skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Youtube on the cusp of profitability, after several years of being turbo-charged with Google's ad network.
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100114/is-youtube-finally-...
No, it is not! It shreds new light over the inner life of trolls of all times and trades.

Sorry... so much temptation ;)
Rumor: Microsoft looking at purchasing Research In Motion
Check out their sexy new homepage: http://divvyshot.com/

(For reference, here's the old one http://www.crunchbase.com/assets/images/original/0003/8843/3...)

Hats off, Sam. Nice work.
I couldn't agree more. Lua is arguably as nice a language as Python, and it has a nice embeddable implementation, but it doesn't have the libraries and documentation.
People in the comments mentioned "I am sitting in a room", which I found here: http://www.ubu.com/sound/lucier.html

Quite interesting to hear.
Weight matters more if you tend to walk or bike around a lot. Carrying a 6+ lb. mobile workstation from your desk to your car and visa versa isn't much of a burden, but schlepping it around on your back for an hour or more on a regular basis can cause serious back and shoulder pain.

Ergonomics are important when you're either sitting in front of a computer or carrying it on your back for 90% of your waking hours.
A hypothetical engineer might be emotionally invested in "Everyone should know enough about computers to do basic things, and they should have learned that years ago, so if they can't do them it is their fault." That hypothetical engineer might bristle at being told "You should help them succeed, even if it means teaching them the basics."

A hypothetical business owner, told that there was an issue that was preventing his customers from paying him money, would probably say "Fix it."

Some days we have to pick whether we want to be engineers or business owners. For my part, I spent time yesterday teaching a PhD how to open PDFs.
a) Congrats, Sam (and Paul, and Michael)!

b) That redesign is seriously gorgeous
My favorite feature is probably one of the hardest to find. To upload photos in Firefox 3.6 just drag them directly onto an event page.

I <3 HTML5
RFC 1855: Netiquette Guidelines (1995)
3000 years is about how long China existed as a state that passed from one dynasty to another in recorded history. 7000 years is how old the civilization is according to archeological digs, though for a long time they thought it's 5000 years, so 5000 kinda got stuck as a catchphrase.

But yeah, pulling the age card as a comeback is pretty lame sometimes.
> Corn-fed beef is more extensively marbled and more tender.

I don't think there's much debate that corn fed is fattier and more appealing to the average palate. The issue is health and omega-6 to omega-3 ratios. Even a small amount of corn or other seeds in the feed put omega-6 way up.
Ask HN: Would you be interested in this web app help product?
I want to make a help dialog box plugin. The ui would look like this: http://twitpic.com/1209jh

Help would be organized into sections. Each section would have items attached to it. An item is a question/answer pair, or title/description.

Implementation would be really simple. You'd just include a CSS file and a JS file.

You would add a class and a hash tag to each anchor tag you would want to bring in the dialog.

Examples:
<a href="#section/regristration" class="helpwidget">Brings Up Regristration Dialog</a>
<a href="#item/43" class="helpwidget">Brings Up Item 43</a>
<a href="#item/email_verification" class="helpwidget">Brings Up Email Verification Dialog</a>

I would like to release a free version where everything is hosted on my site, with limits on sections and items and it wouldn't be white label.

To make money I could have a monthly fee for more features, or I could sell the software itself so people could host it on their own servers.

Would anyone be interested in this? Would anyone here like to use something like that?
CSS Killswitch
Why don't you have a blog? I'd love to read more.
PRWeb Coupon
new coupon code to save $25 off prweb service
Sweet Design!
Startup rule #4081: Just because every VC lemming is willing to fund the same idea that month does not necessarily make it a viable business.
Defining your Core Values
The best wake up call:

1. Write your obituary as you would want it to read.

2. List the milestones it contained in order of achievement.

3. Only work towards those things. Nothing else matters.

Discuss in the comments, would love to hear your thoughts.

@GrantSchultz
For those specs, I'd much rather spend half as much on an Asus UL30Vt (http://bit.ly/c9AxMn), though I'm really waiting for the UL30Jt (http://zedomax.com/blog/2010/01/08/asus-ul30jt-hands-on-revi...).
The one caveat is that Adobe and Macromedia have always been a little hit and miss on the releases. I’m currently using CS3 as it seems to render fonts better.

This, in spirit, is why I can't use Fireworks. I'm in full agreement that the application is technically far better for web and UI layout than Photoshop, but it's so terribly maintained and unpolished that I can't use it in a production environment.
Divvyshot, can you guys give a shout out to your designer? Love your site's design and curious if the designer is available for more clients :)

EDIT: I see it was designed in-house by Sam. Darn. Excellent team
It looks more like a degradation towards perl :-)
At a global scale, the "rains out of the atmosphere" bit mostly covers it. Condensation and evaporation processes tend to make water vapor largely self-regulating, shifting around quantities of water that dwarf human factors.

However, where does the article mention water vapor? They're doing electrolysis, i.e., cracking water molecules apart. The desired result is the liberated hydrogen; the waste is oxygen--hopefully O2, or if you're unlucky O3, which is a pollutant in the lower atmosphere.
The Life And Times Of IE6
Loved people in time, money and spirit. And created beautiful software that brought people together.

Not sure if order matters, though doing the latter makes the former easier. =)
Thank you for showing photos on a gray background - so much better for making them the focus!
> In this case isn't someClassObject just a literal that's resolved at compile-time and erased into a simple identifier symbol?

No. Its a variable assigned in runtime.

public void yesYouCan (Object foo, Class<?> someClassObject) {
// compile time?
if(foo.getClass() instanceof someClassObject) { ... }
}

Regardless, class and symbolic resolution occur at both compilation (to create the binary clsss files) and in runtime in the JVM (to load and execute the binary generated by the compiler):

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/second_edition/html/execu...

> You can't pass someClassObject as an argument to anything but an operator like new or instanceof, and you can't assign to or from it, it doesn't itself belong to a class. It isn't an object.

No, its quite possible/common to write methods that take class objects as parameters.
Oracle calls for JavaOne papers
If the app you need to script is C++ there are much more appealing options than Lua, which is very C. You get ugly C style code in your C++.

QScript, ChaiScript, and projects like boost.python and libperl++, play much better with your C++.
I'm tempted to thow out the over-quoted "luck favors the prepapred mind". Yes, Microsoft lucked out when Bill Gates' mom was a boardmember of IBM, but they certainly took full advantage of it, and their many other opportunities - most of which came with having a more accurate understanding of their market than others. What might seem like luck to the inexperienced mind is usually a well executed strategy in line with a superior model.

All in all, though, I think it wise to hold yourself responsible for your accomplishments - both geographic location and your circle of acquaintances is something you have significant control over.
For example, come up with a quantitative market hypothesis (e.g. X% of Y businesses contacted by method Z in will be interested in buying the "software". Also problem statements etc etc etc - anything quantitative. We setup a simple data collection form (a-la kissmetrics) for the minions at elance and set them at finding out the answer. They generate target lists (web scraping etc), contact them, collate the results and the rest is pretty simple. I've done it in stages so it's not all the same people doing the work.

Now we are starting to outsource the development of a repeatable sales process, which will be an interesting thing. It'll be the first project I've done almost no work on, but could be the most lucrative!

So we are still doing some of the CD, but the hard part (getting out there and finding early adopters, interviewing them, collating feedback etc) is automated.
Did you actually try this? "facebook login" in the address bar takes me to the Google results. It only takes you to the first search result if it calculates you had a high probability of wanting to go there, like typing "yahoo". Occasionally, it does the wrong thing, but not in this case.
Right. It's just a variety of solar power, converting the energy in sunlight into another form--in this case, chemical potential energy.

The potential value lies in weighing practical considerations between different ways of storing solar energy--standard solar technologies tend to produce either heat or electricity, neither of which stores well.
Actionscript 3 Ascii Art Class
Honest feed back? How about this version:

def fact(max=ARGV[0].to_i, i1=1, i2=1, i=1)
i < max ? fact(max, i2, i1+i2, i+1) : (puts i1)
end
fact()

This was the 2nd program I wrote in Ruby (I know it's recursive and therefore inefficient but my goal was to see how short I could make it not how efficient)
Oh, and the lack of an integer type seemed to make it really difficult to do proper bit shifting--i'd expect this to be the bread and butter of an embedded scripting language.
If the company goes away then the servers that invalidate your Windows will not do so anymore.

This system would be a problem, but only if having a working OS depended on Microsoft keeping its servers up.
In California, Labor Code 2870 allows you to keep inventions conceived or reduced to practice entirely on your own time and without use of an employer's resources unless such inventions "relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice . . . to the employer's business" or to "actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer."

"Relate," in this sense, can be read pretty broadly and so there is always theoretical concern over this issue if you as an employee developed something on the side.

In practice, though, there is quite a broad scope for employees to do side projects without having them swept in by such clauses. The exception is where you use expertise that is directly related to your job duties to come up with a better way of doing things in the very area in which your employer competes. Common sense suggests why that should be an exception: if the rule were otherwise, any employee could basically claim job-related inventions as his own.

If you have already left employment, and have not yet developed anything, then you should normally have little risk of having your ideas being deemed to belong to your employer. It is normally virtually impossible for an employer, for example, to prove that you were still employed "at the time of conception or reduction to practice" of your idea, as opposed to afterward. Two important exceptions to watch out for on this point: (1) if you file a patent application shortly after leaving employment relating to your employer's field, this is like waving a red flag in your employer's face that you had conceived the invention while employed; and (2) some assignment-of-invention agreements set forth a rebuttable presumption that any invention you develop within x period of leaving employment is presumed to have been conceived while still employed, and the legal effect of this sort of clause is to treat such an invention as belonging to your employer unless you can affirmatively prove otherwise (an often impossible task).
Some folks have put together a comment filter that flags any comments that are 'formally' stupid in the same way that #14 is: http://stupidfilter.org/main/
I think it is worse than that. I typed in "facebook login" clicked the first link (which wasn't RWW at the time) and here's what I got: http://tinyurl.com/ylapbnu

17 comments and not a Facebook logo in sight.
Could someone explain to a non-CS major (Maths) what would be the simplest, quickest way to implement a BASIC to JavaScript compiler?
Palm orders sudden halt on Pre, Pre Plus, and Pixi production
I highly doubt that the majority of these users are using Firefox. More likely they are using the default browser available on their operating system.
The core product hasn't really changed in years. Most of the time when I get an upgrade it's only so I can feel more current. I could be content with Fireworks 4 if necessary.
Er, no, admitting that you put a lot of effort into a speech is exactly what sprezzatura is not.

Sprezzatura would be more like "oh, was the speech that good? I hadn't noticed myself. Well, now that you mention it, I guess it just comes naturally to me...".
Yes? I do care about this stuff.

The first reason is that I'm kind of a wonk for this stuff.
I like reading about the different languages and learning them.
I have fun doing it; (I also program because I think it is fun, I could probably make plenty of money doing something else had i the desire...).

The second reason is that I believe you should use the right tool for the right job.

Firstly, by learning more paradigms I get more flexible with my programming in any language. I can pick the way to implement that will fit my solution best, rather than worrying about shoehorning the solution in my head into the wrong pattern.

Secondly, I can make better choices at the start of a project.

If I have a basic plan at the beginning of a project, I can decide based on the plan what will most likely make implementing it the most pain free. When your implementing language fits your problem domain perfectly, you can be incredibly productive.
No, it's more like a decoration piece then anything. Read research papers online of the areas you're interested in.
It is the eternal bane of the hasty cook that, alas, hot metal looks exactly like room-temperature metal.
About time someone brought some serious design chops to the table. Pretty much every major photo sharing site (bar MobileMe) rocks the web like it was 1999.
Driven people go to SV because it's easier to find other driven people to work with there. PG says this explicitly quite often.
You're pitching a product to technical users which can be duplicated with your OSS lightbox script of choice (I like iBox) and about 45 seconds of effort. I would think long and hard about what benefits you provide over including the OSS lightbox script in return for asking for money and/or breaking my site when you go down.

Incidentally, in terms of UI design, I think using a modal iBox here is probably a step backwards in many circumstances. Make it a tooltip instead. (You appear to be using this on another site. Instrument it, so that you know how many people click on the help, then actually succeed in asking a question. I predict that number will be vanishingly small.)
Honestly, the worst part is how many 40-80 year old women are using the word "sucks".
Wow. That sounds like an instant, live-remix trance music. I love it.
Denial. First stage of self discovery.

:D
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment data on IT sector employment (http://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag51.htm#workforce) the number of IT workers is relatively small compared to the rest of the population.

What about those untold millions not in IT or the sub-110 IQ "morons"? You know, the people that generally make society function? What about them? Do you think they are just going to sit idle? Or will they all be making pottery? Why should I even buy a pot made by human hands? Please.
The thing is that most people don't know what they want. A lot of people think they know what they want, but very few do. Just the other day I had a snowball fight, and it was great fun and a wonderful experience. When I woke up that morning it certainly wasn't in my calendar - I had totally forgotten how much fun fighting with snow is.

Also, it's much more about the process than the goal. Notice that people who reach their goals simply set new ones, painters paint whether they're paid or not, hackers hack in their freetime, etc.
Stuff like this is why I'm convinced the PyPy guys have the right approach. Write it once in a high level language and then compile it into different targets.
More accurately, everyone here has at least one subject about which they care so little that they won't attempt to "get" it, no matter how simple it becomes. If I start talking computing to my wife, her brain immediately turns off. If i start listening to her reading recipes, mine does the same. It's not that she doesn't enjoy using computers or that I don't enjoy eating the food she cooks, but we all have limited bandwidth and most of us have conscious filters by which we restrict our CPU cycles to subjects that actively interest us.

I think when dealing with the general public, specialists too often confuse "don't care" with "is stupid".
I save very close or more than 2/3 of my current salary.

I own my car, I bought it in cash. Where I live I need it (I already tried the whole Vespa thing, I lasted one winter and was exhausted).

I don't have a mortgage. I sold my house.

I rent. I don't want the baggage a house brings (time, maintenance, stuck in one place). My rent is ~ half of my old mortgage which was not that much and in a much more enjoyable community (behind campus and about 2 min walk from the video store, coffee shops, and grocery store).

I only buy what I truly believe I will hang on to and be happy or content with.

Why do I do this? I don't know, maybe to retire early. Maybe do the whole start up thing someday.

However, I think it's mostly because it's comfortable for me. I don't feel comfortable in one place and like the ability to just throw everything in my car and go. I don't like things that hold me back or slow me down.

Edit: this is after taxes and whatever else they take off. I'm going by what my paycheck says.
I contend that branding people as intentionally ignorant is an excuse for your own laziness. You're always going to be able to dismiss part of the problem as "too hard" to bother addressing, that way. I used to feel that way myself. It's convenient, but it's also not true.

The truth is that people are learning constantly whether they want to or not. It's what humans do. We take input from the world and turn it into cognitive models of the world. The only question is what input and how accurate the model is--things which the designer of a thing can always influence.

What you're seeing when you see laziness is people who have developed a cognitive model of computers (or whatever) that involves a lot of pain and confusion relative to the reward. Some of this is just absorbed from the surrounding culture, but much of it is gleaned from their actual experience in using them. They have learned that learning about the computer = pain, and that's what they avoid. A common element of that pain is feeling stupid and lazy for not yet understanding. (After all, that's what people who do understand computers keep telling you.) But who can blame a person for avoiding painful experiences?

Learning always involves at least a trace of confusion, but it doesn't have to be painful in a way that people want to avoid in spite of the rewards. Eliminate the unnecessary pain from these experiences and you'll find that "laziness" seems to disappear along with it.
When you define a class, say "Foo", instances of Foo are Foo objects. "Foo", itself, is an instance of a class named "Class" which is a direct descendent of the class "Object".

In Java's type system, classes are 'first class objects':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-class_object
I agree that it would be nice, and that's the world most parents try create for their kids. Outside of meticulously engineered/supervised social structures, however, I see little reason for a pure meritocricy to arise, if only for the reason that the concept of "merit" doesn't exist outside of our moral models.

And you can certainly get a promotion many ways aside from sleeping with the boss.
Hard to believe. Then again, these are probably the bottom 1%, as there are probably thousands that went to that page, out of which some were clueless enough not to be able to find the actual facebook home page, and were yet able to comment.

Some of the worse comments:

I don;t understand, new facebook sucks! WHere are all of my friends and why are there all these ads for khabrein? How to I get to my LOGIN?!?!?!?!?

I don't like Facebook's new logo. Why did they change their name to Khabrein!!!???

this is awful. more useless crap i don't want. if i wanted news info i would go somewhere else, but i don't want it, any of it. thanks for spoiling my one outlet in life.
Nope - it was designed in house by Michael Yuan.

Very talented guy. There are a couple CSS hacks in there that don't exist anywhere else on the 'net. Try to find them!
Cars are, as usual, a really poor analogy. It's true I have absolutely no idea how to fix a car if it breaks down; however, fixing cars is a highly specialized skill (especially these days) and requires expensive equipment. Companies like Facebook, meanwhile, spend millions of dollars on usability testing so that their websites and applications are easy to use, and there is the expectation that anybody _can_ use them. Now if we were talking about programming, or even system administration, it would be a more apt analogy.
Pinax, Rapidly Developing Web Sites in Python
I think you need to still sort out what you are offering/selling.
Rarely does 'I want to make a...' turn into a business.
Come at it from the other direction.
'People need ..., I can serve this need with...'.

If websites need help sections, is the best product a 'help dialog box plugin'?
How would you answer the help questions?
Are you just providing a UI element? If so, what is that truly worth, when full suites like jQuery UI exist?
Could you clarify this statement?

rs
iPhoto online but better, sweet, congrats!
I used driving as a way to illustrate the scale of the background knowledge required for the activities. There is a fair amount of background information required to drive safely that has nothing to do with physics. The rules and conventions of the road are not based on physics. Sometimes they seem to be completely devoid of logic as well. Teenagers regularly master these well enough to function. There is little fear that they will have trouble with this. Everybody does it right? (But when that fear is present, it is equally debilitating in the auto world, its just much more rare.)

Neurosurgery on the other hand, is hedged by an impenetrable wall of background knowledge that must be mastered in order to achieve even basic competency. It takes a dedicated expert a lifetime of study and practice. It really should be left exclusively to experts.

My point was that most people think operating to computers is closer to neurosurgery than driving so there's no point in even trying to understand. Just call the expert. Once they realize this is not the case, they often learn the basics fairly quickly.
You must have Java installed on your computer to use the drag-and-drop uploader.

http://imgur.com/mXc6q
'Seemingly coming out of nowhere, rumors have started circulating this week'.
This rumour has been circulating for years, and I believe Ballmer has even commented on it.
RIM does need a new OS, and Microsoft could definately benefit. But this isn't a new concept.
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