skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You'd think that, but to sell it you'd have to phrase it that way in your marketing so people know what to expect. Thats what marketing is sort of about most of the time, managing people's expectations. There a difference between saying "our product can transfer the files you select when your laptop is stolen" and "For $20 we'll use our software to recover as much as we can." In one, a customer assumes they will get something, while in another, a customer hopes to get something. If you fail, the customer who assumed will be angry at themselves for making a false assumption, but they will take it out on you. The customer who hoped might still be angry, but not as you (unless he sees no one else getting data, then he will be angry at you for creating false hope).
Ask PG/HN people: How to manage personal growth?
How would/have you managed personal/staff development in an organization?(in a start up or start up-like enviroment)
Just realizing that, left alone, I would not care that much to develop the so called "soft skills"; and how much of an impact could that have in my whole experience as a person.
I know, traditionally, this is a more bussines oriented matter, but I want the hackers indsigth.
Apple Now Worth More Than Google
Really?

The best scalpel in the world won't make you a good surgeon. Or, at least, it won't make me a good surgeon. I don't about you.
> About the IP address, I would probably find out the ISP and then email the ISP. Realistically, I think that's the best you can do in many cases. The police have better things to do than track down the odd stolen laptop.

You don't seem fairly motivated to recover the laptop (nor even have a real plan), that's not a good quality for such a service. There are plenty of other competitors in the space and they are very enthusiastic about working with the police. A few great success stories are priceless in marketing value.

In general, you should be very very specific about what your software does and what you'll be able to do in case of a reported stolen laptop. It's essentially spyware, so you need to be very up front.
I think the jury is still out on whether a corrupt elite cannot hijack a democratic system. You got rid of "Bush" in '93 yet here he is again. More to the point, the powers behind the Bushes and probably any other candidate you get to choose from are still there - big money sponsors.

And that doesn't even touch upon the other issue, that of the corrupt elite being put in place by the democratic system itself, as happened with basically all the fascist dictators in the 30s. Who's to say that won't happen again?
http://www.scalehobbyist.com/catagories/Detailing_and_Displa...
I think your best bet is an RDF tool like Jena or Sesame. 10^9 is pushing these engines though. There's an HBase-SPARQL lib, but that's gotta be two years away from stable.

For real world problems, I tend to write custom code that's Java NIO heavy. Try to pack the data as efficiently as possible, and minimize disk seeks.
How about: companies that summarily disqualify developer candidates who prefer to use Windows?
Add Your Personal Review of http://www.freshstartafterdivorce.com/blog?p=44
The idea is that it's like Amazon recommending books or Last.fm recommending music (though the technique is quite different). In practice, once you're used to using it, it's a really fast way for jumping into a topic since you immediately see clusters around an article -- i.e. if you don't know anything about Literary Theory and want to figure out what the important articles and authors in the area are you can do so quickly. (An example a friend of mine used when looking for books on the topic, successfully, incidentally.)

My question would be, do you not associate what we're doing with recommendations or not see recommendations as valuable?
good tips for sleeping well
I'd definitely love more granular dependencies between courses. Why do you need "Language LV2" before you can tackle "Math LV3"?
well, then it must be bad.

WTF? Is this the thread where everyone completely misunderstands everything? Did I say "bad"? Did the video say "bad"? Is Brittney Spears the comparable here?, or perhaps should we pit the entire 12 tone catalog against one movement of anything written by Beethoven and see how it stands up? It's just a joke. There are two classes of people who cannot tolerate humor:

1. Islamofascists.

2. People who enjoy 12 tone music.
The tools that you mention are honestly not just one, but a couple orders of magnitude too slow to do interesting applications on at this scale.
it's too bad sterilization is so stigmatized.
Google Reader Finally Introduces Granular Sharing Control
Yeah, but not all organizations just want "a good member of a big bureauratic organization." Some of them actually care about getting (or growing and keeping) high-performing individuals. It's just that people who work at companies like that don't do a lot of complaining online, so they're pretty invisible.
The joys of fantasy and Romance: in defense of imagination
Why is there so much concern over this sort of data, but not over credit cards? We surrender that information freely for a little convenience. The contents of emails and personal messages are different and should be private. But information on what we click and what we buy are the same in principle.
Yeah, but if college's function of "preparing you for work" is taken over by vocational schools, it's not clear that there will still be a market for our current conception of college.

And I'm sure that a lot of you will say that that's an indication that college is mostly a waste, but I don't think that that follows, necessarily; although I haven't been to college yet I feel vaguely that it'll be more rewarding than most things that I could think of to do otherwise, and certainly that it'll be more rewarding than most things that I would in all likelihood do otherwise.
This is a self-solving problem one way or another.

The employers that use low-information predictors of productivity will go out of business and whatever system the remaining businesses are using will drive the educational system.

Either that, or the inevitably-higher credit standards in the near future will help to give the college system a population haircut, which will weed out quite a few of those who don't really mean it (and unfortunately, some of those who do...).
I dropped out of the JC I was attending and just started finding better ways of doing things (read: "developed technical solutions") at each company I worked for, regardless of what the position was. Although I would like to make more money, I trained myself, followed my interests, and now - relatively speaking - I have an above average salary, both for my current position and the region I live in.

College, in my case, was totally unnecessary. Yet I'm a DBA/Developer for a respected Fortune 500 company.
I used to believe that democracy was the best system. I believed in it as fervently and as automatically as a 16th century Spaniard might believe in Catholicism. Can you blame me? No-one in my society opposes democracy. No-one sane anyway.

In the last couple of years, I've encountered well-reasoned opposing views for the first time.

Is democracy a means to an end (good government), or an end in itself? If it's an end in itself, the argument is over. How tragic that good governance - a life-and-death-issue - is trumped by an ideal.

If democracy is the means to good government, then it might be worth reconsidering our assumptions. Growing up good Catholics, oops I mean democratic citizens, we all know that opposing ideas such as despotism have irreparable problems and are the cause of most of the death and destruction in the world. Instead of giving up, let's try fixing those problems. Perhaps the situation has changed since people first started telling each other about the succession problems of despotism. Maybe technology can change the government industry, just as it has revolutionized so many other industries.

So let's back up, and consider how to get an effective x, where x is a cup of coffee or a laptop or anything else. One way might be to get everyone to vote on what kind of x they like, and then give that to everyone. This is of course a terrible system, and not Starbucks nor Apple have that kind of system.

Much better to have competition. I'd be terrible at making coffee or a laptop, and it's best that I'm not trusted to make those things, or to choose who would be good at making them. Nor ought I to be trusted with running a country or choosing who to run it.

So, I think an ideal world might be a world of many smaller governments, each competing for consumers/citizens. Apply the creativity and efficiency of startups to the governing industry. I want a world of Singapores and Hong Kongs and Liechtensteins, where I can pick my government provider approximately the same way I pick my ISP or my employer.

Of course there are problems. So solve them! What better decrepit, corrupt, monopolizing old industry to fix than the governing industry? A Peter Thiel-funded startup is trying (http://seasteading.org).
It is on unamplified guitar. The guitar itself (including the strings) is also a factor, but varying plucking position and method (pick, nail, flesh etc.) gives huge variations in tone. These things also affect tone on amplified guitar, though less so as more excessive processing (distortion etc.) is added.
IE 6 & 7 Developer Toolbar - Not new, but really useful
Seedcamp application zeitgeist
I think that Rails controllers do tend to be pretty "fluffy" -- in fact, I would basically call them "view adapters." Replacing them entirely with a Sinatra-style routing and dispatch model would be a fine approach.

However, that still leaves a gap between the page-to-page flow control and transactional logic, which is an area where Rails just doesn't have much help to offer. Having to flatten my entire transaction state into a session hash, which is then (by default) squeezed into a 4Kb cookie, is constraining.

Why not let me instantiate a controller for a particular transaction on the site and control its lifecycle, ala Stateful Session Beans?
US Federal Circuit decides open source licenses are enforceable under copyright law
5 Things I learned from being rich and losing it all
The thing is, the market only sorts out egregious programmers.

The security certification is a wonderful idea! I think that would be a great place to start. (And end, perhaps.) The test for this could be entirely empirical. An applicant could be required to place $1000 in escrow, and implement a web application on the guild's servers. They would be required to add certain features. During the test, anyone would be welcome to try and hack the website. If anyone can prove that they are successful, they get the $1000. If the features all get implemented with no hacking, then the applicant gets their money back, minus the fee.
Great article, though my day-dreamed educational system would be a little bit different. But who is to say which one's better until you implement them.

On the same note, High school and middle school are pretty much a waste of time. In fact, any kind of system that categorize kids into homogeneous age groups are socially and psychologically unhealthy. How can kids learn form their peers if all of them have just about the same exposure and experience in the world? That's why we have all these angsty kids, because no knows better.

I've been teaching on the side for a few years. And from my experience, when I mix kids of different ages, they assume instinctual responsibilities (almost tribal). Older kids become more authoritative and care-giving. Younger kids become more attentive and respectful. This kind of social learning is both top-down and bottom-up.

I understand the importance of school as a social environment. But if it's going to be homogeneous and unrepresentative of the real world, no real social skills will come out of it.

Don't take my word for it. I'm sure we all have interacted with college grads who are clueless about the real world.
Agreed. Seeing comments here and elsewhere, one wonders if people actually care about quality education just because it's a good thing? How about access lab facilities, the ability to interact with other smart people, hopefully to learn from good teachers, or do quality research? College and grad school was all that for me. Was it perfect. Not at all, but given a choice, I'd do it again.
Ultimate Handbook for JQuery Hackers
C-repl: a read-eval-print loop for C
A small design annoyance: the icons on the left are transparent GIF's, and they're resized in the browser using the image tags.

Resize the images themselves so that they are the same size as they appear on the page, this will get rid of the jaggedy non-anti-aliased resized look. Also, make them JPGs with the blue background color. If you absolutely must make them transparent GIFs, use Photoshop to set the matte background to the blue color so they don't have a white halo around them. This is a small thing, but it'll go a long way towards looking professional, I promise.
The Wall Street Journal may or may not be irredeemably right-wing, but I'd bet on it. Also, looking at Murray's record on number-crunching, and I do mean The Bell Curve, betting on it to be anything more than BS with lipstick would be a losing proposition.
That I agree with, but truthfully it is already there. CPA exam, professional engineer exam, bar exam, medical exams. What doesn't have an exam? Marketing, sales? There is a PE exam for computer engineering/science but no one takes it. Just push people to take them and it will accomplish the same thing.
I have to agree entirely. Trying to define what I do to others is almost impossible! My resume is filled with lists of programs and languages that I have worked with, but I am no where near an expert at. I like to tell people that I work on "solutions" . . . tell me your problem, and I will help with your solution.

As to being an entreprener. I agree that it's an excellent fit . . . although I realized recently that my talent lies in support and refinement of people and ideas. I am not much of an idea man myself, to be honest.
It's so hard to understand this topic when I just can't hear it. I've tried to understand equal temperament, but I just don't hear the difference.

I'm not tone deaf as far as I know (I can tell the difference between different tones), and I enjoy music, but I can't hear when something is out of tune.

Or that 12 tone commercial that someone posted - the comments say it's funny - but what's funny about it? Presumably I'm missing something massive, but what?
The book looks awesome! Just ordered from Amazon! Thanks!
I suggest you capitalize on your studied profession (music). Music and programming is an uncommon set of interests, and if you can talk about the parallels you see between them, it can really set you apart. Picking up a certification or two wouldn't be a bad idea. Also, your qualifications for any type of technology job are completely experienced based. Assembling your projects into a portfolio as a supplement to your resume would be a wise move.

And as a side note, I would definitely avoid jobs with titles like "PHP Wizard". It's a personal opinion, but I wouldn't want to work for an employer who expects me to work magical miracles with PHP. I'd prefer someone who has a good understanding of the realistic capabilities of programmers. I might be totally off base here, but it's my opinion.
The impossibility proof actually stands if you require only one processor to decide (this is mentioned explicitly in the paper). So X out of N is just as hard as N out of N.

Some methods for ensuring a total ordering on message delivery require a round of consensus. Google's chubby lock service requires five servers out of five to achieve consensus. Database commit requires (at least) majority consensus if you're using quorums.

You're right to argue that practically this result doesn't really affect anything in the sense that you can fake synchrony with sufficiently large timeouts, but at the same time systems that are using hard core distributed algorithms such as Paxos are highly critical and it makes a lot of sense to be aware of what is possible and what is not.
Zapproved: A Lightweight Meeting Killer
Good, a concept that doesn't get much attention!

I'm lucky in that I work for an organization that identifies areas that employees need to be competent in and offers a number of courses aimed at getting better in those areas. Also managers have a list of courses that are required. Stuff like basic Finance, people skills, interviewing techniques, management skills, etc. As a new first-level manager I'm still working my way through all this stuff and I am learning a lot.

If it were not for this I probably wouldn't even have realized the areas where I was lacking. Instead I've taken a ton of these classes and learned a lot about myself.

If I were designing something like this I'd start with a personality profile that would let the user understand where they needed improvement and how to also improve the areas where they were already strong.
It seems that democracy inevitably creeps towards totalitarianism, while totalitarianism creeps toward democracy. One wonders if theres not some optimized blend in the middle somewhere that we have yet to achieve, that could yield better results than either of the pure forms of the two alone.
It's now Wednesday, and they just emailed me PDFs showing that my company has been formed and everything has been filed with the state of Delaware and the IRS. I'll get hardcopies of everything by next week. You can pay more to have the stuff mailed faster, but this is pretty good as far as I'm concerned. I started the process on their website on Friday night. On Tuesday they emailed me an IRS form to print, sign, and fax back, which I took care of right away. Today I already have a Delaware LLC with an EIN. Not bad at all for $400 total.
Looking at my receipt, it was $65 extra, not $100.
Many schools are moving towards this. You can take some HS courses in MS if you've demonstrated the motivation, and you can take college courses in HS as well.

Having just graduated college, I see it as the most valuable experience of my life. I've defined who I am and what I want to do in the past four years, and learned a ton about engineering on the side.
oh i see, they're both tiny, so they must be the same. Are you retarded?
That's rather meaningless, but its interesting to compare the competitors there: Apple, RIM and Nokia.

Apple and RIM seem to be on par - Apple is valued at ~2x compared to RIM, but then its also much bigger company (in terms of revenues, employees, products, operations etc).

Nokia seems a bit weak in this light - they're a behemoth in the cell phone market and yet they operate on much thinner margins and aren't valued that high.

Anyway, I am still kicking myself for not buying RIM stock when I was beta testing the original Pearl. Back then I had a hunch they were undervalued and a septupling of the stock price would have done me well ;)
This is a good read. Thanks for offering such insights. 3 & 4 are especially interesting and quite true in my experiences as well.
Ask HN: What happened to the TechCrunch Web Tablet
With a lot of noise they told the world that they were going to build a $200 Web Tablet. But nothing seems to have happened since those postings? They promised a project web site but it is nowhere to be found.

Hoax? What do you think? Anyone with inside info?

http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/07/21/the-techcrunch-web-tablet-project/
http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/07/21/techcrunch-web-tablet-part-2/
I wouldn't want the best surgeon in the world using a clotheshanger and a steak knife, though.
Kind of a freaky read. He put work into showing how someone would do it, not just claiming someone could do it. Excellent job.
Despite the quick momentum the idea picked up, it never quite left its pie-in-the-sky state. It will probably take even more community push before they do anything tangible with it.
Ostensibly,

http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/

this happened.
a hacker can't use Google Docs (ie: free) to open a .doc file and copy/paste?

:)
Kudos :)
"Creativity test" to me sounds like something that wouldn't work well.
I think a small "beta" icon near the link could be a good thing too : It prepares the user to have an error message.

less surprise ==> less disappointment
By elitist I meant to say cliquey, you might filter out people you would really excel
"But you're assuming outsourcing is bad for individuals in the US, whereas most indications are the opposite, it increases their wealth."

Evidence? I'm curious, mainly because I always hear about the Rust Belt and how it's been screwed over by outsourcing.
Robot with a rat brain
Thats exactly my case, I actually was taking a course when began thinking about this; im kinda taken care of, not only by HR people but also my boss;
what do companies with just a few employees get to do this? do they even? is it relevant for people in start ups?
Considering that the maxim for the new millenium is "Safe is risky and risky is safe" I think he might be doing the best thing. All in all, it seems like today the best way to approach things is to be different and his hiring policies are definitely different. Sure, he might fail, but would he be able to succeed if he did the same thing as everything else?
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PopSci is using AdCamo's projection ad format to promote DIY's latest hit show, Blog Cabin.
That's a funny video - thanks.

However, nearly all music with "scales" is mathemagical to a large extent. Anyone who is interested in this sort of thing should check out the 2-volume book "Musimathics" by Gareth Loy.
Boost.Intrusive: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_35_0/doc/html/intrusive.html
I don't understand your comment. Do you know who Barbara Ehrenreich is? If they are irredeemably right-wing, what is she doing on their editorial page?

Murray considers himself a libertarian; Ehrenreich is a socialist. Neither is strictly 'right-wing'.

And which errors from The Bell Curve are repeated in his column? I didn't spot any glaring mistakes, but perhaps I did not read as carefully as you did.
You have zero implementation details on the website, so based on this fact alone I am going to assume that client-side beacon is something simple, like a system service or daemon running under the OS control.

If that's true, then it is quite lame compared, for example, to http://absolute.com/products-computrace-products.asp. These guys went into a trouble of standardizing boot-level beacons, entering partership agreements with HD manufacturers, etc. and that's why their beacons survive all but the low-level HD formatting.

That's pretty much what you have to do for the tracking service to have any value. If the beacon can be wiped out with a simple OS reinstall, your phone-home-after-the-incident rate is going to be close to zero.

In other words, there is very sophisticated and mature competition, and your service doesn't appear to live up to it at the moment. That's assuming I am right about the implementation approach.
I love these diagrams.

It's nice to see that a large proportion of startups are creating People, they make money by Services, and the tools many people use are Tools.

Example answer that ticks the boxes - What are you creating?
We're creating a web-based online information service for social people that they can access on their mobile.
You're talking about a mathematical approach to the choice of notes in a piece, while the article is talking about a mathematical approach to the choice of frequencies for the notes... which, as the article points out, relates directly to how the ear senses sound. Rather than leading to twelve-tone music, the article gives a physical reason why people might dislike twelve-tone music: it doesn't favor any particular frequency ratios.