skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The owner is pretty precise if that's the word.

A friend of a friend of a friend told me when they (the security door company) installed their million dollar security door system at RIMs Halifax, NS office he saw some guy in a golf shirt and khakis standing watching everyone go in. Later on he asked his friend, a RIM employee, who that person was, he said it was the owner of RIM.

So the next time he was at RIM he went over and introduced himself as the rep from the security door company and asked why he was watching his employees go through the new door.

The owner of RIM said the new security door system was too slow and he was upset at the loss in productivity from the wasted time people spent trying to get through the new slow security door system.

The security door rep said it's as good as it gets, they can't make it any faster, the software controls it and it's as fast as it can go.

The owner of RIM offered the services of RIM's programmers to improve the software but...that's when I had to go back to work and never heard how the story ended :(
The Half Million Dollar Wiener: Rent for Hotdog Stand in NYC? $53K/mo.
Look beyond share price:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=RIMM

Specifically, look at the "Income Statement" section.
Seriously edw519? This is HN-worthy for you? My poor broken RSS stream.
"and (of course) the team"

This is something that can't be overstated. OK, yeah, I'm biased; I know and have worked alongside several of the folks at EveryBlock, but I doubt you're going to find a better group of designers/developers available for building this sort of service.

Sure, the code's open source, but it only exists at all because these guys have been in the trenches for years, wrangling things that can take years off your life and turning some of the crappiest, gnarliest data sources in the world into useful, well-designed data-browsing interfaces. Access to that sort of concentrated experience/expertise is worth quite a bit of money all by itself, never mind the other stuff MSNBC gets out of this deal.
I see your point, but saying that a "'SQL injection attack'" was used to "penetrate networks' firewalls" really does conjure the image of somebody setting their IP to "' OR 1=1;".
The article appears to measure "overhead" in bytes, whereas I would measure it in dollars.

If I understand the technology correctly, twice as many slices requires twice as many storage hosts. In dollars, that's decidedly more expensive than using disks with twice the capacity.

This is, perhaps, my general argument against what seems to be called "sharding:" $1k will buy 24 slots in a disk array but only 6 slots (if that) in a server.
> perhaps someone could enlighten me as to what I'm looking for?

You're looking for information. If you tried out Twitter and you didn't get it, you probably weren't receiving the information you were looking for. Its really amazing how people hype up Twitter and then when someone tries it out "they don't get it". There isn't anything to get but updates about things you're interested in. What you get out of Twitter is directly correlated to how well you tune your twitterstream. Twitter is valuable to me because it provides me with real time news and updates about the things I'm interested in. It really is that simple.
So, how are octopart and wufoo doing? (They both seem to be around, still. Have they been in the news, lately?)
America the sleazy? (based on its diplomats not paying tickets abroad)
Odeo. Except that in hindsight, I think the investors may've wished that Ev kept their money and started Twitter out of the same company...
This kind of story has only one purpose: to enable the rest of us to make snarkastic "well boo fricking hoo" comments about the folks featured.

Given this fact, I kinda wonder why any of them agreed to be interviewed. Surely they must have known how this article would turn out?
BEEP! Oh, sorry, just trying to readjust to Honda controls ...

Anyway, I never found 3. to be a problem on my R100GS (w/ early K-style controls) but I think there's another really important point here: supporting those three buttons requires a whole mess of relays, latches and so on, in a black box the size of a couple of packs of cigs, hidden away under the tank. If it fails, like mine did, there's no way to do a roadside repair. It's a black box, literally.

Whereas the standard setup has one simple mechanical switch and one flasher can and not many wires. Its very simple to diagnose and you can get a new flasher can anywhere for $5.

The appropriate BMW slogan: "Why simple, when complicated works?"
"I think a lot of people design systems for imaginary users that don't actually exist."

If I had to determine, based on previous personal observations, which was more likely to exist, iTunes users or perl script users, I would have to conclude that you are imaginary.
A similar article was written by the Times in February 09 titled 'You try to live on 500k in this town':
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/style/09iht-08halfmill.200...
Google can't do math.
Is m^4 like volume through time?
The way I have had it explained to me (which I still don't quite get) is that an object is immutable if there was no time. When you mutate an object, it only happens due to time passing (ie if you were to "go back in time" the object would be as it was) - so changing something creates something else (in time). Confused.
Do not go gentle into rewrite / Rage, rage against the dying of the site.

/me ducks
Would you say that every blog that promotes delicious bookmarking is spamming? That's what I see you implying. If so, you are implicating nearly every popular blog that exists today.
He didn't implement the GNFS; he used GGNFS and MSieve.
>I can't make sense of any of that, or see how it is relevant to what you were quoting from my post. Are you suggesting that logical positivism is correct, or that it's ok for scientists (and for you) to ignore the philosophy of science, or something else? Vague references to "trying to create structures with a certain known function" are just impossible for me to interpret without some explanation of what they're supposed to mean.

Structures with predictable behavior - eg drugs that will alleviate suffering, chips that will compute, etc. I take no position on whether it's ok to ignore philosopy, but as far as I can see they largely do. It doesn't matter to me whether logical positivism is correct - I'm saying people doing science clearly seek predictive knowledge. Models are predictive. If you still disagree, I'm not sure we can come to any agreement here.

> The chemists methods were (typically) scientific and rational, even though they did not reach a good understanding of chemistry using these methods for quite some time.

They're only "scientific" & "rational" in retrospect because you now know what is actually happening. When solving chemical equations, you must take into account atomic numbers, which they did long before knowing about atoms. There's no a priori reason why certain compounds must always be in certain proportions. All they knew is it worked well.

> Certainly, if our brains were different we might have different moral beliefs, but that does not imply that those beliefs would be equally correct.

So if our current brain structure is an accident of evolution what makes our present moral beliefs more correct? Geometry has real world consequences that don't change if brain structure changes. Coincidentally the only moral facts that aren't already changing (much) are those crucial in evolution.

> I am curious, though, why you are so sure that moral facts must be reducible to physical facts.

It's inconcievable to me how you can make a statement about this reality without (eventually) referring to some observation/experiment -- ie some test that argues for that outcome over other possible outcomes. If you claim moral beliefs aren't based on reality then clearly they're arbitrary.
Not a native Pittsburgher, but surely proud to call myself a happy Pittsburgh transplant!
Jeff Jarvis Asks Audience To Correct His New Business Models for News
"Last year's occupant paid $415,000 a year for the Met stands plus at least $25,000 for supplies and labor, and didn't go under—so we can assume he brought in significantly more than $440,000."

If we assume that hotdog vendor worked 365 days a year, that comes to $1,205 a day. If he works 8 hours a day, that's about $150 per hour.

If someone knows what a hotdog goes for in NYC, we can figure out how many hot dogs he'd have to sell per hour in an 8 hour workday.

Below is a link to an article with a bit more detail, that says he sells water for $2 a bottle, so a hotdog isn't going to be much more than that. If a hotdog costs $4, he'd have to sell 38 of them every hour, which is about 1 hotdog every 2 minutes, given an 8 hour workday, every day for 365 days a year.

Keep in mind all this is just to cover rent, cost of labor, and expenses. Making a profit would require selling even more hotdogs.

Also, I just looked at the Met's website, and it says they're closed Mondays, so that only leaves the hotdog vendor with 312 productive days per year. This alone will push the vendor to have to sell close to a hotdog every minute (0.73451 hotdogs per minute to be exact), just to break even.

I've been to the Met, and seen the vendors there, and they're just not that busy. Sometimes they'd get a family buying a bunch of sodas and maybe some icecream, but most of the time they're just standing around doing nothing, even on busy days. On ordinary days it's probably much worse. And in the off-season it's pretty dead (except on weekends).

So I have a difficult time believing they make that much money. But I suppose it's not completely out of the realm of possibility.

http://thebsreport.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/nyc-hot-dog-vend...
Hurley and Chen are YouTube founders. Tom Lane organized the Independent JPEG Group, which isn't the group that designed JPEG (that group is called "JPEG") but rather an author of some important open-source JPEG software. What's the relationship?
You mean DMCA, and IANAL but probably not. The calculator's OS may be a copyrighted work, but the calculator itself is not.
http://img.skitch.com/20090818-ca7b431u5urtm7rpdh1ag7uwnx.jp...
Milk's Murky Origins
I thought it was customary to include the year at the end of old/reposts.
Freakonomics also posted on it: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/hot-dog-ven...
"If, on average, he sells only one hot dog and drink every minute the Met is open, with about 500 average daily opening minutes, that’s 500 servings per day. If he charges $3 for a dog and drink, his revenue of $1,500 leaves him $500 per day to cover variable costs. Seems possible, but I would expect that he’s not making economic profits."

From an economics perspective, what I also like about this is the comparison to the food vendor curb side permits that only cost $200 but are limited to 3100 permits resulting in shortage and a "thriving black market" while these specific spot permits are auctioned off. Almost like event marketing and scalping tickets.
NASA mission broadcasts mixed with electronic ambient (pls)
I thought this article was going to be about beef tongue, which is rather bland compared to muscle meat.
Is advertising inherently deceptive?
Cringely: Is Technology Evil?
The main reason to save things to delicious is for memory. Sharing is secondary. And getting on the front page or popular were a distant third.

So stuff that goes beyond "please bookmark us" - that's what those buttons do - seems dangerous to me. Especially since actual users have the extension or bookmarklets installed and do not need the site buttons.

I'd seen an enormous amount of shady behavior in and around this so perhaps I am oversensitive. At one point I was spending half my day, every day, dealing with spam on delicious.
How does searching for the completely meaningless "acre square feet" mean Google can't do math? Why is this on Hacker News?
Mozart may have died of strep throat complications
Just to note, only the first 50 have been solved in python as yet.
Online Checkout Process Web Design
The checkout process has become widely known on the internet and making purchases online is fairly common for most households. One would think the checkout process has been nearly perfected. Learn how to design the best checkout process with examples.
A bestiary of algorithmic trading strategies
When ISPs hijack your rights to NXDOMAIN
"The main reason to save things to delicious is for memory. Sharing is secondary. And getting on the front page or popular were a distant third."

I think the first and second reasons apply to bookmarkers, and the third applies to publishers. For publishers, the primary reason is the front page IMHO.

"So stuff that goes beyond "please bookmark us" - that's what those buttons do - seems dangerous to me. Especially since actual users have the extension or bookmarklets installed and do not need the site buttons."

I can understand this sensitivity. If you look on my blog, I have a simple link that says "bookmark everywhere." But my popular delicious content is no longer rewarded with a front page link.

"I'd seen an enormous amount of shady behavior in and around this so perhaps I am oversensitive. At one point I was spending half my day, every day, dealing with spam on delicious."

Spam sucks hardcore ass. What else can I say?
Not really sure why I found this so interesting. Maybe because it struck a nerve and reminded me of some people I know. Sorry.
constantly asserting that "it just isn't" does nothing for your case.
hypothesis must be differentiable via making different predictions about the world. otherwise they're not really different.
Excellent tips. Quite a good article.
Depends on the border. Biking around Europe I passed from Germany to Czech Republic with nothing more than a wave to/from the border guard.

Also, U.S. Mexico border is not that hard. Tons of people and drugs do it daily.
Um, I actually feel indifference. I can understand how you could easily have built up a 300K lifestyle just to have it cut short. The expenses don't disappear once the money does. This has happened time and time again to many who strike it rich and don't realize it can go just as fast as it comes.

If you lived simply, and made that money, within a couple years you could retire, and not have to keep up with neighbors, but the neighbors can trigger that competitive bone.

I think the $1M question is, what the hell is this doing on Hacker News!!! Please don't make this a general thread for cute NYT topics.

I think I was expecting something like: "how to run a startup for a year for 300K" or "How to make an autonomous giant squeaking robotic rodent for only 300K".

Anybody else have some interesting interpretations for this subject?
Can anyone recommend an SEO consultant?
Looking to hire an SEO consultant who has proven ability to produce results.
To a poor person in India (or pick your favorite country with truly poor people), the American "poor" live in absurd excess. Surely they ought to have forgone TV, a second pair of pants, and other non-essentials so that they could save up and avoid going hungry should a true hardship strike.

What is the formula by which one should decide how much he can spend every year relative to his income and savings? Should one live at a level where he only has a 0.1% chance of "getting into trouble" should his personal circumstances or overall economic conditions change? What about 1%? What's the happiness-maximizing consumption risk level*?

Should my services as a software guy only warrant $10/hour a couple of years from now, my family will be in trouble after we exhaust our savings. Should we have purchased a house given this risk? Or, should we rent in a slum and save our money for the dark times that might await us?

Obviously, this woman and her family won't starve. And, I have little compassion for those who spend when they shouldn't just to hide their new-found financial state. But, to suggest that this woman behaved irresponsibly while taking pity on the factory guy who got laid off from his union job and can't afford his two SUVs is punishing one's overall level of wealth rather than his choice of consumption risk level.
Off the top of my head, a few mainstay items of Americana that have fallen victim to technological advances:

Western Union (oh, the days of the telegram) / Polaroid (miss that Instamatic) / TV Guide (can't wait for my weekly issue to know what's on TV) / Reader's Digest (popularized reading fare)

These seemed like "forever" companies when I was growing up and are now either dead or are ghosts of their old selves hanging around with just enough presence to haunt us with their reminders of what used to be.
And even that was ripped off from tshirthell: http://www.tshirthell.com/hello.php
I see what you're getting at but I would call that unconscious thought. There is a great deal of that going on.

When you learn something it is conscious. Every bit of the activity that you are learning is new and requires lots of hard work. But at some points you have 'mastered' the skill, and you can do it 'without thinking', which is really just another way of saying that your unconscious has enough information to do the thinking without direction.

For instance, most of the people reading this are probably good typists (to me that's a part of 'hacking', the sound a typewriter keyboard would make when you 'hack' out a piece of text). All of us had to learn that skill at some point, one conscious and slow stroke at the time. But right now I'm typing this just a little slower than I can think it, or maybe even faster in spurts, depending on how frequently I've used those patterns.

If I tried to consciously think of every letter that I'm typing immediately I slow down to a crawl.

So we're good at parallel thought, no doubt about that, we multitask like we're made for it. But we have but one state of consciousness and we can not fork that even for the simplest of tasks.

Take chess players that can play on many boards. That's as close to human 'multitasking' as you can get when making a computer analogy. The state of each board is the thread of execution, the consciousness is doing 'multiple-instruction-single-data' across each board. On a 'task switch' (move to another player) the state gets reloaded and another move is produced.

If you could consciously think multiple threads then it should be much easier to play on many boards at the same time.

I wonder how well octopuses would perform at that task...
Or maybe dissolve the gas in some ocean water before expelling it?
> What charges

Article states "Tennessee specifically outlaws “intentionally and falsely creating the impression that any person is deceased,"
Sounds like a job for video conferencing if you ask me!
Thanks for the shoutout to Launchset.

Launchset is not doing startup pages.

However, there's Launchsoon.com in this space.
Things look really expensive on Listia, but just because the numbers are so high.

I looked at that suit and thought "700! Jeez, who buys clothes that cost 700 bucks?" And then only later did I see, 1 point = 10 cents and your first 500 points are free, so really 700 points = $20.

It's silly and psychological but I bet most of your users don't actually figure out what your "points" mean. Why not just make points equal to dollars.
The cut that slices the deepest: The iPhone is only available on the crappiest network in the world.
I fear there may be less to this than meets the eye.

It reminds me of a foolproof recipe for (human) immortality, which I think I read in a book by Raymond Smullyan. It goes something like this: every day you say "I will say this sentence again tomorrow". If you always keep that promise, then you are assured of never dying.

The point, of course, is that "if X, then Y" doesn't mean that by doing X you can ensure Y, even if on the face of it X is something under your control.

Similarly: yes, indeed, if your company continues interacting with PG and other Y-Combinator-funded companies, then it will not die -- because if it dies, it will no longer be able to have those interactions.
The internal standard for when speed of protocol buffer operations matters is to use the C++ protocol buffer code but use swig to wrap it for python. Unfortunately, this is really easy internally due to protocol buffer integration with our build system, but not easy externally since most people don't have a build phase for their python projects.
Is it just me, or did the acquisition market recently start to pick up steam again? First Friendfeed and now Everyblock. Seems like its more than just the stock market that's starting to look more rosey.
Apple approached Verizon before they approached AT&T, so I don't think that's the case.
Well, close--I live in Steubenville, OH, about 40 minutes away. But I do get into meetups, etc., in Pittsburgh.

It is a great little city. (Though Boston will always be my spiritual hometown...)
They're both doing well, actually. Both are profitable. Wufoo remarkably so, but they've had longer.
Any more HN meetups planned?
BMI suffers from the GIGO problem, since its inputs are height and weight. It is no more valid than the "height/weight" tables that were the fad previously.
We updated the video based on your feedback:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFF16U5jFT4&hd=1

Thanks HN peeps.
You have to respect John for seeing what type of company, within the bounds of feasibility, would make him happiest and pursuing that instead of going for as much money as possible. Very 37 signals ish. Of course, it helped that John had passed a threshold level of wealth where it probably didn't make that much real difference to him. In any case, you see a lot of people -- in particular the delicious guy who has been on here -- who've made choices for financial reasons they've ended up regretting.
SEO is about two things -- site architecture and correct promotion.

Many people can help you with the fundamentals of getting your site together but most of the action is in marketing your site and frankly, having a good site and product that people want to talk about.

Beware of tricks and claims of performance. Many people can do things to manipulate your ranking in the short run but you will be punished long run. Think quality content and alignment with your target audience and you will be fine.
Yes. I'm not affiliated with them; they're a charity I donate to.
Getting people to promote something beyond what they would do on their own is, IMO, problematic.

I agree that the front page is useless. But it always was, now it's just bizarrely Twitter-oriented uselessness.
Don't quote me on this one, but I just asked a co-worker who told me they can go for 6 bucks in NY. That hotdog better come with some cheese and fries and a hotdamn drink.
may I be of service to you? seo@kennethreitz.com
For my girl a porn movie - SlutLoad.com
It looks like their net income grew from $1.3 billion in fiscal year '08 to $1.9 billion in fiscal '09:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=RIMM

That, along with losing nearly half the value of your market cap, doesn't strike me as "fastest growing company in the world" caliber performance.
I see this with SuddenLink as well, and it's very aggravating just for usability reasons, much less the fact that they don't deserve the ad revenue.

Usually I'm one character off the URL I meant to type, and all I want to do is go to my location bar and fix it. But instead, I'm redirected to $NEW_URL, which requires me to completely retype the desired URL. And since I'm then angry because of the stupid ad page, I sometimes mistype it again. :)
Marcus Schrenker stole his idea from an episode of the simpsons!

Good to know the navy will get to you really fast if you're really in a pickle though.