skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I personally like ASmallOrange; they're a small gig, but their customer service is AMAZING - I've been hacking, had a problem at 1 am in the morning, emailed them about it and got it fixed in half and hour - three times already.

www.asmallorange.com

Their prices are reasonable, too, and the shell access is great, but the speed isn't blazing, although very acceptable. You should be fine if you're not too graphics intensive.
cool, /upvote
Why are they at $13 now?
Mobile broadband use skyrockets as 3G moves beyond the suits
They probably just used Java as a buzzword to pull in more institutional investors who read about the language and were ready to put up money based on it.
If it didn´t work out why are they doing it again?
Why is this a bad thing?

Because it's dumb to dole out money based primarily on a programming language.
Lawrence Lessig's last "Free Culture" presentation
Ask YC: Online Text Editors.
Ok, I've been looking for an online text(code) editor.

For WYSIWIG there are many options, and a few leading free ones, but I can't find anything in the Code Editing realm.

Preferably it'd be open source, secondly; if not, something that I can host/integrate and not a hosted thing.

I know you have apps doing on-demand code running etc around here, so surely somebody else is using something similliar to this.

Thanks
Cultural Differences in the Perception of Facial Emotion [pdf]
looks like somebody is suffering from cognitive dissonance;-)
Investors realized Celera wasn't actually going to make money from the sequenced genome and it fell back to reasonable levels.

Craig Venter's company isn't Celera anymore, I have realized, he has a private company. http://www.syntheticgenomics.com/corporate.htm
UN Data: the Ultimate Research Tool
I mentioned it to a friend tonight and he said that he knew of people who have cracked models in South Africa.

If you crack it doesn't it void the warranty or void the device after firmware updates?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana
This article could almost have appeared in The Onion - who could be excited about working for a company that just shifted its focus like that?

"In a dramatic about-face, Ask.com is abandoning its effort to outshine Internet search leader Google Inc. and will instead focus on a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives."

""Everyone at Ask is excited about our clear focus and the trajectory-changing results it will deliver," he said in a statement."
What this says to me is that:

hacking: 0 < version <= 1.0
engineering: version > 1.0

In other words, as soon as the product is "established" as a pile of hacks, all hackers should be taken off the project (temporarily) and a complete white-room rewrite should be done by a team of engineers, with one of the criteria being "to closely match the original product as possible while creating room for future expansion."

Then, the hackers (now known as "R&D") can have at the new codebase, but in a distributed SCM way--a hacker can only work on their branch, and any approved branch must be white-room redeveloped by an engineer before being put into the clean code-base.

...or, "What I Would Do If I Ran Some Sort of Military Project With Unlimited Funding and No Time Constraints"
Drugs, Body Modifications May Create Second Enlightenment
I think that's because you're an engineer and not a business person ;-)
That depends entirely on what your motives are...
Thank you. I only asked because it didn't follow the usual format of user, user, expert, expert, client with money.
So, a hacker is basically a scientist? Cool.
+1 for webfaction here.
A firm like KP wouldn't have had any trouble raising money. I think they genuinely believed the hype about Java, and they were hoping that if they became the official Java fund (I think they were anointed by Sun) they'd get first crack at all the related deal flow. And that is probably what's motivating them here too.
Sometimes isn't enough: the threats to Kathy were made (anonymously) in other blogs. There is also an increasingly trend to blog rumors, gossips and "opinions" about people who are not celebrities (Valleywag, Gawker, etc.).
I thought that they were doing quite well on their current course, despite the advertising being quite bizarre and easy to dismiss:

Believe me, I'm not shilling for Ask.com. On the contrary: during the month I recently spent in London I was forced to watch endless runs of Ask's faux-amateur commercials ... -- an experience that made me want to rip my eyeballs out, right after I burned down the offices of Ask's advertising agency. ... I remember watching the ads with another Silicon Valley veteran, who shook his head and said, "Why would a company willing to spend millions to take on a juggernaut like Google do so with these unbelievably lame and degrading ads?" -- http://abcnews.go.com/Business/IndustryInfo/story?id=4027940

However, the most recent adverts got it together and promoted features not found elsewhere. Furthermore, as an experiment to test the stickiness of Google, I got a couple of users to switch from Google to Ask. (I also got one to switch from Photoshop to GIMP.) Anyhow, I'm really surprised by the specialisation, both the timing and the demographic. Its like an admission of failure when matters seemed to be improving.
Put faces to names: Yearbook of some web innovators
Netbeans for RoR, gvim for everything else (perl, R, autohotkey, actionscript, C). Mercurial. 1920 x 1200 laptop in portrait position with an external IBM keyboard.
Same + Cocoa Mysql + Unfuddle
The hypothetical drug they're talking about isn't hypothetical. It's called Modafinil or Provigil.

And frankly, the thesis of this article is ridiculous. People aren't going to pop Modafinil and be enlightened. It's the internet itself that is causing the next Enlightenment.
As a mathematics major and having gone through some seriously crappy math courses in highschool (and even freshman college courses) including AP Calculus classes, I just want to say that I truely recommend reading this article.

It really cannot be stated any better than this, folks. Even as a math major, reading this reinspires me and refuels my passion for mathematics.

Simply lovely. :)
Mandelbrot Fractals Using MySQL Stored Procedures
Philosophy and Programming: It's not really about code
Meet Facebook's $1.6 billion man
Can Students Be Paid to Excel?
Lawrence Lessig Final Free Culture Video
"Net Neutrality": Destroyer of Internet Freedom
Agree. It has nothing to do with gay people. If he said "sucks ass", would you say "OMG, leave to gay people who love analingus alone!". Or, if he said, "sucks dick", is THAT gay-themed?

Isn't ball sucking a laudable trait in a heterosexual female as well as a homosexual male?

(Did I really just type that?)
I guess perspective is everything. I was an EE undergrad during the first bubble era, with little programming experience. I remember everybody talking about Java during the time, magazine articles, etc. Looking back, I can see how they thought that way; not being an active programmer can cause one to develop bad taste.
Java: Let it be
Performance concerns aside, after reading this I wouldn't be surprised.
Its called society. we tend to like to do things together. Economists call it Social Capital - and it has very real value. Reducing the common time slots reduces the chance for social capital to be built up.
I agree. Seth Godin doesn't allow comments because he doesn't want to find himself writing in anticipation of the comments.

I think it should become much more common to have broadcast-only type blogs. I'll take a one-way stream of someone's ideas over losing out entirely any day.
Nothing like "jumping the shard", aye?
Jason "I have a magic crystal ball" Fried: Apple will dominate mobile for 20 years
Good Perl code is the best form of evangelism
Buffett named world's richest man
are you actually claiming that apple and sun have anything in common?
This reminds me of the saying that Java is a great language if you already know what you're trying to build.
When I talked this idea out in my head, it was originally "Scientist vs Engineer", but I changed it to Hacker for the article because of the kind of people that read my blog.
Here is one amy-editor (http://www.april-child.com/amy/amy.php). If you are doing ruby on rails, Heroku also has an online editor built.
I secretly salted the cookie.

Think HMAC, though I used two completely different keys, rather than generating them from one key, added an optional step of appending the client's IP address after the first hashing (with the first key) and before the second one.

(The second hashing in HMAC is designed to prevent collision attacks (even on weak algorithms like MD5), since you'd essentially have to find a fraudulent input that collides twice: once when hashed, and once more when its hash is hashed).

My implementation also allowed the data to span an arbitrary number of ~4kb cookies). Firefox maxed out at around 0.5MB, though if you're using that much session data, you may want to rethink your app design... ;)
This is a dream for any CS student that doesn't really care about their education.
Don't miss the salamander robot. Last Summer in Telluride's neuromorphic engineering workshop the lead researcher gave us a very impressive presentation on it. It's all about coupled oscillators: for each lateral side of each spinal cord segment, and also some overriding ones for the limbs that fire off at certain activity level of the spinal cord ones.

AJ Ijspeert, A Crespi, D Ryczko, JM Cabelguen. "From Swimming to Walking with a Salamander Robot Driven by a Spinal Cord Model." Science 9 March 2007: Vol. 315. no. 5817, pp. 1416 - 1420

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/315/5817/1416
i have a crush on merci grace and saul griffith is an effing genius.

dan albrightton is the ex-cofounder of iilwy
If you can deliver a demo and pitch that gets people excited you're probably in good enough shape for the press. Try it out on some non-press people first. Make sure you get honest feedback and have good answers to the tough questions.
Can employees?
From the article: The solution that Microsoft posted, however, was effectively a VBScript script translated to a Perl program (by their own admission). ... Hungarian notation prefixes of variables, in addition to the Perl sigils

That's vile. @arrFoo and $intBar is completely redundant.
usually i hate it when titles like "why X sucks", however, it's ok if you're talking about any flavor of IE.
yessir. the timing is solid and friendly. as extras perks, you can record in slow motion, fast forward, or even backwards (backwards recording + parallax leads to very cool aesthetics). once you've got stuff recorded, you can shift it around on the timeline or stretch and condense it like in video editing apps.
publicity and association with apple
Isn't ball sucking a laudable trait in a heterosexual female as well as a homosexual male?

fucking gold
if you lack the discipline to produce products on schedule, i'm not sure what deadlines can do
Ubuntu Laptop, vim, caps-lock-as-additional-ctrl, windows-key bound to new-terminal-window, C, Python, Lisp, Python, Lua, Python. Mercurial.
Twitter Explained by Ev
Presentations: when is the right time to pull the rabbit out of the hat?
Instead of worrying about K&R, memory pointer mismanagement/code that can't compile/code that core dumps, Java* lets you screw up on higher-level issues (class design, coupling, coherence, anti-patterns)

* (and other languages that usually don't allow programmers to manipulate memory directly)
One rumor going around is that Sun will merge with Apple ... The logic behind this rumor is that Apple is now effectively a Unix company, that Apple and Sun could target the desktop and server markets, respectively -- http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2003/pulpit_20030213_0007...
I used to be bleeding edge, always upgrading to the latest version of anything that came out, but as a consequence ran into occasions where things broke that were working perfectly before (and ended up wasting time getting things back to normal again).

My guess is that with 10.5.3 the majority of the rough spots have been smoothed out and all my favorite applications had time to make the Leopard transition.
I think you have to show interest about it yourself. If you aren't curious about it, he/she probably won't either.

From time to time I talk children in my family about mathematical subjects I myself find interesting, and I know something about, such as strange stuff about infinite, mathematical logic, or crazy and counter-intuitive mathematical theorems. And they keep interested about it as long as I do. So I think that can be a way.
Put it this way: Would you rather be the proud owner of an iTunes-marquee-featured Top 50 (by sales, with 70% going into your bank account) iPhone application or a top 50 Facebook app (where your revenues are eaten by bandwidth and server hosting costs)?
Well, the standard way to hack around IE is with conditional comments. And hopefully everyone has done the right thing and used "if LT IE 7" comments to avoid just this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Javascript-based_...

EditArea has a lot of features and works well, if it displays properly in your browser:
http://www.cdolivet.net/editarea/

CodePress does pretty well in FireFox:
http://codepress.org/

I think CodeMirror has the most potential -- I like the parser design in particular:
http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/codemirror/
You can render fractals from a database ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130971 ) and stored procedure languages are powerful enough to generate .tga files.
What about the psychological principle that giving someone an external motivation to something wipes out their internal motivation to do it?

What about dealing with the cultural problem in American schools that makes it "uncool" to be smart instead of being a jock?
You're doing it wrong:

C: http://codepad.org/6vIUD7fk

C++: http://codepad.org/QEuJE8LX
>What about dealing with the cultural problem in American schools that makes it "uncool" to be smart instead of being a jock?

This actually deals with that very well. Doing well on tests became much more socially acceptable when money was involved.
As did billionaire Wayne Huizenga, who started behemoth Waste Management with one garbage truck
Steve Ballmer's Latest Monkey Boy Dance
Mainly because we get a desktop application for free, and partially because we can deliver a next-generation experience compared to existing browser apps. As far as liking it? Haven't written a line of code yet, but I love working with WPF and supposedly Silverlight is the same thing. We're waiting at least another month for the third party tools market to catch up with the current Beta release.
Lessig Calls for Geeks to Code Money Out of Politics
The Internet Is Changing the Scientific Method
Manmade Flood Unleashed in Grand Canyon
Again with the Wil Shipley:

"Don’t announce until it can be downloaded. Don’t let it be downloaded until it can be bought."

His argument is actually a bit more subtle than that, and since you're in a similar position I'd recommend listening to his actual C[4] presentation instead of just this isolated quote.

But it boils down to: Yes, you can get the PR out of sync with the product. Yes, it can cost you sales. Yes, it can even tank your company. Go google "Joel Spolsky Marimba Phenomenon": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/11/02.html
Cardboard Furniture
Crap, the SDK doesn't work on OS X Tiger? Anybody know of a work-around?
What about all those complex APIs and exceptions? NullPointerException still makes you somewhat uncomfortable (if not as much as seg-fault). I guess there's no "perfect" programming language, all have their own virtues and vices.
F#: Lists - The Basics
First the Excel hack, now MySQL. Now I'm waiting for Doom written in COBOL...

Seriously, this is sweet.
tinyMCE is the big one, there is also FCKeditor .

list: http://geniisoft.com/showcase.nsf/WebEditors
As far as I know, IE 8 does default to quirks mode unless you specify the strict doctype. Seems reasonable to me.

If you have an intranet site that depends on the way IE 7 works, I think the simple answer is not to deploy IE 8 in your corporation until the Intranet site works with it.
13 Offshoring Tips for Start-Ups
/upvote
I wish I could upmod this so many times... Amazing article, everyone should read the entire thing.

I hated math throughout school, although I was told I was "good at it", even though I had no clue what was going on. Now I know why!

What can we do about this?!
Just curious, why do you want one? It seems to me that a code editor is almost uniquely unsuited to be a web app. You need to keep your data locally anyhow, unless your whole toolchain is a web service. Furthermore, my editor is a tool I want absolute control over: I don't want its behavior changing unexpectedly when a new update is released.
No way. The "self help" industry is not full of correct but obvious advice. Lots of it is wrong and harmful advice. Including most books about dieting or parenting.
It is still far from http://www.gapminder.org/ (which does an incredible good job at leveraging data using visualization techniques/fancy UI), but at least it's free. Last time I used World Bank data, even for educational purposes, one needed to pay.

It's hard for me to see a good reason why data from the UN or the World Bank should not be accessible to everyone.
And the barriers to entry are lower for Facebook apps. Comparatively fewer people know Objective C and the Cocoa frameworks.
I think this new fund is basically a stunt to get a lot of headlines in the business press. It's not a coincidence that KP is announcing this at the same press conference where Apple announces a bunch of business-friendly iPhone features.

The seventies-era Steve Jobs would have just put up a bloody banner that said DELENDA EST RIM, but I'm sure the older and wiser Jobs decided that an influential VC in a suit, wielding a suitcase stuffed with hundred-dollar bills, would make a better impression on the typical IT manager.

Did they name a single company that would actually get any of this money? I haven't seen any mention of one. And AFAIK the existence of a big pile of yet-uninvested VC money is not news.
From page 10: "On the other hand, serious cardboard furniture makers have suggested that their designs would be ideal for sharing online. That's because shipping expensive, finished pieces makes less sense than simply relying upon local workshops."
Reasons to Drop 20 Pounds That You Don't Want To Admit
When people gain weight, we always tell ourselves to go on a diet, exercise, and live healthy. But we never actually do those things and we gain more pounds because we get depressed just by thinking we are getting fatter and fatter. I guess we don't really get to lose weight because we don't have the right reasons for it.
The bit about finding the area of a triangle was great -- a quick, simple example of what math is and why anyone would enjoy it.

K-12 public school math education burned me so bad that I didn't realize how much I love math until my mid-20s. (These days I'm reading about abstract algebra for fun!)
My high school algebra/trig teacher was a real drone; every problem had to be done by rote and she cared more about your handwriting and placing the numbers the same way she did than whether you actually knew what you were doing. She had the imagination of a four-function calculator; to her it "math" meant "mechanical". I made C's and D's in her classes, because I'd see shortcuts that got the right answers faster but she'd mark right answers wrong if we didn't use her methods to get them.

Meanwhile I was writing my own 3-d graphics engine at home, working all the math out from observation of the real world with yardsticks and using graph paper, because I didn't have internet at home to look up the answers or the math education to know . Every time I'd try to ask her if anything from algebra or trig connected in some way to what I was doing, or if she knew of some math tools that would help me, she'd shut my questioning down and belittle me. I actually worked out sine/cosine and rotation matrices out on my own before we covered them in class, because she wouldn't point anything out to me.

To this day I still don't know if she was such an unimaginative rock that she really didn't make any cognitive connection between math and real world applications, or if she just hated me for being a nonconformist.
Damn, he's good. He can inspire with a talk on copyright law, of all things.
Ask YC: CS/Programming Online
Where's a good place to get a CS or programming degree via online courses?
'Black hole' made from light
Future Blogger - Interview with Tipjoy cofounders
How easy would it be to trade with aliens?
I don't think anyone could have predicted MS would ever attempt to become standards compliant.
SQL Server Data Services ("SQL Server In The Cloud")
Three Color Automata Simulator
Fractals and the Fractal Dimension
The closer the average textfield's behavior could be to that of emacs, the happier I would be.

Mac OS X supports a decent batch of emacs-style keybindings -- C-a and C-e work, C-k and C-y work, the cursor-movement keys work. Give me C-s and C-r and I would be even happier, though. Or C-x C-w to write half-written drafts of news.yc posts to files for backup. Or C-x C-i to import text from files on disk. The list goes on and on.

I type an unfortunate amount of text into browser fields during the course of a day. It would be nice to be able to make these fields work more like a decent editor, and by that I don't mean TinyMCE.
The easiest way to get money out of politics is to get money out of politics. The government should cut back its goals, and tax and spend less.

Anything else would just add layers on top of a convoluted system.

McCain-Feingold is a perfect example of a piece of legislation that did nothing in response to the money in politics.

As long as there is $3T for the federal government to spend, there will be business trying to get a piece of it.

I love Lessig, but I'm amazed he can't see the elephant in the room.
TED Talks Online
It is the freedom of participants on the Internet to offer and profit from whatever products, services, or content they choose that has made it such a phenomenal source of content and innovation.

The author includes what I would call the rules of the network's traffic in his 'services' and it is a problem in the argumentation. On one side, there are user services (e.g. e-commerce, search, etc.) and on the other side, there are network services (e.g. quality of service, priority of packets, guaranteed bandwidth).

I would say it is because the attempts to tinker with traffic rules on the network have been restricted that we had so much innovation during the internet history and therefore such a wide spectrum of network applications today.

Thus, while I do not refute what he says above, I would say it is primarily because of net-neutrality that internet has been so successful (a "phenomenal source of content and innovation").
I would say his example with UPS is wrong.

UPS added a network parallel to the existing mail post network, whereas in the case of internet, private ventures offering "quality of service" services contend with others for bandwidth on the same network.
Actually, a steel company gets about 15: http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:X

Established high-tech companies like Google or Apple get 25-35 if good growth is expected.

They're trying to rape you.
Um, yeah, that's right. I was totally careful to comply strictly with Microsoft's recommended standards for nonstandard XHTML. Yep. I assure you that I certainly did not use any nonstandard hacks to get IE5 and IE6, the banes of my existence, to work at 3am on the night before the site launched. I swear to god.

Ahem.

On a completely unrelated note: Does anybody know if IE 8 runs in XP under Parallels? I have some websites that I should probably check.
Yeah, there's even a product out there that compiles an Excel spreadsheet into optimized machine code, and apparently people do buy it.