skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreeing and adding the data point that having band-aided the "death gap" on my antenna, I get significantly better reception on my i4 than I did on my 3G. I think the original commenter's point is a crock.
I usually agree with or sympathize with Moglen's views but this is just indefensible.

He's saying that Steve Jobs is "a man whose selfishness surpasses any recorded selfishness", and why? Because he opted to support a modular compiler started at the University of Illinois instead of the GCC.

The LLVM's license is free, and even classified as such by the FSF. To smear participants in a fellow free software project like this or those that fund it is beyond low.

I lost a lot of respect for Moglen after reading that.
I wouldn't count on the 'steadily decreasing' part, s3 hasn't come anywhere near to following the downward price trend in hard drive cost per gigabyte/power per gigabyte, but even at todays costs, that's only $3900, which sounds pretty reasonable compared to what others are suggesting, if I did my math right, to keep 50 gigs around for 50 years. Of course, while I'd rather depend on s3 being around in 50 years than a raid in my closet, I still don't know that I'd give it great odds.

I don't think 'use rackspace /and/ use amazon' is a good strategy either, just 'cause if market conditions change enough that one goes under it's likely the other will to... and it's also likely that they could be bought by the same entity. you'd want to put one copy on s3, and then use some completely different storage method, like microfiche or or archival CD roms or something in a safety deposit box.
This is only useful if they don't break extensions on update.
Too many firefox extensions don't survive an update.
I'm happy for security fixes to get pushed out this way but normal bugfix / feature enhancement releases less so.
(a) A significant chunk of HN'ers tend to agree with Gruber, (b) a significant chunk of HN'ers at least tend to learn things from Gruber posts (ie, the scuttlebutt that antenna-exec-guy was canned), (c) Gruber tends to be addressing issues that have captured the attention of HN, (d) Gruber captures the "quasi-official" "pro-Apple" side of those issues better than any other blog, and (e) Gruber's posts are extraordinarily well-written and people like reading them for that reason.

It's incredibly boring --- almost daft --- to complain that Gruber takes Apple's side in these posts. No shit, really, Gruber's pro-Apple, you say? Gruber has absolutely no incentive to be more fair to Apple's opponents than he is. He's not writing for HN; he's getting posted here by people who think he writes interesting stuff.
/second. Was going to ask about this too. Interesting blurb on it in another Ask HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1565375

"Bratislava- Near vienna, but relatively low cost. Seems to be growing in leaps and bounds and has a well educated populace. Environment of low regulation and capitalism, so this could be the startup hub of the next decade. Might not be that now."
Capitalism is the antidote for poverty. This is proven by the simple example of any poor person- whether US born, india born, chinese born, etc, who starts a business-- any business-- and grows it to the point that they leave enough money for their kids to be lazy and non-productive. The kids might not be reared right, but they are no longer in poverty.

The opponent of capitalism is also the cause of poverty. The opponent of capitalism is collectivism. Or put another way, government. Any entity that takes by force (eg: taxes, regulations, bribes, etc.) naturally pushes out businesses that take by free trade (eg: sales, barter, etc.)

The more you have of one the less you have of the other. Notice how there were many postal services in the US and they were growing and competing and bettering themselvs until the US government decided to give itself a monopoly on first class mail delivery. As a result we no longer have a vibrant postal industry, and instead have the very poor US postal service. Why did the government give itself a monopoly? To be able to censor political tracts being sent thru the mail.

How many of you knew that? I'd bet most of you believe the US government provides mail because it wouldn't be economical otherwise. Ignoring for the fact that taking money by force doesn't change whether something is "economical" or not, note that the pony express survived and thrived in a time when people were much poorer and much further apart-- transportation wise-- than they are now.

So, obviously the fallacy that "without government who would deliver the mail?" is nonsense. We have an example in mail, but it applies to everything else- justice, roads, and soon, heatlthcare.

Remember when you didn't have to be politically connected to get treated for cancer? Good times.

Whatever method of organization, city-states, charter-cities, seasteads, a great frontier like the US was-- the essential quality is how much regulation and how much government there was, vs, how much capitalism is allowed to take hold.

Russia, China and India are all examples of way too much government, and all three have resulted in a great flourishing-- not without problems or corruption, but a benefit on the balance-- with the removal of this draconian level of control.
I'd introduce extemely subtle bugs...

You sinister bastard. ;) Nuff said, point taken.
Seconded. As a native Dubliner, I am always impressed with how cheap other european cities are when I visit there.
Scraping is scraping, regardless whether or not you link to it.

By that logic, Google and other search providers' services should be up for scrutiny.
Samsung Galaxy i9000 currently best smartphone on the market. 4 inch super amoled display. 16 GB of built in storage. Supports up to 32GB micro SD.

Also runs on android so you are safe from Steve craziness and Steve tax (unlocked costs half of iPhone 4 16GB).

Most powerful GPU. Runs Quake 3 like a charm: http://www.tgdaily.com/mobility-features/50507-galaxy-s-thra...
Italy has the same problem with limited liability companies. I created a modest initiative to attempt to get things fixed: http://www.srlfacile.org/

I'd be more than happy to link to sister initiatives in other countries!
2 things.

- The html5 transformation is not instant. Everyone gets the Flash reader till the HTML5 version gets ready. Which can be anywhere between minutes to hours (I don't know the avg time).

- The HTML5 version or the Flash is worse than a plain old PDF viewer. Have you used the Integrated PDF viewer in Chrome lately? PDF under chrome makes reading PDF fun again, its the fastest/smoothest PDF viewer I have ever used

Also in order for me to download the PDF version I have to either register or sign in with my facebook account? What nonsense is that?
Who cares? Captcha-solving is a solved problem. If you have an illicit business model that has captchas as an obstacle, contracting out actual humans in third-world companies to bypass that obstacle adds pennies to your overhead. It's almost scammy to suggest that real companies should be investing in better captchas.
They'll just rename your child.

The thing about government is, all the laws apply to you. But they can do anything they want.
What was the best stripe size that worked for you?
Why Serial Entrepreneurs Can't Stop
Actually that's only possible for one case -- a proof by counterexample. If, hypothetically, one were to prove that P=NP and only that an algorithm exists to solve NP-complete problems in P time, then that might be verifiable. However, even if that were the case, what if it turns out that the P-time algorithm complexity were O(n^100,000). That would be P-time, but not easily run for large NP-complete problems.
yes, correct.. Here is how i think of it: For me HN is still one of the best pages to look for news, and everytime one of those fanboy/flamewar topics makes it to the frontpage, another interesting topic doesn't make it.
I would have thought people are mature enough not to upvote those random subjective blogs, it's just not objective enough to be news for me, that's why i don't like them.
I can live with the smartphone market share news, because they tend to be based on some companies numbers...
Anyway, i guess this will be downvoted again, whatever.. i'll just shut up and try to ignore daringfireball links.
So then, patriotic hackers (riiiiiiiiiight) like to target American websites that are critical of the Chinese government because they feel a sense of nationalistic pride? Bullshit.
Seriously. Quitting caffeine was one of the best decisions I've ever made.

- I fall asleep within 5 minutes after hitting the pillow.

- I wake up when I want to, without problem, whether I've had 4 or 8 hours of sleep.

- The number of headaches I get has decreased dramatically.

- More importantly, the severity of the headaches I do get is dramatically different: before they were debilitating. Now, they're more like a hangover. Annoying, but easy to deal with.

- Caffeine radically improves the efficacy of medicines like acetaminophen. 350mg of Tylenol + 1/2 of a coke is more effective for me than 1g of Tylenol.

- When you get fuzzy headed because you've been staring at the screen too long, 10 minutes of fresh air works better than coffee used to.

- waking up is a lot more pleasant. It takes about an hour to fully wake up, but you're always partly functional, never grumpy. A little bit of exercise is the best way to shake it off.

Caffeine is a nasty drug to kick. DO NOT GO COLD TURKEY -- the headaches are evil. Slowly titrate off -- I used caffeine pills and a pill cutter.
I think Feynman may have used this book. He mentioned having a calculus book that had the same quotation that this one begins with:

"I don't believe in the idea that there are a few peculiar people capable of understanding math, and the rest of the world is normal. Math is a human discovery, and it's no more complicated than humans can understand. I had a calculus book once that said, 'What one fool can do, another can.' What we've been able to work out about nature may look abstract and threatening to someone who hasn't studied it, but it was fools who did it, and in the next generation, all the fools will understand it. There's a tendency to pomposity in all this, to make it deep and profound."

-- The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (http://books.google.com/books?id=Md0IirlFUfEC&lpg=PA194&...)
I submit that if you take the time to learn Objective-C you'll feel quite differently.

I've used ObjC for many years and released several Cocoa apps. The syntax isn't the problem; I actually rather like the brackets.

Objective-C has every advantage Java does, but the converse is not the case.

No garbage collection (on iOS at least), inherently unsafe, primitive types requiring silly [NSNumber numberWithInt:x] contortions, header files, no namespaces...
Flash ported to iPhone 4, available for download
I've heard varying things about this from people in Italy. I'm not sure it's entirely ok to live and work in country A for a company that is located elsewhere, but I'm neither a lawyer nor an accountant.
P is a strict subset of NP. If you can solve the problem in polynomial time, then you can verify a solution simply by generating it.
There's really no need to do that. A large enough BotNet can take out almost any host doing nothing more than connecting and doing a GET / HTTP/1.1. Few websites can handle a sudden surge in traffic from 100,000 bots.
This German study (2008) from Jülich (!) was quite critical about the whole concept:

http://juwel.fz-juelich.de:8080/dspace/bitstream/2128/3136/1...
HTML5: Over Hyped of the Next Big Thing
I doubt it'll impact the unicorns-and-fairies searches significantly. Most people already work under the assumption that P≠NP.

Similarly, most people believe the world is round, and we go around the Sun. This hasn't prevented serious flat-Earthers nor geocentrists from existing.
The general feeling is that creativity is hard, and even exponentially hard. When people try to do things creatively they feel like they aren't doing that much better than trying all possibilities and rejecting the ones that don't work.

If someone proved P=NP then unless we're mistaken about how hard we have to work to think creatively, it's likely that computers will end up being better than us at it, using this algorithm that I suspect would be difficult to backport to our brains. :)

Then again, it's possible that skilled practitioners of any creative field have stumbled across this polynomial time algorithm and don't know it, but that seems unlikely.
Ask HN: How do you determine potential market size for a web app?
More specifically, what type of information do you look for to inform your guesstimate?

I've started by looking at the analytics of our (future) competitors, specifically unique visitors. This information has varied significantly and am wondering if there are other sources that could help put my guesstimates on a more solid footing..?

Our web app will cater to individual investors, focusing on stocks. So, I've tried finding out the number of individual investors in the US, the size of investment information market, etc, without much luck. Any suggestions about what direction to take would be hugely appreciated!

I, like many before me, am looking to the HN community for help. :)
I think the 'pain' comes when there are issues with the c library that lxml binds to.
I'd definitely say London, purely for that fact that it has many of the same things that make Silicon Valley so appealing: a (relatively) thriving tech community, especially around the Old St area, it's close to VCs, there's lots of networking events, conferences, etc. Only downside is cost of living, which has frankly been overemphasized here. NY is just as expensive, and theres a pretty sweet scene there...

London for sure.
Somewhere, deep in a dark corner of my heart, I hope and pray that this paper is correct, just so we can keep and revere the immortal words "I am pleased to announce a proof that P is not equal to NP, which is attached in 10pt and 12pt fonts."
Here's a good question, given the probability of a bit on an ssd being flipped by cosmic radiation, how much redundancy would allow recreating the data using parity bits or something along those lines?
Submission with a link to the paper and already a longish discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1585850
This would be really easy on unix with fuse. It's been a while since I've don windows development.
NodeGame: Shooter - Asteroids like multiplayer using Node.js and WebSockets
Shameless plug here... runs

But hey, took about 2 days of work half of the time spend on refactoring the working game into something readable and it's actually pretty fun to play too.
What does it take to make a woman entrepreneur?
It's great to hear all the discussions around my last post on why there aren't more women entrepreneurs. Several have provided counter arguments or asked follow up questions. I decided to write this follow-up blog to answer one comment, what it takes to make a woman entrepreneur, or corporate executive.
I think he's gone downhill a bit since Jobs referenced his blog a few months back.
what would HD Desire do more than SD Desire? They already do 720p recording (and theoretically playback) since Froyo OTA update.
mrdoob rocks in so many ways.
As riffraff says, corruption isn't a problem for internet companies, really. Especially seeing as how most of them are in the north, which, while still not being a model of squeaky clean, is much better than the south.

The problems in Italy for an internet company are 1) bureaucracy 2) the fact that many potential employees are going to value stability over the good things about startups 3) fairly high cost of living in many places (Milan is expensive and an armpit - hot and humid and smoggy in the summer, cold and clammy in the winter).

That said, there are an awful lot of bright and creative people here. I hope that we'll see that potential unlocked sooner, rather than later.

BTW, here's a more in-depth article about Italy's problems, although some of them are not so applicable to internet startups:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/business/global/01italy.ht...
I'd argue that if (assuming it's true that) creativity stems from libido and biological evolution, it's been because there are evolutionary gains for creative individuals. The first person to throw a rock at a tree to knock down fruit got more food, for instance. The most complicated clothing (/nest/dance) gets the most mates.

All of which means it's purely a motivating force, not a requirement. We've been motivated to be creative, so we are. Programs can be similarly guided towards ends we desire; perhaps the most direct analogy is genetic programming, where you determine which "breed" by their "fitness" value.
Perfectly usable compared to what?

A big toolbar at the top, a big toolbar at the bottom, a big sidebar, none of which have any information I want to see; ads all over, and I have to sign up for their website to download the PDF.

That's not even as good as Acrobat (last I used it), never mind a lightweight PDF reader, never mind Chrome's integrated PDF rendering.
can't Desire do haptic feedback like EVO 4G? (if you're looking for a feedback)

for me the problem is rather with soft buttons being inadvertently activated when using the device in landscape mode, not the feedback.
- Practice. Yeah, other people said it. It's that important.

- Find a mentor. You'll improve slowly just from practice, but finding a mentor will force you to get up to their level at a much quicker pace.

- Read things. Books, blogs, whatever. If you have an active interest in it, read it.

- Use new technologies. Never heard of Node.js before? Stop and figure out what it is. Try it. Even if you hate it, you will have been better for learning about it. (Node.js is just an example I pulled out of thin air. This applies to ANY new programming thing you read about and is new.)

- Get a job. Even if it's a crappy programming job, nothing makes you learn faster than having a boss telling you to do things faster and better.
According to Wikipedia, the LDS Granite Mountain Vault (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granite_Mountain_(Utah)) adds 40,000 rolls of microfiche per year. Not sure how current that info is, though; the LDS church is pretty secretive with a lot of its methodology.
The idea behind an ACL for such an attack is that the same hosts will be used over and over again, taken from a large pool of zombies. So, let's take your example of 100,000 bots, an ACL in the upstream router (as seen from the host) could be used to checked against to identify those packets from the zombies and discard them. After all, a single attack of all 100,000 bots at once will just bring the host to its knees for the time-out of the connections and then it will bounce back up again. So, to increase the effectiveness of the attack they reconnect after every lost connection asking for another resource. If they're smart they'll vary agent strings and other characteristics to make it hard to narrow down who is and who is not legit.

Initially you don't have much to go on during such an attack and packet filtering is a reasonably expensive operation when you want to do it for a large number of hosts. So the strategy is to route all the traffic destined for that particular host through a router that has ACLs that are large enough to hold the total IP list for the botnet that is attacking the host, as these IPs become identified.

You don't want to route all your traffic through there because then you'd have to do the relatively expensive filtering on all of the packets, even those not destined for that particular host.

Now if an attacker were targeting the hosting facility they could thwart this strategy by sending requests to a larger number of hosts in the network in order to make life much harder for the crew fighting the attack. After all, you can't partition the problem anymore in to a portion that is targeted to the host and 'normal' traffic, effectively all the traffic could be bot traffic or it could be normal traffic, for all the receiving hosts.

To be able to partition the problem into a smaller one where you can let say 90% or more of the traffic through unfiltered and only concentrate on the remaining 10% would make solving it a bit easier. On the other hand if the attackers are silly enough to re-use the same bots to attack different hosts they've actually given you a clue as to which IPs are bots.

I hope that makes sense :)
When you sit all day with your hands on a keyboard, your shoulders are constantly in internal rotation. Try this quick test:

Hold a couple pens loosely in your hands with the points facing out, and stand naturally with your arms at your sides. Where are pens pointed? If they are pointed forward, then you've got excellent posture. If they are pointed diagonally inwards, you have slight internal rotation. If they are pointed almost straight inwards, then that internal rotation is severe.

The point of this is that pushups, and everyone's favourite lift, the bench press, promote more internal rotation. Most office people would be far better served performing more pulling exercises than push. So deadlifts, rows, pull downs, pull ups, etc.
NeXT under Jobs refused to meet their GPL obligations for their new ObjC frontend until they were threatened with legal action. I'm guessing Moglen was involved in that conflict, and it shaped his attitude about Jobs.
I disagree, strongly, with the sentiment of Mr. Moglen. As a user of a BSD, I can see a few reasons for wanting a non-GPLed compiler. I also suspect that GNU feels threatened by an open source competitor after being the only real game in town for so long.
yet you won't quit.

hypocrisy at it's best.
I don't really understand why this isn't a comment on the existing thread, so I flagged it -- sorry.
Just pointing out that the N1 is HTC.
Interesting. That's what I'm using delicious for, I didn't know of instapaper... Thank you.
The font was specified to indicate that this proof, indeed, fits into the margin.
1. Mission. Try to be near a park, and away from BART.

2. http://www.elementssf.com/

3. Github drinkup.

4. Too general of a question.
New Facebook App for Android, the Number One Mobile OS in the US
The newest member of the Android tribe is none other than Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who replaced his iPhone for Android just one month ago.
AGPL3 might have a larger affect then "startup selling a derivative of MySQL", it is designed to make code for web apps "free".
Prefork requires a process per request whereas Worker only requires a thread per request. So say you've got 20 processes in prefork taking 100mb each. You can server 20 concurrent requests and its using 2gb of memory. Where as with worker mpm there will be say 4 processes each with 20-30 threads. Thats going to be 400mb and an ability to serve 80-120 requests concurrently.

If you do go the worker route, my advice is to use mod_fastcgi rather than mod_fcgid for performance and stability reasons. Also look around for the patch which fixes the timeout errors that sporadically occur.

Worker MPM is definitely the way to go when running apache, something that is overlooked because not many people are aware of it or how to configure it. Beyond that there is also event mpm which was experimental but is now stable I believe.
I really question what you think "senior" means. A career for most people can be 40 years, and you're calling yourself "senior" after 5? What do you think guys with 20 years experience - who've led teams, managed budgets, seen the full SDLC, seen the same fads cycle every decade with different buzzwords, worked in multiple industries, multiple languages, multiple countries, been QA, developers, architects, project managers, business analysts at different points in their careers - see and hear when some kid (no offense) calls himself "senior"?

A revenue generating programmer in an investment bank is called a "quant". Maybe you could give that a whirl.
No, I think he's asking a legitimate question. Who finds these enjoyable to read?

Most likely, the people who voted it up.