skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of free web hosts. What I remember most about those days is how many people just created web pages about Star Trek or something, threw it up on a free web host (or even their ISP's web hosting), and sometimes even kept it updated. Now we have Facebook and Posterous and Wikia, but all of that tries to fit it in a box, to make it easy or private or constrained to the form of a blog or wiki or whatever. Back in the day you just wrote HTML files (there was even a form on Geocities to write an HTML file in your browser) and you weren't constrained to any real form.
If you haven't tried Sinatra, you really ought to. It's a joy to work with. If you're accustomed to using Rails, using Sinatra brings back the enjoyable feeling of being closer to the code, closer to the HTTP protocol itself, and free of the many conventions and the complex file structure that comes with Rails.

I especially recommend it for when you want to hack up something small, useful and lightning quick. Rails is great, but sometimes it starts to feel like a very large hammer, when many web app ideas start out as small nails. Sinatra is a nailgun.
It is interesting that the dumping angle is not much discussed in the mainstream media. I was aware of it, I just didn't know it is that bad. I guess nobody looks at it from their point of view. Also, the pirates don't really have a handy PR agency to promote their point.

At the same time, I wonder if they use the 'dumping' as an excuse to pirate. Pirating is dangerous but it is also quite profitable. They take over un-armed ships, hold them for a couple of months, then millions of dollars land in their lap. It is certainly more profitable than fishing or growing things.
"but for an educated liberal young person"

I suspect most other liberal young people are not cleaning kitchen sinks in other people's apartments when they have that revelation, though.

Bad taste - or maybe it is just being honest? It's not as if those people who are not saying it (supposedly showing better taste) are not thinking it.
What's frustrating is-- this is an opinion piece (the guy's a professor, not a writer), and this opinion piece has no NONE, zip nada, link to the actual bill that Dodd is proposing. It's all just conjecture.

Drives me nuts that the media doesn't link to pieces of legislation when it's all online (and we at Sunlight work so hard to get it there).
"... Your favourite (oldschool) software? ..."

> You are in a twisty maze of passageways, all alike...

Advent ~ http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/ The first bit of software I really used & liked. Still marveling at ths source code now ~ http://www.wurb.com/if/game/1
http://grasshopper.com looks nice.

They can also ring through to Skype, which is a big thing missing from Google Voice for me.
Go began as a 20% project, and grew into a full-time project. There are now a handful of Google engineers working on Go. It is not part of some over-arching corporate strategy (that I'm aware of), except tangentially in that Google seeks to improve the software development ecosystem globally. From the engineering resources given to the project, it would seem Google is committed to making it a success.

It grew out of scratching some itches of C++ (cumbersome and error-prone concurrency, unnecessary complexity, monstrous build times). The interest from the dynamic language camp has been something of a surprise, although not an unpleasant one.
- Drinking too much coffee

This happens because it is not so easy to just take a nap in most office, and regular office hours make it more likely to end up at the workplace being dead tired. Access to high tech coffee makers does the rest.
Just because there have been successful "me too" products, doesn't mean that they are all worthwhile pursuits. It seems that Google is too often played as a trump card to support ideas that don't stand on their own as viable businesses.

(Although, I'm not saying that's the case with this list)
How would you do a full text search on the server if the server only holds an encrypted version of the data? To my knowledge, no homomorphic encryption algorithms exist that can be used for practical applications such as full-text search.

The way to tackle this would be to make index creation on the client incremental: any new messages are downloaded, decrypted, indexed, the index encrypted and uploaded back to the server. I'm not good enough with either search/indexing or crypto to know how you'd use such an incremental encrypted index to perform an actual search without having to decrypt (and therefore download) the entire index first. In fairness, I haven't researched this yet.

Securing the client-server comms is a solved problem, I'm not aware of any problems with SSL/TLS as long as the server also authenticates itself (which current browsers don't permit, but is easy to do with SSL directly).

Caveat: I'm neither cperciva nor tptacek (let alone Bruce Schneier) so there's a high probability I made some factual mistakes in this post.
It's much harder in the non-tech world, especially competing against people with specific skillsets. If you spent your time as an editor, nobody is going to look at you for a secretary when there are 50 resumes for secretaries staring you in the face.

Editor jobs dried up.
The Bank of Happiness
I believe this was done in the 80's and they called it "choose your own adventure."
In the early nineties I used to start extra early so I could get my work done before the Americans started hogging mainframes.
There are many young people who are excited by this - equity is not as exciting to them as being on a team who works like mad towards a better way. I doubt you'd find too many 30-somethings interested in this but there are plenty who see opportunities like this as a way to gain street cred, bypass college, gain experience, etc.
The point at which your project becomes bigger than your head
Sadly, I’m always thinking up services like these. What about a company that connects you with a “girl” to SMS with whenever you’re bored?

I know these kind of exist, but would advertising them as friendly—rather than sexual—hurt or help the business? What about the word-of-mouth?
How does this patent effect ODF?
I've always felt that if you're a programmer and you're hiding from the so-called "mathy" parts of you're doing, whether it's universal things like algorithms or specific things like machine learning, instead of being given a cute title like "developer" and forming a false dichotomy between that and the idea of a "computer scientist", you should be given the title of "sloppy".

Admittedly, you might be able to get by mindlessly plugging in values into someone else's function without ever having to bat an eye. But when something breaks, you're going to be absolutely screwed.

"Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians."

-Edsger Dijkstra
I'm in the same boat. I've never been able to keep a normal sleep schedule outside of boarding school (had no choice there, literally).
I don't think there is a lot of crossover, I've published a few casual games that promoted things like Twitter and Facebook apps, and the conversion rate from portals to twitter and fb has been horribly low every time.

One game of mine that did about 1.2 million plays on portals peaked at I think 400 users on the Facebook version, which was promoted within the portal version.

Recently King.com launched a big facebook app called Funflow, which they linked to from over 100 games in ditribution and several large, many-millions-of-plays new releases. They've probably had close to 100 million plays across their games this year, yet their fb app hasn't quite hit 1 million users.

http://www.appdata.com/facebook/apps/index/id/212391322553
seems like the database can't bootstrap itself.
How To Secure Your Wireless Network
Skills, Big Ideas, and Getting Grades Out of the Way
Ask HN: Good Drupal resources?
I just picked up a small job rewriting a website that uses Drupal. I know nothing about Drupal. I told the guy who wanted to hire me that I know nothing about Drupal, and he said "That's ok, you're a fast learner." Also, he wants it done within a month or so.

I'm currently reading Drupal.org cover to cover, but can anyone recommend some good Drupal resources?
I would not be too sanguine about what politicians beholden to the trial lawyers might or might not do in this sort of area. When you shrink the pool of accredited investors, you remove many of the avenues by which startups can raise capital in a manner by which they can be assured they are not violating securities laws. If the safe avenues are no longer there, the risks of lawsuits increase dramatically. It will all be done in the name of protecting investor rights, but the real beneficiaries here will be the trial lawyers and the losers will indeed be all early-stage companies that seek to raise capital.

Maybe it will happen quickly or maybe it will be gradual but the underlying motives here are pretty clear and have nothing to do with promoting the health of startups.

I express no opinion about the quality of the article posted here but it is a mistake to assume this legislation is benign for startups. It is not.
I use Sinatra running at Heroku for my Hacker News Android app, for the screen scraping part, the part that scrapes pages just like this one. Both are easy and fun.
"Money provides a layer of abstraction"

This is so true.

For those who say that getting money for the sake of getting money is a useless pursuit, no, it isn't. No one who isn't already rich is getting money strictly for the sake of getting money. They are doing it for an infinite number of reasons. Caricaturing them into rat-racey participants of Lifestyles Of The Rich and Famous, simply because they want to be rich, is despicable. Money is like energy. Just because I'm interested in acquiring a gigawatt of energy doesn't mean I want to use it for smelting aluminium. I can use energy for an infinite number of activities. That's why I want to be rich. It allows me to easily pick and choose what I want to do, without specializing in doing just that.
I think the data is skewed; most email marketing is used for B2B, rather than B2C.

And many people have more than one email address and in a corporate environment, it shouldn't be surprising Gmail falls below 10%.
Again, I don't really see the connection between my opinion on this subject and my mean-spiritedness or unpleasantness. It sounds to me like you have an emotional stake in this situation and you are letting it cloud your judgment.

She's qualified, but not for anything that anyone needs doing. Do you think a highly qualified one-foot-balancer deserves employment in that pursuit and that it's a shame if he has to wash dishes because no one will pay him $50k a year to balance on one foot all day? I don't see that as a tragedy, and it's an analogue to this situation. Admittedly it's not perfect because there are _no_ jobs in one-foot-balancing and merely few in editing, but it's the same type of thing.

Since you insulted me, I'll allow myself a stylistic criticism. The "you, sir" thing is lame. Drop it.
It reduces the burden on entrepreneurs by freeing them from the complex and expensive filing requirements of the SEC for making a public offering similar to an IPO. Basically the accredited investor can say 'I am sufficiently wealthy and well-informed that if I lose all my money I will not run to the authorities crying that you encouraged me to take financial risks that were beyond my ability to understand'.

If you wish to solicit funds from the general public for a profit-seeking enterprise, you have to include a huge number of disclaimers and warnings with your offering and pay a very expensive securities lawyer to evaluate and sign off on your compliance with SEC regulations, or you face a very high likelihood of getting prosecuted for mail fraud and multiple other offences.

You may be a smart individual or an ethical entrepreneur, but the empirical evidence is that the general public is rather naive, poorly informed about risk assessment and financial engineering, and there are a lot of people out there eager to exploit this fact.

It would be nice if we could do without police and fire departments and pay less tax as a result, but crime and outbreaks of fire are annoying realities whose costs typically exceed those of professional emergency responders.
Amazing how this makes it to the front page when no one can apparently even read the article due to a database issue.
That's it. Thank you!
I really wish Sinatra were more practical for big projects. It's so much more pleasant to work with, but between the speed advantage that Rails gives for doing a lot of the normal big-app tasks and all the plugins, it seems like Rails is too good for most big apps to make Sinatra a reasonable choice.

I guess if you were doing something very weird, where Rails would really get in the way, it might make sense. And I've seen it end up being a piece of big apps, just not the main web interface.
I've lived in Ireland before and I would get the British tabloids an armload at a time. Something about being able to point to one over coffee and say 'look at this.'
This is the what society sells people who are in the upper middle or just plain upper classes.

what about all the outreach that (especially public) universities do to encourage middle-class and lower-class americans to all attend a 4-year college? i don't think college in the US is something that's exclusively sold to rich kids
Well, that's undecided. I've been in Australia for the past five year but recently lost my visa. I will most likely return there in a few months.
I'm going to Bradford. From what I hear, I'll need them.
While that's a difficult question depending on your meaning, you can get some info at http://copyscape.com. I paid for some premium credits personally, allows you to automatically check every page of your website.

Edt: clickable link.
Living Inside Your Own Black Box
I'm using it exactly for something weird where Rails get in the way - it's truely useful.
Thank you for validating my view of the world: before I clicked the comments link, I made a personal wager that the highest-rated comment would be a self-satisfied post by someone who would misinterpret the story as a commentary on entitlement and higher education. I can see that I was correct.

"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley."

That's the moral of the story. Whatever you think you know about your future based on your past choices, there's a good chance that you're wrong. There are plenty of people from trade schools and community colleges who bought into the same dream as this woman, so advancement through education isn't exactly an a "hubris" exclusive to the vile, arrogant bourgoise.
I downmod commentary explaining when it's right to downmod.
His/her comment does not read as a complain, and I believe his opinion is shared with many. The reason, as you mentioned, is the short description takes away from the service, so I am sure these companies are in fact much much more. Another problem is that all these products are version 0.1 of a much bigger version, so they need time to mature.

Edit: However Zenedy's description was very good and there seem to have a real potential.
Salary Inequality Among Co-Founders: How Common?
It's part of a demo for NaCl. You're right that it probably doesn't belong in the standard library.
I met the FireHost guys at the last couple of HostingCon's, they seemed like a decent enough team. I expect to see a lot of rounds of funding being pumped into already established hosting companies, especially in the dedicated server arena.

Cloud hosting companies are highly profitable, and I expect that to change as more competent players from the infrastructure hosting arena start competing with Amazon and Google.
In previous posts, he has indicated that google has tried to get him before, but he did not want to relocate. The offer this time was that he could work without relocating--he still gets to work from home in Vancouver.
HTC EVO 4G is Sprint's new Android-powered WIMAX capable phone
Ah, but he made a clone of del.icio.us from back when it was new and minimal and still really awesome. Which is much, much better than a boring old clone of modern Delicious.
If his parents wanted that, they should have been geniuses solving million-dollar prizes.

That said, I agree that a lot of good could be done with the money. He should take it and ensure that it does good.
Who else wants a django based popurls script without tooltips, sources included
Auto Smiley Generator
Just curious. Do you actually know that this site is hosted on Rackspace, and if so, how are you able to find out?

btw, I've had my own poor experiences with Media Temples grid service and won't be using any cloud services again for quite a while.
You wouldn't expect Microsoft to allow a competing browser to run on their platform now, would you ?
This Coral Cache link actually works:
http://www.ashmaurya.com.nyud.net/2010/03/bootstrapping-a-le...
This is a tough problem, because 6 years ago someone may have gone to college to be a Computer Scientist. Learned Java or C++ if they were lucky. Probably kept sharp with PHP, Python, Ruby, MySQL et al if they were smart. Maybe a little Flash. Then they get out just when everyone who is NOT going NoSQL is using Amazon RDS. People are hiring iPhone programmers to port Flash apps to ObjC. And everyone is looking to get some Erlang or Scala blood into their dev house.

The fact is that all skills are obsoleted eventually. And eventually comes quicker and quicker these days. I don't claim to know what the answer is but I think looking at the world today and asking what people are paying for can be a difficult strategy to make work.

Now looking at the world today and asking what people will not pay for is somewhat helpful at least. But trying to catch a moving target is fraught with peril.

I think a good piece of advice would be to stay flexible. Flexible in your ability to learn. Flexible in your ability to move. Flexible in your ability to absorb fluctuations in income. I think that in the America of the future workers may need to be flexible, and let a lot of things roll off of them.

If not. I don't know. I could see this whole thing ending badly.
But this is how they should try to work. Otherwise it quickly turns to ad hominem arguments and some such. (The lack thereof is one of the reasons I like comments on hn)
Does Zenedy sound exactly like Demand Media to anyone else?

"..first determining algorithmically what content people are searching for, then identifying what portion of that content could effectively be monetized through targeted advertising, and finally contracting out the creation of that content to qualified freelance writers."

That's pretty much Demand Media in one sentence.
Hey, there's already MySpace, WHY create Facebook?! Why do something similar on the surface, but focus on what the user really wants? Madness.
Smashing Magazine has an article with links to many resources:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/09/24/drupal-developers...
The Advantages Of A Web-Based Solution
Figure out what state has the best unemployment rates. Get a fluffy programming job at a large company in that state for about 6 months so that you can max out your benefits. Then get laid off and start collecting. Rhode Island looks like it's the best option with a maximum payout of $641/week, or $33k per year.
The interface I generated lets you type in "next saturday" and offers to autocorrect it to the right format for submission. You are responsible for the final version being right.

That struck me as a reasonable compromise.
If the final date you will get is displayed to the user, then the user has the opportunity to fix those errors.
The definitions are from the Cold War: industrialized capitalist nations in the West, communist nations in the East, and none of the above, where the proxy wars were fought. So the definition is fixed by history, and also somewhat obsolete.

Note the amusing parallel between assuming the US is turning into a "third world" country, since the gaps in industrialization worldwide are closing, and the article's original assumption that an educated middle-class girl would never have to do the same work as a Spanish-speaking working-class woman.
How to nap: Power napping without sleeping
Almost nowhere. It hasn't even been adopted within Google. But every language starts out in this state. It's impossible to tell where it'll be in five or ten years.
I think this is the best approach. It seems that when it comes to a career path, the common notion is to compare the top percentage without taking into account that for many, this situation is only applicable for the last few years of the career; for many more, not applicable at all.

It's not whether you want to dream of playing in the NHL. It's whether you enjoy playing hockey enough to play in Rochester for some farm team for a few hundred people a night making $50K.
It's not just sold to rich kids -- but there's also an implication that, for a non-rich person, going to college can enable you to move out of your income class.
No, I'm not. As I've said elsewhere, I can understand why this is interesting to researchers. But to be interesting to me (and, I suspect, at least some others) there needs to be some reliably repeatable demonstration of "new physics". I don't see any evidence for that here.

There are lots of people investigating lots of exciting ideas out there. That's great. But there's a big difference between "wouldn't it be cool if..." and "hey, I can show that...".

When I saw the conference details, I hoped cold fusion was at the "show that" phase. Disappointingly, it continues to not be. Hence my post.
Here is a coral cache link:

http://www.ashmaurya.com.nyud.net/2010/03/bootstrapping-a-le...
For those that came before, an exit day
HackerNews goes the way of Digg and Reddit before it.

Here's the PDF of the bill that passed Sunday: http://docs.house.gov/rules/hr4872/111_hr3590_engrossed.pdf

The real page 22 says nothing about auditing, but that people up to the age of 26 may remain on their parents' insurance plans.

The real page 30 says nothing about any government committee, but that insurance plans have to publicly report exactly what they cover and how effective that coverage has been with respect to outcomes.

The real page 29 says nothing about rationing, but lays out some definitions and clarity rules for insurers, and says that all full-time employees at an organization getting insurance from the same provider will be eligible to purchase the exact same insurance plans as each other.

The real page 42 says nothing about benefits, but that the government has the authority to monitor premium increases, and includes funds for the states to help set up their health care exchanges.

The real page 50 says nothing about immigrants, but establishes a high-risk pool to help people with pre-existing conditions before the rest of the reforms set in, gives the Secretary of Health and Human Services the right to establish an appeals process for insurance claims and miscellaneous procedures to guard against waste, theft, and fraud.

I could go on, but I have places to be. If you want to understand the bill, the text is out there and it's not that difficult to parse. Read it yourself and don't rely on two-bit paranoid alarmist idiots to do your thinking for you.
Secrets of Communist computing
They're still considering it, but nothing firm yet. Like Java, it's usable without generics by using interface{} when you would want a generic type. But admittedly it'd be nice to have for some things like new containers.