skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd love to know how they calculated the $200 "hidden cost" of the OLPC laptops. I'd also wonder what that figure is for other platforms, and how they plan to avoid it for their $10 implementation.
> “Do not be scared of the darkness!” Elon Musk calls out to them from the wilderness. “There is nothing to fear—it is merely the absence of light!”

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Combining Clouds: Appirio’s ReferMyFriends App Deftly Links Facebook To Salesforce
Is Jeff really making HTML strings in his methods? Aren't there template systems for .NET?
Excellent observation. I think the problem is that I am currently at the crossroads of being bootstrapped and also considering funding. We have a ton of things that need to be done and can't really do them while bootstrapped. For example, we need an iPhone app and unfortunately, I don't develop for the iPhone. I can probably pick it up pretty quick but I don't have the time (resources) to invest in learning it and would rather pay someone to do it - hence the need for funding.

Thanks for the compliment.
Maybe we'll all have tiny micro-assembly bots and rapid prototyping printers that can also print electronics, so nobody needs to solder anymore.
Yes, premium luxury products can make a huge profit. This doesn't mean that someone who goes for the middle of the market and works on low profit margins is somehow "wrong."

Apple nailed the market with a great product. What makes them special, and profitable, isn't that they make a high-priced lower volume product. It's that they make a product that customers love and value at much higher than its cost.
If answering phones was tripling your sales, why didn't you just hire someone to answer the phone? They could at least field a majority of the calls, and that frees you up to improve your company and make even more money. Seems like an investment to me.
Satire is a difficult art to master. Doubly so on the Internet.
I don't think any of the AVR USB microcontrollers come in a DIP format. Sockets for the available formats tend to be pricey, large (relatively), and not a good choice for high vibration environments.

Why do you worry about being soldered down? I suppose if you are going to accidentally blow the chip it is a cheaper repair, but with a cheap hot-air unit and the video tutorials at SparkFun you should be able to replace that chip if you like. (You will have to figure out how to load the initial bootloader if it is different from the one supplied by AVR, but AVR's is sufficient.)

If you do blow a pin, it probably isn't a total loss. I was winging a little change to just such a processor and ran a 24v line to a digital pin. The pin stopped working, but the rest of the chip continued just fine. The moral is for prototyping you can just use different pins, learn your lessons, and your final deployed unit should be fine.
Ajax Spy
France's labor system is broken. This is when the wheels fall off.
Global Game Jam: How to Make a Game in 48 Hours (by World of Goo creator)
Well fine. If you are going to sell me one laid out better than I managed and assembled for less than I can have the board fabricated and the parts purchased for a lot of 10 then I'll just have to buy your product instead.

I was close though. About 10% larger in area.
Python: You just type "import shotfoot"
List of algorithms not described in Wikipedia
Yawn - wasn't there another article on HN recently that explained how hate articles always get 100 times the traffic as love articles? Don't fall for this troll...
I never thought of it as a real shot - it looked as a promo shot with nice lighting from the start, why all the fuss?
Sigh. Why submit this pointless troll of an article when the LWN article it cites has actual information, content and details?
What wave are you trying to catch?
I found an old list of goals last night that topped out with "Notice those perfect waves. Catch one and hang on for dear life." I don't surf so I'm assuming I meant something like catch the next game changing thing at the right time and ride it out like Ellison, Gates/Allen, Ray Kroc, Henry Ford... I'm looking at the mobile apps, tools for distributed concurrency and healthcare waves... What waves am I missing?
~300$/mo for a financial advisor?
I haven't read PayPal Wars in a while, but I thought Elon bought into the company after owning X.com and kinda mucked around and then got dismissed by the board.
In space, Sir Isaac Newton is your co-pilot. He's pretty happy to let you take a lot of breaks.
The recommendation of Dreamhost was a dead giveaway. They've had tons of uptime issues lately. They're cheap, for sure, but you get what you pay for.
> None of these things are true any more, nor have they been for some time

For smog, especially particulates, that depends on what you mean by "some time". Until a couple of years ago, diesel cars were't close to satisfying CA's requirements. (The switch to low sulphur may have also helped.)

FWIW, diesel-hybrids would be especially effective because diesels have a much narrower "90% of peak efficiency" range of RPM and load.
I would suspect that Dropbox has a pretty fanatic group of fans out there. I'm one: Dropbox saved my ass when Boot Camp wrecked my hard drive. 7 years of documents were all saved, even though I'd deleted them from Dropbox previously. That's an incredible service. I recommend it to everybody who needs a good way to store stuff online, or share stuff.

Google isn't omnipotent. Orkut was a terrible social network because they just didn't get what to do. I'd guess same goes with that animated world they made that just recently closed. While they're powerful, it's really hard to beat out a truly stellar product, and Dropbox is one of the best I've seen.
Now you know why one of the shuttle commanders said that landing is a shuttle is like landing a brick.
Big Precedent: Irish ISP Adopting Three Strikes
I took the "money" option to mean, well, money, amd "Freedom" to mean picking one's own tools, projects, hours, coworkers.

I guess if you want to redefine any others, too, your case would be even stronger.
Is it time for the U.S. to rethink it's educational model?

No. We do not have a model for all education. That's centralized planning, which doesn't work. What we need to re-think is what activities we encourage by financing. We heavily finance 4 years of student activity that, by this author's account, does not prepare students for providing for their own needs after school. In short, we're creating 22 and 24-year-olds without the chutzpah that a common street hustler has at age 15. And we're paying lots of money to do it.

Education has always been about goals. I love the fuzzy goals like appreciation of arts, understanding of various philosophical schools, sensitivity to world cultural differences -- things that you absolutely need but are hard to measure. Problem is, you can subsidize things that are hard to measure. There's no quality control. There's no standard to say whether institution X is doing any better or worse than institution Y.

People, young or old, need to be able to adapt to find a spot in a complex society where they can provide value to the rest of us in such a fashion that we formally thank them -- that is, we give them money. That's job #1. That's something we have a public interest in advocating.

More worrisome is that groupthink that colleges instill. It's always there under the surface, as in this quote from the article:

One newly-minted MBA said that if worse comes to worst, he'll stay at home and look after the baby he and his wife are expecting...."provided," the reporter remarked, "his wife still has her job."

If worse comes to worse he'll actually raise his own kid, instead of having somebody else do it for him. The sacrifices we must make.
When we did a lot of consultancy-based projects we found we often had one of the highest prices for a job. To be completely honest it allowed us to server the customers better, by having higher margins than our competitors. We have done the same with some of our products and whilst we look expensive to some (who are always going to be price-conscious) again we are able to invest more, offer better customer service and frankly sell less to achieve the same goals. We've played with price points and often found that selling something for less money sometimes means less sales. We had two very similar products - one sold for nearly 3 times the price and had more sales as the perception was that it was a better product.
Yes, this struck me as a classic example of how you can't just say "Look, I have a huge sample, so it's statistically valid!" (1% is a huge sample by statistical standards at this scale... or it would be if it were properly random.) The bias in the data is strong and pervasive.

Having such a huge sample means that the data does at least mean something. It does indeed tell us something about the habits of those likely to sign up for that service, after all. It's just that converting that to the universal data we're all really interested in is non-trivial, and if the bias is strong enough, basically impossible if the projection of the noise dominates the signal.

(In other news, this article worked. I'm seriously considering signing up. :) Informative marketing, the best kind.)
They're launching a laptop for $10? With 2GB of RAM? You can't even buy 2GB of RAM for that price. I really hope this is real, but when you put together the costs of a display, RAM, some sort of persistent storage, heck even the keyboard is going to run more than $1.

Keyboard $1
Trackpad $1
RAM $1
Small amount of flash memory $1
Screen $1
Labor $1
Shipping $1
Processor $1
Motherboard $1
Ports $1

And none of that is going to be $1.
Does anyone have a GreaseMonkey script to put the 12 100-500 word pages back together into a readable form?
Why don't you focus on education, instead of schooling?

Pick the things you need to learn to reach the goals you want. Go learn those things. Repeat and rinse. That may or may not mean formal schooling. It could mean mentoring, hands-on work, lots of book-reading, long seminars. There are lots of ways to learn.

Schooling is where they pick those things for you. What I keep getting from these articles is that most major institutions aren't very good at picking those things for you. That the selection of things to pick from are driven more by politics and happytalk than practical results for most of the students participating. There's no feedback between what defines a degree and what the actual perceived value is from those receiving one.

If I were you, I might go back, and I might not. That's kinda the point -- you're supposed to take ownership and actually do something. Failure to take ownership of your education is what leads to working at the chicken-plucking factory, not a lack of a degree.
When in orbit, there is rarely anyone "driving", because once you're in an orbital trajectory, there is no "driving" needed until a change in trajectory is needed. When the shuttle, or any spacecraft for that matter, is in orbit, the only times the controls are needed are when changing orbital inclination, changing orbital altitudes, rendezvous and docking, or for the final de-orbital burn. Other than that, especially with the level of ground-based control used by modern space agencies, there is hardly a need for someone to stay in command of the craft during "idle" periods.
Mostly offtopic, but I thought I'd share the "NASA Water on Mars" picture for those who hadn't seen it:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0504/WaterOnMars2_gcc_big.jp...
May I suggest that _epic_ is not synonymous with _severe_. Epic suggests scale in both time and place. To me, an epic bug would affect a large number of people over a very long period of time. Perhaps something to do with IE security would be epic by virtue of its world-wide and decade-long impact.

On a smaller scale, epic might describe something that brings an entire company down, perhaps (if you believe some of the rants) the decision to rewrite the Netscape browser from the ground up.

JM2C on "epic"...
Not to be confused with LOVE, a procedurally generated indie MMO game that is under development:

http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/index.html
I'm after online gaming.
Because it makes good points. This is one of my favorite blogs to get articles from. The guy is a ranter, absolutely, but he isn't just trolling. He's almost certainly a long-time Linux user with experience developing. His blog isn't so much Linux hatred as it is hatred for a lot of the stupid stuff that gets thrown about in its name.

I used to use Linux, but left because it really wasn't stable. It messed up repeatedly, I couldn't get sound to work after a week's trying to fix it, and in the end I decided that Vista was worth keeping around. The Compiz argument is one of the ones that I most hate: the people who like Compiz are the people who think that people use other operating systems for flashy effects. Not true. The best effects are only minimally flashy, but the real flash comes from doing something meaningful. (Case in point, the way OS X has a search bar in Help that will take you directly to menu commands. It wows friends that I show, but it's not graphic-intensive at all.)

Sometimes it's good to have open hostility in a blog post, especially if it does cite its sources. This isn't about the news of Compiz closing. This is about how awful a lot of core Linux groups are, and how the Linux masses preach stupid, wasteful things instead of the parts of Linux that really matter. That's a message the community needs.
And there you go. You've exhausted the chimpanzee argument, and your third point is pathetic. Turtles do that too.

Meanwhile, I can't hardly even begin to summarize the human contribution to the arts in the same number of words.

You have anecdote-itis. You have no sense of scale. Your argument is so bad it's not even worth addressing any further. I hope for your own sake that you are trolling, because if this is what passes for a convincing argument in your world, you must make a lot of bad decisions.
diesels have a much narrower "90% of peak efficiency" range of RPM and load.

Isn't that gasoline engines that have a narrow range of near-peak efficiency? Diesels do not use airflow-restriction to throttle power. Gasoline engines (current embodiments, at least) do use airflow-restriction to throttle power.
Probably the best I've read in quite a while, especially the ending where he demands that NASA shut down at the exact moment the STS is slated for retirement. Made my day. :)
I wouldn't call this a troll. It's spitting mad, it's definitely a hate article, but it's constructive criticism. It's rude, but it's constructive.
MyMMOShop.com Purchased For $10,000,000 USD
Can anyone explain what he means by "writing better code"?

It seems like he sets up a straw man string concatenation problem and then tears it down in a pointless argument.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=424877

12 points by demallien 20 days ago | link

Hey! Put some carriage returns in there! You're screwing up the page rendering...
It's really not much different with local and state government employees in the US; teachers, firemen, and so on. There are millions of people in the US who have absurd salaries and retirement benefits that by any reasonable calculation will not be paid out. They will make a lot of noise and trouble in the years ahead before they face facts.
Well, the real fastest thing to do is stream your page out by arranging it such that you don't have to construct it out of order, so you never "concatenate" strings at all, simply shipping the page out to the socket with each chunk, except with a small I/O buffer before shipping it out on the socket. Not only will this take less time in all but very pathological cases by avoiding string concatenation penalties, it'll also end up getting the page to the user sooner so they can progressively render it.

But hardly any web framework I've ever used will even permit this, all insisting on being handed one big string to ship out to the user. Sigh.
What is his point, that there are useless open source projects? There are countless open source developers, no wonder some of them are doing useless stuff. I don't see why that should diminish the work of the ones doing useful stuff.
Solve most of your problems by solving just one
Real estate. There's a ton of inefficiencies in this market, as evidenced by the crash itself. Yet it's a market that will always be around, and in fact increasingly valuable as population growth makes undeveloped land even more scarce.
But the Linux masses DON'T preach stupid wasteful things. So some developers decided that compiz matters, and they poured some time into it. Doesn't make them "the Linux masses".
Why The iPhone Version 3 Will be a Games Platform
Will netbooks eat into laptop sales?
GE Drops Google, Selects Zoho
The Art of User Engagement
No. His point is that Linux users tout Compiz as the big thing. I've had Linux users tell me that OS X is ugly compared to Compiz, like it's some magic bullet. Linux users tell people to convert so they can get Compiz. A friend of mine in high school would preach it all over. And it's worthless technology that just lost its lead.

The point of his blog is to try and get the people working on Linux to make useful stuff. He criticizes the bad stuff. Especially the bad stuff that gets lots of attention.

I think that's worth having a link to here. It makes an important point, and it was an entertaining read besides.
Sorry, but I don't see how this story is HN-worthy. All I see is a resulting flame-war between pro-labor and anti-labor people and lots of knee-jerk comments from both ends (which are already appearing).
Turtles do that [provide spectacle entertainment for paying customers by living in zoos] too.

Turtles are intelligent. Chimps are intelligent. Both compete against humans in the entertainment market. Both do not compete very well against humans. Chimps compete better than turtles.

Entertainment competitiveness:

turtles > chimps > humans

Entertainment competitiveness beyond some point in the future:

turtles > chimps > humans > AI
Unlike fiat money, gold cannot be manufactured cheaply.
This limits government's power to obtain it.
Think of Zimbabwe. If you were a wage earner in Zimbabwe,
would you rather keep your retirement fund in Zimbabwean
dollars or gold? These are two extremes along a continuum
of ways to store wealth.

Gold is a good way to store wealth because it is
durable, of limited supply, dense in space and value,
portable, fungible, dividable, identifiable, and
universally valued now and for the foreseeable future.

Zimbabwean paper money is portable, fungible, dividable,
and identifiable, but its performance on the other
characteristics makes it it an overall poor way to store
value.

All forms of government-created fiat money are in danger of
going the way of Zimbabwean dollar. The issuing government
can just decide to print more, thus devaluing the existing
money.

Other ways of storing value have their own problems. Some people use land, but while land is potentially very
valuable, it's not portable, fungible, or universally
valuable. Businesses organized as corporations can be used
to store value, and many people save for their retirement
this way (by buying stocks). This has the benefit that in
good times, the value of your investment can grow by
itself. Unfortunately, it can also shrink by itself in bad
times. Also, shares of corporations are not easily dividable.

My point is that forms of money (stored wealth) are not
arbitrary.
I am a Linux user and I never cared for compiz, so I consider your point refuted.
Yes! I'm glad someone did the research to write this.
French people don't have the "American dream", they simply don't have the job mobility that Americans have. They specifically chose a government that would provide a more security and public service as a result of higher taxes. They choose to work fewer hours (and be slightly poorer as a result) so that they can have a more tranquil lifestyle, enjoying time with friends and family.

The recent policies by the French conservatives threaten to destroy that system. They are loosening restrictions on businesses, which allow them to layoff workers, which cause the workers to rely on more public services, which take money away from other public services, etc.. The net result is a redistribution of wealth to the most wealthy, and a slow deterioration of the public services that French people enjoy.

I have to say that I have a lot of respect for the French lifestyle; who cares if you only make $40,000/year instead of $60,000 when you can actually have time to enjoy life. Software engineers often make $100k/year while being pressured to work 60+ hours a week. I often thought to myself how nice it would be if I could just make $45k and work 35 instead. Good luck finding an employer in the US who will let you do that and still provide decent benefits.
Yup... I've been wishing for a touch-screen, 4"x3" display I can hang in all the rooms of my house to control a variety of things... I think the sweet spot in terms of price would be $20-$50.
See what I said to your other reply. Compiz is a Big Thing when it comes to promoting Linux (especially Ubuntu) as an operating system. It's always said something to the effect of, "Do you like that Vista and OS X look fancy! Look at Ubuntu! We wobble your windows! We have a spinning cube!" I once reinstalled Linux just to try it out, because a blog post that I read said that it set the standard for all operating systems. Compiz is a big name, and it's stupid wasteful, and it gets preached.

There are good Linux things, and the blog has actually focused on some of them before. But for every darling project that works well (say, Firefox), there are a ton that are either bloated (OpenOffice) or broken (Pidgin) or just wasteful (Compiz).
The reference is entirely valid. Both Jeff and Joel are using the joke allegorically; Joel uses it to describe an algorithm that counts the length of the first part of the string over and over, while Jeff uses it to describe an algorithm that copies the first part of the string over and over. (The joke itself is an old one, not original with Joel.)
gapingvoid.com, especially "How to be creative"
bill clementson's lispy blog
Some people care for compiz and spinning effects - and look at the market share of Apple... But I simply don't like your generalizations. I agree that efforts on effects would be better spent elsewhere - or at least they should do it right. Maybe if the compiz effects would actually look good and be useful, they would make people switch to Linux. I don't know, but you yourself admit to having tried Linux just because of compiz. So maybe it matters after all.
Sigh.

His point isn't that Compiz is the only thing Linux has to offer. His point is that it's brought up as a major feature of open source, and that it's bad.

Look, I don't care that you disagree. You're allowed to disagree. My initial point was that he wasn't trolling, he was making good points that just happened to be coated in vitriol. Hacker News-worthy, in other words. I think the fact that we're arguing about this shows that there was at least a hint of truth to what he said.
I like the following:

Hack a day - hackaday.com

Overcomig Bias - overcomingbias.com

3quarksdaily - 3quarksdaily.com

make magazine - makezine.com

developing intelligence - http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/

schneier on security - schneier.com/blog/

... and a few other ones that are slipping my mind. Will update if I remember.
Anything that promotes health or provides active or interactive stimulus to the mind fits. Sci Am just picked out six from a giant bucket. Crosswords, reading Hacker News, and (trying to) solve P = NP all have similar effect.