skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Extensions Broke Your Browser? How to Enter 'Safe Mode' in Google Chrome
Interestingly, gigaom.com is hosted on wordpress.com as well. Makes sense if you're looking to outsource admin and security for a large blog, really.
The same could be said for lawyers and doctors. For every ER doctor, there are 20 family doctors (GP), medical sales, researchers. In the past year I've met many people who hold JDs but aren't practicing lawyers (some do it because of boredom, challenge, or an intersecting business interest). I've rarely met a lawyer that uses esquire, unless they are trying to impress a date.
Will Google's Translator Phone Lead Us to Babylon or Babble On?
The examples he cites are from times when he was an employee. He has founded/co-founded two firms: Epiphany and Rocket Science Games. I would be surprised if he didn't apply what he had learned as an employee to those startups.
Right but we still call those non-PE'd engineers engineers. And in many cases the "isn't a hazard" aspect is only a tiny part of the design.
Ahh, that makes sense. I was misreading it as "this is the nature of a 12-year old".

It seems the more I talk to people who study education and teaching methods, the more I realize the whole thing is kinda screwed. Whenever you hear someone talking about what the "real problem" is, they are at least partially right. Most things people bring up as problems have data to back them up, even seemingly contradictory methods have promising data for both sides. Such a thing suggests we haven't a clue what is actually happening, and are still fumbling for a baseline to ask questions about.
No problem, you can contact me if you have further questions or need more guidance: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dirtbox
How to protect your password from keyloggers
After 100 Years, Are The Boy Scouts Still Relevant?
The best model that I have discovered for "emulating empathy" in a work setting is "Appreciative Inquiry." See http://appreciativeinquiry.case.edu/ for an overview; the "Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry" offers an excellent introduction. http://www.amazon.com/Thin-Book-Appreciative-Inquiry-2nd/dp/...

I have blogged about early conversations with customers at
http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2009/12/15/early-customer-conve... and suggest some other techniques as well.
It's not necessary at all; but this can reach a market that isn't familiar with RSS (which is still a TON of people).
Can you turn off the remote app killswitch?

Reminds me of the loss of functionality for the Amazon readers to auto-read files. It was done by Amazon and pushed to all hardware/software.
Hello HN, thank you for all the great comments! My name is Munish Dayal, I'm a newly admitted attorney in California and we started this site not long ago because we thought that most of the Legal Q&A sites weren't that great (a lot of them charge money). I briefly worked as a corporate lawyer at a firm in California that charges obscene rates but I wanted to say that I am personally going to try to make an effort to answer every question on the site that I can, especially for entrepreneurs bootstrapping their own startups that may not have resources to seek counsel, no matter how small. My passion is working with startups since I'm attempting to start my own so I am happy to at least try to answer any of your questions. I can't guarantee that it will always be a definitive answer but I hope it will at least help you.

I wanted to address a few concerns - I am building up a stable of attorneys, new and experienced to answer questions so the people answering your questions on our site aren't just a bunch of clueless law students. I know our design isn't that great (I'm not much of a designer) but we are going to work on it. George Grellas - you are right to point out that the quality will be variable and this will never replace a talented, experienced attorney (like yourself) that is necessary for startups seeking capital; I can't guarantee I will know something about every question, but we are shooting for it as a resource. I will keep checking this thread but thank you all for the support and I hope you will find this useful.
I love xkcdexplained.
Don't forget WebSocket ;)
Weekly Rental in Mountain View?
Does anyone have tips for a cheap weekly rental or motel in Mountain View? I'm working on a start-up and would like to stay somewhere cheap.
I read my Usenet newsgroups and my mailing lists using the same software, with threaded conversations in multiple branches etc. handled in uniform fashion.

The same style for email conversations (in the GMail grouping sense) works less well because, as it turns out, the heuristic of using the title for thread membership works quite well for mailing lists but not so for personal mail, where "Hello" and similar variations come up too often.

The identity issue is less about functionality than it is about the risk of accidentally using the wrong persona. Not that I'm trying to be schizophrenic, but I do have a degree of compartmentalization in different areas of my online life.
Right now we're taking the figure monetization out later approach to the site.

As I mentioned in other comments, we don't have any plans to charge money for the site for at least a year. We both have full-time jobs so its not a big priority and our focus now is to build a community around it.
Geeze, is 3.5 months a typical current or California hiring period???

Nope. A week is quick for a big company (default for a startup), a month is slow. Two to three months is Google or Hewlett-Packard.
Wordpress' business model:

1. Write horribly insecure free/open source blog software. Become massively popular.

2. Wait for peoples' blogs to start getting hacked. Users then realize they can't / don't want to keep up with the alarmingly frequent vulnerabilities / patches, and turn to wordpress.com to handle hosting.

3. Profit!
A correct answer for California says very little about a correct answer in Nevada, let alone in another country.
IP block that vip.wordpress.com lives on is owned by LAYERED-TECH

I'd imagine the move has more to do with wordpress.com actively updating the software vs. hw / network infrastructure.

Am I wrong in assuming that TechCrunch was hosted on CloudSites?
What do any of those points have to do with the look of the site?
Sure. But under max load, that gzip will be adding to your problems.

And of course, graceful failure is an art in itself. You have to start turning down requests before you actually hit peak capacity, or you risk getting stuck in a thrashing pit.
What did you find distasteful if you don't mind me asking?

Flash cloud?

Personalized ads based on user shared interest?
WordPress VIP hosting has its pros and cons.

They handle everything, which makes keeping a site up even easier than using RackSpace. Their support team is very knowledgeable about WordPress, which is a huge plus.

However, they take an Apps Store approach- they review every line of code. (I even once had Matt Mullenweg himself show up on a few commits; he changed the use of "Wordpress" in a few comments to the proper "WordPress")

This is problem. Their server is quirky- they have a lot of extra, mostly undocumented code (code that isn't part of WordPress), as well as some weird PHP settings. So, it wasn't rare for changes (that were thoroughly tested on our dev site) to break the site for no apparent reason. It would take a few hours to a few days to get the changes reverted.
For the last couple of years, you can just click an "Upgrade" link in your admin and it just upgrades itself painlessly. It also lets you know in the admin Dashboard when there's a new version out to upgrade to. Honestly it seems like they've gone out of their way to make it easy for self hosted users (like myself) to keep current.
horribly insecure free/open source blog software

I always see this on HN, but no one ever bothers to elaborate. Can you please do so?
The first few sentences of each answer are disclaimers and add a lot of noise. Any way to push the disclaimers to the end of the answers?
I have no beef with open audits of published science that is used in decisions of economic consequence.

But I would only add that sometimes you learn a lot more from trying to reproduce a result without the code/schematics of the original experiment. If you implement it yourself and get a different answer, you should publish it and not bias yourself by paying too much attention to the original authors interpretation. As long as you can justify your methods you should be fine.

Also, I feel that it's a lot more fun to design an experiment knowing that it's possible than it is to merely copy someone else's published procedure. A month in the lab spares you a day in the library!
How it can already be heralded as a "twitter killer" in the absence of a killer feature is beyond me.
Not just bugs, but also ambiguities in specification, which helps us to refine our higher level specifications.
I'm not sure the tone is appropriate. This happens at every layer of the stack. Entire ecosystems evolve around hosting software systems from laying the wires between cities to comment hosting services. Really, who better to maintain it than the people who built it?

If you were an oracle database customer, wouldn't you outsource your oracle database management to oracle before you'd outsource it to microsoft?
What they do is engineering so they are called engineers. Software is very different from what an engineer requires. As Toyota is learning at the moment. Mistakes can be extremely costly. Not in firetrap way, but in the end product. You design a product that will have a permanent physical form. You only get one shot to get it right. It's how AutoCAD and Solidworks can justify their existence. Engineering is all about rules, you are constrained by them.

Software is about everything except rules. Software development is one of the few professions that has a creative and methodical aspect. There is very little preventing me from writing the next great app. I just need the creativity to get me there and the methodology to keep me on track.
Lisp: Worse is Better, Originally published in 1991
I was thinking more about the overhead of building arrays of small strings. Depending on how you measure memory usage, Python is 3-4x more efficient at building lists of one-byte strings than PHP is wrt memory usage.
As an analyst, I find that the difference between 24% and 25% rarely matters in practice. Pie charts are useful for showing that big differences are big, and that unimportant things are unimportant. Most other uses require a notion of absolute size of the pie in addition to breakdown, which can be communicated in a pie chart, but it's harder.
Interview with Founder of Pay Per Character Advertising - TheTextPage
There's also an animated version, which uses music from the same person:

http://www.vimeo.com/7151435
The Filter Reboots As Recommendation Engine For Hire, Ex-Googler Joins Board
But the military and NASA don't claim to be generating reproducible knowledge through the use of their code. In particular, the military doesn't WANT other people to be able to reproduce what their code does. Also, there is a difference between operational code (code that runs a physical object like a lander or a UAV) and analytical code. NASA makes some of their code available here: http://opensource.arc.nasa.gov
This kind of article rings hollow with me since it seems like some company out there is always complaining about not finding just the right cog to fit in their machine. Yes, the great candidates are few and far between, but it's not like companies are forbidden from teaching/mentoring a few qualified individuals every now and then...

IT needs are changing. There won't be enough job candidates with $DESIRABLE_ATTRIBUTES, obviously, because $DESIRABLE_ATTRIBUTES aren't taught (formally), are acquired through experience, are in demand right now, and weren't a few years ago.

Dwight Gibbs of Input says: "This isn't just about crimping cable, installing OSes and racking and stacking IP anymore." Right, Mr Gibbs, but a few years ago, that's exactly what it was about. I remember applying for jobs a few years back with (basically) those exact requirements.
Not much elaboration is needed. WordPress has a surprising number of critical security holes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress#Vulnerabilities
Single page: http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/02/boy-scouts-at-100-years...
What I'm trying to say is engineer is a generic term, and the PE's can go get their own damned word.
Sure I will definitely implement that from now on,just felt it was important to point it out initially.
The Cringely 2010 (Not in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour
That seems like a bogus reason. Some people who had already decided that climate change was fraud decided to read comments in the code and interpret them to fit their worldview.

Other people read the CRU code and made intelligent comments about the code.
We all do.
I've been using YUI Grids for a couple of years and it simplified my CSS. I use it to "reset" all the default rules for the browsers so that things like font sizes and spacing appears uniform between the browsers. Then I use it to set up an initial grid layout for the base columns and rows of the site.

I moved from YUI to jQuery because I wanted to use a lighter framework, but I've continued to use YUI CSS because it's still pretty tight.

However, I hope that YUI does look into add compatibility for HTML5 tags because that is something that is lacking.
True, but I don't think development versions of browsers have 75MM users at this time. Maybe in 2020 when HTML5 is ratified. :)
This is to be expected from an abstraction layer. WordPress hosting is really a lot of abstraction layers that facilitate communication between bloggers and communities and it does a lot of that. One of the things wordpress hosting abstracts is server management, which Rackspace also does, though not specifically for wordpress.

There are lots of processes running on the machines and if someone uploads malicious code or bad performing code, it could be detrimental to other blogs on the same machine or machines or sets of machines which may even be managed by Rackspace, who knows, and databases all working together. Systems at that scale are constantly evolving to fend off hackers from within the wordpress community and outside it. From within the network and beyond the firewall.

Rackspace has their own set of problems lower in the stack than wordpress. Lower in the stack than any application specific code, be it within wordpress's open source or a JavaScript library, a custom website for a mobile phone or image processing.
I think the difference between IE6 and WebKit is that in all of Apple's documentation they say WARNING DO NOT USE -WEBKIT EXTENSIONS -- THESE ARE NOT STANDARDIZED YET AND ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE and explain the dangers of using standards that are currently in development.

Microsoft is kind of the opposite, encouraging people to use ActiveX, Silverlight, etc. as hard as they can.
Fair enough, you don't have to push updates. My wording should have been more precise. Apple can pull or disable apps. Not sure about direct OS pushes. But they can at least soft force you get an update by bundling desired features with undesired features.
12 Hours of Matt Cutts can Make you see stuff
Ok, I’ll have to break e-mail week for this… I like watching clips on YouTube. A couple of weeks ago I spent watching 12 hours of video from the Google Webmaster Help channel. Yes, that means all of it. (yes… I am sick…)

I truly feel like I am onto something here…
When I think of IE6 I think of "popular (but frozen) platform that we have to take pains to support," but that's not the iPhone at all. Safari is very standardsfull, and still moving forward.

Beyond that, the good point - to develop for standards, not to a particular browser - is obscured by a cloud of anti-iPhone rants.
It's inspiring to imagine making something so great as to have even a fraction of this sort of response.
So Android won't be any better, I was hoping for a less supervised computing experience. Something as simple as copying files to and from the device, or installing/compiling software on it is not the default approved behavior.
Persistence.js: An Asynchronous Javascript ORM for HTML5/Gears
Any chemistry guys able to explain in detail how this works?
Thanks. Admittedly I overweight choice. I respect that beauty can come from the contrasting space between freedom and framework.
When you outsource your core competency, what value do you actually have left? What is this, the 4th "we're going to throw a hissy fit at our hosting company" that Arrington has done because he can't be bothered to learn how to replicate a simple blog?
Beauty lies not only in looks. Why did you take it that way?
This is not just branding, but considering future prospects. No one wants to adopt a library and then have the project go dead.

What should I use jQuery and not some other .js library? Because I know jQuery will still be there in a year.
“Y Combinator” is a generic term

Well that is interesting. Why shouldn't YC be a xerox or kleenex brand? PG seems consistently annoyed with naming and labels applied to YC, but I don't think he'd mind a generalization of the name.
A friend's startup used Rackspace Cloud for all of two weeks. It's a really strange product. It pretends to be a cloud service but it's really just Yet Another Shared Host, only more expensive. After their account got suspended without notification for exceeding their "processor cycles" limit (wtf?) they bailed.
The wired article goes into more detail and is also quite interesting. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia
Maverick, haha, I'm far from it. Just tired of the restrictions on computing devices I buy. If what you say is true, than I'll have the same woes with Android. In that case it's a shame there's not really an open mobile hardware device out there.

I liken the Apple version of the net to AOL. It's a fully controlled interface with one corporate interest at heart. If Google's no better that doesn't mean I should be stuck with Apple.

What I want is a framework where I don't need approval to copy files to and from my device. That's it.

"This whole post was poorly written, sophomoric and not thought out at all." I challenge you to do better (I'm serious I get a lot out of well written conflicting views).
I admit to being a very challenged writer. It takes hours of effort for me to write something that comes across as coherent, but it's good practice.
I think you misunderstood that sentence. Beauty doesn't necessarily mean appearance, especially for aphorisms and poetry. If you're marrying someone because they're kind and caring, that's the thing about them that you're finding beautiful.

And this confusion only goes to prove the original point, about beauty being illdefined.
I dunno about CA, but I've interviewed with 2 startups in Atlanta, GA. In both cases I had a response in under 24 hours.
Your Focus is Under Attack by Facebook's Latest Re-design
Convincing people that broadband is stable enough to bet their income on is going to be a hard one.
There are actually lots and lots of video tributes to this strip, although this new one does feature a bunch of celebrities. Here's one of the best older ones:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvGhEJyfC7U
My wife is one of them. For financial and geographic reasons, she started at a community college then transferred to a proper university after finishing there. She had to retake one course that wouldn't transfer and a couple of classes at the community college became electives when they transferred over, but for the most part she saved a lot of money that way.
i didn't realize that hosting wordpress was techcrunch's core competency. i assumed that's what wrodpress did.
Is the original Discovery channel ad based on something of its own altogether?

Either way, the 'boom de ya da' is very catchy and nice.
Makes me kind of sad to be still using the G1...
This looks great!

My wife owns a dance studio so I'd love to get her switched over to this instead of QuickBooks POS. I hate it because there's this insanely complex process to get it connected to a regular QuickBooks install.

To even bring up switching over these would be her requirements:

1. Integrate with QuickBooks (not QB POS, but regular QuickBooks)

2. Manage inventory very well.

3. Accept QuickBooks merchant service (whatever the one you sign up with when you install QB POS).

4. Have a way to operate when the internet is down.

Note that there are credit card gateway services like intercept so your customers can use their own merchant services. That would probably drive up your adoption.
Isn't FarmVille a Flash game? If so, it presumably uses Flash XML sockets instead of Comet-style browser hacks.
That is uncommonly long. In most cases, decisions for Engg. positions are made in a lot less time. [I work for FB]
In that Flash piece at the top, I can't click ahead to "Manage your store" or "Secure data" or "Try it free". You have to wait for the movie to progress forward. You should change that.
An offline mode should work. Doesn't HTML 5 support something like that? Otherwise Google gears. Otherwise maybe an applet or something?
I haven't tried out their product yet, but it seems like that would be one of the first things they would've thought of. Probably a way to do transactions offline and upload when there is a connection.
Funniest Quote About Python in 2009
Building trust as an entrepreneur
Agreed, that definitely a hurdle here :)

Most people using a POS system already require an internet connection for processing credit cards, so either way it's critical to a retailer.

If someone's connection isn't stable we recommend a dial-up as a backup plan. We're also investigating html5 and other options for offline functionality. You're definitely right thought, not everyone's comfortable with web-based pos software (yet)
GigaOm is funded by TrueVentures, and Automattic (WordPress's company trading name) is also TrueVentures back, with one of their partners working as the full-time CEO.

It's not surprising GigaOm is so tightly integrated into Wordpress.com - it's more surprising a competitor like TC now is.
Google Creating Twitter Clone for Gmail
He said that they're using LAMP. I'd like to hear more about how they deal with schema updates and how they model their data in general.
I'm not sure creativity or rules are a good distinction. People can engineer lots of things in different ways and software can have plenty of rules.
I completed the second year of high school German by spending a few summer days at the local library. The teacher lent me a second year book for the summer. I'd started my language requirement late, in my junior year, and wanted to make up time and get to a more interesting class. I'm pretty sure it was not much more than 10 partial days' effort, and maybe less. This was without a German speaker to practice with, other than a pen pal. (Well, Dad still remembered some from his school days and travels, but he didn't use it much and I did this on my own.)

However, I had just gone on a school trip to Germany early that summer. Just nine days -- not long enough to really pick much up German -- especially amidst a herd of English speaking contemporaries. But it was a great trip and so very motivating. (I've remained friends with the tour guide to this day.)
Right. Their core competency is tech journalism. Not technology.
Quick comment - is there any benefit in using flash for the start trial now button?
Yea we're working on offline support with HTML5 now. We were really happy when we heard about that :) I think it's a better way to go than having another completely separate application
This article pulls my favorite description of Demand Media from that article:

"Imagine a classroom where one kid raised his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else."
Way to go. Web based POS's are definitely the future.

An online demo might be a good idea. Best of luck. Maybe Intuit will but it :)