skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
RedesignGoogle: clarity wins, with risque and rebuilt not far behind (NSFW)
yep.. there are iframe busters available.
I don't suppose anyone's still following this, but I borrowed a mac, and installed monotouch. It's very impressive indeed. $400 is easy to justify at work, but for free stuff at home not so much.
Sounds pretty great. If it's not too personal a question, why did you decide to leave?
if the ajaxian page were just a link, there would be a percentage of people who would see the image/explanation and then decide not to click through. they weren't interested in it, and so they don't use up the guy's bandwidth. with the iframe, those people use up the bandwidth whether they want to see it or not.
It's an extremely interesting idea. However I'm not sure if the numbers work out. Most of the stable 'bits' are to be stored in magnetic topologies. Unfortunately these topological structures are spaced at extremely distances from each other, further more they decay and magnetic field lines close in time spans much shorter relative to self-organizing/replicating topological interactions than, for example, DNA base pairs.

I was doing research on a kind of self-organizing plasma structure called an FRC. One of our big results was that we could stabilize the FRC to last for 100 milliseconds before it unwound itself. We have to pump a fair amount of energy in to make it in the first place!
That is a really slick looking interface, good job!
Science Fan vs. Scientist
Here's how their post starts:

Román Cortés is having a lot of fun with CSS tricks these days. He just built an example rolling CSS coke can that uses background-attachment, background-position, and a few other tricks to get the effect. No fancy CSS3 needed here!

It looks like they gave him full credit for this. Unless he was selling access to this blog post, I'm not sure why this is an issue. It seems even more benign than piracy. (And as sophacles points out, this uses less bandwidth than a direct link, too.)

Clearly, Román is willing to have his bandwidth used in order for people to look at his cool CSS trick. So why is this a problem when it's a little less bandwidth, plus a third-party endorsement?
If it's a VM (as it's claimed), where are the binaries?

[guest@www.masswerk.at:2]$ cat pager
#!/dev/js/commandMore

[guest@www.masswerk.at:2]$ cat ls
#!/dev/js/commandLs
The satisfaction of getting visitors is very important. Don't read his post as about costs alone. It is more like he paid the costs but got nothing in return. No visitors, exposure or fame :)
Q: "You've called Microsoft the IBM of the '90s. What exactly do you mean by that?"
A: "They're the mainstream. And a lot of people who don't want to think about it too much are just going to buy their product. "

I wonder if that makes Apple the Microsoft of the 2010's.
I have to wonder why they're writing PHP compilers and PHP refactoring tools (in Haskell!) instead of just using something different for their front end.
Aw man, I wish I'd joined as an engineer now. The lens I'm seeing the company through (product management) isn't half so cool. I mean, a lot of the above is still true, but we definitely have deadlines, tasks, responsibilities, and the team doesn't seem to eat together all that much. Obviously teams vary though, and this one has been thrown together fairly recently from a very disparate set of people, so that cohesiveness and flexibility isn't really there I guess. Despite all that, it's still pretty awesome.
Could you eliminate passwords altogether and validate via a back channel? Have a service that ties a phone number and a credit card number together, and allow people to confirm purchases via SMS.

It looks like purchase notifications via SMS is already in play, not so sure if anybody has tried purchase authorizations yet.
>It's not an operating system, because it cannot operate the system (your system being the Computer)

Be that as it may (I haven't fully checked out the source to this thing, so I can't say if it could "operate the system" or not), there's nothing preventing anybody from writing an operating system in (mostly) Javascript. You'd just have to have a JS interpreter built into your kernel. Now, why you'd want to do that other than for pure hack value, I cannot say. Nonetheless, it can be done.

Edit: You could also (theoretically) have a specially microcoded system that can directly run some form of Javascript bytecode, as was done with the old Lisp machines.
And even if you itch to strike out on your own, google is a great place to learn a lot of crazy stuff from a lot of crazy smart people-that's certainly a big part of why i'm here.
Yes, Dawdle.com acts as a middleman between buyers and sellers. We got a merchant account through Paymentech and used Payflow Pro as our gateway to take money in and used PayPal's Mass Pay API to send money out (after an aborted attempt to use ACH for disbursement). Dawdle is the merchant of record and so holds the proceeds in escrow for some period of time to mitigate risk.
Again, there were more iPhones and iPod Touches sold in 2009 than there were netbooks. It looks to me like their position in the market has been pretty well cemented without opening the platform up for "ruinination".
Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
I'm a power user, but I use Chrome. I only fire up Firefox when I want to do something on a page that requires a Firefox extension (like HttpFox or MAFF).

[edit] I would almost appreciate a Chrome/Chromium extension that adds a 'open this page in X browser' option so that I can open it in Firefox when I need to without needing to copy over the URL manually.
What about the freedom to peacefully assemble? That's in the first amendment as well.

If you want to see more of these rights violations, wait a couple weeks until people start protesting a particular sporting event in america's neighbor to the north. If you are carrying a sign in opposition to the rings, you'll be arrested!
The eBook version is free today (Feb 1st): http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ebooks/free_ebook.html
I thought the Keller book warns cooks that +/- a couple of degrees can result in disaster, but the engineer in me refuses to believe that. Maybe it's just the fish dishes that matter.
Oh the problems I have with this review:

* He got "inedibly flaky" chicken after holding chicken in the bath overnight. In other words, he probably set the temperature too high. You don't need to hold chicken at 160f if you're cooking it for 24 hours.

* He cooked duck in the prepackaged Duck L'Orange bag he got at Costco.

* He declared SV "not worth it" for lamb and rib roasts because he doesn't cook them often enough to care, and the conventional oven techniques are "tried and true". The conventional techniques for everything are tried and true, and error prone and inconvenient.

* Short ribs are a draw? You can "fool-proof" braise short ribs for most of a day and wind up with stew meat --- which is great --- or you can "fool-proof" SV short ribs and end up with medium rare short ribs, which is something you can't get out of any other cooking technique. And if you want a "caramelized sauce" when you're done, you reduce the bag goo. How hard is that?

* Anybody buying a SV setup will have no problem doing perfect fish under a broiler? What?
Tell HN: Annoying Facebook bug
If you accidentally remove yourself as the last admin of a Facebook group, it becomes impossible to close the group.

The bug manifests itself as follows:

1. A group can only be removed by one of its admins.
2. In order to remove the group, an admin must first remove its members.
3. Removing a group's members is a process that involves manually traversing a list of members and clicking a button beside each person's name.
4. The list of members contains the admin's name.
5. It is possible for the last admin of a group to remove him/herself as the admin of the group (even accidentally).
6. The only way to become an admin of a group is to be invited by an existing admin.
7. Therefore, if the last admin of a group accidentally removes him/herself, it becomes impossible to close the group.

I have attempted to contact Facebook about this with no luck. It appears that this has been a problem for people since December: http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=10381469571&topic=13332#topic_top
Isn't that interesting how having no price on the post seems like it would make one look differently at the seemingly-legitimate-copyability of one's work?

And, I suppose, sometimes people make a lot of money off of a work and then don't mind copies because they feel like they've already made (and continue to make) much from it.
IPhone’s Global Market Share Slips
I have to wonder why people are so excited about a PHP compiler when there's been an open-source one out that runs on top of the IBM Java JIT for a while. http://www.projectzero.org/
Thomas Keller has a different definition of disaster than most of us. He has a sous vide tank where the liquid is not water, it's butter! He sous vides lobster tails directly in the butter. No, I'm not kidding.
I haven't read the Keller book, but for Keller's applications he's probably right. On the other hand, one of my partners is a trained chef and cooks SV constantly with the same ghetto rig I have, and has consistently excellent results. I should find the link to his octopus post. It's almost enough to make me willing to eat octopus.

A couple degrees either way aren't going to screw up beef, pork, or chicken. If you aim low, it won't screw up fish. If you have a very specific egg doneness target (and eggs are one of the very few things I'm better on a skillet with than in SV), one or two degrees matters a whole lot.

And finally, I think one of the big places temperature control matters is with vegetable cookery; there are SV applications that aim to get in between the temperature at which starches break down and the temperatures pectins break down, and if you're trying to do that (I guess to make watermelons that have the mouthfeel of filet), maybe the PID controller is a dealbreaker.
I've been thinking a lot lately about SV'ing things in a liquid other than water. Oil poaching is obviously a really old technique.
Web Laureate Insight, "Yahoo, Superfluous"
As a few facebook employees have said they have a lot invested in PHP there so it wouldn't make sense to swap it out.
He suggests to give only 30% to the guy who's going to build the entire product? Sounds cheap.
A nice burn against the xkcd SCIENCE! crowd and their adolescent boosterism.

I linked to it in the "Mathematical and Scientific Joke Competition" thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1089188
Freemium is Weak, Subscription is Chic
About Avril Lavigne
Why Vaccines Matter
What, no giant red box marked "Socialism"? And they're underfunding the death panels!
If you agree to use Adobe DRM software:

Further Notes: Downloading Your eBook

Here's an overview of the download process:

A. The big brown button first checks to see if
your machine has Digital Editions already.
If not, it will ask you if you want to
install it.
If you have an older version, it will ask
if it can update your version.

B. The first time Digital Editions is opened, it
will ask you to "Authorize" your computer. It
wants you to associate your machine with an Adobe
ID. If you don't have an Adobe ID, you can choose
the small "get an Adobe ID online" link to set one
up. (It's free.) Some people already have Adobe
IDs, from using Photoshop or other Adobe products.

Here's why to authorize: If you authorize your
computer with an Adobe ID, you will be able to
open the same book file on up to five other
computers or devices authorized to the same Adobe
ID. If you choose "Don't Authorize," your book
file will only be able to live on the first
machine it opens on; it can't be moved elsewhere.

C. The last step is book delivery--there's a very
small file, called URLLink.acsm, that needs to be
downloaded to your computer. When it opens in
Digital Editions, it will launch your electronic
book.
For the impulse purchasers here, let me screw you out of a couple bucks:

http://www.auberins.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&...

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Decker-RC880-Steamer-Stainless/d...

http://www.amazon.com/Seal-A-Meal-VS107-Vacuum-Food-Sealer/d...

The rice cooker plugs into the Auber PID controller, the PID controller plugs into the wall. You set the temperature on the controller (say, to 130f for perfect steak), and it turns the rice cooker on and off to maintain that temperature. You bag steaks with the seal-a-meal, put 'em in the bath, and walk away for a day or two. Done.

Side benefit that my partner Dave noted: your kitchen now looks a little bit more like a meth lab. Sexy!
Paranoid a little? It was most likely downvoted because it has nothing to do with the article and was see as trolling.
I cannot wrap my head around bit-ops in C, anyone want to give me a guide?
I have a problem understanding Binary bitwise operations in C, I tried to do the k&r exercises with no help, and got no where, after trying for days.

Can anyone out there recommend a tutorial/guide or give some assistance please, I really would like to understand how this works.

Is it me, or is it ordinary to be confused about this?

Thanks
So I'm generally fine with Google as a great company until I deal with SEO people (i.e. the recent Mahalo discussion here). If you're all so great, why do we have to deal with so much pollution on the web?
It would be neat to be able to develop a website by building an 'image' through a VM like this.

You could describe the fundamental concepts on a two-page doc. You could easily copy images around. This could be a low-entry-barrier platform.

Changes it would need: a free software license, some system call documentation, a means of maintaining a library of static images, /var/cgi-bin. Nice to haves: system calls for talking to a database on the backend; library import mechanism; ometa.
It'd be nice to see something like this done for linode and rackspace as well.
Flash is pretty OK in Windows, generally. I wouldn't have such a big beef with it if Adobe could get its Linux and especially Mac OS X versions at least as fast/non-crashy.
They are all so smart but not one of them has figured out there needs to be a way in Google Calendar to change your e-mail address?

[cit: http://groups.google.com/group/google-calendar-help-howto/br...]
The original version of "The Office" ended for similar reasons I believe. Contrast that to the American "let's beat this thing till it jumps the shark" version.
On the other hand, this guy is seriously upset about this, but the Ajaxian staff feel that it's proper to just ignore him completely? Whether this guy has a point or not, ignoring him completely on both occasions (the first one where they didn't even give him attribution) shows that they are just a bunch of assholes.

He also does give an example of another site (Smashing Magazine) seeing the post on Ajaxian and believing that the work was the original work of Ajaxian (or a staff member of Ajaxian) and not the work of the real author, so it seems reasonable for him to be upset about this. Especially since his work seems to only be driving fame/publicity for Ajaxian, and not himself.
Enabling innovation isn't magic (Adobe)
I'm glad that someone thought my post to be interesting even though no one found it to be good enough for a direct HN submission. However, I would like to disagree with the statement of my hack lacking subtlety.

The way the Node.js method is performed is by changing the binding of a function. This is possible in any dynamic language that has functions as first-class variables such as Python. Because that type of reloading is quite old, programmers have had a lot of time to find many problems with it: which is why people are hesitant to suggest using Python's reload.

One of those problems is consistency. While I can't think of a simple example off the top of my head, the blog author here acknowledges it's presence which I believe he will soon find to be a big problem.

And most importantly, my method allows you to use a new binary. What happens when you want to upgrade the V8 virtual machine because it has a memory leak or a security problem? With function loading you will still need to restart.

I think Node.js will be better off implementing the spawn method I documented.
The Horseshoe of Loyalty - How sticky is your traffic?
Added bonus: hover your mouse over the red button beneath the image.
> I'm arguing, simply, that the RIAAs lawsuits are chock full of injustice: a flawed core conceit (that IP addresses can identify individuals), lawbreaking (unlicensed PIs) and piles of collateral damage (file-sharing grandmothers?).

The problem I have with this argument is that, despite all the legal chicanery, the chances are that most people the RIAA are going after really did do it. I understand the desire not to punish the innocent, and the reaction of the public when such stories make the headlines, but don't forget the other perspective: big media companies may adopt naive policies in an attempt to reduce piracy, but the guys running them are staring at 10 people, knowing that 9 of them are ripping them off, and listening to lawyers telling them they can't have any money back because no-one can prove to some practically unachievable degree of certainty who the 10th is.

> It's that I see no evidence that the public is particularly motivated by injustice to seek change.

This is a big problem with a lot of legal issues relating to modern technology and the new abilities it gives us. The implications of fundamental shifts like having the Internet or being able to store and analyse vast quantities of data probably won't be fully understood even by interested parties or expert observers for several years.

The average guy on the street will probably never appreciate some of the subtleties in any given area of law, even if it does affect him, because unfortunately people don't always think things through and research the facts before forming opinions. For example, how many people in any given copyright debate on a geek-friendly forum will ignore the fact that big business is mostly owned by institutional investors who run things like pension funds?

Mass copyright infringement is not a "victimless crime", and it doesn't just hurt "those big studios who were ripping us off for years". It hurts people's savings accounts, and pension funds, because when profits are reduced at the big media companies, the values of the investments goes down. At this point, someone traditionally trots out the old "illegal copy != lost sale" argument, again invoking something that while true some of the time is clearly not true of a lot of illegal ripping. And so the argument continues, with the critics using individual cases that appeal to emotional responses, wilfully ignoring the big picture because it's "just greedy businesses taking the hit, not real people".

This is why it is important for laws to be made by people who have spent the time to look at the facts, think through the implications, and then adopt a policy that is consistent with principles the general public support when fully aware of the implications. But it is then incumbent on those who make the laws to justify them on demand to a sceptical public, and right now this is where the copyright brigade are failing miserably.
His last remark is certainly poignant: "After that ... who knows? Maybe there's another locked door behind this door, too; I don't know. But someone else is going to have to figure out how to unlock that one."

Yeah, Steve. Someone else is going to have to figure out how to jailbr- er, "unlock" it.
Why stop there. You can get a high precision scale and pick up some sodium alginate (make caviar out of anything), some transglutaminase (meat glue), Tapioca maltodextrin to turn any fat into powder (bacon fat powder anyone?). The molecular gastronomy rabbit hole.
Why Amazon Lost: "Books are demand-inelastic"
Light levels influence selfish behavior
Or just load up the wikipedia page on him. In the four paragraph* "Since Retirement" section, it mentions both that interview and other attempts to get an interview.

*It's 5 or 6 now, but the later ones refer to this recent interview.
I highly recommend the maltodextrin, if only for peanut butter powder and brown butter butter powder.
NSFW - you've been warned, albeit, probably like me, belatedly.

For anyone wondering why - the second redesign down features a nude woman as the background.
LudicrousText preprocessor?

</Spaceball reference>
Who would've thought of multi-core CPU's at that time?
Really?!

I would have warned if I thought it was an issue at all. Do others also think the small thumbnail of the Go Ogle design is NSFW? I doubt I would have warned even with a larger thumbnail but maybe I'm miscalibrated...
I have though about this for different reasons. Over time I get hard water buildup on my circulator and have to spend some time cleaning. Yeah, I could use distilled, but it's a pain. Not only that but over time the water evaporates, especially at higher temps and I have to keep refilling which drops the temp for a bit. I know there are "ping pong" balls you can place in the water to keep the surface area to a minimum. My current solution is to simply make a tin foil lid.

But if I could find another medium to use instead of water it would be nice.
congrats to the Weave team! a bunch of the ex-delicious folks went there.
Not sure how seriously to take a contest where the second place entry includes a naked woman.
It's the same as pretty much any big company - underperformers are notified that they're underperforming, put on a performance improvement plan to help improve their performance, and if they still don't improve, they're fired.

There're no quotas for removing people (good riddance, the "fire the bottom 10%" school of management always struck me as the best way to create a poisonous, stressful company culture). But it's usually blatantly obvious who the underperformers are...they're the folks who haven't accomplished anything over the last 6 months...
There's a lot of "probablies" in this write up. I applaud the reverse engineering attempt, but this is a little hand wavey.
I have to agree, second place looks exactly like google but different colours + naked woman.
<em>"The big question to me is, why isn't Adobe serious about making this technology better? I mean, if Flash worked superbly well we might be not having this discussion."</em>

It's much better than it was, and about to become even moreso. The major part of work over the past year has been invisible to you so far, but cross-device predictability is coming from almost every major manufacturer this year.

The Apple problems are only partly about technology.
Missing Internet Pioneer Phil Agre Is Found Alive [pdf]
Missing Internet Pioneer Phil Agre Is Found Alive
I was able to get these running on the latest dev-channel Google Chrome on Mac (or regular Chrome Windows) with the Personalized Web extension (which lets you inject HTML, CSS, and JS, the latter two being the important ones): https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/plcnnpdmhobdfbpo...
Verdict is In: Amazon drops 5.3%, wiping out $2.9B of market cap
Did you try the design? There's a lot more to it than the background.
There're a bunch of ex-games-programmers at Google. One of my interviewers used to do 3D shooters and stuff before she came to Google. And Amit Patel, the co-creator of "Don't be evil" and one of the initial architects behind AdWords, runs a pretty popular game programming website.
Of course, this probably doesn't reflect market value directly destroyed, so much as the market reacting to the new information about Amazon's sanity.

S&P 500 up 1.43% for the day, and AMZN was down another 4% on top of that earlier in the day.

Just thought it was worth mentioning the market's verdict: yes, it was stupid.
"Google Just Made Offers On Three Of My Investments"