skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A Facebook phone is really just any gingerbread phone the hardware maker is currently making minus Google apps plus Facebook apps.

Obviously Facebook is making a huge effort to change their design DNA.
February 11, 2008. 2008-02-11, in accordance with ISO standard. The real day was 3.5 years ago.
That's an oversimplification, quoting the newly updated USCIS FAQ on the subject of H-1B employer/employee relationship:

"if the facts show that there is a right to control by the petitioner over the employment of the beneficiary, then a valid employer-employee relationship may be established. For example, if the petitioner provides evidence that there is a separate Board of Directors which has the ability to hire, fire, pay, supervise or otherwise control the beneficiary, the petitioner may be able to establish an employer-employee relationship with the beneficiary."

In other words –- the employer-employee relationship may be established when a board of directors controls the employment status of the beneficiary (e.g., a founder) on behalf of the corporation (the petitioner).
I don't think the author is "keeping track" of anything. If I say, "Hey, will you review my YC application?" and you say, "Sure, but get it to me before Wednesday or I won't have time." and I say, "Will do!" and then you never hear from me again, you won't be recommending me for anything. And likely, you won't take the time to help me if I try to reconnect, unless I have a pretty good reason I flaked.

It's not a list, it's human nature. You invest in things that show promise, and the behavior outlined above doesn't show promise.
Short Q&A with Uwe Schindler on Java 7 Bug, Oracle's Response
Also remember that english is not his native language, so his understanding of the word may differ from yours.
Anybody Still Using 'Old Twitter'?
I guess you're leaving the actual comparison as an exercise for the reader. IIRC, both involved people who had little business savvy and a missed opportunity presented as a regretful decision. no money is exchanged here however, and they never detail the cost occurred to them by the extra load.
they need diversity
Safari 5 Places Second to IE 8 in July Browser Stats
Any number of techniques fit this same definition, raymarching being the obvious one. It's too vague to actually mean anything.
Netscape 6 is (or was) the oft quoted example of why not to do this. All that old code may seem old and boring, but it has a huge amount of knowledge, wisdoms, learnings, fixed mistakes, performance improvements, great ideas, deleted bad ideas and security fixes built into it.

When you throw out your code you're throwing out all that knowledge on the assumption that you can build it all back with improvements.

Evolving an application from a known good state to a known better state is usually the best approach unless your codebase is small or your app has no traction.

Rewriting your app from the ground up is like getting divorced and dating a new girlfriend. The first few months are a lot of fun until you figure out how much you lost.
"Google controls android"

Meh, they control it to an extent. The core open sourced Android (gingerbread atm) is clearly "good enough" that all anyone has to do to credibly fork it and still deliver a high end device is bring as much to the table as Google itself does.

That's not a herculean task although only a handful of companies qualify and most of those are better off jumping through Google's hoops to get the full experience anyway. Facebook probably isn't one that wants to jump through Google's hoops though.

I'm not saying the FB phone will be a success. Clearly some people want it. Let's go benefit of the doubt and say it will be technically awesome. Well so were a lot of other flops. I think a FB phone is one of those things on a knifes edge that could be a Vista/Zune/Edsel level flop or could be the iDevice killer every tech pundit has been waiting on for the last decade.
I think the point is more about time management for the person offering their help to anyone who reaches out. There is an incredible sense of helpfulness in the startup community and a pay it forward/back attitude. When new entrepreneurs, or old alike, reach out for help, your first instinct is to help them because you know how hard it is to be an entrepreneur. This is despite being super busy and drained yourself. So, when you make time for someone, even though you may not have much time to give, it's quite a waste when they take it for granted. It's not about holding a grudge, more about making a decision to help the people who respect your time and value it, and not wasting your time helping people who seem not to.
the military has perfected phase array multi-target tracking technologies quite a long time ago :) There were similar movements in the consumer WiFi arena - that can be equated to hub-to-switch movement that happened in the wired Ethernet years ago - yet somehow it didn't pick up:

http://boingboing.net/2003/02/17/vivato-releases-pric.html

note especially nice thing about beam forming "which allows it to emit at very high, focused power, extending range without running afoul of FCC regs."
Seven of the eleven TechStars Winter Program startups have also gone on to raise funding, with a few more soon to close, Tisch and Cohen said.

This really surprises me. Hackers & Founders boot strapped an incubator, with BizSpark paying for our weekly dinners and space rental. Since then, all 6 of our graduating companies have gone on to raise money. http://hackersandfounders.tv. We were also happy to refer startups to other incubators.

But, 5 weeks since our last dinner, and the six companies have raised $1.4M in total. We referred two of them to 500 Startups, and their demo day is next week, so those numbers are only going to go up.
Serious question:

> Q. Can I request to have a tweet or myself removed from Undetweetable? A. You can request it, but it won't happen.

Is this not copyright infringement? The irrevocable term in Twitter's TOS is not passed on to random sites using the API to the best of my knowledge.
Building a Sales Team: How to Focus New Salespeople
I'd love feedback on my website 
Just launched and still in beta. The purpose of Socialflavor is to help you easily find other others who like the same stuff you do.
The ridiculous used car salesman type pitch in the demo videos certainly doesn't help. They're made with the same sort of breathless breath-through narrative you hear in free energy and perpetual motion machine demos.
I think the idea is opening the discussion for privacy concerns?

I don't think you want to see your own but maybe someone famous. How many times have we read about someone saying something outrageous on Twitter and then deleting their Tweets after controversy?
Pointing a big antenna is not how it would work.

You don't need to point the antenna at anything; you can use multiple antennas that steer the beam ("beamforming") in a desired direction. Link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_antenna

Basically you can have a "phased array" of N antennas (2 counts as an array, but you can think of a line of say N=8 antennas) that delay their broadcasts relative to each other in such a way that the N signals interfere constructively along some directions and destructively along other directions. This is because, from far away,

cos(angle_from_line_of_antenna_array) = const*propagation_delay_between_antennas
"and came from a variety of schools (MIT, Stanford, Brown, CMU, Tufts, Chapman and University of Ontario"

eyeroll Starting the elitism early, I see.
One OS which did not make this mistake was the Classic Mac OS. I had a thread on Ars Technica where I argued whether Copland would have been more secure than Mac OS X based on that.
I'm in a very similar position myself. I'm about to enter my 3rd year at UT Austin, with a double major in Business (MIS) and Computer Science. I have gotten offers to co-found 1 or 2 startup ideas with adult founders that have had very successful companies in the past (that they started!). I was originally only MIS, but my interest has always been in tech tinkering so CS was a must.

I've talked to tons of people and asked this same question and I've learned that a CS degree is VERY useful. Besides engineering, it's one of the most valuable degrees you can get. Many companies don't care about you grades if you're in CS / Engineering, they care about your experience, intelligence, etc. I would strongly recommend working on a startup idea on the side and/or getting an internship in the semester (if no startup) or a full-time internship next summer. Grades are important, but honestly if you have around a 3.0 - 3.2 and you're doing a technical field and you got good startup / internship experience, you're much better than a 4.0 CS guy with very little experience, hands down.
Okay - I don't see why. I already have Facebook thus the people I'm connecting to on Facebook fit the "People who like what I like" bill to a certain degree (generally).

You need something more than just the static graphic I saw to get me to try.

If it matters, I'm running FF w/ Noscript. You might have had some fancy JS-based or Flash-based something or other that I didn't see.
This article is for people on the other side of the table who send you emails and are looking for help. Think of a company who does not follow up after getting a positive response from you.
I used the Try It page. It does support undo of markup when you do the markup with shortcuts (e.g. ctrl+b), but not when you do it with the menu. By the way, the menu often obscures the content, it is quite irritating at times. Have you considered changing the algorithm for moving it around?
How can this be practically used? Start a startup, get a board of directors? How many startups have a board of directors? If you already have 500K or 1M lying around, you can get the EB5 visa anyway which does away with this nonsense of requiring a board of directors that control you and all the restrictions that comes with H1B and all the advanced qualifications for EB2 that are not relaxed for entrepreneurs.
Lessons Learned from AppEngine's Data Store
That's not what they are saying at all. The obfuscator is to protect their source code, it has nothing to do with your account and files being secured or not.
Of course. I wouldn't try and force Emacs down the throat of someone who was just looking for a simple text editor; but by the same token, it is at times wearying to read about "innovations" in editing that Stallman implemented 20 years ago. And so it goes.
I couldn't find it on Foobar2000.
Pachter Defends Crunch Position: What He Really Thinks
Warning: Don't enter your own twitter handle unless you want it permanently added to their archive.

I entered my own twitter handle to see what (if anything) would come up. Instead, I was greeted with a message that my handle was not yet in their database, but it would now be added to their list because I entered it. Great.
The halting problem is an profound bit of theoretical CS well-explained on this thread.

However, the actual halting problem is moot in most of the references I see to it, as the halting problem is usually misused by the half-educated to make claims that 'nothing useful can ever be inferred about the behavior of any program, ever'.

For example, we built a tool to either estimate a reasonable ceiling on the stack usage (whole-program) or give up; it works very well and can detect when the structure of the program prevents this tool from operating correctly (nasty stack mischief or stack adjustments appearing in 'unusual' places). Quite useful for us, especially because we control the source code and know that we don't do naughty things to our own stack.

Entertainingly, on the way to build this tool, we encountered at a couple screeds about how this problem just plain can't be solved because it's equivalent to 'solving the halting problem'. Well, yes - in theory, but no - in practice.
If you have an idea you're interested in working on for several years of your life, it makes sense to start researching it and proofing the concept ASAP.
But Pypy can optimize dynamic strings, while a static compiler can't.

Replace the constant string with argv[1], and run the code: for Pypy, there is no real difference, but the C/C++/D compilers are unable to optimize.
Cool a collection of twitter double posts. Seriously, who deletes tweets? I don't even look at people's history of tweets.
Ask HN: Going to Boston this weekend, what should I check out?
I'm going on vacation with my family before going back to school. I've never been to Boston but I've heard it's very entrepreneurial. I'm going to check out Harvard, what else should I look into?
Ah, clever! Thanks for the link.
For Those Who Want Deal Space to Die... Sorry
"My role is to make sure the company makes money." Do you own the company? If not, you're a hired gun.

My unsolicited advice: be a professional, have integrity, make money for the company. One day, perhaps through no fault of your own, you might not make money, and the company will subsequently kick you out on your ass. Then, you'll see the value of those intros you made.
I don't know what the old codebase is like, but the current one is just 2145 LOC, not counting tests. 62K total.

I know that startups do way more that just write code, so I'm not criticizing them at all. And it seems they're not afflicted with the typical engineer modesty when it comes to their own codebase, which is a good thing. On the other hand it's not exactly a superhuman hacking achievement to rewrite this from scratch.
First amateur polywell fusion reactor, in a Brooklyn apt
According to Web analytics group Net Applications, Apple's Safari Web browser posted an 8.1 percent jump in market share for the month of July

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0&qpca... tells me that Safari has a total aggregate of 8.1 percent of the market share in July...
Tech leaders upbeat about jobs as debt drama ends
The hidden message in Lion (Steve Jobs hand is missing)
Once you start making revenues from your code, a complete rewriting is probably the worst thing you can do for your company. Sometimes it might be warranted, but customers care about solving problems, not about technology.

Chances are if you wrote properly modularized code, you can rewrite modules one by one, which is perfectly legit. But just dropping everything and trying to rewrite a product from scratch is a mistake that a company usually only makes once (before they die).
This very well seems like copyright infringement. They also don't post a DMCA contact.
I liked the what Dean Terry- wrote on his blog:
"over the last couple of months is that I thought very carefully about deleting a tweet, which in turn made pressing send when composing one less casual than before. Everything felt more permanent. I’ve always wanted to create something that made people feel more tension when hitting “send” on a social network." We are a bit too trigger happy when it comes to socializing on the net. The air we breathe doesn't remember our spoken words but the internet does. Be careful.
I checked it with and without JS. All you get is a static image about finding people who like vampire movies. It would appear to be a Facebook for current Facebook users who like vampire movies.
A few people have pointed out that it’s easy to throw out your code when you (a) have tests for it, and (b) only have three months invested in it. I agree with both of those points, but want to tip my hat to a team that rewrites their code after three months.

The reason some code bases can’t be rewritten after a few years is because when the code was only three months old, the team passed on the chance to rewrite it while it was still a tractable exercise.
I'm glad they're happy with the rewrite, but honestly, this makes me feel a bit nervous about updating my Node app utilizing NowJS to the 0.7 release.

Maybe it is better. Maybe it is more stable, smaller, and faster, and well-tested. But it hasn't had as much "real world" use thrown at it as the previous codebase had.

I'm not saying I won't upgrade, but I'll likely wait a bit until I do and stay with what I know works right now, at least in production.
The problem is not that the system was rewritten; it may well have needed it. The problem is that the engineer did not replace the existing system. Now they have two systems that do nearly the same thing.
92% of Newt Gingrich's Twitter Followers Are Fake
Depends on the angle. The person that wrote the codebase is usually the one holding onto the old codebase due to ego. On the other hand, new people that come in and don't like things can be full of ego in the sense of, "I could program this better without any limbs!"
Why don't you take an example from Mike Pall's LuaJIT relying on something more computationally expensive like scimark - he has lua version, and also few other benchmarks (from the alioth site).

If you really want fast sprintf( %s, "%d %d" ) - then you might aswell craft something specifically for converting text to decimal numbers.

sprintf( ) is convenience function, not performance.
This bothers me actually. When I start to type "facebook", it goes to "about:flags". It should have an additional check if the user doesn't end up picking what was autocompleted for them, then it puts back what the user originally typed. That way this feature can be used without frustrating the user.
Anyone who's watched that demo has noticed exactly what he said, that their demo is basically a 2D tilemap of a few repeated 3D objects, most likely to make the memory requirements of storing voxels at that level of detail feasible.
We found that Facebook doesn't make it too easy to find people who like the same things you do - even if they are your friends. We definitely want to have a more animated image which will reflect multiple "likes" and not just vampire movies. Thanks for you feedback.
I'm probably in the worst area for any of the jobs I'm looking for. I'm living in Miami, FL. Here we have warehouses and out of touch web designers. Thanks for the help, I really appreciate it.
Appreciate your reply. This question likely places candidates in a difficult situation, especially younger candidates who are excited about the opportunity, or those needing the job.

If the interviewer plans on asking this question, they ought to have conducted a patent search prior to the interview.

If patents or applications are found - ask the candidate about the problem that was solved by the claimed invention. Ask if the candidate was the one who noted the problem, and ask further questions based upon the answer.

If no patents/published applications naming the candidate are found, don't ask the question.

If the interviewer doesn't want to take the 5 minutes to search, or HR doesn't provide these materials to interviewers as a routine part of the interviewing process then they ought to ask "Are you listed as an inventor on any issued patents or published patent applications?" and then they ought to suggest that in the future HR conduct a quick patent and published application search and distribute the results to those interviewing a candidate.

A candidate ought to conduct a patent search prior to interviewing and use that information to ask a variety of questions and point out noted intersections between tech development and the candidates knowledge and experience.
I wonder what happened to shaft No. 1 ?
Thanks for your feedback - our goal with the vampire image is for it to be an example of the capability vs. the focus of the site. As mentioned, we'll get some new interests rotating through :)
I'm about to start work at a New Yrk startup, and I have had no trouble finding a place to live on my probably average salary. Granted, I am single and don't have children, but I imagine that's not uncommon for startup employees.
the more important question is- Do we want pens/paper to become obsolete? and Who might benefit from this? Meaning- if all writing and reading material becomes digitized, wouldn't there be the possibility of losing all the data one day? (whether by accident or by someone in charge) Did we forget about the 1984 on Kindle incident? What about Farenheit 451? We need to make it a point to keep them around (the pen and paper) is what I think.
It's common for the runtime of game scripting language to have infinite loop detections - for example if loop takes more than 5ms and hasn't reached (or called) specific point/mark then it's reported, stopped or restarted.

But going to the next line...
this issue goes far beyond nostalgia.
Weimar meets Waterloo
Honestly - it's quite ugly - it looks like a game from 8 years ago. I'm not sure what are they drinking?

For sure their graphics are not 100,000x better.
Why can't we create more open spectrum?
Isn't there a question about whether PayPal's employees were great entrepreneurs or if they benefitted from network effects?

Anyway, my impression is that the NY startup scene consists of a lot of high-profile startups. Could someone explain to me why these (or any other) startups should aspire to be PayPal-esque, aside from being absurdly successful?
First of all, your home page doesn't really tell me much. As a user, I don't really get whats in it for me - you need to tell me whats in it for me to make me signup.

My impressions of your service, is that I signup and discover information about my Facebook friends. However, I know all my facebook friends personally so I don't need to discover information about them.

I'm pretty sure that isn't what your service is about - well at least I hope its not!

Either way, you need to explain what your service is, instead of a static graphic on the home page which, doesn't really convey your message.

Secondly, I had a look at your about page & looked at your team pages (fortunately they linked to their profiles instead of some form of bio) but this is where I came across another issue

For instance: Let's use Adam Cross as an example.

To view Adam Cross' profile you HAVE to go to - http://socialflavor.com/adam.cross/m454e528b-b3be-4165-8af9-... instead of http://socialflavor.com/adam.cross/ as this shows "Huh? What Happened?" that isn't great for sharing with my friends etc because, when they go whats your username, I'll say "profitbaron" & I don't want to say profitbaron/this-shouldn't-be-here

Additionally, when I clicked on stuff it never did anything, it just said "Please Wait" for a second but then didn't load anything. You need to fix that too because, its not only your registered users you need to look after (I'm assuming this works for registered users, I haven't signed up for your service) its your non-registered users too!
One thing that's interesting about startups though is that it's not always clear which side of the table is which. A lot of the intros that I end up dropping are with folks from companies that are more important than us. (That's actually really common since they've have dedicated BD people whose job is basically opportunistic networking.)

That said, you're right -- if you contact someone out of the blue higher up in the food-chain than you are, then the onus is on you to follow-through.
This is probably a violation of the Twitter API ToS, i.e.

"For example, your Service should execute the unfavorite and delete actions by removing all relevant messaging and Twitter Content, not by publicly displaying to other end users that the Tweet was unfavorited or deleted."
It could be he didn't notice it till he looked at the photos.

When you are in a new area and everything is new to you, you can't look at everything.
Why diets don't work? Starved brain cells eat themselves
Whatever it is, it looks a clunky mess. This is not the leap in 3D printing I was hoping for.
If I recall in the demo, they kept on referring to procedural generation, and so perhaps they have a few tricks up their sleeve for generating content (trees being an obvious example) that would be varied yet take up little memory.
That problem gets hard very quickly when you deal with recursion. How did you deal with that? (if you did)
You're assuming you have copyright on your tweets which is unlikely as this essay lays out: http://www.canyoucopyrightatweet.com/