skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
EDC (http://www.edcpub.com/), better known as Usborne Books, is an enormous publisher of children's books ("Everyone Poops" being a runaway hit, enough to buy another publisher). Its primary - and successful - sales format is thru multilevel marketing, providing customer contacts where big-brand distributors can't/won't reach. Problem was that its marketers would do the legwork to arrange sales large and small, only to see the customer then turn to Amazon and make the purchase (sometimes quite substantial) at a steep discount, and the marketer lose the sale and receive no return on effort. Faced with the choice of wiping out its sales force and submitting to the Amazon model (and being lost in the warehouse), or defend the loyal sales force (and make its brand stand out) and risk the consequences of leaving Amazon, the company chose the latter.

A gutsy move. We'll find out what the value of a loyal sales force is.

One key point here is Usborne's books are geared toward physical-contact-oriented children, not abstract-concept-oriented adults. Many of the books produced have a significant physical component, such as textured textiles, moving parts, thick cardboard pages, fold-out inserts, or rich coloring - aspects which do not translate to digital formats, and do not stand out in online-only advertising. It's one thing to see a webpage offering "That's Not My Lion" with a .JPG, it's another to have a salesperson hand a potential customer a copy to feel the fuzzy manes, velvety fur, and cold stiff claws featured on its various pages and go "my lion-obsessed son would love this". This kind of product is more expensive to produce than straight glossy pages, but if the customer does not experience the difference they won't pay the difference.

Much has been said about the brick-and-mortar (or variants) model vs. ultra-warehouse just-in-time online model of sales. Some products just don't fare well in the latter, and pushing back in favor of the former may be the only way for some reasonable/desirable products to survive.
I just recently switched to Git after joining a new company. The team I'm on was just in the process of switching from SVN to Git, so we were all spending a lot of time online in Pro Git as well as researching various workflows.

I think that we're still not fully taking advantage of Git because the other members of the team tend to commit and push all the time (so the code is backed up) but that makes rebasing and squashing quite difficult.

Git has also allowed us to work better with maintaining feature branches and bug fix branches which helps us to give individual branches to QA for test and only release those features/fixes that have been QA approved. If a feature isn't ready on time for deployment, it just doesn't get added to the integration branch and it'll go out the next release. That's pretty cool.

Personally, I've settled on using SourceTree as a GUI with a fallback to the command-line for certain operations.
One thing I have always disliked about UX design is the name. Frankly reading "user experience design" is a much better user experience for me than reading "UX design." The bad first impression always makes me wonder what other garishnesses will be in the project due a need to seem hip.
Sergey Brin: I'm Worried About the Internet
1982 Atari Drawings Predict Wikipedia + Portable Computers
Forty million euros? That's complete insanity.

The idea is like going backwards from Amazon's model. While Amazon goes right to the supplier, Fruugo accesses various shops that sell a certain product from the supplier. And the design looks like someone created it with a free site generator, the whole thing just feels cheap all around.
"""But Common Lisp is so flexible that at every stage in your development, you can tweak and twist things left and right, but in the end you still get a convincing, clean, and efficient design. As far as I can tell, this is not possible in any other language (not even Scheme)."""

Of course, this kind of begs the question... why not in Scheme? Considering it's part of the Lisp family as well, what makes CL more flexible? (Taking into account that "Scheme the language", as based on R5RS, R6RS, etc, is limited; but a particular Scheme implementation might have everything & the kitchen sink.)
Intelligence is a weak point to use in any argument.
Point Of Sale Systems
Softapps provide you applications for point of sales, point of sales system, point of sale system services and solutions for the retail and point of sales industry.
the direct link to the site: www.paloradio.com
> Though I love its application to "forensic accounting".

I'd love to spend some of my copious free time auto-pulling the 10-Q's from a financial site and applying it to earning statements. I'd bet a serious amount of money that many companies financial reports disagree with Benford.
I think there might be a good nugget at the core of this, however I've already spent a minute on your site and watching your kickstarter video and am still unclear on exactly what it is the app does. And especially, why it's different from any other photo gallery out there. I think you guys need to work on communicating your product-- maybe talk to a copywriter friend or something, have them clarify your ideas for you. The good news- I like the design of your site. And the tagline -- graphic novel of your life -- is appealing to me. But it does not yet translate from what I can see into your product. Good luck!
There's a fair few extra features you wouldn't think you would need but you'll discover mainly through using it. We made the switch from svn to git a while back and I can't imagine how we used to get by without stash, cherry-pick, bisect etc. There's more to git than just a distributed repository and better branching for sure.
Simple difference: in svn, until you're ready for other people to see your changes, you have to leave them uncommitted. In git, you say "well, I just refactored function X, let's throw that in a commit before I do anything else, and if I have to revisit it, I will"

I've never had to use svn myself, but it's this aspect that's always sounded positively crippling to my workflow
> It also has near-crushing prepaid pension debt.

Prepaid is the only way to do pensions.

If you don't pay pension obligations as you incur them, you're going to run into trouble if there's any biz contraction. And, if it's a long-lived organization, you don't actually reduce your cash-outflow by not paying when you incur.

Run a scenario where you under pay by X%. When folks start collecting, you have to come up with the difference out of then-current revenues. Steady-state with stable revenues, you end up paying exactly the same amount, but you've got debt. Now cut the revenue (and current expenses) by 25% because the world changed. Your revenue can't pay the debt.
Dubai joins the accelerator race with SeedStartup US$25K + 3 months in dubai
Look at their marketing. It's for publishers. Testimonials from Al Jazeera, Fox News and Fast Company. The value in real-time analytics for them is clear -- they're micromanaging their daily page view numbers by seeing what news of the day is attracting the most eyeballs from what sources, moving those stories up on their front page and expanding them, writing more about those topics, etc.
The higher-profit-per-employee option might be more vulnerable to competition, by self-employed cleaners or by someone with a similar business model.
Anecdotally, I absolutely believe their stat about cab show rates. I went out in the city a lot when I lived there, and on Friday/Saturday nights around dinner time, your odds of getting a cab felt much worse than 50% -- it was always a surprise when you did get one. Late at night, after the clubs close at around 2am? Forget about it, I don't think I've ever gotten a cab at that time without waiting like an hour.

In that context, I've found Uber pretty useful. One thing to recognize is that I hardly ever rode Uber alone -- defraying the cost over 3-4 people makes it significantly more economical.

I agree that this is a sad state of affairs for SF cabs -- having grown up in Taipei, I'm used to being able to get a cab pretty much any time, any place.
Build out an MVP.
My name's Doug and I actually work over at Chartbeat. You can get a breakdown of our pricing at chartbeat.com/plansandpricing. Any other questions, feel free to shoot me an e-mail at support@chartbeat.com.
It is important, however, to distinguish between syntax and expressiveness. I don’t care (too much) whether you write function(x) { ... }, \x -> ... or { |x| ... } to denote a closure, but there had better be a way to write a closure somehow! (Java, I’m looking at you here)

Java is the refutation, IMO: it does have a way to express a closure, it's just that the syntax (anonymous class) is laborious. You need to wrap up any mutable variables to be captured in final single-element arrays, and your closure type will be a single-method interface, but the expressiveness is there. The syntax just sucks.

The laborious syntax is what stops you from writing what may be expressed in C# as 'foo.Where(x => x.Name.Length > 10).OrderBy(x => x.Name)' in Java. The equivalent, even using the smaller Javascript syntax of 'function(x) { return x.name.length > 10; }', is tedious. The (current) Java syntax is just silly.

The syntax "weight" of a feature matters. Syntax that's light and unobtrusive invites use. Syntax that's large and clumsy dissuades use, to the point that whole libraries may not come into existence, not because of a lack of expressiveness in the language, but because of aesthetic ugliness.

Lisp has an out here because of macros; almost everything is equally ugly. Many people appear to consider this base level of ugliness unacceptable; others may see it as a flaw of Lisp, because the very malleability of the syntax makes it harder to encode implementation costs in the form of the program.
Marissa Mayer nominated to Walmart board
But that's just it. Being that it's 2012, the e-mail client should be smart enough to do this. I should be able to attach a large attachment to an e-mail (since that's the logical place to make the association), and then, depending on the attachment size, the e-mail client should automatically move it to Dropbox or some other service and translate the attachment into a link for me.

The difference between the your first approach and the second is that yours requires a behavioral change. The second approach does not. Put another way, it is often easier to change the situation (by making it the path of least resistance) than the person when you want someone to do something else.

It seems like some of this is already in the works, fortunately:

http://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/15/thunderbird-to-get-dropbox-...

Maybe it already exists in certain clients (Exchange and Outlook?) and I just haven't looked hard enough.
Cool. What problem does it solve?
Ask HN: Paypal reporting is broken. We're fixing it.
Getting reports out of paypal is slow and painful. They take forever to run, display the data badly and don't provide any business intelligence.

We're in the process of fixing it.

Instant reports, gorgeous charts, intelligent data mashups etc.

Do you use Paypal in your business. Do you suffer when trying to run reports?

Would you use our simple web app to generate the reports you need?
Very nice article Aria. You quickly mention Pegasos as a scalable alternative to SMO. I agree that this works well for linear models. But despite the claim that Pegasos can be trivially adapted to kernel models I have never seen any implementation of a kernel Pegasos and I don't understand how it's even possible. Have you used Pegasos-style algorithm to fit non linear models?

On the other hand there exist alternatives such as LaSVM that can effectively scale linearly to large datasets (but the optimizer works in dual representation as with SMO and not like Pegasos).
Those aren't necessarily legal (and might be ill-received in a region that doesn't want more unemployment); on the other hand, making use of the whole rolodex after leaving might be regulated as well.
It only shows that there are many development shops who have not migrated to a more powerful DVCS (either git or mercurial) and we ought to spread word about how inadequate centralized version control systems are.
Heh, thanks for the post which I found entertaining, especially this part: "Videos allow the viewer to sit in a comfy chair and listen to a soft-voiced, nice-sounding instructor (am I the only one that thinks the voice of Salman Khan is incredibly soothing?), which inevitably puts the viewer to sleep." :)

More to the topic I personally feel that more important than the choice of video or interactive exercise as the teaching medium is the individual's motivation to learn. Without that it's easy to fall asleep, metaphorically speaking, and with it, things like pausing, rewinding etc. isn't a problem at all. The training material simply has to open a few conceptual doors, and the rest naturally follows.
One thing to recognize is that I hardly ever rode Uber alone -- defraying the cost over 3-4 people makes it significantly more economical.

That's interesting. I'm a little unsure about all the taxi cab rideshare apps that are popping up these days because they do ignore a safety concern- I made a taxi tracking app a little while back (bias alert!) and some of the strongest feedback I got was from people (particularly women) travelling late at night that wanted to make sure someone close knew where they were at all times. Adding a stranger to the taxi cab is not too tempting, in that context.
If his current employees are 1099, they're paying SECA, and the numbers are 2x this. If he switches to W2, he'll pay half of FICA, and the workers the other half... but now his job offer is significantly less attractive.

He also owes $187/yr for uninsurance per employee.

Dealbreaker? No idea. Obviously people do make a living running housekeeping services.
SQL is a standard. I believe IBM encouraged and participated in the standardization. That greatly undercuts any case IBM would have against anybody for using SQL.

Java is not a standard.
The Prius benefits from regenerative braking in city driving.
Would love to see some animation options.
I agree that the big wins in machine learning/(weak)AI are probably going to come more from figuring out how to better apply existing models and algorithms to real problems rather than from improving the performance of the algorithms themselves.

That said one shouldn't underestimate the amount of commonality between problems that to some people may appear unrelated. For example this post talks about the gains in machine translation performance from including larger contexts. The same principle applies to many other sequence learning problems. For example you have a very similar issue with handwriting recognition where it is often not possible (even for a human) to determine the correct letter classification for a given handwritten character without seeing it within the context of the word.
IPad Mini This Year?
Wait, what?

Someone is paying FICA taxes.

I think you're arguing semantics here. Yes, everybody pays FICA, but for most people who are working their own business at a lower income FICA is offset such that no taxes are owed at the end of the year. So while you "pay it", it's not like that means much (insert long discussion here about complex tax systems)

What is the FICA/SECA offset you're talking about here? It is not my impression that maid services don't pay FICA.
I just did a view source to see if I could determine that and found some interesting results.

It does appear to be custom CSS, and very minimal, but what surprised me was that the HTML was as minimal as possible as well. There are no HTML, HEAD, or BODY tags.

Maybe not technically valid, but an interesting way to save a few bytes.
Hey Tom, it's not my testimonial, but that of a close friend. This person runs a pretty successful, non-tech, blog. He uses Clicky real-time analytics, and explained to me that he uses it in real-time to either push content (via social media) or hang on to it in order to get a steady number of monthly visitors. Example, if he gets 25,000 page views during half a day, and only "needs" 30,000 a day to be on target with his estimates/budget he won't tweet/fb, or publish a post, etc. On the other hand, if he sees mid-day numbers are down, he will push content in order to reach to the desired number. From his experience, real-time analytics is worth it and works.

I'm certain this no so much the case with non-publishers or page view driven businesses.
As an old C64 hacker that implemented several sprite multiplexers I can write more about the difficulties they had.

First, the characters used one multicolored sprite(which gives you double-width pixels), and on top of that sprite they put a black-bordered monochrome(single-pixel widths) sprite to give the characters a cartoony feel.

Maybe the memory savings was from reusing frames from one of these sprites, I don't know.

All the above is for above the waist. Then, when the raster has painted the last line of those sprites, an IRQ occurs and the sprites are moved 21 pixels down and have different frames and perhaps even new colors assigned to them.

This is where the difficulties happen. You have to update 8 sprite y-positions and 8 sprite frame indices. Also up to 4 colors if that is also changed. You only have one scanline(63 cycles) to do this and one update is LDA + STA = 2 + 4 = 6 cycles.

So 8+8+4 moves is 20*6 cycles = 120 cycles. Just less than 2 scanlines.

They could have solves this by spreading out the sprites a bit in the y-direction so they had to do less but one more scanlines. I don't think anyone would even see this.

Most sprite multiplexers sorted the sprites by y-position and then did one IRQ per sprite. If you did this you'd do much less each time and if you could spare the IRQ overhead you'd easily could have 32 sprites on-screen.
Crab-powered computer created by scientists
I would prefer meters to caps. Caps say if you use more than x gallons of water we shut off your tap, but pay us $100/mo regardless. Meters say, hey, use all the water you want, but you're paying for it.
http://translate.google.com/#sv|en|demo
Of parser-fetishists and semi-colons
Truth, television and the animal kingdom
Samsung Galaxy S III to feature ceramic and metal case, physical home button
A law that grants immunity for sharing vaguely defined information for a vaguely defined purpose, and then authorizes the government to use that information for vaguely justifiable purposes is not an actual privacy issue?
That's funny, sounds familiar.

How do we finance social security again?
I saw a talk about node.js by Mike Amundsen the other day - he did all his work using http://c9.io/ etc
The IDE seemed a bit flaky, but quite powerful - the concept certainly seems promising.
http://www.amundsen.com

Having said that, for me personally I still prefer a very responsive UI, lots of keyboard shortcuts, and the kind of workspace / UI customization you can only get from desktops nowadays.
Major question is how the consumer knows the book even exists? It takes significant in-person sales efforts to promote some products, effort which goes unrewarded if the customer can make the ultimate purchase online, causing the sales staff to evaporate along with consumer awareness of the product.
Agree, the biggest downside to chart beat is the destructive impact it has on productivity and inter-personal relationships
Amazing map of SF made by CMU using check-ins and machine learning
Show HN: Onion Browser, an open-source iOS web browser w/Tor
The design is good and the app sounds interesting, but the rewards on kickstarter are lackluster. $60 for an ebook, a sticker, and 5 business cards isn't very enticing, so I'd suggest reworking the rewards, if possible.
Bitcoins IRC bootstrap method is flawed
It's about time. I've wanted a reflex camera with quality similar to an SLR ever since I bought a Canon G1 10+ years ago. "Through The Computer" seemed like the next logical step after "Through The Lens" SLR cameras.

After a few cameras, I reluctantly switched to a D-SLR for paid gigs, but my "hit rate" went down since I don't always know what the onboard computer will do. Sure, I like the faster lenses and low noise sensor, but it seems clunky to carry so much hardware.

At this point, I would suggest that camera makers try to compete against smart phones with "smart cameras" that have cell connections, "apps", bluetooth, etc. The smart phones are close to eating their lunch. It's just so easy to shoot a photo and email it immediately. With a DSLR, I carry a heavy case and a laptop and need to spend time processing the photos before sending them.
I think you're abusing the word "syntax." I think there is a difference between being able to implement the same functionality of an abstraction, and having direct language support for that abstraction.

I don't think it's accurate to say that Java has clunky syntax for closures. Rather, I think it's more accurate to say that Java has no concept of closures. If you want that functionality, you need to roll your own support using existing concepts. C++ before C++11 is the same.
He said javascript customization, right? That makes it sound like something he would add, so I'm lobbying for parenscript as well.

I get that codemirror is the thing to contribute to, I don't have the time right now but hopefully someone will.
Sacred Language Cows Part 2: we can rebuild it. We have the technology.
Traveling through latin america the last 4 months or so, DVDs selling for the equivalent of .50 - 2.00 USD are ubiquitous. Less so software than movies (sometimes with 4 movies to a dvd); but everything is available.

It's completely open in the midst of working-class markets. In lots of these places $10/usd a day give or take a few dollars is a normal wage; which makes legal media purchases basically impossible; let alone something like a Windows or Photoshop license.
This is a followup to my previous essay. In this essay I hope to prove to you that the benefits of storing code in something other than plain ascii text could outweigh the costs; or at least close enough that it is worth exploring.
The Power of Dropbox | Cloud Photos Blog
Open Networking Summit (http://opennetsummit.org/) is a three day conference just for SDN/OpenFlow. If you're interested in seeing what companies are doing with OpenFlow, you should check it out.

Incidentally, this year's summit starts today.
When someone suggests a business idea like this one I come back with this:

"It's a great business idea. It will provide you with the freedom to choose which 20 hours of the day you want to work, including weekends."

Here's the reality: He gets huge points for going out and "getting into the game". Who knows? This might be what he loves and ends-up thriving despite the hard work and long hours. There are lots of businesses like that. And, frankly, the fact that they don't scale matters not to a huge percentage of business owners.

The greatest thing about this is that you have a (presumably) young man learning about the realities of business. Succeed or fail, he will be better for it. And, should he choose to move on and do something else he'll be a million times better prepared to make the right decisions and do well. He will succeed, regardless of whether this first venture does or not.
> “The truth is, in 10 years, you’re not going to have highly skilled, highly paid people working with networking hardware.”

I'm skeptical.

PC/Server virtualization didn't make IT go away, instead it made the job more complex. Now you need someone to run the VMware cluster and understand the nuances of virtualization. You still have a bunch of servers to patch and backup. And you still need the help desk to fix the same problems we've always had (printer doesn't work, my internet is down).

However, you gain a lot of flexibility and agility (which is the point of the article).

I've just not seen new technology reduce _technology_ jobs. In fact its usually the opposite. We need to coin some kind of catchy "law meme" like Greenspun's tenth rule, Conway's, Sturgeon's etc.