skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not that eating meat makes your brain grow bigger. It's (eating meat)/(eating cooked food)/(having a richer diet) that makes people born with a larger brain more likely to survive. Otherwise, a larger brain would be a hindrance since your body would use more resources than you could easily consume.
"Also AT&T has made the transition from fixed to cell phones, okay so far."

Actually, no. AT&T Wireless blew themselves up with a epic botched software upgrade, and was sold to Cingular at a heavy discount. (Who has since been rebranded AT&T after a complex series of mergers and acquisitions.)
Pair designing/programming/whatever seems to work best when the pair has complimentary skill sets rather than different competency levels of the same skill set. We have been "pair designing" for a while with much success.
So you're allergic to folded proteins? That seems unlikely since even those few raw things you can eat have trace amounts of different proteins in them.

If I were very allergic to so many different foods, I'd want a real explanation for my own sake at least, and not just try to snow people with scientific jargon.
Where do people get this idea that "we" don't know the mechanism for gravity?

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/10/no-one-knows-wh.html

"Mechanisms" that don't give you better predictions really are almost always crackpot. Really understanding a new mechanism usually comes with better predictions of something - though not always everything.
MySpace.com Blogs - micha100 MySpace Blog
Maybe not a plan for vcs, but I am all for the government setting up a 20B dollar fund to purchase from startups. In fact there is a need for it.

Selling to the government is extremely hard or nearly impossible if you are two guys with a software that could benefit the Department of Defense. The fund could ease the process.
Pharo open-source Smalltalk, Modern Squeak? 
with screenshot (!) - About section
How Intel's battle with NVIDIA over Core i7 impacts Apple
So, how do you parse invalid YAML unambiguously?
Friedman does make some good points though:

Our motto should be, “Start-ups, not bailouts: nurture the next Google, don’t nurse the old G.M.’s.”

The capitalist way is to reward risk. However, banks are notorious for not giving out non "asset-backed" loans. And even with the billions of bailout money received, they aren't exactly taking risks by investing in the innovators; they're even more risk-averse.

So how does an entrepreneur who is bursting with good ideas surpass this obstacle?

I think that people -- for example, those who lost everything in one of those natural disasters during the last 8 years -- who have nothing (no assets, so to speak) are in the prime positions to innovate.

Maybe what we need is a stimulus plan more to reward non-asset backed risk takers . . ..
So the guy's clearly able to weigh in on things. And clearly has things to say. The things he says just don't make any sense. I don't know if that's a tragedy or if he just needs a good editor.

That said, I would NOT want to be his editor. The redlines I'd have to send back to the guy would probably crush him.
This link is from the original article, describing how to build Android (Cupcake) for the Eee PC 701 http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ajdmx8kfg357_81cmpr56f6
Interesting. There's got to be something happening here behind the scenes that leads to this sort of tech-pidgeon English. I almost feel bad for pointing this stuff out, but really, people deserve better. The Washington Post is syndicating TechCrunchIT's sister publication. The people I know there would die if they knew they were publishing stuff written by this guy.
A pretty far-fetched theory, resting on a lack of definition of what "grace" actually is, and a lot of very big assumptions that are not substantiated.

I think a better structure for this article would have been to make a good case for what "grace" is and why it matters, and then, once that concept is established, give examples of how "grace" is achieved by rowing... But even then, this would have been fairly hand-waving.

I may just be blasé about this, but it seems to me that the central point of this article is ultimately quite weak.
> However, banks are notorious for not giving out non "asset-backed" loans.

I wouldn't say notorious, that has a negative connotation. All jokes about the current situation aside. Banks aren't supposed to make risky loans, they aren't supposed to lose their capital. All loans they make should be guaranteed by something, even if it's just the word of a wealthy individual like a parent cosigning a loan for a child.
Would shorting the stock and making a lot of money be a vulture thing to do if you knew he was getting worse? If you knew he was making a full recovery before anyone else did, would buying the stock be a vulture thing to do?
You provide a good argument, but what I was trying to communicate was that the sender is still sending an standard format. The coder just makes a bug in his XML and instead of bringing down the whole house its handled.
Nokia N95 8GB Unlocked 
Nokia N95 8GB houses technology comparable to that of a miniature computer. Not that the Nokia N95 8GB is by any means a sight for sore eyes. advantage of the 5 Megapixel camera included with the Nokia N95 8GB, commonplace 3G network.
XML isn't "this sort of thing with tags and attributes". It's a rigidly-specified format, and for any given series of bytes and an encoding, it either is or is not XML. If there's a "bug in his XML", it isn't XML anymore.

You can talk about what to do with this not-XML, but you can't just pretend it is XML. It isn't, because XML is not just this fuzzy thing, it's a very, very, very specific thing.
Yeah, the Science & Tech section of The Economist is rarely any good, but the same is true for all other newspapers/magazines. They're journalists/economists/whatever, not actual scientists or techies.
The course is taught by Jeremy Siek, who has done interesting research on generic programming and the design of concepts in C++. Take a look at his papers: http://ece-www.colorado.edu/~siek/publications.html
dnsmadeeasy is AWESOME. Been using them in production for 2 years, zero downtime, always super fast, and dirt cheap. You can't go wrong with them.
I think it's funny that after working on a dual head, people tend to forget about window management and maximize everything, then get upset when faced with one screen. I much prefer one (giant) screen with tiled windows. It just feels more elegant and flexible.

Also, get yourself a web editor with live page rendering built in. Coda and Dreamweaver CS4 use WebKit. It saves a ton of switching time.
I love dyndns.org But using it for multiple domains gets a bit expensive.
I'm utterly disappointed by the lack of the best input device I've ever touched: The Trackman Wheel. The amount of time, desk space, and wrist strain it's saved me over the years is unfathomable. Mice of any kind feel like toasters now.
Chronic Pain or Acute Pain
The assumption that people's political views are distributed bimodally (which is what he's really saying with his "two superimposed normal distributions") strikes me as being a little bit arbitrary. Is this based on some sort of evidence?

(Of course, the original study makes an equally arbitrary assumption that political affiliation is distributed uniformly...)
The Big Test Before College? The Financial Aid Form
The Eligible Bachelor Paradox
How has XP gotten so much slower over the past few years? The machines out on its release were Pentium IIIs and very early (crap) Pentium 4s, and yet it struggles to run on modern netbook hardware.
I wish I could upvote you a dozen times.

Where were these people several years ago, when raising awareness might have actually been helpful? Now, all they're doing is exacerbating this paralyzing crisis of confidence. It's a self fulfilling prophesy at this point.
I think it would be easier to make a list of things that a hacker is not.
Interestingly enough, there are already requirements on federal agencies to purchase from small businesses.

http://www.sba.gov/contractingopportunities/index.html

I'm not sure how much gamesmanship goes on with larger companies using smaller ones as a pass through, but 23% of federal spending is supposed to be targeted towards small businesses.

Another program that might be relevant would be the http://www.sbir.gov/ program(s).
Just as (un)interesting to non-hackers as it is to hackers.
The reason elite schools play sports is to build a stronger sense of loyalty to the school among alums, especially alums with money to donate. But I think it's better for kids to separate the school from the sports. Put the kid into a independent sports league. And it's better, I think, to be playing in an environment where the competition for positions isn't as intense - i.e. a smaller school or sports club.

In a related matter I see that Sidwell Friends does play football. I had been wondering about that. Here in Washington State, the best small private high schools don't.
ObSmarmySelfPromotion: http://web2.0validator.com/
Two observations about his investment thesis:

1. He says you can build companies with "almost no money": $100k - $1M, if I recall correctly.

2. He says you can delay profi^H^H^H^H^H revenue almost indefinitely by looking out on the horizon.

So given these two facts, when exactly do the founders/managers/employees (all of which are young kids by his own admission) start getting paid real money, like the amount required to buy a house in the Santa Clara valley?

Is payoff 100% contingent on a liquidity event and/or perpetual venture capitalization, thereby diluting founders' capital stock further and further? Are his venture founders supposed to continue living in apartments indefinitely while he looks on from his mansion in Atherton and architects the final vision to be realized a decade or more from assignment of preferred stock?

His whole management vision starts to look more and more like serfdom the longer you think about it. The immediate analog that springs to mind is the A&R practices of the music industry in which they sign young, naive bands to contracts that essentially bind them into a period of servitude under the guise of a promise of fame and fortune (to be realized in spades at a later date TBD, just trust us guys, you're gonna be rich and famous!!!) while paying for their operating costs with a future claim on earnings.

This comparison only gets stronger than it already is when you realize that most financially successful musicians make their money from touring and merchandising - realizing their own revenue in small, and sometimes incremental ways until they get a successful fan/customer base.

I mean the whole analogy seems rather obvious to me, and I believe we as (young entrepreneurs of) an industry should learn the lessons of the music/entertainment industry - am I totally wrong here?

I see no difference between Marc Andreesen and David Geffen. Except one lives in SF and one lives in LA.
"How so? Consider: A page with nothing but a massive collection of hyperlinks, almost no text, a few photos, updated dozens of times per day and followed by millions of people. Sounds like Web 2.0 to me."

Sounds like the early Yahoo, too.
I'm also a fan and user of everydns. I tried running my own DNS server, but the assorted annoyances got the better of me.
Actually, I think this video legitimizes that view. What else would you call using other people's money to bet that you can hand off the time bomb to some sucker before it explodes?
Beyond the crisis, mindboggling science and the arrival of Homo evolutis
"Textbook Innovator's Dilemma."

"Yeah, you'd think somebody at Intuit would have read it."

At the last "leadership conference" at Intuit, Brad Smith the CEO and other "leaders" were quoting Christensen every 10 minutes or so. A bunch of managers even got some face time with Christensen and the resulting videos were "cascaded" down to the peons in Bangalore.

fwiw. :-D
I thought this was going to be about S3!
I have heard this piece of advice several dozen times on another board and I wonder if anyone has tried it in the last 3 years or so. It seems destined for failure to me:

1) A new AdWords account starts with no history. To get preferable placement you'll have to be significantly outbidding the people who already have history. (i.e. I pay Google four cents a click for front page placement for, I don't know, [how to make a bingo card]. If you started a new AdWords account today Google would charge you a quarter.

2) There are automated quality checks which score sites these days and can raise your minimum bid to stupidly high levels, which is essentially Google's way of declining your business. If you put up a page for a product which doesn't exist, you are highly likely to have these checks fire on you, since they're specifically designed to bounce squeeze pages.

3) Getting a click on an AdWords ad doesn't prove the customer had interest, it proves that you wrote the ad well. Conversely, not getting the click doesn't prove there was no interest, it merely proves the ad was not interesting. Do you have someone in your organization skilled at the art of writing 3 line advertising copy? If not, what are you burning money for?
> I happen to be very allergic to all raw produce

I guess I'm an idiot, because I don't believe you at all, at least not in the terms you've stated.

If you had a diagnosed autoimmune disorder like Crohn's I would have no trouble believing you but "I'm allergic to raw produce" just sounds like 100% bullshit to me.

Your behavior is typical of attention-whore types who were either neglected/ignored as a child or were lied to extensively by their parents for some reason. Notice how you dwell on other peoples' ("idiotic") reactions to your mind-blowingly hard to believe claim.
Yeah, it's also used by journalists and bloggers who want to sound more clever than they really are when talking about subjects in which they have no formal training or practical experience.
There's another missing point here. Where is the line between "slightly broken xml" and "horribly broken xml, since they actually sent a csv file". I could argue that a csv file is simply really bad xml, why can't you parse it?
RoR vs PHP commercial (Mac vs PC style)
We maintain all of the element data (including events, etc.) in an internal data store. We attach a single expando to an element - whose name is randomly generated (this allows jQuery to, not only, co-exist with other libraries but also to coexist with other copies of jQuery, since there'll never be a collision with the name). I hope this helps to clear it up.
Ask HN:What is your daily web routine?
Mine is: Gmail, Local Newspaper, HN, Reddit..... work/personal sites.
Actual link: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/22/parent-of-gamer-asks.ht...
Judging by the few comments on Twitter http://search.twitter.com/search?q=37signals+gig+board, there weren't enough gigs being offered to make it a viable product.

Looks like they were caught somewhere between their Getting Real "Blank Slate" case and having enough entries for it to appear fresh and relevant.
Apple was well aware of the netbook segment -- they chose to ignore it. Their "competitor" to the netbooks, the iPod/iPhone line, has been doing extremely well. Ubuntu hasn't succeeded in gaining traction in the portable device market, but you don't consider that a failure.
I'm not missing the point -- I'm saying that your point is silly. You're fixated on doing everything in the same directory, when in fact it's far easier not to do it that way, and the only argument you're making for doing it that way, is that it's more "flexible". But flexibility is not a virtue, unless you need the flexibility!

"obviously you'd never actually do all this in SVN if you were sensible"

Exactly. You'd never do it. You don't need to do it. You can get the job done without doing it. And that's what matters.

Git fanboys are hilarious sometimes...every argument is made from the position that none of the rest of us really understand git, and that if only we did, we'd fall in love with git in all of it's fiddly glory. What they miss is that many of us hate complexity, and we avoid complexity that doesn't justify itself with true functional advantages.

I like simple tools that get the job done. Git makes my life harder; I have to think about more things to do the same, basic tasks that were made trivially easy in subversion. That's the point.
"It's a much quieter but much stronger monopoly"

How is it a monopoly?
To clarify on the prior: It's not always 1/5 -- it's 1/(number of nominations for that category-year). In some years there have been fewer than 5 nominations for certain categories, which this model takes into account.

I do agree it would be interesting to bias it by the preferential ballots from the nominations process. Unfortunately I couldn't find that data anywhere...
I couldnt find any link to enroll, for this distance learning program
Some people might think that this is non-related to hacker news and boring but I'd like to make the case that it is related.

These archeologists in the amazon searching for ruins are the 'hackers' of the field. These people where all told that no civilization could exist in this forest and they all proved them wrong and did it their own way.

They do it for the love of the hunt, the excitement, the same reason why we love to code.
Not speaking for Google, but I'd also point out that newcomers and competitors can experiment with search (think ranking, ui, etc) in very interesting ways. For all the teasing that cuil received, the did try something pretty interesting with the ui, for instance.

I also know that competing on search is very difficult and expensive, given the computational demands, which is why new, good quality competitors is hard for us to come by.
Wall Street’s Brain Drain Defense
Of course, instead of wasting 20 years trying to get the media to use "hacking" the way he wanted to, he could have instead invented a new word that meant "finding creative solutions to problems," which likely would have been picked up by the media by now. But he's stubborn like that.
Millionaire ain't what it used to be, and lunch is still lunch. I have rich friend and I have broke friends and we still buy each other lunch.
So the teenager is being held to a higher standard, in video games, than the last President of the United States was in real life. Great.
Good to see my friend (and former co-worker, twice) Eli White, make HN.

Though I think (without looking at the slides in five or six months) I can summarize. Cache with APC and Memcached. Use versioning and aggressive caching for static resources. Be careful about fields and field sizes in mysql, and use Innodb.
Well, this itself is a great PR stunt.
Yaron Brook: Causes of The Great Depression
Quoting:

> Up and down Wall Street, financial types are grumbling that their industry’s highest highflyers are getting their pay capped. Many Wall Streeters say this would be disastrous. The sharpest financial minds will up and quit, the argument goes, and take their smarts with them at the very moment they’re needed to re-engineer their companies and restart the economy.

If they're really good, and they go into industry, won't that actually be better for the economy? It's hard to see what Wall St types actually contribute to the economy.
Dave Groll played drums on most of the tracks on With Teeth. The "keyboard" for NIN's drum programming is mostly Battery from Native Instruments (where I worked before founding Directed Edge).
Most iPhone applications gathering dust
Check out zerigo, a startup DNS service provided by a friend of mine.

http://zerigo.com
I have a 25" on my desk, and a Macbook; I use the monitor maybe 30% of the time. I want my workflow to work no matter where I am, so I try not to build habits that require a monitor.

We're doing a 2.0 product launch this week, so I've been spending some time in Photoshop and CSSEdit; for web design, I can see "no monitor" as a dealbreaker. For coding, I'm just as efficient on my laptop's small screen.
I don't know if "losing Call of Duty" is comparable to potentially winding up in The Hague.

I'd call this good parenting. Obviously nobody gives a shit about game characters, but here's a dad who clearly cares about how gaming affects his son's perspective. I don't like my (9 year old) son play overtly violent games at all, so this kid is getting more flexibility than many others.
we used dnsmadeeasy at my last startup and had absolutely no problems. it was set-and-forget, which is why i'd recommend them now.
I'm surprised how many of the replies here assume he's being serious!
"Hackers are Archaeologists" now? PG, are you listening?
The Multi-Principal OS Construction of the Gazelle Web Browser
The real problem, like the article says, is that it doesn't give a good indication of wealth at all. Because I'm not a minority, not living in a slum, and working my butt off I do not receive Pell grants, only options I am given are small state grants and subsidized loans. Great.

I filled the thing out myself and if you take it slow and follow the instructions you will be fine. But I'd rather they just pulled the information straight from the income taxes records and criminal records you could remove 98% of the questions easily that way, no problem.

Our government cannot find a way to connect everything and save money/time. Maybe someone could create a startup that somehow connects these things. Automatically with the consumers consent. :)
bring it on mark. VCs have been getting soaked in the valley since 2004, you might as well throw your money onto the fire too.

i guess you'll have the prestige of having a "fund" with your name on it...but what really sets you apart from kleiner, benchmark, sequioa, mayfield, etc? these firms are also underperforming in the valley and hardly outpacing the sp500 since 99.

and i'll call his bluff on facebook...ok marc, tell us how the business could move to blns in revenue this year? i'm sure their VCs would like to know, because so far facebook is a colossal money pit that actually loses more for investors the more popular it gets. its so obvious that there is no reason for msft or goog to offer to buy the company, they know that they can win a game of chicken with valley VCs. just keep waiting ballmer, you'll get facebook for $800 mln.
+ John Resig commentary http://ejohn.org/blog/the-browser-operating-system/
Social Collapse Best Practices [long but worth reading in full]
You can’t get out of it. You can only prepare:
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-p...

Surprised that no one has posted it, so I submitted it here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=490767
Dropbox 100GB Plan
Pcapr: download packet captures for common tools/protocols/etc
And where will they go, exactly? Corporate America isn't hiring either.
I've already commented, but I feel compelled to comment again after looking at his homework assignments. They could easily be the basis for a practical textbook in compiler design and implementation.

For anyone who's never had a class in compilers, but wants to know more about them, Siek's material is a great way to start.
If you're having trouble following enough directions to fill out a single form, you might want to reconsider going to college. There's lots of directions and forms involved.
It's completely unrelated to this site's usual topics. However, it is not in the 'toxic' category: politics, religion, and the like. People who aren't interested can simply move on, and it's unlikely to draw in people who want to debate Marx vs Mises or that sort of thing. Not that it matters much one way or the other, but I don't really mind this sort of off-topic article as long as they aren't too common.
At least if you buy or sell stock, you put yourself on the line. But it is a difficult question. As I said, I guess I didn't really dislike the reporting about Steve Jobs health indicators, as the spirit of it. I don't know enough about philosophy to discern whether that makes for a meaningful distinction.