skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Using the PWC or Venture One data which are comprehensive would be the way to go. That's my plan once I get access.
Alibaba copying Ziliot’s concept. It’s good enough for them
Wouldn't that require having arrangements with all the carriers?

Also, I probably wouldn't give several thousand dollars to an intermediary, especially when some airlines have "special" policies that apply to tickets booked by proxy (e.g. the proxy needs to request changes, not the end user).

Travelers not willing to do some legwork should not be surprised if they find themselves confined to proven tourist trails. And in fact that's what many people want.
This logic applies to every year, since a round could close in 2006 and have been announced in 2007. Regardless of the lag, the trend is clear. It is a downward one.
I'm the creator of this app. I'd like to explain the idea behind this app a bit.

Our dream is to go around the world, so we create this geo/map/game hybrid app to remember everywhere we have been in our whole life time. We want to use the exploration map to memorize our entire life when we are old and unable to walk. We also use the map to find out places nearby where we live but we never know. We actually got surprised many times that we found a lot of new places around where we live but we hadn't been in the past ten years.

I visited Japan four years ago, but honestly, I really don't remember those places I had been at that time, except few really famous places. I don't even know what hotels I lived, what roads I walked that time. And that's why I build this app. Now I can see the map and memorize what happened at those places I had been.
By name only.
What alternative OS can I run on the device?
Programmer's Case Is Matter of (Legal) Code
There will still be a grid. The scenario you mention will be useful for some, but assuming $80/month for electricity over a paid-for grid vs. $10,000 for installation of cheap solar panels+batteries gives a pay-off time of about 10 years. (Currently solar water heaters cost about $5,000, so the best is 5 years.)

I don't think most will be willing to take that capital investment.

It would be interesting to see how distributed solar compares to grid-based distribution in the face of large disasters like a hurricane or ice storm. Especially if the power lines were underground. I assume that those with damaged panels would quickly look for replacements, causing an instant demand and price spike. While the large electricity companies would have stockpiled reserves and have agreements already in place to handle the short-term demand. I don't know how this would affect the overall long-term costs.
A Fireside Chat with Wellington Partners
We are very happy to have the venture capital firm Wellington Partners for a fireside chat.
I didn't use an url shortener, stackexchange just gives me a short link when I click the share button. And if they're banned, how could I have posted this...
There were unofficial versions of Django (forks, but not in the hostile sense) ported to Python 3 before that. The announcement marks the work being done in the main Django codebase, meaning that the next release will work on Python 3.
I don't see links to sites with ads being removed, even when submitted by the author itself.
sex.com. Definitely.
Publish interactive 3D content online
This happens on both YouTube and Vimeo which makes it mainstream.

By way of contrast, YouTube players open the video in a new window when embedded in other sites.

Given FlowPlayer players will often find themselves in similar-looking situations (embedded in a post, or whatever), there's potential for confusion or hesitation there.
Earlier browsers had one address box, and one search box.

Chrome moved both together - and many people liked it.

I'm sure you like Google Instant and Google Suggest - with the results/search terms showing up even as you type - allowing you to refine your query on the fly even before you complete it!

Google Now is one big leap in the same direction.

I search for a lot of things, and I would like instant access to a lot of things that I've searched for before.

If my phone can figure out what I need access to 'Now' because I've searched for it before or it knows my routing - I say bring it on - make my life easier - and give me more time to do my stuff instead of handling logistics and trivia.

Look at the examples - giving you transit timings when you enter a bus-stop, or giving you traffic conditions to your office or next appointment, or driving directions to the place you searched for. Why not using the super computer in your pocket for that instead of focusing your mind on it and distracting you from your life?

And either you're watching the game NOW, and therefore the score is not relevant to you, or you're not able to watch the game, so the scores are useful. Presumably, the number of people who time-shift a live game is not that high. Those folks can simply delete the card the first time and never see it again.

Google Now is adding a rich information layer to your life via your phone. You can ignore it or you can use it.
Why do work visas even have to cost this much? I understand US is going through a job crisis, but I fear it's getting too protectionist. Protectionism never has good results in the long term.
I took a components design course 5+ years ago, but I haven't done any hardware work since. This project looks really exciting to me, but can you explain some of these features and why they matter?

For example, what is a digital-compatible pin? What makes a pin digital capable, versus analog? And what are some of these serial port limitations mentioned in the project description?
You do that by understanding some of the tradeoffs involved and showing that you understand that maintenance for the sake of maintenance is usually a waste of time.

* If it was causing some immediate issue or had a bug that needed to be fixed you could justify it that way, but all too often someone wants to refactor something to make it "nicer"

* Code that's rewritten is going to have all new bugs of its own, those are going to end up wasting more time than the time spent on the initial rewrite.

* A lot of programmers will get the urge to rewrite something before they fully understand the system they're rewriting (and thus aren't qualified to do so). You might be 90% through rewriting it to be nicer only to discover that the remaining 10% doesn't fit with your design. There was some design requirement that you missed which caused the initial code to be so convoluted and "nasty" in the first place, because it was solving a tricky problem in some non-obvious way.

* In a growing business requirements change all the time, maybe you'll spend 6 months now rewriting some system to be nicer, but 2 years down the line it turns out that that system was inherently broken and has to be thrown away and replaced. So it would have been better to commit 1 month of time over those 2 years to keep it on life-support.

* Speaking of resource allocation: Is now the right time to do this, you probably have a 100 tasks with manpower to accomplish 10 of them. Maybe this is better done in half a year when you have more hires, or not at all if some of those other 90 things are more important.

But finally, if it's really the right thing to do just do it incrementally as part of other tasks. If it's really code you're working on all the time, and fixing certain issues saves you time down the line just make those fixes along with other tasks.
"The desk was a continuous source of questions from coworkers."

FAQ on your Intranet? Their interest indicates a desire for change in work practices.
seeing this makes me cry. I can code this is at least three languages (java, php, python) and I can't even get an interview for a junior dev position. I got bored the other day and tried to write it recursively because why not, right?
Now that is a feature. I'd happily download my home town and run it offline always. Waiting for 3g cell reception to get the map to see where you're to go next is very tedious.
Microsoft reveals the shroud of x.
Don't sellers make like 6-8% from their Amazon sales? How does that work with a 13% interest?
Simon Cowell to create X-Factor show for tech startups
I'd like to record here that today both "The Music Academy" as well as the hospital I searched for are locatable on iOS6 Maps!!

This makes me wonder what Tim Cook meant when he wrote "The more our customers use our Maps the better it will get..". Is it a side effect of some kind of caching or learning we're seeing here? The info is certainly there, but it seems like it is the text->geo mapping that turns up "no results" more often than I can tolerate.
this is total bs. MS has a massive work force of contract workers who are paid poorly and get treated worse and i am pretty certain that other companies do the same. If they took that 10k ($60m usd total)bounty and applied it to legit training in the US they would have a better, cheaper, and more loyal workforce and the money would stay local.

This notion that we have to hire over-seas is not correct at all and while I am all in favor or the immigration of foreign skill/knowledge/work ethic into the US, to call it a 'crisis' is nothing more than a publicity stunt to pull attention away from the fact that they are outsourcing jobs when they could be paying that money into the local economies.
Please do explain further - I've not seen this referenced with it's name and description for quite some time on Hacker News! It is very rare!
No, I'm not. As I said, when acquiring geolocalization data on a mobile device, I have no way to decide if they're genuine or not.

If you want a good excuse to just gtfo, come to Switzerland exchange business cards with me.
The 21st IOCCC Winners
Funding could be reported late, but then slotted at the accurate time. For example, in January 2013, we might get news -- and then have retroactively represented in CrunchBase -- a funding that closed in October 2012.

So even if Crunchbase is eventually a full/accurate/consistent record (which is itself a big 'IF'), such a lag in reporting could mean any 2012 numbers aren't accurate (and comparable to 2011/2010/etc) until sometime 2-6 months into 2013. Ergo, any 'downward trend' at this point might still just be an artifact of the limited data.
On the upside there are more visas, the side effect is it makes it harder for early startups to hire H1Bs due to the increased cost. 10K for the H1 plus 15K for the green card. Usually both are done together or really close since you need a green card application in place to extend an H1 past 6 years. That's 25K per employee only for processing vs ~ 2K today.
Oh how witty! And droll!
A better Java: Scala or Xtend?
Now if only that were a headline.
The 5 Must-have iPhone Apps for the Eco-friendly Geek
What would be really cool : 3D print my uploaded models directly on Shapeways.
Or point me to some 3D scan tools to make stuff like this :
https://sketchfab.com/show/j4ArcCV4FeCmcwdan93blBfqOzi
I like it, because I seem to have a knack for it and mostly because I enjoy working on things that no one else wants to touch. It's nice to have a degree of autonomy and not have to deal with working on a big team, even if it means not getting to work on new things.
Freelancer's landing page - Any thoughts?
In my experience those kind of companies are heavily involved with big players like MS, HP, etc. who all push their own proprietary crap. Bundle this with a "we don't allow employees to install other browers so why should we care/test/develop for other technologies? We can even assume every PC has ActiveX installed and ready, so hell yeah let's use that!"
I like your plan. Let's join forces and disrupt the gardening and bird watching space using cutting edge crowdsourced location aware mobile technology.
Cool !! Can't wait to see it !
PaaS Comparison: AppFog vs Heroku
My hunch is yes, there are successful patterns in Facebook that will propagate to many other software categories, both because they are beneficial and users have een trained to expect them... but then no, those patterns won't dominate completely, because certain countervailing needs will change/moderate/negate them.

For example, the 'news feed' is super compelling and attention-grabbing, but at least partially in attention-abusive ways. By intermixing updates of wildly different importance, provenance, and topic, a heightened sense of novelty is created. By the use of reverse-chronological order, a false urgency is created -- "I must read/reply before it scrolls out of view!" -- even when the topics aren't really urgent. So this pattern is a sugar/steroid/stimulant for engagements... against which the mentally-healthy will eventually have to disengage and replace with something more respectful of their attention, with truer cues about novelty and importance.

So I expect the 'feed' pattern to be copied everywhere it might offer a quick bit of 'sizzle' to interactions... but also for new ameliorative antipatterns to be developed, and modify or displace the 'feed', as well. Especially in productive contexts where entertainment/diversion/distraction is not the highest value, it will be tried but then modified or discarded.
So, what's being proposed here is a tax on fairly rich people who can't vote. For "should", it shouldn't cost anything, or, at least, not more than a turist visa (I think ETSA is something like $14).

There is some sense in the idea that the native population should be protected against unfair competition, but there is no evidence that this is the issue - Microsoft (and many other tech companies) legitimately can't fill these jobs, so there's literally no downside to opening the floodgates [of eligible H1-Bs].
What's the browser compatibility for this?
It's WebGL, so it's runing on all modern browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Safari. We'll very soon release a fallback for the others.
i don't know how they can't fill these jobs. There are 12 million people out of work, you telling me MS can't figure out a win-win solution?
Agreed. The thing is, I can't find anything better, so such questions as "when did the popularity of language X peak?" seem unanswerable.[1] We are left with anecdotal impressions, and my own experience ;) says that those are even more suspect than TIOBE's numbers.

Also, I was looking for popularity, not usage, although these two numbers are intertwined and hard to disentangle.

[1] That's not quite true. http://langpop.com/ for example has what appears to be a more well-defined method of accumulating that data. However, "Last data update: Wed Apr 13 14:57:11 +0200 2011", the operator is no longer interested in the project, and would like to sell the site. I cannot find trend data, and my guess is that that's reserved for whomever will buy the site. So it might be answerable if I want to spend money on it.
I don't follow. The address in Brooklyn lists 315 Marlborough Road.
The article makes the mistake of talking about France and Germany and maybe Spain and then of generalizing it to mean "Europe". There are in fact lots of other countries in Europe, 30+ or so in the EU alone where the reality can be very different than France and Germany. Many European countries have flat taxes (Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, etc), hiring and firing is at will like in the US, low to no capital gains taxes, etc. Some provide lots of government incentives, loans and capital, Denmanrk and some of the other Scandinavian countries come to mind here.

Europe is a big continent and taking Germany and France and extrapolating it to the rest of Europe doesn't always work.
Feed-based enterprise products can be a nightmare for users to follow. There must be structured filtering, categorizing, subsets etc to make sure you can find needed information quickly, not miss important stuff and not having to read through absolutely everything in the newsfeed. For many types of information, using the newsfeed paradigm would be absolutely incorrect.
Why do you need "support" for a screen resolution? PC's have had different screen resolutions forever, why were there never news articles about "Firefox Gets Support For 1280x1024" or "Firefox Gets Support For 1920x1200"?
No, it isn't.

When most people refer to a place, they refer to it by it's common name. You fly to JFK, Heathrow, Charles de Gaule, Gatwick, Luton, O'Hare, etc. There is no need to add "airport" to something which so obviously is one in the context.

The familiarity of common names is why wikipedia uses them for article names: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_titles#Common...
Absolutely. One of the most satisfying tasks for me is transforming a big steaming pile of spaghetti code (be it procedural or, more often these days, design pattern infested OO code that involves a dozen classes just to print "hello world") to a simpler, elegant codebase with half the LOC.
Damn, if I were a Babylon 5 star right now, I'd be worried.
That may be true but my response wasn't to compare it to the app. It was in response to For that matter, I wish Google Latitude had any useful visual representation of the 2+ years' worth of location data I've been feeding it.

Latitude does have a useful visual representation. It also makes all the data available for you to do any other representation you'd like. See links in screenshot for downloading the data.
Yes, well, unless your doing something dangerous like climbing Everest, any travel you do completely pales in comparison to the early world travelers who went from Europe to Asia or America. It must make you nearly suicidal to think how boring and mundane all your life experiences are in the context of history.
A Letter to Tim Cook on Maps
Buddhist monasteries and households burned in Bangladesh because of FB pic
13% ANNUALLY. If their margin is 6.5% they will still make profit as long as they keep their stock less than half a year on average.
I think I managed to downvote you by mistake. Sorry…
Ergonomically, this experiment had some problems:

• the photo shows a large monitor, presumably used while continuing to type at the laptop keyboard, off to a side angle. Having your typing-hands/torso and eyes/neck at differing angles can be very stressful for the head/neck.

• the author notes that because of a tendency to "edge closer to the desk when I stand" resulting in eyes "too close to the computer screen", he placed his floor mat further from the desk. If the natural, comfortable standing position was close to (or even leaning against) the desk, he should have pushed the screen back to accommodate that position -- not forced himself to stand further away.

Whether seated or standing, face both your keyboard and main monitor at the same direct (perpendicular) angle. Also when seated or standing, adjust the position of the screen or keyboard to accommodate your preferred posture, not the other way around.
I was just thinking the same thing - potentially you could mashup Selfspy with our SnowPlow (https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow) project - so all your behaviour events get logged to S3 and then analysed...
One is yearly, the other per transaction. This loan will enable them to do more transactions.
Let's see. At 6000 positions and 12 million out of work, you only need to skim off the top 0.05% of the workless to fill these position. Since Microsoft is willing to pay $10k for the visa alone, that is, not including other recruitment expenses, surely you can charge a fee of $10,000 for each referral, and make a total killing as a recruitment agent for Microsoft.

In other words: basic economics disagrees with your assertion.
Two things. R&D is not a generic, fungible thing. R&D that occurs in a patent environment will have a different focus than R&D that occurs without. I'd expect funding spent on lawyers writing defencive patent proposals would be figured on the balance sheet as R&D, even though it isn't. Or R&D spent finding new ways to extend existing patent rights of a drug. Or finding ways to innovate without breaching competitors' patents.

Secondly, there's no evidence to demonstrate that the amount of R&D that happens with patents is more than there would be without patents. I think you're focussed on the upside - companies that do some more work because of protection. But that needs to be balanced against the amount of research and development that isn't done because of the increased barriers to entry.
Show HN - English Cabbie in Mumbai
TheStiffCollar.com presents what is perhaps India's first purely reality, purely digital ad. Catch our Desi Englishman Max Fernandes playing a prank on unsuspecting taxi passengers on a hot Mumbai day.
Why are you people thinking this is better than Microsoft Words annoying Clippy? "It seems like you are writing a letter..."

I already know how to get to work every day.
A one-off $10K fee per hire is chump change, compared to the alternative: if your H1-B costs 50K per year + 10K one-off, he's still much cheaper than a US-based developer who wants 60K per-year -- and that's not exactly the top going rate.

Corporations understand Marx much better than workers ever did.
Please leave more useful comments and explain the supposed error.
LXJS recordings: great JavaScript talsk
Pretty Nice designs, but i find the price a little bit too high considering that your designs are so minimalistic that you are competing with 5mins of Photoshop(to recreate an image) and 3$ of sticker printing paper.

Nonetheless i'll probably order a few for our glass doors in the office.
Just start with Python. I don't know why some people are not recommending Python but they don't have your best interests at heart, they aren't actually thinking of the language that's quick to get up to speed and enjoyable to learn with, and instead are going with some absurd platonic ideal designed for a parallel universe in which their recommendation might make sense.

I'm specifically pointing at the highly voted posts mentioning C and Scheme.
That's CAPM cost of equity assuming a market of rich and emerging market stocks and bonds and a risk-free rate of gilts or Treasuries, whichever cheaper; the average ex-post return of the S&P 500 for the period (1926-2012) is closer to 10.5%.

Regarding VC one plugs in expectations; VC is modern portfolio mechanics at its most vivid.

This is relevant because 13%, as a cost of capital, is not intrinsically high when even Bank of America today would pay that if it raised equity (it has) and could assume a long-run return on its stock of at least 7.3% (below its targeted ROE). A quick bond search shows that several S&P 500 members, BofA included, paying over 13% on at least some of their bonds (no doubt the riskier ones).

Therefore 13% isn't usurious and probably a fair cost of capital for a small business.
Or just get a tall desk chair. They make desk chairs that are tall like bar stools for standing desks. (http://goo.gl/5zMCq) Then you can stand when you want or sit when you want. Pulling the chair up seems easier than raising/lowering a desk
I'm a big fan of Boldrin/Levine but suspect they're wrong about this. The reason medical investigation is so expensive is because there's so much red tape around it in the form of approvals, and the convoluted systems health coverage in the developed world. It's a classic insiders' club. People got institutionalised into the culture, and then can swap between government and industry. There's no strong incentive for anyone in the game to keep costs down. Much more important for the insiders that the barriers remain high.
Facebook's Next Privacy Issue & How To Opt Out
Yes, but they don't have bottomless wallets.

In some respects they do: often government or insurers are left with costs. The insurers make their margin upstream of this, so there's low price pressure on the drug manufacturers.

Also, demand for drugs is often inelastic, so people are more likely to make sacrifices here to pay for drugs. Which is fine in itself, but not when the high costs are the product of a cartel arrangement between government and industry.
I don't think so. I am a mountain climber and my phone is off and for emergencies only. It is not even a smart phone as they are way to vulnerable and consume to much energy to run.