skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
StatSheet isn't only about stats. There are AP articles & photos, personalization features, discussion forums, etc. Soon users will be able to write articles too.
It is in fact per work unit. See the "How it works" page. It's $2.60 per month per concurrent user, which is the same thing.
There is a big search in the gaming industry for new sources of revenue. Development costs are skyrocketing but income is not. Retail and subscription are the big two, with online advertisements growing in popularity. If harnessing players' compute time enables a gaming service provider to offer a better product at a lower price, this could be a win for the gamer, the game company, and the ultimate computing consumer.
You just described 98% of politicians at the national level. Palin is completely unremarkable. There is clearly a special, visceral reaction to her that has nothing to do with policies.

> dressed up in $150,000 designer clothes

I'm sure Obama used his own money for the make-up artist before the debates and also paid for the backdrops used for his convention speech. Newsflash: the parties spend money on TV appearances.

Note: I do not like Palin or McCain. I only find the reaction to them intriguing.
It was in an episode of .Net Rocks! but I can't remember which one.
Take this with a grain of salt, since I am not an economist. However, I think that Government intervention isn't evil.

For the free market economy to work, a number of assumptions are made in the model. For example, we assume that consumers are well informed, and make judgements on the product's attributes. We also assume that there are no significant externalities, and all costs are actually exposed to the companies.

Labelling the foods with their actual properties, testing them for safety, and other similar government intervention can actually bring things closer to the ideal free market economy where the consumers know what they're buying, and the costs of environmental cleanup are passed on to the companies causing the damage.
Anand retains World Chess Championship Title
Something that took me a number of projects and maintenance type work to realize is to use "helper" functions wherever possible.

For example, a profile link:

<a href="/user/profile/<?=$user->id?>"><?=$user->name?></a>

Write a simple function:

function user_profile_link ($user) {
return '<a href="/user/profile/$user->profile">$user->name</a>';
}

And use it:

<?=user_profile_link($user)?>

I used to think the extra code upfront wasn't worth it, but after dealing with a bunch of 300+ line templates for a while, I can tell you that it definitely is.

Also, you can see a use of string interpolation (a common use case for sprintf), ie "count is: $count"
Some of our ancestors had a meat-and-potatoes type diet and some of us still eat the same. However, a lot of our ancestors worked in the fields and did physical labor (to burn off those calories)
Ruby 1.9.1 Preview Released: Why This Is A Big Deal
Microsoft: Next Windows won't be as annoying
http://www.google.com/search?q=vc+nda
I agree. A VC's relationship with key people in the companies which they fund can really help those companies succeed, thereby making the VC money.
This type of article would show up on msn.com.
That's a fair point. I think it would matter only when the company in question has decided to share common tasks (like a bank account, or even a user database) across all of their projects.

Quick decoupling or forced encapsulation of projects seems to be a consideration that should be built into a company with more than one product.
by clone, i mean it offers the same thing that the iPhone already does. it's practically a genetically identical. i mean if it could only connect to itunes seamlessly...
Why I Support Barack Obama
I hear that from all my friends with BB, we will have that very soon.

All depends on my caffeine intake. =)
#1 - I'm a BYU alum and retired Blackboard-hater, so I'm proud that BYU students are tackling this.

#2 - My first thought was "Blackboard's strengths aren't technical, they're in enterprise sales. These guys are going to have to sell, sell, sell if they want to win." Then I read it and they first did a nationwide selling tour before they began developing. That's a team to bet on!

Other HN threads about Blackboard:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=109984

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=56229

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=247955

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315281
that's exactly what I'm talking about. I've been struggling with an easy way to link like this, as I use profiles. After you see it, you wonder why you never thought of it in the first place.
Photoshopping a nice button takes longer than you think...
At Intel and Asus, We Crowdsource Your PC
Chinese VCs share Silicon Valley's gloom
VentureBeat downturn event: report on the VC panel
I use a combination of Stickies on OSX and sending emails to myself in GMail.
I just started using Stickies, the default Mac sticky note application. It turns out that just having it written down somewhere is enough to prompt me to do something about it.

I would use a physical notebook - moleskines have the best reputation - but since I'm in college going for a computer major, I'm very rarely far from my laptop.
"We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year" -- Pink Floyd
Andreessen: Google's Chrome Browser Actually Matters
If you want to review very clean code you should better look at the Zend Framework. It's very good object orientated PHP 5 Code.
What's wrong with Blackboard? (I wouldn't know, never used it).
Backpack, from 37Signals. www.backpackit.com
The most interesting paragraph to me:

Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it’s hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it’s Sodom and Gomorrah.

That seems to suggest that once peer-pressure starts working for the effort in the general population, there is a corresponding rise in hypocrisy as a sort of peer-pressure-release valve, and that can even undermine the committed core.

This effect might be generalizable to other moral-suasion campaigns. This deserves studies and articles all by itself.
I would argue the latter. Where it's cheap to form a household and have kids, people are conservative. This is true all over the country in culturally disparate regions. There are barely any exceptions.

I'm sure it's complicated by mobility: people move from red to blue and vice versa to find people with matching tendencies. But I doubt that's enough to matter.
National Firewalls A Step On Slippery Slope To Censorship
I use org-mode with Emacs for it's flexibility and because Emacs is always running anyways.
What is a good HN title?
Someone submitted a link (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=347679) to my site and commenters hammered on the title: One-man operation taking on ESPN, CBS Sportsline, Yahoo Sports.

It is a little link-baitish (not a word) but I'm curious what would be a good title if someone wanted to submit my site (http://statsheet.com)?
I appreciate the opportunity, thank you.

Fundamentally we view notes as a stream like a log file or Twitter.

You will have one place to easily and quickly dump everything, then be able to grep out the relevant information, and then late bind the decision on what to do with that information.
How to pitch for a VC or Angel investor?
Hello,

I think many of first-time entrepreneurs face with a similar set of questions which are listed below. Plz add your questions as well if you think they belong to this category.

1. How to approach them? (can they be approachable through mail, or so on)

2. How to pitch?

3. Where to find firms or angels operating in a particular area?

Could you plz take some time to answer the above questions.

-Srinivas
I'm trying to like Google Chrome - I'm using it right now to post this - but it has a very annoying bug. When you Ctrl-tab to a tab with a Flash movie playing, and one of the other tabs is loading a page, it has a tendency to lock up the browser. Sometimes this is just temporary, and the Flash movie stutters a bit and then picks up again. Other times, it's permanent, and I have to kill Chrome. Either way, it's really annoying, because I often get linked to videos and have them playing in another tab while I continue browsing.
This really isn't hacker news, even if Mr. O'Reilly has been on a preaching-about-startups kick.
Love the idea the CEO said about manufacturers allowing people to download files to print out objects to repair broken ones. No more waiting for a part to ship!
So is anyone using Smarty anymore? Or is this short form php now all the rage? Just curious because I'd update if it was.
Think $5K is too much? Just wait until you get a dozen services to print what you want for cheap. Fab is overrated and underrated at the same time. We're not going to make our own robots anytime soon, but we are going to get a meteoric rise in expressiveness of physical identity.
I'm having trouble finding the URL scheme to use... or does this only support signing in with email@gmail.com?
Music: pain reliever, stress reducer, performance enhancer
Moleskine - in my pocket with a pen at all times. I jot things down all the time that spark my interest and leave a page or two blank with them. When I have time, usually that night, I will compile more thoughts on the ideas. If they stand up beyond that, I will copy them into a Tomboy notebook (http://www.gnome.org/projects/tomboy/).
Pittsburgh's abuse of PeopleSoft is a double whammy: It is not good software to begin with, and they insist on using it for things it has no business doing.
Designing the New MacBook: Why It Couldn't Have FireWire
Marc Andreessen Q and A
Don't look at other frameworks. I did that and found it a complete waste of time. The best I found was to loosely follow the Ideals of a framework you like. I say loosely because frameworks always have the best intentions but they can't be built for everyone. So sometime I've had to cheat. I've seen code where somebody has made a work around instead of cheating and it's a mess.

Other than that my personal preference is to use jquery for form submits and manipulation, smarty for templating and everything is tied together following MVC ideals. Class inheritance is where it's at too. Simple one is that your Page class inherits the functions in your DB access class which inherits your config class. Silly I know but it works great for me. Which in the end is the point.
I really like the idea of using GitHub as a form of blogging about code, after all what better way to distribute code and small pieces of text describing it than a DVCS. I think I'll start doing the same with the code related posts on my blog.
Enjoy Tomorrow's Web Today with AIR and CSS3
I run a web design company that does a lot of political work. We put this site together quickly before the election to try to build a buzz. So far it has generated nearly 5,000 votes.

I would love to hear what the HN crowd wants to see in a candidate's website.
My notes from Doug Richard's (Dragon's Den) School for Startups
ASK HN: How should I set my company up? 
Company, Bank Account and Set of books for each Web Application?

This is a follow on question about: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=347381<p>In the comments Ryan talks about the difficulties with handing over his merchant account etc to the company that acquired him. I want to know how this can be made easier.
Oh and also sometime I stop writing features and review the code base thus far. This allows me to bring everything up to snuff with the the latest Ideas I may have had. I've rewritten my own code about 20 times and it's now the way I like it.
Google SearchWiki
PG has nothing really new to say.
Ask HN: Review my Sports Statistics startup, StatSheet

Pretty much a convention around here.
The pathos is there, but it's a terrible, jumbled metaphor.

The problem of the fish, or at least the persona he projected on it, is not that it was humbled by its own limited ability to understand. It was precisely the opposite: the world was too limited for its apparently oversized ability to understand.

I can't wait to see those "ramifications for the way we think about things today".
At least ads are visible. A zero-pixel Java applet seems like it's over the line IMO.
I'd kill for your domain :-) Nice site. Why no MLB?
It's news that's interesting to hackers. I think that the comments in particular are refreshing - there is a good debate coming from both sides.

So I upped it. It's a good read, and that's what I come to this site looking for.
hmm I hadn't thought of that. lol
This would only have been news if he didn't support Obama.
I've used smarty extensively at work, but I've always felt like I was fighting with the iteration constructs and odd choice of syntax.

I've always hated that in smarty, associative arrays are accessed with a dot. Associative array indices don't have to be valid php variable names, so what happens when you want to access $user['home-address'] in smarty?
Good god, I can't wait for election season to be over. People buy into the stupid election propaganda more and more every 4 years.
It should be just about stats. You can't take on those three on everything.

You do stats much better than they do. Focus.
How I got my domain is an interesting story in itself. It cost me $500, which I thought was a steal.

Why not MLB? Time and money :-) Plus, MLB stats on the web seem to be better covered than some of the other sports. But I do intend to add MLB in the near future. Ultimately I'd like to add every major sport to StatSheet! Golf, cycling, you name it.
For a long time I was an unflappable Blackberry fanboy. The reality of the situation currently is this:

1) Enterprise ready isn't the unique feature it was 18 months ago. ActiveSync on WM no longer sucks to the point it lowers the barametric pressure in the area (although that's about all the compliments I have for it), the iPhone has compelling Exchange integration, and I have heard good things about Nokia's Exchange support (will know more when my wife's E71 arrives this weekend).

Having to pay an extra $15/mo/device for BES service, plus BES server hardware + BES license fees, just to maintain parity with the other products is a huge disadvantage. The best thing they could do is walk away from BES, but the carriers won't do it because it's margin for them.

2) They release phones so slowly. I appreciate that the build and radio quality of the phones are top notch, but slipping announced release dates (AT&T BB Bold, at least Sept-Nov, and maybe Jul/Aug-Nov) is not cool. I don't know if that's AT&T's fault or RIM's fault, but the whole process is under control of two major corporations -- get it together. If the Storm's release happens at all similarly, it better have iPhone v3 killing features -- that's what it's going to be competing with.

3) The BB App store has a 2009 release date and appears to be a me-too announcement. Unless there's some magic that has escaped announcement, it's not going to be a notable feature at all.
Smarty is awesome, but a little dated. They are finally working on 3.0 alpha which will have much better php5 support.

http://smarty.net

Even as is though, it is worth using.
To my knowledge, there is no perfect way of transferring a merchant account. Your best bet is the advice Ryan offered: choose the biggest, most prevalent merchant account provider you can

Also, this is not particular to tech or startups, but keeping solid documents will make any sale much smoother. Use something like gnucash, mint/wesabe, quickbooks, etc.

If by company you mean incorporation, I believe that Delaware LLCs are generally considered the best option.
It's clear that the era of hands-off government is over.

Indeed, that's been clear since Hammurabi. WTF is wrong with this guy?

Almost every industry is highly regulated except for...oh, I don't know...the book industry. Maybe it's time for an "unfettered capitalist" like Mr. O' Reilly to be regulated, to prevent the damage he's been doing. (Damage being variously defined by whatever phantasms J. Random Bureaucrat determines.)

The hand that feeds.
he addresses some key tech/web issues, and well its tim o'rielly so at the very least its going to be based on some points relevant to hackers.
Maybe most hackers should spend more of their real time in real nature?

In fact, most of us live in a box, most of the time.
Thank you for making this site one step closer to a Reddit clone and one step closer to being unsubscribed from.
Funny, I do the exact same thing, I do it for everything. I thought that this was standard procedure - it gets you much cleaner code and it's easy to reuse all your little functions in other projects.

Maybe a simple website with little boilerplate functions would be something to do as a weekend project?
Agreed - I only have minor gripes with the list, but given that only a handful of the algos have implementations, this thing would really need to be a wiki for it to have any hope of getting completed. Frankly, I'm not going to bother sending an email with new implementations and wait to see if it's approved, whereas I might have dropped by now and again to help populate a wiki.
Actual link: http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/10/google-moves...
Why buy off the rack when you can customize?
A good comparison is photo printing. Even Walmart now carries the expensive Fuji machines that only the top online printers were using.

We'll see the same with Fab -- there will be personal models that work ok. Things will take off though when you can run to Walmart and get things done on a better 3D printer they can afford.
This is silly. I know where you work. In case of emergency, I would mail your bosses and have them pass word on to your parents.
Its not quite "The Diamond Age", but I still think it is really cool, especially from a hobbyist perspective. Just think about all the stuff you've wanted to build, but could not because it would have required both access to a a workshop and the skills to use the machines there properly.
fluent expressions (when uses appropriately) can be great for constructing DSLs. Also any time you see boiler plate code take the time to refactor to eliminate it - often times figuring out how to do that will make new abstractions apparent. As a matter of practice search for the coolest things you can do in python (list comprehensions etc.), lisp and ruby and figure out how to do things in a similar way (if possible) in php.

Such as:

//python version:
noprimes = [j for i in range(2, 8) for j in range(i*2, 50, i)]
primes = [x for x in range(2, 50) if x not in noprimes]

//phparrayplus version:
$noprimes = xR(2,8)->for_each('xR($x*2,50,$x)->out()')->flatten();
$primes = xR(2,50)->diff($noprimes);

//common lisp:
(loop for x from 0 to 100 if (> (* x x) 3) collect (* 2 x))

//phparrayplus version:
$C = xR(100)->if_only('($x*$x) > 3')->for_each('2*$x');

//factorial in phparrayplus, nothing else to compare this too - just cool:
function fac($n){
return xR(1,$n)->reduce('$x*$y');
}
Startups, economy, and the survival
i think for incorporating, if you plan on raising funding from VC's or angels you will want a C-Corp.

As for where, many companies incorporate in Delaware... but IANYL
The Roe hypothesis is false.

A similar argument has been used to explain why religious groups that oppose having children die out fairly quickly. But in the case of American politics, those making the argument assume that the American two-party system will still exist in the timeframe 30-100 years, and further that abortion will still be the primary political topic in a generation or three. The last assumption is ridiculous. And we haven't even considered that new generations often discard important values from the old.
It's the first full screen touch-based smartphone anybody gave a shit about, though. Hop on the train and count phones. It's not just the fanboys; the iPhone is crushing the smartphone market.
How do you find buyers though?
Their UI is terrible. Simple operations take far too many clicks. Every single thing you do refreshes the page which can make the system incredibly slow, especially if you use it while everyone else is using it (during class sign-up times for example).
I've had trouble for a while now with chained ifs, as in:

[CHUNK A]
if (chunk a succeeds) {
[CHUNK B]
if (chunk b succeeds) {
[CHUNK C]
if (chunk c succeeds) {
echo 'yay!'
}
else {
echo 'boo!';
}
}
else {
echo 'boo!';
}
}
else {
echo 'boo!';
}

This gets messy if there's anything interesting in those chunks. Instead, take advantage of short-circuiting and put those chunks in functions. Then you can rewrite the above as:

$success = do_chunk_a();

$success = $success && do_chunk_b();

$success = $success && do_chunk_c();

echo $success ? 'yay!' : 'boo!';

Also, use the ternary operator EVERYWHERE YOU CAN - you'll clean up so much code with it.
Let's see. Product X comes out with functionality A. Product Y comes out with functionality A, B and C. Product Y is therefore a clone, because it offers a superset of the features?

But hey, let's apply your argument to the iPhone itself. You see, the iphone is a clone of the LG Prada, since the Prada came out months before that and the iPhone offered the same thing... Believe that doesn't make any sense to people without an Apple fanboy mindset.
Fed cuts key interest rate half-point to 1 percent
Ask HN: Are one-page résumés passé?  How long is your résumé?
This came up last night at Hackers and Founders Meetup that iamelgringo hosts.

How long should your résumé be? I've always believed that one page was the de facto length limit though last night there was largely a consensus that multi-page résumés were perfectly acceptable and even better than single-page résumés. The rational was largely that 1) short résumés are, well, short and you have to cut information that could otherwise land you an interview and 2) everything is thrown into a database and searched so length doesn't matter.

Sample size was small last night (approximately 6 of us discussing it) so I wanted to hear the rest of the HN community's thoughts on résumé length.

I'm interested in hearing from job seekers and employers alike.

Thanks!
There's nothing wrong with writing long. My problem with Steve Yegge's blog is that it's absolutely not set up in a way to encourage long writing. Fluid width, to start, means that on a big screen I get little dangly lines of text, which makes reading his stuff seem like a pain. His stuff is written in a very generic gray Georgia; the style looks completely amateur. Compare his site to Paul Graham's, to pick the one source I'm sure everybody here has read. PG's site has thinner, stable margins, and it's written in a sans-serif font, which makes it easy to read his essays no matter the length.

And it is possible to use sans-serif well. Yegge just doesn't. And psychologically, that turns me off from his essays before I begin to read. I've got it in my mind that somebody with something to say will at least take the minimal time to ensure it looks good.
You should learn how SPL (standard PHP library) works. Most PHP developers don't even know it exists! In my opinion its one of the most powerful parts of PHP if you can learn to use it correctly.

http://us.php.net/spl

http://www.php.net/~helly/php/ext/spl/

The documentation on php.net is pretty lacking. Heres are some tutorials and examples:

http://www.phpro.org/tutorials/Introduction-to-SPL.html

http://devzone.zend.com/article/2565-The-Standard-PHP-Librar...
On the contrary, one could say that death is the only thing that gives life meaning.