skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of my clients ships software to such an organization - several of our users had IE6 installed when Training day rolled around. Interestingly, rather than going through Tech Support to request an upgrade to IE7 (which takes a while), the users opted to just download Firefox.
Must be part of the 'newer' generation that was first introduced to taking back control of their devices through the efforts to unlock the iPhone rather than modchipping PS1/XBox/PS2/GC/etc. If not then he's a moron.
And even in facebook's case: Revenue is one thing, profit is another...
Sorry, there may not be too many grandmothers reading reddit, but our userbase is very much non-technical.
What about the xbox 360, TiVo, and other set top boxes?
wow that is addictive
same for IE 6 & 7
Dandruff
Yes it can be extremely annoying and embarrassing having a scalp condition like dandruff, eczema, scalp infections or a nasty itchy red rash on your scalp. If you are suffering from: is your scalp flaky itchy or do you have dry scalp with…
Watch out: exclusivity is a strong word. When you say they may become their first client, you really mean that they are guaranteed to become your only client.

What if they don't follow-through and lose interest in your product? What happens to the exclusivity then?
IIRC, being able to make an archival copy is not a law, but is part of a Supreme Court decision (i.e. 'case law'). The DMCA was enacted after the Supreme Court decision, so I would assume that legally it would 'override' it. I'm definitely not a lawyer though so I have no clue if I'm right. Either way, I'm sure there will be a case at some point challenging this discrepancy to the Supreme Court and we'll see what they say at that point.
comparative advantage?
What to do when your startup grows up?
I've been with my employer since the startup days about 4 years ago now. I'm not a founder, but I'm one of the earlier employees. The company is now profitable. The startup feel is gone. The quick-n-dirty, put something great together, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, work late nights, brainstorm new ideas feel of the company is gone. Now there are measure-twice, cut once policies & procedures in place. Strict working schedules. No changes to production code without written approval from everyone above me. People get chewed-out now instead of congratulated. It sucks. I would leave if it weren't for the outstanding stock that the company is using as a carrot on a stick to keep me on the corporate treadmill. My question is: For those of you who live an breathe startups, what would you do? Would you stick with the company to age into the rest of your promised equity even though the work environment isn't what I joined when I signed on, or would you cut your losses and move to another startup with the hopes of greener pastures?
Python Ruby
map collect,map
lambda block
filter select
? reject
reduce (functools) inject (native)

Guido van Rossum on inclusion of 'reduce' in Python 3.0, in 2005:

"This is actually the one I've always hated most, because, apart from a few examples involving + or *, almost every time I see a reduce() call with a non-trivial function argument, I need to grab pen and paper to diagram what's actually being fed into that function before I understand what the reduce() is supposed to do. So in my mind, the applicability of reduce() is pretty much limited to associative operators, and in all other cases it's better to write out the accumulation loop explicitly" (http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196)

Ruby lets you do it however you want to. I don't see myself learning Python any time soon.
In a lot of intersections you can join together right turns and turnarounds to get around those, but that's a pretty ugly hack.

Awhile ago I read a series of posts (http://daily.sightline.org/daily_score/series/bicycle-neglec...) that make important points about this kind of stuff, albeit from a Pacific NW perspective. I submitted it here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740679 if you're interested in discussing the merits of that article.
If it's a fixed-size slab, why bother with the bitfield ? It is hard to beat the performance of allocating a block from a free (double-linked) list. Start with an empty list and full slab. Try allocating from the list first, and from the bottom of the slab second. Free into the free list only. If you memory utilization is stable in a long run, then at some point you will be allocating/freeing from the list only.
I'm using IE 6 and don't see nothin'
Isn't working in FF3.5, but works fine for me in Safari 4.
What causes dandruff
Yes it can be extremely annoying and embarrassing having a scalp condition like dandruff, eczema, scalp infections or a nasty itchy red rash on your scalp. If you are suffering from: is your scalp flaky itchy or do you have dry scalp with…
Is there any way to navigate by keyboard?
You are luckier than us - some of our customers machines are so locked down that they can't even change the date let alone install firefox. We even tried using portable apps on a usb stick, no luck there either! Arrgh.
Russian Subs Patrolling Off East Coast of U.S.
You've been there 4 years but you still have significant unvested stock? Can you explain that?

Just by the tone of your post, it's obvious that you long to move to something else. And frankly, you should.

The only math that I would do is a reasonable estimate of the future valuation of your unvested stock. Is it really significant enough to keep you there? The alternative is that you would start your own company as a co-founder, own millions of shares of something that may be worth nothing or a lot. How does that compare to your current situation?

Presumably, you should have enough vested that if your current company is the next Google and your next one is a flop, you still get a nice pile of cash.
I second KWD's recommendation of BikeFriday bikes. I have a Tikit folding bike. Its far more stable and durable than any other compact folder I've ridden and have taken it over curbs and through pot-holes without a problem. Basically the folding mechanism can't engage as long as there's weight on the peddles.

You will have some flex in the frame, but less in my opinion than other folding bikes I've ridden. All the issues with a lower slung frame still apply.

The killer features for me are: 1) I can fold it in about 5 seconds; 2) I can wheel it around while folded; 3) other than the frame it uses standard bike parts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQscBxx7wLE

http://www.memagazine.org/contents/current/features/origami/...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ci6Muhedms
Rush hour traffic and the price of anarchy
Braess’s Paradox and “The Ewing Theory”
I wish to nitpick your discription of the 1930s federal gun law as taking away the ability of most people to own combat firearms. That law was rather carefully crafted to try to avoid taking away the right to own "combat" firearms, because those firearms are exactly the ones to which the 2d amendment would apply. Rather, it focused on cannons and bombs, which they could argue were not personal arms, and on what it called "tools of assassination", silenced weapons and automatic weapons. Automatic weapons were not common combat firearms at the time, most soldiers would have rifles that were bolt action, a few semi-automatic.

At the time the law was passed the New Dealers were fighting the Supreme Court, which was overturning a lot of their grand plans, so the gun law was crafted with that in mind. It doesn't even technically ban the "class III" weapons, it just requires an excise tax which is difficult to pay. It is still probably an unconstitutional law, and it's benefits in fighting crime are probably not very big -- the old tommy gun gangsters of the 1930s were not driven out of business by lack of automatic weapons, they were tracked down and killed and arrested by traditional police work (some of which was unconstitutional in other ways).

A larger objection I have is to your claim "we've already mostly lost out ability to enact forceful change. Those days are gone." I think the general trend from 1776 to now, has been towards a more just, more democratic, more ideal society. There are major deviations on the way, and we are currently regressing, but still ahead of where we were in 1960, I think.

I also think robot technology will not always benefit just the rich and powerful in conflicts. Hobbiests can already build model aircraft which carry a WRT54G and do auto-pilot; when Palestinians hack a cell phone onto a model plane and send a few ounces of incendiary or a grenade on a long, slow trip to be fairly precisely delivered via GPS or cell tower positioning, then you will know the temporary imbalence is ending.
I've always wondered, what's the biggest application built on rails? Pre 1.0 I developed one (50kloc) that crumbled when wielding my newly found weapon of metaprogramming.
Fun, but someone kept deleting my Angband game.
MySQL@Facebook: Anatomy of a query pileup
I don't believe those temperature measurements for a second. Having a better-than-metal thermal conductivity is all well and good through the 0.1mm or so of grease, but the surfaces on either side of that are themselves metal, and much, much thicker than the grease layer. This is a misoptimization. It's the equivalent of tuning code that your application spends 1% of its time in. Who cares?

The purpose of thermal grease is to displace air, not to be better than the metal heat transfer parts.
They spelled continuous improvement wrong.
Looks like it already arrived at 4chan :)
Hacking the DefCon 17 Badges
This is oddly entertaining. Could you explain how you represent the "world" in the AppEngine data store?

(Also, could you use cookies to bring me back where I left?)
There is a kind of impedance mismatch between computers and humans. Now languages bridge that to some extent. But it is still there. So my wish is a language that eliminates it.
Tiny sales compared to DVD players, almost all download uses require you to do something 'techy'
Netflix market is families and film fans - not people that know what HDMI stands for.

Netflix will definitely be online only one day, probably before Amazon goes the same way, but not for a few years.
I disabled backspace because I wasn't sure whether it should delete the char before the cursor (better for typing) or under the cursor (more natural if you click on something to delete it). Guess I'll just pick one... or have it delete under only if you clicked there?
This site proves the old "normal person + anonymity == total retard" maxim. Trending topics seem to be "gay", "penis", and "Django sucks" - lol.
It sounds like you are asking for permission to quit. Money is a promise of future enjoyment. Are you willing to get chewed out for a future payoff? I am in a similar situation except without much equity in the company and I am about to give notice as soon as I get a contract lined up.
NetHack arrives on the iPhone
I'm not sure what it is good for, but it looks and feels awesome.
Someone installed Firefox on a computer at a non-profit radio station I was involved with not so long ago.

The owner of the station sent an email to all saying that if he found out who had installed the "firefox trojan" on the office PC, he would "sue them and call in the police". A few days later, all computers in the building had been downgraded from IE8 to IE6 and locked down so users couldn't even reboot.

It's now official policy in that company that if anyone puts their own USB drive into an office computer, they'll be asked to leave the station. There is electrical tape stuck over the USB ports. That's the sort of mindless, dribbling paranoia you're up against.
Why There Are No Girls In San Francisco
fwiw, I think you're doing absolutely the right thing. The opportunity cost of sticking with it is too high when you have better ideas to work on.
doesn't load on my iPod so I can't speak to the functionality but I'd just like to commend you on not choosing some idiotic name like Floovr or Meeerrblap or Dooglity or Phlambo or Hogchaw or Speebu for your project. Makes it that much easier to take seriously.
This is one of my favorite optimizations. It is excellent argument in favor of purity restrictions, too. I didn't know there was a way to instrument the compiler---neat!
Here's the dilemma put simply: If you set language based on geolocation, you'll have a tiny handful of tech savvy nerds complain about you on the internet.

If you set it based on the Accept-Language header, you'll have a bunch of non-tech savvy users not use your site because they have no idea their language is set to English in the browser.

It's a tradeoff and, unfortunately, geolocation is the best of a bunch of bad methods to determine your language.
I think you misunderstood me.

I agree that society is more just now -- a lot of progress has been made. By "forceful change" I meant the government is no longer so afraid of armed civilians as it was, say, during the Whiskey Rebellion. Jefferson's quip that "A little rebellion now and then... is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government." hardly seems apt in its original meaning.

Very interesting piece of history regarding the 1930s laws. Thanks for the correction.
Does it take the path as the name of the world?
How should VCs say no when the problem is with the team?
My Father the Drug Dealer
That's awesome fun.

Tip: Try to hear the intervals -- the lower pitch distinguishes between rows, while the higher pitch distinguishes between columns. If you can learn to differentiate between the two pitches, it's easier to map it to the different numbers.
Oauth, here she comes (Coderspiel)
For me the best malloc for me is one I don't have to know anything about - whatever is built in to the scripting language I happen to be using. But I know you aren't playing around with memory allocation for the sheer geekery of it. There are still some problems that can't be solved efficiently with higher level languages. This class of problems I'll gladly leave to you guys.
Best damn OAuth article I've read to date.
What's wrong with Ikea?
Our startup has a name which has nothing to do with what we are doing. Everyone we tell the name says its a cool name. There is a funny story behind the name but at this point we dont go out telling the story to everyone. When someone asks why, we simply say its cool and we like it.
I had a lot of fun when I drew a face, and then got to watch other people alter (and improve!) it...until someone smeared through it with letters...
This is the situation I see in many corporate environments. Thin clients set up and users who aren't allowed to download or install any new applications, Firefox included!
How about the cost of a Windows license?
It's really simple. This was my first App Engine project. There's only one model, Tile, that has contents, namespace, and x/y coordinates. The contents field is a string representing the text in this tile. The namespace tells you what page the tile belongs to (e.g., /newsyc), and the coordinates are relative to the starting position. Namespace, x, and y are part of the keyname, so contents is the only model property. I don't create a tile until someone writes to that area.

I don't want to use cookies, but I'm thinking about implementing some kind of directions feature. ("Where am I?" "How do I get to X?") But I also want to keep the system really simple, so I don't know.
FOSSHelpWanted: A reddit for open source projects that need developers
The key thing to understand is that Conversion Optimizer is just a user-friendly wrapper around cost per click bidding. It will look to you like you're paying cost per conversion, but you're not, you're paying cost per click.

So, if you start "shaving" conversions (failing to report them), here is what happens:

1) I tell Google I am willing to pay 25 cents per conversion. My website converts 25% of clicks, which for the sake of easy math we'll say is constant. (Conversion Optimizer is a good idea because it is not constant, in particular, because it tends to be different for every source of clicks in ways which are very time-intensive to track yourself.)

2) After Google's system has figured out the above two bits of information, it will figure out "OK, he can pay about 6.25 cents per click. In general, I should bid that much on his behalf in the auction -- avoiding clicks priced at 8 cents, and 'backing up the truck' on clicks priced at 4 cents.")

3) Then you start shaving conversions, so that while your site continues to convert at 25%, you only report a conversion rate of 20%. Google figures "Wow, sucks to be him, he can only afford clicks priced at 5 cents now and still make his 25 cent per conversion desired price. OK, I'll stop bidding on clicks between 5 and 6.25 cents, and continue bidding on clicks priced below 5 cents."

Thus, lying to Google doesn't particularly hurt them, it only hurts you. This is in sharp contrast to real cost per conversion (cost per action = CPA) advertising like affiliate advertising, where you pay for every conversion you report, so shaving conversions means you get money from customers but get to keep it for yourself.
My personal experience is very similar to what jzdziarski mentioned. Make a good quality app and support it, you will make money on it. Dont invest money on marketing, I have heard horror stories about it, unless you are someone like EA, amazon or target.

There are a few dirty tricks that I have noticed being constantly used by other developers like releasing an update as soon as your previous update gets approved to be in the new release section. We don't do that because we are serving a niche market and we don't want to upset users, but it works. (IQ Test by McPhun is amongst top 5 apps in education for last 6 months and they come out with an update every week. They do it for almost all their apps.)
It actually runs better in IE8 than it did in Chrome on my work machine...
Actually, there are LOTS of classes and tests on what constitutes the law of land warfare, competent authority, etc. in the military -- way better than anything at MIT or Harvard that I encountered. Yes, these are simplified for junior enlisted personnel ("do this, don't do that", vs. why), but for officers and NCOs it probably goes far beyond what anyone in civilian government, outside the judiciary, thinks about.

Having been in multiple combat zones, I think the US military errs too much on the side of legalism. I actually think the US Government, and especially the military, is the wrong tool for counter-insurgency -- there are a lot of people who just need to disappear, or die colorfully, and it would be better if doing so didn't hurt the image of the US.

(I say this as a libertarian atheist...)

Most of the "rah rah usa usa!" people are not in the military.
Why would they need to change the date? It syncs with a domain controller and if you knock it more than 15 minutes or so out you'll break kerberos and your username and password will stop working, and then you'll tell me "you didn't do anything" and "it was working fine". :-/
Here are a few political problems. I want:

* Journalists to be able to make a living doing the hard work of journalism.

* Formal education to be conducted in a way that facilitates learning rather than bureaucratic hoop-jumping.

* Manual laborers to be able to earn a comfortable living.

* More American cities to be beautiful and walkable.
Ahhh I was wondering what those Ninja Party badges were for...
I started using it in September 2007, which was probably within a week or two of it launching. The major visible improvement since is that the system needs conversion data prior to you being able to apply CO. Back when it launched that was 300 conversions in the 30 days prior to hitting the switch, which limited its utility to small businesses. Over the years that number went down -- it was 200 for a while, and now it is 15.
Some technological problems. I want:

* Sysadmin work out of my way, or at least reasonably simple, and real information available when I run into a problem.

* Ad-heavy, information-poor web sites to stop showing up so high in SERPs.
I assume you only construct a tile if someone types in it; not if someone simply scrolls over it?

How large are the tiles?
I agree that a given A/B test should change only one metric at a time. However I've had excellent results from running multiple A/B tests in parallel. As long as inclusion in each is independent and random, the results of each are informative, and if you're concerned about interaction effects you can analyze for signs of a potential interaction in a post-mortem, then do a more expensive multi-variate test if you have cause for concern.
Pretty interesting match-up really: ruthless efficiency versus individuality; process versus personality; open versus closed; workaday versus sublime; dauntingly powerful Borgian collective versus one man's vision.
If you look closely when it is folded, it only has one.
How many people are actively using Skribit on their blogs?
If everyone accomplishes your second goal, we will probably no longer be wealthy enough to achieve your first goal.

Incidentally, if you live in the US, your second goal is achievable. At least 30 million americans do exactly that. The government classifies them as "poor", although they lack no material goods necessary for survival.
I want wisecracks to have less power to derail thoughtful conversation.

Not an easy problem to solve, BTW. There is a good reason why thoughtful conversation is so easy to derail: it asks for a lot of mental bandwidth, and the competition for bandwidth is fierce. A wisecrack gets its message across in almost no bandwidth, takes no effort to appreciate, and satisfies the primal human urge to see someone else humiliated.
i've never heard from someone that actually works in one of these IT departments

Hi!

who are these unsympathetic robots who, while ironically working in an IT department, are so out of touch with technology

The same people who get emails from vendors warning us off upgrading to IE7 or certain programs will break. The same people who have had such pain from flakey apps for all sorts of reasons that we just don't dare upgrade. The same people who use anti-virus, non-administrator accounts and gateway HTTP, FTP and SMTP proxies with scanners to reduce the risks.

The same people who've learned to beat their inner geek into submission to the principle of 'if it's not broken, and you don't want it broken, leave it alone. Companies want sameness, predictability and uptime, not features, novelty, CSS compliance or security'.
Thanks, whenever I get redirected to a local version of Google, I use that link, it's placed at the bottom right of localized Google home as "Google.com in English".
Did you try the windows low-fragmentation heap? I've seen it used very successfully.
That is spot on. Population-wise, SF men outnumber the women by something like 55%-45%. However, if you tried to estimate that number based on the nightlife scene, you'd arrive at something like 70%-30%. I think the psychological concept that the essay sites also explains the lack of girls in bars (which, for many guys, is a far more important stat than the population-wide one).
Yep, that's my strategy. The hardest part is getting the first number. After that distinguishing changes in intervals makes it easier. Congrats on getting two scores of 8 on Insane. Sure you're not cheating? :)
Firefox 3.5 Jumps To 4.5% Market Share In A Month, IE Hemorrhaging Slows
Download and install? If it's one of ours, they wont even be able to right click! ;)
Wouldn't the delay between 2 sensors only give 1 delay, and thus one dimension? I don't follow how placing them on the corners makes this work.
We used to have quit-o-meters drawn on the whiteboard in our office. Every time someone came from a meeting with the management he would reposition the indicator. Mine was the first one to go into the "I quit" zone and so did another coworker's a couple of days after.