skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After the game jam (An event where everyone tries make a game in one weekend, hence the correlation to topic) wrap up, one of the guys there said something very interesting: they thought it was such a good idea to pound on a concept for the weekend to see if it was viable, they were going to do it for every idea including those in the business that weren't game related (not sure if that meant software or what...)

So while I see the simplifying assumption that says "I could do that in one weekend" and that it's really not that simple. There's the other side of the coin. Maybe some ideas don't need to be so complicated. We evolved our game idea three times that weekend as we completed something we saw what was boring or was failing and modified it.

In both our case and the guy above, we aren't planning to continue the game. I know I tend to sit and idle on ideas for months or years at a time. This is a terrible thing to do. Why not, for the cost of one weekend decide to throw it in the trash and never think of it again. One weekend is way less than months and months of planning and task lists and bug trackers and code repositories... etc etc.

Edit: In case anyone is interested you can find our game on http://globalgamejam.com called "Maid of Dishonor" or on our site, http://tosos.com under the "Unity Games" page.
Sure, the concept of monoculture applies.

Part of the reason for avoiding a monoculture is that you've put all your eggs in one basket; everyone's risks are linked together. While this can be good when things are going well, it can be disastrous when something goes wrong. For instance, if there's a worm that takes advantage of a bug in WebKit, it may be able to hit every single WebKit based browser out there.

Now, this is somewhat mitigated by the fact the WebKit is only one component in a browser. Each of the platform ports has a lot of platform specific code. The networking layer is different, the UI components are different, and so on. It's also somewhat mitigated by the different operating systems, architectures, compilers, and so on that make it hard to write an exploit against something like a buffer overflow, because of the heterogenous environment.

On the other hand, software that is just a small component of a browser, like libpng or libjpeg, can be all that you need to exploit a system. Look at how many vulnerabilities are reported in libpng and libjpeg on a fairly regular basis. And WebKit comes with a JavaScript interpreter that runs untrusted code by default, which can make exploits much easier as they can run code on the client side to adapt to the local environment.

A monoculture can also stifle innovation, and harm the market for new browsers. If everyone just codes to the capabilities of WebKit, it's harder for Mozilla to introduce cool new features that inspire WebKit to copy them, because a lot fewer people will pay attention. This is less likely to be a problem, however, because of the much greater market share of Gecko on the desktop.

Now, the benefits of sharing all that code and work may outweigh the risks of the monoculture. It would be nice to see a few more companies going with a Gecko based engine, however, in order to reduce the monoculture a bit. Fennec is coming along, but doesn't run on much hardware yet.
Propaganda is rarely valuable, even when correct (which it isn't here).
Opera Mini (JME) works great on my Motorola stupid phone.
Okay, according to this paper

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1610000/1600217/p99-hurst.pd...

Knuth-Plass takes O(kn) where n is the number of words and k the number of words per line. That’s definitely slower than the naive line-by-line method.

But the better algorithm can be supposedly improved with the method in this paper (I haven’t read it and don’t have time just now, so I’m not sure how much slower it would then be than the naive way).

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/150000/146656/p546-eppstein....
If you know that witty put-downs are discouraged, then you may also know that spelling flames are considered in poor taste.
Right, because your 140 character idea is worth so much money.

Good, succinct pitches are useful, but only if you can back it up with real experience, ability, hard work, and a good dose of luck.
I wanted to post a long comment about my current journey in corporate life, but really, this is all that needs to be said. If you feel like you have no purpose, you will have no purpose, and you will get used to it. Don't.
You could create a library to read the setting, and everyone could just use the library.

I like the Unix way better myself, as it's more about building up functionality through composition, rather than setting out to create grand unified architecture. Speaking (possibly too) generally, I find large architectures tend to be harder to fix.
Frankly, I rarely ever use my browser history anyway. I think I will just disable it entirely now.
nope. C++ is too verbose
This isn't about TARP money to me, it's about a textbook case a REGULATORY CAPTURE.

Forget about To Big To Fail, we need to start asking who is To Big To Be Indited.

Goldman doesn't seem to be engaged in risk, far from it, they have the power to shape markets to their advantage. Why do so many top level Goldman executives cycle in and out of powerful government positions?
I can't think of anyone else off the top of my head who I consider a real alpha geek, but Rich blows my mind on a constant basis with clojure and how he's doing things there. Not just the technical work, but his taste in design is impressive.
Er, you pitch can't be 140 characters if "#dreamitpitch " is taking up 14 of them.
Starts slow, gets more interesting in the middle. The "people passionate about one thing", "people passionate about many things" is a bit cumbersome - I was mentally filling in "specialist" and "generalist" and "neither" for his points, which isn't quite precise but close enough. Still, interesting enough and short read, I'd recommend it's worth the read. Beginning is underwhelming, but some interesting observations in the middle.
It isn't really the same. Anyone that needs access to something in /etc can get what they're looking for without having the first pierce a difficult binary format. Deciphering what they get back is another issue, but typically it's just a text file, so you can generally figure out how to parse it if you need to.
I think we probably agree more than disagree. Morgan Stanley and Goldman are not banks so they should not have access to Fed money. And sure, they should be allowed to make whatever bets in whatever size they want - as long as they are small enough to fail. If they are too big to fail them I am on the hook for when their bets go bad.

Any business that is too big to fail is too big.
We successfully broke-up Standard Oil and AT&T and we are much better off for it.
What if we Google Buzzed Government?
Is China the Mother of All Black Swans?
I don't think it's very puzzling that a large, profitable institution can get dragged through the mud. There's a very simple reason: Many people don't accept that "being profitable" and "being worthy of admiration" are the same thing, or that Goldman's success as a business proves that they're a socially positive force.

The Mafia was a successful, profitable large institution for a long time. People still thought they were crooks, because, well, they were.

You can argue that Goldman Sachs is not comprised of a bunch of lying con men who made all of their money by cheating it from gullible rich old ladies. But "look how much money they made!" isn't a convincing reason in that argument. Maybe they're just very good at lying, cheating, and bribing their way to wealth! The people at the top of the pyramid scheme actually do make money, after all; it's everyone at the bottom who loses out.
I threw together this page to help consolidate some of the resources I've been using over the years to find domain names.
It would mean that if you port windows to a large endian machine, then you can't share registry files (ie. as in roaming profiles). It's not as much about the file format as it is about the implementation (simply dumping C structures to disk). I think what the author is saying is that it's just a crappy implementation.
2010 SXSW Web Awards Finalists
If your entire business idea can be summed up in 140 characters it's probably not that special. The idea of a pitch is to hook people's interest, not give away all your IP.
Ethics for machines
Nobody denied that it is slower in theory, but I still claim that you won't be able to measure the difference on an average web page. So time is not an excuse for not implementing this (and this was the original question).
We need more conversations, fewer performances
it's not that Outlook is more secure (it's probably not), it's that there's no chain of responsibility or someone to blame when gmail gets hacked.
Newspaper group call to block BBC iPhone apps
:) Sorry about the vague "eight-ness" there -- I just mean I see lots of patterns with eight prominent features, or "spokes." I saw quite a few with sixteen spokes, and probably higher powers of two as well, though I wasn't in the mood to count the large numbers.

And regarding "prime-ness", I mean I didn't notice any patterns with 7, 11, or 13 features -- that sort of thing.

I suppose the prominence of powers of two has something to do with "period doubling" in chaos theory, I don't know.
Another problem fixed with duct tape!
Hey, You Got Circles in my Scripty
Tasty Cookies with nginx
Tenths of a second can be pretty damn significant. Every tenth of a second extra load time leads to approximately a 1% drop in sales, according to research done by Amazon.

One of the big points of competition between browsers these days is in speed. Part of the reason people switch from IE to one of the more modern browsers is because they are just that much snappier.
You can use the ideas for free too. http://twitter.com/search?q=%23dreamitpitch
Let's talk How many of You use This Strategy for your Internet Business
This is the strategy recommended by Sramana Mitra, Silicon Valley entrepreneur/strategist: http://bit.ly/aqMDFG
She is convinced that this strategy can take a viable startup into $1 million revenue without losing much time. She pledge to help anyone who chooses to use this strategy via her 1millon by * $1millon initiative: http://bit.ly/c3fhh9

I would like to know how many of you are using or would consider using this strategy?
Impressive!

Doesn't work in iPhone, sadly. Not sure why not, because Canvas is supported, I think.

Might be possible to make text selectable, but looks like a huge chore: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1451635/how-to-make-canva...
The camera LED is wired in series to the camera sensor itself. You can't power the camera without having the LED turn on.

Conversely, you can't turn on the camera LED without having the camera powered.
Good side project - shellcompanyfinder.com - up/downvote companies as potential shells, share information as to their true owner.
Using Google Earth to save Haiti
I remember reading a glowing profile a few years ago on Nathan Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures(I believe it was on Wired), how they got together a bunch of big scientists and came up with cool new ideas (and then patented them, but that seemed fair to me at the time).

Seems that was just good PR back then, or possibly Mr. Myhrvold started out the business on the best of the intentions... till the cold hard reality of being able to make money by just sitting back, exploiting the broken patent system and extorting raised its appeal.

Has IV actually been responsible for something good? I do not ask this sarcastically(almost), what good deeds have they done?
OK, but Goldman doesn't make money by pushing dope or breaking peoples' kneecaps.

To reiterate: "The only people forced to trade with Goldman were taxpayers financing the bailouts, and you know what happened to them? They got all their money back plus twenty-three percent interest."
I have a member account on SharesPost. It's free and I can view bid/ask prices without having had to talk to anyone.
The windows-specific issues are probably a large part of the problems that happen when you try upgrading Windows versions, e.g. XP to Vista, Vista to Win7, and no end in sight.

Based on what the article points out, I would speculate that Microsoft spends a lot of energy trying to catch and fix all the ways the registry migration breaks when doing an OS upgrade. Not only is that is all wasted energy, it will never hit 100% success rate because there will always be something the porting engineers never saw in their systems.
In context the quote isn't as damning as the headline makes it sound, but he still does sound out of touch with a) his user base b) his company's other reactions to the situation c) his company's mission statement. While the rest of Google has been apologizing and fixing things and basically keeping with their image (as much as they can after they messed up so horribly), he's taking the approach of an extraordinarily stereotypical business-exec-suit-corporate-CEO-type. Blame-shifting, saying it's not that big a deal, that sort of hot air.
Cartesian Metaphors
The school, however, can not violate the law in order to learn about actions which are against the school's code of conduct.
I would like to see society evolve to a point where people interact on a purely voluntary basis, without the threat or use of force. That's my vote.
The main product referenced about 2/3 of the way down (UDOP) was built by my company (Thermopylae Sciences & Technologies) in the 2 weeks after the Haiti earthquake struck. It lets users upload, create, and edit content within their browser, as well as giving them access to a number of common tools, all in one place. It's currently the best visualization tool out there, and it's being used by a whole bunch of different agencies to coordinate relief efforts and spread information.

I'd be happy to answer any questions about it -- I know the article is a little light on technical details.
The article was arguing that the Windows registry implementation is bad. He thankfully avoided the usual unix vs windows philosophizing.

Basically it's a boring debate as Linux does have a number of X windows related registries. For example GConf and X resources (xrdb).
No native apps on Windows Phone 7 Series
7 Classic Nintendo Games Remade In Flash
Perfect, good to know. I've only looked into SecondMarket and incorrectly assumed all secondary markets enforced the SEC regs up front.
I was reading this and feeling - this feels familiar. So I did a simple search:

http://searchyc.com/submissions/model?sort=by_date

No wonder it seems familar: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126580
Yeah, I never would have disagreed with that. Which is why I said “Both seem like pretty weak excuses to me.”

By “non-negligible” I meant something like 2–10 times slower (you’d have to test to be sure... I tried searching around but couldn’t find any direct speed comparisons). For typical pages it’s not going to matter, but if you have a page like the HTML5 spec, where it takes a half a second to resize a window now, it’s going to be noticeably slower using a more sophisticated paragraph composer.

Keep in mind, Safari doesn’t even do kerning, because they’re afraid it’d be too slow. (Also a ludicrous excuse for desktop hardware and typical web pages, IMO.)

And the Safari guys also use the same excuse (“it’s too slow”) for not doing real color management with CSS/HTML colors.
Like "too big to fail"?
There was never a standard for user configs (unless you mean .files all over you $HOME). GConf provides some schema and metadata that might prevent errors when modifying stuff yourself. I think it covers quite a lot actually... do you have any examples of what it cannot do? In my experience configs are usually just key=value lists (sometimes with sections). That's exactly what GConf does nicely.
I much prefer well-defined combinatorics over the vagaries of set theory. Combinatorics are executable, meaning that they map directly to physical devices, and the only "paradox" in combinatorics is non-termination, which is just a simple fact of life.
The public needs an outlet for it's anger. Hopefully some real reform takes place. If not, then let the dissatisfaction grow.
An SEO twist: Optimizing Search Engines
>"You knew I was going to go from version control, your fault for not fixing it in there" is a proven technique for getting people to actually use version control. I've seen it done, and know people who did it at several other organizations and it works.

I know being an ass to people works. Tried and true for sure, very passive aggressive technique to get developers to do things.

Also just keeping a production branch and development branch works too. Check in the production changes to production branch.

Production hotshot doesn't port over changes or at least mention the important ones to the guys working on the dev team? Kick that poor behavior to his boss about how he's not pulling his weight, staffing problems are HIS problem not yours, and by strongarming the guy with passive aggressive overwrites, you're screwing the company AND the hotshot, rather than just the hotshot.
I was starting to complain that the site is dead, then realized this is still an idea and a worthwhile one!
Hope, someone(with thick skin, imagine what you will be going against) actually goes forth with it.
It's not surprising at all seeing a former Microsoft exec abusing the patent system in order to line up his pockets.

Heck. Even bank-robbing wouldn't surprise me.
Why? Crimes against government agents are prosecuted far more severely than crimes against the common man. If you rob a post office at gunpoint, it's a federal felony, with more extreme punishments than if you rob a corner store at gunpoint. The law singles out government employees as being more important than the common man in terms of protection.
Small nuclear reactors
I agree with this.

In fact, what scares me the most about the state of finance in the US is that, instead of well-meaning and meaningful reform, we have idiotic and impotent populist rage.
Application Bundles for Linux (drag&drop installer)
...that doesn't even fall into the category of "propaganda".
This is really cool. I wonder if something like this could be used to supply food for space travelers.
> About the normalised or not data - you have to design your data storage to your solution and needs.

I understand your point. But once you have normalized data, don't you lose most/all the advantages of a NoSQL solution? RDBMS's are designed to handle the searching, joining, and filtering of normalized data -- NoSQL solutions are not.

My original comment about "lack of imagination" applies -- If you're designed your data to handle as many scenarios as possible (which obviously the author of the article did not) then you will end up with something that is fully normalized.

If you need performance, whether it be in an RDBMS or not, you'll need to sacrifice some flexibility. But it seems like with NoSQL you're prematurely optimizing -- picking a solution with a very specific use-case when you're most likely not going to need any of the supposed advantages.

I'm not suggesting that NoSQL doesn't have it's use, but most of these articles advocate using it by default and in situations where it's clearly not appropriate. The author of this article, using it for e-commerce orders, seems like a very inappropriate use to me.
What is P2Web?
I'm guessing Embedded Visual C++ could still be abused to create WM7 apps. Not too many would find it worth the effort though.
Web Laureate Classic: "Microsoft & Yahoo: 44.6B"
No, but they do make a ton of money by frontrunning trades, a practice which is only legal because Congress is too dysfunctional to pass a law against it.
His proposed curriculum sounds very similar to the one used by Fairmont High in Verner Vinge's Rainbows End http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End. Fairmont High was actually the current equivalent of a Trade School.
Reform by itself isn't want people need--the reform has to be good. All you have to do is look at any country dominated by stupid reformers to see the effects of stupid reform. Heck, just look at the history of socialism.
IANAL, so can somebody explain how this isn't considered racketeering (you pay IV for their promise not to sue you)?
How to recover deleted files and photos on your hard drive cameras and phones
Postal workers shouldn't necessarily be blamed for pornography laws, but that doesn't mean government agents should be treated equally.

Highway patrol officers who break traffic laws without using lights and sirens should be punished more severely than a first-time offender who is a normal citizen. Cops who abuse their power need to serve prison time.

With great power comes great responsibility.

We give our public school teachers a lot of power over the lives of our kids, by entrusting our kids to them for several hours a day. If they abuse the public trust, the potential for damage is much higher, and the punishment should be correspondingly more severe.

If we let our schools enact zero-tolerance policies for punishing our kids, we have the right to enact zero-tolerance laws for them f*ing with our kids' lives.
This is awesome. Can't wait to see it on ESPN ;)
"Government-fueled housing bubble"

[citation needed]

Are you gonna cite that law from the 1970s that said banks needed to make mortgages available to poor people and minorities? If so, please explain why no subprime housing bubbles happened between the 1970s and 2005 or so?
Seems like propaganda to me. That is the sound byte I associate with this whole mess. It was repeated quite often.
I don't know if this qualifies, but there was an article about a mosquito-killing invention a few days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516916
Design by Committee: Avoiding Logo Design Pitfalls
How long before this platform is commonly referred to as "WiPh" (Wiff)?
I agree, it'll probably work.

The impedance of the coax cables will likely be 50 or 75 ohm, whereas the UTP will be 100 ohm. You will need a balun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balun. Baluns are easy to make, and depending on the cable you've got, probably available off the shelf.

There's 2 pairs in 100mbit ethernet (and 4 in gigabit) - so you'll need 4 baluns for each run (2 at each end).

Personally, I'd pull some UTP through, but it's worth a shot if you've got some time to tinker.
> things that can get you in trouble for things that didn't happen on school grounds

What?! There is no way that kind of policy would be tolerated here. What is the logic behind this?
Interesting, but as a content creator I can't help feeling it alludes to cases but fails to set any standards for how to handle them.

For example, just now I'm thinking about the costs of getting a release to shoot video in a private location (a shopping center). It would make my film look more interesting but hurt its budget. If I shoot by stealth (not so hard with modern cameras) they would have a copyright complaint against the film and could sue for damages. The copyright claim subsists in the interior architecture, configuration and decoration of the building.

But what if I release my film for free, just to say 'hey look at my film (and consider investing in the next one)'. The analogy would be using an allegedly proprietary algorithm in a piece of open-source code, I suppose. There's an indirect commercial gain on my part (if it proves popular), but should the IP owner have a claim on a free work?

The proposal does include a threshold of whether such a violation does harm to a business, or is likely to. Unfortunately, that puts the defendant in such a case in the position of having to prove a negative, ie that the complainant's allegations of likely harm are unreasonable. If my shopping center scene involved a successful pickpocket, they would have a good claim, but suppose they just complain that I made it look drab or old-fashioned?
ShadyURL - don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening