skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OT: You disagree that challenging circumstances unite people who would otherwise be uncharitable to one another?

In times of hardship would you work with someone you don't get on with so you could both survive? Note that the made up aphorism does not include a term such as "always". A less charitable version would be "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" (an example of the aphorism is which is well known).

Just curious as I felt this was a sort of given about innate human behaviour.
The other point is that with 100% lack of privacy, hopefully this means that the public can now also policy the government. (e.g. with cameras being cheap and everywhere, now it's no longer my word against some random-police-officer-with-a-chip-on-his-shoulder's word)
Really? Are you saying PayPal is not profitable and the lack of profitability is due to the costs of phone support for noobs forgetting their password?

Don't throw ARPUs at me. Either they are profitable or they are not.

I can certainly understand the argument that users of other sign-on systems "may" remember their passwords better than PayPal, but what evidence do you have of this? What extra margin of increased password remembrance makes for a more profitable model?
This article doesn't really answer the question "Do I Need a Co-Founder." More accurately, it answered "Should This Person Be My Co-Founder?"
Wow! There's a lot of stuff here. I tried ls, touch, cat, even vi, it all worked...
I'm really unhappy with this Gizmodo review, but they've got the steak part nailed. It's exactly like they say: you take a steak, bag it (I season it and throw some butter in), and then set the temperature for 130. Wait one hour or 48 hours or any time in between: you will get a uniformly perfect steak.

Do this two or three times and you'll stop poking or probing the final product. It simply is 130f, inside and out, when you remove it from the bag. Checking the temperature is essentially second-guessing a very very accurate electronic thermometer.

The quality of that finished product will be higher than anything you can accompish on cast iron, because cast iron doesn't heat meat uniformly. To get a rare center on cast iron, you have to accept a medium-well band of meat on the outside of the steak. Skill and technique dictate how wide that band is, but it's there regardless.

What you lose in SV is the seared crust. So, of course, after you cook your steak SV, you sear the outside --- for seconds, not minutes, on each side --- and then plate.

There are three major benefits of SV for steaks.

First, no matter who you are, SV is the one way you can set up a couple steaks in the morning before you leave for work and come home with a perfectly cooked steak waiting. It's this benefit that makes me think SV is the future for the American kitchen.

Second, if you're a typical home cook, SV kills the margin of error. Unless you type the wrong temperature in, you're getting a perfectly cooked steak no matter what you do.

Third, if you're a pro chef, SV frees you from having to be an extremely expensive meat thermometer. Electronics are better at watching temperatures than people are. Chefs are freed from the drudgework of monitoring cooking, and can spend that time innovating or refining actual dishes.
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Inspired by Radiohead: "Pay what you want" for the Extended Version of a site
I was working on something that used HTML5 mouse interaction. There was a bug in WebKit with detecting its position on the page. I patched it, submitted the patch, and it was accepted. Bug gone.

That's the difference.

Canvas is not a closed box. I can look at an implementation (and there is more than one) and see what's going on. It can be improved by anyone. Just as importantly, an idle canvas doesn't consume 5% of my cpu. Canvas, to my knowledge, does not frequently crash my browser.

I'm with you on the rich thing definitely. I think more companies are starting to catch on that what they've wanted all along is just some video showing off their thing, not a 'site' which is actually just chunks of video/swirly animations with text that you have to fidget with your mouse on to see all of. Hopefully we'll continue to see the situation improve.
But your statement is also making a generalisation. You say $50 is not much money to a lot of people. How do you prove that statement?

The one-time fee strategy is a way of pulling people in cheaply and then upselling them. You will not a $25 a month product $650 one time, you make it $99 one time payment, and you optimise your funnel to upsell them within the first 4 months.

A $25 a month product will have a LOT of cancellations compared to a $5 a month product.
The problem for Flash is just like the problem for IE — the web has already moved on.

I don't know which planet John is from, but the above is certainly not true on my planet. Some people may wish and/or hope that, certainly, but the reality is not that.

If he had written "the web wants/hopes/wishes/etc. to move on" I would have paid more weight to the rest of the argument, but "has already moves on", yeah right.
glad someone gets it.
It's not an operating system, because it cannot operate the system (your system being the Computer) :) Sorry for the obvious fact, but that is.

For example Linux, Mac OS X, Windows do control your System by taking over all resources, interrupts, almost anything.

At best this is a Browser Operation System (BOS), and even then it's not - because it does not have control over the Browser.

It's an illusion.
If the copyleft portion of the LGPL applies to the parts of WebKit outside of WebCore, then how could WebKit be released under the BSD license?
It's an important life skill to learn to differentiate between when you need a decision and when you need the right decision. Applying the wrong strategy to either situation tends to work out poorly.
This is true. I made it to breakfast once in an entire year.
For Russian, the difference between UTF-8 and UTF-n is statistically insignificant.
Are video games enabling scientific and cultural development?
Author royalties are usually based on Suggested Retail Price, not the actual retail price.

My impression is that Amazon is primarily fighting over the right to set actual retail price, like bookstores all across the country have done for ages. The publishers don't want that to happen because they believe Amazon will set them low enough to affect hardback sales.

But actual retail price has no effect on the money most authors make. A discounted book still pays the author a royalty based on full SRP.

At least that's how I understand this whole thing.
I like SaaS subscriptions as well. Most that hold my data as opposed to just providing a cool tool do not allow you to turn off your subscription for a few months without losing your data.
Is the Chromium UserScripts page[1] out of date? Or are these still issues?

Chromium does not support @require, @resource,
unsafeWindow, GM_registerMenuCommand, GM_setValue, or
GM_getValue.

A lot of scripts that I come across use `unsafeWindow`, `GM_setValue` and `GM_getValue.` It seems to be updated (since the last time I looked at it), since I believe it used to say that @exclude was not implemented, and now I don't even see a mention of it on the page (though I don't think I've come across a script that used @exclude).

[1]: http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/user-scr...

[UPDATE] This should shine some light on the topic: http://www.greasespot.net/2009/11/greasemonkey-api-usage.htm...
The best part about this announcement is that Google Chrome won't be treating user scripts as second-class extensions. Greasemonkey scripts will be treated like real extensions. The ease of creating Greasemonkey scripts plus the visibility of real extensions in the browser takes Google Chrome a huge step closer to Firefox.
Readability: a tool to remove web page clutter
We implemented http digest authentication (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digest_access_authentication) in our application for the following reasons:
- We needed to securely authenticate users connecting with browsers and rss readers without ssl.
- We needed an encryption algo that we could implement in javascript so as to provide reasonably secure login without ssl.

Is there any way to do the above while storing bcrypt passwords on the server? Does using bcrypt in these scenarios force you to use https and pass full text passwords to the server?
Help me to understand: how is this different than publishing scans of documents found in a public dumpster? If you don't want your credit card bills published on the internet, shred all your mail before throwing it away. If you don't want me to republish the contents of your semi-private URL's, encrypt everything.

Yes, in theory the public could have accessed this information on their own, but why would it be polite or desirable to republish it? At a first glance, this looks like an immature stunt of the sort I'd hope would be scorned. I'm not arguing that it's illegal -- just rude.

Are people voting this up to encourage more such stunts? To call attention to the risks? Why?
I'm kind of pondering the claim that this is as significant as the microwave.

Sure, it's new technology that's becoming more and more affordable. But SV cooking is still a fair amount of work. Heating the steak, for example, is microwave-simple. But pan-searing it? That's work.

We've had boil-in-the-bag meals for a while now. When I hear "the next microwave" I'm thinking "the next Jetsons-like machine that will make perfect food with one button".

The gadget we're all gonna have in 50 years, I predict, will be more like the MIT Cornucopia project: http://fluid.media.mit.edu/projects.php?action=details&i...
You know when you have a special case. If you don't - just the most convenient off the shelf database and get back to adding core functionality.

It sounds like you do, however I think that there are a lot of people who have no real reason to move away from SQL other than fashion. The database choice should be just like any other engineering decision - often your familiarity with the new tool is very important.
The moon is incredibly boring when Europa & Titan are within the reach of our unmanned probes. I know it's not quite as exciting to the average person but it's just a more realistic approach to space exploration at this point.
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It's a fun toy
Flash Design Is The Problem
This may be subjective, but from where I stand, SV is drastically less work than cooking in a conventional oven. It adds one additional 3-minute setup step (bag the food), and removes 10-45 minutes worth of attentive cooking. There are very few dishes that are so easy to cook non-SV that they simply aren't worth bagging.

I should reiterate: you are in fact getting perfect food with one button. You're not boiling anything; the whole point of SV is that the water is never going to come close to boiling.

The only catch to this is that if you want a seared exterior, you're still going to heat a pan (or blowtorch the protein, which is what some people do).
How Web Video SEO is Finally Coming of Age
Good point, here's a block from the WebKit goals page.

WebKit should remain freely usable for both open source and proprietary applications. To that end, we use BSD-style and LGPL licenses. Specifically, we aim for licensing compatible with LGPL 2.1+. We do not currently plan to move to LGPL 3. In addition, we strive to create a courteous, welcoming environment that feels approachable to newcomers. WebKit maintains a public IRC chat room and a public mailing list where the ideas of contributors both new and old are heard and discussed with equal weight.
Let's see his angle for doing this:

From the contributor's website (http://lindsaar.net/about_mikel): "I am a Scientologist and work full time as a volunteer for non profit organizations. It keeps me alive and I really enjoy helping people. You can see some of the work I do at the DrugFacts website."

I find it funny that the probable lone Scientologist rails-contributer finds this more offensive (or at least annoying) than all the Christians involved.
Of course. That's a good use case.

Thanks :)
I keep telling my wife that the blowtorch is the next essential kitchen tool that everyone will be using, and I'm always shot down. Can't fault a guy for trying.
I have been doing sous vide for a while. I used similar hacked setups like you, but eventually got a deal on a polyscience thermal circulator (a restaurant went out of business) and have been using that for quite some time.

One of my other favorite kitchen gadgets is my induction burner. I could never go back to gas/electric.
You can get one of those little brulee torches, but a cast iron pan is just as easy.
Video SEO
The system it's operating is a virtual machine. At least that's what I inferred from the description.
Do you get any benefit out of the circulator beyond just a PID-controlled rice cooker? The circulator vendors have all sorts of blog posts about how you're not getting uniform cooking if the water isn't moving, and it's true that I'm getting maybe a degree or two variance up and down, but it's not enough to make a difference to me in practical applications.
He didn't look for "Top Secret.txt"? Maybe that's the safest place to keep stuff on Dropbox.
I just don't get Amazon's stance here. It's evident by other actions that they see the iPad as a serious competitior, which is smart. One of the announced features of Apple's book store is that publishers get to set their own prices. So Amazon...plays hardball with publishers who want to set their own prices. Seriously, WTF? Way to push those publishers away, guys. It's funny--Amazon's relationships with the publishers are its biggest advantage right now; Apple's reportedly moving fast here but Amazon has a HUGE head start. Way to blow your advantage. They're becoming like the Adobe of print or something.
No, it's not an operating system, but for someone who only has access to a computer via their public library and wants to learn *nix/vim/emacs/etc., something like this could be a perfect first step.
With our technology, with objects, literally three people in a garage can blow away what 200 people at Microsoft can do. Literally can blow it away.

and later:

I feel the same way about objects, with every bone in my body. All software will be written using this object technology someday. No question about it. You can argue about how many years it's going to take, you can argue who the winners and losers are going to be in terms of the companies in this industry, but I don't think a rational person can argue that all software will not be built this way.

How much of this has actually been realized? Certainly OO programming is the dominant model, but a lot of popular languages were created around the same time as this interview, and languages tend to reflect "best practices" from whenever they were first designed. Is OO popular just because it's popular, or because it's genuinely the superior approach?

And, as a bonus question, how much does that still hold now that concurrency is a major concern?
It's also copyright infringement. If the server is in the US, anyone who created one of those documents could send a DMCA takedown request.
no that's not what i'm saying. PayPal explicitly chose to not answer telephone support in order to keep costs down for low-value avg users (which is most non-merchants / non-eBay fanatics).

it was deemed to be "cheaper" to just not deal with a minority % of password recovery cases (that might also occasionally be fraud) than to provide high-cost customer support for low-value average users.

think about it: if you can cut a minority % of your customer base that causes a large % of the cost (or simply just more than they are worth) then you can make more money.

this wasn't such a big mistake in itself, except that PayPal probably didn't consider the network effect of negative brand damage due to not providing very good customer service for such a large # -- though still minority -- of users.

i'm saying this:
1) telephone support is expensive, and doesn't offset low-value ARPU
2)
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"We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission." -Jeff Bezos

http://www.amazon.com/tag/kindle/forum/ref=cm_cd_ef_tft_tp?_...

Some guys never learn, I guess.
I'm pretty sure the code coming out of Apple's WebKit team is more than what the LGPL legally requires -- remember, LGPL is much more lax about what you can do in terms of building on the work without having to open up your own stuff.

Edit: And... yeah, they do go above and beyond, since there are bits in there that they've written and licensed BSD. If that code was encumbered by LGPL they wouldn't have been able to relicense it or claim original authorship.
I had the experience of finding the right person and being able to make that judgment call in just a month. It just felt right. He was really exceptional.

On the other hand, I guessed wrong twice. YMMV.
Writing a new spreadsheet or word-processing program these days is a tedious process, like building a skyscraper out of toothpicks. Object-oriented programming will change that. (...) Because these objects will work with a wide range of interfaces and applications, they will also eliminate many of the compatibility problems that plague traditional software.

That object oriented programming thingy looks really cool! I've heard someone is writing a C with classes to do that. Once this is released, I'm confident bugs will be gone forever.
I have a Greasemonkey script in FF (http://defcraft.blogspot.com/2009/02/greasemonkey-search-hel...) that'll google for the current selection in a background tab when ALT-G is pressed. And it uses GM_openInTab API call.

Its equivalent in Chrome seems to be chrome.tabs.create. But when I tried that, I get this error: "chrome.tabs is not supported in content scripts". It seems that these "content scripts" aren't as powerful as extensions (http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/content_scripts.htm...). Am I missing something here?
Junior Meritocracy: Why kindergarten-admission tests are worthless
I don't believe for a minute that Apple is any more open than they are legally required to be...

You would be right to point out that Gruber was mistaken in saying KHTML is BSD-licensed, but the rest is demonstrably false.

They were legally required to open source WebCore, derived from KHTML, because it is LGPL. And they did so, as soon as Safari was announced. They were not legally required to release WebKit, which is BSD. That release came several years later, and is certainly a more significant project than KTHML or WebCore alone are.
This is very much true, and I've made this point myself several times. However, even so the advantages of Flash's superior tooling are relatively shallow. Once you get to a certain degree of application complexity the native advantages of HTML/CSS/JS and the disadvantages of the convoluted Flash programming model start to show.
She knows I just like setting things on fire, including steaks.
a) people certainly use social networks (Facebook) and email and game / entertainment sites more than they use E-Commerce sites -- one is daily (or hourly!), the other is weekly or monthly

b) even if they don't type their passwords in "much", they certainly do so relatively much more frequently.

whether or not my post was a rant, this is a fairly simple point based on simple frequency of use.
My father's pushing 60 and still working those hours, in IT. If you're going to be working those hours, you might as well spend it with smart people, get paid well, and have free food while you're at it.
And yet we have AppleTV. :)

I think it was mostly posturing.
Amazing work. Relatedly, I would love to see an Emacs in the browser, ala Bespin. Is there such a thing yet?

Why do we need a browser-based Emacs?

1. All the benefits of the cloud: access anywhere, always available, always backed-up.

2. The collaborative aspects are perhaps the most compelling. Think peer-programming/debugging. (see also http://jsfiddle.net/).

3. Because of 1&2, it seems inevitable to me that we will be programming in browsers 5 years from now. So I want my favorite editor to be around, too.
SV is completely unattended cooking. So it saves a lot of time. You can do all sorts of things while cooking is occuring.

It's somewhat like baking, but with no checking for doneness.

One neat trick with SV: You can cut your meat very thin but still have even, reletively rare meat. The thickness of the meat gives your cook time.

http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html

So if you make your stake very thin, you can find a nice steak in similar times to your stove can.

If you use the traditional thickness of about 3cm, you're going to be waiting 50 minutes to cook the steak.
Stating this stuff in 1994, in the peak of cyber-hype, was not terribly prescient.

Steward Brand travelling to Xerox PARC in 1973, seeing what all those crazy ARPANET guys were up to, and stating "So much for record stores as we know them" -- that was prescient.
http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html
Controlled intervention over the long term, though?
KHTML is LGPL licensed They had to release source.

And then they also opened up (BSD license) a bunch of other stuff they didn't have to. "Apple only open-sources when a license holds a gun to their head" is, unfortunately for many commenters here, a myth.
The circulator pump has high/low so it really gets the water moving. I typically keep it on low since I use it in a large pot. I haven't noticed any real difference with compared to a hacked setup for typical proteins (poultry, beef, pork, etc). The only place you're really notice is where you want high precision, like the various degrees of egg cookery and some fish.

The real benefit is the ability to "set it and forget it", which matters for me when cooking items for 24/48 hours. That and the volume.
Somebody posted an early version of one. I don't recall what it was called though.
This is seriously cool. I'm constantly impressed with the amount of innovative things done with node.js. It's a very powerful ecosystem of tools being developed in front of our eyes.
This looks like spam. Where's my "flag" link?
They'll never have Tree Style Tabs I imagine, so I'm stuck forever with Firefox for that extension.

Not that I mind Firefox, but Chrome gets to do a reboot and start again without carrying legacy support/etc with it.

Early versions of Firefox felt "lighter" than IE to me for that reason.