skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They have been laying off under performing TEAMS. These teams may have some really good people mixed in with the bad, but the good people already had other jobs lined up in other places around the company.
The article says that Android holds 5% of the total of the smartphones market, and iPhone accounts for 50% of the web traffic, but doesn't state its market share.

The title require some adjustment.
The Collapse of the Middle Class
From March, 2007, this is Elizabeth Warren giving a fascinating talk at UC Berkeley. It's one of the best lectures I've seen in quite some time.
Based on what? I see no difference whatsoever.
The 404 and the Onion.
Save yourself a lot of time, trouble and dealing with nasty chemicals and take a look at http://www.apcircuits.com/ or http://www.pcb-pool.com/ppuk/index.html. I've used them both with excellent results.

Other people have also been happy with http://www.expresspcb.com/ which offers free layout software.
Another bullshit argument.

Where's your proof? Counter-examples are easy to find (Look at the Whedon family for example), so you better start shifting your explanation.

And how the hell has the pendulum swung too far? I'll quote OSX's dictionary. Feminism is: the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men.

As far as i'm aware, we still live in an unequal society. Men make more money than women. Women still face discrimination in the work place. Women are not anywhere close to being proportionally represented in government.

So tell me again, where does the pendulum stand?
Ask YC: getting a US bank account for non-US resident.
Hi!

I'm investigating the possibility of opening a US bank account for non-US resident.
Is it possible at all, and if yes, how hard can it be?
Basically I need to have it in order to be able to accept PayPal / Google checkout.
The only way I see right now is:

1) set up an LLC in Delaware,

2) open a corporate bank account for my LLC.

While the first step is quite feasible, the second one is pretty vague. I couldn't find any good information on what it takes to get a bank account for an LLC, especially if I'm not a US-resident.
Does anyone here have experience in it?

Alternatively, if I'm missing something and there's a simpler way to accept PayPal payments,
point me to one.

Thanks,
Kirill

P.S: I'm from Moscow, Russia
What are the advantages of homemade PCB boards over wire-wrap? Is compactness the only advantage?
Neat stuff in there, good finds.
That's not true at all.. transcoding a video and uploading it to a video sharing site is editing the content and misrepresenting it and something it's not. If the quality of the transcode is poor, if the audio quality has been trashed or segments have been pan and scanned, cut-out or otherwise modified, then it's being represented in a manner that the author may not have intended or desired.

Warez releases are often ripped, modified and repackaged in a way that may or may not look or act anything like the original.

Copyright holders have the right to decide when, where and how their work is displayed, consumed and presented, but the public at large don't seem to give a damn anymore.
My guess is that he was bested by an eager spell checker.
what the heck is "rotimi" ?
This is amazing, wish I would have know how to do this before I made my microcomputer board. I ordered mine from 4pcb.com, but making it yourself is pretty sweet. Whenever I do something myself, it adds a lot of extra meaning to what I did.
Actually, the iPhone does NOT generate 50% of US mobile traffic.

http://wapreview.com/blog/?p=3383

The 50% number refers to the Apple device's share of ad requests from smartphones. Smartphones as a group make up 33% of total U.S. ad requests so the iPhone's true share of US mobile web traffic is about 17%. Actually it's somewhat less than that as Ad Mob's iPhone numbers include requests from iPhone applications as well as browsing.

And that's not even considering the severe sample bias in only compiling data from sites that use AdMob's mobile ad service.

This is why blog journalism gets a bad rap -- repeating a claim they read on another site without actually reading the report they linked to.
OK, so sex can encourage falling in love. How is that "lasting emotional harm"?
If not, it's a really weird point to make. :-)

Could be a spell-checker error.
Saw this on 60 Minutes. Not a mention of Windows or IE.anything. Jaw-droppinginly shoddy.

Best part: Ms. Stahl talks to Vint Cerf, who agrees that Bad Things can happen on the Internet, but also says that he's been using the 'Net since it was invented and none of that bad stuff has happened to him. Does Stahl ask him how he accomplished this apparently impossible feat? Of course not!

Meanwhile, much uncritical time is given to Symantec who, surprisingly, paint the Web as the 9th Circle of hell. Go figure.
They also said that paid vacation is a human right. So we know just how rigorous they are in defining the notion of "rights."
Most of the Long New Foundation's seminars are excellent: http://longnow.org/projects/seminars/

The New Yorker Out Loud has its moments: http://www.newyorker.com/online/podcasts/outloud

The Moth' stories are great for passing that subway ride home: http://www.themoth.org/podcast

BBC's From Our Own Correspondent is pretty good too: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts/fooc/

"Open Source Radio" (nothing to do with open source, except hijacking the term to sound "hip") used to be pretty good, but lately it's been like listening to a podcast by Reddit. Still, they might get some sense back (or you might like Reddit): http://www.radioopensource.org/
DZone - Programming links

http://dzone.com/links/
what do you think of http://eucalyptus.cs.ucsb.edu/ ?

It's pretty much just a clone of EC2... but it's open, so just about any VPS provider (such as myself) could provide almost ec2 compatible services.

I wonder if something 'thinner' would be better, though? something that required less cooperation from the hosting providers?
Terence Tao: The "Mozart of Math"
I agree. It's not low-hanging fruit, and I wouldn't recommend a start-up going against them. Google being intimidatingly good deters potential competitors is a competitive advantage (worth remembering for one's own startup...) - but it's also rational for them to be intimidated.

But research, pre-startup, might reveal better search.

However, thinking in terms of Innovator's Dilemma, most search technologies would be "sustaining" technologies, which Google as a well-managed leader could buy, copy, re-discover or invent around and keep their lead. It's so-called "disruptive" technologies that would cause them problems (which aren't dangerous because they're better, but because they're different in their benefits) - but these are a problem for any company. So Google's position is no more tenuous than any other company's.
A more recent commercial site that is using Kepler (via the Sputnik wiki/cms) is the site for the "World of Warcraft Programming" book, created by the book's author. I have updated http://www.keplerproject.org/en/Uses (the current Kepler homepage itself uses Sputnik, too) to reflect that, and link to the Sputnik sightings page.

The big con is that the included batteries have very low wattage-hour. :-) A lot of things that you can take for granted on the big Ruby/Python frameworks you will have to build yourself.

The upside is that once you get the ball rolling it's very easy to deploy, and will run without issues on the most stingy shared hosting (Lua is very CGI-friendly). It can run on any server that supports CGI or FastCGI, and also includes a Lua webserver (single-threaded only at the time, though).
The article seems to be (primarily) framed in the context of a startup gasping for a last breath of air. It seems like this would also be tremendously valuable advice for a company when times are good.

Furthermore, it's thought provoking to consider the beneficiaries of US federal bailout money in this context.
I'm so tempted to get it -- I'm a big clit-mouse fan -- but $80 is kinda pricey.

Still ...
As I expected, it didn't mention the fortitude they had to fend of lawsuits over the copyrighted clips that were prevalent early on. That alone drove a large part of the growth.

On the flip side, a more subtle point that held them back a bit was an overwhelming community sense of _not_ linking to youtube videos in many discussion forums, because it seemed like unnecessary advertising for their brand. That sentiment was short lived due to the soon to be overwhelming benefit of those aforementioned copyrighted hosted clips.
let-me-in
BlogRank v PageRank - The flaw behind the latest approach to blog search
Wikipedia article traffic statistics
Eucalyptus is nice if you like EC2's abstractions, but it's not clear that they're the right ones.
Ask HN: What's a good recurring payment system?
I'm running a mini web host where I host sites for some designers and developers that I know. I'd like to set up a subscription/recurring payment for these sites, as this is the way that these guys prefer to forward the payment from their clients. It should accept debit/credit cards, of course.

So, what do you use for this sort of thing? PayPal? Authorize.net? Something else? Thanks!
Wire wrap creates a huge tangle of wires that is hard to debug. With careful PCB layout, you can create circuits that operate at microwave frequencies due to the lower parasitics.

Wire wrap circuits can't operate at high frequencies. There is too much series inductance and cross-coupling.

Also, chips are increasingly moving towards surface mount only packaging.

By the way, where are you getting your wire wrap supplies? I didn't know they still made wire wrap guns. I don't know anyone who has used one in the last 15 years.
I got that, but is there something that made that a popular password? It seems like too much of a coincidence that so many people use it.
> We'd been talking about sneaking into PyCon and asking around if anyone there would be interested in working on this. It looks like this PDF miner is the start of something that could do this.

Definitely go for it. I doubt the sprints will take any sneaking to get into. Go find the open government guys sprinting Monday/Tuesday, and I bet you could peel someone off to work on this.
He misinterprets Norvig. The author claims that Norvig said:
"it takes about ten years to develop expertise in [a programming language]." The author then goes to say Norvig was wrong, and he explains why.

Norvig really said that it takes ten years to learn programming. There is a difference. Norvig explicitly includes learning half a dozen languages (including one OO language, one functional language, one with macros, one with coroutines, one with parallelism, and so on). Norvig's 10 years is how long it takes to learn all programming. After following his program, you should have expertise in pretty much every major paradigm and style, and be able to pick up any new language quickly.
mhb is right. This may look easy, but is actually a pain in the ass. It is fine for small circuits, like in the example. For big projects, drilling out all the vias or thru-holes is tedious. There are also registration issues and etch time issues.

There is a reason why commercially made prototype circuit boards are so popular.
Yeah, just buy some really old capacitors or transformers and drain that cancer-inducing goodness out.
This is silly. Presumably all the functionality of Blackboard is still available through the website, which schools have been using at least since I was in high school about 8 years ago (has it been that long!?)
Its touched on a little, but I don't think the features like comments and so on were the trigger. Most of the sites that offered video back then all had some funky player that required downloading some codec that only worked half the time. Youtube just worked everywhere thanks to Flash. If they had gone with a less ubiquitous format, even if they had all the other features they mention, I don't think it would be what it is today.

The biggest take away for me from this was just how recent this whole video UGC thing is. Its hard to imagine a world without YouTube now.
I don't think you can assign a lambda expression to a var in C#.
That's also a bit of a misinterpretation - nobody can learn all programming, particularly not in 10 years. Heck, it's basically impossible to keep up with just the programming going on in the Googleplex, because new knowledge is created faster than anyone can learn it. Just keeping up with the new features and best practices for the webserver used on the search property (that's one component of one product) is basically a full-time job.

Rather, 10 years is how long it takes to become an expert in programming. Someone who's base of knowledge is broad and deep enough that he can form new connections between subject areas that advance the state of the art. Basically, the amount of time it takes to do useful, creative, original work.

Expertise in a bunch of programming languages is a necessary but not sufficient part of that. Hell, I know at least half a dozen languages, including OO, functional, macros, coroutines, parallelism, etc. I've been working seriously at being a programmer for about 5 years (plus dabbling with occasional programs since I was 10 - that's another 12 years). But Norvig's definition also includes significant domain knowledge, and having experienced all phases of the lifecycle of a project, and knowing what other people value in code, and fundamental algorithm knowledge, and plenty of other stuff besides languages.
To Do: Climb the Summit of Productivity; Be a Better Person
Fair enough. I think I consider an expert in programming to effectively know all programming. Granted, they don't know everything, but they understand the fundamentals well enough that they can pick up most anything in a few days.
Yes, but there are lots of reasons for underperformance.
Is the geek sailing trend recent, or just something I'm only noticing being out in San Francisco right now? It's coming up in almost every group I hang out with; they've got time shares, they're going to sailing class. Is this what "we" do now?
I have recently started generating all my passwords using a Markov chain script I wrote in Python. They're much more secure and, since they sound very similar to English words, easier to remember than, say, &&364e7forty-two88()l.
> I didn't know they still made wire wrap guns. I don't know anyone who has used one in the last 15 years.

I just use a manual wire-wrap/stripping tool (from digikey.com). I'm a software guy who dabbles in hardware, hence the arcane technology.
Once-secret 'cloud Manifesto' Sees Light of Day
This sounds like typical corporate group-think to me. There are lots of reasons for underperformance. Many of the "bad" people might be great in another group, another company, or doing their own startup.
They are pretty good for that. Honestly, if you didn't want to go through the trouble to get a PCB fabbed by a commercial PCB vendor, wire wrap is a pretty good choice for simple circuits.

When I do that simple stuff like that, I use wires and solder instead of a wire wrap tool. Wire wrap might be a little faster.

If you want to prototype high speed analog/RF circuits without PCBs, take a look at "dirty" or "dead-bug" construction. HAM guys love it for building radios. You assemble your circuit over a piece of bare copper-clad board and solder the pins either directly together or short pieces of wire. People do this with both SMT and thru-hole parts.

Jim Williams has a great tutorial on this technique:
http://www.linear.com/pc/downloadDocument.do?navId=H0,C1,C11...
A startup usually feels that way until the moment the acquirer's check cashes.
Until I read this, I always wondered why the keyboard was called QWERTY. As soon as I saw it on the list, I instantly realized the reason. I feel ignorant.
Still, wouldn't predicting how well somebody likes something form a good basis for running a recommendation engine on top of it? Maybe it is a waste of effort for many scenarios, but if you can do it well, you can still add all sorts of algorithms to pick the best recommedations from the predictions?
I started writing words backwards (among other things). Not as secure but I don't hit myself when cookies expire.
European Papers Find Creative Ways to Thrive
5 Vital Signs of Life
Do-It-Yourself Magazines, Cheaply Slick
PyCon: PyCon 2009 Videos
Get into the semantics and formal methods side of things and you can pretty much "learn" all programming in ten grueling years. Start with lambda calculus, combinators, basic one-step operational semantics to reason about virtual machines, move to large-step operational semantics for the academic hand-waving, taste a little axiomatic logic stuff and proofs, maybe dabble in prolog-type resolution and inference, backward and forward chaining, take a deep breath and study a little syntax theory, mess with turing machines and automata, maybe pickup a little "actual" machine and write a compiler for a clean Algol dialect, say, Scheme (oh no I didn't just call Scheme an Algol dialect!) Yeah, like I was saying, do your first Pascal then do a little Lisp, like Scheme (wtf? didn't I just call scheme an Algol dialect? what is it?)

By now you're pretty much ready to mess with early Lambda papers, but before you start, grab Wilson and read up on Uniprocessor garbage collection techniques. Yeah, you pretty much ignored languages without automatic memory allocation, but you aren't missing much; ones with block structure and no heap allocation can be done with a strict stack discipline, pick up Hennesy and Patterson and play with SPIM, you targeted MIPS in your early pascal compiler right? right? And Algol type languages that need dynamic allocation usually need it for datastructures, and not executable code, so you wont have to worry about closures, again, read up on Wilson and implement that with the Unix brk(2) system call. Big boy! (or girl!)

It's time mess with a few real systems; you look at GCC and it's a mess, you opt for LCC and it's a well documented toy, you get bored with C and discover Common Lisp. Without even trying, you pretty much learned a bunch of scripting languages and tool syntaxes just to get things done. CMUCL keeps you busy for about 2 years during which you realize you're not really done with programming. So you "learn" denotational semantics. No one ever learns denotational semantics, not even Scott and Strachey. As a matter of fact, you didn't even learn lambda calculus when you said you learned earlier. Time for Barendregt! the big yellow book that falls apart in your hand. Worst binding ever. You spend six months in the first two chapters.

By now you have memorized CiteSeer, you have grown an afro and you're pretty much feral. You go back to fuck with combinators and you're side tracked to term-rewriting and all that jazz, stuff wacko British guys come up to milk Red-Brick institutions for grant money. Graph reduction is your next step and by now you're tethered to your last neuron, stretched thin. You're sick to your stomach of all this theory. You think more than you feel, so you go back to the basics and learn yourself mathematics .. but your ten years are almost over and you're still not a programmer. You know everything and nothing. You can hack on machines that haven't been invented yet.

All this hasn't prepared you for a career in web development, and now you're a lamer in SitePoint forums begging people to teach you CSS and Photoshop. The joys of being a startup hacker.

[Edit: inserted line-breaks for the meek]
This is a common question on another forum I participate on. I got tired of answering it so I wrote it up as a blog post:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2007/08/15/banking-for-the-uisv/

Short version: getting a US bank account for a non-US resident is possible and routine.
In the video he touches on several points crucial for a successful startup including believing in your idea when no one does. Paradoxically, unlike many startup founders (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft) who left schools to focus on their business, he chose the opposite course and left business to join graduate school at Stanford just when YouTube was taking off. If he departed because he never expected YouTube to be a runaway hit (a belief augmented by initial hiccups YouTube met with) or if it was genuinely the allure of academia that he couldn’t resist is anybody’s guess. Does he regret having left YouTube in haste?
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Granted, but my point was that you would think they are better at picking under performing teams than under performing individuals. It is much easier to see weakness in aggregate.
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Where do all of you suggest someone to start who is new to programming and interested in web development? I am beginning with Ruby, but would like to know what some of you think. Python would be my second choice.

Any pros/cons in your opinion?
This reads like a core dump -- informative yet dense, verbose, and difficult to parse.
More generally, they say it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at anything. If you were to spend half of each 8 hour working day programming (as opposed to other tasks) for 50 weeks a year, that is 1,000 hours per year -- 10 years! Sounds about right to me.
Whoever designed that homepage needs to be taken out back and shoot. Also a Manifesto isn't 6 pages full of corporate bullshit.
I was gonna come back with "And then someone asks you to write a GUI...", but then I read your punchline. Well played.

The irony is that your post basically describes what I did in college while avoiding my physics homework. I learned Lisp, lambda calculus, Haskell, denotational semantics, SICP, continuations, 4 different ways of implementing continuations, multimethods, a bunch of different garbage collection algorithms, implemented a bunch of Scheme variants, combinator graph reduction, Ocaml, JoCaml and the join calculus, operational transformations, STM, and Erlang. And then I went out into the real world and became a UI programmer. The first thing I've gotta do when I get into work tomorrow is make this nifty JavaScript hack work with IE8.
hm. Do you have other suggestions? I do need to implement something, my current situation is clearly untenable (currently, my provisioning system is a guy named Nick.) and yeah, I don't particularly like EC2's abstractions, but they are a standard that many people know. (and I certainly would like a situation where it's easy for EC2 users to switch between EC2 and myself. As I'm much cheaper, I believe that would be a big win for me. I was here before EC2.)

But yeah, I certainly am interested in other ideas.

what I'm not interested in is coming up with and marking my own API/abstraction layer. Even if I released all the docs, it would be de-facto proprietary. I want to use something that other people use. I want something thought out by people smarter than I am. I'd really like something that my customers alrealdy know how to use. (That's what attracts me to Eucalyptus. EC2 has a rather large customer base, some of whom are price sensitive, and thus who may wish to become my customers.)
Python is more widely used which is a pretty big pro. The semantical differences between the two are pretty arbitrary and not worth debating. One nice thing about Ruby though is it has this great learning IDE available: http://hacketyhack.net/.
I thought kitesurfing was the new geek trend. Read a bunch of articles about a bunch of Google bigwigs taking that up a couple years ago. I'm still too chicken to try it, alas.

Where do people go for sailing class in SF? I sailed in college and am looking to pick it up again...
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