skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Upvoted but I do not like this idea of "do not go against Google". Zoho did not stop and they are a profitable company without outside funding. All their products compete with Google products. Twitter could have hung up when Google bought Jaiku. Omnisio does not allow new sign ups, and yet there are several people who can use the service. Gmail Chat is beautiful, but Meebo is still doing well. Friend Connect is out there, but Facebook Connect got 1.5M updates on Inauguration day. Android appstore has 800 apps, and the near future is not looking good. And so on...

EDIT:I say pick one field where Google sucks and improve it, make it better. One thing is for sure, you will have less competition by going against Google then by going against Twitter or FriendFeed or HN...
I worked for a fingerprint recognition startup in the early 90's and then later on my own in the early 00's. My quick summary: Fingerprints are effectively useless for security.

Technology reasons: Some systems are better than others but none is perfect. False positives and false negatives are part of the system. The worst part is not that everyone is affected .001% of the time but that a few people (usually older people or people who work with their hands) are affected most of the time.

Security reasons: As mentioned in the article, fingerprints need to be treated as public information. You leave them everywhere and are not that tricky to copy. Mythbusters did a nice episode on this. Also, you can't change them once they've been compromised. For a while I worked in a Top-Secret environment and we didn't use fingerprints exactly because they weren't secure and, worse, could give a false sense of security.

Convenience reasons: Given that you shouldn't use them for high security systems what about low security systems. I hacked a fingerprint reader onto my car and thought it was so cool. I took it to a local car dealer to get his impression. He showed me a new BMW that used a proximity card to unlock the car - blew my system away for convenience.

Societal reasons: There are a lot of people who will just never feel comfortable giving their fingerprint to a computer. The stigma is that's what criminals do. Most common lame joke when doing a fingerprint demo: "You gonna give that to the FBI?, ha ha ha".

Now one of you may come up with a way around all these issues. I know you can get a fingerprint reader on your laptop. I used to think it was pretty impressive when I had one of the first. Eventually the novelty wore off and the inconvenience factors led me to stop using it. I'd like to hear if someone has had more success than I did.
Cellular Senescence: Hayflick's Limit and Aging Cells
Maybe the algorithm should guarantee every new submission gets at least X front-page views for some value of X.
Last.fm launches Android player
Just because you've signed an IP agreement doesn't mean it's legally enforceable.
Best tech companies to work for
As a direct example: the forum I go to (while I won't say its name) is tailored for people who make money through advertising. In their IRC they talk about advertising and I went in looking to just make friends with them and to let them know I'm a designer, without asking for work. Eventually, one person came to me asking for work (and by eventually, I mean within hours) and after the work I did for him, word spread VERY fast about my capabilities and I've been booked since. The ONE important thing it to make sure you always keep your word, otherwise the reputation you've built declines.
Unthinkable Futures
Ah, I guess the course requirements have changed in the intervening years. We got somewhat less time to work on the OS "thanks" to renovations in the lab; none of us had time to get a full, graphical VGA display running.

That said, I think your display better demonstrates real-time-ness than my somewhat-less-than-rigorous measurements. By the time you account for all the assumptions I made to get semi-complete numbers, a working demonstration of a real-time process is far more convincing!
This is just too great.

I think more people should bike, but helmets are important.
> production must be larger than consumption.

What would you do with the excess?
How The Computer Gets The Answer
When I'm in the mood & have the boost.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freigeld
Power Of Idea (is it a YC Clone with a twist?)
20,000 calls per hour = 5 calls per second. Remember this is either per IP address or per username. Is that really a low number?
HTTP vs. HTTPS: It's all about keeping you secure
Original implementation of Javascript
Just saw this posted on ReadWriteWeb: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_were_desperately_aw...

Looks like someone is launching a competitor: Feedsqueezer, http://www.feedsqueezer.com/
Yikes, I thought it was 0-50 for free and any users past that were $50. So 51 users would be $50/yr. I guess you really have to justify that 51st employee :).
Dr. iPhone: 20 iPhone Applications To Improve Your Health
There are many tools available to those who need help getting healthier, and many of these tools can be found on the iPhone. Whether you’re looking for tracking, motivation, or a place to keep your health records, look to these iPhone applications for help.
I've decided it's best to gradually increase rates, which is what I am doing. It takes longer to build up to the 'plateau' level, but there is more security, which is important because any growth I have right now would just be icing on the cake since all my core needs and growth needs are met currently.

You are definitely right though.
These goals sound very familiar to me - survival being the key one, although we hope to do a bit of growing too...
Anyone has examples of precedents here?
I've only just recently released stable version of my service (like a day and half ago), but my startup goal at least for th early part of 2009 is gaining some traction. Particularly the valuable kind that Paul Buchheit talks of with finding that 100 people that really like your service. Though my service is aimed at bloggers so that might be a little hard I think.
I don't particularly want to customise.

I would like wide comments (e.g. containing <pre> text) to not force the whole page to be that wide.

I would like to be able to hide sub-threads if I do not find them interesting. (Whether this should be considered as voting down each individual comment I don't know.)

Actually, I wouldn't mind being able to choose between writing comments in markdown/textile/etc.
I surely like the way they're bicycling in Amsterdam.

I don't wear a helmet. What I'd like to see is proofs about its efficiency. I never found them (though I didn't search that hard, I admit). Anyone got them?
> I’m probably the only hacker I know who do not play video games;

Emacs + code is my video game:-) I think there are quite a few of us, actually.
Nice article :)

My boyfriend lives there so I go often to Amsterdam, and even though biking is becoming "fashionable" where I live (Barcelona, Spain), the difference in the amount of bikes between both cities is abysmal, they are way way ahead.

The Netherlands is a super flat country though, so biking there is really easy compared to my city. I use our public bike system and there are some parts of the city that are way too steep if you are not used to it.
Helmets are not important. If you can't take a little more risk, then drive a car. If you want to be completely safe, you could wear a big padded suit and ride with that, what do you think of that suggestion?
The key to Apple's success? A simple product line
"Side projects" and open-source projects are great for self-education. I've nothing but good things to say about them for employee improvement.

Running a separate business is a different story altogether. Do you really have productive employees who are operating software development companies on the side? If you do, I can guarantee their primary attention does not lie with you (even though their primary income is being paid by you).
Actually, i barely use the main page, as lots of stuff on that I've likely seen before. I come in, scan the top few items on the main page, and then jump into new and go through like two or three pages (until I'm caught up).

So for my personal preference, I'd probably be interested in seeing the newest stuff, and then maybe a column for 'most popular'.

I know it's unconventional, but...
you're dedicating scarce resources to pay this employee to work exclusively for you

Bull-fucking-shit. I don't understand the mentality that because someone pays me for 40+ hours of work per week, they think they own me and can demand that I work exclusively for them, or that anything I do in my own time belongs to them. If my work suffers, or if I'm stealing IP or clients, that's another story. But if I'm working on something in my own time, fuck you if you think you own it.
Begley: Was Darwin Wrong About Evolution? | Newsweek Voices - Sharon Begley | Newsweek.com
It only shows up to other users when you put it in the "about" field.
Absolutely. Not to be an ass about it, but Amsterdam is flat as a pancake and San Francisco (which he compares it with) is definitively not.

Bikes are often very practical in cities but not when it's raining and not when the gradients are significant. Despite the rain and minor inclines I have a Brompton http://www.brompton.co.uk/ here in London and adore it.
That's if you're free loading. If your work standard never takes a drop, then there should be no problem.
A very high percentage of cyclists' brain injuries can be prevented by a helmet, estimated at anywhere from 45 to 88 per cent.
http://www.bhsi.org/stats.htm
I've nothing but good things to say about employees working on "side-projects" and open source projects. They're superb for self-education (I enjoyed participating in both while I was an employee) but are completely different than running a business.

Running a business isn't a hobby: It takes all of your attention, day and night.

I'm not paying employees to start their own business, I'm paying them to work on mine.

edit: I know this chafes with the 'free spirits' on this site who haven't found the guts to start an actual business yet, but I promise you'll find it's true when it's your cash going out as wages.
"Actually," normally starts a disagreement, but AFAICT, you restated what I said and agree. Or do I misunderstand?
Ah, I wondered what nationality you were. (I'm Portuguese too, but not natively.)

Fuck is a bit strong for this type of article. Also, rather than saying 'how the fuck', we would say, at least in American English, "what the fuck is 'trim' in Python?" or even more clearly, "what the fuck is PHP's trim in Python?"

But yeah, I have the same problem when moving through languages. I know the concept, but I have to read through the docs to find out the exact function syntax.
I'd like this too. Even when I do remember to come back to a thread and look for new comments. It's tough to find the ones I haven't read when the thread grows beyond a certain point.

I think you could solve this by changing the comments to sort by most recent rather than score. (edit: not permanently, but have a user option to choose how the comments are sorted)
I think 10 recommendations seems excessive. Good programmers wouldn't waste their time working for a company that required them to bother that many people, just so you could figure out if they were a good programmer.

Think of it as a barrier to entry. Good programmers want good opportunities that don't make them bend over backwards to get. Path of least resistance.

If you make it hard for them to work for you -- they won't.

Seriously, who wants to call up 10 people and ask them if they mind if some random person calls them?

It's a waste of time and any good programmer is going to know this and have plenty of better places to work that don't require 10 recommendations.

Also, what a programmer works on doesn't say anything about how smart (s)he is. If you want to know how smart they are, ask them about as many random things as you can. How broad is their knowledge base? Smart programmers know a lot of stuff outside the world of programming.

Ask her about philosophy, beer, or cards. Ask about poker, pizza and travel.

Smart people have big minds that expand way beyond personal projects and portfolios. If they have a portfolio /at all/ then they are spending more time on marketing themselves than they are on programming and that's not such a good sign. I know you don't mean they have a binder with photos of work they did, or maybe you do, but either way, they should be spending more time on programming than marketing their programmer skills. If they harp on how awesome they are at programming, they probably don't know much about programming.

I'd say irrelevant projects done for fun are almost a better sign of smartness than those that were only relevant.

Ask the potential candidate about how the projects they have worked on could be improved. What went wrong, where were the bottlenecks, what kind of hardware was it, did they find any limitations with the software, programming languages, or environments they worked in?

Ask them how to build world peace and solve the financial crisis. See how rational they are. See how honest they are.

Introspection, Honesty and Rationality are probably the three most important characteristics I look for in programmers. If they can communicate with the "real world" around them as well, that's a plus.

Most people in the real world can't handle the amount of thought, blunt truth, and rationality that programmers dish out, so it becomes the job of the programmer to figure out how to communicate with others, so that just brings me back to the 10 recommendations thing... Probably not a good idea. I hope that was hyperbole.
There are good comments about this by a biologist at Pharyngula.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/01/sharon_begley_how...
I'll second this. The issue of whether you are paying for his time or his performance is a cloudy one. The paying for time argument invariably gets into issues like how much other unproductive time you spend doing things like talking to coworkers, using the bathroom, staring out the window, and browsing the web. In general it seems to degenerate into the horribly inflexible clock-out-when-you-go-to-the-bathroom factory-ish policy.

So if you are happy with his actual concrete performance, then I'd say don't worry about it. If he can make you happy spending 15 minutes of real work per day, then you need to think hard about how to better leverage his talents. Unfortunately, increasing your expectations of him while keeping everyone else the same will not make him happy either. It's still a tough issue.
The physics arXiv blog: Black holes from the LHC could survive for minutes
We have six remotes on our coffee table, and I'm told that Logitech's universal remotes are great products that will let me put all six of mine in the bottom drawer. However, they seem to have about a dozen similar-looking remotes. After an hour of browsing online, I bought NOTHING. Researching these is on my todo list now, but I would have one today if there were just two or three models to choose from.
Early in the article, the author says that a card is something you have, a public identifying token, and, since it can be stolen, it should require something to unlock it. Later, in the hospital example, he suggests that a private key stored on a smartcard works as an authentication token. Seems to me that a card with a private key can be stolen just as easily as an ATM card.
Wrong, you're paying employees for their output. If their output is suffering, for any reason, find someone else. If you lack the necessary metrics and management skills to measure their output, that's your problem, not theirs.
I'm getting a Error 403 from google clicking on the link ...

http://sorry.google.com/sorry/?continue=http://paulbuchheit....
Hate to be another person to chime in with "What about language X?", but I feel Lua fits decently well in the Javascript category. I would say these are true "scripting" languages, because they are intentionally built for scripting the behavior of an application, and they both have very minimal implementations that support the prototype model for objects.
Whoa, written in Lisp! I wouldn't have guessed it! Very cool.
I practically rewrote every IP "agreement" for nearly every job I had since I started working in industry (ca. 1965). The terms were more or less as follows.

1. I am in the business of invention. I invent many things. I cannot possibly disclose all of them. Hence, ANYTHING I have done in the past is excluded and ANYTHING I will do after I leave your employ is excluded without having to be disclosed. This is true even if the thing invented can be construed to be directly or indirectly connected to your business. The only exception to this will be those things directly and explicitly connected to your IP disclosed to me during my employ for a period not to exceed two years after my departure for un-registered un-patented IP. Normal patent and copyright laws apply - BOTH ways.

2. What I do 0n your time with your equipment on projects specifically assigned to me is yours.

3. What I do on my time with my equipment on my self assigned projects distinct from yours is mine.

4. Since my business is invention, if the invention was concieved on your premises but is not DIRECTLY connected to your business, your disclosed IP, and your assigned project, the invention is mine. This will be true even if the invention is used to indirectly support project. In that case, a non-exclusive license to use will be granted by me to you but I still own the resultant IP.

Almost without exception, the terms were accepted. Where there was substantial disagreement, I looked for another job/contract.
Congratulations on Paul generating real cash flow! I'd love to see a essay written by Paul on how he started his blog and what he think made it popular. So many blogs, even good ones, fail to break critical mass. I do blog and day dream of being a professional blogger but realize it really is hard work.
Ask HN: Building a trust system into a social app
I'm starting out on developing my first social web app, and the question of trust and credibility keeps coming up in my mind. My web app would be worthless without allowing users to input content into the system, but giving users unrestricted ability to input content would quickly fill the site with noise. I need to have a good way to identify not only spammers and users who might try to game the system, but users who may inadvertently put in noise/bad data. Likewise, I also want both the system and other users to be able to implicitly and explicitly recognize those users that should be trusted, based on the value of the content they have submitted.

I have seen the following approaches:

- voting system (e.g. Digg, HackerNews), wherein the trust is at the content item level, and the can be influenced by positive or negative voting - once the net voting passes a certain positive threshold, the content is made more visible to the community.

- feedback system (e.g. eBay), wherein the trust is at the user level and can be influenced by other users

- feature unlocking (e.g. StackOverflow, HackerNews), wherein users need to meet certain usage goals in the system in order to have access to features that are deemed to require higher trust

- human review, wherein content is submitted for approval and reviewed by an admin/maintainer user. This approach certainly doesn't scale, but may be useful in initially "seeding the system".

My post is short on details, but I'd like to keep the discussion open as possible within the domain of trust in a social app.

I'm looking for suggest readings, anecdotes, experiences, etc. What has worked in your app? What exactly was the problem of "trust" in your social application, and how did you solve it?
Not enough time killing bugs in his career, I'm guessing.
CS452 for the :P
I hear rumours they are moving away from x86 for that course, have you heard anything about it?
Another bug: expired links, with no link back to the homepage!
Fun and relatively comprehensive list, but where is Prolog? Admittedly it is not often practical, but when it is, it make some problem-domains so much easier to grasp.
That title is really misleading. Linkbait.
Wow congrats on making enough to pay the bills from the blog alone. Although it could be rough when student loan repayment becomes required... would that be too much?

Anyway good luck, hopefully you can "build the hand glider before hitting the ground" as the saying goes
If you're not smart enough to wear a helmet, chances are it isn't changing much.
Get back to me after you've run a business of your own. Not a hobby: A self-supporting corporation which provides your full livelihood.

Let me know then how well you'd do as an employee working for someone else, and if you'd be eager to hire on staff with the same "starting a company on-the-side" mindset.
That's not the answer to the question. That's "government statistics". It's meaningless to refer to a safety statistic like "45 to 88 percent of brain injury can be prevented by a helmet" without understanding how frequent brain injury is in the overall population of bicycle riders.

According to that site, having everyone wear a helmet could prevent 250 to 500 deaths each year out of 80 million bicycle riders (700 deaths, two-thirds with brain injury, 45 to 88 percent prevention with helmets, 80 million riders). So if you wear a helmet, there is a half of a thousandth of a percent chance that you will benefit from it.

When you look at it THAT way, the safety improvement sounds trivial, nowhere near the size of the benefit from wearing a seatbelt. It gives a whole different perspective than "45 to 88 percent of brain injury can be prevented by a helmet".

And, that site pulls data from "multiple sources", not all of which may be legitimate, and appears to be a pro-helmet propaganda site.
my own bookmarking/tagging/searching facility.
No, the O(n) for median selection is the same O(n) for set partition.
Why can't you ride a bike and reduce your risk? How hard is it to put on a helmet?

This logic is like people who drive without their seat belts saying "if you can't take a little more risk, then drive an armored Humvee."
Compatibility with hardware and software, which was a problem in Vista, seems far better in Windows 7 -- even in the beta. I tried a wide variety of hardware, including printers, Web cams, external hard disks and cameras, and nearly all worked fine.

I'm not sure I understand how this could be true. Unless he means "Compatibility with Windows 7 seems far better than Vista at its release." I mean, I doubt hardware manufacturers are providing better support for 7 in beta than they are for Vista, and honestly, I haven't run into any compatibility issues with Vista since I started using it.
Denmark is at least as crazy about biking as Amsterdam. In Copenhagen it's a major advantage to be on bicycle, specially in rush hour where you easily get from A to B 2-3-4 times faster than cars.

Rain is not really a factor, Copenhagen is rainy all the fucking time. Steep roads definitely is. But it isn't all. In Buenos Aires, which is relatively flat, I saw maybe 3-4 bikes in as many weeks. The major factor, IMO, is presence of bicycle paths and the fact that bicycles are actually a part of the design of the 'traffic flow', which means that bikers are first class citizen in Danish cities, while I would never even fuckin' dare to ride a bike in Buenos Aires - it's simply not safe.
I think this is a great idea.

What the fuck is <Language>'s [some string] in <another Language>?

[some string] can even be common objects methods, like Array.splice

For each mapping, you should allow comments to fill in the specifics. For example, VB has "String.left()" and "String.right()", which can both be achieved in by PHP's substr() if you pass the right params. Boy.. am I going to be hated for the languages I just mentioned...
Do we really want the mobile net to be dominated by one rendering engine? Haven't we been down this road before?