skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This gets touched on a bit later. http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/058775...
2,000 bucks is a lot, I know the rule of thumbs is like 3 months net salary to keep for bad days but that's just hard for people like most on HN that are young, trying to either bootstrap a business or have a ton of student debt.

Not sure what I would do but I think I could sell enough non-essentials to make up the money if it was a really bad situation.
I'd go so far as to put the wayback machine ahead of wikipedia on the list of digital assets that should be preserved.
The 0.3mm thin Keyboard
Moon - Sightseeings
Dell XPS 15z. Macbook Pro clone
Yandex IPO exceeds expectations
Apple's First CEO - pay attention to product, but also people
Galois releases HaNS: a pure Haskell network stack - no OS required
If you don't have enough money to handle an emergency, you have an emergency. Go ahead and panic. Trade your car for a cheaper one, move into a cheaper apartment, stop eating out, sell your TV, and get an emergency fund.

If you're already living on toasted rats in a cardboard box, that's different, but if you've got unnecessary expenditures, you should really cut those out and get an emergency fund. To do otherwise is reckless. And you're cheating yourself of sleep and peace of mind.
Quote -

Attention to detail is what Steve is known for, but it also is his weakness because he pays attention to the detail of the product, but not to the people.

To me, the biggest thing in growing a company is you need to grow the people, so it's like being a farmer, you need to grow your staff and everybody else too as much as you can to enable the company to grow, just as much as you need to sell the product.
Note, the Hackage url is case sensitive: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hans
I realize that I'm in the minority as a power user but this would/will seal the deal on me leaving Firefox behind.
(This is not my project.)

I'd be terrified to use it, but I love this idea. Nonsensical preservation of meatspace thingness. Psuedo-voyeuristic recycling.
> spelling and punctuation mistakes
> excellent written English

Erlang's syntax, naming, and abbreviation conventions are straight schizophrenic.

Keywords, directives, method/module names, variables, and arguments are randomly spelled out, others shortened, if you're lucky with underscores or CamelCase, there are some familiar C style conventions but not widespread, directory structure seems to be highly project dependent, etc. - the list goes on.

It's a very "cluttered" language and the lack of a strong proficiency in written English as you mention clearly shows (to me) in the language/framework.
This is a great list. I would add:

* The stable marriage problem (D. Gale and L. S. Shapley: "College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage", American Mathematical Monthly 69, 9-14, 1962.), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem

* Knuth's Dancing Links algorithm http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/papers/dancing-color...
barnabas:btch pota$ time python btch.py
found: 7555794

real	1m18.464s
user	1m18.417s
sys	0m0.031s

(i5 2500k)
I totally agree. And I wish that this thing hurts them in some way. Having moved 3 times in last 3 years, I absolutely understand your situation of not being able to break up with an organization whether its a fitness center, cable company or a bank.
I would rather have misc.foo (or in python terms, from misc import foo), than this_is_a_unique_function_name_that_does_foo, or '0000100302foo' with a ton of metadata to explain what it does and why it's better than every other similar function.

I'm trying to imagine visually parsing a program where the function names are merely unique identifiers that don't necessarily relate to their function, and it's not going well.
Prosecuting financial fraud is usually a great deal slower and more complex because it's more difficult to prove intent (compared to both incompetence and pursuit of legitimate profit), because it can involve so many more people (many of whom may not have been doing anything wrong at the individual level, but whose actions taken together were wrong at an institutional level), and because the rewards are more diffuse and indirect (unit profits lead to pay rises or career advancement for those involved, rather than bags of cash or deposits into secret accounts).

That's not to say that people can't or shouldn't be prosecuted, just that it's a more difficult undertaking. A recent example: http://www.housingwire.com/2011/04/19/ex-tbw-ceo-lee-farkas-...
They "turned off everything they could think of". Sounds scientific.

How about recording the actual network traffic by say doing a jailbreak and installing tcpdump?
Thanks for the perspective. It's easy to get caught up in events and not realize this has been believed for many years.

What did you do with the money you would have saved?
:-) Good searching! Was shocked to see ycombinator show up on my site analytics!
I'd be curious what the survey would have shown if it were given in 2007.

I bet at least some of the people who can't come up with $2000 today is because they've already eaten into their emergency funds due to lost jobs, economy, etc...
I wonder whether or not there is a difference between the 'ability' and the 'perceived ability' to raise cash quickly.

Many people are cash-poor, yes, but I am surprised that over half the population has no cash equivalents, hard assets, or access to credit (even from a relative or friend).

N.B. This is not meant to be financial advice, but just to point out that people usually have many more options than they think they do.
http://operaweb.lngs.infn.it

http://proj-cngs.web.cern.ch/proj-cngs/
Transformers 3 Leaked Footage Dark of the Moon
I'll laugh if it turns out he boasted about (indirectly) on HN. Unlikely, but not impossible - many criminals are undone by a burning desire for peer validation.
How to kill innovation in five easy steps
Exodix product review and price for gadgets
I understand the confusion (here in the South Eastern US they use 'coke' instead of 'soda' as the generic term) but are there other ways for businesses to react? It seems kind of silly to fight against a brand name being subsumed into colloquial speech by frantically suing the pants off of everyone. And when the term finally becomes more widely known as a generic term instead of a brand, then what do you do? It doesn't make sense for "realator" or "entreprenur" to be trademarked. So what should the organizations that own these trademarks do? Hang on to them in desparation? How does that benefit anybody?
yes - there are a few. See Custora and Fivestars Card
Does MuPDF have any speed/performance/etc benefits over the plugin in Chrome? Are there any reasons to spend the time/effort to switched other then one is open source?
Based on my post below, I do not have, on hand, $2000 that I could use in case of emergency. I am fortunate enough, however, that if I absolutely needed it, I have ways of getting the money. (Via family mostly, but I really dont like tapping into that unless it truly is an emergency.)

I'm also extremely thankful for a couple folks that approached me to write some web apps (php/rails) for them. Without them those last few medical payments would have crushed us.

My crappy situation came from double job troubles (gf and I) + dying car + hospital visits.

We've stabilized finally and now it's time to get out of this hole and get my life back together.
Reminds of an article I have seen here before:

Several physicists weigh in on what would happen if you were to place your hand in the proton stream of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

http://kottke.org/10/09/putting-your-hand-in-the-large-hadro...
Free Speech on Twitter Faces Test
I love quotes and have considered keeping a text file in my Dropbox account. Quotica sounds like a natural evolution from such an approach.

Years ago, I kept such a text file on my laptop and it grew to several hundred quotes. To say it was unwieldy would be an understatement. I started organizing them by topics, but what I really wanted was tags. Being the organizational freak that I am, I really hope Quotica will have that.

I use these quotes in personal essays and tweets (especially the shorter quotes). Being able to tweet a quote from Quotica would be cool too.

Neat idea. Wish I had thought of it.
Building An Effective ‘Coming Soon’ Page For Your Product
Security Solution for Hotel Staff Who Face Daily Dangers
Books on RPG IV for a Ruby programmer?
This is incredibly interesting. Thank you!
Hrm, as a power user doesn't that mean you are more comfortable customizing, like turning the address bar back on?

Also, eliminating the address bar seems to be a trend among the major browsers, if anything I would expect Firefox to be easier to revert the behavior (see how easy it is to switch back from tabs-on-top, for example).
>I know the rule of thumbs is like 3 months net salary to keep for bad days

I was under the impression that the rule was around 6 months.. then again, I'm talking about monthly expenses,as opposed to salary(which hopefully a person isn't spending 3 month's worth of salary in 3 months under normal circumstances). It probably goes up somewhat proportionally with age, if you factor in a home / dependents. I'm in the process of looking for a home now, so my decision on "how much home" I buy will be influenced by the notion of wanting to keep around a year's worth of monthly expenses should I find myself unemployed suddenly.
La reina del sur capitulo 59
la reina del sur capitulo 59
che essere a roll May not target only giocato della regina A sporco e di amore
I think it's very important to instill saving behaviors early on in your adult life. After graduating college, I had plenty of debt, but still made sure I was putting money into a savings account.

Technically, it would have been much wiser to put any excess money towards 15% APR credit card debt than in 5% saving accounts (5% savings accounts did exist for a few years prior to the 2008 collapse), but actually having money to pay for unexpected expenses rather than building the debt I was trying to pay off, felt better.

---

Freakonomics did a podcast a few months ago, using either this study or a similar study as part of the podcast. The podcast was about lottery-linked savings accounts. The other half of the equation was that the same 50% of Americans who could not come up with $2,000, were also the ones most likely to play low-odds lottery games. Lottery-linked Savings accounts take the relatively minuscule interest gains on each account, and throws them into a lottery pool, where one or several winners will win the "prize".

This style of savings account worked very well in one country (I believe it was South Africa). The incentive to save, with minimal interest gains, was low. However, the idea of a big payday, which technically was free (you only surrender your interest), led many more people to put money away.

These bank accounts are largely illegal in the United States. Partially because of their image, and partially because states don't want to sacrifice their own state-owned lottery cash cows. I believe a credit union in Michigan was able to work around some laws and find a legal way to offer a lottery-backed savings account.
I understand the sentiment. But to give you an example of the disparity between someone like you and the general public and how clueless they can be; my wife once saw a hash bang in the url bar and ran to me in a panic. She was scared she had gotten some kind of computer virus.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. It's funny that we had thread right before Square dropped their reverse-CRM bombshell.

Despite being a tool for the buyer more than the seller, the new app definitely incentivizes businesses to become part of the Square ecosystem.
Internet Kill Switch Option Actively Debated by Senate
I was actually one of the few people who built this while I was at MSFT. Me and a few others from the VS editor team sat down over a weekend and knocked most of it out. They've since hooked the debugger into it and made it a bit cleaner, but it's still all our code running under there :)

I'm glad they stuck with it. I shopped it around as much as I could to try and generate interest in it internally, but VS proper didn't really seem to care about it, saying that no one really wanted that experience.

A bit shortsighted, I think.
Sometimes I wonder if the claims made by people that banks require ACID are rooted in any kind of experience or fact.
You know what would get me excited? A post that advertised, "Domain expert with deep understanding of high value business problem and strong selling skills looking for technical cofounder". Ring me up when that guy posts.
That was my first thought as well. Outside of hard assets which could be liquidated without affecting ones future ability to earn; we also have that credit is still widely available, although the interest rates are higher than before. Short term loans from social channels are usually available, unless one has recently moved thousands of miles from their hometown.
Chrome bundles a PDF renderer. (You won't find it in the open Chromium sources; it's by proprietary license from a third party.)

http://blog.chromium.org/2010/06/bringing-improved-pdf-suppo...

It's already sandboxed and pretty fast and light-weight, so I'm not sure the Chromium developers would put much work into a replacement.
Physics is so unbearably sexy. It's a cave and an office and a research facility and they're shooting signal beams of particles through the earth with giant tunnels bored through the planet and filled with pipes and lights and equipment. Nobody else does these things! Well, except maybe high reliability data centers.
You mention a "big idea" and use the startup "team" rhetoric, but that's all par for the course. Think about all the signals you're giving off. Others have mentioned here already what the NDA signals. Contract-based pricing and vague equity incentives feels a lot like you're looking to outsource development of a huge project for too little return despite the "team" rhetoric, even if that's not your intention.

Options:

1. if you're looking for "your guy", (s)he needs to REALLY be part of the team. Don't tip-toe around it with vague incentives, contract-based pricing and NDAs. These things signal inconfidence.

2. Become "your guy". Or at least try. Shw that you're hustling and that this thing will get made with or without "your guy".
Couldn't they spend a little more time and write an expository background on papers? Certainly it would be the easiest part for an expert to write.

I was reading several papers in the EE field the other day. Most of them all spend the first page restating the problem in practical terms and then have a substantial section reviewing the prior techniques. I found this darned helpful, especially since the primary material was often not online.

Are they worried about wasting paper, or do they actually want to be uninviting?
Having gone through this process several times, I've found that the most important part of the 'idea vs implementation' equation is 'mutual complementarity'. Regardless of where the 'idea' comes from the participants must agree both on the 'problem statement' ie. 'having multiple information screens in a single household is inefficient' and on the 'problem solution' ie.'unify information screens'. If you agree on this, then you simply lay out the tasks required to complete the work. Finally, the skills needed to complete the task should only overlap in accordance to the quantity of work that needs to be done. So, in starting out, when it's important to have the breadth of skills, it's important to minimize the overlap. So while the Idea person may be the developer, they may also be the designer, the marketer, the seller, the writer, the networker, the motivator, or the enabler, all essential elements to successfully solving a problem statement. So the a priori ideas that a)ideas are negligible compared to implementation eg 1% inspiration vs. 99% perspiration and b) the lone genius has a higher success rate, appear in retrospect to be false, since in actuality it appears that [two is indeed the magic number](http://www.slate.com/id/2267004/pagenum/all/#p2)
The thing I've never understood about philosophy is that why are ethics and good/evil considered to be properties of people as opposed to systems? It seems like all the social science research points to the conclusion that the intrinsic nature of a person, if such a thing even exists, has almost nothing to do with their behavior.

So you would think that there would be dozens of papers that analyzed the trolley problem from the point of view of what makes an algorithm ethical or unethical, but this doesn't seem to be the case. (E.g. why not imagine a universe where the people on each track had to somehow bid via differing auction mechanisms as to which direction the train went, why even imagine a person at the switch at all?)
Lessons learnt by a first-time investor
Six months salary is what I'd always aimed for. I managed that well until recently. Now it hurts.
Generics/friends/multimethods are one of the solutions identified on the slides you posted (and protocols are interesting), but I did not see mention of appropriate namespaces for these.
Isn't the WB600 a point-and-shoot camera anyway? I haven't used it but just looked it up briefly.

People CAN basically use Full-Auto on a DSLR which wouldn't hurt their images but I think that they miss the nuances of a lens or how making slight adjustments to the settings will create a different effect. I don't see any personal benefits from ignoring details of the craft.
Signing someone else's name at the behest of a department head is pretty clear fraud (and more obvious when it's 1000's of documents being signed with someone else's name and backdated). Watch the 60 Minutes segments.

Prosecutors don't want to take on the financial sector because it ruins their achievement record if they lose or it takes too long because the defendant can afford good lawyers. They stick to the people who cannot afford a defense.

No-one has been prosecuted for the financial crisis, I mean the economy was DESTROYED, we are years into it now.
They initially tried to sell the company for < $1M because it was "taking time away from their graduate studies". It was only because nobody would buy that they became a multi-billion-$ company.
Twitter buys Adobe Flash-based TweetDeck for $40 Million
Most Americans have their assets stuck in their house and 401k and other toys.

House: It would take you 6 months to sell a house (good luck with all those foreclosures out there), 3 months to get a loan against your house (hard to get a loan these days).

401k: It would take you 1 month to withdraw from your 401k (if your 401k plan allows it).

Car/TV: There's an abundance of car/TV inventory out there, and it might take 2-3 months to move those.

Relatives: if half of Americans don't have $2000 for rainy day funds, chances are you're not gonna have much luck asking your relatives.

So realistically, if you needed $2000 tomorrow to bail out your family member (or $40k for that surgery tomorrow), it wold be very hard.
That probably just proves that those "rules of thumb" were some random round number someone picked for TV ;p
$2,000 is not a "large medical bill" in the US. An unexpected medical problem will likely cost a lot more.
> thinking about the knowledge in the system at a meta level -- philosophy is in some ways analogous to that.

That isn't what I was looking for. I was responding to "abstract and esoteric questions" and the implications that somehow CS people don't have the knack for the abstract. I am just saying that philosophy might or might not have abstract and esoteric questions(I don't know and don't care), but CS has them for sure and have had even since its genesis.

> However, even if there was a perfectly obvious analogy between ontology in CS and philosophical ontology,

Why would I care? How does this come into picture at all? I was responding to your abstract questions, which to me came out as somehow philosophy helps you understand CS better. If you didn't mean that, we aren't discussing the same topic.

> I think that many engineers would still forgo thinking deeper about life.

Again, how does this relate to philosophy and CS majors? And what is deep for me isn't necessarily deep for me. You might like pondering over if god exists and what's the meaning of existence. Sorry to sound condescending, but if that's what you meant about thinking deeper about life, that isn't deep enough for me. I have my personal belief system which changes based on my perception and that's good enough for me.
Great point. Although the YC universe has plenty of obedience-to-authority elements as well -- think of how many times people on HN invoke "the rules" to shut down discussions about the TSA.
One of the reasons the UK government bailed out the major banks here in the last financial crisis is that they feared what would happen if the retail banking system stopped working - if our chip-n-pin cards and ATMs suddenly stopped working.

I did wonder if it might be sensible to keep a chunk of cash somewhere safe for unpredictable times - having plenty of cash on tap won't help much if it is tied up in a bank that has just stopped working.
Since you invited me to call you naive, you're being naive :o) The tablet market is only a little over one year old and has already exploded. Considering their age, tablets are pretty cheap and versatile.

Further, they aren't meant to replace PCs. That's not the "bullet" that the parent was talking about. The bullet is that we no longer need to buy one for every room just to take advantage of their basic functions. The supply has reached commodity status while the demand is being replaced.
The OP is ill informed.

Devices are meant to be landscape oriented because our field of vision is landscape oriented - and it feels natural to have most of your field of view occupied by what you're primarily engaged in.

This is the reason books are landscape oriented once opened, so are newspapers (broadsheets both when opened and folded, tabloids when unfolded)

Also our shoulders are about 1.5-2 feet apart - so portrait orientations are uncomfortable to hold.

Columnar rivers of text, when laid out correctly (without requiring a vertical scroll) on a landscape oriented tablet "feel" natural -- and is the right thing to do instead of filling empty spaces with attention stealing widgets.

Infact you can attempt similar multi-column layouts on the web, albeit with limited success, like on most of the apple.com site and the erstwhile International Herald Tribune iht.com site (before it got merged into the NYT site)