skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, it all seems so simple and inevitable now, but we have the benefit of hindsight. A year ago trillion dollar losses, nearly trillion dollar bailouts, and general financial collapse was not so obvious.
CostCo does actually have paid memberships to their discount gas. They do an amazing volume of business.
Lua Rocks (a CPAN-like archive for Lua)
So... where'd you get the financing?
I generally agree with you (I find Taleb's writing to be incoherent and his arguments overwrought), but I think his point is still relevant: if you make your wealth through financial tricks that work moderately well 99.99% of the time, but fail catastrophically .01% of the time, you've got to plan on failing in a catastrophic way. For whatever reason, most Wall St. guys don't seem to think that way.

Point being, you don't need to predict the improbable event; you just need to be aware that it's eventually going to happen, and plan appropriately.
Earth From Above: Amazing Photos by Yann Arthus-Bertrand
I agree, would have been nice. Some workplaces are more puritan than others.
why does eBay even need that many employees? They could probably run it the same way with only 10% of the people
Lisp is Changing My C++
Not sure I follow the logic entirely. Are we talking business or fashion shows ?
While it is true that your developer won't mandate an Xbox, there are many interesting problems out there, and if your company offers interesting problems and an Xbox, good equipment, good co-workers, and good salary, it will be much easier to retain good help.

I'd rather work somewhere where I know that I'll be recognized as more than a wage slave and I think that everyone else is the same way. The people who are good at what they do will gravitate toward the companies that offer the best environment, all things considered, which includes salary, perks, "chill rooms", etc.
Here's the simple, god honest truth to why Google is making Docs as well as all the other apps they have. Because it makes people use google more! The more time people spend online, the more money google makes.

Why the hell are people coming up with complex theories on this. The whole reason Google is producing Android is because Google.com will be the fucking default page! Chrome was released, because Google.com will be peoples default page! Any search on Google gives them money, so they want people to search more.

It's an infinitely expandable market. When people spend more time on the internet, more advertising revenue goes into a smaller window. Hence why advertising in the half-time of the Superbowl costs companies millions, but if you advertise on another channel at the same time you'll get the best deal all year because no ones on any other channel.

The more people use google, the more advertisers spend money through google's AdSense. When the price to advertise goes up on the search page, google is making more money for just as much expense. There's only a limited amount of advertising space on a google search page, and the more it gets in demand, the more it's worth.

It can cost like $4,000 for an advert on a local cable channel. It cost $2.7 million per 30 seconds during the 2007 superbowl break, for the same time slot. Google doesn't want shitty little companies advertising for a few bucks a pop, they want adverts by Coca-Cola and Pepsi who are worth millions per advert.
I haven't followed PHP closely throughout its history, but I think at least some of the hate comes from questionable features that used to be a problem, like magic quotes or register globals (and the underlying problem that PHP would let you write code without knowing what you're doing, and thus ending up with horribly insecure web code). I think a lot of that has been fixed, but the perception lingers.

Another reason to dislike it is that it occupies a somewhat awkward niche in the language spectrum. It's not as strict as something like Java, which can make it more difficult to use for large projects. It's not as powerful or expressive as something like JavaScript or Ruby/Python, which makes it a lot less fun to use.

The only thing PHP really has going for it is that it's the closest you can get to a language that allows you to just write code that works "on the web", without having to fiddle with any server configuration or install anything (and it has a good set of libraries well-suited to this purpose).
That means, between you and him, you have to...

And let's not forget that between you and him may also be numerous gatekeepers and headhunters.
You run an editorial style blog site, kill the one you don't like and call it a day. At the end of the day it is still your site and if you don't like the content of it and have not sold it as a user generated playing field then no one can complain.
Fighting that front and center will make you that hoarding programmer that doesn't cooperate or share, writes horribly obfuscated code and tries to ensure job security by not just doing things the "right" way. You'll be perceived that way whether or not you're the Mother Teresa of code, so don't do that.

An arguably better approach to this problem is to find places where the MS stack is lacking (source control, automated builds, deployment are some things that come to mind from my circa-2003 knowledge of the MS stack) and write scripts that improve your company's development processes.

If you do this successfully you might see things change from "we only use $tech products" to "our customer facing, support-requiring products are all written in $tech". From here you have a valid footing upon which to demonstrate the quality, productivity and supportability (be sure you can support these commensurate with the company's need!) of other solutions.

Now that you have a footing upon which to build, you can architect solutions that push the strategic part of the products away from the customer facing veneer and toward an asynchronous, nearline component where potential failures won't be seen by the customers directly.

You may not be able to get that far, depending on what your products do, but maybe you can take the first step or two, and at least scripting in nicer languages can certainly make the rest of your job a lot easier and more pleasant.
Google Trends: Biden More Popular Than Palin -- For 10 Minutes
Causation or correlation?
Samsung SGH-J600 Slider Coral Pink
Samsung launched the new SGH-J600i, a compact mid-level cameraphone with a slider form factor. This handset measures 90.6mm x 44.7mm x 17.9mm (3.6" x 1.8" x .7") in size and weighs a respectable 99g (3.5oz). It has a somewhat small 1.9" main display that is capable of showing 65k colors on its 128x160 pixel canvas.
If you use Google Bookmarks it supposedly does take such things into account when searching.
The Trouble(s) With Google Chrome Security
Google's Pie in the Sky
[xkcd] Depth
For me at least, there is a major exception to #2 and #3: it doesn't matter how peripheral it is, or how many people use it, if it has a great educational value. Of course, prudence requires you to realize when you have extracted all the fruits of such educational projects. At that point, you need to stop and apply the knowledge elsewhere.
How about 8 years ago?

http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_1_the_trillion_dollar.ht...
i wouldn't change your core strategies if you believe them to be sound.

it's just that Roger might not be the angel for you is all.

stick with what you have an work on filling in the gaps or finding compelling explanations as to why you don't need the things you're missing and why they don't apply to your particular situation. you might not get Roger, but you'll be more prepared for these kinds of questions from other investors
Try To Stop The Fire From The Latest Release of Mono 2.0
plan appropriately

Sure. Did you know that on the big stock market drop a couple weeks back, only one company in the s&p 500 went up?

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/new-money/2008/9/30/campbells-so...

if you have no confidence in your banking system and no confidence in the financial markets, the only thing you can have confidence in is the ability to build a bunker

That is the only way to provide against the vast bulk of "black swans". A bunker with plenty of canned goods. And that fact got priced into the market instantly. Even if it amounted to a sort of joke...
Real-World Scala: Dependency Injection
Beyond Games and the Future of Learning
Do you still need a card to get in?
The difference in pay between FTMs and MTFs was 1.5% in this study, and the article seems to suggest that this explains the 29% difference in pay between biological men and women. That's just staggeringly disingenuous. If anything, it means that discrimination is responsible for 5% of the pay difference between men and women, and the rest is due to pregnancy, child-rearing choices, intermittent employment, and so on. Note that this is not what I'm arguing. I'm just saying that the data in question better support that conclusion than the one the article mentions.

Further, fta:

Also, it's harder for MTFs to pass than FTMs: men who become women still have large hands and bigger frames.

If ever there was a case of absolute symmetry, it's this one. Unless, of course, women who become men don't have small hands and small frames! This article is mind-bogglingly vapid.

I know. Someone was wrong on the internet. I should just relax.
Everybody knew that 'debt unwinding" was coming. What nobody could predict, and everybody was betting against, was when.
Allow me to add URGENCY for no good reason, it actually hit me once I saw it articulated on the 37 Signals blog . . . last big project I worked on, my goodness, I had the WORST neurotic and paranoid (I really do think she uses drugs) suit woman from hell as a project manager, no clue, all urgency, I would say "don't do this" or "do that" and she would do the opposite, thereby starting fires that I had to put out IMMEDIATELY of course, it was one thing after another, seldom did I ever get to complete a task before having 3 more hurled at me ALL URGENT it was nuts! After almost a year of that, I felt burned out for like 3 months. Has anyone had similar experiences? This woman was crazy, she would call me on the phone 7-8 times a day, ask 90 questions one after the other (not letting me completely answer a single one before moving on to the next one of course) write me like 15-20 emails (more questions, or urgent requests) . . . she eventually ran the small company into the ground, totally crashed and burned, it was amazing, at least I made some money, but my goodness, it was insane. And underneath everything I think the most damaging thing was indeed the urgency.
12 great iPhone applications for sysadmins and webmasters
Discount sunglasses at big saving
I found a site that I thought were selling fakes but thought I would take a chance. Ordered a pair of Gucci sunglasses for less then $100.00. I had seen them elsewhere for as much as $350.00. They came fast and were the real deal! Came with the Gucci case and couldn’t believe the price. I don’t know how but netshades.com is the place to purchase Gucci sunglasses.
Designer sunglasses for less
If your looking for a pair of designer sunglasses this is the place netshades.com I have purchased a couple of pairs and have saved big. They offer a ton of designer lines and have purchased Gucci and Prada sunglasses. They are authentic and some really fast shipping.
Download Heroes Episodes
You can download each and every episode of Heroes. Become a member and download anything you want. And server is amazingly fast. Downloading will take just a few minutes only. Site updates daily with new episodes, new shows, new songs, new movies and even
Ah, sorry. Missed that part.
Download House MD Episodes
You can download each and every episode of House MD. Become a member and download anything you want. And server is amazingly fast. Downloading will take just a few minutes only. Site updates daily with new episodes, new shows, new songs, new movies and ev
Mint.com users are feeling the hurt, pinching pennies
It's very hard to sell to large sized enterprise without supplying custom work. You're right that the custom work isn't leveraged, but it's a prerequisite to get your product installed into their (often silly) IT structure.

This only requires a portion of your engineering and support resources, and there is no reason you could not establish strong ties to an existing consulting organization to be the "consulting services" arm of your company.
Generally, I get the sense that you can either come up with a new business or a new business model. Both at the same time is rare.
I'm perfectly fluent in C and Java. If writing a thread library and process scheduler isn't the next step (or 3 past it) I don't know what is. I wouldn't comment saying one thing is better than another (which, you may note, I didn't) unless I'd tried both.
What a bunch of bullshit.

Seems to me like the big ones are struggling - teams way to big to produce something as simple as 37signal's basecamp.

So much more space to innovate here.
SMIL 3.0 Reaches Proposed Recommendation
Coworking
I recently left my job and am going to be doing my own projects full time. (!!) However, I'm concerned about spending so much time alone. Do any of you do coworking? How do you manage working solo but also being around people to bounce ideas off of, etc.? Any good coffee shops where SF folks code?
Hilariously ironic: I recently upgraded PHP and something got borked with my Debian repos, so I did an apt-get upgrade to push everything to the latest version. Something seems out of whack with my new Apache, it's hogging a lot of memory, which is a bit of a problem since I'm on a VPS and have no swap space. I restarted Apache and everything seems fine, so I'm assuming it's fixed, but I'll keep an eye on it.
Please Review: FB app for Obama campaign and other organizations
Hi, I'm just testing a facebook app I made with some friends for the Obama campaign. The application is a digital mural -- supporters can add their face and share why they support Obama. I made it with some friends after attending Obama's Volunteer Boot Camp -- I thought there should be a cool way for people to share the personal reasons they support Obama -- the kind of stories people people at volunteer camps get to hear every day.

When the app fills up, the Obama campaign plans to install it into the lobbies of the ny and chicago campaign headquarters to help motivate volunteers.

I'd love comments or feedback. If people like it, we'll clean up the code and make it available to any organization.
IPhone Sales Drastically Surpass Q4 Consensus, Apple Reaches 10 million iPhone Goal
"While the programmers are off building the next major feature, he is busy writing specs so that, when they finish, there won't be any idle time before they can start the next iteration."

This is essence of the problem right there. If the developers aren't involved in the design of what they're building, you have a broken process. The idea that you can "skimp" on talent such that you're hiring people to implement things you wouldn't trust them to design is pretty flawed; it means that you're developers are going to be producing a lot of crap by failing to see or find implementation-time improvements to the stuff in the abstract specs. And the idea that you can get that design right the first time at all, without having written a line of code, is fundamentally flawed.

The rest of the suggestions in the post seem to be attacking this solution sideways, by involving the developers earlier, iterating the specs, etc... But it doesn't seem to recognize the core problem. You can't "hand off" low-level specifications to someone other than the implementor. It doesn't work.
I was actually thinking memberships only to a gas station. I'm a Costco member but they make their money (or at least more money) on the stuff inside, instead of at the pump. With our gas delivery problems in the last few weeks a gas station that catered only to members (and had gas) would have made a killing from membership signups. Come to think of it, Costco probably would have too if they weren't subject to the same issues as everyone else.
http://coworking.pbwiki.com/SanFranciscoCoworking
If you want to be contacted, put your email address in your profile.
"James Gee appears to have similar ideas regarding technology and cognitive learning as Henry Jenkins. Do you think?"

Close, but Jenkins focuses more on how fan fiction can be useful in an educational context, whereas Gee is more concerned more with the medium, and less with the content.
I was about to write a snarky comment about non-descriptive link titles and then I read the article. It's really good and the non-descriptive headline is (presumably) part of it. ;-)
Samsung Isn’t Going to Pay a Lot for SanDisk
Scoble is out of touch. The only thing he knows anything about is blogging. I've never found anything he writes to be particularly insightful either, he just spends all his time writing about popular tech topics. He deserves credit for building his personal brand, but that's about it. I certainly wouldn't take resume-writing advice from him, and I wouldn't want to work for him either. He needs to dial down the self-importance.
an interesting read but one thing I didn't understand, how is one meant to save the plaintext username & password client side (so as to be able to send them with each request) without putting them in a cookie or requiring that the user's browser is set to 'remember this password' - anyone got any ideas?
Philly has some issues, but it's much better than it used to be. It's a huge city. There's a lot of growth in some great areas. You get a lot for your money here. Many compare the current state of the city to NYC in the 80's. There's lots of potential.
Eh, Stephen Hawking seems to be doing OK.
That is an absolutely terrible, myopic analysis. Instead of saying that our nation's education system is not adequately preparing students for college, it's making the argument that college is taking advantage of unprepared students.

That makes no sense whatsoever.
An Introduction to A/B Testing | 20bits
Erlang VM : now hosting multiple languages
Make Something People Need: Campbell Soup up 9% this year
Why not Io?
I think the point is not that no session state at all should be stored client side, but that most session state should not be.
10 IT power-saving myths debunked
Thinking Through Twitter
You thought the Aeron was cool? Wait till seat on Herman Miller's new Embody chair
Yes, Facebook is Open Source, Too [list of Facebook open source projects/contributions]
That's authentication/authorization info; it should/must be stored on the client.
Mixing Our Way Out Of Instance Eval?
SEOmoz | Announcing SEOmoz's Index of the Web and the Launch of our Linkscape Tool
There's some twisted fun in developing .NET on Linux :)
AOL's the great garbage collector of Internet companies.
this is a terrible article.

the degree itself is not bad, the schools and programs are the things that should be criticized individually. i am content with my degree, because i made it through the curriculum. two of my pals who started with me couldn't cut it, and they were both pretty sharp guys. dropout/failure rate from my major at my school was something like 65%. (i don't know what it is now, could be easier to slide by nowadays)

just because some schools and majors don't have standards doesn't mean that all schools and majors don't have standards.
I think part of the problem is that the way the schools are set up they only encourage doing enough to get by, and don't encourage learning for learning's sake. What concerned me about the article is the author's espousal of some sort of universal test. I think most college students would probably only be motivated enough to learn enough to pass the test, and miss out on more important skills.
Software Transactional Memory in Scala
Real-World Scala: Introduction
RTFA. The difference in pay was much greater than 1.5%. Men who became women took a 32% pay cut, while women who became men got a 1.5% pay raise. Assuming two trangsender people were earning the exact same amount beforehand, then the new women were earning only two-thirds the pay of the new men. That would explain the difference in pay between biological men and women.

I agree though that the study probably doesn't explain everything. I imagine transgender people look a little funny, and people who look funny won't get paid as much.
I wasn't fishing for anything, but I suppose it wouldn't hurt.
Lean Data Models and Asynchronous Repositories
Erlang-style Supervisor Module for Scala Actors
Actually, Peej is a REST fan. He's saying that if there's session state it should be on the client side. There should be none on the server side.
I think you missed the point when you get hung up on the fact that he'd prefer standards. His larger point is this:

College is a wise choice for far fewer people than are currently encouraged to consider it.

He's not so much speaking to you, but to your two buddies that couldn't hack it.
"Some Web frameworks use session state to track and hold information about the user throughout their journey through the site, however they go against the RESTful principles and should really be treated as a bug."

I'll bet this guy's not fun to be in design meetings with.
Selling gas by itself isn't profitable (10 cents or less profit per gallon). Hence most gas stations are either glued to carwashes, or have convience stores as a side, with a few outliers that dabble in car repair.
I think the problem with the degrees is that they focus way too much on the concepts and way too little on practice. Schools need to offer and require at least one class where you spend days actually doing the jobs available for your major. Instead of doing BS work problems where instead of using Excel like they do in the real world, you have to use a blank piece of paper.
I was the first member for a brand new coworking studio in Chico, CA (about 3.5 hours NE of SF) and I love it. I have an office at home with everything I could need but there is nothing like being around people to help you out.

Just by joining I've met some really great people and that has created many opportunities and generated more business for my company.

I would guess SF would be more expensive but I only pay $100. In the big scheme of things, it's worth the money and I use the office 2-3 days a week.