skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I'm curious: how would people compare the prestige of working at Fog Creek vs. the prestige of working at Google?"

Improving PageRank (Google) > gluing APIs (anywhere) > editing project docs (anywhere)

It depends on what you do. Google definitely has more high profile jobs than Fog Creek, but also probably more grunt jobs than a typical small company.
The YC startup CO2Stats charges a fee to analyze the energy footprint of your site and purchase an equivalent amount of wind/solar energy, offsetting your usage. You can then advertise your carbon neutrality with a "green certified site" logo like the one on the bottom of this page.
callback is not good enough, it has to be a synchronous operation with ability to stop after specified number of milliseconds
They do if you switch on 'showdead' in your profile.
I never, ever gloat or make fun of others when it comes to security. It seems like a no-win situation. If you go to someone privately with security concerns, you're generally seen as helpful. If I publicly oust somebody, there are all sorts of people like the author (but far less scrupulous) who might consider it their duty to knock me down a peg... and I'm no security expert.

Using "password" for a password is really stupid, but "really stupid" is relative to the knowledge level of the person pointing it out, in most cases. I'd prefer not to find out what really stupid thing I've done to allow some script kiddie access to my servers (or whatever the case may be).
Please forgive my simplistic questions, I do not have any higher education in physics and in my reading of pop science magazines I doubtless remain ignorant of important developments.

What is the proof that there are only three spatial dimensions?

You say "three spatial dimensions and time." Is time a dimension just like the spatial ones but we perceive it differently? Or is time something other than a dimension? And when was this proved or demonstrated?
No.

I chose courses that interested and challenged me. I had semesters that were nothing but computer science, math and physics. Between implementing a compiler, figuring out how to display a polygonal topographical map and learning the life cycle of stars, I didn't have time for side projects.

I submit that if your side projects interest you more than your studies, then you are in the wrong place.
Now, I think the 'out of date' idiom is out of date. . .BTW, what's up with submission filter or how did saveie6.com end up in the index 3 times?

google 'site:ycombinator.com (saveie6.com) AND (intitle:ie6 OR intitle:saveie6)'
The book referenced in OP called Born to Run talks about the Tarahumara a lot. Its a really interesting story and I'd recommend the book to anyone.
Title is silly.

Post is a bit useless too - because the technique is super common anyway. Ok so HP is going to be popular - and it will be youngsters downloading it (though it's possibly a bit ageist to assume their more targetable).

But still - I dont think this is a community that needs "warning" ;)
Well, it can't get much worse now, so go ahead and try!
welcome to my catch22. Not crossing the line is really difficult - there have been times when a laptop turns up that is obviously nicked... (for whatever reason). From reputable sources too.

This is above board though (long term trustworthy customer - who is also totally dopey with computers).

We sent him it back in the end :) the "consultant" is giving it a shot.. he quoted 24hrs, £2,000, half up front :o
I agree. I am big fan of Basecamp and they both look like basecamp and freshbooks combined. Ronin has some less features to offer but Net2Invoice is similar to basecamp. I wonder if 37 signals know this.
My impression is they pay about $11K for OS and SQL licensing.

11K probably "cost" them less then the time and effort to come up to speed on open source solutions. They were MS experts already and it would have taken quite a bit to reach the same level of expertise in *nix land.

If you're young and just starting out and are wondering if you should become an expert in free or commercial software, keep their situation in mind.
delicious, flickr, yahoo finance, plus yahoo answers popping up in search results at least once a day.
Jira Plugin: Unique Issue ID Across the Projects
Dunno what it's like in the states on free to air but they don't even try and put something decent on in Australia daytime TV wise.

I find even if most TV programming is pretty average and dumbed down it's still good to sit down and chill out to when you can't be bothered with anything else. Its also necessary if your a sports fan.
HN Rate My Idea: Socratic Linking
Yeah, that's probably the only thing keeping me from that one. I guess it would make a good side project or something though.
Ask HN: Does this concern anyone else?
Ask HN: Idea about alarm and security
I have a client asking me about alarm and cameras to control his offices remotely.

My Client is looking for a way to see what's happening in his offices using cameras.

I have no idea about this field, but I'm good at Windows 2003 Server and networks.

Do any one knows anything about it? is it easy to do it?

Simply said: Shall I accept the job and go for it? Is it simple to do by anyone (like installing an application in 2003 server and running it) or something more complicated that needs special engineers.

Thanks!
Recession sends Americans to the Internet
If techcrunch paid for the documents or release anything sensitive then sue them. Otherwise why bother - all that would happen is mass arguments on how far journalist ethics go. Ultimately neither of them would really win.
Urmu gölü
Social Skydiving Day 23: Stress I'm Under
I actually don't care much for the tone of this article either, for that matter. It's just a bit off for some reason IMO. Perhaps it comes across as a bit of gloating itself? I'm not sure, but it's not that big a deal.
And the point of that is?
which bit exactly?
They serve different purposes. My point was that there's good and bad in everything.

It would be a really hard decision between TV and the web, not sure which I'd choose TBH.
Social Skydiving Final Draft of Winners Are Made of Fail
Maybe it's just me, but I found Integrals more intuitive as a continuous "sum" of probabilities in a distribution. So, if you want to marginalize a discrete distribution, you just add all its components over the conditional variable. If you want to marginalize a continuous distribution, you integrate.

I guess you could say that you're simply enumerating infinitesimal densities?
I tried those for a while when I was on my last ergo kick. The ball was just too hard to move for me. I almost had to pinch the thing to make it slide.

Instead, I've found this more comfortable: http://www.evoluent.com/vmouse2.html

Works great with a gel wrist wrest on the mousepad.
Clickable: http://twitterrsslinks.com/

Potentially useful and I haven't personally seen something like this before so that's always good. It would be nice if you expanded the shortened URLs in the RSS feeds since they are not bound by the 140 char twitter limit.
Get Out from Under the Crushing Weight of Your Business
Vodafone in AU does the Mini 9.
Seven steps to securing Windows 7
It is a beginning for sure. I was/am actually looking for applications with which consumers can calculate their personal footprint. A consumer enters his stuff + habits: palm pre, macbook, etc. other data is gathered through scrapping or from other providers (e.g. dopplr). There is a calculation...and voila a user see's his total footprint visually. Based on this information plus additional information a consumer can -- if he desires to -- change his products/habits.
Where’s the nearest subway station? Ask your iPhone
The 37% increase in volume + some stuff that's showing up on the front-page, I fear HN is under siege
Oh boy. I am so sorry for them... It... breaks my heart.
It's not so much as people will tell you at every single opportunity. It's more likely that the person has to explain it so often, since TV comes up in conversations all the time. Have you considered that?

E.g.,

Tom: "Lost was really cool last night"
Jerry: "Sorry Tom, didn't see it"
Tom: "Why? You don't like it?"
Jerry: "I don't have a TV"

Well... at least in my experience.
How are they so profitable then?
Which part? Concern?

Interestingly, the growth over the last 6 months has been fairly consistent.

Check out the 'max' option, and from the start of the big jump in January, its been quite consistent.

I think things on the site have remained pretty good through the growth, but then again, maybe it is the constant evolving change. I'm curious how different the entries are from last year.

I think there is less a risk of the quality of HN degrading due to the fact that most people don't submit.

It would be interesting to see the stats on what % of users submit, what % leave comments, what % vote, and compare that with overall visits.

I suspect most of the growth has come from readers only.
What do you say PG? have you got those stats?
That was my original comment, but then I made the assumption they were referring to the explosive growth in 2009.
Yes, 26" Samsung, with:

-

Sky (which I really only watch BBC1+2, ITV and Channel 4 on at night)

Xbox 360 (which I stream TV series' and movies off from my 24/7 Ubuntu box, and of course play games)

Macbook Pro via DVI, which I stream iPlayer stuff off.

-

I must admit I watch TV way too much, but I like to chill out and think (the argument that TV makes you brain-dead while watching is just plain wrong, at least for me. I have my best ideas watching TV.)
He doesn't help his cause very much with his often arrogant bully tactics. Sometimes it seems like he enjoys insulting people who comment, which isn't really so different from Ron Artest jumping into the crowd to fight with folks, is it?
Street drugs and dopamine theory overdoses
Video/cameras is pretty easy these days since there are a variety of wireless, networked cameras that provide their own web access so you can view them anywhere in the world.

It's been awhile since I was researching alarm integration but form what I remember it did not sound trivial. There are modules that you run your alarm system through that then connect to a control server via serial connections (although may be updated now?). Here's a pretty good forum for researching that kind of stuff: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=162
Suddenly it comes as no surprise the best modern OSs we use today are more or less simple improvements on an OS that is about as old as me. And I am not talking about Windows...

Did everybody abandon progress? Did we outsource it to China?
I hope their market isn't women. Most women won't step on to a scale if there are other people in the house, much less if it's broadcasting.

That said, I'd use this if I were trying to gain again. Seems like it'd be a great tool for staying motivated.

And it looks like there is a scale that uses wi-fi: http://www.withings.com/
Canadian Privacy Commissioner Says Facebook Is Full Of Holes
Privacy? What else do you want to share with the world in real time? Number of calories eaten? Blood pressure? Blood alcohol?
I'm not disputing his advice which will probably work but I have to say SEO people seem shadier and shadier to me. SEO started out as a way to make your existing content turn up for people who were searching for it but now it's turned into "blog about this because people search a lot for it" and that seems wrong to me.

I guess it's the same instinct that's eaten every other industry (see TV and marketing execs) it's just sad to see the web going down that road.
Well, first off, alexa.com is to be taken with about a pound of salt because of their way of sampling, even so, obviously something happened (maybe half the HN visitors decided to install the alexa toolbar).

Also, other such institutions can show wildly varying data, for instance have a look at 'compete' for ycombinator.com:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/ycombinator.com/

It tells quite a different story.

The final arbiter here would be the log files of HN or some third party logging service (but HN doesn't use any of those afaik).

The traffic rank that alexa ascribes to news.YC is not in line with what I would expect at all (~5500), at that level HN should be seeing 150K uniques daily and I doubt that from the activity on the forum.
Zookz: A license to infringe?
Do you watch television shows in a manner which actively avoids commercials?

As a follow-up question, would you use a post-transfer model of payment to compensate for the lack of commercials?

I have a small functioning television that sits in a corner gathering. During a local disaster (bridge collapse) local news has much better coverage than the intertubes. There are some things I can't get online and guests will from time to time move it to a more convenient location to watch the news or advertising laden shows. Otherwise, it gathers dust and someday will short circuit when turned on and go poof, I am looking forward to that day.
Are you suggesting they are both almost useless?

Edit: On second thought I assume you mean one of them is useful, but I could not tell from your comment which you though was more useful.
The Broken Hopes of a Spanish Generation
JRuby is a wonderful project. But it's boring to use. It just works, and the java integration is painless (ruby calling java) or basically trivial (java calling ruby).

It's got quite a velocity of development, which is really promising for the future.

It's not completely pure Java though. The distribution includes a few JNI .so files for the odd bit of integration, but they've hidden pre-compiled versions for most platforms so it's unzip and go like java libraries.
If you're thinking about this, and located in the US, check out Cricket's Wireless "broadband". It's only $40/month and there is no contract!
I must speak about the dangers of bundling. Sure, the netbook may look free, but, in the end, you will pay more than its price in fees. And fees will be higher for everyone, including those who don't take the "free" gift because their money will subsidize the gifts for the other subscribers.

Is this what we want? Will we let telcos prey on our selfish shortsightedness?
People like to claim that TV is only full of crap. This is grade A, Microsoft-FUD-level, Bullshit.

Like anything, sure, most of it is crap. Just like if you went to a bookstore and picked up 10 random fantasy novels. You might conclude that they're all just cookie cutter pablum - most are - but then you miss out on George R. R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice, Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana, LeGuin's Earthsea, and other truly excellent works of fiction.

But like anything, it takes some investment to tell the good from the bad. If you just watch Jon & Kate Plus 8, Entertainment Tonight, and According to Jim, yeah, you're better off without the TV altogether. But I claim that there's more good TV being made now than at any time in history, particularly for niche markets.

Here's some of my recommendations: Mythbusters, Penn & Teller's Bullshit, Supernatural, Dollhouse, The Office, 30 Rock, Lost, The Simpsons (not as great as it was, but still fun), The Daily Show/Colbert Report, Mad Men... and more, there's just a ton of really high quality work being done.

If your argument is that instead, you watch things online/through netflix, that makes sense. If I didn't enjoy live sports sometimes, I'd consider doing the same.

Not everyone has to have a hobby of watching television, or movies, or reading for that matter, but the opinion that it's all crap is extremely ill-informed and snobbish, and I strongly encourage it to be dropped as something that makes you sound actively stupid when you say it. It's an anti-pattern.
Yeah, we have a large, vocal userbase.
It's interesting to note the significant drop-off on weekends in Alexa's data.
and don't care, forcing you to either become the unit test cop or just chuck the whole suite and give up
Does http://twitter.com/newsycombinator have anything to do with it?
HN should autoformat tex symbols, because I have no idea what \oint is, by heart.
Hey Daniel,

There are services (like 'fleck' or 'diigo' not sure if they are still working) that allow you to stick post-it like notes on top of webpages, that has quite a bit of the functionality you describe.

It sounds like a firefox plugin would do the job.
The Rails community does tend to be a bit more interested in the "new shiny", but the heavy weight placed on testing has done wonders for improving the quality of the work I do. As for automated testing and TDD being considered one in the same, I believe there's a strong argument to suggest that they are. Allow me to explain.

When I am coaching, mentoring, or training people, I have no problem with bringing up both TDD and automated testing at the same time.

* We write a failing test

* We then fire up the automated test runner

* We make changes to our code until the test passes

* We repeat, adding new tests.

I can show that our automated test runner catches anything we do wrong immediately.

I don't believe you get the full benefits of TDD if you don't automate the process, and you can't have automated testing without good tests. I used to write lots of code without tests and I paid the price - lots of wasted time tracking down bugs, delayed releases because I could't figure out why my new feature broke old stuff, the usual stuff.

Investing time and energy learning how it's supposed to work has been the most valuable thing I've ever done for myself, my clients, and my company. The process I teach others is the process that I learned, and I feel that we're all much happier developers for it.

I just want to come back to the point I made earlier... a lot of the people who evangelize this stuff believe in it not because it's "cool", but because it has actually saved us and our projects. If you want to separate the hype machines from the true believers, ask one to show you. The ones who believe in it will almost certainly devote their time to show you how they do it. I know I would.
I think every website on the planet experiences that.
In my (limited) experience, running an early stage startup is less about innovation and more about drive to get things done. Then again, I work with people who are good at what they do and fully invested in the project. Nobody is getting a salary (and probably won't for at least a year), so that tends to weed out the mediocre players.
this is brilliant. best twitter site ever.
Thanks for the read, jacquesm.

I knew there were basic "post-it" kinds of apps out there, but I didn't think any of them combined the wiki and emotional response slants. For instance, Discus does site commenting and tracking (along with CoComment and others). What's missing to me is the cross-linking between sites based on topic area.

The HN question I was expecting was "Sounds cool. How are you going to monetize this? To which I have no answer.

Just seemed like a neat concept, so I thought I'd throw it out there so you guys could throw rocks at it.
I'm sure that falls under the definition of what he meant by "hire".
Yep - that's exactly it. Setting up the infrastructure to handle large, web-scale content analysis is the real challenge. (Shameless plug alert) That's why we setup 80legs: to help everyone not called Google/Yahoo/Microsoft to have comparable capabilities when it comes to this.
On Demand Distance Learning: The new face of online education
When Harold Wilson announced the plans to launch the first "wall-less" university, such access to higher education was unheard of in the United Kingdom. Today, however, e-Learning programmes are increasing in popularity, appearing alongside traditional university courses at institutions up and down the country, alongside blended learning courses that involve the combination of traditional lectures with significant integration of online resources.
Is every Microsoft-based heavy-traffic database-driven site using this much hardware for just a couple dozen million page-views a month?

Seriously, the hardware they have has a lot of room for growth.
I only have so much time to write - I didn't mention Cecil either :-) Thanks for the Omega pointer.
wouldn't something like this but standards-based be just as nice?
Palm Blog: Mojo SDK available to all
The point (apparently) is to slowly reinvent OpenGL on web, since no one has (yet) added it to Javascript.
I think it is a very neat concept, and not everything has to make money to be successful (see youtube), as long as someone with pockets deep enough believes in it.

The reason I mentioned the post-its is because your idea seems to be a special case of those, you could easily extend such a post-it like application to become what you describe.

One really sad thing is that with all the cross-site scripting jerks out there some of the nicest things that you could do with javascript (layers on top of other websites) are no longer possible.

I've been playing around with something like that on cameria.com (now absolutely defunct, but I do still have all the code in a repository somewhere) which basically dropped a chatroom on top of every website where you wanted one, using little avatars and balloons.

The idea was to recreate the feeling that you have when you visit a mall or a store but then to apply that to a website, you'd basically 'see the crowd' of the other people visiting that site (limited to some geographical filter and a maximum number of users).

This also allowed all kinds of interesting bits like crowdsurfing (before it had a name) and 'guided tours' across the internet.

Alas, the 'holes' in javascript (that I thought were neat features) got closed to stop cross-site scripting attacks and the project died.

So now everybody that wants to do any kind of layering has to either have a friendly relationship with the website that they want to display the layer on (for instance analytics makes use of this through their tag) or you have to cache the data and spit it back out.
Windows Crashmachine cashmachine
Went to get some cash out at lunchtime, the ATM swallowed my card, popped up Windows screen, and promptly hung.No money now!
Facebook monitors your alert() usage
I am not sure but I think what has gone unspoken here is the recent decline in quality of content on this site. Perhaps this is why he's concerned?
Predictable, content-insensitive comment. Plenty of people have a problem with Zed Shaw, or Joel Spolsky, or Jeff Atwood, or Michael Arrington, or ___________, but it's really tedious to hear the same whining with every story that comes across this site.
Help: Who's that girl?
It's important to realize that this is mathematics not physics.

This might give you an idea of what they can be used for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_set_method
New model reveals tactics a small number of interlopers can use to seize power
YC-Clones Pros and Cons
Is YouTube the Next Great Authentication Mechanism?
uh, apt-get install firefox-3.5

Works like a charm for me. Flash too.
I agree with you that it can be an excellent way to develop, but in some languages the same testing-as-you-go is typically handled by the type system or other tools instead* . While I'm quite convinced of the value of automated testing, TDD is just one method, and one better suited to e.g. Ruby than languages like OCaml. (This is sometimes lost on its most vocal proponents.)

In all fairness, the language about type systems is often impenetrably mathematical, so I'm not surprised that the parallel isn't clear. (I really like OCaml, so I tried reading _The Definition of Standard ML_ to get a better understanding of the language family. Wham, brick wall. Then again, I'm not a mathematics grad student...I studied history.)

* Which is just a different way of communicating semantic constraints ("this is never null", "this list always has at least two unique UTF-8 string values", "this can only be used on writable files", etc.) to the language and having them automatically checked.
Guess, Who are World's 8 biggest employers??