skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a fascinating topic (HTML5 allowing web apps on phones and similar devices to become richer and provide an alternative installation route than the App stores controlled by platform owners) but this article is vague, desperately seeking conflict, and has a troll-y headline.
Stack Overflow Voting Pattern Analysis
Why Java Doesn't Need Operator Overloading (and Very Few Languages Do, Really)
I didn't throw out a # other than a 25% wag, but there are several outstanding questions. If they had a 4 month head start (11 months in versus the poster's 7 months) that'd give them 37.5% each to his 25%. But, as I said, there are lots of other factors to consider in the buckets of "contribution" and "risk". For all I know, the third founder might have a TON more to contribute and deserve MORE than a third!

In general, though-- I think people attach a lot of emotional weight to "I had the idea" and "I've been working at this a few months before you came on board" (UNLESS that few months reduced the risk-- i.e. customer acquisition/validation reduces a lot of risk while futzing with code for a few months really doesn't). In 5+ years, the idea is going to change and that original few months of contribution is going to be pretty meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

Regardless, the contribution in the FUTURE is likely what's going to matter most... Which is why vesting is important.
I belatedly came to think that it's just about different definitions of the word "fun". I do find programming work satisfying, I think. Solving problems, making things work, making incremental progress, seeing the pieces come together. It's very satisfying.

It just doesn't fit any definition of "fun" that I subscribe to, which kind of rings of "whimsical enjoyment". I mean, it's like a doctor, perhaps. I have known several doctors and surgeons, and they all seemed to find their work incredibly satisfying. Saving people's lives, putting them back together, telling them what's wrong with them and helping them fix it - there is a deep, virtuous satisfaction they feel in doing their jobs and doing them well. But would a surgeon describe a successful operation as "fun"?

I fully agree with you that the process and work is the whole point, really. I like my work, obviously, else I'd find something else to do! It's just not what I would call fun. I should have just written that originally, but a few hours to reflect helped in clarifying and solidifying the original impulse.
http://TwitterGrep.com
My point is that what is an acceptable "stretching of the truth" is culturally relative. Also, I'm not speaking to what companies try to get away with, but rather the public reaction if they get caught.

I.e. is it "cool, those guys are smart and they're bucking the system" or is it "these guys are slimy and I never want to do business with them."

Again, I'm not condoning unethical behavior, nor am I so naive to believe that it isn't widespread. I'm just stating that what is a "nudge-nudge-wink-wink-everyone-does-it" infraction versus what is a "omg, you lying bastards" is culturally relative.

The OP's example falls into the "lying bastards" category for me, and for most of the companies I've worked for.
I might be wrong, but I don't think any of these 3 "rules" are formal rules of grammar. They're guidelines to be followed most of the time but broken when appropriate. The split-infinitive snobbery comes from Latin, in which infinitives are one word and can't be split, but it doesn't make sense for English (although infinitives should be split rarely).
Coding Horror: Death to the Space Infidels
I don't like this, but then again, the language sorely needs one, and doesn't have one right now.
A RSS feed reader, pre-filled with top 1000 feeds covering various topics, from news to technology to gossip! I'd get the alien to spend the first half of his time reading these feeds, and the latter half I'd show him Google.com and ask him to find out what he doesn't even know he could have found out about! A trip to the urban jungle (Manhattan) and a trip to a natural area, and the being would be all set! :)
A simple, pure Ruby reactor library
http://oldmoe.blogspot.com/2009/04/fast-simple-pure-ruby-reactor-library.html
Try phone interview at google to get that "really dumb" feeling after an hour of answering tricky questions - all of which are real easy when relaxed, but not when there is an "invisible interviewer" waiting on the other end.
Okay, that's a good answer: I was focused on the App Engine part, whereas the real exciting news is the Quercus part!
I love debugging...I even [sometimes] love debugging other people's code...

Its a bit like being a kid, and going out exploring in the woods, or trying to figure out where your parents hid the christmas presents. Everything is new, and shiny (with other's code)...its fun seeing how other people do things...

That and it is a puzzle. Doing stuff in the "real world" is boring, predictable. Doing stuff in code is fun. There are no "rules" really. The only limitation is how much yerba matte I can consume.
Actually, I agree with you. I enjoy the process too. I was just trying to make sense of sho's post. Why would (s)he be coding in his spare time if (s)he so doesn't take some pleasure in the mechanics of it?
Total US Debt so far: $301 Trillion dollars. $1.0M per person
all with the latest data

9.8T in bailouts
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aGq2B3XeGKok

11T in government debts
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

17T in corporate debts
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/business/economy/04charts.html?em

1T in credit card debts
http://www.opposingviews.com/articles/opinion-americans-1-trillion-in-cr...

11T in mortgages
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aGq2B3XeGKok

52T in social security/medicare obligations
http://www.bio-medicine.org/medicine-news-1/Medicare--Social-Security-Ow...

Like other government trust funds (highway, unemployment insurance and
so forth), the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds exist purely
for accounting purposes: to keep track of surpluses and deficits in
the inflow and outflow of money. The accumulated Social Security
surplus actually consists of paper certificates (non-negotiable bonds)
kept in a filing cabinet in a government office in West Virginia.
These bonds cannot be sold on Wall Street or to foreign investors.
They can only be returned to the Treasury. In essence, they are little
more than IOUs the government writes to itself.
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba616

200T in derivatives in banks
http://www.occ.treas.gov/deriv/deriv.htm

Not including derivatives; 101T. including it, 301T

Can't really pay it off anytime soon....

2.3T budget deficit this year. 10T in the next 10 years.
http://www.cnsnews.com/Public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=45528
The truth about encryption:

http://xkcd.com/538/
Re: the text < http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/last-call-resolution.html >

Funny that after making such a good case for local decisionmaking in this matter, they still...

- limit the change to just 4 'major metopolitan cities': LA, SF, San Jose, and San Diego

- pick a rather arbitrary 3:30a last-call as the latest possible, rather than leaving either earlier or later times to local governments
The Bible (any version. Or Qu'ran, or similar epic religious tome).

The 3rd party viewpoint would be very interesting.
Not quite. Most parts of English fit neatly within the deep logic of natural languages our brains are wired for.
The same can be said about all other natural languages including Latin, which have very different grammar but they all compile the same. Pardon my bad, programming based, metaphors.

However, many languages including English have parts that don't fit. They are rules introduced by fiat. Someone at some point decided that because you can't split infinitives in Latin, you shouldn't do it in English. But our brains are not wired for that. You can just willy-nilly mix C++ and Python.

And here's where things get interesting, any native speaker will be fluent in the natural part of the language, but the rules introduced by fiat are often used to distinguish class and education.

Children learn language simply by listening, but more then that our brains will auto complete! That's how pidgin languages turn into creole languages.

This auto completion feature will lead children to naturally split infinitives in English. And equally naturally never split them if they are native speakers of Latin.

Not splinting infinitives has to be learned in a separate process - school, and relies on a different part of the brain - long term memory.

That's why it's used to show of class and education.

English is not unique in mixing natural and fiat rules. Japanese for example has parts which are natural and honorific constructs introduced by fiat.

People who left Japan as young children, can be fluent in Japanese and yet completely not know the honorific forms, which makes them sound very lacking even though they are fluent in Japanese.
Why do they always say its because of VC/funding. Just tell me how many good startup do you know (from india) those are stop due to loss of funding. Actually the main reason is that there are no genuine effort in production development from india.
Ads on twitter will only make the service profitable if they are in-stream.
>Come on: “to go boldly where no man has gone before” just doesn’t have the same ring to it as “to boldly go.” If it sounds better to split the infinitive, then take an axe to it!

It is likely that "to boldly go" has a "ring to it" because the author has watched hundreds of episodes of Star Trek where the infinitive is split.

To my mind there is nothing inherent about, for instance, the phrase "Man and Wife" that gives it a special ring. Instead it is the ingrained convention of the firstness of men that makes the phrase sound "right."

I am not saying the author is wrong about split infinitives, but the example, "if it sounds good use it," isn't a very good one.
Well you hit the nail on the head there; perhaps it's all about what you define as "fun".

For me, fun is a kind of whimsical enjoyment. For example, I love karaoke and drinking with my friends. That's "fun". Shooting aliens in games is fun. Playing paintball is fun. Taking E and smoking a whole pack of cigarettes while sitting in front of the bass box at a nightclub is so fun it's almost orgasmic.

Programming is satisfying and good and necessary and I proudly describe myself as a programmer, despite perhaps not being all that good at it - but it's not like any of the above things, to me at least. It's not untrammelled enjoyment. It can be frustrating, infuriating even. Satisfying too, of course, but I just question whether extended periods of genuine frustration can be called "fun" - for me they're anything but, despite the overall positivity of the process.

Seems opinions differ, and it may all just come down to definitions.
Some of my best friends are journalists, as is my wife. It's not that they are stupid or out of touch or sloppy. There are three things that hobble them:

To be a professional of journalism is to be an amateur at everything.

Your powers of explanation greatly depend on the explanatory skills of your sources.

Hurry up, deadline's coming... and rewrite it with more punch. Take out all those useless technical details.
Erm, I'd contest this. If you're good at English, and you're a native speaker then this (a high percentage of the time) holds true. But, when native-English speaking people have trouble formulating a full word, then I highly doubt they know when they can and can't break rules like these.
Great post! I spent hours trying to do that this week-end, and I couldn't do it. Thank you!
I would start with world history -- first a book that covers the last few millennia, then specific books on significant events. Next would be a few of Karen Armstrong's books on religion; books such as the New Testament might prove difficult to understand without proper background.

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics would probably be a good starting point for math. I'm not aware of any great texts that provide the same level of broad introduction to science.
Without proper historical context I believe the Bible would be somewhat confusing.
What iPhone Apps Are Used Most? Not Games
I mean, a killer idea is a killer idea, no matter what language you use. It's great and their are inherent advantages to using Lisp, RoR, Django to develop your idea, but at the end of the day, it's a means to an end. Facebook is in PHP. Outside of the internet, most software is still written in Java or C++. There are lot of these startups in the US as well.
Top Facebook Applications See 25% Drop In Traffic Since Redesign
These are rules as much as many others are. You won't go to jail or be a literary outcast, so you're right, like ALL grammar rules, you can break them.

That's why the critique of S&W the other day didn't make any sense. S&W is a book on style.
Fine photography by Edi there.
Won't it look as if it come from @gmail.com instead of @mydomain.com? If so, that isn't ideal.
On Amazon Failure, Meta-Trolls, and Bantown
There's a concept for this called utility. It has nothing to do with how many times you get to play, but rather with how much use you have for the money.

If the $10000 means little to you, you might even take a negative expected value for a chance at a big score (people do this every day with $1 lottery tickets), regardless of how many times you get to play.

Edit: The reason that repeating the game has some allure is that you are changing the game from a low probability of winning a large payout to a higher probability of winning a distribution of payouts computable via the binomial expansion. It also changes the utility equation.
I like solving puzzles based on inherent complexity -- complications that arise in the data structures and algorithms of a piece of code. Any time spent fixing complexity layered onto the minimal complexity by confusing or poorly-factored code sucks.

For example: I enjoy solving a performance issue by introducing a time/space tradeoff. I do _not_ enjoy fixing a bug where a previous coder (maybe me) misspelled a variable name once in a 6000-line function -- that's just cleaning up a mess, not problem solving.
It's just one of the many cosmic jokes of web programming. We have first-class functions, classes, DSLs, modules and mixins. Unfortunately these features are spread out over three separate languages: HTML/Javascript/CSS.
Covering planes with artificial feathers could reduce drag
Unexplained red flashes on the moon's surface
Hi, I'm a writer at TechCrunch. Because many entrepreneurs on this forum are going to eventually be reaching out to bloggers, here are a few tips that are probably better suited for 'new media' rather than traditional press. Note that I haven't conducted any kind of formal survey - these are all tips that make things easier on me, which may or may not be applicable to other bloggers (though I suspect they would be).

-Quotes are lame and I never look at them. They rarely say anything unique and often were never even said by the person being quoted (PR agencies generally just write the quotes and then have the person being attributed 'sign off' on them).

-Don't be afraid of talking about your competitors if it helps describe your product, just don't be overly arrogant.
Example: "We're an aggregation service that scours the web for all of your friends' updates, give you a place to talk about them, and then use location based technology to show you where they are!" could have easily been stated as "We're like FriendFeed, but we use maps too". This isn't a bad thing, and it's much easier for me to figure out what the heck you're actually doing. Just don't go around saying you're the "FriendFeed killer", because I'll immediately think you're full of shit.

-Stats are great if they're from a legitimate source and you can show us what they mean. Don't try to pull up some obscure metric showing you're incredibly popular when Compete, Google Trends, etc. haven't even heard of you. People try this all the time, and we're pretty good at figuring out when you're boosting your ego a bit too much.

-Put together a professional, 3 minute video showing off what your site does (I emphasize showing off - don't just talk about why your startup is great. Show us what it does). Videos are great because they show bloggers what they should be paying attention to as they browse your site instead of having to click around blindly. We can also embed them in posts in the (incredibly unlikely) event that we don't do such a great job describing your startup. And you can post the video on your homepage/help section to introduce new users to the site.
So what? There's still billions out there and the cost of starting a business is getting cheaper every year.
@imported stylesheets have high precedence over <link>ed ones. If you @import a stylesheet it's as if you typed it inline in the <style> block.

AFAIK, that's the only functional difference
I guess the problem to is to do it without human assistance. Do you know any related research on this area? I am actually don't know where to start. And they probably want to design the solution to integrate with google's scale nothing infrastructure.
Crisis Reshaping Wall St. as Stars Begin to Scatter
Could you give an example of a fiat rule that isn't natural for you, personally?
Tying yourself to a warlord to whom you have just given a very unequal advantage is exactly the thing that can keep you alive in a circumstance such as this. Further, nothing wrong with "inventing" the assembly line. With this kind of overpowering technology, you can get the manpower needed to get the other ideas ramped up.

Not the most admirable, of course.

The big thing that is missing is that unless you have studied a language and can precisely direct where you're going, you're going to have trouble speaking with anyone. Everyone seems to forget language in these things...
My current job - I sit next to the marketing manager who spends his day either talking loudly on the phone in German or asking me stupid marketing questions that have no relevance to my job because he can't be bothered to walk across the office and ask the right person.

In addition, behind me is the CEO's office. The wall is glass and everytime I open my web browser to do some research he comes and asks what I'm doing - as far as he's concerned I should be doing nothing but writing code.

Also, to my left is a door to the office balcony where the smokers do their thing, so every five minutes during winter I get an icey blast and the stench of tobbaco when they open the door to go out and again when they come back in.

Finally, directly above my desk is an AC chiller unit that blows cold air down my back from spring to autumn making my hands so cold I can barely type.
An ad network is only as valuable as the CPMs it provides.
Ask HN: Please, review my startup Strawlink (online job screening process)
Hello entrepreneurs,

I would like to ask you guys to review our recently launched project Strawlink - it is a Web service for the online candidate screening process. Our target auditory is mostly small business owners (who need to hire people) and professional recruiters (who hire people all the time).

What exactly Strawlink does can be explained very simple - we facilitate the screening process. Most of you, who were looking for a job, probably went through this process like hundred times! The reason is simple - especially nowadays, when companies receive hundreds (some receive thousands ;-) applicants for single job -- and employer needs to identify top talent fast and easy. And this is what screening is what -- you certainly cannot waste time for "face" interviewing everybody. And Strawlink is for screening of your job applicants.

We tried our scoring mechanism in different companies worldwide, internally, and because it worked out very well we decided to make it as a separate product. This is how Strawlink was born.

Please, all the feedback is very welcome.
You can register here -- http://www.strawlink.com/referrer/hackernews
Currently we will credit accounts of all new registrations, so you would not need to spend any money while trying us out.

I would really love to hear opinions from potential candidates (what do you like and what you don't like if you will be screened with us?) and from small business owners who hire people (what would you like to improve? do you want other pricing plan? anything else?).

Thank you!
Thanks for the compliment! Actually, I'd think it's probably due to writing the article "after the fact", rather than to good writing.

The proper approach to a problem seems so obvious once you know it...
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/churchill.html
What goal do you think the endowment folks should have followed, if not trying to make the most money (at an acceptable level of risk)?
I've started to do this. But it can be so awkward that you have to be subtle about it.
Electronic health records raise doubt
This 'rule' is a very modern invention, IIRC. 'They' was used as the singular indeterminate-gender third person pronoun for quite a while.

Then, someone decided that it was bad, and grammarians rejoiced, despite the awkward construct of he/she or it
How about philosophy. It would be hard for them to get the other stuff(excluding math and science). I don't know if they could get our philosophy either, since the way we think and see the world is very tightly coupled with our psychology, but we can assume that if they got our language(lets call it blubish) they either understand humans to some degree, or are themselves similar to us(or similar enough to understand us).
For me it is the challenge and mental exercise of creating something from thin air which is both elegant and succinct (somewhere between code golf and SICP). I love coming across domains/problems/ideas which truly have not been solved/solved best and conjecturing ways to approach it. Something about that just makes me feel ALIVE and excited - like keeps me up at night and dreaming in syntax excited.

One of my latest projects has been simply an sql -> awk (and other unix tools) parser so I can use sql instead of native awk imperative programming. It took me all of an hour to whip the perl script together but when it was working with inner joins on flat files I was like "woah sweet!". http://aql.googlecode.com
Things You Don’t Know About User IDs That Will Destroy You
I was a little confused when I read the section on the St. Petersburg Lottery, so I looked around to see what it was all about.

In order to find the expected value, you simply multiply the probability of the event by its expected payout. Then to find the total expected value, you sum all of the possible outcomes. So the probability of the first flip being tails (1/2) times the payout ($1), gives the expected value of that flip ($0.50). The rest of the flips follow in a similar way: 2nd (1/4)x($2)=0.50, 3rd (1/8)x($2)=0.50, 4th (1/16)x($4)=0.50, etc.

If you take the sum of these values to an infinite number of flips (.50+.50+.50+...), you end up with an expected value of infinity. On the other hand, even if the bank is ridiculously wealthy [1] (i.e. US GDP), the expected payout is ridiculously small. That, to me, is the crux of the fallacy. It reminds me of the legend of the creator of chess who asked for one grain of rice for the first square of the chessboard, two for the second, four for the third, etc. which becomes greater than the world production of rice after a few dozen squares.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox#Finite_S...
My actual scheme is similar in some ways to what you describe. More complex, because it involves many different types of structures.

Also, my approach is more explicit, I don't "restart a parse" in a general way, as I contemplate each possible change explicitly. This is prohibitive to do by hand for a full grammar, but I'm not doing full C/C++/C# analysis, so it's doable. It also makes the dynamic parser fully incremental.