skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You describe them as workarounds, but often this the intended design. If you only have manual control, then perhaps a driveshaft must be made larger and heavier for the case of the ham-fisted user. If the transmission is under software control, the software can be careful about accelerations to avoid overstressing the driveshaft.

The point is that when you consider the system as "mechanical, electrical and software" you get a lot more flexibility than if you think of it as "mechanical and electrical" but we do some stuff in software.
> The sleep needs to be long enough, and random enough that it makes the other variance statistically insignificant.

Given the restrictions, this is actually impossible. (the operation has to be quick enough that it doesn't significantly erode user satisfaction, and the smallest possible "sleep" is a single machine instruction). Your adversary can easily collect millions of samples, or even a lot more. You cannot hide the latency difference well enough.
Or elance for small/quick problems.

What I'd do is white-label it and make it available (revenue share) with communities/networks. e.g., say ForumX always has newbies struggling to install their code and get things working, and a voluntary support forum isn't always ideal. So they run paidsupport.forumx.com (or whatever) as a marketplace for cheap installation help. Scrape x% from the transactions to split between ForumX and WageMachine.
This is such a terrible idea.

If this gets any sort of publicity at all, people will be even more likely to hop at e-mail scams than they already are.

The really frustrating part is that there's no good way to fight it; raise hell, and they get publicity, thus making the problem worse. Ugh.
I can understand what's in it for Blippy when I grant them access to my transactions -- hell, it's a gold mine -- but what could possibly be in it for me except a little embarrassment about how often I eat at Serious Pie?

The "don't overpay" mantra I keep hearing rings shallow. There are plenty of online comparison shopping sites to take care of that.

In aggregate, it might be interesting to see what my friends are buying, however? Music, books, and restaurants might be interesting?
A game should be difficult. It should even be hella difficult. But the game should be so crafted such that the player should feel in complete control at all times, and if he loses it's always his fault and not the game's. Mega Man series games did this brilliantly.
One key reason for the usual 'right now' availability is to avoid cannibalizing sales of existing products. They were happy to pre-announce the iPhone because there were no existing Apple phones. Arguably the tablet can also be pre-announced for the same reason (although one could also make an argument in the other direction viz the MacBooks)
I had a similar problem with my Roomba. Recently it began to bump into phantom walls where there were none, to the point where it would get stuck in the middle of the floor, turning around and around, stuck in a jail of invisible walls.

The Roomba detects this problem and emits a failure code of 9 beeps. I contacted iRobot about the problem, and their response was to ship me a fresh Roomba (without the battery + charging station) right away. Here are some pictures of the battery transplant:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1149620/roombasurgery/index.html

From the troubleshooting instructions that iRobot gives you upon encountering the 9-beep code, I suspect that there's probably just a faulty or possibly dirty (likely very inexpensive) sensor on the front bumper of the robot. I wonder if there's a similar fix to jwz's Roomba where I could patch for the bad sensor somehow (the roomba appears to have more than one way to detect it's stopped moving), and perhaps accept a slightly "dumber" but otherwise working Roomba.
As somebody who hangs out with a lot of English PhD Candidates, I can attest that their job is way better than yours. Here’s what they do: http://squashed.tumblr.com/post/316844790/dont-go-to-graduat...
Certainly I agree the system is more complex and we could have designed it to work this way. But the stark reality was that these components were supposed to be wired a certain way in our design and the drive system was supposed to stand up to a lot more torque, as per the intended design.

So I think it is fair to call these particular fixes workarounds.

Your point that it is silly to look at these systems as anything other than integrated (often quite deeply) is well taken however. The fact that one can fix a mechanical defect using the software section of the system speaks volumes about just how integrated they are.
Now knowing exactly what it is does not preclude one from speculating whether it could be simulated on a computer.

Unless consciousness involves some magical phenomena, it's all physics and physics can be simulated on a computer.
Seven Design Patterns and Trends in 2009
Meh! If I had a dime for every time that I was told to fix a hardware problem in software, or provide a "limp home" mode if software detected a hardware fault, well... I'd have a lot of dimes. It's pretty standard behavior for electromechanical embedded systems.

The really important take home here is that the manufacturer sent out a software fix to a consumer product that is not online! That's a huge leap forward and is something the industry has been pondering for a long time.
I really like the current design, the only thing that bothers me a b bit, is that the "RunMeLater.com" logo is not aligned with the text on the left.
In the reddit thread this seemed to crop up a lot in Drupal where each module installed can use its own CSS sheet.

There's apparently a setting to merge them but at least in that case something like this issue cropping up makes sense.
There is nothing in open source that makes it a "try before you buy". In theory a company can sell a product, this product being open source. So with it I should also get the freedom to use it, share it, or modify it.

Plus there is the open source development model that gives other benefits.
Problem is that you'd lose time dealing with each transaction.

I'd rather have one $1000 transaction than a dozen $100 transactions unless the process was completely automated (no one questioning time-tracking, no getting-to-know-you period, no trading contact details - just work done and money in the account).
This is lovely and all, but what problem does this solve? I just don't have a "need more friends telling me I missed a better deal elsewhere" problem.
> I damaging the host computer in some way or leaking private information is probably a good way to get yourself sued.

The intent is to not damage anything, but rather to only crash the program itself. This might lead the user to visit a support forum where they will be kindly adivised to purchase a legitimate copy of the software.

However, if I understand correctly, the program is crashed when it overwrites its own memory. That means that at some point it could end up executing random code. Although very unlikely, it is possible that it could execute the equivalent of "remove users home directory" code. A more likely, but less 'punishing' outcome could be the execution of a tight infinite loop. That could be interpreted as a 'denial of service' and thus full under the booby-trap law.
http://metrixcreatespace.com/
Also, real stars are enormous balls of plasma and gas, and look nothing like ☆. I've been waiting about 19 years for an explanation from anyone what the two have in common, and still have gotten none. Maybe I should write a letter to Nature...
The $12 startup that was sold on Twitter for about $100,000
It's good, but either a summary of your posts or the full text would be nice, as I usually read articles inside of my reader.
SO there's GOOG/YHOO/MSFT/AMZN/etc, but there's also places like IBM/EMC/HP/CISCO that are going around spending lots of cash.

So look at edge cases around Enterprise Solutions where new tech (or moore's law) lets us do things that were too expensive previously. Some previous examples:

Data Deduplication: Data Domain --> EMC, Diligent --> IBM
Config Management/Provisioning: opsware --> HP, Rembo --> IBM
Open source is just another market force in the software business. If the price of commercial software is too high, open source keeps it honest and is a balancing force.

Ultimately, a world with purely open software is un-sustainable, just as one with purely commercial software is.
We use the AES cipher for user authentication, we use the Rijndael variant since we want 192-bit block size.

Our userIds are 64-bit with a 128-bit secret.

We generate the authentication cookie as follows:

Rijandael(64-bit userId + 128-bit secret, 192-bit key) = 192-bits of cipher text

If you tamper with the cipher text the 128-bit secret won't be the same.

I don't see a practical cipher text tampering attack against this scheme.

There are authorization issues like how do expire a specific user login.
"what my friends are buying" - yeah that's exactly what they're going after IMO, the whole "deal finding" aspect is secondary at best. I've found a few neat iPhone apps people purchased and books they're reading. And of course a very nice camera Jason Calacanis bought that I can't afford.
Not a very good list. Besides that, some factual errors ("Alan Kaye"?!, Apple inventing WebKit) take away the remaining value.
I would prefer to have a panel, where I can access and manage my tasks.
If you want to add the "delete" feature, you'll need accounts . Then a management panel will be very useful.
CoffeeScript: A New Language With A Pure Ruby Compiler
To be fair, if you're comparing against McD's, you're comparing the cheapest foods available on both sides. You have a point that the costs tend to converge on the low end, so if your primary metric is cost it doesn't matter so much. However, when you get past fast food to the mid-range, your average dinner entre at a restaurant is going to be at least $10, while the home-cooked meal is going to be like $5.

For food of the same quality, cooking at home is cheaper. The absolute minimum cost of either food is comparable (corollary: there is worse fast food available than you could cook yourself).
i did look into reinventing the calendar with socialhelix.

the problems with calendar design don't stop there, for one, time is not metric, it's actually really messy.

did you know that GMT time and UTC time are not second -> second equal?

time varies based on geography, different locations have different rules.

politically - time changes when political will needs it to, so ... the rules can change from year to year.

time varies with history, over time the rules have changed and so, the dates when those rules change must be tracked.

the importance of a calendar item can change drastically based on emotional reasons, physical ones like traffic, or even cost.

events are a very hard thing to quantify.
OK, I suspected that. I think that's a code smell, though; I have trouble seeing why you wouldn't want to get such styles into the main stylesheet.
If all the profs at MIT are as good as Starang I have yet another reason to regret not going there.
As we've done with other nascent start-ups, I'm sure we'll all do a pretty bad job at foreseeing how it ultimately gets used, including me, but I want to throw this thought out there because I'm seeing a lot of criticism that's very high-level:

"Discovery" is something all these social sites, at the bare-minimum, do pretty well, and people use. No matter if the social object is music (last.fm), a link (Facebook/Google Reader/Twitter), (books) Goodreads, etc, it's a pretty well-trodden path: surface stuff passively (last.fm) or actively (Goodreads) to help your friends discover.

At the very least, saving money aside, Blippy is showing us what we are likely be interested in (because they are friends or people we otherwise respect + follow) are buying. And we're probably gonna wanna click over and see what it is, even if we don't end up buying/eating/driving/reading it.

To deny Blippy this utility, is to deny all social software of the discovery utility.

Since SO much human activity has commerce underneath it, the potential of Blippy to do all the same stuff the rest of the Internet is good at "How this person fixed their bookcase," "Who that person uses for bike repair," the potential is pretty clear, if a little low-level.

I question not the potential of how sharing consumer activity could be useful, only individual executions of it.
Avoiding these sorts of pitfalls is one of the greatest benefits to using a modern language with good generics support. In C#, for example, it's actually easier to code with lists than with arrays, so you can skip the "fix it so it doesn't have an arbitrary range limit" coding step (which often never gets done anyway).
with that, sometimes you get better players pretending that they're not as good, so they can prey on weaker players when they're categorized as a bad player when they're really not.
See also: nethack

It's an object lesson in humility! In every death after the first few hundred turns, you instantly realize the entire chain of totally avoidable bad decisions based on bravado.
A picture of a bright light taken by a camera lens with a non-circular aperture will generate stars like that. In this case, the 5-pointed star is from a pentagonal aperture.

It's entirely likely this symbol came from pictures of stars, as opposed to real ones.
MIT Linear Algebra, Lecture 4: A=LU Factorization
I wonder about this every time I go through a revolving door. I'm glad to see a webpage speak to it.

You can also speak to anyone who works near both revolving and regular doors, such as building receptionists. They will quickly tell you the revolving door lets far less cold in, and will probably tell you with a good deal of frustration how much they hate the regular doors.
$100,000 != a successful deal. Surely an interesting experience for the founder, that was able to put his hands in what startup means, but... after months of work and customers I think 100k are ok and will not change your life.
And despite the pervasive RNG skewing every outcome, death is always the player's fault, and the player knows it.
How does that succeed? It's not on their top 10 list, and I found it to be personally a giant pain in the ass. I quit after a few minutes.
Yeah, full text in the feed, or don't bother with the feed at all.
Simpler names for cryptic Ruby Global Variables
Revolving doors scare me...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACtW09PT7fY
Your favorite text editor anywhere
I bet this is a viral marketing campaign for Forward Nigeria.
At MS, it might be dictated by a coding standard.

More seriously, I was once treated VERY skeptically by an old-school programmer (not at MS, never worked there) when I replaced some of his fixed-sized buffers with resizeable ones. "If our customers are running workloads that create more than 256 frooble node objects, I want to hear about it." Via a bug report? Really? And then get a new bug report next year when the new limit is reached? But he was adamant, and if it was up to him we wouldn't have made the change at all. The way he worked, you knew how many frooble node objects the customer needed, and if you were wrong then you fixed the code.
Can they send one to Mars to fix the rover?
Fifty cents buys a cup of coffee?
Im guessing he would ask why his name was used as link bait.
The important point is whether the mark is being abused as a false indication of the origin of the goods. In the case of UA strings this is plainly not the case (now). Vendor IDs are still considered to be indicative of the vendor - such an objection could be avoided by a disclaimer but this may yet not be enough if vendor-id were the common method to determine origin.

Of course their are rules against using as a TM something that is not indicative of origin (generic names of products &c.) and so if a name were needed for interoperability purposes then it could well be argued for free use.

I perhaps trolled slightly. Mea culpa.

As for Chrome browser identifying as Safari, I think not, what does Help > About say.
Twenty-first Century Rabbit Ears
I've never seen a car where the "first click" of lights (what I presume you're calling parking lights) doesn't turn on the taillights. In most cars, they're even on the same fuse.

(Yes, there are cars with true one-sided parking lamps that will only illuminate one side front-and-rear to mark the edge of the car parked closest to the road.)

I suspect what you're actually seeing is drivers using only the daytime running lights. Those do not turn the rear lamps on.
It may not be a major league win, but it's hard to say 100k != successful deal considering a lot of ventures crash+burn. It was also started on the side with little capital investment. He also had the profits which he made.
It specifically does not solve the "no rear lamps" issue. In fact, it exacerbates it.
Simon Willison: Design and code review requested for Django signed cookies
A fun thing to do (if you're not inconveniencing anyone) with automated swinging doors (that swing out). Because of the finite state machine in the door controller, if you step on the pad on the outside (where the door swings to), you can block your friend inside.
Great Dieting Biz Model: Lose The Weight or Pay Up
Journey in Android Development, Android Market - the good, the bad
That guy directing your surgeon? He's in sales
New-year irresolution
This is very much relevant to HN.

For many Asian-Americans, starting a company is just not something they would want to deal with. Not because they don't have the talent and vision to start a company, but because the added stress of having to deal with overbearing parents is not worth it. Starting a company is hard enough as it is.
Hey jey, shoot me an email: j[at]jasonlbaptiste.com .
Apple: Best [-----] of the Decade
Good points. I just spend a couple hours implementing some a/b testing for an emphasized version of the signup button. Been meaning to do some a/b testing, but got sidelined.

I agree on the left/right slide action comment, will flag it for fixing :)
Crack Protection for Spyro: Year of the Dragon
Very often I'll see two sets of doors, which form a small room which gets cold/warm, isolating the rest of the building from the outside. While they may not be as efficient as revolving doors, I wonder where they sit on the curve? Somewhere in the middle?

There are other considerations - swinging doors are less complicated (possibly), take up less room and are easier to lock (again, possibly). They are probably cheaper to construct and maintain as well.
It's not clear to me that slowing traffic will increase safety in any meaningful way. Slowing traffic will, for any constant amount of "demand", necessarily increase traffic density. Increased traffic density would seem likely to have a positive correlation with accident rates that would partially offset the decrease you're hoping to see.

During the transition period, I predict you'd see a marked increase in the accident rate due to the increased instances of overtaking and broader spread of speeds. (12 cars all travelling at 80 mph on an interstate is safer than 6 cars travelling at 60 mph and 6 cars travelling at 80 mph. When you figure that each car governed to 60 will have to drive 33% longer, you'd actually have 8 cars at 60 mph and 6 cars at 80 mph to get the same throughput to destination on the highway.)
My (very) first draft ended up being what I stuck with. I was going to position the text, maybe add a border, etc. But when I printed this out, it seemed a good combination of minimal and to the point.

I realize the value I quote is specific to the MIT environment studied, but I'd rather not complicate things. It gets the point across, and the URL is given for those who want to investigate further.

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B1boia8nkdobOWQzZWEwNTg...

(Not that I expect much credit for this simple approach. But now I have something I can put in my bag, ready for the next opportunity.)

EDIT: Also, the term "use" might be considered vague or otherwise non-specific. But it is brief and fits the intended tone of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). In my mind, "use" doesn't create the mental 'stutter' that "consume" or another verb might. And perhaps its repetition in the second sentence provides a subliminal reinforcement. (While the use of "do" avoids repetition within the same sentence to negative effect. Call the literary criticism police; I'm out of control.)
This reminds me of the Gamasutra article about Spyro the Dragon a few years back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1031510

Randomly removing essential game items required for progression. We'll that's just cruel :-)
- Specialty search
That's a job worth doing, basically a very extended search
results set filtering out all the nonsense and sending out
an abstract of the status of a certain subject

A typical query would not be a few keywords but a full
description to guide the searcher.

For instance: the number of tourists that have visited
the United States over the last 3 decades and the impact
of security measures on the tourist industry.

Alotted time for something like that could be several
days and a really good report would probably be worth
good money.

- competitive analysis
Use all the online tools available to compile a report
on how well a business is doing compared to the competition
Bonus if you can sell the same report to the competitors

- patent search assist
research if prior art exists for a patent application
That one is harder because you'd have to be under an
NDA with a patent attorney but it's definitely
something that would pay the bills and can be done
without ever leaving your house. And you'd learn a
lot to boot.

That's all I can come up with right of the bat, I'm sure there are tons of other opportunities.

Good luck !
There's a grasshopper ad frozen on the embedded video in this article. The title is "Sound Professional and Stay Connected." At first I though this was a quote by the license plate guy about how he sold his website, then I realized it was Grasshopper's slogan. Anyway, I have noticed that successful business folks seem to take themselves very seriously, often to the point of being annoying, but it seems to be a recipe for success, since potential customers are so bombarded with noise that they are looking for any reason to write you off.
Is the close pedantic tag meant to suggest that you are not normally a pedant? I find it hard to envision somebody who is not posting such a comment.

</querulous>
First social deal of 2010: Seesmic acquires Ping.fm, expands team
How about a gentle, relatively quiet but discouraging audio tone that activates when the swinging door opens?

Something like "uh uh", "uh oh", or "wah wah ~waaaah~" that is audible within, say, a x=20 foot radius. Maybe triggered only on subsequent usage within a y=10 minute window.

One might argue it discriminates against the handicapped, or causes them unnecessary discomfort. I would draw an analogy to seatbelt reminder tones in cars. They cause unnecessary discomfort to everybody but are so mild as to be worth it, overall.
An air lock -- or vestibule.

There are forms of these that are temporary. Some restaurants and bars will put one up in the winter; typically made of heavy canvas rigged across a metal frame, often with clear plastic window inserts to keep users aware of traffic coming in the opposite direction.

Most often, the primary motivation seems to be to increase guest comfort by preventing cold blasts. But they also aid energy efficiency.
"It's not that I think your solution is bad. I just think you're solving a non-problem."

I second this, although for totally different reasons. I use mint.com, the credit card sites, or just gcal with email reminders. I personally wouldn't use something like this -- why use something so specific, when a general tool that I currently use does the exact same thing?