless there's more than one page). The notes page is more haphazard, with groups circled. It was probably the notes he was taking that day, or at least the notes he hadn't spent time to transcribe yet. One of the last notes was probably why he was killed, although its doubtful any of them are notes about killer -- they're probably about something completely unrelated and he was just unfortunate enough to be seen taking notes while looking at something in the wrong direction.

I hope they catch the murderer someday.
We're not representative of the linux userbase anymore - increasingly it is used by students, home users and office workers that aren't necessarily technical. That's the demographic they should be appealing to and they're more interested in social and media related apps.
Yes, about 100 new signups, 1000 uploaded activities and 600 or so mapped routes per day, and right now, two premium purchases a day with no promotion and an actual "we are sorry these are rough and not ready for prime time" warning on our sales page. It's starting to come together :)
Google Said to Have High Level Mole at Twitter
So many people are hiring, this is a good time to be a developer! Big companies and startups alike.
I may be missing something, but this is totally different than Flowtown.

These guys are integrating much more than social media, and I don't actually see how the referenced link is related to what NationBuilder does at all.
I would second that feedback. I eventually figured out what you were talking about, but for the first minute or so I had no clue. I actually thought you might be a simulation game for a second! I know you don't want to pigeon-hole yourself into being "just" a tool for political organizations, but you really should get some sort of descriptive text up there.
As my programming teacher used to say when talking about floating numbers and their errors, π is 5 in agriculture and 3.14159 in civil engineering.
Thanks. I also thought about installing an SSD. Many people seem to be afraid to use an SSD for memory swapping however, because they believe it will shorten the lifespan of the SSD (especially on Windows XP, due to its overly-aggressive swapping logic).
Google Makes Massive Counteroffers To Retain Employees
Ask HN: Where did the lost traffic from Google's Panda update go?
The massive drop offs in traffic after the "anti content farm" update to Google's algorithm has been well publicized. This traffic didn't just evaporate, it has to be going somewhere else. Are there any sites that have seen massive gains since the update? I haven't seen any media coverage of Panda update winners.
...just curious, how did you implement this over a regular phone line?
We may not be motivated by money, but we all have our price. Would you happily stay at $startup for $200K a year with a 0% chance of acquisition? How about $100K with a 50% chance of acquisition?

Put some numbers to it and you might find you already know the answer.
You're being pedantic in English in response to an exchange that presumably happened in French. :)
Great summary of our paper! From the amount and ratio of the different isotopes you can do a tremendous amount of nuclear forensics, which I knew nothing about before this happened. Not everything is in books (some is still deemed top secret from WW2 and beyond), but we learned a lot by consulting with a veteran of the Manhattan project.
at the very least, get rid of the personal intros and "one of the hundreds" bit.
>This is for someone who turns on their computer, does some work, and then stops using their computer. They do not want to bother themselves with a lot of learning.

>Once you reach a certain level of interest in optimizing everything, you have to use tools to build your own desktop environment, because you are a unique flower

Or the power user can switch to OS X, which requires less 'optimizing' to get it into a comfortable state than any of the Linux environments (e.g., Gnome 2, dwm and ratpoison) I have tried do.

I do not want a set of tools with which I can build my own desktop. I want a desktop that is usable without major customization or tinkering although I do realize that any desktop warrants some customization and administration if it will be heavily used.

ADDED. I ran Linux for 13 years, and command-line Gnu tools and Emacs on proprietary Unix for 5 years before that, and I would like to continue supporting free software if I can do so without undue sacrifice.

Maybe I am just more sensitive to matters of design and aesthetics than most Linux users are, but I started using OS X last year. It's not perfect, but I like it better than I like the Gnome 2 on Linux I used before that even though I have put less effort (but still much effort, maybe more that is rational) into tweaking and customizing OS X than I have Gnome 2.
"ammount of people", down low in the FAQ (check the spelling)
Looks to me like it might be a mnemonic text compression scheme, not encrypted text. I've known one person who used pictographs as mnemonic memory aids. I think this man was using the first letter of words as mnemonic aids to each word in his note. Therefore, each letter has a context sensitive meaning that reminded him of the text of his note. However, don't assume he could spell -- he may have heard the wrong sounds for the beginning of words and therefore may misspell even the first letters of a word. While most people get at least the first letter of a word correct, I know a few who that seem to have an auditory equivalent of dyslexia and make mistakes there too.

In that vein, the key will be the numbers and related letters around them, especially the repeated ones. The numbers are likely not encoded since the meaning of the rest of the text is obscure.

For example, "E 71" "E 74" and "E 75" on page 1 might mean Interstate (or "Enterstate") 71, 74 & 75. Then the trailing "NCBE" could mean "nice camping by interstate (enterstate)" or "no collecting by exit" or, well, practically anything. Without knowing a lot more about the man and his life, it would be impossible to even begin to guess.

Final insight. Page 1 is organized and formatted nicely, and appears like it might have been done on lined paper. It is probably a copy of some original notes about things important for him to remember. If this is really a mnemonic compression scheme, then this page will be the rosetta stone. It would be interesting to know whatever became of page(s) 2 and later of his transcribed notes (nobody denotes a page as page 1 unless there's more than one page). The notes page is more haphazard, with groups circled. It was probably the notes he was taking that day, or at least the notes he hadn't spent time to transcribe yet. One of the last notes was probably why he was killed, although its doubtful any of them are notes about killer -- they're probably about something completely unrelated and he was just unfortunate enough to be seen taking notes while looking at something in the wrong direction.

I hope they catch the murderer someday.
There are a lot of cliches which I think apply to your problem - "live for the moment" and "a bird in the hand ..." come to mind immediately.

Stock options are great leverage for the company and worthless to the employee in cases such as yours.

If you want to be in California and working for $co will make you happy, take it. Once you're here you can always find another $startup.
PyPi is down
Twilio's API allows you to create ad-hoc telephone conferences really easily
Georgian Woman Cuts off Web Access to Whole of Armenia
Yea, where I went to high school (rural Western, PA), kids would bring guns to school for demonstrating something for a physics class (real story), history / social studies was very pro-American biased, and there were many funded clubs and activities around hunting / fishing / outdoors. Oh yea, everyone got the first two days of deer season off of school too - whether you took advantage or not.
>We're not representative of the linux userbase anymore.

> increasingly it is used by students, home users and office workers that aren't necessarily technical.

citations, please. it's one thing where the developers of gnome/linux WANT it to be used by this demographic, it's another to claim that it's happening (and to claim that HN users don't use it anymore).
StudyCards: jQuery plugin that makes flashcard quiz out of any dictionary list
Leadership is one issue. Another one is that the big Linux companies (Novell and Redhat) make most of their money from the enterprise market. So there isnt significant desktop design expenditure because the revenue slice from the Linux desktop market is vanishingly small. Canonical is trying to change this.

As an aside - www.enlightenment.org is one project which has had pretty strong leadership (Raster is a great programmer and also has good aesthetic sensibilities). I hope enlightenment comes back and the big two (KDE and Gnome) becomes the big four (kde, gnome, ubuntus take on gnome and enlightenment).
Twitter Tweets Some Big Q1 Stats; 155 Million Tweets A Day Now
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2270464
Technically, AI used as a tool by humans to develop better AI may not be considered self-improving AI, but would have possibly the same effect, would it not? Self-improving AI might be an implied step after AI as tool, though.
Thanks, I'll join in on the convo
This is so true. I have yet to find another competitor that even compares to dropbox. All the other competitors have their own client to move/view files (Receivd looks like it does too). dropbox works right away and the learning curve is nill. All you have to do is login and use your computer like normal.
C Craft: C is the desert island language.
Yeah, Java doesn't really have generics. Java has syntactic sugar which provides a good portion of the benefit of generics. But type erasure is not the same thing as generics.
I'm primarily self-taught, and at the age of 21 I'm comfortable listing 8+ years of C/C++ development on my resume. I built my first web site when I was 11, and I started learning C when I was 13 so that I could add features to a multiplayer text-based game (MUD).

I spent a few years running a MUD, doing some coding competitions, taking on small freelance projects, and learning about data structures, networking, graphics, and other things. When I was 15 I created a full Win32-based 2D game engine for a school project. It even had a terribly designed scripting language for defining levels and game behavior. After that project I vowed to never touch Win32 development again.

When I was 16 they allowed me to take CS courses at our local university, and I thought I'd found my home. Unfortunately I realized most college students at our university don't really care about programming and are just there for the degree. We had no hacker culture, and I tutored several seniors who couldn't fix their own syntax errors.

I've been happily employed since I was 16. I've done freelance, small projects at our university, computer technician work, and embedded systems software development. When I was 19 I got recruited by Lockheed Martin to write flight control software for the FAA for a summer. It was amazing, but I didn't want to work at a big company in the long run, so I turned down the offer to return.

Last March I dropped my job and began working on my startup full time :) I should also note that I'm in college part-time as a CS/Economics double major.

I have to admit that most epic programmers I know didn't get a formal education in CS. Some have degrees in other fields, and some have no degree at all. I think passion for software and building things takes people further than a degree. However, most of the programmers I've worked with that had CS degrees did quality work and had a good understanding of CS concepts. They just rarely seem to be coding demons.
Deadbeat Companies
Googlebot is a not a browser. It's a distinct "user" of your site with special needs.

Think of Google as a retarded 30 year old user of site. If 67% of your users relied on the opinion of that single user, you'd damn sure do 5 mins worth of work to help him along.

And if you didn't it would be your own fault for failing to get his reference (read: ranking).
See, here's the thing -- thinking the idea of feed aggregators is a dumb one, and a net negative to society is one thing. But shitting all over a guy's work by calling it a prank or a joke in a venue that is predicated on the value of small-time entrepreneurs taking gambles on their ideas... How do you think that is ok?

Just to be clear, this guy didn't invent feed aggregators. There are a bajillion of them. You've got a beef with society, not this guy's work. He's trying to make money serving an underserved niche. I hope he makes a billion dollars.
I don't use GNOME because I find it way to heavy and bloated (I run X and the stumpwm manually). It would however be very interesting to know how early adapters find GNOME 3 compared to previous GNOME versions in terms of bloat and speed.

I also understand that GNOME 3 can be used very keyboard driven. AAAnybodywo swears to the keyboard like me have any opinions?
Ask HN: Which is a better pricing model - Tiered vs. Pay-As-You-Go
I see a lot of consumer startups going for the tiered pricing models whereas B2B SAAS seems to prefer a pay-as-you-go model.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the benefits of either?
Seems like this is a mis-step in the smartphone + tablet era. Do I want a computer in my car or do I want a dock for the computer I already carry around with me everywhere in my car?

P.S. Considering that the big cost of either system is the 3G phone plan and that people tend to replace the hardware of the computer they take everywhere significantly more frequently than they replace their cars, I think it's pretty obvious which option makes more practical sense.
I await with ears wide open... and will keep my eyes open for a beta slot. I suspect that this would scratch a rather itchy itch that I have at the moment with my app.
two separate factors here - in isolation, i'd stay at $startup for $200k for another 1.5-2 years, with a 0% chance of acquisition in isolation, but not if it meant giving up a dream job with $co. i'd take a $30k difference in pay to join $co just because it's getting me on the right track for what i want to be doing with my life. and, of course, if we were definitely getting acquired i'd give up the job and stick around for the payoff (~ 2M with a little luck). it's when probabilities come into the mix that my head starts hurting - i think i don't really have the gambling instinct, and if i were deciding this on pure emotion i think i'd just leave, but i'm trying to do the intelligent thing here.
"And once achieving this point, you neither change the people in the organization, nor do you change the direction of the overall effort."

Good luck with that one.
Ask HN: What profession will Jesus be if he was alive today? =p
Makes me a bit uncomfortable. I hope this doesn't play out like 1997-2000 and trash the job market for several years again.
Agreed.

I like the Durable Clojure hack that someone wrote, because it basically adds disk-backed durability to clojures ref types (which already have atomicity, consistency and isolation). Having ACID guarantees on built-in data structures reduces the need for databases for a lot of use cases and would be a lot nicer to work with than having to deal with an external database.
Have you worked in this field before? It seems like a pretty comprehensive package. If I was still involved in politics I'd pick this over the dreadful crap most offices work with.
I think that's a productive approach.
It's one of my pet conspiracy theories that Google has hired tens of thousands of the best programmers not because they actually need them for anything, but primarily to keep them out of the hands of rivals and potential killer startups.
> The big "click here for pricing" button comes way too soon.

I disagree. Too many products and services make it too hard to work out what they actually cost. It's maddening.

However OP might give consideration to giving the FAQ equal billing (ha!) with the pricing.
Show HN: Acrosync - wifi sync from mac/linux to ios
Acrosync is the only app that can sync files from mac/linux to ios devices wirelessly, without installing software on the server side.

With Acrosync, you can wifi-sync all photos/videos/music in your itunes library to iphone/ipad.

Want all your Dropbox files on your iphone? Just sync the Dropbox directory.

Want unlimited file sharing for friends or family? Set up a server and with one tap they can get all the files.

Even if you don't own a mac or linux, if your school/company provides a remote login, you can still use Acrosync to sync your home directory to iphone/ipad.

The lite version is free: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/acrosynclite/id428846549?mt=8&uo=4

The pro version is ad-free and allows you to send files to other apps: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/acrosyncpro/id428855722?mt=8&ls=1
"In order to prevent an overloading of a single availability zone when everybody tries to run their instances in us-east-1a, Amazon has added a layer of indirection so that each account’s availability zones can map to different physical data center equivalents."

http://alestic.com/2009/07/ec2-availability-zones
Students should love computer science
I just know, statcounter claims Linux has 1% worldwide desktop website-visitors and Wikipedia has statistics that say: 2% of the Wikipedia visitors is a Linux-desktop user. Half of that is an Ubuntu user.

All mobile (non-desktop) users combined statcounter claims is also around 1%
$3.5 million for a key employee I can deal with, but $100 million? It feels like absolute lunacy, if true.
Good job Wompt!
Use the following mirrors if needed:

http://{b,c,d,e,f}.pypi.python.org/

See: http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/index.html#mirror-sup...
Even little old Provo, UT is getting competitive. No lambos or anything like that, but finding good people is hard.
Looks like mirrors are still up, to use with pip:
pip install -i http://d.pypi.python.org/simple [package]
They could have been used for monitoring inaccessible locations earlier in the disaster, possibly by using fiber optic cameras and lighting.
That brings up a good related question: does the average SV tech salary afford you a decent quality of life? What's the point of a 6 figure starting salary if you can't afford a house and need to commute for an hour just to scrape by?
My first impression was, this was a useful convenient internet mass-media platform, not only targeted at political people, but anybody who wanted to appeal to a group of people. It had a twist of painting the user as a leader/creator with 'nation'. I guess you're on the right track if every one read it like I did =).
Ask HN: When to write the full business plan?
I was discussing my early-stage startup project with an old Oracle exec today (who now may become an angel). This informal conversation/presentation was supported with screenshots and a 9 slide PowerPoint (note: See ‘Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liQLdRk0Ziw if you’re interested in hearing what a VC likes in a .pptx during pitches). During the questions towards the end of the meeting, I was asked if we had already created a business plan.

I’ve written four or five full plans in the past at the hatching stages, but differently, they weren't for tech startups.

My feeling is that, at our stage, we should be spending the time developing our product (i.e. seeing what it can become/how it will evolve from iterations) as priority over writing a business plan. Possibly some financial projections could benefit our future meetings with angels, but even these forecasts would be completely abstract.

Can I ask your advice, when should a full business plan be written?
So, the only companies that do this are in Israel?
$50m in outright stock grants vested in only two years for a product VP?

Not really passing the sniff test for me.
French Onion Soup Recipe
You asked for feedback, so here it is.

Have you worked on any political campaigns? Candidates, issues, activism, anything? I have. Your NationBuilder is not yet a full product.

Pitch your product to local campaign managers. That's the fastest way for you to get your course correction.

Campaigns do need better tools. So I encourage you to keep at it.

(If you're wondering why I just don't tell you what you need, I'm working on a business plan for something very similar. Also, I'd rather you earned the domain knowledge firsthand.)
Microsoft And Toyota Team Up To Create Next-Gen Telematics Platform
This is cool but I just want an iPad/Android tablet as my dashboard
Apparently they haven't, one of the panelist (from Tweetdeck) at Geeknrolla said he couldn't talk about any takeover speculation, which implies that it might not have gone through.
I know a few developers there. If they're good enough, they still work there and get a very high salary...

The problem is not that great developers are expensive, it's that they're expensive and very rare.
Why not something more easily understood by everyone:

"You are now aware that you are breathing".

I think the implementation here is quite interesting; pigeonholing it into the idea of a "filter" is probably missing the point.
And that was a fun way to spend an evening: new reactor designs are quite cool :). It seems like a lot of the innovation is occurring in parallel with both fuel types and containment approaches.

I too look forward to having completely passive shutdown of reactors, but from what I can tell (outside of a few small-scale test reactors) we're just not there yet. Someday...
"It's a shame this is so highly upvoted. Pointing out that correlation does not equal causation is the very first most obvious criticism to make of a finding"

What a shame.

The Science paper cited at the bottom of this article found that Montessori kids from one school in Wisconsin had slightly better performance on some kinds of academic tests. The story's "finding" is that Montessori kids are overrepresented amongst the creative/business/economic elite. Clearly, one follows from the other, right?

But yes, let's talk about the up-voting of comments that sound approximately correct, but actually aren't.
That is kind of strange how they want to make it easy to use for the average user, when I think 'discoverability' (how easy is it to find/discover features) of these kinds of desktop environment isn't all that good.

To me it looks more like they tried to make a desktop which also works for tablet-users (read: touch)