skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
MBA is definitely much much easier than getting an engineering degree. Went out to the bars 4 nights a week during my MBA and only did the same once a week during my undergrad. Everything is softer, the said part was that they had to dumb down a lot of the data modeling, quant, finance, econ, etc because most of the class struggled with algebra let alone calculus. We never touched a diff eq in the MBA program.
I can't speak to NetBSD, but FreeBSD doesn't put any user-installed programs in /bin or /usr/bin, they all go into /usr/local. Since bash isn't distributed as part of the base system, it goes into /usr/local/bin/bash
Fine, show me somewhere that doesn't use a tender-contract model.

If something is actually too inefficient, the costs will stop them and they'll come up with a plan that is "efficient enough".

Why do you think companies seek monopoly concessions, or that distributors seek same from producers in the private marketplace? That's what the current litigation over trash disposal contracts in Sf turns upon: http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2011/07/san-franciscos-garba...

Meanwhile, other approaches to competition in the garbage industry have historically proved problematic: http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cb_7.htm http://clevelandmob.com/warofwaste.html http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2008/november/galante_110408
Hey!, thanks for the comment .. actually im kinda afraid for the quality of the people there.

Would be great to get a beer (or pisco (?)) there on Santiago :).
Paleroscorner
Looking for religious products, I found this website and they do have a lot of interesting religious items. Check it.
Skeptics Take Another Look at Social Sites (2005)
I have a free account with Backify and did not receive that email.
Entrepreneurship is an art form and a means of self expression. Not everyone needs to be a paint, write, draw, sing...but painters gotta paint.
isuppli did a "preliminary virtual teardown" listing a BOM of $209
http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/Amazon-Sells-Kin...
My thoughts as well. Without any context, this is pointless.
The HN title is misleading. The speaker visited a B-school and advised students to increase their understanding of technology, which is of course a good thing. Of course, a B school grad who has dabbled in Ruby is not really going to be qualified to "evaluate if somebody technical is good or not".
When I was in college I made a laminated pocket-size printout of the Astronaut Candidate Basic Qualifications and carried it in my wallet every day, and it actually inspired me often to study harder and to go running.

I think it's hard to overestimate how much benefit the space program has had just in terms of how much it has inspired people to study math, science, and engineering -- or how much further that inspiration would go if we were sending astronauts to destinations beyond low-Earth orbit.
I was aghast when I read that the Square COO didn't see much value in NFC (http://gigaom.com/2011/09/26/square-mobilize-2011/). After spending a lot of time in Seoul where it's possible to pay for a ton of stuff via T-money card (a clipper-card-like NFC card for the public transit system), I hate pulling out my card to swipe or counting cash.

NFC can phenomenally improve the experience of nearly everything we do right now, and I expect Tagstand to bring the NFC revolution to the US.

Can't help but be a bit jealous of these guys though, their execution has been amazing, they seem to be doing everything right! If you're looking to do some NFC stuff, I'd recommend Tagstand in a heartbeat.
>It kind of pisses me off that the US is having to buy seats on Soyuz launches.

it is normal for any high tech endeavor to outsource mundane/janitorial work. Russia and US mastered this non-reuseable type of space flight decades ago. It would not make any sense for NASA to go back and implement the same system now. What would be great is if NASA used the time and money to implement a more advanced and efficient system - Shuttle was a great endeavor and its lessons need to be implemented into the new systems. And by the way, for example, while Russia ferries NASA atrounauts, Russia, or anybody else except NASA, has no ability to [successfully] send an actual Mars probe or create JWST (which impact on science and overall enlightment of the human race would possibly be bigger than even Hubble's one). So stop being pissed off and start writing the code for the mirrors alignment:)
I think it comes down to, which matters? I wrote code for OS 9 (via PowerMops, of all things), and for OS X (I shipped two major Cocoa apps), so I'll vouch for the fact that you are technically 100% correct. On the other hand, what became OS X had a radically different design than Rhapsody: even comparing OS X 10.0 to OS X 1.2, the former could run apps natively that could also run on OS 9, the former could read HFS+ filesystems, the former had apps like QuickTime, the former ran Classic apps that couldn't legitimately run natively right alongside the newer Cocoa/Carbon apps, the former had legacy APIs like OpenTransport that the latter lacked. You can argue, correctly, that, technically, OS X is more NeXTSTEP than Mac OS. But I'll give Isaacson some space. His misunderstanding is well within the bounds of what I experienced within the non-Apple programming community at the time. I'd cut him some slack.
Elegant Weapons
Perhaps the OP was referring more to the student who turns in a GUI made with VB for an assignment that called for a console app made with C++. "But, it's a GUI! And GUI's are way more advanced than the command line!"
"Steve - it is Steve, right? You say this gadget of yours is for ordinary people. What on earth would ordinary people want with computers?" (Pirates of Silicon Valley)
You might also be interested in DARPA's similar challenge: http://www.shredderchallenge.com/
Well, just to play devil's advocate to the article, foursquare (to pick one example) is something that nobody wanted, surely. 'Make people want something' could be equally important..?
If you'd like remove Preview then you can use the CSS from this post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3194164 to disable it.

conradfr: You may also be interested in the CSS snippet in the above post since it will make the Cache link show next to the URL.
I liked to imagine astronauts as individuals who excelled so much in their given fields that they stood out and were actively recruited by NASA. Instead, I find out that NASA posts job postings and interviews people just like everyone else. This would be mildly concerning other than the fact that it appears to be working.

Edit: I wonder if they are asked silly interview questions such as "If you were stuck on the moon with only three items, what would you want them to be and why?"
I'm not sure this really answers the question he originally posed. Sure, painters gotta paint and entrepreneurs gotta build, but whether its world changing or not is irrelevant. Some people want to do world changing things, some don't, and some stumble into it on accident.

Whether or not its world changing, a lot of the rules are pretty much the same.
Steve Jobs: Great Idea is WORTHLESS without Execution
The number of academics and graduate students in the world
The Chicago grid actually does extend well into Indiana, and its numbering system makes slightly more sense. It'd be nice to have a version of this for the Second City.
Well. It's the paper that made the topic break out.
Thank you.

I think Square are ultimately technology agnostic, but they don't want the "nfc = payments" meme to spread, not quite sure why. But yes, after travelling through Asia and seeing nfc payments in action, I totally agree.

The Hong Kong anecdote is true. I was surprised that places wouldn't accept credit card but would happily accept my transit card for payments. It's a big opportunity in other emerging markets.
Hermancain.com 404
In my defense, I did try: https://github.com/holman/spark/pull/34/files
PS: using https works too (Silk doesn't proxy HTTPS)
While many of these shanties are home to daily wage laborers and poor migrants, other residents are people with better-paying jobs who could move to better housing, but stay for the convenience.

That is the most surprising line of the article, though given what I've heard about traffic in India, it seems almost reasonable.
whys that?
> * Math education is generally broken in the US. That means that students are not ready for the rigourous thinking and numeracy demanded in STEM. They struggle understanding the basics of mathematics and computational thinking because they never have had it before, so the 'elite' students who do know what they are doing stand out.

Also even the programs considered good, generally AP or IB, are chock full of bad incentives. Most rankings are based upon pass rates, making the dominant strategy teaching students to perform well on the test by analyzing problem frequencies and released grading guides. This ends up being teaching an algorithm rather than reasoning skills.
The Joy of Actually Really Truly Telling the Truth For Real
When I had a job in Congress, 1,000 form letters pretty much counted as 1 letter. It wasn't hard to send one form letter in response in just 5 minutes to everyone.

An individually written letter--not a copy and paste job--gets the most attention.
The Road to Fraud Starts with a Single Step
While it sounds great that someone is taking a stab at making transferring money easier and cheaper, they are clearly missing a few crucial points.

First, they are complaining credit card companies charge them for their service - on the other hand, those companies do have costs for building and maintaining their systems and all costs that come with it. We will leave the question whether their prices are reasonable or fair aside for now.

Another benefit I get from CC transactions: when I send money to the wrong person or got scammed, I can just have VISA cancel it and I get my money back. In the good 10 years I have been using my own CC(s) I needed to do that maybe 2 or 3 times and it worked absolutely flawlessly. You cannot just cancel a bank transaction and get your money back like that.

Also, wiring money abroad is going to be a much bigger problem for them.

But there is a far more fundamental flaw in their logic:

> "We think, in the long term, sending money should be as easy and effortless as finding a friend on Facebook."

The reason anything money-related is so over-regulated and cumbersome and full of regulations and bureaucracy is not just "the man keepin' ya down, bro" and neither is it only stupid people who only try to come up with empty regulations to bill you.
All that is in place to fight against money laundry and help make it more difficult for worldwide organized crime to make easy use of their illegal cash. The very reason you can not just send money as easily and effortlessly as friending someone on facebook is: if you could, your first customers would be organized crime. They cannot wait for new possibilities to launder money easier and faster.

I am wondering how they can be moving 50 million a week without all sorts of agencies cracking down on them? This has got to be heaven for small and big time drug (or weapons, humans) sellers as of now.

So ultimately, it makes me sad this doesn't look like a promising replacement for the paypal overlords.
Basically. Are there very many people who would generate sparklines, using a sh program - somewhere that has sh but not awk or sed?
A fixed bug https://github.com/holman/spark/issues/19 With HEAD:

$ spark 3 4 9
▃▄▇
Is Cloud a Commodity And Why Not?
I think that this 'world changing' stuff is diluting the power of peoples' mindsets. How could you convincingly believe that, let's say Foursquare, is world changing? And that's a successful enough example. Why not just that it's a 'money earning' idea, and have the potential for business growth be the motivating factor before you start worrying about solving real problems?
The problem is blocking google.com javascript will also block recaptcha on any domains that use it (a lot do), which they ever so helpfully moved from recaptcha.org to google.com.
Its weird how they did the math here, they said 30-60M/Month or 350M/yr, that math is busted, is 360M on the low end and 600M on the high end.
Which puts them at $360M/$500 transaction size)$0.25 = $180,000 or on the high end,
$600M/$500 transaction size)$0.25 = $300,000
MIT unveils computer chip that thinks like the human brain
It depends on the office. If you can get the Legislative Assistant, maybe. Chances are you are going to get a Staff Assistant (the lowest paid person in the office) or anintern. Then it is just up to whether or not they take notes and/or how well they take them.
Early this year, the NY Times had an article about NASA losing astronauts to private companies (like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic) because NASA cancelled the Ares I and Constellation programs. Who wants to be an astronaut if you are unlikely to fly?

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/science/space/24astronaut...
Even if the product isn't used on many occasions, the best aspects of it and the teachings from running it often are. I think the aquihires allow experimentation that would be hard to achieve within the acquiring company.

The aspect I dislike is when startups say that they are in for the long haul then sell a few months later. Makes it hard to trust a startup that the investment in time you spend to get up and running on their product will be worth it.
The problem with recruitment for software jobs ... is you (UK)
Huh. TIL. Goes to show that understanding Greek or Latin roots doesn't always help you.
Google+ is about to launch a photo and video API
Asking "why?" in general is a good place to start, because there's also:

--Why isn't anyone else doing this? (Depending on your idea, they probably are. Hint: if it's idea A + B = C, they are.)

--Why me? (If you can't answer this, then it shouldn't be you.)

--Why this and not something else? (If you can't muster up some passion, save yourself the time.)

In other words, "why?" is one of the toughest questions to answer, and keep answering because you can always ask "why?" again. But if you CAN answer it, you may just have something.
Understood.

But here has Google has really made anything more human-friendly? They've simply removed a standard boolean operator in database search syntaxes because they noticed people were not using it (did people even know it existed?), or using it incorrectly. Does this make search more human-friendly somehow?

It certainly makes easy-to-type, using known standard operators, boolean searches more troublesome.

And the reason they have removed this operator?

Marketing. For something having nothing to do with search.
People don't want products; they want solutions.

If you're building a product for any other reason than solving a real customer's problem, you're making a mistake.

A true visionary solves a problem that customers don't even realize they have yet (and is only called visionary if he succeeds).
in a sense, it is still a competitive salary
Its most likely that you would need to build at least 20-30 apps that some of them will make 1 or 2$ a day.

I would recommend to focus on 1 app only and put all your coding, marketing, promoting and design chips in this app.
Yes, that figured into my decision to leave a top 5 CS program. The best students were so far ahead that I thought, "Wow, I obviously don't know the first thing about programming- I guess I'm just a lowly diletante." My other best subject was English, so I figured I might as well do that, get the degree, and I'd still be able to teach myself what I needed to know about CS. It was all going so well until all the job postings started requiring a CS degree...
foursquare (to pick one example) is something that nobody wanted, surely

I think local merchants desperately wanted a way to use social networking to connect with customers and get them coming back. My local sushi place has a deal, check in 3 times and get a free appetizer. Users wanted a new, fun way to use the GPS on their smartphones, and they were looking for something more engaging than Twitter or Facebook.

I can say with 100% certainty that Foursquare addressed both needs nicely. I'm not a Twitter user, but I used Foursquare religiously in the early days. I spent more time (and money) becoming a regular at said sushi place just to defend my mayorship.
@steventruong It's not just about building. How you build and what you build are dramatically different on the spectrum from small/lifestyle to massive/global. There's a big difference between Google or Apple and 37Signals. The way a company gets financing, thinks about scaling a business, thinks about selling a business, thinks about hiring, etc. These are all core to how a business grows, how it scales, how to think about the value in the business (cash vs equity). In technology businesses, those sorts of decisions are usually made very early in a company's formation and baked into the DNA. The types of founders that want to build a massive company are usually pretty different from the types of founders that don't.
The one I work for is. The one that provides my cable modem is too. I don't know how others are, but if those two are, I should assume it's more common than you think.
Spot on. I'm a big fan of the "Why me" as well
Sounds like he means the open source tools startups are generating can be used to target areas they are ignoring.
In all of the news and outcry surrounding SOPA, this is the most puzzling thing. I would be surprised to learn that the lobby of those in support of this bill is stronger than of those against.

Unless I'm wrong about the relative strength of these opposing lobbies, it hardly makes sense that SOPA seems to have so much traction among legislators.
Art of Science
Yeah. But on top of that, people often don't seem to know what they want, so the whole premise seems iffy in the first place. On top of that, i think focussing on 'why now' leads dilution of ideas, in the sense that too many people seem to jump onto an ailing bandwagon when it's a bit late, because well, now's the time.
>PS: I wish people would stop with the lazy and "funny" comments. It's like wading through crap.

Indeed. I think the submission being a light/fluff piece brings out commenters who otherwise would stay away. That's not a complaint about the submission, however. It's both informative and, on a deep and nerdly level, really cool.
Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter
I don't understand what you're saying.

The first problem is similar to the second, yes. They both still need to be solved, so what is your point?

Unreliable services are everywhere. So what's your universal solution for dealing with them? I'll give a concrete example: suppose I have a JSON service being consumed by a Javascript web UI, and my service needs to hit some kind of authentication backend. In the event that the authentication backend server is [pick one: down, giving 500 errors, being slow], what kind of response does my service give to the Javascript app, and what kind of message or visual cue does the app give to the user? If you think the answer is something other than "it depends on exactly what the application does", then I disagree.

If you think latency is the problem, why are you talking about building in latency? It seems like you actually think chatty APIs are the problem. And, yes, chatty APIs can cause slowness. But chatty APIs often exist because they are the simplest possible design. Once you realize that there is too much back-and-forth you may have to sacrifice API usability and simplicity by adding caching and eager-loading code. Again, you think this is just something that solves itself?
I think that there's no question you have to do some things right to succeed, but many people do things right and fail, because ultimately, a lot of it is just pure luck.
A true visionary solves a problem that customers don't even realize they have yet (and is only called visionary if he succeeds).

This is true, but the timing and pricing have to be right as well. Look at the Apple Newtwon...it was too early and it failed. More than a decade later, the iPad is a runaway success.
I spoke too soon, just received the email.
You didn't say if the cosmologist is theoretical or experimental. A scientist would need a solid experimental record to be very competitive as a mission specialist astronaut candidate. (And of course an applicant for pilot astronaut has basically zero chance without top performance as an experimental test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base on her resumé.)
+1 for Michael's comment.

Making something people want is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for start-up success, and it's one that I see tripping up early-stage startup founders the most. Its incredible how many people build in a vacuum for 6+ months, and then release an overly-complex product that doesn't address a single real customer need.

Being able to rationalize "why now?" is much easier after the fact, as the OP demonstrates with his list of his now-successful companies. Doing the same looking forward is much trickier.
Como controlar mis emociones
Suggestion Tampa Bay Vs Green Bay Live Stream NFL Football Week11 online hd tv
Re-implementing is much easier than implementing. Scipy source code is all available, right? Besides, we aren't trying to duplicate the entire scipy stack and ecosystem. We are just trying to make it easier to do common scientific computing in Ruby. Also, trying to do it in new ways.

You seem to be saying that ruby is python, just with perl's inconsistency and unreadableness. The syntax differences between python and ruby (more than 2% IMHO) amount to very large differences in code organization. The ruby community places a high premium on brevity and clarity, and ruby's flexible syntax facilitates this. Part of the reason monolithic code bases are more rare in ruby is because we tend to do more with less code. We are talking about two very different forests.

We weren't going to be working on Theano or SAGE anyway, just doing basic science computation to solve real problems in our fields. That's really the problem, we find ourselves quite productive doing science in ruby at the moment, despite its relative immaturity in this area. It's hard not to imagine what we could do with a few more foundational tools. It really is a small cost to enable us to be able to do science in ruby. Plus, building scientific computing libraries is good fun. Every community should have the chance. As Abe Lincoln suggested, 'Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself.'

Is it so terrible to want to do science in the language you most enjoy and are most comfortable with? To continue with the maladroit quoting of Abe Lincoln, "it's best to not swap horses when crossing streams."

I made the point further down, but will restate it: if ruby hadn't persisted in existing (the nerve!), would django exist today? I find it hard to believe that this is a zero-sum game, and I wish python and scipy every success. Perhaps the most valuable scipy contribution we could make will come by making sciruby something worth borrowing ideas from?
> * Simply put, in Europe you make enough cash so at the end of the month you dont ever have to consider you will be in debt unless you want to buy a ferrari on your way back from work.*

I am from Europe and this is a completely ludicrous and false statement. If anything I would expect my USA counterparts to get way more salary after tax each month simply for the ridiculous taxes I am paying here (48%) plus we are paying some more taxes on ANYTHING we buy including food and water.

There is, however, a big difference between spending mentality - most Europeans shy away from going deep into debt and will typically only take loans on housing and cars but not to spend on luxury and entertainment; we by and large don't have that culture of ver-spending is ok and then keep shifting the debt from credit card to credit card. Matter of fact, I don't even know if VISA here would let me do that more than once...