skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Consult an attorney before applying any of the tips
"I find myself searching and reading 2/3 of the time instead of coding"

That's a fair statement. I do spend a lot of time searching and reading WP documentation. I feel overal I'm still saving a huge amount of time and gettng a much more robust system.
Mathematics' Unintended Consequences
Anything to do with HARO?
Agreed. I wish they would make a USB version though, it seems to really suck down batteries. I have 2 Magic Mice and except for the occasional lag and batteries, it's the best mouse I have used.
TL;dr - 40 minute audio of a presenter and 3 mathematicians (including Marcus du Sautoy) discussing how seemingly "useless" math discoveries have gone on to become useful later on in areas like computing, electronics, encryption, and relativity.
What a terrible terrible interview. The interviewer wanted to have Woz on the show for many years, and these are the questions that he came up with? So bad.
I lived with a guy who downloaded "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince" as a PDF about two months before the book's actual release.

He read all 600 pages, then said it was probably fake, but still a great read.
Why buffer overflow exploitation took so long to mature
Amen to that. Working on it :-)
Quasi-cranks
Why doesn't Windows include native PDF reader support?
The dark future of dating: http://funmunch.com/funpages/funny/dark_future/
The point is that almost everyone I know seems to be having a bad experience with flying these days

Just as a counterpoint, almost everyone I know is minorly inconvenienced and continues on their merry way way when flying. Mainly grumbling about having to repack their carry-on and security theater jokes. And these are people flying into/out of major airports (SFO, LAX, JFK, ORD to name a few).

// edit: Include me in this as well. And I've flown into or out of ROC, JFK and SFO ~8-10x a year (4-5 trips a year) for the past 3 years.

Of course, this just illustrates anecdotes and that people view things differently. Shocking, I know.

Hundreds of people from my country

Out of curiosity, just what country are you from? Or your family? You haven't said. At least, not that I've noticed.
Ruby the language is pretty gigantic, so there are a lot of hard-to-fix corner cases. IronRuby, IIRC, passes 85% or so and just hit 1.0 and can run Rails. So most Ruby you write will run on this, but it is possible to break it.
Ask HN: How to monetize & market Get In Anyway
Hey guys (and the few girls on here too),
Similar to the Fat Ninja Hot Sauce, my startup is also a little different from those normally submitted on here. I'm selling a physical product - my 'Get In Anyway' (GIA) guide. It's a step-by-step guide on how anyone can earn a Harvard degree, taking mostly online classes, and for about the same tuition as your state school.

Initially, I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity for myself. But after realizing how few people were aware of this degree-seeking program, I decided to take it upon myself to let would-be students know that they have a second shot at education from a prestigious institution.

I decided to go physical to circumvent any and all piracy issues. Currently, I have everything setup to print/bind at FedEx office and ship via USPS to every country that ClickBank (CB) supports. Oh yea, I was recently approved as a CB vendor. And, yes, they now accept physical products. I also have an Amazon payments button commented out on my pages. But I recently noticed it's still showing up on some browsers. Anyway, back to monetization & marketing...

One monetization option I'm considering in lieu of selling a physical book is lead generation. i.e., I'd make the contents of the guide available (section by section) online and generate leads for relevant offers.

This article made lead generation appear wonderfully lucrative: http://blog.mediadroit.com/2009/11/14/what-is-the-ideal-way-to-monetize-lead-generation/

And on marketing, I'm wide open to suggestions. Although I'd love to hear something crazy with the potential to put GIA on the map.

So I'd love to hear your ideas as to how you think I should monetize & market this guide.

This is my site: http://www.getinanyway.com

Thanks!

P.S. I thought of submitting this in the morning instead of at night for fear of having it slip through the cracks. But I decided to submit at night anyway. :)
I don't like Awesome. I've been using Lua for a while, and something about the way the Lua stuff is set up doesn't sit right with me. I can't rattle off any examples off the top of my head (it's been a while since I checked it out), but, I tried it, not my thing. (Also, taking a BSD codebase and making it GPL'd and bloated tends to piss me off.)
What about simply using two commands? As the article says, there are two use cases which are hard to combine, so why not separating them?

For instance, use Alt+Tab to jump to you latest used application, and use Ctrl+Rightarrow to go to the next app in order. Plus, you get an obvious way to go to the previous app in order: Ctrl+Leftarrow.
Pretty awesome hack, but doesn't work if you're on a lame network that doesn't use SIM cards.
If you want another perspective on this, we have to answer these kinds of questions a trillion times a week at FreshBooks. We're posting a guide to help people get through it.

The most salient post is Part II, which helps people choose their gateways.

http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2010/04/30/part-2-how-do-paym...

Speaking as someone who frequently has to call into the payment gateways' customer support on behalf of our customers who have hit a brick wall, personally, I like to keep life easy. I recommend PayPal Standard if you're doing less than $2000-$5000 a month in transactions, and then Authorize.net or PayPal Payflow Pro.
Thanks for the suggestion, just added a link to the blog to the front page of http://embed.ly/
Chrome continues surge as IE drops below 60% market share
Ask HN: Help picking a name for my app
I'm developing a forex social webapp. There are two names that I like but unfortunately the .com isn't available for one of them however I was able to get two alternative names.

I want to show you the names and ask you to help me pick one from the available options. They are:

pipsandchips.com

forex is all about making pips. pips and chips sounds kind of like fish and chips and, I think it sounds kind of catchy and fun

tradebook.com

due to the social nature of my app I think the name would work really well. The .com isn't available but I was able to purchase tradebookhq.com and tradebookapp.com

What do you guys recommend?

Thanks!
so you'd rather have ALL your data AND hardware on Google's hands for the sake of 'openness' instead of having parts of it on other companies' hands (Facebook and Apple)?
I stopped looking at notifications long ago.
First off: Use binary packages. The ports tree is for porters and people running snapshots or CVS head. (Also: Definitely use binary packages if you're installing something that depends on KDE, or you'll be building KDE from source as a dependency.)

My "desktop" is emacs, dwm, tmux, and firefox, so that hasn't really been an issue for me. The OpenBSD minimalism is very much my style. (I use mpd for music, by the way.) It makes a killer router too, though.

I've tried going back to Linux a couple times, just to see what new developments (and ports, etc.) I've been missing since I spend most of my time on BSD. (I used Debian for a couple years, then mainly OpenBSD for the last six or seven.) I've gotten really used to OpenBSD, though, and every Linux distro I've tried hasn't stuck around for more than a day or two.
They do it all the time.

I had to explain a good couple times the difference between an application service provider and ASP the IIS thingie.

I really wish they gave up software and kept doing their excellent keyboard and mice.
The $15 a month plan is pointless. I doubt anyone will ever use it more than one month. It costs $30 a month for data, for all intents and purposes.
I first heard about WolframTones on The website of the physicist turned mathematician John Baez. He composed a pretty decent album using WolframTunes called Treq Lila: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/music/treq_lila/
I think the exception to this (and not yet realized) is when color is an integral part of the book. I.e. copiously illustrated books. I would love to see an e-book version of Tufte's books.
simon_ I fully agree.

This is also what drives me nuts about, for example, NPR's coverage of the crisis. I love the Planet Money team for instance but they invariable do their "gosh can you believe how nuts this financial stuff is" schtick during each episode of what is otherwise a decent show.

I'm tired of hearing a procession of Ira-Glass-cadence-imitating NPR ingenues with gee-golly-wow attitudes interviewing financial pros.

Journalists serve as proxies for the reader/viewer/listener. When they do the "this finance stuff is just crazy" routine they imply that we shouldn't have been expected to understand and follow the finance industry in the first place. That implicit expectation of ignorance is the media equivalent of "math is hard".

We need to raise expectations of education and comprehension. It's entirely possible to understand this stuff in high school. We should be teaching it in every public school. Of course that would make it harder to get away with stuff. Not surprising then, that we don't teach it in schools today.
Billing can get complicated if your customers are other businesses and need proper invoices and account statements for tax purposes, not to mention managing coupons, refunds, expired credit cards, credit card failures, account suspension rules, etc. which apply to all classes of customers.

Most web apps are too small to worry about these issues.

(Full disclosure. I work at FreshBooks and I'm actually the product manager of recurring and subscription billing.)
Some people have asked me why I created the www.Twitter-Fail.com blog. It's not, as John Metcalfe said, to "mock tweets I consider stupid." Instead, it is my way of sharing what I find on Twitter that makes me laugh, in the hopes that others will laugh along with me. Granted, you won't get most of the humor if you're not a Twitter user, and I'm okay with that. All the people who laugh, comment, nudge their friends when they've been mentioned, or are thrilled to find their username in a post, are the real reason the blog continues to exist. That's what the Times story doesn't tell you. It also doesn't tell you that the other blogs mentioned are also humorous, and not judgmental, severe or mean-spirited. I hope, when you read the article, you click through to each blog and judge them on their merits.
Because you would have to add runtimes for all those languages with ties to the DOM. It's hard enough to keep JavaScript secure. It would be a nightmare to keep different implementations of JavaScript, Ruby, Python and client-side PHP secure on different operating systems.
What frustrates me is that it's just so expensive to get started... I know that it's "just the cost of doing business" but it really bothers me that you have to give away ≈%3 of your revenue to get paid.

Braintree claims that their pricing is very competitive. I don't doubt that it is, but being in business with them for a single year costs a minimum of $1659* (supposing you need recurring billing). That's a lot for someone who wants to get started charging for a small web app.

I've been really discouraged to get started because I know that as soon as I do I'll be paying high monthly fees that I'm not sure I'll be able to cover.

Thoughts?

*http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/pricing
Netflix on the train. I figure an episode of any half-hour tv show is perfectly matched for my commute.
What's truly sad is that with the size of the screens on the newer desktop machines, a tiling WM would have a lot of room (literally) to shine. With OSX's standard window management, I end up having to do a lot of manual fiddling to get my windows to the point where they're simultaneously large enough to be useful, while not so large that they overwhelm my visual field. That little green button in the upper left corner really doesn't do what I'd want it to do on a 27" screen when I'm sitting just a couple feet away from it.
I have to install a quicktime plugin? No thanks.
Is Digg Under XSS Attack?
What about the requirement that any code that touches CC payments has to be PCI compliant? Doesn't these leave only PayPal and Auth.NET as the only option for smaller players?

ref: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1314560
This isn't just about replacing JavaScript with a CLI VM. It is about replacing the entire web stack, from HTML, CSS, and SVG all the way down to JavaScript.

The primary benefit of this would be that high-level languages like HTML would be implemented on top of the VM, and would no longer be hard-coded into the browser. This would allow you to, for instance, link to the latest version of the HTML runtime the same way you would link to the latest jQuery. This would mean that we would no longer have to wait for the browser vendors and standards bodies to bring us cutting edge technologies. This would also mean that alternative UI toolkits and languages would play on the same level field as HTML and JavaScript.
Good news IE continues to lose market share.
Bad news IE6 continues NOT losing market share. cry

Though it really depends on your market as their final pie chart shows. I know our stats show that IE6 barely gets a look in so we have dumped supporting it as the hassle was too great.
Right, so they didn't really understand the risks involved.

It's not like thousands of people woke up one morning and independently, by coincidence, decided to default on their homes.

It's a long complex causal chain, with snow-balling effects and the like, that very few people had an appreciation for because the instruments involved were very complex and there were too many layers involved.

This lead to a very non-linear system where it was impossible to have visibility over the whole thing.
How does this apply to pretty much any form of local search? It's not enough to know that you're 21 years old and have 50 friends... I need to know that you have a need for a plumber.
By natural light do you mean direct sunlight on the screen? That is a problem but otherwise the iPad is usable outdoors in most situations I've found. I used it in a car the other day (no, not while driving) with lots of sunlight coming in the windows and it was usable. Definitely not up to par with an e-ink display but for someone like me who has no interest in a dedicated e-ink device it's certainly good enough. I don't think there's much doubt e-ink readers will be the choice for heavy readers. Of course we also don't know how many iPad owners bought the device with the intention to read books on it. We know about 99% of Kindle owners bought their device for one specific purpose.
They were already linked.... but to a search field.... Now they are just linking to a fan page which pulls content from Wikipedia.

And it used to news feed them when you changed them anyway ("XX has changed their television interests" or something to that extent)
Agreed. It's remarkable - My weight has varied between 160 pounds and 210 pounds, and almost has 100% correlation with a single factor - whether I was carpooling or walking into work. Diet, secondary exercise, type of food I'm eating - none of them seem to have anywhere near the causative impact as just simply walking 25-30 minutes into work (and back) each morning. Every morning. Every Day. For months on end.

I have friends who mock this, and talk about how much more important it is to get into their peak-heart-rate on their at-home treadmill. That they've actually used maybe a couple dozen times.

I don't have a choice - have to walk to work. And Back. 3 1/4 miles a day. Every day.

That's almost a marathon a week. :-)
In xmonad (and I'd assume most other tilers), there is not only a fixed tabbing order, it is the visual order.

I am almost unable to use alt-tab on a more standard window manager now, because it doesn't behave sensibly; it requires you to keep an in-memory ordering on your applications to get to them quickly. A static order that isn't obvious is just as bad as a dynamic one.
I'd add in NewsRob, an offline RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader - excellent for public transport etc. Caches images, can cache linked web pages too.

Arity is a nice calculator - free expression input, can graph in 2 and 3d.

Battery Left is an decent widget. It has a 1x1 widget that you can put on your home screen which estimates battery time remaining, along with a more precise % figure. It learns based on previous discharge cycles.

Act 1 Video Player is IMO much better than the default video player - it has a nice touch-swipe skipping mechanism for locating in files.

ES File Explorer is a pretty good file manager, especially since it can browse remote file systems over FTP, SMB (i.e. Windows shares), Bluetooth, etc. This means you can copy over music, movies etc. from your network shares onto your phone without having to plug into USB or remove the SD card (usually requires removing battery, rebooting phone etc.)

Another file manager, ASTRO, is handy particularly for browsing photos. Android 2.1's Gallery app is fine for a handful of photos, but it slows to a crawl if you've built up a bunch. As a file manager, it understands nested directories, unlike Gallery. B&B Gallery is a useful counterpart to it; Gallery downsamples images before loading them, but B&B Gallery doesn't, meaning you can zoom in and see more details. ASTRO can also create zip files.

AutoRotate is another widget - it can sit on your home screen and toggle the auto-rotate system setting upon touch. Very useful for browsing the web in bed or similarly reclined. To get the same functionality on my iPod Touch, I had to jailbreak it.

And finally as a pure artistic toy, Doodledroid is a lot of fun. It has a selection of brushes with configurable dynamics, and fingerpainting with it feels good.
NewsRob, as I mentioned in my other comment.
That's pretty poignant. We pay dearly for it, but the App Store and in-app purchasing is about as easy as processing payments can get.
Steve Wozniak: The Mac vs. PC War is Over
Damn interesting I might say. It piqued my interest and is truly strange in that the waves of buffer overflow exploits took time to become mainstream. I have seen it with other stuff like good mobile, killer apps, standards etc. Where ideas are talked about for a long time then finally they get written, then packaged and products, then mass adoption after a certain time.

I would argue is that when it became a game, people played, competition stifled... The article states “Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit“ was released and then many examples spawned, which further spawned more and more ad infinitum.

I mean which one piques your interest:

- COMPUTER SECURITY TECHNOLOGY PLANNING STUDY

OR

- “Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit“

Game it...
Much as I love complaining about Facebook, the fact that they accurately derived the pages to be linked to means they already have this information. In fact I'm not even sure why they bother to ask.
Actually, there were people warning about it. Peter Schiff was one of many.

Housing prices doubled in many areas, far outstripping any increase in the rent they could earn.

And, probably the most powerful indicator of all, people went out of their way to make sure others were holding the bag on a supposedly safe investment. They did not believe it was safe either.
"Microsoft and its partners hold patents for CLI. ECMA and ISO require that all patents essential to implementation be made available under 'reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms', but interpretation of this has led to much controversy, particularly in the case of Mono."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Language_Infrastructure#...
No. They'll just search every one they see by cutting it in half, and finding nothing, returning it to you so you can continue on your way.
You've gotta be kidding me -- no, I know you aren't.

I'm nothing approaching a network admin, and the deductive process and factors you mentioned immediately occurred to me.

This reminds me of a (failed) Rational toolset deployment I suffered under some years ago. TPTB decided they were going to support users in India from a U.S. installation. I argued for testing with one or another form of network simulation, but I got nowhere. Sure enough, they deployed, and the thing was unusably slow. The Rational tools involved wanted to touch files and DB (very) repeatedly for each action. Latency killed performance under these circumstances.

I guess your story heartens me, a bit. I get to the point of feeling under-experienced particularly as, on paper, I may look under-credentialed. But in practice, as often as not I'm the one posing the difficult and pertinent questions.
If you use an API like Braintree's Transparent Redirect ( http://bit.ly/d5wD4P ) you can host the payment form on your site without touching any credit card data. That way you won't have to deal with the drawbacks of redirecting your customers to a third party hosted page. Disclosure: I work for Braintree.
Didn't adobe have the rights for PDF till recently when they made it open source?
Apple's iPad: One Month Later
This is a great idea, I wish more mobile browsers had something like this.
Advice for Computer Science College Students
I bet you're right. With Google's Android TV project pending it wouldn't surprise me to see this at WWDC. Between games and media it seems like the obvious next step.
Yes, I see that you have absolutely no comprehension of choice.
Foxit Reader?
Sachin - the online payments industry is indeed very complex. I'm impressed that you both took the time to write this up and did such a nice job. I would add a few things. (Disclosure: I'm with Braintree)

1) There is much more than meets the eye when choosing a merchant account provider, and not all are created equal (it's very true that few understand online payments). We will be first to say that providing merchant account services to online merchants is very challenging for a host of reasons. Because it's so complex and because there are so many moving parts, no one is immune to mistakes, misunderstandings, complex situations and difficult situations. With that said, the importance of choosing the right provider cannot be overstated. Merchants need to find a company they can trust because when stuff happens (i.e. account closure, reserves) you need someone in your corner that can help navigate. In our experience, merchants are most likely to make mistakes when solely focused on price.

2) I'm very pleased to see you call out data portability. We were the first in the industry to start raising the alarm bells about providers holding stored credit card data hostage. It's a huge issue with very serious implications. To address this problem, we created the Credit Card Data Portability Standard and invited all providers to participate (http://bit.ly/a0i86v).

We've been blogging about the industry for years now trying to help educate merchants. Here is are two resources to contribute to yours:

a) New to Payments - http://bit.ly/cIY58t b) Don't get duped. Use this checklist - http://bit.ly/dliMpH
Blocking an app is no help when you have requests from a hundred different ones.

F.B. Purity

http://www.fbpurity.com/

works well for that. Constantly posting articles about the security risks and general stupidity of Facebook games also helps to make it uncool (at least among my circle of Facebook friends) to play Facebook games. If the spam keeps up even after that, the friends are removed from my feed, or, in the really bad cases, unfriended.
Wifi Analyzer rocks. Also try these: StopWatch, Timeriffic (ringer & radio settings based on schedules), Toss It, Trap! (it's Jezzball!)
My ears are bleedinggggg. Seriously, none of the generated pieces made any musical sense.
It would be an interesting investigation into why Chrome and Firefox have done so well in growth and Opera (a quite nice browser) never seems to have done well.