skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sprint abandons plans to sell 4G BlackBerry PlayBook tablet after weak demand
Which isn't as scary. Because the outsize rewards are not being paid for by new investment into the sector (unless you count later funding, but that's not the incubator's problem - tech boom and bust is already a fact of life for VCs and other people who invest in later-stage tech companies).
Is There Really Room For a Third Mobile OS?
Addendum: Having a post about your app on the front page of Hacker News = several thousand hits, but no extra sales. Funnily enough, this is the exact same experience I had with AdWords.

Have to say I feel much better with the hits from HN than AdWords.
Your important call would have been cut off as soon as you left the station anyway.
Interesting question. I've been programming for 10 years and I want to see what I've missed. I suspect that if you picked good milestones and executed them well you could be in the top quartile of all developers at the end of those six months.
Mozilla Brings The Sign In Button To The Browser Level
Two questions: Why do you think there are so many poor people in Mexico, where do narco-terrorists get money to buy weapons?

NAFTA is passed > government subsidized US corn exports destroy Mexican corn producers > Poor, unemployed mexicans flood into three places: Factory jobs (US outsourcing), migrant labor in America, narcotics export > Cartels slowly increase in power and wealth over the course of 2 decades > Cartels destabilize government
Both of your complaints are mistaken.

You can arbitrarily reorder your photostream (not just sets, your actual photostream), and you can check the organizer to filter your photostream for only public photos.
I would imagine there is power backup already in place to keep the trains moving under the bay in case of a power failure.
Yes, now I know about it, and I would never have heard about it otherwise.

I'm sure that more flowery rhetoric could be said about the whole business, but I'm going to go with:

Bad BART. Bad. Don't do it ever again.
As is often pointed out around here, there's legal, and then there's right.
"On a side note, I had an ex boyfriend who spent a lot of time on the site.(He still does!!). First thing every morning, he would check out the site.That was a bummer."

Good call, ex boyfriend.
Some states seem to have laws preventing this sort of thing since it would interfere with 911 calls. http://www.cga.ct.gov/2002/rpt/2002-R-0891.htm

Not sure about California.
You seem very confused.

a) Mortgage issuers tended to be the victims of fraud, not the perpetrators. The people committing fraud were mostly mortgage brokers and and home borrowers.

(Mortgage issuers are now using fraud to cover up lazy paperwork after the fact, but that's a separate matter.)

b) The mortgage market doesn't even come close to being an "unregulated market". While you can dispute the extent to which the regulators played a role, it's indisputable that the regulators were solidly on the pro-bubble side of the fence.
He has 60,000 photos on Flickr, and 198 on Google+.

Some of his Flickr photos are against G+ ToS.
No, because a bunch of assholes were threatening him with bodily harm
Well, if Python runs really fast for the clued-in users who use PyPy and pretty slow for the non-clueful, then I'm providing my users with a bad experience. I need to be able to reliably deliver fast code without futzing around with custom installs of Python just to deliver an app.
This seems plausible, but I don't use the same passsword between sites. Hm...
It's actually potentially more interesting than that.
AM/FM radio stations on licensed frequencies are required to be transmitting. Dead air has to be reported and justified to the FCC, or they can face fines.
I wonder if that sort of thing applies to CDMA/GSM radio towers and repeaters.
I just open the text editor and start writing code. The amount of planning depends on how complex I think the project actually is.
أســمــاء الألــوان قديماً - ::منتــــ::ــديات فوعـــ::ــة الإمـــ::ــارات::
Don't forget about the bailouts. The wealth conentration in the finance industry would be much lower without the government bailout of AIG and others.
This looks exactly like some of the stuff I have seen on the oatmeal. Brilliantly crafted sir.
It's worse than that. Many Soviet bureaucrats were very smart people who believed in what try were doing. But "merit" in the context of a system that is just wrong on many levels results in a warped perception of "merit".
Check out Berkeley if SF is full right now. There are a lot of student-group-house situations there and it's not a far Bart trip from SF.
Skimming Jonathan’s Card For Fun And Philanthrophy
A better analogy would be a software company that makes the leading operating system who penalized OEMs that produced computers with competing software installed.
Exactly. We need to start addressing both culturally and politically the fact that unemployment in a modern economy is going to get progressively worse as it increasingly requires less manual labor and more intellectual prowess to create value.

The only way to deal with it is proper social welfare, because you can't just "create jobs."

We could have a freer market and near full-employment if we replaced all our social welfare programs with a single minimum living stipend (you apply if you make below it, and if you qualify, get a check for the difference), and abolished minimum wage. It would save tons of money to as so much complicated and unnecessary administration of multiple agencies would be eliminated.

Sadly, a proper social welfare system is exactly what the US refuses to implement. From healthcare to unemployment to disability.

The economy is fine. It's not booming, but companies are flush with cash. The only thing wrong is unemployment, and the only option to deal with it is some form of welfare. The other option is to let the number of unemployed get to a point that social unrest starts becoming a problem.
I'm still going through Skiena's book (we used CLRS in school, so I figured I'd use Skiena's as a counterpoint), but so far I've been impressed with Skiena. It's a lot more terse (as evidenced from the size differences between the two), and so far I seem to be grokking it better (although it's been over a decade since I even cracked CLRS open).
Totally right, prints are just as obsolete as desktops from other today's front page thread. Especially now when you have iPads and other tablets with outstanding picture quality.
It has this. The photographer needs to enable it.
Six weeks after birth, Google+ is already middle aged
I'm not looking for a job, but do occasionally see one here that may fit someone I know, and I pass it on....but only if I don't see (for the 10,000th time) vapid marketing-speak like "join a team of rock stars" or "wanna rock with us?", or "rock our stars" or whatever. I have nothing against actual rock stars (musicians), but if you're basically a bunch of marketing or management suits, you're the farthest thing from a "rock star" imaginable.
Most likely if the borrower wants to refinance the next month he will have the surprise that the principal will be equal to the original principal plus the "negative points" (and of course minus the principal amortization for the first month, which is quite small).
For reference, here's a study that was recently conducted that compares Americans' perception of the wealth distribution against the actual wealth distribution. Surprisingly, participants of all stripes badly estimated the current distribution and proffered an "ideal" distribution even more out of whack with reality.

Before clicking, take your guess. What percent of total American wealth does the top quintile control?

Summary: http://danariely.com/2010/09/30/wealth-inequality/

Paper: http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/norton%20ariely%20in%20pre...
Minecraft is Buy One Get One Free this Weekend
Doesn't matter to the politicans. They don't work for the American public, they work for the corporations who give them money and high paying jobs later in life.
Every social app is a dating site.
This is the same Sam Odio that had a scam Iraqi Dinar exchange...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lcq2LXSAn_U

The service received a cease and desist letter from the government...

http://www.iraqidinarmoney.com/dinar-profits/

Sam Odio seems to exhibit the traits of a sociopath,defined by the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as "...a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.

Why YC supports people like this is beyond me.
This is why government should not be in the cell phone (or tower, or repeater) business. Just as they should not be involved in the newspaper, news reporting or any other business not related to actual governing. Giving any government the power to shut down communication is a nasty, slippery slope. Once it's OK to quash communication in the subway, then it's OK to quash it just outside the subway; then for one block around the subway; then for 10 blocks around the subway ad infinitum.

The big problem is that the governing authorities assumed that everyone around BART that day was there for nefarious cause and treated everyone as a suspect, thereby shutting down potential criminal activity, yet depriving law-abiding citizens the ability to communicate freely. If the governing authorities were interested in preserving security, then they should use the means granted to them by the citizens; namely, police officers.
Tracking Commute Speeds and Slowness With Foursquare
Thanks!

The site was built with Ruby 1.9.2 + Rails 3.1 (+ SASS and Coffeescript), jQuery (+ UI), and PostgreSQL on top of Heroku (Cedar Stack + Unicorn + Memcached) using Facebook Connect and the Google Maps API. We've just been hacking on it for a little while now but the more pertinent point is that we still have plenty of hacking to do :)
Wasn't $3.8 billion around the amount the AT&T has to pay T-Mobile if the merger fails to go through?
It is a good example if a quality job posting, that YC hirers can take inspiration from.
This is really awesome. The one question I had: are there copyright issues associated with Google using its index this way?
Limiting the height is a good idea. Though it seems like it might look a bit barren with so much white to the left and right of the picture.

What are your thoughts on sites that scroll horizontally? I find that they sometimes look nice, but are often awkward.
I experience something different. From $0.99 up to $9.99, no matter what price I set, my daily income remained essentially the same. Before you ask, the amount was greater than $0.
The state of regulatory capture in this country makes corrupt Latin American dictatorships look like bastions of ethics and accountability by comparison.

edit: Downvote away. At least in Latin America, everyone accepted the corruption was going on. Here we pretend the revolving door between policy enforcement and well-paid private sector jobs in the enforced-upon industries is totally fine and not at all subject to conflicts of interest.

Fuck, man, one of the people who approved the NBC/Comcast acquisition later took a very cushy job with... Well, I'll leave it to you to guess. Spoiler: she didn't join a consumer advocacy nonprofit.
I'm here :)

I used to have my own startup, but I'm now working as a cubicle rat, although hoping to return back to paradise soon.

http://flavors.me/davidchua

I usually hang around the hackerspacesg discussion board although I haven't been dropping by hackerspacesg lately.

http://groups.google.com/group/hackerspacesg/

I'm available for kopi/teh anytime. Just hola.
Show HN: stypi-sync synchronizes collaborative code editing with local storage
A single terminal session counts as a user, probably has a few open, plus the system login etc.
Tech analyst says Pandora 'dramatically overvalued'
Which bookstores? Most don't sell textbooks, except for university bookstores.
Android and other tablets have barely hit the market yet. This seems like a completely pointless comparison at this time.
I wish this existed in the past -- trying to figure out best practices for mturk use is almost more work than just doing the task yourself, but simplifying it for common tasks makes it a lot more useful.
I've heard that simply decriminalizing weed in many states has had a material, and in some cases profound negative effect on revenue for mexican drug cartels. Furthermore, many consumers of narcotics are "moving upstream" to prescription drugs. But with less revenue, comes more violence initially as the factions squabble fiercely over a bigger slice of a smaller pie. Eventually this will reach an equilibrium and enough producers will drop out or realize it's not worth it and we'll end up with a few kingpins for the CIA to take out (a la Noreaga, Escobar, et al.).
You're in the wrong comment thread.
I'm trying to ascertain that, but so far lost in a maze of twisty little links on the wireless.fcc.gov site, all alike.

I'd actually be surprised if that was the case though.
Jonathan's Card shut down
Have you visited Silicon Valley???

There is a good saying "the only thing holding yourself back is yourself". If you are a reasonably competent programmer, you will find work in the Valley. There are dozens of large companies and there are literally hundreds of startups.

If you are really serious, take a 1 week vacation. Hang out in Mountain View, Palo Alto and San Fran. Attend a tech meetup every night and talk to people. You will find a job. If your only goal is to live/work in the valley, it really isn't that hard.

- I assume you can code and don't have visa issues (but Visa issues can be overcome for competent coders).
Have You Thought About Liability Issues That Might Come with Your Business Idea?
Good stuff... TFA would make sense if they said concentration of wealth leads to oligopoly, or highly imperfect competition, or rent-seeking. But those are different from central planning. In the 50s, when a vertically integrated GM or Ford controlled 3% of GDP, that was as close to central planning as we got. But back then, interestingly, wealth and incomes were less concentrated than today. The link between concentration of wealth and the form of industrial organization is not very clear.
all right, I will stay away from it... my partner was a bit reluctant anyway.
I've never really agreed that numbering should start at zero (or at one), I think people use indices way too much and it gets in the way of clarity. I much prefer whole array or list operations with no fiddling with indices and off by one errors. I like Haskell's array API, for example. You can index by whatever is natural in each case and you can always get the whole list of valid indices for an array x by using "indices x". I think that's much nicer, and it's also what D is doing: instead of having a(n implicitly paired) starting and ending iterator to indicate a range of positions like the C++ library does, D's library uses a range object. Basically I'm saying you can represent a range of indices as a pair of indices, one pointing to the first valid position and the other pointing past the last valid one, but that's an implementation detail you don't need to expose, make a range abstraction and you'll be happier.

I should also point out that mathematicians don't number at zero unless there is some advantage (the default is to start at one), but more importantly, the preferred style in mathematical arguments is to avoiding fiddling with indices as much as possible (since it's so easy to mess something up working at such a low level of abstraction).
The proposition of this merger is one of the most blatantly negative outcomes for the public I've heard in some time. Anyone with even an inkling of sense regarding this industry understands that it would be very dangerous and troublesome for consumers if T-Mo were absorbed into AT&T -- not only would it pare down the oligopoly that is mobile telco and allow further price gouging (which is already quite excessive; cf. 20¢/text), but AT&T would have acquired the entire GSM market in the US, leaving current T-Mo customers with no choice but to use AT&T or get a new phone and foreign visitors with no choice but to roam on AT&T.

> (somewhere there's a paralegal looking for work today)

I like to think that somewhere there's a paralegal holding his head high for the "accidental" damage he inflicted to this potential merger. Good for you, man.
"i'd +1 that" sounds better than "i'd like that".
Moncler Aliso Doudoune Femme Bleu
They don't have battery backups?
May I post this to a jobslist I'm on?
Is this not an extremely anti-competitive statement? Just curious how often this has to happen to be trigger anti-trust/monopoly scrutiny.
It would be nice if I could intern for someone and just do simple tasks, I'm a college dropout and I don't really know how to go about finding something like that...
It is questionable whether the market really determines what is best. Worse is better.
Six month milestone: still be interested in programming and having fun.

I'm not trying to be flippant; I don't think spending the huge amount of time learning how to hack code is for everyone, especially if you don't have professors, TAs or bosses breathing down your neck to get stuff done.

If you're really motivated, ship something (anything!) that is used by someone other than you.

Good luck! :)
Will Social Networks Replace Search as Our Primary Source?
I didn't down-vote you (I think that its lame to ninja down-vote - it defeats the purpose of conversation), but I think that your initial comment was just a bit hyperbolic.

I disagree with your edit too though. Who here in the US is pretending that there is no revolving door? I don't think that anyone is ignoring the problem. I just think that most ordinary people are completely ignorant of the problem.

Big media has very little interest in reporting on the extent of the problem (for obvious reasons), and most people don't read the kind of news sites that discuss the issue openly. For most ordinary people, the issue isn't ignored so much as it is out of site, out of mind.

The problem is that ordinary people make up the majority of the population. It is a real problem, even when the revolving door is a huge issue[1] it is hard to keep the interest of the general public. The general public is kind of like my cat; intent on stalking something for a few seconds then off scampering around after the latest amusements.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/washington/11royalty.html
Windows Laptop Makers Can’t Catch Up to the MacBook Air
Can they be given a task that requires additional research, training, or creativity?

Example: What if I sent you a dental xray and asked you to report cavity count and location? This would require minor training but could easily be done by anyone with a trained eye.
What the country really needs now, more than ever, is coming together to solve problems and less hyperbole, or convenient political rhetoric.

There is no central planning in the US. There is nothing even close to central planning. Our politicians cannot agree on anything - the political parties are almost as divided as they've ever been - and we are only beginning to see the effects of that. How is this central planning?
The examples the author gives at the very end of the article (the main article on globalgorillas), is the result of the free market at work. The political situation we were in in 2008 and we are in today, is the response to that.
That's democracy and, as gut wrenching as it seems right now, it will eventually work itself out.
I don't foresee any future guy doing any better. The reality is the president doesn't have much power to improve it but as we've seen with the last president they do have a great amount of power in making it worse.
Comments have been pouring in for the last couple of hours on the Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/jonathanscard
The Evolution of Letterheads Throughout The Years
The ultimate emacs course
I fully agree. I often wonder why the posts are something similar to the following:

Young company looking for C++ programmers to help create a small fraction of the functionality provided by a Bloomberg terminal for a small fraction of the price of a Bloomberg terminal. Financial knowledge appreciated, but not required.

NOTE: If I had more than a few hours a week to work on such a thing, and I didn't have a large amount of student debt, then this would be a posting I would eventually like to make. For now, the above is only meant to serve as an example of how I think a job posting should read.
Is the skillset ranking system public at all, or just internal?
Are software patents evil?
what does that say about the hardness of making software resilient to attack

Well, we already know the answer to that question. The long-term solution is to build software out of safer building blocks. A good example is high-level programming languages. When you write C and use cstrings (or other unstructured "blocks-o-ram" data structures), you have to "get it right" every single time you touch a string. In a codebase the size of Flash's, this probably amounts to tens of thousands of possible bugs. But if you write it in a high-level language, the runtime implementor only has to get it right once -- and there's no way you can get it wrong, even if you want to. (The middle ground is something like better string handling functions; OpenBSD tried to do this with strl*, and there are libraries like bstrings that represent strings properly. But you can still do unsafe pointer math on these strings with not-much-benefit.)

The way it stands right now, it's cheaper to write software with the approach of "throw some trained monkeys at it and hope for the best". But in the future, we're going to need to do a lot more thinking and a lot less typing if we want to write secure software without performance penalties.
I'm not condoning what BART did, I think it was wrong.

But, if you decided to use HN to organize a response to an issue and HN deleted your posts, that doesn't make HN's actions a First Amendment issue. The First Amendment does not apply for private institutions that you choose to participate on.
From a "units" perspective it's interesting to see the comparison. However, I think the article presents a false comparison between apples and oranges.

Gaming consoles appeal to a limited section of the market and will generally ship less units than a mobile device. For instance, in a family of four, you might find four cellphones and only one gaming system. Simple fact. I think a more interesting comparison would be between tablet sales and mobile gaming device sales.
> I don't think that anyone is ignoring the problem. I just think that most ordinary people are completely ignorant of the problem.

This is fair – but I've honestly heard apologia for the issue by people who believe this is acceptable. "Only insiders understand the issues at play!" goes the cry.

The ignorance is ever more damning, I suppose. Which is more ripe for corruption – apathy or ignorance? Apathy strikes me as the much more mutable of the two. If people know nothing about the potential for corruption, it spreads unchecked.

Whether the American people are too lazy or too ignorant, the result is the same. An enormous power can be hijacked by anyone with a big enough bank account.