skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I need to see HTML5+JS perform as well as Flash doing multiple things. Sorry, sliding PNGs across the page with jQuery isn't really the same.

If we're gonna go into debate about Flash vs. HTML5, I am gonna need to see more than simple equalizers and canvas bar charts.

Show me http://mycanvas.landsend.com or http://www.myspace.com/fanvideo in HTML5. I wanna see this level of complexity without a hindrance on development time, performance or scope. Enough with the double talk.
Everybody too busy with their YC applications to discuss this? ;)

Venkat
Personalized Medicine on the Spot
Grandma's give checks, why don't people do that. Perhaps it's more personal than cash
1. I've been interested in language and VMs about 1 year ago, built http://code.macournoyer.com/tinyrb/ and a couple other languages.

2. No, it all started w/ a passion for languages. I had the idea to write a book after reading 4 Hour Work Week

3. What do you want to know exactly? I used the keywords "create programming language" iirc

4. Yes, I think it helped a lot. The only "marketing" I've done is on Twitter and my blog (also recently on my site http://refactormycode.com). I was surprised by the success, but I'm now convinced that OSS can pay in a way or another.
Aww yes I need to learn LaTex :/
Welcome to Keynesian economics.
For some reason it doesn't bother my stomach as does the daily 81 mg dose. Also, I usually get a headache at least once or twice a week and taking two aspirin always helps.
Bob is not the copyright owner. He can't re-licence it to anything.

What he can do is re-license a right to use the program, under terms specified by the copyright owner.

I've attached extra meaning to c vs s in the word licence, but the definition you used is not the same as parent.
This reminds me of my "Critical Thinking" class in college. The teacher split us into groups and had us prepare for debates. We were allowed to choose our own topic.

People in my group wanted to debate topics such as "Adam Sandler is funny". I was hoping for something with a little more... meat. Having done debate in high school and being able to tell that most people in class didn't really know what a debate looked like, I emailed the teacher and volunteered to do a short debate (with another student who was willing) that would allow the class to see a structured debate and allow me to debate something not stupid.

Somehow my teacher took it to mean I didn't like my group or the class - I tried apologizing but it just spiraled bizarrely out of control. In one of the last emails he let me know that 1) He had been teaching for a long time and knew what he was doing 2) the leaders of the school trusted him to teach this class so he must be doing something right and 3) no one else was "complaining" and were giving him high marks on instructor reviews.

I think I responded with something along the lines of 1)Appeal to Experience 2)Appeal to Authority 3)Appeal to Popularity.

Keep in mind this is the class that actually TEACHES logical fallacies.
Ugh. I groan every time pone more service I like gets herded into the horrible "attached to your Google Account" profile management hell. I wish Google would find a better way to integrate this stuff. Or just let them stand alone.
> my favorite figure of speech

my not-unpreferred figure of speech, please. If you want to make it not unpossible to believe you.

(Thanks, really; I've developed a belated soft spot for rhetorical devices.)
Oh, an occasional coke isn't going to kill you. Coca-cola is a modern classic. Take some responsibility for yourself and enjoy it.
It depends what your defending against and what your original password is.

If the purpose is to turn a short password into something more secure it is pointless. As tptacek is always saying; Sha1 is cheap. It is trivial to incorporate it into an attack :)

Your better off choosing a random long sentence as your password. Easier to remember and much more secure.
"The point: anyone with money can sue anyone else who has less money and put them out of business. It doesn’t matter whether you have a case or not"

yeah, um, duh. this is why companies invest in lawyers and lobbyists in addition to investing in value-add activities: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capitalism

PG talks about this: "no one will sue you for patent infringement till you have money, and once you have money, people will sue you whether they have grounds to or not. So I advise fatalism. Don't waste your time worrying about patent infringement. You're probably violating a patent every time you tie your shoelaces. At the start, at least, just worry about making something great and getting lots of users. If you grow to the point where anyone considers you worth attacking, you're doing well."
http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html
>Caloric deficits don't work well for long term weight loss because the body has a tendency to move towards homeostasis.

Can you cite this? I've lost a lot of weight and kept all of it off by really really drastically cutting my caloric intake.

This is something that I've never gotten: if your body could do the same work as it does with 3000 calories but only use 500, why wouldn't it do that all the time?
The legislation requiring automobiles to include seat belts[1] was passed at the federal level, not at the municipal level. At the municipal level, resources are also put into seat belt education campaigns and PSAs, which if effective would lower the availability of scofflaws as a potential revenue source. So yes, it's still a valid example.

(I assume you meant type type "if laws didn't make people..." or equivalent)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Traffic_and_Motor_Vehi...
Actually it's a perfect example. That people still won't wear the seatbelt when they're not just running a small risk to lose their life, but additionally a not quite as small risk to pay a fine shows that people suck at dealing with risks - or maybe that they're careless and forgetful, but designing a building isn't the kind of thing where you just forget an important step (ín part because it's feasible to inspect every single building for compliance, as opposed to inspecting every single auto driver and passenger).
We should turn this into a startup/programmer decathalon.
So far I've done 4 of these...to a kid with a hammer the whole world looks like a nail. Maybe I should write the others for fun.
There's problems when other people's buildings collapse, too. A large proportion of the population lives, works, and otherwise spends time in buildings which they don't own and don't have any convenient way of telling whether they're earthquake-insured or not. And buildings don't necessarily collapse neatly--they damage adjacent and nearby property as well. There's a huge public good in everyone being fairly confident that nearly every structure in the country is properly constructed.
A very valid point and it has come up in my head many times, not just in regards to entrepreneurship, but other issues with a similar pattern.

Before giving out the advice, I had to ask myself whether things started getting better because of charging customers, or did charging customers coincide with an unknown event that caused some success?

Everything points to the former, in my case. But I do believe this particular advice applies to many other startups, not just mine.

Edit: I'd like to add, that after charging and studying usage more closely we removed some unused 'cool' feature that we thought were awesome. Charging customers also prunes your app. If you pay attention.
I've heard of machine shop operators that built their own machines. "All you need is a Bridgeport and a Lathe and can build the rest".

Also, I recently shopped for a year for a good time tracking/billing system. I tried many products but non were a perfect fit. Then in desparation I built one in a few days. It improved my skills and improved my code libraries.

(edit: I suppose it's different because I did a year of market research before committing to build something.)
If you want to look at a paper on performance of such a system check out http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/abadi-sigmod08.pd...
Excellent interview Jessica, I hope you'll do many more of these!
"I assume you meant type type "if laws didn't make people..." or equivalent"

How would that even make sense?
Python was started in Dec. 1989 and "appeared in 1991" according to Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)
I wrote a post on a potential way we could fix the layout problems with HTML, but stay backwardly compatible. This article hits on exactly the problem. Layout. More precisely the default page flow layout of HTML which is great for text layout, but that's about it.

http://wrongnotes.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-if-html-wasnt-to...
One problem with the licence is that the text primarily seems to concern itself. Compare MIT licence "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software" or public domain "This ... is public domain." which explicitly tell you what is licensed.

And when you find yourself in court being sued by the original author who says "Obviously, that licence was a joke, I never meant it", good luck....
If your site requires Google search hits in order to be profitable, then you're hosed anyhow. Why can't these folks rely on word-of-mouth like the rest of us do?
Not to mention he received his bachelor's degree in three years, so he was really submitting those papers when most students his age were seniors.
No, claiming that the earthquake damage stimulates the economy would be the broken window fallacy. Aside from being a simple safety measure, building codes are more like insurance - you're making this investment in a building, let's spend a little more money to make sure it's going to survive fire, flood, and quakes. Same with safety standards on cars.

Insurance is always a gamble; if you buy it and never use it, you lose. If you don't buy it and later need it, you lose. This assumes you have the money for the insurance of course; Haiti did not have the money for insurance or seat-belts, and got thrown from the car into a concrete pylon.
Very confusing, needs something telling me what to do! Us technical types can probably work it out but what about non-technical people? Not a chance I'd say.

Also, the "You should upgrade here" bubble just takes me to PayPal to give you $2.99/month without describing why I'd want to do that. The fact that it's the only bit of instruction on the page probably means it will be the first thing clicked on for a lot of people!
Do some Googling, but there can be liability issues with public domain if your work causes damage. There have been some significant discussions about it over the last year in terms of public domain vs GPL and BSD licenses.
Certied Ethical Hacking and Countermeasure Course v6.12 - خدمات العرب
Microsoft's Translating Phone
That's the point exactly. What insurance company would offer earthquake insurance at a price that an average citizen could afford in such circumstances.
Well don't just blog about it, get patching! http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/WebCore/inspector/front... ;)
Good timing. I stayed in someone's apartment that was listed on AirBnb this past weekend. It worked out pretty well. :)

I missed the live interview. I'm looking forward to the catching the video after it shows up on the YC blog.
Why the hell one opens a website to choose password and serve it over clear-text (HTTP)?

Isn't that ironic? Trying to make something secure by actually making it totally insecure?

(Before someone jumps, even it's JS it doesn't mean safe against MITM as someone can inject JS before it loads and send all keystrokes to another server)
I'm glad I don't know my IQ, I can keep imagining I'm in the 500 range ;p
Small country in population, not length (over 4000 km). The previous major earthquake in Chile (Iquique) didn't affect the central and southern regions at all.

Besides, the fact that authorities care about earthquake prevention doesn't mean that consumers do (not at the time of buying property, anyway)
Cool idea and neat sliders and calculation execution! I agree with most others who say that it's not clear in the first 2 seconds what to do. Perhaps in the header:

h1: weight loss calculator
h2: easily plan your diet and exercise routine

I would recommend a numbered-list / stepwise approach for user input (all on the same page still), instead of the all-at-once approach (which is convenient if you know how to use it, but confusing otherwise)

Perhaps have a time indicator that says something like, "it will take 2 months for you to lose 20 lbs at this rate"
How did you choose the price point?
Google AI Challange 2010 Results
Playstation 3 owners should 'stop gaming'
"designing a building isn't the kind of thing where you just forget an important step"

Nor is having a building built much like getting into a car and "forgetting" to put on a seatbelt. If anything, I think your point makes the example less relevant.

"ín part because it's feasible to inspect every single building for compliance"

Absent corruption of the inspection process. Turkey had building codes and many wrecked buildings after the last major earthquake that had "passed" inspection due to money changing hands under the table.
YCRFS 6: iPad Applications
Interesting; I wonder if I've never heard of Fetch because I'm not really involved in this kind of business.

If you have any thoughts you'd like to share on what sucks about your experiences with any of this stuff, I'd love to get an email and pick your brain.
It would be interesting to see a brainstormed list of the most underserved categories. I remember that one of PG's essays has a list of things he thinks could use some startup love, but I'd be really interested in what other people think, too.
They are expensive and require maintenance. I used to rent in an area that gets power outages that can last more than a couple days, 5-10 times a year. My landlord's family, who lived next door, didn't have a generator, were pretty well off, and just lit up candles. I asked the landlord's wife once, and she said simply 'too expensive'.

If it wasn't worth it for them, how is it worth it for people who never have power outages?
Why do you use Firebug to log? Chrome shows console.log() entries just fine for me.
Presumably he meant that most owners of buildings do not buy insurance (and who else would?). And yeah, it's amazing just how little a risk of total loss once every couple of decades (no single quake hits the entire country, especially in Chile) means to people, compared with a substantial monthly or yearly bill.
A "clock" problem, eh? Think it's leap-day-related?
Building codes ARE administered by insurance companies. The insurance industry is the main reason we have building codes. The organizations that maintain the codes (e.g. the National Fire Prevention Association which maintains the National Electric Code) is a nonprofit, non-governmental organization made up of people from the insurance and construction industries.

These codes are then adopted into law by various municipalities, possibly with amendments. The government itself doesn't write the code though.
It's notable that Google is promoting HTML5 quite heavily but just acquired a product that is tied heavily to proprietary technology.

Edit: How feasible is it to build Picnik using HTML5 stuff (SVG, background image grinding, etc.)?
No, that's begging the point.
Even worse is, last year I got married and we had a registry at Crate and Barrel. Several people ended up giving us... Crate and Barrel gift cards. Apparently because Crate and Barrel always adds gift cards to your registry no matter what you do. Of course by now we already have everything at Crate and Barrel that we could possibly want....
There are many happy ways to live, but to each their own.

I wrote an essay on my experience, a bit of a similar topic.

http://daniellefong.com/2008/05/15/advice-to-the-bright-and-...
if you buy it and never use it, you lose. If you don't buy it and later need it, you lose.

The point being: you can afford the first loss, and cannot afford the second one. If the second half is not true, you have identified an insurance policy you don't need.
PlayStation 3 encounters crippling calendar problem
tl;dr Gruber doesn't like the name.
i still wonder why acquisition prices are so secretive
Disagree with this if it's the only way this feature is set. I'd say making the initial default based on the user agent language preference, however, there will be people that would like to change this...I prefer metric units personally despite being in the US.
From 2005. Did DJB deliver this stuff?
Presumption is one thing; details and substantiation, another.
Zillow disputes academic study which questions Zestimates
It must be comfortable to think that those who disagree with you does so because they are intimidated by awesomely intelligent liberals such as your heroes (and perhaps yourself?). Has it ever occurred to you that they might feel the same way about you?
No, it is your example that is made less relevant.
Right, I glossed over it, but even if you slip the keys in through a slightly open window, you should still be able to get in.

The prius is like the iphone, it's not a very good car (like the iphone isn't a very good phone), but everything else is a nice touch that makes it fun to use.
Actually, my apologies for the overly brief comment earlier, I was on lunch and typing on a smartphone.

I suppose you understood my point, but I'll elaborate for posterity: Conway's Life is Turing complete, with the conceptually unbounded grid standing in for the infinite tape of a Turing machine. As illustration, here's a page that implements a literal Turing machine using Life patterns: http://rendell-attic.org/gol/tm.htm

Starting from an empty tape, the number of states in the Turing machine must obviously be proportional to the number of live cells needed; updates to the state of the grid are equivalent to running time for the TM; and the output produced by the machine must be proportional to the population of live cells.

From this, we can (in a non-rigorous, hand-wavy sort of way) conclude that asking for an upper bound on the number of cycles to decide if any grid of a given finite size will be populated or barren is very likely equivalent to asking for an upper bound on the running time needed to decide if a Turing Machine of a given finite number of states will halt. This isn't actually the Busy Beaver function, but is closely related.

Thus concludes my proof by enthusiastic hand-waving (if there isn't a fancy Latin term for that, there should be).
Clicky Analytics are building their own CDN
i used to read http://www.bileblog.org/ but he also stopped writing.
Eve could do that, for sure. Nothing in the license forbids it. Declaring the license invalid and requiring users to re-license it does fall under 'what the fuck you want to' according to my interpretation of the license. But then again, I believe so does 'doing what the fuck I want to', so there's that too...
Inside the Excruciatingly Slow Death of Internet Explorer 6
It sounds incredibly audacious until you consider the number of security holes discovered in qmail after all these years: one, and it wasn't exploitable on any existing computer system.
Atlantic Monthly Redesign
Irrelevant to the larger conversation: old chub comes in cans: http://www.oskarblues.com/the-brews/old-chub

As does Fat Tire now.

It's the cool thing to do, since it doesn't take as much energy to move cans (they're lighter). So it's "Green" beer.
Thanks!

We'll be adding achievements for sure. And hopefully more levels soon. Some sort of currency/experience would be nice, but not sure how to implement it...
Avro 1.3.0 project under Apache Hadoop is now available
Wow $2.99!
>>>We think Apple foresees a future in which the iPad is the default way people do what they now do with computers (and some other new things).

Yes:
Web Designers: Wake Up And Smell The Touchscreen Coffee!
http://ebooktest.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/web-designers-wake...
Speaking as an ex-academic physicist, this is pure snobbery! What's wrong with civil engineering?
It's funny that this site won't come up on my Chrome Browser although it works fine on Seamonkey.
I'd recommend an intermediary step between free and subscription. Today I'll go there once to check it out and provide a review, but unless you sell me RIGHT NOW I'm gone as a customer.

Maybe it keeps track of my profile (height, weight, age, etc.), but doesn't keep a history of what I eat or what I do. That way I keep coming back to it, and it gets me hooked on using your site.

Or maybe you track my history, but doesn't let me see the reports. Until I'm invested it your site, it's Yet Another diet and exercise tracking tool. With a slick purple interface for setting up my profile.

The easy profile setup is a good way to introduce yourself. As others have pointed out, though, the food and exercise entry is the weak at best. That's the part people will be using daily, and until you have me sold on that feature I can't see myself signing up for a trial account, let committing to a subscription.

[edit] On a side note, at least have a cookie to save the user's profile for 20 minutes. I clicked on the bar graph icon to see what it does, and it promptly erased all the work I'd put in. You're not selling me on the security of my data! :-)
I have some stuff bookmarked at work which I can dig out tomorrow.

One thing was forcing InnoDB to cluster by insertion order by adding an otherwise-redundant autoincrement primary key alongside the unique index on the actual key column. Also tweaking various innodb-specific config settings.
Sergey Brin's Resume Before Google
Picnik CEO on Getting Bought by Google (and How Google Works)
HTML clocks using JavaScript and CSS rotation
Injection Proof'd
Problem is journalists looking for a stable income from a high quality operation won't jump on this because it's unproven but to prove this concept you need these quality journalists.

An area like this probably requires a large initial investment to give journalists who do join some job security while the site looks to build up readership.
I just followed some of the links and came across a very interesting effect, much in line with the theme of the "broken web"...

if you follow the homer simpson link you end up on the blog of Roman Cortes, which happens to be in spanish. Chrome helpfully offers to translate the page into english for me (and does a reasonable job too), which is great, but destroys the CSS effect, and you get a somewhat different homer than everyone's used to...

http://www.romancortes.com/blog/homer-css/
Chrome's (and soon Firefox's) out-of-process plugins are a tiny step toward the mainstream, but still just a fraction of djb's ideas. He wants to sandbox all pure "transforms" - HTML parsing, CSS parsing, image decoding, gzip decompression, etc. - and put them into not just another process but one without any normal user privileges.
Deploying software to a war zone
What is a good site to find programmers?
Hi all,<p>Apart from Elance.com, what are the other websites where one can search for programmers to outsource work?<p>Many thx
Yes, but there is a difference between being curious and finding out whatever you can, and posting the results of that search to a public forum - especially when the word "secret" is in the contact email address. It just seems a little unnecessarily unkind.
Its said you only have to build a better mousetrap...
Numberjack - A python constraint programming platform
From the acquirer's side, I'd guess competitive reasons. The amount they were willing to pay sends a signal to their competition about how important that particular product is to them (and if they paid a lot, that message is often very loud and clear).

From the seller's side there's the issue of respect for the acquirer's preferences as well as the fact that broadcasting your payday is kinda like broadcasting your salary: It can create some awkward situations. Especially if you're trying to keep some non-owner employees around.