skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A friend of mine works for a small company that develops the models that many automated tradings are based on. It's so secret that he won't even tell me which companies use the software, only that it's some of the major global players. He does tell me about the software in broad terms though, and it is obvious there is a market for a new player in there. Basically almost everyone is using the same models and algorithms, just with different tweaks. And it's based on 20 year old principles. Start writing code that looks for different patterns (weather, psychological factors, etc.) and you might be able to beat them.
Utterly ridiculous. Which young hacker in the history of the world ever picked a programming language based on how "hip," "cool" or "fun" a marketing site said it was? Who the hell ever thought flashier site = better language? I mean... I am speechless. This may be the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Like, I try to flag it more, but it just unflags it.
Cross-platform desktop development with JRuby and Swing
Uncov was usually much better than this.
> The effect of the sun seems to have been quite big. For shares traded in New York, for instance, annualised returns on perfectly sunny days averaged 24.8%, compared with 8.7% on perfectly cloudy days. Moreover, unlike some stockmarket “anomalies” discovered by economists, investing by the sun would have been more profitable than simply investing in the market index, even after subtracting trading costs. Alas, this does not guarantee profitable trading in the future. Even assuming the effect really exists, investors, now they have been alerted to it, will probably arbitrage away any excess returns to be had by exploiting it.

http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E...

So... it seems as if people really do think of everything - why wouldn't they, with millions or billions on the line. What hope does an individual have?
Protein synthesis: an epic on the cellular level (video)
I think I would pick the one whose website says, "USED BY NASA" as opposed to the language site that has a picture of a dude trying to figure out why he has a laptop in his hands.
If I work more than around 8 hours per day I don't get more productive.
And for me work==pleasure. It's just that I've been sitting up all night long a lot of times not getting anywhere and then gone to sleep and the next morning I'm like "wow what the hell was I thinking last night?".
Action Potential... In Action [dancing about science]
Please flag my submission if you think it is too 'reddit'.
Fabulous. Kick ass.
Sins of Commissions
Please flag my submission if you think it is too 'reddit'.
Make An Average Face [image processing demo]
I'm curious, why do you find yourself needing to add the title of the blog or the name of the author? The url already shows us where the post is coming from.
Thanks. I'm still working on the layout, but good suggestions, I'll make sure to do those.
The Python site looks like its designer placed a higher priority on being organized and informative than being flashy; the overall design says, "This is why Python is a good language, and here's how you can try it out." (The same applies to http://haskell.org, I think.)

The Java site makes it sound like something people would try to sell on TV late at night. ("Operators are standing by!") How many stock images of people with laptops can you put on one page?
That's why you need mathematician versed in mechanism design (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design).
Amazing. There are three anecdotes that form this article. In all three the "employees will game incentive programs" element is pure speculation by the author.

Obviously he is paid a commission by the anecdote and thus makes them up thereby subverting his employers best laid plan.
It is very clearly a better feedback than Google ever gets.

BTW I don't think it does a "small thing". It is not a smaller problem than search itself.

I think the most natural UI for this are feeds though (not email like Google Alerts and not a standalone site like Pressflip).
I recently got in a similar cycle by accident. I was up all night on Saturday then when I tried to take a nap at 6pm on Sunday I ended up sleeping until 6:30am Monday. I've been enjoying waking up at 6:30 every weekday since then and it's working out great. I get to do all the things I usually wanted to do in the evening but never got around to (like hit the gym).
The people who think Rails is a programming language, perhaps.

Anything driven by buzz more than substance.
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 58 - ClickJacking for SETI
"I doubt many Googlers will 'start looking elsewhere'... where exactly would they look? Dubai? China? Heh."

Its not like Google is best company in the world(those days are gone). Even if, company doesnt matter to me,what matters is only the work(and the smartness of co-workers) what Iam doing. I would any day better compromise on the smartness of co-workers as opposed to compromising the quality of work. By this, there could be a lot of better jobs elsewhere.
Depends on how much you pay I guess. My gym membership was usually so cheap that it never really affected me.
Ask HN: Update from Midphase hosting status thread
Earlier this week I shared some hosting issues I'm facing. 42 comments followed, all of which were helpful, detailed, encouraging and (most importantly) useful.

Here's the thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=326012

I wanted to share a quick update.

Based on advice here I took the following steps:

1. Posted to linode.com and Slicehost.com forums as well as the Drupal paid-services forum, soliciting paid, contract work to migrate to better hosting and optimize my server situation.

2. I received 18 responses. Many were impressively detailed. A few were hilarious: "My brother's setting up a box. It's 10x more powerful than anything out there. Let us host you."

3. I heard from a developer I already knew and have worked a bit with in the past. Turns out he's interested and knows his way around Slicehost. I hired him based on our past track record, at a price we both thought was fair.

4. Last night we moved my Drupal site to a 1GB slice. It's already noticeably faster and is no longer crashing every 2 hours.

5. Next week I have some "Drupal sharks" who'll start crawling over my install looking to optimize the Drupal piece of it.

So thanks, HN. It was really useful to learn that I needed more RAM for my setup in addition to Drupal optimization. I am happily on a Slice and now have an experienced hacker to defer to now and then.
How about paying employees directly for debugging the incentive plans: Pay them for reporting how such a plan could be subverted, and then adjust the plan accordingly.
How do "RVC" "classic VC funds" and angels make any money if there are no stock market exits and big fish have no leverage or market cap to buy little ones? There are companies that will very likely cancel S1's now.
BackType (YC Summer 08) Releases API
WPA2 with EAP is end-to-end crypto strong; there's no funky password derivation function to brute-force, the packets are AES keyed randomly after a (most likely) TLS key exchange. I'm not saying I'd choose it --- too many moving parts --- but you can make the argument that modern wireless security is more secure than wired networks.
Because no operating system secures IP by default, so without something in place, wireless is devastatingly insecure.

The first round of wireless security protocols were a hack, a veneer of security designed to give the perception that 802.11 was "at least as secure" as your office Ethernet, which you'd want to secure with SSL or IPSEC anyways. That strategy failed.

The most recent round of protocols is every bit as sophisticated as IPSEC. It's no longer the design goal to provide something that's "good enough" for normal stuff, and to run VPN over for everything else.

There's a lot of moving parts in WPA2-Enterprise/EAP, and I don't love it. But it's no longer a silly strategy.
No offense, but this statement doesn't mean anything at all. Clearly, within the next 10 years, enterprises are going to move en masse to wireless. The cost savings are too high.

The solutions may not look like they do today --- I won't cry --- but the fundamental problem is going to need to get solved. Maybe it'll be opportunistic Teredo/6to4-style network layer security, and maybe it'll be something app layer, but something is going to get done here.
I'm not seeing any layout issues on FF3. Anything unusual on your browser or OS? Would you mind emailing me?
What hope does an individual have?

More than you think. Especially if you change your attitude towards the problem a bit ;-)
Great marketing (pic)
Fair cop. Would it be possible to have the relevant rules presented to us in the submission form? I sometimes forget.
or perhaps, leave your opinion out of the title and include it as comment #1. I often read the comments first to identify why I should or should not click-thru to the story itself.
It's been tough. I've been trading in this market and I've caught a couple pretty good moves.
So wait... incentive systems never work, they will always be gamed.

But Joel's incentive system will be fine because Joel tells his employees not to game it.

Ah, Joel.
You guys are still paying more than Google to index my comments right?
Yes, it's more complicated, but the space elevator can't work right now- the engineering materials simply don't exist for that.

2000 km long is shorter than the cabling that makes up the golden gate bridge.

Nobody knows whether it works in practice, because nobody has seriously tried to build this. Yeah, that makes it harder, because there's no beaten path to follow. Then again, practically everything in this world is something hard that somebody managed to do.
If you ever do end up with me interviewing you, I'll likely work one or two of these into the discussion to explore your level of knowledge about Unix.

Translation:

If you ever do end up with me interviewing you, I'll likely work one or two obscure questions into the discussion to make you feel stupid so that I can gloat. That's how charming I am.
Stones and Pebbles, a Lesson in Time Management
Efficient time management is the key to accomplish goals
> Google Employees Watch In Horror

Feels like Digg.
> They have also decreased the demand, so salaries and/or total compensation may go down.

They've decreased demand only if they've reduced the number of products and/or reduced the amount of engineering required for those products.

Since they gave folks an incentive to leave near the end of a product, they've probably increased the amount of engineering for their products.
Am I the only one who wakes up at a weird time (read: non-multiple of 5) every day? I wake up at 7:01am every morning... it just felt right one day, and now I keep on doing it.

BTW, I go to bed by 11pm every evening. For those of you non-math folks, that's 8 hours and a penny.
Do you happen to recall the historical P/E averages?
Yup, and those folks should react the same way.
Loic Le Meur Blog: Tough times. Tough decisions.
That's utter nonsense.

People don't avoid starting companies because they're afraid of the capital gains tax on their anticipated profits (At least, people with a healthy dose of perspective don't do this).

If you're going to pick from the list of reasons that people avoid starting companies, at the top of the list has to be the fact that most are afraid that they'll be unable to take care of themselves and their family during the lean times. Universal health coverage is an obvious step toward alleviating this fear. The abstract, vague notion of someday paying a (rather low) tax on the eventual, theoretical profits from the venture doesn't even come close.
Excellent news! Hope you are happier in your new home.
My attitude is that it's pretty clear how I can take on (or rather, simply run around) even big players as a small startup. It's less clear how I can come out ahead stock picking as an individual. So it's better to not dick around with stock picking, put my money in cash (like it has been for a while), or an index fund, and just concentrate on the startup stuff.
I've never "met" a company that does tech consulting that carries just 3 employees. You either have more people (developers, designers, infrastructure, sales, HR, etc) and so the shop will invariably go Microsoft or something similar where they own the data (and by no means allow an "impulse buy" when it comes to their precious rolodex), or you are talking a couple individual freelancers teaming up on a specific project.

Of course there are some bigger clients for whom $70/month is not a big deal but I was talking scale. Would you rather charge $70/month to a 1,000 clients or $25/month to 10,000?

(And let's please not make sophistic arguments about "3 startup guys with no revenue living on rice and beans". It doesn't make for good discussion when you pretend that I made an obviously ridiculous statement and then refute it).
I'm no expert on the current financial crisis, but I did study economics in undergrad and this seems fairly accurate. Maybe I'm just too desperate for good news. Is there anyone on HN that could shed some light on the objective accuracy of this article?
I recently implemented OpenID for a new project I am working on and thanks to JanRain it was actually quite easy (I used their python libraries).

Personally I think that although people in the 'business' get the idea that a 'url is a person' it's just not part of the larger knowledge sphere. People are just getting used to having strong passwords, now we tell them to have ONE password on ONE site somewhere and somehow everything is gonna be better?

It will take a long time for normal people to be comfortable with this (IMHO).
> What hope does an individual have?

A whole lot of people support themselves by trading successfully. The thing is, making decent money by trading is a full time job, not an after-hours hobby.

You CAN make money designing trading strategies. People do it. The question is simply whether the EV returns on your time will be higher than working on an actual job or businesses. Someone smart enough to make a winning trading system is also smart enough to get paid a lot in other endeavors. So more often than not it's a wash. Except traders get to work in their underwear...
Agreed, but offering free food, transportation, health care, cell phone, etc is an awesome & possibly economical perk.

Most of that stuff can be paid for with pre tax dollars as opposed to having to pay for it yourself with after tax dollars.

The place I used to work paid for my phone, breakfast, daily lunches, insurance and metro card. My only fixed costs each month were groceries, dinner, rent, cable/internet, minor personal items & student loans.
I once read and author who claimed that goldbricking, malingering and sabotage were really just market effects. When employers pay too little or working conditions are too harsh, employees naturally find ways to remedy the problem. There seems to be a similar mechanism, here.

The pinnacle of this has to be the competitive incentive programs used at certain large software firms. In a competitive review system, the best policy is to passively sabotage your coworkers. This is robust even in the case where you are the rare superstar who has all the knowledge (in which case you simply hoard your knowledge). Those that try to be stars simply attract more coworker subversion. The countervailing factor is the general misery caused by this system. Employees will continue to sabotage until the work environment is as bad as they are willing to tolerate at the prevailing pay level. Thus, the only guaranteed result of a competitive review system seems to be maximally low morale and the majority of employee effort spent on gaming the system.

The late W. Edwards Deming (one of my heroes) proposed that the solution to this (in a manufacturing context) was to have a collective reward system (e.g., profit sharing), and to treat high and low performers as special cases. High performers should be examined to see if their techniques can be generalized across the organization, and low performers are examined to see if their performance is a result of the system or (rarely) a cause idiosyncratic to the low performer.

Many of the software types I've spoken to balk at such a method being applied to their organizations, because "creating software is not a production line process." This seems specious to me.

Have any of you if you've worked in a software house that had a reward system in place like the one Deming advocates?
Couldn't agree more - sorry if I sounded a bit harsh or judging in the OP. I didn't mean it that way. And good luck with the startup :-)
there are so many more investment channels available

This is exactly why banks spend significant more money on advertising (think WaMu pre-death) than they used to. It's also why they derive a higher percentage of revenue from fees.
nice work guys
smalltalk is one of the most influential languages i have ever used. after reading about it in a crappy computer magazine, downloading squeak and learning how to build things
i virtually spent the rest of the night wondering, laughing
about the simplistic beauty of its clean design.
its extensibility and the duck typing principle, as well as object orientation in general, are key concepts of many dynamic languages.

apart from seaside, which is nice anyway, even rather 'primitive' things like graphical user interfaces were
invented in smalltalk. the 'extraordinary productivity', as bowkett is putting it, may probably be the reason for that.

so if smalltalk is cool again by now, why bother?
looks like its comeback will bear resemblance to
the lisp comeback in about 1999.
Hi there

I just received exactly the same today about my website!!!

What did you do with it?

Cheers

Simone
So far, yes indeed. The performance difference is like night and day. We're still combing out blips from the migration, but all's well thus far.
College Works Painting
Looking for a paint contractor that stands above the rest? Seeking the opportunity to help your local community? There is a way to bring the two together.
Success with OpenSolaris + ZFS + MySQL in production
gotta try that!
An appalling and politically impossible way to improve voting outcomes.
"More likely, you'll just get a lot of people doing things that can be made to look on paper like startups."

http://paulgraham.com/inequality.html
Jim Butterfield Memorial Tribute
Options don't become worthless when they're out of the money, as long as they haven't expired yet. The probability of the option being valuable at expiry is greater than zero, so the expected present value of the option is greater than zero.
Reviews: Security scans with OpenVAS
security scanning tool review
AKA why you shouldn't evaluate testers based on the number of bugs fixed and developers based on the lines of code written (though I know places that still do both those things).
Apparently Woot's been doing stock ticker-based SEM for a while: http://www.brentter.com/wootcoms-new-adwords-campaign-offens...

It got them a free TechCrunch mention too, so who am I to argue.. http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/08/are-the-new-woot-ads-fu...
"90% of everything is crap – music, movies, cars, people." - never guessed the last ingredient before
Some of them just look like they're coughing to be honest, or bored out of their brains.
Getting The UnParty Started: Seesmic Lays Off 1/3 Of Staff
I guess the Yeah, ok, fair enough, "kill" is not an exaggeration. was not enough of a sarcasm tag.

Next time I'll use </sarcasm>....
I think its implementation via virtual machine was quite influential, too. While the graphics in Smalltalk-80 look painfully dated, it's quite clear the language was far ahead of its time, and many languages people encounter these days could be considered third-generation knockoffs of Smalltalk (often with an Algol parent). It has a really clean conceptual design, and it gets quite a bit of expressive power from being able to pass around lazily evaluated blocks of code.

In hindsight I'm not sure that its design as a fully self-contained / relatively isolated system is a good idea, but the core semantics of the language make a lot of sense. OO is a better paradigm for some problems than others, but Smalltalk has a far more sensible vision of OO than those grafted onto C's type system, and I would recommend people play with it over reading endless rehashing of _Design Patterns_. (Smalltalk is to OO as Haskell is to FP.)

Also:

> The questioner also adds:

> "For the record: I'm a Ruby guy with little to no experience in Smalltalk, but I'm starting to wonder why."

> The answer: because you look to anonymous crowds on social networking sites for approval when you should just follow your curiousity and see where it leads.

Burn.
This article sums up a lot of good points about Solaris. Userland is a joke, package management is awful, just installing and using the OS is an exercise in frustration for folks spoiled by the lovely tools available in a Linux system, but some of the core technology is amazing. He's not even mentioning the other mind-bendingly great technology that Solaris offers: Zones. Zones are the most efficient and stable way to run many virtualized servers. Because they share a kernel and most system services, Zones can be extraordinarily lightweight, while still providing exactly the level of isolation you want. While Xen on Linux is nice, the smallness of Zones is a killer feature. Linux has vservers (and the somewhat broken fork OpenVZ/Virtuozzo), which use the same model, but the stability and capability of it leaves a lot to be desired. And, of course, Sun stands by Zones...problems actually get fixed, whereas serious memory management bugs have existed in OpenVZ/Virtuozzo for years (possibly also in vservers since they're derived from the same original source, though I haven't seen it, so far).

Anyway, a lot of Linux folks have written off Sun based on an old understanding of what Sun has to offer. If they continue to work on fixing the userland and the package manager (ideally replace pkg with RPM/yum or deb/apt, since both are remarkably better), and solve the driver issue (Linux has dramatically more drivers than Solaris...which makes a difference...a lot of folks like to have their target platform on their desktop, I know I do, and that's just not reasonable with Solaris), OpenSolaris could become a serious contender.

Oh, and dtrace. Holy crap, how awesome is dtrace? Can't forget dtrace. Sun has some serious engineers.
Merb 1.0 For Ruby Emerges. Real Competition For Rails?
Fear is the mind killer of the Silicon Valley Entrepreneur
An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth
Wrong. He said he's going to eliminate capital gains taxes on startups not on startup investors. So if your startup buys stock in other companies and makes a capital gain, it doesn't pay taxes on it. Hear recently of any startup doing such a thing? No, I didn't think so.
Indeed. If anyone has goog options that they think are "worthless" then I'll be happy to buy them at one cent each.
That's exactly why you buy to hold, now. It could go lower, but if you're long, you don't really care. You don't know how much longer this will go, and if you miss the boat, you lose.

All the more reason to go long.
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HTC Touch P3452 Smartphone London Limited Edition (Unlocked)
HTC P3452 Touch Smartphone silver (unlocked) phone is its Touch cube. This unique functionality allows the user to enjoy an interface that makes navigation and quick dialing a happy and user-friendly experience.
Does anybody know what Seesmic's total head count is, how much they've raised and when they raised it, and have a wild guess as to their cash flows? It'd make this a better data point.

[TechCrunch answered my question for me --- 7 was ~1/3rd of the company, and they raised $6MM a few months ago --- at 180k fully loaded (optimistic), they're now burning ~$3MM/yr, with probably a 1.5 year runway without significant revenue. Sound sane?]