skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've conducted tests on similar questions for my day job, and having the arrow consistently in a predictable position proved to be far superior.

Sorry, I can't provide hard data as it's company confidential, but consistency of position has become one of the main design driving forces, so clear was the evidence.

I would be interested in knowing why you claim to be indifferent to it. My tests showed people thought it didn't matter, but their actions were significantly more efficient. Some didn't believe the results, even when shown the measurements.

Why do you think you are indifferent?
[video] Book 1: Solaris 10 Patching Philosophy
Computer music: a bastion of interactive visual dataflow languages
smart pricing also factors in conversion rate for the end business. a lot of the businesses which use Google Adwords also use Google Analytics for conversion tracking. and when Analytics has data on a particular domain sending traffic from Adsense blocks, it will regulate pricing based on that.
As others have pointed out, if you take away the oil, Norway's economy is crap. The infrastructure sucks, there aren't really any other industries to speak of, taxes are very high and the incentives for someone to start a business there are appallingly low.
LG KP199 Unlocked
The unlocked LG HP199 (unlocked) triband gsm world phone is a candybar phone that meets the very basic needs of cell phone interaction. As an entry-level handset the phone performs admirably and doesn’t fall into the category of devices that are made cheaply and meant to be disposed of after use.
What testing have you done on this hypothesis?
I like to read more than just the title before I decide whether or not to vote. When I get back, the left is easier because I don't have to read the title again.
There's no technical reason that printing couldn't have existed 2000 years ago. (Ok, it did exist in China but not in Europe anyway.) Apart from technologies there's also social demand and historical necessity. I don't think Flickr and YouTube would've been appreciated and would've challanged traditional media in 1997.
It's interesting you should say that because I've often considered Smalltalk/80 as the last point we were headed in the right direction.

I've spent a long time (a decade, yikes) with some Ph.D students doing research on the trajectory I think it should have taken.
More Americans “Pro-Life” Than “Pro-Choice” for First Time
One of the green stories of HN hits the mainstream media.

Their answer is no, we don't need vc's and angels anymore.

When saying this on HN your karma will be heavily dropped ... I would like to know the latest opinion of YC about this issue.

Since it is very cheap to start a web business, and since there is no more marketing as usual in this segment (a good idea hits the mainstream immediately) how angel investors see their future?
Unfortunately you can only create a view from the
original data, there is no way to create views whose
input is other views. This means that you cannot do
anything really interesting with values from multiple
documents. You can aggregate data from several documents
using the reduce functionality into buckets, but you
can't process that data further.

I've come to this idea also - when we do get it the world changes. New era for hackers. We will be able to operate against a couchdb cloud from a console-in-a-browser with the power of (and as a full alternative to) a unix system, and to think in terms of that cloud rather than in terms of services. The barrier between code and data will be much more blurred in practical terms because the cloud will host the services.

Another idea that couchdb already does that is a necessary pre-requisite to this outcome (from http://jchrisa.net/drl/_design/sofa/_show/post/standalone_ap...):

Over the last few days I've polished up my
notion that CouchDB can be a perfectly viable
application host, all on its own, without any
3rd tier between database and client. That
is, CouchDB is capable of serving standalone
applications. These standalone CouchDB
applications can be deployed to any working
CouchDB node and used from any browser.

I wish couch was based on IO rather than javascript, because with IO you can reverse algorithms out of running code. Hence processes could act as datasources if the VM was like IO. See http://hackety.org/2008/01/05/ioHasAVeryCleanMirror.html
I doubt they can beat the cash cow of

* making a profit on all hardware sold
* taking a cut on every copy of every game sold, at essentially zero cost to them

The only comparable business is Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch ecosystem. The other console manufacturers cross-finance the hardware with game sales.
no, the idea should be in a static place if you expect people to interact with it.
First off, "legal" is pretty fluid; I can find a jurisdiction that allows me to do whatever I want with personal information.

The GPL seems to work regardless. It works because it is respected by and large by the programmer community, and because most of the relevant places respect the relevant laws.

Second, once someone has a copy of personal information in an unencrypted format, the source becomes very difficult to identify (unless everyone gets a customized copy, as you point out for email;

A "Trusted Computing Environment" would ensure that only the trusted environment would ever get a copy.

I used a scheme like this to track who was selling my email to spammers from 1998 for a few years, but it didn't do me any good to find out, and it was a bit of trouble to keep up with).

If it was implemented as a protocol and integrated in the browser, the user would only have to see "Received at address send to X" and the rest could happen automatically.

I'm not suggesting that there's any social inevitability, here, except as a result of a technological one.

But printing kept on getting more efficient throughout the Industrial Revolution. The cost of transcription was a relative non-issue. The technology trended in a direction that would indicate more copying. Yet it came to pass that there was less copying of books and that it wasn't as acceptable. Why?
Creative Brief for the new Firefox icon
I think you're missing the point: there's no "wrong kind." There's no way for a non-US Citizen with $65k in the bank to legally come start his or her business in this country, even though its (relatively) easy for people to slip across either border. It's not a matter of "oops, I accidentally applied for the investor visa, I should've picked up the startup-founder visa instead."

PG has written about this idea here: http://www.paulgraham.com/foundervisa.html
I think this is because you have showdead set to "yes". Go to your profile and turn it off.
Valve own Steam, and take a cut on every game sold on their platform without having to sell any hardware.
SchoolTool - OpenSource School Administration From The Shuttleworth Foundation
I think the question is how does this happen, and why don't these ghosts know they are dead? It is very 6th Sense.

"I see dead people. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead."
Although it's nice to see these numbers, I'm a bit sceptic and think one should not over-interpret them.

Reason: Who says this is a systematical effect due to their organizational strucuture? I know I'm being picky now, but you could also be the leader in this table if you were selling half of your assets in one year.
Yea , No one seems to do that,because everyone seems to be hell bent on being abused and mistreated by American Redtape without actually evaluating the real benefits .
A little googling puts Craigslist at 81 million in revenue. I don't know how much of that disappears into serving 9 billion page views a month and the payment on their Victorian mansion in San Francisco, but before that at 24 employees they're over $3 million.
MongoDB shows promise.
Can you link to examples?
Maybe there is a way to get the best of both worlds : Not having ads on day one AND getting users ready to expect them.

Why not reserve some space for ads here and there from day one, but fill them with ad-looking text (à la google ads) about this or that feature of your own app?
Then, a month later, replace those ads with real ones.
‘Gumblar’ spreads across web, becomes one of the most successful malware attacks
People often forget this part of what Gordon Moore said. Perhaps the final barrier will not be technological, but economic in nature? (Reminds me of issues with access to space.)
Fist of all, I must thank all who have taken the time to read and/or comment on my post.

However, the fact that US (or more specifically, Silicon Valley) has given birth to more successful high tech companies per square mile than has anywhere else in the world is not incidental.

Being able to grow a startup in the fertile land of Silicon Valley means closer access to a wide array of different classes of investors, world-class peer entrepreneurs/technologists, and active and mature users, all of which are big advantages over startups elsewhere -- even with the high cost of living taken into consideration.

After all, it's like telling a minority student who was rejected by a top university for (disputablely) unfair reasons that she doesn't need to go to college to succeed, sure the statement could be true -- just unfortunately not statistically.
Google's Rich Snippets and the Semantic Web
Class-Action Suit Against Google Cites Trademarks as Search Terms
One point that that the article didn't mention, is that a very large fraction of Apple's employees are retail staff. I'd be curious to see how Apple's profit per employee measures up against Best Buy or Wal-Mart.
Deliberate practice needs to be grueling? I guess I've been doing it wrong.
I used to have a hard time trying to concentrate at work. I would work for 9 hours a day but not get so much work done as I expect. So I kept looking for ways to fix it: stay away from the internet, track time working vs resting in minutes (like 50min work/10min rest), etc.

It ends up it wasn't that much my fault. I worked on a pretty crowded office with lots of noise and where people would interrupt you multiple times. I'd get multiple emails in a day (multiple like 15, I've worked in places where you get 100s), and we'd have numerous meetings which weren't important.

It all changed when I changed jobs. I've been working from home now: its all silent, I dont get any emails, only work 7 hours/day, and no meetings except the morning scrum, which hardly takes 5 minutes.

When I spend time on the internet it hardly takes more than 10 minutes. I never have any issues going back to work, and get a lot done each day.

So instead of focusing on self discipline, turning of internet, etc, I'd say focus on your working environment and project. That was the game changer for me, not internet, not self discipline, not 'get it done already'.
The rebirth of the news business: Tossed by a gale
One problem with Eve Online a few years back, was that they chose to organize servers by star system. In other words, loads were distributed by named location. (Which was why certain populous systems like Jita often lagged.) Also, this distribution was static and didn't adapt to changing situations. (Like roving fleets of 200 ships.)

Processor load should be distributed by population and user activity. The unit of processing should not be named locations. Aggregations of players should be the basis for the units of processing. With a space game like Eve, this is easy. When people form a fleet or a squadron, the squadron's frame of reference becomes a "locale." When two fleets merge, two locales merge. This would be an inherently dynamic load distribution system. The merging operation could be disguised with "warp-in" effects. You could even have a locale moved from server to server, and this could be covered for as a "warp storm" where both sides are effected.
But it should be...
The real question IMHO is neither "Is this software perfect" nor "Did it function correctly?", it is "is the software quality sufficient for the risks associated with failure?"

What are the bad events resulting from failure? I see mainly people being wrongly punished (and suing) and people wrongly not being removed from of their cars when actually drunk.

On the other hand, the source reports "incomplete verification of design, and incomplete “white box” and “black box” testing". That sounds like the "well it mostly works I guess" level. To me, that's insufficient.
DAINIK BHASKAR TV - Free Article Diretory Submissions
Two things about E-2:
- substantial investment. Looking over the net it seems 'substantial' means at least $200k
- 50% of ownership lies outside USA
- Candidate leaves USA at the end of business

I am not sure a start up entrepreneur would be interested or can afford 2 & 3
Vittorio Colao's ambitious plan for Vodafone
The more of these "software hipsters" that fail to understand CouchDB and quickly abandon it, the better. Wish I had more to say about this article, but that's about it.

edit: in case it's not clear, I like couchdb a lot and I think it's absurd that people people are backlashing against it because some monkey coder dorks found it highly buzzword compliant and are making it popular, despite not understanding it at all. So you end up with people hating something because it's getting some limelight for whatever reason, and then also many of the people championing it don't know how to use it correctly to build an app or anything. It's like two layers of stupid.
Hackers 'destroy' flight sim site
IPhone 3.0 betaphiles upset the Apple cart
if Wolfram Alpha gives you that information quickly

Scaling will be a problem. It's doing more work than google, but without their datacentres, parallelization techniques or incremental experience. Being fast was at least half of google's success. (I agree it's not competing with google; it's just an example of scaling well.)

But, on Google, did you know they acquired http://www.gapminder.com ? And, if they get mobilized, why couldn't they follow where Wolfram has led - but with faster results?
"A software firm must write several versions of its applications for different platforms, for example, and the owner of a particular handset is usually restricted to a particular platform. Mr Colao’s other chart, titled “Tomorrow: One relationship”, is centred on a big, red box labelled “Vodafone Services”. This is an über-platform that would allow programmers to write an application which could then run on other platforms, and would also provide essential sub-services, such as determining a user’s location and, most importantly, charging for downloads. Mr Colao promises not to be “too greedy”: Vodafone intends to pass on 70% of revenues to developers, the same share as Apple does."

Ok - but how does he propose to do that?
> The answer to that question is "I don't know -- there is data missing", so the database returns Null.

There is no way I'd give that answer to my boss (via dashboard reports or in person) Even though he asked me what the Sales in August were, my answer would have to be $123456 + Missing Sales Staff (which has 12-month rolling of $789) so estimated Sales in August is $123456 + $789. Null does not work in real-world and a computer that says "I don't know" is not a useful computer.

I'm definitely in the minority here but personally I think databases would be a lot easier if Null=empty string/0/0D/False or any init value set for a field. I've been coding for 15 years now and have not once used Null in a positive, useful way. The only time I care about Nulls is in WHERE (field='' OR field IS NULL). I would rather it treat nulls like empty strings etc. because then I only have to check for field=''. Nulls in every real-world app I've used mean the same as empty string/false etc.

Customer name isn't entered in the system yet? That's not allowed so system will not create the record. Has customer been set as type 'Active'? We don't know? Then they're not active. Do they have multiple shipping addresses? 0 rows in the customer-ship table? That means no, they don't have multiple shipping addresses as of right now. The worst is having a null in a boolean field. That's not boolean, that's a ternary! I either want a TRUE or a FALSE in a boolean field. Null doesn't make sense. Is employee salaried or not? Null is not allowed in that field. The user-interface will not accept a blank or null. It will be a radio button 'Yes' or 'No'. There is no way a Null can be set for that field.

I can totally understand nulls in C/C++ with pointers etc. That makes complete sense and I'd be a fool to argue against the need for nulls there. But for databases where a field value is missing, it's just extra work instead of any benefits. I don't see why I'd ever need a Null. It's not like I'm using weird hacks to do whatever null is supposed to do. I'm just saying all I ever get from null is extra code on my end yet I get no benefits of detecting that something is null.
Just consider it as hexadecimal.
The content for these placeholder ads would need to be very carefully chosen to avoid misleading users when you switch over to actual ads (so they don't still think that's data about your service)
Please don't conflate Ruby and Rails.
I'm not sure why you are opposed to the 1GB of storage, a book is fairly small.

My to-read folder on this computer has 248 pdfs in it most of which are academic papers a few (maybe 10 or so) are books. Even a 500 page imagescan of a book is 63 megs.

I found a bibliography of cryptography on a university page (I think it was MIT or Berkley) a while back which was 700mb over about 2 728 pdfs large.

I wouldn't be so worried about 1GB, the amount of dead trees you can fit on there will keep you busy for months. Unless I guess you want to have massive amounts of audio books but then I'd wonder why you wouldn't just get an iPod instead.
Nationwide Mobile App: Simplify the Auto Insurance Claims Process
I love the idea of interactive learning (between students), after getting a lecture+project broadcast. Syntax is a killer for new programs, things just don't work and weird errors sprout up (newer languages have fantastic IDEs to minimize this impact).

Ideally it'd be groovy if teachers could get paid to build some functional (simple?) tools with their classes. Students could learn and produce at the same time, but in a limited/structured way. Professors do this type of research with grad students all the time. Companies do this type of thing with new employees all the time (mentor + noobs).

Brings back memories of my first college coding project. Getting true basic to identify harmonics within a metal rod, and displaying info about the structure (thanks to Bjorn Einerson for doing the heavy lifting that weekend). About the same time I was cursing (syntax) at my green and back CRT in the main library while coding up a simple 6 node neural net in C (backpropagation).
For a 30 years old company Microsoft is still pretty impressive.
Presumably mods kill them, and if they knew they were dead they might respawn.

If people are getting killed for no good reason, that sounds like moderator abuse. But I'm skeptical; I have showdead on myself and haven't seen anything that seemed like it was wrongly killed.
Perhaps we'll get a big shift towards more ARM processors soon? "Performance per watt" was big in Jobs' pitch of the move from Power PC to Intel Core.

The 8086 was released in 1978, and 31-year-old bytecode still runs on Intel's newest x86 chips. The only thing that's stayed more constant for 3 decades is the rotational frequency of disk platters.
Or SPARC!
What I've Been Up To: (Biotech) Risk Analysis
The spirit of your answer is correct, but the code won't quite work the way the problem was stated. allFours should actually be 4444... and the same for allTwos. This way, it doesn't matter whether you keep the high and low bits together as I described or just concatenate the piece indices. Correct choices of the lowBits and highBits masks will handle the difference.
no... it is usually done in a few months.

The usa has this 6 years backlog..
I'm amazed that the numbers are so high.

What does it cover? Do any of them do any significant profit sharing? Google provides lots of creature comforts, are they paid for by the 'profit' or are they some of the costs before profit is calculated?
I would have to go with businessmen first. The advent of the interchangeable part directly contributed to the development of the assembly line, and with it, the emergence of the unskilled or semi-skilled worker, the very antithesis of craftsmen.
You seem to be dismissing the advice in the article -- take big tasks in small bites. Your advice is good but it doesn't cover all situations. Sometimes the work is just a means to an end.

For example currently I'm working on a side project that I'm procrastinating badly on -- the work is tedious and uninteresting. But I need the project to help pay for home renovations that are important to me. I could do the renovations myself (and I've done it before) but you see I can make 2x or more money per hour than I'd pay a skilled professional to work on my house. In the end, while I appreciate your advice it is only applicable for career decisions.
Ask HN: How Should We Treat Each Other Here?
Yesterday there was a absurd post about a guy who would rather be in jail than in college. Instead of flagging it, I thought I'd turn lemons into lemonade by posting a smarta$$ comment, as many of us often do.

Humor is a strange animal on-line, especially in the hacker world. What would obviously be a joke in person can easily be interpreted differently in writing. I have often resorted to using <sarcasm> and </sarcasm> tags, but sometimes forget. Also, hacker humor has an even higher standard. There's a fine line here; too subtle: nobody "gets" it, too obvious: take it to reddit where it belongs. But humor does have its place here. Some of my favorite comments have made me ruin keyboards when I read them while drinking.

I often joke that I feel like I'm in jail working in a cubible in someone else's office instead of my own company, a common theme here. So my response to the "accounting vs. jail" post was 3 words: "What's the difference?" Interesting things happened. In the first half hour, it got 6 up-votes. I imagined fellow hackers in the same situation getting a chuckle. Then I got this response from kyro:

"Your childish, baseless, and condescending comment is actually quite offensive. You'd think someone as old as yourself would know that there's more to life than a job. And you'd think these types of garbage comments wouldn't get upvoted. To be honest, it's not even that witty."

Ouch.

I have a personal rule to not respond to something like that for 24 hours. So I just said something like, "Lighten up," and forgot about it.

24 hours later, I haven't forgetten. kyro, would you have said that to me in person? If not, then please don't say it here. I have bumped into about 25 fellow hn'ers at various events, and couldn't wait to meet them in person. Now I wonder what I'd say if I bumped into kyro (whoever that is) at an event.

I once made the mistake of referring to someone on-line (OP, not a poster here) as a pussy. Big mistake. I still think he was a pussy (he talked about how he needed drugs to make it through school), but I never should had said it. You guys straighened me out in a hurry.

I would suggest everyone remember the site guidelines, which are basically the same as in any kindergarten. Don't say something you wouldn't say in person. If you downvote, add a comment (why?) And most of all, treat others how you would like to be treated. With so much talk about, bits, bytes, and dollars, it's easy to forget that it's always people first.

Oh, and if you have a smarta$$ remark, go for it, but make it clever. After another 300 lines of code, I could use the respite.
U.S. tax rates appear lower but when you combine federal, state, local and property taxes, it is similar to most European nations.

I'm interested in this - do you have any numbers to back this up?