skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, this worked for me: head over to http://www.feedbooks.com/author/245
(that's the Robert E. Howard of Conan fame).

Pick up any one of the stories tagged "Western". They're almost all humorous stories about a larger-than-life-yet-naive frontier-man who bashes his enemies plentifully, is in turn knocked about and shot at quite a bit, but survives to prevail. Most of his enemies also survive.

With appropriate search-replace, one could probably produce amusing software development parables from those stories. They're about the right length, too.
Cool tips. I especially like the part about testing the market before actually doing the work. Clever.
Why People Participate on Mechanical Turk, Now as a Mosaic Plot
> The people who had computers in the 80s were computer geeks and engineers

Computer geeks are not super-smart. It's wrong to assume they can master something other people can't. Most people didn't have computers not because they were too complicated but because they weren't useful enough. A diverse ecosystem of useful computers would attract as a diverse user base as we have now, perhaps more, if we accounted for a more diverse set of available computer platforms.

What's wrong with files? What's wrong with clicking a button with a floppy on it to save a document to a network-mounted disk array? My son never used a floppy to store his data on. He never owned a floppy. And he's 14.
This article is certainly an opinion piece, but the opinion expressed is about economic methodology, not politics.

The main opinion expressed is that economists should measure well being, not GDP. It supports this opinion by giving examples where GDP != wellbeing (man marrying his maid, TSA harassing people, magical productivity increases) and advocating that economists measure wellbeing rather than GDP whenever the two differ.
Beautiful. Touchscreens will also change the Internet and designers will have their work ahead of them.
In the 80's, Grandma would have no use for a computer. She owns one now because she can use it for something.
Uses part of an MD5 hash of a typed-in phrase as a seed for a random number generator.
Interesting, but the final result generates a password that is extremely difficult to memorize.

For most people, simply using the initial typed-in phrase as their password would be a significant improvement on security and it would be easier to remember.
Minor suggestion: put the intro to narro the scrapdealer on the load page and lose the keyboard instructions page altogether.
Really? I'm using Chrome on Linux, and most of these points still seem to be present on my build. Maybe Ubuntu is serving me up a stale version of the dev build?
Engine Yard Cloud Is Now Pay-As-You-Go
> Windows's user experience is still generally better

"Familiar", perhaps. "Better"? That's highly disputable.
Fair point. The creative visionaries are the people who should be leaders in an ideal or even morally acceptable society, but almost never the people who have the capability to grab power.
really digging the animation/feel of the game. Also, I died =), hit continue, and the music stopped.

Best of luck man, looking forward to seeing your other games.
Okay, how would I tell the player the controls then...?
Another cool one to try the spinner 3 in a row
Thanks for sharing.

How do you like e-junkie? What other alternatives did you consider?
Modern CentOS distros ship both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries (including 64-bit kernels). All they should need to do is kick a 64-bit image and remove the 64-bit binaries, and change your yum repo to a 32-bit one only. If the initrd was an issue they'd just switch to the other arch's initrd or rebuild kickstart-images with whatever support they need. This is pretty easy stuff.
HDMI 1.3 delivers 10.2Gbps according to the Wiki, and some simple math says 48-bit 1920x1080@60p is ~6Gbps.

So, that should explain why it can't be wireless.

It can be done over fiber—something the article's author apparently didn't bother to research as a Googling for "HDMI fiber" finds equipment. "HDMI cat5" tells me it can be done over CAT5 ("ethernet") cable as well.
In Windows Chrome it's Ctrl-Shift-I
Cute visualization!
Why not just use the phrase+password as a password?
I used Flixel. I had to add a lot to get most of the game mechanics in a reasonable way. Flixel provides the basic platforming phyiscs, but I had to add things like variable jumps, dialog screens, pickups, enemies, inventory, etc.

The world is actually a collection of text files in a format Flixel uses to make the basic physics. Each level has three files: background, widgets, and enemies. I modified the file parser so I could spawn enemies, doors, and triggers easily.

We used a free level editor to make the text files.
Awesome story! Extremely motivated now.
There has got be a better way to think about this market that just selling eBooks. It's premium information conveyance, right? Like a stock tip sheet?

My brother is in a marketplace that depends heavily on advertising to get customers. He spends several hundred a year, just on newsletters and eBooks that tell him how to best utilize his advertising budget, which seems to be over a thousand per month.
Deniers try to use process as wedge for false-dichotomy argument.

At some point, we need to see a few correct predictions made by the models. Otherwise, your "science" looks more like Creationism.
Batteries that last for months or years for portable electronics.

That's a multi billion dollar solution if anyone can manage it. Battery tech has definitely not stagnated - it is just maddeningly hard to progress.

Even the most modern car out there (arguably, the latest generation Toyota Prius) is still a mess of gears, oil, wires, and fairly crappy and old UI conventions on the inside

The reason that "mess" has survived relatively unchanged for so long is simple: it "just works". It works really well and is simple. Changing a winning formula is tough.

Better locks for my home

We have digital locks at work and they are the biggest pain ever :) again there is a reason we have keys - they work.
Start your own. . .
I've always thought it would be incredibly convenient to have a remote-unlock for my front door like my car has. I'm always fumbling with my key while carrying bags or groceries. It would be nice to unlock the door from my car before gathering everything. I guess remote garage-door openers remedy this for most homeowners.
Uh,

Odd person to imagine as an advocate of health.

The circumstantial evidence for the health-damaging effects of high-fructose corn syrup in particular are still fuzzy but the correlation of sodas and obesity is pretty established. Where is Coke on that question?

-- I wouldn't advocate imagining your health as a glass ball. There's something to the point that your body responds to the imagines of yourself that you give it. I'm a rubber ball but not one whose going to put Coke into my system.
Life is easier in rich countries than in poor ones. Rich countries also have higher GDP. However, the relationship is causative between the wealth and production and higher quality-of-life, not GDP. The arrows go like this: Wealth -> GDP. Wealth -> Well-being. These are tight enough to make it hard for an order-of-magnitude difference (as opposed to, say, 20%) not to denote a better quality of life.

However, the US has a very high GDP and, although it's not Third World yet, has a distinctly lower quality of life than most European countries (expensive healthcare, high educational costs, 1-2 weeks' vacation being considered normal) despite those countries' lower GDPs.
Ask YC: "Yodlee" type service for airline and hotel points?
Hi All, does anyone know of a service or a set of API's to get a person's airline rewards/miles and hotel rewards points by entering their login/password? Sort of a "Yodlee" equivalent per se for Mint would be a good analogy.

If not, how does Points.com get this information? Do they integrate individually with each service? And if yes, how do we do that?

Thanks everyone, we're bummed here so any help is greatly appreciated.

Cheers!
I glanced over the JS source and didn't find any evidence that the site is malware. Unfortunately, that's about the best thing I have to say about the security of using this method.
I am aware of that. I factor in non-dollar benefits such as the peace of mind and the ability to engage in riskier behavior (which insurance companies hate but can't stop).
Not RISC, not SysV.
That's the kind of perception people see when you use Linux for about two hours before getting back to their regular environments.

It's the little things that make it a really high-quality experience and that makes it so hard to move to other platform after using it for a while. The font rendering is usually better than Windows (although somewhat worse than with Macs). Select text and middle-click somewhere else spares me a lot of keyboard-mice coordination. Compiz is outstanding, and it's not just eye-candy - the multi-desktop concept is amazing and works remarkably well as an organizing tool, and maximizing/tearing off windows with gestures - that's something Windows users had to wait until w7 to get. Then there is the smooth operation - no lockups when your Windows box is too busy to bother to move the mouse and no annoying beachball from hell either - if the computer is heavily loaded, it just becomes slower, gracefully. It's also the "I told it to do it and it just did" thing - never, ever being unable to delete a file because a crashed program opened it. The computer will never demand to be restarted in the middle of your e-mail, but, when you tell it to restart, no iTunes or Office will block you. I forget how many times I told my Windows notebook to restart and went on to grab coffee, just to learn that a certain program refused to quit and that program was more important than my order to the machine to restart. Who's in command after all?

People often confuse quality with good-looking icons. That's not what it's about.
i must have missed the part where coke forces itself on customers.
Clj-facebook: Clojure library for Facebook Platform
I don't know if you did everything yourself during those two weeks but if you did can we get a more detailed breakdown:

1. Time spent on graphics

2. Time spent on level design/creation

3. Time spent play testing

4. Time spent programming

5. Time spent on sound and music
Wow! I've actually been trying to come up with a secure, but easy-for-me-to-remember password scheme.

What I wanted to build was a password generator which takes a username and domain as inputs and spits out an pseudo-random passsword.

Something like: bgraves & ycombinator.com & salt = ybcgormabviensator#salt

The problem for me is that I use very hard to guess passwords, generated by my password database program (KeePass). Now I have no idea what those PW's are and rely solely on KeePass to keep track, which isn't available on my workplace PC (and, no, syncing my password DB between environments is not permitted.)

This site maybe what I was looking for, and it even looks like it's in JS to prevent most MitM attacks!

Thanks HN!!
How much time did it actually take you to write the book?
> Strongly disagree

Would you mind explaining why you disagree?

> the most sane approach to distributed transactions is to redefine the problem, and restrict transactions to be within "entities" that fit on a single machine.

How is disallowing distributed transactions a sane approach? There's no harm in allowing distributed transactions using 2PC and letting the developer decide if he wants to incur the performance penalty or wants to colocate the data-structures to the same node to avoid 2PC overhead.
> their sys admins are dropping Cassandra and pushing all the engineers back to MySql

I'm curious what you are thinking of, because I have better picture of companies using Cassandra than most. :)

I do know of one company that fits your description, where some of the mysql DBAs were very anti-cassandra because, frankly, it's not mysql and that's what they were used to. But that has been resolved (the most vocal DBA left) and the Cassandra migration is continuing.

> If there were any pitfalls or hairy parts with maintain Cassandra, that would be good to know

Other than the obvious (it's not a relational database), we've documented the main limitations here: http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/CassandraLimitations
You deliberately choose not to base your opinion on a scientific matter on actually reading studies, listening to experts, observing evidence and learning about the underlying physics.

I have neither the time nor the expertise to do that. Instead, I rely on the counsel of those who do it for a living. When the predictions made by those people consistently fail to reflect reality, at what point is it OK for me to show signs of skepticism?
e-junkie is OK, but the UI is horrible, it's all in flash. I went w/ e-junkie at 1st because of the coupon code that gave me 120 days for free & because they handle all the digital delivery logic like link expiry.
I'm now w/ ClickBank as it seems to be more popular w/ affiliate marketers, only costs an upfront $50 & can accept multiple methods of payment.
> even looks like it's in JS to prevent most MitM attacks!

The JS is delivered over cleartext HTTP. A MITM attack can substitute malicious JS code that will deliver your password to a third-party server.
What are some negatives to using a security method like this?

In my mind, it's just a way to come up with "hard to guess, but easy to remember" passwords.
That's a case from Tim Farris book ( at least the first time I read about it)
Just call them up and see if they're interested? What do you say? In my case I don't have an actual product, just the skills and time in the evenings to do something. So maybe I should just call up some non-techy friends and see if they're having problems at work that might be solvable with computers...
Patrick is clearly too modest to link to his own post about this so here it is: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/
What do you want?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. (I heard that one from an environmentalist, ironically enough.)

Extraordinary calls to action, such as rewiring the global economy, require ironclad proof.
[replying to cx01]

> Would you mind explaining why you disagree?

I did, that's what the rest of the comment is. :)

> How is disallowing distributed transactions a sane approach?

That's the subject of Pat's entire paper, which I linked.
At least a couple of these issues are IP-related:

"Video on demand for everything."
The media czars own the copyrights and want to keep control.

"Batteries that last for months or years for portable electronics."
There is not much "freedom to operate" with battery technologies. I haven't read up on this in a while, but my understanding of why Toyota had a hybrid that was head-and-shoulders above other companies was that Panasonic owned the patents for their batteries, and wouldn't let anyone else come close (except Ford, who licensed them for the Escape). I don't know as much about small electronics, but I'm guessing it isn't a much easier area to work in.
Not if you just save the JS file to your local machine, right? There's no HTTP involved in that case (which is precisely how I intended to use it).
I think this is in an incredibly bad way to create passwords, at any given moment they could swap out the js so that it phones home and then boom your insecure.
"Significant overcapacity" in global lithium-ion battery market?
Interesting links - thanks. There's definitely a continuum here - the full ACID model at one end; key-value stores at the other. It looks like Google is moving in the right direction - adding more ACID - which certainly plays to my personal bias :-)
> When the predictions made by those people consistently fail to reflect reality

I'm curious... What events got you into an extremely skeptical frame of mind? Please be specific.

Most of the overturned predictions were years out before they'd have very direct and visible effects on most westerner's lives. Right now we're just in the beginning-of-climate-instability part of it.

But to answer your question specifically: I've been skeptical since day 1, and I encourage you to be the same. But part of being skeptical is "being convinced by the research and evidence" and "making an honest attempt to learn about the subject."
Strong Authentication
The implementation of strong authentication by Symtex is very flexible and can be integrated into a business infrastructure at various key points dependent upon the business requirements.
Twitter Picks Up Cassandra
It's incredibly simple to save the JS files + HTML file to your local machine and run it locally.
I'm curious... What events got you skeptical? Please be specific.

The hurricane business is a perfect example. It was only a couple of days ago that Al Gore beat that particular drum in his NYT editorial.
Because that doesn't give you security if the site is compromised.
For example, if my Phase+password combination is RootGod+Facebook.com it wouldn't take very long for someone to realize that RootGod+Gmail.com would also likely work there.
Firebug to log in?
Writing took about 2 months IIRC. But the learning took >1 year :p
Instead of defining columns on a table, each attribute has its own table
(new tables are created on the fly), which means that we can add and
remove attributes at will. In turn, performing a select simply means
joining all of the tables on that individual key.

... and now you know why nobody is doing this.

Back before NoSQL had a name (and fast implementations) and we would just build key-value stores inside of relational databases and describe them to people as "tall, skinny tables", this was how you would construct a query.

Of course, it was a lot easier in a skinny table than the method you describe because you'd simply join the table back on itself n times rather than having n tables sitting around in your database.

Regardless, doing things that way was generally regarded as a bad idea even back in the 90's, and was only something to consider when you had highly-configurable things to describe that didn't fit well into a relational structure. Everybody realized that you suffered huge performance hits at query-time, and you were essentially eliminating the possibility of reporting.

So no, given that NoSQL is all about using key/value stores to boost performance by trading off reportability, this solution (which actually trades both sides of that equation away) is not a replacement.
You're spot on pchristensen, the assumed goal for these principles is to build a $$ generating business (i.e. not the VC-backed long-term+scale model).
File encryption made easy
Yes exactly! It works for everything you want to sell online.
1. The biggest negative is that there are no positives: as TimMontague already pointed out, you might as well just use phrase + password as your password. To anyone who knows about this site, the output is no more secure than the input.

2. The cipher used is laughably weak. Given a sufficiently large output string (and sufficiently large is not large at all), it's trivial to brute-force the seed used to generate the substitution chart and determine the input password.

3. See my other comment on MITM attacks.
Reminds me of cave story in space.
Or create an iphone/android app for yourself.
he pays for newsletters? Can you share which ones?
Facebook - The World's Dominant Media Company
Can Cardpool (YC W10) Solve the Unused Gift Card Problem?
These 32-bit machines use too much memory. I only need a 31-bit address space! Can you guys please drop everything to support my micro-optimization needs?
Another easier and more secure is to use a sha1 hash on every password you generate and just use that as your password.
This hurricane business is the exact example you want to see, then. Specific predictions being found incorrect over time and revised. The IPCC isn't trying to lie to you or misrepresent their position.

And there really is a HUGE amount of data on the subject. The current state of climate research has moved past the argument about "is there warming?" Because there is, we've found a ton of data to validate it. We're up to a very high degree of certainty that this is not purely cyclical (although more data obviously improves this confidence).

Where the research continues to grind is on specific effects of warming (such as this hurricane issue) and specific feedbacks in the system that can either slow or speed the rate of climate change. You see a lot of things about that now in the news now, but you may notice that there is much less discussion of "if the hockey stick really exists."

I'd also like to ask why you care what Al Gore says? He's a poster child and a ideologue for a specific political group. I certainly don't care what he says. He's not making scientific claims that are worth addressing. How he got a Nobel I will never know.
Tell HN: quick startup funders compare
|----------------| Seed Camp |	Dream IT | lunch Box | Tech Stars | Y combinator |

| startup Fund~	| €30-50k | $15k-$25k | $20,000 | $18,000 | 20,000	|

| times per year| 1 |	1	| 1 | 3 | 2 |

| location	| london | Philadelphia | Washington| Boston, Boulder, Seattle | Bay Area	|

| stakes	| 5-10%	| 4-8%	|	6% | 6% |	2-10% |

The above is a "very quick" comparing table. May it helps some hacker looking for funding :)

thanks
Not quite sure, but I'm assuming this is recommended for local system passwords, rather than web based passwords?

I can't imagine actually getting people to remember (and enter) strings like p?7J9JJ4M^E97J*J7J into a password field.

Or am I using it incorrectly?
CeBIT 2010 Prevue: Sparks, Smouldering
Next time, he's going to pretend to shoot the guy's daughter dead. What fun!
for some reason I didn't find this funny ... it's oddly reminiscent of "Punk'd", where Ashton Kutcher places people in awful situations and then pulls the blanket and laughs at how upset they got.
Have you read many peer reviewed economics papers? Or even college economics textbooks? They make same arguments about well being, dead weight losses, etc. And they are full of weak assertions and sloppy logic. Peer review can be a process for eliminating error, but it can also be a process for replicating error. Where does your faith in academia economists come from? Have you read a bunch of peer reviewed papers, and decided that they have better logic and reason than the writings of a top econ-blogger ( like Winterspeak ( http://www.winterspeak.com/ )?

Also note that while econlib is funded by the Liberty Fund, most academic economists are substantially funded by the government. There is potential for bias everywhere, let's worry about what people say.

Of course, I also think Henderson is wrong in one of his points. GDP is total national income times a price deflator. If government spending does not result in more productive output, then that will show up in the price deflator, and "real gdp" shouldn't rise. At least in theory. The real problem with the GDP statistics is that the calculation of the price deflator is riddled with methodological problems.
My two 16 year old cousins go to Harriton. They were thrilled that they got free laptops for use at school. I've frequently seen them or their friends post videos to Facebook which makes me think that they know that if the light is on, the webcam is working. I'm going to give my uncle a call tonight, I'm sure that hes furious about this.
My Startup(s) Story. I hope it motivates someone.
I have never had this issue. I use the dev channel of Chromium. I don't use the standard beta channel of google Chrome for Mac
Provided that the code is intact when you initially retrieve it, that solves the MITM issue. But then you're tied to that computer, and if that's acceptable, then you're far better off just using a password-keeper that uses real crypto.