skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Oh no, you might have to start treating them slightly more like human beings!

I don't think many startups are guilty of this. But even so, could you imagine what it would do to the startup community if you required every company regardless of size to offer its employees health insurance? I don't think that Palo Alto would end up looking anything like it does now. There are risks involved in launching a startup the first few years. Everyone knows this. But, with the risks come proportionate rewards, which brings us to:

> Instead, he gets spooked that he might have to give more of his precious precious money away.

You have it backwards. It's been said a lot recently that the "hard working middle class middle americans" are the foundation of our country; actually, the entrepreneurs and business leaders who end up making tons of money are the foundation of our country. Without them, no one else would have jobs. You can offer as much welfare or unemployment benefits as you want, but the people you really need happy are the founders of the world. If you make it totally unprofitable or fail to recognize the risks inherent in going out on a limb with no safety net to offer a service to others, we'll either stop (well, slow down or find a new model to do it) or move elsewhere.
Or, you know, automating them out.

I really wonder how long we are going to keep an unskilled proletariat around given the advantages in computer & robotic animation.

OTOH, I'm also really surprised how ancient some of the manufacturing techniques are in "How It's Made."
For me, electronics only started to make sense after this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Electronics-Paul-Horowitz/dp/05213...
So, uhh, you're stealing and then coming here to brag about it? (Not to mention comparing yourself to Gandhi...)

What's that you say? It doesn't count as stealing because you didn't deny the ticket to anybody else? Sure, but everybody else at the concert had to deal with having one extra stinking body taking up room there, didn't they?

Seriously. If you wanna steal stuff that's between you and your conscience, but bragging about it just makes you a dick.
Qt is GPL.
He mentioned his routes files was 2500 lines long. That's probably the difference.

Hopefully his blog post gives a wakeup call to the Rails core team that the mass inefficiency in the routing system needs to be fixed. Even if your routes file is 10,000 lines long, it shouldnt cause your app to bloat to a hundred megs of ram.

Comments on his blog post mentioned theres already a patch on the Rails lighthouse addressing this. Hopefully it makes it into 2.2
I've wondered about this myself and have found that the most common responses usually reference, "The Art of Electonics". Great book, sure, and very heavy on theory.

There are a few books out now that touch on the Arduino platform - the Make/O'Reilly site has a few. Additionally, there are a couple of folks using a Sanguino/Arduino for building a rep rap, so it might be a good start.

I've found "Electronics - Self Teaching Guide" by Harry Kybett to be a decent introduction to electronics in general. I also picked up "Embedded C Programming and the Atmel AVR" which is regularly recommended for the AVR platform.
Hedge fund managers 'funereal' in midst of crisis
Figure out how to live forever.
Another innovation that I wish I implemented first! :-(
nice glider favicon
This is the way things are.

Everything was better in the good old days before everyone else discovered it.
Apologies. Consider it a parting shot, and back to work improving people's lives through better access to, and understanding of, Internet technology.
edit: hugeurls don't work on HN.
A lot of this points out why I don't understand "left-leaning" folk.

When the minimum is forced up, being better than the minimum gets harder.

If you make it harder to fire people, hiring becomes more risky and especially smaller firms will think twice.

If you force employers to pay for employees sickdays, and make it illegal for the employer to even ask you what's wrong, mr. nice guy, who'd never ask anyway, is cornered by mr. bad boss, who's just looking out for the law.

If you force the minimum wage up, all those jobs worth less than the minimum wage will not be done. Not a problem for high-tech startups, but if you're the guy washing staircases at night, and your price goes up, you'll be the first to go when things are rough. Low salary employees are seldom unexpendable.

If you think you're being unfairly treated at work, protest. If that doesn't work, quit.

If you need to keep your job because you have credit card debt and the installments on your new home entertainment center and custom build kitchen and the mortgage and ... well, you got yourself into the mess, do you really think it's fair to get the government to bully evil mr. $250.000 into bailing you out, and imply that he's somehow not deserving of his salary?
>Thus, if the best effort a man with an IQ of 80 can do is sweep the streets, then we should give him job as a streetsweeper and not replace him with a robot.
--

Assuming we _could_ replace them with a robot, this would seem to imply that the person is truly without use but that we are providina a made-up task in order to make this person feel 'useful'. They might as well be tieing and untieing knots on a piece of string, leading an existence depending on the generosity of others. I am not sure if there is a better definition for 'society would be better off without them', even if this is hidden from them. I am all for finding useful tasks a human of IQ 80 (whatever that means) can accomplish, but withholding progress and providing a fraudulent sense of accomplishment does not strike me as the most respectful approach one can take towards solving this problem.
I'm sorry if you feel insulted by my comment. I was merely approving these bargain techniques with my real life experience. And in no way would I ever compare myself to Gandhi. You must have miss-read my writing.

Sure, it's technically stealing, in the same way that downloading music is. I don't deny it.

If you could take a second to forgive my misdeed, and maybe even consider calling it "selective stealing"?

Selective because I only sneak into shows that charges $50+ by musicians who are already rich. On the other hand, I often donate money to smaller independent bands as they come through the non-profit venue I used to help at.

I hope my act will balance out (even just a little bit) the heavily screwed music industry. And if I have to endure being called a thief, so be it.
Don't bother. If you use the arduino board, you can approach electronics the same way as one would programming - by trial and error.

Learn the basics - resistors, clock signals, how chips work, and the rest you can pick up by experimentation.
Surely concurrency has more to do with performance than scaling?

Scaling is more about a product's ability to easily grow and handle an increasing amounts of work, rather than it's ability to render/dish out pages.
the art of electronics is cool, but the ARRL handbook is even better.
Reminds me of BroadVision's 3-page long URLs of dot com boom fashion.
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

but in this case, replace 'hell' with 'serfdom.'
Dynamic Default.png files on the iPhone
Well Written... I find myself in complete agreement.
On further inspection, you will find that I am not even objecting to the argument, but merely wondering about the underlying motives. I do believe the argument to be a reasonable one.
What proportion of top-level architects don't have architecture degrees?

Today all of them do because it is legally required. My girlfriend is currently attending architecture school and it is beyond useless. She's learned an awful lot about "aura" and "algorithmic design" and precious little about designing buildings for the real world. Architects end up learning everything on the job.

In the 19th century, it was not uncommon for architects to be high school drop outs. The New York Public library, some of the tunnel projects under London, the California Aqueduct, were all designed by drop outs.

The structural integrity of the buildings was very high, and the aesthetics far surpass the creations of modern architects.

To construe it as purely anti-competitive is pretty misleading.

I obviously would not want an untrained surgeon practicing on me. The trouble is that credentialing laws are a highly unstable equilibrium. It requires 8 years of post-secondary schooling to prescribe penicillin, read an x-ray, or set a broken bone. I could be convinced that 2 years of schooling might be necessary. But not 8. The reason it is so high is because of lobbying by the AMA. I'm sure they argue that the requirements are in the public interest. Perhaps they even believe their own PR. But if you talk to doctors about medical school, most of them will tell you that it had little relevance to their actual job.

Perhaps the most notorious example of credentialing is the orthodontist profession. The average orthodontist works 35 hour weeks and makes 350k ( about 40% more than dentists). The reason for this is that number of orthodontists allowed to graduate each year is actually capped at 280. The orthodontist association have even gone after inventors who devise new labor-saving (and thus income-reducing) braces, See the case of Viazis v. American Association of Orthodontists. This is blatantly anti-competitive, and it costs thousands of dollars from the pocket book of every American.

Finally, do you think that teaching citizens about civic culture and American political institutions is a mis-use of public education?

I once worked a bit on capitol hill. The civics class description of American democracy bears little resemblance to the reality. However, these the civics class lies are probably necessary to make a democratic system even marginally functional. My preferred solution then, would be to get rid of electoral democracy.
Has the systemic use of these puzzles in the hiring process backfired horribly for MS?

I ask because, rather than filtering for smart people in general, these puzzles seem to filter for a specific subset of puzzle-oriented smart people.

There seem to be definite blind spots in MS software when it comes to design, usability, and what you might call developer-to-user empathy. I've wondered for a while whether they might be unintentionally weeding out the employees that could help them with those issues.
Qt has several licences.
Not really, you can take a small loss by consistently selling the entire global demand at a lower cost, and as we're talking about gold from space it would be exceptionally easy to deliver anywhere in the world. The other thing is that the processing cost for 'new' gold today is ridiculously high, where as from an asteroid like Eros it's purely mining costs that you need to absorb in the price not the billions of dollars of equipment required to get microscopic amounts of gold out of rock.

The value of gold will only drop to slightly below the base price of every other company in the world. Once Mr Ore Processor in South Africa can no longer pay for his billion dollar equipment to sift dirt, then the price becomes fixed. It's like coal in the UK, there's still millions of tonnes of reserve, but until the price gets high enough there's no point in hell of mining it.

So yes, you can't sell 3 trillion dollars of gold in a single day and expect to get what it's worth at market value. The prospect is that, you could probably undercut every gold producer in the world and still make a tasty 1.5 trillion (or more when companies start going out of business) in the long run. You could run it like the oil industry, just supply enough to try and keep the price in a nice range for the foreseeable future.

Edit: My point is that you'll make far more profit mining it as pure gold than the current processes on Earth. From a little research, global demand is already almost 50% higher than the supply. So supposing you sell the global demand of 3800 tonnes per year at half current market price, would still be 50 billion dollars a year, every year for 30 years.
No. The only thing added is a highly speculative and suggestive quote (Of course, factoring in enough cronyism, corruption and official ignorance and boosterism, it’s possible the principals could make some money during the initial stages, before the crows come home to roost) from the "Los Alamos Study Group".

Also, the article ends in the words, "Or maybe not".

That fully sums up the criticism of the device.
A major milestone for DB2 on Rails
It's the organization & bureaucracy, not the (smart) people they hire.
If I pass it do I get my choice of joining the Excel Macro or Visual Studio maintainence team? Because I do have a clear preference.
i usually suggest folks get a kit - arduino, or an open source hardware kit from http://www.adafruit.com -- they're all fully documented and you'll learn by doing and move along harder projects as you become more proficient.

(phil from MAKE magazine, also a good resource)
IPhoneize your website
iPhone apps start "instantly" because the os zooms a pre-drawn picture of the application onto the screen. Often it looks like the frame of the app but without the content.

If you have a dynamic picture you could save a snapshot of what's on the screen when the app was closing, save it, and use that as your default image next time it starts. i.e. the last email you were looking at. It makes the app feel even more responsive when starting up because straight away you see what you saw before you closed the app.

There may be other uses but that's the one that jumps immediately to mind for me.
Why we launched boxee for Mac before Windows
I honestly can't tell if this is satire. Does your universe of programming languages seriously consist of just C++ and Java?

I'm glad that coding in C++ makes you feel like more of a man, but Java's not the only competition. C++ and Java have both (awkwardly) added closures in their latest specification, so they're obviously maneuvering against something outside of your little duality.

Also, I don't see how you can knock Java for its libraries when C++ is essentially worthless for large-scale development without Boost.
Ask HN: Review my startup, reportminers.com
I have just launched a startup that offers a service to convert .pdf, .txt, and other report files into Excel Spreadsheets. I would love to see what the Hacker news community thinks.
Art of Electronics is a very good book, but if you want to learn from a fun / programming point of view I highly recommend "Making Things Talk", by Tom Igoe.

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510510/
Whole life built on religion; turning into an atheist; how to tell others?
Please donate generously to the Methuselah Foundation, and check out the book Ending Aging by biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey:

http://www.methuselahfoundation.org/
So that it works like a webpage/webapp does... (Safari caches the last state)?
Not to worry, the world still needs mediumsizedurl.com

It'd take any URL and convert it to something kinda medium-sized. 30 or 40 characters maybe, fill up a respectable chunk of the bar at the top of your browser window while leaving a nice bit of breathing room.
Electric cars don't have combustion engines, which kills your analogy. Although maybe it doesn't, since a language without pointers is valid for non-systems programming.
Your page titled "How it Works" does not actually include any information on how it works.
> and doesn't need a fancy GUI, C++ is great.

And what's great for fancy GUIs? I'm curious too.
I hate to reply to myself, but... I was just thinking about that a bit more and I think it could actually be made quasi-useful.

If the hashing worked with dictionary words, you could use it to make unreadable, unmemorizable URLs both readable and memorizable. Each new url could be assigned three random dictionary words, e.g.:

mediumsizedurl.com/acute_recovery_cable

(Thanks to http://watchout4snakes.com/creativitytools/RandomWord/Random... for the random words)

And that'll give you something that's both medium-sized and readable. Without going into obscure words we can easily get 20,000 of 'em, so that's 8e12 possible combinations of three words -- shouldn't be an issue.
Does religion make you nice? Does atheism make you mean?
http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/apollo.htm

As I stated above, I think the Apollo missions were unique in their historical context and unlikely to be repeated as a model.
These are so lame. I would filter people based on what they have made in the past, not how good they are at school or solving stupid puzzles.
Bittorrent lays off again; replaces new CEO after a year.
Feh. Looks chunky without anti-aliasing. Compare to this one: http://foohack.com/favicon.ico
Amazon Web Services Not Just for Early Adopters
Simple Device Invented in 1833 May Lead to Cheap Hydrogen
Marriage? Having a kid? Really? I'm no serial entrepreneur, but I'd have thought those are exactly the wrong milestones to pick to do a startup, for obvious reasons.

Other than that, good article, even though the Presumptuous Capitalized Phrases get a little annoying.
FREE Bible Coloring Pages - The Book of Genesis
> Surely concurrency has more to do with performance than scaling?

What I meant to say was concurrency is a way of distributing load and getting scalability.... But, yeah, you're right - my example was terrible/inaccurate.
What's the Maximum Length of a URL
Why IE 8 won’t use the WebKit rendering engine
The Incredible Shrinking Software
I'll admit that depending on your situation you may be more concerned with performance over scalability - but doesn't make them the same thing.

Scale is getting higher throughput by adding resources - Performance is getting higher throughput using the resources you already have.
Mono 2.0
Professor Hellerstein essentially stresses the distributed nature of MapReduce:

" it works on 'shared-nothing' clusters of computers in a data center", "the MapReduce framework is a parallel dataflow system that works by partitioning data across machines"

To what extent does MapReduce leverage parallelism (on a single machine)?

Would "Distributed Programming in the Age of Big Data" be a more appropriate title?
What about people that choose to turn their "parental instinct" to have and nurture children towards helping their society as a whole instead? Is that also a sign of immaturity for lack of "progeny"?
Caching is hard though, and its best to use profiling to decide what to cache. Especially if you have any sort of user-specific content, you need to resort to fragment caching which is sometimes tricky.
Ask HN: What problems (other than posts like this one) would you like to see solved?
Ask HN: What problems (other than posts like this one) would you like to see solved?
"Religion poisons everything"... even atheism.
Maybe he means "How To Use" here. Are you outsourcing all those conversions to India or China?
This is a bit broad as stated. Time travel, etc. It might be more interesting if you phrased it as "What would you do if you knew you'd do it as well as anyone else?"
This is awesome. Nice work.
Motorola ROKR E6 Black Unlocked
For the business person who moonlights as a rock star, the Rokr E6 is the perfect companion to your hectic lifestyle. Its small enough to slide into your pocket, but has a screen large enough to properly display your documents and makes reading them a very easy process.
I suspect that most people who go for whatever field is apparently "hot" wind up not doing very well. I would imagine those who get into fields because they're just following what they know\have interest in have much better chances. They have a hope of finding and building something so cool it makes the new "hot" field.

Course, that was a huge generalization with tons of assumptions, so YMMV.
I thought this would be really valuable, especially if it had an API. But then I looked at the pricing and "How it Works" and started to realize its not an application but a service. Is that correct?
Did you try the actual headline story?

He knew pefectly well he was not allowed there, he prepared and succeeded.
No it doesn't. Period. Even the relatively "creative" jobs like software engineering want a fundamental skill set and raw intelligence, not the ability to quote Chomsky.

Right, but the people who have the ability to quote Chomsky may be able to transfer that skill and quote Knuth or Sedgewick instead.
That's a very addictive and self-validating reasoning path. Beware.
Meeting Dr. Doom: Scientist wants to kill 90% of human population
That already exists. I forget the URL, but I've definitely seen that.
we've traded focus & specialization for broad generalized learning in the hopes of producing 'well rounded' individuals (at least officially). While great in theory, in practice it fattens the coffers of our nation's largest (private) universities & secondary education systems.

i.e. apprenticeship v. general education

fact: public universities will increase tuition when the number of students graduating with degrees in <4 years increases.
Updated: Our top 10 term sheet hacks
Seth Godin discusses free content and the publishing industry
Do you have evidence that supports this assertion? Warren Buffet is not all-knowing or infinitely wealthy.
I plan to do all of the conversions myself for now using a variety of tools and software. The How It Works page and the whole site are from the perspective of the non-technical clients who need a simple solution to converting their reports.
I absolutely hate puzzles and I absolutely love programming.

When I look at a puzzle like the (non-programming) one posted on the page, I have no idea where to start. When I'm given a programming challenge, I have a huge bag of experience and tools I can draw from and I can immediately start banging away at the problem.
Cartoon: Partial Text RSS Feeds
Electronics is pretty broad. There are books for each area, depending on what you want to do:

- Building kits?
- Building circuits someone else designed?
- Designing printed circuit boards?
- Designing digital circuits?
- Designing analog circuits?
- Designing power electronics?
- Designing RF and microwave electronics?
- System design and assembly?

It's a great hobby. You can spend decades learning all this, and more. I have.. And don't get just one book. Get a few different ones. Google for stuff. Search Isohunt for ebooks. Get application notes from component manufacturers. There are tons of free useful info in those.
http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/

in combination with

http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/socratic/
Analog electronics and digital electronics are different beasts. Most of what you'll do when hacking together projects will be digital.

If you are a programmer, and especially if you are a low-level programmer, you won't have a problem getting your feet wet on the digital side.

Snag one of the kits folks are mentioning in this thread and get busy.
Not in your target market, so take my advice with a grain of salt...

Page design is really good. Lots of people fail here--you are not one of them. I clearly understand what your business is and does.

Samples are excellent.

It's not clear if you magically OCR the PDFs (i.e. PDFs made with a scanner and some paper), or if you only accept texted PDFs. In the latter case, you might want to explain that to your non-technical audience. In the former case, you're probably good already--the less mumo-jumbo, the better.

Pricing seems a little high to me--but then again, I'm not in your target market, so...

You seem to be shooting for the non-technical people here. In that case, you might want to focus more on the benefits of having digital data, which might not be immedidately obvious to your target market.
Everyone says that. If anything is mediocre its this realization.