skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can confirm this. In high school I hated math, planned on getting an English major, because the English teachers were so good. Previously, in middle school I hated critical analysis of books, but because my math teacher was so good I was an absolute math geek.

I remember my high school Algebra II teacher was asked, "Why should we care about what you're saying?" His answer: "You shouldn't care. You're here to get a grade. You'll never use this and it's not fun." This while my English teacher was staying an hour after class to debate Lolita, Ulysses, A Space Odyssey, and a whole ton of other stuff with basically every student willing to talk to him. There were a lot.
There is a great Erma Bombeck (author who wrote books satirizing suburban life "The Grass is Greener Over the Septic Tank") line about how the only real excuse notes are those written on a napkin, in lipstick and crumpled.
Low Bar, High Ceiling - The Posterous Philosophy
Jeff Bezos: Regret Minimization Framework [2001]
Note a slight error the transfer rate is 20mb/s not 200mb/s.
I'll confirm product quality. It's just that right when the economy exploded there were a lot of people who were pretty snarky towards Apple, sneering at a company that dared make an expensive product. In fact, I spent this week on prog.reddit, and there are still people basically saying they'll laugh at Apple fanboys' faces when Apple collapses and they lose everything. I'm just glad that's not happening.

From anecdotal experience, every graduate at my old high school just picked up a 13" Macbook Pro. They're everywhere.
FUD is still FUD, and with MS, that's all the FSF is good at.

Lawyers who do primarily ideologically-driven work have difficulty understanding transactional law. And transactional law is pretty damn clear on this point -- by actively encouraging the use of Mono, MS is estopped from ever suing for patent violations for the use of Mono (estopped means that b/c they have induced others to reasonably rely on statements that they will not sue for using Mono, they cannot later go back on their word b/c this would be unjust -- the court will not allow them to "trap" others).
It's been settled law for decades.
Apple's market cap is around Google's, according to Newsweek. They make a pretty awesome profit on every product they sell.
The Song of the PowerSquid: The Inside Story of the Life of an Invention
I haven't used Etherpad, but isn't Google Wave going to capture the essential feature of Etherpad (N-way realtime collaboration) while being federated, backed by Google, and open source to boot?

I know that there is still room to be a niche player in a market even after someone dominates a space, but I am curious to hear if the AppJet folks have any more ambitious plans for dealing with this.
This is actually pretty stupid. There's a literal 0% chance that Tony Hsieh got a bad deal here. The guy's a successful repeat entrepreneur who had been through the whole thing before and was dealing with a top-notch VC firm. He knew the game way too well to be getting burned by participating preferred or some absurd liquidation preference. Hell, I knew the game well enough to have avoided that before I even got in it, just from Googling around. (Thanks PG!)

He may have been forced to sell perhaps, but he gave up that right when he took the money and he knew it was a very real possibility. He also knew that if it happened, he'd be making a bundle off of it. If he feels screwed right now, which seems highly unlikely, it's his own fault.

VCs don't hate entrepreneurs, most of them love them. They just have a business to run and look out for themselves. The good ones, like Sequoia, do it by aligning their interests with the founders as much as possible.
Maybe the second poster just needed to be less complete...
One of my high school buddies would do this (only once per audience, granted).

I would tell a joke. People would laugh. Then he would start telling the same joke, trailing off when people started looking at him funny, ending with "Well, it was funny when HE told it!"
Reading a bunch of these answers I think, "It must be nice to live in a place where you don't need a car to get anywhere". In Texas (specifically DFW), commuting means sitting in traffic for 30 minutes to an hour.
I'm sorry, it seems one could conclude from your statement that you don't believe Jobs-era Apple (which, after all, has had basically the same business model all these years) hasn't changed the world. It seems to me they've already done that a few times over.

The iPod. The iTune Music Store. The iPhone. A world-class music studio for $500. A world-class motion picture studio for $1000. The evolution of the digital hub. The insistence that technology should "just work". I honestly don't know what else you could expect from any other company of any size or business model.
The had already pulled off good creative writing in their excuse notes, notes that could have been written for any class. Writing those fake excuse notes DID come from their natural inclination, and when encouraged to continue to follow it, rather than to get back to the program, they produced even greater work.
The FSF has a problem understanding the word "necessary".
A court will determine that any method/code/algorithm necessary to fully implement the specs is "necessary", and thus covered by MS's promise.

In contrast, MS never released the FAT family of patents under an open license, as it has with Mono.
Bringing up the spectre of TomTom (in the article) is FUD -- it's irrelevant and displays a ridiculous lack of understanding of the law. (And since the FSF is a legal organization, that means their legal opinions can't be trusted to be accurate.)
Can I see the demo with the click of just one link?

Sorry, I have no time for free registrations or downloading and running something, I just want to see the demo.
Well, if your culture tells you that a drought is because the gods are angry, and you must dance to bring the rains again, and you dance and the rains do not come -- you must not have danced enough yet. Dance more, and eventually the rains will return. It's always worked before.
Slight?
No, it means you're trying way too hard to convince me using unrelated smokescreens, and oftentimes borders on deception.

How many times have you seen, on a support page or whatnot, a picture of a smiling call center guy with a headset? It's probably the most common usage of a stock photo.

But that isn't your support guy, in fact a lot of these places have the founders answering their own phones - so why pretend to be a big company when you are not?
Scramjets promise space travel for all
Mapping Drug Use by Testing Sewer Water
I have no complaints about doing things here in Pittsburgh. We have our own incubator (AlphaLab) and a solid Open Coffee Club. Everybody seems helpful, and everyone knows everyone else. It's a small town.
Identity Theft and Protection
Identity crimes or impersonation committed online has become a common phenomenon. U.S Federal Trade Commission (FTC) indicates that an estimated 10 million Americans are affected every year.
Free IP to ASN mapping service.
Totally agreed; this is exactly the generalized message I took away.

How many "lessons" (goals) could we tailor to the desires of the "student" (user) as a substitute for enforcement mechanisms? Surely not all, but many more than we're presently doing.
If it made economical sense, people would be clamoring for massively fuel efficient cars.

But look at it as it is now: A hybrid car carries a premium over a normal car of much more money than a hybrid owner could ever hope to recoup in gas savings. That will change as the price of gas increases, which will happen naturally as we run low on fossil fuels, which will push a switch to more fuel efficient vehicles or alternative energy vehicles.

For now, there is no problem. I wish people would stop making noise about it.
I highly recommend Instapaper for offline reading on the iPhone. It also has an added benefit that I spend less time reading long articles while at work. Instead, I just click the Read Later bookmarklet, and the article is waiting for me on my phone in easy to read, text only format.
He cited statistics that showed how much people are willing to pay for media content: $5 an hour to watch movies, 75 cents an hour reading books, magazines, and newspapers and 25 cents for every hour of Internet use.

There's an awfully big difference between "willing to pay" and "will actually pay".

What statistics are he citing, anyway?
The Irksome Cellphone Industry
Now, if you are teaching kids Network Security and you start getting these kinds of forged excuse notes, you are exactly on the right track. Just start having the kids alternate between thinking of ways to make sure the notes are really from the parents, then thinking about how to crack the system they just came up with.

If anyone reading this is teaching such a class to undergrads or lower, please use this as a lecture technique and let us know how it goes. :)
Perhaps audio quality makes a difference? On the G1/iPhone it can sample audio at whatever rate it needs, rather than just having to take what comes over the line.
Ask HN: Things to consider in an acquisition
(It was suggested I submit this again - thanks!)

Long story short - a large multinational has proposed purchasing my startup (me and my wife essentially with a couple of part time guys). We'll be lawyering up before signing anything. But I wonder if hackers here who have successfully been acquired can provide any down to earth advice? We'll have enough cash to do anything we want for the rest of our lives. We may or may not be pushed out of the company (its ok if we are given the size of the check!).
Although his outrage is surely warranted, I think he would get more positive reactions and help for his cause if he didn't resort to caps lock and swearing. Ranting on twitter is probably not the best channel for resolution on this issue but it does bring his case to light...
I don't think the reckoning is weird at all. Being interrupted for an hour in the middle of your work costs more than an hour in all but the most ideal cases.

If you could somehow save your brain state in an instant, teleport directly to the meeting for an hour, teleport back, and then reload your previous brain state as you returned to your work, it would take exactly an hour to catch up.

The fact is, it takes a bit of time to change gears for the meeting and then quite a bit more time to get back in the creative zone. Aside from just remembering all the details of what you were working on, it takes quite a bit of time for your body, including your brain, to get into a state of "flow".
That's a really impressive piece of software.
Canada's leading Web 2.0 pioneers
it's a bad habit of mine to prematurely judge people's intellect solely on their ability to differentiate between the two
Late 20s, early 30s usually means the women want a bit more out of a relationship than most guys are willing to commit to straight away. It makes no difference how smart/beautiful women are at this age, guys are just more likely to stay away from them.
I'm still wondering what happened to the whole 'social' movement for web apps in the early 2000's.

Facebook and Twitter came along and suddenly people were only interested in whoring themselves (and buying iPhone apps) instead of inventing apps (and using them) to change the world with 'social' or truly democratic means.

Moral: People tend to only care about themselves ("look at all my followers!") Big, hard global/social problems can wait for 'the next generation'.
Expensive to do on per individual basis if it is for government curiosity, but can be used by corporation - let say some company that have unstable staff, such as retailers, fast food chains, installs a device in the bathroom, collect samples and once in let's say month send them to the lab. Can be used for discrimination to enforce occasional drug users to work for smaller salaries...
Strange how two stories on same day don't get analyzed together. Consider how Techcrunch reports that online ad revenue is off by 85%:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/23/online-ad-revenues-at-t...
The rich wouldn't shop at Walmart.
Is, but any chance, the cost of going to the cinema in the US somewhere around $5 per hour? Trying to transfer the willingness to pay some amount for that experience to paying the same amount for watching something on a computer screen is a nice piece of wishful thinking.
Really enjoying the features coming out of Heroku. By far the easiest way to deploy a Rails app. However, their pricing is rather high, are these high costs worth the time it takes to set all this on up your own VPS?
The Ups and Downs of Respected Careers
True, but (1) we had many years of quite good economic growth until 2008 and (2) their big $$$ are coming from the iPhone right now - wasn't there a post yesterday observing that it's outselling the Mac? So one could argue that the iPhone is their lower-end product line: Mac design philosophy that goes in your pocket.
This flash drive is all about the bragging rights. Until they come out with a 512 GB one.
Kontera Raises $15.5M For Annoying In-Text Advertising Technology
Generating PI in Haskell
But at the point you talk about gaming, you eliminate mac as a competition.
I've said this before and I will say it again -- any list of Canadian entrepreneurs without backtype.com on it is a sorely incomplete list. They're building real core tech that is powering dozens of other sites.
Wow, the original is 10 pages... really? This is getting out of hand.
I normally rub my eyes, and maybe scratch my ass on the way from my bed to my office, which is right next to my bedroom.
Erin Andrews Peephole Video Rapidshare
It's actually 20MB/s not mb/s
People in eastern Asia have historically consumed sugar at an extremely low rate. In many of those countries, fruit passes as dessert.

Mexico is the second fattest country in the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_Mexico), and soft drinks are used heavily there.

There are no calories in water. When your brain is inducing your body to increase blood glucose, you won't crave water. Sugary drinks are some of the most calorically dense (wrt volume and cost) foodstuffs you'll find. Poor people don't drink sodas because they are thirsty, they drink them because they are hungry.
How do people from different nations evaluate new ideas :)
They'd have to charge more in line with pay per view (which is what iTunes does) and could probably do nicely with that. It would make cable companies mad, but hey they already are.
Startup CTO mistakes I'd rather not repeat...
Lack Of Cybersecurity Talent Could Leave U.S. Vulnerable
I love http://isitgoingtoraintoday.com/. All the weather info I need.
I think josefresco meant the world outside the computer market. The iPod and iPhone, I agree 100%.

Music and movie software...no. As a professional in that sphere I personally feel Apple comes late to those parties after working out or buying what everyone else is wearing. That's not meant as a put-down, I just think you're overlooking how much innovation comes from third parties.
I looked at review board yesterday, and didn't really like how well it integrated. It seemed like there was a lot of manual patch creation. I'd prefer something that monitors the repository, automatically creates reviews, and sends them out to a group of people.

I can get close with Crucible, I'm currently looking into that a bit more.
I wouldn't even have heard of YC if not for the essays. I'm sure the same is true for others, some of whom have probably applied and been good investments for YC.
I think this is interesting, because there's very little being done to increase the level of "cybersecurity" knowledge among the students not looking to do malicious things. I personally believe that they should teach _every_ Computer Science student to hack, if only because the malicious ones will learn it anyway and it's important that the non-malicious ones learn it so they can fight back
Just redesigned Launchset.com. Looking for some feedback.
My app, Launchset.com, aims to connect early adopters to sites. Early adopters can discover up and coming sites. Sites can use our beta management service to find and manage early users.

I just finished redesigning the site based on feedback I got from people the past couple of weeks. The big part is for people to easily understand what the site does. I had to get rid of some features so I can clearly present what the site is all about.

If you have any suggestions, let me know. If you want to use the service, email me at danny -at- launchset.com or go to the Submit A Site page on the site.
Here are links:

http://www.launchset.com

http://www.launchset.com/site/add/ (Submit your site)
Agreed - looks like this list only includes Web 2.0 companies that are located in Canada. While Backtype was founded by Canadians, I believe they have moved to Silicon Valley??
Thoughts on making regexs easier to read
Use bazaar.
Oooooh, instapaper now works on the iPod touch too. Perfect. This may be worth upgrading from iPod Touch 1.2 to 3.0 for. Thanks for the pointer!
I miss the syntax highlighting option... hopefully that will come back.
I wouldn't say that Apple is the only one in the >$1000 market. However, they are the only one who is successful in that market. My last two laptops have been Macs (iBook and then Macbook). I didn't see them as high-end machines, although at $1300 each, they would have been "premium" by other standards.

The only other company whose laptops people rave about is Sony. I personally don't think that you should have to pay $2000 for a subnotebook, but if you intend to do that, Sony makes a very nice product.

Everyone else would love to get into this market, but can't. Dell, HP, Asus - they've all tried, but Apple's "low-end" products are better than their "high-end products."

Sure, I'm sure that Apple would like to get into the lower-end market, but they won't compromise quality to do that. The mac mini is the only low-end product they make, and it is also the only mac that doesn't have a convincing value proposition (funny how that works).
What about the parts of the (human) brain that are just some wet-wired differential processing grid. Though their phenotype is ultimately prescribed in DNA (granted a list), I wouldn't be surprised to find that many of those "moving parts" are more efficiently approximated/realized by things like 'hashes' (etc) as opposed to lists.

(My apologies if I'm out of my depth here.)
I scour HN shortly before I leave for my 45-minute commute on a bunch of buses. I'll Instapaper any pages I find interesting and read them on my iPod touch.

I don't do this when I get back home though. I use that time to think up ideas for my projects.
Good point. In general, in the VC backed business, the interests of employees tend to be aligned with interests of VCs not with interests of founders. Both VCs and employees need an exit and both make too little money to matter on a small exit.
Did you read the same article I did? Abrams and the author return to the fact that Friendster wasn't "keeping up" with its own growth and "didn't work" a half-dozen times.
As many people have already observed, ideal rationality and reality are very different. This is one of the reasons why assertiveness and risk-seeking behavior is rewarded in {dating,business}. The game theoretic calculus might not provide the optimal course of action, because its assumptions might not sufficiently model reality.

I'd offer that we don't see many beautiful, single women because we irrational agents take the risk to chat her up anyway. And HEYYO, turns out that, empirically, maybe that's the right thing to do.
Byline looks to be exactly what I need. Thanks.
I think people forgive intermittent outages more than persistent unusable slowness. An outage you know will be resolved; frustrating slowness may persist indefinitely.
Apple has 91% of market for $1,000+ PCs, says NPD
Git's incremental commits may be a great idea in theory, but in practice, it allows you--even forces you, if you run in any mode except "git add ."--to make commits you've never actually tested. I'd rather have a cluttered history that built at any given point than a clean one that didn't.
Or also, just before Friendster, Ryze?
Ask HN: Credit Card Processing in Canada?
I am looking into accepting Credit Cards. Can I still use Authorize.NET even though I am based in Canada?
Didn't know clojure tries to do OO
DirectVM targets 130mil users with Splashtop, the slim-and-fast version of Linux
"Annoying" is certainly correct. The damned things pop up even when your mouse rolls over them. Now I know who to add to my Roast-in-Hell list.
Original source of the story: http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-has-91-of-ma...

Buried a bit deeper is something more interesting:
Despite these advantages, US Mac retail sales slowed for about six months.

The Macolypse Hits Apple*
From about November 2008 to April 2009, Mac year-over-year US retail sales declined, even as Windows PCs dramatically gained. There was kind of a numbers reversal, following the late-September stock market crash. For example, in October 2008, following release of new aluminum, unibody laptops, US retail Mac revenue grew 25.5 percent, while Windows PC sales fell 4.2 percent, according to NPD. By January 2009, Mac retail revenue was down 10.4 percent from a year earlier and Windows PC revenue was flat.*

He goes on to say Mac Sales are up for June YOY, while attributing some of this success to price cuts, and noting that while Apple enjoys the high-margin territory firms which are pricing on value are holding onto market share.

I think the real losers here are not PCs in general or even manufacturers with a range of offerings like Dell and HP, but other luxury computer brands like Sony and boutique workstation suppliers.

As noted, the brick-and-mortar limitation is really distorting. Last time I was in Office Depot or Best Buy, they were strongly emphasizing value over performance with their space allocation.
Adobe Confirms 0-Day Vulnerability
I wish more shopping sites were like yours. I just found some neat stuff I like within seconds. Even on Amazon which is fairly usable, there's so much crap to distract your eye it becomes ridiculous.
I find that having my server administration out-sourced is worth the cost. Plus, if you figure that you can run an app on Heroku for free at first, the "real" price might be lower than you think.
The future of mobile malware - digitally signed by Symbian?
Not wanting users to sign up right away and hiding your advanced features sounds like odd/contrary advice. On the low end, wouldn't you want Aunt Suzy to sign up right away (before she gets confused) and geeky Nephew Bill to know how to connect your app to all his favorite social sites (without digging for it)?
FYI: Your website is improperly categorized by OpenDNS as 'Adult Themes' (probably due to the word 'sexy' in the domain), and therefore blocked for me. I flagged it as improperly categorized. Hopefully it gets resolved soon as I am interested in reading this post.
Fuzzing SCADA PLCs
Wireless power system shown off
The Mercurial equivalent of "git reset --hard ORIG_HEAD" is "hg update --clean" (or "hg up -C" for short), which is still clearer to understand than the git equivalent, in my opinion.

To correct another common misconception, you can absolutely push only certain heads of a repository. The command is "hg push -r <head of relevant branch>". If you have bookmarks installed, that can be as easy as "hg push -r <bookmark name>".
click the link... there's a demo video right there.
I'm not a big fan of Review Board for the following reasons:

- It's not effective for large changes because it presents all the diffs on a single page

- It makes it difficult to jump around in the code. I prefer being able to open the code in my editor of choice and jump around in the file using ctags or whatever code-navigation solution you use

- I would like better code-navigation features

It's not a bad tool, but my team didn't find it very well-suited to its needs
Thinking about the play button