skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems like a really bad idea to me. Learning from primary sources more-or-less forces you to learn things in the order they were discovered, which in turn requires you to repeat and then correct every mistake that was made along the way. This is still largely how physics is taught, and Eliezer Yudkowsky correctly points out how unwise this is: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/quantum-explana.html (look for the paragraph that starts with "The order in which humanity discovered things"). In the case of discrete math, this approach would leave you with a lot of silly misconceptions like that the axioms of Boolean logic are "laws of thought".
Key Requirements of a Software Release Management System
Facebook Fires Finance Chief and Offers Some Big Numbers
The iPhone is, without any doubt, a market on its own.

Apple did what nokia, motorola and others couldn´t, or didn´t know it was possible to do.
jcl yes this is a compromise, if you check smaz_compress it does this kind of checks but only in order to glue together consecutive verbatim outputs into a single one (up to 256 bytes), but does not back-check if a single byte interruption is not worth it.

I think this can be an option that can be done in a second-pass way if a given #define is active. Thanks for the useful comment.
Yep, look-and-feel is protected as part of a company's intellectual property. As it should be.
Criminals Surfing the Kido/Conficker Hype
It's also bad form to publicly masquerade as an official support forum for a company without discussing it in private first.
Ask HN: If Facebook was in the public markets, would you be concerned as a shareholder?
no, you can "add" Huffman coding to this algorithm to get better compression (but it will be much slower). What I used is a modified version of the LZ algorithm family, but instead of a table assembled from the data I'm compressing I use a fixed one.

It's basically a simple table-lookup, with two special bytes needed to emit verbatim bytes.
We need someone to start up a site that provides user feedback on GetSatisfaction, using GetSatisfaction's look-and-feel. Taste of their own medicine.
That they have a valid point is not in question.

totally unwarranted

If you agree that Jason's point is valid, I don't see how you can think his response was unwarranted.

Jason did not appear to believe GetSatisfaction simply slipped up. Instead he accused them of extortion! His response was in line with this belief and only unwarranted if you disagree with his point.
Dragons Den vs. The Apprentice
"Our traffic studies show that Microsoft traffic would be about 42 percent of the bridge, yet Microsoft is paying for about 50 percent of the bridge, so we think we are getting fair value."

Politicians...
It's great to see companies talk about the features they remove in addition to the ones they add; thanks Amir!
If CouchDB is overkill, how simple are your projects? I thought CouchDB is supposed to be as simple as it gets?
I know people who loan money off of credit card receivables. Terms are usually for 6 months and at a very steep interest rate.

What's a future invoice?

You're better off getting cash redoing their website.
IWidgets brings Diggnation to facebook
The Wikipedia article on planarity testing cites, for instance, this paper: http://jgaa.info/accepted/2004/BoyerMyrvold2004.8.3.pdf which describes a not-insanely-complicated algorithm that constructs planar embeddings (or proves they don't exist) in linear time.
That they have a valid point does not mean that all their points were valid.

Valid point: GS wording is bad.

Invalid point: GS are evil extortionists.

Both can coexist in the same post.
37signals absolutely has a valid point and I agree with their decision to make this public so all can be aware of the tactics being employed by GS.

FYI-GS is using the same type of extortion that the Better Business Bureau (BBB) has used since inception to scare companies into becoming a paid member. The general public has no idea how dishonest many of these client attainment methods really are.
Like ohmigod, I was on the phone with Becky, Tiffany, and Amber the other day? (My daddy has conference call. It's totally wicked.) And I was telling them, like, you know how the mall has like, all these stores like Bloomie's and The Gap and Hot Topic all under one roof? Well I thought, wouldn't it be cool if one day we could just like, live at the mall? Like wake up, grab breakfast at Cinnabons, and then shop all day? That would be awesome, don't you think?

Oh, who am I kidding? Mall housing -- gag me with a spoon.
Facebook CFO is out
That they have a valid point is not in question.

Should I have taken that to mean: "That some of the very minor points he made were valid is not in question."?

Clearly the takeaway from his post was not that he disagreed with the wording.
PyWhip: Online Python programming exercises
I'd be hesitant to provide business advice unless I were a lawyer or accountant and those guys aren't doing it for free. There's not enough questions either and you really don't want someone else telling you how to run your business. Find a trusted advisor and good reference material and figure it out. The scope is not nearly as big as programming questions.

The place I work at built a small business resource and discussion site for a client with some similarities to SO and it's not doing so hot.
Threading Challenge Programming Contest
public broadcasting model. An example...

http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/
What ~couldn't~ you use it for?

I'm not so sure about the isolated part. If I recall correctly, all instances should have the same data. Hence the size of a given database should match on all instances.

And why restrict the size? ...just charge per mb and put the onus on the user.
I used to work for a company that did this kind of brokering, or "cashflow factoring", etc.

The basic idea is that they give you Y*X dollars now against X future revenue from your organization, where Y is much lower than 1.0. You're selling a lien against future revenue.

Usually they target lottery winners, manufacturers with firm orders, people who have won monetary awards in lawsuits, etc. It's not a very good idea.
Usually I enjoy Ebert's writing, but I didn't really get the point of this piece. I don't see why the future he envisions is inevitable, and I don't see why it's tragic.
Ask HN: Anyone interested in working for clients, not just building startups?
The prospect of building an app, or a startup, from the ground up is intriguing and incredibly sexy. Your photo in Fast Company, your name written all over HN, the chance for TechCrunch to blog about you and spike your traffic for a day

I've done it, I'm in the middle of it, and it's fun but it's very tough. And I say this as the business/strategy half of a startup tht hasn't yet failed (www.youintern.com). It's been incredibly challenging.

I do this while working full-time in advertising and have for a year now considered trying to combine my skills and network with a talented programmer to try and create a service agency -- a company that builds tangible solutions, small or large, for all manner of clients.

Advantages would be that there's more direct money up-front, conceivable ends of every project, the challenge to keep working on new ones, and the prospect of acquiring new business regularly.

Starting the next boxee is exciting and inherently risky. Why do programmers so rarely consider using their talents for more immediate gains? Why the assumption that a startup is destined to become a 20-person hot shop with a cool office and news articles, but a "digital agency" could not?

I'd love to discuss this with anyone in NYC: chaparian at gmail dot com
What law of big numbers are you referring to?
I personally think that new uses for old spaces is quite cool.

If you agree, you might enjoy the book "How Buildings Learn".

http://www.amazon.com/How-Buildings-Learn-Happens-Theyre/dp/...

HOWEVER.

The cost of demolition and new construction is much lower than renovation, especially when the systems requirements (showers, plumbing, etc.) are so different.

I feel quite confident stating that - aside from a stunt or two here and there - we will never see malls turned into housing in any sort of massive way.
to clarify: too simple to justify upgrading my host and installing when mysql is a button push away.
No. He implied that if the boy broke enough windows the town will put up CCTV cameras and no windows will be broken further.
Why does so many people want to create desktop-like web apps? It's not a desktop, it's the web. It never worked and it always looked bad and unusable.
Really enjoyed that. I wonder what that graph would look like for other car companies.

I have to imagine that, as cars became commodities, everyone's margins were slimmer, but it'd be interesting to see what a company unburdened by retirement obligations looks like over that same time span.
I have to say that I seem to be completely wrong here. Looking through the Internet Archive, with the previous design it used to say:
"Anyone can add a company or organization

Love a company? Or hate one?
Add it to Satisfaction!

Is your company or organization already here? Claim it and get involved with your customers."

It would seem as if I'm misremembering because I have spent a disproportionate amount of time on GS the last few weeks. Apologies.
Personas Expands Opportunities to Personalize
Today, we are launching a major expansion of the Personas experiment, which includes more dependable functionality, a cleaner look, an expanded gallery of artistic designs, and a much easier way to contribute.
2 new Cisco critical vulnerabilities
Thanks for commenting.

Featurelist won't appeal to everyone visually, though, neither does Reddit or HN. A lot of our users have liked the simplicity of the site, but it might not be for you.

We're not focusing on the visual aspects (not to the extent we have for bug.gd or yumbunny), so no one should expect a facelift or for it to win any awards. I'm just sharing it here so people know they have other alternatives floating around. To each their own, of course.

Thanks for your feedback.
"GetSatisfaction has passed the first test of customer support", What customer? 37Signals are not a customer, but a victim.
Can anyone point me to a good technical review/discussion which is favorable to CouchDB? I've spent a lot of time reading their documentation and I didn't "get it". I am afraid I'm not smart enough to understand why running your queries in a form of two JavaScript functions can be faster or more convenient than mighty SQL.

Frankly, I am also not into "distributed" thing either since I haven't seen a startup (with my own eyes) that had such insane load requirements $1K MySQL hardware couldn't easily handle.

However, I realize that authors didn't spend all that time implementing something without a real need for, I just haven't discovered it yet - most of CouchDB stuff I was able to find was mostly tutorials, docs, etc but I wish I could find a systems architect blog post titled "How CouchDB saved our ass".
The "magic" of unregulated capitalism brought us Fox "News" and the economic collapse we are currently experiencing.

Unregulated capitalism is an extremist form of economic system. There are no answers to be found in extremism.

The answers to our problems will found somewhere in the middle of the range between unregulated capitalism on one extreme end of the spectrum and socialist economics at the other extreme end of the spectrum.

Government oversight of markets. Elimination of monopolies. A voice for the employees. etc. In this case, there will probably be some donated money and some government money going to a public journalism system similar to public broadcasting.
even worse, local politicians.
Currently we don't make any money :) We have some thoughts on how to monetize it in the future, but at this point we are just focusing on building an awesome application that people would actually find useful.
http://www.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=NYSE:SSP

Take a look at that trend! (Switch to the 'annual' view). The free-market response is that the company turns around or goes bankrupt. If they were nationalized, you'd expect them to keep losing more and more money, until finally, someone had to take action -- by taxing blogs.

I really don't think that competing for thousands of advertisers is going to make people more honest than serving a single owner with an infinite budget. They'd end up being even less honest than the average Fortune 500 company's internal newsletter.
You said that we'd be better off if the problem became worse so that we'd be more motivated to solve it. How can that be read as other than advocating (in the short term) more spam? The point of the Broken Window parable is that even in the long term we do not end up better off, because the people who spent their time solving the spam problem could have put their energies into something else productive instead.
Gmail? Google Docs? They work, look fine, and lots of people use them all day long.
Taking the logos without permission is bad enough.
They don't mean accident in that they fell on a keyboard and that came out. They mean accident in that someone wrote it as placeholder (or supposed final) copy and it didn't get reviewed/agreed to by the team before it got launched. Clearly some writer was overzealous and the higher-ups didn't get a chance to read it.

Happens all the time at small startups.
Ugh. I am really not looking forward to tomorrow.
The improved sales figures at HP and Dell due to spam are representative of the broken window fallacy. Those numbers still look good on the GDP charts, even though they're essentially destructive.
My version:

Git: sudo port install git-core

Aliases: do not want. sudo port install bash-completion

MySQL: sudo port install mysql5 +server

Capistrano: sudo gem install vlad

ImageMagick: sudo port...

Quicksilver: out with the old, in with http://code.google.com/p/qsb-mac/

I don't get the anti-macports attitude. Why go through the hassle of downloading a bunch of stuff when it can be just a command line away?
Wow! A grand prize of a$350 net book computer. The generosity of the $giga corporation is staggering.
I thought you could write a javascript function to filter out datasets for each server, the client then queries multiple servers looking for what it wants?
i remember the kids playing this when I was in high school...6 years ago
An enterprising lawyer could put together a compelling class action case if only GetSatisfaction's pockets weren't so shallow. I'd like to see them get their asses handed to them for this shit.
So GetSatisfaction mildy misrepresents their association with 37Signals and uses their IP without authorization.. and 37Signals counters with a potentially slanderous letter in a public forum? Not exactly a great way to start a dialogue or build a legal case.

Most any other company would first engage with a civil, private, discussion, followed by legal action before firing off a public lambasting as a last resort (a rare event at that.)

There may be some valid points in the post, but whining in public makes you like a fool, to customers, to other businesses and to the public at large. Totally unprofessional.
I do both. I'm currently developing my own startup thing on the side, working full time as a web developer, and doing web development/design work for clients
Here's the part of the article that struck me as Google's big UI mistake:

"From the campaign summary screen the status of each of these campaigns reads in big red letters as it did before, during and after the issue - DELETED..."

What is the point of having a "deleted" option on a campaign if you can run it while it is deleted? To me, "deleted" suggests that the campaign can no longer be active. But in this case, the "deleted" option actually means "not visible in most views". A much better label for the option would be "hidden".

And even then it would be extremely unlikely for a user to want a campaign that is both "hidden" and active. The UI should prompt the user if they try to make a hidden campaign active, and, if approved, it should make the campaign non-hidden at the same time it activates it.
Companies like the AP and Reuters will pay for it, because they can then sell the content to publications (both online and dead trees).

People will still pay for content, and hence someone will still get paid to produce content, but the simple fact is that traditional newspapers can't compete as a distribution medium with other, newer, mediums.
From my own limited experience, ancient documents tended to be very elliptical; when everything had to be copied out by hand the reader was expected to do a little more work to understand what documents meant. So this tablet may have been the equivalent of notes accompanying a lecture: "As you can see from the triangles on this diagram..."
08: http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/25/diy-kit-lets-houseplants-...

And flagged.
An argument that I'd expect to hear is, "my startup work is more personally fulfilling."

Do you find this to be true? If yes, do you think this is because of the clients that you work with?
Bullshit (will probably get a downmod or two for my vehemence).

If Jason Fried dropped them a note saying, "I almost hit PUBLISH on the following rant-style post, but I wanted to drop you guys a line first", they would've jumped just as far, just as fast.

It would've cost him exactly NOTHING to give it a day or two on private channels before posting a rant other than the time it took to find a contact form and hit "ctrl-V".

Public rants are fun. Causing public harm to someone who has slighted you is gratifying. Getting a reaction from supporters and an apology from the rant-target is gratifying. That's the motivation of this post. Self-gratification. I generally love 37s, but not here.

Pretty disappointing.
I guess they're just busy trying to avoid beaching themselves and trying to hear themselves think with all that ultra-low frequency sonar bouncing around these days. I mean, we all get a little User Generated Content fatigue now and again. Now imagine how hard it is to type with those really big flippers.
People have disagreements and confrontation all the time.

Mature people resolve those potential conflicts through calm discussion.

Immature people resort to attacking the people they disagree with.
This could be a killer app for business applications.

Having the development environment hooked up to the visual mockup designer is a key element for quickly bringing apps that the business likes and IT approves of.

If they can get this right, there is a lot of money here. Especially considering the amount of lazy IT shops out there.
IBM And Microsoft Bury The Hatchet On 'Open Cloud'... Sort Of
That badge is/was on every page for companies that haven't set up an account with them - which I assume is a lot. And according to what other commenters here have said, it's been worded as such since launch. I have a hard time believing that the "higher-ups" hadn't read something as ubiquitous as this on their own site.

Also, at a small startup, shouldn't there be very little distance from the writers and the "higher-ups"? In a truly small startup, I would assume the descion-makers are the ones to write the copy.
Good thing people are building new local news solutions!

Check the list of startups over at http://jstartup.com/categories/7673-startups

Here in Chicago, The Windy Citizen, my local news startup has just hired its first ad rep. We're basically a local Digg, loosing connecting together all the little local sites in the city through links and buttons. People are going to keep starting little local news sites. We're here to help them get that first 500 readers they need to get off and running.
> Happens all the time at small startups.

ORLY? How many layers of management bullshit are there between the decision-makers at Get Satisfaction and the people writing their core message? This is not some random page buried deep within the site, it is top right on most of the pages they are generating.

I have a feeling that what they mean by "accident" is that someone with a voice decided to call them on it...
When the harm caused is largely that of public image, I think a public explanation is a reasonable response.
Because it was lame and not worth reading.
Google bans tethering app from Android Market
A developer is reporting that Google has banned his tethering application from the Android Market, one of the first hints that the store may not be as open as Google has promised.
Ask HN:  Are you concerned about the Conficker worm?
I think your last sentence answers your question.
Loud public fuss is usually a reasonable backup plan if asking them to change doesn't work, but starting off by asking people to resolve something lends you credibility because you've tried to resolve things amicably. If you want to put a squeeze on them, you can add, "Or we're going to lambaste you in our popular blog."

But starting off that way is just obnoxious. Granted, as noted, being obnoxious drives page views.
Two new malls went up in recent years in my city with housing built right in. http://www.hillcountrygalleria.com has http://www.alexangalleria.com and then http://www.thedomainaustin.com
I like the concept. There could be an interesting business idea here. One of the problems that concerns me is speed of data access. If I'm running the service on AWS, your app will need fast access to your data. If you are hosting your app on AWS, why not run couchDB yourself? You will get much better speeds utilizing the cloud service's internal infrastructure rather than accessing your data via the internet. If you are hosting your web service somewhere else, then why not use the database solutions provided there? I'm just trying to understand the need for this kind of service.
That's only half of the job. They still don't offer a way to "delist" yourself from GS. Customers will still think GS is providing support for 37Signals and will be disappointed. Even if the badge says it is not an official site many people will not read it.

Some comments in the post compared this to Google, but it is not a valid comparison, as Google offers a very clear way to get yourself out of their index.
After 10 minutes of searching on Wikipedia, i could find no reference to it even though I have heard of the law many times before.

Essentially the law of big numbers states that "A very large number multiplied by a small number is still a large number"

As the poster indicated, even a few minutes of daily span cleanup multiplied by millions of people equates to quite a bit of time.
The site also hosts, without permission, company support pages for over 14,000 companies. They’ll use your logo, title the page “Customer service & support for [COMPANY NAME HERE]” and generally make it feel like an officially sanctioned place to get official support from the company in question.

If they're using your company's logo and name, and those are a registered trademark, isn't that grounds for a lawsuit? Isn't this exactly the sort of thing that trademark law is supposed to prevent? (One company purporting to be associated with another when it isn't)

I know there's a reason a I can't make my own cola, slap a Pepsi logo on it and sell it out of the back of my truck. I thought this was it.
Job opportunity in Boston that might interest a hacker