skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's hard to overstate how cool extended battery life can be. I replaced the batteries in my old Newton eMate with some modern NiMH rechargeables, and now get over 30 hours of continuous usage. In practice, that means I need to recharge about once a month.

That makes it an awesome device for backpacking, mountain climbing, adventuring anywhere you won't have an outlet. I once was able to type lengthy journal entries while traveling on the Tibetan Plateau. It was an amazing experience, and I couldn't have done it with a normal laptop.
Do most offices not allow you to park your bike inside, but out of the way? Perhaps I've been more fortunate than I thought to not have that problem.

Parking is not the be-all-end-all solution (proper bike lanes is also crucial, and showers/lockers are a requirement for an additional subset of potential bikers) but obviously it helps lower the barrier to entry for enough people.
You guys suggest using Mixpanel to measure user engagement via split tests, but Mixpanel doesn't have a good way to split test!

I've resorted to hacking something together using properties. I use the property name to represent a segment/test name and the values to represent the splits. This leads to having a ton of properties, which the UI isn't designed for.

ex:

{"event":"signup","properties":{"techcrunchreaders/signupbutton":"blue"}}
{"event":"signup","properties":{"techcrunchreaders/signupbutton":"red"}}
sorry, I wrote these down in a math class in rush.

I think the copy-cat thing in China is overrated. Sure there are many copy-cats, which are somehow successful in domestic market. But there also many innovations are going on in China. Especially the innovation in monetization, micro-payment etc. There are a few examples:

1. Tencent in China is the first company that made their success solely based on the virtual good market (Same as Zynga's sales in Farmville etc.). They sell virtual costume for several cents and accumulated massive profit. And that is year 2003, for the note, online payment is very immature in China at that time. Tencent sold prepaid card from Internet cafe. That works, people bought prepaid card (usually for 5 RMB or 10 RMB) to pay the furnitures in their virtual home etc.

2. mop.com, back in 2004 (or 2005, I cannot recall correctly), developed the first web-based online game. It is a typical RPG game, but the innovation is that it requires no Flash, no plugins, no downloads. There is a reason for the development. The main visitor group of mop.com (a popular forum, like 4chan) is office worker, which have many spare time on computer but have no permission to download online games, this game just filled the hole. Another notable thing about mop.com is, it is also the company behind xiaonei.com, the largest copy-cat of facebook.com. Chinese companies are more realistic, and many have such hybrid gene of copy-cat and innovation.

3. China Mobile, the largest mobile service provider in China launched a product (actually a website for mobile phone) in 2003 called monternet which expect to provide all the applications/contents that needed for mobile phone users. It is so convenient in that time: you just need to click a link, and the payment will go to your next month phone bill (remember the situation I described about online-payment in 2003's China?). That is the model of iPhone's AppStore which get all the buzz recent years except it was launched by a ISP. The application sale part failed after one or two years because of the popular pirate software and wide adaption of symbian S60 OS in 2003 (made the universal compatibility is not necessary for most people).

Few months ago, my friend's words that online-casual game has no market in U.S. because "the market was dominated by game console" and the recent booming of Zynga/Playfish/Playdom made me think that there maybe no much difference between Chinese and U.S. market, some innovations in China may be suitable for U.S. market too. Some failures, like the monternet case may also have some indications for current U.S. mode (http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/10/24/0136250/App-Store-D...).

There are many innovations happened in China, and meeting true innovators in China are quite a pleasure thing for myself. Some innovations can even get global success from my perspective. but lacking of financial support, bad government policies against startup made the first-time-entrepreneur hard to succeed. But for copy-cat or serial-entrepreneur, they are simply much more capital friendly.
Physics of politics
Tetris chair: http://technabob.com/blog/2009/10/28/line-breaks-tetris-chai...
Here is a video of the chair:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRWIRWZ9hos&feature=playe...
Unlock pattern? What's locked down about the phone? I thought one of Android's main selling points was that it's a completely open platform.
I have set up a system with the people I talk to frequently. The person who initiated the call originally is the one responsible for calling back if there was a connection problem. Done.
I don't think they are directly comparable. Couch surfing seems more like a lifestyle thing, but airbnb you could perhaps even depend upon for your stay.

I've tried couchsurfing. I tried contacting three people, never heard from any of them. Perhaps I didn't write appealing messages, not sure what the reason was. Or maybe they just signed up and aren't really into couchsurfing anymore. It feels like being a guy on a dating site, you put a lot of effort into writing messages and you are never quite sure if you are just wasting your time.

I don't like where this analogy is going, but suffice it to say that finding the service you need is easier when some money is involved. I have to admit that on airbnb the first person ignored us too, but with the second one we now have a reservation. Our trip is still in the future, so it remains to be seen if everything goes well, but we are optimistic.

I think which is for you, couchsurfing, airbnb or just a hotel really depends on what you are looking for. If you are looking for friends and really adventurous, couchsurfing does seem promising. If you can't spend hours trying to hunt down a place to stay, but don't like the sterility and expense of a full-blown hotel, airbnb might be the answer. Our next trip is to Boston, and we got (or are promised) a full apartment for our use for a lot less than the price of a hotel. Still, if you stricly need a place to stay that is absolutely dependable and hassle-free, then go for a hotel.
I think the author needs to keep in mind the audience of HTDP:

"everyone should learn how to design programs."[1]

It is a book for a first semester not only for a CS curriculum, but for several other courses and styles.

"So why should anyone learn to program?

The answer consists of two parts. First, it is indeed true that traditional forms of programming are useful for just a few people. But, programming as we the authors understand it is useful for everyone: the administrative secretary who uses spreadsheets as well as the high-tech programmer. In other words, we have a broader notion of programming in mind than the traditional one. We explain our notion in a moment. Second, we teach our idea of programming with a technology that is based on the principle of minimal intrusion. Hence our notion of programming teaches problem-analysis and problem-solving skills without imposing the overhead of traditional programming notations and tools."[1]

If you are already a programmer, there is a commentary from Matthias Falleisen about how you should read the book:

"If you are an experienced programmer, you should read HtDP like this:

-- read the sections whose title starts with "Designing ...."
-- also read the "iterative refinement" sections
-- pick five exercises in the preceding and/or follow-up sections

and solve them according to the recipe
-- unless you're stuck move forward
-- try to understand the "symmetry" between data definitions and
templates

I expect that somewhere around late part II, you will slow down. You
may pick up real reading as of part III, though some may make it thru
III and only "stutter" in IV.

Also:

-- use check-expect to express your examples/tests
-- avoid draw.ss exercises, replace them with world.ss but that's a

non-trivial switch " [2]

[1] http://htdp.org/2003-09-26/Book/curriculum-Z-H-2.html

[2]http://groups.google.com/group/plt-scheme/browse_thread/thre...
The lower your public exponent in RSA, the faster you can verify signatures. So e=3 is still used quite often in embedded applications. It can be secure if used properly, but for most cases, it is safer to use 65537 as that can protect you from actual exploitation even if you have a variety of implementation bugs.
Oops, I was unclear. I should have specified that I was comparing engineers cum quants to engineers qua engineers.

(These are the two groups of people we were originally discussing.)
Verizon Droid vs. iPhone 3GS: in-depth feature comparison
Twitter apps sing on MongoDB
Netflix Prize: Was The Napoleon Dynamite Problem Solved?
I like your ADstruct concept. Having worked with a couple of out of home media companies, i feel there is definitely space for innovation. If you don't have contacts to European media buyers, fell free to dope me a line.
I'll second that. They have good customer support.
I don't think that's correct. Coppersmith's attack requires at least 2 messages. You're talking about the paper "Low-Exponent RSA with Related Messages (1996)" right?

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.33.6...
I've heard pg make some pretty strong statements. I'm sure they turn people off but I'm not sure he cares about the opinions of those people.

I think it's pretty gratuitous for you to give me a lesson on selling to investors and customers here. Yes my comments may have been polarizing. I don't think you understand the opportunity cost of always saying what you think people want to hear.

I've gotten a lot of opportunities by speaking my mind to and rubbing influential people the wrong way initially. They give me attention they normally would not give, and in debating with me give me more respect in the end than had I just championed the status quo. This isn't something I seek out, but I find that standing my ground almost always serves me well.
Personal data warehouse
first things first, product needs to be really good.
and when you're selling try to quantify the experience of your product in a simple way.
As to what it is, what it does and how it does, in a non-tech,no jargon,no bulllshitting manner.
this has always worked for me .period!
I'm going through something similar right now, except that I have been running sales & business development. My partner has really good intentions, & he is very talented as a developer; it's just the committment level that isn't working out. I've been slowly taking over assignments that he was supposed to do, & now it's to the point where 2 deadlines have passed and we are empty handed to 2 clients. (we are doing consulting work to pay the bills).

Anyway, I'm looking around for another partner if you want to compare notes. My email is in my profile.
I beg to differ. On a Mac, Open Office's export to PDF is broken in weird ways (line weight sometimes wrong, fonts rendered incorrectly, other glitches), but printing to PDF from Pages (or any other application that allows you to print, including Open Office itself) has not yet let me down so far (and I use it a lot). NeoOffice, when I was still using it, did not have this problem, but failed in other interesting ways.
I encourage all people who enjoy seeing lots of bikes on the streets to visit Florence, Italy. When you are there buy bike for 50 euros and sell it for the same amount when you leave. There are literally hordes of bikes parked everywhere. In this city crowded with tourists you can safely ride a bike though dense crowd, and leave your bike anywhere next to fifty other already parked there.

Of course bikes do get stolen as everywhere else so locks are obligatory, but herds work for bikes as well as they work for herbivores.
Shazam: not magic after all
I can think of two main benefits you can get from a VM that you can't get from bare metal:

1) (and this is also true for most if not all dynamic languages) that you can distribute your app to anyone on any machine and have it run. This does limit your access to the full capabilities if the hardware, but write once run anywhere was pretty close to being true (at least at the JVM level).

2) you can perform optimizations at runtime that you may not have known about at compile time.

As I see it, those are the main theoretical benefits.
The policy says accessed, not modified.
It actually borrowed some code from jnode. At least it grabbed a driver for the ext2 filesystem. I'm not sure what else.
YC's first fund was a lot smaller than that. It just goes back to the point that you don't have to launch something with a $100m bling marketing budget to succeed. If the product/service is right, organic growth can happen very, very fast.
I respectfully disagree. It is not a knee jerk reaction. The writing is on the wall for many single use 'gadgets': gps, point & shoot cameras, calculators, etc. It is not google per ce, but powerful pocket computers (iPhone, Android, etc.) that is driving the change. There will always be a need for niche single use gadgets, but for the mass market the multi-purpose pocket computer will dominate.

It is deja vu all over again.
Love your product and know EVERY single facet of it. There is no better selling technique than knowledge and enthusiasm.

Personally, I've never been able to reliably see a product I don't have a passion for. Maybe this makes me a bad salesman, but I know I've had a lot of success over the years selling what I love and have never had to resort to sales 'tactics' or otherwise.
I don't think I'm a "good hacker", but my first instinct was to try and find an algorithm that would generate these kinds of messages.

Language processing is always interesting.
Instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it — perhaps an impossible proposition — the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value.

This is the reality that Rupert Murdoch is trying his best to ignore.
Evolution of the International Space Station (animation)
Stock prices should equal the future discounted stream of a firm's cash flow. A free option for the sole product that you produce will certainly lower the long-term prospects of profitability.
This is similar to http://github.com/defunkt/cheat but is based on Bash instead of Ruby.
Yes, I disagree with the article's conclusions, that's the point.

Portland and New York are not every city, they have unique problems that other cities do not have. In most cities bicycle theft is not as serious and merely improving bicycle parking does not necessarily get rid of the theft problem entirely. In the vast majority of cities the biggest roadblock to bicycle transportation is the roads. There is simply nowhere to ride except on the same roads that carry heavy vehicle traffic.

Bike theft is highest in places where bike transportation is already very popular (figure out why this is so), solving the bike theft problem is a 2nd order problem that most cities do not face because they haven't yet solved the 1st order problem of making it possible for anyone but the most committed to commute by bicycle.

Also, I should note that I've lived in several cities in 3 different states (Oregon, Washington, and Alabama) where a bicycle was my primary form of transportation, in every case parking was never as big a concern as just getting from point A to point B safely.
My first thought was that the writer's boss said "and I want you to mention her haircut somewhere in there." And the writer couldn't find a good place and just said: "screw it."
I use Open Office and iWork on a Mac, and Open Office on Linux. On the Mac, Open Office's GUI sticks out as ugly and buggy. I think it's ok, but not great, on Linux, though. (This probably reflects that the Open Office port to Mac is still relatively new.)

I prefer Open Office Writer to Word because the way that it handles styles and document hierarchy make more sense to me. Also, the document layout seems to be relatively stable; at least I haven't observed many cascading layout catastrophes in Open Office Writer yet (as opposed to Word).

A big downside of Open Office Writer is its inability to embed many file types as figures (for example, you can't embed PDF). Apple's Pages is much better in this regard.

I dont use spreadsheets much, but even my light use brings Apple's Numbers to its knees. Open Office Calc is much better in this regard. However, Open Office's charts looks like crap, and Excel's chart feature is powerful but a pain to use. Numbers' charts are easy to use and quite pretty, but Numbers breaks down in flames for even moderately-sized documents (as in click, click, draw chart, go get coffee, come back in 5min, Numbers still not responding). I now crunch my data in Open Office Calc or Python and render down-sampled graphs with Numbers.

Open Office Impress is terrible. You are pretty much limited to bullet points, images, and ugly transitions. I hate PowerPoint. Keynote is great; there is no way I am ever going back to a presentation package without a "magic move" transition.
Block battery's reduce from factor, but they don't change the weight. If you want 50% more battery you end up with a ~50% heaver battery. Which is great for cellphones but laptop's are more limited by weight than volume.
Do you also argue thata car with a Chevy logo is conspicuous but that a Mercedes logo is not?
Darpa's Machine Reading Program
WOW.

Google is fundamentally changing the business model of many companies. This is a great example. To Google this is all data, and their goal is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

So these companies should ask themselves: what are they offering? A service, or data?

That said, the stock market has overreacted. Nothing Google has done has affected the earnings of any of these companies. Yet. You all have a decent chance of pocketing a 20% gain if you buy now, because that fear got priced into the stock today.
Sorry, Zinc air batteries are already used in hearing aids because they take up less space, but they don't reduce weight.

Zinc is far heavier than lithium, and delivers far fewer watts per pound not ideal for a car. or a laptop. http://www.ecogeek.org/component/content/article/2328

Periodic Table of the Elements:
Lithium: Li 3
Zinc: Zn 30

PS: They cost less and have high volume efficiency so it might be useful for UPC's and other grid connected storage applications. But, they are not going to be as cheap as lead acid any time soon.
I have a friend who studied econometrics. They learned quite cunning math during their courses. Trouble is that they didn't understand it. They didn't know where it came from or why it works. It was black box to them. What is more this math allowed to calculate things according to one of many competing economical models which none of have been proven in any way to be actually true. It's all fine at the university when you research models, but later on the job it's completely useless. These people perform calculations on daily basis that they do not understand as a form of cargo cult.

Later I had a pleasure to work for econometrics professor and his PhD employee. Even they didn't understand all the math they were using.
The solution to having no tests is adding tests.
The solution to overgrown, unreadable, unmaintainable code is refactoring.

A rewrite would take about 2 years probably (using some very naive calculations).
This is a pretty big deal. Unity is a fantastic way to make games. It has sophisticated graphics capabilities and seamless cross-platform integration.
"because he built Carbonmade for himself originally rather than for anyone else"

That works pretty well for a v1, Tim O'Reilly had the colorful phrase "fishing with strawberries" to explain why it works so well:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/articles/straw.h...

I'm down with user feedback and a/b tests, I guess I was asking specifically about usability testing though since I don't see it talked about much around here. It's categorically different from the other stuff and yields much more qualitative insights (why did they just do that?) versus the more quantitative results (which page layout has a higher conversion rate?). Plus it's actually a hell of a lot of fun to do! If done right.
Microsoft to release Outlook .PST file specifications
I'm sorry but I am not proper researcher so instead of pieces of evidence I have only experiences and thoughts most of the time. But I still want to share them with anybody interested.
I think there's an inversion of your logic about grading papers when applied to investing.
Usually grades in college operate on a curve; the peers are harsh because their grade is relative to other students.
In this case, it's ycomb that is putting money on the line. Your peer reviewers have nothing to lose by dropping your name into the hat.
the blurb at the bottom is HR speak. We are pre-funding in that we haven't raised a venture round yet. by well-funded, they probably meant we have money. We do, because we're profitable.

As for retention, yes, we have 99% retention, but since we're growing so fast, we don't have 100 people that have been here a year, but we do have over 100 people. Cut it however you want, the point is we have really good retention. especially compared to our competitors. :)
People don't bookmark pages because search engines make it so easy to find content. So rather than bookmark the php manual page on date formatting, I'll just type php dates into Google knowing that it will pop up in the first ten results. However, I also notice that I regularly have trouble locating content this way when I go back for it. This is usually when I am looking for something very specific and forget the exact query string that generated that result.

On the other hand, there are times when I'm searching for a datapoint and am frustrated that Google keeps throwing the same links at me. I have to constantly hit "next" to get the results that I want.

I wonder if there is an opportunity for a search engine to heavily invest in either providing people with completely fresh info every time they query for something or provide them just the results they've seen before.

This is probably not relevant to Duck Duck Go but thought I'd throw it out there.
Have you lived in Asia for a long period of time? There are clear cultural differences between people who have lived in China their entire life as opposed to someone who can speak Chinese and watches Asian music videos.

Just saying that a so-called "cultural advantage" vanishes if you, well, aren't of that culture.

(I was born in Taiwan, but... not so cultured.)
Lessee, I think airline pilots are like firefighters. I'm fine with these people being bored, as the alternative is usually not a "good thing"... When they're, umm, "excited", it's usually a bad day.