skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hahahaha, that was hilarious! Thanks for posting that! :)

I especially like the part at the end -> "...or if you are taking MAOI inhibitors as this could increase your risk of clot or stroke."

The sad thing is there are coders who either code this way now or will take this seriously, haha.
Very good article indeed. I loved the style of writing and the content was great.

"But then remember there are four things that the prepared ice-climber brings to the base of any climb: training, tools, fitness, and partner(s)"

So true. I might have to check out that book.
Hey, umm Paul? Don't mean to trouble you in your temple of Arc-ness but it might be time for a little something to keep this from happening... maybe, please sir...
The Frontal Cortex : How To Think Under Pressure
HiPhone
That is very unconventional indeed ;)
I think that it is trendy - but non conventional. It sounds very cool and fun to me.
Define life
Life is an enormous vacant space with no light, no direction, no instruction; it's your job to find your path.
Major product upgrades - is your current version good enough?
This headline is misleading, you should have written a blog post reacting to the OpenDNS post not insert your opinion into the real news story; Google and Dell redirect your typo's to a page that shows nothing but ads where people are most likely to look and click.

OpenDNS becomes users DNS when they or those in charge of their network choose to use them. The results you are presented and ads are the same you would see on Google.com search engine results pages (SERP's).

Why the negativity - it's not hijacking if you open the door and invite someone to drive your car nor is it hijacking if you use OpenDNS and they help provide a better experience with typos.
Are they yielding reasonable results in micro-domains right now? Like specifically terrorism-related defense?
The real limits are economies of scale. If more and more people leave big companies to do startups, big companies may be forced to raise their salaries. Google might pay a smart hacker far more than the hacker would make on average in a startup, because Google can leverage the hacker's talents across its enormous user base.

Economies of scale are based on transaction costs versus measurement costs ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm ). Transaction costs have declined dramatically with improvements in IT infrastructure, but measurement costs have changed relatively little. In fact, measurement costs in knowledge industries are very high. Thus I expect startups will continue to become more popular.

It is true that specific technologies saturate. Browser based AJAX may run its course in a few years, but there will be new platforms to replace it.
Ask YC: Is Internet Slowing down?
Normally I dislike "Ask YC" posts but I am genuinely curious about this one, so I decided to ask:

Is it just me, or just central Texas, but I have a feeling that Internet is slowing down. I work on various connections, from 1Mbit/sec to 9Mbit/sec and I am starting to notice that most web sites are getting slower.

When I got my first broadband in 2000, most sites would load instantly or nearly instantly. These days everything (except maybe google.com) takes 3-5 seconds to show up, regardless of my connection speed. "Flat" download speeds, i.e those of large files', remain fast though.

Has anyone else noticed this? If so, how would you explain it? Generally slower networks because of increased loads (video, torrents) or ISPs silently introducing delays, or web sites running out of servers?

What kind of "cloud computing" are we talking about if we're spending more and more time in front of loading... banners? Even gmail, from a God of Scaling, has slowed down for me and isn't getting any better.

Add to that increasing number of ads, heavy flash content, and browsers that quickly swallow hundreds of megabytes of RAM and routinely block UI thread, and user experience is slowly drifting downhill.

Again, is it just me?
Maybe I'm dumb. I don't understand why anyone would give up spit for such a small amount of money. That early and the money offered is so small. Forget about the % and the stock and all that. From the amounts I read about I could do contract design work for a couple months and earn that much. Yikes. I mean, even if one of, say, two founders took a 6 mo contract working somewhere, and slso pounded code late at night, and the other founder all day and night, the two could do it all. In fact, that's exactly what happened here. And it provided still other advantages. Nor do I see how you can make anything happen for such a small amount of money. You can't even buy some software tools, a fax machine, let alone a CPA to spit out one tax return or a single patent application. Even a phone line and broadband is >$100/mo. Takeout food and heat, that's all you're going to get. Who needs that kind of money? I say just work your asses off 24/7 like we did, then you're not wasting time begging people to listen to your idea, either. These days even with a demo their eyes just glaze over. Investors don't have a clue. Just make it work and start selling them. That's what we did.
A few years ago, I woke up to my alarm, really groggy, and accidentally hit alarm off when I meant to hit the snooze button. Then I thought to myself, "I think I'll stay in bed for a few more minutes. I'll just remember my current continuation and if I oversleep I'll call it back with an error".

I overslept.
Drag and drop programming environment
Tipping their cap to Scratch, Sharendipity has a cool drag and drop interface for defining behaviors and control flow within custom software.
Geeks can be users too!
I agree with eusman about the "skip" verbage.

I know this is a large change to the site but my opinion nonetheless -> I think a battle type system such as www.puppywar.com would be more successful.

First it's statistically more accurate. I also think people find the comparing of photos to be more fun/addictive.
Hey, I thought the internet was already wiped out on Jan,1 2000! That Van Impe guy said so!

Every once in a while its good to go back in the grand internet archive and surf like its 1999. It grants mighty perspective to this type of nonsense.
Either that or you didn't read the essay. Its whole point is that money is not the important ingredient in early stage investing.
Create RSS Job Feeds from Job Searches
By forward I meant earlier. Several people have misunderstood this; maybe I should rephrase it.
I think that the guys who were able to hack into cardiac pacemakers would be a lot more dangerous:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/...
I think 3-5 seconds for everything is a bit much.

However, I see where you're coming from. In the time frame that you mention I too have noticed a drastic slow down. I would imagine it to be a combination of:

A) The increasing amount of users online. This taxes EVERYTHING from the local regional carriers to the main network backbones to the server hardware to the already sketchy DNS system.

B) Websites not seeing the need to scale as a priority over adding new features. Websites that grow very quickly seem to sometimes follow this trend.
Shrink-wrap software games are unique in that way: By the time a list of all the bugs, glitches and development snafus is published, the primary revenue for the product has already been earned.

When any other piece of software would be worried about its v2.0 reputation, a game will be sitting forlorn on the discount remainder rack, discarded by its creator.
Please no - this is not reddit.
AOL + Bebo = Still No Market Differentiation
Are you using the Firefox Beta? I've had serious problems with the beta on my machine (to the extent of 100% cpu usage on a dual core when running a BIM pacakage at the same time.) The internet is now a whole lot faster with Safari, I must say (running on XP).
Unfortunately there's a huge difference between Apple / Google style minimalism and vi style minimalism:

http://rob.tc/index.php/2007/08/20/everyones-first-vi-sessio...
GMail didn't begin as a 20% time project.
Language agnostic?
http://twitter.com/mike9r/statuses/771290476
Happy Pi Day! 
That is all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi
I agree with you that a battle system could be more addictive. I'm just not sure how that would work with something like movies or artists, where the user already has an opinion on the two options, which might not be that comparable (eg a comedy vs. a drama). For puppies, kittens, or people, it's always possible to make up an opinion on the spot.
hrm. I've never tried that.

but you know, google's mission is to "organize all of the world's information". I assume this includes HR info as well. With all of that data and all of the high-end machine learning talent that works there, you'd figure that they would be able to learn when someone has no interest working there.
Save time and read a text summary: http://blog.longnow.org/2008/02/26/craig-venter-joining-35-b...

> Venter proposed that our current energy and climate situation requires truly disruptive technology. One project he’s working on would use altered microbes to metabolize coal in the ground and generate methane, for a tenfold increase in carbon efficiency. Another project proposes a “4th generation biofuel,” where engineered algae directly convert CO2 into hydrogen in bioreactors.
The challenge with the original wiki implementations using "wiki markup" are that it was hard to get non-engineering members of a team to use them (or at least contribute). WYSIWYG editing in the browser window changes this for the better.

The second key defect early wikis shared was a lack of contention management. When you are working against a deadline you need a contention management (e.g. file locking) scheme so that "he who saves last saves best" is avoided. I have seen this cause much unhappiness for projects when a wiki is used that allows "forks" in the history with two or three people editing the same base version with different results.
You can easily check the speed of fetching an individual piece of content. I check frequently on my projects that pages are served up fast (sub 200ms). In general, it's as fast or faster than it ever has been. You can also test your max theoretical throughput by running parallel GETs on the same piece of big file content (using a "download accelerator").

I suspect you're confusing perceived speed with actual speed. The web is much richer now (as you mentioned). Flash, Javascript, and CSS wreak havoc with rendering time. Browsing the web with anything less than a ~2 year old computer is going to feel a bit sluggish these days. Even with a modern computer it's not going to be as fast as the largely static web of the old days.
Thanks for the reminder... "March 14 also happens to be Albert Einstein's birthday."
Hmm. So I was using the iPhone version of News.YC by the Buxfer guys, and when I went to submit the comment, the iPhone didn't seem to register the click. I kept tapping it, wondering if I missed the button with my finger, then turned the iPhone sideways and pressed it some more.

Apparently it was posting. Sorry about that.
No, I'm on FF 2.0 (Windows|Linux) and on Safari when I'm on a Mac. However, FireFox, especially when paired with Flash, is a topic for another discussion: my CPU utulization sometimes jumps to 100% when I simply switch tabs in it.

Actually I am finding more and more often that I DONT want to use a "web app", but want a slick and fast desktop option instead, I started thinking that almost immediately after I left Windows behind (Leopard or Ubuntu now)
TipJoy Wordpress Plugin featured on WeblogToolsCollection.com
Ok, here is a quick test. I am pretty sure none of us has any portion of cisco site in our caches. Copy&paste this link into your browser and see how long it takes for this page to completely load. It has no flash, nothing complex: a bit of text and a few images, very much like things used to be in the 90s:

http://www.cisco.com/web/partners/index.html

Takes about 4 seconds on my 4Mbit/sec connection with AMD X2 4400+ and 3GB of RAM.

Want a true horror story? Check out http://www.nick.com
Are hacking skills completely necessary to be successful these days?
The title says it all for the most part, but as a young entrepreneur whose skills lie particularly in design and marketing, should I invest the time in learning a language or two or stick to what I know and focus on doing them better? It seems to me like the more successful startups are coming from those who bring the company from idea to product completely from their own work.

I've heard arguments on both sides of the fence, and am curious what YC members have to say on the topic.
ThinkGeek.com is celebrating them both
Rocket lifts off with secret satellite
FF 2.0 was even worse for me with the extreme memory leak when using google apps. Safari so far is blazing fast (on windows)
Microsoft proposes new members for Yahoo's board
<3 seconds on a 6mbit/sec connection.
I agree that databases seem boring. I'd been using them for about 10 years before last year when I had to write significant parts of one. Once I started getting under the hood I realized how interesting a lot of the database problems are. Turns out, the geek factor is pretty high. Problems like query optimization, fast multi-dimensional indexing, full text search and so on give a nice playground for CS mojo. :-)

Per SQLite: It is probably the simplest SQL database to learn. However, I fear it might give a skewed perspective on SQL to someone just starting with it. While it's fine for the simplest of applications, if you start building up complex queries, its performance is orders of magnitude worse than almost every other SQL DB, potentially leading one to falsely believe that such things were to be avoided.

I personally find MySQL to be user-friendly enough for starting off with. Though, honestly SQL in general is one of those things that I'm glad to know, but find painfully inelegant.
You must hang out with the wrong girls...my girlfriend would get unconditionally aroused solely due to the moment I said half a sentence about random content generators.
Loads completely in 2-3 seconds for me. I'm ~20ms away from www.cisco.com (which is served out of San Jose for me). Anyway, that Cisco page actually does contain javascript and CSS. Not a very 90's style page.

Here's a better test of a 90's style page that has a lot of content: http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html This page loads almost instantly for me.
The cisco site took around 30s on my 256Kbps BSNL connection.

BTW Anyone else from from India here ?
RFID Cards Hacked
what editor are you using for scala? The eclipse plug barely does anything and I am fed up of using the scala interpreter on emacs :(.
New Driving Simulation Laboratory at University at Buffalo
ScanEagle: Boeing Biological Detection System Tests
AMEX advises clients to avoid SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Yahoo to Begin Indexing Microformats
One more vote for HSBC from me.
Climate Change Threatens U.S. Roadways
If you have a pasty physique it means you're not taking enough sun and probably not exercising, and I'd adventure a guess that that makes you a good candidate for cancer.
On one hand, I think everyone should learn at least a little programming. But honestly, casually "learning a language or two" isn't going to make you a great hacker.

That said, I certainly don't want to discourage you from doing it if you want to. Perhaps try learning a little programming, and if you like what you find, learn more.
US military concerned about increasing cyber attacks
How can I get permission to mod down this submission?
Possible vulnerability in TrueCrypt 5.1
Breaking Google Captchas for a Day
3.14159265...
These visual programming environments take the wrong approach. All they really help with is the syntax, which is the easy part.
The six hats of project management
How to make visible international characters in your Linux console
Linux powers "mash-up platform" for phones
For purchases abroad, use a Capital One credit card. They don't charge / swallow the currency conversion and international use fees, so all you pay is interbank currency conversion rate. Other cards might have ridiculous fees (minimums and up to 3.5% transaction fees).

My only peeve with the Capital One card is that their online interface doesn't allow automated bill payment, so you have to do it manually once a month (and not forget).

For ATMs, any large US bank should work fine abroad (anything that's part of the cirrus, etc. networks). Fees vary. Also try telling your bank to whitelist you for certain locations/countries.
Is this a underhanded pitch for me to shill for RescueTime?! I won't do it, I tell you. I WON'T!
Working hard or hardly working? VC-backed startups vs. Bootstraps
here is a benchmark involving computing streaming digits of pi.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=pid...

the lesson i take from the results is if all you're doing is calling a C library (gmp) anyway, it doesn't really matter whether you're using C or Python.
Years ago, I toured an active Navy ship of some kind of other (pretty big ship). When we got to the command center area, I noticed that all of the individual computers were running Windows 9x (the ones they used to check email), but that the one hooked up to the projector with the location of all ships in the Navy on a map was running some form of Redhat 5 and GNOME. When I pointed this out to them, they turned off the project in a hurry :) (someone had forgotten to turn it off before we came in)
That's an idea. We've just put a 'skip link' under the voting panel on www.hugamovie.com, and we'll see how often people will use it.
does simulating state in http with continuations scale?
Some sites are still fast: http://www.biographicon.com
And no, I don't think it's your imagination.
Back to Basics With Unix Permissions
This vulnerability exists in all programs that save their passwords in memory and on all OSs, the system doesn't even have to hibernate for the vulnerability to happen, it's enough that the password gets transfered to cache.

If you want to expose the password, just ignore the program, consume a ton of memory from the machine and the password will be written into the cache as the machine scrambles to shift less frequently used memory to the cache.
It sure is on my machine.
(edit) just had to make sure.

tuna@tunamasiina:~$ echo -e "#include <stdio.h>\n#include <time.h>\nmain(){printf(\"%d\\\n\",sizeof(time_t));}" |gcc -x c - &&./a.out

8
Botnet malware defense
Thanks for your input. The 4 sites have been launched recently, so our user base is quite small at the moment! We are getting feedback from other channels too, but we think getting comments/advices from geeks is quite valuable (especially regarding the use of AdSense, the Amazon associates program, and the concept in general), even if those comments are short and simple.

And I guess your strategy for ads placements will probably be more relevant later on, if the traffic ever justifies it.
Nerve-Tapping Neckband Translates Thought to Speech
'I think there is a fair chance that much of the semantic web dream (i.e. "the internet organizing itself") will arrive pretty suddenly, with exponential-like growth.'

I'm skeptical. It seems like you'd have to either solve some pretty tricky AI problems, or get people writing for the internet to do all this extra work. It might still to feature in some larger, professionally developed sites, but I'd be surprised if it took off.
3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510 :)
Your ISP may have a web cache which is creating high latency. Can you fetch large files quickly? It the delay most noticably when fetching many small files?
Microsoft and Yahoo met to discuss merger
Geeks and Gangsters have the same personality traits.
think about it. in some ways geeks and drug dealers have a lot of similarities.

they both have a very small group of friends. in fact they usually have one or two and they work together. geeks and drug dealers are only about what their product. they are obsessed with it. they want to have the best on the market and they will always go the extra mile to get that product. they understand that if you product is 5% better, your market share grows exponentially. they both like viral marketing. they usually have little money to spend on conventional advertising so they count on word of mouth. to them success is not how much they make, but how much market share they have, because if they control the market, they will make more money down the line. they usually don't want others to know who they are. you could sit in a bar and serve a geek who's startup is worth 80 million dollars and you could swear the guy needs money to buy cigarettes (i am speaking from experience here). these guys, as well as drug dealers, are not in it for fame. they both get burned out and tired after 5 years of building their own empire and they always quit just to get super miserable and come back to the game a few months later. they are addicted to the game. The only difference between most geeks and most drug dealers is that society sees one as a good guy and one as a bad guy.
17 Tips For Getting Bloggers To Write About You
Here's a Wikipedia article I wrote about a year ago on an interesting "property" of pi:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_point
Bandwidth has been following something like Moore's law just about everywhere except north america. It's been a while since I checked this, but back in 2004 (?) about 80% of the fiber laid wasn't even lit up here. [ref: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail400.html in one of the questions]
mobiledreamers@gmail.com
earle we d love to talk to u
Garrr. Yes, that's the word I was looking for. Thanks :)
I vote HSBC as well :)
I think you vastly overestimate the organizational abilities of Google recruiters. I have friends who, while working at Google, had recruiters contact them to ask if they were interested in working for Google.

I'd say listening to what someone is saying and assessing whether they might be more interested six months later requires far more sophisticated thought processes than looking up whether someone already works at Google before trying to recruit them -- so making sure that you're very explicit about what you want them to do (mark your file as 'do not contact') is probably a good idea.
You're anthropomorphizing. Giant corporations don't react at the human time scale. Anything you see coming out of the corp today has been under development for months, if not years.

A soon-to-be-ex-colleague wrote a good piece on this recently.

http://getluky.net/2008/03/04/is-the-ie8-standards-mode-a-re...
did that include nuclear subs?
Building product awareness is a full time task and so is programming.
Breaking Google Captchas for $3 a Day
Who vacuums at 12:31 am?
Answer: My neighbor does.
The problem is the preinstalled software that is also difficult to uninstall. It is DNS requests hijaking. By the way, some people are concerned about privacy. Don't you think it should be their choice to use google bar & dns request smartness or not ?

If Dell would provide a first time loging dialog asking the user if he want to use google toolbar with this and this benefit it would be a much different situation.
Secrets of Pixar's inner circle
[video] Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner Panel
Inside Google's European HQ
yeah, but when I posted that link it only got one vote.