skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It might seem to you that we can answer these questions without revealing secrets, but consider that (1) I've not been answering them and (2) you're asking whether we can do what was thought to be impossible, so real answers will necessarily provide direction. Short answers will just annoy you, full answers will reveal too much, and frankly, there's little upside in replying. If you'd make a good early-adopter customer for us, contact us and we can have the discussion. But equally, I see that you haven't replied to my call for early-adopters!

One I can definitely answer: yes, full SQL vocabulary support (though we haven't implemented everything yet!)
The bit in the post where the woman deleted a swath of emails touched on that.

Ouch!
Profile - Play Free Online Games on PCHGames
[edit] Meant to reply to axod's post.
Why are you normalizing it?

Is there some huge performance advantage in having the state field be an Id into a states table? Perhaps it would make updates easier if they ever rename Washington?

Why not normalize the name? There must be lots of Johns in your DB
Dazzle Camouflage from Computer Vision Face Detection
You are throwing a lot of ifs.

If you are providing a service that needs to be programmed.
If you are short on funds.
If you are only focusing on the US.

The problem isn't that. The problem is this:

When you are providing a service that relies on processing international orders...
When you are no longer a startup and earning money...
When you want to accept orders from the international community...

If you don't want to support the international market, don't. But if you do, do it right. I've seen it happen: "Launching in Canada!" and they still have a restriction of 5 characters for their Zip Code, or require all numbers.

It's silly. That's what the article is referring to. Wanting to accept international customers but doing it poorly. You'd be better off not offering the service and doing it right then offering it up poorly.
That thread has skepticism, but I didn't think any of it was rude or anything close to a personal attack. That's quite different from what the author of this post described.

The other side of the author's point is that you have to be careful not to take criticism of your work as criticism of you as a person.
Say you just met someone at a party, and you're having a conversation about something, when suddenly unprovoked they start tearing you a new one.

Would you be upset? But yet, this person is no less of a stranger to you than someone on a board on the internet, or anywhere else.

The fact that you don't see their face makes little difference.

It's nice to pretend that we're logical machines where we don't care about anything that doesn't materially affect us, but the truth of the matter is that we're all human, and when someone rails on us, even perfect strangers, it sucks.

Now, a healthy human being will pick themselves up and move on, but I don't think at any point it will simply not affect us at all.
http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Netflix-Reviews-E11891.htm
while we are on the topic can we lose the dropdown list of 196 countries you got from the ISO table?

Seriously, how many products have you shipped to Afghanistan or Albania but you make everyone scroll past these to get to the only country you actually deliver to (+ Canada if you're lucky)
Even better is his rant "Clojure is the false lisp
", http://imagine27.com/articles/2009-08-19-011225_clojure_the_....

It's great that he's taken time to actually learn Clojure and see how nice some of the libraries are. With Penumbra (thanks to Zachary Tellman) your OpenGL code looks downright beautiful.
I've received some pretty biting ones from people that were upset about having to pay to use a product or service online. It's interesting that people are willing to put hours into a hate note, yet aren't willing to pay $20 for something online.
Software customized by users: UW prof wants to revolutionize UI
I don't know why she branded them all losers, but it sounded like the old "I would never join any organization that would have me as a member joke" to me. In other words "I would never date anyone who would want to date me".
Sure way to make me read a blog post: reference a line of Firefly dialogue in the title!
India got the 100000 marker on IjustMadeLove
Didn't sell it yet but we had people interested in. We are from near Montreal.
No special reason - I just don't know PHP. But it is on the todo list.
More deflation increases the value of debt, making it harder to write off, no?

Also, almost everything I've ever read about Japan (not an expert) has blamed the high savings rate for the deflationary spiral there. As far as the general idea of keynesians being wrong, they have 29-32, 32-37, 37 double dip and the Japanese situation at the turn of the century as data points in their favor.
First, let me say that I entirely follow the technical description of the potential attack they're talking about, and I can imagine ways to exploit it.

My question: is it really worth worrying about?

What's the threat scenario where this leaks appreciable amounts of my privacy ? Note: I'm NOT arguing "my privacy is worthless".
> "It's a waste of her time to bother."

I agree, in this case since she has no interest in them, it would be a waste of everyone's time to write back. She could write a "sorry, not interested" message back, but it's really not necessary.

That being said though, what got me about that example was "Ugh, losers" - it's not so much the fact that she ignored the message, but rather that she has judged these men who have (insofar as we know) shown no such indication, and from what we know wrote well-penned, thoughtful messages.
Too bad they didn't arrange it for the C64 or Sega Master System... the NES had the poorest sound quality.
"... climbing shoes or hiking boots for more challenging terrain then just going off the sidewalk will have other vectors of importance."

Yes, but still, who are the majority of people who are buying those specialized shoes? Normal people who don't really need them. So it still applies, even there, even if the exact mix of people changes.
If you chalk everyone up who critiques something you're doing as "bitter", you're liable to miss a whole lot of useful information.
Ask HN: Which technology should I use for client-side web encryption?
I'm moving forward with developing a prototype of a cryptographically secure social networking site/messaging service/photo service.

All encryption will take place on the browser, using Open PGP standards. The server will see only encrypted data.

I can't decide between using Javascript/HTML5 and a hidden Java applet to do the bulk of the work.

Advantages of Java:

* Much faster for bitwise crypto operations (a significant concern).

* With the right permissions, it can load files directly from the hard drive and encrypt them in memory. As far as I know, this isn't possible with Javascript - the only way to upload a file is to submit it directly to the server though a form. This could be a dealbreaker for Javascript - though alternatively, I could use Java for only this specific task and everything else could be in JS.

* I can use direct socket communication to reduce latency (the page is likely to be very chatty).

* More crypto libraries already exist.

Advantages of JS/HTML5:

* Not Java

* Will work on the iPhone/iPad immediately (otherwise, if I went commercial, I'd have to develop an app).

* More transparent, giving technical users a greater sense of security.

Thoughts?
That's a non-trivial task.

Yes, that's true.

I only bring it up b/c if your goal is to turn pdfcrowd into an app that people would pay money for (and I would be one of them), solving that problem would go a long way towards achieving it.
Others have stated the reason for normalizing it already: interacting with third party software and/or services.

It makes more sense to normalize it at the beginning in order to give the user a chance to approve that it was processed correctly. You could just do the normalization at the point when you need to interact with the 3rd-party services, but then it's hidden in the back-end so you have to be confident in your normalization processing.

You could roll out a solution where the confirmation page is just there to allow the user to approve that normalization works on their free-form address, but still store it as a chuck of text in the database. Then when you are confident enough in your normalization process, you could just remove the user confirmation part.
Doesn't the author address this pretty directly?

you should remove the State field if the country isn't set to U.S.A. or at least make it optional

He doesn't say "Remove state completely".
I think that's kind of the point.
The quality of http://www.princexml.com is amazing. It's not open source and there is a cost to use it commercially (<1K, if I recall). I used it to convert my HTML documentation for Sleep into a camera-ready PDF.

http://sleep.dashnine.org/manual/ - original docs
http://sleep.dashnine.org/download/sleep21manual.pdf - result
I disagree.

In real life, there's an element of safety. If someone's hurling verbal abuse at my face, I'd be worrying that they're going to get physical. The same isn't true online unless they cross over into real life and come hunt you down.

If someone writes a ranting email/comment on here about how much I suck, I'd likely read it, see if it's funny or just boring, and move on. If you're going to rant, you should at least try and make it witty and clever.
Ask HN: New project, pick.im, A Freelancer Marketplace
Hello HN. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Yesterday we launched a very light version of pick.im. It is a marketplace for freelancers. For clients it is a way to search for freelancers in their area, at their pricepoint. For freelancers it is portfolio management, lead generation and (eventually) contracting and payment services.

We are focusing the search to be local (Designers in Portland) and not on specific cost (a 'competitive' search yields the ~65% of the market) This is much different than many other sites that really focus on bidding to the lowest cost in the world. We are not that.

Our broad statement is: professional tools for freelancers. Our shorter motto is: celebrate freelance.

We are working to build a site that allows search on:
Type of Freelance
Availability
Cost
Recommendations / Connections (linkedin connection)

In the next few weeks we are adding a simple contracting and payment option, essentially adding a 'buy it now' button to a freelance portfolio.

If you freelance and want to sign up put 'HN' in the invite code: http://pick.im/request/invite
Facebook Revealed Private Email Addresses Last Night
I did downvote, but at the time, the parent post had over 15 points and I wanted to know why.
Our matching algorithms evaluate more than just location to determine if two phones are a possibly match (and highly accurate location is fairly rare). So often we are able to match the correct phones even if there are others in close proximity that are also bumping. In the event that we match >2 phones, we prompt those users to bump again and compare both datasets.

Although you can sometimes trick the algorithm into matching phones that did not physically bump by shaking them from across the room, bumping will not work reliably if you do not bump into each other.
you bring up a good point. Having been fostered in the world of ecommerce, I've dealt with my share of angry customers. I've found that people find every chance they can get to get a discount or get something if they're remotely not happy with what they get.

sometimes you gotta cut your losses and remind yourself that some customers aren't worth servicing.
Clickable links:
http://pick.im

Invite: http://pick.im/request/invite
Again, in corporate networks the policy on downloading and running executables of the internet tends to be "don't do it" - regardless of whether the .exes are harmless or not.
Sorry, meant to vote this up, not down.
What are the threat models that you care about (in some sort of rough rank order)?
i think of "stop caring" as in...care about it on a professional standpoint but don't ever take things personally.
Why? Because the light stays in the same position? Then maybe it's better to move the light?
My current plan is to charge for conversion tokens but I'm not decided how much yet.
Darpa Chief: Fix America’s Critical Geek Shortage
Mozilla releases first quarterly analyst report
Ask HN: What are the options for non-dilutive financing for early stage firms?
Which US institutions/government bodies offer grants and other forms of non-dilutive financing to early stage tech companies in the US?
Thanks for the report. I will look into it as there should be no default HTML in the editor.
In real life, cute girls turn off 10 guys a day without thinking about how they feel. Why would/should they act differently on a dating site. (I'm not saying that I appreciate this act thought, that's just how reality is.)
So... someone is making a massive XML database out of some other components?
For the love of POSIX: A more useful way to not segfault from null pointers
I think maybe you misunderstood what "easy" means in this context. It means casual and unrestrained in sexual behavior. In other words, your friend's quote confirms this. If you want more examples, try Chatroulette.

Whether or not it's easy to find a good man is an entirely different question.
I have exhausted myself trying to persuade prince xml to not blur my images. That's the biggest hurdle for me.

If PDFCrowd can effectively handle images, I'll brand their logo into my bicep.
Are you guys gonna be at the HN meetup tonight?
why not just use bluetooth?
> all attempts to make a simplified limited computer over the years have failed

Really? Ever heard about iTouch/iPhone? They are the very definition of

> Make it simple to use, but not limited.

Tivo is another simplified, very limited computer. That is the nature of consumer devices. Limited but exceptionally simple and "just works" at the thing they do.
But if every smart person was contributing enough, we wouldn't be in a mess like we are today.

That has more to do with a mass of powerful but useless people that has collected at society's top than with an epidemic of lazy smart people.
I always read it as a joke with meaning. "Needless" within the context is a 'needless' word. =)
"My Indian and German friends are aware of the fact that not every country has states, even though their countries do"

Apparently not: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1232278
Their website is missing a clear and specific description of their service.
I never said that it has to be paid vacation.

My point is this: how many companies, when offering $100k for 50 worked weeks (e.g. 2 weeks' paid vacation), would allow someone to take $90k and have 7 weeks' vacation, or $80k and 12? Very few.
Because that's scary for users who have anxiety worrying they didn't input things correctly. If you tell them the phone number format and have a state dropdown, people rest easy knowing you will get their contact info correct.
Three months ago I wrote a little piece of rant about Less vs. Sass here (https://riobard.com/blog/2009-12-18-less-vs-sass/). The day after I posted it, Nathan Weizenbaum (author of Sass) emailed me saying those tiny problems will be fixed. Now they delivered it. Time to give it another try!
Most of us need to have things repeated to us many times, in multiple forms, before we get it.
It was a very good talk. When you read the blog entry realize it was live blogged and that is why the English is the way it is - my fingers can only move so fast.
I think the author is missing the point of the ksplice article ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1231961 ), which is that you can exploit NULL pointer de-references in the kernel to gain privilege escalation.
Yeah, that line really stuck out to me. Wasn't there a link floating around in the last week or so where people were able to utilize some kind of bug in the iPhone to extract the entire database of SMS texts, including previously deleted SMS messages?
Yeah, I laughed on reading that: ''that was just the demo'' : ). I am typing this on a Nokia E63 and it seems kind of ok, though a robust budget device. I have to place the phone some distance from eyes because it's resolution is bright. Point is, there are still some nuggets of good engineering at Nokia. Just give them time to learn from mistakes.
I use four different computers in a day, I'm often taking breaks to read HN or Reddit, visited styling isn't helping me much there.

The place I use it most is for Google search results, particularly when I refine my search and I want to know what are the links I visited in my previous search so I can click only on the new ones.

It's always a trade-off. I think this is a fairly reasonable one.
".. going to break a lot of layouts and a lot of javascript"

I'd love to see an example, because I can't think of any myself.
I don't think the ksplice article was really about a way to "not segfault" from dereferencing a null pointer, but this ended up being a nice, short exposition on handling signals anyway.
America, please quit playing! Start reading!
Google unveils free wireless service to homes: Google TISP
I would guess you wouldn't even sell 5% as many at $5. You're in a land-grab now, it would be nuts to even think about charging. Even if you did sell that many for $5, $1.5 million will end up small potatoes when the final chapter on the live online streaming video book is written.
Developers More Interested in Android than iPad [STATS]
I agree. After reading around a little I SORT of get what it does, but not really.
And yet you don't buy an iPhone as a replacement for your computer. People still need a "real" computer, and for that reason we're probably not going to see computers go the way of the dodo in favor of iPads.
My friend is using a German keyboard on his MBP. He is thinking about buying a wired Apple English keyboard and exchange all the key caps with the MBP and then use English keyboard. Not sure if this will work, but then the keys will be white instead of the default black ...
Have you tried flying saucer? I found it to be excellent for my purposes.
From the article being ranted about: "Next time, we’ll look at how a process can not only map NULL in its own address space, but can also create mappings in the kernel’s address space. And, I’ll show you how this lets an attacker use a NULL dereference in the kernel to take over the entire machine. Stay tuned!"

So it's not really about handling NULL ptr derefs, but exploiting them.
Here's what we need front and center.

"SimpleGeo, in its most basic form, indexes data by location using latitude and longitude so that you can easily search for things that are nearby. This allows developers to easily scale, manage, and query their location data. On top of this basic feature, SimpleGeo also provides rich location data, reverse geocoding, and other tools to help developers leverage the location of their users."

http://help.simplegeo.com/faqs/company/what-would-i-use-simp...
I think it's a problem when you may have beliefs that some others don't agree with but which you don't think they they have a right to know.

Here's a simple case: What if your employer was very stuck-up and controlling and the CEO is a crazy {insert religion or lack of here}. They make you log in from home to check your email on their website. Now what if their website sniffed your computer to check if you'd been looking at {insert other religious belief here} and forwarded that information on.

In this case your expectation of privacy does not match the actual privacy case. Most people wouldn't think that looking at a hard-core christian website from home might get them looked at funny by their atheist bosses. This is a case of technology not behaving properly, which is a bug.

You can think of all sorts of cases where there might be negative consequences for you if everyone could view your at-home browsing history.
Google To Go Nuclear
have you seen this? http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/
Also annoying are email address parsers that don't accept .name Domains.
Yes, its so hard to target a product like this. I think we'll just leave it sitting in version control, as I'm not passionate about solving industry specific problems other than the ones we built it for! :P
Are there any other retail categories with the same type of regular repeat purchase?
I don't think there is anything wrong with saying, you just have to have the right device for the right task. If what you need is to check email and browse websites, get something that does that. It might do more, but if that's all you need, than it doesn't have to do more. Likewise, if you need a "very specific genealogy application" then you know you have to get something that runs that. Just because some customers need something specific doesn't mean that everyone needs something that can do everything. You just need to find the right thing fo the job.

Case in point, I have a friend who was going on a multi-year trip to Australia. She wanted to get a computer that could travel with her, run skype, let her update her blog and upload pictures. Other than that, she didn't need anything else. She may do heavy picture editting on her Macbook at home, but she realized for a trip like this, all she needed was a netbook with linux on it. She got skype and webbrowsing, and the ability to pull pictures off of her camera. She realized a full Macbook or Windows laptop would've been overkill, so picked the right tool for what she needed.
The problem here is that you've caught all SEGV's, not just the ones from NULL pointers. That's much more dangerous than trying to be clever about NULL.

You can play games with sigaction and siginfo_t to get around this, but that's hairier than just mmap'ing.
You don't think people would pay cash to watch TV/Sports on their iPhone?
All encryption will take place on the browser, using Open PGP standards. The server will see only encrypted data.

You've already lost. If someone can compromise your server, they can serve up a web page containing modified code.
RDF is absolutely not XML.

It's a directed graph, not a tree. It died primarily because the dimwits at the W3C saddled it with an atrocious XML serialization, but the semantic web bullshit didn't help, and neither did the poor use of it by Mozilla and others that led to it being used ineptly for RSS.
While what justin.tv does is interesting, lets not get over our heads already. Youtube just needs to flick a switch to make most live video stream obsolete.
I'm reminded of an incident a few years back when Monster sent a cease and desist letter to Blue Jeans Cable. The CEO wrote them a response that was pretty well publicized: http://gizmodo.com/380055/blue-jeans-cable-calls-bs-on-monst...

I bought some cables from http://www.bluejeanscable.com/ a few months later. I needed to make a few longer than normal runs, and they had reasonable prices and were direct about the capabilities of their different products outside of spec.
That was my thought exactly. They've got 13 people doing what exactly? I tried to read their story, but the "Our Start" page in the company section isn't there.

It's a really clean design, but really sparse on real information.
Speaking the language doesn't automatically give you good communication skills. That being said, I agree that most Romanian programmers have good English skills. I studied computer science in Romania with English curricula - all my colleagues spoke outstanding English, making English classes somewhat superfluous.

I find that good command of the English language is a conditio sine qua non from a Romanian programmer - how else would he go about to continuously educate himself ?
Andrew, look forward to seeing this project grow! I think it will be super useful!