skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amen!

I never even started caring and whenever someone asks me about it I can only shake my head. I mean seriously... When I'm going to a place where I know I might take my shoes off in front of strangers then I'll spend the extra minute finding a matching pair. But normally the places where I take my shoes off are the places where people already know that I'm in denial with that part of "etiquette" and who somehow managed to get over it.
The 45 minutes is for a partial charge. Still, 300 miles beats the heck outta the 40 promised by the Volt.
Reddit, stage right.
What if your exit strategy is death?
Google Apps - Gmail Incident Report 2009-02-24
Every business owner I speak with criticizes the media for being overly negative. This is the kind of news most people are looking for and lets face it ... this little funk we're all in is mostly emotional.

And any other year of this past century, year over year numbers would mean something, however this is the one exception.
For those who want this functionality but use a version of Python older than 2.6, there is a backport of this module:

http://code.google.com/p/python-multiprocessing/
My personal taste is similar to yours, but I've learned the hard way that your visual design should be shaped specifically for the market you are targeting.
Poll: How long did it take you to build your first iphone app?
< 2 weeks
4-6 weeks
6-8 weeks
8-10 weeks
10-12 weeks
12-14 weeks
> 14 weeks
Good points.

It probably doesn't make sense to allocate ALL of AIG's losses to shareholders, just enough to create some disincentive.

Also, with this mechanism, the market would figure out over-leveraged companies with liability exposure and beat down the share prices.

Finally, maybe the answer is to allocate losses not to shareholders, but to officers, directors, and highly compensated employees, bounded by the company compensation to each person.

In other words, if you create a "too big to fail" company that fails, you might start to be personally liable for what the company's paid you in the past, and has promised to pay you in the future. The idea, again, is not to get back all of the loss, but to dis-incent extreme, leveraged risk taking by management.
There is some trade-off between efficiency and friendliness, as long as friendliness requires some real human services (which is likely the case for the foreseeable future). Of course, there is definitely room to provide more of both, but trade-off exists nonetheless.

When a typical merchant signs up for a service, she'd look first for the expenses involved. If a non-free service springs up even with a great customer service, there is little chance they will get enough scale to compete successfully in the long run. As long as most merchants don't have big problems with mostly automated (and less friendly) services like this, Web-based payment services will stick to this free model.

That's an issue with this 'free' economy. Nothing is really free. We've collectively given up human customer service to get these 'free' services.
It will be interesting to see if amongst these early electric vehicle manufacturers a de facto battery/charging interface standard can be established. I can see that widespread adoption would be difficult to achieve if consumers cannot reliably charge their vehicles in a number of charging station locations because of properity hardware barriers, etc.
As someone with a math major/engineering MS, I was of course pleased to hear Barak say this. But of course, our president himself has a law degree. Most of the politicians who want Americans to become engineers are lawyers themselves.

I remember an absolutely fantastic Onion article titled "Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others"

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/report_98_percent_of_u_...

I suspect that 98% of lawyer/politicians favor engineering careers - for others.
The Newest Worthless Pieces of Paper: MBA Diplomas
Has already been posted. Has already been discussed ad-nauseum - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=531424
It's kinda weird to compare ruby with ocaml for object overhead. The former is a dynamically typed language that fully supports all kinds of introspection/metaprogramming at runtime, while the latter is a statically typed language that has very limited introspection capabilities.

But the numbers are interesting anyway.
Good article. I had seen headlines about Unladen Swallow before, but didn't realize what it was and never followed the links.

I'm using Python for my side-project / hopeful startup, so I'll keep this on my radar and hope that I can capitalize on their efforts.
It's all in the viewpoint - I don't see "blogger" as dismissive at all and see "author" a bit pompous for the level of writing.
I really hate matching socks, it seems like such a waste of time. Every time I do laundry I think to myself "There has got to be a way to make the socks match themselves". I mean the dryer is already moving the socks around, and probably bringing every sock by every other sock. Can't there be a way to make like socks attract, stick together?

Alas, 29 years and I still haven't thought of anything :-(
Seven days for the first version from "Create New Project" to iTunes Connect. And it was actually quite useful and popular. Apple then promptly sat on it for two weeks, but oh well.

It still more than paid for this year's WWDC :)
You must have done some Mac development before!
I have recently been wondering if all of this multitasking I was so proud of is a prime reason that time seems to pass too quickly... You mean it's almost April already?

I have been working at purposely slowing down, doing a more thorough job. My clients and friends seem to appreciate having my full attention. So does my wife :)

And I still get enough done that I am satisfied. Maybe it is because I am not having to do things over so much?
That statement is wrong. Forum selection clauses are binding absent a signed written contract. For example, one of the more famous cases setting precedent for forum selection clauses involved Carnival Cruise Lines. In that case a passenger injured on a cruise attempted to sue Carnival in the passenger's local jurisdiction. Carnival countered that because there was a forum-selection clause in the contract printed on the back of the passenger's ticket that the passenger should be forced to sue Carnival in Florida. The case went all the way to the US Supreme Court which ruled that the forum-selection clause on Carnival's ticket was fair and reasonable and enforceable against the passenger. Check out Carnival Cruise Lines, Inc. v Shute 499 US 595, 111 S.Ct122 (1991) for details on this exact case.

Now I am by no means saying that forum-selection clauses are an end all to potential contract lawsuits (key here being contract disputes and not just any lawsuit between a plaintiff and defendent corporation). There are ways to fight the forum-selection part, but you must be prepared to fight it and pay the legal expenses involved. Sometimes it is a matter of weighing the cost versus the outcome sadly and that is why corporations end up avoiding the lawsuits in contract disputes.
From the article, Vosburgh was found guilty of clicking the link.
Central Japan. A bit of both.
Very true. That is definitely a way around the forum-selection clause and a good way to fight a contract dispute.
Analytics for startups: What should I track?
These people didn't create a too big to fail company, they were hired by a too big to fail company. When I'm taking a job as an engineer I should have to inspect all the books to make sure they're clean or else I could lose all my personal savings? Forget it.
My understanding is that Facebook is still not profitable. At this point, being several years old and claiming 175 million users, I'm growing more skeptical about their potential as a business.

I would think that by now, Facebook would have found the right methods of advertising, marketing data, or paid premium features to be self-sufficient. How much more growth can there be before revenue when you have 175 million users?
It's exactly the fear of this scenario which forces the system to police itself. Removing this incentive reduces the incentives individuals have to police their earnings. If they were subject to serious losses, there'd be more market incentive for an independent entity to step forward to guarantee shareholders against these kinds of losses. Those entities, in turn, with their money on the line, would police the guaranteed institutions themselves. Call it malfeasance insurance.

This is a much more natural system of incentives than the current ratings boards, who are paid by the entity being rated and hold only a limited, indirect personal stake in their failure or success to rate correctly.
Circumcision Reduces Rates of Two S.T.D.s
Youtube edu channel
These time scales do cause one to consider: what is the lifetime of SGML, HTML, XML, RDF, ... How have those Gutenberg typefaces held up? I was in a British church last year, and the floors were made of carved granite, which were completely illegible.... People walking on the floors for centuries caused gradual wear.

Chiseled granite!! What names or words were written? I don't know, but 12,000 years is a long time to propagate a certain signal... This causes one to consider...
Tsukiji is a great place to go on your first day in Tokyo, given that the action's all in the early morning and you're still jetlagged. I posted a few photos from it and other Tokyo sights after my vacation there last year: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaronbrethorst/sets/72157604531...
The discussion spawned by the poor comment sometimes more than compensates for the little irritation the downvoted comment brought.
Fear of Failure in the Forex Market
Capital Factory Gives Austin Its Own Startup Incubator
My only point is that he does not have a broader view in which bizdev is a super important role in and of itself.

I think the author is suggesting that the "Marketer" fulfills this specifically in the vertical he's approaching.
It's a beautiful car, for sure.
Isn't abstinence-only education a proven failure? What makes Obama think he can succeed where Bush failed so badly?

http://www.eatliver.com/img/2007/2302.jpg
Compare Doctorow to somebody like Clay Shirky, as I did. The one essentially uses his popular "interesting links" blog to give his uninformed opinion on things. (It's not a completely awful opinion, but it's certainly uninformed.) The other does pretty extensive research, writes some fascinating pieces and writes them well, and, because he's not the editor of a pop blog, doesn't get nearly as much attention as Doctorow.

That's what bugs me. Doctorow is certainly a Paris Hilton: he does things for attention and he uses that attention to do things he couldn't do otherwise. That doesn't make him stupid (nor do I think Paris Hilton is particularly stupid, though she certainly plays the part): it just makes him somebody who doesn't deserve the box he gets.
Argentina - 1? That's me!
Amazon has something like this. I noticed it as an option for buying iced tea bags, I could select to automatically repeat my order every n months. Don't know what other products they offer it for.

37signals story about it - http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/512-amazons-delivery-subs...
When you say "where is the upvote button?" when you agree with a comment on another discussion site.
If Google explained their termination process for Google Checkout, would that mean they also have to explain their termination process for Adsense?
ThisMoment: Rhymin' 'til the End of Time
If your email to them reflected this tone in any way, I can see why they didn't answer.
Harvard and Heroin
When Stars Twitter, a Ghost May Be Lurking
The idea sounds good if you have a chip on your shoulder about rich people, which the author clearly does, but the proposed system is insane. Good economies encourage people to work and invest. This is a MASSIVE disincentive to do both. It is no coincidence that many of the world's poorest economies are found in regions where the government thinks like this.
It’s Time to Make a Coffee Run: Caffeine as a Performance Enhancer
What ethics board approved this study?
New Microsoft commercial: Windows is a generic OS X substitute
This is why people don't have money.

I think the point of items like this is not "I am going to spend the rent check on socks" but rather "I have money which is more than sufficient for my needs, but my life is stressful and I have very little time, and I will willingly trade money for time or stress relief, even in doses that seem smaller than some people might appreciate."

My business is built on charging people $30 for something they could do for free. Of course, its only free if you think the extra hour of your life it costs you was valueless. My customers don't.

I paid $3.50 this morning for a coffee and pastry when I could have brewed my own darn coffee and packed a pastry from home for a third of the price. Is that rational? Eh. $2.50 saved a day times twenty work days a month is about $50. That's sort of below my feel-burning-urge-to-change-habits line these days, particularly since the equivalent amount of mental effort of my business would have much better returns.
It dorks, who we are and what we do.
I had an experience where a customer purchased software (about $400 worth) and then after 2 months claimed they never received the email containing the license keys. I attempted to email them through many various routes (eventually from my own google and ISP accounts, even) but they kept claiming they did not receive any email from me. I don't really know if this is true, but if it is, they have the most aggressive SPAM filtering in the universe since I have never experienced this from any other customer. In the end, they issued a chargeback and told VISA it was fraud, and the payment processor, ShareIT refunded the money. ShareIT is pretty expensive, but I must say they were very good about it - they communicated with me directly (real humans), seemed to understand the situation and have not held it against me in any way (as far as I can tell).

(no particular point to this, just thought the story might be interesting to others.)
Marketers create demand for a product. Sales people convert demand into paid customers. Hackers build the product that is sold.
How does this relate/interoperate with stackless python?
http://www.stackless.com/
Hmm, if we entirely remove the penis the infection rates will be 0, perhaps that should be considered. Cutting off body parts is a barbaric ritual and should not be encouraged. Spend the time and effort in distribution of condoms and education.

Not sure why this is hacker news, other than the obvious pun.
I don't really prefer one way or the other. If digg's content was at the level that HN's is, it wouldn't be that bad.
It sounds like they make decisions when confronted with heaps of data. A billion searches? Sure, we can figure out what worked & what didn't. Versus a few dissatisfied customers, orders of magnitude too small to train models on.

Also, given that engineers have to design their services to scale well, perhaps the answer is that we just don't know how to build cheap customer service yet? Perhaps they need a Mechanical Turk like interface for CSRs.
You didn't finish the sentence: "It's a massive incentive to do both..." in the form of a single company over the liability limit.

The obvious hack is to slice the company into (company size)/(liability limit) pieces, but while typing up my complaints about how easy that is, it occurred to me that we have anti-trust, anti-racketeering, and anti-price-fixing laws in place that are basically solving the same problem, so maybe it could work after all with a sufficiently clever law.
Two other deleted threads include:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=532396

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=531880
In other news ...Most Top 10 Lists are Rubbish

More at 11
You have too much free time. Get some more clients so you can make more money. Doesn't your wife want ...'things'?!?
Advancing the Ruby 1.9 Adoption
Solution, have all your socks be .... wait for it ... THE SAME

I work off 1 big package of socks at a time. Matching them is easy because they're all the same.

Genius.
Ask HN: How do you deal with irrationality?
I'm a fairly rational person. Perhaps some around me would say too rational. A lot of you here are rational. I know it because I read your comments. Many of you are also wiser and more experienced in dealing with the world around you than I am. I am itchy on the trigger finger sometimes and I get myself into trouble and offend people -- without intending to.

I had a conversation the other day with some rational folks. One of them was noticing an increasing trend in his discomfort with the world around him. An older gentleman in the conversation said he noticed that trend in himself years before and was bothered by what the younger person had said, because "it doesn't get any easier," he said.

I watch interviews with Ayn Rand and read Kant and their words are words I have said myself before. It is scary to think that the thoughts in my head mirror those who are "outside society." I don't want to be outside society. Sometimes I want to fit in.

It's difficult to look around and see continuing trends in irrational behavior leading the world into what appears to be a very negative direction. "Why don't we just make the right decision, it's so obvious!?" I think to myself...

What do I do? How do I find peace with it. I don't want to grow into a grumpy old cynical man. I am full of optimism. I was told years ago, "You just haven't had your wings clipped yet." I don't want them clipped, what do I do? How do I deal with a crazy world? Or am I crazy? Am I alone in this? I don't know...
Power comes to those who spend their lives pursuing it. This is not about to change.
A man with a shovel, instead of an up arrow? That's like

ADD X TO Y GIVING Z.

instead of

z=x+y

so yes, it wouldn't be that bad, but food from Per Se wouldn't be that bad if you ate it at McDonald's, either.
Ask HN: Please take a survey to help my startup
You don't post that short, witty comment because you're worried it's too "Redditish" and will effect your karma.
~1hr. No previous Mac, XCode, or even much Unix experience. I made Pong. I did it by converting the GLPaint sample one piece at a time.
basically, never forget that you're a part of the society that you wish to instill the change in. its a problem the second you think things are so bad that you don't want any part of it anymore. as long as you think that change is possible and worth working for, you're doing fine.
New Microsoft Ads Point Out, Cough, High Cost Of Macs
Don’t Blindly Trust D.E.B.B.
The post was actually a bit of an appeal for engineers and innovators to be more powerhungry. I'd rather have Larry Ellison than Hank Paulson run the companies that matter to the economy.
Don't allocate it to the shareholders at all. Allocate it to the executives. Arnold Kling got there first with a proposal that institutions that are obviously "too big to fail" and as such have a government guarantee should be bound by a spirit-of-the-law (S)contract, rather than the letter.

"I would like to see managers of government-protected institutions take an oath to safeguard the soundness of their companies. I would like to see them subjected to prison terms for violating that oath. The oath is a general promise, not satisfied simply by staying within the boundaries of L regulation.

I believe that S regulation would change the motives of bank managers. They would be looking for ways to avoid failure, rather than for ways to stay within the letter of the law."

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/11/letter_of_law_s....
The Republican Budget (Response) [PDF]
> This bugs me like the idea that public companies are legally obliged to maximise shareholder value.
... Aren't you supposed to build something you want?

Yes ... if YOU OWN IT.

If you are the EMPLOYEE of a company OWNED by other people (i.e. "CEO of a publicly traded company"), then you do not get to be a prima donna with other people's money (i.e. their retirement hopes, their investment for their kids' educations, etc.). You buckle down and you do your job. And that job is "trying to grow the investment".
Why Could Google Die...
as a startup you shouldn't track anything beyond the basics(i.e. # of users)...finish the website first...add the features....then when you have nothing to do, you can focus on doing all that a/b testing. If you spend the time building that prior to launch, you are wasting your time.
Video of the Tesla Model S http://twurl.nl/ds6e3l
Is it a contest? I don't understand this sentiment.
Not to mention that this is new home sales we're talking about, a product that has had a huge hit in supply. It would be more interesting to see sales year over year based on percentage of supply sold.

Basically any way you slice it you can argue the other person is full of shit. That doesn't mean anyone actually is.
You sound like you're disagreeing with yourself. If the media is overly negative, why didn't they use the year-over-year figure? Instead the more positive number was used.
Yes, initial cost of algae could not be a problem since it reproduces itself. But how effectively it reproduces itself over time is problem I've read about - the algae that's good for biodiesel tends to be out-competed by general-purpose algae that blows in over time. I am not sure how the "breakthrough" in this article relates to this problem.
Behind Pwn2Own: Exclusive Interview With Hacker Charlie Miller (ex-NSA)
That's the best Windows commercial I've seen...maybe ever.

It takes the one thing that Windows clearly and demonstrably does better than Apple and advertises it. Microsoft has always had a bit of identity crisis...not realizing that Windows-based PCs are like Wal-Mart: a high volume business based on offering a lot of variety at a really low price.

Of course this could, theoretically, backfire. Really cost-conscious buyers might find the <$300 netbooks running Linux to be even more appealing, since they're $50-$100 cheaper than equivalent Windows-based units. $50 isn't much in a $1k lappy, but it's 15-20% of the price on netbooks.
That survey is so biased. Where in the list of languages is Java, C#, VB, C or C++, Pascal? Haskell? Django isn't even a language!
http://www.carsonified.com/dropsend-sale/things-potential-bu...
I've not seen that to be the case - in fact, from what my friends have told me, they're doing only replacement hiring right now.
I think at the beginning stage you should store the data. Maybe that's what he's asking. What data to collect.
Wow, I hadn't thought about prefetching. Interesting territory.
I suspect that the process of pursuing and attaining power would change engineer types into what they detested. You cannot win the game without becoming a player. Unless the game (society itself) changes to favour those who do not desire power. I consider that an extremely unlikely scenario.
vaksel,

We're talking about startups that are launched and continuously iterating to find the right model. We only spoke about A/B testing once, when starting out tracking user engagement and responses is more crucial then building out every feature that would pop in your head with no empirical evidence to back it up.

I would never consider learning about your customers "a waste of time."
Volt will be out first, and Tesla could be gone before they are ever able to ship even 1 of these.

2.5 years from now when/if this thing actually surfaces we'll have lots of hybrid/electric choices.
Webapp scalability
While researching about the scalability of the Wicket framework, I came across what seems like a widespread myth. In a couple of mailinglists and forums people were basically saying: "Scalability is basically limited by how much data is stored in a session. But memory is cheap, so don't worry". Sad, that this just slightly misses the point.
Friendster didn't fall from grace due to disruptive innovations, it fell due to disagreements between the founders and the investors.