skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For several years he was able to make good bucks off his Ludditism - enticing some further hilarity from reviewers of his 2002 High-Tech Heretic . So that the Seattle Times said:

"Stoll's long experience with technology gives him authority. . . . His claims are based on facts, logic and common sense." --http://www.amazon.com/High-Tech-Heretic-Reflections-Computer...

"Authority"? They forget to mention his capability as a far-sighted prophet :)
I disagree.

I think this is a perfect topic for HN; Dressing well is important in improving self confidence, and it is vital in making good first impressions (useful for VC funding ;).

If this doesn't make sense to you, think of how you perceive a website on your first visit. Would you use a service with a design that had been slapped together in a few hours? It's the same with people. Being sloppily dressed conveys an image of laziness and carelessness.

One thing I enjoy on HN is discussions which may not be related to programming or start-ups. It's interesting to hear how hackers approach problems in other areas of their life. That being said, I'll gladly listen to fashion advice from those who have the experience to offer it, even if they are women or homosexual men.
Mad man with a moment of clarity:
What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where--in the holy names of Education and Progress--important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.
Opera 10 disappeared from YUI A-Grade Browser Support Chart ?
I think it's a mistake, but Opera 10 seems to be missing from the list of A-Grade supported browsers on the last update. Anyone know anything about this ?
Isn't much of anything rude, thoughtless, or chauvinistic? I can buy that it's true of "the web", sure, but also "businesspeople", "academics", "the people who live in your neighborhood", "the people on TV", "the people who watch TV", and "your classmates", depending on what situation you're in.
The role the YC plays in this case is hiding the memoization.

The memoizing Y combinator is the same as the Y combinator, except it doesn't re-compute inputs it's already seen.

Writing recursive functions in "Y-combinator style" is a way to expose internal recursive call sites to external inspection and manipulation.

The Y combinator version still grows the stack.
I use Long URL Please (http://www.longurlplease.com/), and most of the time don't even realize something was posted as a bit.ly or some other shortened URL until I look carefully. It replaces shortened URLs from most services with the actual URLs that they lead to.
I dont think Mac OS X server is really anything special - Mac OS X itself can be a good server. Unless your using some specific Apple-only technology like Xgrid, plain OSX is fine. And Id only use OSX as a server over linux/bsd if you really want a GUI to administer your server as opposed to command line. The GUI really is the draw of OS X generally over Linux.
Thanks for adding your input to this thread. I think that the way I am eventually going to go is the "starving artist" route. I do love creating ideas, but I hope "some other guy" can monetize them via action. I think I will just have to face the fact that like other people here (I've seen a number of threads on the topic) I will have to do some triage, filter out my best idea for execution, do it, make money, then maybe return to this problem.

I think people are willing to pay for ideas (or even a book) from someone who has proved that at least one of their ideas has had value.

Well off to finish creating my "Customer Evolution System" a piece of software that is a hybrid of the Customer Development process monitoring and a CRM I hope I can get a beta version done by the end of March and have some people here try it out, as it is especially designed with startups in mind. Then maybe pg will overlook the single founder problem and I can enter it into the next YC.

Thanks everyone on here for their time, and btw, I have added my email into my profile if anyone else has any more comments.
For those of you who didn't know, Stoll is the author of "The Cuckoo's Egg", his (true) story of tracking down a hacker that broke into Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's computers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_%28book%29
http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionag...
Information Content of Goods
In my opinion, the most exciting new uses of technology today involve bringing people together in real life, creating a more social world.

TV isolated us. The web will bring us together.
Q?: Is Theory still improving much? Is it possible to improve it a lot without breaking backward compatibility, or would that require breaking legacy support?

I'm all for Theora, but the (admittedly limited) anecdotal evidence that I have is that it isn't quite competitive with h.264 (with a good encoder like x264) at higher rez 720p and 1080p). I might be mistaken on that, though.
I'm saying that he wouldn't have rented out a bar in Portland for an 8th anniversary party, or paid the bill for 67 parties worldwide for the 10th anniversary (the two times I met him in person) unless Metafilter was pretty fucking successful. There's usually a couple Metafilter meetups somewhere in the world every week!

I do not think he would have been successful if he'd spent much more time on the codebase (it's Coldfusion!) instead of attending to the community and steering it into helping itself.
I do agree with his remarks, though the internet has come quite a ways since then in adding "human contact." Things like video chat give me the opportunity to talk to people with more human contact than I would otherwise be able to because of distance. Overall though, despite all the things I like about the internet, it is not a substitute for going outside and talking in person.
I've worked as an IC before without much difficulty. I did have to pay $500/year in employment practice insurance and go through validation. The validators seemed most intersted in a statement-of-work and an employment agreement between myself and my company. I had my own equipment and came in about once a month for meetings. Paid my taxes, used the legal deductions, and never got audited.

I can't imagine why anyone would believe a contractor is an employee if they apply for unemployment.Such a person has admitted they willfully lied under oath to the IRS when filing their 1099. People with so little integrity should never be hired or contracted with; I hope all such people are indited for fraud.
TRue. Just red it! Great book about happiness in general not just working productively!
I will be there for sure.
Also, MS never lost a case/ruling on contractors. They settled with a man named Vincento, who they would have defeated at trial. At the same time, they litigated antitrust an cases they had no chance of winning. MS has among the worst legal representation in the world.
what on earth is this doing on HN?
the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Well that didn't take long to change.
Right, what I'm saying though is that people were willing to stick it out and fork instead of rewriting. I'm surprised a programmer would do that.
I believe that our legislative branch is nearly broken. But for the most part, people are tolerant of their situation. But how long can we go on without a functioning (i.e. serving the people) legislative branch? That's like driving down a winding mountain road without brakes. If the grade gets too steep, and the road too twisty, we'll fly into a ravine.
I'd say engineering quality is tangential to success -- not strictly orthogonal. Still, it's close enough to orthogonal that it takes a heck of a lot of attention to notice the difference.
I perma-deleted my Facebook account last week.

Whatever the motivation of this acquisition, Facebook simply doesn't appear to do enough to look after my privacy, especially given the personal and sometimes sensitive nature of the data they are handling.

The notion that they want to expand into online payments and banking is laughable without a dramatic rethink of their approach to data.

For a company which built their reputation on protecting their users' privacy to follow the path it has is tantamount to business suicide.
Earlier today I went to the Facebook profile of a friend of mine who lives out of state. He had uploaded a video of his child singing and had it on his profile.

There are many more means of human contact than meeting at a coffee shop.
I've read the book "The Living Dead", mentioned at the bottom, that makes a similar convincing case that there are plenty of people doing basically nothing within most large organisations.
ISO 3103:1980 (ISO standard for tea making)
Splashy Music Publishing, the music supervisor's best friend
Splashy Music Publishing is your solution for getting all king of quality music for your productions. Become a part of a great music catalog by submiting your best songs to splashy music publishing
Livejournal was very well done, Brad Fitzpatrick innovated a lot on every facet of it: the hosting platform, monetizing it, the social network aspects, privacy features, etc. Before NetNewsWire took off like a rocket, it was by far the most popular feedreader in use (its "friends page"). Tumblr feels pretty well put together too, as long as you fit in with it's opinionated style.

As far as open source stuff, the only great ones are the ones you write yourself :). A couple years ago I wrote a tumblr/4chan hybrid for AppEngine that I never got around to using. Both AppEngine and Heroku make fantastic platforms for such things, there are a bunch of good blog engines for each that you could use as a starting point to great success.

The problem with Wordpress and Movable Type is that they are simply terrible, no good, piles of shit; full of terrible ideas poorly implemented on crappy platforms. Anything else is better. At least Movable Type committed suicide by license-wank, it's too bad that something worse stepped in to take its place. That Wordpress is becoming a premier application framework that people use to get Accounts+Admin depresses me.
Interesting at first, but after a couple minutes of video without any kind of explanation of what the bullets were actually doing, this got boring quick.

With such visually compelling frames, why not throw a popover that provides some context for those of us without physics degrees?
Security Cameras, 
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I think there is both large scope to do research as well as exciting momentum in Large-Scale Machine Learning. As data in many domains arrives faster than we are able to learn from it, we need to switch from the traditional "one-shot" machine learning approach to systems that are able to mine continuous, high-volume, open-ended data streams as they arrive. Establishing the theoretical basis of such an approach, is still virgin territory.
I think you're right - they are not a direct competitor.

However, their API sets eliminated the need for Facebook Connect because you could make virtually any data set portable, check it out in the wild:

http://www.traderjaw.com/invite.php

or google "Powered by Octazen Solutions Invite Engine"
What's the difference between tangential and orthogonal?
probably would be running [Linux] on my Air right now except that I can’t quite get it to. The 2nd gen Airs are not very kind to Linux at the moment

I'm running Ubuntu on a 2nd gen Air. The big problem is getting it to boot. The -noapic kernel option helps. Also I have a little ritual where when turning it on I hit the power switch at the beginning grey screen then proceed to turn it on again.
If you actually read the article, you'll see many of his points are valid.
PyCon 2010: What every developer should know about database scalability
I tried that about 8 ways from Sunday - all I was getting was a black screen of ambivalence and a dead USB port until I COPS'd it. I finally just gave up for the time being.
I jailbroke my iPod Touch in order to disable the auto-rotation "feature". I've never installed a cracked app.
- v |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occams_razor
[iPhone App] "Downloads" App: A Sample Use Case
Behind the Windows 7 memory usage scaremongering
I've never had to take off this when typing: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002HI5N5A/
As a hacker who had 3-4 xServes for several years, do not run OS X Server by choice. If you need your server app to run on OS X because you are making some crazy decisions in your life, use the standard client OS X. The Server version adds bullshit and pain, and doesn't remove any of the standard Desktop bullshit. The only bad thing about xServes is that Apple doesn't support running the standard OS X on them!

If by hook or by crook you find yourself as a developer running OS X Server, do not use the built-in Apache or any of that shit. Compile it all yourself with MacPorts, and manage it as if it were just another unix box. The only Apple provided services you should use are SSH, NFS, SMB, and NetBoot.

I was mostly running them for NetBoot (doable from Linux, but it's already enough of a PiTA on big heterogenous networks), and because it was the most politically viable means to have root on some non-CS servers at my school -- otherwise they'd be Windows or old RHEL, domesticated into the domain, with storage on an anemic SAN, and probably virtualized to death.

As a sole server for a small business, it would not actually be too bad, as long as you weren't trying to host real webapps from it using the included Apache, and didn't really try to use the OpenDirectory stuff. The file sharing stuff works, Mail/Calendar/Contacts server stuff is pretty well done, and the Wiki server is fucking fantastic -- I saw it demoed at a Leopard tech talk in December 2006 and still haven't seen a better rich text editing interface in a browser. Unfortunately nobody used it because they stuck with 10.4 Server as the core OS in 10.5 Server was riddled with regressions (I've heard 10.6 Server is a brand new day)
He has a handful of good points (eg. the importance of human contact), but most of his examples are laughable because he picked precisely the things that the Internet dominated (eg. daily newspaper).

His mistake was equating hype with falsehood—it's true that at the time people were predicting that you would do anything and everything over the Internet, and clearly that will not be the case anytime soon. However with technology as powerful as the Internet, it was crazy to assume that it would not change the way we live in any significant ways. Even trying to predict the things that wouldn't change proved to be an insurmountable obstacle for this guy.
Ask HN: How do I go about shopping for someone to build me a website/flash app?
I have a video game idea that I'd like to pay someone to build me in flash.
Also I have a need for someone to make me a website which will require some cgi content.
Is there a good place to shop for this kind of service instead of just throwing darts at internet?
Manage multiple accounts in Twitter
This is the top quote " Many online merchants are considered high risk by banks will and struggle to get a competitive rate for transactions. It is not unheard off that transaction fees of 10% are levied on some online traders. Before you embark on your venture solve this problem."
I agree, but it wasn't my title...
It sounds like your usage of jQuery is advanced enough that you'd benefit from getting involved in the jQuery alpha and beta releases - just dropping them in to your projects temporarily and filing any bugs that come up.
This is definitely very cool. I was actually fortunate enough to attend a presentation that the first author gave just a couple of days ago. It was a good talk and the slides were substantially based on the ones from the project page, so I'd certainly recommend checking those out.

A couple of notes from the talk (paraphrased):

- Image-space photon mapping solves the same problem as traditional photon mapping; it does not introduce any extra simplifying assumptions. The performance improvements come primarily from (a) acceleration of the first bounce using rasterization, and (b) the improved radiance sampling technique yielding good results with 100x fewer photons than traditional methods.

- The slides that I saw included some extra material, including a list of other common numerical problems that can be relatively easily formulated as special cases of the rendering equation. Since image-space photon mapping produces randomized solutions to the full rendering equation, there may be extensions from this work to other important problems. (He drew an analogy between convolution and rendering a scene computing only the first bounce.)

- Q: It's not clear to me exactly how to convert some of the other numerical problems you mentioned into scenes for rendering. Which of your contributions do you think might be most valuable to people working on these problems? A: The radiance estimate. I think the lesson to draw from that is, no matter what your problem is, it's a good idea to try using fewer samples and extracting more information from each one.

- Q: Can you handle volumetric effects or sub-surface scattering? A: No, we assume that all scattering occurs at an object surface.

- Q: Why are you attempting to achieve physical accuracy? Studies have shown that people are really bad at judging whether the scene they're looking at is physically accurate. A: You don't want your artists to have to understand the guts of your rendering techniques. When you start using hacks to capture only a few perceptually relevant effects, the result can be fragile, and as soon as the artists change anything the scene looks terrible. If your renderer is physically correct, though, everything just works.

EDIT: Made point (a) in the first note a little more precise.
The VCs who did that would get a bad name.

Also, it is in everyone's best interest that the angel investor network is healthy.
Well yes, but the internet provides native affordances for said behavior: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/
looks like techsansar is a serial spammer, look at his(her?)previous submissions.

delicious yummy spam.
Update: http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/02/19/laptop.suit/index.html?h...
Looks like an Airport Express
The sea level used to be 300 feet lower than where it is today. The planet changes, deal with it. Why is whatever the temperature was in 1700 the ideal temperature? If we have the power to change the temperature of the earth we should be thinking what the ideal temperature we'd like it to be is and do that instead of picking the day we started burning coal.
I was talking to my wife today about how a great many people HATE being sold things.

Part of the reason is that most salespeople are all, "HEY! BUY SOME MORE USELESS CRAP!?!?" and not very "What can I do to help you, or make your experience here more pleasant?"
At least I was trying to add information, where you were just making a dumb joke and then a dumb personal attack.
all of the share icons below the headline are more than a little ironic
I've had my Mac through these folks for a while; I was unwilling to give up the idea of owning the gear (so VPSes were out) and was pretty happy with the thing in general. I run Linux on it.
This was really cool to watch. However, I wish there was information on the properties of each of the substances being bombarded with bullets. I could make reasonable guesses as to what some of them were, but does anyone know if this is available anywhere?
Five Marketing Tools You Can Print On The Cheap
Cheap printing is perhaps the savior of the small business marketing environment; since contemporary technologies have made it more affordable than ever for even micro-businesses to compete with the big boys.
"The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."

So he got the newspaper thing (partially) wrong. The government hasn't changed, nor has education. The truth of the education thing is this: you can learn anything on your own, but a teacher can tell you in 20 minutes what might take you a month to figure out by yourself. Government will take a long time to change. And (many) more people still rely on mainstream media outlets for their news than any other source (though they may get their news from said media outlet's online presence, rather than their print one.
>It's extraordinarily difficult to execute well with users socially and execute well on the engineering.

Very good point. This is exactly what I find difficult. I can write hard code, but then I'm lost in the sea of the web.
Chinook - The 'impossible to beat' Checkers computer program.
He's also the Klein bottle guy.
It took me 9 seconds to find the date of the Battle of Trafalgar vs 15 minutes in 1995. Moore's law for information search?
Web grabber | web spider
He fills a niche. The world requires a public face for every viewpoint. Alex Jones, Pat Robertson, Al Sharpton, The Crazy Guy Down The Street. Everyone with a viewpoint wants some more important authority to cite to support their viewpoint.
Official: FBI probing PA school webcam spy case
Semapedia
Long time lurker, first time commenting, but I think this may apply to me.

The company I work for now has me classified as an independent contractor (I do web development work) but you would think that I'm an employee by the way they treat me. My pay is salary based, I have to be available between the times they specify, I speak directly to a "supervisor", I have paid holidays/vacations and sick days, and I'm not allowed to take on other work, even if they're not direct competitors.

Is what they're doing wrong? This seems like a pretty sweet deal for them because they don't have to give me any real benefits or pay any employee taxes. I on the other hand, who really isn't an "Independent Contractor", have a tax-lien against me now because I can't afford the huge amount of taxes the IRS wants at the end of each year and have no idea what I'm going to do about it.
Oh noes! If you do that, shallow girls who want your money won't sleep with you! Oh noes! (Did I say "oh noes"? Oh noes!)

(Sorry, some of the comments above really irked me. "Buy expensive shoes because that's what girls look at." The ones that are settling for you over their favorite TV star that they can't get, anyway.)
If you have a mac, open Spotlight and type "battle of trafalgar." You'll get a result from Dictionary.app with the date of the battle and a very short summary.

The answer to his question now sits on the hard drives of millions of consumer computers around the world. This guy must be some sort of anti-psychic.