skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As tlogan's response notes, the distinction to draw in judging 100CE-era commentary is not between Europe in 100CE and now, but rather between Europe in 100CE and the ensuing decades and centuries, which demonstrated that the naysayers of 100CE Europe were completely justified.

That things then swung back upward again is cold comfort to the ancient Romans and does not demonstrate that things could not swing downward for our civilization.
Yammer Enterprise Social Networking Platform Raises $85M
Not to mention the sick cinematics that Blizzard is renowned for. Definitely not 'maintenance' work.

Patches for WoW – maybe – but expansions are huge effort!

Not to mention Blizzard aim for global simultaneous release for its games whenever it can. (Asia used to lag behind WoW's expansion up to a whole year compared to NA/Europe) Can't imagine the effort and coordination required for that task.
True Story:

A friend of mine was traveling through various airports in the states. He had accidentally left his pencil bag in his back pack which had a pair of scissors in it. The scissors were over the length allowed on a plaine (Something like 4" is considered safe.)

He went through 2 security checks in the states, and boarded planes with these scissors in his back pack. It wasn't until he went through a simple, small security check in a small Canadian air port that they were found and confiscated.

I find it funny that he made it through all this elaborate security in the States, and a simple security check in Canada with a Security guard who did his job well found the scissors.
100% absolutely - here is a really good TED talk that puts things in perspective (sorry if it's a repost, but it's definitely worth your time to watch) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDaFwnOiKVE

For just momo or momentum traders that deal in extremely liquid trading instruments, microseconds can even make a difference. Our current feed from a US equity exchange is about 220 microseconds or .22 miliseconds - and we are on the "slow" side of things. The guys that actually read, process, send transactions usually go as far as using FPGAs even (some of the bigger firms)

That said - there are still lots of places in the market where opportunities exist!
People relate this to TaskRabbit and I believe that's wrong.

But not for the reason you might be thinking.

So why is it wrong to relate this to TaskRabbit? Because TaskRabbit isn't competitive, yet. They're about the auction format not the on-demand format. Apples and oranges. That's fine, but take stock in their assets: national brand recognition, solid network effects, a built out rep system, resources. It is only a matter of time on _if_ they want to compete.

If I were a TaskRabbit decision maker I would start a skunkworks team to clone, but not launch. Not until Exec does all the work of validating.

So really Exec is more relatable to Cherry.com, an on-demand mobile car washing service started by three valley insiders. I sign up, pay $30, go shopping, and get texted when my car is done being detailed. It's amazing.

And after talking to Cherry's contractors, there's also an amazing feedback system built up to ensure quality. But Cherry is just one vertical so it lacks scale.

That's where Exec could shine, by being the consigliere some of us need to get through modern life. Or while in a bind on the way to Burning Man.

On-demand dial-up services are the future. If you use Grindr, you know what I'm talking about.
> But I think you think that ...

I don't. I merely restated the current public discourse of each company. This is not a knee-jerk reaction, because it's not a reaction at all, merely a summary.
After reading the same paragraph, I think he is the type we need leading the TSA
14 Incredible Women to Watch in Silicon Valley
I love it how people are pissing on this as though it is a failure. Really, unbelievable. Here is a group of dedicated guys and girls that work their asses off to produce a $25 computer with more punch than you'd ever think possible for that amount of money.

Not only do they deliver, they are sold out in absolute record time with the sites simply collapsing under the load.

I'd chalk this one up as a success, definitely not a failure and I fully expect the second (and subsequent) runs of the RaspberryPi to have a similar effect. Kudos to Eben, Liz and the rest of the team, you guys really rock and I hope that you won't let the sourpusses ruin your fantastic day for you.

I've watched the RaspberryPi saga closely from day 1 and I'm very very happy to see it come to fruit ;)
Intel to sell two Flash memory factories to Micron for $600 million
I agree with you on that. I would rather not use my Facebook account to log in somewhere. I don't mind if it's an option, but if it's forced or you're pressured to do it... I am turned off.
I don't think he did anything wrong. It's a cold email after all. Imagine you get an email from an unknown entity and they say "Hey there my name is X from company Y and I'm not selling anything but want to learn more about the problems folks in your industry may have to better serve my current and future clients".

Now, you're a busy business owner/decision maker and lots of people want a piece of you. You're inbox is always filling up with junk and even the non-junk you often don't have much time for. So assuming you even decide to read past the first sentence, if at all, you might decide that you'll write back but not right now so you mark the email as unread but never return to it as the inbox just keeps filling.

That's a best case scenario in my book. Others probably delete the thing immediately and those who open it and read it may wonder if there's a catch because no stranger gets in touch with your business unless they either want what you sell or want you to buy from them. A "I'm-not-selling-anything" email may reek of deception to a lot of people. I know it does for me.

Even with cold calling getting 1 in 50 is a success. I think you're being too quick to judge here. I think he did a great job and I think he's actually be a little hard on himself to be perfectly honest. I'm always reminded of Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" speech when I hear these kinds of stories. On the outside it seems like a failure and it's all too easy to criticize but the man in the arena is to be respected even if he fails miserably because in this world so few people even have the balls to enter the arena in the first place. We live in a spectator society. Most people are armchair quarterbacks and eventually the ones with the balls to try something brave or dumb or risky are rewarded so long as they keep going.
One of my biggest problems using marketplaces is the cognitive overhead of figuring out the often complex process how I'm supposed to use the site.

With Exec, I wanted to make something that was super simple and just works. Most of our challenge is actually figuring out how to inform users of what they can get done, because for most people outsourcing their errands is a new behavior to learn.

We haven't created any features that weren't based on iterating to solve a real user problem that was being experienced during our trial. Our minimum viable product really was "minimum" -- everything including the the map / location tracking, iphone app for the Execs, etc came out of that process. The first version of Exec was literally single text area.

We have done a ton of work on the backend to make sure that Execs pick up and do your jobs excellently -- a lot of that is transparent to the user. Lots of thought has gone into making that work well.

If by "basic" you meant the site's design, then I fully admit that. We used Twitter Bootstrap, which is awesome. I'm not a great designer, but hopefully we can bring someone on soon that is excellent :) (Shameless plug, Exec is hiring a designer and senior engineer for our core team. Come help us build the future of work: https://iamexec.com/hiring)
The point he's making, which I believe is valid, is that you can take over a plane with just about anything. Also, with some plastic explosive and a detonator in your Rolex, you could easily make a bomb. I've never seen security dogs, and I've frequented some of the busiest airports. So how would they find the C4 in your bag/pocket/butt? Not to mention, it's easy enough to go through security in a smaller airport and then get into the secured zone in a hub with minimal effort.

If you want to blow up/hijack a plane, it's easy. It takes a smart person, ingenuity, and nerves of steel, but I don't think there's anything hard about it...the reason is that instead of the TSA sitting around and thinking for a few minutes about how someone could blow up a plane, they only think about how people have already blown up planes.

Their methods are flawed, and I feel absolutely no safer travelling via air with the TSA around.
Sure. For many people that would be just fine.

However, the UI designers seem to forget all about the guys and girls sitting at their workstations doing precision work, designing, programming, architecting, editing, writing, etc, where you don't use your fat fingers to touch screens and where screen real-estate IS important.
Hi HN,

I created this newsletter because I want to learn the WordPress API, but I got a bit overwhelmed by all the available functions on http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference . So I thought that learning a little bit of them every day would be easier.

Please let me know what you think!
Note: there is a competition associated with the API - $10,000 in prizes are up for grabs. More details here: http://www.espnalps.com/details
I highly recommend the book Nail it Then scale it.

http://www.amazon.com/Nail-then-Scale-Entrepreneurs-ebook/dp...

There's some interesting discussion in there about cold emails and cold calls. It proposes that you should be emailing/calling prospects about a problem you think they have. (Do some research first instead of just saying, "I know nothing, tell me about your day").

The rule of thumb this book recommends is 50%. If you don't get a 50% response rate from emails or calls, you either picked the wrong or too wide of a demographic, or the problem you think potential customers have isn't the biggest type of problem. Iterate the demographic, or iterate the problem statement.

I've been using a variant of the 50% rule in an online survey/Google ad, and it's led to some very effective output. It's helped me pick headlines and solution ideas, that get a bunch of interest from people. I created a product the other day (just a landing page pitching people pay me X to do a specific type of project for them) and I had sales that same day.
That's not really very surprising. You probably wouldn't have played D2 for very long if it was only normal difficulty, and only the section before Blood Raven.

Personally I quite enjoyed the beta, a lot more than I enjoyed the same period of the D2 game. I'm anticipate spending many, many hours enjoying D3.
Exactly.

This can only be a boon for the .EU domain, ccTLDs and all their registers, especially those which allow second-level domain names like .de.

There is simply too much uncertainty with using American-hosted domains already and it is increasing every week.
Trying to prevent an -extremely- unlikely event via a lousy ineffective attempt at prior restraint is worth treating everyone as a criminal, ignoring the 4th amendment, and curtailing freedom? In America? Why?

Prior restraint is a great evil that needs to be carefully weighed against its benefit and I just don't see the pre-boarding perp walk actually making us enough safer to be worth it.
Looks pretty interesting.

Annoying that UrbanAirship cancelled SimpleGeo. Good for you for providing an alternative. I hope the migration path is simple. Do you have any details?
Impress.js + Jekyll + Github pages = Hekyll: presentation nirvana
I think you're right -- I don't think this is more than a blip on the radar. However, when layoffs start happening, others start to think about leaving too, so it's far more than 60 developers in the end.
We Were Promised Mobile Payments
soon, I hope! we want to make sure it is excellent in the Bay Area before expanding.
Secure, Fast, and Feature-Complete.

Pick two.
If he knows a few VCs it probably means he can network, thus has the requisite skills you are looking for. If there are two of you sitting there too afraid to pick up the phone, then you have a problem.

To hustle is to con someone by the way, usually out of money. We already have enough trouble with the word hacker...
ISPs located in a country that has signed up to the treaty would have no issue communicating with other treaty member ISPs and since the idea is that most of the worlds decent countries are signed up to this new treaty, where's the problem?
Based on your post, I am not sure how familiar you are with the Windows platform.

The Metro interface is covered in materials on Windows Phone 7. XAML is also covered there and elsewhere as it relates to Silverlight as a programming environment (rather than a browser plugin). Books on .NET are legion - and are the place to start if you are not familiar with the Windows platform.
Not sure if you meant having an HTML/JS app served from GitHub with database capabilities, but maybe you'd want to check out something like StackMob? (Disclaimer, I work at StackMob, but appearing here as a fellow developer)

You can commit your HTML/JS files to GitHub and StackMob will serve those pages for you via the GitHub integration StackMob has. What that enables you to do is actually use StackMob's REST API for its backend services (datastore, versioning, custom server side code) via AJAX since there's no cross-domain AJAX problems (pages and ajax calls are going to/from your stackmob.com hosted pages)

I use it to host my fiancee and I's wedding site and I use the datastore to hold guest information, people can register/login etc. The data is stored on Stackmob via the AJAX calls by using the JS SDK StackMob provides.

Example javascript:

var user = new StackMob.User({ username: 'asdf', password: 'asdf', acquaintance: 'bride', ...});
user.create(); //this fires off the ajax call to StackMob and saves your data in the datastore on that end.

It's free at a certain usage level (I'd imagine your personal use would be within the free threshold) if you wanted to give it a go.

https://www.stackmob.com/devcenter/docs/StackMob-Hosted-HTML...
here's the all-on-one-page printer version, aka the readable version:

http://www.businessweek.com/printer/magazine/scott-forstall-...
Pretty Lisp
I'm not a SimpleGeo customer, but I can speculate what the number one priority feature would be: a migration path. Even if you haven't launched yet, design it, document it and share the steps for migrating. That would be a great "Show HN" post.
I suppose I could easily see many of these coming from support as that department has been running more an more like a separate entity since Blizzard more or less moved support to Austin, TX from Irvine (keeping only a small, but eventually growing staff around in Irvine). With support wait times dropping as much as they have, it seems they would have reached a point where efficiencies and lower subscriptions in the US could mean making the hard decision to reduce support staff. UPDATE: I know one of those affected, and he was a trailer in the support staff, and one of the best guys around who really fit the company culture. He knew everything there was to know about WoW, and was constantly learning so he could make sure that our new hires, some of whom had never played the game, could learn all there was to know. Guys like him were what made the support staff special at Blizzard, even as things became more corporate and removed from the "cool" entertainment side of the business.

Testers are technically development, so some of the "60 development staff" may have been from that department, but they tend to be very overworked (I'm not sure they would consider that to be the same thing as understaffed) so unless they realized there is no way they will have new products nearing completion for a good long time I find it hard to imagine this is testers.

I'm not sure that the Diablo team really uses contracted developers rather than proper employees. It doesn't feel like the Blizzard way of doing things where developers have a very low churn and company loyalty is well rewarded.

All guesses and speculation on my part. I was shocked to see this news because it isn't something the Blizzard I know would have done except as a last resort, and it's hard to imagine the company being near any "last resort" situations—the worst case scenario right now seems to be lower profit sharing for the higher ups, and I've never seen any of those guys as in it for the money rather live of the games. I know the company line at Blizzard is that Activision has no control or say in operations. I hope that's still the case, but this move, lacking any specific details, does smell like Activision all the way.
No, you're right. Thepiratebay.org redirects to thepiratebay.se
Eh, you seem to be able to get dirt-cheap USB b/g/n adapters too these days, though they're presumably 2.4 GHz only and who knows what the ARM Linux support is like for them.
We really didn't mean to do anything negative here. The reality is SimpleGeo is going away, and their customers don't have a good next step. We're working to provide that. (This project is driven by our need. Note that the Urban Airship doc recommends essentially that you build your own version of the Context service.)

That said, we're happy to be as transparent as we can about what we're doing, and definitely not trying to fool any unsuspecting customers. There's definitely code behind the site now, and we are on schedule to provide at least some subset of the SimpleGeo feature set in production in advance of their shutdown. We're posting now to get feedback to direct our prioritization until launch. If Urban Airship had given us more notice of the shutdown, we would have waited until we were live to post this. But they are pretty clear that March 30 SimpleGeo's APIs will start returning 410s, and there's nothing we can do to change that.
Well, in theory, this is true for any country. If you ship widgets to a customer in Madagascar and those widgets violate some obscure Malagasy law you never heard of, the Malagasy authorities could prosecute you. But if you didn’t have any assets or employees in Madagascar and never planned to travel there, and if there was no law or treaty in your home country that let them extradite you or attach your home assets, then you could just put their warrant in the trash.
It's not that watching loads of stuff is bad, but that editing or messing with the feed of changes from those watched projects in a facebook way is bad.

I also find the social aspect of github useful for discovery and there could be some new useful features around that use. But certainly not by breaking the watch feature to optimize for passive bulk watching.
Idealistic or not, it's more than just a great argument. It's what the US Constitution requires.
No. $250 is ridiculous, even for buying everything new. I just spent 2 minutes googling:

Amazon Class Class 10 8 GB SD Card: $9
Best Buy 20" LCD: $90
Keyboard: $15
Mouse: $7.54
Speakers: $10.54
Total: $132.08

If you go to your local thriftstore, you could get all of these for <$50. Not sure if you have ever been a poor kid or not, but take it from me, this computer WILL bring computing to kids who would not otherwise have access.
Vipassana changes the spirit of business
Fearing Change
I'd nix the money part. This is all about good communication. If you communicate your intention to help the person you're emailing in some way early then you've changed the whole dynamic of the interaction.

If you say "I'm a smart guy looking to solve problems, can I pick your brain?" then you've hurt yourself. You've created a situation where you are asking for help and not giving it.

If you say "I'm a smart guy who's been researching problems in your industry and would like to toss some ideas at you to see if they'd be helpful for people like you" then you've created a situation where both people benefit. You're getting your questions answered and the mark is getting ideas that could potentially help him too.

This is a really simplified version but the idea of creating a relationship that benefits the other person makes it far more likely that they'll agree to what you're asking.
I saw exactly the same thing happen on Grand Cayman. At the end of the summer, Cayman Islands security found a pair of scissors in a girl's backpack that she'd evidently been traveling with all summer.
Well, not really, because as I was saying below, in a lot of cases you know that on average a certain solution is (just as an example) 10% off the best possible solution (on average, avoiding Mawell's devils).
Once you know that, it's not the TSP all over again. Because you can control the first number and you expect the second to stay within 10% (on average).

An easy example is computing an integral of any function (assuming the integral exists, makes sense, blah blah blah).
I can write a solution Monte Carlo style in something like 10 lines of code. It takes me 2 minutes to code and it solves most integrals. Of course, the solution isn't exact, but I can go as far as I want in precision (using a little more code if I want to use optimization methods instead of just brute force). Still, it's pretty fast to write.

Now you can write a program that actually solves the integral exactly, but that takes more time.

Or you can write a program that makes bins and calculates the hight of each bin and computes the integral (not as good, not as fast).

So, if I know I need a solution where I don't care about the forth digit precision, why wouldn't just write the Monte Carlo solution that is superfast?

Although you can try to go back to some academic problems in most cases I don't need an academic solution, so...
What about IE10 for Windows 7?
Amazon's CloudFront uses (as you might expect) utility pricing. It's pretty cheap to try out.

It's also dead easy to set up -- you used to have to use S3 for the backend, but now you can have it refer to any server. So you could make cdn.example.com simply pull content from www.example.com and then just replace "www" with "cdn" in your img src's and you're done.