skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Attorney At Law | Paul I. Weiner Equire L.L.C.
Mr. Weiner is co-author of the best-selling book Wrongful Discharge Claims - Preventive Approach (2nd edition) and has extensive litigation, speaking, and lecturing experience. He also has published other works including:Trial Strategy and Preparation in Employment Litigation.
Don't be fatuous, Jeffery.

The commenter was clearly referring to this:

> If you look at pictures of US presidents in Japanese newspapers, they look slightly Japanese
Check out the low prices on bulletproof jackets
If your loved one is taking fire overseas, make sure he has a bulletproof jacket like the ones found here.
Wow. They are actually for unicycles and banjos. I was expecting some weird, ironically named, social networking sites.
So you think that Apple makes good designs just because they're a large company? I've got news for you: the companies they compete against are much larger. Dell and Microsoft could easily afford more designers than even Apple has. The products they churn out are still comparatively worse.

You'll notice that Gruber mentions the period in the 80s where Jobs was still an employee as a period which saw similar results. This is not something that requires a huge team. Back with the original Macintosh there was a similar effect. I would hope you've seen the computer's initial unveiling - it's on YouTube - because that's a video that inspires me to this day. Younger, tuxedoed Jobs reveals it, begins using it, and the audience begins half-screaming, in a near-frenzied way. They can't believe that they're seeing what they're seeing. And that's the startup Apple, that's the two-man operation. Back when they didn't have as much in terms of resources, they still focused on creating that simple core, because that's what people care about.

You think simplicity and evolution is a bullshit concept? Not that I know anything about you or the stuff you've worked on, so apologies if this sounds ignorant and facetious, but that's at the core of making anything. That's a "secret" that I stumbled upon independently. I know a lot of programmers who came upon that - and I find that I respect their work much more than I respect the work of people who don't "get it".

Look at NewMogul. Do you think that if that site was started by Paul Graham it would be as small as it is right now? No, not because Paul Graham necessarily has a publicity advantage, but because if he were making it he'd most likely go about making it tied in with Hacker News. HN is his simple core model, and NewMogul could be seen as an expansion of that initial concept. As a concept of its own, it's failing - if you wanted to make a huge site for business-interested people, cloning Hacker News is not a smart idea. So the failure comes down not to the design, because the design is quite pretty, but to the concept, which is not simplistic enough to work.
I am thinking of getting either an Asus Eee or HP Mini. Does anyone have any experience playing Hulu or other flash sites on one of these? How does it compare?
You can't "iterate" to the iPhone. That is his point. The iPhone is a core concept that you can't get from iterating. It's a basic phone model that didn't exist before.

Other companies aren't as successful at making new phones because they're reluctant to abandon everything they have to create new systems and models. Their minds are stuck in a single pattern. Nobody making those mock-up sketches for the iPhone thought that Apple would get rid of a numberpad. Nobody. Every indie designer making a mock phone kept the numpad there. You can't necessarily throw lots of people at a concept and expect it to be better. It takes a certain moral bravery to get rid of everything and start anew.
Searching for that Google-beater
I was just noting davidw's point on the speakers, the network. If U. Edinburgh can get speakers over from the valley on a semi-regular basis this isn't that big a problem. Yet again, London's better because the number of cool intersting people passing through will be orders of magnitude higher so you can piggy-back off of that, more and better speaker opportunities.

But your point is well taken, meetups are not a big problem, and the lack of them is relatively easy to overcome.

A proper YC clone probably requires
(a)Angels, plural, successful ones, with personal experience of startups
(b)20-50K per round, so assuming 2 rounds a year, and three years to get some form so others will back you thereafter, ~120K min.

I think that's it, and if you're lucky you could get away with less. Here, government might be useful. 60K isn't chickenfeed but it is doable in grant aid. If you could find someone willing to pony up 60K, you could get matching funds from a local authority somewhere in the UK, or from one of the enterprise incubators.
It all depends on the construction site. The companies that do building houses and small business offices generally do have a few really strong guys doing the heavy hauling, back in the UK where I worked you'd get a guy carrying like 200 lbs of brick up a ladder.

However, I specialized in the Handy-Man kind of work so there's too many different job sites or the companies too small to actually have a specific guy hauling stuff. So in the jobs I worked you had to be both smart and strong. Electrical, plumbing and gas can be extremely complicated to put in, especially when you're modifying a house that's over 50 years old.

(At 17 I started working as a reviewer and the editor considered me the best they had. So I believe I have a high aptitude for writing. I've had a couple short stories published, and right now I'm working on a novel.)
DevTeam has an iPhone 3.0 jailbreak but you can’t have it - yet
Twitter Confirms And Details New "Discovery Engine"
Strimko set#3 
Smartkit releases new online puzzle, Strimko #3
is it me, or is 520 cars reserved cars in a first week ridiculously low? Don't larger manufacturers get that amount per dealer?
A speaker going to talk at a university is a lot different from a speaker talking to a small, focused group of people in a no-holds-barred sort of environment (those talks are not recorded and are not public, afaik). The YC dinners are weekly, too, not monthly, and not just some random thing that anyone can show up to.
Yep, that's what I meant.

And yes, from the sound of it, it is a complex, multi-faceted problem.
hi jlees, glasgow hn-er here. would love to chat - email is in profile.
Nintendo is a terrific company to compare Apple to. They have a similar grasp of the gaming industry that Apple does of the tech world, and it's why they've had such an edge designing. Similar to Apple, they go unexpected directions, and other companies don't seem to get why it is that they surge ahead. They assume it's because of "gimmicks," and add similar gimmicks to their products. Look at how SIXAXIS went compared to the Wiimote and you see something similar to the touch phones that non-Apple companies released to beat the iPhone.

It's worth noting that Nintendo is an outright slaughterhouse in terms of sales. In the top 50 weekly VG sales, they have 18 in-house games. 6 of the top 10 (10 of the top 15) are for Nintendo consoles. Only one other company has a game on the list that's sold 5,000,000 copies. Nintendo has 13. Things like that are why I laugh at people who say the 360 isn't that far behind the Wii, because the Wii is in a universe unto itself.
Simple doesn't mean lacking complexity in terms of code. It means lacking complexity in terms of usage.

Say what you will about Rails, but people using it can develop things pretty incredibly quickly, and there's not an enormous learning curve. That's simplicity.
That paper does not mention any specific brands or models.
Then you should avoid the word fuck instead of bowdlerizing it.
Time Warner Cable Expands Metered Billing To Four More Cities
I'm a DF fanboy and an Apple fanboy. For me fanboyism means realizing that something's good enough to be a fanboy about.

Gruber's a Mac fanboy, but he's also one of the most critical Mac users I know, along with John Siracusa. When Apple does something bad, Gruber is vocal about it. He's still critical of a lot of OS X's interface, and writes about it often.
Building Campaign Monitor Part 3 - Design Process
Is Twitter Turning Into MySpace?
Here is what bothers me about this. How can you not get a regular bank account? Doesn't Bank of America just require an address, plus a deposit? What else is needed? I think it's more fair to say that they don't trust banks, rather than can't get regular bank accounts.
Real World 2.0: ready for open source hardware, sensors?
The current economic crisis won't just produce major changes in the world's economic institutions. Programmers, tinkerers and DIY aficionados aren't just waiting for change, but reinventing what it means to participate.
Does anyone see any obvious documentation on defining your own reduce function?

All the example use the built in "aggregate," which looks like it refers to the Hadoop aggregate sub-package. The lines output by the map functions start with the name of a Hadoop class within the aggregate package, which must tell it how to aggregate.
Personally, I expect that the current recession will not end before then.

Wall Street is up a bit (and by "up a bit" I mean "it's still way way down, but from time to time it's up a few points"), but the fundamentals are as bad as they've ever been.

I've got an acquaintance who works in energy demand forecasting, and she can see the aggregate expectations of growth 6, 9, 12 months out by looking at energy future prices, and she says that it shows all the classic signs of a "Japanese style" "L-shaped" recession.

I also think that most people are waiting for the other show to drop - inflation, further huge government deficits, further layoffs (I note that the job figures released by ADP yesterday were worse than expected).
The Energizer laptop: 20 hours on a single charge
Coder, your days are numbered
Media left feeling foolish after Conficker fails to strike
Seeing the April 1st date of the article it was just a little bit harder to believe they would write it like that. As folks have taken it seriously...

The Ruby community was formed without being forced into it necessarily. Academics did not force people into Ruby. Businesses did not force people into Ruby. Even Ruby on Rails was created because DHH was not forced to use PHP and instead tried to make things work in this new called Ruby.

Scala has its followers but Academics push it and business types can push it as well even though many business types still prefer Java and C#. Also, Scala is being primarily used for server-side stuff which is a very crowded market already and many developers are just a little bit too tired of having to interface with complex server-side stuff while trying to innovate on the client-side.

Thing is, as a guy who really digs Ruby, Scala does not worry me one bit. I could always try and use a hyper-advanced Scala implementation or application in the future given I can make choices at one point and then have to revisit said choices in the future given the changes brought by new developments.

Let me tell you a little story. When C# was being first introduced in its very early versions, I was very much playing Ultima Online on pirate servers. A new pirate server was being coded in C# and it was becoming rather popular quite fast and the single developer (or was it?) was having quite a lot of fun with it. Nobody told him to use C# for that kind of thing I am sure, it was just him putting his passion forward with the means he had at the time. C# has grown since then, and many pros and hobbyists use it to create all kinds of little programs on Windows.

Scala? Scala has an uphill battle, and many other languages have had their own uphill battles throughout the years. It's tough.
Unix tricks - Useful but unusual
Here are a few Unix tricks you might not have seen before.
Doesn't Bank of America just require an address, plus a deposit?

You can get a bad checking account with high monthly fees, check writing fees, ATM fees, etc. I'm pretty sure you have to submit to a credit check or have additional deposits to get a free account.

While these bad checking accounts are probably less expensive overall, it's more difficult to judge the costs, especially for financially unsophisticated customers. One big fat fee from the payday lenders probably seems smaller than N smaller fees where N is unpredictable.
Internet traffic in Sweden fell by 33% as new anti-piracy law came into effect
As a software developer it's easy to think a million dollar cash flow is the result of a good idea and some code. But a tester to discovers nasty bug could prevent a million dollar problem from showing up. My point is when a small team that's working together on a measurable task you can reward the team but it's easy to overlook the tester or junior developer that was vital to the teams success.

As to your example the reason it seemed so obvious that one employee had a million dollar idea was how little effort it took to get there. However, his idea would not have made as much money if his boss had not decided to up the cost of advertising. And if the traffic was not there to create the market etc. So while the idea might have generated a million in revenue he was far from the only person involved.
I don't follow, if it's patented then didn't they already release the important details in the patent application?
Wouldn't Wolfram Alpha help aggregate some of this data?
It's in Spolsky's interests to hire people who "could" manage multiple projects if given that responsibility

I'm not sure that's true.

I've never been a project manager, but I have had a job where I would sit idle for weeks at a time because nobody had anything for me to work on. I eventually quit.

So I would expect that someone who could manage multiple projects at Fog Creek, but is only managing one, would not be happy there, either, even if he/she were paid as much as the people who actually were managing multiple projects.

And, yes it's good for there to be a buffer of talent, but that buffer would ideally be spread across the whole company--every person who is managing one project should be able to manage one project and contribute to another--not concentrated in a few stars.
Snag your username before someone else does
A new site helps you to find social networking sites where you've yet to claim your favorite username. Better grab it while you can!
Chicago area.
You can be denied an account. There's a company called ChexSystems that maintains a "bad customer" database and basically tells banks not to give you an account if you've ever bounced a check or had some other mishap.
Almost everyone who gives speeches on a (semi)regular basis will be used to some hostile questions at the end, and I really don't think you get to that level without being able to defend your ideas in other less formal contexts.

Sure, the YC dinners are weekly, no-holds-barred, and have a select audience, but if you have a proper YC clone going you will be able to get speakers on a weekly basis. Probably not of the same quality, or with the same ease, but you can get speakers. The other points fall under
All discussions follow Chatham House Rules
Great article.

The fact that teeth could heal themselves was unknown to me for quite some time. I thought that if you had a cavity, you had to have it filled.

I used to have horrid teeth (and the diet to match). I stopped drinking soda and my dentist recommended a product called Recaldent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recaldent). This concentrated paste helped most of my teeth strengthen and recalcify.
Most of those fees can be avoided if they treat the bank like those pay day loan processing places.
The PDF here seems to be a good start.

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex...
Have you any idea how much effort and training is necessary in order to become proficient enough in one game as to be able to compete professionally? Just because the professional gamers are not running around or doing push-ups, doesn't mean that they're not investing their time and effort in their profession. So much about being lazy.

As to being useful, the only thing that makes professional football players more "useful" than professional gamers is the fact that their entertainment industry is more mature and established, which allows them to move more money around. This will probably change in time, with games steadily gaining more popularity with mass market.
Map/Reduce is really hard. As you can tell, this thing takes the operational pain out of Hadoop... not the thinkin part :) Beyond something like this: http://hadoop.apache.org/core/docs/current/mapred_tutorial.h... there isn't too much in the way of docs on how to think in map/reduce that I'm aware of, but I found the classes in the Pig tutorial to be quite helpful.

edit: oh, guy above me has great link!
If you apply the filter of who has had a major part in the creation of revolutionary products, I think Steve is legendary among his peers:

Apple II

iPod

iPhone

Pixar (first successful computer animation studio - but not a product)
Is employee A working late nights because he or she is working hard, or to fix bugs introduced by careless coding the previous afternoon, or because for every hour physically at the office, 45 minutes is spent reading HN? It's hard for the manager determining salaries to tell the difference.
Five Technologies Tim O'Reilly Says Point Past Web 2.0
thats my point, its all based on an open stack. so while innovative and important (i no longer use my regular host) its reproducible. In fact there are already several players converging on this space (slicehost et al, appengine).

Long term this business is analogous to the hosting business: low margin and commoditized. is it a market? yes. Is it a big market? no. Why? because there is no lock-in.

If you can't understand this consider the scenario where 5 or 10 years from now Amazon is providing the infrastructure for 20% of the web, taking in 20% margins above the cost to operate the data centers and making a hefty profit.
What stops Microsoft or Google or any other player for that matter from getting in on the action by undercutting them in price?

If you look at any (amazon scale) money maker online there is some sort of lock-in involved which is central to their business. Most often its a network effect of some kind. Go ahead, go down the list of the top 10 web companies and take a look yourself.

Just because something is technologically cool does not mean its going to make enough money to be significant to amazon's bottom line.

Also don't insult people if you can't grasp what they are saying.
The iPhone: Is this all there is?
Is the iPhone now pretty much what it's always going to be? Sure, it will get better -- the iPhone 3.0 improvements look great -- but getting better isn't the same as "jaw-droppingly amazing." That's reserved for New Things.
There are none who do it even semi-seriously. Move.
Google PageRank Underway | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
This is in reference to a previous thread, but interesting that 3 of the cloudera team have a degree in Mathematics.

http://www.cloudera.com/about

Maybe the question should be, does a Mathematician need to know programming, or can he just learn it on an as needed basis?
Battery pack is a good idea. I have a UPS that is just about dead (~1 minute of backup, but I keep it for spikes and drops). I thought it would be great if the PSU had a built-in UPS. The space between the PSU and drive bay would be a perfect spot, no need for the heavy switching hardware since the PSU can deliver the 12 or 13.6 volts needed for the battery to charge.
Yes, there have been a few publicized incidents at large hosting centers where the central UPS either failed or didn't kick in when it was supposed to. By putting the battery in the server it eliminates that single point of failure.
What battery chemistry are they using? It looks like a lead-acid package. Those are cheap, safe, and reliable. But they have very low energy density and there are disposal issues.
I remember one of their chief expenses a while back was under-utilization - they need enough capacity for the christmas rush etc, but it does unused during the slow times. It looks like they're letting other people pay for their under-utilized computing power and also deal with the utilization problem themselves beneath the 1 hour mark.

Every now and then I wonder if there's a market for someone to do something like app engine on EC2 in order to cater to the 10 minute job market.

With something like that you could just leave the EC2 instances up and just swap jobs in and out, track the time and charge some small markup for the convenience.

As long as the demand was there you'd just have to bring more instances up in peak times then let them die off one by one when things slow down. Put a nice client side API on it and use Amazons billing API so the client can handle all of their computing payments at the one point and you're ready to go.
No, it's pretty fair to say Asus developed the first netbook, proving the segment was commercially viable. OLPC got some publicity among the nerd crowd but had no real effect on the market.
My mortgage, family, etc says don't move. Lucky for me I'm a semi-serious entrepreneur :)
"Actual Jobs"? Ironic that the NYT would gloat.

Next article in the series: Non-Virtual News Sources Fold, Forcing Journalists to Find Actual Jobs.
Not filed under Google but under Exaflop LLC (one quintillion floating point operations per second)
[hat tip to: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/02/15/googl...]

Patent application: 20080030078

"Each UPS includes a battery selectively connectable across a DC bus, and a AC-to-DC rectifier that converts an AC input voltage to a single output voltage on the DC bus. The regulated DC bus voltage may be close to the battery's fully charged voltage..."

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se...
Hal Halpin of ECA lobbies for gamers’ rights in a digital world
What is Google's lock in? Anyone is free to write a better search engine and buy a bunch of hardware to throw at the problem. The switching cost is typing a different URL to search, or configuring your browser search box to use that engine.

The "write a better search engine" part is not easy, and Google's algorithms are proprietary, but their success is not really a network effect, is it?

Also, saying Amazon is providing "infrastructure" implies they are going to deliver their current product then stop. But they can continue to build higher levels on top of what they already have. Maybe next will be algorithms baked into Hadoop, so you can throw your data at it without writing any of your own code. They can keep building up like this indefinitely. If Microsoft had released the first version of Windows and stopped, it would have become a commodity eventually (even with network effects).
Seems pretty cool, but who is really the target audience?

Wouldn't it be more useful as a netbeans/rubymine/eclipse plugin?
MySpace and Citysearch Team Up to Challenge Yelp
If you liked my article, definitely go out and get 'Information Rules' by Varian and Shapiro.
This sounds great... maybe we'll be able to avoid spending $12k to get my wife's teeth fixed (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=454040).
This isn't the end of professional video gaming. As the article points out, Major League Gaming is still going strong.

Also in other countries professional video gaming is even stronger than in the US. I was surprised when visiting Korea to see in airports big screen TVs showing video game championships. The big money's over there, someone recently signed a six-figure contract:

http://www.sk-gaming.com/content/22880-FOX_officially_unveil...