skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Should the New Mantra Be: "Free as in Data"?
One way to prevent 2 hour meetings is not to let people sit down. We had an unofficial rule to that effect at Viaweb.

I remember once passing by a room and noticing a bunch of people sitting around a table. I must have raised an eyebrow or something, because one of them jumped up and said "We're not having a meeting! We were just talking."
Driving Traffic: Twitter User vs Hacker News
Why a woman's attractiveness acts as a repellent, explained using probability.
The very act of doing that would make them a protester who is more subversive than average, and worthy of taking. And with such an inaccurate weapon, they aren't actually looking for specific targets; they're trying to intimidate.

Getting random people even benefits the leaders. If the population knows that bad things happen to political prisoners, and that the mildest of protesters are being marked as leaders, then some will lose their nerve.
This study has an inherent flaw: the queries used were selected from the most common queries. Answering common queries is (relatively) easy, but Google claims (and other independent studies have shown) that Google is much much better than most of its competition for returning good results for uncommon queries (the "long tail" if you will).

Edit: I just (briefly) tested this myself. Searching for for my username on Gigablast returned 3 results: 2 of my HN comments and a wordlist. Google on the other hand found 3k results, with the top results being my linkedin and facebook profiles (which I would deem the "best results").
I can't quite have any schedule I want. In 2003 I could. Now I have a wife and a kid and YC.

I don't think YC would be more successful if one of us switched to the manager's schedule. VCs like to meet with one another all the time to learn about tech trends and hot deals. But we don't need to rely on other investors for either of those. The only people we really need to meet with are the startups we fund, and office hours seem to be ideal for that.

I'd gain nothing by switching to the manager's schedule, but I'd lose essays and hacking, both of which I think help me do YC better. So it looks like it would be a net loss.
Well, I certainly do not believe that graphic design will be done on small mobile devices ten years from now.
The syntax looks to make a lot more sense than Scala; any ideas what the performance numbers are like?

I'll need to play around with this.
HHOS, as we used to say.
http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html
Strangely enough, management may actually be better done on a maker's schedule. It's certainly no worse done. Office hours seem to work fine for all the startups who want to talk to me. And in addition, compressing them all into the shortest time means that a group that shows up for an appointment during office hours is likely to meet several other groups of their peers while they're there. They invariably talk, and often end up helping one another.

Plus you're assuming that doing making work doesn't affect the quality of one's managing work. But that isn't true. Actively working on webapps myself makes me a much better advisor to startups doing it.
There's an app called PhoneView that lets you access saved notes, call logs, SMS messages, photos, contacts, etc.

http://www.ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/
Run Rails under Yaws
The shoes I'm wearing now were purchased on Zappos and the design dates back to 1966. Fashion can have staying power.
Sure. And I noticed the tokens in URLs but did not usually care that much since they are over https which doesn't reveal the parameters. Now I do care.
"Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded." Yogi Berra
You might also want to check out http://historicaerials.com 's aerial photos. In addition to 1956, they have 1948, when it was pretty much all agricultural, and 1968, when it had all been built over with suburbs.
What's the perk? It must be pretty good if you're willing to put up with constant interruption for it...
Yahoo confirms Xoopit Acquisition
I think though that in general, Tony at Zappos cultivates a pretty open image about him and the company. Anything you read from them is really light on the legalese with clear thoughts. There are a few other notable CEOs that take this approach, but most do not.
Can relate entirely... and I've been talking with my boss about "sequestering" myself, perhaps even regularly. Something like half-day Monday, half-day Friday, then a full "I don't even open the email application" day on the weekend. Might work, haven't tried it yet.
What do you mean by 'checkpointing the hash'?

How far can you go into an SHA1 calculation and then change the input and have your calculation be useful?
Q: Will we get a discount at Amazon?

No, because we are planning on continuing to run Zappos as a separate company with our own culture and core values. And we're not going to be giving the Zappos discount to Amazon employees either, unless they bake us cookies and deliver them in person.

By all accounts a fascinating culture. I wish them well!
Intel X25-M G2: Dissected and Performance Preview
I read the title as "Do Fruit Flies Have Free Wii" and read half the article expecting some connection between Wii sales or AI or programming and fly behavior.
Recap of FutureRuby
When kiko.com first came out and then I read about reddit.com. I then stumbled upon his essays and hid in the server room of work for two days to read them all in one sitting.

I'm still not rich yet.
http://www.who.int/healthinfo/statistics/bodgbddeathdalyesti... is the spreadsheet I got the numbers from; I downloaded it years ago, which is why I didn't know where it was linked from. Unfortunately it doesn't cite sources. It's linked from http://www.who.int/research/en/ as "Causes of death [xls 3.03Mb]".

The NationMaster number is 0.056 per 100 000 population per year. I don't see how to square that with the 50× higher numbers from the WHO spreadsheet.

Thanks for the reminder of adult medical complications.

The US figures seem to be in the normal range for OECD countries, although maybe toward the high end, and they are much lower than the worst countries (typically those in the middle of a war).

http://www.worldmapper.org/extraindex/death_notes.html#table... (from your third link) matches the stats from the WHO spreadsheet (at least for Mali and Angola, to all three decimal places).
If they are better than google and nobody cares, that is a frightening thought.
Fan executes pretty close to the same speed as Java.

Here is a presentation illustrating some benchmarks of Fan versus other JVM languages:

http://www.slideshare.net/michael.galpin/performance-compari...
There are federal levies on owning real estate? I haven't owned real estate in the US in several years, but I don't remember ever hearing about federal property taxes.
This totally reminded me of something posted to Twitter by Cisco yesterday - http://twitpic.com/b5tl3. Obviously the Cisco setup is a lot more expensive but it looks incredible.
[image]Taco Bell Dog Dies at 15
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AmoLatina.com - Latin and Colombian women Dating site. 
More than 10,000 Gorgeous Latin and Colombian Girl's profiles with photos and videos. E-mails, calls, flower delivery.
Hacker News Account - Is there a way to restore my password?
I had been logged in so long with the browser cookie that when I recently cleared cookies I am left with absolutely no idea what my password was. I remember my username, but not my password, and with over 200 karma saved up I don't really feel like starting a completely new account.

Is there any way to have my password emailed to me or restored? I don't see that feature available.
I love Konami Code Sites. http://konamicodesites.com/
Design by committee is a tricky business, especially if Bijarne says they are always aiming for the consensus and not a simple majority vote.

Even not considering C++, this approach is more likely to result in the acceptance of a feature that everyone feels equally "meh" about rather than something that "only" 80% really likes, but 20% opposes.
There are quite a few basic grammar sites that could (and probably should) be developed.

Their, There, They're.
We're, were.
i before e...
The correct spelling of many common words.
Neopythonic: Scientists Discover That Hidden Persuaders Are Real
But our vision is quite a bit more than just that feature.

So is Facebook's. ;-)
It's not loading for me. Firefox's "Connection timed out" page is pretty minimal, though.
I love the email name I got. Any time the words "knobby" and "moat" are what get randomly generated I snort like a drunk frat boy.
Unsung heroes save net from chaos
zero insight.
I'll see this point and raise it: particularly ambitious projects often need weeks, even months of uninterrupted time to really get going. This means that a short mid-week trip, a conference or two, and a little contract work can clobber several months if you're not careful. Try blocking out two months with no interruptions and see what you can do!
pg, was this done on etherpad? mind sharing?
I am sure, many over here share my thoughts of watching you write.
Wolfram Alpha: What is the meaning of life, the universe, everything?
Google, on the other hand... no sensible answer. I ran both these queries while doing a self-join on my macbook SSD, that is doing a scan of 51 million rows, has been going for 30 minutes, and is starting to feel like the big computer in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy...
Ask HN: Buying a startup?
I've been reading about startups on HN for awhile and getting ready to dip my toes into the water!
I'm likely putting an offer on a small e-commerce site with some friends in the following days. The site is incorporated in NJ. My partners and I are in CA, MA, and NJ. Is there anything I should consider from a legal aspect? Do we buy the LLC or all the assets (domain name, etc.)? What should we do ourselves vs. with a lawyer? It's a small site, so I don't want legal fees to be too large a percentage of the total transaction.
I guess what I was trying to say is that it depends on what you mean by luxury. I always viewed luxury as whatever took some annoyance off my mind, so having a phone/mp3 player/camera/clock/gaming combo that syncs quickly is a luxury to me. I also really like pretty things that act very responsive, which I consider a luxury since that's not strictly a part of usability.

Keep in mind that I won't even wear a watch because I don't like dangly things, so I won't even pretend to understand what sorts of people go for the typical sorts of luxury item.
That makes sense. Thanks for qualifying!
I like how it's white on black instead of the typical black on white. Perhaps because of the impeding doom.
My personal pet peeve:

s/independant/independent/g
Interesting that CodingCrypto and hashbreaker (who tied for 2nd place but lost the coin flip) were the same team. This wasn't mentioned on the Engine Yard blog.

Also, this story is cute:

Paul noticed the contest and brought Dan and Tanja in - just one condition: he would get the iPhone. Sure - sufficiently unlikely to work anyway. To make it more likely and to have more fun with GPUs, Dan and Tanja brought in Bo-Yin and Doug - who might now figure out how to program in Ruby and were very busy getting all machines to work and running the code which included reconfiguring the machines

Not sure why they mention Ruby because it doesn't seem to be actually used.
A Beautiful Mind covers this issue from a slightly different angle. It's a decent flick. I'm marginally surprised neither it nor Nash was mentioned in the article.
Okay, that's an anecdote. But the problem is that you may well be seeing a good factory. There are thousands of others that you aren't seeing. You also aren't seeing what they don't want to show you.

There have been plenty of documentaries and articles about human rights abuses at Chinese factories over the years. Google for it. It isn't fiction. Maybe the electronics industry is an island of civility of in the midst of a sea of corruption and abuse, but somehow, I doubt it. In a country where people are tainting food with plastic to pinch a penny, I don't give the benefit of the doubt.
There's no benefit in trying step 2 because the gibberish input is as likely to be a close match as a sentence that makes sense.

A sentence that starts 'Be' (001000010...) and the same sentence changed to 'He' (001001000...) would produce very different hash results by the Avalanche Effect ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalanche_effect ). So having similar letters in a similar order or in similar positions, or using similar length words, wont help.

Isn't that the whole point of this competition?

The point was to get a hash with a similar quantity of 0 and 1 bits in the output as their hash, not to guess their sentence (they said what it was).
I recommend zappos to everyone. I haven't bought footwear anywhere else for at least the past 5 years.
It seems bizarre it took so long for an online retailer to figure out a great barrier for online shoppers is the return shipping if the item doesn't work out.
They got my loyalty based on that even though their prices aren't the absolute cheapest on the net.
Best Programmer Web Comics
It turns out that people actually glow in the dark (science)
There's theory and then there's reality. There are many attractive women/men who are wondering why noone attractive is chatting them up.
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Thanks. I learned something about finding WHO statistics with your help.

I think the conclusion here is that people in the United States who die of severe malnourishment do so mostly because they have diseases that impair their eating (something I didn't consider at all in my first reply). So I learned something else today.

In the overall context of this thread, I am not particularly worried that the economic crisis we are now in is going to push my family, or even much poorer families, into starvation. People will still buy and sell and trade and (in North America) mostly eat very adequately.
Well, there is certainly a missing factor in the model -- what about the probability q that a date with Carol will be a worthwhile experience, for whatever definition of "worthwhile" Guy uses?
I've always found that asking people to put it in writing is a good filter. I refuse to conduct any financial business on the phone, even with my bank (whose customer service department regularly attempts to bullshit customers).
Stem Cell Transplants Can Restore Lost Memory
Commercially, C++ is already on life support: it's no longer a general applications language but rather a niche language. Microsoft supports it in Visual Studio for the game industry and Intel supports it for the same as well as the HPC market. For all the rhetoric over C++ (it will either save or destroy C++ depending on who you talk to) its unlikely to make a big difference either way.

I think D is pretty cool, but it has a lot farther to go with regards to standardization as well as implementation. There is a current reddit thread going over its shortcomings:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/93jh5/ask_progg...

Whether it wants to be or not, D is now in the same niche as C++, but without either the maturity or commercial support that a niche language needs to thrive. And that probably won't change now that the larger software world has moved on.
C++ has many compilers for loads of embedded platforms. It has to be standardized. It's not comparable to the languages with two or three implementations that all sit on top of Windows or UNIX. It is much harder to change C++ without hurting many compiler writers.
Do you know of a better one for "mere mortals"?

(Please note: This is not a snarky "don't criticize if you don't have a better solution". That's a bogus rhetorical device. This is an honest question.)

Or are you just observing that it doesn't seem very practical in general? (Which I'd somewhat agree with.)
Bullshit. A repellant to a certain type of guys, maybe. But the hotter a chick is, the more dates she goes out on unless she chooses to be picky.

From the article:
1. He talks to Carol and she responds in a friendly manner. He gets her phone number and a proper date next week.
2. He does not approach Carol. He can enjoy another rewarding task (like reading the last issue of Plus).
3. He talks to Carol and she proves uninterested. He will feel miserable for a week.

No guy who is actually interested in a woman will pick option 2. In fact, it's a non-option.

No guy who will "feel miserable for a week" over some random chick turning him down for a date. If he does feel miserable for a week, he's got serious emotional problems or instability issues. A few minutes, maybe. A hours, possibly. if he has a really sensitive ego.

Finally, as to the anecdotal evidence at the bottom of the article which inspired the article, I call bullshit again. Uma Thurman and Jessica Simpson were both referring to boyfriends, not dates, and discussing how their careers and financial success was scaring off men who were intimidated by the spectre of being in a relationship with a more successful woman. (I watch Extra, so sue me.)
> Gigablast databases are scalable to 200 billion pages with minimal hardware. (100,000 servers)

While that's obviously a ton of pages, I've just never heard someone call 100,000 servers a minimal amount of hardware. Different points of view I suppose.
Actually, part of my point is about the firearm aspect of nonsurvivalists. # of armed people >>> # of survivalists. This is part of the reason I've not dedicated a whole lot of time to survivalism.
Simple explanation. Unattractive people are more used to rejection, and also are more likely to approach when they're not as into someone, so they mind it less. Attractive people have less experience with rejection and approach others selectively, so it hurts more.
That statement implies that every class has one student that should be in a higher class. How is that possible? What about the highest class?
I think this is useless without pics of Carol
I never realized how much of a geek Bezos is until watching this video.

Really awesome to see!
Simple explanation. Unattractive people approach less selectively and have more experience with rejection, so they're less sensitive to it. Attractive people tend to be much more risk-averse.
> no longer a general applications language but rather a niche language

If by "niche" you mean "anywhere code has to run fast or in a small space." C++ is displacing C in embedded applications. The JIT compilers in Java and MS CLR are in C++. C++ is only growing for use in simulations, which remains a rapidly growing field.

C++ remains a good choice for GUI development, which is hardly niche.
The smart people always need other less smart people to do the things they don't want to do. There is always space for a worst of the team.
Guy considers the possible outcomes:

(a) He talks to Carol and she responds in a friendly manner.
He gets her phone number and a proper date next week.

(b) He does not approach Carol. He can enjoy another rewarding
task (like reading the last issue of Plus).

(c) He talks to Carol and she proves uninterested. He will
feel miserable for a week.

A week? Guy needs to lighten up, and not take rejection so seriously. His attitude may have just cost him a date with an intelligent and attractive woman.
Thoughtful comment in source:

<!-- if the lhc actually destroys the earth & this page isn't yet updated
please email mike@frantic.org to receive a full refund -->
It's quite funny because before I clicked the link, I actually wondered if they were going to include the iTunes Store or the App Store as part of their "Virtual Goods". For after all, digital music and softwares are just that : virtual goods.

I actually spent some real USD in Second Life to buy decent clothes. That was for corporate use, with the company credit card. I discovered at that time that Second Life was a cheap and efficient way to organise online meetings (very decent VOIP, and the 3d-sound is a killer for large groups), but definitely not easy-to-use / intuitive.

For my not yet public startup we are actually thinking of going the Virtual Goods way... though I personally would prefer just charging users to use the product. Maybe I'm a bit old-school... well, anyway, the priority is to release the product.
Fear of failure is the main reason one would not chat up an attractive girl. The point of this article is that men think they are going to fail, not because they are not attractive, but because attractive girls must have so many other options.

Therefore, it is somewhat independent of the man's assessment of his own attractiveness. This model is probably oversimplified, however, as self-confidence must play a role in there somewhere.
Premji's vision to have two CEOs helps Wipro achieve goals
I wonder what the profit is like over at Zappos. We know that they did $1.1ish Billion in revenues but profit figures may be much lower (I've heard as low as $50M pre-tax). My guess though is that Amazon's shipping chain will allow Zappos to lower their costs, increasing EBIT. Still though, does not seem like a cheap deal.

At least Amazon will be able to leverage the Zappos brand should they decide to expand more into Apparel. This would probably work out well in the long term.
Evernote is bloated and the desktop versions are ugly and over complex. After test various note taking
apps, Simplenote (http://www.simplenoteapp.com/) is my app of choice: clean ui and web sync. A nice review can be found here:

http://daringfireball.net/2009/07/simplenote
The Real FLOSS Community and the "Faux FLOSS Fundamentalists"
My first thought when I read this announcement was if my Amazon Prime would work with Zappos eventually.

It sure would be nice, but I'm not counting on it.
Your experience has been entirely different than mine. I've never had any problems with Evernote in two years. Granted, I'm running it on a Mac, maybe that makes the difference. Evernote on the desktop and iPhone make a for a powerful combination.

Evernote also deserves major kudos for frequently updating the app and each one makes it even better.
The 10K makes it pretty clear: Google's in the advertising business, period. They hardly sell any search appliances.
According to this blog http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=3433, M$ did so because otherwise it would be in violation of the GPL.
"It was a lot less so than it is today."

So? That doesn't make the argument any less fallacious. Maybe products are a lot worse today than they were in 1989.

My point is that there's no clear and necessary reason that a comparison of 1987 product quality to 2009 product quality is a valid counterargument to the OP's assertion. The only way it works is if you intend to argue that product quality has risen (or at least stayed constant), while the percentage produced domestically has fallen. And if you're trying to argue that point, you've got to provide some evidence (something more than a quote from Spaceballs, anyway), or you're just begging the question.
This is something a competent lawyer should advise you with. Songkick used (uses?) Gunderson Dettmer, Wilson Sonsini is quite popular in the Valley, and it sounds like you'll need significant experience, especially because you haven't posted many specifics to go on.