skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What would you do different in terms of structure of a large company? Also who would you hire for large companies?
With all due respect to the man, but thanks Captain obvious! Tell me something I don't know.
These kinds of sales are usually handled by liquidation companies. Their first act is to close the store, mark everything up 100% then mark everything down 50-70%. Each week after that, they take 10% off until the item reaches an actual total discount of about 10% of the original pre-liquidation price. All that doesn't sell at this price gets packed into 18 wheelers and sold at auction. You will then find the items in "ebay stores" set up by the next creatures in this food chain.

They don't bargain, you don't get a deal. Its retail theater. A play in one act designed to skim the cream before the real action starts on the auction block where the entire store is sold, lights, display cases, merchandise and all.

This information gleaned by talking to an employee of said liquidation firm during the closing of a hardware store chain in the area.
The other side of things, kind of rounding out the child-like analogy, is that the exposure to opportunity is limited similarly to the exposure to responsibility. Engineering hire number 14,162 might make it to middle management if [s]he sticks around long enough.

If you combine this with the trajectory that a lot of smart folks end up on -- home, college, grad-school, large corporation -- I think there's a natural disenfranchisement when kids that thought they were going to change the world and be astronauts when they grew up realize that they're staring down a few decades of project management meetings and internal bureaucracy.

Added to a smooth transition from their parents to their company taking care of all of the hard parts of life, it does lead to an odd form of young adulthood where a lot of folks are too afraid of deviating from the prescribed path to break out and do something that's more fulfilling to them.
I think its misguided to say that greed got us into the current economic mess and that selflessness is the solution. It's a nice happy theory but it flies in the face of almost everything that we know about human nature.

The real interesting question is how we can tweak our economic system to better manage greed.
Vopium to be one of the 2009 Sponsors of Team Saxo Bank
Vopium, the Danish based mobile communication company, is now one of the official 2009 sponsors of the professional cycling team, Team Saxo Bank. This means that you as a Vopium customer will get exclusive cycling related offers.

Vopium gives you cheap, international calls from your mobile phone at a superb quality. In short, with Vopium you’ll reach the world for less. Team Saxo Bank is owned by Bjarne Riis, former winner of Tour de France, and he has managed to create the world’s best cycling team who is present at all important races throughout the world. The team of cyclists will in the future be using Vopium’s service to make their international calls and they will, of course, be extraordinary exponents of the Vopium brand.

Tanveer Sharif, CEO of Vopium, comments, “We, as do Team Saxo Bank, share a common goal of results, commitment and teamwork. We’re thrilled that the team will be using our service when making international calls – and especially, of course, to have the riders of the world’s best cycling team be exponents of our product.”

Bjarne Riis, owner of Team Saxo Bank, says, “Like ourselves, Vopium represents entrepreneurship and leadership; those same virtues that have enabled us to lay the foundations in creating a world-class team in cycling. We’re delighted to welcome Vopium aboard as a partner of the 2009 team.”

We at Vopium are thrilled to welcome Team Saxo Bank as part of the Vopium family. And we’re looking forward to being able to give such exclusive cycling offers to our customers as an exciting add-on to our core service of mobile communication.
Why is this being upmodded? I guess it's funny if you don't have a clue how to make money with advertising...

CPM rates vary massively with sector. Try it out and see what sort of rates you get, I don't think you can estimate these sorts of things well.

I run a 'free stuff and competition' website, and that typically gets $5-$10cpm. For a finance or gambling site, probably multiply that by 10. For a social network site probably divide by 10-20.

Also remember adsense is only one form of advertising, which works well on some sites, not so well on others. You can often get better payouts going for per lead or per sale affiliate programs.
aside from being really cool i've always wondered how useful this would be. i'd lose whatever window i was flipping through and unless he's using some kvm switch, minimally he's running at least 2 boxes. again, cool to look at... but otherwise what good is it if you can't utilize all of it.
Number 2 is not really a new idea, but if you can make it work and become the default place for overseas shopping it would be a goldmine. I actually already use a service like this for video games (www.play-asia.com) since I live Japan but I want the English versions of games.
Anyway, if you go with number 2 and you need a contact in Japan, send an email my way. :)
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Can't see the video outside the US :| Wonder what the application for this is? I can imagine maybe for trading and dashboard scenarios?

At an old workplace we did some unscientific usability testing on big screen and multimonitor setups.

One thing I found was that 30" was too big. For me, flicking the mouse required you to track your eyes/head too much. 27" was borderline, but I found 2x24" was the best setup for coding - one primary screen and one secondary screen.

3x24" was quite good if you had a tertiary task - e.g. having chat/email/etc open. For me though, this was just distracting. It was better as a task that I switched in and out from.

Any more and the redundancy of screen real-estate started to be distracting rather than useful.
i can only speak to having 3.

https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/163594/IMG_0077.png

I like it quite a bit...it helps especially when you have 3, 4,5 IDEs open and don't feel like constantly resizing/maximizing them.
There is 4 books on non-Rails topics on the Rails section. 3 Ruby books and REST-book. But yeah, there is more Rails-books, so what?
It should be three periods when it comes in the middle of a sentence, and four periods when it finishes a sentence....
This article is advocating a economic plan made possible by taking money from people, and worrying the plan will fail because people will want to improve their own lives instead of further sacrificing their lives for the sake of the country.
User Interface: Remember The Ecosystem
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همکاري با شرکت فناوران اطلاعات وستا؛استخدام برنامه نويس؛بازاریاب
Check out http://startuply.com
WW2. Nearly all the prosperity of the last 60 years can be traced back to innovations done because of the war. You have: computers, encryption, microwaves, radar, jetplanes, sonar, foreign oil sources, rockets, synthetic rubber, silly putty, many plastics, nuclear power, and widespread use of penicillin. In many of these cases, the technology existed before the war but was not cost-effective or reliable enough for general use. The war spurred development on these fronts enough that it opened vast new consumer markets after the war.

The irony is that the government was not trying to help the economy with WW2 spending. It was try to blow shit up, and avoid getting blown up. It just so happened that many of the innovations that were good for blowing people up were also very good at improving their quality of life later. So once we were done killing people, we had 60-80 years of prosperity.

We just need another genocidal maniac, and a few tens of millions of people to die. Then it'll be all better.

(Irony aside, a similar effect happened after the civil war: many innovations like railroads, oil refining, trench warfare, steam engines, steel-hulled ships, etc. were commercialised because of the war, and then led to 60-80 years of prosperity afterwards.)
How good of an answer can you give to someone who asks for a revenue estimate for advertising without telling you anything else at all? He either doesn't understand any of the relevant factors, in which case it's laughable, or he's for some reason not sharing them, which is begging for nonsense in reply. Given that he's trying to do "revenue estimates" in this manner, I'd guess the former.
Actually, the theories about infinity are pretty much necessary for calculus, which is pretty much necessary for most physics, especially practical physics. So the basic properties infinity is, *indirectly, a very practical and applicable topic.

Also, The continuum hypothesis is not a statement of "unknown" truth like the Rieman hypothesis but rather a statement which been proven independent (or "unprovable) from the axioms of ordinary (Zermelo-Franklin) set theory. It is not that we don't know whether there exist sets of a cardinality between that of the integers and that of the reals. Rather, we know there exist consistent models of set theory where the statement is true AND consistent model where it is false. I also haven't heard of the alpha-null notation being discouraged either - it is used in the article you link-to.
If you can leverage contacts to shorten the first few sales then a very small team (2-4 people) can endure the true sales cycle until you pick up momentum.
TechCrunch Tablet Update: Prototype B
Ah perhaps I was reading too much into your post then. I thought you were suggesting ad-supported isn't a viable model or something ;)

I agree, the original question is extremely vague, and hints at some naivety... If the revenue estimates are for a business plan, or to show investors, may be best for him to step away from the computer and stop now.
Eight monitors, but only a single-core CPU?
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The bike is a pretty cool idea. I could see myself pedaling to burn off extra steam rather than just tapping my knee up and down.

Hook that thing up to a light or a series of LEDs and you've got enough whiz-bangery to set off my OCD and force a continual state of working out.
Proof that success (at least in whatever past-life he came from) and wealth do not equate to good taste. I like the library though.
Teams and managers are very different there. I was told they liked it for people to stay on projects for at least 18 months, and that it's difficult to get a transfer with less time than that. That was the company line from my very first project there, in 2004, when it was still a relatively small company. A lot of it is just luck of the draw with your initial allotment there. Glad you found something that you enjoy though.
yeah, but it kind of sucks thinking about it as part of your salary, because then you feel like you're throwing money away if you don't stay for dinner every night. Sometimes you just want to eat with your friends and family.
Looks like they might actually pull it off..

I didn't expect that, it certainly deserves some respect.
CCNA training
Has anyone tried CertificationKits.com as it seem like they have full CCNA certification kits? Their free material seems pretty good.
Poly.html - check the source
Exploring Life's Origins
Also, a bug might be cheap now, but when it breaks a year down the road and no one knows what happened, it's going to be a big problem.
It's not going to work. The major problem I see is that we only have two arms - if both are holding the device, how do you input data into it. If you drop it on the table, then it's flat on the table, which is also uncomfortable to enter data into. You want something that leans towards you.

What they need to do to make this work is:

1. Drop all the border around the touchscreen. Make the screen almost flush with the plastic around it

2. Use metal for the edges - like the macbook pro. Pay extreme attention to the external aesthetics

3. Make it smaller. One should be able to hold it comfortably with one hand and type with the other

4. Increase the size of the on-screen keyboard
I use Visual Studio with the Vibrant Ink color scheme from TextMate, and I've had the same experience. I find it surprisingly pleasant.
This isn't totally true. When CompUSA was going out of business, great deals could be found on the final days before the stores closed. I got a brand new MacBook, worth 1299 at the time, for 359 and a Velodyne subwoofer (299 normally) for 35 bucks.

I think generally it's hard to find deals though.
It depends on the context. I've had some very simple fixes/updates I've wanted to put in production that I knew were incredibly low risk, and anything that could go wrong could not possibly be catastrophic, only to be vetoed and told to go through a very expensive testing process.
I wonder how many people get the punchline. Is the joke on which it's based that well known?
> Because the device skips the resource-sucking parts of the operating system and focuses on one application - the browser - very low end hardware can be used and still give users a desktop-like Internet browsing experience.

I guess he never looks his Activity Monitor / Task Manager
I don't understand why people would want this over a netbook. Having a screen flat on your lap could make things pretty uncomfortable. Whilst holding it in one hand while you type with the other could be equally irritating.

Might be nice to mount on the wall though, for example in the kitchen so you can look up recipes while you cook.
Another big change: FDR stopped villifying and prosecuting business. If one studies investor surveys, the change in attitude and the corresponding measures of investor confidence are clear. That probably did at least as much if not more to bring the economy out of depression. The government may be big but it cannot match the spending power of several hundred million people.
Did you notice the part where TC is unable to get an answer for an extended period of time and they begin to call ChaCha "fail"? Did you read the article? No.
For anyone curious about the true history of QWERTY vs. Dvorak, check out this article:

http://www.reason.com/news/show/29944.html
Ask HN. How does distribution work for iPhone Web app.
Would love to get some insights from someone who has build and distributed an iPhone web app.

Specifically:

1. Is distribution a much bigger challenge. Does the new iphone web app directory on apple help.

2. Assuming that there is no equivalent website so that the app has to develop traffic from scratch.
Ummm... you do realize the public spending on international projects is miniscule, ~5% at most. If you want to attack spending, go after SS, medicare, and medicade. These programs just by themselves eat up ~50% of the US federal budget and more on the state level. If you are talking about military spending overseas, then note the fact that just medicaid uses up as much money every year as the war in Iraq has used up in its entire duration.
I'd be curious to hear what people think about TechStars in comparison to YC.
Well I could be wrong but it looks like in one of those screenshots it has a USB port; what's stopping someone from just getting a keyboard and using it?
I also thought, that these small "test" assignments might be a trick to get (some part of) the work for free.

In ten hours for free plus ten hours at five per cent, times the number of eager programmers, you can get a lot of footwork done.

> Not likely though, since then they'd offer to pay more than the minimum wage

The minimum wage could be helpful to get applications only from a certain type of programmers: Those who don't mind a low salary and care more about the Lisp experience and learning new things. I myself would probably like to have that kind of people on my team.

If anyone here takes the job, please let us know how it goes. ;-)
Python, Ruby, Bash, HTML, Javascript tested. Worked.
Ask HN: insomnia?
What do you do when you have insomnia?
How much input would you need? Aside from chatting, just having access to RSS and typing in Wikipedia entries would be enough.
You can also re-use some form of balanced binary trees where all interesting operations are doable in log(n) and adding requires about log(n) (mostly internal) nodes to be rebuild. That is worse than the optimum O(1) for linked lists you can reach --- but it's easy to come up with and often good enough.
They could split the keyboard in a way that would make it thumb-able.
i think it will work (if not in this iteration then another), it does one thing, and hopefully well. it allows the owner to consume information. which is one of the main tenets of the internet.
I only have a Yahoo account.
Very true. That's a pretty strong statement for Techcrunch; they could go from a one-man blog to a blog/event and now hardware "empire" in just 4-5 years. Even if the tablet is crap, that's quite an accomplishment.
Hack. Or read Hacker News.
When I was hiring recently I set a programming task:

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100 (inclusive), but if a number is divisible by three print "fizz", if a number is divisible by five print "buzz", and if it's divisible by both three and five, print "fizzbuzz".

80% of applicants failed.

For those who succeeded we then talked about symmetrical code, repeated tests, parametrisation, leveraging library code, converting routines into blocks, and so on.

But we started by making sure they could actually write code.

And most of them couldn't.

I welcome people who ask relevant design questions, but I've found that some of them can't actually code either.

I resent the wholesale condemnation of simple coding tests in the hiring process. Perhaps they are the sign of someone who has limited vision or scope.
I'd think so.

Am I the only one disappointed to find that Randall has taken to recycling old jokes?
Why you should fail early and fail often - the numbers
Yeah, I'm doing both right now.
I wonder whether anyone does something like jogging, play Go on KGS etc.
So.. does this mean any promotion to get people to help on the OpenMoko project? Or are we going to silently pretend that it didn't happen -- like a mistake that the polite don't mention?
I do not include SS, medicare, medicaid because this is not new spending. These are old "debts". Yes, those programs are too expensive, but its a whole different problem category.
Tough to compare unless you've been close to both. A friend of mine was in a TechStars startup. Just got funded (in this economy!). http://foodzie.com/

The advice & support he got was really helpful. Lots of successful people's brains to pick, and enough cash & supplies to build a basic v1.0. I'm not sure what else to tell you...
this would be a killer device for university students aswell, i would love being able to carry this to class vs 4 different massive textbooks, and imagine how much more useful a chemistry/finance etc textbook would be if every page was interactive, imagine quick referencing and word definition
Microsoft accused by EU of harming web browser competition, again
Oh, well I don't jog at night if I can't sleep. But I find that running during the day helps me sleep at night.

Here's my list: hack, play TF2, catch up on my stack of PragProg PDFs, plan out the next day, practice juggling
Will Obama be good for the tech industry?
There is even brainfuck and whitespace in there...
Now make it valid Malbolge and you win.
Personally, I prefer double vertical monitors (better for coding). But, when you've got 8, I think it's safe to say you can pretty much set them up however the hell you want.
I have no clue what it's based on and just don't get it :(
I swear that when I have kids, I'm going to them multiple keyboard layouts at a very young age so that they'll be able to switch back and forth effortlessly when they're older (similar to learning a few languages at a young age). At least, I'm assuming that's how it'll work!
See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=437333

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=438639

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439233
Not everyone "gets" xkcd anyway, but in this case, show people this one and ask them if they know the joke.

Alternatively, ignore it.
Speech Analysis: I Have a Dream
Yes, the prototype clearly has USB, ethernet, and VGA.

Realistically, though, why would anyone bother to plug a keyboard into this thing? Why wouldn't you just use your laptop or desktop?
It's a cool toy, but I really can't imagine how/where I would use it in-place of my laptop.

What are some use cases?
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Well, I'd be inclined to buy this kind of device for my grandmother.

Touch screens are intuitive for people who don't have a good grasp of technology, and combined with a decent homepage (perhaps a dumbed down google IG with large bookmark icons) she would get everything she needs.

Quite simply, it could be a great entry level product and useful for others who just want to check emails or other stuff while doing other stuff.

What would be great is if this was semi waterproof aswell with a stand for inclination - would be great to use in the kitchen while cooking.
Read & exercise.

It's the best thign for it (esp if your really not going ot get any sleep).

Steven Fry is an insomniac and he knows a lot of crap simply from reading books when he couldn't sleep. I try to go the same way :D
The greatest 16-minute speech ever: "I Have a Dream"
I'd say about 30% of my interaction with the internet involves me sending data out. The other 70% is about reading stuff. The form factor of the tablet is not correct for reading, which is part of the point I'm trying to make. We have hundreds of years of experimentation with reading equipment, and there is a reason that books are a certain shape, size and for. It works. Why are they throwing all that out and coming up with a brand new form factor for something that is supposed to also be a reader?
Give it a stand and use in the kitchen for recipes etc while cooking?

Perhaps as an entry level product for people who don't know how to use a mouse but might want to use the internet.

A basis for some kind of learning device for younger kids (if they get it more robust that is).
Facebook app Let’s Cram gets seeded to connect study buddies
Well, if they offer a small bluetooth keyboard as an accessory, then it would be okay.
1) I assume they can't get rid of the border because of the camera that comes with it.

3) If you read the article, it will be probably half as thick the final product - this is just a prototype which they left lots of room in it.

With the being flat on a table thing, what about the addition of foldable clips that would put it on an angle (like underneath your keyboard) - that would fix that problem.
New in 2009 - JAOO days about web 2.0 and agile