skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Which is why I consistently continue to remark that articles like this, be they from the left like Stiglitz, or "right" such as mises.org, or whatever else, are not really on-topic, and tend to be a good topic to avoid, so as to avoid long flame wars about politics and economics with no real resolution.
Ok, it's a hard problem, but there's gotta be a way.

Maybe the coupling mechanism could be something long that extends from the back of the train. The cars can connect can over a wide range of distance, kind of like a runway. The connection is made with a friction clutch that can be applied gradually and eased off if something goes wrong. The coupling also has a drive to pull the cars together after they are securely linked.

They could always slow down to make the link too.
Selling shovels (spades) vs Mining for gold
A quote describing the gold rushes in the past went something like: "If you want to make money on the goldfields, open a shop selling shovels (spades), don't waste your life looking for gold".

It feels like more startups these days are selling shovels (spades) rather than digging for gold - by that I mean you can't swing a dead cat without hitting bug-trackers, project management apps, CRMs, URL shorteners, wordpress plugins, ebooks etc but who is really digging for gold?

Is this just a sign of a mature market for websites/apps? or lack of creativity/risk-seeking?
Interesting to hear that from someone who has sold a company.

I find it really sad and ironic that although the YC mantra is "Make something people want", some founders think nothing of selling to a big corporation even if it means screwing their users.
Some of my most cherished friends view work purely as a way to support their family and lifestyle. They don't worry about getting nowhere; in a sense, they're exactly where they want to be already.

Attention-grabbing title aside, this is a great article for people who would like to do something interesting but feel that they "can't" for various reasons or who aren't sure how to start. I can think of several people in high school or college who would appreciate this article.

(I really like the color scheme and font choices, btw!)
You don't see any value for some Java refugees in this article, do you?

Have a nice life. Inside your alone monad.
For the sake of argument:

Perhaps there is something to be said for his intuition, for he spends nearly all of his time evaluating startups. He successfully predicted the success of Mint. Also, Arrington co-founded Achex, sold for 32mm USD, as well as TechCrunch, which is one of the world's premiere news sites for technology.
Nine-year-old steals password to school system
It appears to now load fine. Unclear why it occurred before, but is now off the NIS list.
You could also ask what's the obsession with MicroSD cards, right? It takes up less space in the device, and in a year all operators will probably support them, so what's the big deal?
EDIT: Don't forget that the SIM card takes up quite a bit of PCB real estate because of the connector footprint. This might be just as important as the physical space savings.
- Pret A Manger
Effective Exercises for teaching TDD
Lower Isn't Always Better
Placebo Nocebo
Custom Logo Design Services Company, Website,Affordable Designs USA, UK
Well, as an investment, that's somewhere around a 50-100x exit for YC, if their investment in it was roughly along the same lines as the terms they currently offer. And the founders didn't do too badly either, walking away with $millions. I mean, they sold for more than Reddit!
Revisit: Visualizing the Temporal Dynamics of Twitter Streams
I was just linked to this reply by a friend of mine, and indeed it doesn't feel right. It feels wrong that someone else is using _why.
There's a link at the end to download it.

http://www.red-gate.com/careers/book_of_red_gate.htm

It's quite a good bit of propaganda for potential colleagues.
An introduction to using twitter anywhere
No. There are plenty signs but this isn't one of them.

If they were valued at several million, then yes.
Seeing as it mysteriously stopped booting, I'm guessing they bricked it remotely when it went missing. Who knows if they can still track it.

If I found one of those, I would pull the battery out right away, or if that wasn't accessible, I'd go into the subway.

Although, it probably has a dead man's switch anyway.
It's not obvious what you're asking but the answer's probably "no".

That page features the output of reCAPTCHA and compares it against an unnamed standard OCR.

The standard OCR does poorly, but it's on tricky documents selected to show the benefits of reCAPTCHA. It doesn't say it's this OCR code, nor does that page really tell you anything about how good it is, if it was.

The other thing you might be saying is that you think the reCAPTCHA output isn't very impressive either. As well as the human element, reCAPTCHA claims to use several standard OCRs to process their document and combine the output is some way. It's possible that the Google code is one of those that they use, but if so it's only part of the process.
Fun projects for mushroom fans or tracking how much parliament members attend the sessions are definitely not signs of a bubble :-)

One of the projects on the other hand made a lot of fun out of funding/exit bubble, making it their key theme: their only goal was to exit by next Friday. The first thing they did was list themselves for sale on an auction site. One of the VC's on the jury actually made a 50 cents bet on them, raising it from previous 40 cents ;) Having fun is important, not all things are dead serious.
The links says: "The OCRopus engine is based on two research projects: a high-performance handwriting recognizer developed in the mid-90's and deployed by the US Census bureau, and novel high-performance layout analysis methods.", so it appears so.
48 hours hackaton: releasing public data for the people (spanish)
I'm finding omnigraffle's dot import and auto-layout useful for flowcharting. I write dot layouts by hand then pretty them up in omnigraffle.
It's RTL on Windows Safari.
thank, perhaps it was due to an unusual traffic spike for a small site and that the words malware, spam and botnets occur in paper titles on the page?
In my case, it was 8 years of my good work. And, 30 of my employees, who are now in a very different situation. (I'm contractually prohibited from discussing the matter, so you'll understand my being a bit oblique.)

In answer to your last question: no, it's not that that one project was really more important than anything else I could ever do; but it took a few years to get past the bitterness to be able to focus, and find the right "next step"-- which could have been avoided, if I had sold to the right people at the right time (instead of the wrong people at the wrong time).

So: "selling out" can be a great thing, if done well. Or, a really soul-searing thing, if done poorly. Choose wisely. Here endeth the lesson.
The triple threat to citizen journalists
I guess it all depends on how emotionally connected you are to your company. Some people see their companies as their almost literal babies and get very emotionally attached to them. Others just see it as a thing they built to make money. Depending where you fall in this spectrum will greatly affect how you'll react to such a deal, and trying to judge people on other end of the spectrum by your standards is basically pointless.
It's not about Youtube though. If Google only cared about Youtube then they'd be going with H.264 as the licence fee cap disadvantages both smaller video sites, and people who want to self-host.

Youtube is important because they can encourage large numbers of ordinary folks to adopt whatever solution they use, and as a large-scale example to show that whetever technology they use is feasible at that scale. But if they free a codec then the point is for all the other websites to adopt it, and for that Flash would be an invaluable partner.

Adobe says that they get near 100% update rates within a year so any new codec will get out there fast. Faster if Youtube prompts people to click the updater. Not that users of Google Chrome will need to worry, as Google has conveniently decided recently to bundle Flash and auto-update it for them without intervention.
Info-Visualization Trough the Eyes and Talent of 10 Brazilian Designers
This is a guest post by Tiago Veloso from Visual Loop – a non-stop stream of Infographics, Maps, Charts and many other Visualization Goodies, with lots of new posts everyday. User submissions are always welcome, opened to artists and designers from all over the world..
You could use latex; either directly or using dot2tex.

http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/simple-flow-chart/
Quick and Easy Candy Recipes For the Microwave
The Cloudy Enterprise: Hours More Important Than Dollars
How to Save Money on Printer Ink
Are you paying hundreds and thousands of dollars on printer cartridge toners? If yes, then a little saving of toner can reduce your bills to a large extent. Here is an exclusive tips to save money on printer ink.
How does A PATENT [sic] have anything whatsoever to do with whether people are allowed to unlock it?
Credentials or Knowledge - What's your goal and why?
Perhaps you should keep in perspective that people didn't give you all that money for YOUR well being. They gave it to you because they believed you would be able to generate large returns for them. As such, it's your duty to maximize their investments as well as your own. Of course, if you believe what you're creating is changing the world and cannot detach, you shouldn't be selling.
I see FourSquare akin to FarmVille: a distracting non-skill based game designed to get users addicted. It's not going to be that fulfilling project where you improve the world, so take the money while location-based is still a buzzword and move on to something else.
That's strange. I was able to type in the output window and press enter. Maybe you should ask on the PyDev forums or file a bug report.
My point, which I didn't think was too obtuse, was that if you squint at a bicycle from the point of view of a motorcyle, then you could easily conclude that it was just a crappy motorcycle, as it doesn't meet the applicable quality criteria.

But, and this is where it gets interesting, you can do the same in the opposite direction and conclude that a motorbike is just a really crappy bicycle because it's heavy, expensive etc.

You could say the same about most web apps versus their desktop equivalent.

So, to a lesser degree, a laptop designed within the constraints of a factor of 4 price difference, perhaps with mobility (and all the many non-obvious things that mobility entails, like the iBooks being designed to be put in student backpacks and so not having little breakable flaps covering ports) being paramount are going to be faced with very different set of engineering trade-offs. I think it's simplistic to say that the Apple one has greater quality if you don't take that into account. (Especially when their expensive material choices seem to regularly kill wireless signals, that's a quality and engineering factor too).

Apple themselves have said that they don't know how to build a cheap netbook that isn't crappy (I think that's almost a direct Jobs quote) so I don't see why they should be getting plaudits for sitting out a market that they've decided is difficult, when you're calling out the folk who actually make products for their lack of quality. I think it's a good business move for them, and I'd continue to buy their products as I have for years, if I couldn't get something much, much cheaper, that does the same thing (and often a few more things) and doesn't lock me in to a series of interlocking, expensive purchases within their ecosystem. What locks-in their users, also locks out people like me.
I will tell you in 3 months. I was actually one of the organizers for this group of events (startup weekend and associated events were done all over the nordics last weekend and the weekend before) and I honestly don't think it's really about actually getting a startup going so much as the experience and meeting people. I do know from talking with the Startup Weekend guys in the states (Clint) that some of these actually do turn into real startups and get funded and launch but many don't. I don't think that's a problem at all, I know from my personal experience (Lund, Sweden) that is was very heavy with university students who probably weren't considering or thinking about startups at all. The event helps people become aware of the opportunities, network and meet a lot of people who might be interested in doing something. One of the things that makes it easiest (my opinion) is other people interested in starting up and knowing the right people in your region to actually get help (legal, business, investors, feedback, everything else). These types of events give that opportunity to people who might have never even thought about it otherwise. If a startup is born from the event, AWESOME. If not, what else was gained? I think quite a bit.
Ask HN: Why is the Cofounder spreadsheet locked for writing?
Yeah I agree. It's still exciting though :)
Yes, in my view, languages supporting operator overloading, macros and first class functions are in a completely different league than languages that don't have those features when it comes to syntactical abstractions.
Great action! Congrats to the organization and all the teams! They all have special merits since the state of the public data in Spain is just awful. One may think of crushing raw data but it's more like scraping really crappy websites. I hope there's some noise with this action and open data really starts in Spain.

My favorite entries:

http://lospresusde.org/

http://3126euros.com/

http://www.gastopublico.es/

http://www.misparadas.com/locations

http://modalkombat.demimismo.com/

http://populo.heroku.com/

http://monquartier.heroku.com/ (I may be biased here, this is my project ;) )
That Iterator Again
Could be handy when they charge you for an extra keycard.

But we already did this 10 years ago with a cheap card reader/writer. So the news part is a bit missing here...
Foursquare opens a whole spectrum of indirect interaction between business owners and their clientèle. The game mechanics are little more than a usability technique.
It was ridiculous. If someone wants to encourage reflection they should simply say that instead of inundate their writing with unnecessary words. Words are meant to convey information, and what interests me as a reader are not thoughtful conversational tones. I prefer an executive summary with the option to delve deeper into areas I find interesting.

This instead read like a freshman's first English Literature essay.
How sure are you of that $20m number? It sounds high.
Watch Internazionale VS Barcelona Live Free Broadcasting
OWASP Top for 2010
Not sure at all... I took it from the spreadsheet.
For simplicity in implementation but guaranteed upper bounds I highly recommend AA-trees.

WikiPedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AA_tree

Original paper: http://user.it.uu.se/~arnea/ps/simp.pdf

Tutorial giving intuition for this data structure: http://www.eternallyconfuzzled.com/tuts/datastructures/jsw_t...
The age of a project matters too, I think. If you got into Linux kernel development in 1995, you had no experience, but not many other people did either. If you start becoming active in 2010, you're 15 years behind, and there's no possible way to catch up to someone like Alan Cox or Andrew Morton in influence.
On Design for Testability
In Tallinn we also had a great mix of people, from high school and university students to experienced professional people. Even 2 of the Skype founders, who have written core part of that product and made hundreds of millions in exits, were in the teams, developing Garage48 software products. Not so much to create new fantastic businesses, but to hack, have fun and meet people.

Interesting fact: On quick count 14 present and former Skype staff contributed to 6 of total 16 Garage48 teams. Skype has had a great effect on Estonian startup and development culture.
I use paper and pencil for my mockups. They've got the unique property of not making you think about details, but allowing you to put them in at any level. You don't need any skill either. It works even if your drawings consist of lopsided rectangles.
Microsoft launches "Fix It"
And we should be getting collaboration soon - I'm going to start working on it tomorrow.
When will this all be over? I'm sick of getting bugged to death about this lean startup stuff. Are all startup people this borish?

What I'm asking is, does anyone else get super bored by the constant evanglism and promotin of this concept, or is everybody super excited about it, and it's just me that gets bored?

Does being constantly promoting your ideas help your startup succeed or does it hurt it because "normal" people get sick of it and shut you out?
So you're upset that they say Core i5 2.4Ghz, instead of Core i5-520M 2.4 GHz?
Yahoo Answers Clone Script
Yahoo Answers, Clone Script, Answers Clone, Answers Script
Of course, if you believe what you're creating is changing the world and cannot detach, you shouldn't be selling.

It's rarely so black and white. I'm suggesting that if you are selling, you should make sure that either a) the buyer's vision coincides reasonably well with your own, or b) you're sure you'll be satisfied walking away (or getting pushed out).

I speak from experience.
See, back in the day, we just called these hackathons. I don't have any objections to what happens at these sorts of events (no doubt it's a good experience for those involved), but there's some general annoyance at them being labeled "startups" because it misrepresents the actual challenges of starting a startup, which are wholly different than what you'd encounter in such a brief timeframe. Usually the technical / design facet is the easiest component of starting a startup.
Helping Others: Pro-Social Behaviour & Bystander Apathy
Not really news. They will change the code anyway after you move out whether you've returned all the keycards or not.
Hofstadter-inspired writing, with a helping of Knuth served in the comments.

Also good in Mark's blog: Ribbon Hero is the future ( http://diveintomark.org/archives/2010/03/03/microgames )
about learning/achievement games.

That post included a link to Space Invaders Enterprise Edition ( http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2010/02/space-invaders-enterprise-e... ). The title by itself is worthy, but the post is about rule engines. That interesting point was not much discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1131502 .
New PCI Compliance Regulations For Online Merchants Fail To Secure Card Data
Daily Telegraph website hacked
Exactly. The problem with location-based advertising etc. has always been that you need users to willingly give up their location. The genius behind Foursquare (and the other services like it) is that giving up your location is the whole point of the "game" - it's not a step required before you can get value from the service, it's the core action that the service rewards you for.

And really, this is the not-so-secret behind most privacy-threatening trends and technologies: most people will gladly give up their privacy for a [ sense of safety, comment from a friend, virtual badge ].

And if that is the value that most of the world places on their privacy, maybe there's nothing wrong with losing it.
I almost pre-responded to this response, since I knew it was coming.

Put it in a FAQ or even a link - There is a link to "forgot password" on the sign-in page, plus a FAQ, plus an article in the FAQ called "Having trouble logging in?", plus some smarts in the ticket system to prompt people who email about logging in with a message saying, "Maybe you should read this article titled 'Having trouble logging in?'

That's like 4 layers of tech-support between the user and me, and I still get emails about people needing password help.

Trust me: Any site with a sizable userbase will have a lot of support requests. You can find ways to mitigate some of it, but the only way to mitigate all of it is to provide poor customer support.
Open Data Ottawa Hackfest (Saturday April 24th)
You should look up the Basel Accords, specifically the bits on Tiered Capital.
Quite often 50% of the team members is design/development, another half is marketing/biz dev. For Garage48 we had people who were doing a huge amount of stuff in those non technical areas: making real business partnerships with restaurants/bars/cafe's, handing out flyers on the streets, actually ordering manufactured soft pet toys, making deals with other non-profits or organisations, hiring external team members or roles, making sales etc.

All of this during a weekend, where they basically had to use all of their contacts and networks to get external people into work mode - and succeeded in that. So in addition to more technical software hackathons, events like Garage48 give also a lot of experience in other areas. It's correct to not call them startups, but startup seeds (startup idea is not correct either, as the events are more about execution than pure talk). May be some of those seeds will blossom or mutate into new lifeforms.
Fact that you can copy magstripe keycard has no security implications. The whole idea behind hotel keycards is that each guest gets unique code on keycard and thus cannot use his copy after leaving hotel. In fact it is pretty secure design: you don't defend against copying, you simply expect that copying is possible.
Will This Be The New Google Web Design?
I'm the guy who keeps/maintains the spreadsheet.

ALL of the exit values (except 1 or 2) are my personal estimates and educated guesses... nothing more. I'm always happy to revise them with better information!
I haven't implemented Chargify on my site yet, but I did sign up for the beta and have looked it over. Plus, I've been running subscriptions via Amazon FPS for about 2.5 years now.

By far, the #1 thing I like with Chargify is the ability to modify existing subscriptions. With Amazon (and PayPal too, I believe), once a user signs up with a rate and term, it's locked in. To change the rate they'd need to go through the workflow again. So, if you say $5/mo and want to move to $10/mo, you're screwed. Good luck getting them to go through the checkout again.

Not that this is something you'd want to do all the time, but perhaps you've been doing something for a couple years and want to raise your prices a little. Or, you want to add another tier of service and automatically bump some customers into it. It's easy with Chargify, and very hard with the others.

There's other stuff too, but it's hard to articulate. Believe me, having been there, I would highly suggest that anyone seriously evaluate Chargify over PayPal or Amazon SimplePay. Definitely DO NOT roll your own, like I chose to originally. It will be an unending source of pain.
I see what you did there.

Sweet, sweet irony.
I haven't tried the software but here's at least a bit of feedback:

Your landing page does not say anything about your product. I see a plane and a message telling me to join your beta. My first impression was "What is this? What beta? What am I doing here? I'm probably at the wrong website."
Do you plan to support Data Matrix ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix
Social Web Flow that Supports Open Real Time Updates
Tungsten heavy metal
Hosting platform isn't too bad, but changing payment API is a real pain since it's basically impossible to move existing subscriptions to a new system without user interaction.

However, I think Chargify is probably the best route for anyone doing subscription based stuff. Managing billing for subscriptions is such a pain in the ass, and these guys seem to understand that at the core.

I'm on Amazon SimplePay right now and I'd switch to Chargify in a heartbeat...if I could move over my existing subscribers ;)
Thank goodness for LeechBlock: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476

It's like noprocrast for everything. (Although I wish they hadn't mangled the UI in the last update.)
Also called marginal utility.