skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think what Zed missed, and possibly Jeff as well, is that only a small percentage of people really have what it takes, brain-wise, to do programming. And not just to do programming but to not hate it. The intersection of those two things. And I'm not talking just about writing a simple recipe-like script. But really understanding how computers work, memory, networking, recursion, threads, etc. Just as only a small percentage of people have the right mental chops to do advanced math or physics, etc. Writing Hello World? Sure, just about anyone can "learn" to write that. Writing an operating system? No way in hell. You'd be surprised by what most people are like. Not us. Not the typical Hacker News type. Not geeks. But most people. Not saying they're dumb. They're just different. Really. Trust me. You'll understand, hopefully, after you've been on the planet a few decades in the real world.
This may not be exactly on subject, but "Well, what do people do when there is extra food around? They eat it!" is something that has been observed in several consumer-focused studies. I do not remember whether it was Pespsi or Coca-Cola, but one of them found that the consumption of their drink would increase significantly when they sold 2L bottles instead of 1.5L ones. When a 2L bottle is bought, consumers would simply drink it just as fast as a 1.5L, which gives credence to the above point. This was a fantastic way to increase their business. This has been observed among several consumer products companies, in different categories: a bigger packaging leads to higher consumption.

It is not too far-fetched to think the same could apply for Food. It's probably best to ask the question to people working for food products companies such as Nestle or Danone, where I expect a number of researches must have been conducted.
I don't think it's a good point at all. I think it's completely disingenuous. The analysis quoted assumes that the implementation of the rangeCheck function is on the critical path to shipping, which is preposterous in my opinion.
It's only trivial for someone who has used MATLAB, taken a machine learning course, or otherwise has similar experience. I'm sure the biology people know this is automatable; it's the "easily" part that's the problem.
I've only flipped through this so far, which obviously isn't enough to fully grasp the argument. But you can find the researcher's reasoning explained in his slides at : http://sciencehouse.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/aaas122.pdf
Japanese maples
We offer the largest selection of dwarf conifers and Japanese maples available! Whether you're a plant collector,or the occassional backyard warrior, we have a tremendous variety of simply stunning plants for your landscape.
> It is losing money, sure, but short term losses are not important when you're talking about entering a market as large as the mobile phone market after the existing players are firmly entrenched.

I think the point on mobile is that Microsoft itself was a well-entrenched player in mobile, and they laughed[1] while allowing that position to get completely eroded by less experienced competitors.

It's true that after that happened, they've seemed to build a pretty good project in Windows Phone 7. But I don't think it's really accurate to start the scorekeeping so recently.

[1]:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

edit: formatting
That's very tempting. Would cut my bill in half over Verizon and I could upgrade my wife to a smartphone.
Kodak would have had huge hooks into the national security side of things in the US government.

They made all kinds of films used for imaging various parts of the spectrum, and would have had their researchers available for the USG (surely at a price of course). That they had fissionable material is entirely reasonable and expected.
If you assume (as many do) there is a relationship between the stock price and the profits of the company, then corporate taxation serves to reduce profits, reducing the stock price. So, instead of rising to $500, it may have risen to $750. The forgone (and invisible) $5 million of appreciation was the loss due to corporate taxation.

(Obviously, the above is too simplistic to actually rely upon, but that's how corporate taxes reduce investor returns, effectively resulting in double taxation in many people's mind, including my own. I still believe that's part of the reason LTCG are and should be taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income.)
As a service provider to any industry, it is fundamental that one understand the product. Lawyering is no different but as an attorney it astounds me how many times this is simply ignored.

I believe it is incumbent upon the attorneys to understand the basics of any industry that they are involved with. I first learned BASIC in 1980(?) and have been an amateur ever since and I do believe that has helped me relate to my clients.

BTW, thanks to HN I "learned" Ruby shortly after the posting of a great article on _why.
I don't think this true: despite all talk of elitism, CS classes at universities like Stanford are actually more diverse than technology companies.
This free book:

http://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php

The best way I know short of immersing yourself in a community of *nix geeks for a long period of time.

If you were looking for something more grandmother or time friendly, I'm afraid I can't help you.
The average effective corporate tax rates last year was 12.1%
I bought a Galaxy Nexus from Google about a week ago for $399 from Google Play. Completely worth it, as it's unlocked and it runs pure ICS and will be updated whenever Google releases an update.
This would be more interesting if goodfil.ms actually had TV shows. The top 40 or so of my Netflix instant streaming are TV shows and I've already watched a ton previously.

Movies, I don't care so much about... otherwise, I'd just use Redbox.
I thought the problem (in the US) was that At&T or Verizon don't want this model to work, and don't make the plans attractive, so you end up paying more for the phone and still end up paying the same overburdened service cost.

Also, that available primarily online only phones don't sell nearly as well as hands on, in person sales.

This strategy seemed to have not worked so well earlier. I guess seeing how subsequent Nexus devices going through the carriers have been mangled, lack upgrades, etc -- leads them to think they just have to do it anyway, and try for the long game.
Recognizing that automation is possible is very hard. A quick tip, if you can find a pattern in a task, you can probably automate some or all of that task.

My first internship after college had me taking technical tables in old Word documents, and rewriting them as old-style HTML tables. These documents were often thousands of pages of tables, and there were hundreds of such documents.

It took me a while to realize that, over a few dozen tables, I had come up with a manual system that was just a series of copy/pastes of various HTML snippets in and around the copy/paste of the table contents in a text editor. At the rate I was going using my copy/paste method I was processing tables at about 2-3x the rate of the other interns who were hand typing the markup in the table (the average was about 20 tables per day, I was doing a solid 50-60).

Thinking for a minute I whipped up a script to do the work and my metrics went through the roof. All I had to do was copy/paste the table contents (I couldn't come up with a way at the time to automate that bit of tedium), then run the script. In a day I went to doing 6000-8000 tables a day. My boss, who fortunately thought it was pretty cool, had me train the other interns and we finished the project months ahead of schedule.

So even if a complete solution wasn't to be found, automating even part of it was a massive boost to productivity.
Every CEO and executive should experience a bit of this.. there is soo much productivity waiting to be unlocked if only c-suite could 'get' IT. Sigh ...
This is hilariously disingenuous. He's paying 15% on current value and renouncing his citizenship to avoid paying his taxes on its fair market value when the IPO hits.

I'm not by any stretch of the imagination against people making money, but you have an obligation to pay it forward to the society that enabled you to do it. Defending this sort of behavior smacks of the wealth-worshipper disease and there's not a lot worse than that.
"They've made awesome deals with companies like HTC, even convincing HTC to pay them $15 for every Android phone they sell, etc."

Suing hardware companies like HTC is not "convincing" them of anything. It's strong arming them using "software patents" (aka. patented math) because they realized they were losing. I believe I read somewhere that microsoft makes more money from suing manufacturers over Android than they make on their own mobile platform/software. Seriously... WTF kind of business plan is that?

Can't innovate and make something amazing? Just sue the company that does!
The top marginal tax rate averaged about 54% for the 20th century: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...

It peaked at 94% during WW2, but even absent of any wars, it was significantly higher than it is now (35%).

It was even worse once you work out how much more progressive our tax is now than it used to be. In 1982, you were paying 50% federal tax on all income above $106K (about $200K in today's dollars). Now the top tax rate doesn't even kick in until after $388K.

People today are paying historically low tax rates mostly because of the Republican's cynical attempt to "starve the beast" in order to reduce spending - which I might add is entirely backwards as it gives everyone what they want and no one feels any pain. If they really wanted to reduce spending, they'd force tax raises so everyone felt the consequences of every new government program.
The Nexus One is two and a half years old at this point, it really can't be looked at as a "developer" phone anymore, even if it will works well for casual usage. And it's stuck with only 512MB of built-in flash to store the image. ICS as shipped on other device simply won't fit. It would have to be a custom spin, which for a device this far removed from the state of the art just isn't worth anyone's time.
An interesting dimension of this that other commenters haven't noted is that keeping a home backup of this scope would be so clearly against policy at most corporate technology companies as to be a termination-worthy offense.
An employment manifesto
ice t would be proud of you http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAlzPgXb6rE
It will be a while before that comes to pass. There aren't any significant competitors to Excel, Active Directory, or Exchange.
You are right, but he didn't say he was arguing in his comment, he said he would. :)
Apply for Uttarakhand Open University Haldwani Career 
UoU Haldwani Uttarakhand was established by the Government. The university is recognized by Distance Education Council, UGC and AIU. 8 regional centers and more than 300 study centers are running under it.
Slate magazine picked up the story, but exercised responsible journalistic practice and credited Joshua Gross:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/05/15/taxi_button_t...

And to think they did this without having to be told and without finding it necessary to insult the author--quite a contrast.
His middle name is Haskell. What did you expect? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Haskell_Alsup
Customers not on a contract and willing to avoid AT&T, Verizon and Sprint can avoid quite a bit of fees. E.g. T-mobile has a $30 plan for 100 minutes, 5GB of 3G (and EDGE after that), and unlimited SMSs. The 100 minutes is problematic, but I use Google Voice so I can just use my computer for phone calls at home. And at $0.10 per minute overages, it's still cheaper than any of the contract plans.

There are also other carriers in the US with cheap plans if you're willing to shop around.
>Everyone who gets a copy has that copy forever, essentially gaining all the benefits of purchase.

So? If I really wanted, I could make a copy of a book from the library, too. The possibilities
are endless, but all of them are less convenient and cost more than a digital copy. Other than
that, there is no factual difference. Your argument is still invalid.

>This argument... is patently untrue.

Except it isn't. Unless you define "benefits from the system" as "gets a very small slice of
the overall profits from a sale, the rest of which is swallowed by a useless industry".

>Everyone who downloads it without buying it gets all the benefits of my work without compensating me.

Am I obliged to pay you? No. You demand to be payed for the costless act of copying your book.
That's ridiculous. If you want to be compensated for actually writing the book, find alternate
ways of doing so (there's Kickstarter, for example). Nobody is entitled to make a living of selling
copies of a non-scarce good. It's cool if you can, but not if that involves needing an artificial
monopoly on said non-scarce good.

I take the liberal approach here: I can't force you to give me things, but neither can you stop me
(or others) from sharing them.

>But don't walk around trying to say that downloading stuff is not stealing.

But it isn't, no matter how much you some people try to insist it is. There is no valid definition
of "stealing" that could be applied to the act of sharing digital data. None. Argumentum ad nauseam
won't make it any more true, either.

>Don't consume the content if the industry bothers you that much. Buy your
music directly from artists, go to the opera, read only public domain books,
whatever, hell, even steal it, but don't pretend you're doing the writer or
musician a favor.

How is this mutually exclusive? I enjoy going to concerts - which is how musicians
can (and do) make money these days. I also have quite a lot of merchandise in the form
of T-shirts. Services and services - both are business models with a future. Charging
for exclusive access to a non-scarce resource, by contrast, isn't.
they're the worst because they're the best. normal ads i can ignore. wikipedia's ads are not only visually hard to ignore, they're morally hard to ignore (and they don't go away after you donate)
Interesting conversation between Zed and Jeff: http://twitter.com/#!/zedshaw/status/202471821264691200
I once worked in an office where at the start of every month we'd get a cell phone invoice for 30-some phones listing every call made in the last month in an Excel document. One of the secretaries would then print out the whole thing spend the next two weeks going through it with multiple colored markers annotating it with who had which phone one which days and checking for different classes of violations of the cell phone usage policies.

Another secretary realized that he could make it a lot faster by just copying and pasting the data into different sheets for each person and then highlighting it in Excel. Then he wrote a macro program that would automate the highlighting once you'd done all of the copy and pasting. This cut the total work load down to a few days.

I was very derogatory of the whole thing and insisted that it was absolutely appalling that humans were spending so much time doing obviously machines' work, so I got assigned to fixing it. I ended up with an HTML+JavaScript application that would read the invoice file and monthly phone directories to automatically match up names with numbers for every day, calculate policy violations, and write the results to a new Excel spreadsheet in the established format. It cut the total human time involvement down to 5 minutes per month and time to wait for results down to about an hour.

Once we had the phone records available on the first day of the month, demand suddenly rose for even more detailed and different kinds of analyses. So it turns out we still spent more than two weeks on making reports, but only because new ones kept being demanded since they could actually produced on demand.
Imagine you have somethng to sell, I have the ability to place ads in people's homes via their electronic devices and I give you the choice of placing an ad for your product in one of two places.

You can place the ad into everyone's photo albums so that when they are flipping through photos they will see your ad.

Or you can place your ad in everyone's telephone book so when they are looking up the contact information for some source of some product, they will see your ad.

Which one would you choose?

Of course, in the real world, advertisers can choose both. They will advertise both on Google and Facebook.

And sure, it matters what the product is.

But overall which do you think is more valuable?
Microsoft takes on manufacturers' junkware.  Sort of.
How to spot the future
Having grown up in Rochester with many friends and family who were Kodak employees, I thought I'd ask around. My father, a software developer at Kodak who wouldn't have had any particular reason to deal with the reactor, says he was well aware of it and that it wasn't any big secret.

Given that they filed plenty of public paperwork and notified all the relavent authorities, I'm inclined to agree.
Also, there is likely more supply opening up to remote workers, which can drive down rates.

On the other hand, top developers can pretty much ask what they want no matter where they are working from.
Where is Toronto?
Must be a Windows or Chrome problem. On my dual core 3-year-old Mac, Safari stayed between 20 and 30%.
AT&T is probably going to be pushed to do so by the continued existence of T-Mobile. We're lucky that deal didn't get through, or you can be sure you wouldn't be able to have SIM-only plans.

My guess is Verizon will block this point-blank, and refuse to activate the phones. It'll take a change in the legal landscape to compel them to do so. They already have Android phones coming out of their ears, plus the iPhone, so they have no need to play nice with Google, particularly if Google isn't willing to use Motorola to play hardball.
> This is not the fault of those people, it’s a fault of education. Automation is not intuitive, it’s not something humans understand instinctively.

Actually, I think a large number of people who are good programmers figured out automation on their own, meaning the education system is almost entirely useless when it comes to this. We all have our own stories for this moment of enlightenment - mine was writing TI calculator programs to "automate" problem sovling in middle school algebra.
Important point here: You are not representative. If you are on Hacker News, you have probably been called brilliant at least once. You are almost certainly, given that you don't seem to be a non technical co-founder in a startup, in the top 5% of the population for mathematical/logical(not necessarily arithmetic) abilities. Just because you find the calculations tedious does not mean that most people don't benefit from them. From what I recall, most people forget a concept that they are exposed to once and only once.
I think the more interesting theory (Gary Taubes's I believe) is that most of us have the causation backwards. People are eating 'all this food we have' because they are obese, not that their obesity is caused because they ate all that food.
Probably a list of future Android version names :)
Google docs adds research feature.
Exactly. It's probably not even that common for biology groups to have a programmer doing work for them, so they don't often get that chance. That's why we need more interdisciplinary research groups / teams.
I think they need to run the JavaScript in order to get those screenshots that pop up.. otherwise too many people would complain that their pages weren't being rendered properly.. its probably something like PhantomJS or some other headless webkit.

Maybe the easiest way to get the screencapturing browser to display a part of the page is to simulate a click. Or something.
When you say "we all came in under founders common stock", you mean that you WILL all have founders common stock once the incorporation papers are signed, yes? You said above that they weren't signed yet?

Founders should always have vesting. It is going to permanently screw up your company if this guy has some large percentage of the company and isn't a part of its success. Plus the rest of you should have vesting anyway in case another founder doesn't work out for whatever reason. Everyone should ALWAYS have vesting.

So my advice is that, if you haven't yet signed the papers, you should go back and put vesting on all of the founder's shares, including his, of course.
WooRank - Nice service with some great insight into your website
Why it's a bad idea to buy Facebook stock (at least right now)
And the result from http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+the+best+smartp... now responds with a list of five different phones using data from Best Buy.
Blogger Confronts Newspaper Editor Who Plagiarized His Post
If we assume that Saverin had to pay his taxes by selling shares at the same price at which the IRS assessed then, then my logic still holds. Saverin would have to sell 15% of his stock to pay the 15% tax.

If, as you suggest, he is able to sell his shares at a greater valuation than the IRS uses to calculate his exit tax, then you are correct. When you renounce your citizenship, I have no idea how long the IRS gives you to actually pony up the exit tax.
Ask HN: How should I ask a startup about financials in an interview?
I have an interview with a startup in a couple of weeks and I want to tactfully ask about their financial runway. What is the best approach to do this? Anything else I should make sure to ask? This will be my first startup interview.
I think retargeting is really only creepy for people like us who are smart enough to link the retargeting back to our identity because we are logged into google.

My mom (again) is subjected to retargeting, but she doesn't identify it as tied to her identity so much as tied to the current search. She uses gmail for work and her personal account (because i set up a google apps account for her), but I doubt she knows that just because she's logged into gmail that google search is tying that information back to her identity.

This is a far cry from Facebook where people know that things in Facebook are tied back to their identity, and not only that is tied back to their identity in a way that may be visible to friends and family.

Both Google and Facebook track you, but Facebook is personal, and people are aware of that fact.
As an employee, it's not the federal government you'd worry about. It's your own company's lawyers, etc. You're much more likely to get in trouble internally for violating the company's policies about making statements related to the stock valuation than any outside entity.

Employees at Google (and many other tech companies) are often privy to what would be considered "inside information" about the company's future plans and performance. Making statements about the stock price's relative valuation can be seen as a form of making tips based on that material non-public information. It's not a good idea to go around making statements (positive or negative) about the current valuation.
Amazing Top 5 Places to Visit in Dubai
Dubai is one among those destinations that are loved for their great sightseeing attractions. But among these numerous sightseeing points few always stand apart from others and that’s why these Dubai attractions are must to visit for everyone.
For Facebook boosted video apps, reality checks in
Sorkin Confirmed as Screenwriter for Film Adaptation of Steve Jobs' Biography
Interesting...CNN appears to have pulled the content...
Doesn't it make sense that if there will be 100,000 available titles, then the average percentage will be even lower? Why is he trying to suggest that just because Netflix has more titles that means the quality is poorer so people watch fewer movies on Netflix?
Shallowness of Web 2.0 Technologies