skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google's stock and cash worth $6B is still better offer to than rising $100MM. Not only first is 60x more, but it is also the ultimate exit (done deal - wash your hands go to the bank to cash the check), versus "$100MM investment" is just a gas for a business to sustain it and move it forward.

So still you haven't convinced me that Mason was after the money. I think he obsessively believed in the idea, which to me (personally) has no merits from business perspective, therefore from the investor/stockholder perspective this is a nightmarish position to be in, but one has to agree Mason did build something good: he gave jobs to thousands unemployed and stimulated the recessed economy by providing platform for both businesses and customers to continue selling and buying.

edit: I don't believe Mason had a crystal ball to predict how future will look.
You're describing a premature optimization. Performing poorly is better than not performing at all.
I admit, I probably used a bit stronger words than warranted, but this is entirely due to the frustration on the constant state of public IT procurement failure in the country.

Anyway, I'm quite well aware how the RFQ process works. The problem is that even though the idea works well, it is still very easy to write your requirements so that your preferred vendor gets the deal.

This is sort of in line with the classic Stalin quote: I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.

Also, I find it curious that the city is even allowed to get into deals that deny them public accountability.

This might be a great strategy for a politician: if you screw up, lock the details behind a similar deal, only to be opened after the next elections.
It's pretty clear why Kyle hasn't anticipated this kind of reaction to his project. After exposing his whole life online during his previous projects, he obviously lost kind of sensitivity most people have about their own privacy. He studied some laws and rules and decided it's OK, but it would be better if he asked some of his non privacy-stunt-artist friends what do they think about his idea. His story nicely shows how our ideas of ethics are influenced by our own personality and behavior, not just out environment.
I've had similar experiences. A lot of simple things in OSX just don't feel natural or when done give me a result that I didn't expect. I've been using the OS for almost a year now and still feel that way.
There are some videos on youtube of les horribles cernettes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-m8A0aHikY
Looks like a good work life balance at CERN!
That doesn't make any sense... You just "type" and it "magically" works and goes where it needs to?
Requires you to have to ask them less questions when you run into a blocker. Helps you debug issues.

it helps you help them design the interface or design an API.

Are you just missing the fundamental point of why anyone learns anything? You learn more so you can do more and make more effective/informed decisions.
ctrl+f,bar,esc,ctrl+shift+right,foo

i think it's easier to grab the mouse, dlb click bar, foo

with vim, it's still easier than grabbing the mouse. that's the litmus test of text editor interface effectiveness. the mouse is awesome, hard to beat. so if your editor beats it, game on!
New Scam: Posing as a Remote Access Service Technician
Modeling is an estimation of how something works, but it isn't the mechanism by which something works.

Let's look at a concrete example. Suppose someone produces a device that contains some generic components: a centrifuge, spectrum analyzer, etc. and sells this device on the market. Someone else comes along and develops software that, with the aid of one of these generic devices, can detect a blood defect or airborne pathogens or whatever. Do you agree that this software should be patentable?

Maybe you'd say that the software isn't patentable, but using the software with the machine is? And attempting to sell a clone of the software wouldn't be patent infringement per se, but if it was clearly intended to be used with the devices would be inducing infringement and also a tort?

If that's your position then we agree in spirit, I think, though I think that looks mostly like double talk to me. If you don't think such a device should be patentable on the grounds that the only new component is software, then we disagree.

What makes complex software more valuable than simple software?

I didn't say it was more valuable, and I don't think complexity should even be a requirement. It's just that software that pertains to the real world tends to be complex.
Just watch the video of the page http://blog.extracheese.org/2010/11/screencast-custom-vim-re... to get the gist of "entire blocks of code with the flick of a finger".
Me. I was just recently curious how base64 encoded data would compress (gzip) compared to non-base64 encoded data. I tried it out on a few types of input, including random bytes. It was not, of course, 32gb, but it was large enough it could have been my nefarious plans or not-tiny collection of child porn images or whatever. It doesn't have to be huge to be important - an encrypted file listing a few hundred account numbers could be vital to a money laundering investigation or whatever.
I assume you know that patenting teleportation is more than just writing down "I patent teleportation."

So, let's so with your example. Someone has an idea for a teleporter, and at great expense comes up with the blueprints that will let it be manufactured. However, it will take $3 billion and 2 years to create a working example.

With patent protection, the inventor can seek out industrial or financial backers to produce it. Those parties can hire their own scientists and engineers to verify that the blueprints ought to work.
SpaceX Completes Design Review of Dragon
I'd argue in theory, no, but in practice this is often helpful.

For example, I was working on a multi-step activation system where I had to get the user in a certain state no a specific UI element showed up. That required spending 5-10 min. every time to set up that user, which would go away once you use that button, and development would have taken days.

That is, until someone showed me what the Activation schema + model looked like and how to just toggle the boolean or attach an expected relation. You could maybe argue that there should be an admin interface for manipulating model state, but nobody else really would need it: BE devs can already change the models, and business types don't care about this particular state of the user.
In all fairness, they appear to have handled this incredibly well and have been very informative. Which is much more than can be said for the breaches in most other cases. And at least the passwords were hashed (although how well, they don't really say -- I guess that would be part of the vBulletin package?)
Venture Capital with Dogbert
Quoted in the article: “Can you name any non-serial entrepreneurs? I can’t think of any of the top of my head… all entrepreneurs seem to be serial offenders. Max Levchin, Evan Williams, Justin Khan, Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus… (and a dozen other names).”

Isn't this obviously selection bias? Of course you don't hear much about one-failure-and-done entrepreneurs. Why would you, unless their failure was somehow exceptionally spectacular? But that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of them... there are likely many, many more of them than those that stick with it.
Exactly. People who buy the iPhone do not do so primarily for games. People who buy the Ouya do.
It's not worse, it's just different.

Many SW Devs are great at creative front end work. Many FE Devs used to be amazing back end Devs. Many Devs don't care what end or language they work in. Those are A players.

If you've just never worked with a single particular technology, that's fine. If on the other hand you have never touched a lot of technologies.... probably not an A player. If you don't know anything about recursion, you are definitely not an A player.

Frankly, I find saying that FE Devs shouldn't care about recursion insulting to FE Devs.

Watching a good FE Dev sling HTML/CSS/JS is a thing of beauty. It's not as easy as a lot of SW Devs think it is.

If they mess up fundamental computer science concepts while slinging JS around, it's gong to be painful rather than beautiful to watch. And I make no claim it is easy. JS in particular is lovely programing language liked by many SW Devs.
My reaction to this point was that the author is essentially proclaiming, "All you need to do is just have a comprehensive and unabridged knowledge of every single external library and API your code touches, no matter what kind of project it is!" Which, to me, comes across as a bit on the unrealistic side.
I believe this has to do with whether you're running a Flash or HTML5 video. I thought HTML5 triggers Lion fullscreen, although I'm not sure.
Anyone has screenshot of it?
I ordered some jeans online, taking measurements from another pair of jeans. In fact I aggregated together measurements of my body, measurements of my existing pairs of jeans, and sizes from the labels of my existing pairs of jeans.

The first pair that came were too short, and a bit big at the waist; the company agreed to swap them for a shorter pair (but I had to pay to ship the old pair back to them). I couldn't tell if going to a two-inch-smaller waist would mean an uncomfortably tight waist, so I didn't ask them to send me a pair with a smaller waist. The fit is now at best acceptable.

I could have been more stubborn about it and done more exchanges until I was happier with the fit, but that would have meant more inconvenience - and the expense of shipping them back again. Had I been buying at a shop I could have tried on a whole bunch of pairs of jeans, and I think I'd be happier with the overall fit.

For comparison, I have successfully brought sneakers, t-shirts and sweaters online so I'm no stranger to shopping for clothes online.
>the Bill of Rights has been deprecated.

Things aren't so black and white. You could argue that we should be allowed to yell fire in a crowded building, but most people agree that should be discouraged.

As for all information should be free, obviously you would have an exception to restrict the flow of your private information. And then what is considered private...
It depends on the game, but controls are a huge part of the game experience and many types of games are just fundamentally horrible to play on a particular set of controls. Bad controls will simply ruin a game. I remember the pain of playing Mortal Kombat on a keyboard for example, also bear in mind how long it took for consoles to make FPS games tolerable on a controller. This is worse than that, you might have some luck in porting a touchscreen game over to mouse control or vice versa, but touch control to gamepad?

How on earth would one play "cut the rope" on a controller?

I agree though that it might well be worth the $99 just for use as a media box and to play old arcade ROMs on but the question is whether that is a viable business model for them?
I think that's pretty much what the article said:

"So, why no second hardware startups? The most likely reason is probably the obvious one: after spending a lot of time in software, it’s hard to go learn a whole new field, especially if you’re already rich and don’t have to work to pay bills."
Wait, you found it too difficult and time-consuming to install software, so instead you wrote software?
A video is worth a thousand words.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCiVCiku3cM

http://blog.eleutian.com/download/vimteaser.wmv

http://blog.eleutian.com/download/vim2.wmv

http://blog.eleutian.com/download/vim3.wmv
My entire point is - who defines this REST / SOAP / "who cares" layer? If it's strictly back-end engineers, front-end interoperability is not represented. A FE engineer involved in the development and maintenance of this API layer ensures that concerns are effectively recognized - which requires an FE engineer who knows the whole stack. Yes, these details should be abstracted away from the strict implementation of the actual FE code, but that API has to be created in concert.
For that I would probably have used a regex search and replace in any decent editor, or perhaps a Perl one-liner.

cat file | perl -p -e 's-\s(.)\.rb-// Run the $1 command\ndef $1()\nend\n-'
Of course, but I think it's only talking about entrepreneurs who have already had at least one success
I don't think the quote is about one-failure-and-done entrepreneurs, I think it's about the dearth of one-success-and-done entrepreneurs
For one project is Sublime, for one is Aptana, for another it could be VS. Who cares? In the end, as I see it at least, all it comes down to is you getting the job done.
What’s new in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion GM build?
Microsoft cuts hundreds of advertising jobs to focus on Windows 8 and Xbox
Ask HN: How do you attract advertisers to an advertising startup?
Greetings,

I have an online-ad startup ready to go. The only problem is, I don't know how to attract advertisers (I sound like an idiot, I know). I've been in the tech side of things for a while, so I don't know much about advertising. My business model is basically an ad-network with a more efficient twist. [I'm the middle-man between companies (small and large) and users]

The rest of the technology for the site is ready to go, now I just need advertisers. How would I go about doing this? Do I directly contact Ad firms? Do I need some connections first?

Any advice would be appreciated...
Ask HN: Is it Responsible to Hire a Schizophrenic Developer?
I'm not sure how to broach this, so I'll just get it out.

I've been tasked with recruiting great talent for my organization. I was introduced to a (very) young man by a mutual friend who was extremely polite and obviously brilliant. He's active in open source and in fact we already use some of his older software. In our fairly rigorous interview process, he demonstrated mastery of a number of difficult to find/train skillsets as well as being an obviously extremely skilled programmer.

It seemed like the most obvious hiring decision ever.

Towards the interview he matter-of-factly began to explain that a pc manufactured in the 80s is being used by CERN to control the world and starting talking about birds being advanced human beings

This struck us all the interviewers as very strange which motivated a conversation with a previous employer who during the course of employing him had determined that he was a paranoid schizophrenic and had fired him because of fear of his instability and bizzare (but harmless) paranoid behavior at work.

I later spoke with the mutual friend who claimed that in his every day life he's a very kind and charming young man who would be fine to work, but admitted that he's become notably unhinged as he's gotten out of his teenage years.

I feel like he could be game changer for our tech but I can't risk harming our company's velocity.

Do any of you have experience or suggestions on if it's wise to work with an (actually) crazy person.
This has been happening a lot lately, wasn't there something with Yahoo! just a few days ago? And I recall one or two others not long since.
the problem is that there's a lot of accumulated work that has gone into vim at this point, and none of the attempts to reproduce that atop a cleaner, more modern codebase ever went anywhere. emacs's evil mode[1] looks like the most promising current alternative.

[1] http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil
Clarence Irving Lewis
I'm personally partial to SizeUp. Moom's interface is a lot better (its grid system is brilliant), but I can't stand that you can't use it to send windows to other spaces.
Hmm, no obligatory info on how the "quad-core" affects power consumption vs. the Raspberry PI.
put that into a ms natural keyboard, a LCD screen in the center, call it Fuchi Cyberdeck I, and sell it to me for 10x more!
I think you've unknowingly nailed the problem. Unlike men, womens' fashion moves at a very rapid pace. So for long term, it'd be more prudent to buy something timeless rather than the current trend.
Does ODROID-X ARM Mali GPU supports OpenCL?
How are you managing constantly getting blocked by Google for scraping (literally) hundreds of thousands of pages every month.

I'm sure you're running a pretty large proxy pool?

If you're using the Google AJAX Search API (now deprecated) - I don't see the accuracy results being too good.
Wow - I never realized ci"baz<esc> would work with the cursor starting in column 0 - thanks for this tip !!
>I have used 4x simultaneous monitors on my MBP

What do you use for that?
30% is a awesome conversion. Any specifics on how you were able to get it up so high?
Thanks for the clarification. 'Business method' patents would I take it be the ones like Blackboard's patents for course management.

My original point stands: I can't see the logic in any district court having jurisdiction over patent cases.
Great application of WebGL.
Love Origami? How About A Speaker
Even in that situation, while that cuts the number down I'd still put good money on there being a lot more entrepreneurs who had one great success and then cashed out compared to the number who are "serial entrepreneurs".

I think there's still SV-bubble (not economic bubble, but bubble in the social isolation sense) logic going on there in assuming the majority are serial.

Of course, I have no data to back this up (but neither does the other viewpoint -- a list of 8 or so guys is hardly a good argument for that side).
I also recently signed up for twitter, and noticed the same thing. I just figured it was based on location, and maybe what twitter pages my IP had visited before signing up.
Whole line completion is very useful when you write very repetitive languages.

In CSS, <C-x><C-l> is a gift of the gods.
Eagle Research LLC | Timmathy
Android 4.1 arrives to Galaxy Nexus
Shift+I moves your cursor to the start of the line, and enters insert mode, too.
Betaworks acquires Digg properties, plans to work with News.me
Locate anything quickly with a Brand New App
Please make it fly.
Solving every Sudoku puzzle with 15 Lines of Code
http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.ph...

"Normally ODROID-X consumes about 1A [at 5V] in most cases. But it can go up to 3A if you use some USB hard disk drives in parallel."
Applied research is nothing new, sure isn't that what PARC was? Commercial labs still exist, and in many different fields. (I know PARC was Xerox, but now they take on proof of concept work from externals)

The real problem is how do you identify particular groups or commercial labs to approach, so that they can complete your work.

Research money is quite risky because you are asking for someone to achieve something that does not yet exist. You have a good probability of running out of money before something comes back to you.
Mass Hallucination, Hysteria and Miracles
Try out xvim if you want to use Xcode + vim. It's still alpha but I use it for all my Xcode editing. Patches welcome.

edit: link - https://github.com/JugglerShu/XVim
Microsoft launches The Bing Fund
I believe it was 1.8. I know it wasn't a high-reliability configuration, and it could be that an unclean shutdown was to blame. I do not claim to know objectively how reliable MongoDB is.

I am, however very hesitant to rely on it for anything now, much as I would be hesitant to touch a machine that previously gave me a severe electric shock even though its creator and other users assure me it's safe now.
Motion Smoothing
I think they should really have already got something cast iron in the pipeline from some reasonable sized developers (mojang for example) before they launched the kickstarter.
Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
Ask HN: How do employers view the prospect of employing ex-freelancers?
At the moment I'm a freelancer and I'm pretty happy where I am. At some point I think I'd like a change in job. It's not that I'm having trouble freelancing, quite the opposite in fact.

Anyway, my own motivations aside. I often wonder what the perception of employing freelancers is. I've experience of running my own show gathering and managing my own clients. As a result, I feel I have something extra to offer. Additionally, I'm thrown into a lot of different situations so I end up becoming familiar with various technologies, applications and their architectures.

The problem is I wonder if this is a double-edged sword. Are freelancers perceived as being 'mercenary' or likely to leave at the drop of a hat? or thought of as not being team players? Thoughts?
3D printed vascular network made from sugar
Betaworks to Pay $500,000 for Fallen Social Media Star Digg
I can't think of any successful games console that didn't launch with at least one exclusive "killer app".
I would personally dislike your example because of the use of extended keyboard keys that require repositioning the hand (End, Left).
Bitcoin’s Big Win
Maybe, though I have to say same day delivery is not really the most important aspect to me. For example we get a box of groceries delivered once per week, which is a huge time saver. In general, any kind of thing I can get delivered I will probably prefer - within ecological bounds, but I think delivery vans might not even be that bad. Certainly more efficient than people driving to the mall by car, I presume.
2nd that. Needs FAQ.
Microsoft: "Post-PC" is the wrong idea
i think it's not even so much about the learning curve, it's about the sheer amount of leverage the skills get you. it's very similar to the way chefs are chuffed about their knife skills - all of a sudden you're doing so much with so little effort that it'd be sadly jaded not to feel a thrill.
Jimmy Wales: Protect Internet Freedom And Seek Justice for Richard O'Dwyer
Great write-up, thanks.
At long last, the dreams of the Coyote ordering from Acme and getting immediate delivery of his latest gadget to catch the Roadrunner come closer to fruition.
I finally upgraded to Lion a few weeks ago because a client I have (I'm a web dev, mostly rails) had an app that was built on Xcode 4.3 that I needed to be able to compile and test. I really miss snow leopard. my computer runs slower now under lion and I'm dubious as to whether the UI improvements improved anything.
Not so subtly the author is telling the reader if you program with Vim you'll be just like "all the really great programmers" who can write 4 line solutions to problems that take ordinary programmers 10 pages. You'll produce "impossible patterns of code and text manipulation", and be able to "fill dozens of registers" (admittedly I don't know what that means). This is all bit silly and reminds me of "hacking" in the Hollywood films.

I understand that this post was tongue in cheek. I also understand that not all text editors are equal, if you see someone writing their first hello world program in Notepad yes you should tell them about much better alternatives. But this post confuses ability to program with ability to use Vim.

Being really good at using Vim will definitely let you say you're part of the club of people who are really good at using Vim. It just might make you more efficient at manipulating code. But let's not perpetuate the elitism that is pervasive enough in hacking, it's a text editor. It doesn't make you more intelligent, better at problem solving, or writing more efficient code.
Roundtable Recap: July 12 – Spotlight On Western Massachusetts
The problem is, this isn't some crazy mad scientist innovation that people simply don't have to insight to understand.

This is a bunch of commodity hardware thrown into a box surrounded by very sketchy details surrounding development,software and the controller.
Yup, I daily have to deal with Office documents that have 'pointless' formatting. A good set of templates with formatting protected could save so much time. That goes for Open/Libre Office as much as MS Office.

LibreOffice has mathematical formula editing that I find much more congenial than that currently provided in MS Office 2010. (Yes I know LaTex but I'm talking casual use of simple formulas here).