skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The 140 character feature is definitely an execution issue and not an idea issue. It wasn't part of the original design, they iterated their way to that.

"@Jack was still just an engineer, and the service was only a few months old when the group acquired Twitter.com and re-branded. Back then, we had no character limit on our system. Messages longer than 160 characters (the common SMS carrier limit) were split into multiple texts and delivered (somewhat) sequentially. There were other bugs, and a mounting SMS bill. The team decided to place a limit on the number of characters that would go out via SMS for each post. They settled on 140, in order to leave room for the username and the colon in front of the message."

http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born...
It is funny how the isolated impression of one 15-year-old is being used to define an entire generation's supposed social networking habits.

I am a boomer, but no particular fan of boomers, yet one who will stand up and say that boomers, like others, come in all shapes and sizes and are not all strutting peacocks, contrary to what the author says or implies.

And since when does using social networking to better connect with friends, or for any of a number of business, social, or other purposes, become a mere outlet for vanity?

Even if his premise were true, the author does a lame job of advancing it.
But the whole point of the article, and I entirely agree, is that you don't have to win anything. If Zoho ends up with 10% paying share of the online office business, that's more than enough for them to keep 350 people employed and give their customers a more reactive platform that Microsoft - not everybody needs it, but those who do will appreciate it and keep paying.

I agree that no business has been killed by fair competition. There are some cases where competition is not fair.
Pepper Spray–Equipped ATMs
There's an easy way? :)
The analogy is that while the enemy wasn't beating him up and "occupying" him as badly as they did others, he still had to deal with a bit of a blitz and ended up using his ingenuity to break their enigmatic code, develop a radar against future attacks, and ultimately develop a world class force of his own to contend with them.

Of course, the analogy breaks down around there unless he made friends with an even-less-bullied kid and another bully who suddenly became outcast and bullied in his own right, and worked together to defeat the other bullies once and for all.
You can use all the traditional tools. Just take the time to tweak the settings to achieve something that is both unique and effective. Office 2007 has much better defaults and you can accomplish a more original look with only a few clicks, so at least do that. But if you want a graph that really rocks, you need to really tweak it.
Thanks for sharing your experience. An online store of which I have a high opinion sells a product called SutureSafe which they say relieves tension on stitches and staples. Maybe they would be helpful to you:
http://www.leevalley.com/gifts/page.aspx?c=2&p=61673&...
Reminds me of this classic image: http://i26.tinypic.com/e8lfu1.jpg
Sridhar Vembu: Silicon Valley’s Unknown Indian (Zoho founder)
These suggestions aren't very good suggestions for making charts in general. Instead they seem to be biased for an audience which doesn't want to parse and understand your data but simply be wowed by hand-waving and feel quantitative reassurance in that belief.

John Tukey (I believe) suggested that there were two broad classes of charts: exploratory and descriptive. Exploratory (Tufte style) seek to visually describe as many variances in your data and their relations both to one another and the marginal totals. With all this at hand, a careful analysis may reveal patterns and idiosyncrasies in your data. Descriptive comes later, once you know what you want to present, and seeks to maximize the visibility of whatever detail you're highlighting while providing appropriate context. It's the kind of statistic that "lies" via omission (or, rather, selective attention) but it also leaves the hints that let a careful reader suspect a larger picture.

Godin's suggestions don't really produce either of these though. Without contextualization his graphs are simply ethos arguments wrapped up in a white lab coat.

Not to rag on him: I'm sure he knows this, too. These aren't really suggestions for good graphs but instead for good presentation of technical matters to non-technical audiences: an endeavor which is probably doomed to live as a half-lie.
I thought this was link bait, but he makes a compelling argument.
Has all the classes streamed:

http://oyc.yale.edu/
Well, for all we know, given we have hardly left our little dirtball much, they could be sitting right around the proverbial corner and shaking their collective green heads over that infantile bio-experiment going on down here.

Or, in Star Trek terms: They could have a cloaked probe in our solar system. Or they could possess technology that deals with time and space in ways we can't imagine. Broadcast dissipation might just not be an issue for them.

I don't know, you don't know. I think that's the only thing we can say "almost certainly" here. :-)
DeMarco and Lister's _Peopleware_ is excellent, IMHO.
You deserve them! It must have been incredibly traumatic to go through something like that out of the blue...

Best of luck! I hope the rest of your recovery goes smoothly!
1) you are right, I and a lot of other guys are already doing this.

2) Indeed Cuda can be used with success, and this is probably the way to go. Unfortunately I don't have any board at hand, but I'll buy one later in order to experiment with this technology.

3) This is not going to save you any time. Basically the part that alters the five chars at the end is nothing compared to the rest of the computation.

There are other tricks that can be used, like to compute a fast hamming distance, just xor the bytes of the two strings and count the bits using a lookup table. Or even use some specific asm instruction for bit counting. But again unless you are doing this stuff of the xor in a very slow way this is a negligible amount of work: I commented out the hammer distance computation in my code and the numbers are exactly the smae, 3.5 million comparison per second per core more or less.

Another obvious optimization is of course to avoid doing too much permutations of the words. For every permutation there are a lot of tries to do just altering the final five chars.

Basically there is no way to win without to resort to fast hardware and parallelization, being it a large set of computers, CUDA, or a very lucky run that outputs in 30 hours an entry with an hamming distance of 31 or 32 just... against the probabilities ;)

The only reason I'm running the contest is that it's funny and a very good way to teach something interesting to the programmers working in my company. We care a lot about having fun programming.
This is curious. The author is worried about the future of museums, due to the points in U.K. law under question. And yet, while he notes that the photographs would be considered public-domain in the U.S., there doesn't seem to be any worry about U.S. museums. Or those in other countries.

Isn't that a bit odd?

Now, is there a serious problem here? Maybe, maybe not. But the rather provincial viewpoint of this article doesn't help us answer the question.
an oldie, but a goodie. A good way to keep track of your progress online here:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/online/hdo.html

It will calculate everything for you and even provide the pretty little weighted graphs just like in the book.
A Smart Data Center and the Cloud
I agree with you. The litmus test is this - would you do this job for minimum wage with somebody else's children? It would have the same perks that the original article is quoting (no commute, no dress code). Most stay at home parents would say "hell no". I have no doubt that many of the people who chose to do it find it rewarding or at least worthwhile, but it is not a career choice, it is a parenting choice.
Amazon zaps purchased copies of Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindles
Ask HN: Review our new Kongregate feature - level sharing
Ask HN - Is this guy Full of Crap? Beryl Wolk @ U Penn - (video)
One problem with Software Engineering lies in the engineers themselves when they forget the time or money aspect of their designs.

Your design may be perfect for the domain, but if the time you have is just 6 months, you have change your design to something 'buildable' in that time.
I fall for this one when I got an interesting/challenging project.

Given enough time, the ability of a S.Engineer to find diferent solutions depending on money/time availability will positively affect her/his pay. (and the size of the assignments)
Verizon says it will limit new exclusive handset deals
This just in: "surprisingly" unpleasant jobs pay much more than "surprisingly" pleasant jobs. Coincidence? I doubt it.
please, at least hear the quackjob out: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4362041487661765149

science mag and a lot of others thought he was worth listening to...

the argument is that it's not something simple like calorie in, calorie out (seen this argument on hn a few times), but rather how certain calories trigger certain behavior with insulin in our bodies.

After all, if he's right - it quite changes how we approach the problem, and considering the backing this research has from other reputable sources - it's quite foolish to just ignore such a paradigm shifting idea like that. perhaps it was worth ignoring before the guy wrote a giant book looking at one study after the next....before he presented such a good case for the argument...but at this point, obviously wrong is not true.

if you've got a good reference, a link to an article perhaps, to why Gary Taubes is wrong -- I'd love to see it.
How to encrypt a Master lock
Load Balancers for Developers - ADCs The Code.
I believe this one follows it to you by batch.

I didn't try it mainly because it's asking for a password instead of using OAuth.
Arrowlets for JavaScript concurrency
In any case the entire concept of starting a business around an idea is stupid to begin with. Twitter and Google aren't the result of a good idea, they're the result of thousands of good ideas, a sufficient quantity of which were executed well enough to keep the lights on. Real business people don't start with a business idea, they start with an asset they want to capture, and then come up with several dozen ideas for capturing that asset and then pick the best ones to push through the dip.

Perhaps a stupid question: what do you mean by asset in this case?
you say that, but our office actually does have one. The sales guys are usually pumped after getting a contract so the ringing is extra loud... when you're deep in thought, and the ringing goes off, it scares the jebus out of ... well, non-sales guys. Ever since, we've always had to keep an eye out for someone going close to the bell... definitely does not help in getting work done. We've always joked that we'd pad the insides of the bell. Now beer:30 (5:30) on fridays as a ritual...
Have you ever worked in a funded startup?

It's not a game of chess; it's more like a game of lacrosse where you are the only one without a mask. As an officer of the company you have a fiduciary responsibility to your minority shareholders which can override the ownership share, or earn you lawsuits you will lose if you don't go along with the boards idea of how to fulfill it. And in the meantime, you need to be hustling to make the company work. You don't have time for boardroom shenanigans if you are doing it right; and if you're doing it right you'll be part of the 50% of founder/CEO's whom forcing out would be a bad idea.
Awesome irony. As a side point, I'm pretty pissy about this and it didn't even happen to me. Just because you can doesn't mean you have the right, and it doesn't mean you should. We used to use these publisher bastards to help us determine what to read since we didn't have an efficient way of establishing credibility.

Enter TEH T00Bz... We don't need these jack asses anymore. If I write anything, I'm going to e-publish.
Google's way of indexing was not novel at the time. There were others that used the same methods.
Their execution on the other hand was flawless.
"That said, what I find truly disturbing is seeing bright, intelligent, logical adults wallow in disgust and outright anger over things that were perpetrated on them by children."

You should try talking to people who were abused by their parents, or rape survivors. I think having your fingers broken is closer to that than "the social stigma of being the outcast".

"The author is mad because people from a school he admits he had no friends at are contacting him 25 years later! They not only remember him, but want to see him. They remember that they were children once, but they aren't the same kids from 25 years ago any more."

It's telling that not a single one of these invitations contained an apology.

"The only one that is affected at all is the author."

Victims of abuse are usually more affected by it than perpetrators.
Doctors in the US usually over-test people due to lawsuit fears.
Ask HN: Review my web app, CraigUpdate.com
It's a local-market vs extended-market issue. Money is the medium of trade; it has to circulate or trade stops.

If you have a local market, the people producing products, and getting paid to produce the products, are also buying the products and/or buying other local services from people who can then afford to buy the products. The same money can circulate many times within the local market to keep the economy moving, and support the production of valuable things.

In an extended market, you've got a separation between the people creating the products and the people buying them. Money has to travel between these groups in order for trade to exist. If there is a balance of trade between the groups, the money circulates evenly and both groups benefit; it's like the local market, but bigger.

If trade is not balanced, the money winds up on one side and the products on the other. Eventually, the flow of money stops because one side runs out. For the people running out of money, must do one of the following:

(1) Start producing additional goods/services that can be sold to the other side, in order to increase the flow of money back and restore a balance of trade.

(2) Reduce the amount of goods/services being bought from the other side in order to reduce the flow of money out, also restoring a balance of trade (at a lower level than #1).

(3) Purchase the goods/services on credit rather than with cash, in hopes of having the cash later to pay off the debt.

(4) Inflate the money supply by producing more money, and hope that the other side doesn't increase prices to reflect the lower value of your money.

In the US/China trade, the US has been buying lots of Chinese goods, but the Chinese haven't been buying much US goods. Instead, the Chinese have been collecting US money (in the form of both actual currency and bonds.) Trade has been out of balance, with the US on the side running out of money. We'd like to do #1, by selling more into the Chinese marketplace, but the Chinese government has been very slow to open its markets to outside companies. We can't do #2 for a number of reasons; we've lost our capacity to produce many of the good we buy, we can't produce similar goods at competitive prices, and for political reasons we can't raise tariffs on Chinese imports to bring their prices in-line with domestically produced goods.

So, we've been stuck with #3 and #4: going into debt and inflating our money supply. These options can only work for so long before the other party stops accepting credit and inflated currency. The US has pretty much reached that point with China now, so we're going to have to go back to #1 or #2.
How To Get Traffic To Your Website or Blog
Wikipedia disagrees:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dork

Interestingly enough it considers the penis definition more important than the nerd definition
If you need treebeard's nested sets with form/admin helpers, try django-easytree (a treebeard fork): http://bitbucket.org/fivethreeo/django-easytree/

I'll work on adding stuff from easytree into treebeard as soon as I get some time (I'm the author of treebeard).
I love Gears, but hope that Chrome OS isn't dependent on it.
I actually had to check it wasn't April 1st. Oh the irony indeed. On the plus side:

1. This might focus people's attentions on the problems of buying DRM books - I am still astonished how little it bothers people.

2. For the love of all your deities, can we please revisit copyright laws. The man has been dead for 59 years. Surely we can all agree those books should be public domain by now. Death+70 is just too long.
Absolutely right. Still, I'd be wary of bringing on an "idea person" to a lean start-up if they didn't also have business contacts within the widget supply business that could be leveraged into sales, or skills to otherwise contribute to the product.

Also, I don't think it's all about coders. Depending on the business, there are lots of other day-to-day productive roles that need to be filled. But it's incredibly rare that I would describe any of them as "idea person".
He does, but fuchsia background colors on :hover makes it aggravating to read. Thank goodness for being able to disable stylesheets..
hah wow.

strikes Kindle off "to buy" list
Death plus 70 is just one instance of laws being purchased by special interests; and that is a tough problem.
The narcissistic nature of being an entrepreneur
That's an interesting response. That implies that something that is very much a core topic of HN discussion could be nothing but flame bait if the treatment of it in the submission is sufficiently inflammatory.
Curiously, the full text of the book is prominently posted online in multiple places, for example:

http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/index.html

This could be because the copyright has expired almost everywhere.
I recently prototyped a site using CSS that only Safari 3+ and FireFox 3+ could understand. I never loaded IE up once while doing it. Boy was it a pleasure being able to have a CSS stylesheet declare rounded borders with one declaration. The problem with supporting IE at all is that so few (almost none) of the CSS functionality that eliminates hacks we've been working with are available. Even IE8 isn't enough. So choosing to support IE at all means intentionally refusing to adopt features supported by Safari and FireFox. That is, unless you want an inconsistent experience for your users.

But why do we have to provide a perfectly consistent experience between desktop browsers?I'm starting to think that this is precisely what we should do to force MS to get with the times. Let your site degrade for IE in ways that do not break core functionality or fundamental design requirements. When users start figuring out that they can't see a prettier version of NYTimes because IE doesn't support @font-face, rounded corners, CSS transformations, and other advanced CSS functionality, many will decide to switch.

The difference between this approach now and how it was implemented in the 90s during the Netscape/IE wars, is that it's a best practice to degrade gracefully but retain important functionality now. The criticism of this strategy back then is that many sites simply did not work at all in one browser or the other. That would be unacceptable.
Anyone know a similar site for Chinese/Japanese/Korean ideograms?

I was given a Chinese (I believe) scroll wall-hanging with 100 characters on it (in a 10 by 10 grid), and I'd love to take some steps toward identifying the text, I'd say "It's all Greek to me", but it's much, much worse than that...
When I saw that on CNN's front page this afternoon they lost any remaining shred of journalistic integrity that I had for them. Stuff like that puts them on par with Weekly World News.
How to recover a combination to a lost Master combination pad lock
2004! This article is 5 years old, and it's a reply to an article written in 2002!
Ask HN: How big is your index page?
By index page, I mean the first page the user sees when they go to your domain.(duh)

If it varies(i.e. you display random user images), give the current size.
Thanks for knocking something off my to-do list. However, what I really wanted (and I wrote an ugly version for myself) is an update for apartments. We were looking for 1-2 beds that allowed dogs/cats within a certain prices range, not in certain neighborhoods. Add that feature and you have an awesome product.
It's by Tom DeMarco. The co-author of this:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0932633439
Well, that's a matter of opinion. From what I have read, their method was innovative, hence the patents. The problem with working this kind of stuff out is that history is always biased towards the winners (in the sense that nobody talks about the losers). With that it mind, you could quite possibly be right.
Interesting...I think you may be right.

I originally though this - http://www.engineyard.com/private-cloud - was a cloud environment a la EC2 based on the title (which would work with my theory), but reading more about it makes it seem like it's still optimized for Rails, and hence not for this.
I agree about DRM on books being bad. That's what I love about Pragmatic Programmers' e-books, I can get a plain PDF that I can read on any device that can read it.
I felt Amazon had gained respect when they released their MP3 store without DRM.

They have lost it today, utterly and likely irredeemably. There is no excuse for taking back what a customer has already purchased. None.

And that they did so without even asking the customer? It should be considered outright criminal.
open university/courses will become a norm... if you're interested in the subject then there should not be any reason why you cant study and clear exams without any hassle ....

one such univ. is "University of the People", world’s first tuition-free, online academic institution dedicated to the global advancement of higher education.

visit: http://www.uopeople.org
Its easy to preach when you are not the victim.
Yes, but are they using IE6?

I'm actually writing this from a Chinese cyber cafe at the moment - one problem with a lot of these places is that IE6 is ubiquitous. According to the article, most Chinese use the net from home (I thought it was otherwise), I wonder if their browser preferences are different?
Dark Flash Photography - UV/IR Flash Instead of Visible Light
Not when they're outside in the exercise yard.
The Google OS Is Doomed
I think its a bad idea. Part of the fun is the joy you get when you achieve that next level. If a user can just go level = x and skip all the hard levels, it'll get boring after a while.
Someone on HN recommended www.nciku.com . It's down at the moment, but it can recognize drawn characters (I can't draw at all with the mouse, and it still usually gets it correct when I do it.)
It's generally not possible at a business-level to treat IE users as second-class citizens. So while your idea appeals to anyone who has ever done webapp development, it's not conducive to business interests.

After all, there's always another website looking to take the users that you're not willing to fully support.