skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=the+unfair+platform... 2 million hits on google, hundreds of thousands of hits on websites like armorgames and kongregate. Pretty good for a flash game.
You have just made my day. I shudder to think what the search space for nested parentheses is like -- egads.
Annotatr
I've previously used/edited http://sicp.org.ua/, but it seems to be out of commission right now.
I've met Sean and Adam and they seem to be smart, hardworking guys. I remember Adam saying Ping.fm is about the tenth app, or "thing" they worked on, although I'm sure many of those other projects were completed over a weekend or given little attention. At any rate, these are the type of people that should be successful. I think Seesmic made a good move.
Ask HN: What does everyone use to send out newsletters, email campaigns?
We have been using mailchimp for the last couple of months but our user list has been growing and we are looking to change the service or build our own. What is everyone's opinion about it or everyone use for their own startups/blogs etc.?
Right, there are actually two potential problems here: 1) the initial compaction takes a long time and there are a correspondingly large amount of buffered writes to append and 2) the compaction never finishes, either because compaction hung or died - and then we are adding to the buffer indefinitely.

I don't think that 1) will be that much of a problem: the amount of writes that the db can process in the time it takes to do a compaction of even a large db should be small compared to the rate at which they can be appended to the compacted file.

2) is more problematic; I'll need to add a timeout-like guard to prevent a runaway write buffer.
I don't get how those 17 people would likely be "potential future clients". Clients who have the money to pay for things to get done... pay to get things done; they don't try to learn it themselves first.

Of course this is not an absolute rule, yes yes, it is possible, I just don't see how that really is one core benefit worthy of marketing.
Prevention is Better Than Cure
While using a condom might give you some assurance that a pregnancy is unlikely, don't be overtly sure. It is evidenced that users of male condoms see a 2 per cent pregnancy per year. However, it is something which cannot be helped.
I have worked for an consulted for some of the companies mentioned in other responses to this thread. I can attest from personal experience that one large web application (>6 million uniques / month) is using an Enlightened Perl stack (Catalyst + Moose + DBIx::Class), as well as several internal projects for house-hold name companies (Walmart, Marriott, American Red Cross for example).

More directly I have been responsible for the back end of at least 2 applications in the iPhone store. The most recent of which is an app called ParkingMobility. ParkingMobility tracks disabled parking places via user submissions on the iPhone. The REST server that powers this app is 3,344 lines of Perl, and 32 lines of shell (mostly for our continuous integration server).

The reason I chose Perl is first familiarity, I use Perl daily and have for over 10 years now. I have been working with the specific tools in this app, Catalyst, Moose, and KiokuDB for at least 3 years. None of these projects is older than 5 years old, though Catalyst turns 5 later this month.

Second though is that these tools have provided me with a quick and agile development platform. The server for ParkingMobility for example had one developer[^1] and went from roughly scratch[^2] to release in a little over a month of developer time. This includes 95% coverage for my test suite and two large design changes (one after we'd sent the client a second release candidate). The app is broken out into 46 files, the largest of which is 183[^3] lines long. This code is (to me, and most of the people I work with) still highly legible if a bit idiomatic. The conciseness means that at any given point there is only so much context you need to be aware of at any given point in time, much like lisp.

Does this give some reasoning of why some of us still choose to write large projects in Perl, even if you haven't heard of them?

[^1]: To be fair, I have a partner who did 100% of the iPhone client while I did 95% of the server code. He's waded in and done cleanup work while I was unavailable as the owners are his clients.

[^2]: I'd written a similar application previously so I had the architecture but I rewrote basically every line for ParkingMobility

[^3]: The Controller for adding/updating/retrieving new Locations (ie Parking Spots). Since this is the main functionality of the App, and I tend toward fat controllers and thin Models personally I think 183 lines is reasonable.
Or send through a bunch of guys with harmless stuff on them first.

After a number of 'false positives' the chances of missing something real would definitely increase.

Or get two or more people to smuggle bits & pieces. That's probably a lot harder to pull off though.
I like prawns idea, seems like something definitely testable.
I was just going to throw out "google answers" service which was basically the same as what you are saying but for any type of question, and did not seem to work out.
This sounds good. A similar tool is It's All Text! for Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125). It lets me edit textareas with Emacs. It's only Firefox, but it's cross-platform.
This problem can be avoided by using @import statements within each style tag to import more than 30 stylesheets. Some discussion here: http://drupal.org/node/228818

Of course, you should avoid doing this in production anyway, and just asset package your stylesheets into very few stylesheets. I've made a fork of the asset_packager project to support this behavior after 31 stylesheets: http://github.com/jamesyu/asset_packager_ie_css_limit
Heh I'm currently in Germany and the BBC is one of the few English channels available. The experts they've interviewed to date have all said things along the lines of "scanners and physical checks won't stop embedded explosives", "the terrorists will simply use internal explosives next" and "we have no means of screening for explosives". As one HN commentator mentioned: "state of the art for explosives detection is a labrador retriever".

Putting aside the fact these experts have just told terrorists where security gaps are (perhaps its a false admission to try and catch terrorists offguard?) it is deeply concerning if these security gaps do exist and that increased security measures will do nothing more but infringe privacy.
It's not entirely relevant to your point but anyone with a film camera would be concerned with checking their camera gear (well films at least). Similarly, most airlines charge extra for checked luggage while some staggering amount of checked luggage is delayed, lost for a small time (weeks-months) or lost indefinitely.
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Great move for Seesmic.
Why don’t Aussie retailers hookup with DIY upstarts?
This is a decent thread from reddit where a Visa employee fields questions (on fees, among others): http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/al3tl/iama_fraud_preve...
NASA Kepler discovers hot stellar companions possible new class of astr. objects
Engadget: Nexus One Review
Sometimes it's bad luck. "You fall into a pit! The spikes were poisoned! The poison was deadly! You die..." before you could get poison resistance, for example. The classic example is the early-game gnome that gets generated with wand of death, which you have no defense against at that stage.
This has more instant-amazement-factor than any software I've tried in a while. Not sure if I'll find myself using it long-term, especially since it doesn't work with Firefox, but still: hats off.
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An  application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK [pdf]
But if it's only physics, then it can be simulated and if it can be simulated, then it is a matter of time until someone cracks it and makes it work.

Your mind is already running on your meatware brain. There are no magical properties to it. We may not understand them all fully, but that too is a matter of time, since there are no magical entities at work within it either.
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MailChimp. Cheap, wonderfully featured API, pre-existing Ruby code that took my integration time to within 2 hours.

If you're doing iPhone apps at the traditional iPhone price point, though, I don't know how any service which charges for a marginal email is going to be worthwhile for you.
Everything Paul Buchheit has bought from Amazon in the last 3 years
Relational databases are sooo 20th century...
i'm a bit late to this thread, so not many people will end up reading this, but i'm very much against overloading of the term "graduate school". in particular a Master's degree and a Ph.D. are not (not, not, not) merely different shades of the same beast. it's not like you do 4 more years of master's level coursework and suddenly get a Ph.D. A master's degree is technical training in an applied field (e.g., a master's in software engineering), whereas a Ph.D. is training to become an academic researcher. I'm not trying to say that one is better than the other, but they are different. Thus, this article should really be named "Ph.D. in the humanities: Just don't go". Master's in humanities is a completely different beast altogether. just my 2 cents!
CampaignMonitor - http://www.campaignmonitor.com is pretty good.
And it also takes your data with it.

All databases need backups, but I don't trust MySQL not to need the restores too.
So... which search engine are they going to buy?
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Apple & Google maintain their collision course with this announcement.

Amazing that a few years back Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board and was not see as a competitive threat.
The ideal scientific test for finding a compatible geek match
ALL BUSINESS SOLUTION: 2009 Acura RDX
Since negligence is a hot knife cutting through limits on personal liability I think this startup would last right up until its first minor accident, after which point the officers and backers of such a venture would spend the remainder of their natural lives in court trying (and failing) to keep the injured parties from taking every penny they have...
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Why can't this be done with a download and USB?
CEO/PhD founder
Alternatives to Y Combinator for Pre-Beta funding?
Can anyone tell me of any outfits who provide seedfunding for startups that have everything together but the most important thing, their beta?
We have for example:
> powerful concept/value proposition and huge potential blueOcean market
> great team
> clever powerful marketing and viral marketing strategy/tactics
> sufficient barriers to entry
> interested potential huge strategic consumer partners
>patentable inventions
Please respond to Gary@OurCoupleSpace.com
Perhaps a little editorializing of the headline is appropriate when it's one word that doesn't tell me a single thing about the link?
I use campaign monitor. Maybe its just a developer (rather than designer) thing, but the super-rich design-tastic layout that is mailchimp was actually a huge turnoff for me - I couldn't seem to just find stuff. I really wanted to love mailchimp because the monthly rates make it really really cost effective. But I ended up having to go with campaign monitor even though it is more (if you send a lot) because campaign monitor is just damned elegantly simple. The api docs are simple, the interface is simple, the plans are simple.

Just really could not get over that damned chimp staring at me, talking to me, telling me what to do all the damned time, I guess. =\
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It would be great if you had more info about compatible GPS units. Are there specific brands/models that work? Are there keywords to look for (any XYZ protocol-compatible GPS)?
I saw mention of the Garmin 605 and 705 in the FAQ, but are those the only models?
well that was my experience, I didn't even know I was getting mentions, until I installed TweetDeck.

We aren't talking about active twitter users here. We are talking about a new person, who just created their twitter account. Of course someone who is active on twitter knows about @username.
I’m confused by the numbers: 1100 km in less than three hours would demand an average speed that is higher than 350 km/h. Not much, but still. And how useful can a train be that seems to stop nowhere? A normal number of stops (say ten) would add at least one hour to the traveling time. But, yeah, that is still damn impressive.

I also don’t think that the Munich-Hamburg connection mentioned in the article (somewhat more than 600 km) is very impressive: you will still be in the train for five hours and thirty minutes (you will pay 130 €). Which is not that much faster than the mentioned US connection.

We Europeans have our fair share of problems with upgrading our train networks (as opposed to pretty much starting from scratch). There are dense existing network but those were built decades, maybe even a century ago. Maintaining them is expensive and upgrading them for highspeed trains is probably not much cheaper than starting from scratch would be (new tracks, new course, electrification, etc. – there really is not much you can reuse). Europe is also densly populated, with fewer huge centers. You can’t just send a train 600 km through Germany without stopping at least half a dozen times.
What "hand sanitizer kills 99.99% of germs" really means.
Pre-Beta seed funding sources?
Pre-Beta seed funding sources? Can anyone tell me of any outfits besides Y-Combinator, who provide seedfunding for startups that have everything together but the most important thing, their beta? We have for example: > powerful concept/value proposition and huge potential blueOcean market > great team > clever powerful marketing and viral marketing strategy/tactics > sufficient barriers to entry > interested potential huge strategic consumer partners >patentable inventions Please respond to Gary@OurCoupleSpace.com
that was posted today already (and killed):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1030950
My honest advice: Think like a business.
DO NOT build your own email system. Why do that when you can use that time to evolve your app?

If you can't pay a monthly mailchimp fee with your current model, then the model needs changing.

edit: Take heed of Patrick's "marketing evolution" strategies below and realize there are oh-so-many more lucrative things to be working on than coding a custom mailer.
Months, not years. Five, to be exact: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/08/03bod.html
A good compiler without bias would help the whole market, but not enough to be worth the expense.
I'm Ben, Mashable's Co-Editor. We've been working on this redesign for months. Now that it's out, I wanted to get the opinion of designers and programmers that might catch things our team didn't see.

Most of all though, we just appreciate any feedback and are always listening.
- Ben
I stand corrected. That is nuts.
The folks behind http://www.beanstalkapp.com also do http://www.newsberry.com -- we've used it for a few projects and had good success.

They start off at Free! for < 100 subs, http://newsberry.com/pricing/standard-plans
It may be a sanity check; often when writing parsers for "in the wild" data you have to pick a cutoff for where "doesn't make sense" is so that you can tell if you're looking at junk data and stop trying to make sense of it (and the RAM / CPU entailed in such).
If I had to guess, I'd guess that Apple will be using Quattro's relationships to roll out an advertising service for free iPhone & iPod Touch applications - in exchange for their 30% cut, which is about right for an ad network.

I suspect Apple figured there was simply too much free-app monetization going on to escape untaxed, especially when they're bearing the costs of free application delivery. Perhaps Apple also realized that other parties were getting a bit too much insight into their marketplace through advertising.

If I'm right, this could be very unpleasant for advertising-related startups in this space that aren't Quattro. Now that Apple's got an iPhone app ad company, there's no reason why they won't make it the iPhone app ad company.
It's not directly relevant to this article, but you can stop the beeping of a Thinkpad keyboard by disabling this driver.

See:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=155201
Are preferences portable across the web?
Skiff Reader: The Largest Yet Thinnest eBook Reader to Date
156 items in 3 years? That is obscene. He averaged one purchase per week from amazon over this time period, which basically makes Amazon.com PB's religion.
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Usually people focus on "which algorithm" (you may have heard endless debates about key length) when "which options" is what actually ends up biting you. But one argument seems fun and the other mundane, so the latter doesn't get the attention it requires.
I guess the plastic logic reader will have competition after all.

I could use something like this. I'm annoyed, though, that all of them insist on being a networked device. I really just want a miniature flash drive that displays files.
The problem is that, eventually, the ride stops and you have to get off... and, then what? That's the point of the original article.
If the version is not covered by the HMAC, you may be subject to rollback attacks. Compare the SSLv2 and v3 protocols to see what was done to address this.

Really, it's very easy to make a mistake.
What does the Nexus One mean for Google Voice, Apps?
agreed.

we (http://friendsell.com) are running c#/bistro/ndjango/couchdb
Yes. And cryptographers are culpable for not finishing this critical handoff by assisting in production and review of such libraries.
Also, don't trust Kerberos. It was built long before things like SRP existed and hasn't caught up with the times. It hasn't fallen apart yet, but it's creaky.
We use Campaign Monitor as well and never had a problem. They're Australian too!
Charlottesville is a beautiful town, but the real estate market there is messed up. The prices haven't come down as much as they should have since the popping of the bubble, a local family controls a huge percentage of land, and so on. The walking mall is great and the university keeps things interesting, but in spite of it all, it is still "small town" by urban standards.
If you have interested potential huge strategic consumer partners and something patentable to boot you should approach those partners and get them to bankroll you in return for some equity.

That's going to save you the hardest part of finding funding, explaining to an investor why they should invest in you.

Your strategic partner already understands and presumably has the funds to make it happen.
Kurzweil Takes On Kindle With New E-Reader Platform Blio
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But... it said my favorite editor anywhere. Why would they lie?
Can the findings of behaviorial science make life better?
The article is a bit of a jumble. I've thought for some time that there should be a "by line" reputation system for the internet in general so we can put karma to print journalists.

I did enjoy the odd juxtaposition of AT&T's 97% wireless coverage number presented as if somehow their deception is a commonly accepted fact.
I'm still missing 2036 and 2086, but besides that I have the rest of them. I will get those points sooner or later!
The Great Sugar Shaft
I loved A Supposedly Fun Thing, but my wife hated it. Maybe that was my fault for suggesting she read it on the cruise ship. (-:
i was tempted to blog about this a while back. i've gone from java (back in the 'ole days), to c#/net only, to the view that platforms don't matter. or rather platform boundaries don't matter. i spent the last few months developing out a .net mvc framework for my dayjob. when it came time for us to build http://friendsell.com, that's what i and the guys knew best, so that's what we built on. but we wanted to use CouchDB as the backend... and so we did.

there are subtle implications to the platform decisions you make, but on the scale of most startups, the extra $40 bucks a month you'll pay for that windows ec2 ami isn't gonna make a difference. what will make a difference is you building on top of the stack you're most proficient with. for us that meant building on .net and couch. for someone else that'll be RoR and mysql.
This is a great example of warning signs. Note the number of times sizes (bits) and algorithm (AES/Rijndael) are mentioned. Note the lack of clarity in the specification (is "+" addition, XOR, or concatenation?) Note the overly-large UID space which has nothing to do with security (will you really have more than 4 billion users?)

Now look at how useful this design is. You've created a single-purpose authenticator that just says "someone at some point in time has seen this exact UID/authenticator pair". All other features (expiration, privileges, source of the authenticator, version, system name the UID is for) are left out.

Maybe it's "secure", but it doesn't do anything.
Yes, the focus is on preventing cookie forgery for pre-auth account compromise or privilege escalation.
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But most people say that it is difficult to integrate with Authorize.net
We're going in circles. My point, stated as simply as I can: since understanding what exactly consciousness is will probably require an upheaval in scientific knowledge, it is naive to say it is "simply a matter of time." It's possible that we will never figure it out, that the necessary scientific upheaval will never happen. Further, since what is required is unknown, it's possible that nothing we are ever capable of building will be up to the task.

I am only willing to use the phrase "it's a matter of time" on scientific and technological improvements that are iterative. This is not iterative. It is disruptive.

Also, it's not a given that all physics can be simulated. We have never encountered a non-computable physical phenomenon, but we also can not prove that all physical phenomenon is computable.
The point of the article is that some people use encryption to try to achieve authentication, which doesn't work. You're right. Signatures are appropriate for providing authentication. HMAC is a form of symmetric authentication.
Seconded, MailChimp is mindblowingly awesome. Their feature set is wild and they present everything in a very easy to use way. Their new free plan makes it worth a try too.
The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users [pdf]