skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dude, i have burnt my hands in such deals at least couple of times as only 4% start ups make money and only 10% recover money. Not to dampen the spirits, I will tell you one mantra which i follow. Pitch for revenue sharing and stock options both.

Stock options have to bought first and when the company makes money(VC comes in) you can dilute them. But if you get revenue sharing you will be earning something even if company is not a huge success.
Sampling bias? Could those who enroll in online college or continuing education courses be more highly motivated for some reason? Or perhaps those who take online courses are savvier technologically and/or better at self directed study, both of which probably correlate to doing better overall?
Where is the "baby-boomlet" reflected in this data?
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-07-16-baby-boomlet_...
Dropping Django
note to downvoters: "camping" is a brilliant and bizarre microframework for MVC web apps, courtesy of our friend why.
That explanation seems highly unlikely, especially considering the lack of any messages saying as such.

update: I assume I'm being downvoted because people do consider it a likely explanation? It would be utterly unprecedented AFAIK.
for the first 5 to 10 years immigrants, especially illegal ones, are a net drain on social services.

Where do you get your data from?
I was thinking about monthly share of profits vs annual bonus vs non voting shares for a cut of the sale of the company. I'm not sure what the long term benefits are in the different cases.
Following Ban, Microsoft Moves to Keep Word in Stores
Definitely there are people that know _why. He has family and friends and such. He just is unique in his style and doesn't want to be famous for his art, he wants the art itself to be famous.
To reiterate, I don't think it being a matter of not-enough-services. I think its a matter of organization. Put the cake teaching lesson under cooking or something.

I would probably focus the home page on 6 or 8 primary categories with four or five providers underneath and/or current trending auctions. So under Creative I'd see a few different people or auctions, and would be able to go into the creative section. The random list of everything isn't helping me. Basically copy (by which I mean improve upon) eBay and eLance - focus your first hit on the categories, since the categories represent broader needs.

(Also, I'm sure this is just not finished, but the auctions are only sortable by end time. But clicking on end time doesn't resort the list.)
It's important because it's a step towards completely abstracting away the underlying OS when using a computer.
Version 0.5 of _why's Poignant Guide to Ruby is still available on Rubyforge:

http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=183
needs a bright green background to emphasize the tree connection.
Rock Band's Cultural Shift
Yeah, but it's insane to construct left-right divisions into issues like social justice and cooking! Basic human rights (social justice is a synonym of those) are universal.
Check some definitions:

"Fair and proper administration of laws conforming to the natural law that all persons, irrespective of ethnic origin, gender, possessions, race, religion, etc., are to be treated equally and without prejudice. See also civil rights."
http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/social-justice....
Might not work in all browsers, but check your status bar.
The fact that Hpricot used a DVCS is a godsend in cases like this, but we still confront the fact that the software's canonical source, including its documentation, is gone. That Sucks, DVCS or not.
Am I off basing asking for a fixed cut of every support incident? That's something I'd think of if I was providing their software as a service.
The Factor community likes to use the following phrase to answer that question and I think its quite correct: "Idiomatic Factor does not use the stack".

That is, well written idiomatic Factor makes use of higher level abstractions which hide the stack from you. The stack should not be used as a data structure, but rather as a scratchpad to allow pointfree programming. Factor provides a load of abstractions which can often handle all of that low level stack handling stuff for you, making the code easier to read, follow and understand (once you know the abstractions). Factor also provides local variables, for use when it makes sense to name your data. Its not shunned to use them over the stack - when it makes sense to. Finally, Factors macros allow you to modify how the code is parsed (Factor calls them "parsing words"), so you can actually change the syntax. Core Factor provides an "infix" parsing word which allows you to write infix expressions and it is advised to do so when it makes sense (eg, for mathematical formulas). Another example of parsing words put to great use is Jeremy Hughes' inline C/C++ library, which basically allows you to write C/C++ code inline in Factor source files. During compilation, Factor will compile this code with GCC and simplifies writing of FFI stubs for wrapping C/C++ libraries.

Basically, Factor is very different from Forth. Slava likes to say that "Factor has more in common with Lisp than it does with Forth" and its often said that Factor only has a syntactical resemblance to Forth, but is otherwise very different.
Another good tip is to actually respond to your customers, especially when they are trying to give you more money.

Currently waiting for Libyan Spider to respond to my third ticket trying to get access to my account so I can renew two domain names I have with them. Not pleased.
Wouldn't the normal laws governing user-uploaded content protect them, though? As long as they were at least somewhat responsive deleting offending content when it was reported, of course.
I think the only thing that's kept credit unions from doing that is size. If, and this is a huge IF, a credit union like Zopa can grow sufficiently large, it could do it.
And copy/pasted DHTML snowflake effects.
It's not ignored, it's just not for sale, or even formally announced.
I agree, it seems to escape him that Sony don't make business decisions on aesthetics alone: judging by the past Sony does this sort of thing when it's beginning to think about another product. This miniaturization also normally means the price comes down. Either of these ought to lead to excitement rather than a rant about the box.
It's not getting ignored as such; it doesn't exist yet. I own an N800. Its interface is as best tolerable, which seems to be fairly widely accepted; that's why everyone says to wait for the N900 and its new, Qt-based UI. But that's much like John Gruber's point in this article, that the problem with Android is that everyone's always focused on the next phone, because the current ones...well, stink.
A colleague of mine wrote about agencies moving to this odd, search-style site a few months back:

http://www.newmediacampaigns.com/page/big-ad-agency-websites...

It just doesn't make any sense. It's not even trendy.
L4.Verified project - A formally correct OS kernel.
Suddenly this comment seems more relevant.
I think all you can do as a designer is get the basic idea across in a 5 second read. Beyond that, it is a partnership between the end user and the site content to answer those questions.

Personally, I don't want all your questions answered on the first page. If your issue is that you couldn't find the FAQ then you are nit-picking.
Interesting point. I wonder how many people actually implement such things?
This one has commits through Aug 11/12: http://github.com/adamsanderson/potion/tree/master
good points. we may add a better FAQ at the top of the page.

What does it take to bid on somebody?

just an account. we manually monitor any questionable bids and will definitely have issues here with fake bids etc. but will improve this as we run into them.

Do I need a credit card?

No. However, many providers allow you to pay them online using a CC.

If somebody has a city listed, does that mean they can only perform their task within that city? Within 50 miles of the city? Do I go to them?

We need to do a better job at this but in some cases yes, in some cases no. We'll try and get providers to list better details on the location of service field.

Can I cancel a bid? Etc. etc.

Hmm, not yet, but we'll develop this policy tonight.

Thanks!
Got it. Great, thanks! We have to go do our Demo Day pitch right now but we'll get on this stuff asap.

Thanks!
Oh, I was able to get coding very quickly too. The REPL is very good for learning and development. Still, I find it dificult to read other peoples code and some problems take me significantly longer to work out in Factor than another language. Having said that, I'm not familiar with a lot of the common higher level abstractions, which I really need to learn to make the most of Factor. I think its easy enough to get started, but dificult to become fluent. YMMV.
No, he shouldn't give people a day's notice.

He doesn't owe it to you, he doesn't owe it to me. That makes two of us. Let's imagine we're not unusual in that regard. Who does he owe a warning, then?

when you release open source code there's a kind of implied promise that you don't suddenly delete the master repo in a fit of internet pique.

You're making a lot of assumptions, not least among them _why's motivations (should they even exist) for dropping off your radar. Again, he doesn't owe you an explanation or a warning.

You were a user, not a co-owner of the projects, not an extensive financial donor (most likely), not an employer. The relationship is entirely one way. _why gives you things, you say "thank you", and move on. This is also the Internet we're talking about, if someone decides the content (repository or writing) should be made available again, it will happen.
I worry that’s going to be the Android community — forever talking about the next year’s batch of phones, because the ones available now just are second-rate.

That's my worry, too. I remember hearing for what feels like a decade that Linux On The Desktop will be awesome "next year," and it's only over the last year or that it's (barely) reaching adequate.

Right now the theory of Android is far better than the implementation. Let's hope that actually changes quickly.
Everyone seems to ignore the fact that BBs on ATT can use the Google Voice app. I also used Google Voice sans app on my previous phone on ATT with no hassle.
This paper, and my post in reply, is about a question deeper than that, namely, why doesn't time itself run backwards sometimes, in essence? (That elides over some things, which unfortunately including the essence of the question, but there isn't a snappy English formulation of the problem that I know of.) Nothing seems to stop it, except inasmuch as it never happens so something clearly is.

What you're talking about is a foundation to that argument, but the argument itself is beyond that. While the physicist in question has hopefully considered the point I make, he certainly knows about the statistical nature of entropy. However, while that is necessary knowledge, it is not sufficient to explain the other mysteries of entropy that this paper is about.
Scarcity and the world of digital media
being a super spy is not easy, however with training this sort of infiltration should be easily avoidable by any deadSwap cell. For one, the cell would already have been infiltrated if the "cyber-enforcement division" know the sms gateway number, if the agents are good (and never allow a rabit to see them), the most they could sting is one rabit, who would have deniablility as he is only just now getting the drop.
The wiki is still there, probably because they are jeckylled static files:

http://wiki.github.com/why/hpricot
If they were using the regular data channel, and they charged the regular (even though they are inflated as is) data prices, this would be a non-issue.

It's like if the USPS decided to charge a buck for post cards because people liked them more, so the logical thing to do would be to just stick the post-card in an envelope, but then the USPS declared that illegal and outlawed post card sized envelopes.
yeah, vapor ware will do that to people, and i hate to be the kind of guy who will fall in that pit (considering it will be my first "smart" phone) so yeah, guess the argument resounds.

But I still feel like this is the one I can put my money on. I mean, a debian based phone? really? i can't wait. The specs are strong, the software is strong, the community is there - we'll see when we see.
I'd venture a guess that anything remotely resembling experience or doing will beat school any day. There might be exceptions for rote learning tasks like multiplication or history.
The guy wih the axe doesn't really need deadSwap to find somebody to chop up, he could use craigslist
Lawrence Lessig makes very good slide shows. He does this thing with html-style meta tags that are very cool. He talks, while the slides outline the context.
An acquaintance of mine did. I had moved to a different state. We kept in occasional email contact. And one day I noticed he had deleted his LinkedIn account. Found him in the obituaries, he had passed on a couple of months before. RIP.
Maybe he just needs a break from the internet?
There is a one-to-many Person to Broking Account mapping.

Some large institutions have thousands of accounts. This is for both legal reasons and reconciliation simplicity.

This is similar to Retail banking, where people have a Current, Savings and Credit account.
A much more thorough, free book along similar lines is:

"An Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda Calculus"

http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~greg/books/gjm.lambook88.ps

There's also this:

"Introduction to Lambda Calculus"

by Henk Barendregt , Erik Barendsen

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/barendregt94introduction.html
Just pulled it and updated mine. Thanks!

If nothing else, this is an excellent test of Git's distributed-self-healing goodness.

I really hope he comes back though.
Apologies if it wasn't clear. What I meant was UK users can get Vista HP (Upgrade) for £60.75, if you buy this now they'll give you Windows 7 for free when it comes out. As only complete versions (not upgrades) of Win 7 will be ship in the UK you could therefore save yourself a fiver on the full version.

As petercooper mentioned, it's not an earth-shattering saving but in these times it doesn't hurt to point it out. Plus it's definitely not an affiliate link. I ensured it was stripped of all the usual Amazon tracking data and only contained the URL parameters need to read that article, before posting.
Maybe the title of one of his RailsConf sessions gives us some clue: "A Starry Afternoon, a Sinking Symphony, and the Polo Champ Who Gave It All Up for No Reason Whatsoever."
Well, look, everything you say is technically correct. But my reaction remains the same. It's not about "rights" - I agree I have no "right" whatsoever to continue to benefit from _why's beneficence in perpetuity. No, _why hasn't breached any laws or contracts, but he has breached social norms.

For example, this site. I think all would agree that we have no "right" to its continued existence. None of us pay or contribute financially to this site in any way whatsoever. And yet if PG suddenly changed his mind and deleted it tomorrow, with no explanation or warning - I would consider that to be very poor form, and I'd wager most others here would, too.

Same deal. It's about basic respect for your audience, whether they were paying or not.
That you need to know fewer people is significant, and even more so is that you not meet in person that is why the "Dead Drop", "Dead Letter Box", etc is such a common tactic in espionage. deadSwap is a file sharing system/ urban game based on the concept. When done correctly it is very effective and very difficult to sting, thus it has been a standard in spycraft for decades.
Fair enough. As far as a main issue, what I should have articulated before is that the calls to action are poorly defined. I don't think it's nitpicking to say that most users aren't going to bother to scroll down or to control-F to find a FAQ if their personal 5 second read isn't as informative as someone else's.

It's not immediately obvious what you're supposed to do when you want somebody's service. When you click through, it's not obvious what you're getting when you click the bid button. A moment of panic sets in when I push the button and give some random price expecting some extra verification step and instead I suddenly think I might be on the hook for a $100 haircut.
If Sysadmins Possessed Super Powers
I'd be somewhat surprised if it isn't Bayesian networks.

Oblig. wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network
The New, Faster Face of Innovation
I thought Picwing was only making the smart frame (http://www.picwing.com/frame). Was the printing there all this time and I missed it, or did they just change direction and focus on the print service rather than the hardware?
As someone who's done a fair bit of roofing, I would never in a million years butt two surfaces next to each other, caulk them, and call it a roof.

Water is insidious. Things move and degrade with age, with the seasons, and with the weather.

Two things keep a roof tight:

1) using gravity to help you
2) using multiple lines of defense

On the gravity point, what I mean is that water rolls down hill. The great thing about conventional shingles is that they overlap by 50% of their length. For water to infiltrate it needs to get under a shingle and then wick up. Water doesn't tend to do this.

On the multiple lines of defense point, a good roof has two layers of shingle at any given point (row n and row n+1), as well as tar paper (or better yet, a polymer sheeting like "Ice & Water Shield".
This seems like exactly the right way to use a framework -

* start by using it as it is intended. Save lots of time by being up and running quickly.

* find a flaw.

* realize that the workaround is more work than rewriting a piece of the framework.

* stop using that part of the framework, but continue to use the rest of the code that you still haven't had to write.
Why oil won't return to triple digits
sclipo.com
If you know where to find it, the BBC doc on the Open University is worth watching http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lz2p5
where do you actually buy it? I can't find a link on that page or the main one. Do you have to call them?
That ideal doesn't seem very consistent with his removing all of his work from the internet
It's at the bottom:

http://www.eaipatterns.com/ramblings.rss
It doesn't even sound like he made an effort at learning django, let alone python. . .look, django has a bit of a high learning curve behind it (I'm still at it myself) but when it comes down to its a web-framework, a web-framework for people who like programming in python.

I'll admit I felt the same way at first, but I was honest with myself enough to stop toiling with django and set aside the time to learn how to program in python. Once I started pin-pointing the obvious advantages of writing application-level programs in python I started to grasp the underlying advantages of django's design and philosophy.
This tiny slice is important. Disruption of industries starts at the bottom and the margins. Finance's lunch will be eaten by the internet or one of its successors sooner or later.

It could be argued that the mortgage market meltdown was only possible with modern computational and communication technology so in some sense, the disruption is already happening -- the i-banks couldn't keep their newly possible hyper-risk under control.
While I do agree that the author(s) of an open source project do not owe me or you anything, I'll have to disagree with you about what is an open source project. Once you've opened up your project it belongs to the community (and even if I'm not a lawyer I think that most of the OSS licenses speak in this direction).
Anyways, I'm pretty sure we will hear soon about what happened and it will be easier to understand things.

./alex
Exploring Information Leakage in Third-Party Compute Clouds [pdf]
Someone outed him here:
http://whoiswhytheluckystiff.wordpress.com/
Although I had posted it earlier and been trashed for it I will point to "We Don't Encourage Individuals to Form Startups" at http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/12/04/we-dont-encourage-in...

My thesis is that most entrepreneurship is involuntary (either due to fundamental personality characteristics or lack of opportunity to do anything else). If you like the structure corporations provide, embrace it. My only caveat is that most have done away with a commitment to lifetime employment, give some thought to what you might do if you were not able to continue to work in a corporation. I think the best book on the psychology of entrepreneurship is "You Have to Be a Little Crazy" by Barry Moltz http://www.amazon.com/You-Need-Be-Little-Crazy/dp/079318018X... who concludes:

"Entrepreneurs start businesses because..they have no choice. Passion and energy drive them on good days and sustain them on bad days."
Wow. Thanks for the story. I hadn't heard any concrete examples of people actually doing that.

Well yeah. Let's hope it wasn't that.
Yes, you have to call: 1-800-JETBLUE (538-2583), prompt 4.

I believe you also need to register for their frequent flyer program (free?), though I'm not sure if you can just do that when you call.
SRI is the same org that initiated studies of Remote Viewing in the 1970s.
So quite possible their study was done with psychics.
What, and lose Netscape 1.0 support?
This sort of sloppiness makes me really angry.

Perhaps that has to do with the day that I woke up to NPR on the radio, and the announcer said "Douglas Adams... bestselling science-fiction writer..." and I immediately knew, before even hearing the next word, that my favorite author was dead.

I have flashbacks to that day. And I just had one now.

Worst. Linkbait. Ever.
Do you think maybe his mom or someone might know his real name? There are people in the community that know his real name, but out of respect for his desired privacy, to let the art itself be famous instead of the artist simply refer to him as _why.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/scottlaird/31366517/

:)
Maybe they are trying to test it on a smaller subset of users.
I can understand submitting this link to Digg / Reddit / 4Chan.

But why here? It's nonsense
This patent seems ridiculous, it seems if you were going to use XML for a document format you might want to express what that document meant using other data, rather than code. Isn't this just a data-driven approach?
But unlike real spy rings, this one is centralized. By how they've described it on that site, everyone must trust the SMS gateway to give them orders, so the gateway becomes a single point of failure.
Just fyi, his GitHub account is/was 'why' and not '_why'. Wiki's are still there: http://wiki.github.com/why/shoes, http://wiki.github.com/why/hpricot, etc.
http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-05-0...

why is awesome. he's one of the big reason I'm a ruby programmer. He's contributed so much to the community, and he doesn't owe anybody anything.

If he deleted all his repos, sites, etc with no notice, then that was a dick move. It doesn't mean he's an asshole, it means he did one asshole thing. That doesn't mark him as an asshole, but it wouldn't change the fact that it was an asshole thing to do.

If you're running for the elevator and I don't bother to hold it, that's an asshole thing to do. Maybe I saved your ass last week when you forgot to check in the fizbit and the client was pissed, whatever. That doesn't change the asshole-ness of my one action. And that's ok, we all do it. why's still awesome, even if possibly for an hour he was an asshole.