skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I merely said that the content was predictable once you knew the author and venue and contained nothing new for me. Surely that is a valid sentiment?

For sure, it can not constitute an "ad hominem attack" unless you consider saying that people are predictable an "attack". I didn't even say I disagree with the conclusion (though I do).
Mrtoolkit: Simplify the creation of Hadoop Map/Reduce jobs
So the fact that I hold a contrary opinion is being an ass?

No. The fact that you responded snottily makes you an ass. You're allowed to disagree, but it irks me when people get smug over a difference of opinion.
Also affiliate offers
CEOs are like movie directors. Just barely more important than the other cogs in the machine, they have managed to use excellent PR to convince everyone that they're the most important (by far) cog, essentially auteurs, and therefore require not just good compensation, but adoration.
Features are great, but I'd prefer if they focused on stability.
Chrome is lean and for that reason I use it on a daily basis, but it crashes consistently which makes it a pain to use.
But its a constant annoyance which is going to stay for ever. Why not choose a different name? (Or buy the domain, before launching, its going to cost more, the more successful you become.)
Unlikely. I have 2 contacts that did the same thing months ago. I actually thought that this was an already advertised service.
Can you point me to where in the WG3 report it says that? I can't say I've read it carefully, but my impression from the Summary was that there are substantial mitigation measures that are both "market feasible" (comparable ROI of investing the money otherwise) and "society feasible" (meaning it will be a net profit, but if you wanted to maximize profit you'd invest it elsewhere).
But isn't that the case for many websites out there? Just because you wouldn't use something, doesn't mean someone else wouldn't. In this case, it's integrated, saves a step and doesn't require an additional account to be created.

And a ton of people use Twitpic:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitpic.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Deep-Blue-Building-Computer/dp/...

The story behind the building of the Deep Blue chess playing computer.

Great read. Inspirational.
For the record, we do have a way of making clips from videos that you're watching. (Maybe we need to make that feature more prominent...)
"Much of the excitement we get out of our work is that we don't really know what we are doing." -- E. Dijkstra

Indeed, as a scientist and entrepreneur, I have realized that it is deadly to be paralyzed by not knowing what to do.

So Bre Pettis's advice stands.
If you liked this, you should check out Underground by Suelette Dreyfus. It's by far the best book about hackers ever written.

Edit: Oops, already mentioned in this thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=621273
F you
Don't micromanage the developers. Work with them to set goals, get explanation when goals aren't met, and celebrate when they are.

In my experience, developers actually work way more than the 30-40 hours a week they're "in the office" - they are thinking about the problems they're trying to solve when they're at home or when they're laying in bed, etc. You can't think of it as a clocking in / clocking out type of job.
> ...the obtuse hardware design of the G1 (recessed touchscreen?).

What are you talking about? The G1's touchscreen is perfectly flush with the bezel around it.
What living persons he admires.
I read "The Man Who Knew Infinity" - Ramanujan's biography and it was fantastic read.

http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Knew-Infinity-Ramanujan/dp/068...
Do check out recommendations by Amazon, seems like a great set of books.
Beyond that, it also plays into the defense's stated goal of portraying the trial as a ridiculous circus.
> Something consumers have, IMHO, overwhelmingly proven that they do not demand from their cell phones.

I think you are generalising from one case. I'm sure when the Model T ford was the best seller people would have been arguing along similar lines.

> The tech industry if full of people building products for themselves, as opposed to the people they are trying to sell to. This obsession with CPU and RAM specifications, open access, etc, is just a symptom of this.

Time and time again people have predicted that ordinary people will have no use for certain technical features. Right from personal computers through to the internet and mobile phones they have been consistently been proven wrong. Remember Bill Gates 'Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM!'?

Of course most users just want 'better stuff' but thinking that this is going to result from reversion to a unipolar 'Model T' type marketplace is, in my view, mistaken.
Made of 100% Cotton; It's Sales are 99% Ironic
Can someone please tell me at what price one must be selling "Open Table" SaaS service to restaurants (and to how many of them) to receive $59MM in revenue ? How many restaurants are there in San Francisco, Sillicon Valley, entire U.S.A. ?
I think there comes a point where you have to stop using quantitative measures of happiness or suffering and just commend anyone who makes a genuine effort to do something for what they think is right.
Venture Realities: Startup financing news from the frontlines
Apart from his Other idiosyncratic elements 'died' and 'left' of Erdős vocabulary I found the following particularly amusing:

# children were referred to as "epsilons" (because in mathematics, particularly calculus, an arbitrarily small positive quantity is commonly denoted ε);

# to give a mathematical lecture was "to preach" and

# to give an oral exam to a student was "to torture" him/her.
Not quite a book, but I recently read and enjoyed the first essay from Tom Wolfe's Hooking Up - the essay is called "Two Young Men Who Went West" and is about Robert Noyce and William Shockley and the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor.

Tossing it out there because most people wouldn't buy that book looking for a true story tech book, but a little of it is.
Google also broke using the enter key (when using Opera).

Whenever your query does not match one of the suggested alternatives, you now HAVE to use the mouse instead of just pressing enter.

Annoying!
Another one like this thats been live for a couple of weeks now.. http://tinyvid.io - much the same thing.
Agreed, except I have found it pretty tough to figure out EC2. EC2 is fairly impenetrable at first.
Electric current in copper does not travel anywhere near the speed of light. In fact, motherboards using fiber optic buses instead of copper buses may be one solution to the problem you're talking about.
Don't sell 8 O'clock short.

http://shopping.yahoo.com/articles/yshoppingarticles/204/con...

I have this sneaking suspicion that its harvested by third-world leukemia patients, or fertilized with aborted ponies or something else terrible, because it's too good to be true. I live out in the sticks and my coffee options are the grocery store and the gas station. It's not only tastes better, it's half the price of any other whole-bean coffee you can find in a typical grocery store. (I like whole-bean original myself. The Columbian is too sour for me.)
I've (and by that I mean the company I represented) been on the opposite end of this. It sucks. When you are out looking for a product that 400 companies need per year they try to milk you for all your got. $15k is what they quoted me, per year, plus maintenance. Just like that article. Pushed me till I yelped.
Growing fresh air [video]
I do get the point about qualitative vs quantitative. In the case of screen resolution and web browsing I think they come closer than in other cases. Most web pages are design to work on screens of 1024 so presumably this width on a phone would allow you to see the page exactly as intended. Admittedly it would be pretty small but I think of would still be a big advantage.

I'd still like for someone to let me know if you can get WinMo phones in the US? Everything in this whole crazy iPhone saga would start to fall into place for me if that was the case. I can still remember watching that first Jobs speech and wondering what all the fuss was about when the trusty imate sitting in my pocket could already run arbitrary software.
Can someone propose a list of uses for this device?
Especially uses for which this device excels, compared to a standard desktop.
Why is unlocking the doors so late on the list? I would think that instructing the doors to begin unlocking could be done relatively early in the process. Perhaps they meant at that point the doors were completely unlocked.
I'd like to see some correlations between how many users a site has and its longevity, exit, revenue, etc...
This review is for a relatively new book. I prefer the classic(there's a section - flow in sex for the curious.[had to mention as it has been sexytime last couple days here with orgasms and all!].

If you need the classic : http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060920432/
Flow:The Psychology of Optimal Experience

This book is not those personal-help books, instead inspires/motivates you to overcome (hacking pseudocode for the layman); if I may compare - very similar to talk about getting over "the wall" by Randy Pausch, but this book gives more insight 'behind-the-scenes'.
You have obviously never spent much time with a tablet. To each his own, but --

When standing, you anchor the tablet near your elbow joint. It gets tiring after a while, but half hour is no problem. And usually you don't need to hold it for that long. For those who do, there are specialized and/or detachable ones that come in at less than 2kg; the HP TC1100 is very usable for this.

I have been a hybrid user for the last 3 years. I used to own an Intuos. There is no comparison, and I am not looking back. In some cases it brings probably a 10x increase in productivity. Why? Wrist movement vs finger movement, indirect visual feedback vs direct visual feedback. In fact, this efficiency has been critical for meeting the deadline for a research project I am on.

I am so tablet-happy that I will use Vista or whateverthecrap M$ sells me so long as it is the most tablet friendly OS (and it is). But I'm waiting for Apple to make one! The Modbook doens't cut it. Expensive as hell and no keyboard all for this "this is what we think is best, eat it" attitude (which, no offense intended, seems to be a very Appley attitude).

Anyhow, a 10" Mac tablet isn't all that appealing to me because it will be quite useless for serious tablet work. But if they have something 12"+ with a stylus, I will buy one the very day it comes out.
Well, they're giving the licences away FOR FREE.
Actually, this raises a good point...they don't own @twitvid. What's to stop Twitter from taking it away and giving it to the Twitvid.com guys and reasoning that Twitvid.io should use @twitvideo?

(yes, I'm aware that people don't own domain names, either)
The actual value of connoisseur-ship can be debated in ANY category, from coffee to beer to audio equipment, ad infinitum. I do think it would be worth it, since being able to discern depth, nuance, and quality is very rewarding. However, what I absolutely hate is arrogant connoisseurs, whether or not they actually know their stuff. You know the guy who asks what you're drinking, and when you say Miller Lite he scoffs and claims that all domestic light beers taste the same, then glances around to see who was impressed. I'm sure the same thing occurs in the coffee world.
It doesn't mention it on that blog post, but the new version of Chrome has 300 bugfixes: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2009/05/speedier-google-chrome-fo...
Does this book cover the business relationship that Tesla had with Westinghouse?

The impression that I got from Empires of Light is that Tesla's "research" needed a lot of "design" by Westinghouse's engineers before they could be turned into practical, working designs.

That makes sense at some level, but I'd love to read other perspectives.
Whoever downvoted: You probably didn't watch long enough. It's not obvious that this ad is interesting until about halfway through.
Los Alamos is still an amazing place. I highly recommend visiting if you ever get the chance.
Please show me cool career sections of tech companies
Hello,

For years (yes, believe it or not), i've been doing my own research and observing the career section of many companies.

A while ago I saw some YC start ups that had really cool / non-mainstream career sections.

One of them is Xoni http://www.xobni.com/about/jobs .

Any other ones please?

Thanks
Which reminds me. The Jargon File could really use an update. Any takers?
Ask HN: How do you get feedback from potential users?
Hi HN, Anyone recommend any service to get feedback on your site from a sample audience within a target demographic?

eg - to test a new product idea or messaging, before we develop it further

How do you do it?
Ouch - nice images though.
I just don't see the appeal of a slab style tablet. It's awkward to handle and has to be docked to use on a desk. Even using one sitting in a chair can be difficult unless you put a leg up and use it as a stand. A dual touchscreen device (folding at the middle) makes a lot more sense. The bottom screen could be used for control -- either a keyboard, or whatever interface device made the most sense for the particular app you were using. Ideally you could fold the device open to a 180 degree angle with little or ho gap between the screens.
> where some sort of training and certification could be substantive, meaningful, and actually benefit the world

The problem is, a lot of the recent issues that have been identified have come from people who are probably qualified to write the training courses, and yet they still make mistakes. For example, OpenID still had a hole, even though it's been debated ad nauseum for years on mailing lists around the world by some of the top people in the field. This isn't like building a bridge where you just follow some well understood design principles and the bridge doesn't fall down. We probably just have to admit that this problem is hard (really hard) and there's no amount of rote learning, training or certification that prepares you for the inventiveness and creativity of the people who want to hack your system. The best solution seems to be complete transparency, eternal vigilance, maximum communication and shared experience.

edit: I'm not saying training isn't important for anyone doing this stuff - just that making it mandatory probably won't change much over what we have now.
Integration as a differentiator doesn't seem to be enough of of a drawn in this context. Friendfeed integrates with other sites that do all of this, and more, as long as they have RSS feeds, and people still use the likes of twitter. With Friendfeed you get to pick which services you want to you use to, say, manage photos, be that flickr, or picassa, or even FF itself.

There must be some advantage to the marketing of these kinds of "add on services" to simple things like twitter that draw people to them; either that or twitter is so stupid simplistic (and they keep removing features) that the market is drawn to add features that the core developers have no interest in maintaining.
Google Research Blog: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken [2006]
I said this shortly after on Twitter, but I was not at all satisfied with the answer I got from him when I asked if WineLibrary TV had turned into sales for Wine Library. I don't buy that he doesn't give a fuck at all.

I do believe that he's building a global brand, but he's only tangentially helping Wine Library. More than that, he's building the Gary Vaynerchuk brand, which is admirable, but does me no good when I'm trying to show people who don't "get" the internet that you can actually help the sales of a brick-and-mortar business by becoming a big name on the web.

I like Gary, but he did dodge my question.

Rachael Osborn
One factor is that future money is worth less.
Search is a particularly disruptive technology. Traditional search engines, e.g. Google, have made searching for certain types of information phenomenally effective. This has resulted in interesting privacy ramifications ("Google-stalking") and issues with research (easy access to bad information).

Wolfram|Alpha works by way of a new search paradigm: rather than simple data-mining it seeks to construct /new/ information based on a query. What do you foresee as the social consequences of a computational search engine?
WAAS Up?
That's exactly what they are saying. The original point was that you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. Someone ventured Gates as a possible exception, but if you look solely at Gates the businessman, he follows the rule too. I'm not sure who you're disagreeing with here.
I would think he means stretching your limits.
MySQL forked beyond repair?
Good God get a hold of your self man.
A number of Gates foundation efforts are toward decreasing the misery of those children. I've also been impressed by the large number of micro-grants given to researchers for far out ideas. That kind of charity takes a page out of the positive Black Swan theory -- if you play a lot of small bets in a field where some random finding has a huge impact, you're maximizing your upside. Your comment makes it sound like the Gates foundation is just setting up food kitchens.
I threw Chrome 2 on my Windows 7 VM for the heck of it, and all I need to say is -- holy crap, it feels like I got a new computer. JavaScript-heavy sites simply have... "the snappy" now.

At first I thought it might just be perception, so I decided to run the SunSpider benchmark against everything I have installed.

* Chrome 2 (Windows 7 on VMWare Fusion, 1CPU): 915ms

* Safari 4 Beta (OS X 10.5.7, 2 CPU): 1304ms

* Firefox 3.5 Beta (OS X 10.5.7, 2 CPU): 1497ms

* Firefox 3.0 (Windows 7 on VMWare Fusion, 1 CPU): 3784ms

* Internet Explorer 8 (Windows 7 on VMWare Fusion, 1 CPU): 7124ms

Stability issues do exist, granted I've run into them with every beta browser I have installed (Safari 4 crashed for the first time today, Firefox 3.5 has bombed out twice I think). Once the OS X version matures, it'll be a huge incentive to switch, although the lack of a dedicated search bar (and support for search providers a la Firefox) is something I'd sorely miss.
The worst thing about it is that the interface lag problems seem to have gotten significantly worse since launch. I've even tried re-installing the firmware, backing up only my contacts, but it now seems common to wait sometimes as long as 7-10 seconds for an app to load, or up to experience up to around a five second lag in keyboard input, especially in search boxes in Safari and YouTube.
Just the word "zillionaires." I don't think (and, um, I have some inside knowledge) that either of them have made all that much money. Especially for northern California. Tim Ferris wrote a book, mostly, which is pretty notorious for being not very rewarding.
Yes, that's pretty much what the author of the linked article said -- did you read it?

Personally, I think Al Gore's a pretty smart guy and if he just wanted to get rich, there are easier ways...

But sure, lets agree that both sides have something to gain and move on. This silliness about the "Big Green" lobby is distracting from a meaningful discussion about global warming and how seriously to take it.
Maybe the doors are stronger when locked.
extjs is a library and Objective-J is a new language. It is different in many respects. extjs might be good library to have with existing frameworks but if you are building something really complex UI on the web you are better off with Cappuccino.
Ok... I'm still against it. Do I win a prize?

I think it generates relatively expensive energy and creates an undue amount of risk for harm to people and the environment. If we're going to build new government-subsidized power plants, I'd prefer solar or wind.
Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date

Bob Cringely

(This book gets mentioned in Founders At Work... I think one of the Lycos guys had read it?)
Screen Sharing and Desktop Sharing Software
LiveLOOK is a web-based, instant screen sharing service designed to make online meetings and interaction easy. LiveLOOK is one of the few cross-platform instant screen sharing tools on the market, allowing subscribers to host or join online meetings from PCs, Macs or Linux.
Agreed, I've seen that video and I sent it around like crazy. It's important to know what you're up against especially when your innocent.
The compost started out as food; I don't see why it ought not become food again. By the time it comes out the end of the system, it's seriously just like dirt.
His Atlas of Simple Programs has excited me since I first heard mention of it. Now with Mathematica 7 and Alpha out, will there be a little more free time to take the Atlas to the next level?
Blackboard is a classic example of a product with a long list of desirable features that looks great on paper and to the kind of bureaucrats who make purchasing decisions. Unfortunately all the features are implemented so terribly that it's a constant battle to actually use the thing and becomes almost worthless.
Terrible latency, though.
I don't think that will solve the problem. Why should a book reader with access to Project Gutenberg carry the burden of an adults-only application? And doesn't that kind of prudery render the explicit tag meaningless to parents? The only thing it does is covers Apple's ass^Wbackside.
And for those who don't care for a browser that phones home with your browsing habits, Iron is up to date:

http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_download.php
A Google developer who works on Chrome posted some interesting information on Shacknews: http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?id=19972940#item_19972940

"We continue to work on our own extensions framework. There's still a lot to do for "version 1" but it's progressing fast. Extension auto-update is just starting to land so you won't have to manually remove/re-install extensions to update them (yay).

Mac and Linux are also progressing fast. I can't say when we hope to start getting alpha-quality versions into the Dev channel but we're hoping for Real Soon Now. They're still obviously rough but the teams are pushing them forward fast."
connections - this is the yc mafia
Sounds like dueling bureaucracies. There is also the LORAN system, which was resurrected a few years back and is reportedly now on the chopping block again. Even if the GAO's dire predictions aren't true it would probably be wise to have a redundant system in place. Shipping also depends heavily on GPS, now that it has been certified as a primary navigation tool.
What about things that don't stay DONE? (i.e., what about entropy?)

This may be a case of productivity porn. (a common gtd-related term)
Gosh, I hope that you're trolling. Otherwise, that's a very lonely and unhappy way to view the world. It's also an incredible misinterpretation of modern philanthropy.

Charitable organizations like the Gates foundation aren't interested in quick "band-aid" fixes, for exactly the problem you raised. They're interested in long-term sustainable programs that don't just help today, but also improve life for future generations.

A good example is malaria eradication. The Gates foundation has targeted malaria for complete destruction on a global scale. This means assisting current victims, yes. However, if they meet their goal even partially, the lives of future generations will be improved. Permanently.

A good anecdote about Bill Gates is when Douglas Adams went to solicit funds for a Mountain Gorilla conservation program. Gates asked how much it would cost. Adams started giving him estimates for the first year, and then Gates cut him off. He said, "No. How much to solve the Mountain Gorilla problem. Forever."

That's the current attitude. If it doesn't work past the current generation, it's probably not worth doing. We've acknowledged that, and have moved on.
I'm still young at less than 50 :) but the journey is becoming much more enjoyable and important to me than just knocking out another destination...