skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You would be surprised. A kick ass secretary will make all the "sticky" points of running a company go smoothly. I have seen 2 great secretaries that if they replaced would have a significant impact to the efficiency of a company.

Also an rock star secretary can work smart rather than hard finding ways to remove repetition.

A janitor could be a rockstar if they used methods to clean an office space to extreme detail with utmost efficiency.

Admittedly the more work moves into the physical world, the harder it is to scale with simple mental skill, but programmers are not the only ones that can become "rock stars." Also, WPM is not as relevant a way to measure a secretary's skills any more just as it isn't a way to measure a programmer's skills.

@brl: I know you just wrote a sentence, and this really isn't a reply to directly to you, but more to the elitist us and them content of this forum.
You're looking at dotfiles.com, but I was referring to dotfiles.org.
MicroSlice based servers
Finally a startup with "Pricing".
Just installed it and found it way too harsh on my eyes. I have no eyesight problems so a background with a harsh contrast like that does more bad than good.

I've settled on Novel theme (black on creme background; which is similar to HN background) and I find it the best when my eyes are tired. I also use Panic Sans font. I've tried all kinds of fonts (including Consolas) and Panic Sans is absolutely the best one I've tried. Definitely give Panic Sans a try: http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2007/04/in_love_with_a_fo...

Download: http://rapidshare.com/files/187757062/Panic_Sans.dfont.zip
Free apps have a lot fewer hoops that you have to jump through, so you can publish almost immediately.

As far as the article goes, I think the main point has been obvious for some time. Apple knew that these sorts of apps would be popular and initially blocked a number of the more crude ones. When they stared allowing the fart apps etc., the flood gates really broke open. The same happened with facebook apps. Whenever you have such an open platform with the potential to reach a wide audience, you're going to have a wide range of "success" stories.
Congratulations to both of you.
I am just not really surprised. Their tech is just not the best in any category.

I hosted on windows server, now Linux
I had my PC on windows, now I run OSX and Linux.
I had a pocketpc phone which killed the palm and then completely stopped innovating and was in some cases still very buggy, now I have an iPhone.
I used Office, then switched to open office and now 80% google docs.
I have never liked MS browsers, Firefox all the way.
I can't think of a single web property from MS I use...

With them loosing all the developers, developers, developers... It doesn't take long until they start to loose people that are leading everyone elses technology choices.

(I admit visual studio is pretty sweet, but I use Ruby)
> physicalization takes a hardware-based approach to dividing those resources into independent, TCO-optimized, single socket compute nodes

Anyone have any concrete idea about what they are talking about? Specialized VLAN + management platform?

Vague press release... (what's new)
Ask HN: How do I make myself competitive for a master's in CS after college?
I graduated in May with a B.S. in the computer sciences. I would like to apply to a competitive master's program in 2-3 years.

During undergraduate, most of the focus on graduate school admissions was for Ph.D. programs, for which there are fairly standard ways of making oneself competitive: get great grades, do a thesis with a well-known professor, get to know a couple of teachers to have good recommendations, and get an 800 on the quant portion of the GRE (with an emphasis on research and recs). During the time between undergrad and grad school, what can I do to make myself a competitive candidate? Furthermore, what do master's degrees admissions emphasize in contrast to Ph.D. programs?

I am particularly interested in a few "elite" programs--not because of their brand name, but because I constantly see "great" minds in the field come out of there. I feel being surrounded by such people would give me the greatest return. Specifically, I would like to apply to the MIT Media Lab and the Stanford Symbolic Systems program. So, for another point of discussion, should I work as hard as I can to make myself a great computer scientist, apply to 10 or so solid schools, and hope I am accepted by one or two of the best ones? Or should I focus my goals on what a specific program values?

EDIT: Related thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422773
"I assume this confirms my previous bias. By the way, did you notice how this story provides even more evidence that my bias is correct?"
Good point. I come from the old age of Usenet signatures, where proper etiquette said 4 lines was appropriate. Except they were displayed at the bottom of people's screens, not inline like threads nowdays (do I sound old enough now :-) I'm really not).

I do have an opinion on signing (using at least one line at the end), because I believe it helps the conversation to know who said what. If all you read were anonymous comments, it would hurt the conversation. When I see the same name again and again in a thread, my brain automatically connects the dots and I follow the conversation better knowing that the same person is responding again, or a new person chimed in, etc.

You could argue that the name of the writer is already mentioned at the top, but somehow I always seem to skip that part and rely on the bottom of a post to know who wrote it. Maybe it's because if I read a message til the end, it means I found it interesting. Only then do I want to see who wrote it. That would explain why I skip names in the header and expect it in the footer... Anyone has read good research on that topic?
Whew! Good thing I have a crap app coming down the pipeline.
Cuil I.P.O and other related jokes.
Surprisingly Cuil has not made a sound louder than a bear’s fart in the woods. Even comedians have failed to even make a decent joke about Cuil. Maybe because that would be as morbid as making jokes about the neighbourhood retard.
It's strange that the author ignores the most important point until the very end, then doesn't do anything with it:

In traditional property regimes only owners have the right to modify or control the use of the property. The right of modification is not transferred in rental, leasing, or licensing agreements.

Access does not trump possession. Access (or the control of it) is possession, with both physical and intellectual property. If everyone had unrestricted access to everything, ownership would have no meaning anymore. This is not a matter of "traditional copyright regimes", but the whole concept of ownership.

And of course herein lies the problem with not owning something: someone else can deny you access to it, either though intent (Microsoft shuts down their DRM servers) or negligence (the company that owns the goods goes out of business).
Microsoft cutting 1,400 jobs today, 5,000 over 18 months
Maybe now they will be able to focus on creating competitive software like they did in the late 80s.
Review of Pro Django (1/2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Michael_McConnell

From 1992 to 1996, McConnell served as Director of the National Security Agency (NSA). He
led NSA as it adapted to the multi-polar threats brought about by the end of the Cold War.
GHC works hard to remove the lazyness where it can guarantee that this change won't break your program.
let me help you with that, I think he was missing one of these:
</sarcasm>

BTW, as I recall, most of Uncle Sam's krypto is 40-bit symmetric based on algorithms that predate Diffie-Hellman. They still have couriers carry the keys on specially made (aka, archaic) tape drives from point to point under two-man integrity and hand-cuff the briefcase to the courier. So Dr Strangelove. Skype is be better than that. A lot better. Here's a starting point if you want to find out about mil crypto. Check out the KY series, especially KY-58, 68, and 90, as I recall. A more complete listing here http://hereford.ampr.org/millist/m25.html
Perhaps they shouldn't have spent so much money on those shitty ads with Seinfeld.
http://www.google.de/search?q=probabilistic+parser

At least some people are writing papers about them.
He was talking about the cash, not the people ;)
It's even more complicated than that, right? Tesla can't always use commodity parts because of the technical decisions they made.

Getting the transmission right, for example, delayed production of the Roadster for a long time IIRC.

So, not only do they have to engineer an awesome car, they have to engineer a whole new supply chain -- maybe even a new kind of supply chain. If they can get through these problems they'll be golden, but I certain don't envy their position in the market.
Definitely interested in this and would become a paying subscriber, if:
1. prices were lower
2. it was more comprehensive(went through tinyurls for your domain, scanned other social websites)
New Pylons website on CouchDB
For almost any purpose I can think of, the roads of the world serve me as if I owned them.

If I owned the roads of the world, there would be a heck of a lot less traffic on the 101.
> If this is the way you approaching languages, then the problem is not with Lisp, but with your application area.

No, the problem is with CL (not "Lisp") if:

a) it doesn't provide something compelling enough to make me use it over another language

b) the community hasn't created enough buzz around it to place it firmly in my consciousness next to some problem domain (at least one)

> Find an application area first, then design an environment to solve the problems of that application area using Lisp. The next step is to create a community of people interested in solving that problem, and finally offer the Lisp environment to that community.

Yep, this is what needs to happen for CL to have a chance to go mainstream. The important thing is that the application area needs to be very common, e.g. webapps, and the offered solution needs to be radically better than the alternatives. Think Rails <-> Ruby back in 2005. CL may be the best thing for hardcore AI stuff, but few programmers work on hardcore AI problems.

Your examples are off btw. AutoLisp and Emacs Lisp are embedded languages, not something you'd write a whole standalone app in. It's like saying that if you want to write a spreadsheet, you should use VBA because that's what Excel uses for scripting.
Digg to cut 10% of workforce, hire direct sales team
5000 very talented people...MS has enough cash they could have sponsored all of them in a new venture. what a waste
no surprise. as global IT exits the "build-out" phase and enters the long commodity phase, headcounts will fall everywhere in tech.

and while msft won't admit it, open source and the web are starting to impact the bottom line. free and "good enough" seem to be trumping expensive feature-laden software.

google continues to be the winner here going forward. they'll continue to see companies like genentech transition on to google docs as a company platform, forsaking the msft stack.
I'm surprised it took this long. Boston area has been great for hardware startups, but the software scene is (IMO) a far distant 2nd to California. Have contemplated moving west a few times myself.
Monaco 10 over here. Using 13 makes me feel like grandma.
Don't be torn. You never would have had me even try your service if you asked for a credit card. I suspect its the same for most people.

Getting a credit card later is proof that you have made an invaluable tool that people just didn't forget to cancel, and should make it easier for you to adjust your service until you hit the sweetspot and become a must have.
but creepy in a way....even the commenters, when given the freedom to vent anonymously, use phrases like "realignment"...
Apply for a PhD. If you get in, you can bail after you get your master's, and they pay you if you are a PhD student. A professor at a top-25 CS grad school once told me they accept almost every American citizen who applies to the PhD program because it's so much cheaper - so worst case, you should be able to go to a well-known school that has merely a good CS program.
7 Sins of Success
> He also rode a unicycle.

I got this. Let's see what's left on the list.
Lord of the Domain
Funny quote!
They can replace you if you are just a coder. If, on the other hand, you work on an important product, acquire domain-specific knowledge, and know the code inside-out, then replacing you with someone else will be a lot harder.

Think, for example, about the folks who work on the Microsof's C/C++ compiler. I doubt any of them need to worry about their job. On the other hand, if all you did is implemented the Shutdown button for the next release of Windows then, sure, you can be easily replaced.
I think your messaging is a bit off in the "add brand" section

I created a brand, and then it asked for keywords or phrases, so I entered keywords, not the brandname itself as I thought this was a tag kinda think, maybe you were doing analysis on cross-section of Brands (that's capital B, 'cause you are calling your brand grouping a 'Brand').

Not a bad idea to have Brand keywords.
Anyway, of course I was supposed to enter the brands I wanted to follow in that box, like the comma delimited list said, but of course, I didn't do that the first time.

Then I had to create another Brand (I'm beginning to think that Brand is a bad word for that, Brand Group or something might be better). I couldn't find how I edit a Brand I already created.
Of course, the "edit brand' is in the menu on the left, but for some reason I expected it to be up near the to by the "add brand" button.
Add/Edit do go really well together.
We're working on making things more flexible. If you have any specific questions about what you need please feel free to email me, brett at slinkset.
Wireframing, mockups and prototyping for websites and applications
Some people at Microsoft (or any company) might contribute more by just that.
The "Hacker News |" part at the beginning of the page titles is redundant; please remove it. 99% of the time, the Y-combinator icon is enough to identify the tab as belonging to Hacker News.

On a tabbed browser, a sequence of HN tabs looks like this:

(Y) Hacker News | Aa... (Y) Hacker News | Bb... (Y) Hacker News | Zz...

Where (Y) is the Y-combinator icon. So, I can see which tabs are HN, but I can't see what they are about (save for the 1st 1 or 2 letters of the title of the discussion, and a little browser-provided ellipsis).

If the "Hacker News |" was removed from the beginning of the title, I would still see that the tabs were HN, because of the YC icon. And I would also be able to see the first 15 or so characters of the title of the discussion, which would help the navigation.
Why does he have this need to prove that so bad to other people that it trumps everything? Doesn't he know this himself already?
(honest question)
Why does a user-content driven social networking site need a sales team? What are they going to sell, and to who will they sell it?

I hope they're not staking their profitability on ads.
> "because it's so much cheaper"

... cheaper to pay Ph.D. students than full time staff you mean? Or am I reading this wrong?

As I wasn't exactly an all-star in undergrad (3.52), I'm trying the route of getting a masters at a second tier school (and attempting to be an all-star while I'm there) in the hopes of leveraging that to get into a top tier school.

Also gives me an easy way to bail if I find I don't like it as much as I hope I do.

Of course, if this plan is idiotic, someone should point that out. The CS school employs a lot of Masters students for TA/RA positions, so I'm not too worried on the money front.
I played board games last time - but wait that was in SF...
Any idea why it's "so much cheaper"
Well, to be fair it's like 5% learning and ... 95% entertainment.
Yes, many private industry employers like "all but dissertation" applicants, who have a combination of technical knowledge and orientation toward private industry rather than academia.
We were just talking about cleaning up the add brand page and making it more intuitive, as you're not the first person to do this :-) Thanks for the feedback!
What if Apple sued Palm, would Microsoft come to the rescue?
No, I was talking about the people. But the cash should go to better uses too.
I agree with the advice already given that the best way to be admitted to the programs you desire is to be ready to apply to a strong Ph.D. program.

But why do you desire the master's degree? Can't you meet great minds in private industry?
There's a good quote from a John Carmack post on Slashdot in the same vein:

Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.

From: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=25551&cid=2774808
Great to hear. A couple quick questions:

1. What's the price point that you'd be willing to pay for? What would expect for that price, in terms of number of brands tracked and number of users on your account?

2. Can you explain the tinyurls thing a bit more? What other social networks would you like to see added? (we're working on a long list right now, btw)

Thanks!
Senate Panel Approves Geithner for Treasury's Top Post
She got Techcrunched because she is a 17 year old girl. Her promising website currently displays a blank page: http://internshipin.com/search.php

It's a nice story for bloggers and journalists, but I don't think she's someone I need business advice from.
There's more to CA than the coast and the valleys. There's also mountains.

If you want snow, the Sierras, which are two hours away from the SF Bay Area, get 20-40 FEET a year, with a 10+ foot snow pack. http://www.eldoradocountyweather.com/donner.html isn't even the place that gets the most snow.
Turn Your Blog Into a Widget With Blidget Pro
three things.

1. The "keyword" concept can be better explained. I wasn't sure what to put there during registration. It was only after I saw it in action, and saw that it was actually asking for specific search terms, that I understood. Then I went back in and changed the keywords for my brand to specific terms I wanted to tack, rather than words that described my business.

2. When I see my latest results, I want some kind of a refresh button that will tell the system to go check for new results.

You know how some people refresh their inboxes all the time hoping for new mail? I would totally do that with this, hoping for new results. So give me a refresh button that checks for new terms.

3. The language on the brand-editor page near where I enter my Twitter info is confusing. Under the "change password" field there's a checkbox....with no text near it to explain what the heck it does. That needs to be fixed.

There's some big text to the left just kind of floating that says "Don't display tweets from this account." I guess that might apply to the check box. If so, shrink it and pull it closer to the check box.

Also, with the twitter setup, when I enter my twitter info, I want a little JS message confirming that Mighty Brand successfully linked up with my twitter account, so I know that's working and the pipes aren't goofed up or something. Put me at ease.

I may think of more stuff later.
Thermal Photovoltaics Breakthrough by MTPV Corp.
How to document AB split tests
Indeed, congrats to Jessica & Mr. PG.
I think both Joel and Paul are right. Most of the code Paul talks about writing took a "few hours" to write, what Joel is talking about are massive projects that take weeks of effort only to find out that they solve the wrong problem.

So, rapid prototyping: good, unspecced large projects: bad.
And why should they get the web better than any other bunch of middle-aged business guys? Microsoft is a desktop software company, the web isn't in their DNA. The web is a threat to kill their primary revenue streams!

Goes to show that realizing there is a lot of opportunity somewhere and throwing an obscene amount of money at it is not enough to succeed.
Awesome product, we (FreshBooks) may even end up using it. But it is going to be kinda cheap for us, all we need is the blogger package. This is sillly. We are a 30 employee company, we could afford to pay much more.

You should up your prices for guys like us, or (somehow) charge on some other metric.

Awesome site - it is totally slick.
"Crap" iPhone App Milking $200/hr
There was actually some recent discussion about this on the Factor mailing list.

Factor's macros aren't really the same as Lisp's, as they are a compile-time optimization of dynamically-generated code, rather than a means of syntax extension. Factor does have a method for extending its syntax (called parsing words), but as of now they are not really first-class citizens in the way that Lisp macros are. There are, however, plans to remedy this and make them more declarative & easy to use.
Why are all the examples females who study humanities?
I run into trouble with this as well. I get a lot of looks when I mention that I'm in a fraternity. However, a large percentage of the 70 people in my fraternity aren't white and many of us are on financial aid and student loans. Hardly a white boys club.
Is Blackberry being genericized to mean a smart-phone? The General Dynamics device doesn't look like a modified RIM product.
... so I connected to that ads database (I assure you, random engineers can no longer do this!)

Interesting. I guess protecting the infrastructure of a billion dollar business is worth the cost of there being no chance of another billion dollar business being discovered in this way by a random engineer.
I did not know this about American citizens, but it seems unlikely. My intuition is quite the opposite: because Ph.D programs are drastically more competitive than master's programs (higher average test scores, GPAs, and lower rate of admissions, at least at my university), my chances of being accepted into a super-competitive program would be more feasible on the master's level.
In FF3, clicking on Feedback shows underneath the video on http://mightybrand.com/features
There's http://mrtweet.com/ and http://www.whoshouldifollow.com
This is cool. Being able to play my Vimeo videos on the page is sweet. Looks like the got Hulu in there too.
> But why do you desire the master's degree? Can't you meet great minds in private industry?

You absolutely can. However, I enjoy the academic environment as a platform for personal development and have made achieving a graduate degree a personal goal. I actually desire a Ph.D., but the 5+ year commitment doesn't exactly align with my other goals. I am also attracted to entrepreneurship and feel I would reach a point of diminishing returns at the 3-4 year mark. Hence, a master's degree (notably the programs I mentioned) are a good compromise.
You need to allow brand names to be more than 20 characters. A lot of brands are longer than that, for example school names. "University of Blank" will almost always be too large, and those educational brands spend a ton of money on marketing.
How to hack your own personal daily comics page
Interesting packaging. 6 mini-itx boards, each with a 2.5" drive in a 1U form factor. 44U in a rack and you get their 264 servers number. It does not appear to have redundant power supplies.

They talk about smashing the $500 per node price point for hardware, so there is plenty of room for profit in their model.
Technology is Great, but Are We Forgetting to Live?