skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Following @joehewitt recent thoughts on browser innovation, I think it would be cool if browsers added client-side support for processing lesscss (or sass) files. They could send an extra header (accept-encoding:less), and web servers could serve up main.css.less vs main.css.
Ask HN: is it safe to have ".net" in a product name (considering MS's .NET)?
This is going to be a commercial product, something like "Orange.net" as an example, and I'm thinking about acquiring the corresponding domain name. It's going to be a web-based application, both hosted and for intranet use.

My main concern is a possible clash with Microsoft's .NET and their family of products that end with ".NET". How safe is it to have a name/trademark that ends with, say, lowercase ".net"?

Ours is a UNIX-based product and has nothing to do with Windows/.NET technologies anyway. The first part of the name won't clash with any other trademark in the software industry.

Thank you for your answers.
How would a "reasonable person" know the difference?
My physical therapist actually made me switch to the smaller wireless keyboard, and the lingering remnants of my RSD went away. Just shortening the distance between keyboard and mouse made a huge difference.
I can't believe it; a screed against CSS constants, published on April 1st, and it claims not to be a joke.
Eh, as games go I'm not impressed. If you want to impress the guys using Flash to produce games (like me) you're going to have to make something much better than that.

Show me something that fits in at Kongregate or ArmorGames, not something that was probably done in Flash a dozen years ago.
Thoughts on Horses
As a heavy Java user it's really frustrating to see how little effort Sun (Oracle) has been putting into maintaining the JDK tools. It seems like only critical security bugs get fixed and everything else just languishes.
I submitted a new javac bug 10 days ago and, although it was confirmed fairly quickly, it still hasn't even shown up on the public web site.
Or look at Bug ID: 5093723 <http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=5093723&#.... It's been open for five years with no fix. I would be willing to pay for a fix but there doesn't even seem to be a way to do that.
And ironically they stopped after it was just good enough to do so. With the critical piece being XMLHttpRequest. Which they added so that they could implement Outlook on the browser.
To answer this question you must answer, why are they pushing HTML5? The reason is I think one of the most unnoticed stories in the industry. I think MS actually thinks they can deliver the best platform for HTML5. They think HTML5 will actually be a good rich client platform. They're going to invest a boatload so that HTML5 runs better in IE than any other browser.

So what about Silverlight? Silverlight is really a tooling play. And with HTML5 they're beginning to see that they can bring the Silverlight tooling over to HTML5. The big question is probably layout more than anything else.

Silverlight then becomes their platform for future features of HTML. Rather than "embrace, extend", they extend via a plug-in, and then as feature prove useful, they get them through standards (which is common in most standards spaces).

This is really the path that Adobe should have down with Flash, and based on what I've seen with CS5, I suspect it is, they're just getting to it really late.
Looks like it doesn't use canvas. I would expect that performance will suck and it won't get any better in the future. Am I wrong?
Google saw it, Android phones and Chrome OS netbooks are targeted into this space. Difference from Apple: Google thinks it can deliver both hardware and software at knock down prices or free, without needing to curate an in-house ecosystem, and profit by monetizing what the devices provide access to - the whole internet.
I think the real news here is the release of Scripty2, the successor to scriptaculous. Check out this demo:
http://scripty2.com/demos/cards/

All in 70 lines of Javascript.
h.264 is far, far more open than Flash. What matters is that the spec is public and that you can choose from many implementations. There are no usable competing implementations of Flash, but dozens for h.264 including excellent open-source ones.

The h.264 terms aren't onerous. If you ship less than 100,000 devices you pay nothing. At large scale, it's $0.10 / unit. When selling hardware, that's a pretty light tax.

As Jobs points out, Theora is not immune to patents. On2's many patents are irrevocably licensed for free, but there are thousands more patents that may apply held by trolls. It sucks to ship devices with unknown patent liabilities. It almost destroyed RIM, for example.
This method essentially converts the typical tabular calculations into a lattice, where the x-axis is the 10's coefficient.

Cool way to think about it, but I doubt it would give any extra insight to someone learning how to multiply.

It also loses a lot of the "elegance" when you have to carry over sums > 10.
Very possibly not past the final vote on the financial/Internet (FTC)/lots of other stuff in 1,300??? pages bill.

Goldman is a big primary dealer in Treasury securities. As long as Team Obama is borrowing a new 1.5 trillion a year and rolling over a half trillion in short maturity debt every month, they're not going to roil this market by executing Goldman (an indictment for a firm like Goldman is an instant death sentence, see Arthur Anderson, the shell of which eventually won).

Well, unless they're really stupid. Bill Clinton sure didn't like being constrained by the bond market, but he accepted reality.
From the article:

Big Pharma and its partners in establishment psychiatry have smartly used Scientology to defuse criticism of their medications. I honestly believe that if Scientology weren't around, then our society could have a much more rational discussion about our drug-based paradigm of care.
You have to 'carry the one' just like the regular multiplication algorithm they teach in schools.
Given the last couple of weeks?

Unfortunately, yes, it might happen. Or it may be declared to be against the terms of service or something stupid like that.
That is not really true. As of 2008, 95% of users have Javascript turned on. To put that in context, consider the fact that about 3.5% of people in the US are colorblind.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Prevalence
The background image loads extremely slow. And I have 100 mbit. I suggest you fix that :)
I should've said "You should add an intermediate variable" instead of "Or add an intermediate variable". If you were to name a variable !blue, it should be treated like a global variable, and only used in matters of say, the color palette of a site, and not the particular color used in sidebar.
If only there was a programming language where you could write something like:

do { foo; bar; baz }

or:

do
foo
bar
baz

and they would both be equivalent.
Overall some very interesting points, but as I remember it, MS stopped innovating in IE when the competition died off. Netscape was in the gutter and went OSS, which ended up meaning a massive gap in releases while they rewrote the thing, and Opera was still for-pay. The DOJ intervention was too late to have any impact.

Hence, IE6 remained stagnant until MS started feeling some heat from Firefox.
>Neither of those claims is true.

Yes, it does apply to new houses. I'm sure builders are all over fair tax.
"Yes, they are. They're the only company that's realized that if you want a stable, integrated experience, you need to control the entire product, top to bottom."

I don't think that's accurate, on multiple levels. First, they aren't the first company to realize that. However, it is easier to have a stable, integrated experience when you control the product line. Which is what I've been saying this entire time. They essentially took the easy way to quality.

Which leads to:

"But ultimately, that's the only thing that really matters. I hate to be utilitarian about it, but the value a product brings to the end user is the only thing that matters."

I agree. And I never argued that. I said that from the beginning. I apologize if I came off suggesting that they made shoddy products. That was never the point nor my intention. =)

"I mean, I agree. I'm not saying you should be downvoted, I'm just trying to guess why others were. Hearing the same arguments gets really old, especially in a series of articles like these, which are basically just shouting matches of the same opinions, over and over."

I understand, but it's still stupid to downvote something just because you've heard it before. I've heard a lot of things before. Doesn't mean I down vote. Should I down vote every comment that has repeated something I've read before? If a comment doesn't add value, fine. But if it's a comment you are tired of, just ignore it and don't upvote it! And, I'm not referring to you, rather, I'm referring to the royal "you". =)

"I used to be obsessed with technical details, until I came to the startup world, where I realized it's all about value creation, not about the tech. It's disappointing, and we programmers tend to be an exceptionally meritocratic bunch, but really, even in the tech industry, tech is kind of irrelevant."

I agree. And that's a good point. I fully realize where Apple's value lies. However, that doesn't mean I'm not an idealistic thick-headed fool that's going to speak his mind, even when it's not the most popular. Being opinionated and stubborn has worked so far. =)

Basically, I just feel like Apple gets a lot of credit for doing things it shouldn't. They do a lot of really cool things, but at the end of the day, I realize it's not really that impressive when you realize the slate they have to work with.

Good questions/challenges. Sorry if you've had this discussion before. I've never really discussed this particular angle. Most of my friends aren't geeks!
I clicked on work and the image was AWFULLY slow to load. I'd drop the filesize or outsource the hosting to an S3 bucket or something.
The Five Whys for Startups
Teaches Flash at university!? Where do you go, DeVry?
so replace MS with apple and Dell with app store developer and Linux with WebOS or Android. The exact same argument applies.

Same applies to the other Devs aren't locked in to windows, IE, etc. MS doesn't owe them a living. Develop for Linux.

Entity(MS, Apple) has vast majority of sales in the market place(os, phone applications) sets rules that favor themselves and you can either go along or die in a corner(develop for Linux, develop for WebOS.) Personally I prefer die in the corner with freedom than happy subjugation.
> I never liked the 8008 and its offspring. The ARM is much more elegant.

I agree very much with you, even the 68K architecture was clean in comparison, and then there is MIPS.

But it's been a long time ago when the underlying CPU was visible enough for me to worry about its architecture, the only way I'm aware of it nowadays is by what kind of toolchain I have to use and a few optimization flags.
In 10 years time only Apple and Android will remain.

Wow, I seriously hope not. I like having a real unix-like userland on my phone, and I want to keep it that way.
I think looking at 13Fs is helpful but there are some caveats to the approach.

First, if a fund is known to trade pretty frequently/have tons of turnover, the 13F might be bad to look at. In addition, many funds are not simply long-only vehicles. A lot of them will be doing some shorting, stuff outside of the US, or macro fixed income commodity currency strategies that wont be reflected in the 13F positions.

Still, 13Fs are useful, especially from an idea-generation perspective. Definitely a cool tool, I use something similar.
I think the point is that there's a bait-and-switch going on: tell us a little about your ______ habits, and we'll give you this free stuff as a thank-you (and in hope you'll keep buying it. OK, no problem with that.

But after you've given the info, then it's 'oh you have to let us sell the data to get the stuff', and most of the time they don't just want to sell your anonymous little data points as part of an aggregated statistical picture, but your name and address as well as your customer data. It's not so different from giving out 'free' browser toolbars or smiley collections, except that in the fine print they also claim you've given permission for them to install a browsing monitor and what-all else.

And as regards baby products, they're taking advantage of the fact that new parents are usually exhausted and overwhelmed both practically and emotionally - not just for a first baby either, and this doesn't conflict with feeling happy. It's still stressful even if you're thrilled.

Carrying out a commercial transaction under the guise of friendly generosity at a time of unusual emotional upheaval is rather unethical. Consider too that not only do they want info about the parents; they're building a marketing profile on the kid that has just been (or even, is about to be) born, and realistically that data footprint is going to live longer than the actual person.

In find that creepy. YMMV, but even though I appreciate your point about it being a trade-off, it disturbs me that there's no easy route to finding who has your information and what they store. In many countries you can write and request that information of a company, but there's a lot of companies out there.
I have to think that, for the last 10 years, they have been open and closed in just the right places.

If you look at it objectively, Apple use far more open standards than Microsoft, and rarely resort to inventing standards to implement the closed systems that they want to.

Look at their open source releases: http://www.opensource.apple.com/
If you really want inline XML and SQL, why not have some sort of quoting operator so that this is actually possible to implement sanely?

Programming languages designed by PHP programmers... the goggles do nothing.
By defenses I mean people like you and me fixing things, in a less violent way than shutting off the whole Internet.

Ad hoc, on the fly ... hard if your part of the grid isn't up ... I'm just saying that in a timetable measured in hours to days the defenses against such an attack won't be entirely static.
Their desktop business was never a walled garden, was it?
On the adobe side (i know) you have http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/afcs/ AFCS which answer this set of problem quite well.

As mahmud said "rest is just a simple matter of user authentication, managing timestamps, and maintaining consistency between the server side data-structure modeling the shared "object" being collaberated on,"

Which is imho not so easy.
sorry - WP was having issues with Chrome yesterday...everything should look better now.
best line ever
LeBron wins 2nd MVP award
Shop slr camera bag online
A place where your favorite camera bag will be available. Shop and grab it
And now the network effects on facebook are way stronger than they ever were on myspace, they would have to really screw up privacy(a lot more than they have) to lose to another network in the foreseeable future because I don't think they would lose on engineering given the team they have assembled.
For others (like me until a moment ago) who don't know the name "Matt Mullenweg" ... He founded WordPress.
Very creative attacks by the penetration testers:

- Map out the organization's staff by Googling Facebook and LinkedIn pages with relevant keywords

- Do the same thing for the IT infrastructure by Googling IT job openings at the target company to find the relevant security technologies

- Submit a fake infosec job application to the target; use the phone screen to pump them for additional security info

- Exploit a PDF vulnerability that allows you to install a trojan on a bank employee's machine.

The information gathering phase of the attack was fairly interesting. The actual break-in seems to have been as simple as "find a current Acrobat exploit".

Great read considering FST doesn't appear to be a security-focused publication.
Look like...Windows? Really? Have you even looked at a screenshot?

Ubuntu looks nothing like Windows. If they're mimicking anything, it's OS X.
Related blog post:
http://snosoft.blogspot.com/2010/04/hacking-your-bank.html
Mr. Social: Ashton Kutcher Plans to Be the Next New-Media Mogul
Webkit is open-source because the people who wrote it (KDE devs) put it under the LGPL. Apple was playing catch-up, and used the best code base they could to get started. They aren't philanthropists, they are just (grudgingly) abiding by the license of the software they are building on.
For what it's worth the first two tactics could be useful for improving one's chances in a legitimate job interview.

Just remember not to say "I watched all of your YouTube videos, read your team's LinkedIn bios, and read every press release for the last 18 months" out loud.
The Cognitive Manifesto
But it really has little to do with PHP at all. Besides the name, I guess.
Is this in San Francisco?
I'll second the need to rank Universities based upon a course. As a non UK resident I have only heard of a handful of the universities. I'm sure there are some lesser known Universities with great departments, try not to make me click on every university to find them...

After some further investigation I see you've implemented a decent attempt at solving this problem with the 'similar universities' table (However there is a built in assumption that i can find a university at my academic level. Also as an aside, check your algorithm, Oxford Computer Science is similar to Cambridge CS but not vice versa).

The analytical side of me would still strongly prefer all universities for the selected course ranked in a table, especially if I can reorder the table by metrics as rossj suggests.
Does adam eat apple?
Wall Street on Demand, Boulder, CO. Need to work onsite.

http://www.wallst.com
I disagree. Terrible design can be ugly, but also a feature. For instance, the squished pictures may be driving profile views (people click to see the unsquished picture).
Watch ICC World Twenty20 World cup 2010 Live Online
So playing around with this it also works for multiplication with decimals using say a dashed line between the appropriate digits. The location can be read off by finding the intersection of the dashed lines and putting it in front of that column's digit. It's significantly less elegant, particularly when that column yields a multi-digit count but it does work visually.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to realize this, but it's cool that decimals can be integrated into the method while keeping vaguely in the spirit of the idea.
For me, it's easier to inspect the element in Firebug and copy/search the hex code, since I get the guarantee that I'm not changing an unrelated poorly named variable.

I find that for simpler sites, naming colors after their closest tone works well, but when I have a dozen shades of the same color, I start to run out of names very quickly (e.g. it's not unusual for me for a single page to have different background boxes, zebra striped tables, subheaders, selected/hover states and an array of other details on top of the overall layout)
It's interesting that the OP says this: I know many of the GPs and they are all great people and great investors, but this situation reminded me of one of my critical fundraising rules for entreprenuers

... then tells stories that prove at least some VCs to be indefensible assholes.
SASS isn't new, but good that Atwood is pointing people to it. Much nicer than raw CSS.
The American Family’s Financial Turmoil
This is a much better example of games you might actually see on flash portals, done in HTML5:

http://www.kesiev.com/akihabara/
We're looking for one or two strong software engineers to join our team building Windows backup and disaster recovery solutions with C# and C++.

Work is on site in Reston, VA, USA. No visa sponsorship so must have right to work in USA.

http://www.appassure.com/company/careers/junior-senior-engin...

I'm the development director at AppAssure, so drop my name and mention HN when you apply.
Partly that's because while US personal taxes are middle-of-the-pack-ish, their corporate tax rate of 35% is behind only Japan: http://alhambrainvestments.com/blog/2009/01/29/corporate-tax...

(And partly it's because there's a lot more that goes into the ranking than just tax rate.)
I believe the stock market is a measure of human consciousness. It measures our expectations, our emotions, and our perception of reality. I once had a job in a finance department, before I knew anything about stocks, and I said, "I could build a computer program to do this..." The finance guys around me laughed.

Years later, when I had capital, I built that system. I found many correlations between words in the news and fluctuations in stock price. I developed algorithms to filter out future winners from over 8,000 stocks. Over the course of the two years I used this system, I looked at many stocks a day and even after two years, I had only examined about 1,600 stocks. The system I built tracked every time I viewed a stock and let me put notes in there, so I could remember why I looked at it the first time. It's almost impossible to rationally decide which among 8,000 companies to buy. Most of the great ones aren't even looked at. How many great winners of today hid among the 6,400 I never even saw? Most of the ones we see are the ones someone else wants us to see -- why?

When Katrina hit, I knew there'd be a lot of work on the coast and used the system to quickly find companies that would be employed to fix the mess. Over the next two years, these stocks beat the market substantially.

Point being, the weather, wind, words -- everything -- affects the stock market. Little of it is rational. Little of it is p/e, om, revenues... so I have little doubt that the wind has a big impact on share prices. Hurricanes certainly do.
Every PHP programmer has lamented PHP's TMA (Too Many Ampersands) design, inconsistent method naming, function parameters order, etc. But PHP is the 800 pound gorilla with 15 years of momentum. It is what it is: a DSL written in C that's good enough at web development.

But you ain't gonna teach that old PHP dog new tricks without creating an entirely new language---in this case a DSL written in Java. When you get finished redesigning PHP, it's not PHP anymore. It's not even JPHP.

BTW, there are already languages that are free of sigils, semi-colons, and braces: Python and Ruby have been there for 15 years. If you need to do web development in those languages, they provide ample tools (Django, Rails, etc.) Both Python and Ruby have been ported to the JVM.
So you're implying that something like 80-90% of smartphones in use are iPhones? Because that's pretty much what the situation was with Windows in the 90s.
Shotput Ventures 2.0
Most standards, up until the turn of the century, were required by governments to have RAND licensing terms in order to prevent abuse of market power. That's Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory, so you could charge fees but couldn't mess with competitors.

Governments are now pushing for Open Standards which must be RAND-Z or RAND-RF. Z stands for Zero cost, RF for Royalty Free. These Open Standards make much more sense for software or services delivered at low or no cost via the web, or as Free or Open Source software.
We need senior/architect Java people.
StyleFeeder / Time, Inc.
Cambridge, MA
http://www.stylefeeder.com
jobs@stylefeeder.com
I don't know about the chipset issue, and yes this is an important point.

But the biggest move that points to the seriousness of their approach , is moving to selling ATOM cores at TSMC.
selling cores is a low margin business, but it makes sense to enable fast time to market , and high integration, which are important for consumer products.

That of course that doesn't mean that intel would win, but i think they seriously try.