skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Glide ratio, or lack thereof. Swept wing fighters usually have a glide ratio of like 1.5:1, meaning you go 1.5 feet for every foot you drop. With the engine out you've lost the hydraulic boost you have over the control surfaces so the aircraft is going to become more and more difficult to control as it accelerates. Also, crap glide ratios mean it's much easier to get into an accelerated stall that almost instantly becomes a spin...and then you're really screwed.

And the low glide ratio means that even if the control issues weren't there, you're not gliding your way out of a t-cell. I've flown over a flat-top cumulonimbus once with a friend who owned an Epic LT turboprop. Those things are...well, words fail. Epic ^ inf.
Slides are designed to keep the audience on point as the conversation goes on and to ensure that the audience isn't reading the slides instead of listening to the talk.

These slides get it while leaving a 'alright, that was memorable' feeling as you walk away
Here's the Github repo https://github.com/ricodigo/shapado
If you want bikers to respect car drivers, stop speeding and blowing yellows. Virtually all car drivers don't respect these two laws, yet they get upset at the large minority of bikers that blow reds and stop signs.
Share Commonly Used Documentation for Web Design & Development
I thought that maybe this was a well-known anecdote that I hadn't heard about. But this passage in the Jobs bio was basically the only instance (besides a few random blogs) in which that quote appears. It's kind of humorous that Jobs, in his last years while talking to his biographer, chose to retell his particular categorization of Jef Raskin.

Also, it's just an interesting anecdote of how much personal relationships/emotions got in the way of business. Raskin had to have someone else -- who was not a "shithead" in Jobs's worldview -- convince Jobs to take an interest in Xerox PARC, which ended up providing a huge revelation for Apple's technology.
Dissection of a viral launch
Unfortunately no. Netflix has been recommending "Hitch" with Will Smith since I've been a member. 8*(
Good Business Writing is Not a Mark Twain Novel
>"I think I have a simpler test: Do you have a customer?"

Hopefully, a person's optimism and lack of experience still allows them to distinguish between actual customers and possible customers [Hint: until money changes hands a person is not a customer].

One thing which struck me after reading the article was the difference between today's typical customers and those of Jacques' younger days.

Although today's base of potential customers is much bigger due to the expansion of computing devices into the consumer market segments, their expectations about software costs approach $0.00.

Conversely, back in the day, the smaller market expected to pay real commercial money for software - i.e. one typical customer could sustain a person for a year whereas today one customer won't even get you fries off the $0.99 menu after the app store takes their cut.
US H-1B visas to Indians increase by 24%
I would be willing to carry something-er-other in my wallet which would alert my home automation system (which I don't have) to my presence/location in my home. I usually leave my wallet in our bedroom when sleeping, so it would still be accurate at night. My wife might be willing to wear a small ring or something like that, but it would be a harder sell.
I'm a native Sydneysider, but I have to agree that Melbourne would be the place I'd go to start a startup. Apart from the costs (lower) and the general frictional costs of life (getting around takes less time) and the coffee (oh, the coffee!), Melbourne just has a much better atmosphere for creative work. Sydney seems to have mutated into a town where all the smart people are either in law or finance, and the highest ambition a person can have is to have a slightly better view.
I would love to buy the book about his experience, but copies are way expensive ($60-$160).

http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Rode-Thunder/dp/0135482712

Perhaps if all us HNers could click on the "I'd like to read this on Kindle" link the publisher might re-release it:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/digital/fiona/detail/request-kindle...
Worth it if it can save you a few dollars/month and make you more comfortable in the process.
More importantly it is poor grammar.
Are you suggesting that there could be a CLI for creating and altering graphics, which was even 1% as effective as photoshop?
I have to agree, Melbourne is just too cold to live in year round. The idea sounds great and I hope it works.
It seemed to me, as an ignorant bumpkin who visited from Plant Normalperson, that social status in Sydney is based entirely on the square metres of the harbour you can see from your home.
Yeah, and you will also NEVER be a computer scientist. You will never be hired by a team building a compiler, or a team building a database engine. You condemned yourself to a programmer title for the rest of your life, doing mind numbing business logic for the rest of your life (unless you decide to go back to school that it).

Besides higher education is NOT about learning skills immediately useful for employment. It's about so much more. It's about mental gymnastics, about stretching your mind, it's about dedicating 5 years of your life to nothing but bettering yourself, reading and learning anything you can get your hands on, exchanging ideas with other great minds, and becoming better you.

This is a unique time, that can't be reproduced otherwise simply because you never will have the time (unless you are a millionaire and don't have to work) to do that any more, and when you become older you become less plastic and more set in your ways.

Dropping out of school is a tragedy really for any young mind. So is choosing easy school. If you are going to study anything, study hard things (Math vs English). They change you more.
Wasn't one of John McCarthy's original AI papers about an intelligent thermostat?
Inconsistency across browsers was one of the things that inspired the development of the various js libraries we use today, including jQuery. Despite the existence of standards (even standards with comprehensive test cases), they are needed to abstract away the differences between the IE, Firefox, Safari etc DOMs.

If browsers were to embed a native implementation of jQuery, you'd then have to have some kind of meta-jQuery library to abstract away the differences between IE jQuery, Safari jQuery and Firefox jQuery (etc).
I don't think that anything we do is natural just because we are a product of nature. It's getting into definition and semantics here but something like cross breeding a chicken and a pig can't be called natural as far as I'd say.

I suppose that is not possibe but can you imagine chicken bacon?
Definitely agree with the advice.

One objection that people often have is that "why should I do something that's not ultimately scalable and that I'll have to stop doing anyway?". But what they're missing is that when you're first starting a company that's when the fragile young plant needs the greatest care and nurture. In my opinion you should actually go out of your way to do things that you KNOW won't be possible to do manually or personally later because this not only increases the chances of getting off the ground successfully, but one day you're going to miss the early days when it was just you and those precious few people that valued your product enough to use it before it became a hit. So enjoy connecting with them and don't think of it as a chore.
Users of Photoshop or InDesign or Illustrator or Maya or Logic or Premiere Pro most definitly do express themselves

But in those programmes, the GUI is more like a keyboard of a CLI than the actual programme. The GUI controls are used as tools to use on the main area, the drawing area. A graphical programme like photoshop presents you with a massive empty whitespace for you to draw in. It doesn't tell you where to draw, or what colour to draw. It allows you choose any colour you want. Once you paint some red, you can then paint any other colour.

In this way the programmes you list confirm the "unbounded, "lack of constrains" and "newbie unfriendlyness" of the CLI.

A newbie doesn't know what commands to type into bash, and they don't know what colours to put down first in photoshop.
LOL - no I'm not Reed Hasting. I just throw stuff in there that I hear is good. I don't watch everything all the way through if it's not.

I watch about 2-3 movies and 2 TV shows a week though so it does take me a while to get through my queue.
And yet I note you haven't actually challenged my point: A subsidy is when the government pays for food, then gives it out for free (it costs less to the consumer than it would otherwise.) An investor pays for food, then sells it at a higher price, extracting the value for himself (it costs more to the consumer than it would otherwise.)

That's the only difference; in neither case do the people who wind up actually eating the food, i.e. everyone else, have a choice what to pay.

You're trying to draw this distinction between "voluntary" and "involuntary" payments which doesn't exist in the real world. I guess taxes are supposed to be involuntary, while food purchases are voluntary? Except that in the real world, if you don't buy food you die, and when one group of people who know they will never be hungry have the power to raise food prices across the board... That's a very twisted idea of "voluntary."
"why have the display to begin with?"

My guess is that many consumers have replaced thermostats before and have found the process fairly painless. Or, maybe they understand the idea of replacing one dingus on the wall for another. The idea of cutting wires in one's basement is much scarier. Your suggestion is quite rational but probably hurts sales.
Lispings ala John McCarthy
Funny that as an example of unbounded UI he shows GUI version of Emacs. Overall I feel that his division between GUI and CLI is rather arbitrary.
We've already seen it over and over again: once a GUI is actually combinable, it may as well be a CLI or code.
What Startups can Learn From Restaurants
89hm,n / would be good if more copmanies used node
This automated approach is fine, but only if you don't try to pretend it's personal. SlideRocket does this really well - sign up for SlideRocket and watch the helpful emails roll in. Not too many, and always with a good tone and good content. But none of them pretend to be produced by hand in Gmail.

Sending personal emails to the first 1,000 customers is great, and switching to automated lead nurturing after that is great. Partly for scale - there are a hundred high-value things a CEO can do once a business gets going. But also because customers don't think it's appropriate to get a personal email once you grow to a certain size.

Anecdote: I've been heavily involved in our sales process at Zencoder since the beginning (as CEO), including writing personal emails to 500-1000 signups early on. (We've stopped that by now, but it was the right thing to do early on.) A few months ago, our sales director and I went to meet with a high-value prospect. At that point, their financial value wasn't huge (hundreds per month), but we knew they would grow, and that they'd be a good reference customer. So we pitched them and everything went well.

I ended up meeting with them a second time, and they asked me point-blank: "How is your business viable, if we're only paying you $X00/month?"

The subtext was this: "If we're only paying you $X00/month, and we get the CEO in for two in-person meetings, then you must be small, and we must be a critical customer for you to win." Customers should feel important, but never critical.

This came to a head when we sent them a final proposal. They asked for a price break and concessions, and said explicitly that because they were an important customer for us, we'd give them these things concessions. In reality, they were no more important than 20 other prospects we were working with. But because we brought our CEO into sales meetings on a small deal, they thought we were smaller than we were.
Would army service not be similar to getting a degree, in that you are focused on a daily bases on core learning? It sounds as if your service experience has been as valuable as some schools.
I compiled some of these posts and some other thoughts on LISP (far far from completely formed, but perhaps amusing) into a blog post:

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/10/25/lispings-ala-joh...
Looking forward to someone porting this to WebGL. This animation could be realtime in your browser.
The Vickers Report is Useless and won't bring banking reform
FYI: Typography is totally fucked on win7+chrome
http://imgur.com/7Ad0d
When you say it only tracks the commit count, is it just a simple counter (e.g. "256 total commits across all branches") or does it break it down at all (by repo, branch, day, week, month, etc)?

The first section of the website could be more clear in this regard...
IContact
AppSumo Business of Software Deals (free)
I find it's installation method, like most PHP programs, to be somewhat off-putting. Yeah, it's great for a development box--place in front of a web server and hit the browser to finish up--but it's a nightmare for automated deployments: source code and configuration are two different assets that _should_ exist in two different places on the filesystem. When they do it's reliable to update one or the other without issue, else it's a bit chancy for my tastes.
Thank you for this insightful and informative article. Had no idea!
Which is a shame. Perth has awesome Californian-style weather, plenty of cashed-up mining millionaires for capital, 4 halfway decent universities and relatively low costs.
But only if the banks say you qualify. I know someone going through the process (last 5 months they've tried) and it isn't fun, or beneficial at this point.

Don't buy the hype. It has really stressed them, and despite needing that help (value has fallen below their purchase value, that's why they're underwater) they expect to be refused because of how they've been treated.
Sure. Check out the Lisp repl that is built into AutoCAD.
Judging from the agenda, Nokia World is primarily for developers.

Nokia Series 60 sold 116 million handsets a year, 36% worldwide market share.

Windows Phone 7 has roughly a 2% worldwide market share.

Yes, it's very easy to say "I don't know what it is, but I hate it." At a 2% market share, it doesn't make commercial sense for developers to pay attention.
This sounds interesting, but what kinds of commit statistics can I expect to see if I sign up?

Also, is there any way to get statistics on existing commits in a repo I have? It would be awesome if I could do something like:

cd ~/code/myproject
curl https://hulkort.herokuapp.com/load.sh | sh

and get back a URL with all my stats for that repo fully loaded.
in a format that the new system can understand

Or you can write your own converter - it probably takes ~30m to whip up something in Python.
One other thing that is also useful: for any automated message you send, make sure that it comes from a real address that you monitor. Many, many customers reply directly to the automated emails.
Watch How Nokia N9 Smartphone is Made
In the case of Maya (and his cousins like Houdini, [ex]Shake...) every gui action is a word in an embedded DSL/bindings api (mel script, hscript, python). Maybe Adobe products too, but the javascript parts aren't a cultural feature of the application. Maya is as macro-capable as Emacs, you operate buttons, open the console log, copy the last instructions and drag it into a toolbar to have a new operation.

Plus the underlying reactive dataflow model is like a limited mathematical language. The gap between GUI and CLI is short here. So even without relying on text, you still can build operators (Houdini does this to a great extent, even the skeletal system is build out of user-level geometric primitives)

Some software that took the growable GUI a step forward is Luxologic Modo, here GUI tools are combinators that you sequence in a `toolpipe` to suit your needs, kinda like building a function out of lower level ones.

I agree with jpalomaki (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3154076) there's room for different and more linguistic GUI.

To finish on a blurry note : text doesn't exist, bytes lead to intepretation/action aka a function of the application model, I see no real reason that visual interactions can't be made 'linguistic'
Hack initcwnd for faster page loading
My take on this is pretty much the same. Drop out if you have something else to do. Do not drop out to sit at home smoking, drinking and playing Xbox. or in more words: http://nerdr.com/should-i-drop-out-of-college-and-start-a-bu...
For the love of god, let us see an example.
Sure, a Graphical User Interface is likely the best interface for doing by-hand manipulation of graphics.

But is a Photoshop-like GUI the best UI for anything else?

Furthermore, don't some of those high-end packages you listed include a CLI component too?
I'm not the grandparent, but I use TikZ to "programmatically" create graphics in LaTeX. It is much faster and looks much better than what I produce in the GIMP. (See e.g. http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/.)

Of course, I'm drawing graphs and geometric objects, not trying to do "photo work" - but CLIs can be an excellent interface to some kinds of graphics.
Take the pain
The technical school I went to gave finals a low weight. You could phone it in and not change much, or you could do really well and bump your course average up a point.
> If the first OR statement is true, any good compiler will skip the next two clauses.

This has nothing to do with the compiler, it's part of the language specification. If your compiler doesn't comply with this, it's broken.
On the website "Activity sensors
Nest's activity sensors have a 150° wide-angle view so Nest knows when to set itself to Auto-Away."

At $249 though it needs to make some sort of sell that I can recoup more than those costs.
This conversation is like listening to some executive's over-caffeinated assistant trying to help her boss's overly Xanax'd therapist. Not sure what the take-away here is other than Eliza is such a lazy program. It just falls back onto open-ended questions when confused and doesn't really do anything productive at all.
Rhode Island Innovation Fellowship
From what I understand of it, the program is for folks who've gone upside down in their mortgage because of inflation and falling real estate value—not bad/underwater loans.
It sounds like they are actually trying to throw in some 'entertainment'/gamification features, according to the Wired article (http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/10/nest_thermostat/), such as a leaf icon (achievement badge) that shows up when you've set the temp to something eco-friendly. There's also a lot of potential with the web/mobile app, where system monitoring can be done in some interesting and interactive ways. I hate to bring in the cliches, but this actually has potential to have some kind of social media integration. A significant minority of people love keeping track of the personal data of their lives, and this can be another platform for exactly that.
The Rhode Island Innovation Fellowship is designed to stimulate solutions by Rhode Islanders to Rhode Island challenges. The program, made possible through the generosity of Letitia and John Carter and managed by The Rhode Island Foundation, provides seed funding for ideas to reap community benefit. Our goal is to invest in Rhode Island’s potential.

Rhode Island Innovation Fellows will receive up to $300,000 over up to three years to develop, test, and implement innovative ideas that have the potential to dramatically improve any area of life in Rhode Island.
This story also appears in Gavin Pretor-Pinney's The Cloudspotter's Guide, which is one of the more amusing and inspiring books about clouds I've come across.

There's a slightly more modern instance of someone surviving a CuNim under canopy: Ewa Wisnierska (and some other pilots) encountered the mother of all cloud suck during practice for 2007 paragliding world championships in Manilla, Australia. Ewa survived after reaching an altitude of 32600 feet, ostensibly because her unconscious body slumped in a position that steered her glider out of the storm by weight shift, and the accumulated ice in the canopy (paragliders are a ram-air airfoil of non-porous construction) caused a collapse which returned her to a survivable altitude. Another pilot, He Zhongpin, died after being struck by lightning in the same system.

There's a documentary called Miracle in the Storm which details Ewa's survival.
It's like everyone involved with Windows Phone is looking for reasons to take potential customers and make them keep saying "Well, maybe I want one of these at some point, but clearly today isn't the day to go buy one."

First, cut and paste is coming at some point, then it was delayed. Then Mango is coming at some point with multitasking and a bunch of other stuff. Now, handsets newer than a year old are only slowly trickling out, the country with the best OS-supported services is late getting them, and the handsets may or may not be coming to any given customer's carrier anyway.

To say nothing of all the time this gives people to settle in permanently with iPhone or Android in the meantime.

It's like a business school case study in how to keep customers from taking action.
Darn. I have a dual-fuel system (heat pump for spring/fall with natural gas for winter), so I think I'm out-of-luck for now. My current thermostat has an exterior temperature sensor and switches between modes when the outside temp drops below a certain level. Heat pumps are energy efficient on mildly cold days but don't work very well in the dead of winter. FYI, I live in Ohio.
"Physical interfaces (and by extension, GUIs) cannot combine at will to create new behavior."

'Physical' doesn't seem to quite capture the distinction he's after.

He uses a guitar as an example of an interface where you can combine at will, and it's a physical interface.
"more convenient than tracking down an uninstall link within the email"

Perhaps you should make your unsubscribe links easier to find?
You are talking about possibility. I have no doubt that it’s possible to manipulate images, sound and videos with CLIs. The question is whether that would be the optimal way.
No repo/branch data is tracked. But the time when the commit happened is saved. So it's possible to break it down to year/week/day/hour. You can set your timezone in the settings to get correct times.

Currently a commits per day graph is available.

And I agree with your suggestion for the homepage, it should be clearer and have graphics or example graphs. Thanks!
If one wants to build stuff like that -- I wonder - how do you do the low-tech stuff (the hardware that is not electronics but the plastics/aluminium shell, glass, etc.)? What skills/tools are required to actually create that? How do you get started if you can't afford mass-production at the beginning?
“But is a Photoshop-like GUI the best UI for anything else?”

It isn’t. Why should it? Is a hammer the best tool for anything but hammering?

“Furthermore, don't some of those high-end packages you listed include a CLI component too?”

I’m not sure how that’s relevant. I have no issue with CLIs or the way the author characterizes them. CLIs can be wonderful tools.