skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well that's a bit out of context and a bit summarized and so I can see is misleading. The concept of Y Combinator means people need to travel to where Y Combinator is. So us founders had to pack up bags and move to the valley to participate in this program. We all had pretty established lives here in Chicago.

One requirement was we had to find a place where we could have a dog, since a founder already had a dog and we couldn't get rid of the dog! :)

So the best place we could find was a house for the three of us in San Jose. We definitely ate cheap food and used cheap hosting and had cheap everything. We even used 3 imacs that were donated to us by someone from Apple.

But rent in California is a tough one, but something we needed to get through for our participation in Y Combinator. Which was totally worth the experience.
You may be right in general. Though: Democracy from the Romans? They used to have a Republic, but it was not a Democracy.

Much of the `Roman' stuff comes from the Greek. And they also got a lot from elsewhere, too.

I do find myself agreeing with your assessment of China and Mongolia more.
Sorry for being spelling nazi.It is "Coast Guard", not "Cost Guard"
Game Design: "Too many minds" - is your design full of it?
MIT's Genius Grad Ring Design
There is absolutely a cost of living problem in California, but who's fault is that? Houses in Texas cost 1/2 to 1/4 their California counterparts for a reason. The point is that Texas has held a pretty fiscally conservative line in the past decades while allowing a pretty liberal zoning policy, this allows them to afford proper education because teachers don't need crazy high pay for houses that are in short supply.
I am the same way. English is actually my 3rd language. I learned English because I had a ZX Spectrum computer when I was growing up and most of the programs and were in English. So I learned English so I could understand my computer. It turned out to be very useful to know Enlglish later on.

So I hope this doesn't sound insensitive but I would rather everyone learn English, I think it will just make everything a little easier. It is like having a common API between people ;-)
The core point lies in your content - you can't force people to like shit they don't like.

Forget all the shit some people are trying to sling at you and stick to that maxim. It doesn't matter what your intentions are or your ultimate goal is - as long as you're providing people with things that they find interesting, you're getting it right in my book. I enjoyed your posts - well done.
The nice thing about working retail through college is that it motivates you to do whatever is necessary to never have to do it again.
Parse Domains from URLs easily with Domainatrix (Ruby)
F5 Blog responds to HP blog: Intercloud is practical not premature
Use Amazon Mechanical Turk.
I know the blog is to help people learn English, but isn't that antithetical to helping non-English speakers learn how to use computers?

Shouldn't we instead be contributing to non-English documentation so that even those who are too poor to learn English, can still learn to use a computer? Ubuntu is doing this beautifully.
Can some one post the reviews Link. Can't find it.
ISPs would lose money on those accounts at current rates, so they'd have to make them so expensive that the user pays more money for bandwidth than he gets from the CDN. Would you have multiple ISP accounts paying perhaps $20 from the CDN when they cost you $400 each? Because that's how much they'd have to cost based on what little percentage of the bandwidth price the user gets in that spreadsheet.

As for the anti-piracy argument, Have you actually looked at the numbers? It assumes $0.02 per GB bandwidth fee to the user - I doubt many people pirate movies they consider worth less thant 2 cents.

And no, jacking up the bandwidth fee would not change the picture much. The point is that CDNs are already paying ISPs for bandwidth. There is no money to be made paying users, who get their bandwidth from ISPs, period.

And storage fees would have to be relative to available bandwidth because 2TB storage on a 1MBit line is worth much less to the CDN than on a 100Mbit line.
The Economist used to be a good publication. Now however they seem to specialize in closing barn doors after the horses have already gotten out.
I still don't understand why this is a terrible idea. Is there absolutely no way for ISPs to react to this in such a way that they save money rather than lose it?

If decreasing traffic between providers doesn't save money, then wouldn't there be some savings at least from decreasing traffic between subnets?
Hi Ryan,
What's the exact text you posted? I tried this in FF 3.5.7 on Windows XP Pro and everything worked as expected.

-- R
Lancet urges China to tackle scientific fraud
My friend at Amazon writes, "We know that pricing isn’t as competitive as we want it. We are working hard with our book refurbishers to fix that."
Food industry 'too secretive' over nanotechnology
It's not just about potential bugs though. It's readability, maintainability etc. For me, the original code pasted is horrible in terms of readability. Sure, it's concise, but it's lots of small characters that you could misread etc.
An onion of obfuscation
How Do You Look When Merging Fails
Maybe it was a secret shopper organization :)
I'm told there are plans to add a trade-in button to the product detail page, but they were delayed first by a technical problem and then because of the holidays. (Amazon will not launch unproven changes during the critical holiday shopping season.) The change will go through A/B testing before general launch, of course.
My backup needs are outgrowing what I can store on individual backup servers (30T and counting)

I'm not trying to discourage you from giving me money, but at $9k/month, Tarsnap is probably not the most cost-effective place to store 30 TB of data.

so I'll need something that scales better.

Erm, yes. Scaling. Please let me know before you start uploading 30 TB to Tarsnap... I'll want to watch a few things to make sure that they scale the way they're supposed to.

The fact that you seem to be in for the long haul really helps

Wow, someone who thinks that me not trying to build Tarsnap and sell it off as fast as possible is a good thing. After reading so many people espousing the virtues of "take lots of VC, get big fast, then exit", I was starting to think I was the only one.

In all seriousness, if someone offered me $10M for Tarsnap tomorrow, I'd probably sell; but given a choice, I'd much prefer to make money from Tarsnap being profitable in the long term, rather than by selling it.

Do you have some kind of policy in place about what will happen if/when tarsnap gets acquired ? Do you have a survival clause in your contract?

I'm not sure what you're asking here. There's no way that I would sell Tarsnap unless I was satisfied that it would continue to serve its users as well or better than they would be served otherwise -- I've invested a lot of my personal reputation in Tarsnap, and I have no intention of ruining that by turning around and screwing my customers.
In case you missed it, HighScalability recently had a long, well-written thought-provoking essay on Planet-scale distributed systems:

"Notice how global, how plentiful, and how fast the flashes flicker. It looks as if the whole world is afire, every ember burning with computation. That's a planet full of compute power. With millions of available nodes botnets wield more collective processing power than the world's top 10 supercomputers.

Now imagine if all this power was available to your application. Take a moment...welcome back."

http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/12/16/building-super-sc...
I knew someone in college whose parents made her work at McDonalds one summer, for this particular reason.
CDNs don't scale down that well. The likelihood that there is demand for one particular piece of data within the same subnet (and thus the value of having it there) decreases dramatically with the size of the subnet.

As the article itself points out, some CDNs already do this with large ISPs, directly. This kind of thing may increase and get more sophisticated, but it will never include the users themselves as middle men.
Thank you for mentioning firefox autorefresh! I knew I needed something like that. You just made my life better.
J.P. McGill's
J.P. McGill's
232 E. Bennett Avenue
Cripple Creek, Colorado 80813
Phone: (719) 689-2497
Is anyone else puzzled about all this "inbox zero" stuff? My email is very manageable. And I may not be Aaron Swartz, but I'm not a complete loser either.

It's possible I am different, because I assume that any tweet, email, or blog post not directly ONLY at me, or my local work group, is usually ignorable without consequence. I also don't make commitments when I know my interest is only marginal. I may also be more immune to social pressure -- if someone adds me on Twitter or starts commenting on my blog, I feel no obligation to add them back.

Is this rude? Am I a recluse and don't know it? I don't understand how others get anything done without severely throttling the messages they receive.
> ...using English in contexts that don't require it.

Yes. But I would think in the information technology domain, most of the entities don't translate very well. For example words like 'daemon', 'driver', 'segmentation fault' etc. these acquire a certain meaning that just cannot be translated easily to other languages. So you end up with half-half type mix, half of the words in English half in the native language. It ends up sounding silly.
The real question is, why is living in California so much more desirable then living in Texas? If Texas was as desirable, would they have some of the same problems? Ultimately a state(in the US) is made up of citizens, not land or government.
I think we're getting there. It's just a long process.
I fully agree.

And they need to make a good amount of money to "feed" 20 people after they exhausted the funding. Think of it this way: you need at least 95% less sales to make the same profit per person (implied you sold your app for the same price).
Aviary.com/URL to screen capture the web page at URL
CDNs don't scale down that well. The likelihood that there is demand for one particular piece of data within the same subnet (and thus the value of having it there) decreases dramatically with the size of the subnet.

Is there no inflection point in between, where this makes sense?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that CDNs cant be everywhere, but users can
14 days of JQuery 1.4
I've never done any web programming before, so this is an honest question:

Is HTML so complex that people honestly cannot be expected to write legal markup? Because, if the great majority of people who have made websites are perfectly capable of writing to-spec HTML, having a stricter parser really wouldn't reduce the size of the web in any significant way.
In lieu of a thesis, my college offered what was basically a year-long small-group internship with a corporate sponsor for several technical majors (including math!). I would highly recommend them to anyone, even people continuing into pure academia. My college takes this program more seriously than most, to the point that CS and Engineering majors don't even have the option of a traditional thesis, but I've heard that they're available in some form at a lot of universities.
http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html

The only question is fidelity of the underlying data. On mobile devices it can be very high. Most (all?) desktop browsers that support the Geolocation API just use the IP address, so Firefox says I live in Alameda, CA, even though I really live in Palo Alto.
Nice Programmable Coffee Maker Deals
Find some deals compiled from some of the best sites out on the web for any type of programmable coffee maker and coffee.
http://milo.com is trying. God bless them.
Reminds me of what I did between undergrad and graduate school: Summer in Alaska.

There's nothing like freezing your ass off burying fish in the back of a freezer truck to make you think: "sell-out" and get a nice cozy office job? Sounds fantastic!

Well, nothing, except maybe sliding around on your belly on top of a hold full of dead halibut and refrigerated seawater covered with fish slime with your boots filled with the same.
No, it's not released. The 14 days of "release events" don't event begin until January 14:

http://blog.jquery.com/2010/01/08/14-days-of-jquery-and-the-...

Also, why was this duplicate not detected? Was there a trailing slash or something, that was missing and then inserted somewhere else?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1039716
I don't know who downvoted this comment but I agree completely.

There's a tiny, tiny window of visible content if you open it in a 1440*900 window. I looked around for ages thinking wtf is this?

One of the worst sites I've seen in a long time.

How this submission is getting upvoted I do not know.
I work on a large/popular open source project and the one thing we get requests for more than anything else is multilingual support (which we'll be adding in the next major version). Everyone seems to think it's so easy to add with the inclusion of one language file to translate the system. While it's true that this can be used to translate the core system (and is probably what we'll do) our software is designed to deal with large quantities of user-generated content, so we also need ways to support multiple translations of that content, handling fallbacks if the translations don't exist, switching between them on the fly, search indexing, making our UI fluid enough to accommodate different lengths of text in navigation, etc. The list goes on. None of this is particularly difficult, but there is a lot to consider that, judging from our user base a lot of people (many of which are developers themselves), just don't think of. Proper multilingual support can be quite tedious.
Maybe, but have they yet? Until the concept becomes massively popular, there is still a business opportunity.

Keep in mind also, that it only matters that the end users get more money from their bandwidth than it costs them to buy it from their ISP. As long as operating a distributed CDN node is more valuable than just the bandwidth to drive it, then there is still a business model. That added value is from the spare disk/cpu the end user would be contributing.

In that case ISPs might jump into it themselves, but I still see that happening only after the idea became massively popular.
yeah ok, changing title. I have no idea why the duplicate was not detected. I hadn't seen the other article before posting.
Hi Raffi, thanks for the follow-up.

It's actually the comment that I posted above, except that I started it with "Im" instead of "I'm". It noticed the missing apostrophe, but didn't apply "I'm" when I clicked on that option.
I think it is still a great publication. Maybe you know more than you used to so your perspective has changed. I'm where you used to be. Partially ignorant of these issues.
From space.com today: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/100106-aas-black-hole-...

They could have at least given him some props.
Hilarious. This should be built-in to all of those error-reporting systems that software developers use so they can really feel their users' pain when something in their software breaks :)
No, it's completely fair. Leveraged ETFs rebalance in such a way that the losses compound faster than the gains. If they did no rebalancing (i.e. started out with $100M in cash and $200M in debt, and kept the $200M no matter what the equity price did) the decay wouldn't happen.
Crazy isn't it.
Autism Clusters Tied to College-Educated Parents
I think in Aristotle's Poetics he discusses the "best" plot for a play to have.
thx! we will look into that!
Chris
> and extra stuff can be accessed through the function (args) or the symbol $args.

Hmm.. what makes $args a symbol? The sigil? If not, what does the sigil $ indicate? Isn't that syntax? Why isn't it listed here: http://www.taoeffect.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/new...
?
How to connect to Hotmail using Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2003
It should be "Hot App Program" in the headline.

Took me a bit of head scratching to figure out what that meant.
At first I started thinking "well this sounds kind of silly" ... and then I scrolled down far enough to see his results and saw the perfect expression of what it feels like when this happens!
It is well known that you can't sleep if your blood sugar drops too low - this is why a mug of hot chocolate and a biscuit before bedtime works (the casein in the milk slows the digestion of the carbs in the chocolate lowering the GI). Athletes trying to make weight only having a protein shake before bed often report insomnia.

The key to sleep I found is to always wake up at the same time, but only go to sleep when tired. It takes about a week to rebalance yourself. Just don't throw it away by partying too hard at the weekend ;-)
http://ycombinator.com/about.html

We think of the money we invest as more like financial aid in college: it's so people who do need the money can pay their living expenses while Y Combinator is happening.
How so?

Say 消除鋸齒 to computer geeks in Taiwan and they'll understand it without difficulty. Say it to non-computer people, and they won't get it... just as English-speaking non-computer people won't understand "anti-aliasing".

Assuming you're not talking about languages used by aboriginal groups who don't have computers, how could you translate a term "well" and yet come up with something that makes little sense?
I just meant that the point of the article rests on the fact that the copyright holders can change the distribution terms whichever way they want. The "other" licenses won't be GPL, of course, but there's nothing preventing them from releasing under two licenses.
Update - it seemed a shame to leave so much typing in a nested comment, so I cleaned this up and posted it on my blog:

* http://quandyfactory.com/blog/39/the_virtue_of_forgiving_htm...

I also posted it to HN:

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1040169

----

> Is HTML so complex that people honestly cannot be expected to write legal markup?

If you're already a programmer, HTML syntax is easy enough to understand and produce in valid form.

However, most people who create web content aren't programmers - particularly during the early days of the internet when it grew exponentially and established the positive network efficiencies that ultimately dragged more professional developers onto that platform.

Rather, they were amateur enthusiasts exploring a new technological domain. Thanks to HTML, the number of people who could create web pages was vastly higher than the number of people who could write computer programs.

It was the rapid democratization of HTML made possible by forgiving parsers that accounts for much of its success as a language - and of the success of the internet as a platform.

When an HTML parser finds code so bad that it can't render it, the parser just skips it and moves to the next line, in the manner of VB's `on error resume next`. (Contrast the stricture of XML parsers, which fail on encountering malformed code and produce no output at all.)

Since HTML rendering in response to an HTTP GET request is essentially idempotent, there's no real harm in continuing to parse code after encountering an error - but the network effects from doing this are huge.

If only programmers possessed the arcane ability to produce well-formed, valid markup, it would never have experienced the early growth that transformed it into the reigning standard of a huge and growing public network.

Edit - one more thing: for many people, HTML provided a gently sloping pathway into programming for people who might otherwise never have managed to overcome the steep barriers to entry of, say, C or C++.

Many programmers today (myself included) found their way into programming from a start in HTML, after bumping into the limitations of static content, exploring event handling in javascript, and then making the jump over to PHP or classic ASP and thence to SQL - and ultimately over to more modern languages with more robust, structured software design principles baked into them than the spaghetti code that powered a lot of early dynamic websites.
Why would they correlate it with level of education?

Why not the obvious fact that highly-educated functioning autistic people often have even more autistic children?
Or ping me; I work there. :) (There are quite a few of us on HN, afaict.)
I just sent that to our team that is getting used to using Git/Github as opposed to msft VSS and were just asking about merging fails. :)
TalkTalk buy out Telecommunication giants Tiscali
After much hype after the alleged take over of the Tiscali network, it has now come upon us and in a strange fashion indeed. The £235 million buy-out could add an extra £5 a month fee to current Tiscali customers, if do they comply in subscribing to the TalkTalk service
Actually it's there - if you click on "Take a free demo test" (http://codility.com/demo/take-sample-test/) on the Codility page there is a free test and you will be given the option to tweet your result at the end.
I had forgotten about BGP. Telnet and administrative access should be on it's own private LAN. I really cannot picture anyone administrating a large router, via telnet, over the public internet.

Ports don't need to be open on the router in order for it to route packets.
Is there any more delicious metaphor for a dead ambition than Tombstone pizza?
Also note that most home users have asynchronous connections -- uploads are often an order of magnitude slower than downloads
Actually using software-based encryption is fraught with problems. What if the person you're sharing the disk with can't install the crypto software?

What if the person you're sharing with copies the crypto container off the disk whilst it's plugged in and uses a keystroke logger?

An ideal solution for sensitive data is something that does hardware encryption on chip, uses a read-only partition with a container application and provides two-factor authentication - and doesn't send a static hash over the USB channel.

I evaluated MXI's Stealth MXP a while back. There was a later firmware version that sent the hash over the USB channel but the version I reviewed was good - although I think they only make the bio in that series now and haven't evaluated the new Stealth M - http://www.mxisecurity.com/
Wow, that sounds really interesting. Is there anywhere I can read about this/his story? Blog, portfolio, etc...
Mainly because all the software developed for P2P CDNs so far were so cumbersome unlike file-sharing counterparts. Redswoosh in my opinion was the least cumbersome but having used it I never actually saw it use P2P, instead relying on its main server. Kontiki (used by BBC, Sky and Channel 4) was a joke too. It was difficult to remove; users couldn't control bandwidth easily and it forcibly started upon boot. When you removed it, it put itself back in the startup list again.
Flag this one-sided, conservative crap. Doesn't belong on HN.
One helpful company could actually publish that language table, so that with a Polish message, you can find out what is the corresponding English message and use Google with that.
The '$' is just another character. $args is a symbol defined by newLISP, which uses the $ character as a convention to indicate system symbols:

http://www.newlisp.org/downloads/newlisp_manual.html#system_...
'He notes that the results could reveal something as simple as a higher level of autism awareness among highly educated people. "At least in part, the more you are educated, the more you might readily recognize the symptoms of autism and push for a proper diagnosis," Gerhardt told Discovery News.'

This seems like a key point of this article, yet it was mentioned in an offhand way at the bottom. Must be hard to make a good 'story' out of it otherwise.
Thanks. You just helped me find and fix a bug in my jQuery extension. I generate a link useSuggest("'" + suggestion + "'") which broke with the single quote. :)