skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My office is in San Jose, which likes to call itself the capital of Silicon Valley. The best connectivity I can get is either a consumer-grade DSL connection for approx $60/month, or a symmetric T1 for approx $500/month. I can't get Comcast "business class" unless I want to spend tens of thousands of dollars trenching someone else's parking lot for the installation.

The same was true at my 2 previous office locations, so it's not like the current setup is an anomaly.

If I wanted to be right in the middle of downtown San Jose, I could be in the same building as MAE-West and could probably get sweet connectivity - but that location would make my clients sad (parking is tough and not free) so I'm not gonna do it.

I shared office space for awhile with a guy who had a fixed wireless install - it was OK (the connection was fast but sometimes flaky) but it still amazes me how tough it is to get meaningful connectivity in a major metropolitan area on the West Coast. DSL in that building was nigh-impossible because the copper wiring in the building was damaged in some way that the landlord and the phone company collectively refused to fix.
Bracing For a Solar Superstorm
http://www.rentjungle.com
No, it is just that exits are an easy to see measure of success. Any company that is no longer a startup or had significant traction would be a good measure of success as well.
That's pretty awesome. If you have more general hex-value editing needs in vim, I recently hooked up a color picking app that I wrote to vim. While over a hex value, you can hit a keystroke and launch the color selector. Any changes made to the color there are automatically update in vim:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h5VB9hUg-E
FWIW, you can enclose things in quotes to force strings to be searched verbatim. It's an extra character, true, but it does work.
This is very cool and would be helpful for more than just cars if it weren't in violation of the terms of use on Craigslist.
You can turn it around and ask: Really? Is the morale of the employees not worth the cost of a bagel?

Removing the small benefits sends a message to the employees -- and it's the wrong message to send.

In my company, we've had lots of nice little luxuries in our kitchen. Slowly, they removed these, bit by bit. They save an astonishingly small amount, but morale did suffer because of that. Our extra happiness at the workplace is not worth the cents to the management -- is basically the message.
The reason oil companies get a lot of their subsidies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_gimmick

Also, created the problem of sending so much money overseas.
he also has a book for individual investors, 'Unconventional Success', which is very good, and also skewers active fund managers.

the opportunities in the context of an endowment are somewhat different from those facing individual investors, ie alternative investments are less practical, tax and time horizon considerations are different.
I think we disagree on Google's legendary omniscience. Minimizing the years-long frustration I, and many I've talked to, have experienced because Google knows best is a hollow argument to me.

The quality of their product degraded and they just kinda... did nothing about it for awhile. It got so bad it had to turn into a press thing before they did something about it. The press is damn lazy, so for my money, that means something.

As to the rest – I share you admiration for that kind of gumption. Money can so easily blind and poison progress. So the strategy to continue evolving is sound! The tactics, though, are dubious.

I'd say that any changes to search need to be made with relevance, convenience and user satisfaction as inviolable factors. Anything else is playing with fire in a library, if you're Google.

Or maybe not. We'll see.

I just really want my 2007-era Google search back.
Doubtful. More likely pent-up demand for the next-gen iPhone.

Apple had in previous years been like clockwork - every summer, new iPhone. Then 2011, and no successor in July... so many people waited (I did). Also this is the first iPhone launch without AT&T exclusivity (both VZ and Sprint are alternatives to the big bad T)
In Haml:

.span3
= render :partial => "col1"
.span3
= render :partial => "col2"
.span3
= render :partial => "col3"
.span3
= render :partial => "col4"

Or, to do 3-col:

.span4
= render :partial => "col1"
.span4
= render :partial => "col2"
.span4
= render :partial => "col3"

Nothing in the partial needs to especially care about the grid (as long as its simple) --- but if it wanted to, it could nest columns.
Dividends are taxed like ordinary income (IIRC), so paying dividends would be sending money out to shareholders, it gets reduced by taxes, and then the shareholders have to figure out what to do with it that would return as much as Apple would. The best return would thus be likely re-investing it in Apple shares. Its then a smaller amount, due to taxes and thus there's no really positive effect of it. I think the mainstream thinking about dividends isn't quite right-- the value of each Apple share goes up a dollar for every dollar they retain, and more than a dollar for every dollar that Apple can re-invest in its business at a profit.

This is why, for instance, Warren Buffett doesn't pay dividends in Berkshire Hathaway.

Apple is a very fast growing technology stock. It's really not the kind of company that should pay dividends because it has lots of opportunities to invest that money profitably.

Its quite possible that Apple is contemplating a $50-$70B acquisition that is very strategic.
The $13.1B profit is the 4th best quarterly result in world history, the 2nd best in US history (Exxon Q308), and the best by far of any company outside of Oil & Gas. Not inflation adjusted of course.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_corporate_profi...
I see many great suggestions here, but calendar replacement has not been suggested yet.
this paper has a lot to say about the cause of programming complexity, Out of The Tarpit

This paper is highly regarded by some smart people, but every time I've tried to read it I've seen nothing of much value - only some obvious platitudes about complexity (including the bit about complexity being intrinsic to the problem vs. just the implementation), a lot of architectural gobbledygook (complete with boxes-and-lines diagrams), and some hand-waving about combining the functional and relational models. Has anything ever come of this? Specifically, any working systems?
You have no idea whether the author has "met enough variety of people."

Which would be why I said, "I think..."

driving is a 2d problem

Uh. Okay, sure. I submit to you that it's possible I was referring to more than simply driving, and that your claim of driving being a 2d problem is just silly.

Programming is not a deeply human activity, not in the least. It involves strict, logical thinking, abstraction, and hierarchy. You disrespect the variety of humanity by claiming it to be intrinsic.
Regarding your first complaint, I find that 90% of the time the suggestion for a different spelling is in fact the search I wanted. The 10% of cases where I was searching for something obscure do stick out in my mind more, but I'm OK with that. They've optimized for the common case, typos, which is a win overall. I haven't noticed any extraordinary synonym replacements myself, though, the stem's always been the same...

I hope their search quality improves. I understand it's an arms race with spammers, and they do give a lot of value for free minus ads. I guess I'm so attuned to identifying bad results by now that I haven't noticed much variability in results quality. But echo-chamber curation doesn't feel right, and the feel is important.
HTML5 and JS Command and Conquer
yeah, that's a major fail on our part. I'll add a notification that only USA is currently supported - thanks for the feedback I honestly hadn't even thought about international stuff yet :P
Very cool. What's the software stack behind this? How are you performing searches across all this very diverse data? For example, you must be doing some sort of text-analysis to retrieve the mileage property out of the text, no?
If you're following the call (fantastic liveblog from Jacqui Cheng at Ars[1]) really great exchange when they try to shoehorn the mac-windows analogy into mobile OS's:

Tim: I wouldn't classify it like Mac and Windows at all. The Mac has outgrown the market for over 20 quarters in a row, but still has a single-digit percentage of the worldwide market

whereas iOS, if you look at phones and tablets and iPod touch, we've sold over 315 million iOS devices

If you look at the NPD data, it shows in the US, and this is just looking at October & November, so part of our launch in October and all of it in November, it shows iPhone at 43% and Android at 47%

the Nielsen data from a few days ago shows iPhone at 45% versus Android at 47%

Comscore data that came out on October/November shows iPhone at 42% and Android at 41%

it seems that all of the data from the US would seem it's a very close race for iPhone, and I think on the iPad side, I think all of us inherently believe the iPad is way ahead

there's really no comparable product to the iPod touch out there

I wouldn't say it's a two-horse race. There's a horse in Redmond that always suits up and always runs and will keep running

So what we focus on is innovating and making the world's best products. We'll just keep doing that and somewhat ignore how many horses there are.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/01/apple-q1fy2012-liv...
Well at some point Google and Apple will both have so much cash on hand that either can consume the other in an 'all cash deal'. it will be an interesting benchmark to watch, the sum of their cash at the end of this quarter is $100B and climbing. GOOG's market cap is only 188B, so more than half way there :-)
What if you don't want to tell them who you are at all?

I.e., you block cookies.
You don't have to edit the CSS at all. You don't even have to open the file, ever, to use Bootstrap. Just link it in the head of your document like any stylesheet and use the class names from the documentation.

Want something on your page to be 3 columns wide? <div class="span3">...</div>

Want to make it 4 columns wide instead? <div class="span4">...</div>
Your examples are of cultural icons whose lifeworks were in music. It's possible that many who had not known of those music artists bought their albums after their deaths because they wanted to understand why people were grieving and perhaps people who were already fans bought more memorabilia since they miss the artist that they held so dearly.

But with Steve Jobs, it's unlikely that people think to themselves "Damn, who was this Jobs guy? Maybe I'll buy an iPhone/iMac to find out" since iPhones and Macs are not going to give them a connection to who Jobs was as a person. And compared to Lennon, Presley, and Jackson, Steve Jobs is less of an icon for the general public. Most people know Jobs as that Apple guy, but fewer actually know who he is and what he did. I have a teacher that thinks Jobs worked with Paul Allen and founded Apple when she really means to say Steve Wozniak.
Why are some parents against cochlear implants for their children?
It's great that Apple is reviving a stagnant market, but this isn't going to last forever. It's an artifact of soaring market share and turning smartphones and tablets into more than an executive toy.

It could go on for a long time, but all it takes is someone figuring out how to compete, and that's going to become more likely as their profile grows. Apple has earned its wealth, but it's too easy for them to forget what made it possible and slide into mediocrity.
Also fascinating is the amazing and innovative virtual machine that drives Prolog: the Warren Abstract Machine.

See: http://wambook.sourceforge.net/
It won't happen overnight, but this could be trouble for Google. If it was still Google vs. Yahoo, it would be no contest, but Bing is nipping at their heels (at least in terms of search quality) and is actually pretty damn good.
I have yet to encounter someone who was simply unable to grasp a mathematical concept or a concept in CS

I honestly don't know what to tell you. We can do the whole, "some people don't get it," "oh yeah, you just didn't teach it right," circular nonsense all day. I don't really care. All I can tell you is that I've been close to a number of people who would never be able to grasp programming in any meaningful way.

HN is an echo chamber of highly intelligent people, a disproportionate number of them in the Bay Area. I don't think HN participants have much of value to say about what people in general can and cannot do or understand.
On my laptop in Firefox the feedback button covers the keyword search. I suggest moving it to the upper right corner.
A week or two ago, I read the book _Willpower_ by psychologists Baumeister & Tierney. They include a chapter praising To-Do Lists.

Who should I believe, 2 famous psychologists who basically invented the entire subfield dealing with willpower, or a consultant business blogger?
Kevin Smith's SmodCast Pictures partners with Phase 4 to release indie films
Just in this context of a political system, having a self-interested politician is less dangerous than having an idealistic one. Mind you, there are good and bad idealists, but their impact is greater; and since politicians generally are negative, it's better their impact be restrained at least by that narrow sentiment.
If only they put their record-breaking profits into building factories and inspiring local workers, rather than relying on near-slave labor in a faraway land.
> "they're all proprietary B2B applications. It's some of the best work I've ever did, yet no one will ever find out about it online"

I used to work at Amazon on some meaty back-end-y things.

Then I had the same thought.

Now I write mobile apps, which I find to be more creatively challenging, and the amount of recruiter emails (and cold calls, really guys?) has jumped through the roof.

Another side benefit is that my parents now understand what it is I do for a living, and women apparently find my job intriguing for some reason.

It's even nicer that, if someone asks me "what have you done?" I just need to shove the phone across the table.
"Park City, UT (January 23, 2012) -- Berry Meyerowitz, President & CEO of Phase 4 Films, announced today that the company has entered into an exclusive distribution deal with SModcast Pictures, the production company founded and run by filmmaker Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy, Red State). Through the deal, Phase 4 obtains exclusive rights in the U.S. and Canada to exhibit and distribute up to twelve films per year under the newly created 'Kevin Smith and SModcast Pictures Presents' label. Phase 4 will release four of these films theatrically each year, which will include a live tour with Kevin Smith, similar to that of Red State, with the remainder of films being released via all other traditional and digital platforms."
Steve Blank's New Book - The Startup Owner's Manual
I like to separate my work and life (especially when working for someone else) and I don't think I would like to live in a company owned building.
wow. we seriously forgot to add Infiniti - will fix tonight, thanks!!!!!!

::facepalm::
Free is Bad for Business..
Is it even legal? It seems like this would open up all sorts of discrimination issues.
Ask The White House Your Questions on Quora After the State of the Union Address
I've been seeing this new development being characterized as Google's "evil" moment, but I'm not convinced. I thought it was more evil when they changed account creation last week to require both a Gmail and G+ account. That's bad for users. This doesn't seem that way to me.
You use grids to group and align your content.

Basically you need look at your design in order to determine what would make most sense.

A very popular choice is to divide it into three equal sizes and then have one of them be the right or left column, while the two others combine to form the other column.

So you end up with two columns one for content and one for navigation (typical blog look)

Grids can obviously also be much more complicated as those used in photoshop, 3dmax, word or windows/osx.

If you want to get really into grids I can recommend probably the best book written about them.

Josef Muller Brockman Grid Systems

http://www.amazon.com/Systems-Graphic-Systeme-Visuele-Gestal...
Apple's monster quarter in charts
Yeah, but "descent" works well too. :-)
Frankly, that's about it, really. It's really straightforward imho.
That was the word that knocked me out of a spelling bee when I was in junior high school. I still hate that word.
Very nice. Used it to research upcoming purchase quickly, would have signed up to persist saved results if you had that option.

Main feedback - browser refresh, back/forward, tabs, middle-click should work, e.g.

- refresh now loses half the state (why half?)

- opening 'Click to view listing' messes up state (loses saved)

- want to be able to middle click on 'Details' to open in new tab

Nice to have: integration with Edmunds to appraise the car
Cookie Recipe Generator
Show HN: AirXE - Rethink Currency Exchange. Feedback/Advice appreciated
It's too bad that no one is trying to disrupt education (except for Khan Academy, Coursera, Udemy, Lumosity, Knewton, Skillshare, CourseHorse, Inkling, Edufire ...)
Show HN: Bitcoin voting on CoinSmack news site.
Federal judge rules that your encrypted laptop can be used to incriminate you
I imagine that the book might as well have used another (simpler) language. Now, as I see it, to understand the math, you need quite a lot of domain knowledge. A formula doesn't make sense out of context. Most statements written in programming languages do that, in a much higher degree.

Therefore, to actually do the ECC, I think it's quicker just to read the language specification of your (simple) language, than actually understand all of the math being the formulas. Granted, you wouldn't understand WHY it works. And that's my point. Comparing math to programming languages is like comparing apples to oranges.
I think it's more the status in society of formal education over alternatives rather than education itself that needs to be disrupted. People will still pay for more for the same education if it comes with a piece of paper from a recognised and well regarded institution.
It's amazing to me that ideaone is not hacked every day. I wonder how they do it.
For all it's worth, here's a simple printer that runs on sand and sunshine:

Video: http://www.markuskayser.com/

Text with photos: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/06/markus-kayser-builds-a...
That seems like a perfectly reasonable point to collegially disagree on. I can't say that I have any special insight into what goes on inside Google, but contrary to your experience, I feel my search experience has generally gotten better. I doubt that Google at any point "did nothing" about search quality, but again, I have no special insight there. I do think that Google frantically doing something in opposition to a hostile SEOsphere can look like nothing, while in fact being a whole lot.

I do agree that the tactics are often dubious. I certainly don't always agree with them. But I can simultaneously understand the motivations behind them. I would have loved to see more grand, open initiatives like Wave, even as it failed spectacularly, but I can understand the trepidation.
How did it go from

This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else.

to

If you don't get SPYW, work somewhere else.

I understood the first as "if you don't understand our goals, you should probably not be working here" and the second as "our way or the highway".
>if you google SPYW on Bing...

You don't "google" on bing, you "bing it".
yeah, at those rates they could afford to stop using slave labor or at the very least invest a bit to make life easier for Foxconn employees or maybe startup the charity programs again
Newly Launched StartupReadingList Offers You The Best Startup Articles
I created a site where you can post links, videos, images, and blobs of text (html allowed).

It works much like most social news sites where visitors can vote up stories they like to the home page in various different categories. The difference is that the voting is in bitcoins in increments of 0.001 units. 80% of the bitcoins received go to the poster of the article.

Posting and voting up articles is an anonymous process, and no login is needed (also IP addresses & sessions are not recorded). For those that are into Tor, onion links are welcome and are marked with an onion icon. Hopefully this will help with the discovery of content on the onion network.
The "Why Dependent Types Matter" paper at http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~txa/publ/ydtm.pdf actually uses an implementation of "sort" as its driving example.

The paper starts out with a simple sort implementation, and then adds static proofs of correctness for:

A) Totality (Termination/no infinite loops)
B) Length of output = Length of input
C) Output is sorted

It does not prove the one-to-one mapping, and I don't know how hard that would be to prove (intuitively, it does not sound like it should be too hard).

The dependent types approach lets you write a program while reasonably controlling its algorithmic complexity and operational behavior -- and still have its mathematical meaning proven to match a specification.

I think a title like "I want to fix programming" is a bit over the top -- given that it is a hard problem with very smart people working at it. It is more acceptable, in my opinion, to "fix programming" after learning in detail what the state of the art already entails. That means knowing Agda, Coq, Logic languages, Hoare logic, etc.
Isn't Bing also including social signals in personalizing their search results? If so, neither of them are just sticking to the task of being a simple search engine like we knew and loved years ago.
> If an office had a policy of shredding old financial paperwork and that policy was faithfully followed on the day after, say, the COO was whisked away for embezzlement, would it count as evidence tampering?

If it could be reasonably expected that the financial paperwork would be relevant to the ongoing litigation, yes, you're in trouble for destroying it. When companies are on notice of pending litigation, from that point forward they are required to take affirmative steps to preserve potentially relevant evidence. Failure to do so was one of the things that got the Enron folks in trouble.
I assumed that I did not need to mark the post with <sarcasm/>.

What I implied is that companies are no different to humans in some respects - your life's mission when you are 5 is different from your life's mission when you are 15, and is different from your life's mission when you are 35. And there's nothing wrong about that - companies, like people, have the age. Welcome to the new grown up Google, I suppose.

(of course, all of the above rant assumes that the quote is real. Which I decided to hunt down, and it is, apparently: http://glinden.blogspot.com/2004/08/google-playboys.html)

But the other part of the quote got me thinking - "...analogous to taking money for search results. "

I caught myself a few times this year that I'd prefer to pay for the premium quality content rather than have to wade through the soup of the ads mixed with semi-relevant results. So maybe therein lies some version of the future.

EDIT: of course, the rule "don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to ignorance" still holds and it might be just an experiment that went a bit too far - I can not reproduce the "ads above the search results" on my browser right now.
2012: The year iPhone reclaims its title from Android
In most cases it seems companies either do small incremental improvements OR big leaps at roughly the same pace. Doing something bold doesn't have to take more time -- it just requires a lot more vision, effort, and balls.