skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with this approach is that it substitutes good somewhere else for badness here and now. I like craigslist. I like the honesty, the local-ness and the community. It is useful to me. I have never encountered scammers or slimers like on ebay. I've found real people I can related to. Running partners, indoor soccer teams, tennis rackets. They are doing good for the world, and they're doing it directly and sincerely. They can do it better--I like many of the features listed here that they lack--or a competitor will. But I hope they or the competitor retain the sincerity that is a unique gem in today's corpate world.
It's not "clever" to hold the news till after the bell. It's done that way to avoid causing damage to high-frequency traders such as arbitrageurs and market-makers who, by providing liquidity, are good for a stock. Earnings are also usually announced at 4:10 for the same reason.
No they wouldn't. Here are a few reasons:

- The checkout path is the most important part of a site that sells consumer products, the people you lose here are ready to buy: If you lose them during the process it's money right out the window. For this reason it's the most optimised part of any serious retail site.

- This is a pretty standard trap, and any usability professional will know this. I would be very surprised if Amazon, even years ago, was designed by Jeff Bezos 14 year old cousin.

- Amazon is known for running split tests and numbers on their site to see how something works. They have done this since they launched. The thought that they somehow didn't do so on the checkout path, the most important part of the site, is pretty far fetched.

- Jeff Bezos is a numbers guy - he used to be a stock broker, and is crazy about optimising and testing.

It's like saying Steve Jobs approved the new line of Ipods being Scottish tartan with the user interface outsourced to Microsift.
Startup Riot Accepting Applications
Apple strongarms Wired to remove Hackintosh video
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=NYT

Full Time Employees:	10,231

The question isn't "writers" but all of the employees involved in actual news creation. I have no idea what it might actually be, but a 1:10 ratio between "operatives" and "support staff" is my guess.
Emacs - Great Operating System, Decent Editor
When the junk bond/leveraged buyout strategy started, it was a reaction to the fact that corporate managers who had lived through the great depression were too risk averse when it came to balance sheet debt, along with the fact that there is a tax asymmetry between providing returns to suppliers of capital in debt form as opposed to equity form. In the early days, these factors, along with low stock prices, permitted the financiers to buy companies and either restructure or dismember them to produce a profit at fairly low risk. Early profits on these deals attracted competition, eventually resulting in extremely high prices and debt levels. By the time of RJR/Nabisco, the debt levels were too high to be safe in an economic downturn. I expect that there was a similar life cycle for collateralized debt instruments. The people that made out well were the early adopters who understood what they were doing, and the people who got burned were the ones who simply had to be in the business because they saw that other people were making so much money.
AAPL peaked at $200 a year ago. Should have sold then :(
I wonder if their firing department is expanding though. That's where I'd like to work.
Are there really that many abandoned suburbs out there?

In Texas, suburbs are still going strong.
IPhone Developer Quits Day Job After 'iShoot' Hits Number One
Well, they almost certainly did if this story is true. Please point me out one other company that's worth around $25b and has the online sales to do improve by $300m per year. Just one. Regardless of what you think about Amazon specifically, who else fits this profile? It's not as if there are $25b companies doing hundreds of millions in sales online that you don't know about.

This is a standard trap now, but he was a numbers guy back when it wasn't, and he hired someone to optimize and test. They found that error.
One of my friends is not happy right now. http://www.grabup.com/uploads/7670d4cf3feb6e5f53a469e59935e8...
This is the reason I was fascinated by the app! Simulating steam believably is quite a feat. Any papers or rough algorithmic sketches out there?
Because we've bulldozed wetlands and prairies and invested hundreds of millions of dollars in non-renewable building materials to put them there? "Save" might not be the best word here, though.
Try looking in Florida.
The 7 Ways to Get Traffic on the Web
To reward or not to reward is a tough dilemma. That's why I would just give him a certificate "A donation has been made in your name to the Human Fund". This way, there is no jealousy from the coworkers. One's contributions are appreciated (or seem to be), and you save your money for things that matter.
Help Ban Non-Competes In Massachusetts
Psoriasis-Psoriasis treatment-Psoriasis Relief
Choosing a psoriasis treatment can be difficult, as people react differently to different treatments. While choosing a treatment, it is important to consult your doctor and to discuss your psoriasis symptoms. Specific psoriasis conditions (like scalp psoriasis, genital psoriasis or pustular psoriasis) may require different treatment.
Typos=features
Amen to that.

You can even have very broad definitions of "non-trivial": it used to be received gospel on one programming board I frequent that Java was a terrible choice for a downloadable application. If you tried it your users would abandon you in the middle of their 120 terabyte download, your application would win awards for poor non-native design, and it would take approximately seven years to boot the JVM.

Then I made a few tens of thousands of dollars with Bingo Card Creator. (Which is written in Java. Further frustrating my efforts to win geek cred, the UI is in Swing.)

We don't hear much about the impossibility of making money with downloadable Java applications these days.
While it's sad to see these products close, this strikes me as a long-overdue sign that Google does in fact follow the same laws of physics as everyone else.
Getting more work done with a bigger monitor
is it time to start working on androind instead of iphone ?
Google Code Blog: Changes for Jaiku and Farewell to Dodgeball and Mashup Editor
Damn, I love HN.
he used to be a stock broker,

He was a quant. Huge difference. Any idiot could be a broker.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_analyst
Really amazed at the way John ingeniously "patched" the broken cross-platform language
Thanks for checking it out! you have a point there.. I was also debating with myself on that before, but I decided that going with songs/singles will make the charts move faster (people will be encouraged to vote more often). Also often when I want to try out new music, I just like to hear 1 song from the artist (preferably the best song on the album)-- if I like it then I try the whole album. The browser part is good, I need to add that.
I play my tunes through Winamp and have the Last.fm plugin installed so it uploads my track data for each song I listen to to the site...then the last.fm site recommends similar music based on what other stuff other people listen to who also listen to what I listen to...

Works pretty well, but one day I would really like to do a mashup that better allows someone to start at a certain band and branch away to newer artists as they explore similar bands. Just not enough time in the day....
Which part are you referring to? Just curious.
It will be interesting to see what changes AppEngine needs to run Jaiku.

I've got a few projects on AppEngine and having a code base that has Jaiku's feature set will be a huge resource for building all kinds of apps.
It eases the registration. You can also publish your votes to Facebook, which some people may like (like being a fan to an artist). On the part of making money, there's the usual ads, and I'm planning to sell mp3's from Amazon.
RMS: What is GNU?
How many people in the audience that advertisers care about would be affected by Apple tanking?

A lot.

How many people that advertisers care about would be affected by new police evidence rules?

Nowhere near as many.

Seems pretty cut and dried. If advertisers pay the bills you write to the audience they're interested in.
From the movie "Revolution OS": http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7707585592627775409
Shipping rates hit zero as trade sinks
you find me one introductory programming student who can even read the code for xmonad let alone write it

xmonad is feature-laden

it is a small codebase not because it is trivial, but because the people who wrote it are kick-ass coders
The Future of Jaiku Finally Revealed
I've read a lot of stuff criticizing this ruling around the web but it seems reasonable to me. The facts of the case indicate a clear cut "in good faith" error. I guess I just dont see it as the huge afront to the 4th ammendment that others do.
The 25 Worst Business Failures in History
Security Tips For Using Free Classified Sites
All of us have a great affinity towards things that come free in life. Free things attract even a millionaire and it goes without saying how much it would matter to those who are trying to cutback on their expenses. You can find a number of free classified sites that allow online users to post their ads for free to promote their products or their services. You can also find job postings in such sites. Since it is free for both ad posters and for those who are interested in buying their services or products, such free classified sites attract a lot of traffic.
A lot of entrepreneurs have stories like this. If the experience motivates you to stop working for someone else then it's all worth it.
"Anybody who owned a modem in the 90s knows how dangerously addictive these games are."

As embarrassing as this is to admit, I was actually addicted to Idle RPG at one point. This is the IRC game where you level up based on how long you can go without saying anything.
about a package a day is being added to hackage, so my guess is that you are just spewing uninformed bullshit.

you don't know anything about haskell, hackage, or anything related. stop commenting until you do.
How is that excellent advice?

Most problems should be solved. And when they shouldn't, you can work on the problem of why this guy is complaining pointlessly.
Fake Steve Jobs Banned From CNBC For Life
I really hope he's alright. This is unfortunate, but I think the press is overreacting by automatically assuming the worst.

It's not shocking that a 53-year-old man would suffer a health crisis requiring a 5-month reprieve from work. He's a cancer survivor (and cancer treatment side effects often persist for years) with a hormonal imbalance. It sounds like he's doing the smart thing.

Part of why I think this is major news is that, unfortunately, a lot of people have health crises that merit or require half-year career breaks. I've seen a lot of people work through illnesses that really deserved time off, especially when I worked on a trading floor. It sucks that most people can't take breaks when they need to; in his case, it leads to a billion-dollar drop in his company's market cap.
Joyent Buys Reasonably Smart to Create Open-source Cloud
this haskell example is exposing you to two cool things:

- algebraic types. haskell has type inference, so it can do the right thing while you only describe the function as operating on lists. now look at java...strong typing but no intelligent inference, which is why you are forced to write retarded java like HashSet<Integer> s = new HashSet<Integer>()

- pattern matching. you can describe functionality based on the pattern of the data

this isn't just syntax. these are really powerful fundamental features of the language
Lines of code fails as a measure of code quantity for languages like Lisp and Haskell. 500 lines of Haskell code can accomplish what will take 1500-5000 lines of Java.
Uhh...wrong. Check this out:
http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/02/26/amazon-shopping-cart/
YUI 2 and YUI 3 Source Code Now on GitHub
Indeed. Type signatures mean that the code is naturally self-documenting.

My stance on the static/dynamic controversy is that static typing becomes a win as the amount of time spent reading others' code increases. A single programmer is probably going to be more productive in Lisp than in ML. (I don't know enough about Haskell to speak for it.) On the other hand, if I were choosing a base language for a team of 10 people who would all be editing the same code, I'd most likely choose one that's statically typed. Static typing enforces interfaces and allows the compiler to detect a decent share of bugs as well as most code breaks.
huzzah for last.fm's rec engine. even with a wide spread of genres, it recommends very well. the configurable level of obscurity in the engine is pretty great, too.
You're right...

I went out and searched for screenshots myself, and found this one: http://www.webreference.com/programming/xul/amazon.png which shows it more clearly.

Damn, I hate being wrong :-(

And sorry Matt for being so persistent in being wrong. :-)
Joyent Acquires Reasonably Smart to Take On Google App Engine
I remember, about a week into my exposure to Ocaml, asking what a functor was. "It's a function from a module to a module."

My response was along the lines of, What? It turns out, though, that Ocaml functors are really cool and can provide some of the functionality of Haskell's type classes.
Monads aren't that hard. A monad is just like a burrito!

Pattern matching is awesome. It makes code immensely more readable.
(Probable) Leopard fix to connect to Windows VPN
Having trouble using Leopard to connect to a Windows VPN? Check it out if my tips help you out.
Mars methane discovery hints at presence of life
In the exurban counties around the Twin Cities, yes.

High enough cost of gasoline could probably kill off a lot of suburbs, especially in places with traffic congestion such that commutes are already annoying. When commutes are both annoying and unaffordable, the suburbs that are only bedroom communities will be abandoned for places with a job base.
The answer is that profit sharing IS awesome, and companies that treat their employees that way see their employees start to act like family members in a way that no performance bonuses ever can.

Where I work, 25% of the profit from each of our product lines goes directly to the team that produced that product, and the whole company has bonuses separately based on whether the company is making money or not (making money-> everyone gets a bonus).

I'm not sure whether this is better than profit being shared across the whole company or not, as it has the positive side that people want to work on projects that they personally feel will succeed, yet the negative side that people stuck working on maintaining legacy products or projects they don't believe as much in end up demotivated.
Multi-core concurrency is going to kill OO. FP will resurge in the 2010s among good programmers, spreading out to the "vital 25%" (who are, right now, mostly upper-tier Java developers) rather than being restricted to an elite 3-5%.
I think you're right. Not sure how that happened.
Wow! Great article. I still remember that first version of the Amazon website shown as part of a series of historical screen shots.

The author makes a great point about having an evidence-based culture.
4GB Spy Pen With MP3 Player
Switch the art and call it Earth 2025 or Utopia or Oilwar.
This comment was supposed to be to this article:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=434567
It must be Best Buy. Their checkout copy is quoted in this thread from 2005, and matches the article exactly.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum22/4423.htm

"you do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout."
"to make your future BestBuy.com purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout."

Best Buy had close to $25 bil in revenue in 2004 and 2005.
"Invalid redemption code entered."
Just basic economics.

The Law of Sunk Cost: if you abandon a project, then all the money you sank into it to begin with is lost! Therefore, never abandon a project, always throw good money after bad.
The difference between the two is really in how cynical the observer is, not in anything that they're doing. For example, one of Buffett's first (and most profitable) investments was in See's Candies. They make chocolate, at fairly high prices. Where's the value in that?

Then he used the money to buy companies like Coca-Cola (they sell carbonated sugar water, and in developing nations often steal much needed water from indigenous people to do it) and furniture stores (which purchase furniture from cheap laborers and sell it after a 4x markup).

This really makes perfect sense when you consider that "greed" is a synonym for "what people want", with the only difference being that "greed" implies that what they want is frivolous, unnecessary, or destructive. So Paul Graham's maxim of "Make something people want" could, if you're cynical, translate to "Exploit people's greed." The end result is the same - you have something they desire - but the connotations are very different.
Recycled Boeing 747 Becomes Jumbo Hostel
If you want to link statically against an LGPL'ed library you have to distribute your object files. I've switched one library I maintain to dual LGPL / MPL for that reason. A lot of companies have bans on the LGPL because it's still an annoyance for them.
I don't really know when this flame war started but what I got out of Jeff's article was that sometimes users don't realize something changed inless there was a visual improvement and modification. Makes sense to me, why do you think dreamweaver and photoshop look slightly different each version. The visual adjustments indicate adjustments under the hood.
VoIP User Interconnects British Telecom for Free Calls to VoIP Devices
VoipUser announces the interconnection of British Telecom 0870 range numbers to the VoIP peering iNUM network. British Telecom will make 0870 numbers free to call to subscribers on their Anytime call plan starting on January 16th, 2009.
You'll need to wait for this final release candidate of UI 1.6 to come first. UI 1.5.x depends upon jQuery 1.2.x and UI 1.6.x depends upon jQuery 1.3.x.
There's still plenty of room in the market for similar games -- pick your theme: sci-fi, fantasy, pirates, ninjas, vampires, etc.
In your article you claim that Haskell enables 'people to write sophisticated programs in less time and with greater reliability.'

Am I out of line to expect some sophisticated Haskell programs to exist before taking this claim seriously?
Is there any way to turn suburbs into small towns?

I never understood the mentality of people so against the convenience of walking to the corner to buy a gallon of milk that they zoned properties in such a way to make it impossible. I guess it's some masochistic thing, that would just make life too easy.

The debate seems to be suburb vs. big city, evil vs. good (or vice versa). But I grew up in a small town, and never realized what a privilege it was to walk to my elementary and high schools, ball fields, play grounds, library, grocery store, pharmacy, even friends' houses without crossing major highways.

Can we all just admit now that the people who invented suburbs were idiots and find ways to make a subdivision more like a very small town? I'm afraid the answer might be no, but maybe hope I'm overlooking some way this could work.
Thats not terrible at all. I am rather glad that is not in the likes of breaking news. Somethings should be low key. His life is not everyones business. People who need to know about Mr. Jobs will find out either way.
I think the main problem with that idea is that the warehouses and lofts of most cities were located in the run down downtown areas and often near the waterfront of the city, as most cities old warehouses were originally used in shipping. Suburbs on the other hand, and especially the ones in concern with this article are in the middle of nowhere.

Artists/startups wanted to be located in the city and close to the things they needed because, as with wanting cheap place to live, they didn't have money for cars. The majority of these now abandon suburbs were entirely designed to be used by cars. They are bedroom communities with nothing in or around them but houses, and poorly built houses at that.
My friends has simply notified me that my account was hijacked, as I rarely actually logged in anymore. My friends said that they would IM my account, and get a response either in russian, or in very broken English, informing them that this is a russian now.

Upon which they called me to ask if I was pretending to be russian.
Is X slang for ecstasy?

Googling for "X" is a bit of a challenge - but I've never heard the term before.. Wiki seems to suggest it though.
That's probably because they can transmit in proper HD.

Also the "liked" metric is just a way of favoriting--I'd assume any sponsor scouring the web for stuff like this would understand that.
I have always dreamed of being able to build a suburb community, with the poor building materials and rush production methods used, in the middle of nowhere and never let anyone move in. Just leave it and see how long it would take for it to return to nature. I might actually get the chance to see this happen now.
I got that but...what does that have to do with the rest of the article?
If you really care about sick people and dying people, donate to the Methuselah Foundation (google it, or Aubrey de Grey). 150,000 people die of aging-related diseases every day, and almost nobody is working on curing that.
Is there any way to get respect points other than by paying for them?
I typed it a number of times here, not sure if that's the right screen:
http://pics.posterous.com/untitled-17116

Let's team up (anyone who wants): 100239599
When I'm trying to get stuff done I would rather spend 3x as much time typing in code than waste all week deciphering 'core' and reading heap profiling output to track down a space leak that could never happen in any other language.
...as Google goes into the grim economic times predicted for 2009

Note: predicted. Zappos did the same thing - they laid off people in advance because they expected things to get worse - and they even said that laying off the people cost them more money in severance that it saved in the first year.

Is this becoming a self fulfilling prophecy?

Are we predicting a downturn to the point that we are causing one?
I'll miss google video:

1: there was no maximum length

2: the size of the player window was larger (was the encoded res larger too?)

3: and you could download the uploaded video in it's original form.

Youtube can't/doesn't do any of these things.

And google engineers here? Can you add those three things to youtube? Oh, and can I use my google login on youtube?