skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The really unnerving thing is that they've improved 9 stones in only a year. One of the biggest criticisms of Kurzweil was that the software would never improve fast enough to match the improvement in hardware, but we see here that this program is able to beat dans by using a slightly modified version of guess-and-check.
No it isn't. I don't agree with the argument, but it's not insane. What the commenter is saying is that if candidate employees are in competition for jobs with candidates from other jurisdictions where noncompetes are enforceable, and many people don't really care about noncompetes, the candidates in the places with enforceable noncompetes have a market advantage. They can exchange a noncompete agreement for job opportunities.

The commenter is making the point that you always had the freedom not to sign noncompetes, even when they were enforceable, just as you have the freedom not to work 70 hour weeks for a $150k salaried job: don't accept the job. But you probably want the opportunity to work the odd 70 hour week, if it advances your career.

For a slippery-slope alternative to the "freedom" you're talking about, see France in the mid-90's, and try to start a competitive software shop there.

Like I said, I disagree with the commenter, because noncompetes are wildly abused in our industry. But I think reasonable people can disagree.
Um, the statement "You are not allowed to freely agree to X" is clearly limiting your freedom, even if X is "limit your freedom in exchange for something."
Ah OK, maybe I just confused the title of the series, I thought it was "Idiot's guide to...", not "... for dummies".
Denmark. There are no official Apple stores, so it's this company Humac handling all Apple business, which results in a tedious process, e.g. they can't perform simple fixes in the store, because they are not allowed to buy spare parts from Apple until they actually have the computer.

So, it's not directly Apples fault, but still, they should hire somebody else to do it. When your job is your computer two weeks without it is a very, very long time.
IPO Official for A123
This company is still losing money but interesting in an age of little IPO action, a lithium battery company filings are official
Visions of our far future
Smoking is restricted because it is a public health hazard, for the same reason we regulate the emission of toxins from other sources like industry or agriculture. So yes, there is a restriction in "freedom" in that case. But it's done for a clear, transparent and very compelling reason. (c.f. "no first amendment right to shoud 'fire' in a crowded theater", yada yada yada).

What is the public health interest in restricting employer choice?
Give E-TextEditor a try if you're stuck on Windows.

http://www.e-texteditor.com/
The cult of Y Combinator? I think not.
It is if it's done in the purist way Facebook uses it. Sounds dumb but bear with me for a moment.

Facebook is all about levels of communication. You can tag somebody to draw their attention to what you've done, you can write on their wall to chat publicly, you can write privately if it's either a walled-in discussion (set number of speakers) or if it's something too sensitive to say out loud.

Poking, which I think I'm right in saying Facebook made first, is a method of bridging the small gap where you want to talk to somebody but you don't know what to say. It's the equivalent of small talk when you do it with friends: it's just a matter of alerting them to your presence. With people you don't know so well, it's even more a matter of flirtation: you don't have to explain your poke, or pretend there's a reason. All they know is that you've poked them, for whatever reason, and by doing so you've been brought to their attention.

So, if it's being copied in the exact same manner, used in the exact same way (where "poke" is an option on the level of "send message" and "add friend" on every menu), then yeah, they might have a point about copying a feature. Poking is simple like Twitter is: yes, it's basic, but what matters is implementation.

Also, regarding that site's layout: yech. It's like they took the brilliantly minimal Facebook design without realizing what made it such a brilliant design, and added tweaks to something they didn't quite understand. Sickening.
It's stupid not to work on hard problems. Worse, it's lazy.
yeah, I don't think facebook had any real innovations, its just a utilization of current resources
There is no way that my boss will tell the guys in India to stop using Dreamweaver. First those developers would be clueless without it. Second, for some reason my boss seems to favor using dreamweaver.
Top Resources to Find Jobs in your field
Accusing the ruby-core folks of a lack of candor in their handling of the previous round of vulnerabilities isn't really fair. Once the issues were effectively documented and explained, they released updated versions of Ruby 1.8.6 and 1.8.7 quite quickly.

The problem was simple that the core team doesn't use Rails, so they didn't test the patches they produced with non-trivial Rails apps. When other people did that testing, they got segfaults, freaked out, and basically tried to tell the core team that their release process was shit, and that they should let a bunch of outsiders tell them how to manage their releases.

Personally, I was embarrassed to be part of the English-speaking Ruby community during that entire episode.
Washington Post Reeling: Print Ads Down 22%, Online Growth Slowing To A Crawl
Nobody is going to comment on the Little Britain reference in an Economist headline? Quite unexpected...
Along the same lines, I've found www.changingminds.org to be the mother of all sites for techniques on convincing people to do what you want them to do.
Not to make this an Apple Person argument, but I think this is the sort of Apple Person mentality that I like the most: the one that isn't about constantly harping on other computer types, but that just quietly appreciates how beautifully simple most Apple stuff is.

I subscribed as well.
Oops, sorry I deleted my comment because I didn't think it added much. For the record, it was something like:

"I also suspect Go is related to AGI, so I'm finding the strong advancement a little unnerving (as someone so far skeptical of the likelihood of singularity in our lifetime)"
From my experience, Ryanair doesn't seem very concerned about PR. Their only real focus is to preserve a reputation as the cheapest no frills airline in Europe, and do everything possible to make their ticket prices appear lower than competitors. Or maybe they're just one of the sleazier companies out there.

While their base ticket prices may seem incredibly low, they make their profits by tagging on extra "service fees" that appear on their website after you've begun checking out. For example, a few years ago I remember I had to pay extra for "baggage insurance", which ensures that your bags do eventually make it to their intended destination and don't get lost, something that is usually implicitly included in the original ticket price of other airlines. The UI of the Ryanair website stresses the importance of this baggage insurance with a popup window. Other airline comparison sites probably have decent UIs that don't push these options to the extent of Ryanair.

They also go to great lengths to cut any cost. I've heard that employees are not allowed to charge phones at work in order to save on energy bills. And from my experiences, their employees really don't seem to have any sort of customer service training. Or maybe they're just grumpy because Ryanair treats them so poorly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryanair
The Criticisms and Complaints section is actually pretty interesting.
How to generate revenue from your RSS feed: interview with Founder & CEO of Pheedo
Any interest in ad-supported cellphone service?
you need to put some thought into the engineering process
behind it, and that includes putting some forethought into
how you're going to handle security problems

Again, the ruby-core crew aren't thoughtless, or inexperienced; they have processes in place for both normal releases and security advisories, and have a pretty damn good track record for getting updates into the hands of the folks who need 'em.

There are now far too many versions of Ruby out there in the wild for the core team to effectively predict who is going to be affected by a particular issue. Every Linux distro and release of OS X has a slightly different bundled Ruby runtime, and most people don't seem to bother tracking the stable release from the core team until something like the last round of security updates leaves them scrambling to keep up.

The problem isn't the core team failing to handle security issues, it's the community not giving a shit about the code that makes up the 'ruby' binary until something goes wrong, and then not having any clue how to update their systems and do basic compatibility testing.
Slow down. Caltech has a lot of intellectual self-respect. Getting into Caltech is hard. Getting out of Caltech is also hard. You need brains. Lots of cc of brains.

"It's just a piece of paper."? Uh-uh. Not from Caltech. It's as much a piece of paper as a cat-scan result that says your brain is big, or a check for a million dollars. In this case, the words on the piece of paper mean something.
#django, #python, #apache @ freenode

It gets a little overwhelming if you join too many channels
One semantic/aesthetic difference is that git floods tab completion with all the git- items, which is needlessly annoying. Namespacing the entire public interface behind one executable feels cleaner.

I suspect the underlying reason people complain about this is that it's a particularly visible instance of hg having a vastly cleaner public interface than git. Of course, one person's "feeling cleaner" is another person's "easier to write scripts/extensions for that won't break every time the public interface to the relevant exposed internals change in the slightest way". There seems to be much less effort to encapsulate the git interface for consistent external usage.*

Some people will prefer git for just this reason, though: You can easily get at the internals, if necessary. Like most of these "holy wars", it's a trade-off, and different people have different values. Make an informed decision. (Git's design values seem to resemble C's, while hg more closely fits Python's. I strongly prefer the latter.)

* This is unsurprising, though: Linus has spoken rather condescendingly of monotone's "nice object-oriented libraries". (http://lwn.net/Articles/249460/) (He also complained that it was slow, though he caught it at a particularly bad time -- one of the lead developers had just gone on sabbatical (and was preparing to move across the country), and the issues causing the sluggishness were fixed shortly after.)
#perl @ irc.freenode.net

#daytraders @ chat.othernet.org
The degree isn't the point. The point is that he accomplished something. You could substitute a lot of other things for your own personal version of the story.
There's a minimum bar for getting into Caltech, and an even higher minimum bar for graduating from there. We're talking about lower bounds here. Saying "a degree is a piece of paper" entirely misses the point.
#iphone, irc.saurik.com
Girl Talk is great... kind of funny to see him on the same playlist as Jason Mraz, though. ;)
To be an extremist, you need to be pretty damn irrational. I assume that the correct allocation would be something at least partially rational?

I mean... firebombing houses is probably not going to help us find the Higgs boson.
Now? #django #python #startups

Back in the day?
Quite a few more.

IRC is actually where I started programming quite a bit back in the day. Bots, scripts, simple servers. I would like to think all that 'wasted' time has paid dividends.
Here are some screenshots of what my emacs typically looks like:

Reading e-mail, hanging out on IRC, fixing some cut-n-pasted elisp:

http://disk.jrock.us/bingo/public/random/irc-color.png

Working on Perl stuff, reading e-mail:

http://disk.jrock.us/bingo/public/random/8-aug-2008-screensh...

(Shameless plug for Stylish-REPL: http://git.jrock.us/?p=Server-Stylish.git;a=summary)

A desktop without distractions:

http://disk.jrock.us/bingo/public/random/8-aug-2008-screensh...

Here is my Firefox desktop:

http://disk.jrock.us/bingo/public/random/firefox-screenshot....

Then I have another desktop where Amarok lives, although I mostly control it from emacs.
... and the $25B is a good 6+ minute introduction to the page-rank algorithm. The difference between the two perspectives is that the $25B paper treats PageRank as a general eigenvalue problem, while this one treats it as a very specific eigenvalue problem that has been analyzed to death by every student of QM or numerical analysis... including the associated perturbation theory, stability, preconditioning techniques, etc. As a result, the paper is very easy to scan. It is not a magnum opus, but it is cute.
I won a statewide competition in chemistry in high school, went to Caltech as an undergraduate, and it was hard. Transferred to another top-rated school, which wasn't nearly as hard.

To get a Caltech degree does require being smart, and being dedicated.
It would probably work on me. What is that.. like $4?
Post a comment and let me know what you think of the video...I'd love your feedback!
Additional-- even the worst Caltech undergrads were reasonably smart and dedicated. My recollection is Caltech had a 33% non-matriculation rate--extremely high for a top-select school
Has anyone ever seen a truly smart person struggle? I for one have never. They must either hide it very well, or never really hit those roadblocks that make people think themselves, and not the roadblocks, are the problem. What is it?
Patry's Copyright Blog (http://williampatry.blogspot.com/) also discussed this case at length on August 2. Since Patry took the blog down temporarily and is now putting it back up, I'm going to copy paste the relevant post here.

The Executive Branch of our government has been on an IP public relations binge lately, strutting like a peacock and showing off its finest colors of commitment to strong IP rights. Alberto Gonzalez has been paraded out much like Johnny Depp without the eyeliner, vanquishing those pesky pirates. The Office of United States Trade Representative (before Mr. Zoellick's recent departure to Wall Street), strides the globe like the Colossus of Rhodes, mau-mauing ("Mzungu Aende Ulaya — Mwafrika Apate Uhuru!") small and medium size countries into agreeing to DMCA and even DMCA+ provisions. The Administration is solidly on message: IP 'R U.S.

Except, perhaps when it comes to the Government's own conduct. In Blueport Co. LLP v. United States, the Government successfully asserted a defense of sovereign immunity against a charge that it had violated 17 USC Section 1201, the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision. Federal Federal Claims Judge Lawrence Block described the factual allegations:

The bare facts of the matter now before the court are quite simple. It involves a copyrighted computer management information program and the alleged attempts by the U.S. Air Force to circumvent technological safeguards designed to protect the program. Plaintiff is a limited liability corporation, organized in the State of Idaho. On March 6, 2000, plaintiff acquired all the rights to a computer program entitled AUMD and AUMD Admin (“computer program”) from Mr. Mark Davenport, who was then a Technical Sergeant in the Air Force. Allegedly, the computer program greatly increased the efficiency with which Air Force manpower resource requirement reports were generated. The computer program contained an automatic expiration function, so that the program would stop operating on a particular date. This feature was included in the program to control licensing and to prevent unauthorized use beyond the license expiration date. Plaintiff alleges, in essence, that Air Force personnel unlawfully “hacked” into the computer program to alter the automatic expiration function, to the Air Force's advantage.

The defense was not as one might have expected, that the work was ab initio one of the United States government and therefore not protected by virtue of Section 105, but that the governement cannot - ever - be sued for DMCA violations because Congress did not expressly provide for express waiver of such immunity. Plaintiff referred the court to a number of exemptions in Section 1201 that refer to conduct by federal employees, exemptions that would not make sense absent liability, but the bottom line was simple: without express liability, the Government is free to be a DMCA scofflaw.

The ball is now in Congress's court.
I've always thought that this criticism didn't make sense. Improvements in software are highly dependent on improvements in hardware:
http://prog21.dadgum.com/29.html
What would have once taken incredible software engineering skills is now trivial. Hardware is a big constraint on software development. How can you possibly expect software and hardware development to be neck and neck?
Like the constitution.. it is written on parchment! Parchment! How terrible. You can't search it or handle it with your bare hands.

That being said, it is easier to update a wiki than to get a man page updated. This may foster better or more documentation, but ultimately the format does not dictate the utility.
http://i529.photobucket.com/albums/dd332/sharjeelq/myscreen1...

Thats screenshot of one of my two screens. I place my laptop on the right and use synergy to connect. Do all my dev on 19" desktop and use laptop mainly for browsing, reading.

My dev env: WinXP, Python2.5, IPython, PyScripter, Aptana, Firefox + Firebug
The SEC is Twittering...
here's my link dump y'all. I believe IANAS: i am not a spammer

google custom search
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=018342486690831005521:1iq2...

http://searchyc.com/

firefox plugin
http://jetfar.com/search-yc-firefox-plugin/

xirium
http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/

feeds by user etc
http://ycfeeds.com/

(haven't tried this)
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/30512

FAQ
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

s'more tools
http://blog.hystry.com/
Not to mention that, even when you state something as obvious as 2 + 2 equals 4, some anxious amateur editor will add a [citation needed], along with a few other deprecating warnings.
Summary: "As long as you don't steal trade secrets or confidential information, you can do what you want."
It was a simpler example, for which there isn't a one-to-one mapping with the actual case. The point of the example was that when you turn a choice into an obligation, you don't get more freedom, even if the obligation is to do something that, on average, maximizes freedom.

We can try another example. Let's say you own a nice sound system. You want to move into a nice new apartment, where they like things quiet after 10 PM. If the manager is able to ask you to agree not to use your sound system after 10 PM, are you a) less free, because you are able to give up a particular freedom, or b) more free, because you can agree to abide by a set of rules in order to get something you want? I think it's clearly b), and I'd even question whether or not you 'own' a sound system if you are unable to agree to turn it off sometimes.
I had assumed this is by design.
I once was put on a project with a very senior engineer. He had many more years of general experience than I, but we were both new to the project.

I tended to sit around feeling stupid, making feeble attempts to be productive. He, on the other hand, knew how to ask the right questions of the right people and get the information he needed to proceed. He was just as clueless as me on the project, but the difference was he knew how to quickly and easily move from being clueless to being knowledgable.
I have always thought this was a horrible idea. If you work for years in some specialty say machine learning. If you leave one job chances are you are still going to work in that same specialty. NCs really ruin a persons options.

You shouldn't take any code, and if there was a particular area a past employer was innovating in perhaps steer a bit clear of that specific thing.
I'm actually curious if Wikipedia is more deletionist or if its an artifact of everyone having made/contributed to a page they care about, so when they delete, you actually notice.

(That being said, I too think its lame.)
Somewhat useless without pics.
Unicodoth, rather.
Improvement in hardware promotes laziness in software development.
Ben Casnocha uses the text from Apple ‘Think Different’ ad as analogy for entrepreneurship
I've tended to log into IRC just to see what goes past. Much like I do when I've logged into Twitter.
I stand corrected; I was under the impression that the big problem with the last release, was that it broke core functionality that had been available in all previous stable releases.
Posting these links where people new to the site will see them is the whole point. Your comment will be buried in a few days. :(
#django, #zope and #plone, mostly. Had some trips to #ubuntu, #ubuntu-laptop and so on because I want to buy a netbook and wanted opinions. People were not very friendly there.

#startups seems a great idea. I will check.
If you are interested in some light reading on the topic of influence and negotiation, I definitely recommend reading the book that the author references. It's titled Influence: The psychology of persuasion by Robert Cialdini.

While the principles discussed are pretty simple (they were all named in the article), Cialdini explains them very well. They are immediately applicable and will definitely be useful for anyone needing to influence/manage other people.
...What if there was a wiki that people could use to participate in the documentation, and then that documentation would become the man page with the next release? Everyone wins?

I like and use both man pages and wikis, but I'm not sure how I would even begin to participate in helping with documentation for something like a man page if I wanted to. The actual creation of the man page itself, as I understand it, is a single-user task. If you want community involvement to get source material, you're going to have to have an accessible participatory mechanism; a wiki, essentially, in whatever form that may take. But it should be easy, no?

I suppose there's also the counter argument that "people who need wikis to participate in something like git documentation are probably not the people we want writing git documentation."
Why would it have been a problem to start a software shop in the mid 90's in France? 35 hour workweek? Other government mandated benefits? Not saying it wasn't. I just want to know exactly what the referent is.
Ask YC: PR agency that invests in you?
One of my local contacts remembers reading an article in a business magazine sometime back about a PR company that, instead of working for a flat fee, reviews your company and product and then works in exchange for a portion of the subsequent revenues, or part ownership, or some such thing. Basically, it's a PR firm that invests in your idea if they like it.

Has anybody heard of such a thing? I've searched everywhere. She thinks they were located in New York (of course).
It's a video, which is lame but funny. It's like trashy TV designed specifically for geeks.
I like the rotating new article at the top of Reddit, how about that for HN?
The new story suggester at the top of reddit helps people to notice new stories a bit more and bring some stories that might have not been noticed to the top. Anyone else think this would be good to add to HN?
If they had an api comparison site wouldn't have to screen scrape
I made it from a sheet of 4x8 melamine and some cleverness with a jigsaw and router.
Ask YC: Do 30 day trials actually help get customers?
Has anyone here seen any benifitof offering customers 30 day free trials for a web based product.
Ideas for Google on how to better monetize YouTube
Is the IPO Window Opening Up Again?  A123 Systems Files
used to hang out on #django on irc.freenode.net

then we switched to php, no need for irc anymore