skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to think that SV startups had sort of a rock-band quality to them. It's a beauty contest for the team, eyeballs are all that matters, and they are managed and treated like "talent", not businesses.

That's still mostly true, but looking at it some more, it's more of a Burger King problem.

When Burger King started out, presumably, it made a lot of money and expanded quite a bit. But what they found out (along with other fast food businesses) is that customers are fickle. Unless you mix it up now and then your customer base will slowly melt away to go to Five Guys Burgers, or some other new fast food place that everybody thinks is cool this week.

So what they and other restaurants started doing was launching these short-lived, heavily advertised changes to the menus. Miniature burgers. Mexican burgers. Burgers on a stick. Whatever. They kept a bunch of ideas on the back burner, rigorously A/B tested and used trial markets, then launched something new every now and then. There was always something new and different enough to keep folks from drifting off to the shack down the street.

Startups are now forming a somewhat similar function for these huge tech giants. A startup has some catchy idea, gains millions of addictively faithful users, then sell out to McGoogle (as an example)

Works great for everybody. Google gets new talent with a proven record of coming up with ideas that capture eyeballs, they get an instant boost in eyeballs for their services, and, better still, later on these features can be rolled into the code base. Maybe. Maybe they just buy a startup up to keep the other guy from having it. Works the same way.

I'd also note that this is at a much higher level than the "lifts" restaurants get. It's entirely possible that the next eyeball catcher has no kind of long-term value at all; but is still worth tens of billion in lift to some acquirer over a period of a decade.

So articles like this get it wrong. There's absolutely real innovation and value, but at least to me it doesn't seem like the same kind of innovation and value you get when you cure the common cold. It's more like making a cool new kind of french fry.
...and you think this is an argument in favor of including a BOM?
Me too! I hate it when those investigative journalists try and cover a serial murder investigation. I only want to hear from other serial murderers on the topic. Writing about serial murder is just not the same as having actually been one.
Designer Jessica Hische Procrastinates Her Way to Success
Re finding a needle in a haystack: On an email list for parents of gifted kids, some folks shared the unconventional "mom, you are a retard" reactions of bright kids to this proverbial problem. The one I recall: Set the haystack on fire. The needle will survive but the hay will not.
For what it's worth, here was my reaction: At first I was thinking "cool". then I read that headline, and thought, "I hadn't thought of this as something I need to trust people with. In fact, now that I think about it, I bet that's really hard to pull off." Then I thought about the crazy non-contextual intellisense stuff out there and was wondering if the whole mess is even possible without turning the website into a spamfest.
IBM does quite a bit of research, they just don't blog or tweet about it all the time. Example of just one of their labs, right in the Silicon Valley foothills: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/almaden/welcome.html
You have the light speed thing backwards. People had already had a fair amount of evidence that the speed of light was constant, it's just one of those things that's hard to accept / build a reasonable model for why that might be the case. Think of it as an open question if the experiments where inaccurate or the universe was just strange. Until relatively came along and said, assume the speed of light is constant what would that mean?

1849: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fizeau%E2%80%93Foucault_apparat... "Fizeau's value for light's speed was about 5% too high." which is not that bad for a first stab. And good enough to show that water slowed the speed of light vs speeding it up.

vs 1900 to 1905: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity
Data vs. diabetes
The whole point of taxes is that we can't rely on voluntary donations to fund public goods. It's pointless to argue that people or corporations should voluntarily pay more taxes than they're legally required to pay.
That is a good question, but I guess the answer is that XSS bugs are particularly hard to catch. Static code analysis can't know if a particular field you use in your templates (or wherever it is that your html gets rendered) is user supplied or not. You can try to catch it using manual code reviews, explicitly marking code that should not be escaped, etc., but it's easy to loose track of it. You also try and have a number of users with names like this in your testing environment, but is not fail-save either.
While I agree generally I feel you've chosen the wrong example. The post office hasn't received tax funding for its operations since the early 70s when the Postal Reorganization Act made it responsible for its own finances.

But even unfunded, the USPS must operate under a strict legal framework requiring them to keep offices open and uphold a large pension program. Imagine needing to go before congress anytime you want to adapt your business.
Summary:

* We make a lot of low-paying jobs for young people, hocking our foreign-made goods to Americans in every state.

* We may or may not create jobs as a bi-product of our app store, where developers can try to scrape in an environment where people will turn to piracy because $0.99 is too expensive for an app.

* We pay more in taxes than any of you plebs.

(The last one is the Adam Carolla attitude: "I pay a large absolute value in taxes, so you should thank me, regardless of any considerations of relative value or overall rates")
"A witty saying proves nothing."

-Voltaire

(Hey, it works!)
Nobody is advocating that Motorola get early access, just that they don't waste time building custom UIs on top of stock Android.

If Google ships the OS code to all partners (including Motorola) at the same time and Motorola just worries about getting the OS running on their hardware while everyone else worries about that plus porting their own custom UI toolkits over, that's a win for Motorola, but not because they got the code any sooner.

The win is due to the other partners wasting time competing on something that most users don't care about or if they do, actually prefer stock Android, at least IME and at least since 2.2. Earlier versions of Android than 2.2 actually had some UI warts worth fixing but now the custom UIs are generally inferior to stock and exist pretty much solely due to inertia against abandoning them and company politics, IMO.

If the hardware manufacturers really want to differentiate themselves they should do so via hardware, form-factors, novel input methods (like the Galaxy Note) and add-ons (like Playstation compatibility in Sony's case), not by messing with the core UI.
I feel like I heard this same thing before... just over a decade ago.

Here's the deal, economic value is all about returns on capital.

User value or some other sort of "value" may well fit with what you're arguing, but fundamentally, economic value is all about return on investment. That means how much is my investment growing? Growth, therefore, must be measured in real dollars. If it's not able to be converted into a liquid asset, it's not real, it's speculative. So, until such time as you can actually, demonstrably monetize the "value" you're asserting exists in a company like Pandora, is, in fact, speculation and nothing more.

Bubbles are driven by speculation en masse. Some people get rich in them (because they sell before the crash). Every time there's a bubble, people start talking about how the old rules don't apply. Thus far, every time, they've been wrong... and it's because to increase value, you need to be able to monetize the offering. If not, you're creating user value, but no economic value.

Over anything but short-runs, investors want returns on capital – because you can find them elsewhere... so if your capital is tied up in an investment that isn't actually producing monetizable products, it's not producing capital gains. Therefore, there's a clear opportunity cost associated with putting capital some place that it's not growing in any sort of real (i.e.: liquefiable way within some predictable timeline) – and if the investment stays like that for too long, investors will go elsewhere, for greener pastures.
What is Generic Programming?
People of ordinary means should not invest in startups because it is financially insane to do so without some sort of diversification. If you can afford to diversify, you are not "ordinary", economically speaking.
I think you misunderstand. I'm not talking about attribution errors. I'm talking about the fact that discoverability and cross-linking is severely hampered the bias towards previously cited works. This doesn't create errors per se, but can narrow the scope of inquiry to the point where it becomes detrimental to the institution of science as a whole. It's a naturally emergent silo, but a silo nonetheless.

A NLP-based referencing system would not need to be correct all the time; it would merely need to be helpfully suggestive. As you're writing your paper, it would put tips in the sidebar: "Maybe this is relavent? (Hover to read abstract)". As long as there aren't an intolerable number of false positives, it would be quite a useful tool, I think.
This guy is undertaking a very complicated task, I wish him good luck!
Here comes another loud Hacker News gender 'debate'.
This confuses me. I believe Zynga has earnings, because in the comments of the OP Fred Wilson estimates their P/E at 13x ("Zynga trades at something like 13x pre-tax cash flow when you back out the $1.5bn of cash they have.") And I know Pandora has earnings, because I pay them $36/year myself.
Wow! Good job! #jobinsiliconvalley TT?
Wow, really? Really sorry to hear that.

Moving through trees is one of the fastest page level operations on the site as far as perceived performance. We'd like to make it faster but it's definitely in the area of perceived performance we're shooting for with the entire rest of the site.

Is there maybe something I'm missing here? What browser do you use? Are you primarily slowed down on the first request or when browsing layers deep.

Also, we wrote up the details on how we optimized tree browsing a while ago. Might be interesting from a general frontend perf perspective:

https://github.com/blog/760-the-tree-slider
- Government isn't massively inflating costs of education. It is rising in all major countries. What you are talking about is the cost of paying for education. Which is a completely different story.

- I am European. I fly 20 times a year. It is exactly what exists elsewhere. Or did you forget that it was the Netherlands that first introduced those scanners ?

- And you would have the money for infrastructure if you didn't go into two wars. So it seems the issue isn't taxation but how it is being spent. Which is an issue for the people who voted them in. You.
It would be really great to see somebody take this on! Although if this idea makes you into a millionaire, then you'll owe me a burrito, okay?
We simplified the default Android keyboard from ~28 keys to 3. We didn't simplify Morse Code.
Other good sources for learning iOS are HackRocket.com[1], Stanford CS193P[2], Lynda.com [3] and Raywenderlich.com [4]

[1] http://www.hackrocket.com

[2] http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/ipad-iphone-application-dev...

[3] http://www.lynda.com/iOS-tutorials/iOS-SDK-Essential-Trainin...

[4] http://www.raywenderlich.com/
s/loophole/tax law

s/society/government

morality is not defined by how much taxes you pay the government.

who's immoral?

The company that pays less taxes and returns the money to the shareholders,creates jobs, donates to charity, etc. or big government that waste tax payers money by spending it on useless government programs and wars?
This is a very short post, with minimal statistical force, carrying the weight of precisely one writer's opinion, radically generalized to a universal law. Skip it.
Not only kanji, but also hiragana and katakana (syllabic alphabets) encode to three bytes per character. Shift-JIS can encode all three to two bytes, as well as half-width katakana to one byte per character.

However, if size is such a concern (eg for web transmission), text compression neutralizes the perceived benefit of region-specific encodings.

Shift-JIS' continued popularity has much more to do with change aversion than it does technical merit.
I wonder what are implications of having XSS on .google.com these days? All auth cookies are likely to be http-only, so probably not a serious vulnerability?
Dev Rocket - The Photoshop Plugin for iOS Developers
Genius is just a word. As someone said before, we're all geniuses. It's all about your willpower to use it, train it, or not.

It's often not even about working hard, training hard, or something. It's just having a proper state of mind, and the right conditions.

As simple as it sounds, it's complicated. If it was simple, we'd all be happy right now. Not because we'd feel like geniuses but because we'd be able to achieve _anything_ we want.

Even thus, some points of the article correlate with having a proper state of mind, for example, you need to be able to think out of the box (note: you don't need 3 f. paragraphs to express that idea). You need to attempt to have a complete understanding of things, from every angle.

But all this still boils down to will power and proper conditions.

My 2 genius cents anyway.
"But that makes an article like this even more relevant because it allows consumers to take this into account when they choose which product to buy."

That's the problem though. Consumers will take this into account. But because the article only focussed on one company they will just end up buying from another company doing the exact same thing.
I use Arch and have gotten two other developers to switch to it from Ubuntu and Xubuntu, they also think it's awesome.

The reason I switched to Arch was because Unity breaks all sorts of Gnome things, and I didn't want to use Unity. I love Arch.
Joel Spolsky's 'The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)' is a good start: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Like a few other specialised fields (cryptography comes to mind) the key takeaway is to use a library and rely on the work of people who know it better than you do and have handled all the subtleties already :)
For network2
Ask HN: What would you use for ad tracking?
Google Analytics doesn't seem the best in UX terms for non-tech people. Is there any alternative?
I swear this community falls for linkbait more than any other.
At least individuals have dignity enough to warn you that they are planning to kill you! :p

But inserting conditional probably doesn't change anything:

P(A) >= P(A|B)
I like lubuntu a lot, but LXDE is a little harder to tweak than Gnome 2.
Or "macho cultures" have a lower percentage of male college graduates, creating more opportunities for women at the top. Or they correspond to fast-growing underdeveloped countries which, because they are developing in an equal(er) rights environment, aren't replicating the male-dominated model elsewhere. But who knows? There's not any data to back p explanations in the article anyway.
Except that generally, the average person knows little about the inner workings of things.

It is easy for the average person to believe that building Twitter was hard, though surely it was. Our ability to understand things decidedly maps to things we can already understand.

To give a completely made up scenario about how this might have gone:

Stupid person: "Wow. Building twitter is hard. You type on a website and something comes to my phone. AMAZING."

Average person: "Eh. They probably just use some sort of service. I mean, if I can send a text, why is it amazing that somebody else can?"

Smarter-than-average person: "Twitter is down again? WTH? How hard is it to keep a website up? My Wordpress blog has never crashed, and all the posts in it are WAY more than 140 characters."

Smart person: "Yeah, I can see how scaling to x-thousand reads and x-hundred writes per second IS a big task. I guess you have to put in a really beefy database server to handle the writes and distribute the reads out to slaves, then do all your queries from there."

Smarter person: "If we get rid of relational database stores altogether, we can scale these records much better, and our only upper limit is memory."

etc.

Yes, it's a completely contrived example and I'm sure I probably insulted everyone who's ever done any Twitter-based naval-gazing, but that's what it is.

In short though, the average person is more easily fooled into thinking things are brilliant when in reality, they're made by equally average people who have studied in that particular field more than they have.
Apple's EMEA headquarters are in Cork, Ireland. 2,800 people (and growing) are working there. In the last quarter, 23 percent of Apple’s profits were made in EMEA (compared to 33 percent in the Americas, 28 percent in Asia-Pacific, 16 percent in Japan and seven percent in retail). The article on The New York Times quotes numbers from 2004, then EMEA made 28 percent of Apple’s profits.

I don’t think it’s a problem when Apple decides not to move money made overseas back to the US. That's their decision and there is nothing shady about it either way. I can't think of any moral objections.

Purposefully moving money somewhere in order to avoid taxes, however, could be if not a legal at least a moral problem.
Why not have downvotes too?

If you ask me, upvotes-only (as here on HN) works great if post get hidden when x time goes by. But AFAIK links "value" will not devalue over time on TYTC and therefore the early submissions will get ahead by far, even if they are of lower quality than the links posted later on.

Downvoting does not mean bullying, and I cant imagine people will be afraid to publish links with the risk of getting a downvote or two.

But I may be wrong, and please point that out, HN!

EDIT: Also, I wouldnt mind if there was an adsense ad on the left side of the list. A small tower one that would not be in the users face. I'd turn off adblock for you!
If Google cared supporting users on old devices, they could continue to add features to apps on old OS versions (even if they can't get carriers to push OS updates). Consider that Google's Chrome Beta I'd only available for ICS.
I think a lot is due to side effects, such as the need to fit in / be like everyone else. The easiness of following what's already there, basically, the laziness of the mind.

The laziness of the mind which so many of us are taking advantage of to control people, as it's so easy to let others think on your behalf.

And then again, this makes you right: the education system was made precisely for this. The education system might be actually one of those "genius" ideas.

By formatting people and putting some barriers in their minds, you make them controllable and productive, and thus, you may actually advance humanity in some ways. But at which cost?
Coding Culture, Agile-Lean methods and DevOps @SlideShare
You could say the same about C. Sure, the C standard library is specified along with the language, but it's still a library, not a set of language features. You could have C without the stdlib. So does that mean an example in C with an alternative IO library would be ok, but not a similar example in Python?

I don't think whether IO is built into a language is really the important question. If people are interested in seeing how IO works with different frameworks, those examples should be there. But if people just want to see what a language's basic syntax looks like, not the specifics of emitting IO in various frameworks, there should be one example per language, even for languages which lack built-in IO.
You're right that using an A record isn't great because your hosting provider loses the flexibility of being able to change IP addresses. This article explains it really well: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/avoiding-naked-domains...

My solution is to use CloudFlare for my DNS (it's free, why not?) and use their "page rules" feature to do a 301 (permanent) redirect from domain.com/* to www.domain.com/$1.

You can see what happens if you run `curl -I maxmasnick.com`.

dnsimple.com (another DNS provider) also lets you add a "URL" record, which also is a 301 redirect.

One should be careful with 301 redirects because the are cached locally and quite thus permanent (see: http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/301+redirects+-+a+dangerous+o...). But in this case I think this is what you want.
What a great way to advertise yourself, I'd be bought if I was a recruiter.
There's an implementation in the pull request queue.
Are you an advertiser or a publisher? what exactly would you like to track?

OpenX.org and google.com/dfp/sb (if you are a publisher) are both free and great.
The bottom line: go to school.

I'm well aware of the drawbacks of academic science. I'm aware that some of the best progress happens outside of academia. It's not about that; it's about resources.

I've been doing some consulting for a company that's working on improving medical diagnosis (among other things.) I'm trying to build risk models for diseases based on genetic data. The problem is that this data isn't freely available. "Open" access data is usually only "open" in the sense that you can apply for access, and you usually have to be a biology professor to be considered. It's not like the tech world at all. We're used to open source. They're not.

If you want to do science, you need access to resources. You need a lab, or you need experimental data. It's really hard to do that outside of academia. Heck, it's hard to read journal articles outside of academia.

Going to school, for all its hassles, is essentially free access to resources. You don't have to be narrowly academia-minded to get an education -- I'm getting a math PhD, but I'm philosophically closer to the tech industry and I don't plan to work in academia. Grad school isn't a tribal identity, it's an opportunity to get what you value out of it.
Why not? The harm is to heat dissipation at high clock rates and voltages -- basically to overclockers. The targeted clocks at the performance points they are aiming at don't have any trouble staying in reasonable temperature ranges, so why bother?

Lots of this is market based, not technical. The only competitors to Ivy Bridge are from AMD, and frankly don't compete well. There's simply no pressure to produce a "pull out all the stops" max performance chip. They have a comfortable margin even with comparatively poor heat sink designs, so they might as well save the nickel.
how is the J-1 working out?
However, when it comes to the internal representation of text, things are quite complex as of Python 3.2: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0393/
And hard work oversold.
No external hard drives attached, except when I remember to back up my machine (I frequently, but not always, plug it in when it is on my desk, but it is just for Time Machine).

Also, unless I am running heavy CPU things (XCode, VirtualBox machines, etc), I usually don't get a lot of CPU time like that.
Hackdays, best way to find someone you gel with is to build something with them
Cool, if you like to keep it low as you say, blocking anon is probably a good decision.

How do you block tor? If by blacklisting public nodes, someone can set up their own bridge relays if they really want to take the effort.
It's actually my client's startup, he's selling ad space so he would want to track clicks on those ads to charge properly.

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll dig them out!
Revenue != earnings.

Earnings = revenue - expenses

It's super-important to remember the distinction.
Covering a murder != saying "that's how the murderer should proceed for his next victim" :)