skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Success is all about incentives. In this case, by the end the kids probably end up with $100K-200K each. Perhaps the biggest incentive for them will be not to be those guys who got a jackload of money from donations and never delivered. Google remembers forever.
Stop Apologizing for Your Code
Yep. Over here, Opera 10.53 on Linux, on an Athlon X2. Uses about 75% of one of the CPUs. I'm impressed that I can hold any combination of the game-playing keys, and it doesn't falter (thrust + turn + fire). The framerate holds, and everything looks and behaves smoothly, with great responsiveness.
Shaun Inman's study of the Super Mario 3 camera behavior
"This has little to nothing to do with the current situation in ruby."

I was addressing the complaint that the encoding in Ruby is hard now, and it broke working code. Encoding is fundamentally hard, and if encoding used to be easy it is almost certainly because your old code got it wrong, and your old code probably wasn't working. I emphasize the "probably" because it is faintly possible that your old code really did work and now it really doesn't work, in which case I would understand the frustration, but if I were giving odds on the chance that the old code actually handled everything correctly I'd open the bidding at somewhere around 5:1 for a superstar encoding expert (working in a language with poor encoding labelling support), with the odds getting worse the further from that you get. There are some things that are just hard without language support even for experts.
And it's worth noting that the government gave rebates for buying those boxes. I got my box for free.
Ask HN: Adding lots of initial content to a user-generated-content website
My website is a one-man operation, and, since it relies on having an initial critical mass of content for it to be useful and "sticky" for visitors, I'm wondering if you guys know of established, effective, ways to add a lot of content.

For example, can you get a bunch of college students and pay them to generate content for your website?

Are there established channels for doing so, or do I have to find these people myself?

Any other ideas?

(BTW, if there is no website offering this sort of service, maybe there is a business model there, since I can see lots of startups needing this)
Shutting it down? are you for real?
I hate, I hate, I hate iPod/iPhone syncing. It's intrusive, annoying, and constantly get's in my way.

First, it interrupts whatever I'm doing. I like to listen to audiobooks, and if I'm at my desk, I might plug my iPod in so I can charge it up, but I don't want to stop listening to what I'm listening to. But no, it stops everything and starts syncing.

Next, I need to jump through hoops to stop the syncing. iTunes starts up, and has to do it's thing. I can't just cancel the sync, I have to click through popups coming from iTunes to cancel the stupid sync before I can shut it down again.

And god forbid iTunes actually SYNC what you mark to sync! I hate installing it simply because if I do, I have to go find the place that says "Yes, when I tell you to sync an audiobook, you should, you know, actually sync the audiobook."

And then, after you are done syncing, I can't just jump back into listening to what I was listening to before.

Yes, this happens, it happens often. Really, the entire iPod/iTunes environment makes me regret getting the iPod.
Is it great that these guys are raising money?

I don't know them, but if the issue is a major fundraising effort to replace Facebook, I would think that selecting teams to implement the new system would need some serious due diligence.

Should someone raise money? Absolutely. Is it these guys? I honestly do not know. More information is needed...
Amazon Mechanical Turk. Easy to setup and fairly cheap. You can have people do anything you want. I've seen tasks like take a picture of yourself holding up a sign that says "I love <some website>.com" or to write a review of a product on a website.

You can also give offer to give out 'bonuses' to motivate people to generate really good content.
I actually work for the company who did a lot of the original work for recovery.gov and carried out the transition of the production environment to the cloud. I am not exactly sure why it's still resolving to Saavis as another reply points out, but it's probably some sort of DNS TTL issue. Recovery.gov is hosted on Amazon EC2.
Orkut is just not popular in your country.

Here in Brazil it wasn't until last year that people started even knowing what Facebook/Myspace is.

The social rule around here is Orkut + MSN Messenger. Unfortunately it led to a wave of "@hotmail" emails, but that's another thing.
What is to gain by having a destructive file operation and a non-destructive branch operation have the same name? Why do people seem to feel hurt when people suggest to name them separately?

Because they are both the semantically correct name for the operation. Check out a file, overwriting my local unstaged changes. Or checkout an entirely new working copy from the point referred to by a branch.

I don't feel hurt that you suggest it, though. In fact I mentioned in another comment that I always thought `git branch` could do the switching itself rather than checkout... I just don't think it's a problem. I know I'm working with a file or a branch, so I just know what will happen. It doesn't matter that the name is the same since it's function depends on context.
One thing I'd require in this donation model that they provide an online "billing" statement that shows (at least roughly) what they spent the money on.
Am I the only one that finds this statement distasteful? I would understand if you said the project looks like it has vaporware written all over it, but saying the "group" looks like they have vaporware written all over "them" suggests you're basing your opinion on their physical appearance. I expected more out of HN.
Ah, thanks. I haven't done OTA on a TV since the mid 90s.
You could have invented git (and maybe you already have)
That's my experience with any recent ATI card in Linux. Flash doesn't have to be involved. High resolution or full-screen video with a quad-core AMD Phenom and 8GB of ram results in dropped frames and tearing.

I fixed it by switching back to NVIDIA.
I like the concept a lot...enough to worry that I would waste too much time on it :)

Putting it on Facebook is a smart way to reach a wide audience, but (like a lot of people) I have lately become allergic to the idea of Facebook apps due to privacy concerns (with FB, not you!). So I urge you not to limit yourself to that platform - make it accessible to Twitter and Google users too, who will also bring you plenty of traffic.

A smaller grid might be needed for mobile phone users - I hope you'll consider an Android client. I could definitely enjoy a casual multiplayer game like this at the bus stop or during lunch.
Agree. Even though I'm a huge Ruby fan, that part still left me scratching my head.
Yeah really... Haskell and Scala? Unless your job is posting on Reddit all day about these languages, good luck...
Agreed; 10K seems a reasonable "investment" to see if they can come up with the goods. 100K (or more) smacks of people jumping on the current "Down With Facebook" train and not considering what they are putting money into properly.

They don't really need 100K - and if it ends up being all about the money it's never going to end well :(
Why would Google "donate" senior talent to a project which at this point is basically just some videos and badly designed logos for download?

Comments here are as insane as the amount of money these guys collected.
I'm not saying Orkut isn't popular anywhere, but by any metric it's not as popular as Facebook is globally.
I hope this is a "Work in Progress". The guide only really talks about the new sectioning elements in HTML5 which is only 3% of what HTML5 actually entails.
ATM Gold Dispenser
Is the US government really the world's 'largest consumer of information technology'?
Feature Removal
Yes, absolutely. They initially asked for $10K. They now have 10 times as much.

To pause the contribution round now and to show they can deliver would help them in avoiding the enormous risk of as someone else here already mentioned of becoming 'the next cuil'.

Hype is a double-edged sword, it's great when you have it but you only get one shot at delivering and in an overhyped situation that is much harder than in one where expectations are still realistic. The more money they pull in the more this will be overhyped, the bigger the chance of a public disappointment when they launch.
This is the second time in this thread (which I am kicking myself for reading) that someone has intimated that Diaspora is just a couple of Google developers away from being big.

No.

If Facebook was 2, 10, or 100 top-caliber Google engineers away from a serious challenge, Google would already be seriously challenging Facebook. Google is a CS-hiring force of nature.
Less and more
Google provides for consumers. From the spec of this project it is an interesting idea - but I don't think it will be a consumer project/site/resource like Facebook is (i.e. it won't pass the "dumb blonde" test).

(on the other hand there may be some interesting technical ideas they would find useful - so perhaps from that perspective...)
What about DVRs, DVD recorders and good old VCRs?
This has reinvigorated my interest in Kickstarter. I lost interest when I wasn't able to set a high enough goal (some sort of field validation bug) for my first attempt to post a project.

Maybe I'll try something less ambitious this time around?
Adobe Hits Apple With Hugs - Adobe - Gizmodo
And how do you propose Mark Zuckerburg came off to his friends when he first started talking about writing a website to get pics of girls (if that story is indeed accurate)? Probably like a horny college nerd.

I'll admit the likelyhood of them succeeding in dethroning Facebook could probably be measured with several zeroes after a decimal point, but I don't believe that has anything to do with their personalities. Mabe I'm naive?
HTML5 For Drunks
Exactly. All this amounts to at this stage is a signal to facebook. A powerful signal, absolutely. But not by any stretch of the imagination a threat.

If they deliver somewhere in the fall and if it starts to draw significant traffic and if they don't have a big security breach themselves, and if there is no falling out between the four founders then they might be a contender.

But that's a lot of ifs.
What Would You Ask the IE9 Team if you had the Chance?
This is just an ad for a law firm.

You should always be clear who gets what when you freelance or when you hire freelancers. Any legal "default" would fail to capture the subtleties. For example, who owns the copyright to my "library code" when I use it in your project?

I always prefer to specify something like a BSD license to the code. That means that it doesn't matter who owns the copyright - we both get to do anything we want with the code. If the client wants exclusivity, then we explicitly agree that he gets 100% ownership of the code that was written just for him, and the remainder is BSD licensed.

None of this is hard, and none of it requires a lawyer.
Committee. I don't have any grounds for this, but I get the feeling that this is a very typically European project. The website and the fact that it's backed by Vodafone set off my bells. These kinds of projects by states or big corporations usually never launch, but are instead drowning in bureaucracy.

I might be wrong, but this fact alone makes me think Diaspora are doing the right thing in finding their own path.

It doesn't matter a lot to me though, I'm certain that we will build an open social network soon, whether OneSocialWeb, Diaspora or something else.
That's a good question, and one I'm not entirely sure about. My guess is that the index itself is also scattered across the disk, since it gets added to at the same time as the rows get added. So in the real query, where we are reading actual data, and not just counting the number of rows, there are actually two seek costs --- seeking to finding the correct part of the index to read, and then seeking to find the row it points to.
Coming soon to the Food Network (biatch).
Here in the Netherlands we have 'hyves', and until last year 'hyves' was pretty much 'it'.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/hyves.nl

says it all.
Because of the context, I parsed that as "if I were [Kickstarter] I'd shut down the pledge site now", and was having a hard time following your reasoning. Assuming you meant Diaspora, your point is a lot more reasonable.
Learn To hack or crack Administrator password in windows xp
I've always thought that if I had children I would try to treat them less like little kids and with more autonomy. For example if they misbehaved, instead of just punishing them, I would give them a chance to write a paraphraph or two if they wished to dispute the punishment. Or giving them some (though not complete) freedom in choosing what to do, such as "would you prefer to go the opera, play, or concert?" Is this a good idea or am I being too optimistic?
It's now on EC2.
Before I got into tech I founded a PR agency. I agree that you shouldn't outsource PR as a startup. If you can't fumble your way through a pitch to a journalist you either a) have a shitty product or b) shouldn't be running a business. Journalists are remarkably tolerant of the amateur if she is honest and believes in what she's doing.

The 'clueless staffer' email is a bit old though. No agency worth their salt would put out something like that. I'd say the #1 issue in PR is not having a solid story to work with. 'PR in the boardroom' is considered the holy grail of agency/client relationships and frankly pure BS if anyone ever tells you they have it. PR doesn't guide business decisions. That means the business is either newsworthy or it isn't, regardless of what the agency does.
That's probably why it's described as "This guide introduces you to just the main elements of HTML5 that you’ll probably want to use right away. This guide is for those who want to get the basics figured out first, and worry about the finer details later on".
That is ridiculously cool! I wish it showed the output - it's just a "RE" otherwise. :(
The Google Job Experiment(Video)
Car Crash Triggers Amazon Power Outage
You now get hauled off at the end.
Seconded, but beware of filling up a site with a tide of poorly-written crap, a la 'I love hackernews.com because he hunts bugs and doesn't afraid of anything on hackernews.com!'

It would help if we knew what the site was or what sort of content it needed. Like a lot of other HN readers, I'm usually happy to throw in 30 or 60 minutes of effort on adding to something that looks like it will be useful once it reaches critical mass.
Hacker Diary:Building a Programmable Shading PipeLine for MechAssault2
Immigrant engineers don't drive down U.S. wages
Have these guys updated their plans now to reflect the new funding?
At the techrunch+engage event yesteday held in edinburgh, one of the investors bemoaned a lack of innovation in scottish startups.

We have an excellent grassroots community growing and an abundance of engineering talent but still a relatively minor successes.

The letter is from a local startup founder (who also started techmeetup) to the vc about the lack of bottom tier funding.
Making a comment, deleting it, and then replying to a comment that agreed with it stating that what they are agreeing with you upon is wrong is an interesting way of creating an argument.
Diaspora at this point in time is a signal, not a contender.

I think facebook, for the next couple of years is unassailable, but they should definitely take note.

The facebook brand has been damaged in the last couple of weeks, and the hype around diaspora is damaging it further.

That's the only way in which this will have effect. If they pull it off though (even if they just ship) I'll tip my hat to them.
"When markets are open, anyone with a great idea has a chance to drive innovation and find new customers. Adobe's business philosophy is based on a premise that, in an open market, the best products will win in the end — and the best way to compete is to create the best technology and innovate faster than your competitors."

Is it just me or does that perfectly explain Apple's business philosophy regarding iPhone OS as well? The mobile market is open. Apple doesn't have a monopoly or a majority of the market. There are plenty of other phones and carriers to choose from. The bottom line is Apple is trying to make the best product with the best technology and faster innovation than anyone else – and they are succeeding. Adobe is just-now-almost-ready-to-release-a-beta of a mobile optimized flash player. The iPhone has been out and innovating for 3 years. Adobe is not following it's own philosophy very well.

App store approval, no flash player, 3.3.1, all the decisions Apple have made that have got people angry are all explained by them trying to make the best mobile experience they can. Is it the best ever? Is it the best for you? Is it the only way? If you answer 'no' to any of these you have two options: buy something else or make something better.

Having flash on the iPhone will not make it a better platform (from Apple's point of view, and mine). Did you see the flash content running on the Nexus One the other day? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y7XJI4NN7k) It looks great! If it allows reasonable battery life I want one. But at the same time I want iPhone apps. I don't want the progress of the iPhone and iPad to get stalled trying to get flash to work. Apple can keep innovating in it's way and Adobe can work with Google and HP and whoever else to innovate in another way. They can both coexist.

I think a lot of the issue is Adobe (and by extension flash developers) feel like they are entitled to develop for every platform. Apple has so much mindshare (despite is relatively small market share) that it's the new toy for developers to play with. Flash devs understandably want a piece of it. They are used to being able to write once run everywhere. Adobe is used to being able to tout their ability to allow flash devs to write once run anywhere. Apple's just finally the first company in the position to say no and be able to back it up.

note: I make a living doing flash and web development (5+ years)
Five Best Linux Netbook OSes
Those startups are going to give the VCs back something. They will make profit. But this is something which will not be making profit. Its a non profit thing and the people pledging money will not get a penny out of it (may be some rewards but that's for major investors.

I admit the over exaggeration on the "living like a king" part but I fail to see any analogy with VC funded social startups and this
the problem with internet is, they dont bring much culture into their product
Review: Fedora 13 offers power and stability under the hood
It actually doesn't need access to download & update games, since those are simply kept inside the user's home directory.

It also doesn't need admin access to view all running processes, any user on a unix system can do so.

That being said… I'm pretty sure Steam never actually asked me for an admin password (and I run in a non-privileged account), so I'm not quite sure what this guy is talking about.
It doesn't matter what health insurance costs if you can't obtain it. That's the situation with non-guaranteed-issue health care; there are a raft of very common health circumstances that will prevent founders from obtaining family coverage --- at all.

Non-guaranteed-coverage is founder-unfriendly. Guaranteed issue, even if it inevitably raises the cost of premiums, at least levels the playing field between established companies with group plans (which are already effectively guaranteed issue and which already cover the majority of residents in most states) and 2 person startup shops.

We can argue this all day, but the point is: this report is a thinly-veiled advocacy piece for the US CoC's agenda. It's not a real study of any sort.
DRM in a browser doesn't stop a select few individuals from screen capturing content either. Hulu is only looking at stopping the majority so that they can secure their licensing rights.
Ellison will definitely make more money than SUN did with its own assets.He is going to put price tag to anything that boots. But SUN represent something much much bigger how many open source projects do oracle supports? none!!!
In the real world, and especially in small companies, people eventually hire people they like and get a good feeling about. You're just not allowed to air your preferences in certain areas or restrict the /chance/ to different people. Behind closed doors, though, nothing is any better than before all these laws. If one didn't want to hire someone with quality "X", is their back-room thinking /really/ going to be entirely non-discriminatory? No chance.
You didn't address my comment at all; you just repeated the same point you've been making everywhere else about Facebook.
I've heard this same story everywhere outside Silicon Valley; Not enough big exits, means not enough angels, means not enough seed capital, means too many service companies and almost no product companies.

pg's talked a lot about being ramen profitable and as a decent engineer you should be able to put away $15k and take 3 months off to go build a startup.

Except capital is only one piece of the puzzle. Building a real product company takes a lot more than just capital. I don't know what a good solution is, but atleast NYC seems to be solving it with pumping more early stage money into the system and slightly easier access to mentors. But even here we don't have a lot of people with the time, inclination and big exits behind them the mentor and nurture younger entrepreneurs...
Back of the envelope has this between $250K and 1.5 million if this keeps up.

At this point I think the more money they raise the bigger the chance they'll fail to meet expectations.
There's always the risk that they'd prefer hanging out with the hoodies.
Lol yes, all this sudden Facebook bashing came out of nowhere for us! So, we need to now adapt and probably introduce other platforms like Twitter...
Still the user would have to learn a new way to write. Not great especially when you consider that things such as Dvorak have failed to get traction.
The Great Beyond: Oil spill science
Browser più sicuro . - google.it - Yahoo Buzz
Sure, all it does is links the commit to a github login. It doesn't somehow give you access to any data that's not yours. You've just discovered another way to post spam.
git pull = git fetch remotebranch + git merge newstuff

git pull --rebase = git fetch remotebranch + git rebase newstuff

Standard merge feathers commits together. Rebase looks at your new changes, puts them aside, brings in the remotebranch's changes, and then replays all your new changes on top of the remotebranch. This is great because it makes YOUR changes truly new, and you can handle all your conflicts once.

http://darwinweb.net/articles/86
Diaspora, for sure.

Sorry, that reference could have been more clear.
No, my screen sucks, and I see it. It's a different color than the bar.
Many who think they have food allergies actually do not
Seems unlikely. Also, given how small your company is, it'd be nearly impossible for someone to prove you've discriminated based on any particular factor, as opposed to just being selective. Not enough employees to demonstrate a pattern. So I doubt this should even be a concern for you.
Don't you mean, "The fiction that they maintain so that they can secure broadcasting rights?"
And a follow up at http://gameangst.com/?p=441 . Very interesting reads.
The fact that more information is needed makes me lean towards the "no" side of the house.