skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't worry so much about getting into YC. I'm surprised at the amount of people who see this as make or break. If you're committed to building a great product you should just be building and iterating all the time.
> Java cannot run without a JRE

Yep... As I recall from responses to this critique, 99.9% of C programs cannot run without support from libraries either, usually already installed with the OS. Even though the executable size looks small, you still end up loading up a large code image into memory as you statically include all those dependent user mode libraries.

I have not tried it myself, but I remember reading something that suggested you could install part of the Lisp image on your system and have a slimmed down executable that knows how to autoload the main image (there was some kind of bootstrapping technique in there).

In a sense, this is an advantage with a Lisp binary as compiled by SBCL in that almost everything you need is bundled into the one image (easy to deploy!)...with the caveat, of course, that you will still need whatever external libraries the binary requires.

Note that I have little experience with other Lisp systems -- and not enough experience, really, with SBCL to be more than a novice on this subject. Like others, though, I was looking for the "how to make an executable" answer, and what I found satisfied me. I can mix Lisp binaries with other stuff I use at work.
Millions do it for XBox live. I do.
I think the key point of the article is
"Given the increasing rigidity and length of the Western academic pipeline which now extends so far beyond the PhD that the average age for first-time principal investigators on grants from the US National Institutes of Health is 42 the BGI model may be worth serious consideration."

This isn't even just getting a PhD. It's the whole post-doc rigmarole after that too.

The question remains, I think, a valid one. Does our current postgraduate system work well, or could it be better? Sounds like BGI is trying a great experiment and I'll be interested to see the results.
Aaah, ok. I was keying in on the "There is no way of..." and "have to..." to mean you thought it was impossible, not that it just wasn't easy currently.
Looks like there was a december 2009 release?
I guess eye candy sells in general:

http://apcmag.com/disco_public_beta__burn_baby_burn.htm

I predict the next App Store success will be a tip calculator app with wooden side panels set on fire.
startups couldn't do well because Brown isn't as cool as Obama

OMG, someone used that as an excuse? What was their excuse when Blair and Bush were in power?
You can make that sort of snarky comment about pretty much any career. There are always hoops to jump through (though you might not see them till you get there).
Maybe he should read the documentation that is there in the first place.

What kind of installer do you need for a single executable file?
What's the recommendation you would make to a generalist developer on a library they can safely use to implement their own secure transport with ephemeral keying?

You sound very clueful but I don't think you've thought this through. Off the top of my head I can think of zero popular cryptosystems that haven't been burned by terrible implementation flaws. I just told you that Tor, which was implemented by someone who got a PhD under Rivest, managed to screw up DH. Your response is, "if you picked better libraries, you'd do better than Roger Dingledine". No, you wouldn't.
> Is taking as much as possible such a bad thing in that case?

Yes.

The right amount is "the minimum that will let you achieve your goals". That amount depends on the biz and goals but it is never "as much as possible".

In other words, the fact that certain biz require $1M to get to viability while others can get there with $10 does not imply that the former should take $100M.

Too much money, like too little money, causes problems. Does your startup need more problems?
If you right click or Ctrl-U using Google Chrome, it makes a second request to the URL and shows you the source of that second request.

This strikes me as a bug, because when you click on a button that says "View page Source", and it shows you the source of a different page, that's not expected behavior.

However, it seems so glaring and has been around for so long that I'm guessing there's a reason why Chrome does it.

Anyone know the reason?
Save your money for Land of Lisp by Conrad Barski, coming out this month. http://www.amazon.com/Land-LISP-Learn-Program-Game/dp/159327...
It's pretty similar in practice, though. A PhD is effectively a "license" to hold an academic position.
Any investor who would be against letting a founder draw because he wants the founder to remain "hungry" is a manipulative asshole. I hope these don't exist in the post-Google era.
I am straight, but I would be pissed of at discrimination of homosexuals.
Web Entrepreneurship: Does the City You Live in Matter?
No, computer B just needs some way to access the encrypted key for the files from computer A. You can either have computer A create a master key that gets encrypted with a user-supplied password and then handed out to any client that passes a "does user A approve of this transfer" check, or you can use fine-grained ACLs or capabilities similar to what is done in something like Tahoe-LAFS. The server does not need to see unencrypted data in either case.
Even worse, if you right click and hit "Save Page" it also makes a second request and saves a different page.
probably best to have a enable/disable switch for multitasking, with disabled as the default setting.

majority of the iPhone users (i'm guessing) doesn't care/know about multitasking and would gladly use their iPhones without it.
Patent Skirmishes Shed Light on Apple-HTC Suit
over 40 million people have died in car crashes. That license thing doesn't work so well.
I like that the manuscript is on display, but I'm a little disturbed by the "holiest of holies" treatment, equating it to the Dead Sea Scrolls even.

General Relativity is dynamite, but it isn't scripture, it's a scientific theory that'll have to step aside when a superior theory comes to take its place some day. Then it'll be historically significant, but not "holy".
Go language "Issue 9" finally bumped to page 2
Out of site, out of mind...
I wonder what all is in there. Definitely not just the stack article, because that is nowhere near 144 pages.
SecurityFocus is shutting down
Those two questions have the same answer. I have a PhD and my experience is that the process is broken because it's geared towards the wrong goals of (1) writing papers, (2) getting grants, and (3) the game of getting a tenure-track position and then tenure. If you happen to make a great discovery, that's nice, too. Most people I know get a PhD for career advancement, not to engage in the scientific and discovery process.

My experience was that the process was more "cargo cult science" and less science.
Ah, stupid me. I was going by the copyright notices. I was using it before Dec 2009 when I had my concerns.

Go Chickenfoot !
Registry entries (for Windows deploys), data files, silly DRM stuff, etc. You'd want an installer/uninstaller for your more complex deployments.

But that's not something one should reasonably expect from a Lisp REPL or compiler; that's just packaging, and there are installers out there that excel at that. I suppose it would be expected that modern Lisp IDEs have support for that.
Sed & Awk - Still friendly after all these years
Refenes's & Saltsman's Baffling $350 App Store Success
You mention wanting to be a NYT/CNN/etc competitor instead of competing with digg/reddit/etc. Does this mean you want to be a news producer instead of a news aggregator? Or are you just looking for intelligence behind how you aggregate news (something closer to newsvine?) Also what sort of news? Big breaking headlines? Feature stories (research-based)? "Hyperlocal" news (like everyblock)?

If you're doing "intelligent aggregation" and wanting the content to live within the context of your site, as you say, I think you've got a copyright nightmare ahead of you. There are several sites out there that do nothing but pull together AP content and smother the pages with ads -- I think a few of them are making enough profits to cover the outrageous cost of the AP feeds.

I'm not trying to discredit your idea -- just hoping to get some more details. I happen to work in the news industry (on the software side, but am still exposed to the mess that is news) and find ideas in this area intriguing.
By following this way of thinking, the designer of the first calculator should have made his product look as much like an abacus as possible, so he wouldn't confuse the new user.

What you're saying is reasonable, but it misses the fact that you have to find a balance between being familiar and exposing the capabilities of the software you're using.

The calculator is a good example, because it's actually very painful to use such a calculator on a computer. And saying new users can't grasp the way a proper computer calculator works mean you didn't try hard enough to explain to them. It's really taking the easy road.

On a side note, i always wondered why we don't see the same kind of walkthrough you have got in many videogames in software. There should be an interactive walkthrough mode in every packed application in windows/osx. It would be a much better solution than trying to mimic real world objects by providing an interface that imperfectly behaves like the users preconceptions make him expect.
One data point you are missing: if you fire the incompetent wife, in the USA by default she gets the kids too. Guess what kind of life they will have with just her raising them.
Well no, the article is suggesting not exiting early, since and early exit means only the founders get any real money (hence my suggestion to instead give early employees lots of stock so they don't get screwed.)
I've been in the webcam business since day one, this is one of the reasons why we make it purposefully hard to get to the real IP of our users.

Only after you jump through a fair number of hoops can you expose your IP, if by then you aren't warned yet you probably can't read.

We've had some stalking issues due to this in the past as well, especially the 'early days'.
Mediamove by Dmailer
Those things would be easy if it's just you. However, imposing those policies on the wife is another matter. It just devolves into fighting over money all the time.
Ask HN: Learning Java in 2010
Almost a month ago I read one "Ask HN" story, and debate, about Learning C++ in 2010 (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1119992>).

I was wondering the same about Java: It seems that the language and the ecosystem are taking off again and I am increasingly interested in Java projects (from Cassandra to Lucene and some other stuff from the Apache Incubator).

What should I read? How should I "practice" to avoid all the bad Java docs and programmers out there?
I don't really know what you mean by "settlement". There's no settlement that I know of when you get fired in the USA.

Here, a "settlement" is something you might get if you were to sue someone for something and the court awarded you money.
And unfortunately that culture is directly damaging the open-source ecosystem on Windows.

For instance the author of Paint.NET (a former open-source project) started releasing only binaries because some individual ripped off his work, taking all the credits (in breach of its license), and probably bundling it with spyware / charging money for it ...

http://blog.getpaint.net/2007/12/04/freeware-authors-beware-...
http://blog.getpaint.net/2009/11/06/a-new-license-for-paintn...

To see your work used like that, most likely without a Thank You, probably hurts a lot.
I'm listening to David Gilmour's "On An Island" right now. He didn't concern himself with pursuing a Ph.D in music before starting his career. But his body of work is extraordinary nevertheless and society has benefited tremendously.

Asking questions and following the scientific method doesn't need anyone's permission either.
Hurf Durf, Computer System Probably Has .00001 Dollars On His Account. OMG, Blog Post. Lulz All Around.
It really isn't a question of which system is better. It is about supply and demand. If there is a huge demand for scientists (as there appears to be at BGI today) then the requrements for getting a good job will be reduced. With the scarcity of decent jobs in US Academia today the prolonged PhD/Postdoc cycle is just a symptom of the underlying lack of demand.
I'm a S10 applicant, and the only thing I've been doing since submitting the application is working my ass off to make my product better and increase my user base. It would be amazing to get into YC, but being reliant on it would be foolish.
CSS 2 eye candy in mobile browsers
Bob Floyd never even tried to get a PhD. (He did collect letters addressed to "Dr. Floyd".)

Stanford made him a full professor even though he didn't spend "enough" time on the tenure track.
Imperative is "how to calculate a factorial"; functional just says what one is.
Thank god for tiling window managers. Xmonad, we salute you. You are the best.
Heh. It feels like the same sentiment there was around shareware back in the day. Suddenly, there was this idea that if you could hack three buttons together in Delphi, you not only could, but you ware entitled to make money from your software. I've lost count of how much shareware I've used, where I had the distinct feeling that more effort went into "protecting" the copy against piracy then making the software itself.
Ask YC: Adding Facebook chat to a website?
Does anyone have any experience with doing this? Was not able to find any implementations other than Meebo on a website. The help is very sparse - anyone have any examples/code of how to integrate facebook chat on an external website ?

Thanks in advance.
/the/path/of/most/resistance
I'm in favor of letting founders cash out partially as the company grows. We did, and it worked well for everyone. But I should point out that asking for FF shares spooks a lot of investors, and VCs in particular.
Microsoft Security Advisory (981374) Remote Code Execution
> People can't actually "try out" 10+ pairings and not be damaged by it.

Huh?

I suppose that it depends on what you mean by "try out". Obviously you can't live with each of those pairings for 15 years.
The argument is only relevant to startups that have funding options; there are plenty out there that would need to work hard to get funding.

However, if funding is a realistic option, and the investor isn't detrimental in some way, it's a much better deal to give up some equity and take a salary of some sort. Much like selling 100% of the equity would be too extreme, selling 0% is also over aggressive. I know a few people who are pure bootstrapping right now, and the consensus seems to be that it's a better deal (for the founders personally) to have a salary and a little less equity.
It depends on the field. As far as I can tell, some undergraduate degrees are traditionally so watered down that most graduates simply haven't had the opportunity to become fit for research. (Chemistry, I'm looking at you.) Other programs do better. (Physics. EE. CS at the more hardcore schools.)
Wow, that is a sweet deal. Thanks for posting jacques. I can't imagine a startup idea I may have that requires that much disk space, but it may set the mind turning to know the option is somewhat affordable.
Article doesn't give the company valuations - just the share price - at IPO. Share price doesn't tell you much.
Palm WebOS supports Unreal Engine 3.0
I second this. I did undergrad and grad pure math at UW, and a lot of comp sci electives. The faculty was phenomenal. I learned so much, and not just of the subject material. I learned so much about how to think during some brilliant lectures. You want some mental exercise that will make programming seem easy by comparison? Get a pure math degree at UW. And take all the hard classes.

Nor was I bored in even the intro C Sci classes. There were typically other experienced folks taking the classes with me, and some projects open-ended enough to let them challenge themselves. I saw some guys build an animated 3D vector projection from scratch in CSE 143, and in CSE 373, during a speed competition, I remember someone taking apart and rewriting scanf.
What is so inflammatory about a claim that it would lead to polygamy? "Traditional" marriage definition is a reproductive (baring health issues) couple. If you decide that isn't a consideration, then what difference does it make if you allow more than 2 people to be "married"? I am really struggling with trying to understand in the long term would lead to "chaos and anarchy".

I just wish the State would use another term and leave the term "marriage" to the churches. If some/any church wants to "bless" your social union as a marriage, then cool. I am kinda on the conservative side, but if someone else wants to have a "triple" union - I don't really care as long as it isn't some genetic travesty (siblings / cousins).
I want built in notifications, comments and task completion. I could get this via Google docs, but it isn't seamless.
Are you thinking something along the lines of http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/ with better recommendations and perhaps some way of following stories as the unfold?

I agree that news consumption is broken and there are lots of opportunities for new entrants, but I'm not sure what the "right way" is - I, for one, spend way too much time sifting through news, blogs, tweets, FB updates etc etc and probably still miss a lot of interesting stuff while reading stuff I don't really care about.

- Gummi
I am curious if the technique described in this paper (http://www.cam.cornell.edu/~sharad/papers/searchpreds.pdf) would give an advantage over the long run. I would imagine that if the majority of bets are placed for entertainment value based on guesses, this could be a quick way to rake in some dough.
If you're building it, doesn't that make it an HN startup :) ?
Wow: "We'd like to advise maine.edu to stop using student's names in their hostnames. We've decided, at least for the time being, to hide IP & host information as some user-identifiable information was found in some entries"

They put student names in their hostname? That's... bad.
Bottled Wind Could Be as Constant as Coal Power
As an emacs user, I find this entertaining. You are correct in that once you know how to use emacs it's trivial. However, anyone that doesn't know the emacs key bindings will see that it's "simply hitting something that looks like 4 random keystrokes to any non-emacs user."
What's really worrying is if you search for the "Editors" of the book there are over 17,000 book by them:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3D...

They must have made an automated system that creates these books and sells them on Amazon using print on demand.
My talk is basically an expansion of that blog post.
This is really a non-news and the reason is simple, from a marketing standpoint you never want to mention the competitor's brand because it promotes that brand also, especially if that brand belongs to a newcomer/non-market-leader and you're the market leader.

For example, if Coke ad (as someone else also reported) mentioned Pepsi, then not only is a consumer seeing "Coke" but is also seeing "Pepsi".

The only time you see the competitor brand mentioned is when the ads are very specifically negative or when they come from an underdog against a market leader. The usual examples are Verizon-AT&T, Apple-MS, etc. Here the underdog or newcomer has nothing to lose so they will mention the market leader's brand.

So, here MS is not afraid, rather it doesn't make sense for them to mention Linux or rather any *nix by name. But, if it was reverse, it totally makes sense for Red Hat to mention MS Windows by name.
The Shade Premium: A new pricing scheme for Miami Dolphins tickets
Good thing that this is a site for entrepreneurs that are not trying to find a place to be hired at.
Your cells are new every 10 years. [Citation Needed]
Apple blocking third-party security software on the iPhone
If you're new to Java, I would suggest going through The Java Programming Language and Effective Java. The former hasn't been updated very recently, but should still be a good introduction. The latter was updated two years ago, and offers great advice on Java style.
The author is actually outlining a new market for programmers. This is akin to fixing the MMDDYY errors in databases that brought the Y2K phenomenon (one part factual basis, two parts hype and hysteria). We could call it "Y2Gay".

But, I agree with other posters here. While MMDDYY was indeed pervasive, I've seen very few DB designs that assume role/gender at the schema level. That said, I would not be at all surprised to find logic or 'validation' that would choke on "MM" or "FF" or "was M but now F".

Y2K made lots of consulting firms (as well as retired mainframe programmers) quite profitable during 1998-2000. Here's to new opportunity. :-)
Yeah, I've checked the posterous video for new views (alas, none so far). But mostly I'm working on improving the existing app, dealing with a recent influx of users, and filling out applications to other programs with later deadlines.
Personally I was swayed by the bandwidth, the fact that it is unmetered 1G for 1.45 / Mbit is really very low compared to other places. And this is a very serious hosting facility, unlike some of the other 'price breakers' out there.

They currently host 10's of thousands of servers, including some pretty major sites.
>Claiming that gay marriage will lead to polygamy or bestiality is inflammatory.

What argument would you use to defend gay marriage that would not also allow polygamy? Or what argument would you make against polygamy that wouldn't also apply to gay marriage?
Nice Arram, thanks. I was just thinking the other day about how nice it would be if more people spent time once in a while refining their thoughts into an essay rather than barfing up conjectures as blog posts.

Interestingly, it may be that Heisenberg uncertainly requires that if you extract all of the information out of Riker in order to reform him, you must necessarily destroy the original Riker, saving you a bullet. (IANAP, _obviously_).
Http://cnnworld2010.blogspot.com/
Recording via MIDI
The Big Rethink: Design driven innovation
Returning "not implemented" is compliant with POSIX specification, but does not make the implementation useful. Which is exactly the case of NT POSIX subsystem.
huh? flash provides video and vector graphics in a browser. If html5 can do these then flash is doomed, hence related.
A bit of a sensationalist title? There's not even a mention of Steve Jobs in the actual article. How is this article getting promoted to the top of HN?
Freeman Dyson on the topic:

http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/freeman-dyson-on-invention-an...

Brand: One of the things I got from Infinite in All Directions – it was a delight to me, and I’ve been quoting it ever since – is that you honor inventors as much as scientists.

Dyson: It’s as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn’t a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There’s been lots more like him, and it’s a shame they don’t get Nobel Prizes.

Brand: Is it the scientists who are putting them down?

Dyson: Yes. There is this snobbism among scientists, especially the academic types.

Brand: Are there other kinds?

Dyson: There are scientists in industry who are a bit more broad minded. The academics look down on them, too.

Brand: Is that a weird British hangover?

Dyson: It’s even worse in Germany. Intellectual snobbery is a worldwide disease. It certainly was very bad in China and probably held back development there by 2,000 years.

Brand: How would you stop this intellectual snobbery?

Dyson: I would abolish the PhD system. The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don’t have PhDs.