skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a fascinating documentary/long-form article in VICE about another Nike missile silo in Kansas that was backed by a VC and fronted as Y2K fallout shelter/precision spring manufacturing facility for NASA but was in fact producing kilos of MDMA and analogue chemicals.[1]

One of the guys behind the operation, Leonard Pickard, was formally convicted of producing 200,000 doses of LSD in an industrial facility in Mountain View.[2]

Interestingly, the facility in Kansas was turned into an even more luxurious living abode than the hypothetical ones presented here. Think Scarface.

[1] http://www.vice.com/hamiltons-pharmacopeia/getting-high-on-k...
(Scroll down)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Leonard_Pickard
What A True Leader Knows About Life And Business.
SF, CA - full time

Love games? We have a job for you.

Betable is looking for a self-motivated, full-stack senior software engineer to join our founding team. We want someone who is passionate about web development and can help us build a world class platform.

Betable is committed to challenging the status quo by building disruptive technology that helps developers monetize their creativity in a very lucrative, proven way. We expect that millions of people around the globe will engage with this product & that it will transform at least two multi-billion dollar industries - gambling & gaming.

The company is backed by Atomico Ventures, the venture capital fund started by the founders of Kazaa, Skype & Rdio, Niklas Zennistrom & Janus Friis, as well as various top tier angels. Our Advisory Board includes Chris Larsen, Founder of Prosper and E-LOAN, Roger Dickey, EP/GM at Zynga and Founder of Mafia Wars and Fishville, Owen O’Donnell, CFO of Betfair, CFO of King.com, CFO of the Financial Times and Director of Rank Interactive, and Ash Muarya, Lean startup evengelist and author of, “Running Lean.”

We are looking for people who are great coders in any language and are flexible to adapt. We need those with both platform experience to build our API and front end experience to build our suite of consumer facing sites.

We offer great compensation, flexible scheduling, and a fun, hard-working startup atmosphere. If you're interested, drop us a line at Tyler@Betable.com to find out more.
5 ways to be a great Airbnb host, courtesy of Conan O'Brien
Netbook sales have stagnated and have been passed by tablets. They are expected to continue to decline.

As for tables, most users use dedicated apps so this design change won't affect them. Google usually does a custom web interface for tablets/mobile anyway to make it more touch friendly.
Occupy Wal... or Occupy the Ivory Tower
German multicopter makes first manned flight.
This is something that has been bothering me for a decade. and I know what is wrong with it. The problem is not the technology. It would be trivial to fix email technology.

The problem is the people running email servers. They're the worst anti-social, celibate, neckbeard stereotype you can possibly imagine. and they fear change - trust me I've tried.

It would be so trivial to simply remove many of the options in a modern email system (do you really need uucp at all today?) and produce an email server that could be setup by anyone.

In fact, I would suggest someone begin a new protocol by building a hybrid mailserver. One that supports the ancient smtp/pop/imap stuff, and that supports a new utopia protocol. At the EHLO foo.com split off into your new utopia. The neck beards will fight you tooth and nail against that though. Simple way around that though - target the users.

Good luck to anyone who tries. The challenge is not technical, it's social.
Hey Alex - alright can see where you are coming from. Venkatesh Rao (from Ribbonfarm) writes ridiculously long posts on Wordpress. Maybe you can reach out to him to see if your product would interest him?
Adding middleware to node.js with Connect
Khan Academy is interesting but imo it's not complete. Technology enables us to make learning an interactive experience -- either interacting with another person or with a REPL interface (like Codeacademy). Just posting videos online in one place is kind of like the obvious step that took a surprisingly long time to get to. It's definitely a step forward, but I can't imagine people are learning enough about, for example, Biology to be able to do something significant with what they've learned.

Computer science is a little different, because people have been learning CS online since well before Khan Academy.
All of these programs / apps / sites etc. are new things. I would say that zeebox.com actually validates your work so far by showing there exists a market for it already.

Plus, it is not a zero-sum game. You can both win (in terms of profitability, exit, etc.) If you are far along and will not need to spend much more money or time, go for it. If you have just started, maybe take a moment to think about it. Either way, you can just learn from zeebox.com mistakes and implement better with your own project.

You must be realistic to know when to quit and use your time more wisely, BUT most startups don't actually die - they commit suicide. Good luck
I can think of at least one fairly large development organization that has moved to the github model internally - with pull requests and everything. Their developers love it.
I'll be writing a series of blog posts about the architecture of the game as well as more info about the API at http://blog.wikimaze.me/

At a high level you are mostly right. The incorrect answers are generated using http://www.freebase.com/ (now a Google product)

Lots of pages have to be thrown out, but after analyzing thousands of articles it was relatively straightforward to know when you had a good page versus a bad one.
Enterprise pricing. Learn it, live it, love it.

(the point of block pricing is to extract some extra revenue from people in your situation. as a bonus, you get a slight user-license runway so you can add people without paying more if you are in the middle of a license block. also, some companies vastly overestimate their users and will order much more capacity than needed. free money is the best money.)
Nice post. I did some user tests on Friday with beginning Python developers and found they were completely mystified by the pip install process.

I feel like adding virtualenv on top is the right approach, in the long run, but for the beginning developer it might be better just to install plain pip while he is struggling to figure out how to get packages installed, and then later figure out how to do virtualenv.

Almost everyone's first experience with pip is in the context of another task, like trying to use the twilio-python library (the use case I was testing Friday). In that context they're not looking to learn how to use pip correctly (or learn why they need virtualenv) but trying to do something like send a text message or run Flask or whatever.
I don't want to predict the future, but if HP thinks it can win over customers with 100% marketing and no technical details, that's not a good sign.

I make the IT purchasing decisions for my company, and I know what an ARM CPU is, and why it's a good idea. Therefore, I know that HP's approach doesn't make sense: ARM hasn't been proven in this market. Therefore, customers and vendors (like HP) need to work very closely and there needs to be openness about design issues, performance tuning, etc.

HP's starting off on the wrong foot. Maybe there's enough money in ARM that they'll figure it out. But if I have to make a prediction, I'm of the opinion the ARM server market is going to take off so fast that HP will be left behind.
At the risk of losing karma, I have to say that I think this entire thread has really gone way too far.

Guys, this is HACKER NEWS. I thought we were supposed to hold ourselves to a higher standard of conversation over here?

Could I just post one thing?

http://www.paulgraham.com/randomness.html

If you disagree with what someone writes, then you should reply simply and without embellishment. To conclude that someone has a "sick mind" or has "killed their company" is a bit much of a conclusion to draw from a simple online debate at a tech/startup discussion site.

If Hacker News offered the ability to lock discussions, then I am quite sure that this one would have been locked.

Can't we all just calm down and get back to coding?
Apple: Music Cloud Lockers Are Fine, As Long as It's Our Cloud
Windows tablets have been available in a variety of forms for around twenty years. Without exception, they've all been failures in the marketplace.

People like the idea of a Windows tablet much more than the reality. Real products have to make compromises, like sacrificing performance or battery life to run legacy applications designed for PCs, and there's no magical way to make interfaces designed for a mouse and keyboard suitable for touch input without changing them completely.
The Most Dangerous School in Los Altos
I'm not saying you are, just that some people will be dissatisfied regardless of what solution is put in place. That said, I don't really consider this particular conversation worth having. You want some level of unique ID on a site like this to deter casual/not spamming, but if you implement strict ID then you'll either drive people away and/or make them paranoid. This is meant to function as a barometer of sentiment, and there's no point in over thinking it. If/when Congress allows some sort of formal petitioning mechanism that guarantees some degree of legislative procedure, then an audit trail and a balancing of transparency with privacy will need to be in place. That wouldmrpobably involve use of a social security number or similar to ensure only citizens can participate.
Why Believers Will Grow Stronger If the World Doesn't End
Savant News
New York, NY. Full time.

Sense Networks is hiring for a Hadoop-oriented Junior Engineer spot.

Details at: http://jobs.nytm.org/job/junior-software-engineer-back-end-d...
SEEKING WORK - Remote (Tokyo)

Interface designer from California. I work with companies around the world on application design, usability, and branding.

HTML5 / CSS3 (Sass, Stylus) / JS / Photoshop / iOS

http://nylira.com
You Must Have The WILL To Succeed
Does it support ECC ram? None of the other ARM servers I've seen yet have.
TO ALL AMERICANS  PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION ASAP
Will do, thank you very much.
I think in his biography, it was mentioned that Jobs had a dislike for those doing philanthropy publicly, as in, trying to get recognition for it rather than the cause. Jobs helped and donated to certain causes quietly in areas like education and I think his wife was involved in a number of areas.

I mention the above to state only one thing... Practically everyone here does not know enough about Gates or Jobs on a personal level to make any kind of judgement. Anything you hear is all second hand information and what is displayed by the media. It could well be, relative to a lot of other rich folks, Jobs didn't play a big enough role and certainly Apple was not involved in any charity related stuff, but that doesn't mean he hasn't done his part towards causes he wanted to help out.

Metaphorically speaking, it's a lot like saying someone who has money but doesn't buy much is cheap. That's not necessarily true. They'll spend money, and lots of it, on things they actually care for and want. On other things, its not important. On this front, Jobs also is an example. All that said, it's their life, their money. Let them choose how to live it their way.

As another HN member already commented, don't idolize either but take away lessons from each and mold your own path.
You're right that "closed" is far too strong of a word, since you can easily share outside of Google. But the new Reader is definitely not what it used to be in the "open access" department.

The old way: people who wanted to follow me added my Reader feed to their RSS reader. They use their RSS reader.

The new way: I add G+ users who I think want to follow the things I share to my tech-related circle. They use G+.

My target audience is limited and disempowered. I'll try it for a bit, but likely I'll ditch G+ for this use and find another RSS posting service. Google could fix it by adding "public circles" and RSS feeds of those circles.
thanks for posting these, guys.

one request - could you please get rid of the devastating meebo bar?
Thanks for jumping in! Are there screenshots of this customer dashboard available anywhere?

GitHub Enterprise is the latest release of our on-premise product with a re-engineered back end and our new customer dashboard.
Take Email Triage One Step Further by Focusing on Your "Wheelhouse Emails"
Throw undeclared checked exception in Java
How Print Drives Your Business
San Francisco, CA - Yammer. Fulltime; H1Bs considered.

Yammer is an awesome tech startup masquerading as an enterprise software vendor. We're building an enterprise social network (an internal communication and collaboration tool. Like Facebook.) and we need your help.

We build our product with insight and wisdom gained from the consumer social networking space, but we charge enterprise prices (and our customers pay them!) We're fighting some big serious competitors (Salesforce/Chatter, Jive, and VMWare/Socialcast) and this space has never been more exciting.

Yammer is really changing the way people get work done. We have actual challenges to overcome and we're doing our best to make a kick-ass product that makes our users happy.

Tech we use: Ruby/Rails, Scala, and JavaScript. We have Obj-C and C# stuff too.

Some bullet points for you to skim:

• Amazing group of smart engineers to work with. Really.

• We hack in Ruby/Rails, Scala/JVM, Javascript/JQuery/Node.js/Adobe AIR, Obj-C for iOS, and some MSFT/Sharepoint stuff.

• Competitive compensation. Enough said.

• Delicious catered lunch and dinner daily, with a 3PM snack cart. Also a fully-stocked beer-and-beverage fridge.

• Fancy Apple hardware of your choice (you can have a PC if you really want one.)

Some links for you to read more:

• Our jobs page: https://www.yammer.com/jobs

• Our Engineering blog: http://eng.yammer.com/

• A blog post about why it's so awesome to work here: http://eng.yammer.com/blog/2011/5/31/shameless-recruiting.ht....

Feel free to get in touch: bkudria@yammer-inc.com
There's a fortress mentality amoung many of the wealthy I know. Beyond gated communities and personal self defense it has extending to overly secure homes outside of major cities or secondary homes in other countries. Many of them think of it as "insurance" just in case the economic poop hits the fan and there's a more agressive backlash than OWS.
I love the use of white space and the clean looks of Gmail, but it pains me to see when "UI designers" build an interface where 20% of the screen is taken up by useless objects.

I understand Google wants me to search and to use G+, but for user's sake, could you shove all that into 1 button and make it expand on click, so I could actually use my gmail screen for something like... answering emails.

Is this too much to ask?
Google, the new Yahoo!?

p.s. No, the "compact" view doesn't really solve the problem. The objects get smaller and narrower, but the top banner still takes up all the premium space.
Show HN: KeyedBits, my friend's socket friendly JSON alternative
Adding virtualenv is definitely one more layer of complexity, however installing everything to site-packages is asking for a lot of trouble to new users that don't understand whats going on. As soon as they have multiple versions of a library from different projects they will be an a world of hurt that they're unaware of how to untangle themselves. Starting with virtualenv from the beginning really will help prevent a lot of headache later.

If you're using Flask now and use it later and have two various versions you essentially get 1 working application and 1 broken one due to versions.
Handwriting recognition lets you jot down notes on a large diagram without stopping to switch contexts and find some sort of keyboard input mechanism.

The courier was designed for people who are spending most of their time drawing, and don't need the overhead of dealing with a keyboard. I've seen some similar Windows 7 devices floating around, and I'd be interested to try them out.

This obviously isn't marketed at coders, and it sounds pretty useful for some heavy-duty drawing tasks.
Depends on if a company needs 250k or 2m for traction.
BlackWeb 2.0 Founder Defends TechCrunch Founder Against Charges Of Racism
No kidding. Clearly they're using IIS, which has the equivalents of mod_rewrite built-in. Why would they keep using such awful URLs? The only other major company still using cruft like that I can think of is IBM. Totally unnecessary.
How a Few Bad Apples Ruin Everything
>Microsoft is very afraid of disrupting its main business

Maybe, but this was a shitty idea.
WebMynd is hiring Javascript developers in San Francisco and London.

We're working on making writing native mobile apps as easy as writing an HTML5 web app. We are backed by Y Combinator, Ron Conway, 500 Startups, Founders Fund and a syndicate of great angels. We have paying customers.

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This is a really bad month for iPhone people: There is an app freeze in December, so all our main projects are in a rush to hit that all the time.
No worries, fully agree more people need to be using and using it to what its capable of.
This is not the purpose of this document.
Agreed on all these points; you're right, I've seriously played down the difficulty of addressing model error, which in reality usually overwhelm the other two sources of error anyways.

I understand this all too well - I once blew more than six months (and also burnt myself out, ending up in a long period of career-related depression, but that's another story) on a fixed-bid contract that I had quoted based on a three week estimate. Why?

Because the last .5% of error to reach the acceptance threshold ended up requiring a model that was several times the complexity (over 5x as much code, seriously mathy shit, too, and I'm saying that as someone with a background in mathematical finance...) of the one that got me to that plateau, which I had assumed would be enough to do the job.

The "lesson learned" there was that it's seriously foolish to submit fixed bids for modeling problems, unless you've previously fully solved the exact same problem (within epsilon) to the required accuracy. I don't care if you have a reasonable expectation that you can hit the target based on domain knowledge, if you haven't seen the data before, you have no freaking clue what you're dealing with - you might need to blow two weeks sanitizing the data before you can even think about modeling (I did), and you might discover that the "3 million" data points that the client promised are mostly irrelevant to the behavior that you're being asked to model, so you spend the next week trying to track down other data sources, and more time negotiating those transactions. Given all that, you're likely to end up doing long term open-ended research, which is fine if someone wants to pay you for your time and is willing to accept a reasonable chance of failure, but those sorts of tasks are most definitely not typical development projects: my rule of thumb these days is, if I would be able to publish an academic paper in a legit peer reviewed journal if I did the project by myself instead of for a company, then it's not a deliverable suitable for a fixed bid.

Another word-to-the-wise: you're doubly stupid if you agree, as I did, to both an accuracy target and a model performance one, triply so if you also neglect to specify in the agreement what hardware they'll be evaluating performance with respect to...

Better yet, just don't do this type of stuff as a consultant unless and until you really know the game, it's way too easy to go wrong and end up screwing over both yourself and your clients.
One of the signals that we've said that we use in the Panda algorithm that launched in April is how many users blocked a particular site.

A new launch last week is that you can now import blocked sites from Chrome into Google.com. That way your blocked sites will work wherever you sign in. More info: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/10/export-your-sites-b...
Couldn't agree with you more. Right now we just built a feature that we see as core to the product. In terms of what we want to offer writers, it's:

1. Control over their own content. That's why we liked the idea of building on Dropbox and using plain text. No lock in, everything you write is always on your machine.

2. We've worked out revenue numbers, and if we can provide a simple way to publish and consume ebooks that takes up a tenth of one percent of the market not currently owned by Amazon, Apple, and BN; well, that's more money than I could ever spend.

3. Dropbox can definitely do it; but I don't see how it's in their interest. I'd imagine their newly launched API was developed in hopes of having people like us build things on their platform. They've build a great hard drive in the sky, I don't think that people should fear to build on that any more than people should have feared building on top of traditional hardware.

From what we discussed, publishing on the web isn't easy if you're a writer who doesn't have an interest in blogging. We don't want to for people away from the tools available on their computer that they're comfortable with and we don't want you to have to know how to set up a web site (Wordpress, while great, is a PITA to set up for non-technical users).

We're hoping by providing ways for authors to broadcast their content and the tools to analyze traffic, they'll be able to bring their own readers in. Once we have some people writing, we can better enable discovery of new content.
Can anyone copy-paste it here? It doesn't load for some reason.

EDIT: It seems there's a non-JS version which works: https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petition-tool/response/promoting...
Homemade Nyan Cat costume
Atlassian also has bitbucket, which is a direct competitor to github and priced at $10/month for 10 developers or $25/month for 25 developers. So, it's only $240 a year for 20 developers (https://bitbucket.org/plans). It may not have all the features of github, but they provide basic git hosting, wiki, and issue tracking. Do the extra features of github justify 20x higher price?

They also have a free plan for up to 5 developers.
Twitter Stories
What do you mean by you are "overloaded with multiple start up projects"?
SEEKING WORK - Washington DC; remote work is fine

I am a web developer with significant experience with Python/Django, Linux system administration, and HTML5/CSS3/JQuery. I understand both Git and Mercurial, and validate my code with both pep8 and the W3's HTML validator.

Contact me at hn-2011-11@marteydodoo.com
Top de favoritas
> And do remember that the "creation versus consumption" thing is a talking point originally introduced by... Microsoft!

Really? I didn't know that. When did they create this distinction?
Uses of Touch Screen Exhibit Laptop Computers
Thanks. In retrospect this seems like the only way you can guarantee eventual consistency anyway, so I suppose I should have assumed it.
Ask HN: Startup development infrastructure - ec2, cloud services or own servers?
I'm just starting a job with a startup and we'll now have a team of developers instead of just one—which means setting up source control, continuous integration and backups.

Anyone have any advice on best practices or good solutions to this? We're considering either an ec2 instance, a physical server in our office, or a reasonable set of cloud services.

Details: a few developers and a designer, Java web apps and an Android app, probably Jenkins for continuous integration, git for source control.
We're hoping to target technical writers from the onset as they'll be the ones most comfortable with plain text and formatting using Markdown. Hopefully we can then leverage that momentum to bring in other writers.

Any other genres you can think of that might be a good fit?