skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Our users' privacy and data security have always been
a priority for RockYou and we strive to keep them secure

No you don't
what about http://www.picolisp.org ?

fuck compilation.

fuck lexical scoping.

do something for real in lisp, like

* entity relationships over a graph db

* webframework

* flightsimulator
Indeed, the reporting requirements differ depending on the size of the company. But even a small company has to file:

a profit and loss account and a full balance sheet

These are submitted every year to Companies House. See http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/about/gbhtml/gp2.shtml chapters 6 & 7.
I use ehealthinsurance.com
If this is true, I wonder what kind of software would run on this thing.

Methinks CocoaTouch is a very nice framework to build apps that suit the hardware, but still allow incredible creativity.

If the Courier allows any ol' WPF/.NET app to execute, I can see the intended users being quite confused.
OTOH, there are some interesting interaction flows in WPF (e.g. back/fwd nav) which, like CocoaTouch, could form the basis for consistent app behavior.

I wonder about the dual screen thing. It could be cool (two screens can yield a nice dual visual context), but I wonder about things like launching an app - which screen would it land on? can you move it from one to the other? can it span both screens?

If all the speculation around iSlate and Courier come to fruition, Jan 2010 is looking to be quite an exciting month.
On the other hand, college is an industry, like healthcare, where demand is highly inelastic due to incentives involving third-party payments. It is also an industry, like healthcare, where price inflation has far outstripped inflation in general.

Is there an example of an industry where government-created demand accounts for a major portion of consumer spending and there is not rampant price inflation? I am open to the possibility that there could be other causal factors here, but the a priori logic is pretty compelling.
I was thinking about writing a fairly short "no bs nutrition for nerds" post. would anyone be interested? I think there was a recipe thread awhile back and in the comments a couple key points were hit, but this hitting the front page indicates that maybe there's some interest again.
Controlling Variable Scope in Ruby 1.9
What does Wikipedia need $100'000s for?
Travel startup is looking for a business partner/cofounder
/hugs 1Password
The very first example ("mv -T" to retarget a symlink, something I didn't know about and that the manpage is silent on) is not atomic! The symlink(2) syscall will not overwrite an existing directory entry. You have to call unlink(2) first, which opens a race.

That doesn't mean this trick is useless, but calling it "atomic" is wrong, and opens up the possibility of bugs (likely security holes, even) if someone actually needs atomicity.
Looks like I’m going on FoxNews today because it’s cold outside
Regarding Sun, join Sun Startup Essentials in your area and talk to them. Access to technical help, for free, is one of the "selling points" of the scheme.

http://www.sun.com/startupessentials/

Get in there before Oracle cancel it. :-)
I like goduckgo.com
I've been using duckduckgo as default search engine for two months now and it has been a painful and unsatisfying experience. Bug me to write about it, I actually took notes.
His main premise, that government student loans are co-signed by the government and students resulting in the distortion of demand, is spot on. Demand = Need + Purchasing Power. With the Purchasing Power of the government at students' backs, schools would see that they needed to raise prices to keep supply at the same level.
isn't this like a month or two old?
An individual plan, right?
Ask HN: Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok?
It seems a rethorical question, but apparently it needs asking because it seems to be that this is not clear to some.

Because it isn't mentioned in the guidelines this is looked upon as a 'loophole' and some people use this to boost submissions to the new page.

So, what is your take on this?
Bessemer Venture's anti-portfolio, deals they passed on but should have taken
Wow. 13.4 us "end-to-end latencies and up to 4,100,000 messages a second today", but then again, it was something attractive enough that iMatix (for whom I have a lot of respect) bought the company, so the only surprise is that they were able to get it that fast.

Thanks for the info and pointer!
yeah, this is old news. they've already been shamed on techcrunch, and across a ton of other channels.
Nutrient density, like he says, isn't the only factor in determining what makes food healthy.

For example, food which tastes delicious and raises blood sugar makes us 'high'. Being high is bad for the body (please note, I'm not saying it's wrong).

Note also that whether something tastes delicious depends on how we interpret the experience and therefore healthiness is not wholly attributable to the foodstuff in question.

To complicate matters still further, worrying about food is surely unhealthy, isn't it?
We are sorry for the inconvenience this illegal intrusion onto the RockYou system has caused our users. We will continue to advise our users of any information that would help them.

To me, this is a textbook case of a non-apology apology. Allowing (unencrypted!) passwords to be stolen isn't inconvenient to users, it's a pain in the ass.
21 days-ish: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=997488 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=995634

I really wish they would implement a feature that lists similar topics when you are about to submit a new one.
it wouldn't even be unintuitive. longways slide (current) for regular home. sideways slide to go straight to phone. I can't believe no one has thought of this.
Are you kidding? Eating a lot of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, and nuts are not going to give you severe health problems. It will most likely make you a lot more healthy.
If you start thinking like that, then you don't deserve your customer's money.

This isn't an open source project where obligations are low - and even in open source projects there are _some_ obligations - this is a business that has obligations both contractual and implied, and if you fail to honor or modify them then you can expect customers to go elsewhere.
One more: mkdir(2)
Erlang programming rules
From an SEO point of view it is better to have them all in one basket, if you think you are ever going to spin off or out one of the projects then they should be on a domain in their own right.

Also, it is much harder to market a large number of domains, think of it as trying to market a large number of brands at the same time. You'll have to split your budget.
Implementing Startup Metrics for Pirates – Part 2: Conversion Funnel
Somehow go always makes its way into online conversations about chess.

The Wikipedia article on computer go suggests that humans are better at calculating long sequences in go than in chess because the pieces in go stay where they are unless they're captured. This seems reasonable to me, though I'm no better than a beginner at go (I'm probably around the equivalent to an "amateur low dan" at chess, and can do what you suggested a go player of that level should be able to do in replaying and memorizing games.)

Also, it's not really fair to compare international titles in go, of which several are contested every year, to the world championship in chess, which is only contested every other year. A better comparison might be some of the major international tournaments like Wijk aan Zee, Linares...or perhaps this year's Nanjing Pearl Spring tournament, in which Carlsen decisively defeated a field consisting of five other top-20 players: Veselin Topalov (currently world #2, and the challenger for the world championship to be held later this year), Wang Yue (#9), Peter Leko (#12), Teimour Radjabov (#16), and Dmitry Jakovenko (#19). Carlsen scored 8/10 (six wins, four draws) -- no one else scored above 5.5/10.
there are other issues at play too though. schools don't currently maintain a supply and demand equilibrium. they under price and then use rationing. private schools could simply raise prices until number of applicants is approximately the number of positions available. but of course there is a prestige economy in place that interacts with the money economy.
Not only that, the requisite class action lawsuit has already been filed:

http://gigaom.com/2009/12/30/rockyou-sued-over-user-data-bre...
Not obviously true; the article you cited is reviewing a bugfix revision of the Phenom. Or did I miss something?
Yeah, I just hope you can turn it off. I tried out a HTC Eris a while back and there didn't seem to be any way to turn off Flash.
Don't call attention to the crazy. If you let it lie, you'll let it die. Talking about it just makes it seem like perhaps a valid viewpoint.
Why does the army corps of 'engineers' get called in when something needs to be destroyed ?

It seems to be pretty obvious, construction and destruction are the two sides of the same coin.

In order to effectively destroy something it helps if you have knowledge of how things are constructed.
The tablet may have an entirely different GUI than the iPhone/Touch or OSX but I don't think there's any reason to believe the OS would be a radical departure from Apple's current operating systems.
I know this is old, but in this day and age, it's surprising how many companies store plaintext passwords.

Pandora Radio, for instance.
I agree. All video/audio clips on the web should have transcripts with them. I usually skip it if they don't.
Or, you can buy this one right now:

http://www.usbgeek.com/prod_detail.php?prod_id=1219

(Wireless. Receiver is USB dongle. Approx size and form-factor of a Blackberry keyboard, with a touchscreen instead of a screen.)
I love how they follow "Our users' privacy and data security have always been a priority for RockYou and we strive to keep them secure." with a missive about how they don't follow the same security standards that every web app has used for 10 years. Their legacy system is presumably not older than their company, which has not been around since before even hobbyist web developers like myself learned not to store passwords in plain text.

Next we're going to find out that their system accepts the username "Delete from users WHERE"...
To be fair, its not that simple of a problem. At the time, Facebook Connect didn't exist, Twitter didn't use OAuth, and I don't know what MySpace was doing. So if you wanted to give a 3rd party app access to your account, they had to store your password. Sure, they should have used some kind of 2 way cipher on it, but how much safer than plain text is that anyway?

Of course, once Facebook et all started using OAuth-like protocols they should have dropped the passwords. There's a lot of shame here for sure, but its not quite as amateur of a mistake as it sounds on first blush.
That's about $400 more

You could also view it as a ~$100 discount on the Mac OS X tax, if it's only $400 more than equivalent Windows or Linux tablets. Apple laptops tend to be about $500 more than similarly equipped laptops from other manufacturers (my last Dell was $626 cheaper than an almost identically equipped MacBook Pro).

Of course, I don't know what Windows and Linux-based tablets are actually going to cost, so the Mac OS X tax may be more or less on tablets. I guess we'll see when the tablets start hitting the market in reasonable numbers.

I'm not entirely sure I see the use case for a tablet at any price...though I have a netbook, and like it, and have a Kindle, and like it (but the insane battery life is a primary factor for the Kindle; a tablet won't be able to come close). So, I may figure out uses for a tablet when they're more common.
I agree with your points only because my goal is to offer an idea and then have it be sublated as a result of discussion, with new truths revealed.

Because I used an unorthodox tactic, the thread was derailed. So nobody's discussing anything about practical Customer Development.
Tech Rant on Foursquare
What's worse is the way for-profit colleges are abusing the system and taking federal loan dollars for subpar educations.

Their default rates are appalling, but that's to be expected when you charge $40k for a two year degree in Fashion Design. This should have been reigned in years ago.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-12-14-student-lo...

http://federalstudentaid.ed.gov/datacenter/cohort.html
Come on, there is more to federal college loans than supply/demand distortion. Easily accessible student loans have much further reaching societal and economic implications than "inflating tuition costs", and those should play into the calculus of whether government-sponsored student loans are worthwhile.

This guy's example of Yale's 42 year stint of $33 tuition and so forth is pretty poor, too.

"What has changed? Back in the 1800's there was no Department of Education, no government guaranteed student loans..."

Gee, mainly that there were only a few sons of aristocrats going to the few universities in the country, and all they did there was read Great Books. Today universities are centers for research and have much broader educational missions.

Guess what? Tuition isn't the primary source of income for universities (at least not mine, a Tier I research university). It's /research grants/. Tuition allows you to pay for high-caliber faculty that can bring in huge grants. Schiff misses this point /entirely/. We keep raising tuition so we can offer salaries competitive with our peer institutions and keep getting top-notch faculty (as an out-of-state student at a public university, I'm quite cognizant of these increases).

"If the government didn't guarantee student loans, no one would give them, it'd be too risky."

Completely false. Student loans are some of the least-risky loans to give: the expected income of future doctors, engineers, etc easily justifies the risk of a loan. That's why there is a thriving private market for non-government guaranteed student loans.
I'm sort of confused by your use of the term "on the other hand". I'm in complete agreement with Schiff (and economists in general) when talking about the effects of price distortions from tax/subsidy (two sides of the same coin).
Your last point is an "it depends": a lot of companies set up stuff next to the computers of the exchange(s) they're interested in, so that latency is very low and largely bounded.
I would say absolutely not.

Submissions should be voted up based on their own merits, not on how many friends you happen to have on HN to help you. This, as far as I know, is an ongoing problem at sites like Digg where it is reportedly almost impossible to get on the frontpage without being a member of some kind of voting ring, or having the right connections.

I hope we're above that.
Gee, mainly that there were only a few sons of aristocrats going to the few universities in the country, and all they did there was read Great Books. Today universities are centers for research and have much broader educational missions.

um....history would like a word with you.

I do however agree that Sciff's assertions on this matter are grossly oversimplified.
So the argument is that if they eliminated student loans, colleges would have to cut prices in order to maintain demand, right?

Isn't that a little risky, with the chance of pricing out the lower 1/2 of income earners in the US?

What if, as a compromise, they just eliminated college loans for those with family incomes over a certain level? Then you could get the economic effects without consigning a third of a generation to "sorry you were born in the wrong place kid, no college for you".

If we want to eliminate economic distortions, we should go after the farm subsidies, of course. But those are even more of a political minefield than this idea.
You're either trolling or you haven't paid any real attention to the perl community. Your comments are simply inaccurate, which is probably why they were downvoted (not out of some weird fanboyism).
It's sadder that they never got past that due to it crashing continuously. It was a wonderful tool, but nobody I know ever experienced it as a reliable one. Tell me you don't know the disruptive experience of Cmd-Space and...nothing happens. It's like having your leg fall off mid-stride.
Chinese companies are sued over software piracy
Ask HN: Is any one else frustrated with Adobe Air and Flex?
We recently upgrade to Flex SDK 3.5 and realized that Adobe Air auto-update functionality is completely broken. It is really frustrating to have a complete regression on a major part of the software. The stories of a decline in development quality seem to be now manifesting themselves. Is anyone else feeling frustrated with the lack of quality control in Adobe Air and Flex? I filed the bug with Adobe here - http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-24919
I have a copy of "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, Second Edition" (featuring very good description of C/POSIX/SuS/XSI protocols/api's and programming techniques for Linux/BSD/OSX/Solaris/other UNIX systems). Anyone who seriously wants to do thread safe multiprocessing or other complex low level stuff on UNIX platforms should have a copy of it. It's basically "the book" on the topic.
Plenty of "non-profit" colleges also take federal money and provide subpar educations.

The only real difference is that the non-profit colleges funnel money to employees rather than to shareholders.
Great comment - the prestige economy does seem to have more of an effect on college price than any traditional supply/demand curves. We'd all be wise to recognize that.
See jimmyjim's comment below:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1034232
I'm glad to get another source on this. The other one could have been having some fun yanking my chain.
They might be slowly crawling out of a big hole, but that doesn't mean they're not doing well. I'd argue that the cost so far should be considered more of an investment than a loss. They entered a difficult market dominated by two large players with a lot of brand/name loyalty (i.e. fanbois) and huge barriers to entry. Over the last 8 or so years, the Xbox brand has become number 1 or 2 (depending on which metric you use), beating out the last gen's leader (Sony). They've also become the leader in the online console space where profit margins are high and revenue is recurring (think WOW).

All this isn't to say that MS won't mess up the courier concept but that they're better than many people give them credit for.
Sony Ericsson S302 Black Unlocked
Sony Ericsson S302 unwraps to make public equipment and pattern confident by personality. See hidden elucidation become noticeable at what time a call comes in. the new presentation of Sony Ericsson is just with amazing 2 MP of camera.
I know I can't be alone in being super-excited that all those annoying Flash ads for dog food are going to work just fine on my mobile phone too.
From Allan's post:
I feel I should stress that I am not posting these “status posts” in an attempt of painting some picture of TM 2.0 being around the corner to increase sales or avoid having people jump ship. Please make your decisions about what software to use/buy/support based on released software, not what I or someone else writes about “the future” (which none of us can predict).
The extent of Steve Jobs' comeback
The post explains that no passwords to outside services were implicated in the breach. So this is just as amateur a mistake as it sounds - storing their own passwords in plaintext for no reason at all.
I've mentioned this a few times before, but I really wish votes here were public information.
I realize I oversimplified my point there, but I think it's hard to argue that the Yale of 1810 has the same educational and social mission of the Yale of 2010.
Essentially your argument is 'the end justifies the means' because somehow your posting is important enough for this but those of others are not.

The thread was derailed because you chose to cheat and got called out for it, but most likely it has worked wonders for you in the past.

Look, I have 0 clout on this site, but if this were my site you'd be booted out for this, it's as simple as that.

There are plenty of people that have been kicked off HN for just their tone of voice (unalone comes to mind, he may not be the most polished of characters but some of his stuff was quite interesting), the only saving grace as far as I can see is that you at least are honest about what you did.

What I'm really wondering about is how common this tactic really is. If you think it is ok and you ask your friend to vote your stuff up, it stands to reason that you'd do the same for them, it is proof positve that there is a back-channel that is being used to muster voting and/or flag power beyond what 'ordinary' users have.

That's a really really bad development in my eyes.

Or would you like to state that you are not aware of anything like this happening in the past because of you asking your friends to vote stuff up or flag it and / or you voting stuff up for your friends and / or flagging stuff at their request?
None at all. I stopped reading when he ranked iceberg lettuce as over four times healthier than chicken and beef.

That's a straw man inadvertently created from a cursory reading of the website. It's not his position that maximizing nutrient density is equivalent to eating a healthy diet.

Not to mention the telltale "toxins" which are always mentioned (but never enumerated) in this sort of scam.

I agree that this should be taken as a sign of a scam. (Though it is unfortunately so common, that it's entered the realm of "fluffly marketdroid language.")
Windows 7
iYogi, the on-demand tech services company with a unique global delivery model, is offering an ongoing Insight Series leading up to the launch of Windows 7 with helpful tips for consumers and small businesses planning to move to the new operating system.
So iceberg lettuce "wins" by being low in calories, rather than high in nutrients. It's a common problem with any metric involving division. Salt water completely breaks it.

Anyways, are nutrients even a more-is-better sort of thing, or is nutrition more or less threshold-based?
I have yet to meet anyone from the middle east region who is not an engineer.
Since I haven't bought a new desktop machine in nearly three years (until this machine, I upgraded religiously every 18 months), because my current CPU is still plenty fast for the work that I do (partly because I no longer work with C/C++, and partly because processors are just so damned fast these days), I would like to see power consumption / performance mapped out like this. So, energy efficiency is a much more important factor to me these days.
Are the roads in Silicon Valley Paved in Gold?
Yet non-profit colleges have a repayment rate of 95.3% while for-profit colleges sink to 83.3%. So it's not the 'only real difference'. But I'll give you that non-profits are not entirely blame free.
The question I pose to you isn't - is the Xbox hardware profitable? It's - is the Xbox software profitable enough to make Microsoft a profit taken the hardware into consideration. If so doesn't that make the Xbox profitable? HP and other printer company do kind of the same thing. They sell the printer at a loss and make money selling the ink.
one or more individuals illegally breached one of our databases

I love the fact that they mention multiple times that it was an illegal breach as if that diminishes their culpability.
Ian Bicking does useful things all the time - that impresses me.
IPC semaphore ops using the semop() function are also supposed to be atomic at the kernel level.
If I read this chart correctly, it says that by eating more green vegetables and fruit, a person will consume significantly more nutrients than a person who does not.

This advice is certainly unnecessary for Americans, who generally eat only from the first two columns.

However, it could be helpful for the few that eat exclusively from the lower half of the third column.
Seems like a bad idea to encourage such things.