skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not a student at the Media Lab, but I do go to MIT and have some friends there. From what I have seen, it helps to have some good artsy-techy projects under your belt.

I don't think they require the GRE to get in, and I'm not sure how important grades are if you've done some interesting projects. I think they want some form of "accomplishment" combined with decent coding skills.

Admission is to specific research groups, so I'd look at the site, find a group doing work that interests you and contact the professor or some of the researchers in the group. Can't hurt to ask them what makes a strong candidate.
not about this post, but about YCombo moving to SV because it's a better environment for raising kids.

Could you be more specific about what makes SV better for kids? Personally, the whole suburb-traffic thing there makes me nuts. Is it the basic dynamism thing?
Questions For Startups Killing Free Membership And Going Pay Only
This actually happens a lot at Microsoft; the reason why it's unheard of is they're normally hiring more people than they're RIFing. The Microsoft reorg 30 day job search is a way of life for people in some disciplines and teams there.

Much like high level programming can "waste" large numbers of clock cycles, cutting huge orgs while hiring other ones certainly doesn't seem efficient, and is especially grating given that we're talking about livelihoods, not zeros and ones. Unfortunately I don't think anyone has come up with a paradigm that works a lot better than this, although I'd be curious to hear of any large successes.

After a few years on the payrolls of mega-corp, you get replaced [...] Perhaps it's inevitable with a competitive labor market...

Yeah, it was a feature when many of us were getting in during high-school, but it sucks as an incumbent. I guess the takeaway is to stay hungry.
Yes, incendiary unsourced quotes and all.

Karen Hughes, one of his closest advisers, "rarely read books and distrusted people who did."

Who knows where that came from. Gotta love billion-dollar words thrown in like "homunculi" and "ratiocination" instead of the clearer "cronies" and "reasoning," respectively.

I just can't help but feel that this particular analyst is strongly biased.
Really? Even among the Kikuyu and Luhya?
The headline's a bit misleading, isn't it? Revenues and earnings are not down; they actually grew, but not as much as expected.

Still looks bad, I guess, compared to Apple (disclosure: I use Apple laptops and desktops) which reported great numbers. But still, "Earnings and Revenues Down" is quite a bit different than "Grew Slower Than Expected"; especially in an economic downturn.

Client revenue declined, which is caused by, I presume, Vista woes. Server, Tools, XBox revenues all grew.
To be fair, it sounded like a good business decision but it was poorly executed.
Sun Microsystems may lay off 6,000 today
I've noticed some startups that are killing their free versions and going pay-only (notably jott and sprout builder lately). I had a couple of questions about that, and for anyone that would rather talk here than on my post itself, here are the q's:

1. What percentage of free users convert to paid users?
Looking at a TechCrunch article that covered Jott, they say:

In August voice-to-text service Jott moved out of beta and added a premium feature for $4/month. Since then, the company says, about 30% of Jott’s active users have opted for the premium, no-ads version of the service.

30% seems really, really high to me, but I could be way off. But even if 30% of the free users upgraded, that leaves 70% that are gone completely. That’s 70% of the people that have heard about you, come to your site, and actually signed up to use your service.

2. What is the cost of keeping free members?
Like I mentioned above, most startups would kill to keep their users, especially when they have a premium version to offer. With such a captive audience already using the product, there are great opportunities to plug the full version in every communication.

3. Are there competitors ready to take your free users?
When you get rid of your free users (especially if they are frequent users of your service), they’re likely to look for another service to replace you. What if there are other services that would welcome your subscribers?

4. How will startups attract new users without a free version?
Without a free version to hook new users, how do you sell users on paying for the service? A 30 or 60 day trial? If that’s the case, what’s the point of getting rid of the free users? Is it solely the ability to charge them after 30 or 60 days? Is it the simple shift from
a) users that are freely using the service without offering up their credit cards

to

b) users that are using the service, but have their credit card on file, so if they forget to cancel, or think the service is ok, you can charge them

I’m not knocking the strategy. It certainly has a higher probability of making some cash, but free trial vs. freemium upgrade certainly feel like very different animals. One motivates me to check it out and bail immediately, looking for flaws and reasons to stop payment. The other makes me actually try something out at no cost, and if I feel that the service is useful, I’ll pay for it by making the choice myself.

5. Will the cost of your service be enough to be profitable?
Finally, the big question: even with a high conversion rate, is the subscription charge enough to make sufficient profit without some ad component?
I was just about to say that. About the only MS product I actually like (as opposed to use out of necessity) is Visual Studio. It's the only one that keeps innovating and has a feature set ahead of much of the competition.

Well, I gues add Xbox to the list. MS came into the market and beat Sony on features fair and square, and built up a whole new meaning for online multiplayer. Good for them. If only their Windows and Office teams were half as innovative.
I'm a more joyful person now, though more conservative also. Less selfish, more concerned about the future... and a lot of small changes...
Looks well thought out - I think the idea has great potential! Just a few points on the marketing pages:

* Why do the Twitter / Yahoo / Digg links on the home page actually link to those sites? Maybe it's because the arrow pointing up to the T for Twitter, but I clicked one of those links expecting more information about how your service integrates with that site. Instead was swept off your site. I'd gander that most of the people in your target audience are well aware of what these sites are.

* Is there really no audio on the screencast? A little explanation along with it would go a long way.

I'll look into it a bit more later on. Seems to have promise though! Good luck!
Yes, actually. Perl uses one to handle cases of ambiguous syntax, where it's possible to "guess" the correct parse quite reliably from the surrounding context, but it's impossible to infer the true meaning simply by looking at the line by itself. (Thankfully, this technique is rare if you're writing clean code, and as far as I know, it's gone from Perl 6.)
Gary is the real deal. Growing a business to $50mil in 10 years is a great accomplishment!
You still need to test your interface and scripts interactively, the ideal solution would be remote access to your page.
Get to know your Twitter followers better
And is this mostly in Redmond/Seattle area?
from founder of threadless.com, really cool ideas. love the 2009 mantra: brutal prioritization and maniacal focus.
A few suggestions:

There needs to be a way to sort the results by source so people can see only mentions on twitter, digg, blogsearch, etc. Currently it can be tough to tell where any given conversation was found.

It would be helpful to have negative filters for removing false positives. Some brands have similar keywords, so it's annoying to see the same irrelevant topics coming up.

The positive/negative filters need some work. About half the results in the negative tab were actually positive in the test I did.

You're tracking the keywords by sucking in RSS feeds for search queries correct? You might have a challenge convincing savvy individuals to pay for a service they could basically recreate in an hour inside their own feed reader.
I’m a Linux. The Song.
Which is why the third option, removing any appearance of a control, can be nice. If I can't do anything with it, why style it as anything other than static content?
No, he means its "so much cheaper" to pay for American Grad Students versus foreign ones who need Student Visas. I've been told by a professor who's brought in Chinese grad students (he himself is Chinese) that its really hit and miss. And you put up a bond for their visa -- they bail on your program or commit a felony, that's your grant/research/grad student funding money going out the window. It doesn't happen very frequently, but it does happen.

Another situation with foreign grad students is that they get here, and after a year or two of abuse in a lab, they go get a life, and get married or (iff female) get pregnant. Then, their work ethic trends "Average American" and they adopt the "take this job and shove it" attitude.
I'm not at all convinced that this rumor is true. Having said that, there is certainly a big pile of grants and fellowships that preferentially target US citizens.
How about the first 20 mentions of your company free per month for the basic account - then go into the packages..

Good luck
In other news, the iTunes Store rewards "crap" music, "crap" movies, and "crap" TV. Shocking!
Question: What about when you need to do something that the IDE doesn't have built in?

(I use Emacs. Many years ago (mid 90s) I used the IDE that came with Turbo C++, but haven't used Visual Studio or Eclipse, and am genuinely curious how they handle extensibility.)
> I hope they're not staking their profitability on ads.

What else do you expect them to stake their profitability upon? Sales of amusing digg-themed t-shirts?
Nice, I've been wanted to learn more about AJAX. This will def help.
Seems awfully pointy clicky to me.

I just use this script and cron.

#!/bin/sh

function getone
{
PAGE=$1
TO=$2
SUBJ=$3

URL=`curl -s "$PAGE" | sed -r -n -e 's/^.*"(http:[^"]*zoom.gif[^"]*)".*$/\1/p'`

[ -z "$URL" ] || ( curl -s "$URL" | mime-construct --subject $SUBJ \
--to $TO --attachment comic.gif --type image/gif --file - )
}

getone http://comics.com/9_chickweed_lane/ someone@example.org chickwee
getone http://comics.com/dog_eat_doug/ someone.else@example.org dougeatdog

Of course any kind of content scraping brings ethical questions.
It's hard to say what the quarter would have been like without a major ad push in Q3. Maybe the ads were bad, but maybe their revenue would have been worse without them-- solely from a business perspective, you have to be careful with statements like that.

For all I know, their advertisement strategy is what saved the company from needing to lay off 20k in this announcement.
congrats to both of you, really exciting news. love that the reasons all make sense but really it was all about where you want to live and raise kids. despite it all this seems like the best way to make decisions: "whats best for us?"
I'm surprised they still have 6000 employees.
In your FAQ you have the question:

Why would I need something like this?

People 'love' to feel like someone is listening. Millions of people are talking online about you, your competitors, and your market space. If you're not listening and effectively communicating with them, you're missing a great opportunity for customer support and acquisition.

From a sales perspective, I think this is a bad approach. It's a defensive position that assumes the visitor's default position is "I don't think I need this." When I read this line, my thinking changed from "This could be useful" to "Yeah, why DO I need this?"

The answer to the question is good, but the question itself is what I would change. You could ask "How will MightyBrand.com help me achieve x?" and then answer by selling the benefits of your service.

Also, the Feadback tab hovers over the text on some pages (like the FAQ).

Goodluck with this. I think it's a great idea! Goodluck on the execution!
Yes, that was the one. I thought it gave pretty good recommendations.
Second.

Your name stands out from other websites, but the design does not. I would strongly suggest less a "Web 2.0" look. By that I mean lose the orange/grey color scheme, silly white gradiated buttons, position:absolute feedback link.

A good reference would be design that utilize a more traditional poster-like typography, rather than other websites.

This might be helpful:
http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/20-websites-with-beautifu...
So Buchheit was the key figure behind Adsense, too. Wow.
Well, I was hoping they had some interesting new idea.

I don't personally much care, I haven't been on Digg in about 2 years, the value diminished pretty significantly for me.
Impressive list. OSX could use a few more browsers, but I'm surprised just how many Linux/Windows browsers they have available.

I've been doing a lot more web testing for a project this week, this might save me some serious time hunting down problems.
You're assuming they're "very talented people..." but that's not necessarily the case. Given Microsoft's size and breadth and the fact that they've been hiring and not firing all these years, it's to be take for granted that they've gathered a number of people that are as brilliant and talented as they'd like over the years... so perhaps this isn't as bad as it seems.
Contracts are to keep honest people honest. But if you are dealing with a con the contract doesn't matter.
It would be a good question: What is the boundary between political/term positions and career positions, for this stuff?
I don't understand where these ads he is displaying are showing up?

Can someone with an iphone explain please
Do you have the impression that the missing email scandal was a technical lapse or politically motivated? I know it's widely assumed to have been the latter, but it's often easy to overestimate these things.
Four Free Ebooks for Web Developers
IControl 101 - #21 - Rate Classes  DevCentral  F5 DevCentral  Documentation and Tips
MouseTerm is great! I've been looking for something like this for a while...

Thank you!
This is great news, long, long overdue. If he wants to spend his way out of this recession, then investing in basic research is one of the best long-term options.
http://mightybrand.com
I'd disagree with this entirely. In the digital era, ownership is so darned easy there's no reason not to own.

At the very least, I have no plans to let my glorious cloud overlords have that much control over my experience. Look at this in terms of power relationships and this whole essay is a paean to the virtues of turning over all control and power over you to somebody else. Thanks, but no thanks. I know how that story ends. Without possession there is no freedom.
Unlikely. Those Seinfeld ads didn't actually try to sell anything. A bit of overpriced, mild brand reinforcement most likely would not have affected the company's short-term prospects.

By the way, what M$ is doing here is very screwed up. They're laying off the first batch (1400) immediately, but using the remaining 3600 as a threat to make competition cutthroat. I might just quit if I worked there.
his "tip" is to do market research to prove that everyone is uncool? sorry bud, you got lucky...
Yes, PLT-Scheme is nice.
Aptera Completes First Pre-Production 2e Model
I echoed this sentiment after getting into TDD: http://akkartik.name/blog/53634708
Worse is better?
English phd students tend to be quite a despondant lot (I have one, but avoided most of the other students on the course).
One major advantage of doing a phd in the humanities now (providing you get funding) is the flexibility. I knew about the job prospects for English phds before I started, but I was fascinated by the period and was offered a scholarship, so thought why not, but I also used the spare time I had to set up an internet company - which we sold for a modest amount the same week I passed my viva.
People worry too much about following the herd - partly because they read too many articles like this.
1.5 billion devided by 5,000 people is $300,000 saved per person let go, unless I miscounted zeros in doing that calculation.

That seems high, I think usually companies claim savings of around twice the employees salary when they fire people.

Of course they also mention reducing contractors also, but then they are also hiring more too.
Burstsort: Fastest known algorithm to sort large set of strings
Yep, they're pretty good. I'll probably play with it a little more later to figure out what the rough weights on correlation are.
I really like those boxes that he uses to structure the site. I looked in the source... Does anyone know if the ShadowContainer is available as some type of JS library?
Can someone please clarify:
What (of Bush's "record") can I read and where can I read it?
Depending on the content (which I am not clear on) this could possibly be a problem for national security. Shouldn't it be something like former-president-records-go-public-after-XX-years?
What?... I think the big problem with DSLs is that people think it's a complicated technique that's applicable only in a few specific, obscure cases.

It's actually a technique that scales well, in the sense that you can make languages as simple or as complex as you need, with an implementation as featureful of trivial as you need (just a bunch of macros VS a full compiler and VM complete with high-level debugger), and if you use a language like Lisp that makes it easy to prototype new languages (the lisp reader, macros and closures help a lot) you can afford to make a few DSLs just for one app if you like.

Just for my web framework in the making, I have 5 DSLs:

Purely declarative configuration management (almost done), static and dynamic HTML and CSS generation and manipulation (done, but I have plans for something better), HTML and CSS rewriting (in the making), i18n resources (in the making but very simple).

And no doubt I'll need a few more for my specific applications.
I'm not putting down the contributions of secretaries or any other non-engineering roles in a company.

My point is simply that the quality of developer talent at a software company will permanently influence the future of that company in a way that can't be compared by simple analogies.

There are good reasons to be more concerned with hiring the best programmers you can find than hiring the best secretary or the best janitor.
That's both right and wrong. While making yourself valuable to your company is probably a good idea, you have to be working for an employer smart enough to realize it. Which is, in my experience, not most large employers.

In the layoffs I've been through, the people let go were almost random WRT how valuable they were as employees or developers. What was rewarded was managing up.
From the FAQ:

Please don't sign comments, especially with your url. They're already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile.

You're just not in the habit of looking back up at the name when you finish a comment that you like. It's not hard to train yourself to do that.
Did they show mercy?
congratulations to Jessica and PG.
Obama Gets a Thumbs-Up for His BlackBerry
I'm so tired of talking about fake gag iPhone apps.

I'd like to thank the person who made the Clinometer app, wherever he or she is. It's like a $2 digital level. It's really a slick real-world tool I didn't expect to turn my iPhone into.
And with a few advances in automated fabrication and a lot of creative work by startups we could take this approach to a mass market. Although I think http://www.zipcar.com/ has the summon a car thing covered for the urban middle class.
Does anyone know of a tool like this that can make webservice callouts?
Only if RIM is unsuccessful at preventing trademark dilution (like Kleenex and Walkman). If you're interested in reading on trademark dilution, I found that Wikipedia has a link to this source at Boston University School of Law: http://www.bu.edu/law/central/jd/organizations/journals/scit...
Not that anybody usually cares about meta-conversations around here, but I like the idea of one-line custom tags at the bottom of each comment. Especially since this is a startup board. People should be proud of what they are doing and should be wanting to plug it.

My two cents, fwiw.
But it is a good way to get your app mentioned all over the web.
This article relates to what I believe will be a hugely important economic issue in the next 50 years: the ease of ownership, especially in digital media. We are seeing this now with legal markets, such as that of OSS, and illegal markets, such as music/movie piracy. As long as the ease of creating new copies of digital information remains practically nil, it will drive out capitalism in that sector. Whether or not this is a good thing remains to be seen, seeing as how capitalism is not built for such low variable cost markets. However, it is certain to have drastic effects on our future economy. If capitalism fails in that sector, it will cause an economic crash unless dealt with appropriately. Imagine a world with free music/movies. What incentive do these artists have to continue? Now you may argue that OSS works, so why wouldn't entertainment? The difference is that OSS has an extremely low fixed cost AND variable cost. That is to say it does not cost much at all to produce the first unit of OSS, and it becomes cheaper to produce each new "unit" of OSS. Also, many OSS contributors contribute so in their free time. They do not contribute as a primary source of income (for the most part). For the entertainment industry, which can have exorbitant fixed costs (millions of dollars for most films), the failure of capitalism will cause drastic shrinkage of the sector. While the shrinkage in itself is not neccissarily bad, the fact that it will occur so quickly will cause mass layoffs and general unstability of the economy. Where we go from there, nobody knows.

Well, I guess I rambled a bit there, but I hope that made sense :-)
I have seen this one before, and if you want a bunch of screen shots, especially from some of the lesser used OS/browser combos, your going to have to sit there and hit "extend" on your 30 minute lease time of their services at least four or five times. Their ETA is generally way off.

That said, its nice when you don't have the option to access your page through some different OS and browser combos, plus they will let you download all the screenshots in an archive.
Entirely correct. We did not get the best people. It probably cost us more money in the long run. But we were able to ship the product and survive.

It can take years and years to find an amazing team of programmers that's a good fit. After 12 years we have, but in the beginning we just had to ship and get paid.
I just downloaded it: there's a thin banner across the top that says "Find Golf Resorts Maui Hawaii Now!" with small "Ads by AdMob" text beneath that.
Www.indogambler.com Judi bola,
Looks good.
Great concept.
Pricing section MUST be reworked. no on "big shot"
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Burstsort's design considers cache effects. (A cache miss can easily cost you 200 instructions.) In the grand old days of sorting algorithms it was instruction count that mattered.

Judging from their graphs, Burstsort is fastest by a wide margin for sufficiently large datasets.
Doesn't work in Opera...
You're arguing idealism; I'm arguing reality. In most cases, programmers serve a role that is closer to the construction worker than the architect.