skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess I'm confused. The video doesn't help:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=1234279011

Why are they trying to pretend that traditional boxes are difficult to open? They aren't. Also, how exactly are they going to protect the product from shipping damage? It seems like packing foam or similar materials can't be used with the new boxes.

Do they not realize that...especially with toys, but lots of things...the packaging is part of the charm? To me, an item in a cardboard box is a factory reject or OEM. A child would likely reject a toy that didn't have the packaging of a store item.
This is totally excellent. If nothing else, it'll make kids happier since they will be able to open their own presents.

Lots of kids toys have thick binding, thick clear plastic etc., that is very difficult even for adults to open, and often requires sharp scissors.

Great move, and congratulations to Amazon.
Someone recently regifted a 32GB flash drive to me. I could not care less that it wasn't in the original packaging.
JQuery Cheatsheet - just found it, oh so useful
Vancouver, Canada Startup Meeting
Anybody in Vancouver want to do a coffee/lunch meetup? Leave email address here or email me simon@lingermedia.com
I was about to write the same thing
How to make your blog popular and awful
Lifts curtain? Anandtech had a series of benchmarks just a month ago, with some rather impressive results: for example, x264, the project I work on, got over 40% faster at the same clock speed... before we even started on Nehalem-specific optimizations.

I myself have had a pre-release system for over two weeks for optimization purposes, though (as you might expect) I'm under an NDA with regards exact specifics about performance.
Erlang Web: open source framework for applications
United Kingdom. Our council is quite progressive on the recycling front. Despite the inconvenience at first, I'm in support of it. I think we recycle about 60% of our household waste now. Large families and those with babies get special allowance to have more trash, so it's reasonably fair.

The only downside, and one many are complaining about, is that they alternative trash pickup with recycling pickup, so you have to leave some trash sitting around for 2 weeks.. not pleasant to drag through the house on pickup day.
Google Keeps running Prop 8 Ads on my Blog. WTF
You must not have encountered the hard, welded plastic envelopes in which they typically sell small electronic goods. (where the hell do you live?) They're effectively impossible to open without a very sturdy set of scissors, and even then it's easy to scratch your hand when you get impatient and try to fish out your device.
A Revenue Stream is not a Business Model
In the latter instance, the term you are looking for is not 'Markup' it is 'source' or 'text'.
Oh, the article is definitely interesting. The song on its own would just be WTF material.
Yeah, I don't believe they give those people honey roasted peanuts while they ride in those metal tubes either.
XKCD used to be this engaging, before it devolved into in-jokes and IRC memes.
To me, an item in a cardboard box is a factory reject or OEM. A child would likely reject a toy that didn't have the packaging of a store item.

And that's an attitude worth changing in order to cut down on the ridiculous amount of packaging many products use (including non-recyclable plastics, etc). If it takes someone as big as Amazon to do it, bravo.

The whole glitzy packaging thing is a reasonably new invention anyway. When I was a kid things tended to come in cardboard boxes (though printed on). Playing with boxes was as fun as the toy often times!
This is quite brilliant... I've always felt the issues described in the article w/ regards to political correctness and turning a blind eye to certain legal but immoral practices in the voting system affect poll accuracies, sometimes rather heavily; but never thought to consider the gambling market as an alternative....

Really great read, especially the history of gambling and the elections.

Currenly betfairpredicts.com has Obama's likeliness of a win 92% to McCain's 08% (don't ask how :P). Interestingly enough, fivethirtyeight.com shows similar figures - that's another really good and accurate resource.
Makeuseof.com domain stolen from the owners Check yours
Ah thats why. I use a box cutter to open my packages. That way nobody gets hurt.
XKCD still is engaging. It's just become less consistent.
Maybe, but I guess like authors who say you only get the best results when writing slowly with a pen, I feel that speed should never be of the essence when typing code.

That said, I'm not a Java programmer, so I'm somewhat biased in my appreciation of brevity ;-)
you're right but what concerns me is being trigger happy with change while lacking in requirements, which is my impression of the original post.
It would've been very impressive if this incident were a staged PR stunt.
Thank you! This is why I'm so happy to send real money to this service.
yeah, well, part of it depends on how smart you are.

As the article said, you need someone who fits in to the team, someone strong where the rest of you are weak.

Me, I'm kinda dumb (well, I mean, I qualify for mensa, but only just. Meaning, compared to most really good programmers, I'm kindof dumb) But I'm really good at dealing with people who are less socially able, so for me, it makes sense to hire the smartest person I can find, at least for technical positions.

If I were smarter, and/or if I had a harder time getting along with people, or if I was hiring a marketing and/or bizdev guy, hiring down might make a lot of sense.
Fair enough, those are all good points.

I still question this initiative though, for the simple fact that there are no book rental stores the same way that there are movie rental stores. There are book stores, libraries, and even used book stores, but no rental stores.

That bothers me. It tells me that there is something about the way people consume books that is inherently different about how they consume movies.

At any rate, I'm not educated about the topic enough to know this answer. This site is going to find out whether this is an untapped gem or a bust waiting to happen.

I wish them luck.
Amazon is one of the companies that took a very unsexy thing (book selling), and is just revolutionizing business processes. Amazon is quite an impressive company.
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538 had a post earlier this year, during the primaries I think, about how In-trade was lagging behind their projections. That seems to make sense to me. Smart betters use all the info at their disposal. 538 is one of the smartest sources around. 538 was also able to highlight curious movement at In-trade well before it became obvious that someone was manipulating the McCain margin with heavy betting.

If I was placing any bet, I'd bet on 538's numbers - even at the state-level, before any betting market. Better to trust many aggregates of randomish samples (polls) over one highly-motivated, and non-random, sample. 538 goes the step further to weight polls based on their historical accuracy and weight samples based on predictions about party ID, demographics, etc. Just a highly tuned model with lots of data to support the tweaks.

It will be interesting to see how close 538, versus the betting markets, came based on electoral votes and percentage win. There's no empirical test of likeliness.
Apple Slashes iPhone Production, Says Chip Analyst
This is approximately the opposite of my experience with purchasing and enabling a G1 on its US launch day.
"Tron Paul".
Just wondering about IIS, IE, MS SQL Server, MS Exchange, NtOsKernel.dll, OutlookExpress, MS Outlook, MS Office VBA macros, WSH (vbs/js), COM/OLE, ActiveX, and the list goes on...

All major security holes and vulnerabilities founded so far in these products are 3rd party?
Don't think it is and it would be a major PR fiasco if that turned out to be true...
Dash is killing its device? Sad And Smart
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=352258
Why Your Next Computer Might Be a Linux PC
Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity
It might be true but it's not xkcd though.
Thanks, so using napkin calculation...

(1,000,000 users) x ("well over 1% conversion", we'll call it 4% to be generous) = 40,000 customers x $4 = $160,000 in revenue.

They have 6 people in the team, so allowing modest salary of $50,000 each = $300,000.

So, they must make the bulk of thier money by Adwords (11,000,000 uniques will generate $$$) as I assume the others services offered are not generating much cash yet.

Anyway, it is still a good and sustainable model and well done to them for turning a profit, something so many big(ger) name startups have yet to do.

EDIT: $160,000 x 12 months = $1,920,000. Also, allowing conversion rate of 2% rather than generous 4% = $960,000.
A late entry: the Banach-Tarski theorem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox
nice looking mac, but my late 2006 black MacBook is still working nicely and as the new MacBook no longer has Firewire I won't be upgrading any time soon.
Congrats!! I love Weebly - a few weeks ago I was doing a post about how easy it is to create an online web shop using a local startup, and even after wasting 20 mins trying to fiddle around with a similar site, I was still able to get the site up in under 2 hours. Absolutely the right balance between ease of use for noobs and flexibility for more advanced users. http://tinyurl.com/weeblyrocks
http://www.visualjquery.com is an excellent resource, too.
It is my favourite Java editor, but is expensive compared to the others which are free. However, you get what you pay for.
More RSS icon size! Bigger!
I'd be more interested in seeing the cases where this kind of thing fails. Surely there must be some?

Does New York have an outpost in Las Vegas surrounding the New York New York casino? Is Venice a bi-lobed city spread between northern Italy and southern California? Does Sydney exist primarily in Australia, but have a lot of tiny outposts surrounding all the places where girls called Sydney have posed for photographs?
Ditto on the putting off and for the same reasons. I am sort of eying the next generation MBPs (18 months from now or whenever) as my next laptop though.
More like Linux trivia than an admin test. Fun nonetheless.
That $160,000 would be monthly, as I understand it. But id give 1.5% for "well over 1%" otherwise they might say, almost 5% :)
Great article. Following the money seems to work almost every time.

Somewhat related article by Steven Levitt regarding sports gambling markets:

http://is.gd/6ej7
Our interviews went pretty well despite getting absolutely grilled by Pete from Songkick. It was probably one of the sharpest, toughest interviews I’ve ever had.

Pete is such a nice friendly guy it makes me smile thinking of him grilling someone (though, of course, he can). So who was being "good cop"?
What's the well ordered one about?
Well, that's largely true but misses the point. The world is much different than it was in 2000. The War on Terrorism is real. Whether or not you agree with the Iraq War (and I never did) you can't call him a hypocrite for changing his foreign policy in the light of new and very important information.

You would expect the same from a good President.
Why are gambling markets organised so differently from financial markets [pdf]
There's exactly zero chance that store shelves will contain boxes similar to ones that Amazon is using here. Therefore, there will always be two kinds: 1) The displayable kind, and 2) The shipping kind.

Listen: I'm the last person in the whole world who cares what packaging looks like. But the fact is, lots of people do, and these boxes' success will be correspondingly limited.

This whole thread is insane though. They're really doing nothing more than 10,000,000 ebay sellers have been all along. Getting manufacturers to do it is just a way of shifting costs, as Walmart is doing with RFID tags (though the total costs probably go down some, which is good).
Doh! For some reason I thought it was $4 per year. Must learn to read properly.
It should probably have been "Stuff i've been told is true but I don't entirely understand"
I have no experience with the foreign branches, but considering how much emphasis is placed on customer service at TMobile USA, it's surprising how badly that was flubbed. TMobile USA pushes that they are competing to be the best service organization in the US. (Not best service of a cell phone provider, but best of any company. http://www.t-mobile.com/company/PressReleases_Article.aspx?a...
shows a bit of the push.) I'll also point out that verizon seems to have beat them in the last rankings.

I can't speak as to how well this works in practice at their actual facilities. I only went through the standard initialization after a takeover at a location that is scheduled to be closed soon. I've already found a job elsewhere, so no worries there.
First they should just make their boxes suck less. If I could open them without a box cutter, I'd be ecstatic.
Html version (doesn't show up very well): http://is.gd/6ej7
If culture and parenting were largely immutable, this would mean that not a single early childhood intervention program would have been able to show a statistically significant improvement. This is not the case.
Not all your employees should be like that, though.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things...
Wow, that was truly awful. At least the most unwanted song had some bright points of originality.

In fairness though, I'm sure that the elements here: love, soprano sax, string swells, power chords, and cheesy male-female harmonies, could be combined into a much better song than this.

Probably still not as good as an idealized Walmart holiday operatic tuba rap though. That'd be awesome.
Ops, sorry...haven't checked HN before posting...I thought HN can see the dupes, at least try to identify them (as Digg does)...
What is Microsoft's Cosmos?
I would like to point out that giving everyone 1,000 dollars would significantly reduce income inequality. But multiplying everyone income by a number does not change it.

PS: Income in equality is measured as a fraction. EX: Top 1% / bottom 20%.
I still don't really understand what Yegge was trying to say with this essay. It seems to boil down to, "Very Very Smart, And Gets Things Done".
Hire really good people. Your concept of "good" might be flawed, so think really hard about it.

You could get more insight by just sitting your team around a table and talking about it rather than going on the word of some dude on the internet.
Because of the pretension of being real--as in, adjusted to the real price--when they are not.
Materials from CS193H, High-performance Web Sites taught by YSlow author Steve Souders
Enterprise applications on Facebook -- Force.com for Facebook
I like how they call guessing the type of a variable via flaky heuristics "type inference". Methinks they have spent a bit too much time reading programming reddit.
That answer means you must have misunderstood what I said. Anyway, I was mostly looking for an explanation of what is so great about Weebly because I didn't get it.

Surely we must be able to critisize here right?
Internetting every thing, everywhere, all the time
the key here is 'say chip analyst'... but what about the rest of the component makers?

There seems to have been a small bit of buzz in chip circles that Apple is looking to become a chip producer (or at least designer), and that could be reflected here.
Ask YC: Feedback on idea
Since this community seems to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, I thought I would ask for some advice on an idea.

The problem that I've identified is the extreme difficulty of finding indie fashion designers online. Unless somebody directly tells me about them, there is no way I'd find them.

I was thinking of creating a platform where users can create a brand page giving information about the brands history, products, reviews etc. Each brand will have links to "similar brands" so that they can all be connected in one giant web of insanity :p (my biggest struggle is that once i find a cool brand, its hard to find others like it).

I think a cool business model would be something similar to Yammer and giving brands the ability to claim their page, they can then produce updates and notifications for users who are interested.

I know fashion is about as far away as you can get from hacking, but this is a super group and I'd appreciate any help you can give.

Thanks
I'm interested and I emailed you. Paul
Changing my gmail password right now.. k thanks.
I have to agree. I think he might be trying to turn "Smart, and gets things done" into a two-tiered system so you can clearly decide that, in some cases, it's okay to go with the bright guy with an unimpressive resume, and in others, you really need to dig for someone who is exceptionally talented and has enough experience to teach rather than learn.
Correct. But where does the WOE ID come from? Are people manually typing those in or they are using something like http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/ to come up with the WOE ID? If WOE ID is generated based on latitude/longitude of a place, then all they are doing is a plotting data originally retrieved from their own DB.

Say I have a table of 40,000 zipcodes in US. You take a picture in zipcode 33708 and ask me for WOE ID / state and I say "Florida" and then you upload the picture. Now do this ten million times for every zipcode. Now I will look at every picture with WOE ID / state = Florida and find a list of zipcodes and map them. Obviously they will map out the entire state of Florida. After all I gave you all the state names.

Not that this isn't cool or anything. Just trying to determine how cool it is. If they had used latitude/longitude + tags to generate this, then it would be super-cool indeed. But if they did it by the method above that I described, it is cool but it's also a big "duh."
There are a handful of companies in YC (aside from my own) that I would love to personally invest in (if I were in the position to invest). Weebly is definitely near the top of the list, and was from the first moment I saw it during Winter '07. They're totally pragmatic, and just get things done...not one information astronaut in the bunch.

And they work in that space where nobody wants to be: technology for newbies. A couple of folks in this thread are criticizing Weebly for the very things that make it so explosively successful. I'd advise anyone who thinks they're smarter than the Weebly folks to pause for a moment, and think about traffic, and what it means for there to be 1 million websites at Weebly. That's one million occasions where someone browsed to the site, filled out the form, and went through the process of creating a website. How many people have signed up for your web application? How many made it to actually using it to do real work? And how much money does your app make if you imagine 1% of those users being willing to pay you a monthly fee? When the number of people committed enough to create something with your site reaches a million, you almost can't not make money with it.
All essay critiquing aside: '''strong disagree''' on on the idea that you want/need to go past [[gets things done]] in an early stage startup. You need the mo'; you don't need the architecture you're going to run on 2 years from now.
Pete was the only one from Songkick that interviewed us. He was much nicer after the interview :). It wasn't a mean grilling - just a thorough one. He was/is very impressive. Also, it didn't help that we were on a transatlantic conference call.
What does static typing have to do with refactoring? Smalltalk can refactor just fine?
I don't think I used that word or explained my concept of it. But I'll try to think really hard about it anyway.
JSON is not a document markup language; it is a data structure interchange format. KnitML actually needs to be a document markup language. Therefore your example implying that XML was the wrong choice for KnitML is based on a lack of understanding about what the language's intent.

Also, you seem to imply that an "extra 30Mb in software" has something to do with the fact that it's processing XML. That is a pretty wild assumption and is simply not true. First of all, the 30Mb is in reality too large because of a Maven bug which duplicates JAR file dependencies in a ZIP archive. The true size of the app is about 15Mb (and the upcoming release will in fact be much smaller). Secondly, JiBX is the only third-party code which does XML processing. The rest is built into the JDK. So you're really only talking 7 Mb. But it's not relevant, because you are not making a clear argument.
Hey thanks for the feedback and is greatly appreciated. I am tying to make the site better but I am not the greatest coder...the search is actually via google maps api and you can click on users skype button via the maps, most people never get it though so maybe a switch to traditional or both is in order? Thanks again!
New Visual Studio Warning World Record
Just wondering if this might be the Visual Studio Warnings World Record
Same here, holding off till the next generation. I especially hate the fact that Apple decided that everyone wants a glossy display.
Who the hell does this guy think he is? A background in programming does not make somebody qualified to broadly classify and stereotype as invalid entire classes of arguments. Frankly the entire piece can be summarised as a self-gratifying ego inflationary tripe that serves only to reinforce the authors misguided belief that people care enough about what he says to discount anecdotal evidence and millenia of debating technique evolution.

Can someone else continue through levels 4-7 ?
No, but security defects are found in these bits less frequently than in their ISV competitors. There's been one remote found in IIS 6 in the last 2 years; none in IIS 7.

[edit] lemme correct myself --- there's been one remote that you heard about found in IIS --- the rest, Microsoft paid a shitload of money to find privately.
Maybe, but it could turn into a nightmare with search engines, I don't think they'd risk that.

Hope they get the domain back, people like the guy who hijacked it makes me sick.
I got one last week and I love it. I was upgrading from a 1Ghz powerbook G4 however, so it was a well deserved upgrade. I'm looking forward to installing winxp on it and playing through Half-Life 2 over xmas break.

It also runs my numerics for HW and things sooo much faster than my old computer its a relief.

The only thing that annoys me is that the mini display port doesn't have an s-video adapter, which I used a lot. I'm still crossing my fingers that they release one, but i doubt it. Probably have to buy some sort of converter.
I think I would pay the $2000. With hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue on the line, it seems like a good investment. Plus, once the hacker cashes the check, he is that much easier to trace.
>IS< stealth-mode really bullshit?

no one has convinced me yet :(
I wasn't talking about you, I meant the universal "you" ('one' as in 'one should', like 'man' in German). I was just agreeing with your assessment. :)
I wish additional young startups would share their stories. Many of them are much more interesting than ours.
That makes much more sense. Thanks for clarifying :).
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