skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, but it does let you just remember one password you change regularly while allowing you to have different complex passwords at each site. So it allows you to have better security for lower costs. The point isn't to save you typing, its to let you have better security for the same typing.

(You can put a password on boot and wake from sleep and turn the password off your keychain, too, if you prefer not to type it every time, at a cost of having your passwords exposed if you leave it on and someone steals a minute on your computer.)
The fanboys are out in force tonight.
Perhaps that's why mac is just a tad more secure. Would you rather a unified system for managing your passwords, or just have applications store them in plaintext files?

When I switched to mac I was actually pretty impressed that such a thing existed.

Call me a cynic, but I think you decided you hated macs way way before you ever tried one.
going to museums hardly makes me weep, but stuff like this touches a special place in my heart. i always wonder what the future of digital anthropology will be like, especially in the wake of DRM, and encryption.
exercise is a great source of energy and i've found it also decreases appetite. I didn't feel the benefits until after a few weeks of a regular exercise schedule; during the initial ramp up the changes in energy and appetite were inverted.
What irked me about this article is that the example given (arnold on mars movie) comes up with the "correct" top hit in Google. In other words, we're already there. Some pipe bomb.
2400 Baud To Broadband
I had linked to the ReadWriteWeb summary because they seemed to have a better description of what the company did than the actual Prototype website.
Funny link. Just as funny as it was 4 weeks ago, even.
I've churned out a fair amount of open source software over the years. I like it, but it doesn't really pay. I just feel that his article comes off more like a rant than listing problems that need to be solved, and will generate revenue, because in the end, that's got to be part of the equation too, otherwise he should just be hitting up people with money to spend more of it on charities.
Can solving math problems boost IQ?
You still have not provided a reason why partying is immoral or bad for business. People in tech live terribly isolated, anti-social lives for the most part.
in '94 my friends were learning assembly language, and c. had my father been an electrical engineer rather than a chemical and plastics engineer, i might have caught the bandwagon. instead i was learning CAD, and winning Math and Junior Engineering competitions. by 96 i was learning java with only the value of getting me away from my homework. looking back, i did not tell my teachers off enough in high school. (they actually tried to hold be back because the school was going to run out of math courses, and they wanted me to take spanish over engineering graphics. i should have taken programming independently too. oh well hind sight is 20/20 and will do none of us any good unless we can some how make use of a time machine)
in '94/'95 i remember my friends telling me about ebay in gym class. doh, i wish i would have seen the potential of selling your stuff to strangers.
Having used dos/windows for 17years, linux for 11 years, and mac for only the last 2, I wouldn't call myself a fanboy.
I use what works best for me.

Personally, I think dragging an application into your 'Applications folder' is pretty damn intuitive. I'm not sure quite how much simpler you could get. ok, it takes a couple of minutes to understand that it's mounted a disk image and you should unmount it, but after that you think "Yeah that's actually a nice way to do it".
Time to legalize drugs. What happens if you take an organization that has all the resources of a large corporation, but put them outside the law? This is what happens.
The problems are clear though: create something that will make the variations you speak of (whatever their causes) rarer, slower and of lower magnitude. We have done it before (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution) and we will do it time and time again, hopefully. The solutions, as usual, are hard to see. But if we do not work on the big problems, the hard problems, do we do valuable work?
The guys behind "Valley of Broken Dreams: A YC Postmortem" should read this.
I don't understand it, the article says he faces a sentence of "25 years to life in prison", but what exactly is the number of years he will have to be in prison? Why is it a range?
Yeah, I was pretty broke in college.
i had one that taught 4 (??) basic games on the c64 and spectrum. loved it. thinking about it, that's how i learnt to program. unfortunately i think i might have lent it to someone that didn't use it and didn't return it... :(
Solving the IT Turnover Crisis: Employment 2.0
something else to learn from this, is how we should all look for employees. a number of the books i have read like "good to great" and "built to last" have suggested the only true way to build a great company is to create an environment where the right people flock, and the wrong people leave on their own. setting the bar this high from the start will have this effect, and will give you the authority to tell someone the are good, but just not what you were looking for. it will keep your costs low, the expectations high, and the time you spend managing down.

i wonder which amazon employee/ founder was hired as a result of that ad.
Maybe someone in the MA area will be kicking themselves for not answering this one in a few years:

http://friendfeed.com/about/contact
The google maps API also has pretty good geocoding, for free. You can give it a location, and it will tell you not just lat/lng, but also how specific that location is. (Is it a zip code? A city name? An intersection? A precise address?)
I'm curious: how many have you completed?

Do you find yourself re-ordering potential projects because one or another seems more promising or doable?
Anyone who disagrees with you must be a fanboy?
Beating the codebreakers with quantum cryptography
I don't disagree with you or your friend's numbers.

What I was trying to say was the number of women in general who participate in something like one night stands or a purely sexual relationship MUST be closer to 1:1 than 10:1 or 100:1.

Hence, there is great opportunity in putting together both sides of the equation, online sites by your numbers need to somehow draw the attention of women who they are clearly neglecting to serve well.
Must have been late 1995 (if not 1996) given eBay's start date.
Submarines, radar-detecting planes, custom mapping software and encrypted radio networks? If it wasn't for all the , uh, murder and illegal drug trafficking, that sounds like a lot of fun.
"'90s: an in-joke for the rest of us." -- Or maybe you are the VB equivalent of the 90s? Easy to use, and fast, but try to do anything large scale and it becomes a kludge.

I am using both scripting (Lua), and Java for mobile development, and I can tell you that in large programs scripting languages start becoming a burden.
If you are working on a small thing, or on something when only few people are involved (4 or less), scripting languages are great, but when it comes to larger applications it takes a very high level of disipline in the team, and higher calibre developers to produce bug free code. -- unfortunately not every company can afford high calibre developers, and have to settle with average programmers.

In scripting languages, team member X, and modify a shared component, and team member Y sudenly sees his part of the code doing wierd things, or even failing silently. It is easy to break things appart and introduce bugs in scripting langauges.

In java, if a method's signature get changed, you are going to see compilation errors allover the place that will force you to fix them.

Plus, there is the dynamic languages performance penalty, that will always be there.

I am not advocating Java, as I sweared my next job has to be "Java free", but as a static language (together with C#) it has good place. It allows average programmers to be somehow productive in large systems, where there are many people working at a code at the same time, something that is actually value creating.
Ask HN: Intellectual property 101
I live and work in Florida, have not signed any sort of IP agreement with my employer, and am now wondering about the implicit agreement (if any) between myself and them regarding code and the ideas in the code. Is it generally true that a company may own the program itself (code), but not the ideas contained therein (unless explicitly stated otherwise in a signed contract)?
I don't think we have a good enough idea about all the implications of quantum theory (like quantum gravity, or an answer to the question about whether space is discrete or continuous, for example) to throw around claims like it's over for the code-breakers.

Such claims, viewed in a historic context are always arrogant in retrospect and are quickly proven wrong by new discoveries.
What were you planning on doing when the first VC you pitched to rejected you? Seriously, take the rejection, and channel that into drive. Prove them wrong. Drop them a politely smug mail when you do your IPO. :-)

As YC grows it's invevitable that they, like every investment group, are going to pass on something big, and I think the good folks running YC would be the first to admit that.
It's a brilliant idea for a project. I'm not sure if I'm up for it now but I'd love to hear about how it progresses.
I would think that it would have been more gradual than that. Some people in the community probably started growing the plants that they usually went out and gathered, since it was easier. Maybe during a time when they weren't moving as much. Or maybe they migrated between different areas depending on the season, so they planted, say, berries at all the different sites. I think it would have started more like that. Then because there was more food available from this, more people started doing it, and eventually it won out over migrating all the time or even staying in one place and hunting and gathering.
To be honest I do. I also pick which ones to add based on how much free time I expect to have coming up and what I'm looking for and drop some off the list totally if after a few months I start to question it's feasibility.

For example in a few months I am relocating to Australia where I will be traveling with my girlfriend for a year before picking a city to settle in for a while. With that in mind my current choices tend to settle around smaller "set and forget" sites that provide steady if small recurring incomes and things that look good on a consulting portfolio as I will probably take a few contracts as well during my travels and like to have current projects to show off.
They're like cars -- they depreciate a great deal as soon as you drive them off the lot, but then depreciation slows considerably. If you buy a used one and keep it in good condition, it probably won't depreciate hardly at all.
Why Should Engineers and Scientists Care About Color (and Design)?
Latest books:

_Made to Stick_, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, about what makes some ideas memorable and others forgettable. Urban legends, for example, propagate quickly on a vast scale despite having no marketing budget.

_Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times_, by Morris Kline. Did you know that Gauss proved, in a section of his doctoral thesis, that partial-fraction decomposition can always yield real coefficients?
Anyone who finds trolling in a logically coherent argument as to why the author dislikes something is a fanboy.
I have a better and more recent one, courtesy of yours truly (don't spread it around):

http://therobert.org/stuff/misc/5-digit%20Commercial.csv

7.7MB | February 2008

I need a database that shows the population in each zip code, too. If any good Samaritan can share, that would be great.
http://friendfeed.com/entelarust
pssttt... do you want to get us fired?? please shut up ;)
Can't believe they missed the opportunity to mention Hemingway.
Two books if that's permitted:

1. "Smalltalk-80 The Languange and its Implementation" - They eventually dropped the implementation chapters from the book, but you can still get the original edition used on Amazon if you're curious as to how Smalltalk was implemented (http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0201113716/ref=dp_olp...). I'm surprised at how cheap they are, as the book is considered a collector's item.

2. "Computer Lib" by Ted Nelson (http://www.digibarn.com/collections/books/computer-lib/)

And, as a bonus, the TRS-80 Model I Users Manual. I still remember the first "program" the book taught me:

10 PRINT "HEY MA, IT WORKS!"

20 END
I'm not a lawyer, but I just went through a round with one on a similar issue. In my jurisdiction (which is outside the US) the principle was that code was protected, and ideas were not (unless patented), BUT if I went ahead and built a product that was suitably similar to one I had worked on before under an employment contract, the burden of proof would be on me to prove that I did not copy the code (and thus it was a good idea to throw in some novel features, and use a different programming language/framework/platform).

Still: spend the bucks and ask a lawyer, if the issue is relevant to you. Better to have too much legal advice than too little (believe you me.)
The wild rice gathering practice of current-day Native Americans in Minnesota is a great example of incremental drift into agriculture. They go back to the same patches in the water brush rice into their canoes with paddles, inadvertently spreading the seeds of new rice plants in the process. It's easy to imagine how this could've turned into rice agriculture over time.
I read once in Discover Magazine that standing (and, to a lesser extent, sitting up) causes the release of stress hormones that impair thinking. Given that, a standing desk may not truly be all that.(Sorry, I couldn't find a link to it on the website. I have had trouble finding articlelettes in the R&D section of the magazine with the website's search feature before.)

Of course, whenever I need to do any truly deep thinking about a problem, it's usually not at my desk, so perhaps that detriment may not really be that important

Meanwhile, if you really want to take having an active posture while working to its extreme, I once read an article about treadmill desks...
"Machine language for the Commodore 64" by Jim Butterfield
@jsjenkins168: best advice ever
Social Addicts: How do Hardcore Facebook, MySpace and Twitter users differ?
I won't rehearse my "large system" credentials here, but I have them, and this meme that C++ and Java are somehow safer for large teams to work in is a joke. I've done large projects in Tcl (!) and in C++ (!$&#) and there are more ways to shoot your teammates in the feet with C++ than in Tcl; they just aren't first-class elements of the language. And C++ is universally regarded as a language for large system development.

I won't rehearse my "high performance systems" credentials here, but I have them, and this meme that the speed penalty for dynamic languages is a problem is a joke. Reread my previous comment: I'm getting in between the processor and the native instruction pipeline in Ruby, and it is, I believe I said, the greatest thing ever.

Belaboring the sentiment: the problem with the "fast systems language meme" is that it leaves you with the impression that the language is where speed comes from. No. It is trivially easy to write slow systems code in C: do everything off an interrupt, do 3 system calls per byte, demand-spawn a thread.

The answer to fast systems is to find the bottlenecks and fastpath them. It is much easier to fastpath a bottleneck when a hash table of digraph structures is 2 lines of code instead of a 1.5mb compiled library with template headers that take 3 minutes just to parse.

None of this is heresy. You can read it in "Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets", which is the first C book lots of people ever read. Your design is where speed comes from. If method dispatch is a bottleneck, please don't waste time moving to C++: your design is fucked, and you are doing it wrong. Do it right.

My heresy is that static type checking is white elephant. I've been doing this kind of work for going on 15 years now, and I can count on 1 hand the number of head-scratching bugs I've had due to type safety, and that includes 100kloc+ components built entirely around void* closures. The things that really fuck you in large systems are object lifecycle and concurrency.
Win-xp sp3 released
Microsoft Stops Fighting Linux, And Tries To Give It A Big Bear Hug Instead
Record Labels Strategically Invest $2.8M in MOG
Sorry, but from what I have been reading the guy comes out as a narcissist/sociopath. Just being an aspie doesn't justify anything. I have aspie friends, (very smart ones), and they know wrong to right.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/29/...
Updated: We Now Know 8 of Microsoft’s 12 Proposed Yahoo Board Members
I'm too young to play... :(
Except that the "correct" link on Google is useless. If I search for a movie I want to watch it, if I search for a song I want to hear it, if I search for a book I want to read it. Sending me to informative pages can be useful but if I'm looking for an action I want an action to be my first result.
Clean water is one area where someone stands to make a lot of money and do a ton of good at the same time.

And as far as money to charities goes, there's money out there. Figuring out the best way to spend it is an ongoing problem.
This article boggles my mind. If you don't think the degree is worth the money then don't go to college. The worst thing that can happen is schools start teaching students to pass some government mandated generic career readiness test.
PG grow a beard fast or Arc will fail :P
The trolling started with:

A girl with some sort of mullethawk and a tattoo creeping up her neck asked me if I needed help and I almost said “no, but you do.”

and then continued all throughout the 'logically coherent argument'. Then continued into the posts here calling people 'fanboys'.

It really doesn't matter, I would just prefer you did it elsewhere. And to end the conversation: Troll away, it seemed to work well on the poker blog.
Well books maybe not, but I just LOVED reading old ANTIC magazines.
i stopped having a TV in my household around 2000/1. It's great to pursue other activities.
The add seems very reasonable (in the startup mentality kind of way):

"Well-capitalized start-up seeks extremely talented C/C++/Unix developers to help pioneer commerce on the Internet. " -- Good. I want to work with only other top notch developers.

"You must have
experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable)
systems, and you should be able to do so in about one-third the time
that most competent people think possible. " -- Ok. I get it, you want the very good fast types. But are you willing to pay for it?

"Familiarity with web servers and HTML would be
helpful but is not necessary. " -- Awesome. You just showed that you know what is important. Don't you love adds that say must know HTML. How hard is to learn anyways?

"Your compensation will include meaningful equity ownership. " -- Awesome. This is what I wanted to hear. You want great developers, but you are willing to compesate them in a meaningful and fair way.

If I knew C/C++ that well, at the time, and if I wasn't in school, and if I was around the area of Seatles, I would have responded to his ad.

I am still waiting for some ad like this, but in the mobile space.
The first part was humor. I know humor generally requires an explanation here.
ICANN Takes a Step Toward Ending Domain Tasting
About Time.
Amiga hardware reference manual (Addison Wesley), BYTE magazines,
Norton's guide to 8086 assembly language
1) Yeah, it's a reasonable ad - but that's my point. Almost all ads are "reasonable". You never see an ad saying "Startup looking for mediocre developers." Nothing about this one really resonates.

2) "if I wasn't in school, and if I was around the area of seatles". If I knew this was going to be Amazon, I would MOVE to Seattle and take a leave of absence from school.
guys,

0) if you want responses from me, it would help if you commented where the original post is.

1) these shocks are distinctly not "random fluctuations". they are long-term shifts.

2) what should you be doing? like i said - redress the imbalances these shifts point to. whoever can find a solution to food or water imbalances, for example, is going to be bidding on private islands with larry and sergey.

3) we are very definitely not fixing these problems: the level of cleantech investment is tiny, etc.

4) i appreciate that it's a lot to handle. but aren't you guys supposed to be revolutionaries?

thx to everyone for the comments.
Terminator! Self-Repairing Robot Video (via pmarca)
I've read this before, and never get tired of it.

Off-topic: I mistyped "get" as "git" in that sentence above, which tells you how I spend my days. Occupational hazard, I guess. :-/
SICP, of course. Is this a trick question?

Oh, 8-bit. The 6809E reference manual. Motorola sent it to me for free when I wrote asking where I could buy it.
fyi, davidw - your open source point is waaay off base. the point of my post was that solving big problems = big $$$, so we should be investing in them.

just my opinion, but cynicism is a great way to never have the imagination to fix these problems.
Hah, now that is comical.

Perhaps you can't piss in people's ears here and tell them it's raining.
actually no I am not ignorning his point. Its just not statistically meaningful. The truth is that of the people that click on ads, they are midwestern housewives. But there are statistically not enough of them to make many services that rely on them profitable. TV and print are broadly successful at attaining users attention. The web is not - at least for display ads.
Moral Hazard: An Open Challenge to Silicon Valley
Proof that labels are effectively delegating their R&D to startups, and letting them find ways to make money off music.
Of course. But this was on page three "and most links are dead or tiny", as I pointed out above. I just found it frustrating to click on five or six pages that were dead--and many that were the skinny "majin buu", which seems to be the far more common one. So, I thought I'd share the nicely sized set of images that I finally found after several search misfortunes.
It would be fun to try and find a blogger who meets that standard.
And most busy people's morning breakfasts are not significantly portioned enough to risk indigestion against a workout that is probably about 5 minutes at the max (1.5 min. for rest time plus .5 min. for timing wrong plus 3 min. for doing LOTS of push-ups, theoretically). That changes if you throw in the core routine.

Most of us are just eating a bowl of cold cereal or having some toast. Not a full English breakfast.
I've launched five of the ideas off my list in the last three years. http://NearbyGamers.com is the only public success (though it's small and growing rather than big and robust). I've got one idea currently in development and am actively exploring the design and market for two others.

I reorder the list probably every six months or so as markets change, I have new resources, and I finish things. With >30 ideas on the list I know I'll never get to them all.
"So here's my challenge. If you're a revolutionary, then be one: put your money where your mouth is, and fix a big problem that changes the world for the better - if you really have the courage, the purpose, and the vision, that is."

isn't that essentially saying: "be good"?