skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Between the title and "WSJ.com" you can almost predict the entire article. One admits, however, mild surpirse that the author literally admits to only doing "a cursory review of the data," such is suspected but rarely explicitly confirmed.
Crazy is better than common
Amen. You need a minimum of four hands to solder easily.

"Then blow air over the hot area."
I'm no expert, but I've always heard this is a bad idea. (A "cold solder joint")
I was thinking about this in the light of our conversations about this (and other suits) over the last year - reading the two complaints side-by-side is quite a study in contrast. The amended complaint seems (to my amateur eyes) to build the case from the ground up rather than the top down, and invite the court's opinion rather than peremptorily demanding its acquiescence.

in essence, a lifetime claim against a founder concerning the subject matter of an engagement in exchange for a token money contribution

Which do you think is worse, from a court's point of view - the long and predatory-seeming delay in filing the suit, or the insultingly low initial 'investment' of only $1-2000? It would sure have a different feel if Ceglia had put up even $10,000, which most people would agree was 'real money.' $1,000 or $2,000 is such a puny sum that MZ can truthfully say it wasn't even enough to buy food for the lifetime of the relationship.
Personally I'm really missing seeing the karma on comments.

Fundamentally, removing them has changed the balance of what karma is all about. Karma previously had a function for the reader. It highlighted and bubbled up the good. It showed where there were good counter points. Now...well it's just for the account owner. It feels just like it's there for your own rpg-levelling style dopamine hit. It feels pointless.

I really feel this is a mistake. Comment karma had a function for readers, not just for account owner's inner satisfaction. This role has now been lost. It's making browsing comments - especially for very popular topics with lots of comments - much harder. I'm skimming a lot more or actually skipping the comments altogether because I don't want to read them all to find the goodness. It also means people can't learn from others what is or is not a valued contribution.

So I really hope this will be reversed or at the least make a better way (more than just what is the top comment) to make karma benefit the community not just the individual.
> This meant there were FAR fewer opportunities to collaborate and learn from a group of similarly-interested people.

I'm going to tread carefully here. =)

Similarly-interested in a small segment of likes. I think it's fair to say that in most careers, their exists a culture, and if you aren't apart of that culture, you miss out. I see this in all sorts of industries, and the type of people involved generally follow a well established stereotype. Their are exceptions, and stereotyping is bad, but I think it's safe to say we all see this and know it exists. It's not on purpose. Us white male programmers just happen to have a lot of similar interests.

> but it still leaves me pretty far behind?

Do you find this a fault with the industry? With those white guys? With you? Or no ones fault and it is what it is?

My own experience is that people who have the same dedicated drive for programming but aren't interested in the same extra-curricular activities as most programmers usually have a lot to offer. Have you found that to be the case personally? Do you feel other people see that in you?
Meal Snap - Magical Meal Logging for iPhone
I've used this for a few small games I cranked out at the South Bay Game Jams. Being able to edit the code in the online IDE and see the changes immediately in the running game makes it really easy to tweak the gameplay.
Show HN:  Appnu, a win-win marketing solution for iOS developers and users
http://www.appnu.com/

Appnu is an opt-in mailing list focused on new iOS apps, where the subscribers can win free apps just by being subscribed.

Once a week I'll mail out customized promotional emails containing apps in just the categories each subscriber selects. The intention is for app developers to "buy into" the mailings by giving away their Apple-supplied promotional codes, which I will raffle off to the subscribers. If a developer would like to reach additional users, more slots could be purchased.

What do you think of the model?
We've had nginx in production for three years. 20 billion requests. 458 live configuration changes. A dozen or more live binary upgrades. Countless DOS attacks.

One known failure. One. Because I was an idiot and tried to do something a little too clever in our configuration.

It's one of the best pieces of system software I've ever used. I can't thank Igor and the nginx community enough.
I agree with jnorthrop.

Although if you want to be a bit more hardcore about it, you might try a few (short) barefoot runs each week. In this latter case, however, be careful. It's easy to do "to much too soon."
They came from emacs. Readline is now around v6, readline v2 seems to have been from the mid 1990s.

There is a smaller set of standard commands for killing (C-h for char, C-w for word, C-u for line) which are used in many terminal apps. They are orthogonal to emacs, and probably about as old (1970s).
I've made one important change in how I vote as a result of the hidden score change. I'm now more afraid to downvote. My usual downvote algorithm was: If offtopic/noise and score >-4 then downvote. Now I don't downvote for fear that it already has 100s of downvotes and I'd just be dogpiling.
Is there any real advantage to standing up for long periods of time vs sitting properly?
I suspect there would be a negative impact on the knees.
Clickable link: http://www.appnu.com

Also, I set up a Google docs survey, which I'd love for iOS developers to take: https://spreadsheets0.google.com/viewform?hl=en&hl=en...
Interesting, I founded La Distribution http://ladistribution.net/ and we also wants to help people easily install web applications, and take care of everything (configuration, permission, updates, backups, ...)

The difference with Heroku and clones, we're targeting end users rather than developers. Also, we're currently focusing on PHP web apps (Wordpress, Dokuwiki, Status.net, Firefox Sync, ...) but will hopefully expand to other stacks (Ruby, Python) in the future.

Oh, and we're open source https://github.com/ladistribution :-)
We moved the site from the old domain. Possibly there is a bug. Feel free to contact me, but I'll be double-checking with all the browsers again.
"Technology is changing so fast, and, as a direct result, so is consumers' behavior," said Jordan Levin, chief executive of the TV and Internet studio Generate. "One of Hulu's problems was that it accelerated changes in behavior faster than the companies were prepared for."

Hulu didn't change behavior, people were watching TV online long before, now they're just doing it legally.
A plausible explanation I read about the wage gap (if there is any, contrary to this headline) blames it on the fact that wages are bounded from below (minimum wage) but not from above. If you have two groups that would normally have the same average but one is more dispersed, such a truncation on one side will lead to the gap.
In discussing why IE9+ will not be available for XP, they write:

Others have dropped support on Windows XP for functionality that we think is fundamental to performance.

This is completely disingenuous. What they are actually referring to (and link to) is Google disabling GPU acceleration and WebGL on XP starting in Chrome 10.0.648.114 due to stability issues. Importantly, Google intends Chrome 11 to re-enable these features on XP for known-good drivers. Here is the relevant ticket:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=72975

The thing is, I actually agree with Microsoft's decision to not support XP. XP, like IE6, is a fundamentally flawed platform and the sooner people move off of it, the better. I just wish they'd make the argument honestly.
Would be awesome but it seems hard to implement. Do you randomly choose half and tell them "sorry, no school, you must start a business"? If you let them choose which group they're in instead is the experiment biased? Ideas anyone?
I agree, and it's also unlikely that most people would even stumble upon this approach. Most people pursue golf because they enjoy it, on some level. I assume that would involve actually playing full games of golf pretty early on.

Although, now that I think about it, his approach is how we teach many academic subjects. A freshmen physics major often has no idea what it looks like to be a practicing physicist, much in the same way that someone who only works on short-range putting would know what a full game of golf is like. (Aside from cultural awareness, of course.)
Peter Thiel explains his own opinions
I agree that it would be interesting and exciting, but the sample size still seems small to draw any serious conclusions.
Wadhwa ends up helping Thiel's cause, not challenging it. He starts by proclaiming his bias and stating he "asked three [engineering deans] to help me quench this fire". But the deans try to challenge it with statements like "most will fail", "they aren't ready", "it would be a good thing if more [cohort] stayed in school", "it's unlikely they'll succeed", "getting an engineering degree reduces variance in your career..." Can those responses get more stereotypical?

He's right that students will take Thiel's message very seriously. His message is emotional, inspirational, anti-authority, and anti-establishment. And it's impossible to counter with those kinds of responses.

Also, the experiment that the Stanford dean describes is impossible to run, and the closest possible thing has already been realized. The people who want to drop out to take responsibility and start a venture are self-selecting. You can't just randomly assign roles like "you'll stay in school" and "you'll go to a startup" because the students would be emotionally invested in either decision. And many of them do already receive huge no-strings-attached financial assistance to stay in school.
Social Commerce Network Lockerz Raises $30 Million
NASA Names The Space Shuttles’ Final Resting Places
I'm astonished that that's rare. Do you tend to select companies to interview who aren't developing for themselves (non-young men programmers)?
I use this architecture myself where there's an Erlang thing sitting in the center, dispatching relatively heavyweight jobs to Perl daemons waiting for them, and it does work. That isolates all the "eventish" stuff in Erlang, and turns the Perl daemons into, well, basically webservers, in the sense that they are just serving stateless RPC answers synchronously. This definitely avoids the complexity explosion.

You don't need a project like Beam.js to do that, but having someone else having already written the utility code can certainly be useful. Nothing like that existed for Perl but it hasn't been hard to do what I needed.
Windows Azure AppFabric Caching availability announced
For me, I missed karma scores most in indented threads, because good comments didn't naturally sort to the top the way they do at the root level.

Also, I was reading the nginx 1.0 post where I saw some short but technical observations, and I had no idea if the community deemed them valid or informational. At first I though this was bad, but upon further reflection, and after reading some technical comments with more beef, I'm now on the fence. The beefier comments brought along their own credence, so if removing karma scores prompts folks to write longer more explanatory comments, that might be better.
Design can be subjective so be sure to find someone who's on the same wavelength with you.

Share your idea and I'm sure there will be some people who think it's cool. Don't take it too hard if a lot of designers say "no". We're a moody bunch ;)

Also, maybe this will help: http://www.builditwith.me/
With pure file encryption where the user's password serves as the key you lose...password recovery features, public links for files, shared folders, web access, mobile access (unless you want your phone doing the decryption)

All other syncing services do things a pretty similar way
if you can't convince someone for equity you can try 99designs.com. I had good success with it and a fair price tag.
Windows 8 To Have An App Store [Leaked Screenshots]
This generalizes to minority men as well.

Even if its not that risk taking is discouraged, risk averse or more conservative routes are certainly encouraged more.

There is also the pressure of not having multi generational wealth to fall back on.

Not having previously successful family to lean on in times of need or if things don't go right is a strong precursor to risk aversion
Microsoft Mix 2011 - Live Broadcast
Majority of Leading Network Firewalls are Hackable
Facebook Comments Plugin Gets Support for Hotmail Logins
Maybe I am misinterpreting it, but comments seem to vary in color from black to nearly white. I am not sure how many levels of gradation there are, but it seems that ones that have been down voted are lighter than those that haven't?
Wasn't part of FB's initial cachet (for people outside of Harvard) that it was initially exclusive to Harvard? And wasn't Z being at H a prerequisite to H students using FB?

I've always felt like FB's success was due more to good timing and marketing (using recursive network effect) than anything else.
It would be nice to see some details on where this is hosted on their site, so hosting for an accompanying app can be chosen to minimise latency. Seems to be on EC2, but which region/zone? Are there plans to move to other EC2 regions or even hosters?
If you're engaging in sensitive escapades via Tor to conceal your true identity, shouldn't the intentions and identity of who you're tunneling all your traffic through be one of your top priorities?

How do you know if that node with the pretty flag saying it's in Switzerland isn't logging all IPs, DNS requests, and packet headers straight to another Room 641A?

I just dislike when people suggest things like Tor without having used it themselves and seen the glaring issues and essential deficiencies with the tool.

Especially when there are such better and faster solutions available.
It's called "click through" and I also prefer the Windows behavior. Especially since the behavior is not consistent on Mac OS: certain actions do not require a click through (e.g. you can close a window in the back without bringing it on the front).
Equal Pay Day: Pay Equity and Startups
How is Clojure debugging now? Last I checked, I couldn't get a reliable stack trace, and the advice I read online said "just step through it" or use somesuch tool, which is presumably not very helpful when you're trying to figure out why an hour-long application unexpectedly crashed. That was enough to scare me away.
Being a golf pro requires a lot from the mental side as well. First you need the skills, which you can only acquire through countless ours of practice. But there are so many people with those skills that it's really about who performs best under pressure.

So if he fails, it says nothing about the theory. Should he succeed, that's a whole another story and would be pretty exciting.
Thoughts re: zero karma display currently in place:

I'm getting a lot more up-votes for what I consider to be relatively mediocre comments. Some display is useful, as it helps prevent such artificial inflation. It is interesting in that it does mask whether the top comment is high-rated or merely new - I've gotten used to it with my Flattehn extension and I sort of like it, it helps spread the votes around a bit more.

Not sure what all needs to be done to counter-act everything. Keep up the experimenting! And may I request tool-tips on color / display differences, like the green names had a little while ago? Or a current-version legend somewhere?
This is great. And there are obvious paths to export games for mobile devices so this could be the best cross-platform development environment for 2D games.

The hardest and most time consuming part of game development is iteration and livecoding makes that so much easier.
I bought the previous bundle, but now I'm torn. On the one hand, I want to show support for them and for linux gaming. OTOH, the hardware requirements are rather steep for me. The games I've gotten around to playing from the last bundle all run well on Intel graphics.
The whole argument of "bubble" is not about importance of higher education, rather, it argues that the cost is not justified.

As a side note, I applied Facebook for internship when I have taken no CS classes in my college at all, and they accepted me. I am not sure how "true" his last paragraph about applying job in Facebook without a degree would be.
Strange: the domain unXis.com is parked.
Actually Dustin's pull request is a bad example entirely. He wanted to change the whole API of emile. He liked the functionality but it didn't work for how he wanted to integrate it into ender. If an API doesn't work for you, you're kind of screwed, whatever library you're using. You either hack it yourself or you ask the maintainer. If some API of SproutCore wasn't to your liking, then what?

Dustin could've written an adapter around emile to expose the api he wanted to for ender. But that would defeat the purpose of ender which is to cleanly integrate several great micro frameworks. He didn't have to wait for Thomas. He wanted to explicitly. It was a goal of his to keep the dependencies pure.

Dependency hell is a problem with integrating several different frameworks. But I'm not sure this is the best illustration of that.
Where I could see things changing is higher highs and lower lows: previously I wouldn't downvote a well-intentioned but wrong comment below 0 or -1, but now I might because I don't know. Also, previously, I stopped voting up the first comment on an article if it already had a ton of votes, now I'm not so sure, so I might vote for it.
You are the Reason eBay Sucks
Do you think the tweets are an unbiased objective account of the events that transpired? I view them as a sort of color commentary. Anyway, which ones do you think were personal? His experience doesn't sound any different from what I expect anyone who gets bonus screening to get. It's inconvenient and adversarial. I assume that's the rule, not the exception.
The only reason I signed up for facebook initially in college is because it seemed like it was something officially provided by the school. If nothing else, the fact that it had public defaults for visibility, but limited to an exclusive network struck a balance that college students liked. That would have been harder to do and to understand from outside of a college.
Well, the primary reason for the existence of SPDY is encryption everywhere and speed. Something which with current HTTP/HTTPS doesn't really exist. HTTPS is still slower than HTTP and HTTP is slower than SPDY.

A lot of the speed increase comes from the use of multiplexing. So without it, it wouldn't be able to achieve most of it's goals.
The world record is 2:03. The guy you mentioned may not have been close to the world record, but a 2:40 marathon is 26 back-to-back 6 minute, 10 second miles. That's pretty damned good.

Looking at the 2010 results from the NY and Boston Marathons, that's a few minutes shy of the 100th best person. Considering that those are elite races with entrants from around the world, I think his time is pretty damned good in an absolute sense, not just a relative sense. Best in the world, no. Olympic level, no. But I'd consider him elite.
i agree ;)
Ask YC: Why don't you take a convertible note instead of equity?
It seems strange to ask, but given all the changes pushed by PG within seed stage investments, why doesn't YC take a convertible note? Why push one set of standards for other early investors but extract the highest price from young companies? I get the fact that 7% doesn't require all that much in increased valuation to pay for itself. But it seems strange to require the equivalent of a ~$250k valuation to participate and with a take it or leave it offer. Startups may rarely be bound to this valuation in subsequent financing but a $1M valuation would still give YC 1-2% equity on average without any discount. It seems strange that PG pushes for notes but then relies on equity. Why?
They do, but I don't know at what levels this happens. I'm kind of hoping not to need a pantone swatch to vote in the future.
Heck, for all I know a public library subscription would be more useful in "getting to know oneself" by reading what the great minds of our world had to say about it, not to mention that it'd be a lot more cheaper
Whoa, same here. I guess I will direct my referrals elsewhere from now on.

On that note. Where is the best online community for entrepreneurs then?
1. It isn't Gladwell's theory.

2. Even Gladwell isn't stupid enough to say that it's sufficient to put in 10,000 hours, he just implies it.
You will meet others and learn from your peers by surrounding yourself by smart interesting people, but this doesn't have to be at a university.

Create that community. I fear that is harder done than said, given that none really exists.

No one used Facebook because they knew the developer was Harvard educated.

I don't know if Mark can do Facebook at Harvard and get traction w/o being a Harvard student. At the very least Facebook probably doesn't exist w/o a Harvard -- a collection of young exclusives who are technically saavvy. No Harvard means no Facebook, one way or another.

A better question is whether drop outs who start businesses are more or less likely to succeed.

A better question, IMO, do we need more startups than are currently being created? Imagine if college enrollment is cut in half. And we increase the number of startup companies by a factor of 20x. Is that net good? Will innovation and goodness increase as a result? I'm not sure it will.

It's almost as if the self-selection of having to choose to leave Stanford/Harvard is a good funnel for founders.
Wikipedia has a lot of surface area. Another favorite example of mine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_fish_on_stamp...

I'm not sure deleting stubs really gains much (http://forre.st/storage --> "here's a nickel, go buy another gigabyte"), but adding sources really does improve articles. There's concrete info about node.js that people can cite (and the less hype-ish, the better).
I have attended both UT Austin and Texas A&M, who both proudly and decidedly adhere to opposing views.

UT places CS under the Natural Sciences, and indeed I have spent the lion's share of my 3 years here studying algorithms, discrete math, and numerous levels of predicate logic.

At A&M, however, the focus was on engineering robust software, using theory where applicable (straight from Dr Stroustrup's mouth during a lecture, actually, and his views were widely accepted among the faculty I spoke with). CS is under the Engineering School there, and they felt that was where it belongs.

I think part of the issues is semantics. A&M CS is not known as a prestigious department, but their engineering college as a whole is; they might see it as an admission of inferiority to be "merely" the practical side of things. However, what they do is not inferior (even if it's not what I want to study): it's the other side of the coin, but they want the department to be just as well known so they use an improper term to catch attention. I think they have a great opportunity here to differentiate their offerings and start the trend if they would just call it the Department of Software Engineering to complement their well-known Petroleum, Electrical, Computer, Nuclear, Mechanical, Civic, etc offerings.

[edit: apologies for poor articulation and verbosity. resolved wontfix].
Not sure why this is popping up years later, but mrshoe and I presented this at PyCon in 2007. Obviously, the landscape of individual technologies has changed since then, but the basic approaches are still true and pretty language-agnostic (it was just natural at a Python conference to have the talk in Python-centric terms).