skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to state something incredibly radical, and possibly (to some) fool hearty: Last week I announced to myself that I would no longer take a part in the political process until 60% of the baby boomer population in the US was out of office, succeeded by a member of a younger generation.

With some notable exceptions, the Baby Boomer generation is painfully slow to adopt the globalization of information technology in such a capacity that younger generations have; sometimes to the point of willful ignorance. Their timid nature results in often refusing to be a part of these new trends, and often stopping their adoption on wide levels for no reason other than not understanding how they work.

That said, those who have been empowered by such technologies need to be exponentially more vocal in driving down the capital and overhead of our expensive lifestyle by making use of these cost effective technologies and they must do so by(A) leveraging the benefits of a globalized workforce that doesn't place such a heavy dependence on third-party workers (in much the same way the US has depended on foreign energy to the point of hyper-polarization and excessive political baggage) and (B) strategically implementing infrastructures that would allow for a symbiotic relationship that develops social capital in these areas with cost effective solutions; thereby empowering these smaller nations, while inspiring and creating incentive for keeping the machine back at home well oiled.
Ask HN: does anyone here use wolfram alpha?
Do you use it? How often? For what?

I'm just curious.
Thanks google, love ya guys ;-)

Now, what would be the benefit of calling:

http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Inconsolata

which in turn serves the css that contains the real call to the font:

@font-face { font-family: 'Inconsolata';
src: url('http://themes.googleusercontent.com/font?kit=J_eeEGgHN8Gk3Eud0dz8jw')
format('truetype'); }

So, why two trips, instead of just one?

What I'd do is just call the font directly and teach developers to use @font-face

And shrink the url a bit:

http://fonts.googleapis.com/Inconsolata

Remember, once it gets widespread use it would be harder to change a single char
I use it for solving equations, or graphing things.
My favorite way to write is with Emacs running on one of the virtual terminals under Linux. A fullscreened Putty session sshd into a Unix box will also do in a pinch.

My co-workers, by contrast, even paste code into Word documents.
They'll have to support all three or it won't work. I'm guessing that Google is actually writing the code so all MS has to do is add Google's Media Foundation components to the IE 9 whitelist.
Because complaining about "mixed content" was completely pointless in the general case -- you could mix content across multiple https sites, but the certificates were never correlated, and the second site would still get all the headers just the same.

It's extraordinarily user-hostile, and would just add to the pile of pointless wankery that keeps people from using https (see also: shitting all over self-signed certs when in reality the CAs don't do shit for their rent and identity is useless anyway).

The actual solution is to never send Referer headers for cross-site requests from an HTTPS page.
how about you set up a separate domain (e.g., supersecretduck.com) where all the options you mention above default to their paranoid settings?
Base64 convert from text to base64 at Duck Duck Go
You need to add it as a service from the list of labs products (add more services from Google Apps dashboard for premier account admins). Took a couple minutes after the announcement to start showing up here.
Foucault's pendulum is sent crashing to Earth
Store = Yes, Apps = Yes, Install = No
Once in a while. Someone asked what the average salary for teachers in new york were. I pointed her to wolfram
You can use App Engine "supercharged" free quotas plus S3 or Google Storage. Just place a minimal static html file.

http://izuzak.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/how-to-supercharge-yo...

The problem I find with S3 and CloudFront is no restriction based on referrer. It can be addressed with some moving of the files and dynamic HTML but that would kill caching and might break on some browsers.
Privacy Terminology
Facebook: Where Privacy Meets Design
Hello back, proprietary software. I still don't like you, even with new clothes.
What about influAds? http://influads.com

They seem to be quite new but gathering an interesting batch of members. Small when compared to the scale of the others.

Anyone tried?
A brandable domain name would still be beneficial for marketing, demos, documentation, etc.
Add Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn Info to Your Gmail Contacts [APPS]
Will you make the spec for the package format open, so other browsers would be able to implement support for fully packaged apps?
Yea, I basically am calling a sys_write and outputting what is in the registers to stdout...

Would be really cool to expand on it, and make a really tight php like language that runs off of apache via fastcgi or something... if I only had more time, haha.
True. torbutton does a lot of that, however, so if you enable it and completely disable javascript you can get your browser uniqueness down to about 1 in 1500
Amazon S3 just announced a "Reduced Redundancy" version of S3 priced about 33% cheaper.

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing
> The actual solution is to never send Referer headers for cross-site requests from an HTTPS page.

That should be on someone's todo list at the major browser vendors. You're right, there really is no point in sending that header along, and sending it can cause all kinds of trouble.
Gist Gadget for Google Apps: A Look at the Social Inbox
You could do that on AppEngine already. Just put everything in your static_files directory and set it as the default responder in app.yaml

For more see http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/gettingstarted/...
Proof that Google TV will make its debut tomorrow
This is pretty close to the reasoning. You can broadly categorize sources into three tiers: primary, secondary, and tertiary.

Primary sources are the actual documents or individual recollections involved in an event—a treaty, a memoir, a transcript, etc. These are the archival documents that historians love. A programming-language-analogy might be writing something in a close-to-the-metal language like Assembly or C.

Secondary sources are usually synthetic works that comment on primary sources and other secondary sources, or strongly advance/test a certain hypothesis. These would be the works produced by historians, political scientists, sociologists, and so on analyzing the historical data and evaluating the theories of other social scientists. Most books fall into this category. The analogy would be higher level languages like Java and Ruby.

Tertiary works are produced for the general reader. Rather than providing new scholarship or advancing a hypothesis, they generally try to summarize the existing consensus in a concise manner. Because encyclopedia articles aim to give the generalist reader an overview, they are usually a good starting point for someone with no background in a particular area. But, the idea behind writing analytical or research papers is to get the student beyond just a general familiarity with a subject, and to get them to engage some part of the debate. Citing encyclopedias, while in and of itself not wrong, it usually evidence that the student hasn't really engaged the topic. Presumably, if they've read 3-6 secondary sources, they would have all the citations they needed and the encyclopedia would be extraneous. The programming analogy here would be using very little code to paste together a bunch of libraries that you don't understand.

Wikipedia has an additional epistemic problem that other encyclopedias usually don't have. Other encyclopedia entries are usually written by experts in their field. There is no such guarantee for Wikipedia articles: they could be written by experts, they could be written by 14-year-old Singaporean communists writing from their mother's basement (I speak from experience as an admin who's had to deal with this scenario). While studies have shown Wikipedia to be comparable in terms of quality to mainstream encyclopedias, there's no way of telling at any given moment which revision you're viewing and who it was last edited by and what their level of expertise is. For that reason, Wikipedia is usually especially discouraged by academia, which as an institution places emphasis on linking the authority of a piece with the person who wrote it.
Unity ported to NativeClient and Android
Having a centralized structure will help in pushing adoption, but I feel like we should make sure that once we have acceptance, we don't become dependent.
Leave Facebook For These 11 Alternatives
You might be wrong in thinking that your "faster" way is better. Given no details I can't really elaborate, but a fresh perspective often omits important subtleties that management values.

For instance: paper forms becoming web forms / database tables. Great for 99% of enterprise situations, but there is a loss of flexibility in edge cases. You can't write notes in the margins, or enter "invalid" but actually correct data.

Adoption will be seen differently by different people - those who have seen no edge cases (aka you) see the common case become substantially more efficient. Those who have more experience (aka management) might see the frailty of the new system and worry that important business will be lost.

So, people who value their time (doctors, lawyers, etc) still use older systems (often paper) that are more mature and flexible. Heck, I find myself (a "Millennial" early adopter) moving towards free text systems as I run into random inflexibility.
"SQL database support on App Engine gives enterprise developers access to the full capabilities of a dedicated relational database, without the headache of managing it."

Wonder which RDBMS they will offer, MySQL?
It's interesting to see this trend of breathless articles where people who don't grasp the intended design of Facebook assume some malign purpose behind anything that confuses them on the site. Not so much because of the dim view of Facebook's intent, but because of how it underscores the pre-existing problematic aspects of Facebook's design.

What's a "page"? How is it different from a "profile"? Why can people see my posts on some parts of Facebook even though I said only my "friends" should see my posts?

These are questions that were already valid, but because Facebook had enough goodwill in the bank they were previously able to skate by without addressing them.
That hard to believe, as MP3 was standardized in 1989.

Didn't you mean AAC?
When they released buzz I was thinking than that was wave for everyone.

I wonder if they will still try to push wave as an independent product or it will just die slowly in the background without anyone noticing.
It's telling that the article doesn't recommend any alternatives. Building an easy-to-use yet flexible WYSIWYG word processor is a huge challenge, and no one has nailed it yet. I like Apple's Pages, but it's less powerful than Word and still has a steep learning curve. What else is there? Is anyone going to seriously suggest that OpenOffice has a way better UI than Word? Or Google Docs, or Zoho?

It's true that Microsoft isn't innovating in the word processor market. Neither is anyone else.
FYI, until recently if you compiled Firefox under Gentoo with +branding (now the message comes up with -bindist):

You are enabling official branding. You may not redistribute this build
to any users on your network or the internet. Doing so puts yourself into
a legal problem with Mozilla Foundation
You can disable it by emerging ${PN} _with_ the bindist USE-flag

I don't know what those legal problems are (as far as I can tell, it's just the Firefox logo), but I think that's interesting.
MongoHub - MongoDB GUI administration tool for mac
OneThing: Lists, ratings and reviews of everyone on the web
This appears to be more of a way to help developers showcase their apps with the option for payment integration.
I wish they'd serve everything from subdomains in google.com. I mean, seriously, why does Google keep registering new domains for projects (google<something>.com) when they could easily use <something>.google.com instead? What's wrong with fonts.google.com?
I'm very intrigued by Apple not being on this list. Considering that MPEG-4's container shares a history with Quicktime, and the amount of time and effort Apple has spent supporting h.264, I wonder what they're saying internally?
Seven years of Flickr commits visualized with Gource
Gource project link: http://code.google.com/p/gource/

Previous discussion on gource and DHH's rails commits visualization: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1329495
New deep-sea cables needed to protect global economy
The Icelandic Model of MMO Development
They are moving to a more 'agile' style development. The Lorentz release (originally 3.6.2 now 3.6.4) is supposed to be the first release in which new features are just shipped without waiting for a major point release.

http://www.developer.com/open/article.php/3860226/Mozilla-Fi...
I believe that it's handling the browser differences server-side.
outside of search and gmail which of google's pet projects have gained significant traction? Orkut? App Engine? Nexus One store? Wave? Google voice?

Google has a pretty bad track record - until they improve I don't think there is anything to fear when they launch these pet initiatives.
It says “The API will generate the necessary CSS specific to the user's browser so you can use the font on your page.” If you change your user-agent, you’ll see it change.
It is important to note as well that http://themes.googleusercontent.com/font?kit=J_eeEGgHN8Gk3Eu... doesn't return just the font but the font that works with the browser that requested it. In IE it gives the EOT font in Chrome it gives the TTF
It's a lot better on Chrome, but it's still choppy. I'm on a fast Macbook Pro.
Safari supports everything that Quicktime does. You can add the support yourself, just like you could with Theora: http://xiph.org/quicktime/

http://perian.org is a Quicktime Component that wraps around libavcodec (ffmpeg) that has a pretty wide install base on OS X and checks for automatic updates by default every time it's loaded in an application. Google has a set of patches for ffmpeg on their site that will surely get picked up and automatically distributed before too long.

If Apple ever ships support, it'll be with Quicktime, not the braindead approach of linking it directly into the browser. IE9 has this approach too, just with a codec whitelist. Google Chrome bundles a pared-down libavcodec that you can swap out with your own. Opera does the same but with GStreamer.

In reality, the new version of Flash with VP8 support will get %95 penetration in a couple months after it's released, and fallback to Flash will continue to be how the <video> game is played. I wonder if Google's stopped charging Adobe for VP6 as a quid-pro-quo? It seems like that (and VP7 for Skype) were On2's sole sources of revenue.
Hair Grow Faster in the Summer
All of chrome is open source and the format is already documented -- other browsers are welcome to implement it, or just take the code if they want.
The prediction API looks really interesting.

Can anyone think of some interesting use cases and the implications of making something like this available to the masses?
You linked to a homepage but I guess you meant to post a specific URL.
AdSense, AdWords, Maps, Docs, Chrome, Calendar, News, Suggest (now integrated into the main search) and Android all seem to be doing pretty well.
If it requires an install it will be irrelevant because Flash will support VP8 and is already installed.
> Of course using an ipad as my only computer is probably not a good idea either.

Fixed that for you.

This user is precisely who the iPad was made for and she can't get one because of heavy handed anti-piracy policies.
I think the basic failing of wave was that it only solved the easy problems and largely ducked the big problems. No amount of technological wizardry and demo-friendly glitz and glam can make up for failing to meet a need.

The problems that Google Wave tackled were immediacy of communication and inclusiveness. But these are not problems worth solving, between email, IM, wikis, even twitter, nobody has much of a problem with immediacy or inclusiveness. It takes a click of a button to forward an email thread. The problem is information overload, increasing the signal to noise ratio of communication, providing proper contextualization and summarization of information, wave didn't tackle that problem.
Did Yahoo Just Pave Its Way To Finally Buying AOL?
WebM and The New Online Video Landscape
Yes - both Webkit and Gecko. Webkit handles considerably more posts nicely, but also has its own maximum. Those terrible lags were on Gecko.
> It's almost as if my professors wanted to instill in me the belief that I should trust credentialed experts rather than trying to figure things out for myself.

Well, yeah. That's exactly what they're trying to do. They have a vested interest in it!

I spent a entire class arguing that it was a logical fallacy ('appeal to authority') with my Eng. Comp. professor, when he required that x% of your work be cited.

He finally did agree, but declined to change the requirement. I dropped the class (and the college!).

It remains to be seen who 'won' :)
I dropped "word processors" long ago, in favour of emacs and latex.

Word processors are the slalom of writing.
Yes. But it's not just that. The key is that the user is buying an app that essentially get's "installed' onto his computer like a traditional application.

I'll be interested into seeing what happens if a user wants to install an app while browsing with IE. Will the App store download and install Chrome, and set Chrome up just to run the app?
I once worked somewhere where to reset your network password you needed to provide the last 4. As in anyone could use anyone's account without even guessing the password.

To make matters worse, I had my username wrong, and so they helpfully told me "my" SSN, which was someone else's.

We live in a world where I have an 8 digit alphanumeric password protecting my weather preferences, but nothing protecting my credit.
only used it to compare companies profiles (shares, employees, revenue and such)
I trust Microsoft about as far as I could throw them but it would be beyond perverse for them to support VP8 and not support the full package.
If you can pay the $1000/m for it: http://code.google.com/premiumsupport/

It's currently tied to the per-user program, but there's no innate reason why it has to be just for internal apps: "you can get these features by migrating your app to Google App Engine for Business. We will have a method of migrating existing applications to App Engine for Business when it launches. (Stay tuned for App Engine for Business pricing for publicly accessible Internet apps as well.)"
Very rarely. I find it difficult to write my queries so Wolfram understands what I'm trying to get. In the amount of time it normally takes me to get the answer from Wolfram, I could probably have gotten the same answer through a bunch of different searches on google or bing.
Good stuff!
The main reason they've chosen RoR is cost, but with Azure/.NET one can get a better price vs EC2/RoR. Mainly because .NET is highly optimized and takes a lot less hardware to serve the same amount of requests.
Perhaps the actual problem is that there are a lot of people from older generations that were promoted to higher positions than they should have been and now they get to start making decisions. They're bad managers, but because they're in charge, nothing gets done to fix the problem. This probably ends up creating an illusion of a generation gap, when in reality the bad managers are usually older people that were promoted on seniority alone.

Either way, it's extremely frustrating to deal with bad managers no matter what generation you're from...
Buzz serves a similar purpose to twitter while Wave seems like to a mix of Gtalk, Docs, and Gmail. How is Buzz a "wave for everyone"?
I would love to play with this [for a side project], any ideas on what the timelines are for access for small fish like me?
Valve isn't the only place you can buy games online.

iTunes isn't the only music vendor.

They might be the biggest and most popular, but they aren't alone. =)
Like they did with http://www.lively.com maybe?
This helped me get an idea for what I should charge, http://freelanceswitch.com/rates/

Of course a lot of different factors go into what you feel you are worth. I found it best to be flexible with my hourly rate based on the type of work that is to be expected.

An example is if another developer comes to me looking for an extra hand on a project to knock out some code and I don't have to manage the project in anyway, I charge a lower hourly rate than if a business owner said they have an idea and wanted to start from scratch.
If I understand the Prediction API correctly it's a text classifier. I would imagine it's a bayesian classifier, like the kind found in most spam filters. I don't know how accurate it is...it would be nice to see how it performs on a standard corpus (like the 20newsgroups).

If you're handy with linux and you don't want to deal with their API, you could probably just download and install rainbow http://www.cs.umass.edu/~mccallum/bow/rainbow/ (though it is a very difficult installation).
HTML5 Stereoscopy
when I want specific data points about something (stock price, units, basic statistics).
Don't target OCaml. It's a fine language but a shitty backend. You'll get saddled with a wonky 31/63 bit integer type and a very literal non-optimizing compiler. Similarly, compiling to Haskell may result in unpredictable performance due to unintentional laziness (though I guess you could stick strictness annotations everywhere). I would go with LLVM-- they give you an IR which is reasonably high level and comes with a whole armada of analyses and optimizations.
My guess is they don't want to send all the cookies stored on the google.com domain whenever someone loads a font.
2010: Web Fonts Are Here and Ready to Use
"First of all, you are lumping WordPress the open source software and WordPress.com the hosted service together."

Yes I am, and I apologize. I did not realize there was much of a distinction. I would edit away much of my message now if I could.

But...

"Also, our fast deployment model helps to very quickly fix whatever problems there may."

Security problems do not work that way. Rapid deployment does not recover your user database that the hacker got, just as one example. Rapid deployment may close XSS holes, but doesn't undo the damage they did while open. And you don't need rapid deployment to close XSS anyhow, historically lots of people have managed that without rapid deployment. I still see it as potentially beneficial on some fronts but an enormous risk on other fronts I care about a lot.
So, how long until the database is lost / leaked?
People like that making up nearly half the office would be a significant change. What you describe is highly useful and productive, but also a small minority.
'No results found for "slalom of writing".'

Excellent!
Does the POST switch works when you are using DDG via the Google Chrome URL bar? (I have it set at "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s)
Then again, the update before that was on April 24. Lots of likes though. I guess he doesn't like sharing in free-form text all that much.
Any thoughts on why Google is doing this other than a perverse will to take over the entire Internet?

My thought is that they're hoping this will encourage more text instead of images as text. That helps them index more information and collect more data on the whole web.