skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I believe the alternative bill they presented a week or so ago was political theater mostly."

Consider http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:S.1099: . Note the date. It may not run to 2000 pages, but I consider that a feature, not a bug.

Again, the idea that Republicans did nothing but run an obstructionist campaign is pretty much objectively a lie. What is true is that only their obstructionism was reported in the press. That said, it's not like anything they wrote had a chance of getting passed, I am aware of that, and frankly at this point I'm not a fan of either party on this point as it's pretty clearly a choice between dumb and dumber (reader's choice as to which is which), but the putative "coverage" of Republicans has been blindingly biased. Not that the press has done much more than sit there and twitch feebly every once in a while.

(Further, I'd point out that as a minority, "obstructionism" is pretty much their job. The idea that this is evil rather suspiciously dates to January of this year, for mysterious reasons.)
$555 Billion Sahara Solar Energy Belt Takes Giant Step Forward
Great positive outlook on the rewards of entrepreneurship when the media is constantly droning on about the negative effects of the recession.

I too am looking forward to seeing where we'll be in 10 years time.
When I first started using Django, I wasn't sure about it either, for a few different reasons - but performance wasn't one of them. Long story short, I'm glad I invested the time in taking it up...

Django was actually my first use of Python - so you can imagine how pleased I was to replace a custom PHP app with something I just learned - and in record time. (if you're interested, the web app was: http://www.snapact.com/)

I have noticed no issues with performance as compared to PHP.
Predictions on the future of NoSQL
A paradox need not be self contradictory.

There are generally 3 resolutions of a paradox
1) The premise(s) are wrong.
2) The logic is in correct.
3) The "answer" is not self contradictory.

If the resolution is 3 then there is no contradiction. Even if its 2, there isn't technically one (just a mistake). If its 1, there might be a contradiction.

I remember discussing this with someone and coming to the conclusion that the word "paradox" really should be "paradox for me" because its only a paradox to someone until they see how to resolve it.
I thought all of these were common sense? ;)
Yes, if you define bounce rate by number of pageviews, then this holds true. I wish I could have defined bounce as visitors who spend less than say 10 seconds on website but calculating exact time on page in realtime is very expensive operation which most web analytics tools don't do.

A typical example supporting your case would be a blog post. Most people come to your blog post via a link and they read the post and they go back to whatever they were doing. Even when web analytics tools will call them a bounce (because they just saw one page), I would say them non-bounce because they spent time doing what they came here for.
The author has updated the post, string concat takes significantly more compared to the buffer or builder
Newborns Pick Up Language in the Womb
The difference is that the maximum downside of not buying the warranty is the cost of the unit (actually the cost of the unit discounted by the regular warranty period ) the downside of not having medical insurance is that you die (at least in the land of the free / home of the brave)
Great question!

Various systems of "magic" (Crowley, Chaos Magic, Robert Anton Wilson etc) have advocated engaging in pointless exercises of willpower in order to develop it.

Maybe, willpower is like a muscle that can developed.

I would like to see science on THIS.
5 years of Firefox
I'm impressed. You just described my wardrobe quite accurately. Technically the shoes are "light hiking shoes", but you get the idea.

/tangent
> Give it another ten and where do you think it'll be?

With pet.com?
Neat visualization. Am I getting this right?

Arrangement 1:

Ceiling -- A -- B -- Weight

Arrangement 2 (Picture is a bit weird, but both are attached to the ceiling and the weight and not to each other right?):

(Edit: Making picture clearer).

Ceiling -- A -- Weight

Ceiling -- B -- Weight

If thats right... it shouldn't be that surprising. In (1) B has to carry all of the weight, and A has to carry the weight and B (even if B weighs 0 it still has to carry it) so each spring is carrying the weight. In (2) they are in effect sharing the weight.

Its probably easier to think of the action movie scene where William falls off the cliff, Brad catches William but starts falling and Adam catches Brad and holds on. Brad has to hold up William and Adam has to hold them both up. But, if instead, Adam and Brad each took one of William's arms, it would be easier for both of them.
Most "mainstream" / average everyday people still use the word pointless to describe Twitter when I ask them about it and why they are not on it + their thoughts about the service. Not agreeing or disagreeing with this point, just sharing it.
This is an old link (that I wish would be updated) about performance of some various frameworks (in various languages):

http://www.alrond.com/en/2007/jan/25/performance-test-of-6-l...
Review of the new "Viral Loop" book - How Twitter/Facebook do viral marketing
Price matching serves two purposes. One is it's an effective market segmentation tool (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_segment) as it allows people to trade effort for discounts.

The second is that it does not dissuade price differences but does dissuade price wars. As long as prices remain stable, differences are not much of a worry. It's when they start reacting to each other that retailers stand to lose a lot of money.
I would like to take the No Politics rule in response to that question, because my answer would tend to incriminate me.
What he doesn't tell you is how much the Reader code would be if it was just gzipped. That's the real comparison to make.

If gzipping alone would get the code down to 800kb or something, then the improvement made by closure doesn't seem so awesome.

Nonetheless, it's obviously good to get the file size down to the absolute minimum when you are going to serve millions or billions of copies.
A very interesting reminder of just how low the barriers are to doing a start up today.
Dresses like that aren't worn every day by average women, but on average, women wear dresses like that every day. If that made no sense, what I'm saying is that given enough women, dresses like that are worn every day by one of them. Since you can't rent a dress more than once a day anyway, an overall every day seems like enough. It doesn't matter if everyone wears dresses like that all the time, only if at all times, someone is wearing a dress like that.
I think what kwantam meant by lower G-forces is that an experienced pilot can use abdominal/extremity muscles and a fancy flight suit to take around 9G before losing consciousness, but redout will hit at around -3G and there is not much you can do about it. A maneuver that you could easily do in normal flight becomes impossible to sustain if you are inverted, for example.
> Can you please give some more info about your opinion?

Visual Studio web services generates some befuddling code, at least when I last used it about 5 years ago. Maybe things are better now?

Also, it is difficult to implement a good SOAP library. For example, in the Ruby world, there is soap4r, which has difficulties talking to EJB SOAP and .NET SOAP, which have different conventions. I had to interop with a .NET soap service, and it was pretty painful.

> My SOAP services was always easier to implement than others like XML-RPC for example. Never found anything complicated about SOAP.

Good for you. You must be smart.

I find REST much easier and straightforward. I never bothered learning the SOAP protocol, which doesn't make me very sad for some reason.
Yahoo Indonesia
What caused TC to report this in first place? Seems like tips from Zynga's competitors who refused to take part in this.

What's your source for that?
C isn't especially dynamic.
Update, just found out my neighbor's son got a job working at the Port of Oakland for $8.50/hour. He also has a high school education (not that it has a big bearing on the employment rate of his peers).
Sure. Insurance is just a way of pooling risk. If you have enough money you don't need it. If you're an average risk, you save both the insurance company's profit and the tax you'd have to pay on the money you'd have to make to pay them.
The Droid fails as a product when compared to Palm Pre and iPhone
You borrow so much from the Ruby community you should add opinionated design to the list. Adding a second syntax to OOC would really detract from the language a lot.
fateh ali khan

(p.s. unless you need to meet a text message minimum, don't use url shorteners)
I agree with you about K&R and The Good Parts.. however, after reading those little schemer book, I felt like 1 book = 1 page of sicp and I really felt like the author took my for an idiot.

And, again imho, you should just first dive in, then search for answers.
Examining a list of the 75 richest people in the history of the world, Gladwell notes that “an astonishing 14 are Americans born within nine years of one another in the mid-19th century.” http://features.csmonitor.com/books/2008/11/17/the-outliers/

England's colonial shipping trade and railroads were also technologies that changed the economics of business, making fortunes in the process.
My dad showed me how to setup a web server. Imagination took care of the rest (mostly motivated by money).
Do extended warranties actually ever pay out? I bought one, once, on a cell phone from best buy, and a year later when the phone broke, I went to best buy and they said they had sold off their phone warranty division or something and couldn't help me. But that maybe on their website I could find a number to call.
Excellent article.

I think code is just one tiny piece of the puzzle, but here's an example: I'm one guy who programs in his kitchen. I would up at 6:12 AM last Saturday and, unable to get back to sleep, decided to write a new feature into my website. I found it easier than I expected and eventually ended up writing two new features. Then I set up A/B tests for both of them. I then got done at 10:37 AM and spent the rest of my day playing videogames.

I was able to "write" two features in 4.5 hours because it was a matter of snapping two bits of OSS code together with a bit of UI glue drizzled on top. (The A/B testing framework is also OSS, though I wrote it.) My customers don't care about that, though: they care that they couldn't do X or Y last Friday and now they can. (Well, if they're in the A/B test group.)

You know what isn't anywhere in the above description? A four hour planning meeting between six people discussing whether X or Y should go into the next version of the product. I've been at that meeting before. I think we all have. It is a tremendous waste of time when I can just ship the feature in an A/B test and tell you a week later how 5,000 users reacted.

(Answer: feature X increased task success. Feature Y decreased it. Neither effect was statistically significant. As I had been delaying making these primarily out of fear that featureitis would hurt task completion, in the face of repeated customer requests for both features, I'll be shipping them to everybody.)

And I'm one guy doing this from his kitchen table in his spare time in a not-too-rich niche. There is nothing about these techniques that make them less effective for bigger, better funded, more focused teams in richer niches.
:retab

(in vim)
I can see why though. The focus of the selling company is to move material. If they provide tech specs, then they are competing on features, which won't provide the same profit cushion as warm feelings most of the time.
A normal person has maybe ~$70k to lose if they get seriously ill or injured without insurance.

You have millions to lose.

I'm not making a moral judgement. It just seems crazy that you'd risk losing so much money just to avoid an expense that had to have been a rounding error to you at the time.
Ask HN: Does the Nash equilibrium promote communism?
This question randomly popped into my held while thinking about the many worlds theory.

So assuming the economy is a non zero-sum game, wouldn't the most ideal outcome for everyone be achieved if we didn't only pursue our individual interests? I just want to be sure I'm grasping what the Nash equilibrium is.
I'm just throwing up ideas here but isn't it possible that this can be addressed by limiting selection. No dresses that are a good fit for only a small portion of the population. If it only looks good in a size 8-12, it's only available in those sizes, etc.
I've seen (and used) benchmarks with compressors other than Closure. The compiled + GZipped size is usually about half the size of the just GZipped file. Closure may do a bit better because it performs pretty aggressive dead-code elimination. 800K-1MB sounds pretty reasonable as a rough estimate.

I'd disagree on this not being awesome, though. 800K -> 143K is huge. You're talking about shaving several seconds off your user-visible load times. You get less cache thrash through having smaller pages. And at Google scale, this could be exabytes worth of bandwidth per month.

I've had code reviews held up while I shaved 3 bytes off the compiled GZipped size, and proposed changes vetoed because they'd add 19K to the GZipped JS size. The entire JS for websearch is something like 13K. Saving 600K+ is absolutely enormous.
In your lifetime, your only young once, but you can stay immature forever.
These people are typical of the ethicless parasites that infest everything creative smart people make.
I would really love to see more marketing articles on HN. There's a sweet spot for us hackers who aren't in a situation where we are ready to hire anyone and would like to know more about marketing to cement their plans. By us I mean me of course.
I read both stories on-line at "RockPop" and according to their separate timelines, it looks like Mr. Cefalu was first with his logo by a good 3 months before Mr.Pasche. - Neo
I'm working on a "headless safari" script for performance testing. It's based on Paul Hammond's webkit2png. There's also Perl's WWW-Mechanize.

It seems kind of odd that these kinds of programs tend to be either one-trick hacks, or hugely complex "suites" like Selenium.
The full might of the federal military had trouble with Iraqis and Vietnamese.
I just read both stories on -line at "RockPop" and according to both separate timelines it seems as though Mr. Cefalu's logo was done a good 3 months before Mr. Pasche's. - Neo
Cisco releases 61 products targeting MSFT/IBM
> Most web products have no marginal cost of replication, so adding a new customer is pure profit.

This is my single gripe about this article. This isn't true: although there's a higher profit margin because the cost of one customer on a general web application is close to nil, the cost of acquiring a customer is sometimes pretty high. Especially if you factor in that 1% of free users will convert to paid users (in a freemium model.)

Unless if you hit it out of the ballpark with some crazy lucky viral marketing, I'm pretty sure you're going to have to do some solid marketing to gain traction.
Decaf:Administer your infrastracture on Amazon EC2 from Android
"Here’s the really insidious part: game developers who monetize the best (and that’s Zynga) make the most money and can spend the most on advertising. Those that won’t touch this stuff (Slide and others) fall further and further behind. Other game developers have to either get in on the monetization or fall behind as well. Companies like Playdom and Playfish seem to be struggling with their conscience and are constantly shifting their policies on lead gen."

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-ga...
> It seems that the entrepreneurs who “hit” these days are doing it more quickly, making more money, and doing it at a younger age.

Citation needed! I think 'younger age' is likely to be true. Thanks to the internet, it's easier to build up a network and get informed earlier. I wish I had had HN ten years ago! The rest of it... well, I'd like to see some facts.
The Gmail Hoody: Breaking down offline communication dropoff
Incorrect headline , the author never says what Twitter is good for. He does indeed say what it is not good for , but then as someone else so succinctly said , pointless comes to mind.
If making technology products has become accessible, similarly barriers to entries has been reduced. When there are lots of players, Nasim Taleb describes the situation as winner takes it all.
Also, in terms of running speed, Closure is a better form of compression than gzip since the JS engine still has to parse all that ungzip'd JS.
Book: "Theory of the Integral"
Is CNA career for you?
Certified Nursing Assistant or CNA is a challenging profession which is also rewarding and satisfying. As a nurse assistant, you have to keep away your stress and provide highest possible level of care to the patients. Your desire to help someone should be of extreme level so that you should not feel your work as a burden. Read this article before you decide to go for CNA as your career.
I also visited both Mr. Cefalu's and Mr. Pasche's web sites and I have to tell you straight up, Mr. Cefalu's site is off the hook. He has done over 209 album covers and has some really incredible original album cover art and prints from the originals for sale. I highly recommend that everyone should check it out at: www.originalalbumcoverart.com I assure you it won't be a waste of your time. - Neo
On the plus side, if your trial -> purchase conversion rate is in fact 1%, then a single A/B test which increases your conversion at any step of the funnel between trial and purchase by 5% results in an almost immediate 5% increase in top-line revenue. And 95% of that (allowing a little bit for cost of payments) will flow straight to the bottom line, because you typically pay for COCA whether the person converts to premium or not. (Well, unless you're doing CPA marketing. Even then, there are compelling reasons to do conversion optimization, as it will make your effective payout for affiliates higher, attracting more of them to your banner.)

Actually, come to think of it, in a freemium subscription model a 5% increase in conversion doesn't necessarily do 5% to revenues instantly because a portion of your revenues are produced by existing subscribers. Sorry -- I do one-time purchases, sometimes I forget about the economics for other folks.

Still: what other businesses can assign one junior employee to work on button designs for a week and walk away with 5% added to the value of the business? And close to risk-free, because you can experiment on a fraction of your customers and terminate it almost instantly if it doesn't pan out?

That is leverage, broadly defined, that would make hedge fund managers green with envy. ("Hey, can you figure out a way to make us 5% extra on all our capital? Oh yeah, and do it risk free. Oh yeah, and I'd like whatever you do to be basically repeatable with a minor variation next week, so that we can institutionalize this and do it as a process rather than a one-off. Alright, call me when you've made me a billion, I'll be on the golf course.")
Good for SEO Knowledge: @mattcutts, @dannysullivan, SEObook.com, searchengineland.com

Good for Social Media: @mashable, @readwriteweb, @jowyang, @adamostrow, @tamar, http://www.chrisbrogan.com

Overall marketing: @adage

Software marketing: @asmartbear

PR: @haro, @joshdilworth, @skydiver, @briansolis

I hope this is a good starting point for you. :D
Absolutely. There is a ton more leverage in the current space, you're totally right. It's just not the dreamy $0 CPA world that you'd expect as a 'seed-stage entrepreneur' reading that article. :)
But you would tell a salesperson he probably can't code and you when you're upset with your sales team thinking they can code, you might write an article entitled "Salespeople can't code. Sorry".

We all make generalizations when we are trying to make a point, because it is the best way to state a point clearly. A title like "Many webdevelopers seem to have a less-than-average capacity to sell" states something so mind numbingly obvious that you'd ignore the article. When someone says "webdevelopers can't sell", you should interpret that as "if you are a webdeveloper, you may be interested in this article, because you may be overlooking some important things that help you sell your app".

Interestingly, your type of response illustrates the article: you criticize details, while ignoring the big picture. That's the same as mentioning your features, but not the problem you solve.
In the world or high end fashion, couture, etc, it's almost a constant for women to be a size 0 or 2. Designers don't make 10 different sizes. They'll only make 1 or 2 which is enough to fit the type of women who tend to wear their clothes.
nice find! amazing guy.
More YC interview advice from Luke (S09, FanChatter)
The analyzer comes built into Xcode 3.2 on 10.6; no need to install another version (unless you're still on 10.5, I suppose — but you should update to 10.6 in that case, if only for the new dev tools).

Either hit cmd + shift + a to run the analyzer or check the box in the project info to automatically run it before every build.
Ask HN: What start up would you invest in ?
It seems like lately I hear many people say that they wish they could invest in Facebook(twitter/Zynga/etc). But those are big and quite obvious choices.

What small startups do you believe enough in, that you would be willing to put some money in (if you had some extra) ?
There's one point this highlights - even if you're working with friends, you must have a contract.

You don't need a lawyer to write it (it's better, but in the early stages you can economize), but anything written on paper that divvies up the IP amongst the founders will prevent a lot of heartache later on.

I guess that guy would have complained about creating "negative energy" though.
Yeah, but the SGML declaration for HTML contains SHORTTAG, so

<a href=../bar/index.html>Bar</a>

is actually shorthand for the invalid

<a href="..">bar</a>index.html>Bar</a>

Good luck reading real world HTML with a browser that implements that correctly.
(And that is why the W3C validator so often complains about a closing A tag that is not open (or at least used to do). )
We made our own. We wanted to track really random stuff like retention rate, ARPU, etc. which is hard for a generic analytics program, or even mixpanel to do.
And this is why I reject the argument that higher-level programmers don't need to know lower-level things. The string concat issue in particular is something every single Java developer needs to know. I've successfully taken 6-day jobs down toe 3.5h with this alone.
"which makes online games, like FarmVille, that have become incredibly popular on Facebook among people who are missing parts of their brains."

As an aside no mainstream media would actually use those words , though they be true.