skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're too close to the forest to see the trees. Forget you are a hacker for a minute and think of yourself as say a screenplay writer. Where would you rather be, LA or some hicksville town ? If you are in LA and you bump into some two-bit actress moonlighting in a bar and talk about your script, soon, she'll connect you to someone who knows someone else who knows something who will soon reshape your unsellable script into something that can actually get made and within a span of a few weeks you'll be on a studio lot while they go over the makeup of a costar you only saw on TV until yesterday! Sounds like complete baloney, but that's how it really works!! You can read say William Goldman's book Adventures in Screen Trade where he spells it out in considerable detail - Why professors with PhD in literature are still working on the nth draft of their dream project in the English Dept at Andover while some street smart dropout hacks away at a script on a couch in some dinghy motel on Hollywood Blvd that actually gets made.

It ain't fair but that's how it is.

In you go to SF with your pet project which has no traction and revenue, it will suddenly have traction and revenue. Don't ask me how. It isn't exactly logical. Things happen. You'll meet people who'll tell you if only you change this feature and add that feature and do this and not that you'll have a saleable proposition. So you'll say what the hell and give it a shot and soon it becomes so! Its just not rational, and as a coder and mathematician I hate irrationality just as much as you. But that's how it is.
Whereas with no such brutal feedback, you can labor away at some precious project until it becomes larger than life and super-brittle and soon even you don't want to touch it cause who knows which module will break which other module, and then you go looking for customers and nobody really wants it cause its gotten way too complex for anybody to decipher.

I've heard ideas that are so lame ( an app that counts ONE TWO THREE while you do pushups. Really! Yeah, that's got funding to the tune of a couple mil! ) your 3 year old could have come up with it. So its not the traction, framework, revenue model etc. Its just finetuning an idea to the point where it becomes saleable. And for whatever reason, perhaps because its in their DNA, SV seems to have the sort of people who actually give you a listen and then tell you exactly how to go about it. They actually give a damn! If you have an idea, I think you should atleast spend 1-2 weeks in SV trying to pitch before writing it off as a futile exercise. Nothing to lose, everything to gain.
The #1 reason I ignored notifo is I couldn't understand the business model. As such, for our internal systems, we notify via SMS, email and jabber. Things that I know will still be around in a year.
And people wonder why women have trouble getting into this industry.
Any suggestions?

Hire lobbyists.
Jsconf.basho.com
> When precision in coordinates becomes an issue, you make a transformation and use relative coordinates anyways.

This.

Celestia, for example uses 128 (64.64) fixed-point for positions.

The nasty case in games is when you're subtracting positions to get a relative result. It's okay to store all positions as fixed point, and then return a float for the difference operator.

In general, you're not simulating the whole large volume with the same fidelity. You might be simulating a certain volume around the camera.
TechCrunch is not some 'outstanding' reporting venue with a long history of righteousness.

This is the internet, this is capitalism.

Start your own 'Techcrunch' if you want fairness, no one is stopping you.
Glasses-free 3D on iPad2
Won't it have it's own flavor of gravity? As in a force that attracts matter together and a force that attracts anti matter together?
Two things. One, I think 30% is a very high percentage to be charging for a fee, which inevitably will affect how questioners feel about paying it and the growth of your site. Second, if you don't actually charge until the transaction is ready, then few should object to paying say, $60 for a $50 question (20% fee) for an answer ready to be read.
Why would you need floating point arithmetic for anything? You can do all mathematical operations with fixed point just as well.

And using relative coordinates everywhere might not be practical either. I don't understand why you are defending using floating point for everything so hard? There are cases in which it is not a good choice.
Please. It's a bug, not a feature.
Thank you for posting this !
The whole post means quite a bit for me. Almost every word you write feels familiar.

I wish you good luck with with your startup. Actually I wish all startups having difficulty raising the next round good luck.
Microsoft makes tool to port iOS apps to Windows Phone 7
> but by doing it at sea, American authorities presumably were trying to avoid creating a shrine for his followers."

This is exactly what the Israelis did with Eichmann.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Eichmann#Execution
Latin American Company rocks the house in Mobile
Well, if you work in the Music industry go and pay millions on Ads and TV commercials and you can create the next mainstream artist like Lady Gaga or something.

Try do the same thing with a website with poor content, visitors will never come back.

Try do the same thing with an iPhone/Android app, user installs and uninstall within 20 minutes.

Try do the same with a paid web service, user will only pay the first month of the service.

An Amazing Product will engage the users and they will automatically spread the word.

I certainly will not give that advice to Tommy Mottola(or whoever is in charge of Sony Music now).

Read this, this is Dropbox(YC 07) CEO talking about Adwords.

http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/27/dropbox-drew-houston-adwor...
I think the beauty of Internet startups is that, since the Internet is (essentially) global, one doesn't need to put so much weight on where their business is physically located.

There is some credence to the idea that startups in NY or SF will do better because there is a certain type of culture around there. However, I don't believe a startup will live or die depending on where their mail is delivered.
Suppose the business decides to give me a dividend of $20,000 and I have nothing to do with the business.

Your statement is not logical. A business can't just "decide" to pay a dividend to random individuals. A dividend, by definition, is a distribution of profits paid to the stockholders (owners) of the corporation. So, anyone who gets a dividend is, by definition, an owner of the business!
The truth is, it hasn't been worth it at all... yet.

What about being your own boss? What about learning & producing at 10 times the rate you would at a desk job?

Also, I think you'll find there are plenty of "Nobodys" with past successes. Don't do it for the fame.
100000ly / 2^64 = 51 meters and change. And your simulation is probably faster with appropriate int math than any float math will be.

Transforming to relative coordinates doesn't solve all the problems; you do your local calculation with the improved precision, but presumably at some point you then throw that back away again when you translate back to the global coords.
That shouldn't be why they fail, but why they were not successful earlier.
I imagine there is a large gap between the top 5 and the bottom 5. But, I guess I would need to see the data behind the calculations.
This is not always true. I am a French software programmer, with the cadre status. I have 9 days of RTT. With the 25 paid holidays, I have almost 7 weeks of holidays / year (34 days).

As a cadre, I am not paid by the hour: I am paid to attain results ("you leave when your work is done"). If I can do it in 35 hours, great. If I need to work more, so be it. I often work 40-50 hours, but it's a choice. And I have relatively flexible hours, as long as the job is done.

Now, while the actual number of hours worked varies, and nobody keeps count of those hours... my employment contract still specifies that I am supposed to work 37,5 hours / week. Which is more than 35 hours. Which means I get 9 RTTs / year to "compensate" for working 2.5 hours more than I should (I work a lot more in reality).

Some cadres have contracts that specify they should work 39 hours / week, and they get 18 RTTs / year to compensate. Regardless of the actual hours worked.

Some companies have contracts that specify their cadres work 35 hours / week, and they get no RTTs... Even though they often work a lot more than that.

FWIW, I had 9 RTTs in my current and in my previous company. Both around 100-150 people.

(note: we should have 10 RTTs, but we lost one day due to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journ%C3%A9e_de_solidarit%C3%A9... )
Automated Cash Empire Review
Automated Cash Empire Review
Most restaurant/bar specific POS systems are water resistant for exactly that reason. I'm sure it that's happened though, that's why it's "water resistant" and not "water proof".

So lets say it happens to your iPad POS and you run down to the Apple store to get a new one. What happens to your data? Is it stored on the device, or is the backend hosted somewhere? How do you get your old data into your new iPad?

Another thing I just thought of... lets say there's a horrible bug that's causing some big problem. Wouldn't you have to submit a new version to Apple, which then needs to get approved by them?

All that being said, there's risks with any POS system since it's pretty much mission critical. When I launched my company and did a Show HN, some people thought it was a bad idea (it's web-based). There's a lot of what ifs you can bring up that all sound terrible to a business owner. I'm sure a lot of people will go with iPad POS systems, I'm just wondering if there's a good reason to or if it's just the cool thing to do.
Better description of how this issue affects video games, here:

http://home.comcast.net/~tom_forsyth/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BA%...

It's funny, I was just thinking about this a couple of weeks ago for a simulation project.

Google Code search reveals that Celestia uses a 128b (64.64) position class to solve the problem.
It's not much better in context, though (I will admit that I did not look at the context, however). You could just have easily made the same point by saying "the insular nature of many communities and focus on karma (or whatever arbitrary measurement is used) can lead to ignoring arguments despite the validity and usefulness of those arguments" without insulting anyone.

And yes, he won't read all your posts. However, these posts are not helping in catching his attention (at least not compared to emailing him, which is an actual effective thing to do).
Not only that, but Schneier posted a follow-up later that month saying that there was no evidence for what he had claimed:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/02/more_details_o...
The debate over hygienic-macros is not as straight-forward: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/comp.lang.lisp/dcX15VC5BdM...

Some* argue that hygienic-macros are an unnecessary burden because sometimes you need to capture variable names and this is easy to do with Common Lisp. The situation with Scheme is different because it stores variable and function definitions in the same way (Lisp-1 vs. Lisp-2).

* http://p-cos.net/lisp/guide.html
I assume that depends on their terms of service. I'm guessing that their terms don't leave the door open for them to share your information for any reason whatsoever. That said, I'm sure their terms don't indicate that they're require a court order either...
Is it? His point is about multiculturalism in our society, and using his name is a pithy (and, imo, appropriate) way to make that point.
Exactly what I was going to say. US and many Western countries are idea machines, but they are all built in Asia.

As someone said, Japan takes something and makes it better, China takes something and makes it cheaper.
"A" people hire "B" people.

"B" people hire "C" people, and you are doomed.

Hire the best you can. Wait. Hiring the wrong person (and I have done this) will be the worst possible thing you can do.
It's really awful sometimes, and it's unfair to worthy startups that deserve the attention.

Compare the coverage of Quora versus StackExchange, for example. There was a period when there were two Quora articles per day on TC. StackExchange is lucky to be mentioned once every few months, and even then it's usually only brought up as a comparison to "Quora and other Q&A sites".
Show HN: Edit public web pages and have conversations over them
A great point. For some reason a lot of people have it ingrained that terrorism is a recent phenomenon, not realizing that the 60s 70s and 80s were a complete mess and a very tense time.

All the major cities in Europe experienced hijackings, bombings, kidnappings and hostage drama. Most people today don't even know who Ilich Ramirez Sanchez is, or the PLFP, or as you mention the Red Army Faction

On that note, both the mini-series 'Carlos' and the German film 'Baader Meinhof Complex' are fantastic.
https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#settings/fwdandpop

When a message is marked as deleted and expunged from the last visible IMAP folder:
Mountain View, CA

23andMe - https://www.23andme.com

23andMe was founded to empower individuals and develop new ways of accelerating research. The members of 23andMe have come together because we believe in the combined potential of genetics and the Internet to have a significant, positive impact.
We are looking for software engineers, dba's, systems engineers, and bioinformaticians to help develop our industry-leading personal genome service.

https://www.23andme.com/about/jobs/

mikep at 23andme
"Superstar" programming is a function of the talent as well as the environment. The standards set by the team during one's formative years has a lot of bearing on his/her eventual superstardom. I tend to look for motivation and willingness to learn, in addition to smartness and ability to get things done.
Also check out "The Little Schemer", it's great.
Already-Written Book About Navy Seals That Killed Osama Bin Laden Suddenly Hot
A book about the Navy Seals that killed Osama Bin Laden in a mansion near Islamabad will be published this May.
One of the things I've always really liked about Robert Sedgewick's algorithms books is the abundance of useful diagrams showing the various algorithms in action. It turns out that he actually took the book's example code, and stuck in a bunch of printf statements to spit out PostScript code describing the current state of the data, and combined this with visualization code that was also written in PostScript to produce the pictures. The end result is a book that's worth buying even if all you do is look at the pictures.
I'm not one to defend singletons (been burned by them myself), but this is a pretty poor example of why they suck. Any singleton that requires an outside .init() call is a pretty poor singleton. The whole point vs. globals is that they are lazy loaded. Why not:

getInstance() {
if(_instance == null) { init(); }

return _instance;
}
Ask HN: Not a design or code ninja - how do I pursue a great idea?
I have a great idea for a startup. My idea has cash flow built in. My idea provides value even with a very small user base, but is highly scalable. My idea is social by nature, and can piggyback buzz on social capital from FB and Twitter networks. My idea appeals to one of the biggest web demographics, is fun and clever and has an intrinsic sense of irony. My idea is really useful, and has some great options for marketing strategies just oozing out of it.

I am a serial HN lurker & I am technically savvy, very intelligent, and learn quickly. I am not a designer. I am not a developer. I have never started a business. I have worked in branding, marketing and strategy for 2 teeny companies and that's where my value is.

I would be willing to throw myself headlong into learning RoR or JS or whatever, except that I don't want to be designer or a developer. I want to bootstrap and manage a lightweight site that will look awesome on my MBA applications in a couple years. I also have no money.

What do I do?

1. Try to find a technical cofounder who has time to devote to a new project, buy a theme.
2. Partner with a designer (I know some of those), and learn to code it myself via:
a) Youtube
b) Some technical college
c) Trial and error
3. Other

Next question: What communities out there can offer support for newb SaaS entrepreneurs? I am not in SF, so where can I find people to learn from and bounce ideas off of online?
Introducing FOSS Factory — a Bounty System for GNU Hurd Work
Some constructive criticism. The video does a really poor job selling this. Here are a few things I've learned from building software over the years.

No matter what the end user says, they do not care about fine-grained permissions. Not that they don't care about your system having them, they just have no interest setting them up or ever changing them. The way us software engineers think about things and the way management thinks about things are just too different. "I just want Mary to be able to see the f*$%ing orders!" It's really too much to go, "Ok, well Mary is part of the Server's group, so you go into Servers Group Permissions, then look at this list of vaguely worded categories and find the one you want, then click into that and get half a million switches, then find the action verb that we've assigned to viewing orders then click it on. Oh yea, this also gave Carlos and Mike the ability to see orders because they are in the Server's Group. Oh you didn't want that? Ok, well make a new group called Super Servers and then put Mary in that gr....."

At this point management has slipped quietly into a coma.

Split this video into a, "Here is what your servers will see, look how easy it will be to get those minimum-wage monkeys to use this" and a "Here is what you will see, look at how much more money this will put in your pocket as you are able to manage more effectively, you king of food you!"

And then make a third video about the nitty-gritty technical details of Role-Permission systems and launch that into the sun, no one wants to see that ;)

I think it could be a really compelling product but right now the video doesn't seem to be addressing any audience (other than maybe other developers writing POS software).

Personal Note: For some reason the line, "Refulgent is very proud that Ambur saves all the information pertaining to all closed orders, just as if they were open." irks me to the very core of my being. Whoa, you did the most logical thing to do by keeping historical records, this is nothing to be proud of. Be proud of the truly innovative parts of this product, not the silly things that are obvious for your software to do.

I wish you the best of luck, just throwing in my $0.02 and trying to share some wisdom I've learned the hard way.
>What Groupon actually nailed was all the hard parts of the business model that don't look really freaking difficult on the napkin -- particularly "signing up local merchants" and "cost-effective customer acquisition."

I may be misunderstanding what you're saying, but signing up local merchants doesn't seem all that hard. There seem to be many Groupon clones that have produced deals with merchants.

The main problem for the clones is not having Groupon's scale/distribution.

I think what Groupon got right was the simplicity of its offering.

One page that clearly explains what you're getting, at at least 50% off.

When looking at an offering, I see a picture, a short and sometimes funny/interesting description of the offering, short crisp bullet points about restrictions, how many people have bought it, how much time is left, and contact info -- specifically where the place is located.

That's really easy to understand. The user can vote yes or no in a minute or two.
In all fairness, Brightcove was first on a lot of this stuff. Hard to believe they're 7 years old, older than Youtube.

The content distribution model was what they did from the start, too.

(Former BCer)
How we found Osama Bin Laden
hah, I invision something like "Beauty and the Geek", but replace the girls with VCs.
not as good if you are hoping to get the latest on the situation in Bahrain
Agree. I was using like as in "like totally," I realized it after I posted it but didnt have time to go back and correct it.
Hi Paul Graham,

I’m one of your customers.

We don’t really know each other. We’ve chatted at a few events, Hacker News features some of my posts, but I’m mostly just a guy who reads Hacker News a lot. I find it’s a pretty good place to see what’s important in the industry.

I am software guy, not a media critic. But I’m a big believer that economic incentives shape behaviors in subtle and unmeasurable ways. And I think your decision to make investments in startups is going to make Hacker News a worse product.

I can’t tell you exactly how. Are you going to be a little more likely to flag stories about competitors to your companies? Upvote them, even when they’re not newsworthy, to show you’re not biased?

I don’t know. But I think it’s going to happen, it’ll be subtle, and it’ll make Hacker News worse.

I’m not making demands or threatening to leave. Just making a request, from one software guy to another: moderator independence is a great feature. Please don’t cut it.

Best wishes,

Reg Braithwaite
This looks totally normal and sounds really good faith. It's not like Facebook can say no to a warrant, but they make it clear they're only going to give up your information if 1) there's an emergency, and they have a good faith belief that not preserving the information will result in bodily harm, and 2) if they get an official warrant.

Considering they need to have this kind of thing in place to exist at all, it looks to me like they've done a good job separating good and bad faith reasons for granting access to data.
Those fall into the "hard to quantify" category. They are positives, yes, but there are equal amounts of negatives to go along with them. Hard to measure exactly, so I went with the easiest way to measure "worth it" in terms of running a company... finances.
But for someone else who knows GNU screen really well, the $10 could easily be worth the short amount of time it would take to provide an answer.

I could see this being a good way to go deeper than the regular Q&A site format by offering monetary incentives to participate.
Damn I wish more people would realize this. Our brains "need" a clear antagonist, someone to pin the blame on. But that's not how it works, rather it's an agglomeration of many small attitudes that result in an emergent phenomenon known as culture- every time you say "hmm we need this or that!" - or more likely, every time you don't question authority and instead just roll over and accept it- you are feeding into the fucked up system that results in evil. It's not special evil people doing it. It's us.
Great article. Might use a few ideas in http://www.djangocanvas.com, I sitll haven't finalized the project structure and will likely support multiple ones.
So let's go with a rational assumption, which is that your email provider has the capability to read your email (scenarios: warrant, hacker, bored sysadmin).

You, being a good geek, encrypt your personal systems out the wazzoo.

Then you want to take the next step: encrypted communications (examples: legal, business).

This now makes your request of everyone you deal with to dink with public/private keys and - likely - some sort of infrastructure.

What's the best real-world (i.e., non-propellerhead) solution to this?
Ah, OK, I come from a different background. But this issue of different precisions at different magnitudes is also well-known, and is made clear when studying the definition of floating point. Others have mentioned the "obvious" solution of using relative coordinates, but apparently that has some issues also.
The tweets clearly say he heard helicopters. That's how the US soldiers get on the ground and leave. Nothing in the tweets sounds like a drone attack.