skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Science says X, and creationists sat 2+2=5, they also say that X is wrong, even if it is, 2+2 is not 5, even if big brother says it is, its not! We have nothing to prove or disprove, there is no creationist theory, 2+2=5 is not a theory! And if god exists(we can't be sure) isn't it possible that he created the universe, so that life can spontaneously emerge and evolve? Im not religious at all, but evolution doesn't disprove god(nothing does, and nothing proves it either), it just disproofs creationism. And here is a good question: Who created god?
We used 99designs.com for our logo (www.dojolearning.com) as well as the new logo and product box for www.sitellite.org with great results. Our design was done by a separate designer though (he did 3 different styles that we offer in a handful of colours so customers can choose).

The key was to provide good and prompt feedback, which resulted in improvements to entries. Communicate and be appreciative of their effort and it seems to go a long way (doesn't it always though? :).

We also looked at designs from other contests and sent messages with "hey I like your designs!" to designers who were really good, and that seemed to help get a few top-notch designers onto our contests too.

I've since recommended this approach to several other companies I work with, and they've been very happy with using 99designs as well now.
Face(book)lifts All Around  And A Bit of Botox for AOL Too
Spec work is evil:
http://andrewhyde.net/spec-work-is-evil-why-i-hate-crowdspri...
That's nice, but how easy is it to understand those 2 pages of brilliance later and how brittle are they?

Remember - the author is the smartest person who will ever see a given piece of code. The reader, even if it's the same person, will be dumber.

Programming isn't literature or poetry. No one ever had to add a mail reader to"Ode to a Grecian Urn".
A list with 7 different ways to do unit testing that doesn't include "N. Adding features to it" is probably not a good list for a startup.
Is Apple’s Genius Good or Evil?
I think we all experiment with a password management app too, don't we?
5 Reasons to Move Your Startup Out of Silicon Valley
TechCrunch 50: VideoSurf “A Website that Doesn’t Suck” According to Robert Scoble
Marissa Mayer Clarifies: Search Is Only 10% Done, Not 90%
http://www.consumer.att.com/ccrf/

My favorite bogus "fee" is AT&T's "Cost recovery fee". In their explanation, they explicity state that :

This fee is not a tax or charge required by the government.

"Cost recovery" used to be known as the "cost of doing business" and was included in the monthly price.

This is just a deceptive way to add a few extra dollars without raising the nominal price.
The name is a miture between iteration, iter (latin for way), and trend.

Like fancy words, do you? My suggestion would be to drop the fancy stuff and just make it easy for me to explain to my grandmother. I'm a smart guy but, like most people, I've never heard of the word "miture" nor did I take Latin in school. Just use words normal people use - "It's a mix of the words iteration and trend - iterend."
OpenWebPodcast 4: Microsoft on ECMAScript, IE 8
This guy is way too critical of himself.
omg, i love this. the little kid in the blue hat is hilarious. i wonder if IDEO has outtakes too.
This is also very cool: http://www.spore.com/comm/prototypes As far as I know Spore is the first game to publish this kind of previous work, and not just the source code (some games published design docs, and a lot of games published postmortems too, but entire working prototypes? I've never seen that).
Sounds like Apple wants a Pandora clone.
I saw the demo live and it looked great with a stylus... so-so with touch and worse on a phone. Still has work to do.
They calculated the compound annual growth rate

CAGR = ((last number/firs tnumber)^(1/number of years))-1

The assumption is that the first year is 1.7 billion, last year is 3.6 billion and the number of years are 6, as they appear to assume that "by 2012" means 2012 is not included as a year in the calculation, giving a 7 year span. But they also excluded 2005 to give a 6 year span.

so the calculation is ((3.6 / 1.7) ^ (1/6)) -1 = 13.2%.

Still, they are off by 0.2% if you keep to 2 significant digits in the calculations and not use selective rounding. And they did fudge the span of years, making (intentional or not) the growth look better.
"... The No-Spec people will say it takes paid opportunities away from designers ..."

Hey catone, have you added any form of ranking or leader board tied for designers tied to feedback from visitors or clients? One way to counter criticisms would be a ranking or grading system that allows good work to be recognised.
I think it's a lot easier to understand what some code does if you don't have to read a lot of language imposed cruft that surrounds the actual 'meat' of the algorithm.

Erlang really is easier than Java -- both to read and to write. I think people too often confuse "different" with "difficult".
This says so much about why the world of enterprise java is a complete pile of shit that I just don't know where to start...
Hopefully they get bought soon so you can write your tell all book. :p

..kidding...about the later - not the former.
:P or rather,

curl --header "Content-Type: text/xml" --data "<?xml version='1.0'?><LocationRQ xmlns='http://skyhookwireless.com/wps/2005' version='2.6' street-address-lookup='full'><authentication version='2.0'><simple><username>beta</username><realm>js.loki.com</realm></simple></authentication><access-point><mac>$(arp -a | awk '/[0-9a-f]:/ { gsub(/^0:|:0:/, "00:", $4); gsub(/:/, "", $4); print $4; exit; }')</mac><signal-strength>-50</signal-strength></access-point></LocationRQ>" https://api.skyhookwireless.com/wps2/location
Mega Mind? Seriously?

If they want to fully "diggify" the title it should read:

"8 Incredible Startup Secrets from the Mega Mind of Marketing God Seth Godin"

The worst part is: the article had some decent points - the title just takes a lot away.
History of IMG and EMBED Tags
The design business is changing and that's just a fact. Some will be better off, some worse. Fifteen years ago we used to buy stock photography CDs for $3-4K each. It was either that or pay a photographer to shoot each image on spec.

The internet changed the rules on that business and now I pay $10-$20 an image and an infinitely larger range to choose from. But if you were a photographer making a tidy living in 1993, you may not like that scenario.

Some graphic designers are in the same boat now.
If a black hole were created on earth, the earth would not collapse into it, rather, the earth would be pulled towards it, and because the entire matter of the earth could not be absorbed that quick, the earth would swing away from it, then go into orbit around it. A black hole is not that dangerous. It's about as dangerous as a mini earth.

Anyways, where would all the matter come from to make it have so much force?

That site is just spreading FUD.
I've learned a great deal from this Socratic exchange of ideas, unalone. I've learned that I am stupid, snipy, arrogant, and that I piss you off. I'm factless. I spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I don't think logically. I'm ridiculous. And I'm an irritating, unnecessary bitch. Your artful ad hominem has shown me how wrong I was to think that our conversation was not about me but about browsers. Thank you for presenting such a dignified example of how one should argue, and thank you for not letting the topic of this thread get in the way of your helping me better understand my many personal faults.
Heh, unless you believe these guys:

http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Build_Less.php

:P
MediaTemple now offering Django GridContainers
Mpowerplayer Scores $2.5M Series A Round : East Coast Blogging
Blackberry Curve 8310 Red Unlocked
Blackberry Curve 8310 Red is available with GSM 850/900/1800/1900 support let you access different credible features without any boundaries.E-mails,Blackberry maps , and Integrated GPS are the basic feature of blackberry.

Deal Price: - $499.99
LG KM500 BLACK Unlocked
A while ago, LG Electronics has started to launch multimedia handsets especially designed for music lovers on the mobile phone market. The fact didn’t go unnoticed by more experienced mobile phones manufacturers (Nokia, Sony Ericsson), which are delivering the best music phones. Even if LG knows that the leader position on this market is almost impossible to attain,

Deal Price: - $169.99
The photoelectric effect was an important step along the way to quantum mechanics, without which there'd be no transistor, and probably no personal computer, or Hacker News.
epoll() is for IO-bound situations. You write your program using an event model, where the events are IO related (you select events based upon file descriptors being ready for reading and/or writing) which (in my opinion) make for easy programming of network based daemons ( http://boston.conman.org/2007/03/08.1 ).

The general method appears to be, write the program using an event model, then create a thread per CPU, which each thread waiting on epoll() (timeouts optional).
6) You won't get caught in the bubble - 95% of Internet users have never heard of Google docs, even fewer have tried it.
Because the web is not print.
You have to know how to navigate away from the many rocky shores littered with shit. I was embarassed to call myself a Java developer after going to J1 this year, so sad.

That being said, there are some amazing libraries out there.

Google Guice, Google Collections Framework, struts2, BDB JE to name a few. They help me ship.

Lots of great software if you poke around.
As I commented on that post, Atlanta is now a city to consider. A flurry of tech events and startup community activities have grown in the last year. For the past 2-3 weeks I've attended 3 or so tech events each week. Things like "Open Coffee", Tweetups, Web Entrepreneurs meetings, Ruby Users Group, Startup Dinner..
We don't have a complete archive of sites in our index yet (we only want to concentrate on the top blogs). Also, by default you are only searching the last 24 hours.
Javascript will replace Erlang in the 2010 as the standard for Enterprise Applications.
Erm.. I see tons of comments about the 'maths trick' behind the tech.. but have any of you tried out the app cos it's really amazing! A great idea, great execution. If this gets the news coverage it deserves then this could be huge I think.
We also used it for one of our upcoming sites and were quite pleased. I spent an incredible amount of time providing feedback to the nearly 40 designers who took a shot (over 136 revisions). Still, it totally paid off and we came away with 4-5 we would have been happy to use. Just keep in mind that you get even better results if you work with your designers to nudge them in different directions of your preference.

We also did a trick of offering to pay for two logos. This made the grand prize lower (because of our budget), but it created some great competition.
Ah, yeah, that's what I was talking about. I didn't realize there was a suit that changed their policy. I talked to them fairly recently, and their reps denied the possibility of opting out.
Good article. Though I actually don't like their answer to objection #2 -

2. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest.

My response would be that this is a mischaracterization of the theory of evolution. My knowledge is grade-school level, unfortunately, but I always thought that the theory of evolution was that random mutation, filtered by natural selection, let to speciation.

That is a refutable hypothesis - ie., something that can be supported or refuted by the evidence. To me, the circular thing seems true, but irrelevant.
Chronology of the AA debacle
Need a Remote File System for my desktop application. Forum experiences and suggestions. 
Hi All,<p><pre><code> I am working on an desktop application idea for which I need a remote file system. Each user should be able to mount it as a shared drive on windows and similarly on unix. Ideally I want to mount when my application is run (developed using Eclipse RCP ) and unmount it when closed.
</code></pre>
I have searched on internet for some solutions but frankly speaking I don't know what am I supposed to search. I found several products like samba, webdav, jcifs, amazon s3. Obviously I would need quotas , sharing etc to some extent.<p>If possible I don't want to build anything from scratch. I would like to use something off the shelf? May be like amazon s3 or Nivanix. I know that amazon/nirwanix does not provide ability to mount as shared drives.<p>I seem to find some kind of webdav to s3 adapter etc.<p>My question to the forum is how do a typical remote filesystem is implemented? What technologies are used? What are your experiences in this regard.
Sounds like Pandora lost an exit.
Same here. I agree fully with using version control, and that reading other code is educational (although being bit hard by having to maintain unforgivably sloppy code you wrote a long time ago will teach you some of the same things, i.e., being neat will make things much easier to fix later), but advice that essentially says, "1. Test, 2. Test, 3. Test, 4. Test, ..." isn't advice, it's a sign that there's something suspicious going on.

I think it's telling that the most noise is made about TDD in the Ruby (and to a lesser extent, Python* ) world, but that it hasn't gotten as strong a foothold in many other languages. TDD seems to me to be a way to take advantage of dynamically-typed languages' strengths while compensating for against their weaknesses, but then it only makes sense with certain kinds of languages / styles of programming, and its advocates seldom seem to address this. (Regression tests are more generally useful, for example.)

Also, contrasting TDD against testing styles from other language-cultures may be enlightening. For example, look at QuickCheck in Haskell: Many tests that could fall under TDD are already covered by the type system in Haskell and ML, so instead it focuses on automatically finding edge cases for you and verifying that invariants hold.

* Also, many testing practices, e.g. TDD, automated unit testing, etc., originated with Smalltalk, another dynamically-typed language.
Agreed.

In my experience, it takes at least a couple of years to introduce a new technology to a large corporate (i.e. the ones that actually run enterprise apps).

Many large corporates will have multi-year enterprise licenses for things like IBM WebSphere. It might be years before they even consider a technology shift, let alone that shift becoming dominant.

The reasons are many and varied - resistance to change, need to prove the technology, integrating the technology with existing systems, changes required to methodology and process, instrumenting the new technology, vendor support, cost, skills availability, access to quality training, access to recognised certifications, tooling (dev/test/deploy), infrastructure, regulatory compliance... The list goes on and on.

Even when you take all of these... Nobody ever actually decommissions anything.

Cultural and methodology changes are massive in the enterprise space.
Sorry about that.

Does sound a little diggified. Didn't realize that when I was writing it. Your variation would have likely done better on digg though. :)
The resources spent moving a company from CA to Boston would probably dwarf the savings. Perhaps he meant "5 Reasons To Start Your Startup Outside Of The Valley".

Having lived in SF and moved away, I find it near painful to go back. People really do get caught up in the tech bubble there and have trouble connecting with the rest of the world.
I liked 'The Ten-Day MBA'. It is a pretty quick read, and covers all this stuff.
Photoshop's not 'for' print, either. I think you'll be hard pressed to find a better program to use for doing graphic design, especially for things that are to remain digital.
Bug farms
Ok I am admittedly one of the many libertarians that use NewsYC. I think ardit33 is being a little bit unfair. Not all libertarians necessarily want 8 year old crack dealers and the right to individually own nuclear weapons. There is something in between.

There was a similar problem back in the early-mid 1990s with internet and broadband. The market of the time often charged per minute or per data transfered. Especially when stepping up to ISDN or a T1. Everyone said this was crazy and a total rip off. And that without government intervention the phone companies would just continue to rip everyone off forever. Then cable came along and provided some serious competition and now everything is changed. (Though if uptime is THAT important customers can still pay per bandwidth on a T1...)

Internet worked itself out with the same high entry costs and regulation. Wireless will also work itself out.

Government intervention may speed up the process, in this case, but that is (as others have pointed out) only because there is such regulation and high entry costs.

I'm all for the senate putting some pressure on the industry. They should bring the issue to the public. But I don't know if this necessarily requires additional regulation.

As for the phone companies screwing the customers - they will get what's coming. Just wait for there to be another option. Everyone will flood to this alternative and the phone companies will immediately adjust their business model and pricing to compete. And I imagine most people will be so bitter they'll abandon the telcos over issues such as this.
If you’re interested in intellectual property law, especially in the US, I found this (free) MIT lecture series particularly useful:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...
The focus is on Copyright, but I found it a really great backgrounder on the US legal system and Intellectual Property in general.
Read again what he wrote. He can do it himself, he was just complaining that apple charges so much for such a simple task.
"... All tech startups need just a few ingredients to germinate: sophisticated money; first-rate technology universities; and a few template successes ..."

True.

At a local perlmongers meet some years ago Brent Chapman of Majordomo fame http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majordomo_(software) "who wrote this as his first Perl hack", talked about how there is nothing stopping you creating a Startup anywhere but in SV things just happen a lot faster due to the concentration of knowledge, facilities and people.

Another thing he commented on. Debugging some obscure bit of code and talking about it while eating out there's a greater chance the staff are aware of a potential solution. New York has out of work actors working in Coffee shops. SV has developers. So areas that are outside major Startup clusters this could effect your success.
Because 10% is actually 90%, but there is only a 50% chance of that.

... Either way, the position in this article seems to make a lot more sense.
Once Google feels comfortable enough with Docs that they put a little link to it on Google.com below the search box (like they did with Chrome for example), what do you think that percentage will be after a few months?
"rock star programmers"? Really? It takes rock star programmers 4-5 months to do a digg style q&a site?
I've heard people say: you can't complain about some bad thing x - you do bad thing y!

I tell people I don't have to be perfect in order to make things better.

Or the similar: what's the point in fixing X if Y is so bad. Same thing - you can make things better even if you can't make things perfect.

It's like that for him. He can't do anything about what google does, so he does what he can do. He doesn't have to be perfect and avoid them completely - he did what he reasonably could.

Politicians have this disease: they both agree that X needs fixing, but disagree on Y. So neither side will pass a bill with just X, because they want the bill to also have Y in it - their version of Y, which they can't agree on.

So they do nothing.

It's a disease. You can fix one thing without fixing everything. You do not have to be perfect in order to criticize someone! You can even do the thing you are criticizing and still criticize them (as long as you are aware, and mention, that you do it too).
It has some decent points, but anyway, I still not "get" Seth Godin..really, I saw a lot of his blog articles being heavily linked, but I never ever saw any really good insight from him. Please enlighten me what so special about that guy.
>> 2.You can recruit better outside the fishbowl.

I agree with this from experience!
Is spectrum really finite? Quite a few smart people don't think so...
See: http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/OpenSpectrumFAQ.html

(btw, I am also a libertarian :-)
Good point.

A possible argument against Photshop (and similar tools) is that they lead you to create a look that you will never ever get quite correct in a Web page. Assorted fonts, kerning, leading, and so on may not be reproducible in CSS.

On the other hand, if you are mindful of these things, it's a big help to have multiple layers and such that you can easily move, swap around, etc.
SF yet to locate Terry Childs' terminal server -- will spend $1 million cleaing up mess
> How might the discoveries of the LHC experiment be applied?

Why is this even a question?

The results of the LHC experiments will (hopefully) give us answers about assumptions in the Standard Model of physics and a load of theoretical speculations besides.

The results will allow us to interpret measurements already taken in a new light and will alter the means by which we measure (and/or interpret) things in the future.

The LHC experiment will not end the world, nor will it suddenly give us all flying jet cars.

It will (again, hopefully) advance our knowledge of the universe we live in.

Commercial interests are not a factor. Why do people keep moaning about the price tag and speculating on the industrial aspects when they're not busy predicting the end of the world?
that wasn't really my point.

What I meant was that the valley tends to discard something as being yesterdays news that hasn't even hit the opinion leaders yet. Google docs is an example of this.
In case anyone else is wondering what transistors have to do with quantum mechanics

http://madsci.org/posts/archives/mar2000/952639215.Ph.r.html
Taiwanese businessmen plan to bring the most rural part of China into the 21st century
How does a person think that builds weapons for a living?
I love Python, but ProLog kick's its ass here:

http://blog.milesbarr.com/2007/01/prolog-sudoku-solver/
Not really my bag, but I admit to liking Brandy because sometimes I just like old pop, what can I say? I am generally a fan of progressive rock, industrial and grunge more than anything, though. Oh and good ol' rock (60s and 70s of course).

That being said: Brandy, you're a fine girl, what a gooood wife you would be, but my life, my lover, my lady is the SEA doo doodoo dodododooodooo!
I vote for religion vs atheism topics not to be discussed here in HN.
Try S3-FUSE or SSHFS.
That was comedy gold.
The subtitle from the article probably does the subject more justice, but wouldn't fit in the 90 character limit:

Two idealistic Taiwanese businessmen happened into the most rural part of China and thought: Let's bring it from the 15th century to the 21st.
Trust a company you know with your data != trusting strangers. For example if I suspect Google is mishandling my email I can take them to court. What do I do when I don't even know the people that have my data?
Graded guide to Demo Fall 2008 business apps
I'll give it a try. Due to the ipod, I'm thinking Apple was big enough to dictate its own terms. Some of that applies to amazon besides they get to sell DRM free stuff because the labels hate apple a lot more.

Working as intended. The industry is one big middleman. Does anyone think they'll willingly let in another middleman?
Wow. I don't think it was till I saw this that I realized how full of it Scoble is.
Bluesman B.B. King, the would-be CS student
Chrome likely is pulling others from IE because it can often be installed with non-admin privileges.