skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On a related note, OpenStreetMap has allowed minority languages such as Basque (http://www.euskalmapa.com/), Scottish Gaelic (http://osmalba.org/), Irish (http://maps.openstreetmap.ie/?zoom=7&lat=53.55822&lo...) to make their own custom map in their language.
An Algorithm Can Predict Cardiac Arrest 24 Hours Before it Happens
Unfortunately, you've just missed the hundred other cases where Jobs was correct and persevered. People will always be wrong, this doesn't show anything about good decision making or bad decision making because you can find examples of both in everyone. It does show a little bit of humility on Jobs part though, which I think was the point. Arguing about the merits or demerits of the decision itself is irrelevant IMHO.
Many Israelis understand that a two-state solution is the only sustainable solution

Links please.

What is the right direction? Please elaborate.
Funny you mention the word alumni, because it made me think of the operational structure and salability of a fraternity where past members serve the same positions that once served them.
Hmm. I have upvoted you automatically: in the past it did not just mean I think your argument is interesting, but also (in cases like this one) that I share the sentiment and do not want to litter HN with "+1" comments. Of course, now that none except you can see your score, this is no longer working like that.

Happy birthday to raganwald!
> Scala runs a little slower than Java (I've heard about 6x in benchmarks, but I'd bet it's worse in Dalvik),

[citation required]
But wouldn't the browser only check for port 80?

Agreed that it's probably not the solution, just wondering.
Boston's Fourth of July Events for 2011
Are people really down-voting a comment made in good faith purely because they disagree with it, or is there somethingly fundamentally wrong with my statement which I'm just completely missing ?
I guess a better explanation of my point is: This surprises me, because it's iOS. If it were Android, I'd be surprised if 10% of people connected their phones to their computer ever.
"Scala works very well with existing Java frameworks. Android is, of course, one big Java framework and we were going to have to interface with it a lot. A number of people asked, given the above, why not use Clojure--this is why."

Since when does Clojure not work well with existing Java frameworks? I wouldn't advocate Clojure or Scala one way or the other since I have little idea of what they're doing, but the above doesn't strike me as sound reasoning.
Off the top of my head, a simple "is" would be nice. Pronounceable and short.
Fits.me announces fembots for online clothes fitting
there are a lot of people in occupied territories that don't have a vote

By your logic, the United States is not a democracy because illegal aliens cannot vote in US elections.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship
I also wonder: Do developers who spend a lot of time on Stack Overflow get "better" than those who actually write code? I've met more than one "Aristotelian Programmer" who could quote you every design pattern from heart and draw UML diagrams on a white board all day, but who actually couldn't write code.
Speaking of that, I'm wondering how iOS version updates gain market share so quickly if 50% of them never sync?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/01/what-percentage-o...
someone in our shared office never connected her iPhone 3GS with her computer. She was still running 3.2.1 until I helped her to upgrade to 4.3.3.
> As an aside - I would LOVE a historic online mapping service. The ability to view a map moving through time, communities displacing, rivers changing course, harbours silting up, whole countries appearing and disappearing, simply by selecting an area and scrolling along a time axis, would destroy my ability to achieve anything productive for a very long time ;-)

In theory something like this could be achieved by wading through the regular releases of openstreetmaps[1] data. Although there you're more likely to see the results of the collection/moderation process than anything else. Still, possibly interesting to look at.

[1] http://www.openstreetmap.org/
They'll be using it once they've been to the Genius bar. Bear in mind that some of those 50% will have been repeat offenders (some of the other 50% too since they'll have had their phone updated only at the Genius bar).
Secular jews too.

Maybe all the 'non-religous' need to effectively lobby their congresscritters?
Sounds like a great reason to introduce new hardware in the fall that takes advantage of the new device setup process and wireless syncing to iTunes/iCloud.

iOS 5 is better on iPhone 5.
Personally, if Paul does a 'greatest hits' list for his essays I would vote to include that one in the list. I'm interested in your reference to it though, can you say more about how it relates to this discussion?

Are you suggesting that discrimination is one of the 'fashions' that Paul refers to?

Its statements liks this:

"IMO the reason why many older developers are worse than younger developers is because they THINK they are better than the younger developers."

Which causes me to wonder. We could certainly debate the results of a study that polled a few thousand developers between the ages of 20 and 60 and asked them to self evaluate themselves with developers older, the same age, or younger than them. Except we don't have that study, do you know of one ?

Paul's essay is a good one on open mindedness, and it gives great examples of how people can over-turn or distance themselves group-think by seeking out the unthinkable.

I certainly cannot claim to know what you are thinking but it reads like you think that labelling older developers as lazy, self-deluded, parasites is an example of giving voice to something that is 'true' but 'unsayable' because of some sense of societal impropriety.

I can't really comment on whether or not its 'true' because I've not seen any process where that question has been analyzed. The data from the Stack Overflow study says that people who self-report as older on Stack Overflow give more answers and have higher karma as a result. I didn't see anything in the data that would support a conclusion that these folks are making value judgements about their younger peers or that they no longer wish to improve.

"I was just really upset by the tone of the OP."

Paul wrote in his essay:

"The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous. The irony of Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble for repeating Copernicus's ideas. Copernicus himself didn't."

I guess I'm trying to figure out is what you're trying to say. Are you threatened by the idea that someone "older" who has more experience than you is probably "better" than you are by some definition? Or are you trying to argue that your youth and mad social skillz has permanently elevated you above the skill set of people who came before you?

I'm not critical of either view, I'm just trying to understand the data that leads to it. I liked the analysis of the Stack Overflow answers because it was data + analysis. As someone who is always looking to hire top talent, understanding effectiveness is something that helps me do my job better.
This kinda looks like an apprentice-ship training system! The master adviser trains up a few keen trainees, these then in turn become masters who train more apprentices etc...

Maybe it IS a pyramid scheme all along! I did have my suspicions with the recent discussion / evaluation of YC performance.
Layout and usability is vanilla and noting too special. I'm guessing this coincides with larger rebranding effort?

I think the only thing that's turning people off is the intensity of the green in the graphics. With full picture content and ads, it looks like a design that's easily tolerable.

I personally think the text over picture isn't suited for a blog platform unless it's restricted to big feature articles. I don't read TC that much - do they even have content like that?
Yeah, it is literally impossible for a real bell curve to exist, but if you want to be pedantic, that's also because people are clumpy. The bell curve might say there ought to be 0.00000067 excellent answerers at age 12, say, but reality insists on there being 0 or 1 excellent answerers aged 12.

Whenever we look at real data, we acknowledge that it's a discretized approximation to a bell curve and not a real (continuous) one; the point was that on top of the discrete approximation, we have the additional problem of anthropic biases - people not existing or dying at either end.
I'm in a seed incubator this summer. We're building a product that will instantly setup a blog that matches the style and navigation of your startup's website. Instead of custom designing a matching theme, our hosted blog will figure everything out and pull in the header/footer for seamless navigation.

If you are part of a startup that blogs, I'd love your input .
I've been noticing an increase in videos taken down due to copyright complains on my playlist. The real question I have is whether this is going to be another US centric product like Hulu.
Link to Extended Static Checking for Java paper not behind a paywall: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~bchandra/courses/papers/Flanagan_...
10k hours - the amount of time proposed that it takes to master a craft.
Yup, but they don't have to.
They NEED to get rid of all the little facebook and twitter widgets. I have the widget block plugin on Chrome and TechCrunch is finally fast because I block all those share buttons. About a year ago I think, we techcrunch commenters checked the actual size of the site and the front page was 9 MB !!! We complained and complained and months later it went down to 4 MB. Today it's at 2 MB. How they managed to stuff 7MB of worthless javascript and code and button images, I don't know. But the good news it's MUCH faster than before. Unfortunately, I lost interest and moved on.

My reason was this: What's the point of absorbing all that information everyday from sites when I'm not investing what I know into doing something. If you want to seriously get your startup off the ground, for me at least, the right thing to do was to quit TechCrunch, quit Mashable, quit Reddit, and severely limit HN, and actually start getting something done. I'm a much happier peaceful and productive person without the "latest news and opinions" being beamed into my head every few minutes. Mark Zuckerberg is wrong, information overload is real, information addiction is even worse, and once you are free of it, you don't ever want to go back.

edit: On one hand the widgets do bring in traffic but the sluggishness of the site might cancel that out.
Help my startup's MVP by taking our survey
I'm in a seed incubator this summer. We're building a product that will instantly setup a blog that matches the style and navigation of your startup's website. Instead of custom designing a matching theme, our hosted blog will figure everything out and pull in the header/footer for seamless navigation.
If you are part of a startup that blogs, I'd love your input.

http://blogic.wufoo.com/forms/instantly-create-a-branded-blog-for-your-startup/
China's Waterways Now RFID-Enabled
Political speech?

A company pays to have a satellite built and then put into orbit, and then sells licenses of the images the satellite takes.

That is commerce, not political speech.

If you started a non-profit that built and placed into orbit satellites, and then freely distributed those images, I would agree with your argument.
I think "bias" is technically applicable. I.e., the population of older developers is not comparable to the population of younger developers because of survival (or if you prefer, self-selection) effects. Any non-trivial conclusions (e.g., that individual programmers should expect to get better with age, that your company should make an effort to recruit/retain older programmers, ...) from this data are confounded by these effects.
You could price the cost in USD, and use bitcoins only as a means of transferring wealth. People would pay an amount of bitcoins calculated dynamically from the market rate, and then you'd convert the bitcoins you receive into dollars as soon as the transaction was confirmed.

I suspect that we'll begin to see web services that handle this sort of conversion automatically. Give them a Dwolla account, and they'll provide you with a Bitcoin address that will automatically dump the equivalent market rate of dollars to your Dwolla account.
The value you get from Apple's promotion has a primarily multiplicative, not additive effect on your existing promotion. Charts, features, recommendations, etc.

Apple helps those who help themselves.

Releasing an app with no marketing plan in place, app store or not, is stupid. It's why there's an incredibly long tail on the 300k or so apps.

If you're an indie developer, you have to remember the actual developing is only half the job.
Here's the thing that rubs consumers the wrong way: "the Groupon version of the tapas menu."

IMO, if a business is doing this and trying to cut costs then don't be surprised if that person does NOT convert into a regular customer. It's penny wise pound foolish.

It's obvious that people are smart enough to spot that their servings are smaller and their choices are limited compared to normal people. That angers customers! It's as bad as microwaving your food and thinking people are clueless and can't tell microwaved food from fresh food.

Sure, maybe you're saving a little here and there but you're almost guaranteeing that that person won't come back.
Pragmatism and the patent-troll problem
Mr Holz
Mr Holz various website includes news from all over the world , sport , celebrities news , movies , albums , funny videos , technology and more
I asked a question (and got it answered :D), and saw lots of other questions in there. Were you expecting a bigger turnout?
This is my point, you can get this advice easily outside of YC.

I disagree. There are a lot of experienced people willing to learn about your business and provide you valuable insights but in almost all cases, they have some interest of future gains - such as investing in a future round.

When that is not the case, it is still pretty rare to get someone experienced to really get involved in your business and offer non-generic advice over a prolonged period of time.
Oh, you did it? Very nice work!

Care to share something about it? What did you use to create it? What was the process like?
I think it's an interesting solution. I think that CSS-only styling would be more difficult thanks to a lack of regions. This is more an "automated" way to get the browser to lay out the text within your content DIVs.

The good thing is, you can craft a layout and put in some placeholders that get filled with your content. The bad thing is, you probably could have done this yourself by hand rather than by using a CSS extension. The ugly thing is waiting for full browser support (border-radius STILL requires -webkit and -moz!) for these solutions.
I didn't understand: that's the copyright license of the code, or a license of the spec?

If it's the license of the code, then it's not GPL compatible and hence Firefox can't use it, since they tri-license GPL, LGPL and MPL.
You're not the only one. I still remember the iPod days where syncing might mean "erase all of your music and replace it with the 5 songs on the computer you plugged it in to."

I don't trust apple, and it's really sad, because they generally have some good products.

Look at what happened to the iPhone 3G when you "upgraded" it to the new OS; it stopped being functional (answering a call could take 5-10 seconds. Launching an app equally long, etc). To the point where I actually had to jailbreak mine to get it into a usable state again.

I know I'm wrong, but my perception is that when iTunes gets a new version, the new version is there to take away some previous functionality (breaking things like ourtunes, for instance).

So while I have synced my phone, I generally avoid it. Every time the "syncing" screen comes up, I cancel it.
I don't think Facebook is worth more than $20 billion, at most. Where's the revenue to back that kind of number up?
Ditto to what others have said. I figured you were in your early 30s.
In defense for consumers, normally tip should be calculated off of the pre-tax subtotal. Most restaurants calculate tip (say if you're in a group of 6 or larger so it becomes compulsory) based on the post-tax total. So tip, as it is, isn't always accurate.
My gut doesn't believe this. I imagine the apple purchasers buying the apple experience. This seems very odd.
iTunes, even on my macbook pro, is a pig. It ends up eating 99% of my CPU, and requiring a force-quit almost every day for me.

What happened, Apple? I get that iTunes is trying to be a million things, but why?
http://bitbills.com/

(Another symptom of the bubble: there's a three-month backlog. (Was there a backlog on Aeron chairs in 1999?) Considering the primitive tools and exorbitant markup, I can only assume that people are ordering these for novelty purposes.)
Only if you see no value to being able to transfer wealth electronically without the need for a centralized broker.
You can finally implement INTERCAL's squiggle operator efficiently!
It /might/ be faster? What? Do you fully understand the invariant of the algorithm? The left should always be less than the right partition. There's no need to re-merge them each call. As it is, you are always comparing all elements in the left and right partitions with the merge when you don't have to!
Actually this varies by state. In California, the minimum wage law applies with or without tips.
I rarely sync my iPhone because the laptop I'd used to set up my iTunes with is a 6 year old POS(and I don't mean cash register.) It takes several minutes to launch iTunes and up to 2 hours to sync(excluding the time to download any updates.) Now, I only sync when there's a major update to iOS and even then, it's an all night process. I'd transfer my stuff to my new MacBook but I don't have a flash drive big enough to handle everything. More than likely when Lion comes out(and I get it because I want the bugs worked out before I take the plunge) I'll migrate everything, but since Apple no longer does that when you get a new Mac, it hasn't been a priority for me.
We're five members of a sub-team of a sub-team of a large corporation whose recent products are used solely due to the critical mass of users built around the previous generation of our company's developers' products.

Herein we will pay lip service to a barely innovative also-ran office product that happens to use a lot of complex JavaScript (which is fashionable), answering any questions posed with vague responses whose only substance is an alignment with our corporate goals. In truth we've probably spent the best years of our lives fixing bugs relating to the pixel-perfect positioning of the buttons in a particular form in the application.

Our motivation for writing this IAmA is most likely to convince ourselves that despite our cog-like position in a massive corporation wherein our only career path is sideways or into middle management, our jobs and lives have some semblance of meaning, and have created significant value for the planet. If upper level management approved our IAmA, they did so only for the goodwill and free PR that may result from it.

In truth, we are but 5 representatives of a company whose massive weight is being used to shape the future of the industry in ways favorable only to itself and its stockholders, and deeply unfavorable to small, independently controlled companies. Its recruitment drive has been turned so high in recent years that the mere name-dropping of "Google" is unlikely to mean much with regard to our individual skill-sets. We are mediocre developers with limited vision, working for a company that chooses our direction for us.
--

I'm sorry for being so negative, but honestly there is almost nothing of value to be derived from these kinds of posts, it's not like these guys are authorized to tell us anything of substance with regard to future product plans. Guaranteed 90% of the comments are feature requests and self-congratulatory nonsense.
I suspect the parent comment was just hacker news v reddit elitism flaring up.
Hackaday recommends development boards (Part 2)
Deciding not to use Bitcoin - a casino startup's perspective
I've fixxed a getting started project using the latest Android SDK and Scala 2.9: https://github.com/danielribeiro/HelloScalaOnAndroid

Edit: The pull request was accepted at: https://github.com/gw111zz/HelloScalaOnAndroid
And they are already starting to go the TC way. http://thestartupfoundry.com/2011/06/13/tsf-is-looking-for-f...
I'm trying to understand why you would think that it doesn't make sense, and how you think that iOS 3 being replaced serves to contradict it.

The observable in the first link is about people who bring their phone into the genius bar and need the phone to be replaced. It doesn't say anything about what version they had when they came in, or what version they had when they left.

It also says nothing about whether the users even use their phones as iPods - or whether, if they do, they had an existing collection of music before they got the phone. (One can, after all, buy new music over the air).

So could you elaborate?
The US hasn't looked kindly towards hackers since the early 1990s. This won't change anything.

The people saying that this type of thing is going to cause an "internet crackdown" of sorts have had their head in the sand for the last 15 years. Doubly so for the last 5-10.

Media companies have been screaming and crying about multi-billion dollar losses, and using all of their lobbying ability to get an "internet crackdown" to happen.

It already has. You could argue that most of the crackers of today are a result of it.
Someone just said to me:

whenever i see these stories, i wonder why these inventions are all coming from the country with the "worst health care in the world"
Amazon’s Navigation Bar Is Revealing
Can you please drop me a line? Maybe we can figure something out?
Once MS stops development of VB6, the deathclock on its runtime has effectively started. The VB6 runtime may in the future only run on XP emulation. The situation is even more dire with the IDE. The support has effectively run out and if the next release of Windows doesn't support it, you are on your own trying to keep the environment going on an old machine.
we did not sell twitter on "secondary markets"

we do not participate in the "secondary markets"

if we sell, we sell in a financing organized or facilitated by the company we have invested in
I wanted to post that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
- It needs a way to be semantic, so that common things on the internet must be representable, such as products, events, flight reservations, etc. XML solves this with namespaces. - It needs to be able to provide a way to show documents written in that language in current browsers using a plug-in. XML solves that with XSLT (there will be a standard .xls file for easy backwards compatibility). - It should be able to be just uploaded on an FTP server by the average author, just as HTML, without installing server-side software or messing around with settings. - It should be easy to write for authors.

Isn't that what RDFa is? Which has to advantages over HSS already: 1) it's designed to extend HTML while remaining compatible with older browsers and 2) It's already used by big sites and understood by Google.
what a bubble they've become.
Last I heard they were pulling in $2 billion a year, so $20 billion would definitely be on the low side.

$100 billion is still high imho (though I've been wrong before, and previously thought they were crazy for turning down one billion), unless they come up with a better way to monetize their huge userbase in the next six months.
How the hell do young programmers learn such a big stack in a few years?

They don't. Witness the never-ending repetition of basic mistakes leading to SQL injection vulnerabilities, script injection, etc.