skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't disagree that this has been overblown, but in fairness it would be fairly difficult to reach down and pull the gas pedal up while the engine is raging and the vehicle is undergoing significant forward acceleration, while the driver is presumably trying to avoid colliding into other vehicles and objects.

Of course, they should just shift it to neutral and let it redline.
Is the world ready for name based HTTPS vhost service?
For me it is about consistency. With javascript on the client and the server, it's easier to write code once and move it around. Compared to having to write perl, java, php, whatever on the server side and javascript on the front.

It reduces the learning curve for new developers because they only have to learn javascript, not javascript plus something else.
> That isn't true; that ends up with the wall from the middle move in a different spot.

Oops yes you are right. They would only be of the same value if the map was symmetrical on the diagonal line going between the first position and the last one.

I wonder it they should be similar (at least in situations where you don't touch walls).
> I'm having second thoughts on picking up an iPad now.

Seriously? Comparing one box that runs the same software iPhones and iPods run to another than runs... Windows Mobile?
Ask HN: Help beta test my startup and possibly win $50
Jon & the Daily Show crew have a satirical way of covering certain topics without actually covering them, which I appreciate.

It's the same reason that most of my news comes from the Daily Show and news.bbc.co.uk
I’d appreciate any thoughts about the giveaway and or the concept. Thanks!
They're just trying to hurt your productivity
Being distracted while driving is less safe than simply driving--given that your car is in good working order. If you have a stuck accelerator, you're going to crash if you can't fix it. I'll take the distraction and possible loss of reaction time over the sudden and guaranteed death of flipping a curve at 120+, personally.
How does a founder get fired? So, the CEO says "you're fired". Well, I'm guessing that if you're a founder then that means you're a co-owner. So, don't you just tell the CEO, "um... no"?
I think the real issue here is just letting anyone use your servers for whatever they want. It's a big problem in the cloud because even there, you're guilty by association.

The cloud providers are going to have to be more scrupulous about who they allow to use their infrastructure if they don't want to tarnish the image of their upstanding customers.
Indeed, you don't need to do it ever. I don't take CVV codes, nor does 37 Signals.
Like others are mentioning, Javascript is clean, familiar, easy, and has some compelling language features to boot (closures, JSON, etc).

Cultural norms and design patterns in Javascript Land increasingly orbit around projects like jQuery. This sort of influence works out spectacularly-well if you've spent the last several years working countless hours on browser-side code and suddenly stumble on nodejs and its evented/closure style of programming. Perhaps this doesn't describe you, but from my vantage point, this describes a vast number of programmers. There are a lot of people in that demographic who want to be able to rapidly write out web apps in the same frame of mind client and server side and not have to switch to thinking in Python or Ruby.

The fact that V8's engine is competitively fast isn't hurting these efforts either.
Here's Yegge on the topic:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.ht...

... though he doesn't explicitly say he's talking about Javascript, it's pretty likely that he's talking about Javascript.

1) It's got C-like syntax.

2) It's got the dynamic- and functional-language features that make people happy.

3) We're stuck with it no matter what. Changing the world's installed base of web browsers takes about a decade; such is the lesson of IE6. The only universally-supported client-side language on web browsers is Javascript. Its successor, should it exist, hasn't even been sighted on the horizon. [1] So we're in for at least another decade in which every web developer needs to know Javascript.

4) Because of #3, lots of folks are working to make Javascript fast and reliable. There are several JS interpreter projects in active competition. That kind of focus has already paid off in spades, and is going to pay off even more over time. Those of us who remember the days when Java was considered painfully slow, to the point where people complained about how crippled it was, understand what happens when the bulk of the world's compiler wizards spend a decade optimizing a language's runtime: It tends to become better. Much better.

---

[1] The only serious challenger, Flash, is not only proprietary, widely loathed, suffering from a PR slump, and under direct attack from Apple but is also... based on ECMAscript, a.k.a. Javascript. Or so I understand. So it's more of an alternative runtime than a real alternative language.
Visual Math Friday -- new article series on catonmat
Strategy: Planning for a Power Outage Google Style
Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative
I'm the developer of tweetminer and my only goal has been to build a viable tech startup (something like hootsuite) from the word go (as regularly discussed on the podcast techzing)

I've followed all the classic advice:

1) Build something to scratch your own itch
2) Cultivate a community using a service like get satisfaction
3) Ask customers what their pain points are and implement those features
4) Be transparent
5) Check Twitter TOS tot he best of my ability before releasing a new feature

I only mention all this because I think this story highlights the issues of "playing in someone else's sand box"

Even if you play by all the rules it's no guarantee that you won't be affected. It's an important risk to fully appreciate and understand when considering what your next startup will be.
Google and RSS.
Google Acquires Docverse To Further Office Arms Race
What Would You Do For $5?
Canada vs. USA Final Made Power Consumption Jump by ±600 Megawatts in Ontario
that's how I failed my first driver's test.

Was reversing into a spot, and hit gas instead of brakes.
That may all be true but in the absence of a compelling antagonistic narrative it makes for a poor online rant. Your position is way too nuanced.

Try to reframe it as nerds vs the world or even better, nerds vs the normals and then maybe we can talk.
Seeing that you require an email address, the first thing I looked for was your privacy policy. Unfortunately, the lightbox screen doesn't scroll in my browser (Opera 10.10) so I couldn't skim through all of it.
That's still way too close for comfort. "Oh, don't mind these laws, we don't actually enforce them except when it's really necessary. We're on your side! Just trust us."

It's just a small step from suddenly "needing" to question what constitutes "really necessary". We should be resisting tyranny as it creeps up on us, not remain complacent until after it becomes a true crisis.
This needs to be more than just a whiteboard, and it needs iPhone/iPad apps ASAP.

a) What does this have over Microsoft NetMeeting?

b) What does this have over Abode Connect Pro?

c) Drawing with the mouse sucks

d) Writing with the mouse sucks

e) Placing text boxes sucks

f) Most conferences use pre-prepared slides (that you might annotate), having to screen cap each one in sequence is clunky.

g) Easy screen sharing duplicates of 95% of this app's utility. Why not do that and allow annotations on top?

I don't want to be a complete downer. But this needs to be much, much better than it currently is. Possibly the only advantage you have is an iPhone/Ipad interface to the whiteboard -- I would make that the highest priority.
The problem is one of combinatorial optimization (as are most of these 'hard' competitions), but the tools these students always start with are the slgorithms they learned from the algo courses. Constraint programming/automated planning are modern techniques used exactly for combinatorial optimization.

The winner's heuristics would have been part of the constraints and so would have been the first thing he tried and would be faster because they would have been pruned from the search tree and the solutions not evaluated (incidentally, this is the difference between constraint programming and prolog, in prolog you generate, as he did, and then test, while constraints prune and test). The iterative deepening search is known as breadth first search in prolog/constraint programming and would also be one of the first things you try.
Thanks for the answer. The difference is that the scandals in the Wikipedia article all directly involve government:

Credit Mobilier: "The distribution of Crédit Mobilier stocks by Congressman Oakes Ames along with cash bribes to congressmen"

Teapot Dome: "control of U.S. Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming and at Elk Hills and Buena Vista in California, were transferred from the U.S. Navy Department to the Department of the Interior"

And Army-McCarthy, Watergate and Iran-Contra are all obviously directly tied to the government.

In those cases it makes sense for Congress to get involved. It's when Congress start to investigate "private citizens whose activities suggest the needs for legislative remedy" that I get concerned. That type of broad power apparently gives them free-reign to investigate anything they don't like.

It seems to me that in the past (15 or 20+ years ago) Congress didn't get involved in non-government related "scandals" like Toyota and college football, I'd be interested if anyone has examples to the contrary.
Kind of aside the main discussion, but the Canada line was approved at 1.35 billion, cost 1.9 billion, and had it's scope significantly reduced in order to manage that. It being a p3 allowed hiding 'competitive' information such as cheaper but disruptive construction and single track sections from the public, and the cities involved until after it was approved. I like having new mass transit, but I'm not sure this can be used as an argument for the economic benefits of the olympics. Though it could be an argument that the olympics give political cover to push through large projects irrespective of the problems/benefits and that may or may not come out well.
Calling it "slow" is generous. It doesn't work. /saved is also borken.

I guess that's the price we pay for being on year 3 of the hundred-year language.
"ChatRoulette is like regular roulette, but five of the chambers are filled with cock."

Strangely profound statement. As always, he does a magnificent job of making the mainstream media look like morons.
What amazes me about this short is not that they satirically covered the news, but the amount of clips and actual people they were able to put together to make the segment really work.
Of course not, they're not psychic.

But they do decide on the basis of which drum they think people expect them beat.
If Congress really wanted to get at the truth, they should have called disinterested third-party engineers to study and get their opinion on this case. Nobody believes Toyota, even if the final facts prove it's correct. Everyone believes the witnesses, even when the engineering evidence often disproves their testimony. It is impossible to come to a scientifically valid conclusion under those two circumstances, which is why many individuals involved in this issue have described the proceedings as "witch hunts."

Actual American political debate hardly happens anymore. What we have now is theater. The mentality of the LCD American voter is simply abysmal. You can see it from the low or sloppy intellectual content of the "product" which is presented to them by politicians, journalists, and other media workers.
Primary reason is, especially when used with something like CouchDB is absolutely no data transformation. What's in the DB is exactly what jQuery gets on the front end. See this:

http://labs.mudynamics.com/2009/01/14/js3/
Yeah, but 10,000 days came out years later. :) I was at the Coachella concert days before it was officially released. (Not to mention the Phoenix concert where he was hit by a water bottle thrown from off stage.)
I'll have to look into that. Thanks for the input. edit: added Here's the link to our privacy statement http://unbig.me/privacy.php
The C&D article (and the ones it points to about their road test) is really good. Because there are more people talking about this than actually know anything. Including in this thread.

The C&D article does leave the door open to the possibility of the brakes not stopping the car. If you pump the brakes, rather than firmly putting them down once, you may lose vacuum, or overheat the brakes in a series of "slow down a little" steps. The vacuum is apparently hard to replenish when the throttle is open.

The advice about turning the car off works sometimes, but not always. Suppose you're in a rental Lexus like the one the CA state trooper died in. Would you know that to kill the engine, you have to depress the off button for 3 seconds continuously? Three seconds is a long time with the throttle wide open.

It seems the key technical mistake on Toyota's part, as pointed out in the C&D article, is to omit an interlock that kills the throttle when the brake is depressed. This is apparently standard on many other cars.

Toyota's damage control on this has been disastrous.
On the contrary, I think they understand exactly what this site is about and are happy to demonize it, possibly to the extent that they can get the powers that be to introduce restrictions on online video so that we can all go back to getting our spoon-fed media.
Until you get a heart attack, or some other critical medical condition. Are you willing to pay the $1000-$3000+ a night for your hospital stay? Or are you willing to stay home so those of us who do pay for insurance don't have to cover your expenses, since you will most likely not be able to pay them without bankrupting yourself.
Moral Crusade a front for anti-competitive strategy against RedBox
Interesting, looks like whatever you typed after the "5" tickled a HN bug - there's an unclosed <i> tag that causes the reply link on your comment to be rendered in italics.
MixergyNOTES.com: a better alternative to Mixergy
Seven Day Roguelike (7DRL) Challenge 2010 starts March 6th.
Another really cool thing users of jailbroken iPhones will have that most will not. Another symptom of how Apple is handicapping themselves by being so closed.

(EDIT: Okay, fanbois. Know that I have firsthand experience with both configurations of the iPhone mentioned. I also own other equipment running OS X.)
Couldn't agree more. If you application is heavily dependent on UI (like most any webapp), then you massively benefit from having one person that's able to do it all. It's a competitive advantage you can't live without.

There is just too much overhead, otherwise, in splitting and managing duties among 2 or 3 people. When I hire developers for my webapp consulting firm, they need to be badass programmers that can own every layer of the stack AND they need to be comfortable slicing PSDs themselves.

IMO, this should apply to Marketing and Biz Dev as well. It's super annoying when the "marketing guy/girl" can't render their own message on the corporate website and has to pass that task on to a developer. Marketing people need to know HTML/CSS at minimum. Otherwise, you just have an "idea guy" with a major handicap in executing on the web.

(btw, this being written by someone who's worked in both a marketing and a tech role)
No, probably it was never released on DVD. I always wondered why he didn't continue the series with, say, Nerds 2.1 (The Fall of The Nerds) covering after-the-bubble internet and Nerds 2.5 (A New Dawn) about web 2.0

It looked like a solid and successful storyline, so much so that he could eventually become a nice cliche. Really pity he stopped working on the series.

Did he ever give any explanation as to why he never made another sequel?
My first job out of college was with a startup that did health risk assessments. Part of this involved the use of new genetic markers for disease. This was decades ago (yes before the Internet even!) so it was early days for genetic testing. We had an expert system that put a questionnaire in front of customers and charged them for the resulting recommendations and any tests we did.

Two 'hot' technologies of the time: expert systems and genetic testing.

We learned:

1. people want >answers< not statistical results.

2. people told they have a significant probability of a disease get unhappy. Do that enough times someone gets unhappy enough to sue. So your follow-up debriefings have to be done carefully and in person - very expensive.

The lawyers that ran the company did not see the cost of lawsuits, on top of the high cost and error rates for genetic testing at the time, as a deal breaker going in.

Good to see 23andMe make what looks like a better attempt at this market.
Competitions like this should be relabeled as who can reimplement constraint programming fastest and without bugs then.
Harlequin novel study shows why they're popular
> This means DNS queries will not resolve for government employees if they point to Linode hosted machines.

This is total FUD. Please check your statements for accuracy.
Java, for a class I took in my senior year. We were asked to write a Diffie-Hellman key exchanging chat application. I used threads to do non-blocking user input. After turning it in, the professor remarked that it didn't need to run continuously, but that my work was good. :)
This is intriguing. Care to elaborate on a problem you've had and how number theory helped? I did the typical math courses required for a computer science degree (discrete math, linear algebra, diffeq, probability and statistics), but stopped short of the serious math courses (analysis). I've been meaning to start up with analysis (mainly for fun) but I'm intrigued to see how it might help in my day to day work.
The family package is an excellent idea, Paul.
Donald Knuth tells his story [video]
The asterisk is used for italics. If you leave one at the end of your comment it does this, it seems.
The first concern of most news networks today is ratings/viewer numbers. They pick stories that will attract the average person, and thus you have Missing White Woman Syndrome. It's also well documented that certain networks (i.e. FOX News) have stuck to a schedule of talking points handed to them by various political entities.
Looks like the Google Code link found in this blog post is broken. Does it work for anyone else?

http://code.google.com/p/remail-iphone

EDIT: It works now! Before it was giving a 502.
Friends don't send friends links to geo-locked video clips.
I don't know wtf is wrong with these newspeople. Not that many people know about ChatRoulette -- for instance, no one in my family knows about it, and with all the time I spend online on sites like this, I've only heard it mentioned a few times.

But when you get on TV to "warn parents" about this "frightening new trend" of seeing penises, you tell a lot of "normal" people about it and only make things worse.

The mainstream media is desperate to look like they know what's happening with kids and the internet, but they really just constantly misreport and their own reporting skews numbers. See also the ridiculous obsession with Twitter.
I've used everything from pthreads to goroutines to Those Things That Ruby 1.8 Calls Threads Even Though They're Not Really. It's not that multithreaded code is inherently hard, it's just that it increases the number of interactions you have to think about exponentially. If you're used to thinking of programs as a procedural set of state manipulations, you will be incapable of reasoning about a multiprocessing system because between every two steps in your algorithm there can be an arbitrary number of steps from other algorithms which will wreak havoc with your state.
Google Agrees to Buy DocVerse for $25 Million
Apple Insider recently posted an interesting analysis speculating the reason for the delay.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/02/19/apple_plans_du...
Medicare is a "disaster" because of the funding cuts, which are a direct result of our tendency to elect assholes to represent us.

In many areas, government can do a great job when it's not being kicked around by bunch of asshole politicians who think government fails at everything (I include almost all Republicans and at least a third of Democrats) and are therefore invested in proving that point by making it fail.
Currently, JavaScript is the only thing I can actually convince customers to use in place of PHP, which has various weaknesses that make it a terrible choice for certain apps. The killer argument is that there are lots of people who already know JavaScript.
Remail-iphone source code
I notice the people who don't use the word "I think" often will get ahead in the workplace. It shows strength and exudes confidence.
We're using node for increasingly more projects. It's much easier to create rather complex projects that would take way more time to create when we'd use other languages.

For example a simple comet style notification system can be created less than 100 lines of code.
This is a straw man. I wasn't commenting on whether the power is right or wrong or will or will not be used. I was commenting on the editorialized and misleading title. It says "Police to..." as if they have announced plans to or something. More appropriate would be "Police granted right to..." One's accurate, one is linkbait (or here, commentbait).

I'd flag anything that has a title that I feel is baiting.
Windows Mobile 7.

And if Windows Mobile 7 is anything like it looks like it'll be then yes, that's a very reasonable comparison.
Thanks, took a look and it seems a bit dusty ... (e.g. latest client for Ubuntu is for 8.04)
While I do tend to believe AJAX sites should try to work in browsers that only do HTML, I wouldn't put that anywhere near on the level of "don't require Flash". Almost any modern browser, including FOSS browsers, supports JavaScript and AJAX. That just leaves out text-mode browsers and paranoid NoScript users. :) Requiring Flash, on the other hand, leaves out people like me who refuse the proprietary Flash plugin, as well as many users on smartphones and other platforms that don't have Flash plugins.
Sure, if you hold 51% of the equity, and even then it would get messy.

The power to hire and fire is (usually) the CEOs, devolved from the board. The board is (usually) appointed by the equity holders.

For some set ups reversing a CEOs decision might require 50%+ of the shareholders deposing 50%+ of the board and replacing them with tame board members who fire the CEO and appoint someone else.

That's going to look pretty bad to the staff, any investors who don't agree, anyone you might try and hire as the new CEO, customers and any potential future investors. And after all of those people have run away as fast as they can how much of a company is really left?
If the venue is privately owned the second part doesn't scare me. I believe any privately owned property has the right to refuse entry to anyone they wish, and that that right trumps civil liberties. WHICH is why the first part of the story is a terrifying encroachment on liberty. No warrant? No laws broken? To have them simply enter and dictate what you're allowed to display on your own property? No way to refuse entry?
"we're slipping guys. we're bleeding viewers. people just don't care about the news anymore. we need something that grabs people. steve, who's our main demographic these days?"

"uh...well according to nielsen it looks like...scared old people."

"I have an idea."
I'm really interested in 23andMe but I'm always a bit concerned about privacy...
Some accounts of history don't have Americans backing the war until 1942. It could indeed be that WWII changed the way we looked at war and little to do with popular support.
Clojure Pre- and post-conditions: a quest for a nicer syntax
So long as you're correct and being asked to make a decision.