skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can one of the Wakemate people please respond?

First off, I love this product. But before I click purchase, I want to know: how good of a proxy is the wrist accelerometer for brain wave activity?

Someone else asked this already but I didn't see a response. Ideally, I would love to know what the quantitative results were from your testing. For instance, if sleepers rate their grogginess after waking up every day, what kind of an improvement do you see in those ratings? What is the distribution like? Are there a certain percentage of people who don't respond to the Wakemate because for some personal reason their wrist movements don't correlate with brain wave activity?

I think this data would help sell a lot more of these since that's definitely what made me pause - and I was very ready to purchase.

Thanks!
Any comments and suggestions I can pass on to the founders would be greatly appreciated.
Maybe the lesson is that if you launch enough businesses, eventually you'll get lucky.
For me it just depends upon the type of site I'm working on.

In these competitive times you need to support as close to 100% of the sites user base as possible. If the site drops 10-12% to a rival because it lacks ie6 support thats not going to go down well at all.

I do like the car analogy, but if you have a 25 year old car & you can't get a newer one, it's rather harsh. You can get away with it as long as the percentage is low enough.

On backends (cms/admin areas etc) then this is were you can specify what browser can be used and ignore ie6 as long as you can explain why.

For my work projects ie6 is a must as it still registers around 10% of visitors. Personal projects tend to be more techy with virtually 0% ie6, so no need to support it.

I look forward to when I can ignore ie6 completely!
Duplicate? - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=959596
Web apps don’t have the “push”
After two months of product development, business planning, and strong forward momentum, my friends just got their first real “punch to the stomach.”

Being rejected by YC is far from a "real punch to the stomach". The point of the article is absolutely right. You need a quasi-inexhaustible supply of rock-hard abs to run a start-up. Sometimes, things go very wrong. As the comments on http://danieltenner.com/posts/0005-starting-up-with-a-friend... showed, it can oh-so-easily happen that you find yourself losing your best friends over your start-up.

After I launched my first start-up, my father's advice was: "Are you prepared for the possibility that it might all fall apart in complete disaster in 6 months?" I didn't know how right he was, but having that in my mind certainly helped prepare me.

I'll close with a quote from the ever-insightful "If" poem by Kipling:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

...

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
Jason is a good personal friend and lives here in the Jacksonville Beaches area. Just wanted to mention that he does a lot of work to execute the concept, much more than is readily apparent. The job is not only wearing the shirt -- he spends hours producing original video content EVERY DAY -- engaging and retaining his audience is the main part of the job.
"p.s. i don’t use spell check - deal with it"

Advice from someone who can't be bothered with the most basic details and easiest remedies? I'll pass.
Add in $2500 per month sponsorships and thats another 30K on top.
Personally I'd say I was introverted due to fear of being ostricized in public till I was about 13 or 14. According to MBTI, then I'd be 'INTP', now 'ENTP'. My personality was probably always 'ENTP', I just overcame the fear.

AFAICT, MBTI wouldn't really pick up on that.
So, would you care to explain how it can be correlated with something in a series of studies and still be meaningless?
For your critique to be useful, I think you need to say what are the superior alternatives to Java + Closures.

I'm betting that whatever language you propose, there will be some set of tradeoffs that make Java a better choice. That's why we have different languages.

Java is fast, has as many libraries as almost any other language, decent threading support, decent unicode support, garbage collection, runs almost anywhere without recompilation (compared to most other languages), and a good fraction of all programmers know it.

For most other languages I can think of, Java is superior in at least one of those aspects. (Those other languages are superior to Java in one or more aspects, too, which is my point.)
Has anyone tried this system that claims to do the same thing? Looks like it was out before this latest link-bait: http://www.david-laserscanner.com/
I was only able to see the first paragraph of the article. If anyone else has this problem, you can see the full article by accessing it via Google: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&oi=news_re...
"His idea of the university is more like a degree mill than a place of higher education."

I don't mean to put words in Philip's mouth, especially ones that are very controversial, but having read him for the last ten years I think he realizes this and the reason he proposes these changes is that he thinks it's the best you can do, given that most Ivy League professors are extremely stupid and bad at their jobs.

Now I'm not saying I fully agree with this, just that I'm pretty sure this is why he proposes some of the things that he does. The funny thing is that this is actually less cynical and more optimistic than what he used to say, which was that most Ivy League students were just extremely stupid. (Which is basically what he was saying around the time when Philip and Alex was published.)
Online Advertising In The U.S Begins To Stabilize
or

sum(range(366))
Travel Delay Tracker
A while ago someone posted a link to their website which predicted airport delays long before the airlines would tell us. Does anyone have a link to that site to help with the thanksgiving rush?
I am deprecating it quite aggressively now.
Presentation is an important component in blogging as in other forms of presentation.

The arrangement of whitespace in the original post made it harder to read. The intro line in the second version is far better than the nondescript blurb in the overcomingbias version. The picture is more appealing, and underlines the tagline. All of these things conspire to ensure that instead of 1 out of 10 people actually reading the post, perhaps 1 in 3 read it.

The lesson: if you're going to publish great blog posts, make sure they're published in a great format that also drags the reader in.
Asana Announces $9M in Funding from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz
it is never too late to improve a language with such a useful feature

I have a different hypothesis. Every feature you bolt on decreases the learnability of your language, decreases the navigability of your documentation (the books are now 20% thicker, and the old books and web pages are now useless), and decreases the odds that two programmers who "know Java" can actually read each other's code.

It is also very hard indeed to introduce a new feature while preserving the functionality of existing code. The gyrations and compromises that are required are often enough to destroy most of the value of the new feature. Better to build a new system around the feature and let it shine, not struggle to fold a bastardized version of it into the old system.

The time to tinker with your system is when it is young. When the system is old, and people have already built their lives around it, it is too late to remodel the foundation. You can take this principle too far [1] -- it is important to enjoy your youth fully, not settle into premature senescence -- but any system which becomes popular will sooner or later reach maturity.

Eventually your codebase, installed base, community, and documentation reach the point where every time you change something important, you lose more in coherency than you gain in power. [2] At that point your system is mature. The best thing you can do at that point is to accept the facts of life and let the system settle into its role -- preserve the value of the work you've already done, the books and lectures you've already written, the people you've already trained; then build on that work by calling its APIs -- while working on a new system on the side. Because it is, in fact, often better to have two or three smaller, comprehensible systems with fundamentally different features and maturity levels -- Erlang for the telephone exchange, Lisp for the airline-schedule AI, PHP for the three-line CRUD web page -- than a gigantic system that is constantly remodeling to add more corner cases, like the Winchester Mystery House.

Of course, Java's designers have never believed this hypothesis, or they would have left well enough alone years ago.

---

[1] As in the legend of the "make" syntax, which supposedly remains broken because, by the time the designers realized it was broken, they already had ten users and felt it was too late to fix. Don't worry about the first ten users. By the time you have a million users, however, it might be time to start thinking about stability.

[2] Think: Windows. It's mature. It no longer seems to be possible to make major changes in the fundamental structure of that operating system. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, unless Microsoft insists on trying, spending billions of dollars and most of a decade and breaking a lot of existing infrastructure in the process.
"We need people to help us tackle some of the hardest software engineering and computer science problems, including developing a ground-breaking programming system that decimates the time required to build a web application end-to-end."
This is brilliant. I've been wanting UPS to add something like this themselves.

They've focused on the social aspect, which is great, and would be a perfect fit for reddit's current secret santa project. However, I think the applications in traditional e-commerce have more widespread potential.

For instance, I frequently purchase parts from dubious vendors on pricewatch.com, and I would love to give them a SendSocial address instead of my real address. If its easy enough, I'd use that address for everything I bought online from Amazon to eBay.

Design is very nice too BTW. I like the subtle 4chan reference in the main graphic too, fits the target audience.

Edit: Just noticed its only available in the UK. That's too bad, I hope it comes to the US soon.

Edit 2: Just noticed the nav links have no anchor text. If you're using Firefox, goto View -> Page Style -> No Style, and you'll find the page isn't very usable.
http://www.flightcaster.com/
What about Live Mesh? (When assumed that all your computers run windows). As I see it, there is basically all the functionality of Dropbox, plus 5GB free space, ability to sync several folders, and remote desktop functionality.
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No surprise here. I tried editing 3 or 4 articles, and every single time my additions were reverted, even if they were valid. There are too many power-tripping people on wikipedia.
Virtual Mafia in Online Worlds
Troco project, an experimental peer-to-peer currency based in google wave
yes they are working on US launch about Feb

[EDIT: great idea about reddit and secret santa btw, anyone know who would be a good contact?]
Shilpa Shetty, Raj Kundra Marriage Photos
I think this is true, but it's important to bear in mind how much they contribute back, not just through the community they support, but directly in terms of code they've open-sourced. They could get away with doing this a lot less than they do, and deserve credit for how dedicated they are to open-sourcing their code.
You might be better off contacting them directly:

Questions? Comments? Send an email to contact@wakemate.com, or call us at 1-800-951-4761

http://www.wakemate.com/about/
I swear I read that this behavior changed somehow in Python 2.5. But I'm not sure how. But it does at least appear to work in python 2.4.
Lean, Green Machines
Arms races. Wonderful elucidation by Dawkins.
Anything that can remove the requirement to be home at the time of pick up/delivery would be awesome. Also being able to give out a virtual address. Something like a short-lived virtual PO Box. Think prepaid credit cards.
> Could you imagine sitting at your desk watching a powerpoint on the greatest programming language ever?

I agree watching Powerpoint will be boring, but it is simply a supplement to real learning in his proposed system--working on projects. Also, you can skip unedifying parts, unlike with live lectures.

> His idea of the university is more like a degree mill than a place of higher education.

Not really. The current system seems more like a degree mill than his. When you can get A's and B's in many courses just by reading a few nights before exam time, that is a waste of four years. If you need to work on challenging projects while learning theory to make them work, you'll definitely learn more than just taking exams and quizzes (with occasional exercises).
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The judge notes "large losses". Banks have a fiduciary duty to safeguard the deposits of their depositors. At least some of the people to whom she provided the loans and did not meet the criteria of the internal lending criteria should not have gotten them. She stole money she didn't have. I get that desperate people do desperate things but she wasn't desperate - in fact, she was a senior banker who was entrusted with access to millions in deposits.
In China, if you are one-in-a-million skilled at your endeavor of choice, there are still a thousand people better at it than you. Ditto with India.

I had a facts-of-life conversation with myself prior to entering college on how good of a computer programmer I am (decent, but not the best) and what my competitive situation would look like next to 100,000 Indians graduating every year (not so great). That is when I decided to double major in a language. Playing the Venn diagram game, the circle of people who are better programmers than me is pretty big, the circle of people who speak better Japanese than I do is pretty big, but the intersection of those two circles is pretty freaking small.

I really suggest that everyone play the Venn diagram game for themselves. And, no, "speaks English kinda good" and "has a college degree" is no longer enough to cut it. Find yourself a niche and be at or near the top of the skill curve in it. (I rush to add, for my fellow ArtSci graduates, that it helps if the niche has cough economic value. Nobody says you can't be the world's leading expert on traditional Louisianan pottery, but that may end up being your hobby rather than your day job.)

P.S. "Can program way out of paper bag" INTERSECT "marketing skills" results in a disgustingly small set. This is great news for small businessmen!
I don't see your point. It's either a bug, or an extremely bug code. (And by the way, it certainly looks like a bug in that case).
Setting up continuous podcast play on iTunes
I'm not in the target market, but https://sendsocial.com/how_it_works doesn't really say explicitly that the sender address cannot be read from the barcode. Obviously, most humans cannot read barcodes, but that's not very good security.

This does require a bit of thought to solve, since you most likely don't want to discard the return address. A bit of crypto can solve this, but that puts quite a bit of work on the delivery service.

(On an unrelated note, what's with forcing every page to https? It doesn't hurt, but it's a bit wasteful.)
The old link is protected, here's another one http://nostarch.com/lisp.htm
A lot less. $ 1,283,305,580,313,390
My policy for IE6 is: don't.
I think I'm in the minority, but I will fully support IE6 until it's less than about 5% of traffic to a website I'm working on. Once you know IE6's quirks, it's not that hard to work around them. I think the benefit of an additional 10% or 15% or web traffic outweighs a few extra hours of development. Again, it sounds like most people disagree, but I developed a somewhat complex ajax app back when there was only Firefox 2 and IE6 and it wasn't that bad. I'm not in charge of a big design studio, but that's my policy for side projects and part-time clients that I work for. They shouldn't have to care about IE6. It should just work for them.
Key Lessons From TechCrunch Realtime CrunchUp
Am I the only one who feels that having to actually try to get a good job straight out of uni should be the norm rather than the exception?

College is not training for a job. It's something you should do because you want to learn. If you go to university because you want a job, you're a fool. There's no conceivable reason why simply "having a degree" (or, for the blue-collar example, being alive) should be a guarantee of a "good job".

I didn't graduate all that long ago, from a top university, and yet I had to actually struggle to get my first job (graduating right after 9/11 and being a foreign student didn't help). I don't see that as abnormal, though. What's so terrible about a little struggling? It's not like any of these so-called thousandists are struggling to feed themselves. Does anyone really want to just waltz out of college into a boring, reasonably paid job for the rest of their life? I find it hard to empathise with anyone whose aspirations in life stop there.

Sorry for the slightly incoherent rant, but this sort of thing (which I think they call "an overgrown sense of entitlement") bugs me. Nothing's guaranteed in this world, not even that you'll have a fair shot. Compared to most of human history, these are fantastic times we live in, where almost everyone is at least given the opportunity to do something with their life. Stop bitching and get on with making the most of your life!
Star Trek viewing correlated with higher IQ. Now what? Anytime you divide a population that's large along any category or measure you will find many many correlations.
If your website will have a tilt to "Enterprise Customers" (worker bees in Fortune 500s) in any way then you must support IE 6. You have no option.

Otherwise forget it for now. "Early adopters" are on the cutting edge (browser wise) anyway. You can always accommodate IE 6 bugs later on if the site "makes it".
>>> a lot of anonymous classes are using just that by boxing those vars in final arrays

final variables (primitive and references) will be accessible in the function literal, the proposal only states that 'capture of non-final variables' will not be supported.
Economic bubbles in the Bronze age
I think that you have to look at the client's visitor profile before you make this decision. If a client's site sees 10%+ IE 6 visitors (and many of mine do), you can't simply say we're not going to support this technology.

Often I tell them that we will review the site in IE 6 and make sure that it's "functional" but we don't guarantee it will be pixel perfect unless they pay for the extra work.

Also I don't like the IE banner / alert option. Maybe you want to try to proselytize the death of IE6, but I don't think it's appropriate to force your paying clients to do the same.
Sure. In that measure of success, it's wildly successful. But it's not a sure thing they'll be able to monetize it well.

Surely the value should be measured based on how valuable it is to each user * number of users. I'm not convinced that's as high as people think. Their retention rates aren't great at all.

But if the measure of success is 'can we hype and sell', then definitely twitter are already wildly successful and I'm sure they'll all do fine out of it. (Then whoever buys will probably completely kill it and the cycle will repeat).
Venezuela to ban violent video games
Building Data Centers Faster, Cheaper and Greener
In the absence of the ability to capture non-final variables, the proposal does not add closures to Java, only 'function-literal syntax' for specific use cases, or for the java community 'anonymous-function' is lieu of more verbose 'anonymous-classes'
Man, it sure was nice when TC was about reviewing startups.
I simply don't cater for IE6 anymore. Not for contract work or my own sites (IE6 use for my sites hovers around 3% and it wasn't until it hit 10% where I decided to not care for the browser). Hell, even my corporate dayjob is deprecating IE6 development (we're in the health insurance industry).

If I'm doing contract work I usually spit it out early that I won't be catering for IE6. It is up to them to figure out whether the lack of an IE6-friendly frontend would harm them or not (I deal mostly with the same clients I've had for years, so they trust their metrics and me by now).

It hasn't happened yet, but if a client demanded I had to cater a project for IE6, I won't be afraid of firing them.
Rocket Science, Entrepreneur-Style
Google Chrome gives false alarm:

"This is probably not the site you are looking for!

You attempted to reach sendsocial.com, but instead you actually reached a server identifying itself as a248.e.akamai.net. This may be caused by a misconfiguration on the server or by something more serious. An attacker on your network could be trying to get you to visit a fake (and potentially harmful) version of sendsocial.com. You should not proceed."
what in the world makes this a reasonable post for HN ?
Presentations vs Discussions
I somewhat agree with you in that Java should have made bolder moves earlier on to provide some of these features and not lash itself to a bunch of backwards-compatibility cruft.

And maybe a bunch of language changes right now will muddy the water a bit - but as far as I can tell, most of the new language features in Java 7 will cut down considerably on boilerplate and unnecessary verbosity, which should go a long way toward making code more understandable, which will be a breath of fresh air.

If a little bit of altered syntax like what's being proposed is enough to make anyone's head explode, maybe they should reevaluate whether software development is really for them. And if your enterprise's codebase and culture isn't ready for language changes, nobody is going to force you to switch to Java 7.
DO NOT WANT!
Advice from someone who can't be bothered with the most basic details and easiest remedies?

This is actually excellent feedback.

It reminds me of the time I took 4 enterprise vice presidents from New Jersey to visit a software vendor in Silicon Valley. They had great (multi-million dollar) software and it was perfect for this customer.

Our first meeting was at 9 a.m., and there was no coffee! The Vice President of Sales actually found the coffee and filters and brewed the first pot himself in the vendor's conference room. (Probably the first time he made coffee in 20 years.) Then he said, "Why should I trust them to handle my customer orders when they can't even do the basics right?"

A subtle but very important point. When engineering people sell to business people, we have the extra burden of showing that we know how to conduct business at their level. The easiest way to get started is with precise attention to details. And faux pas destroy trust much quicker with web technology.

I didn't even notice OP's quote. Thanks for pointing this out, efsavage.