skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's safe to assume that the Hacker News demographic is not exactly the main target audience of this site. I submitted the story because it poses interesting questions about the ethics of provocation-based promotion, the viability of a business model that purposely excludes customers, the popularity of exclusive online communities, and so on.
I think the PostgreSQL project might become even more robust with the coming mass defection away from MySQL. Except for easy replication and the ability to explain it to a know-nothing manager, MySQL has nothing on Postgres these days.
the OP's use of the word 'purvey' was exactly backwards. if i had made such a mistake, i'd want to know about it.
Monthly recurring revenue as a way out of tough times (old but good)
I'm pretty sure you mean this article:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3408/the_cabal_valves_...

It's about the unusual design process Valve went through to produce the original Half-Life, and I too found it a fascinating read.
Sounds like a problem for C++ templates.
It's not an official confirmation, but FWIW the WSJ is reporting that Apple "will unveil a new multimedia tablet device later this month", citing "people briefed by [Apple]" - see http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870358090457463...
No idea. It's a damned brazen idea though. The value of the data is obviously huge, they just have to figure out some value proposition for the users (it's obvious from the other reactions that technically astute 20-35 year old men won't be their target demographic...).
Thank you very much. This conversation really helped me clarify my idea, even to myself. And it's allowed me to identify the things I've said which may be confusing or ambiguous.
it always feels a bit wrong

It helps to think of it as "don't care" code rather than "error compensation" code. Which way should the engine be wired? It's cool; the software doesn't care. Just wire it up however. What order should I start these services? It's cool; they don't care. Just start them up however. As soon as your users stop caring about the stuff you can take care of, they'll have time to care about something else that's more important.
It's a $12 startup only if his time was worth nothing.
The guy does some pretty interesting stuff - writes scripts to automatically generate structures so class variables are byte aligned and within cache lines and all that.

But he has made some of the dumbest use of C++ I have ever seen. Verbs as classes, sometimes making it obvious that inheritance escapes him, and an entire cpp file over 10k lines long that does nothing but assert the mass amount of assumptions his code makes. The one method is literally called 'check_assumptions.'

I'm not bitter though.
The code for a the basic (mode A/C) transponder isn't actually unique. It's just 4 base-8 digits settable by the pilot, with several codes reserved for specific uses. When on an ATC-assigned code, that code in only "unique" within a specific area. I might be assigned 0234 flying in Boston Center's airspace and someone else might be on 0234 in Phoenix.
Actually it would be good if a resubmission includes the previous submissions comments.
I'd offer up a word of caution though about generator comprehensions. They're much more expensive than list comprehensions in the small cases. In Mercurial, a patch came up to move some listcomps to gencomps, and it was rejected because it slowed things down. Sometimes the state required to manage the generator is more costly than evaluating everything.

Also, dot lookups in a loop are frequently a poor choice. Often you can get a huge speedup in a tight loop by changing

for x in xrange(10000000): # or whatever
foo.bar()

to

foobar = foo.bar
for x in xrange(10000000): # or whatever
foobar()
FYI, this is know as the Streisand effect ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect )
I would never defend Internet Explorer, but I don't think this is really a big deal. If you have more than 30 style tags on any page, something is very wrong. IE has plenty of bugs and limitations that are much worse than this. :)
FleetDB
Hi - is your Rails app for ancient Chinese literature? Is it public anywhere?
I am the Coin (Puzzle consisting of 20,000 custom minted coins)
It's a $12 startup because somebody thought it made a catchy headline.
Local hacking
I know of a university cafeteria that simply puts up a “Use the revolving door” sign on the swing door. It’s pretty effective. Nobody will stop you if you use the swing door, but hardly anybody does use it.
That has not been our experience with Twitter. I know your passionate in your belief, but our statistics do not support your position. Business clients pay for performance, not beliefs...
It's not the message that's annoying, but the format:

FYI: You flipped it, "A purveyor of goods or services is a person or company that provides them" not the other way around.

That communicates the same thing and takes up less space, and is easier to understand. And by starting with FYI: most people can simply skip it.
I envisioned a system like this while prepping for the MCAT. Put in terms of the SAT: Up front I pay $x dollars into an account, where $x is some amount that I find appropriate for break-even given an SAT practice test, your GPA, and some demographic info. For every 10 points below 2400 that you score on the real thing, my obligation to you is reduced by $y. If you score too low, you owe me.

This would only really be effective if the student had the ability and time to do extra prep for the test, etc. And it would do nothing to resolve the underlying flaws of the exam itself.
That looks like a fine example of sound safety engineering at work. All doors are risky in highly windy environments. My neighbor is missing several finger tips due to a wind-slammed door. I've also witnessed a sliding door dislodged from its tracks and tumbling down the street. In this video, the safety glass shattered as designed, leaving the man startled, but unharmed.
"There are always risks involved with going over the air or using an antenna to receive a digital picture, mainly because digital airwaves are not as forgiving as analog airwaves and are always subject to interference," said Darryl Ryan, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable.

This kind of stuff makes me think that the people who run the cable companies REALLY ARE like the DirecTV commercials.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SglXWd_fY3E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0XXS7eswC0
Meh. I do tons of free coding for people, and I would do this as well. It's like free coding, but I get paid and get to train my patience! =]

More importantly. How are the workers guaranteed to be highly talented? I'm under the impression that all the workers are added by invite; however, what are the real tests of ability? I'd be curious to know.

[EDIT:] I love the idea! (My only skepticism/criticism/dislike is that I can't find the hiring process online and therefore can't approve of it.)
If China were to start selling dollars, there’s no reason to think it would significantly raise U.S. interest rates. It would probably weaken the dollar against other currencies — but that would be good, not bad, for U.S. competitiveness and employment. So if the Chinese do dump dollars, we should send them a thank-you note.

I'm not so sure about this. It might be true, but I think there is a lot more back story. A weakening dollar is bad for people who don't have debt, and it's bad for people who want to buy any good produced in foreign countries who's currencies aren't depreciating as quickly as the dollar. However, for anyone awash in mortgage and credit card debt, the weakening dollar is welcoming news, as it lowers the cost of the debt. The caveat is that you have to be able to support yourself, despite the weakening dollar, while still not falling further into debt. If you're able to increase your pay to match real inflation then you're in a real good position, but most people's income will lag far behind the increasing cost of goods.
I just tried out the service. As someone who isn't a full time coder it's great to have someone with years of experience on the back to share some tricks with me.

Plus I regularly hire freelancers and while making it simply into a freelancer market place would be a horrible idea, I would definitely say that I would hire someone who has been able to help me out with a problem in 30 mins. And I think it's also a good way for developers to see if their potential clients are complete idiots or if they're not too bad themselves.
From what I understand, it's actually a safety system malfunctioning. During a fire, the 4 doors are supposed to collapse together, to let people go straight through. For some reason, it tried to switch to fire mode with the guy still inside.
Crockford on Javascript: The Series
Have you checked out .NET Reactor and/or IntelliLock?

http://www.eziriz.com/

I had been considering them for a product of my own. There's a lot of positive feedback about them around.
It's an interesting area of research, but nothing especially new:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_suspension

The trouble is almost always with how much energy these systems suck down, typically increasing fuel consumption by 5-10%.
And in this case, don't forget to do a #define INVERSE_MOTOR_POLARITY 1 or similar, so that the hack is clear and doesn't bite you when porting to another platform.

It's not a bug, it's a customizable feature :)
There will be new MacBook Pros at some point in the near future – but I think Apple is less and less inclined to give any such “boring” changes their own events.

I think Apple has been moving away from situations where they are forced to present something – anything – (like Macworld) and will try to only use events for really new stuff. The two lone exceptions are the WWDC and the yearly iPod event. You might see simple spec changes in the WWDC keynote (probably only mentioned in passing), but I don’t think you will see them anywhere else.

(Design changes might be something they would present at such an event. But since we just lived through the change to the Unibody design I don’t think we will see changes in the next one to two years. That would be unnecessary and stupid.)
TSA Agent Posed as Blogger in Bid to Identify Agency Leak
Intel just released new 32nm laptop CPUs with embedded GPU, so there'll probably be some new laptops with those chips.
Why Comments Snark
This fragmentation problem is starting to get pretty ugly. I have an HTC Hero which, IIRC, went on sale via Sprint in October 2009 and I cannot run Google Nav or Google Goggles, or use Bluetooth tethering via PDANet because I'm stuck with 1.5 My 3 year old iPhone 2G runs almost everything in the App Store while my <3 month old Android handset cannot even run Google's newest official applications anymore? This feels like a rerun of the Windows Mobile situation to me.
Having been through the Apple rumor cycle more times than I'd like to admit, this is most likely real. The amount of leaks, the date-pegging, and the absolute lack of any look at the device suggests that this is happening, and directly matches the iPhone launch.
Interesting... why would they collapse with that amount of force? It seems like it is collapsing awfully fast to be by design, not wind.
Can you explain your comment about "mass defection away from MySQL"? Do you think that's something that's about to practically happen? Thanks.
It's a pity Windows Mobile isn't better.
This is why games suck now.

'Make a game easy' is what you do when you can't design good gameplay mechanics that work at multiple skill levels. If your game can only work at one skill level, you have to make that skill level really easy if you want to keep as many people as you can playing it after their first try.

The downside is that there is no reward for improving at the game. You play it a few times, and you do not improve. There's no newer corners of the game to explore, no new approaches to playing it.

Some games are so good that you can re-release them over and over for years with just a few changes and maybe some new content, and people will keep buying and playing it. Tetris. Puyo-puyo. Super Mario. Those are the games you should try to idolize, not games like Gears of War or Halo or random-indie-game-that-wishes-it-were-Braid #455321.

You can brute-force a game that sells a lot by playtesting it with countless focus groups, paying Hollywood-level for game assets, and marketing it to death on Gamespot and whatever, but that's the equivalent of hiring a giant workforce and grinding out your web app in some old Java enterprise WebPortletComponentModelerFactory thing.

Be agile, try small fun stuff and wander around until you get something that's fun to play, and then think up a way to make a full game out of it. Don't start the other way around, with the desire for 'some game' but no way to fill it out with the fun part.

Addendum: Don't be afraid to let the player die. That's why there are multiple lives (if your game works like that, I mean.) Most games I see today go as far as possible to prevent a player from dying during normal gameplay, to the point where you can clear many games on your first try without any sort of negative feedback -- Assassin's Creed 2, for example.

To learn to play Super Mario Bros., you had to die or watch someone else die. If you're setting out from the beginning in your design with "I never want the player to die", then just don't have lives and death at all, like Braid. It's ridiculous when you have a lives system in a game but contort your game mechanics to never use it. You end up creating an environment where a player never really gets negative feedback on when to not do something, and you have to constantly push them in the right direction with obvious and uncouth hints in order to prevent them from making an 'accident'. You're preventing your player from learning. Stop it!
Now my hand hurts from playing it :/
It's amazing that Google is heading down this treacherous path, I would expect them to learn from Microsoft's mistake and Apple's success.
I have worked through Guru.com and enjoy it. The web site provides a lot of nice tools, including escrow payments, work rooms, and private message boards. You pay for it though -- around 7% fees on each project.

The one complaint is that you have to lower your rates substantially at the start until you build up return clients. At the point, they like your work and give you private projects.
Everyone can stop the seat belt reminder by putting on their seat belt. Handicapped people can't use a different door.
I only skimmed the article so might've missed this, but you'd hope they'd work affiliate links in there on products and potentially split revenue with users. Even then, it's a pretty big step to hand over a bunch of your logins just to scrape a couple of cents from your handful of followers.

Once I ran a list of my ideas past a venture capitalist. He liked a good number of them, but for a few of them, he simply said "What problem does this solve?" and within a few seconds I'd realised that those ideas were likely duds or, at best, up-hill battles.

I think it's a good question to ask early in any idea brainstorming.

Store cards and rewards cards are a similar goldmine of information, but they provide quite strong incentives - frequent flyer points, discounts, etc. Not to mention, less risk.
"Phone cards are basically just (small) deposit accounts that are withdrawn against for one particular purchase. It makes a lot of sense that they'd fall under the same law."

No. Bank deposits are accounted for as money held in trust under a limited power of attorney, the total principal value must be reserved against by high-quality assets, and they are super-senior debt instruments that have priority in liquidation.

The purchase price of phone cards is accounted for as income for the phone company, the cards are sold to provide a bearer service contract, they can discount the sale price to account for minutes that will not be used, reserves are whatever the phone company wants, and they are junior instruments that have low priority in liquidation.
The saving grace is that installable apps are still somewhat marginal to phones. IE, you could have a decent product out of the box.
The answer is in the script.
Comparison of lossless PNG compression tools
How would you avoid it, sell their own line of phones?

I think the value of Android is that it might produce an iphone quality phone at a (real) $200 price at some point by allowing cheap hardware experts to go to work on making hardware cheap.
yeah, gotta love easy to solve riddles by looking in the js
Rails developer needed for stealth/VC funded YC S09 startup [Bay Area]
We were part of the Summer 09 batch. We have yet to launch and have closed an angel round from some of the best angels in Silicon Valley and we have raised a VC/Seed round, so we are well capitalized.

Since we're still stealth, all we can say right now is that we are tackling a very large problem in a very old industry... this is not your run of the mill Silicon Valley company.

We are looking for a talented rails developer to join our team. Here are the job requirements.

Requirements:

* 1+ years developing in Ruby on Rails
* Good understanding of JavaScript, experience with jQuery (or other framework)
* Deep understanding and appreciation for MVC
* Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science preferred, not required

Bonus Points:

* Ability to build mock-ups in HTML/CSS by hand. Fast.
* API development experience
* SOAP experience
* TDD experience
* Deep understanding of MySQL, can hand-craft optimized queries when Rails fails
* Sphinx experience
* Photoshop/Illustrator experience

Competitive full-time salary, equity compensation plan, and benefits. You will have the freedom to choose the technology and tools you need to be most productive.

Please send a resume to:

railsycjob@gmail.com

Include in your cover email three interesting things about yourself to give us a little more insight into who you are as a person.

This position requires your presence in the Bay Area.
Ajax please.
If major corporations aren't dick enough to do this to their users, i don't think many of us have the luxury.
Ask HN: How's the world been treating you lately?Review my iPhone app:My day was
He found a pretty unlikely niche and made a good bit of money in a relatively short amount of time, which is commendable.

Since it is a market that is probably easy to saturate (who would ever think that as many people would want a European vanity plate) selling it was probably a good decision.

It certainly doesn't sound like a must-have item in a growth market.

The big trick now will be to leverage the take of the sale in to something bigger.
Another failed interview
I'm using all the proceeds to fund my startup: Picfiti

Picfiti helps you leave virtual notes on real world objects and places using your phone camera.

Take a photo of an object and type in a message to save it. When a friend comes along and takes a photo of the same object, they'll see the message you left for them!
And for the record there is no such thing as a digital antenna. It's exactly the same antenna for analog and digital.
How about a promo code?
I just dined at a nice restaurant that had a set of heavy velvet curtains in a semi-circle around the inside of front door. Not only did it prevent cold blasts to the tables close to the door (I always hate that) it made for a really elegant transitional experience between the dull outside space to the exquisite interior.
My takeaway from the article wasn't "don't use AES" - it was "use a sufficiently high-level cryptography library such that someone smarter than you is deciding which algorithm to use and with which options".
style=".." on an element is an attribute, not a style tag (<style>), and so is unaffected by this limitation.
Treat people with respect. Have good boundaries. Don't be an attention hog. Don't let negative prejudices dictate your behavior even when you do run into them.

Generally speaking, I tend to be pretty open about who I am. But there are situations where that is practically guaranteed to cause problems. I try to be more low key and dole information out more slowly in such settings. Does it make me feel like I am wearing a mask? Sometimes. But you can't be deeply intimate with the entire world, so it is inevitable that a great many more people will know me only superficially than know me well. <shrug>
Social Network Fatigue and the Missing Web 2.0 Address Book
" Here's what I'm talking about: an address book for my phone that remembers everyone I call, and everyone who calls me, and syncs with my email, which remembers every email I send and receive, and an IM client ditto -- and that uses Google-like heuristics to help me figure out who I want. And then uses P2P and various trust metrics to help me find people who are not in my immediate communication orbit.

I mean, how often do you search through your email to find the email address or phone number of someone you communicate with but just didn't happen to tell your address book explicitly to remember?

So now start imagining this "real" social network, as expressed by our communication tools and captured in our personal address book, starting to be overlaid with everything else we know about ourselves and our contacts -- their photo stream, their blog, etc. Imagine Nat Friedman's dashboard (I wish that were still progressing) in the sidebar of any communication app, reminding us of the latest to be known about anyone we're communicating with.

I could go on and on. Add in Seth Goldstein's attention recorder and ideas from mybloglog, a dash of Microsoft Wallop, and Gordon Bell's mylifebits." --Tim O'Reilly
Sounds like Pascal...
Also checkout this screencast by Railcasts. It may show you how the vulnerability can be exploited a bit more clearly to those of you who are possibly thinking "how the hell can they pass more parameters than the ones I have in my form".

http://railscasts.com/episodes/26-hackers-love-mass-assignme...
If you need an antenna build this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWQhlmJTMzw - original video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8jsDxNgHn4 - improved model

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=798265 - main discussion site

http://www.frontiernet.net/~mclapp/Antennas/diagrams.html - plans with exact measurements

It's absolutely amazing how much better this antenna is compared to regular commercial models.
I have a couple of things up with demos/screens and code available:

- A mapping tool that searches for Chinese placenames through about 2500 years of history and shows you when/where that name existed, what level of the administration it was in, etc.: http://www.digitalsinologist.com/places

- Beginnings of a Cocoa-based critical text editor. http://www.digitalsinologist.com/blog/index.php?id=40

- One attempt to format a critical version of a text online: http://digitalsinologist.com/texts/XieLingyun/text.html
Big news: money thrown at vague problem because of famous names.
I just saw a link in the HTML.
Yeah, that quote jumped out at me as well. Last summer I helped my dad tune the TV at our summer house, and it's so much easier with a digital receiver since they all can display a nice little diagnostic screen where they show the exact signal strength and quality. Makes it a lot easier to figure out where you should place the antenna and in which direction you should point it. And as long as the signal quality is over a certain threshold, you get a perfect picture.

...as compared to the old analog times when you did the same by trying to decide which picture looked better, and when every tiny drop in signal quality made the picture deteriorate.

Yeah, them digital airwaves sure aren't as forgiving.
I use the side doors - opening them by hand - because revolving doors move more slowly than I like, and it irritates me. It's the equivalent of a "loading..." bar for a website's flash intro - I don't want to deal with it, just get me into the building please.
DisplayPort and USB 3.0 Named Among Top Technologies of 2010