skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not PowerPoint, it's all computer-based presentations.

Personally, I would not speak at this conference. I like my Takahashi slides, and I do like to reuse them when overlap is unlikely (a talk in Minneapolis, and then one in Oslo). Reuse means I get to make it iteratively better each time; I usually "test" my slides in front of a small group before I present in front of a big group. Someone has to deal with Rev. A, but not everyone.

With the method this conference requires, it's always revision A... so I hope you practice a lot before your talk, and I hope your dog gives you good feedback. I have given some good impromptu talks, but those tend to be entertaining rather than technical. If someone is paying to go to a conference, breadth of subject matter is probably better than watching me make fun of my hair.

IMHO.
Installing and configuring FlashDevelop for FlashPunk
What stops me from putting another user's notifo username? Most users use the same username on various sites...
The task creator is the judge of accepting/rejecting the solution.

If the requirements listed isn't suitable, the other task rewarders can simply make a comment saying "i'll contribute $200 for this task if you add this requirement." Then the task creator can add it to the list of requirements.
"No spaces or characters", I'll have to remember that next time I make a form that shouldn't be used.

I used to have a fifteen-digit number on a visa or mastercard (not amex), which was a little weird, but I was amazed how many vendors couldn't handle it. Aren't there standards for this stuff?
I'll be honest, I'm not spending $499 or more on an iPad.
Yeah, committing to your local copy better be fast, it's committing to the shared server repository that I'm concerned about.
I think so...in principle. But imagine how this would work in our partisan legislature - I'm sure you can think of equally awful possibilities regardless of your individual political affiliation. While some bad laws would die a suitable death, some good ones would be made into political footballs as well.

And it would create havoc in the courts. Recall that the Icelanders settled most of their disputes via blood feuds and something like weregeld. Doing that in the modern age would result in many arguments about retroactive punishment and/or restitution for people convicted under expired laws. you might be found guilty, punished, declared innocent, compensated, and then declared guilty after all and owing the money back.
I think you are drawing a false distinction between "technical decisions" and "business decisions". In the context of a business, what technical decision doesn't affect the business in some way?
Passwordless scp with python and pexpect
Was this really unpaid though? Looks like they covered his housing and living expenses - see comment from horse's mouth below.
I have to say that this is kind of sad. I've just discovered your blog and the podcast and I feel like I'm going to miss your essays.

I'm not an engineer, but a designer who likes to program and your thoughts on software are useful even for me. Now that you are venturing into the realm of VCs and being a media company I would've love reading (or hearing in the SO podcast) your insights over that.

Anyway, good luck. And I guess I have ten years of essays to dive into.
I don't think anyone intends to lose or break their laptop, but it happens. I would rather be out $300 than $2000.
Well they suffered from a particular problem - invasion of non-technicals into technical conf.
So, that was a forced measure.
Ask HN: MySQL expert anyone?
I need to get a MySQL expert to help me optimize my database.

Mainmusik.com is a high traffic music site which is now getting slower and slower as the database getting bigger and bigger.

Anybody here want to share some experience?
Thanks!
Are you a mobile app company or an internet messaging company?
> Because the punitive response to default makes even less sense.

I always thought that banks don't care for punishing people per-se, as morality it not their business. It seems they just have an excuse to create some bogus losses to offset their gains on paper? Does that makes sense? In other words, they know that some of these debtors will never pay back so they start charging a high (say 35%) interest. All that accumulated "loss" can be written off against their gains for tax purposes.

Does that make any sense or am I completely wrong?
Very interesting - seems so obvious, but the article does a good job of explaining how it fills a social need. I see a bright future for this, subcultures are often good leading indicators.

Rather than separate applications for different groups, might it not be better to have a general one and set filters - you could use it for everything from a hookup to professional networking or connecting with fans of your favorite TV show etc. etc.
I would expect that rule to be more reliable for startups than for large companies that can survive on mediocrity.
I'm so glad there was like 100 examples, I wasn't quite certain what the guy was on about till the last few.
You can check my blog. There is a lot of code=data manipulation there. For example, this one:

http://kazimirmajorinc.blogspot.com/2009/12/symbols-as-sexpr...

This post describes implementation of hygienic (even recursive hygienic) fexprs in Newlisp.
Ask HN: Forum/site for "unused" startup ideas?
I'm not one to share ideas for startups that I deem good and may eventually pursue. I might solicit friends for advice, of course. But, for the most part, I keep them as secret. I keep them in a simple txt document, which I add to whenever a new, decent, usable idea comes to mind.

Usable, however, is the key word. I don't include ideas that are outside of my domain, or which I won't ever likely pursue. And so many ideas go all for naught. I can't "use" certain ideas, so I don't record them - and no one uses them.

So, question #1: What do you think about a forum or community site where HN users (and, eventually, everyone) could post good (but for them, unfeasible) ideas for others to use? (This thread could be the starting point, of course.

Now, question #2: Would any of you like to help develop the site? I own everstretch.com, which we could use - a place to stretch ideas.

And, finally, here are my first two ideas - one radical, one more conventional.
1) Caloric Intake Tracker - I'm not sure if this is at all possible, but I would use it everyday for the rest of my life (and happily pay a monthly subscription), if it were created. Instead of having to log in and estimate daily intake, this product might be a wristband, or a chip, or whatever, and would physically check to see a person's energy balance. It might even be a pill to swallow, once a day, or week, or more.

2) Twitter "Get to a TV" Score Updates - I follow many sports teams. But I don't always watch them live. At the same time, I hate missing those close, intense, sometimes epic games. So, this idea would be a website where (1) a user can select which team to track closely, and (2) whenever that team was in a game, and the game was very close in the final minutes, it would tweet a DM notification to "Get to a TV."

Cheers.
My family has always just used two strips of velcro. Mate ~1/2 of a few inches each, and the remaining tails stick to each other. Wrap & go.

Advantage: you can wrap it around the handlebars / a part of the bike when not in use, so you never have to remember to carry it.
Open Source publishing with Geoffrey Grosenbach, Brandon Mathis, and Tim Caswell
The handgun can be used for perfectly legal purposes, if a program they have written only serves the purpose of doing something illegal I'd imagine it's a different story.

If a handgun manufacturer made a custom weapon with the discussed intent of using it for a specific illegal purpose would they not be liable?
For anyone in the Charlotte, NC area who's interested, Aaron Heckmann (one of the contributors) will be giving a presentation on Express April 15th:

http://www.meetup.com/CharlotteJS/calendar/12929151/
A Tech-Filled Life, Without Power - Pogue's Posts Blog
I wonder if any startups are using this tchnology. What kinds of advantages could a js stack like this have over something like ruby on rails?
If it's a US or Canadian lawyer try searching for their name on http://www.talkburst.com/ - anyone with a name can be reviewed now.
Exactly. In my experience there is plenty of challenge in virtually every facet of building a product. I've held a job(at single product shop) for more than 5 years. It wasn't like I went to work one day and went 'welp.. everythings done. Lets pack it in!'

There was ALWAYS things to do. I guess I get my rocks off by actually accomplishing things. That means doing a really good job no matter what challenge I'm dealing with. There are a lot of challenges in software development. I think too often folks are looking for glamorous problems to solve. It's more about ego than anything else.
As far as I can tell, HR mostly stamps my paperwork and then does things behind the scenes. When I have questions, they answer my emails. No reason most couldn't work wherever, whenever.
Also - why do people disallow characters such as
,./:;'"[{]}\|-_=+ in passwords on theirs sites. I can't understand this. I would understand banning non-ascii, but normal ascii characters should be allowed everywhere.

Now every site allows different subset ot such characters, so every site forces user to have different password to it, if user wants non-alphanumerics in password.

I would like to have 3 passwords - trash password for social sites, etc; better password for e-mail; and good password for important things. It would be managable.

Thanks to arbitrary restrictions I have to remember many more passwords. Which is bad for security.
"Wait, is there any other programming besides web programming?"

In the last year I've been asked about iPhone programming more than web, seriously.
Yes, by competitors, I meant other startups building ecommerce software, not sites like Walmart. IIRC it
worked well.
0.01% of billions is a lot of money.
Check out CouchSurfing for an example of how to solve this problem. Craig is just talking about how to make it universal rather than site-specific.

CouchSurfing provides enough trust data that you'll have someone into your home based on a web profile. Some of the mechanisms include personal references, friend lists, community awards (that are meaningful and hard to get), and unrevokable vouches.
Anyone knows where that law comes from? "A person may not walk around on Sundays with an ice cream cone in his/her pocket." It makes me kind of curious
Awesome tip, thanks for pointing this out!
As a counter example, I present Florida. Florida is a no-fault driving state. A couple years ago, the law that decided this expired for about a month before it was renewed into law again. This sort of last minute law wrangling is a mess and requires millions of people reconsider their insurance temporarily. It's a "great idea," but it's terrible in practice.
Descriptive relativism is merely the positive or descriptive position that there exist, in fact, fundamental disagreements about the right course of action even when the same facts obtain and the same consequences seem likely to arise.
Exactly, what people seem to be doing is mistaking beautiful elegant code as the aim which it isn't. Sure we all love fast well designed code but all we care about is getting the users page to them as fast as possible with the minimum fuss.

If it takes more than one line to write or read or invalidate your cache you are doing it wrong (or your framework is doing it wrong). (Same with your split tests, you split test right? . . right?).
I'm sorry, but this entire article sounds like FUD. I could point out various parts I had issues with, but the bit that bothered me the most was the title of the section "Recommendations to Improve Mint.com’s Security Posture". I might be naive here, but can someone please point out the valid points raised in this article that actually make Mint.com 'weak' when it comes to security?
Actually I wouldn't have integrated Notifo into HN if I didn't think it deserved it on its own merits. HN is a labor of love for me; I wouldn't integrate random stuff into it just because founders asked me to.

Out of 172 companies we've funded, I've only integrated 2 functionally into HN: Clickpass and Notifo, both because I thought they were useful to users.
Yes, I don't think that it would work if laws are retroactive... But then it's quite unfair if they are not.

It is an interesting idea, but I think there'll be a lot of tweaking to be done to the process to get something effective. For example, how long should the expiration date be, 6 years is to short because of the political football problem, 20 years is long if the laws aren't retroactive. Also what to do with the existing laws? Stage out their expiration? How do we choose which one will expire first? or should there be an easy way to strike down old laws?
If the conjecture is true, a cube is topologically equivalent to a sphere

No, the cube and sphere are homeomorphic regardless. (Pf: Points on S^3 are unit 4-vectors. Projecting onto the unit cube is continuous and invertible)

If the conjecture is true, and if you find yourself on a nice 3-surface, then you can conclude you're on the 3 sphere.
I bet gzipped JSON compares favorably for larger objects, though, and has the advantage of not being a new protocol. The fact that it supports Haskell and Perl with proper hackagedb / cpan modules is nice, however. Very rare for web 2.0 stuff.
whats the big deal? They didnt shut down the apple store. Its just the homepage....
I don't mean to bitch but that site is just a pain to read. However, one of the source links, http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1454163 looks pretty interesting. Or at least the abstract does.
Running FlashPunk
This could be fixed though with a transition period after the law is expired, where the law is still valid for a few months while it's being discussed. I don't think any of those ideas can work perfectly with our existing democratic system right from the beginning, it needs to be used and modified over time as problem arise (the problem of course is that governments are not very good at this kind of continuous development)
I admire Dr. Perelman for his work (even though I don't completely understand the proof), but most of all I admire him for his integrity. He withdrew from mathematics because he felt dishonesty was tolerated and he didn't want to be part of it. He refers to Shing-Tung Yau of course:

"I can't say I'm outraged. Other people do worse. Of course, there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest."

( from "Manifold Destiny", New Yorker, Aug 28, 2006: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/08/28/060828fa_fact2?p... )
My preferred way:

1. launch your site
2. wait until it starts to bog under load
3. add caching in the bogged down areas so you can still make money
4. use the time you just gave yourself to optimize
5. Repeat 2-4

Adding caching should be as quick as finding the bottle neck. Sure optimizing might take you the same time but it might be a critical flaw that you're better off caching around until you have time for a refactor. Either way your customers are happy while you toil away in the code.
And the truth of it is that it's like a 1 or 2 line data sanitization fix in most languages nowadays to normalize the data value to the expected one.

1) strip whitespace off the front and backend.
2) eliminate unexpected characters in the middle of the string like - or spaces.
I really like the concept. I've been frustrated by slideware nearly everywhere I've encountered it, be it academic or industry events. Sure, it makes it pretty hard to demonstrate software and such things, but hey, how about build an embedded device to show the things you want it to show? Or even draw on the flipboard for you. This conference is all about intelligent objects.

On a more serious note, this should make it easier to adapt the presentation to the audience. You no longer have the option to hide behind your slides or to fear that you won't get to the last slide in time. It will scare off a number of decent presenters (as jrockway said here) but it will also scare all but the very hardcore marketing types. Would probably give startups an edge though (used to pitching without materials).
Why just stop at dashes and spaces?

s/\D//g
I'm extremely dubious about the claim that it's harder to repeal old laws than to create new ones. Why would this be the case?

The big problem I see is that it makes it harder to know what the law says at any given time; that's an inevitable result of more change. Change isn't necessarily bad, but in this case, change for change's sake undoubtedly is.
If you have a machine shop in your garage and your neighbor asks you to build him a hand gun for the purpose of committing a murder, and you do so, yes, you will be an accomplice to his crime. If you sell cast iron frying pans, axes, baseball bats, or hand guns and those are used without your knowledge to commit crimes you are not an accomplice for those crimes
Set goals and triggers (warnings) on different timeframes and levels. Not too many, so you are able to keep track of them mentally and don't spend much time administering your list. Get advice from friends and/or your romantic partner (if you're in a serious relationship) about what should be on that list. Have good friends who will encourage and applaud your progress, and some close ones you can share problems with and who'll tell you if you're driving into the ditch. I have a shrink I go to occasionally and it's good to have someone you can speak to with total unabashed honesty, and who will ask questions or notice things about your thinking patterns that may not even occur to others. A good attorney can fulfill a similar function for some people.

Have a safety valve and an anchor, too. Could be a place you go or an activity that lets you reboot mentally when you're having a particularly difficult time, or some obligation or giving-back to acknowledge your good fortune when you find yourself feeling cocky. Church or a community activity fill these roles for some people.

Finally, have an escape hatch. Have some place you can take off to for alone time and an excuse for why you will not be available to anyone, because when you go there you disable your phone etc. There are times you need to stop talking, stop planning, stop thinking and just be. To quote an old Zen proverb, if your cup is too full of your thoughts and ideas, there is no room left to pour in new ones. So empty your cup from time to time.
Finding Comfort At An Indian Cafe
South Carolina Sportsman
South Carolina Fishing, South Carolina Hunting, South Carolina Sportsman Magazine, for over 20 years the leading authority on South Carolina Fishing & Hunting, Daily South Carolina Fishing & Hunting Reports, Fishing & Hunting News, Your most complete South Carolina Fishing & Hunting site.
Aren't you forgetting Scribd for PDFs?
You also don't need to ask for the card type (Visa, MasterCard, etc); it can be automatically determined based on the number.
Does a messy desk imply that you are a working hard?
I am a graduate student; I have the messiest desk in our lab. By messy, highlighted research papers, open text books, and scratch sheets of paper sprawled out across my cubicle. As opposed to the banana peels and empty soda bottles. Is the sight of such clutter a sign of a hard worker (positive) or a lazy scatter brained student (negative)?
IPadWatcher.com interviewed me
Whatever Happened to Web 2.0?
Relatedly: telephone numbers. (555) 555-5555 is understood by every American above the age of like six. Why can't your website figure it out? phone_number.gsub!(/[^0-9]/, "") prior to processing, pretty_print_phone_number(phone_number) in the view, and you're freaking done.

Relatedly but of less obvious salience to most Americans: if you tell me to write my name in hankaku kana and I write it in zenkaku kana then rather than telling me to rewrite it, call your zenkakuToHankaku function on my input, see if it contains anything other than kana, and if not just coerce the input over. I have been on a crusade to do this at my day job.
From the Amazon page's editorial reviews, by Publishers Weekly:

Taubes says that the current U.S. obesity epidemic actually consists of a very small increase in the average body mass index.

Interesting, considering the data in the top link implies otherwise. (I haven't read the book, can't comment on the editorial review's statement's accuracy)
The sloppy adherence to the notability guidelines has pissed me off so much in the past that I've entirely written off even bothering to contribute to wikipedia anymore. I've posted pages on people, software, projects and the like that met or exceeded the guidelines and had all but 1 or 2 deleted within a day or so and spent literally months on getting a few deletions reversed until I finally just threw in the towel.

I'm constantly surprised at the things that wikipedia doesn't have in it more than what it does. And I'd wager that there were pages on those subjects in the past and they've simply been deleted.

In other cases, subjects that I've referred to on occasion over the years have seen their article content slowly diminished over time to be practically useless. Things like screenshots being taken down, history or explanations being gutted, external links disappearing. It's all becoming basically useless on many levels.

I used to start research at wikipedia to get good pointers to sites, now I pretty much just google and hit next page a few times to get past the SEO spam.
What is Lymphoma Cancer
Yeah ... but what type of real world data is sparse?
Lady Gaga, The Illuminati Puppet
Using 2.5x as much floor space as a standard cabinet, I have to question the scalability of a solution like this.
Ask HN: How to datamine grocery stores?
Ideally it would be real-time inventory data, but just a list of all items a store typically carries would be a good start. Some possibilities:

* Self-checkout screenshots
* Crowd-source customer receipts (thanks Kliment)
* Browse aisles with camera
* Ask store for listing
* Mine store websites

[Edit: Updated possibilities.]
It's a hall of shame, the point is that their presence on the list makes them want to fix it.
I decided to try just that (with html canvas). Its probably WAY off, but it was fun to mash up.
http://thecowch.com/media/demo/index.html

edit: just a disclaimer, im no genius at physics and Ive probably misinterpreted the OP's post or made some other gross flaw in this sim.
writing the same language server and client is obviously easier (fewer context shifts, smaller code base, etc).

It's also asynchronous (non-blocking) so you can run thousands of connections out of a single thread (instead of RoR's silly 1-connection per process model).
It can be a sign of an anxiety disorder.
Seriously.
Oh yes; ok, 3.
ya know... after all that, I actually think I would feel better about the site. It's a half-decent breakdown, though FUD-heavy (especially U and D), and lots of parts of it point out significantly better practices than my banks currently employ.
What we are doing is not really ready to launch, but we match the first part of this description perfectly ("a GUI-based way for nonprogrammers to scrape data"). The GUI is web based, you can watch a demo and try us out immediately (you get your data in CSV):

http://siteparse.com
No, but there are quite a few strange old laws still around.

For example, if a Welshman crosses the border on a Friday with goods for market, you can kill him.

http://web.mac.com/jdewynne/OldAquarium/MISC/welsh.html

"In Shrewsbury in 1776, seven Welshmen were killed, three by musket, three by sword and one was bludgeoned to death with his own crops. The Borders Act has never been repealed."
What do start-ups spend their initial seed money on?
How do early stage companies figure out what kind of budget they need at the beginning?