skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Factually inaccurate. Apple did not sue Woolworths. Apple registered an objection against the granting of Woolworth's trademark during the period that the granting agency (IP Australia) specifically asks for objections to be filed.

From Wikipedia's entry on Australian trademark law:
If an application is accepted it will be published for opposition purposes for three months, during which time third parties may oppose registration on certain grounds. If there are no oppositions, or any oppositions are overcome, a certificate of registration will issue. The term of registration in Australia is 10 years
So to restate: We need to praise intelligence as an applied behavior, not an intrinsic trait.

This mode of reinforcement really should be reapplied to anything "natural" vs practiced: athletics, grace, popularity, ninjitsu...
http://www.talkiphone.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/nokia-s...
No, he is right; however, Java has the exact problem.

The place where this code will screw up is in the logic of the comparison routine. It will be difficult for the types of x and y (or a and b in the Java example) to be wrong, but it is easy to say:

compare (length x) (length x)

or

compare (length y) (length x)

instead of

compare (length x) (length y)

Your tests will catch this, though.
In moderation. Once you get past the point of moderation, it is harmful. At least 35% of the population is way past that point.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db01.pdf
Well luckily for me I did not have success ;)
tptacek put it best,

"The reality is, nobody is going to physically attack your laptop (just don't bring your work machine to Black Hat). But there is an unacceptably high probability that your laptop will get stolen; for instance, you will often leave it in your car, where anyone with a cinderblock can get it in under a minute.

[Encrypted home directories are] about the guy with the cinderblock, not about stopping Joanna Rutkowska from installing a keylogger."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=885291
HTC Hero Kernel Source Code Released
1) I think you'll lose conversions at signup when people are tasked with trying to figure out how many "API hits per hour" they'll need. What qualifies as an "API hit"? What happens if you go over your API hit allotment? Does your site just stop working for the rest of the hour?

2) What qualifies as a "user" on a site? If I am a web developer using the service, do myself and my client both qualify as individual "users"? Can we both use the same account?

To simplify the packages I would probably split them up into three different tiers:

Free
- 5 Pages

Basic - $10/mo.
- 20 Pages

Advanced - $20/mo.
- 100 Pages

I would give all accounts unlimited users and unlimited "API Hits" to reduce confusion. If an individual account is bogging down the system I would deal with that if the time comes rather than try to explain to people what an API hit is.

One thing I find curious is that it appears that the client's server requests the data from BitsyBox via a PHP include in which case I am wondering about the content delivery via CDN claim. Wouldn't Amazon be delivering the data to the client's server, at which point the client's server would push the data out via whatever path it wanted, as opposed to the data being delivered directly to the client from CloudFront/S3?
Amazon Releases Kindle For PC, Looks Great On Touchscreen
Yeah, emacs has them too. Interestingly, I've noticed that Komodo supports emacs modelines, but vim doesn't.
Although many of the people who have been attracted to this movement, mainly because they are passionate about programming, I can't help feeling that this metaphor like many others does not describe software development either. I'm not sure that it is that useful.

For me software is becoming more varied and ubiquitous it is some systems will need engineering vigour, others perhaps are design problems, others have heavy linguistic elements, others are mathematical and many are built from building blocks. Moving through the software profession I think you meet characters that in other worlds would be anything from lawyers through bankers to builder/plumbers.

http://www.kheper.net/topics/blind_men_and_elephant/index.ht...
Regular Friday HN meetup in San Francisco
Hi all -- I hold a regular meetup / co-working thing called the Open Hacker House on Fridays, 3-7pm at Epicenter Cafe, 764 Harrison. If you are in town for Startup School, come on down.
What the fuck are you talking about? Zeldman is talking about creative entrepreneurs. Zeldman is a creative entrepreneur[1]. I'm pretty sure you weren't on his mind at all, unless you know something we don't.

[1] man 5 happy\ cog
Well I was asking about the employees not founders - it seems that working for a startup exposes you to the downside risk without paying out in the event of a win (except of course for the miraculous event of an IPO). Do the employees all know why they do it? Maybe I'm just wrong about the possible upside.
Yes but despite the downvotes, I'm sicking to this one. There was litte danger of confusion between brands, Apple basically just made a nuisance of itself.

Apple has a long history of heavy handed legal tactics against much weaker entities, including bloggers and critics. Apple innovates. They have a real product, so they often find themselves on this end of the stick when it comes to patents. In other matters however, they seem quite comfortable swing it. Especially at small heads.

I suppose there's no small element of schadenfreude here to see the tables turned and Apple unfairly harassed by a perversion of the law.
This is a useful discussion.

"I’d also say that I’m not quite as negative about funding someone else’s seed deal anymore. I now know that the mega funds that did too many seed deals aren’t paying enough attention to them. So I’m not put off by the fact that I’ll be used as a stalking horse or that there is something wrong with the company provided I’ve spent quality time with management and can make my own assessment about the team and business."

Perhaps as entrepreneurs become more educated about the Chris Dixon and Venture Hacks argument, they can essentially use this argument to justify to other VCs why the first VC passed on the deal ("First VC wanted to low a valuation, knowing that they could signal to other VCs not to take the deal unless I agreed to their low valuation"). However, some other commentators on this thread have mentioned the VC "herd mentality" syndrome, so perhaps it requires a shift in VC mindset too.
Hi, I'm new here. What do you mean that "this post will be dead within the next couple hours"?
Same here. I was really hoping that this was a translation between vim and emacs modelines. That would actually be useful.
What they really should add is the ability to try an app for 24 hours. I think they would see sales go up dramatically for apps, I don't buy any software for my PC without trying a demo first, should be able to do the same with my iPhone
I attended a community college (mostly during high school) and also have taught at one.

In my experience, the community college offers two general styles of education programs: one is more or less equivalent to the first two years of a 4-year college, and the other is primarily focused on skill development.

Many students who plan on completing a 4-year degree start at the community college for a year or two, because they can complete a lot of the general education requirements for the 4-year degree cheaper and/or easier.

Other students attend a community college basically to learn a trade. While the college might have a 2-year program in computer science, they may also have a 2-year program in "computer programming", offering classes like "Introduction to IBM AS/400", "COBOL Programming", "Java Web Services", etc. For some IT jobs, this sort of training is really more useful (at least in the short term) than a study in computer science.

Other "trade" programs that I saw included culinary arts, industrial craftsmanship (welding, usage of AutoCad, etc.), dental assistantship... these are basically terminal associates degrees, and the college tells you up front to not expect these classes to transfer toward any other university program.
[penzu] journalistic integrity
Sorry, but if you consider a single research paper cited (and sponsored by Wi-Fi Alliance) as a conclusive evidence that Wi-Fi poses no health risk... you're bound for extinction.

The paper doesn't even touch biological effects of EM radiation! It merely states that most APs operate at power levels "below the internationally-recognized RF safety guidelines".

This is exactly what I was talking about.
Evidence that hypnosis is a real phenomenon (2005)
Agree that most people who skip CD are doing for lack of trying ;-). I think the ease of gaining access depends largely on the target customer profile. Consumer, even SMB targeted stuff by definition has a large number of potential customers compared to the Enterprise. Additionally their barrier to purchase is much lower than the Enterprise, therefore the signal from your 30 minute cup of coffee is much stronger. It's a trickier proposition with Enterprise customers, but I guess that's why the deals are bigger.
The thought process he had at the time reminds me of the marketers responsible for New Coke. They knew people liked New Coke, and would drink it if you gave it to them, but they never asked the important question, of whether people would "depend on" New Coke—that is, buy it to the exclusion of Coke Classic.
Epicenter's happy hour is also between 4-6... :)
> "doesn't have any drive and hasn't had a breakout success"

He pretty much single-handidly started the web standards movement with DWWS (http://www.zeldman.com/dwws/)

A List Apart is one of, if not the, longest running and most influential web magazines around.

An Event Apart sells out every session.

Happy Cog is an extremely successful design shop.

Zeldman.com has been around forever and he has the respect of just about everyone in the industry.

He's a craftsman, Jason, not a suit. He doesn't need a breakout success, just to enjoy and improve at his craft.

And lastly, he's a human being who seems to be going through some stuff and he wrote a blog post around it. Ease up.
Taking individual courses can be just as much of a signal as completing an entire degree. There's nothing here that implies that "some courses are imparting actual skills." What's implied is that the people who actually take courses at community college are likely to earn more than the people who don't. There could be any number of underlying causal factors though, many of which fit with an interpretation of college courses as pure signal.
Sequoia doesn't participate in the seed rounds in this case. They have the same relationships to the startups we fund that Sequoia LPs have to startups they fund. They're entitled to a percentage of our returns, but they don't pick the companies or own stock in them.

Also, within the industry the phrase "passing on a deal" does not mean anything as casual as it sounds. It implies that an investor has scrutinized it fairly closely and made a conscious decision not to invest.
So they're claiming it's something like this?

http://www.grand-illusions.com/opticalillusions/angry_and_ca...
Dang I missed this simply because I was busy developing =/
Response to Dignan: IT Innovation Requires Network Innovation
Very true. It's entirely possible that people who save up their own money in order to make an investment in themselves through education are simply more shrewd by enough that even if they went another route, they'd make $6k more than the median.

I know we interviewed a CC grads (more out of kindness/curiosity than anything else) and while the guy wasn't what we were looking for, he definitely put a lot more effort into it than most people his age likely would have.
Do you sit right next to radio/TV transmitter day and night?

Does you cell phone use always-on connection?
Thanks for the feedback about the packages. We'll take all that into account for any future changes to the offering.

The CDN claim is for the serving static images, not for data served through the API. We're offering a PHP client to make it easier to work with our API, but you're welcome to use your own code to connect, download, and parse data if you want.
I'm going to put together a bigger post about this later, but we have something up to help coordinate everything right now:

http://eventgel.com/ev/startup-school-09/

We're still in deep development after our review post last week, but we hope that it can still be helpful (it really should be, mostly we're ironing out design fine points right now)

Anyways, just wanted to put it out there for everyone trying to get events going. It might be easier if everyone knows what else is going on out there :D
"you know cars? they really should have had airbags when they were invented... oh, and they should have had CD-Disc players as well. Boy those car manufacturers were sure stupid."

Why is this article interesting? He doesn't like HTML & CSS. Fine. I've got a different developer who enjoys his work. Perhaps I'll hire him instead.
Mandatory XKCD comic... http://xkcd.com/552/
Good idea.

As non-US based developers we can't even give coupon codes to our beta-testers. Those codes only work in the US.

And in Canada you can't even use iTunes gift cards for buying apps so the only way we can reimburse beta-testers is by sending them money by paypal.
Would you assert that there is no final truth, or only that we can never know if we've found it?
I did. I won't comment next time.
Oh come on, layout languages had been around for years when CSS first appeared.

The problem with CSS is that it was designed by the sorts of people who like to design languages around vague concepts rather than design languages around getting things done. In the case of CSS, the overriding concept was semantic information. Surprise, surprise, it only turns out to be mildly useful.

The visual web was horribly crippled in order to achieve a mediocre result with a few non-visual edge cases.
You're confusing dietary fat with your own body fat. The thinking for a long time was that dietary fat caused body fat, but that's not the case anymore: "Diets high in fat do not appear to be the primary cause of the high prevalence of excess body fat in our society, and reductions in fat will not be a solution." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12566139

Sugar, on the other hand, does turn into body fat.
Do you mean Primer (no "The")? Because if so, then yes. Awesome!
It's more like if cars were invented without steering wheels, and when people pointed out that wagons had steering wheels, all the car advocates told them that they just weren't leaning to the side hard enough when they tried to turn.
When your existing investors don't maintain their pro rata in a new financing, prospective investors will wonder why. This assumes that the existing investors: (1) Have already invested in your company (duh), (2) Have some knowledge of the company (e.g. served on the board), (3) Make it a habit to invest in follow-on financings like yours.

You can still get around this if you have a good excuse, e.g. "Our existing investors are out of money". And your existing investors confirm your excuse when prospective investors inevitably call them.

So if USV didn't participate in the latest Twitter round, the company and USV probably had a good excuse, e.g. "Our fund isn't structured to make acceptable returns at $1B valuations". When a random angel who isn't on your board doesn't invest your Series A, most prospective investors won't wonder why.

Regarding YC-Sequoia:

The firms who are likely to invest in post-YC companies are likely to be mavericks who can think for themselves. That's the kind of investor you want anyway. You don't want to tell prospective investors that Sequoia spent three weeks intensely studying your company and decided to pass. But the fact that Sequoia could have looked closely at your company, but didn't, will probably be irrelevant.

On the other hand, if Sequoia and other YC insiders are cherry-picking the best YC investments before they hit the mass market, good investors are going to get less interested in demo days. That will hurt YC companies.

I don't know how these forces and other forces will play out in the marketplace. And since we're talking about game theory, the existence of this thread will influence the outcomes.
I know what you mean. I've written programming articles, but sometimes I wonder whether I was (am) only doing it for ego reasons and whether that time would have been better spent by simply doing more programming.

Maybe Why the Lucky Stiff had the right idea when he disappeared. I've thought about that a lot.
Ask HN: Extending C
Just for fun, I'd like to extend C with a few control structures, wrapper functions, and maybe even overload bits of the standard library. What's the most portable way to do this? A header file? Writing some preprocessor code?
An article in Byte magazine back when that meant something.
>They already see every deal. So if Sequoia passing on a deal deterred other funds from investing, they wouldn't be able to invest in anything.

True, but you can't deny the fact that it's now more likely Sequoia will back YC-funded companies. As a result, other VC's will have some additional reason for concern when Sequoia doesn't invest.
If anyone is interested in how to motivate employees without resorting to cash -- which doesn't work well -- I would highly recommend "Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow" which, of course, is heavily based on Maslow's work. Tony Hsieh said it helped him think about culture at Zappos; it's a good read.

http://www.amazon.com/Peak-Companies-Maslow-non-Franchise-Le...
Wrap some preprocessor macros in a header file, if you must. Or use a macro language to preprocess your source, such as m4, although that's probably dirty.
http://www.civilizationrevolution.com/iphone/
you can't deny the fact that it's now more likely Sequoia will back YC-funded companies

Why should they be any more likely to back YC funded companies? They already funded all the ones they thought
were good enough.

Are you saying they'd now start to fund
borderline cases in order to increase returns from their share of our returns? If you run through the math it's obvious that would be a stupid move.
Except there have been several revisions of both, and even modern revisions suffer the same problems.
Take 1M high school graduate and compare their salary with 1M community college graduate and you probably are right. Fast forward 20 years later, and I am sure the difference will be extremely significant.
"Giving companies limited time monopolies on their discoveries (by definition, limiting competition) increases the amount of R&D they do."

I think this was a public good as long as companies--Nokia and Apple are both examples of this--used their R&D to produce goods and services for the marketplace. Under the circumstances, there may be some merit to Nokia demanding licensing fees.

My guess is that there is some back-room stare-down taking place. Perhaps Apple feels that Nokia should cross-license some of Apple's patents. Perhaps Apple is threatening to invalidate some of Nokia's patents. It will be interesting to see this play out. I hope Nokia doesn't devolve into a shell company trolling for license fees :-)
Correct me if I'm wrong. But it seems that HTC is the more developer friendly company among the various Android packagers.

I was so keen on getting a Samsung I7500, but HTC seems to be much better in packaging the latest release and also releasing the source.
I barely made it out of high school. I learned almost nothing academic after the 8th grade. That was back in the days when you passed if you showed up enough. I went to community college and paid for it myself just to learn basic college level english, math, public speaking, finance, economics. I have to say it was worth every dollar. I was never interested in a degree. I didn't have time and money to waste on Women's Studies and Interpersonal Communications and host of other garbage that was required. Today I earn far more than 45% more than the average high school only grad. Not all, but part of my earning ability, I credit to the community college. For the price, you can't go wrong on the core skill stuff. I've never worked for an employer who seemed to care about my education, they all seem to care only about experience and performance. I've never even been asked where I went to college during an interview.
Site was down due to large traffic spike. It's back up and running now.
Tips for Super Fast Web Browsing
Why do you think that? In particular, how would you have done it differently?

EDIT: I am genuinely curious--not trying to give a hard time.
Interesting, but this means absolutely nothing to me if international users cannot make use of it.

I was so excited when they announced the international kindle only to find out that my country(Lebanon) isn't supported.
As a former PhD student in economics I can tell you that this kind of research is often not very well done. Having not read the paper I will reserve final judgement, but based on the journal it's published in this probably doesn't hold much weight. Here's why:

In order to say anything causal (as the author of this paper would like to) in a field where you can't run experiments and only have observational data you need to have a source of identification. It's not enough to compare means. Yes this has everything to do with unobserved-variable bias.

In labor economics the huge unobserved variable is ability. People who are naturally more "able" will likely earn more than less able people and also will likely obtain more education. If that is true then it will look like education is much more important in determining earnings/wages than it actually is.

So there are all these ways of trying to eliminate that unobserved-variable bias. The popular one in the 90s and early 00s (and still popular today despite a lot of criticism) is the instrumental variables technique. Here's the idea:

We need to introduce a source of randomness into our otherwise non-random data. If we can find a variable that is correlated with the causal variable we are interested in, but (arguably) uncorrelated with the unobserved variable, then we can use that new variable as an "instrument." I won't get into the technical details of how to run the regressions with actual data, but this method basically uses an external source of randomness to attempt to say something causal.

The classic paper on this is Josh Angrist's and Alan Kreuger's paper estimating returns to education. They used Vietnam draft lottery numbers as their instrument, since your draft lottery number should be completely uncorrelated with your natural "ability," but definitely would correlate with how much education you got (those having to serve couldn't go to school). More on that paper is here: http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/priindrel/670.htm.

So basically I doubt that this community college paper does much of the required analysis to actually "identify" the causal relationship it is claiming to have found.

UPDATE: Having read the methodology (page 7) portion of the paper (link to the pdf at the bottom of this page: http://userpages.umbc.edu/~marcotte/pubs.htm) I can confirm that my doubts were justified (the author also makes some highly questionable assumptions in order to estimate individuals' work experience as well, but I won't get into that). The author does acknowledge that unobserved variables will confound the results, and attempts to eliminate the bias by controlling for underlying ability with standardized high school math and reading exam scores. This is a common method, but it's really not good enough. We are still dealing with observational data, and we still haven't been presented a source of identification. That is, even if two people scored exactly the same on their high school math and reading exams, but one went to community college and the other didn't, you still haven't accounted for whatever underlying differences existed to lead each to make a different choice.