skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two of my favorite topics, entrepreneurship and economics, being discussed by leaders in each respective field.

It's when you get crossovers such as this when you get into the field that Joseph Schumpeter and Clayton Christensen really mainstreamed:
1. "Creative Destruction": The concept of new technologies destroying the older ones.
2. Innovation as the driver of creative destruction.

My only real critique of Y Combinator and Graham's model in general is that it's still very tech/web-oriented. I get the cost and exit benefits, but the noise around this sector has changed people's ideas of startups: Lemonade stands, clothing lines, etc.

Most surprising takeaway is at the end, where once again immigration limitations are shown to stifle economic creativity and growth.
The author mistakes "downloading" for "sharing", and it all goes downhill from there. Based on this and a series of other false assumptions and deductions, he arrives at the conclusion that the award of $675,000 for the plaintiffs is unconstitutional.

This is pretty silly stuff, especially from someone claiming to be a lawyer.
If java has one thing going for it, it's the tooling. Refactoring, eclipses compile errors as you type + quick fixes etc are the only reason to stay in java.

If you program like you are suggesting you lose the only reason to use java, and have to enforce your code using unit tests in a verbose language. No thanks.
Wow, I'm used to journalists getting details wrong, but this is just cringe worthy.
I'm surprised there is not mention of OpenID.
You mean, generally on a php mailing list?

I cannot imagine that somebody with at least rudimentary education in CS would concur with such a judgement.
Not wanting to nitpick, but shouldn't we be apologizing for his persecution, rather than his prosecution? Homosexual sex was illegal at the time, and his prosecution seems fair even if the law was not. Many others fell foul of this law, and to apologize solely to Turing because he was a war hero and a genius of the first order seems rather unjust. I find the story of Turing's subsequent persecution - the inhumane chemical castration and his treatment at the hands of an institutionally bigoted civil service - far more disturbing. Homosexual acts are no longer illegal, but this kind of institutional prejudice and bullying is still very much a problem.
For Windows, Launchy is a great program that allows you to do the search filtering thing for your programs.

http://www.launchy.net/
Same for all searches as well. Documents, actions, programs, email, websites, etc etc.

If you have indexing enabled (client-side for local data and server-side for network shares) it can scour trough gigabytes of data in no speed.

It's obvious that he that said that "Windows is still based on Windows 95 hierarchical menus" haven't really used Windows the last 5 years.
Venezuelans rise up against Hugo Chavez on twitter #freemediave
The statutory damages for copyright infringement were put into place when peer-to-peer infringement was unimaginable. They were clearly intended to dissuade businesses from engaging in wholesale copyright infringement for profit, say by selling pirated movies.

Nonetheless, the law is the law, and I can't foresee even a committed grass-roots effort convincing lawmakers to reduce the statutory damages for willful infringement. The best bet would be to get a high court to determine that willful infringement doesn't apply when there is no profit motive for the infringer.
I can't believe you just blamed the monstrous crimes of a foreign horde on the _right wing_. How much brainwashing did that take? Christ.
My fun stat:

California has had a Republican Governor for over 80% of the last quarter century.
I'd call that a poor excuse. The bodybuilder can name and point to the muscle he's exercising. He doesn't practice by lifting some random heavy object (piano, car, girder) that might not even use the muscle group in question.

When I see education justified with that excuse, I'm tempted to say "OK, replace that with a targeted exercise", because I know the reaction would be horror. Exercise is the way you sell the task to skeptical persons. The actual aim is to require them to learn the capital of Colombia. Just because.

And that is ridiculous.
Napster's fines amounted to a grand total of little more than 1000 songs shared based on this compensation.
I feel this whole issue needs to be explained more clearly. It isn't that these people downloaded the songs that are getting them in trouble. It is the fact that they allowed other people to download them from their shared libraries. If you could get in trouble for downloading illegally, then this person's argument makes sense, but he is comparing apples to oranges!
> Ten years ago you were complaining that you'd never use any of that silly Math they were forcing you to learn.

No, I wasn't. I minored in math.

> Ten years from no I won't be surprised to find you backpacking across Guatemala

And no, I won't. One of the ways to make the pain go by faster was to go to a language school in Mexico. Worse two weeks of my life in recent memory.
Secret History of Silicon Valley 7: We Fought a War You Never Heard Of
TortoiseSVN (which has the ability to merge excel and word docs)

I did not know that! I'm hoping tortoisegit adds it as well.
I'm using Windows the last 15 years. I just deactivated most of the annoying Vista bling bling.
Hey, that can come in handy! I want to get up a bit earlier without using an alarm, so I hope it works!
Overall I enjoyed (and agreed with) the points here, however I have three reservations:

The first is that the big-filtered-list depends on jumping from the mouse to the keyboard and back (if I'm mistaken, the means of using the keyboard exclusively are not obvious enough). This is an expensive jump and should be avoided in most common cases.

The second is that you usually don't know what you are looking for (otherwise you wouldn't have to look, you would just "know" where it is). In this case, textural filtering doesn't help you (although the meta-description idea for searching programs addresses this in the application launching context).

My third reservation has to do with the concept of "most recently used". This implies that the list's contents (or at least their order) is dynamic in nature and this is very destructive to the ability to memorize the location of commands. There is a temporary advantage to the unaccustomed user, but for most "desktop" applications this user is the minority (hopefully) and moving things around punishes the daily user.

Again I want to re-state that I think there are allot of good ideas here and implemented as-is would result in a vastly improved user experience, but I believe with a few of these issues addressed it could improve the current state without introducing new problems.
I wonder what implications would twitter have had it existed back in the coup attempt of 2002
Making Hyperlink Icons with CSS
Who's controlled the legislature?
I accidentally noticed this a few years ago and have been waking up refreshed ever since (prior to this I was consistently groggy in the morning my whole life). I attempt to eat a large breakfast, a normal sized lunch, and then a light healthy snack in the evening if I must. Probably not for everyone but it's worked for me.
$2.50 a word to reprint it, not to read it.

So the answer for me is no, but if I had a way to generate more than that through clever advertising or some other method, then of course it's worth it.
>Wow, talk about missing the point.

No, I didn't. I understand the point of university is to learn. I did a lot of learning on my own. I get that. I'm not some idiot that you make me out to be.

The point is that it took way too much time. The one thing I didn't have enough of and it impacted my future career. The reason I had to take 14 hours is because some decades ago, some inflexible bureaucrat decided that we need to "understand" each other and created this idiotic requirement. Now, in the 21st century, that ideal is becoming irrelevant and of course the language department won't let this change. This, as you can probably tell, has created a lot of resentment.

Let me be clear: We had to take 14 hours because of departmental politics, not some hypocritical ideal about how the university is for learning.

I can't take them at the university because I don't have time now that I'm working. Also, there are somethings that I just need guidance on. So maybe I am a moron. Whatever.
We (Timetric, startup I've cofounded) got data on this from the Newspaper Association of America:

http://byline.timetric.com/2009/06/07/classified-information...
Texas is a model citizen? I have only thing to say to that: oil. Sometimes it seems like Houston doesn't so much have an economy as a local oil-money leak.
That's true, but caveat emptor still applies. Common sense will tell you that they are not in a position to make such a promise unless they can show you the paperwork on a deal with the name of a third party that is willing to hire you provided you pass their program up front.

Anything less than that and you know for sure that there is no such thing as a guaranteed job, especially not in a marketplace that is as variable as the IT market is.
if profit is a bad word to you (go read history) what are you doing on this site?
My only real critique of Y Combinator and Graham's model in general is that it's still very tech/web-oriented. I get the cost and exit benefits, but the noise around this sector has changed people's ideas of startups: Lemonade stands, clothing lines, etc.

Ycombinator is web-oriented, but the model isn't (necessarily). You could have a company similar to YC in any field with low initial overhead and high scalability. Unfortuantely, I can't think of any that can match web software (maybe finance, actually: there are already hedge fund incubators, and they might scale down average funding to scale up the number of people they fund).
Rivals strive to topple Google in quest for the 'perfect search'
Useful Tools Review of Zenbe
That just supports my point. We could achieve the same functionality with a lot less code with source code with a bit more structure.
What purpose would it serve?
either in the weak form of acknowledging that his persecution was wrong, or in the stronger form of apologising for it.
It's easy enough to add. It's just a bunch of hooks that call into word and excel's internal diff and merge stuff.
I'm generalising here from your particular view on state apologies to a more general one about state responsibility. If that's not an accurate appraisal of your view, my apologies; I hope this post will at least spur you to clarify this point.

Disavowing the continuity of the State through time might, perhaps, be a defensible position, but let's be clear as to the ramifications.

To begin with, states shouldn't have to pay the debts incurred by previous governments: those debts were incurred by a totally different set of people, perhaps with wildly different motivations and ideologies.

If a government signs a treaty, then when they lose power, the next government is under no obligation to honour that treaty.

People do, generally, consider that governments must abide by the obligations of their predecessors. They may be wrong to do so, but an argument is surely required as to why we are all wrong when we think that.

An apology might seem like a minor thing, especially when the object of that apology is deceased. We should resist this view. An apology is an admission of guilt and an acknowledgement of moral responsibility: "We did that thing, and we were wrong to do it, and we are sorry for it." An apology is required because the British state, while having a different government and different citizens, is an entity with continuity through time that retains some element of responsibility for its actions in earlier ages. With time, and the change that happens over time, this responsibility may diminish or lapse entirely. But Alan Turing's death is not long in the past, and the spectre of homophobia still lurks within our society. An apology is past due.

From a utilitarian viewpoint, we might argue that apologies better allow people to "not hold those prejudices any more". By apologising for the mistreatment of gays, or ethnic minorities, or colonial subjects, a state sets out a position: this mistreatment is not acceptable. Such apologies endorse a particular social norm, giving it a weight it might not otherwise have had.
Apologies are a way of acknowledging that what has happened was undesirable and wrong. It's also a way of signaling that you will try to prevent it from happening again. Taken from that perspective an apology is useful.

Of course, if the next step after an apology is "getting sued", there's not much incentive to ever acknowledge anything bad...
If you are lucky to be using scala a simple bean he showed is like:

case class Mountain(
val name: String,
val latitude: Int,
val longtitude: Int,
var country: String)

For the above code you get a nice factory like

Mountain('name', 11, 12, 'nowhere')

with hashCode, toString and equals. Plus that you can use this class to decompose it using pattern matching:

mountain match {
case Mountain(name, _, _, country) => println(name + ' located in ' + country)
}

The future is here - it's just not evenly distributed:

http://scala-lang.org
Nice...I've been trying to wake up earlier and get on the same sleep schedule as hubby (I'm a night owl, he's a morning person, constant source of relationship tension). Maybe this will work...although since I don't work well when I'm famished, I'll have to wait until I have a free day to try it.
10 more photos from 2009 worst cubicle in the world contest
As for concrete details about the device itself, the veteran analyst had only one thing to say about his or her hands-on experience: "The machine impresses with its display of hi-def video content. It's better than the average movie experience, when you hold this thing in your hands."

This smells like BS to me.
Fortunately, we live in a legal system where one needs to _prove_ how much damage was done. The RIAA did not, according the the article, demonstrate anything beyond the value of the song, $0.99.
Hm, that is not what I wrote at all. Maybe I can explain it a bit better. These crimes are not by a 'foreign horde' but by children of immigrants with the French nationality. That makes them French, and possibly a French horde but French nonetheless.

The fact that the majority of them are children of foreigners (or can trace their lineage to an immigrant within a few generations) is incidental, there are plenty of children of French citizens that take part in these riots that are not of African descent.

The 'right wing' uses the high incidence of African descent kids in these riots to justify their tough stance on immigration, deportation and so on and they use it to stoke the fires of xenophobia and use it as a platform to blame those kids. All they are doing is to use them as a cynical pathway to power.

Whereas principally it is a problem of French society (and other european countries as well) as a whole that these people - and plenty of them are lily white - think of themselves as totally without any chance to succeed in their society. That is why their anger is directed against property and not against people.

The European right wing parties leave out those not-so-convenient facts because it would work against their interests, which are predominantly based on being anti-islam and anti-foreigner.

Burning a car is a crime, sure. Is it monstrous ? I don't think so, I think it is as much a crime as creating a society that has an underclass this large.

When you push people into a corner you'll get a reaction. Best to create a society where as few people as possible harbour those feelings.
Uh, yes? Here's how I implement salted digests:

my $p = Authen::Passphrase::SaltedDigest->new(
algorithm => "SHA-1",
salt_random => 1,
passphrase => "passphrase",
);
$p->to_rfc2307;

Here's how I implement bcrypt:

my $p = Authen::Passphrase::BlowfishCrypt->new(
cost => 8,
salt_random => 1,
passphrase => "passphrase",
);
$p->to_rfc2307;

I save that $p->to_rfc2307 string to the database. When I want to verify the password, I don't have to worry about the algorithm in use, I just say:

my $p = Authen::Passphrase->from_rfc2307( <whatever> );
$p->check_passphrase("passphrase") # returns true or false

Polymorphism is a wonderful thing. If I started using a salted digest and later wanted to switch to bcrypt, I could easily do that. But of course, I always just start with bcrypt.

(There is other nice stuff, like a passphrase that never returns true from check_passphrase, for disabling accounts; and a subclass that stores the password in cleartext, for debugging.)

I am really shocked that a web framework like Rails requires you to do the salting manually. I wonder how many people, like the Perlmonks folks, got it completely wrong.
If by "much more efficient", you mean "lethally long waiting times for treatment, limited choice and no means to estimate competency of treatment providers", then you are correct.
Well we could stop interfering with biotech and let loose the dogs of war so to speak. Because I would rather have more cures with a slightly higher risk of accidents, then no cures and the same risk of natural borne killers.
FYI they also run namesecure.com, but obscure it pretty well. The interface sucks and the service sucks even more. But it is cheaper than their normal Network Solutions portal.

I switched to namecheap.com instead.
one of the things mentioned towards the end is that they "don't get" the time sink application. that is because they are producers. the internet has made visible the vast unproductive masses. paul doesn't like timesinks because his time is valuable, most people's time is not valuable.
My snarkier side wants this to be tit-for-tat. If she believes her degree is worthless and is seeking reimbursement for tuition, should she also be allowed to retain her diploma?
Ask HN: Inventing a physical product
I have an idea for a product that I think would be useful to a lot of people and based on feedback I've gotten, others seem to agree. Web apps make sense to me, but, how do you do you make an idea for a physical product a reality?

Say, for example, the idea is for a new type of lumbar support device and that I've made makeshift one out of some wood, duct tape, and pillows from my apartment. Now what?

I'm guessing it goes something like this, though I really have no idea: design it on paper... send it off to have it professionally designed... patent it... find a manufacturer that can make it... negotiate with them... buy a couple hundred...sell them on a website...make some entertaining YouTube videos... and profit (hopefully).

Anyone been through this process or something similar to it? Where do you start?
Andy Ihnatko: Damn. I really like Posterous. Now what?
Yes I have heard Mountain View is boring but I am more looking forward to the working part of it. I have several areas to choose from that are more fun e.g. San Francisco. The companies out west are far better for someone like me though.
Convincing you to do it wrong (PHP and unsalted passwords)
Even more interesting, if the stats supported it, could you file a class-action for everyone that attended that school for that year, claiming mass fraud?
Staph bacteria are normal flora. In some circumstances they can become infection, usually if you have a compromised immune system. Due to negligent use of antibiotics, a resistant strain now exists.

The diseases produced in factory farms have the potential to kill you in your house, and kill healthy children and adults. In fact, the conditions in these farms is almost ideal to produce such a flu strain.
Looks like Enso http://humanized.com/enso/launcher/fingertips.php , which is no longer actively maintained but is pretty much complete. Actually, a bunch of the developers were absorbed into Mozilla to do Ubiquity, which has a similar UI for web commands and is in early beta https://ubiquity.mozilla.com/.
Out of the Search Business, Yahoo Shifts Its Focus
PC makers have paused production on next-generation Netbooks until they see what Apple's come up with

In the Elder Days people used to give companies like IBM a lot of grief for preannouncing products, thus freezing the entire rest of the industry in place out of fear.

The sight of people freezing in place because of rumors of whispers of unconfirmed sightings of a cheezy Photoshop mockup of an Apple product makes me think that IBM may have gotten a bad rap. When people are under the spell they'll act afraid no matter what the scary company says. If Apple preannounces a tablet they'll die of fear. If Apple does not preannounce a tablet they'll die of fear anyway.

Of course, it may be that nobody cares but coffee-chugging rumor-mongering tech journalists and this article is just full of nonsense. It certainly offers little evidence of credibility.
It's introduction into a community: the community of educated people. The classes are a formality. The main thing is induction into a community, a culture.

That's a nice way of saying it, not wrong but certainly rosy colored.

A more cynical person might say the degree is a low quality signal you're an adult. The community is about social stratification. And the classes are indeed just a formality.
I've heard this argument before, and while there might be something to it, I think it's more specific to say that ambitious people tend to have fewer children. This makes sense purely in terms of time commitment: the more time is devoted to raising children, the less will be devoted to one's startup, research, political ambitions, etc.

This doesn't necessarily mean that more intelligent people will have fewer children, as it's more of a question of prioritization than of ability. It does probably imply a weak correlation (smarter people tend to like to use those smarts), but there are certainly many intelligent people out there who value their children more than they value their personal ambitions. (While this is certainly not a given... consider your parents!)
DefCon: Boston Subway Officials Sue to Stop Talk on Fare Card Hacks
Absolutely. I understand that a company needs to release things quickly in order to be competitive - they can't test everything 100% in every situation. I wouldn't have the slightest problem if after a few months Apple announced, "we've discovered a problem in some of our batteries, if you experience a problem, please call this number for a refund/free repair/replacement" or something. But when they insist you don't tell anyone and threaten YOU with legal action? That's just not cool. Apple's been very disappointing lately. If it happened to me, I would gladly go to the press and skip out on the refund.
Tuition costs to join the middle-class are so high that most kids today end up in a form of indentured servitude in order to pay off the loans. I don't support the notion that universities and colleges are responsible for finding anyone a job, but the price these kids pay should be investigated.

I have my doubts as to whether the current loans for tuition model is sustainable.
So, you're arguing that the fine should be $0.99 times the number of people who downloaded each song this person shared, times some kind of multiplier for punitive damanges?
I admire your decision to become a vegetarian.

Like you, I grew up (in part) on a farm, eating meat. Your points about a vegetarian diet feeding more people, from a simple farm to nations, are correct.

But most importantly, eating meat causes much unneeded suffering in the world.