skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This guy should write a book. We could use a modern "Psychology of Everyday Things", focused on software design.

And no, Steve Kurg's book doesn't cut it.
I see a new business plan forming!
Surely a deposit is by definition non-refundable? That's what a deposit is.
Birth Announcements
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Open Source Zigbee Stack
The WLAN and Bluetooth have dominated the consumer wireless market. Zigbee is getting hotter in the mesh network application as well. More and more chip vendors have released their new products for Zigbee.
It was nice to read that his system is not perfect or he doesn't follow it in a perfect way, yet he still managed to win a fields medal. So I feel the "fields medal winner" was an interesting aspect.
I absolutely hate bargaining like this, and countries where you're hounded and hassled to buy things without price tags on. For me, it's an education on how not to do business. It's quite like spam email.

Unfortunately this system just doesn't work with me. I'm less likely to go in a shop with no price tags on, because then I know I'll have to ask the shopkeeper the price of everything. It's inefficient. I guess if you grow up with the haggling you develop strategies for coping maybe, but I'm so glad to not be in a country where you have to deal with all that.
Strange VC Enquiry. Anyone else had one?
Hi there

I received an email enquiry from a venture capital firm, which reads as follows:

"Hi Adrian,

My colleague, ######## is interested in SourceGuardian.com and would like to have a quick call to learn about the company and discuss the possibility of OpenView Venture Partners making a future investment in the company.

Do you have time for a brief call? Please let me know a couple of times that work well for your schedule."

I've never heard of them and a quick web search shows that they're based in Boston, have made investments, but a few results also show that it appears they've been sending out these emails in bulk. Has anyone else had one of these or know anything about the firm? Investment, or actually selling SourceGuardian, is something I've been thinking of, however I'm unsure whether OpenView Partners are the people I should be speaking with.

If anyone has any knowledge of them, please share

Thanks

Ade
Copyright, Fraud and Window Taxes (No, not that Windows)
Have you tried a tiling window manager? Looks like you'd like it.
You ask whats changed about "desktop Linux". How is the new graphics system an advantage for users of "desktop Windows"?

The problem with this discussion is the choice Linux users have. You can always say Linux has a poor user experience by referring to the software for Linux you hate most. On the other hand Linux users can say: "it is just an operating system" or "you picked the wrong distro" or "don't use fluxbox/emacs/the command line/compiz if you don't like it".
You can not not campare apples to oranges when you compare any subset of the GNU/Linux software ecosystem to windows.

That being said, the security model in Vista annoys the hell out of everybody I know who uses Vista. Everytime they interact with this new security model, it interrupts their workflow and makes them a little bit frustrated and angry, quite like a fnord.
I think application of this into a startup is all about interaction. How can a company passionately (read: more then just newsletter drips) interact with their users after they have signed up for the freeby but maybe aren't quite ready to pay? Even with the "free plan with hopes of people upgrading to pay" model so popular these days, conversion rates still seem too low to me. Users sign up for the freeby but then instead of diving into an engaged relationship with the company, too often those users are "off the hook" from courting... they have already shown interest, now wow them into converting.

Reciprocation is covered with the company providing the free trial or the free shipping. In startups, "Social proof", "Liking", "Authority", and "Scarcity" are all more-or-less defined by the userbase and market the company is in. That leaves us with "Commitment and consistency" as the magical 'weapon of influence'. So what is that exactly? I think it comes back to providing your users with an excellent product, excellent service, and make them feel like they are part of the family. From a different model, I think Zappos does an excellent job of this. To loyal Zappos customers, using the service is a no-brainer - at every turn the company makes users feel catered to, and in turn the users will continue to shop and feel confident that the relationship will work like it always has in the past.
I quickly tire of this kind of bargaining, particularly because most sellers' 'friendliness' invariably turns to anything between indifference and hostility as soon as they understand that you are wise to their game and they will not make the tourist premium off of you. On more than one occasion in Turkey, sellers have abused me just because I refused to budge from a price I knew was reasonable (which I had gotten in other shops).

At least this is true for tourist destinations. I've had more enjoyable experiences off the beaten tourist path in South East Asia. Generally though, in the long run it grows tiring to have to spend twenty minutes negotiating every time you go in a shop.
Copying as the tapping point for revenue redistribution, and correct attribution and sourcing as a side-effect of that.

Brilliant formulation. I'd note that the attribution requirement needs to be relaxed sometimes, too. It is a well known problem with the CC-BY family of licenses when applied to art. Mark Pilgrim said it well at http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/03/05/cc-dogs :

Now imagine that every time you upgraded your kernel and rebooted your Linux box, you had to scroll through 741 lines of credits. 741 _additional_ lines of credits, cumulatively. Creative Commons is fine for one-generation remixing. But you quickly hit a wall, either from data degradation, or cumulatively onerous license requirements, or some other damn thing.
This might help you:

http://thefunded.com/funds/show/OpenView+Venture+Partners?vi...
Keep every little bit of paper work you get

That applies to pretty much any knowledge-based job out there. I worked as a consultant for several years, and every time I lapsed from keeping everything in writing I paid for it.

And for Christ's sake, if you're a business person with no know-how in technology, be prepared to pay the developer you hire more than you think they'll need.

If you're a business person with no know-how in technology and you want to start an on-line business, be prepared to take on a technical heavyweight as your co-founder. Otherwise, you have very little chance of making it, imho.
Alexander technique exercises
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You've been fat already for some time now.
Web Conferencing, Online Meetings, Online Seminars
Voxwire provides web conferencing services that allows people to talk to each other, send text-messages, and see the same website or other presentation on their screens - from anywhere in the world.
XP was released in 2001, Let's just remind ourselves that the first ubuntu came out in 2004. A _lot_ has changed since the linux of 2001. Including the graphical system (compiz, released 2006) everything in the 2.6 kernel (released 2003) the hardware abstraction layer/project utopia (somewhere around 2003), a new sound system, pulsaudio (2004).

And if you take into acount that the start of windows vista's coding cycle lay before the release of windows XP, you might want to include the gstreamer media framework.

They've come a long way.

P.S.
They never bothered to reimplement the security model. Though some improved models have been available since before 2001.
JUMPSTYLE HARDSTYLE
The same research shows that those companies pay people above market rates to to reduce turnover and attract the best people, coupled with rewards that share organizational success, but money is not the primary reason why people work there.

I propose an experiment. Unilaterally reduce their wages to slightly below the industry average and see how many stay. Then a rather different motivation will emerge. It is one thing to tell an interviewer that you are an idealist who is not motivated by hard cold cash, but the correlation between successful companies and high wages exists for a very good reason, and it's not that the shareholders didn't feel like so much dividend this year.
I see this more of a lesson in persistence paying off, and understanding your client, their needs, how to predict and answer their questions, and behave to sell effectively (in this case usage of the environment) - things any entrepreneur in any business needs to know.

Yes, it is a social hack and manipulation to an extent (I don’t agree with bringing the kids in etc., that is low), but these are the same lessons and issues found in most business (merchant wants as much as he can get, client is often reluctant to buy until they see the benefits to them, and in order to reach a deal there is often much bartering and negotiations to be had).

Are some of the people we meet and network with, especially in business conferences and trade-shows, any different? Are price negotiations between the companies we interact with any different?

Simply put, the rug sellers understand what they are selling, what people are willing to pay, and how to sell it to them, and these are things all people in business should know. If win-win can be achieved (client thinks they are getting a bargain and seller is happy with sale price) then all the better. If you buy a rug, are happy with the rug, are happy with the price, what is the problem?

It is really market competition, and in many cases desperation, that is the root of the unethical behaviour. I do not agree with using pressure tactics, misleading "consultative" selling (was what he was teaching them about rugs true or was it tailored to his needs?), inferior goods supplied ("bait-and-switch"), or the multitude of other things that occur. But I see similar behaviour occurring in many high pressure environments, especially in the financial services sector (some stock brokers come to mind).
US animal-rights extremists firebomb scientists' home, car
Have a closer look at the photo. There's rows of holes for connectors along the top and bottom of the board. I see one set is labelled JTAG. It looks like the tracks and holes are there for soldering on other I/O connectors if you wish. Oh, and there's a LED in each of the bottom corners. ;-)
X2X.

If you've never heard of it, you're missing out.

Two or more machines, each with their own desktops, but one keyboard and one mouse.

When you move the cursor out the right of your first desktop, it appears at the left hand side of your next desktop - and so on and so on.

It turns as many desktops as you want into one virtual one.

Did I mention it rocks?

If you've got a Windows machine, there's also X2VNC.
Chernobyl
USB over Network 3.4.6 released
I'm curious to hear what the author actually recommends for print newspapers-- "Let’s completely forget about the print edition and just try to build the best damn online service possible" doesn't address the problem of monetization.
The Treachery of Hyperlinks
Could you please tell me where you got your wallpaper?
sadpanda :(
Using violence to make a point about animal rights seems a little odd...
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Why is extremism always so misallocated?
10 ways to screw up despite Scrum and XP
You think? I'd have thought that anybody with a good math background would better served by something like the "$25B Eigenvector" article focusing on the Linear Algebra aspects of PageRank (http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~bryan/googleFinalVersionFixed.pd...)
Gruber on iPhone Blacklist: It's a Core Location Blacklist
Multiple vulnerabilities in Ruby
These extracurricular activities really only matter though if you are a high-SES white or Asian student, only because there are a surplus of these with good credentials so the other factors end up being the tie-breaker.

Sorry that I took so long to reply. I disagree. Elite colleges favor minority students over white and Asian students, but they don't have any program favoring low-SES Asians and whites, who are by-and-large screwed because their admissions still hinge on having the right extracurricular merit badges, which are difficult to attain and game due to their low SES.

A poor white student from rural Wyoming or West Virginia might have a geographical advantage, due to state quotas. However, a working-class white applicant who grew up in Chino, CA, or a second-generation, relatively poor Vietnamese student who grew up in Chinatown, NY, have little or no chance of ever being admitted to an Ivy League college, even with near-perfect SATs and high school grades.
The bloodiest, sickest game from EA
It'll be interesting to see if the Ruby core team handles this round of vulnerability patches with more candor than the last.

Judging the amount of detail they've provided on this news post alone I'd say they're off to a better start.
Before you go overwriting pretty useful default functionality, check Vim's manual for what those do to see if it isn't more useful (I prefer the defaults).
Granite Countertops
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actually this example in the rug essay is not a good one.

If you want to understand & use negotiation, read Shell's "Bargaining for Advantage": http://www.amazon.com/dp/0143036971/
Art forgeries: The computer says no
You know, that's the exact formula for making great things.
Libraries Quietly Boosting Demand For Apple (AAPL) iPods and iPhones
This implementation would be utterly trivial to game.

Fail.
Where the big jobs are
Accurately predicting Olympic medal winners
Is Wikipedia saturated? Yep For a year, at least.
The graph of total revisions-per-month shows: the English part of the Wikipedia is saturated: no more exponential growth!
Paper about Athens predictions (pdf):
http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/pages/faculty/andrew.bernard/G...
My screenshot looks like the default windows interface, but with eclipse, VS2005, VS6 and an ftp client. I don't customize it so that I see exactly the same stuff my users see.
Sure. But unless it's a board assembly class, the students will spend an inordinate amount of time becoming proficient at soldering, removing solder bridges and replacing burned out chips.
The most underhyped Silicon Valley success: Meebo
IBM To Linux Desktop Developers: 'Stop Copying Windows'
Software development dogmata - good practices gone bad
Following On Heels of First Solar (FSLR)...Here Comes First Wind (WNDY)
The fifth element of the Agile Manifesto
It's Friday - go play "The tombs of Asciiroth"
A Preacher Screwed Over By Sprint Nextel
There were street vendors/con artists like that running around in Fiji when I visited--asking your name, carving it onto a painted, balsa-wood knife-thingie, going on at length about how their kids were going to starve if you didn't fork over at least $20. Luckily, my co-workers ran into 'em first, so I was forewarned and forearmed. I pulled all but $3 from my wallet and folded it up in another pocket before hitting the street, and when the inevitable vendor approached me, I got the Fiji keepsake for about what it was worth to me, no social pressure involved (and he wasn't shy about looking into my wallet when I claimed I only had $3 on me).
I asked several EA employees about working conditions (and even got rid of the PR people to have some good conversations) and they say that the attitude of management toward work hours has dramatically improved but still could be improved more

That's the interesting part of this article.
and if you're using unix+mac, there's also synergy.
>IBM's comments to the Linux community of developers carry a
>lot of weight, given the huge investment and contribution
>the tech company has made to the OS. IBM threw its weight
>behind Linux in December 2000, when it promised to spend $1
>billion on development of the OS the following year.
In a Down Economy, Angel Investors Change Course
I wonder what the size comparison is to the beagleboard. We are playing around with a beagleboard in our office and the thing is pretty impressive, for the price it might be the best choice for a single board computer right now. The OMAP3 processor on it is impressive, it is smaller and cheaper than comparably powerful ARM chips.
Share emacs colortheme?
I liked his honesty here:

"my ability to do any serious mathematics fluctuates greatly from day to day; sometimes I can think hard on a problem for an hour, other times I feel ready to type up the full details of a sketch that I or my coauthors already wrote, and other times I only feel qualified to respond to email and do errands, or just to take a walk or even a nap."
This is totally off topic... Is it really necessary to mod someone down to -8? Sure, the comment deserved to be modded down, but isn't -1 or -2 enough? At that point the font changes to light gray and you can barely see it anyway. It seems like modding it down after that is just beating a dead horse. I could understand if it was offensive, but this is a typical stupid comment that doesn't contribute to the discussion.
Nothing special here: http://img115.imageshack.us/img115/9397/8augdesklu5.png
And now we dance -- at Yahoo
He wasn't speaking to IBM employees, was he?

Much of that billion was spent on persuading IBM Global Services customers that they needed a whole lot of new global services to switch to a different OS for running their same apps.
What struck me is how great is is that his career allows him to do that. Most people have to sit and work at a slow pace instead of just relaxing for a bit and getting back into things when they are ready.
None of these vulnerabilities is particularly scary:

* You were already pretty crazy if you were relying on Ruby "safe levels" to sandbox code, and I haven't seen anybody who does. If an attacker can eval Ruby code in your interp, you lose.

* An algorithmic DDoS against a bad regex is a classy attack against Webrick, but it's not as if once you fix it you're not vulnerable to DoS attacks.

* DL and "taint" don't play well together. You shouldn't have been relying on taint, but pretty much anyone can see that if an attacker can control the arguments to the DL functions, they get to jailbreak from the interp.

* The resolv.rb DNS spoofing problem is the 1995 problem, not this year's problem: monotonically increasing QIDs. The reason nobody noticed it until now is that nobody uses resolv.rb, which is a thread-safe async full-ruby DNS client hiding in the Ruby standard library. They ought to just remove it from the library.
Good sales people are worth their weight in gold. I've thought about taking a course in sales, just for the social engineering skills that can be picked up.
Congratulations to all the kids born in the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s | TechJaws
Weev: universe is algorithmically designed
Predicting Performance improvements from memory increase
"Growing a Business" by Paul Hawken? (http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0671671642/pchristensen-20 )

I haven't read that book but I have read other books by Hawken and I highly recommend his work. GaB is probably just as good (Joel recommends it too).
My guess is that Graham believes Microsoft couldn't/wouldn't provide proper incubation for an inexperienced group. They'd immediately try to impose a "big company" mentality. As a corporation, he is probably right.

Microsoft could fund an investment group that essentially used the company's influence to help startups externally. If that same group shielded a startup from Microsoft's corporate influence internally, I think they could be a powerful incubator, not to mention a phenomenal asset. Unfortunately this will never happen.
in the uk, kids will come up to you with puppy-dog eyes and just hold out their hands. i was at a bus stop and a 10-year-old in designer clothes came up to me. i laughed and told him i wasn't giving money to someone dressed in nicer clothes than i was. he didn't budge. then i told him i didn't have any cash on me (all i had was traveler's checks at that point, plus bus fare). he didn't budge. finally, i reached in my pocket and pulled out all the change i had--probably about 20p. i dropped it in his hand and said, "ok ok, you got me." he looked at the money with disdain, dropped it on the ground, and put his hand out again. by that time, the bus had arrived, so i was able to end the interaction, but talk about persistence (stupidity? stubbornness? many words apply.). i sometimes wonder how long he would have stood there had the bus not arrived when it did.
Do all massages end with a happy ending for this startup?
Great video: uses the misintepretation of a 'fully body massage' to point out how it is to find things on the web these days.
You really have to visit one of these places to understand the whole setup. They most certainly will try to rip you off and will use every trick in the book to do so.

My favorite is this one: You pick a cheapish looking rug and they tell you you have "champagne tastes" and say it is very expensive (even though it is worth nowhere NEAR the price they ask). I remember my uncle replied to these men with, "No... I think I just have beer tastes".

That being said I highly recommend visiting the country as it is beautiful and just loaded with history going back to Roman times.
I can no longer submit stories to y-combinator, it just takes me to a blank page-anybody else have this problem??
http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/upload/screen.png

(XMonad, so all you see is emacs. Big font because my laptop has small pixels and I have bad eyes. If anyone can recommend a better program font than Luxi Mono (O and 0 indistinguishable, bold letters are wider than regular, but I like the way it looks at this size), do tell.
I think the people who enjoy it are the people buying, not selling.

I was recently in Taiwan with some locals, and everything we did was discounted. It seemed awkward bargaining at a 4-5 star hotel - but we ended up paying about half by paying cash in advance.
Not sure about that. There was a guy who knew his stuff and ran the build and version control system at my last job. You had to kiss his butt to get things done (=pay karma), but I wouldn't call him nice.

What it overemphasizes is jobs that benefit multiple people in visible ways. At my last job, I wrote code used by the internal QA team of 50 people that made their lives easier. I imagine that would earn a lot of karma. On the other hand, when I worked on a bug for an external customer, only my manager would care.
My relatively uninformed hunch is that, per hour of time expended, YC is not nearly as profitable as traditional venture capital. YC probably gets a much better nominal return-on-investment, but a more modest return-on-effort. YC has to provide mentoring in addition to capital, which means that there's an inherent bottleneck in the amount of business it can do.

I suspect Paul Graham is running Y Combinator not because he wants to maximize his profits, but because he enjoys mentoring bright young entrepreneurs. So although his return-on-effort is lower than it would be in traditional VC, this isn't problematic, because the utility of said effort is positive, and YC is presumably more than profitable enough.
In Rome I would worry about someone touching me - it is a common tool of distraction by the pickpockets there.