skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Pleasant to use" is not benchmarkable, it is subjective. You can benchmark the speeds and figure out which one runs something faster, but it's very hard to quantify what languages are the most pleasant to develop in.

Some people like OO, some people like FP. Some people like things explicit, some people want things inferred.

All these popular languages are built around various trade offs. As I understand it, the functional languages allow you to use FP for your high-level stuff, but tend to be a bit slower than C (like one order of magnitude). Ruby has a lot of flexibility and allows for rapid development, but can be very slow for some things. C is fast, but it's C.

Get what I mean? Try a few. Find a language that works the way you think.
Is this hard to "get into"? Well if I get to go, I'm going. I'm from L.A. and never have been farther than tempe, Arizona; this sounds like a perfect excuse.

Anyone want to share the cheapest hotel we can find?
Anyone want to explore MIT/Boston with me for a couple of days?

email is in the profile!
Google: True Colors Shine Through
I wanted to reply to this even though it is a little old.

Simply because this is a fallacy: we are "supposed" to choose #4 because he hacked the answer.

The problem is as follows. Whilst his was the best solution to this problem with an existing answer he is not necessarily demonstrating an ability to crack an unsolved problem.

Unless your re-inventing the wheel then #2 and #3 are demonstrating much more useful engineering skills :) (indeed the argument could be made they though of calling mum and then realised that proved nothing)
Firefox 3.5 in its current incarnation is extremely stable for me on both Linux and Windows. Betas were rough, and 3.0 remained pretty crappy, for me, throughout its entire cycle, but mostly that was memory usage complaints.

I did have a few weeks worth of horrible Firefox instability last month, but it turned out to be due to faulty memory in my desktop machine.
With a combination of Hulu for TV and Netflix for movies, live broadcasts are the only thing cable has left going for it. Once sports events are broadcasted over the internet as well cable TV will have been thoroughly supplanted.
Hmm... every corporate place I've ever heard of uses acronyms related to the location and purpose of the machine.

If a machine gets repurposed, it typically gets wiped and reidentified.

My college used Pokemon names, incidentally. Which seems to work out pretty well since they keep adding new ones and none of them have accents or special glyphs.
No, sorry, we aren't selling this internationally right now, because the Topo maps only cover the US and Canada. We will be releasing an international version, as well as two other apps that will be available near you soon: Gaia Maps and Gaia Places.

Maps and Places are cheaper and are standalone features from Gaia GPS.
See also Bluff, a JavaScript port of the Gruff graphing library for Ruby.

http://bluff.jcoglan.com/
Amazon has ready competition (Newegg) waiting for it in this area. But of-course newegg should be worried right now.
Netflix Prize: Details of the winning algorithm by Pragmatic Theory
I think the assumption is that eventually the world's population will stabilize as third-world folks start breeding at bare replacement levels like rich folks do. If we (as a species) can keep producing enough food right up to that point, then we're fine. The alternative is that we hit the point where a massive worldwide famine (like, hundreds of millions of deaths) is required to get things back in balance. I'd rather avoid this if at all possible.

As far as I know, ever since the discovery of agriculture we as a species have never really been at the point (except on local and temporary scales) where the population was limited by available food. Reaching that point would get extremely ugly.
Not just you. I see it on my Mac and Windows at work. There are times when it just goes unresponsive for 3-10 seconds, then unfreezes and runs fine. But it's def. a slow bloated POS at this point (and IMO).
An opposing viewpoint on net neutrality
There are a number of programs out there to look at images from MRI's, CT, etc, but if you are interested in hacking something together, the pydicom library is worth checking out.

http://code.google.com/p/pydicom/
CitySourced: Lessons learned from our TC50 experience
Insiders call that business money laundering ;)
What? Only five businesses ranked higher than Google in number of changesets, and all of them are companies that (unlike Google) distribute their own versions of Linux to customers.

Fourteen businesses rank higher than Google in the most recent (2.6.31) report; most or all of them are Linux distributors or hardware vendors. (Note: I'm not counting none, unknown, academia, consultant, or the Linux Foundation as businesses.)

Compare this to other web companies like Amazon, Yahoo, and Facebook. They use Linux just the same way Google does, but they sponsored zero lines of code identified in this report. [Greg K-H gently chastised Amazon about this when he did a tech-talk there on Linux development.]
Does any of that contradict the statement: "When his seeds were used widely in 1963, Mexico instantly went from famine-prone to a wheat-exporter. Their wheat harvest was six times greater after" ?

The seeds may have been capable of increasing the Mexican wheat crop by a factor of six, but not capable of making Mexican wheat production price-competitive with producing it elsewhere and shipping it to Mexico. They may have been a net importer since the 1970s, but presumably that means they were in fact a net exporter in the 1960s.
Course work is the least important part of a Ph.D. Most of the work and learning is in the research.
Roku already did a deal to get MLB.

Unfortunately they're the only major sport that kept their rights to broadcast over the internet when they did their broadcast deals.
They do, there are two but they're just starting to get traction.

tru2way is a standardized Java stack for set top boxes.

EBIF is a scaled down interactive TV software for legacy boxes that can't do a full java stack. It's just starting to get deployed.

Actually and Verizon is doing their own Lua based widget platform. But tru2way and EBIF are standardized so those will be run on multiple cable co's.
I not only realize companies can morph from consulting to product companies, I advise it:

From http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfaq.html:

How can someone start a startup if they have a family to support?

The best plan might be to start a consulting business that you can gradually morph into a startup. This way you always have a source of income. See How to Fund a Startup, especially the section labelled "Consulting."

So what exactly are you saying I'm mistaken about? Can you give me a specific sentence I've written somewhere that you believe is false?
Why does it have to be a "massive worldwide famine" rather than a general slow starvation that forces an overall balance?

I get why some human issues lead to catastrophe like, global warming, but I never get why all issues will lead to catastrophes rather than gradual equilibrium.
The strategy may be in fact to take down a smaller case and use it as a precedent to go after larger companies.
One thing I'm struck by is how willing Hastings is to kill a a feature or product that isn't quite ready. They wait until the timing is right and then change the game. "No" (or, "not yet") is often the better answer.
Why so negative?

It seems that Europe's population is actually declining, so is japan's, and a lot of advanced countries.

If they keep feed themselves right now, they should be so even 100 years from now, given the same condition (unless we have some drastic global climatic change).

it is the poor countries, whose economies are based in subsistence agriculture, that are having a huge population increase.

So, the other question is, do you have to bring all these countries up to the level of western europe/japan/us in order to stop the population boom? if we have to, then there will certainly not be enough resources for everybody (especially if everybody has to live like american do)?

I have a good counter example for this. You don't have to be super developed in order to have a clear stabilization of the population.
Even my country's Albania (which has about 6kUSD gpd), population growth has halted (from 2.2 children per woman in 1990, to 1.7 last year).

So, you don't have to get super developed to have a decline of 'overfertility'. It seems that bringing economies out of rural ones, and into more mixed (agriculture/services/technology), will help the population not to increase so much.

It seems that this is a noble goal to achieve for the rest of the world, and this guy helped on it.

And making crops more durable, and farmers more productive, will make people move out of villages and go to cities, and redirect economies to towards services/manufacturing/technologies, where education is more advantage, and having more kids is very expenvie.
vimeo - http://www.davidthomasgreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/v...
There's not stock photos in the header, though there are in the footer :)

And I guess I just disagree. I think our designer did a great job, and the page conveys the right things.
The Roku box is flat out an awesome deal.

That being said there's a whole next generation of TV's with internet access where you don't even need another box. I have a new LG that has both Netflix and Vudu (pay per play on-demand service). It also has the new Yahoo Widget engine and can connect over my home network to watch videos off my media server.

On Thursday at the Intel Developer Forum they are going to be announcing some really cool advances on the TV front.
Have you read about the Schelling model of segregation? It is a model where non-racists can segregate due only to a slight preference to not be completely outnumbered.

I speculate that the phenomenon you observed in the lunchroom could have been caused by a mechanism similar to the one described in Schelling's model.

http://timharford.com/2009/03/the-logic-of-life-racial-segre...
http://web.mit.edu/rajsingh/www/lab/alife/schelling.html
Maybe the environments and rewards of startups appeal more to men than women, and changing this would require changing human nature. (hah!)
Another one is flot for jquery.
I think a big impact on a child's ability to move up in the world is whether they have a father. I recall a study out there saying there is a distinct difference in income between a child from single and two parent homes.
Like most people here, I would love to cancel my cable TV and TiVo subscriptions and just get all my content on demand. However, aside from streaming every movie and TV show, Netflix/iTunes/whatever also needs to nail these two features:

1) Live events. Sports, breaking news, presidential inaugurations, etc.

2) Same day for new TV episodes. I don't want to find out what happened in The Office at the water cooler the next day.

The other hurdle is that the cable companies practically have a monopoly on broadband in many areas. I can already see how the call to Comcast will go.

"You're on the special TV+internet plan, which is $99/month."

"OK, I just want internet now, so cancel the TV portion."

"No problem, that brings your monthly bill to $98/month."

....

Wonderful.
Am I the only person who has several things I want to do? Even if I was making $1million a year in my dream programming job I can totally see myself taking the $40million, quitting that job and trying out starting up something with one of the other things I want to do. Who knows I might even enjoy that more.
Maybe it's the statistically well supported paradox that men are overrepresented at the extremes, both negative and positive extremes. And start-ups, for various reasons not limited to risk, are a kind of extreme case of (self) employment.
Brunel, Locke, and Stephenson: three giants of engineering
>>All govts selectively enforce laws. The "bad" cases get called corruption.

>Agreed, but I don't see what this has to do with our discussion.

The relevance is that you charged in arguing that govts weren't all that relevant to corruption, your best argument being that they "enforce laws". I merely pointed out that how they enforce laws is where most corruption occurs.

> That's just false. Ever heard the word "externality"?

Yes, I have, and it has nothing to do with biz-only corruption.

>>How about three examples? [of biz-only corruption that affect other people unwillingly]

> Nepotism, price fixing and protection rackets.

You seem to think that every bad thing that a company can do is corruption. It isn't.

You're not owed a job at a given company, so nepotism isn't interfering with something that you're entitled to.

Price fixing and protection rackets aren't even (necessarily) violations of a company's rules (which is a necessary condition for corruption).
Overcoming Bias : How Is Our Era Unique?
"Where the Women Aren't?" -- They are not learing CS for sure. My Computer Science class, had about 2 women and 40 guys.

I am assuming you have to be an engineer, or very tech savy person to be able to be in startups as a founder, and it seems that the lack of women in the techrunch award show, was about right.

In another anectodal evidence, I could tell where there were women. At the Afterparty!

A lot more women. Mostly nobody's, and few of the usual vapid gdiggers, and social climbers.

Also, from the 8-9 people I talked to in the after party, only one was an engineer. The rest were 'wanterpenerous'.
"post offices and currier services" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currier
This title made me think Nelson Mandela had passed away
I'm excited to hear the conversation around this.

I would like to take a step back and point out that almost every major city in the states has a business incubator. We don't hear about them because not much is produced that we all use. Locally, they can produce some great projects.

Just wanted to say this because the model of small investment, even if it is office space and time, is happening all around the world. YC just did it better than any of them (and deserves a ton of credit). :)

I always go back to the first bubble and study the incubators. Such a sad ending to many of them (and why most 'accelerators' stay far away from the word 'incubator.'

That would be a fascinating read. The take away from that (so I think) would be 'let's focus on building smart and sustainable accelerators' over 'which one is the best?'

Loved reading your thesis, well done!
HBO/Showtime are also a problem if you're into that sort of thing.
Making a resolution independent UI
Fine, let the ISPs charge us for what we use. Just like they did with dial-up modems. In a truly free market, competition between ISPs, apparently limited by their technical abilities, will only lead to better service as they try to gain market share by providing better service cheaper.

Imposing a constraint now does not mean long-term doom. So fine, let them charge and see what we, the customers, do.
Hi
I'm not sure what this is about :)
I went "skip" a few times and am now stuck on this page

http://www.baseloop.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=reg.signUpLogin

An about page would be good and maybe a demo. Design is nice and I get the basic concept.

Will try again if I can get out of register page
OnStartups.com
Right on. I consider myself a citizen of the United States of Internet. I'm in Britain but know barely the last thing about the "scene" here - it's all in the US and it's easy to access online (or on trips).
TVs last 10 years; do you want to bet that "Yahoo Widget engine" will still be awesome in 2019? I'd rather have the box.
> I thought it was easy to get spouses in.

Something else:

The Fed Govt. doesn't recognize same-sex spouses (e.g. if you're married in Canada, South Africa, etc.). This is due to DOMA. There is currently legislation under way to try change this (UAFA).

Many other countries do recognize foreign same-sex marriages for immigration purposes, even if they themselves don't recognize same-sex marriage.
A Summer in Techstars
"... One could blame the industry's flirtation with misogyny that may shun entrepreneurial women in the Valley away from attracting attention. Another culprit might be the infringing expectation the industry seems to borrow from the 1950s (as recounted by AMC's fictional hit show, Mad Men): If you're a woman, you might get noticed for your work as long as you're attractive, not particularly eccentric and generally easy for a company to wear ..."

There is one aspect of silicon valley, hi-tech businesses not covered in this description, Startups and Startup founders. Why don't more women create hi-tech Startups?

I've often wondered about this. You don't need permission. You don't have to ask anybody. All you need is an idea and even that doesn't have to be a good one. You do need to be obsessed with making things and you do need to have a technical background. You also have to find users and make something they want. It helps if you can make your Startup Ramen profitable. It's not as if it's Rocket-Science. None of those concepts are beyond either gender. You don't even have to even be extremely bright, just more determined than you competitors.

There is one other ingredient that you need as a hi-tech founder for a Startup and that's another co-founder. This might go some way to explain the lack of Startup companies founded by women. They simply can't find enough like minded friends with similar interests. Women need to found more tech companies instead of working in them and for them. If more Women created their own Startups, it might go some way to reduce the kind of inequity in established companies. There is risk, failure is the norm. So build that demo and become a master of your own tech destiny instead of offering lame excuses like the one above.
Hopefully DOMA will get overturned and/or UAFA passed in the current session.
BBC NEWS | News Front Page
Christmas already?
4D Quaternion Julia Set Ray Tracer
ok, thanks, they don't seem to use that background anymore.
I think you might have gotten a better response if you mentioned in the HN title what kind of app it was.
"when we’re talking about ISPs that are near-monopolies built in large part on the basis of government subsidy or exclusive federal licensing,"

Isn't that the real problem? Govt first helps create monopolies and then worries about how to deal with them with antitrust and what not and starts lecturing about the flaws of free market or capitalism. Why create those monopolies in the first place? Why not have free market all along? This is the same story in telecom, healthcare, etc etc
Facebook Developer Garage - Techcrunch50
My use of "staved off" was entirely intentional. I'm sure we'll hit apocalypse somehow...

(P.S. "staved" by itself means "crushed inwards" ;-))
Excellent set of links! Thanks!
This is the most important point:

Third, the new regulations create an additional layer of government bureaucracy where the free market has already proven its effectiveness. The reason you’re not using AOL to read this right now isn’t because the government mandated AOL’s closed network out of existence: It’s because free and open networks triumphed, and that’s because they were good business.
That will NEVER happen. We already have enough food to feed 7 billion people over multiple years. The problem we face now is more related to "distribution of food to the right people" rather than production. What if the population explodes? Earth can sustain more human beings than you can imagine. The only thing we need to be careful about is polluting the atmosphere.
"You're on the special TV+internet plan, which is $99/month."

"OK, I just want internet now, so cancel the TV portion."

"No problem, that brings your monthly bill to $98/month."

This is actually accurate. My cable Internet plan is $68 per month with Comcast. To get basic cable television would cost one dollar more (and yet I still don't want it, since I don't own a TV; which was stunning to the salesperson). I hate Comcast.
Why not have free market all along?

That's nice to say in retrospect, but simply deregulating rights of way and video franchises wouldn't address the fact that strong incumbents exist today. Overbuilding an incumbent like AT&T or Comcast will cost billions and the reward for this investment is 20-30% market share. I think we're dealing with genuine natural monopolies here.
Because "compelling evidence" can be easily fabricated. Just ask all the writers that have had their works expunged from the Internet because an ex-wife, ex-writing partner, or angry reader decided to claim copyright infringement in order to mess with them. It happens all the time.

The valid affidavit requirement in the DMCA is a strong deterrent to this kind of nefarious abuse.
"Why not have free market all along?" -- Because having every company dig up ditches along public thoroughfares and through yards would be untenable. Also, some companies only decide to make the infrastructure investment in towns if the town council would agree to allow that provider to be exclusive (a town council then has to decide if the monopoly is better than no service... but the problem is that these contracts are sooo long.)
Were you thinking about sexy women during the scan? If you focus the green axis of the scan just one click to the right from the center of your nose, your brain stem looks just like a dancer leaning against a wall.. Either that or a crucifix. Maybe you are catholic? :)

Anyway, very interesting pictures. Thanks for sharing.
Don't know about you, by my browsing of the Internet and reading of the PDFs requires virtually no typing. Ideally I'd like to have a notebook with a detachable touch display, and the tablet is as close as it gets to that.
I doubt current generation TVs will last 10 years. They are now more like computers than traditional home electronics, and the computer life cycle is dramatically shorter. I'd be surprised if TVs bought today average even seven years. It'll probably be about five. They're getting cheaper, bigger, more efficient, and more capable, with every generation.

Then again, 1080p is likely to be the maximum useful resolution for at least ten years (since most current "HD" content sources are actually 480 or 720), so maybe things will slow down once everyone has 1080p-capable TVs.
You probably should get really angry, cuz you seem to have a insider's view into Scribd's back end. If not, then you're just bloviating and making strawman arguments that don't really stand up.
Ask HN:  What Would It Take To Startup A Telecom Company?
The obvious answer is money. But I'm interested in the not-so-obvious. Thoughts?
I just signed up for NetFlix this past weekend, and set it up on the XBox I bought to play Rock Band. It's dead awesome. The instant stuff is mostly what convinced me to sign up (though the availability of some stuff that can't be streamed anywhere currently is also a benefit).

I've been using Hulu and Amazon Unbox (both of which I wish would come to XBox!) and love them both. Netflix doesn't quite match the Amazon experience, as far as video quality goes, but the selection is getting better (I'd canceled NetFlix about 1.5 years ago, because I wasn't watching DVDs anymore, and the streaming selection was dramatically worse than Hulu, but that lack of content begun to change).