skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The opportunity cost of learning Java (or any programming language/paradigm for that matter) is very low compared to cost of failure (in the instance i've quoted). Your thoughts on what's good in Java is well put. I don't know if generics/annotations made the language uglier but I can definitely vouch that it has made my life a lot more easier to write programs faster. Has it made my programs faster? - maybe or maybe not :)
Satchmo is coming along well in the Django/Python world. They are currently forking the payment module out of the main program. One of the big benefits of their system is the highly customizable nature of the design and the nature of django's frameworks. Check it out here: www.satchmoproject.com I cannot attest to the ruby world but I hear great things about active merchant coupled with rails.

I have used magento and did not like my experience in it at all. The php seemed clunky and one or two steps away from a vulnerability. Also the templates are all over the place and to make a change to one part of a page required changes in multiple files in a lot of cases. That and the magento is about slow as molasses.
The main case that 1-3 month trial periods don't work for is when the person you're considering hiring already has a good job, esp. one that they like. This is often/usually the case when you're talking about top tier talent. Want to try selling a stud on coming to work for you for a bit for a chance at a real job?
Well, this could be a good strategy for patent trolls.
Software recalls and quick fixes to safety-critical computers in robocars
Making money, overcoming presentation anxiety, selling, art.

Edit: If you need help on the regular expressions you might want to pick up the mastering regular expressions book from o'reilly. It's a great book for that: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596528126/
I would say if you want to go it alone, do so. Just plan on funding it some way other than venture capital. If you can get venture capital, great! But I don't see why that should be a central concern. If it is a concern for you, then do a comparison of the type of business that VC works for and the type (model) of business you are trying to create. See how closely they line up. If they don't line up at all, then it's a moot point anyway and you are free to do as you please because they don't want you anyway.
They just released the first two screenshots. Looks amazing. http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/news/2009/10/ns_7th_anniver...
The primary thing you need to know about holding your breath is that it becomes painful, and in an emergency, you won't have had any time to warm up.
Awesome! Finally something that combines the best of Varnish and Squid.
Actually for number 3, assuming you're talking about the mini usb and the square type USB, I'd say the miniusb is better for smaller gadgets. So it wouldn't be ideal to put a regular USB size connector on all types of gadgets.

Ipod's dock connector is wide so it can physically stand the ipod, iphone, or whatever up when plugged in. So the physical design of connectors often serve purposes other than just to transmit data. And for this reason we'll probably always have proprietary connectors.
BMI is not a good measure of how unfit someone is. Incredibly fit people often have high BMIs.
Something to note:

"The world record for holding your breath after inhaling pure oxygen is now Blaine's 17 minutes and 4 seconds. The record without the pure oxygen, which Blaine failed to break during an attempt last year in Manhattan's Lincoln Center, is 8 minutes and 58 seconds."

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1736834,00.ht...
You are on that hot new diet of eating less than 2500 calories and exercising?
The colors make my eyes hurt. Hitting back to HN is serene in comparison.
Using my time wisely, as time is money.
Good point. We'll probably change the venue to something very quiet, once we find a better host. I asked Sun. Hacker Dojo is a good idea too, but we'd need to find a host (otherwise it's $100/month to be a member?).
Correlation, I'd like to introduce you to Causation. And yes, she's way out of your league.
As far as a restaurant is concerned, why would they really care? It might annoy customers, but as long as the tables are still filling up, I feel the restaurant is more than happy, because they're still making the best of their available resources (tables and wait-staff).

You answered your own question -- to the customer, it's annoying.

... and to the restaurant owner, it discourages walk-in traffic.

It's immoral in that it's dishonest (We have a word for reserving space at the restaurant by claiming to be a party of two, but not being one -- it's called lying). If you wanted to do this in the moral clear, you need to speak to the restaurant owner first, and see if they'll pre-allocate you tables.
Did you read the post? It's a commentary on countries that literally eat their food more quickly compared to others.
Eating food makes you fat. Eating fast food helps. I've lost a fair amount of weight with a calorie counter, it's a pretty simple equation.
Generally speaking, I think old people are valued less than they used to be because it takes less wisdom to grow old than it used to. It used to be only really wily, wise individuals had much hope of getting really old. Then we invented antibiotics and such and now virtually any idiot can live to a ripe old age. Then someone looks around, realizes we no longer revere our elderly and starts coming up with an explanation.

In some sense, it's true: "Technology" has made our old people less valuable. But I don't think it's so much because it has made wisdom less valuable. I think it is more that old age is no longer a strong proxy for wisdom like it was historically.
Lessin's comments are the only smart ones.

At an abstract level there's some appeal to this notion.

At a practical level not so much, though, and that's even before you get into the nitty-gritty mechanics (like tax law here lol).

The adverse selection risk is huge, unless you go for very young people. What this means is that for people who're already "established" and/or have a track record:

- if they have a worthwhile idea they won't have trouble getting better, cheaper funding than this

- ergo if they're asking you for this kind of funding:

-- they either blew through their previous earnings and don't have a concrete idea to pursue next (NOT GOOD!)

-- or they aren't actually that "established" / lack a track record, and therefore are actually exactly the kind of people you don't want to invest in like this

...so pretty much investing in people proven-successful won't be happening.

We can roll back and consider younger people -- those too young to have any great success to there name yet -- and now there's some possibility here: catching brilliant people on the way up and giving them a further hand up.

Your problem here is that:

- you're competing with student loans as a choice of funding; for a student to pick your investment over a student loan it has to be a better offer. For any student that anticipates serious success you'll have a hard time being a better offer in terms of net payout; student loans are painful b/c their payback is frontloaded into the postgraduation years, which are at the point of the lowest lifetime earnings potential...but in net amount 3% of lifetime earnings will be much greater than the total amount of student loan payments.

- most of the really talented individuals won't even need your money, as there's an unbelievable wealth of grants and scholarships and fellowships for the truly exceptional in all walks of life (science, music, athletics, etc.) that they pretty much don't need funding until after they graduate. After graduation they might take you up on the offer but as time passes they become ever-more-likely to be able to raise cheaper funding for whatever they desire

...so even going after the young'ins leaves you unlikely to be attracting the people you'd want to invest in.

Which means good luck: even if you had the money together if you extend the offer at a price that'll leave you likely to turn a profit it's unlikely to be compelling to anyone you'd want to invest in.

And if that doesn't dissuade you think about the tax law implications: given how easy it would be to do an end-run around inheritance + gift-tax law with this type of "investment" -- and that that this end-run route isn't being taken 24/7, etc. -- I can guarantee you the recipient of this "investment" is going to be taxed on it as income (or at even worse rates, perhaps)...which means the math for the recipient is even worse:

- your investee now has to decide if, say, 125k or so (about what'll be left out of a 250k investment after taxes) is worth 3% a year

...which further contributes to the adverse selection issue as you're only really offering half as much as you think you are.
I'm not so sure that it does. It relies on filling the tables at the restaurants. The restaurants don't care if the people who come to fill your table aren't the same ones that originally booked the reservation. Nor do they care if a certain number of reservations are no-shows, if the number of no-shows is smaller than the number of people waiting at the door.

Restaurants are in the business of filling their tables by making customers happy -- those customers will return, tell their friends, and the tables stay full. By filling up available spaces (thus resulting in customers being told that a very long wait is to be expected) and providing a paid line-cut (who enjoys being cut in front of while waiting 60 minutes?), you're going to make a lot of the restaurant customers unhappy, both directly and indirectly.

If this was an ethical business, they would have told the restaurant what they were doing and received approval before they decided to lie to the restaurant to achieve their aims.
Realistic steps to success as an entrepreneur
I know many people who have feet like that (mine included).
As a guess, I would bet there are a number of things in terms of both culture and food quality which go into that "number of minutes per day spent eating" data point for each country.
Its a misconception to think startups don't use Java or C#. I did a search on startuply (YC funded site for startup jobs) for some of the programming languages I know to get an idea of how many openings exist in startups and the results are below. Guess which language has most openings in startups ..

Python: 167
C#: 87
Ruby: 187
Java: 601
PHP: 318
Erlang: 14
Clojure: 3
LISP: 7
Perl: 100
Note that Squid is also heavily used in Yahoo's internal caching system. I suppose there must be reasons for that.

But, this is certainly a good thing. Traffic Server was an extremely good product in its heyday (my previous Squid-based company competed with Inktomi-based products), and maybe an Open Source version will be good for the eco-system in general. Varnish gets mentioned a lot as a super fast alternative to Squid, but it has a very limited set of use cases compared to Squid.
The event was "Startup Hiring: I've hired all my friends - now what?"

http://www.finance4founders.com/2009/10/19/startup-hiring-i%...
I'm waiting another post from this guy describing how they got tired fight the fraud and now they do offer their app for free.

PS. We are charging from day 1 and it's damn not easy. Really! If fraud does not kill you in a year, there's 90% of success.
I'm already good at using my time wisely. I have some specific things I need to work on in terms of translating that into increased income. I think it will all come, eventually. (However, I was born without a patient bone in my body so I'm not very content about my expectation that "it will come, eventually.")
The primary thing you need to know about holding your breath a long time is if you only work four hours a week, it will start to seem like a good idea.
Not using the $5 at all thinking outside the box is. You break a rule that thought existed before you thought about it. It is a constraint on your mind, not your world. This is a space pencil.

Using $10 instead of $5 is not thinking outside the box.
It would be interesting to see other companies try to do things like this.

From http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/news/2009/10/ns_7th_anniver...

"The great thing about the pre-orders is that they have allowed us to hire another programmer (although it took some time to find the right person) and he will help tremendously."

I think it's pretty cool when people know what the preorder money is going into. It allows them to feel like they have a hand in the development of the game. Very impressive stuff for such a small game studio.
"The US spent a million dollars to develop a pen that could write in no-gravity. The Russians used a pencil."

False: http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
The US spent a million dollars to develop a pen that could write in no-gravity. The Russians used a pencil. they didn't, and pencils are useless in space 'cause of the filings floating around and jamming equipment
As a user of Smalltalk for almost a decade, let me assure you that walking away from source files is not folly! In fact, I get something which is just as nimble and reliable, and yet even more powerful. I can write snippets of code that act like queries into my codebase. With a short script I can rewrite broad swaths of my code with syntactic precision, and with a little work be assured that I have done a perfect refactoring. I can undo/redo all changes. I can even do dangerous things that even bring the VM to a screeching halt, and not lose any code. All of this is enabled by giving up source files and going to a "change log" which is like a transactional log of my changes.

You can think of this as something like going from ext2 to ext3, then onto ZFS.
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

EXCERPT:

What percent of our ancestors were women?

It’s not a trick question, and it’s not 50%. True, about half the people who ever lived were women, but that’s not the question. We’re asking about all the people who ever lived who have a descendant living today. Or, put another way, yes, every baby has both a mother and a father, but some of those parents had multiple children.

Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years ago. Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men.

I think this difference is the single most underappreciated fact about gender. To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.
The primary thing you need to know about holding your breath is... there is no breath.
RedTube
So perhaps a companion article, Why To Hold Your Breath Like David Blaine, would be in order?
I knew Steve would write something about this
PHP might not be the best choice for every job, but do Java developers really have more resources? Google says...

java+libraries: 13,600,000 results

php+libraries: 32,200,000 results
I put an asterisk after the corrected word, wonder if that matters.
Sir, the floor wishes to hear no more about your colon
Oh thank goodness I thought it was because I ate too much.
"the intuitive-thinking trait[1] is correlated with superstition because the two share the same cause."

Why is that?
what's your argument here... don't charge because of the potential for fraud?? That's crazy. If we all took that stance there would be no such thing as business.

with spreedly plus processing through paypal, there is a high level of fraud detection. We've actually rejected a number of payments because of high fraud potential.

The rest is just business and the risks associated with it.
Ask HN: Where to Meet Entrepenurial Developers
Greetings HN:

I've been doing customer development, testing, and prototyping for a web app over the last 3 months. Rather than continue to rely on contractors, I'd like to meet an entrepreneurial developer who would like a significant piece of equity and join me full (or part) time. Thing is, almost everyone wants cash instead of taking the equity route.

Anyway, I'm wondering if you could suggests a couple meetups or events where business-minded programmers get together to swing for the fences and build a business?
I disagree that because there is no proof yet, that it is "quite useless." There is at least enough evidence to make it interesting (at least to me). For example, MWI is an intriguing explanation for our fine-tuned universe.
No, BMI should not be used as the sole measurement in some government unhealthiness tax scheme, but is a very good measure in most cases.

The "incredibly fit" people with high BMIs already know they are fit.
Towards a Permission-based Web. Wherefore Net Neutrality?
Strunk and White - 50 Years of Simplicity as Style
You all may be interested in these two ruby-based bash completion libraries: http://github.com/drnic/tabtab#readme and http://github.com/cldwalker/lightning#readme. The former is similar to compleat in wanting to make command completion easy to define but it does it through a ruby dsl instead of usage statements. The latter autocompletes paths given a yaml file of paths.
I don't have a good answer for that except that it just seems sad.
Build your own Google Street View for $300 with open source software
Google Wave Invitations
That may or may not be true, but it's not why this trick works. The need to take a breath is triggered by the level of CO2 in your blood. Hyperventilation exercises like Blaine's flush out the CO2 so it takes longer to build up to the threshold level.
In the nearest large town to me, they had 2800 doses for a metro area of almost a million.

Even if it is effective and even if it doesn't do anything bad, the vaccine is probably going to do little good on the grand scale.
The area of a circle, for example, would be r^2 pi/2.

This is actually my favorite example of why pi is wrong—it's the "exception" that proves the rule. To see why, set τ = C/r = 2 pi, and then consider the following chart of common quadratic forms:

integral of u 1/2 u^2
kinetic energy 1/2 m v^2
distance fallen 1/2 g t^2
spring energy 1/2 k x^2
triangular area 1/2 b h
circular area 1/2 τ r^2

We see that, far from causing "different complications", using the right circle constant brings the area of a circle into a more natural form. The 1/2 in the formula for circular area is actually a missing factor; using tau in place of pi restores it.

N.B. I made a previous comment along these lines, but put it in the wrong place. If you're still a "pi is wrong" skeptic, considering the improvement in radian angle measure may yet convince you:

The explanations mapping complex exponentiation to rotations are basically right. In this context, it's worth noting that the conventional choice of circle constant is off by two. We should be using tau = τ = C/r as the circle constant, rather than pi = π = C/D. Read τ as "turn" and all those radian angle measures suddenly make sense. Ninety degrees? Instead of the confusing π/2 we have 90° = τ/4 = one quarter turn. And so on: 60° = τ/6 = one sixth of a turn, 180° = τ/2 = one half turn, etc.

In these terms, Euler's formula would be recast as

e^(i τ) = 1

That is, the exponential of the imaginary unit i times the circle constant τ is unity: one full rotation.
If it was structured correctly, you wouldn't take a tax haircut on the 250k. (You don't pay taxes on the proceeds when you get a loan, e.g.)
Thank goodness, I thought it was because of the cheeseburger waffles... http://thisiswhyyourefat.com/page/21
“Do I have the right to refuse this search?”
Ask HN: What's the deal with mailing lists?
I noticed that in almost all open source projects, the main avenue of communication is the mailing list, or multiple mailing lists for big projects.

Every time I want to ask a question, I have to sign up, and it's usually not a very friendly or intelligent system. Memorable messages include: "Do not use a sensitive password because it will sometimes be mailed to you in cleartext" and "This is a reminder, sent out once a month, about your python.org mailing list memberships."

Then I have to mail my question in and wait for other people to answer, while in the meantime my inbox gets flooded with long threads about the project which are of no interest to me. After people have answered my question I still have to remain registered for some time, just in case someone will still have something insightful to say. All the while still getting unwanted messages. After that I have to interact again with the mailing list software to unsubscribe.

Why? Am I missing something here?
Sure, it's Goat-Renter Guy! :)

http://www.werealotlikeyou.com/ - click on number 80
And there's not even that much correlation. From the comments on the post, someone did did some calculations and it's about 0.18 - and the line pretty much becomes flat if the US and Mexico are removed.
Not sure if that's sarcastic or some crazy new diet thing exists? I don't really subscribe to those or even read about them. I look at losing weight or gaining it (for bulking) as something very scientific and tailored to ones body. I used to train for bodybuilding, so this isn't just me talking out my ass either. The one constant like all things in life is dedication. Read all the books, buy all the supplements, gym passes,etc. and they won't mean shit without unwavering dedication.
Just an idea, sell lottery ticket, 50 cents per ticket and winner gets $5.

Need to make some assumptions and do some calculations to figure out the optimal way to price the ticket.

Also, we can ask people to buy ticket in advance, then use that money as new prize and lottery that again. Sounds like ponzi, but in fact more like the fractional reserve system our banks use ...

not sure whether this will really work, just an idea ...
The problem with goats is that they are notoriously good getting out of their enclosures. If a goat sees yummy grass that looks better than his bush, he will almost surely get out. They will also try to eat anything (even if it doesn’t even look green).
If that was a Wet Hot American Summer, Janeane Garofalo reference, then +1 to you fine sir!
Food is fuel. Don't overfuel. Consume fuel that builds lean body mass. Simple equation.
Very cool! I'm thinking of doing something like this myself next year or so while studying. The local marina offers cheap boat space in the off season, and I found someone who is willing to lend me their sailboat.

Should be pretty cheap housing for a student if you have the opportunity.

Would you mind sharing some more tips, experiences or fun stories?
Solving a Sudoku using SQL
How to have a Happy GaGaWeen | eHow.com
I don't think that I have ever seen their web site down, but in the last 3 months (or so), a few times my robots stopped getting event notifications for brief periods of time.

But, hey, the system is in beta. I'm pretty much enthusiastic about Wave: I'm writing a DevX article right now on Wave robot programming, and I have a business idea using the Wave platform that I want to try out.
You might think so, but there's not an existing legal framework for receiving equity investment as an individual.

If it were that easy people would already be getting around gift tax and estate tax by investing $millions in their kids in exchange for .01% of future annual income, initial payments deferred 15 years (and transferring as part of the estate) and and so on.
I don't think the author talks about intuitive thinking in positive vein. Whatever is not analytical is named intuitive.
However, the real definition of intuitive is probably that kind of thinking that comes out of subconsciously learned patterns and not from proactive conscious thought - often cited in the usual example of Friedrich August Kekulé discovering the benzene structure from a dream of a snake biting its own tale.
Interesting tools, Typinator looks very nice.

For me, a very simple tool: iTunes

good music = less stress, relaxed mind, hit those milestones.

laugh if you wish.....