skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Both flooz and beenz are famous failures which tried to introduce a new global reward scheme.

The OP and myself are talking about is a trading market between various existing (and assumedly succesful) point reward systems.
Disqus is awesome. Is it a YC funded company?
Yahoo's Fireeagle Project open for business
Hmmm... I think you are right in some way. However you'll probably agree with me that you are going to think that a developer that hasn't to go after you is probably more successful than the one that does. Of course you'll need to do networking and all that... but cold calls aren't going to be very expensive sells according to my experience, at least not if you show yourself as desperate for selling (and going for a walk to sell web development surely looks desperate).
The core problem here is that recruiters are adding so little. It's fairly simple to get a great job without involving a recruiter. Why not cut out the middleman?
If they let you be anonymous in a site that requires authentication, then it's a bit more sophisticated. If not then it's probably simple like the other explanations below.
It doesn't necessarily matter that he wasn't working with highly dangerous or toxic chemicals. My roommate works in quality at a medical devices company, and many of the regulations they deal with have to do with things like proper labeling, storage, disposal and the like. And their product is chemically inert.

While I'd hope that chem regulations aren't quite as stringent as pharma or biomedical, it isn't unfathomable that the guy broke some or many of them. Unless someone here is knowledgeable of the relevant regulatory environment (which I'm certainly not), it's unfair to make any accusations based on a blog post and a terse newspaper story.
I really enjoyed the article. Somehow I'm not convinced it's not parody.
I think most of the - points were for "leave hardcore research to analysts"
+1 for the TotalImmersion link. I swim about 10K a week at a reasonable, but not superstar pace, and the TI drills improved my stroke no end a few years back. I can now swim a length of a 25 meter pool in 16 - 18 strokes, where as most of 'paddle wheelers' notch up about 25 - 30 strokes per length and hence tire much more quickly.
Yes, but who'd you rather be? The idle developer that obviously needs the job so is going to be cheaper, or the more expensive and busy one? That's the successful one afaik.
Yes, it might be true. I guess it depends on how you present yourself for doing the sell.
"You’re ok if you bring a hacker." Recap of Boston Y Combinator Event
Thanks to the Y Combinator startups for a great event.
I actually like the new logo better. Cheers to Red Cross for acting like real people over this and not a bunch of Suits.
another good idea. just gotta find somewhere to buy full sheet clear printable stickers...
Yes. http://disqus.com/docs/company/
very carefully.
Still, they have wonderful content creators and a number of their blogs (Deadspin, Gawker, Jezebel, io9) have very large and active communities. It's not the smartest thing to rock the boat unnecessarily.
- The text practically overlaps

- He wrote a top-ten list of UIs - but there's no actual links to listed items

- I couldn't read the article. I scanned through to see if I could find the links, but couldn't

- I'm a UI designer and I don't remember a single entry
Yeah - the name is bad. Although it was better than my original name: MyCOVCG&PS
It's very possible that he's paid a lot of money simply as a "valued" measure to refute the real costs of quality UI design (which can cost more than 40k to 1M).
Total Immersion really is an excellent program. It brought me from totally incompetent to competing on my high school's varsity team within the space of a couple months. I never expected to see it mentioned on news.yc.

Actually, though, you don't need to have good technique to get a good workout from swimming. In fact, I think swimming badly is significantly better exercise than swimming well.
Agreed, I started bicycling regularly about two years ago, and it has vastly improved my overall health, focus, and drive. Getting sick in the winter used to be the regular course of things -- I'd be knocked out for about a week or so with a cold or flu -- but the regular exercise and exposure to fresh air has kept me healthy in spite of everything. My productivity is higher, and my ideas more focused. I can only imagine the health benefits that would carry through into old age.

There is certainly no silver bullet to living into a healthy old-age, but it seems clear that running, biking, swimming, or any other exercise could only help you. Combined with good diet, social activity, intellectual hobbies, and who knows -- Ray Kurzweil's predictions may come true.

While biking the other day I came across this old dude (probably 70 years old) who was also on a bicycle up in the hills north of San Francisco. He was flying down this major hill, pedaling like mad, and the wackiest grin was on his face. When I'm old, I want to be that dude.
OMG. You're comparing Nielsen to cubism?

At best he's paint-by-numbers, using only 0 and 1.

I'll give him props for that aesthetic. Bit-minimalism.
Here is a potential conundrum that I have never quite understood:

If your goal is to get a workout (burn calories, raise your heart rate, move your muscles, etc.), then why would you want to learn to swim more efficiently? Wouldn't it just take more time to achieve the same amount of exertion?

Of course I understand that if you want to win a race you need to be efficient, but it seems to run counter to the goal of exercising. No?
What's being built with BOSS
Loss of Customer Data Spurs Closure of Online Storage Service "The Linkup"
Just remembered this German startup: http://designskins.com/ -- never tried it but apparently, upload your design and they send you the Laptop-sized sticky foil that apparently can be gotten rid of just as easily.
Ask HN: Web Programming Platforms
I'm starting a new web project soon and I'd like to try a new platform. I'm currently using CakePHP which is OK, but I want to learn Python or Ruby. With Python, I've heard the major ones are Django and Pylons, and w/Ruby, Rails of course. (Note that I don't know either Python or Ruby, but I figure I'll pick them up as I go along).

I've done some reading and it seems that these platforms have many of the same features. I don't want to start a platform or language war. I'm just interested in hearing some pros/cons of each. If I've left out a platform you especially like, please mention that also.
Been there, discussed that. Search for it, then try both, see what you like.
Ask YC: Hecl language syntax?
I'm sure Swatch will eventually get around to sending a letter too. I had a Swatch watch with a face that looked almost exactly like this logo (with black hands even), except that the background was red instead of transparent. (Photo: http://www.switzerwatch.com/product_info.php?products_id=138...)

I think that the logo would look better without the 3D effect--especially in the favicon and in the smaller version of the icon that is on the homepage. The gray shading makes the logo look dirty when the logo is on a white background (or printed on letterhead); when it is on a gray background (like the favicon often is), it is hard to make out.

Logo design is hard.
This is one reason why science is getting extinct.

That is a little hard to believe. The rate of scientific progress is, if anything, continuing to increase. As a society, we are increasingly dependent on science and technology. Science education has long been a priority of the educational systems in most first world countries (for better or worse). And as for "science at home", it is pretty hard to argue that it's under attack, a single anecdote about someone in Massachusetts notwithstanding.
I don't buy the "syntax doesn't matter" argument, but am a bit frustrated by just how much it does matter to some people. What do you guys think?
Userplane Re-Invents the Message Board
i always learned 'includes' means 'including but not limited to' and 'consists of' means 'including and no more'
I think I'm missing something important here.

What is the purpose of a smartphone in the first place, particularly for 'a young programmer' ?
Agreed completely. I found the original Eee (and I don't even know the numeric model to go with it) to be a great idea. Nowadays I don't even have a clear mental image for what it is, a low-end cheap laptop? A desktop? What?

Too bad really, Asus had a good thing going.
Yeah, I saw that, but what were his expectations? I mean, how noisy is it?
Is there a way to put Disqus into a custom Python web app, and still get the SEO cred?
cool, thanks. ill look into it.
Could someone build an iPhone app that sends your location to fireeagle? I'd do it but I don't have my license yet.

(Or maybe I could write it and someone else would be willing to upload it onto the store?)
Throw merb into the ruby options and then try a simple app in each of the four. All of them are great frameworks, it's just up to you to determine which feels best.
Wait, I thought the hard part was execution? Weren't they just trying to get their ideas executed? Why does it matter if it wasn't unique or first? Ya'll need to make up your mind, is it 90% ideas, or 90% execution? :)
Sorry, but no. The "controversy", if you can call it that, is whether or not it is proper to use "includes" with a list that is complete-- everybody agrees that it is the best choice for an incomplete list. Check your link again.

Seriously: if I said "The science faculty includes two Nobel Laureates", would you really think that there were only two professors on staff?

It's a nonsensical argument at best-- and when folks attempt to use it to argue against common sense (like stating that the United States does not include the 50 States), reason is left whimpering in the corner.
Come fly the fee-filled skies
I'm curious too. It would be harder to look through the phone book to find companies with bad programs :-)
Not in this country. The facilities might be better, but I don't see any encouragement for curiosity and discovery, and I know enough people who've found out that doing DIY Biology might get them labeled as "dangerous people". Maybe I am just old and crusty.
I tried this with some lawyers once back in the day when I just finished college ... needless to say these are some cheap ass motherf*ckrs ... they wanted almost everything for free - setting up their network, fixing their printer, calling comcast when internet was down etc. All this just because I wrote them a small desktop application.
I agree that extinct is too strong a word. Let's call it "science is having a tough time" (and that it is). How many kids do you know who'd like to spend their holidays doing garage science (or adults for that matter)?
Amateur Science (The story of David Hahn)
it wouldn't really take more time because you can still get your heart rate up quickly while swimming correctly.

Swimming efficiently also is more of a full body workout I think than just paddling your arms.

Also swimming poorly can be frustrating and would make people not want to work out as long or maybe give up swimming alltogether.
Yet another blah article generalizing about entire countries based on experiments done on 30 people at a time under lab conditions.Go NY Times.
a velcro strip isn't going to keep a power plug from getting jerked out of a server by a careless admin.
Ask HN: Best way to show current weather?
I want to show the current weather conditions at the top of The Windy Citizen (http://www.windycitizen.com), my Chicago blog network. What's the best way to do it? Is there an embeddable widget that's head and shoulders above the rest? An RSS feed I could grab and update with cron? Something less well-known that's really wowing you with design/features?
the YC press machine churns on. good coordination. time to get outside the 250.
How is that related to "stored hundreds of chemicals in his house" and "more than 1,500 vials, jars, cans, bottles and boxes" ? This is hardly a "chemical set". It sits firmly in "WTF" category, especially if you are charged with protecting public safety.

Consider the context. An usually large amount of potentially dangerous chemicals in a residential area is an emergency situation. They responded accordingly - eliminated potential danger first, analyzed it second.

And before you downmod me again, imagine yourself living next door to this "chemist" or sharing a graywater supply with him. Then ask yourself if you still think authorities were wrong in their "overreaction".
Looks like Brightkite with some of the features removed and Yahoo integration tacked on. Not that Brightkite broke completely new ground either, but Fire Eagle really looks like a knockoff.
Direct link to paper:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/MES/pdf/JRP2003.pdf
Two things:

1. Naming is important for open source projects as well.

2. From Jay Philips' Blog (http://jicksta.com/posts/what-were-not-admitting-about-aster...):

"Here’s what I’ll let out: its name is Adhearsion Inc. and it’s not consulting. We’re currently seeking private funding. If you are or know of investors, send me an email at jay-at-adhearsion-dot-com. We think we know how to turn the industry around."
"A manufacturer of these devices cannot be a user, because they'd be dead..."

Well, unless you're Tony Stark.
This is fantastic.

I totally needed to make it easier to track my every move.

I'd use it, but without the ability to post my social security # and bank account passwords, it seems useless.
Yes, after our API gets better documentation over the next few days.
the difference between zipties and velcro is that velcro is best for organizational binding... zipties are structural, and should be largely considered permanent. You shouldn't cut a ziptie holding a cable that would take down production any more than you should move a rack while production servers in it are still running. If it is the sort of thing you might want to move while the servers are running (like, say, ethernet, or a bundle of cables that goes to more than one server) like you said you should use velcro or something else temporary.
I think the author still has a lot of work to do to defend his case. BMW doesn't hesitate to make concept cars (see, e.g., http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1890/69/), but it has brisk sales and an enviable brand cachet. It's tempting to find some one variable which differs between successful companies and unsuccessful ones, and then spin it, but I think that, in reality, no one variable explains things so neatly.
I'm sorry to hear gmail is down, but really what can you expect for free?

When the service was down for your email which your life depends on, where you able to reach someone to get support-- I bet that answer was a sad "no...". Oh yea, I forgot, you could go read the community forums...

Company's like TVC.Net, Godadd y and others offer email for a buck a month and you can bet had service been down with them you'd be able to at least call someone-- or even move your account quickly to another server and be back up in no time.

So do you depend on free and prefer the type of service you get with free?

At what point did businesses expect free would be reliable, and expect free customer support as well?

If you lost money due to using a free service methinks you only have one person to blame.

Enjoy,
Jim
Thanks for the help! So to hopefully clarify my bandwidth question a bit, and this might be a dumb question, but is there any way for the content of http://free.megaproxy.com/go/<url>; to completely avoid megaproxy servers? In the specific example of megaproxy I assume they need to run that page through their servers but if someone just wanted to display a webpage in this manner, could they avoid running the third-party site through their servers and just feed the page directly from the source to the viewer?
Fire eagle has been in the works at Yahoo for years and years and year and years.
Awesome guys, thanks so much for the help!
Except that watch looks more like a stylised version of the Swiss flag - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Flag_of_Switzerland.svg
Genetically engineered dogs that excrete sealed tubes will put you out of business.
That man is a chemist. I'd personally think a chemist's "chemistry set" would contain a little bit more than a teenager's. What difference does it make if it was contained in vials, jars or boxes? What else would you contain chemicals in? What if you had a rack of rackmounts you picked up on craigslist serving as a distcc farm, or something else and someone broke into your basement and accused you of "hacking" or some other absurd charge because they had no idea what one would do with all that computing or something that 'looked' like it was dangerous.

What seems like "too many" to someone who isn't involved with hobbyist chemistry (or whatever he's involved with) is completely unimportant. You show me a law on the books that limits your hobbies and if you find a law that fits that and is reasonable, I'd agree with you.

If I was an EE hobbyist and built a small tesla coil (which many people do), I wouldn't want people living next door giving me the looks and trying to shut me down because it doesn't look kosher to /them/.

They didn't respond to any chemical-related threats, or a chemical fire, nor did he have a criminal record, so I'd disagree completely with you that there's any concern for worry.

I love it how people take it upon themselves to decide what is acceptable and what isn't.
Yes! Pretty much all I've done for years. An old hn post of mine...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182489

[Edit: Oops, almost forgot that this was one of those posts where someone picked up on a seemingly insignificant detail and started a big debate over it. I posted the link to save myself from cutting and pasting. The "debate" below it is pointless.]
Brooks is confusing collectivism with dictatorship, and they're not related. You can have a collectivist democracy, like Japan, or an individualist dictatorship, like Saddam's Iraq or Nazi Germany.

China's recent economic improvements have nothing to do with its collectivism. They're due to more freedom, both economic and personal, for its citizens. Taiwan, whose people are arguably very similar to the Chinese in cultural outlook, started prospering as they emerged from martial law under the Kuomintang to democracy. Hopefully China will follow the same path as Taiwan and South Korea in this respect.

I get the sense that Brooks wants to prove that dictatorships are just as morally legitimate as democracies, and that the people of Asia (or the Middle East, or wherever) are somehow culturally programmed to thrive under a dictatorship. He's got it backwards -- the people thrive not because of the dictatorship, but in spite of it. Once they're freed, they'll thrive all the more.
What a Jakob Nielsen designed WinAmp skin would look like
I really like swimming. But the chlorine compound (or whatever) in swimming-pool water affects my skin. So I can't swim regularly.
Modalbox in Grails
There is a nice and handy javascript library for creating kind of a modal “window”, similar to the famous lightbox. Here are few lines of code to make it running in a Grails application
any connection with ze frank as in ride the fire eagle danger day?
"After all, they're basically a manufacturing company, not a marketing company, right? The fact that they created a great brand was probably an accident anyway.

But as a marketer, that's what makes this even more infuriating. Creating a great brand usually requires hard work, lots of creativity, and tremendous discipline. When someone pursues the goal in that manner and succeeds, I admire them. But when someone accidentally succeeds, and then destroys their own work, I just want to bang my head against the desk."

Asus created a great brand by building consistently great products - not by marketing or gimmicks. To this day, I refuse to buy any montherboard other than an Asus. I've had Soyos, MSIs, and many other spontaneously fail on me, but never an Asus.

That's the right way to build a brand name.
changing the process is exactly what I am talking about here... not so much changing, though, as creating. Usually, when you tell a SysAdmin to do something (install a server, remove a server, etc...) she just does it. I mean, most of this is pretty simple stuff. my suggestion is that when you see a mistake of inattention, you add process so the problem does not occur a second time. set up a checklist for that process, or as in the power cord example, change your process for installing new servers.

the alternate is to just fire people when they make dumb mistakes... but for me, that is unjustifiably expensive, especially when compared with the cost of adding process.

Sure, if you control the app you can set things up such that losing one physical server isn't a problem, but that is usually a lot more expensive than a few zipties. One thing I've learned in my years as a computer janitor is that a fix I can put in place now with materials I have on hand gets done. A fix I suggest to the devs, even if they agree it is a good idea, rarely gets done.

Process, when it includes humans, is bureaucracy. And yeah, you need to make sure it doesn't get ridiculous, however, having a checklist for, say, installing a server, or replacing a bad disk is still, I believe, in the realm of 'good bureaucracy.' When you get paged at 4am after a late party, you can't count on being sharp and remembering everything. You have to accept that especially for emergency maintenance, sometimes your admins are not at 100%.

you also need to accept that things you don't expect will happen. You can't always rely on process. I'm just saying that you can use process to avoid making the same mistake twice.
I'm not part of the "syntax doesn't matter" camp either.
Since Hecl (I think) is partly intended to use for coding directly from phones with crappy screens/keyboards, for me at least, syntax would be especially important there. Not so much that it would be familiar, but that it would be as concise as possible.
you do not have to go up and down 2.5M times/sec - unles you are batching messages. but have to take care about latency big care. btw on zeromq website is nice chart latency vs. throughput - worth to have a look.
Canon Pixma MP470 Multifunction Printer
Canon Pixma MP470 Printer right at home. This versatile All-In-One lets you quickly print beautiful photos and laser-quality text. Copy important documents, with results that are truer to your originals. And scan photos or forms, even thick notebooks.
It gets pretty unwieldly on the bigger sites (Gizmodo, Gakwer, and LifeHacker) when there are hundreds if not thousands of comments. The position now is basically the attraction isn't the discussion of the posts but the posts themselves. Things might change soon though.
Yahoo Fire Eagle Launches Geo-Location Platform To The Public
Here's today's article by the same journalist (John Markoff), but some additional information:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/technology/13cyber.html?em

It seems that Georgia has to currently go through Russia for their Internet communications.
Different brand.

The Eee brand meant something else, and could have become the label for an entire product category. As "iPod" replaced "MP3 player", "Eee" had the potential to replace "real computer small enough to take anywhere without thinking about it too much."

This is the brand whose demise Eric Sink laments.
they don't do transparencies :( gotta have a solid colour as the background.
Yeah, you could set the frameset src to point directly to the webpage of interest. You lose the ability to alter or read the page content from your address bar, though. (I think; perhaps you could exploit some browser security bugs to do it, but you shouldn't be able to.)
Rupert Murdoch fires his CIO