skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> My guess is that the “back-end” supply chain / software / inventory management problems are just not as sexy as the “front-end” consumer-facing problems, or maybe the consumer-facing problems are just more intuitive.

Absolutely! I wrote MRP systems for a pharma manufacturing in Florida and the kind of stuff I had to do on a daily basis far surpassed the complexity of your breathtakingly-beautiful but typical project-management webapp or customized T-shirt webstore. Let me be clear, complexity has absolutely nothing to do with the merit of one product vs. another. KhanAcademy code could be simple as 2nd grade math but nothing I ever write will ever be as beneficial to the world. However, complexity is expensive, takes time and dedication, and rarely pays off in the short-term.

There is a reason most supply chain software installations run in the millions to tens of millions. Here's an example of something I wrote while ago: A drag & drop scheduler in JS, kinda like Google Calendar that lets you schedule production jobs on different equipment, across different labor teams. When you change a single job on the schedule, it auto-calculates the entire requirement for the entire company. Moving one production job up (say shampoo for customer A) could end up in the company losing $500k because one of the ingredients that went into shampoo for A also goes into conditioner for customer B. This particular item has a lead time of 3m from China. And since order for B is significantly larger in amount, every single day of delay is money actually lost because you bought all the other raw materials for B on credit from the bank and now have to pay interest on it, while it just sits in the warehouse waiting for the raw material to be flown in from China.

Of course, this is something you want to avoid in the planning stage itself. And that's what the software does and warns the user within seconds of making any changes. One tiny bug in the code, say it doesn't correctly factor in the internal lead time from QC (this particular chemical needs to be sampled for microbiological contamination) and you just delay the project by a week. Putting up a pretty website is hard work but it is nothing compared to hiring 20 people to spend 3 months mapping out the multi-stage routings for 500 different SKUs. No tech-VC wants to invest in businesses that require a tremendous amount of operational labor. That's what banks are for.
Also, look at GroundWire.org. They work with mostly environmental organizations. They have a non-profit (Grants + Private Funders + lower cost Services revenue model. As a US Non-profit, they file an IRS Form 990 and publish a detailed annual report.
Yes, it sucks, but I'd keep doing it yourself for a few reasons for both refunds or even folks who want to cancel your service after some time (assuming its subscription-based):

1. It'll offer you an opportunity to get feedback which can help make your product better.

2. It can turn a hater into a net promoter if you do it right.

3. Direct outreach from the founder of a company makes your firm more human (not sure what industry you're in but in ours, people really appreciate it). It may not turn the "gamers" into buyers, but if you believe most people are good, they may be less inclined to game if you're not just some "evil business"

And although I also sometimes remember rejection more than successes, I find these requests motivate me.

Note: I've got no sense of volume you're dealing with so I'll caveat the above with that if it's becoming a time-suck.
Funny you should post about this... we actually started something similar in Singapore. Just a FB events page and posterous site for now. First project happening this weekend in fact: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=277529252262119; http://sdcrux.posterous.com/
That wasn't "intuitive" to me either. And what about the simpler case of multiple values of a single index, for example Chicken and Cashews. Any good retrieval system should be able to intersect the lists from the indexes. The existence of these compound indexes leads me to believe there is some limitation.
For me facebook has always been boring, all my friends are there, thats the only reason I use it, to keep in touch. Not because I am excited at looking at the latest picture of their baby eating some pudding.
Innovation is the Enemy of the Incumbent
Philadelphia Old City Restaurants
Google Plus is definitely going down
Using soda bottles as light bulbs replacement in Philippines
Do you have a 'no questions asked' refund policy? Do you still ask questions as of to why?

We do have such a policy, but we do ask 'why?' in a manner that aims to clarify and improve our service. A subset of the users are nice enough to explain and sometimes addressing that root cause cuts refund rates by about 25%.

Btw, would you mind sharing the points in your refund response email template? I would assume the effectiveness would depend on the nature of product, but it'll still be educational me thinks.
WOW. you created my idea I posted a few days ago here! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2997247
Many lessons learned from this interview. My biggest takeaway: “I appreciate more today that Apple was never just a business to Steve. Apple is Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs is Apple.”

I think all founders need to strive towards this. If the company is an extension of the founders, you can bet that the need to be great will be upheld at the top level and should trickle down to all of its stakeholders.
Can you break down the process in your head when you "think real hard"?
Firefox now scores 100 on Acid3 about 16 months ago.
> 1. Google instant. This is such shit I can hardly believe it. Yeah, I can turn it off, but the average person is going to be charmed by the gimmick of it without realizing how awful it is. On unfamiliar computers, I go to bing automatically.

The average person doesn't need exceptional people like you to tell them what's good for him.
What century?
Answer to the first quiz is clearly wrong; scanning an index - any index - is faster than scanning all 5k pages.
In a sense they were ahead of the game: they took a principled stance not to partially implement standards they considered unnecessary, just to score extra points on Acid3.

The change to the test is (to some degree) an acknowledgement that they were right on this.
Generated Pixel Art: Simple and Suprising
If you go to http://www.analyticsrock.com/ you get some bumper page, and pinging it resolves to a completely different IP, we resolves to this page: webredir.vip.gandi.net. I guess there is some DNS misconfiguration.

The site looks really promising though! Definitely get a twitter link up there or something.
The question isn’t whether Metro will be good: it probably will be. And that’s a huge accomplishment for Microsoft that they should be commended for.

But how will their customers react?

The way Metro is implemented vaguely reminds me of Windows Media Center PCs (simple front-end interface). When I read this question by Marco, I couldn't help but think of my experience with MC which was generally a move to disable/not use it entirely. Not to say that this will happen with everyone, but I'm curious to see how it is adopted and whether or not users will be evangelists or expect something more/better. Great article.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results. If only more people had consciously avoided deals that looked too good to be true, Bernie Madoff never would have happened.
I'm impressed that Madoff was smart enough to mimic Benford distribution in his monthly returns (that's what the article led me to infer).

I actually made an r/math post about Benford's Law that I thought was pretty interesting, although it didn't get much attention or many comments (admittedly bad signs). Any peer review (or su-peer-ior review) is appreciated.

Here's a snippet:
"...generation of the geometric layout for Benford first digits is a similar process to creating a Sierpinski Triangle by drawing a triangle, and randomly plotting midpoint dots between vertices and sides recursively. In the Benford case the plotted dots are instead individual numbers, which share a geometric connection (e.g. two galaxies colliding will on average be a doubling, so galaxy size should possess Benford distribution)."

http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/gkj2i/benfords_law_exp...
Touchable 3D Character Projected Into a Real Environment
It doesn't work so well in a tiling WM: http://i.imgur.com/PXVzO.png.
Wow that is pretty cool. I've been using 960 Grid and Blueprint, but that one looks more "complete".
Who said anything about H1Bs? The only thing you and the OP seem capable of doing is whining about age, when that has nothing to do with anything, and making asinine assumptions about the way other people hire.

We're not hiring H1Bs. We're not discriminating based on age. We're hiring talented, knowledgable people in a knowledge-based economy.

You don't want to educate yourself, upgrade your skills in your own time, keep your own knowledge of the industry current? That's perfectly fine. You want a job that lets you re-use the same knowledge for 30 plus years with no need for effort on your own time to keep you relevant to a changing marketplace? That's fine too. Go stamp out license plates or resurface roadways.

But don't whine about how this industry is so mean to you because of your age. The only thing that's being discriminated against here is your unwillingness to put in the effort to keep up with the changing needs of the people looking to pay money for the right knowledge.
Account management had everything to do with security & privilege containment.

People got tired of every exe running in ring-zero and wreaking havoc. To authorize actions they needed authentication, so .. accounts.

Multi-user operation and remote access were just fringe benefactors of the security. The system itself needed delegation of roles to operate safely. The fact that networking was becoming so widespread forced them to go for a full account management, instead of BeOS style dual-user mode.
Ropa Ejecutiva para Mujer
I've been using KO for about a year now, and it's been awesome. Version 1.3 is in beta now and it's even better. My favorite part is how I can create custom bindings to work with almost any set of UI widgets I throw at it.

If you know MVVVM, KO just feels natural.
Feedback on our Launchrock Beta Invite
We've been eyeing Launchrock for a while now and we finally think we're in the right place to take the plunge.

I'd love for feedback on our setup. Is the concept clear/ pique your interest? Does the email give away enough? Also most of all, is it not too spammy?

The site is here:

http://www.flamecourt.com

We're planning on beginning to share it on Monday, so any feedback before then would be very helpful. Thanks!
So it's based off the NYTimes article and the associated paper. I have been trying to look for what exactly the terminology means but was not successful. As mentioned in the article, it's meant to be a counter to the traditional GPA as a measure of success
Detailed account of graphics techniques from 8-bit computer games
Got it. Here is what I'd do.

1) Direct requestd for refund to a specific form on a page.

2) Have a virtual assistant receive such emails.

3) Instruct such assistant to issue legitimate requests for refund under whatever process you currently follow.

4) Ask her to forward bona-fide feedback to you. So that you can use it to improve your product.

5) At the end of each week or month, ask for stats.

This should prevent you from dealing with the issue first-hand, while still figuring out any real issue.

BTW, are you an Italian developer living in Canada, too?
Not really a well thought out article. Here's why -

1) Why should anyone care about solving the problems that the writer of this article wants to see solved?

2) She fixates on the 3-8% that affiliate sites make without considering a few things:

a) Sites make that regardless of where the user actually buys. So if someone comes to your site and decides to buy a jacket you make money whether they buy it from Retailer A or Retailer B.

b) It's usually 10% for fashion sites and once you are driving larger volume you can cut deals for 15%.

c) If you become the decision engine (something Google and Bing are trying to do with their Flight Search and other initiatives in various verticals), then you can easily take over the entire business.

If people are coming to you and you help them decide what to buy - then you can start selling them that stuff.

3) The costs and barrier to entry is much lower if you are trying to fix the discoverability problem.

4) The real problem, and the most important thing, is the role of fashion. What fashion really does. That can be tackled completely in the online world through a website.

5) Fashion is a market that is going to make a lot of startups a lot of money.

Things that signal status (such as special electronic brands and designer bags and Grey Goose vodka) are never going to go out of style.

Instead of listening to this writer's advice, any company going into fashion should look at how backward thinking most people in the industry are, how little they understand technology, and how they are unwilling to admit the core purpose of fashion.

The easiest entry is discoverability and influence and that's also the most powerful element of the fashion ecosystem.

If you become the discovery engine and the decision engine then it's game over for everyone else.

All those VCs funding fashion startups are not idiots.
For criticizing her article for not being "well thought-out", you sure didn't write a well thought-out reply. I don't see how your reply actually disproves anything she said; you've basically just said, "no, she's wrong... because she is wrong."
Why Startups Shouldn’t Hire People With Graduate Degrees
Show HN: Pulse — A simple pulsating indicator.
Feel free to use it in your application. You can make it imageless but I used an image just because you can easily swap it out and its a little less code.
You don't even need to look at the entire index. See the point where chicken jumps from 15, to 582? We know we can then skip to at least 582 in all the other indexes we're looking at. (Which is doable as the indexes are going to be stored as some sort of tree we can retrieve a particular range out of) This is pretty much a merge join http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sort-merge_join

Incidentally you can make indexes on Ingredient->Page/Cuisine->Page rather than maintaining Page indexes for specific ingredients/cuisines. So with just two indexes you can filter out any Cuisine/Ingredient combo (You can even do multiple ingredients! As it's an intersection though, multiple cuisines wouldn't be useful as few dishes are likely to fall under multiple cuisines, you could still do it though.)
Myself, I'm still slowly learning. Coding came out of necessity. I've been working for different technical support jobs for pretty much my whole adult life, and started off trying to automate a couple of things around the office, and then for clients (a PHP script that generated a regex which configured a client's email account in Outlook Express, for example).

I created a couple of useful things which gradually became more complex - a little voicemail queue (where we'd enter client messages and then call them from the top, in a cycle), then generated a map of our client's locations using google maps, etc.

Nowadays I'm fairly fluent in JavaScript, VBScript (don't laugh!), and I'm gradually learning Python simply because it's something that I need to learn for a project. I'm not a professional coder by any definition, I "get by" with a little help from my friend (who IS a hacker).

So my advice would probably just be "go your own speed, on your own highway". It really depends on your needs.
how about adding a tag with an address in the opposite direction to your house.. Of a non existent property or abandoned place
Here's a video from a different angle that really shows how fast it happened.

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/US/09/17/nevada.plane.crash/
the page goes completely white and then it "hangs", if I close the tab it takes ~10 seconds to respond, if I wait ~60 seconds the page finally loads. At first I assumed it was processing on the fly (the site I was loading the analytics for is ~120m page views in the past 30 days) but I checked the source and it's not doing anything fancy clientside so I have no idea what it could be.
Any more successful stories to share from the floor?
> Ultimately, people dislike ORMs for the same reason they dislike things like CoffeeScript

This is not a good comparison. With ORM, you started with Python/Java/C#/etc + SQL, and ended with Python/Java/C#/etc + SQL (a lot less). There is nothing new added.

With CoffeeScript, you started with JavaScript, and ended with JavaScript + a perlish language.
ClassConnect (Imagine K12 s11) is rethinking the LMS
I really want to let this run long enough to reach equilibrium, but my laptop is getting too hot.
Legislation proposed to ensure that boards of directors don't suck
> Unfortunately, the hackers, the workers - ones that actually have the power to demand changes - are willingly allowing themselves to be exploited by those that lie, and not demanding any moral judgements.

(Emphasis added)

I think this point of yours is frankly quite wrong. The productive part of society is not the part of society with political power. Gaining political power is in and of itself a non-productive activity, and accomplishing it takes so much time that none is left over for productive activities. So the non-productive part of society naturally has power over the productive part of society, just as teenagers who focus on being popular end up being more popular than teenagers who focus on programming computers and learning stuff.
It's definitely interesting - the idea is not solid and clear, but I'm not sure that it has to be in this case. The ambiguity might be what makes people sign up!
翁帆-杨振宁Franklin Yang的娇妻入清华(组图)
诺贝尔Nobel物理学奖获得者杨振宁的娇妻入清华，清华确认翁帆入读该校建筑系 拒答是否杨振宁特殊安排。。。
So, I'm going to toot my own horn here, because this article is extremely well timed.

(Note: her site is down now, thanks HN! :P)

This line of reasoning is exactly why we decided at Everlane to start manufacturing our own apparel. You just don't capture enough of the value if you exist as a pure discovery layer unless you (somehow) get everyone and their uncle visiting you, looking to purchase, i.e., Google.

The internet does afford you the opportunity to redefine how people shop, but sorry: you're probably going to have to really sell things.

If that sounds rad, come join us and send me an email at jesse@everlane.com

Edit: Just noticed the article is about a month old. So, well-timed, but not timely.
LED Tube
I think for most any computer that is at constant high CPU utilization power will cost more than the hardware over its lifetime. Unless you have very cheap power.
Intel officials' emails posted after hack of cybersecurity group
New Tax Rate for Millionaires
Yes, fashion is a huge industry in the US, and you can make a ton of money in the market.

By just being a middleman, you're looking at margins in the 10% region. Enough to build a business, but not a game-changer.

If you target production and supply-chain problems, which are far harder, then you can build a business with margins north of 40%. Not only that, but because you've solved some seriously hard problems, you've driven the cost of competition up for the existing players, while adding yet another entry barrier for other startups.

That's the point of the article -- that today's fashion-focused startups are all going after small game, with nobody shooting for buffalo.
Damn you IE, always being different!

(╯｀□′)╯ ┴—┴
Stick it on Github as three files - image, html, css - so folks can "watch" it. I've found that the watch feature of github helps me remember all these little nifty snippets of functionality so that, one day, when the need comes around, I actually remember that the thing exists, I can find it easily, and I can use it.
What companies is she even talking about?

Because the best fashion-related startups that I am aware of are super revenue and retail focused. I am talking about renttherunway, or this other startup that sells subscriptions to product trials etc.
Look through this book, I graduated with a degree in ECE 5 years ago, and this book blew me away: http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building-Pr...
Printing Parts
I've fixed this long ago. Block all crap from Farmville, Mafia Wars, etc and goodbye spam.
What percentage of users _use_ a discrete graphics card, though? Especially on ultra-light laptops?
Nice little effect. Could work well on realtime force-directed graphs:

http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/force.html
Interesting. Can something like this be made to photograph bacteria in water, outsourcing bacteria image recognition to an outside server?
"In fashion, trust me, that are MANY problems that need to be solved: a highly antiquated supply chain, non-standard, un-linked computer systems, non-standard sizing that varies even within the same line, inefficient pricing methods."

I don't see why internet fashion companies couldn't take a crack at solving / mitigating at least some of these. For example, there are some sites (like zafu.com - no affiliation) that help women find jeans that fit. They can't change the sizes on the jeans, but I'm not holding my breath for the fashion industry to make sizing any easier any time soon.

I also disagree with her claim that discoverability is not a problem. A lot of people are trying to solve it, but I don't consider it solved for myself (or other women I know). I find the choices in women's fashion to be overwhelming (to say the least), and I'm still looking for the more efficient ways to find clothes I like.

I agree with her overall point that the number of trendy affiliate fashion sites is getting tiresome, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't be developed in interesting ways. It may be true that affiliate sites need to sell a ton more in order to compete with "click-and-mortar" fashion companies, but I'd argue that affiliate sites can also be more innovative, flexible, and forward thinking. If you're not shipping or manufacturing, you can iterate more quickly.
Sure they do. Imagine all the doctors and programmers and air traffic controllers (and many others in different industries) going on strike tomorrow.
I'm just plain curious & trying to get my head around it (I've played around with procedural noise textures & the like).

Does the navier-stokes function (or functions like it) operate on a repeating (wrapped around) grid or is there a more obvious method that I'm missing?
True. Most of his (relatively) recent interviews have a very wistful tone to them.
re: kvm - this might be of help:
http://blog.falconindy.com/articles/build-a-virtual-army.htm...
She's talking about sites like Pinterest, Svpply, TheFancy, etc.
The World's Rudest Hand Gestures
Hi,

We started a not-for-profit web development organisation 7 years ago in the UK (Aptivate.org) to serve NGOs, IOs and charities particularly in the international development sector.

We've worked with organisations like the World Health Organisation, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, the UK Department for International Development, Open Society Foundations as well as smaller organisations.

Our proposition is to provide high-quality "commercial grade" services with an understanding of the international development sector, at reasonable prices.

We do all our software development with an open source license wherever possible.

We have a mixed model of skilled staff and volunteers.

...and we're hiring. So if you're a damn fine Django developer and want to work in this sector, feel free to apply: http://www.aptivate.org/job-web-developer

We're always looking for skilled volunteers too.

We're based in Cambridge (UK) and Brighton (well, Hove, actually).

Cheers,

Alan
Solar Panels Facts About Flexible, Lightweight Kits