skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks. I couldn't find a list of the largest blocked mergers, just of the largest successful ones (topped by AOL/TimeWarner). Pretty amazing how many of the large mergers turned out. WorldCom tanked two years later, so that would have been another combined failure.
So slowly raise prices until you only get a few responses?
Hang on--that's 0.5s for server (64-bit) hotspot? That's astonishing.

Any details on how they were able to achieve it?
Apply with Me for YC winter '12
I'm looking for 1 or 2 people to apply with for Y-combinator for this winter round.

I'm still kicking around a few ideas, and i'm open to input from others, but primarily I have been thinking of working on some simple/low-cost hardware solutions for both active and passive data collection. There are already companies working on this in the health and security sectors, but i would like to produce input devices and sensors that can talk with each other and with the web to enable a range of flexible and creative applications beyond even what we might imagine (i'm an infrastructure guy, meaning i like to make tools and open up new possibilities). I'd also like to build a well-designed software suite or API which would support these devices.
We would probably start with some simple mobile apps which would mimic hardware and allow us to prototype quickly, and perform user research. Then build arduino-based hardware prototypes, before securing future funding to go into real production. I can get a lot more specific about this idea and why there is massive potential, when we talk, and i have already built one prototype mobile app.

another idea is for a physical mail version of twitter, in which you enter your mailing address and then you "follow" people, which would allow them to send you physical mail. think: newsletters, short stories, photographs, special news content, coupons, etc. more on this if you want to discuss. it could cost money to follow some people if they want to pass on the cost of printing to their followers. Our company could handle the printing and shipping of content to followers.

A little about me:

I am 25, trained as an interaction designer, visual artist, and cognitive scientist. I taught myself to hack web apps so i could make 'real' stuff myself. I founded Social Print Studio last year, which gave me experience in the start-up game: running a company day to day, designing, hacking, hiring, marketing, writing/presenting, pitching to companies + investors, customer service, etc. I'm ready to start something new, ideally with a good hardworking team. I want to design and build with quality, and I care deeply about the world and creating meaningful, valuable things/experiences.

I'm looking to meet hardware/software hackers who are passionate, self-motivated and have real experience making things happen. Ideally you are analytical, critical yet still imaginative. please get in touch with me here or by email or phone.

find me at benjaminlotan.com

Cheers!
Well -

I have written several systems that used that sort of approach. Pretty soon you realize you just reimplemented SELECT, and you did a buggy, half-baked job of it.

If you have money to burn on speed & reliability, dropping the database is a good idea. Otherwise, I simply have written too many half-baked hardwired select queries to recommend it.

At this point, I'd rather do some kind of in-memory SQLite with a persistent MySQL/PgSQL backend.
I'm honestly interested into why you consider yourself a very happy T-Mobile customer. I'm in DC and have T-Mobile and they are god awful. Dropped calls, reception in my studio's living room but not in the kitchen, 3+ hours downtime after earthquake. Obviously the only thing they have going on for them is their low prices.
<prejudice> I think that, these days, uniquely identifying oneself with just a single programming language is a bit like identifying yourself with a particular OS or computer. Most Windows users don't care much about this. They use Windows because it works best for them, not because they have t-shirts with Windows logos (or vice versa). The same holds for the choice of programming language. </prejudice>
Having been through the puzzle dog and pony shows at Facebook and Google, I still have to say that the best interview I've seen was a trial carried out by my last employer.

They hired the candidate as contractor on a one-week term. He paired with the senior members of the team and worked on the code base from day one. He started as a full-time employee two weeks later.
Constitution does not say government should be small but common sense does. Also, wasting taxpayer's money over soap factories and airlines (not even 5% of India's population uses them) is also exploitation which has lead to abject poverty. A million children in India die every year just because of lack of food.

An open economy is certainly not free from faults but it at least helps us get rid of some basic problems. The new problems that arise that need to be addressed then. Our primary objective must to end that acute poverty which then leads to people selling their votes for a bag of rice.
Anyone have suggestions for helpful packages? I'm currently using Sublimelinter ( https://github.com/Kronuz/SublimeLinter ), but that's it, would love to know about more.
There are other budget options in the wireless space, including Cricket and Boost
I was just about to order it, but their registration system is messed up...makes me iffy on the idea of buying it now -- if they can't get a simple checkout process right =D
FYI (OT): The "Bionica" link in the upper left of your blog leads to the default github "page missing". The home link on the right is OK.
I would say "give it a shot, first". I find the Metro UI very attractive, but my wife (who is not into tech in the slightest) was turned off by it.

And then I let her play with my WP7 Mango phone and her opinion completely turned around. A pretty good example of the contrast between user interface and user experience, in my book.
That is true... but it can go the other way to: Imagine a security bug that is introduced on every browser within the hour.
> There is no benefit for humanity to be gained through patents, they merely hinder our technological advancement.

I disagree. There are three alternatives (that come to mind) to patents:

1) Make all information freely accessible to anyone. This is the one we'd all like everyone to do. However, there's very little (economic) incentive to innovate when you do all of the heavy thinking and anyone else can just come along and beat you to the implementation.

2) Stop innovating. If you can't protect your ideas, you might as well just stop trying.

3) Hide your information. Only you can benefit from the information if no one else knows about it. (You can't license information and keep it a secret at the same time!) There are laws to help protect you, but you also have to do a lot of work to protect yourself. You can also keep your information secret indefinitely.

By filing a patent, you're telling the world how to do something (allegedly) new. In 20 years, (or longer/shorter, depending on the country) everyone is freely able to use the idea.
Yeah, I read this and immediately thought of the terminal in OSX. Sure, there's a full unix environment beneath it all, and the people that want it (in most cases, developers) can use it. But, you can definitely use OSX, be willfully ignorant of the terminal and/or unix, and not feel like you're missing out.

If Microsoft can pull off a similar analog, I think this could really work.
As much as I hate to defend Microsoft you have to admit they're essentially doing the same thing Apple is in OSX Lion. Just substitute Metro for the Mac's new iPad like interface. Both are splitting the difference by implementing a more modern system while hanging onto the desktop metaphor.

In some ways I'd even give Microsoft the edge (in that Metro Widgets/Gadgets can be interactive)
Cheezburger's DVCS Workflow
Sorry to post a bit.ly last time somehow it got flagged as spam because of all the funny cat pictures at our domain. :) Here's the direct URL: http://eat.cheezburger.com/development-practices/cheezburger-dvcs-workflow-a-history/
Solyndra to file for bankruptcy, lay off 1,100
I agree with the principle of "over design" - we old guys call it "if it isn't broken don't fix it".

However, some of his examples aren't convincing for me. I actually like the ugly Motion-X toggle switches compared to the IOS toggles which are a bit confusing I find - I can immediately see what is active / selected on the motion-X screen but on his examples of the correct" design I couldn't immediately work out what is selected/active. Also, the Motion-X tabs are much clear to me - there I said it.

To be honest the author comes across as one of those who insist on people following the "correct" rules even when they get in the way or there is a better solution.

I'll bet there are a lot of people who also disagreed with some of his examples but who won't say anything for fear of appearing "ignorant" in the eyes of the "design police".

Another important point. He states

"On average, only 3% of people who have downloaded an app use it after 30 days. Why? Because the majority of iPhone apps don’t make any sense to users."

But where is the evidence for this? He shows App usage over time graphs which don't separate between "over-designed" and "correctly designed apps" and then goes on to make an unwarranted assertion that the fall off is due users not understanding how to use the apps! How about the utility value of the apps not being enough or users getting bored with their $0.99 fun purchase ?

Lastly, if you go to the author's web site. You'll see he's designed an app for a pizza company. I downloaded it and it's beautiful (in fact I fancy a pizza now)! However, It does not use ANY standard IOS controls and has gone for a very nice custom dedicated UI!

His article spends a lot of time basically saying that the standard UI should be used but as his own app demonstrates there are cases where a custom UI is appropriate. His article would be much better if he provided guidance on when using a custom UI is better and provided evidence for his assertions.
Gee, some people really do NOT like facetious comments, parody, and humor! What is it particle physicists: Don't understand humor?
I'd also like to state that I take issue with the fact that patents are purchasable.
Coping with Internet Spending Shock
This is really cool. I really wanted something like that.
How and Why to Hash Passwords in PHP
4 traits of highly innovative businesses
yes, I am proficient with GIT.
Again, I’m opposed to punishment for punishment’s sake and civil law doesn’t really have anything to do with that. Of course you should be entitled to damages if someone steals something from you. Paying damages isn’t really what I would call punishment. (It’s just that drug addicts usually won’t be able to actually pay you anything. But that’s just how it is.)

I do not know whether there are crimes that can actually be prevented by doing something besides punishment. I just wanted to make clear that I’m open to the possibility.
If you're interested in the relative performance of the current crop of JS engines, you may like to check http://arewefastyet.com/?a=b&view=regress for commit by commit benchmarking over time.
How to make an intelligent blockbuster and not alienate people
For me, it's a cycle. I have trouble reading about something when I don't know WHY I am reading about it. If I 'do' first, then hit a wall, then read, then I really care about the reading because I've got skin in the game. Then I'm trying to solve a problem, which makes me happy.
1) There seem to be two things that impact the number of rounds necessary, your description and how many names are taken in that area. With the same description, usually one or two rounds is sufficient to see how well you're going to do (sometimes you'll get a bad batch of workers, but one or two rounds is usually enough to smooth the variance). However, if you're changing little things it might go longer. For example, if I was to do more rounds, I'd probably add something to the DebtEye description to ask for more "safe sounding" words, and less sort of sleazy words (e.g., "ez" or "instant").

2) $5 is below cost, our twin goals for the moment are to gather more data about what sorts of names we can do well on and to get our name out there. We'll probably do a survey or something later of real buyers to see what the actual price should be. There's also some raw-ness to the results right now (e.g., you'll get 2 or 3 good results with 47 bad results) so we're keeping the price relatively low until we have better automated filtering.

3) Unfortunately, when we were just starting out we didn't have Domain Refinery (and a naive implementation doesn't work terribly well for reasons I won't go into). As a result, we did the days of brainstorming followed by purchasing an overpriced name route. However, we've since used Domain Refinery for our naming, and in fact, Domain Refinery is named using itself. The top three names for what is now the Domain Refinery were domainrefinery.com, nolongernameless.com, and brainstormdomains.com. Ultimately, we liked domainrefinery.com best because it signaled the refinement aspect that we wanted to contrast against competitors.

(I'm one of the co-founders.)
Want to become superhuman? Apparently you should drink more coffee.
How to promote your small business at 0 cost
And a large corporate HQ will cost you in the millions. You can pay for all of these things out of profits (or funding) once you've successfully built a product.
Anesthesiologist Revives Patient 96 Minutes after Heart Attack
Great question! It is for the same reason that Google agreed to a really high breakup fee with motorola. It signals its willingness to fight the lawsuit up to the cost of the breakup at the least. Therefore it signals to regulators that they won't be a pushover.

That means a lot to agencies that are severely underfunded. They would rather not even start something that will last half a decade or more, like the msft case

It's a common example in game theory of how agreeing to ridiculous terms benefits the agent
When people set out to design a data driven application, they usually end up updating and deleting records.

FTFY...

It's not hard to build history into a SQL table design. You can even store events in a...wait for it... SQL database. I have built numerous systems backed by SQL databases that have complete history retention. Answering questions like 'who had id 'X' on this date 3 years ago' are easily solvable with basic standard sql.

I certainly don't believe SQL databases are perfect or the tool for every job, but in many cases they work just fine until you get into very large datasets. Admittedly, I only deal with databases in the 100s of GB range so I have yet to personally run into the scaling problems that a Google or Facebook have and the SQL backed systems I have built work just fine.
I'm a single founder, and while I haven't found success with my first app, I've definitely noticed some unique challenges.

First, designing and building an app by myself is different than anything else I've done in my career. It's incredibly exhilarating. Also a bit scary. Everything is on me. It can be stressful, but I don't think I could go back to the old way.

Second, when people realize it's just me behind the scenes, they don't take the app as seriously. I don't try to hide it. Kind of similar to how tech bloggers don't take you seriously unless you have funding. (But that's a different topic.)

Third, it's tough to get context or a neutral perspective. You're so close to it that seeing where you go wrong can be difficult. This is why I disagree with point #2 in the post. I worked on an app for a year and didn't realize it was a lost cause. (Dumb, I know.)

By and large, I think the pluses outweigh the minuses. Especially since I had cofounders bail on 4 projects before I went solo.
Can you add 90s or 80s&90s as category ? I like it :)
"you can no longer decide that it's a bad idea to upgrade to the new version because of an annoying change."

Exactly what I dislike about the web app model; I want it even less in my client apps.
Cricket's apparently smaller than US Cellular and MetroPCS, neither of whom I even knew existed anymore.

Boost is an MVNO. I'm not sure if they really count in this discussion since they don't own their own network. They're really at the mercy of whomever they lease their capacity from.

I feel like this is kind of like making a case against the DOJ/Microsoft lawsuit in the late 90s by saying, 'it's ok if Apple exits the computer market, because there are still competitors out there like Amiga and Compaq.'
This is awesome, and I totally agree-

"It’s like everyone fantasizes about… whatever… but once their fantasies start to become reality, they piss their pants and self-sabotage."
Try Activestates's pypm. It is a binary package manager so anything that might fail a pip install where compilation is necessary is already compiled for you.
I do not like this metaphor.
That's an awesome idea! Adding to the top of the to-do list.
FPGA, VHDL and Verilog online courses from Altera
Awesome, love it.

I like how it's based on genre, most other music discovery sites I know of tell you to pick an artist or song, and then they suggest others they consider similar.

But for someone new to say, dubstep (moi), it's a great way to iterate through marking ones you like.

A few thoughts/questions:

1. Where does your list of genres come from? Is that all the genres available from soundcloud? I ask because it's relatively general. For example, check out this list of subgenres of electronic music:

http://www.reddit.com/r/electronicmusic/comments/czhzq/offic...

And even that is out of date and doesn't include things like complextro (http://www.reddit.com/r/complextro).

2. Can you make it so that when you click the name of the currently playing song, it takes you to its SoundCloud homepage instead of the pure SC flash player playing that song? Would be nice to favorite it on SC and dl it if possible.

3. had another but forgot, will add it if I remember it...
Screen to tmux: A Humble Quick-start Guide
Is this not just console.fm?
In part: because the U.S. cell ecosystem has severe problems, and eliminating an independent competitor (particularly on GSM) sets us back rather than moving us towards an affordable, sane wireless economy.
Hacking Google Analytics
Interesting that the author asks the question about how many were sold, and then mentions a few hundred. We already know that at least 5 digit values of TouchPads were sold before the great unraveling of HP, and now that number is no doubt into the hundreds of thousands, judging by demand and ad impressions (as well as the download numbers on my webOS app).
I really want a Linux version of the binary with the updater. There's an open feature request for it, but no activity on it.

Flash is unfortunately still a requirement for a lot of websites. The 32bit binary chrome has flash bundled, so updates are received as quickly as possible (I know, I should run some flash-blocking plugin, but I don't right now). On 64bit Linux (which is what I need most of the time), you have to maintain the flash plugin separately, and run it through nspluginwrapper, which makes it much less stable in my experience.

You used to be able to run the 32 bit debs on 64bit Ubuntu, but that broke a couple versions ago, and I never had time to see if it could be fixed. You also lose the package manager updates when you do this, since apt isn't multi-arch aware.
Reception quality can vary drastically with location. Your experience may not apply to wherever the OP lives.
Ask HN:How to make most of lean startup event tonight?
I'm going to the indianapolis lean startup circle event tonight and wonder if there are any questions I should keep in mind?

Thanks!
Hi thanks for the ideas. We're going to add more genres - I think it will be autocomplete so that the full list will be available. For #2 we're looking at different ways to integrate further with Soundcloud, but obviously we want to keep users on our own site. ;)
This process would be difficult if you had a full-time job already or if there are a relatively high number of potentially qualified candidates, how do you choose who should come work for a week? It may get expensive quickly, certainly for a small startup.
Pre-Lion, the spaces interaction with second screens was outright bad. It was wrong, it did not work well, it simply wasn't even considered in the design.

Now, each set of spaces is segregated by monitor, instead of every set being paired. If you're actually trying to manage lots of simultaneous tasks on multiple monitors, this state of affairs is radically better (and is the default for many Linux window managers, which have long ago addressed and solved multi-monitor problems because their user constituency is full of people in that space). In this regard, Lion is much better than Snow Leopard.
Direct link to some presentations

Basics of programable logic
http://www.altera.com/customertraining/webex/PLDBasics/playe...

VHDL Basics
http://www.altera.com/customertraining/webex/VHDL/player.htm...

Verilog Basics
http://www.altera.com/customertraining/webex/Verilog/player....
The World's Most Tech-Savvy Boutique Hotels - TNW Insider
Here in Denver they're pretty good. There is a bad spot in Downtown (that I used to live in), but other than that one block... it was great. I was about to switch back (I had moved to Verizon for other reasons) until they announced the merger.
That, and if they do get the iPhone in Oct as rumored, I will switch from AT&T.
The difference is that frequentist practice would be to stop at the 95% confidence interval and leave it there, whereas a Bayesian would use that observation to update their probability estimate of the theory being true.

"If the Higgs were at 140 GeV, it would have 5% probability of producing the results we measured experimentally" is the same as
P(Observation | Higgs at 140Gev) = .05

So we can say that

P(Higgs|Observation) = P(Observation|Higgs) * P(Higgs)
-------------------------------
P(Observation)

So given that getting your new belief about the probability of a Higgs Boson at some energy is going to be updated based on your observation, you can see that it ends up being scaled by that exact confidence result. That's sort of an oversimplification, since really you end up calculating the P(O) scaling factor based on P(O|H) among other things, but I hope you can see how they're closely related in practice.
Ask Lean Startup guru Eric Ries how to scale your startup
I wasn't aware that you can open pull requests from within the same project (i.e. not from a fork). The idea of using this for quick code reviews before merging code into the production branch is really interesting to me...
Private School Loan
It does that every OS upgrade. I think the reasoning is that that particular developer toolchain was tied to that OS. Now that you're using a new OS, you shouldn't use the old toolchain. This particularly mattered in the 10.5 to 10.6 upgrade, because they extended gcc to support "blocks," which were tied into the Grand Central Dispatch implementation in the kernel.

It would be nice if they automatically detected, "Oh, you have XCode installed, so you would probably like the new version, too."
Right, the best way to answer the question "if a candidate can perform a job" is to make the candidate perform the job.

Another thing is that companies like Google or Facebook can't seem to afford this, they prefer false negatives, bad for them.
If you do decide to try and get it compiling then I would really appreciate it if you could let me know how you get on!

My email is in my profile.
...and I use TakeCommand/LE.

For me so far the best (for working in teh cygwin bash (used Terminator before, and Putty, and Console2...)).
Does anyone else remember QWK mail packets?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_%28file_format%29

I wonder if someone could take the idea of QWK and build it into modern web forums / email systems.