skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Remember the Y2K bug? All computers would have to be reprogrammed to make them 'year 2000' compliant? We would run out of time?

Yes. I remember that not much happened to the standard customer. I also remember the crazy sums spent on upgrades of both software and hardware. Illegal number of overtime hours taken. Key people spending the night on site just in case. Some errors were corrected later, even though customers never heard of them. Many problems were avoided exactly because of that preparation.

Now, for a change look at predictions based on current usage patterns: http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html - just above a year left unless reserved ranges are given away. Sure - a typical user has 0 or 1 address. But IT companies deal in at least /24s. I'm using at least 20 or so addresses (16 at home) for own devices. And there are some people who will keep their x.y/16 just in case they need to expand and request more for current needs. Noone's going to tidy up now. It's better for companies to over-allocate and request even more now, so that in a year there's some space for scaling down.
Got a 403 Forbidden error when going to the article.
How many other HN readers built a model X-15?
Cloud computing, facebook alternatives and plug servers
Somehow I think Blizzard will manage.
As much as I tend to agree with the "I should be able to do anything on my phone" crowd, it seems to me like it would be a good idea to have some kind of built-in back-up dialer that can't ever be removed, in case you ever need to call 911.
The company that did the Time Magazine app for iPad: http://www.woodwing.com/en

inDesign extension/tool that will do iPad/AIR/HTML5 packaging:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1IZ-16FVs4

I think they also did the Sports Illustrated HTML5 magazine with thewondefactory.com
I suppose this is good news.
it's not like many people care, we just all like to pretend we do and say how terrible it is
Startup Strategy Roundtable: Don't Waste Precious Years Of Your Life
Before anyone gets riled up, be sure to see the resolution: a rep working on her day off to resolve the issue, a $100 credit and 2,500 frequent flier miles.

Not the best experience, but this one worked out.
Seconded Shopclass as Soulcraft.
This is the drive me crazy though i havent experienced it since moving to a 2.x device. Applications no longer appear in downloads view once you uninstall them.
Risk management is not the same as "limiting risk at all cost." The former will balance the reward potentials with the risk of investment; the latter will turn down anything that's not a lock.
How does one get a job operating this equipment? Or writing software to use on/with it.
sadly the alternative I was working on was a kickass ExtJS based toolkit. We'd been building it and doing workshops for 3 months.

Senior management is terrified of developers writing JavaScript... :(
It absolutely is relevant - if Apple cares about usage, and 90% of the market doesn't care either way and uses iTunes because it just happens to be the most convenient option since it integrates with their iPod, that's GREAT for Apple. It will encourage that 90% to buy further iPods when it's time to upgrade, and that's ultimately one of the main purposes of iTunes.

I'm looking at it from the angle of their wanting to make money.
Judge orders Google to hand over captured WiFi packets
... or Visual Basic... or COBOL... or any other language everyone has pretty much determined is awful.
What To Do With Your Millions
You light a candle. What's the back up plan when all your applications are online and your internet cuts out. Even if you have the data backed up on your computer what use is it if you have no way of interacting with it.
Two of my friends are working on a "am I hot or not" for code that (AFAIK) has features like this. The url is http://codesmackdown.com/ but there is nothing there yet. Hopefully me posting this on-line will get them to get off their ass and release something.
The author's work on fundamentally improving programming looks interesting:
http://subtextual.org/
Drill baby, drill!... Yeah.
No. Have a look at the posting on reddit to see why.
I gotta agree with him on this one. There's no reason the market app couldn't display the current conversion into your local currency whenever you browser the market.
Ask HN:  Playtomic.com - like it or not?
I'm in the process of rebranding my game analytics service to something less restrictive than SWFStats that lets me do analytics for flash games as well as anything else I want to do in the future.

Playtomic's the best idea so far ... does anyone hate it for any tangible reason?
Why do you say the implementation is atrocious?
Hi JoshCole, thanks your feedback. You are thinking along the exact same lines as us. Your suggestion is on our todo list, and the latest post/users are just a filler as we have not gotten around to implement a recommendation system yet.

But we plan to utilize a users posts, the people who they are subscribed to, and the posts of the people they are subscribed to in order to serve more relevant content.

Again, thanks for the feedback, it really helps.
I have no direct knowledge of how we use that survey, but I suspect that an outlier such as yourself would not affect the results of the survey. If there is a wide-spread drop in quality, I think the survey would pick that up. It's hard to design the perfect survey though, but I'll see if the powers-that-be can improve the survey.
The compelling part about pg's lisp "triumphalism" is that he describes how lisp helped him build a better product and add/debug features faster. This author doesn't address that point -- he's talking about a kind of elitism that one would find in newsgroup flame wars.

I (and many others) couldn't care less if a language makes me appear brilliant, but I do care about what advantage that language gives me.

(EDIT: I wrote this comment before viewing the link to his previous post where he directly addresses the issue. Still wish he'd elaborate more though on how the abstraction level of a language would not help a programmer do better work. Is it enough to just proclaim "There are no super programming languages, only super programmers" for it to be true?)
Legal fairness may bear little relation to what lay people consider fair. For instance as long as you and a large corporation both have lawyers, a court fight between the you is considered "fair" even though the large corporation has substantially more resources and likely has better lawyers.

In this case the standard of fairness to apply is Delaware law. And under Delaware law, that was fair.
Hey neat! I didn't know you could do that with the search on Google Code. Thanks.
Hey, I very nearly don't have to imagine it. I can practically live it. :D

Type in Houma, LA, USA in the box next to "Move the Spill"
I guess the only questions is why did it take weeks to do get this into place and several days to evaluate once in place?

How exactly could they have made this worse by rushing it a little bit? Shouldn't there have been round-the-clock engineering shifts being paid for? Why is anyone going home at night to sleep comfortably?

In our terms this is like "oh well, server is down across the country, it's hard to reach so we'll just analyze our options for a few days and try a few things until something works - nothing to lose sleep over".
I'm in the minority that cares deeply because it's something like 50 - 100 miles southeast of my house.
I'm the author of the article.

Ain't nobody talking about downloading the thing as you read it.

All of the content for an HTML 5 version could be stored offline, you'd be gaining massive size savings - which on limited mobile devices (not just the iPad) would be huge gains.

I'm actually considering writing an open source objective-c framework for specifically this purpose, I would hate for Adobe to get a foothold in this and kill the promise.
The only language? What about Haskell's type inference and lazy computation? Or the great pattern matching. These show up in my current favorite language - Scala - but I don't exactly think this a mainstream language.
Yeah I'm in the process of moving the thing off livingdot and onto slicehost.

I had no idea it would hit like this. 100K hits since 3pm EST.
Reading that article was a highly ineffective use of my time. Setting aside the questionable value of your main thesis due to its obvious nature, you could have said it more simply, clearer, with less wiffle-waffle. Given that your website claims to be "zen" this just makes it so much worse.

Also your "about" section claims this website to be one of the top 100 blogs in the world? Just how did you get this statistic?
I love #1. My personal goal is to I work on something I'm deeply attached to that's also insanely useful. I want to wake up to the sound of my phone exploding with customers pleading me to get my service back up not only because demand is toppling our servers but because my service is something those customers absolutely need every day. Don't get me wrong, I'm not asking for scaling issues or to be Techcrunched. I should be so lucky to have scaling problems working on something I love.

#4 is approaching the same thing from a different perspective. It's still a worthwhile question but I would put it under #1.
I'm the author of the article.

Have you used it?

It really is pretty much a slideshow. Even if you write it using webkit, you can ape whatever wonderful interactions you seem to be having (that I must have completely missed) using multiple UIWebView's and some good ol CoreAnimation.

You can also extend UIWebView with straight up Objective-C, further adding in the ability to do pretty much whatever you want.

There are a shit ton of HTML 5 demo's on the web. Try google.
Of course I'm playing with the double meaning. It's a semantic irony to insist iPad and iPod apps are built in "iPhone OS" and never "iPOS".
Do you know if there is a regulatory issue that this is not implemented in the US?
A lot of BP's value was tied up in it's brand as the greenest oil company of the lot. Now that that brand value has become significantly eroded, it's not implausible to suggest that BP has indeed lost 25% of it's value.
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Tell HN: Don't worry about people stealing your ideas
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." --Howard Aitken
oh ok, that's pretty boring then. No real point having it on Reddit in that case, may as well send in letters :/
"I suppose you could have created a native app with everything bundled locally and a UIWebView for rendering the HTML5 content, but really what do you gain from that?"

An easy jumping off point for cross compatibility with Android, Windows, and OS X?
I'm surprised, given this is from Paul, that angel investing is not mentioned.
Tim - he says "avoid long-term or illiquid investments, though it's fine to put a few percent into random things such as starups, but understand that you'll probably lose that money, so consider it an educational expense."
Using facebook data to determine which US cities are best for singles
Thanks for that link. I don't know if it is "the answer", but it sure was an interesting link!
I can tell that you aren't into cars. People that are into cars really get a lot more than the A to B utility. they identify with cars. They drive them for the sake of driving. They race. They accessorize. They like the way driving their car makes them feel. I'm not a car guy myself, so I can't elaborate, however, I know some of these people, and they think computers are mostly "single purpose". It is all about perspective.
You could "make" a job that involves operating, or writing software for, that equipment.
How to meet important people in Silicon Valley (or anywhere else)
Not much to my comment, but I saw him speak in 2009 at Temple University and I was left feeling the exact same way.
This isn't a very technical or sophisticated method but it works for my cohorts and I. When considering a new startup idea or really anything (domain name, features, marketing) we just put all our ideas up on the wall for about a week or two. By the end of the week, whichever idea has been built upon the most (variants or child ideas) is pursued and the others shamelessly forgotten. If no idea gets built upon it means our current work is more fertile than any of the new ones.

Also, #5 struck my attention and echoes the fact that most good "new" ideas are too contrarian for the general public to pick up on and are hardly profitable right off the bat. Some say primordial Google (search) was in this boat but Yahoo had existed since 1995 along with others, hints the next "______"s are easier for people to find because they are fed up with the old system and will type in "______" without spam/flashy ads or "_______" with such and such feature that works. People first need to know what "_______" is to search for it. A fact that spells disaster for truly revolutionary ideas.
I started reading Andrew Tobias' book but so far I'm bored with all the penny-pinching tips at the beginning... does it get better?
"But beyond needing to replace Yahoo! Finance, my daily life wouldn't change all that much if Yahoo! suddenly disappeared. Would yours?"

No. I never use Yahoo!
How to answer if you don't have an answer
Even though Paul has been pretty successful with his angel investments ... but on average, that seems to be true.
'...I strongly prefer an existing market to creating one from scratch'

'In short, the first mover advantage is a crock of shit'

So many people are scratching their heads trying to invent something new. Don't. Pick a market - the bigger the better and out-execute in some key area, be that design, usability, marketing etc.
Sure, contact me offline if you like.
I thought this was a clear, albeit indirect, hint at angel investing:

It's ungrateful to not make the most out of it (and also help others become a little more lucky).
UK Identity cards scheme will be axed 'within 100 days'
> Since they're optimizing for time-to-market

How have they optimized for time to market given that they have a large team of HTML-savvy web designers in house?

And what is the point of optimizing for time if you fail to deliver something that delights your market?

I haven't tried this thing, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but if every page is an image, how does one copy text? If there is text in a column, Double tapping ought to maximize the text to fit the column. I don't imagine that works either.

So they're making something that looks like a web page but offers less functionality. That's a very poor trade-off. Those 90s CD-ROMs made money for people back when browsers couldn't deliver that experience. They offered more functionality than the web.

Today, stuff like this offers less functionality. That's a big sacrifice to make.
Online Education: Subprime 2.0?
Well the concept of projecting something onto a non-native locale for comparison purposes is not exactly groundbreaking. So I'm not sure it really matters which came first.

Call me "old fashioned", but I actually find the simpler Google Maps based visualization more effective in conveying the scale.
If only there were some giant atomic furnace beaming us down energy from above, maybe this wouldn't happen.

If only.
This reminds me of something one of the Penny-Arcade guys (I think it was Jerry) said once. It was along the lines of that when they got a ping pong table in their office, they realized that having space for a ping pong table meant they were a real company.
Microsoft Running Out of Excuses
Not for me. For new users. Have I misread something?

I find it hard to fault them for changing defaults, the big thing is my settings haven't changed. (But again, some peoples' settings are bound to have been corrupted or mis-imported during Facebook's quarterly overhauls.)
I don't think he's really blaming Google for it, just suggesting that they stop promoting (via Android Market) a replacement dialer that doesn't let users make emergency calls.
Yeah, I'm saying that from what I'm reading they must have intentionally been looking to create a completely native app that is worse than the Flash-compiled one.

That or the descriptions of the app are somewhat overcritical.
Ed Catmull, Pixar: Keep Your Crises Small
Programming is an embarrassment compared to other fields of engineering and design. Our mainstream culture is one of adolescent self-indulgence

Alan Kay made the same point in a interview with ACM: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523. He, much more eloquently, said:

Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, you’re always going to get a pop culture.

Fixing this is a much bigger issue. It in fact encompasses a lot of other areas, and they are no closer to solving it than computer science is (which was humorously cited to be a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia).

Edit:
As a side note, Eric Ries recently said on a Lean Startup talk we live in an era where ignorance is truely optional http://bit.ly/9v0XI6 . The problem is that most people opt in.
I think a lot of these were also cleaned up for use in Peter Salus's A Quarter Century of Unix, so you might find that more readable.
Your brain makes you good at the things you do. So if the internet really is the best way to get the information you're looking for, it makes sense to practice internet surfing instead of book reading.

That said, it still makes sense to make web surfing easier if that's possible. This Firefox extension looks promising:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4111/

There's definitely a lot of crap on the internet, so I'm thinking of doing something like skimming Hacker News at the end of each day, emailing important and content-rich articles to myself to read in the morning. It seems relatively safe to indulge in this distractable mindset right before I'm going to sleep, during which my mind will presumably be reset to its default state. And by browsing the web in different modes at consistently different times of the day, classical conditioning will be on my side. It'd be interesting to play with other ways of using classical conditioning for this. For example, always wear certain clothing or eat certain food during one type of web browsing.
I think it depends on what type of company you are starting... For any web-based startup, the lean route is the obvious choice (especially if you think you have an idea that will blow up)
Google's Top 1000 Site in JSON w/additional data (server headers, IP, location)
That's just it. The firmware that he chose to install removed the default dialer. Most of the time, a phone that has Dial One installed on it, still has the default dialer that can be chosen from the application launcher.
"The harder I work, the luckier I get" -Samuel Goldwyn
Ask HN: What's the Posterous business model?
I like Posterous, but I'm really confused about the business model. After I blog into it for two years, are they going to start charging me money? The fact that they were (are?) trying to monetize affiliate-able links sounds kind of desperate.

I don't actually raise this question to bash Posterous, but I was curious about it because I have an idea for something that is like Posterous but for a specific vertical. Well, it's not exactly like Posterous, it's just that I would have a huge head start if I had Posterous's functionality out of the gate. So I'm kind of standing here looking at this large hill of development effort and thinking -- is it worth it? Is my idea good enough? Are the lack of players in the space I'm thinking about an opportunity or a "no gas for the next 500 miles" kind of sign? If Posterous is free, can I charge for what is probably going to be something "less than" Posterous for a long while?
Well, there are languages I learn to improve my mind, and to improve my craft. As far as the mind goes, perl is nothing new (on the mind to-learn list: Haskell, OCaml, Eiffel, Erlang). Craftwise, it looks very useful.
This is actually a great way to visualize the size of pretty much anything within the scale range of 10^-1 to 10^2 miles across. Nothing humanizes a distance more than seeing it directly in comparison to what you experience every day.
I agree that attitude trumps pure intelligence in general for programming projects. Indeed, pure intelligence tests (e.g., "why are manhole covers round?") fell out of favour as interview techniques at Microsoft. As far as I know (my own and friends' personal interview experience) Google never used such for programming interviews: ability to apply intelligence to the task at hand (programming, software engineering/architecture and algorithm/data-structure design) is what the industry leaders look for. This (the ability to strip away non-mathematical details and break a problem down to pieces that are machine-solvable, preferably by known and proven algorithms) in itself takes not just intelligence, but also practice.

Nonetheless, there are some projects that require a minimal amount of intelligence and/or education and beyond that no amount of attitude can help. E.g., I'd love to hack on applications of machine learning algorithms, but I don't have the educational background to do so. It would require years of serious study to be able to even do even the most basic work in that field.

On the topic of the author's previous post, I would agree that a way to get top programmers to work on less-interesting business applications is to let them use a more interesting language. In fact, some of the most difficult development (systems programming, scientific computing) goes on in fairly boring languages (although using higher level languages for this sort of work is becoming a reality).

I will, however, take strong issue with the assertion that Common Lisp is a language only suitable to top percentile of programmers: countless schools teach Scheme as the first programming language to undergraduates and Scheme is a much more functional language than idiomatic Common Lisp. Macros aren't inherently related to functional programming (nor is writing your own macros required for Lisp hacking, Graham is fairly unique in this respect). Closures (a heavily used feature of Common Lisp) aren't inherently functional, neither are multiple dispatch nor dynamic typing. Lack of syntax is a salient feature, orthogonal to all other distinguishing features (except for macros) and again, not especially "functional". If it's possible for newbies to write fairly mind-bending Scheme(1), why shouldn't it be possible for educated and experienced (even if not 99.99th percentile aptitude-wise) programmers to do the same in a less pure language (Common Lisp, OCaml)?

(1) My alma matter (which most people, even those living next to it, haven't heard of) uses Haskell: http://www.cse.scu.edu/~atkinson/teaching/wi10/070/
To me, this pandered to a lot of purposes and ideals all in the same blog post
Andriod + HTC EVO on sprint will be the beginning of the end for the iphone OS.
I made our Terms of Service reusable under a creative commons license: http://www.opendns.com/terms/

Our Privacy Policy is more specific, but you can rip from it as long as you make it read as if it's yours, clear it is not ours, and it has no reference to OpenDNS: http://www.opendns.com/privacy/

Very expensive valley/startup-savvy lawyers have reviewed both many times over. :-)

But to answer your question, NO. Don't spend the money. This decision is always about the right thing for the right time. This does not matter right now. Seriously. You are not big and nobody will sue you. Ignore any other advice. Later, you can spend the money to redo it.

That said, make sure YOU understand your privacy policy and ToS. Make sure you think it covers how you'll look and use the customer data. Then make sure you abide by what it says and change it if you need to.
My impression of him is that he's so extreme and scary that he makes the more moderate people look good. I have not hear him speak ... I'm only going by this sort of second-hand anecdote of which yours is fairly typical.