skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Completely agree. If you find yourself on a PIP, start looking for a new job elsewhere ASAP. Speaking as a manager who has seen this play out several times at different companies, a performance improvement plan should always be seen as invitation to leave. It always surprises me how few people get that. The company is essentially saying, "We're just not that into you."

If the company is large enough, they'll almost always be willing to pay you something (4-6 weeks salary is fairly standard) to go away quietly. Your best bet is to negotiate some kind of exit package while simultaneously looking for new employment. If you're good at it you can dovetail them so that your employment record is seamless. Your employer may even be willing to give you time off to interview. (Remember, they want you to leave.)

The chances of making a comeback after being put on a PIP are slim. It's a HR formality that's essentially a prelude to termination, to protect the company from potential litigation. I don't have hard numbers, but I'd estimate that 75%+ of employees placed on a PIP will either leave or be terminated within 3 months.

Lastly, a PIP doesn't mean you're a bad person. In fact, it may not even be a reflection of your performance. Sometimes personality and budget issues play a large role. American companies don't have many options when cutting staff, and they often default to this one when they don't want "layoff" headlines. I'm not defending it (it's a sucky practice), but see it for what it is, try not to take it personally, and get the hell out before things get really bad.
Maybe that's googles' subtle way of telling your brother to buy some advertising with them ?
Perhaps ADA could be thought of in terms of Battlestar Galactica. ADA would be like a Centurian, clunky and mechanical. Lisp would be more like a "Six", organic and capable of independent though. :)
Blackberry Curve 8900 Javelin Unlocked
Blackberry Curve 8900 Javelin incorporates a defined sense of style that sets it apart from other Blackberry phones. RIM has taken the Bold color scheme which is darker and most sophisticated in tone and removed the 3G.
> Personally, I am not an "ends justify the means" kind of guy

I'm a "means produce the ends" kind of guy.

For example, I'm pretty sure that a system which uses coercive means will have coercive ends. FWIW, many people disagree with that specific example - they insist that their system that uses coercion will not end up being coercive.
That's pretty nifty, but the holy grail remains solving the last-mile problem. Once you've solved the doorstep-to-station issue, existing public transit solutions are fairly competent.

Does anyone know of current startups in this space? The last high-profile development was the Segway, and that clearly didn't catch on for its intended purpose.

That said, it sounds like you wouldn't have to worry about line changes and transfers with PRTs. Which would be nice.
Error recovery not failure avoidance (the core skill of innovators)
If you move where you need to live first, and then meet a girl second -- like many people do -- that might avoid the "want to live in different places" problem.
One reason Ada is not used instead of C on embedded platforms is it's RAM requirements. Many embedded platforms have 3000 - 8000k of RAM. Ada's runtime uses something in the range of 100k.
Sadly, not available outside the USA. What an utter miserable oversight.

And, I wonder what would happen if the Kindle supports music. Might be a very worthy competitor to Apple.
But they're usually still numbers. It could also be a hint to pull from an address book or autofill.
Humans are superficial. Hot or Not was a ridiculously huge success for this reason.

Looks like a good site idea to me, as long as they design to keep down their customer support costs.
No, I mean that a language implemented in JavaScript is sort of a milestone, once you can emulate language 'a' in language 'b' I think that counts for something. My JavaScript knowledge is somewhat dated and this opened my eyes as to how dated it really is.

I was not aware that JavaScript was so versatile, even though I've used it plenty of times to achieve some functionality not present in html. In fact, that's probably the closest I can come to a one line description of the way I viewed JavaScript, an extension to html, obviously I was very wrong.

The html in this case simply is a container for a completely self contained language implementation, so that goes well beyond 'extending the functionality of html'.
I agree with this. I didn't click the link because I assumed it was either a porn site or an Easter Bunny / Chocolate thing... or even Easter Bunny porn! Really I had no idea what it might be about.

And yeah, matching on looks seems frankly bizarre. Perhaps as a bit of fun, in a hot-or-not way, to construct the most appropriate couples... but actual dating? No.
Welcome to Video WallTronics
Video Wall Tronics has an extensive inventory of LED Rental Panels for indoor & outdoor video screens. Screen truck design and purchase is a large part of visual displays
James Dyson: Let engineers make Britain great again
Well, one of the kindles strongest features is that it can connect to a cell network and receive documents really quickly online. Amazon has to negotiate a similar deal with an evdo carrier everywhere else for it to be available everywhere else. Not a small task i imagine.

And Kindle vs iPhone isn't a real competition. The iPhone may be a very nice generalized device, but it can't replace the kindle for reading. Specialization and focus still wins out.
Is the real-time web a threat to Google search?
Google Web Toolkit showcase: TeamPostgreSQL
We have finally released TeamPostgreSQL, web-based administration and team platform for PostgreSQL. I ran a small beta here on HN a few weeks ago.

The application uses a sophisticated AJAX web client and as such is a good showcase for what can be done with GWT in that arena. The interface is complex yet dynamic and customizable and service invocations are fast and immediately reflected on the client.

The server is realized by a slightly modified Apache Tomcat, supporting the well-known JEE features with regards to security, deployment, dynamic configuration etc.

If you'd like to check it out, the download is available at: http://www.teampostgresql.com
Scene Systems reconstructs scenes such as Sully’s crash landing
To be perfectly honest, after using my sister's, I almost considered buying one solely based on the fact that I wouldn't have to fight with the binding of a book.

Aside from that, being able to browse and purchase books from anywhere is definitely convenient, as well as having any book you want at your disposable without having to plan/store/carry copies of said books ahead of time.
Correct. It's a widely-used term in the tech area, and beyond.
Then that's what you should get in your contract when the hire you. They will probably stipulate that you must give them X notice where X is a fairly is larger than average, with the stipulation that if you aren't performing at a good level during X period they can somehow get money from you...
Libertarians are against managing the econonomy because this would infringe on the individuals property rights.
F5 And Bytemobile Partner To Scale And Secure Wireless Networks
I find Cappuccino (objective-c-like interpreter) and 280slides (corresponding demo) significantly more impressive, and they're from a YC startup to boot.

http://cappuccino.org/ | http://280slides.com/

There have been major apps written in Javascript for at least 5 years. I mean, a huge slice of the whole "web 2.0" shebang is client side Javascript apps doing asynchronous communication with servers...
Thanks for the perspective and update. The focus on storage first makes intuitive sense, as it is the unique step/subsystem that needs to work well before larger systems.

The information about heat/cold from the compress/decompress cycle was fascinating. Is efficiency anywhere in the ballpark for having applications for home heating/cooling? As in: run a compressor nights or winters to give off heat and store air, then release the air days or summers for a cold blast to replace traditional air conditioning?
Depends on where you live. http://www.auda.org.au/policies/auda-2008-05/

SCHEDULE F

ELIGIBILITY AND ALLOCATION RULES FOR ORG.AU

The org.au 2LD is for non-commercial organisations.

The following rules are to be read in conjunction with the Eligibility and Allocation Rules for All Open 2LDs, contained in Schedule A of this document.

1. To be eligible in the org.au 2LD, registrants must be:
a) an association incorporated in any Australian State or Territory; or
b) a political party registered with the Australian Electoral Commission; or
c) a trade union or other organisation registered under the Workplace Relations Act 1996; or
d) a sporting or special interest club operating in Australia; or
e) a charity operating in Australia, as defined in the registrant’s constitution or other documents of incorporation; or
f) a non-profit organisation operating in Australia, as defined in the registrant’s constitution or other documents of incorporation.

2. Domain names in the org.au 2LD must be:
a) an exact match, abbreviation or acronym of the registrant’s name; or
b) otherwise closely and substantially connected to the registrant.
FWIW, the Kindle's drm has been cracked for months by now.
Looking at our present crisis in particular, there's certainly something to be said for taking a simplified approach based on core economic principles, logic, and intuition (all three of which this author seems to dismiss categorically). Yes macroeconomics is complicated, and yes we have created concepts in our financial systems that are beyond the understanding of everyone involved. But the basic fundamentals still apply and should still be discussed in the context of the more complex systems. The idea of long-term equilibrium doesn't disappear just because your financial system is convoluted.

The foundation of macroeconomics is the aggregation of microeconomics, which comes down to people making decisions with their money. And everyone can understand that - even programmers. If the public truly can't understand the financial system, then that's a tremendous problem in and of itself.
yes - but then you need some funky google-fu so that when users google for www.yoursite.COM they get directed to www.yoursite.NET

The .com is still the best option
I know it's not easy, but it's not impossible either. Besides, every country with mobile coverage has one or two dominant players which means that the number of deals might be manageable. They can gain more efficiency if they reach multi-country deals with multi-national carriers such as Vodafone or (please god no) Orange.

And I was thinking the music-supporting Kindle might be an entertainment device to rival the iPods not the iPhone. Imagine a device with books and music: it would be an awesome mobile entertainment device. They already have most of (all?) the necessary hardware in the Kindle 2.
An other reason could be the need for publishing contracts for eBooks. Amazon has to provide a sufficient amount of ebooks on their marketplace to make the kindle a success.
Video: Kindle 2 as slow as the original
That is the original reason, but randallsquared is absolutely right that Libertarian economists from for example the Austrian school of economics believe that complex systems can not be micro managed by a small group of experts.
The reason for "ugly strings" is that the value for named constants can be changed at a single location.

If a given constant appears in multiple locations, you're likely to screw up when you need to change its value. (Nope - global search and replace doesn't help - it will change semantically unrelated constants that happen to have the exact same value. Consider 0.)
You beat me to it. The Camel Book's examples of "false laziness", "false impatience", and "false hubris" are quoted here:

http://blog.nix.is/perl-book-mini-reviews
I don't get what prompted the basic complaint of the article. The quality of discussion I see online about economics is usually pretty decent. Much better than some CNN circle-jerk of pundits, anyway.
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I think his stance is that there's (more than?) sufficient grumbling about Microsoft, and insufficient grumbling about Apple and Google. There's an obvious bias to his writing, inasmuch as he just takes this as a given and moves on, but that doesn't mean he's totally wrong.
We have finally released TeamPostgreSQL, web-based administration and team platform for PostgreSQL. I ran a small beta here on HN a few weeks ago.

The application uses a sophisticated AJAX web client and as such is a good showcase for what can be done with GWT in that arena. The interface is complex yet dynamic and customizable and service invocations are fast and immediately reflected on the client.

The server is realized by a slightly modified Apache Tomcat, supporting the well-known JEE features with regards to security, deployment, dynamic configuration etc.

If you'd like to check it out, the download is available at: http://www.teampostgresql.com
This is 100% true, but what this guy is failing to mention is that it seems that economists don't understand macroeconomics. We are in a terrible terrible mess that was predicted by a very select few that have been shouting out for years by this point. The majority of economists seemed to think everything was just fine. I read somewhere that the world has lost 40% of it's wealth in this recession. This tells me that the old systems, even if I don't understand them, aren't working that great. They very well be the best we have, but it doesn't take a rocket scientists or macro-economists to see that.
Introducing Shindig-dnd - an open source iGoogle-like gadget container.
sigh In the past, Apple allowed other companies to license the OS and sell it on different hardware. The only reason this stopped was because Steve Jobs forced the renaming of a particular version of the OS so that the contract would no longer apply (it covered version X.Y, they changed it to X.Z)

Also, what's wrong with seeing Mac OS X in Walmart on discount machines?
Spolksy and Atwood's StackOver is a huge success
The way your accountants record your assets makes no difference to the money supply. That is a completely separate issue.
Choosing a framework; and why Django?
I saw that as well, though I wouldn't generalize so far as the differences in how men and women think just from a pair of articles.

Also, an exciting life is not necessarily a pleasant one...
The web isn't made for desktop-applications. It's broken in other ways too, so you have to wait in line.
There's Going To Be Many More Rails(es)
Eh? I had lighttpd+Django running on my iPhone last April when I purchased it.
> Get an interest only mortgage and suddenly your rent is "tax free".

The mortgage interest deduction only applies to the first $1M of the loan.

And, the mortgage interest deduction goes away under AMT.
Mm, I've never had issues with book bindings for general reading; only with programming book bindings.

I tend to read just one book at time.

Does the Kindle allow full-text search across all books that you own?
Checking the root http://www.tradecommissioner.gc.ca/ they're currently doing maintenance on their web site this morning. It looks like I could have chosen a more opportune time to submit this!

If you're Canadian and looking to build a Start-up, you may find this seminar helpful (it's not just in Toronto and Vancouver -- they're doing a road-show in different parts of the country). If this crawls off the HN front page (which it probably will before the site returns from maintenance), you may want to bookmark the page and check back later.
Albeit PL/SQL is a subset that gives you only a flavor of Ada.

I think Ada just plain did not gain momentum at a time when developers looked for a new paradigm to aid in building larger, more complex systems. The nod went to OO and C++ was the lucky recipient of attention because of its relationship with C.

Now that OO, as implemented by C++ and Java, have not proven to be the Holy Grail, developers are looking for another paradigm. It appears to be a dog fight now between dynamic and functional languages for the nod.

Not to stray too far off topic, but Lisp seems to have not gained momentum for almost the polar opposite reason as Ada. Ada's OO stuff was a little late to the table when OO got the nod; Lisp was too far ahead of everything - programmers were too used to the machine level interaction and were not ready for high level abstractions. (Mind you I am coming at Lisp as a newbie who looks at what it offered for decades and shake my head that we passed it up.)

Languages often do not get a second chance but Haskell and Lisp, as implemented by Clojure (or Arc), may actually become mainstream.

Ada falls into the same category, for me, as Eiffel. I know intuitively that they could reduce some common errors but they're just not interesting.
Typing Genius defies Apple, introduces Emoji support
To your last question, convenience. Being able to carry around in a single 10 oz device an entire library is quite handy for those of us who don't know what we want to read. Or anticipate wanting to read several books on a trip. I don't have one, and looking at the selection on the Kindle Store, I'm not sure I'm going to get one yet, but I expect I will get one eventually.
One of the coolest JeOS things to check out is rbuilder: http://www.rpath.org
The same problems of people being able to move fast without exertion or neighborly interaction seem as true for this PRT as for cars.

What's the problem that they're trying to solve? People want to talk on their cellphones and read a book as they drive? Cabbies aren't everywhere? Even if it solves these problems on the cheap, it's going to be pretty unsatisfying if you just zip around in your lonely pod. This sounds like an enormous capital expense, compared to (say) self-driving 15mph cars, and it doesn't seem like it's a big benefit holistically to a city.
What should I do with this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=472410
In theory unemployment pay is similar to this system, but in practice... maybe not so much. Personally I don't know anyone who's ever received severance pay either.

In general I think "at will" employment is a net win, but it's certainly not a friendly system.
yet experts-exchange remains strong
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stackoverflow.com+experts-e...
I knew they'd be able to use their existing audiences to push the site but I think this is probably more than that. If the trend continues they really are going to have a huge amount of traffic and make a ton of money. I'm impressed.
pg can add this to his list of shit that has a low barrier to entry for opinions.
Heh... Still waiting for REAL PDF support... Even DRM king Apple allows for arbitrary MP3s to be played on the iPod/iPhone. Until then the kindle is relatively useless (to me).
it might, but the reality is that plenty of people end up 'chasing the buck' at least once or twice in their lives.

So you might get a head start that way but eventually you'll be looking at making compromises.
Startup Marketing Plan: Building a Foundation for Buzz
To whomever is downmodding theklub, please explain why. It reads perfectly rational and reasonable to me.
Perhaps. I don't blame the bankers in general. However, these banks received government money because they had liquidity problems, then promptly handed out that same government money to its employees in the form of bonuses in numbers that stagger the average American.

Then, statements such as it being difficult to live on less than a half million dollars are said in editorials, and these same bankers complain.

The rest of America sees this as rewarding failure, regardless of the individuals making profitable decisions for the company.
Will Wilkinson's blog has been tracking how professional economist opinion on the bailout tends to follow their political views. On issues like free trade and price controls there is little disagreement among economists. But in macroeconomics the professional debate isn't much better than the layman debate.
It's not a healthy situation, but that's largely due to the poor results other search engines provide. I tried using Yahoo! and Live for a while instead of Google. I had forgotten how awful the results were. It wasn't the formatting or the speed, but the lack of relevance the results had to my query. It's no wonder people don't use Google's competitors.

In the mean time, the rest of us have to pray that our site is considered "relevant" in Google's eyes.
I think the catch with macroeconomics is that anybody can come by after the fact and provide an explanation for why things happened the way they did. Many of the explanations are not falsifiable, and two competing explanations might both sound reasonable. So, a person chooses the explanation they prefer for some reason other than economics. If they distrust government, they prefer the explanation that says it was government's fault. If they hold contempt for the rich, they prefer the explanation of corporate greed. And so on...

One of the key tenants of science is that a hypothesis makes testable predictions. If we can't falsify economic explanations, then perhaps we should take this approach and focus on the theories that make the best predictions.
you work on it nights & weekends to find out if it has traction. most things don't, but if yours might, then it's probably worth testing the waters.

from what i understand, http://carbonmade.com is a good example. three guys working part time (according to their 'story'), who now have a nice lifestyle business. they have big competitors, but have attracted enough paying users to do well for themselves.

so possible, yes. and learning web dev skills won't be a wasted effort, regardless of whether or not this particular venture works out.

if it's a big enough market to support several successes, i'd encourage you to take it on.
I think the target environment makes a big difference. Quick iterations, hacks and experiments are nice when creating a web app or an application prototype which can be refined iteratively. However, if you program a spaceship or nuclear missile, you have to get it correct the first time, and the program have to work correctly under any concievable input. I think this calls for different approaches and different languages.
I think Microsoft is going to catch a great deal of flack for this one. I can't imagine how they came up with the idea that people use 2 apps at a time on average. Even if this is true on average, every user will at some point want to use more than 3. Being told by your computer you can't do so will infuriat Windows. And windows can't afford to infuriat its users. Not its users who only stick around because the environment is so comfortable.

This move has another interesting consequence. The simple hack for beating this limit is to use your web browser for everything possible (which is actually almost everything). Are starter users going to wind up using google docs instead of office to save having an extra application open?
Visualizing Statistical Profiles with Chartprof
that's an excellent point. we hadn't thought about making the urls more search engine friendly. thanks!
It's hard to tell, because I've seen a lot of "lifestyle" articles in the Times that seem pitched to appeal to people with seven-figure incomes.

E.g., there was a cover story in the NYT Magazine a few months back about surrogate motherhood, by a woman who was married to an investment banker, and not only dropped $25K to have another woman gestate her baby but hired a nanny--excuse me, a "baby nurse"--to care for the kid. Not that there's anything wrong with either one, but I'd be embarrassed to have my face in the foreground of this picture:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/11/30/magazine/30su...