skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I visit this site not only for the links but mainly for the comments of intelligent people about those links.
OpenID and/or Clickpass
T3 is inevitable..

2-legged animals are no match for 4-legged robots that can't even be knocked over - just ask the target of a K-9 pursuit dog
It seems like a very robust system, and the way it displays the ability to fail gracefully really demonstrates some amazing software. I am very impressed that they are able to un-tether it as well. The fact that they apparently were able to get the power plant and the processing hardware onboard is really very impressive.
which is incidentally really great if you're a teenage girl.

No blue screen of death or "no axc45 module available please refer to section 56b of the msdn manual for further analysis" dialog boxes.
Lovely idea.
i think we are in deep shit. there is no way that such robots paired with artificial intelligence do not take over the world. we are a few years away from it. humans will self destruct not by killing each other, but by creating robots that will be out of control.
That was exactly what I thought too. It looks just like the new Hunters. Good thing it's being built for the U.S Military and not the Combine....
Can somebody make a script for Firefox that automatically queries this site when the browser is unable to resolve a URL and then returns a dialog letting the user know if the site is truly down? That would be epic.
He talks about how problems are caused by IE8 identifying as IE. So sites which check for IE to run hacks run them anyway, even though they aren't necessary any more.

Couldn't this be fixed by rebranding? Instead of IE8, release a totally new browser that just happens to reuse a lot of code from IE. No hacks get applied. It either works or it doesn't, and if it doesn't it also doesn't work in Firefox, Opera, etc.

I suppose it would be a nightmare from a marketing perspective, though.
Apple is just an example of a company agile enough reinvent or refresh a product line before it gets to the point that it is no longer "trendy". Apple's next answer to the laptop may not be called a Macbook, but I think it will definitely still be
a hot item.
Allow me to give my opinion as somebody who always buys the minimum hardware necessary to barely get by (that is: web browsing, MS Office, maybe running Cygwin and/or compiling a Java program now and then).

I bought my Macbook last year when Vista was just coming out. Had it been 3 months before, I would have bought an XP machine, no doubt about it. You can run XP fine on 1/2 GB RAM, which is what I have on my home desktop PC. And, for me, it was a known quantity. What the heck, I ran Windows ME on my desktop PC for like 6 years before I upgraded to an XP machine. And that was because I got the idea of playing with MIDI and audio sequencing.

However, at the time of the Vista release, the consensus seemed to be that 1/2 GB RAM wasn't going to cut it. And at that time, the price difference between a Mac and a PC with 1 GB RAM was more like $200-$300. And with a Vista machine you would then have to buy an antivirus, firewall, etc, maybe even a program for playing DVD's. And who knows if Vista wasn't going to need 2GB anyway. So I went with the Mac.

Today's situation looks quite different. The $500 Dell has 1GB RAM, which seems to be enough to run Vista tolerably. So, today I would probably have a hard time justifying buying the Mac. I could try (Unix underneath, no viruses, dev tools included) but I don't know if the wife would buy it :-)

Yes, I am ignoring details such as CPU and front bus speeds, web cam, etc. But as I said, my position is to buy the minimum HW to get by.

(BTW I haven't used Vista yet, and to be honest I'm not looking forward to it.)
Ironically, it seems to be down, at least for me, right now! I got one query done, but nothing after that.
--
Edit: Ok, works again.
Now that's i call a workstation ! ( chris pirillo via techcrunch)
Isn't that a good thing?

There are always going to be teenagers who know (and care) nothing about computers. If they happen to like Macs because they think it's cute, what's wrong with that? They get a stable, usable system. What would you prefer they get?

"No, you can't play with it; you won't enjoy it on as many levels as I do... Mm-hai bw-ha whoa-hoa. The colors, children! Mwa-ha-lee!" --Professor Frink
I love this robot. It is the right way to do legged locomotion.

Leave it to "a few guys in a garage" to crush Honda's 15 year effort with Asimo. Granted, those few guys were key in the MIT leg lab...

Note that BDI is all about the mechanics. They haven't done much work on the perception side of things. If you work in that area, contact them.
Don't forget the sharks that shoot lasers from their eyes.

Or the dogs with the bees in their mouths, and when they bark, they shoot bees at you.
Web Has Unexpected Effect on Journalism
if you need a macbook, or it makes you work better or more efficient, by all means, buy one. but buying one just because it has more bells and whistles and looks pretty while you surf the net and you write your school papers is ridiculous.

the argument that you should always buy top quality of whatever your purchasing, also, is a pretty insane argument to make.
Functional programming in C++ with the FC++ library
I was thinking along similar lines while reading the article (why doesn't Firefox have this problem?)

I don't think it's so much that the other browsers have SOLVED the problem, more that they never created the problem for themselves in the first place (to the same extent that Microsoft did, anyway). By sticking closer to the "standards" yesterday, they made backwards compatibility simpler to solve today, and Microsoft hasn't.

None of this answers the real question: now what? IE isn't going anywhere soon, and we'll have to live with it either as web developers or as users for the foreseeable future. Even if Microsoft wants to do the "right" thing, how can they clean up their mess without breaking all the "if IE do this" sites out there?
Looks promising, I haven't used it yet. Does anybody have any experience with this?
Why bother having a resume?
It seems that it is much easier to stay up with three or four legs than two. Just lock them into a slightly outward direction and you cannot fall. If you're on one or two though, you've really got to balance the rest of the system much more carefully.
After several years of using ThinkPads running Linux and BSD for mobile work, both my X24 and T30 died within a few weeks of each other. I thought about it for a couple of weeks, then bought a mid-spec MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo, LED backlight, okay RAM/HD specs).

It cost about five times as much as I'd ever paid for a laptop, but I haven't regretted the decision for moment, even though functionally, I don't use it for much more than I did my old Linux systems. (The only exception for me is Adobe Lightroom, which by itself had previously been reason enough for me to keep one Windows desktop machine sitting around.)

Why, after gaining all my hard-earned knowledge and credibility shoving Linux and BSD onto poorly-supported machines, would I shell out the extra money for a "trendy" machine? Simple: I got sick and tired of wasting my time trying to make my f'ing machines work.

Instead of fiddling with xorg.conf lines, or downloading proprietary wireless card firmware, or manually twiddling the list of modules to be loaded and unloaded on suspend, I have spent the time in which I've owned the MBP actually doing work. That alone is more than worth the difference in price, especially since that difference actually wasn't very substantial.
Not if you don't know what those things are.
I am quitting my job in 6 weeks to freelance. All this news about the recession is kinda freaky. The wheels are in motion and I am not turning back - recession or not (gulp!).
After Bear Stearns, is Lehman next?
How things are in Seth's world:

"A resume is an excuse to reject you. Once you send me your resume, I can say, "oh, they're missing this or they're missing that," and boom, you're out."

How things are in the real world:

"No resume attached? Boom, you're out."
I really get the impression he didn't think this working from home thing through _at all_ before he dived in. Surely his points are utterly predictable?
Ask PG: Should I apply if I don’t know how to program?
I have been contemplating whether or not I should post this because I am not sure if I will be apply to YC, but I think that the answers to my questions would be useful to other people as well. So…..

I guess the title says it all, but let me expand a little. I come from a biochemistry background and have come up with an idea (one of many) for a start-up that will do a lot for research in biology, as well as other areas in and beyond science. The idea is web based and is awesome, naturally; but the problem is that I don’t know how to program or ‘hack’ – the last thing I hacked was some E. coli. I know about computer technologies, what could be used to create my start-up and how to communicate my ideas to developers, but I can’t code it myself. Therefore, I have come at it from a business angle and know about the problem, the solution, the target audience(s), competition, doing business plans, future directions, world domination, etc., etc. I have met plenty of helpful business people, got some great advisor's, but have yet to meet some hackers that could take it to the next stage.
So my questions are:

1) Can/should I apply to YC as a single person with an idea, who is ready to build a prototype, but does not have any hackers on his team yet?

2) Do I need hackers on my team before I apply?

3) Would I be able to team up with hackers after being accepted, or even in Boston?

I know I would probably be the most unqualified single man ‘team’ to ever apply – ever – but it would be worth the risk if I knew I would at least be considered and not immediately dismissed. Even if I was, it would just make me more determined.

Cheers.
For a lot of things, it is insane to buy the top of the line product. A computer, however, is a fairly major purchase. Not only are they a hunk of change, but you're going to be spending hours and hours on it, even if you are a teenage girl and not a hacker. It makes sense to buy the highest quality computer that hits the right price point, and the macbook makes a very compelling point for both.
Ladies and gentlemen: you're arguing about buying a computer.

100 monks just died in protest of military crackdown in Tibet. The Feds just okayed 30 billion dollars of printed money to ensure a big bank stays alive. Women in Darfur are raped and killed.

Put all this in perspective. You're arguing about computers.

Buy what you need to use, pay the price if you think it's worth that price, and shop around to get the best value for your dollar. But at the end of the day: they're computers. Stop indulging in your mindless masturbation.
Does anyone in marketing care what the User Agent says?

Change that and be done!
The Consumerist - Sprint Gouges Business Customer For Over $30,000 In Inflated Fees
Sizing up the coming Recession
I agree. I even read his follow-on post giving solutions, and those also seemed predictable.
There are quite a few "Ask YC" posts. How about creating a forum, or list a separate 'ask yc' section at the top?
If you can demonstrate credentials in the area of world domination, then you should be able to team up with whomever you like.
The problem is the installed base of web sites that are specifically designed around IE6 and IE7, bugs and all. Those sites will break on a "standards-compliant" browser.

You and I tend to forget that such sites exist, because the environment of the public web, which teems with Firefox and Safari users, has rendered them mostly extinct in the wild. But in captivity, behind various corporate firewalls, where every single user has been running IE for a decade, such sites still exist, people care about them, and those people just happen to be Microsoft's core customers.

If, as you suggest, Microsoft ships a totally new browser -- which, let's face it, might as well be called "Firefox 3.0", although I suppose it could just be IE8 with a different User-Agent heading -- you and I will be happy, but lots of internal corporate sites will break, with no upgrade paths other than "redesign your site's HTML to be standards-compliant" or "tell your users to run two browsers: one for the intranet and one for the modern world". And corporate customers don't want to fork over license fees in exchange for that.

That's the basic contours of the dilemma: MS can either blow off their installed base or blow off the standards movement. The installed base has the money. The standards movement has the influence. Spolsky is right: The IE team is well and truly damned. They're just going to have to weasel out of it somehow.
10% of all X'S account 25% of all Y'S! Just a few bad X's cause most of the Y! (So what?)
Concentrate on finding someone who can hack who believes in your idea. (My advice, BTW, no idea what PG & Company will tell you, but... I imagine it's something similar).
Am I being downmodded because my sarcasm wasn't obvious enough?... Or just that it wasn't funny? :/
Not at all. He's saying people are using plugins but not writing pluging. When's the last time you saw a C programmer extend his compiler?

I've heard this complaint before, in fact:

"I complained at the last OOPSLA that - whereas at PARC we changed Smalltalk constantly, treating it always as a work in progress - when ST hit the larger world, it was pretty much taken as "something just to be learned", as though it were Pascal or Algol." --Alan Kay
Well, only if we give them the ability to be self-powered and reproduce without any help. The first is feasible, but the second is so difficult that I can't see it happening by mistake, or being worth the added complexity compared to just making non-self-reproducing robots on an assembly line (on Earth, at least).
BlackBerry, Corporate Smartphone Digital Cameras: Problems and Solutions
Paul Krugman: The B Word - "things are falling apart as you read this."
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I hired one of the founders at GreenMountain Engineering. I'll point this post out to him. The other guy is in grad school (still).
ew. I am not skilled graphically so I cannot provide any advice. But I agree with one of the previous users that the logs do not contrast well.
Story of the Mexican Fisherman
Probably not. Cause in a startup you'll need to do before you ask questions.
Exactly. The problem is that MS can't turn time backwards. The time to have "solved" the problem was back in the IE4 through IE6 days -- when, frankly, nobody realized how great "standards-complicance" was, because only about three people on Earth had seen a "standards-compliant" browser load a "standards-compliant" site. Before Firefox and Safari, everyone used IE. [1]

The IE team seems to be properly repentant, now, and they're down with the idea that they need to conform to standards. But they're under pressure not to break all existing IE-specific sites at the same time. And they can't go back into the past and convince their old marketing team to emphasize "standards" instead of encouraging customers to develop around IE-specific features. The laws of physics don't work that way.

[1] Cue irate reply from an old-school Opera user in: 3..2..1..
For good science to happen, you should convince yourself about the validity of your theory / experiment as well. You are your own critic.
I'm sorry, but I think this has been covered too much and it's a fact that everyone knows already.
But... but... but.. don't you read my BLOG?
Bret Taylor of FriendFeed on "Google's strategy tax" (video)
It's getting scary.
It's not that we're going to have robots going haywire and killing people on its own. It's that the elite crust of humanity is going to use it againstt us. Think blackwater is bad now? How about when they're not even human beings?

The thing keeping the elites in check for all of human history has been that they can't get too crazy or their own soldiers will mutiny. Hitler was a study in charismatic leadership. He was able to commit atrocities only because the german populace liked him so much. WHat attrocities will be possible when it is impossible for your soldiers to disobey?
Wow! Amazing.
It actually makes me think of a robot horse more than a dog.

Does that mean in 20 years we'll all be riding robot horses around?

Once again, the Japanese are way ahead of us...
http://www.absoluteanime.com/saber_rider/index.gif
Greenspan: We will never have a perfect model of risk
every depression since the big one has gotten milder. If you look at the actual numbers the people getting burned are the assholes who made idiot wagers on the housing market. The only thing that will make the recession worse is funding bailouts with taxpayer dollars while we're already in thehole for the war.
Your comment got me thinking. From a technical point of view of traversing over unknown and uneven terrain, there really is no reason to go with bipedal, especially if it's easier to do control systems for tri or quadraped robots. Of the handful that can be bipedal (primates, bears, birds), it's not their preferred mode of movement. However, it's probably a psychological disadvantage for the robots to be 3 or 4 legged and work along side humans in a job that requires it to be treated as a human, like a waiter, house companion, etc. That alone is reason enough to continue bipedal robotic research.
Dave Barry's Read This First
Both are good and help give you some perspective on stepping back and looking at the big picture.
Bear’s pits
How things are. How things should be.
I got out of college at the worst possible time, early 200x. Knowing that the job market was tight, I came up with some sample applications that I put on a webpage, in order to have a "programming portfolio". Well, the professors seemed to think it was a good idea. So, I wrote the URL prominently on my resume and sent out a bunch of copies to companies. I'd estimate that about 2 or 3 percent of employers actually went to my "portfolio."

I didn't understand it then, and I still don't. When I look at other people's resumes, the first thing I look for is a website. Oddly, it seems pretty rare.
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My impression has always being that if we create AI that can tweak itself to become even more intelligent, they will simply look a us with pity, smile, pat us on the head and fly away to explore the galaxies in their brand new interstellar ship.
Maybe it's more like companies should compete for people, and people should compete for whatever jobs or job titles there are to be had within a company.

begin /mini-rant here from personal experience:

But with the advent of bloodsucking agencies and such, this ideal tends to not work. This I've learned the hard way. People can't compete for jobs within a company they're hired to go actually work at b/c they're stuck under contract (or would be) if the "trial period" goes well; finders fees and various other things added onto the cost of hiring said employee.

On one interview I went w/a place in San Jose I was basically told (because I specifically asked) that if this place found me a full-time employment gig, they'd take THIRTY percent of a full year salary. So, if my going rate is, for simplicity purposes 100K, this agency makes 30K. $30,000 for what? The week's worth of work it took to "discover" my resume on the internet, call me in for an interview, and interview me and make me sign a contract? I don't think so.

It makes such little logical sense to me why companies even feel the need to outsource their search for talent. Why do they? HR is one of those things that's benefiting from the efficiencies of the web and better search methods.

/end mini-rant :)
The latest version of Dexter walks faster and more robustly.
Lol. Very true. I am a coder, but on my startup I am not coding. It is because my partner's skills far surpass mine at programming and my skills at online marketing, sales and pr outweigh his. So I am focusing on branding and awareness while he focuses on the nit and gritty code. It is a great relationship. But we are also best friends and have worked on projects together in the passed.
Yeah, that's a pretty natural way to look at it.
You kind of figure someone doing SEO spam would realize links with rel = nofollow are worth shit.
I am working on my startup all the time. At work, at home, out on the town. I am always talking about it, emailing about it, and marketing it. To some I may look like a whore because there is not one family member or friend who I have not asked if they have connections to anyone in property management or real estate investment. Why I don't drop all my work and focus on it full time is lacking of capital. If I had enough money to get by for 6 months then I would do it in a heart beat. But that is not the case.
Here's the headcrab:

http://www.bostondynamics.com/content/sec.php?section=Little...
Sure, but convincing yourself of the validity of your own theories is always easier than it should be. That's human nature.

Among other things, rigor costs money and time. People's self-criticism tends to taper off as the deadline looms. This is a particularly important factor in Mythbusters -- my impression is that the Mythbusters folks are exactly as self-critical as their budget allows them to be.
Noodle, no pun intended, but did you read what I wrote? What bells and whistles are you referring to? Besides, MacBook is the opposite of "top of the line" - it's a bare minimum of a computer one needs to care for these days.

Disclaimer: I work on ThinkPads with Linux on them. They're more costly than MacBooks, this is why I recommend Macbooks: they're well-built, inexpensive, modern machines that will make you more productive.

Top of the line are MBPs and ThinkPads "P"-series, $1,700+.
It's more complicated than that. If a browser breaks Sharepoint or any other intranet site, it won't get deployed. I imagine there are many, many, many corporations who still haven't upgraded to IE7.

One possible solution is to identify as IE <= 7 to intranet sites (which can be designated via Group Policy) and IE >= 8 to non-intranet sites. Of course, this means admins have to properly define intranet/non-intranet, which means much rioting will ensue.

Poor IE team. You're getting screwed because management decided to rest on their laurels.
Not a bad idea. Resumes are mostly for HR. I have interviewed a lot of people for both junior and senior positions on my company. You can't believe the amount of people, with "good looking" resumes, that can't frickin code. Not even simple problems.

There are many, many people that put things in their resume that shouldn't be there. Too many people inflate their resumes so much, that they almost become irrevelant, b/c there is so much noise out there. I am afraid, our HR recruiters are filtering out good people people with honest resumes.

Hence the resume is more becoming a tool to game the HR. Honestly, I always read a resume before interviewing the person, but don't put too much weight on them. Actually I mostly use them to ask questions on skills/languages the interviewee claims to know.

Sometimes it it is a good story, and the person actually knows their stuff, but too often it is not.
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I think that depends on the company. I'd say, especially in the software industry, that if a company rejects you simply because you don't have a traditional resume, then they probably aren't looking for exceptional people.
Zen maxims and the like are usually one-sentence.
How easy it must be to pontificate bullshit when you don't have to live in reality.