skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the most part, I view the RFP as a way to encourage wrong and ill-fitting service providers or third party consultants to engage with your company or business. Simply put, an RFP is just a tick-a-box approach to seeking skills and services externally. The tick-a-box approach and mentality by it's nature sets up a very black and white context. This is the problem. Business for the most part is not purely objective.

A better approach I think, would to be more proactive and approach only those service providers or companies that are somewhat aligned with your business or company values and vision.

Another solution (for bigger companies) would be to fund smaller independent teams to consult as an acting external supplier.
Advantages of a name-brand school
I think you underestimate the difficulty of getting low latency video connections.

For example, Flash by default buffers at least 8 frames for decoding. This means you instantly have 1/3 of a second of latency for a 24fps stream.* Most live-streaming encoders use a VBV buffer size of about 1-2 seconds--very few are even designed to go below about half a second.

When you need to go low latency, every millisecond adds up, and it becomes painful fast.

*There is a (very ugly) hack to somewhat reduce this. I don't think I'm allowed to talk about it due to my current contractual obligations, but if you're experienced in video streaming, perhaps you can figure it out.

EDIT: I agree, it's possible, but JTV might have to modify their internals to make it possible.
I'd think "multiplied by some constant" rather than "squared".
The Frontal Cortex: Dopaminergic Aesthetics
No, they're just smart enough to know that certain signals don't help them.
You need something to propel you forward. Declaring that you're brilliant after you accomplish something is sometimes fun, but feeling that you're brilliant 24/7 is like putting a brick wall in front of you.

People don't often realize that most experiences, and feelings, are common; but, it is the lack of skill to communicate that makes us feel lonely.

I say, learn to communicate well. And be around people who know how to communicate well. I think this is very important to a person's happiness. Especially people who are, indeed, above average -- perhaps even for their sanity.
It's interesting to see app makers rediscover the lessons learned by mobile gaming developers years ago. Handheld games have been a brutal business going back to the Gameboy. The keys to success seem to be: 1) licensed properties and 2) amortizing development costs by reusing the same technology over several titles. You need a lot of discipline to succeed.
This is why Slicehost rock, they always communicate brilliantly. What I find amazing here is that the Linode representative hasn't even said sorry in the first post they made and hasn't in the second post either, crazy.
loop-recur has its good points, but it has its limitations, too. To wit, recur is not allowed inside a catch or finally form. (At least in Clojure 1.0.0.) By extension, this precludes the use of for, dotimes, doseq, and any other macro which expands into loop-recur. Luckily, calling an external function does work, so exception recovery which happens to require a loop is possible.
"The next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today."
Net Neutrality: Follow the Money
Google Voice, Now Serving on Your Numbers
SMPTE, not SMTP(!) - what is wrong with me :) sorry
What are your hardware specs, and how much ram did you give the VM? I have a mbp that is a few years old with 4GB of ram, and fusion has never been slow. I did just upgrade to 3 and installed a Win7 image and it runs seemingly like bare metal.
Any comparisons available between Fusion 3 and VirtualBox 3?
Hmm, this perspective seems to ignore growing services like InnoCentive and Aardvark to connect people with knowledge to buyers. I'm not sure about the pricing equilibriums in play, and I'm not sure about the relevance to RFPs. Am I relating two frameworks that shouldn't be?
Well, they aren't campaigning for peace ON Facebook, so I don't see why you think this is about equality in facebook itself. I don't see why equal in rights and opportunity is nebulous either. If you look at one of the contrasts on peace.facebook.com, Israel and Palestine, it's pretty obvious that the two populations are not equal in rights or opportunities and that this is the reason for the current strife in that region.
First thought "Decouple sound from video."

Next thought "send video directly between computers."

But for a truly ugly hack, double each frame on the client side so flash thinks it's 48FPS video.
do you think he is engaging in dialectic?
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I just want to point out that ""The courage to play incompetently is a cure for fear of incompetence" is true, and obviously a tautology. However, it is taken out of context. The full line reads:

Competence is not a cure for the fear of incompetence. The courage to play incompetently is a cure for fear of incompetence. Put in contrast, I think it has more value than standing alone.
First, recur is annoying because functions can have multiple arities, but you can only recur to the same arity. So

(defn foo
([bar baz] ...)
([bar] ... (recur x y)))

would fail because you're in foo/1 when you call it which seems broken to me.

Second, not all lisps are as PC as clojure (though most try), CL lets you use 'go (goto) within a tagbody which afaic is the right thing.
Dear Tired and Lost,

Welcome to your life. You are the latest man in a chain many thousands of years long to wake from his deep sleep and discover that he is incomplete without a purpose.

First, the bad news: the pain won't go away by itself. It will get worse, like a constant implosion dissolving your heart from within. During sex and danger the pain may abate - and then come back, strong as before. Be warned, though; ignored for too long, the pain can numb. Then your purpose has abandoned you, and you are lost.

The good news: if you find your purpose and live it, the pain will go away. As I said, you are the latest inheritor of this burden - many have walked this road before you. They have left you way markers - the world's great spiritual traditions - to help you find your path.

You must open yourself profoundly to the world around you. Find a teacher, meditate deeply, question incessantly. Test yourself at every opportunity. Find your true purpose, and give yourself completely. Do so, and you may be enlightened, suffused with joy at the wonders that have always surrounded you. Fail, and die an anonymous end to a vacant life.

Happy hunting.
But for a truly ugly hack, double each frame on the client side so flash thinks it's 48FPS video.

You're getting close ;)
I've done some work for a Federal government agency a few years back and a provincial government within the past year. eHealth was exceptional not because of the cost but because nothing got done.

Here's where posting anonymously is beneficial (but alas since it's anonymous, take my account with a grain of salt). My opinion is that a select few large IT companies in Canada have a virtual monopoly on all government work. In fact, the only reason that I was involved in these projects was because certain teams from these companies screwed up so badly that some bureaucrats formed a skunk works side project to move things along. There was an unspoken understanding that the government wouldn't sue and shake the boat, but that they'd screwed up badly and needed to let another party try to resolve the situation.

Pretty much the only way you're going to get access to government contracts is via sub-contracting for these firms. To bring this post back on topic, the reason that this happens is because in a bid to try to account for government spending, the government issues these RFPs that are so lengthy and cumbersome to accomplish that only the big companies can actually pull them off. But it's a premature optimization and means that the government spends more money than it needs to. It's not unheard of for a simple web application to have a budget of CDN$1M. This would be something that your typical YCombinator team could pull off in 3 months and US$17K.

Some of the more successful government projects that I've heard of are ones where you have a bureaucrat that hires acquaintances without an active bidding process, because they can vouch for their expertise. Stuff gets done quickly and correctly the first time because there's little red tape to work around. Unfortunately, eHealth involved friends hiring friends and stuff just not getting done. I always thought that the criticism of eHealth folks hiring people they knew was less of a concern than the fact they simply didn't get stuff done. I mean think about it, in the private sector do you get people to actively bid on every little position and project or do you have your go-to guys?

Anyways, my opinion is otherwise largely positive with government work here in Canada. They seem to spend more money than I think they would if they let smaller more agile companies into the fold more often. But stuff seems to get done and when it doesn't (e.g., eHealth) you hear about it. Most of the government people I've worked alongside care very much about their job and doing it well. It wasn't unheard of for them to reply to my off-hours questions on their Blackberries on a weekend. So all is not lost. If I'm a little bitter, it has to do with what I perceive to be a rigged RFP process that favours these big vendors.
Good point. That is possible, albeit with a modest overhead. The overhead would be irrelevant except that state machines get used in very performance critical ways, such as inside a regular expression engine. But possibly Clojure isn't the right language if you care about performance that much.

Incidentally I'd be shocked if trampoline was a special form rather than a function. I'm not sure what type a function is (I don't use clojure nor is it installed here), but it should be possible to implement it something like this:

(defn trampoline [f]
(if (eq? (type f) 'function')
(recur (f))
f))
You're being defensive. All he said was that Erdös had high output and it was postulated to be related to his lack of family life. Nobody here is making value judgments about a prescribed good life.
I think paulgb has covered what I wanted to say. There are "blogs" and there are blogs. Enabling comments and responding to webcomics shows a willingness to engage the public which I would never have expected from the TSA (based on my past perceptions).
Contact lens solution is on the list of exempt substances - you should be able to carry a full-size bottle with you, separate from your 3-1-1 bag.

Like with all TSA stuff, however, it's somewhat at the discretion of the security officer on the spot.
For what it's worth, I have also have VPS in Dallas that is running fine right now, and has been up since my last manual reboot (more than 30 days ago).
Telecommuters fearing swine flu may clog Web networks, GAO says
Ideal Conditions To Build A High Growth Startup Like Heyzap: YC & SF?
Bray says "structured goto" like it's a bad thing. He should re-read Knuth's classic paper, "Structured Programming with Goto":

http://pplab.snu.ac.kr/courses/adv_pl05/papers/p261-knuth.pd...

This is the original source of the much-quoted "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." Unfortunately, few people read the rest of the paper. Many of Knuth's "structured goto" examples have since been added into mainstream programming languages as exceptions or various types of "break" statements, but the most interesting ones still work only as tail calls or gotos, and therefore are simply not possible in certain languages. In fact, most programmers these days would never even think of the solutions that Knuth considers most elegant, because current languages have left them with a huge conceptual blind spot.
Trapping a wolf - on camera.
The paid version of Google Apps costs $50/user/year, so for a multi-year contract, $241 isn't too bad. I'd be surprised if they could pay less than that with anyone else.

(That's all assuming that LA is getting Google Apps, and not just email.)
Keep in mind as you brainstorm that there are additional API's coming out, including a pay-per-view API, subscriptions, etc. Also integrated ad networks if desired. Monetization shouldn't be a big problem moving forward. I'm sure there are some brilliant ideas waiting to be discovered involving PPV...
Upside & downside of Total Recall
hm. well, personally, I find 'relationships' in business usually raise costs. How to get around this? I don't know.

You could simply only buy commodities. If this is possible, it is clearly the best answer. However consulting isn't a commodity, and neither is design work. it seems that making it a commodity is a 'hard problem' - RFPs are one attempt to treat consulting as a commodity, and they are obviously imperfect.
Ask HN:  Is there a spam filtering web service?
After reading Resig's post about Google Groups, I was wondering if there exists a web service that specializes in filtering out spam.

I would imagine I could create a new filter, send training data to a filter, and send data to a filter and have it return the likelihood of it being spam.

Anybody have first hand experience using a web service like this? If so, has it met your expectations?
In case anyone's wondering, RFP (probably) stands for Request for Proposal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_proposal
I've been on the other side of this wall, though not for anything near this large of a service.

A lot of shops run with minimal staff, because -- let's face it -- cost is a very large factor of competition in the hosting industry.

Then a problem occurs, and if it were an easy problem to solve, they'd just solve it straight off and then do damage control in PR. Or, the problem is more like this one, and it requires some hard and fast thinking on the part of the staff that are available.

If you're one of those staff, the last thing you want to do is distract yourself by logging in to a forum every twenty minutes, or checking email, or writing status updates every thirty minutes. You instead feel incredible pressure to get the problem fixed immediately, meaning you don't even stop for a bathroom break if you can help it.

As a sysadmin, you'll also justify your decisions by saying that telling the users what's going on won't really change anything; it's not like they're assisting you in troubleshooting. Even if they're intelligent, they still aren't familiar with the specific systems and network topology and other good stuff involved in your operations, so you'll probably spend a lot more time answering their suggestions than you would if you just got in and figured it out yourself.

Though as a user, that kind of attitude is extremely frustrating.
Have a successful product, everyone thinks I am unemployed
Curious to know if others have managed to create a good life for themselves as a one person company, only to have the rest of the world think they are unemployed. In my case, this perception is compounded by my disdain for materialism.

Many people earning a lot less often suggest they can help me find a job -- certain I am completely unemployed. Any similar stories?

(I don't mean to suggest this is a real problem. But it is a minor annoyance)
Programming for a fixed amount of memory/stack is also an optimization.
The thing I like most about Vim is that I'm not forced to configure it.

Emacs has modalities too, but you can't bail out of them by hammering on ESC...

I'm sure I could get comfortable in emacs, but then I'd be one of those guys that has to copy his config files everywhere.
Here's a version with css: http://web.archive.org/web/20070709003322/http://haystack.co...
My first warning about this was my "Host down" sensor firing from the monitoring service, almost an hour after they noticed the issue.

I really love Linode and my experience with them so far has been great but such a lag in communicating critical issues is not acceptable.
Go to webhostingtalk.com and look around. There are places that will host 1U for $50 each including bandwidth and remote reboot support.
Defensio?
Ah, thanks. Any first hand experience using it?
Jedi Gym
A Faster Journey to Mars: The Plasma Rocket Engine
Cancers Can Vanish Without Treatment, but How?
Android 2.0 now available, features included
Get some sharp looking business cards -- or any business cards at all, really -- for about $20 or thereabouts from some online provider. When your friends ask what you're doing, light up with a big smile and say "I've started a company!" and whip out your cards and start passing them out.

If they ask how business is... tell them.

As an anonymous YC founder said over the weekend: "A lot of what startup founders do is just posturing. It works."

If that doesn't do the trick, get a second set of cards that claim you're an Amway representative. Your friends will never ask about your job again. But be careful, because they may also start running away as you approach.
and then close down the API, or require API keys but then stop issuing them, etc. etc. etc. Google makes great stuff, and some of it would be great for other apps to use, but Google is rarely developer friendly. Compare to Yahoo!'s well supported, well documented Dev Network.

http://developer.yahoo.com/
The materialism can be solved easily enough; just buy some bling. :-)
The high tech sandwich is missing the meat
Snow Leopard's boot camp adds HFS+ support.
GAO: U.S. News Rankings, Not Accreditation, Key Driver of Law School Tuition
What's your site? :)
Angels Spend Less, But Seed More Companies
Simple Windows Keystroke Logger with Source
He says, "I think the semantics of computer programs should be made explicit in their syntax" However, when the semantic definition specifies tail calls, when tail calls are performed is trivially lexically obvious. Either he doesn't understand the paper he cited or he was not being careful with his wording.

I don't think anyone will be able to have a constructive conversation with him about this until he both gets the paper or can precisely word his objections. I think that may be why people keep pointing him at the paper.

As an alternative to reading the paper, he could also just implement a basic ML compiler that does CPS and performs tail calls. It'd probably take him less time than it took to write that post and read all the comments he's going to get...
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I had noticed previous posts about running here (I only walk, personally), so I guessed this might be of interest to regular readers of HN.
They're shooting a movie about the origins of Facebook
Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years
Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years http://bit.ly/38kABD
I'm thinking of doing an econometrics Masters, could I pick your brain on whether it's a good idea or could you point me to any resources that would give me a better idea if this was a good idea? E.g. by the end of an econometrics Masters I'd be able to perform statistical analysis on anything, like genetic data?
Honest question: does anyone actually /use/ OWL? My only experience with it was in a class, and it seemed to me like a very verbose and overly-complicated way of describing some pretty simple stuff.
Thanks for the advice. Great business cards is a good idea. I am fairly opposed to posturing however, unless I am speaking to my customers. I prefer to not posture in front of friends -- this, I suppose, is not helping.
Yeah, all my linode sites are dead (timeout) and no shell, at the very least for 1 hour, NJ datacenter.

Sucks. Will be interesting to see how this unfolds.
Yes, but man... it's one thing to be called 'Sure, Not', quite another to spend the rest of your days being called 'PhoneZone, Hot'...
How to Select a Company or Product Name
Lala heralds MP3-killing iPhone app
Behind the Big Law Firm Curtain: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
Not compared to the cost of exchange admins, project managers, licenses, production servers, QA servers, test servers, power, cooling, load balancers, web servers for OWA, etc.
Sexy Halloween Costume Ideas for College Students
Apple probably intentionally makes it seem like a gold mine. Probably why they keep the top apps list fresh and new, so that more people can share their stories of sudden fame and fortune. Then more people release their mediocre apps, sell a couple, and Apple makes more money.
Here are some useful links for people thinking about building stuff with the justin.tv api:

http://apiwiki.justin.tv

http://www.xbmc.org/trac/browser/trunk/xbmc/lib/libRTMP

http://ffmpeg.org

http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html

http://linux.bytesex.org/v4l2/

http://videolan.org

I work at Justin.tv on the api, btw.
Also, http://peace.stanford.edu/ launched about 30 seconds ago. It has a list of all the other participating Peace Innovation sites.
All important points I'll keep in mind. I'm not thinking too much about business models yet, but patterns of adoption are important.
There's an alternative: Just don't let yourself get dragged into an argument/deep discussion of the matter. A simple, nonchalant reply that they can't get any hooks into is a good out. You may have to repeat "No thanks. I'm fine." several times. People seem to be deaf to such things if they fly in the face of their perceptions. It's a slow process and leaves people baffled but is effective over time.
"PHP encourages you NOT to separate presentation and logic."

Is this a stated policy, or are you inferring it based on the structure of PHP being embedded in HTML?

There's nothing about PHP which prevents separating the two. There are even the shorter tags and braceless syntax, which are especially friendly to templating. Eg,

<? foreach($pages as $page): ?>
<h2><?= $page->title ?>
<div class="content">
<?= paragraphs($page->content) ?>
</div>
<? endforeach; ?>
Not sure where you are but in los angeles you can't tell if the person is unemployed or a rich actor by looking at them. The general way anyone can even guess is the famous guys usually have a nice ride.

If you want some nice business cards check out the metal or the nice hard plastic cards and get them custom designed.

If it really becomes annoying just tell them what you would need in $$ to accept a job offer. After that they will most likely stop trying to get you a gig.
And he was right. Facebook's policy of uniquely targeted ads is unlike anything else on the market, and it will be the future of advertising. It's killer.

Advertising doesn't just change every hundred years, but if you don't think Facebook is one of the two Great Advertisers of the decade, along with Google, then you weren't paying attention.
Question: which UK schools are known in the US?
quite true. I'm sorry for taking you out of context. It is indeed more valuable that way.

I would ask the next question; which is the more important problem we are trying to "cure" -- the lack of competence or the lack of courage? One can lead to the other, but not vice-versa.
ReMail (YC W09) launches multiple accounts
Oxford and Cambridge are the only two that come to mind, and I know nothing about them but their names.
In other words: Connections and reputation. It lets you market yourself better and meet people you wouldn't meet otherwise.
If it doesn't help next quarter's or Fiscal year's numbers then I think most people don't care. :(
These would be the things that we would absolutely also want on JamLegend. Being able to see how you are doing both in the game and seeing your friends real movements are key to the future of internet gaming.
But if Facebook were to speak out actively in favor of either side, it would alienate the other side, which goes actively AGAINST Facebook's mission.
Guess I lucked out. My linode in Fremont was unaffected.