skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"most kids with rich parents don't become hackers"

That is a very good observation that I hadn't noticed before. Of the scores of rich kids I knew who had computers in their rooms, I can name on one hand the number who now code or do anything close to coding as part of their jobs.
Fantastic analysis. I think there will be more grown men with gloves at tonights game than the kids. Normally I feel foolish packing one along, but if I had tickets, I'd definitely bring it.
Each security breach, however small, paves the way for a bigger breach. Even if the information gathered in this case seems innocuous, these impromptu social engineering attacks do demonstrate a real vulnerability.

Also keep in mind that the contestants weren't allowed to ask for anything more sensitive:

Contest rules prohibited asking for any sensitive information, or targeting certain types of organizations such as government or financial institutions.

Given these constraints, I'd say getting a rundown of version numbers and getting a user to visit a page is about as good as anybody could do.
Google SmartAss
Some code is plain old awful. Some such code I have left in place without rewriting because life is just too short.

And what exactly does "At this point I wasn't decimating things all together" mean? Should "decimating" be "denigrating"?
If you're still checking out this thread, you should know I sent an e-mail using the "contact us" option on your site.
I suppose it is a little ironic that moreofit.com isn't itself indexed. It's not popular enough :P
This is why people should not play lawyer: the charges (for every instance I'm aware of, and certainly the popular USCG cases) are for illegal distribution, not illegal download.

A-ha. So then downloading is fine, then? That certainly makes more sense to me.
What version of web browser? Damn, some day some black hat will invent the user-agent header and we'll all be toast.
Classic, "Scoble: Action Aggregate"
my problem with this blog is that she wants stress the fact that she is a girl developer like she should get some acclamation for that fact..

a developer is a developer!
and she should be judged by her merit, and she's intentionally fooling us to read just ok content. (mainly guys in tech)
GNU's rep existed previously
Nice work! I tried amongst others “dpreview.com” and the results I got were very exhaustive. Pretty much the list I would have made had you asked me for websites that review digital cameras.

It also works for international websites (the results for my favorite German-English dictionary [+]) but you could maybe work on eliminating duplicates.

[+] http://www.moreofit.com/similar-to/dict.leo.org/Top_10_Sites...
"working hard throughout grad school (in math) was the great equalizer"

The trouble is that so many people don't do that. But also there is only so much that effort can overcome. I have been coding for nigh on 30 years, having started with a hand-me-down Trash 80, Model I, Level 1. I have worked in all kinds of environments and hired coders who fell variously into both camps. Almost without fail, the coders who have been coding since they were kids do better. It is almost like breathing for them. I don't know how to explain it, but they have almost a Zen-like relationship with the machine that no degree or amount of compressed effort will match. I would like it to be so, but it just isn't the case in my experience.
Ah yes, that's exactly what I wanted. Thanks!
I don't know if you've ever tried, but Google generally won't actually let you look through millions of results. It also eventually presents you with a CAPTCHA to solve if it detects that you're scraping its SERPs.
Windows apps like powerpoint ?

I just installed an iPad for our sales guy - the iPad acts like a giant remote control for powerpoint (or whatever the apple eqivalent of powerpoint is).

It shows you thumbnails of all the slides, lets you click between them and read notes - all while the iPad displays the main presentation on it's video port.
You can even make edits with the on-screen keyboard - while the presentation is running.

Compare that with any conference you have been to with Powerpoint on a PC.
During the 5mins of trying to make powerpoint appear on the non-primary display of the laptop you then get introduced to the owners desktop, the photos of his kids, all the little popup reminders from explorer, the cell phone sync software, the corporate login complaining that it can find the domain controller.

Then if they need to switch to another slide you have to drop back into edit mode, and wait while they navigate through powerpoint to the slide and restart the view again.

If I was presenting to anything more important than a parent-teacher conference, the iPad would be worth it for that alone.
Also don't forget that the total inflation between 1970 and 2000 was 340%, that is 4.03 millions of 2040 dollars would only be worth 0.9 million in todays dollars if history repeats itself.
That's a really important point, I think. Looking back over the past 25 years, what has Apple consistently done better than any other technology company? Snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. What has Microsoft consistently done? Just as you say, they consistently deliver a couple of turkey drops, and then start to get it right in version 3.

It's not clear what "version 3" of MS's tablet strategy really is, or whether their product-development effort has reached that level yet. But if history is any guide, we'll know it when they ship it. Most likely, it will happen around the same time that Apple's proprietary, grasping nature starts to become self-defeating.
You see, when you say something like this, it would never occur to me that people can do this.

When I hear about bad code, I'm thinking about code that is not scalable or unmaintainable. Or, it doesn't follow a proper design pattern or maybe trying to be too clever coding. Or, maybe have resource leaking. Somethings just would never cross my mind.

I need to get out more.
You're right :-) But those meetings turn one's mind to mush, so it's hard (or at least I find it so) to concentrate on something at night.

If you can design an some software/hardware/toy that one can pass time discreetly during those meetings while pretending to listen, my friend, you'll have a huge market
Sucks is a little strong, but a single CSS edit it would make it much easier to read.

Notice how your navigation elements are 5px larger than the body text. But when we think about it, the primary use of a blog is for people to read the content - not navigate around. I suggest bumping the body p's font up from 12px to 15-16px.

Here are two screenshots, one of the default rendering in Safari and one with the Reader feature turned on. Notice how much larger the reader font is than what's specified on the site.

Browser: http://imgur.com/18wIi.png

Reader: http://imgur.com/HqnKY.png
The iPad is pushing us closer to computer-as-appliance. The distinction may not be so clear-cut in the future.
Thanks for the feedback.

Some duplicates can be removed by selecting the "domain only" option, since pages are often indexed separately "foo.com" and "foo.com/home/". I agree that this should be automatically completed -- it's a difficult task that I'm not keen on doing yet.

Medium-sized niche sites, like dpreview.com, work especially well. I'm glad you noticed. If you'd like to explore a little bit more, you can try [1] and fussing about with the tags. Maybe change one to be "satire" and see what happens. The possibilities are endless, as in essence you are exploring a 60,000 dimensional universe of links. (By the way, the "tag search" option is available by searching for a site, then clicking "search by tag signature" just below the first hilited result.)

[1] http://bit.ly/bcNumG

Again, thanks for the feedback and I'm glad you found the results satisfactory.
The URL to your profile and your name are always public information on Facebook, regardless of what settings you tweak. All this torrent supplies is your name and your URL.
This is exactly the sort od thing that makes a trip to HN worthwhile! Very cool, Thanks to high-school latin I was able to make a bit of sense of the table of parts of speech. Shame I haven't got a use for it ATM.
Yet another "spend less, invest in the market" article.
You probably know more about the intricate details than I do! I think perhaps one of the more important recent approaches for potentially gapped or slightly mismatched reads is the use of the Burrows-Wheeler transform. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows–Wheeler_transform

Heng Li wrote BWA based on this, and it seems to handle some of the issues you were wondering about.
The message from both PG and the VH guys seems to be this style is on the rise, especially among the best startups -- so there shouldn't be a "this is different and spooky" effect.

In the article Nivi rephrases "below market" as "priced to move" -- to create excitement and eliminate the need for lengthy due diligence. Leaving a little on the table could make sense for a faster, more-likely-to-finish-without-a-hitch round.
Personally I think it's smart. I'm sure she gets more page views because of it as well. First time reading the blog and I thought it was interesting enough.

I don't see how she's intentionally fooling you. The URL is girldeveloper, she has a picture plastered on the right (like a ton of other blogs I might add). I guess I'm confused by your reaction.
Yes. You pretty much nailed it.

I believe top management really wants to completely ignore the law and employ every subcriminal tactic available in the books and, perhaps, write a couple new ones in the process. I also believe they don't have the guts this would take, as they believe that their past transgressions brought attention enough for someone to end in jail.

That and the lack of balls to design products no focus group wants, but build them because you know people will want them once they see them.
I believe it's a good thing when I see code I wrote 6 months ago and think it sucks. If I thought it was perfect then that would be a sign that I hadn't learned much since I wrote it.
Fb could up the limit for an ip based on the number of users logging in from that location. Plus I'm only thinking the public facing non-friend profile views.
This isn't about Microsoft Research, this is about Microsoft products. This is a completely irrelevant point. MSR is a fine institution which is a great place for academic papers, they don't generally develop products for Microsoft.

Don't talk shit about stuff you know nothing about.
It wouldn't solve the entire problem, but resolving the IP address to its assigned DNS name could also help. Anything coming from .edu could be exempt, but 100 full hits an hour from *-dhcp.mylocalisp.com could be flagged for abuse.
Except for when it really does suck.

I was dealing with some CSS recently that was just odd. Everything (yes, every single block element) was a float resulting in a soup of fixes and workarounds because of the oddities they introduced earlier. In rewriting it, I managed to lose more than half of the CSS statements and make it be an almost pixel perfect match and be more browser compatible.

It was written by another contractor and I was contracting. Handling the politics delicately was the real problem.
OTOH, they are too scared to do it and create incentives for people to migrate away from Windows. Even if most of them move to another Microsoft offering, they don't seem to want risking it.
Virginia Heffernan and the science bloggers
Just a random, half-baked airport musing, but what if you had a related service that filtered out links which were similar and likely to be competitors. Someone might want to restrict what sites their crowdsourced content might link to?
Honestly, I clicked it, entered by blog, and expected a clusterfuck. Couldn't have been more wrong, the results are probably as close as anything I'd expect: http://www.moreofit.com/similar-to/alexgaynor.net/Top_10_Sit...
Why does Google use the Generalized Second Price auction to sell search ads?
>> it's reported that the entire iPod development process ... only took 18 months

> Pro-Apple spin machine at work.

WikiPedia reports 12 months of development for the iPod. IIRC I read the 18 month figure in Leander Kahney's Inside Steve's Brain but can't seem to find it now.

http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Steves-Brain-Leander-Kahney/dp/...
That should be something you can hack with the Contacts Data API:

http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/docs/3.0/developers_gui...
But a quite boring fixed interest saving plan would do the same effect

No, it wouldn't. It probably wouldn't even beat inflation.
In other words, no one knows what the right price is: http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.ht... . I suspect most people luck into the "right" price—or don't.
I laughed when I read this:
"I just counted. I have 17 tabs currently open"

Am I the only person that sometimes has literally hundreds of tabs open? I love tabkit, but a hundred or two tabs seems to be the limit with that approach. I'm definitely looking forward to Tab Candy...
USPTO open to public comment on what can be patented
This was posted recently, using point thresholds: http://jmillerinc.com/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-over...
"Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people."

That's gold
On a side note the Chrome integrated PDF viewer (on dev channel) is just beautiful and fast: http://i.imgur.com/f7vMY.png
I've considered the uses of moreofit for competitor-like stuff like this. I could make a service which (when installed on your site) scans users' histories for the top 500 competitor websites, aggregate those results, and let you know which competitors websites your visitors have most often been to. Also, if they've been to X competitor, theres a Y% chance they've been to Z competitor.

I haphazardly concluded that the value seems to be in the service itself, not the "finding competitors" aspect. You likely know who your competitors are, or can find out with a 1 time search on a similarity site such as mine.

That doesn't mean the idea has no legs. I imagine it's something people would pay for, and probably already are. It's just not my cup of tea at the moment to be censoring or sniffing people's histories.
Ask HN: Jump starting techniques for a new site?
In #startups (irc.freenode.net), Phil_H brought up the interesting question of alternatives to founder sock-puppeting to jump start a website and/or community.

What are your suggestions or past experiences with this kind of situation?
Laptop Evolution A History of Portable Computing 
Laptop Evolution A History of Portable Computing
If Perl 5 suffices for your applications, by all means use Perl 5. Perl 5 will continue to be a useful and usable language for a long time.

David Skoll's original post missed the point that plenty of people use these features in Perl 5 I added in my comparison. Adding them to the language as intrinsic features helps everyone who uses them, and everyone who might want to use them, and everyone who currently can't use them because their shared hosting providers won't install them or their system administrators haven't vetted them or they're incompatible with existing projects they've had to write themselves in their own organizations.

In short, Perl 6 exists in large part to improve on things Perl 5 did not do well enough. One of those things is programming in the large.

We'd also like Perl 6 to be usable for one liners and small, short-lived applications, and we're working on mechanisms to avoid paying the cost for features you don't. Yet Rakudo Star has always been "a usable, useful subset of Perl 6" and never "a drop in replacement for everything you use Perl 5 for right now." Bugfixes, new features, modifications, and optimizations will come.

In the meantime, compare like to like.
Wow. After some brief testing, I am also very impressed with the results. Well done.
1. Pay people to create the initial content.

2. Create it yourself using multiple accounts.

3. Have a following like the StackOverflow guy did.

I've had success with growing it one user at a time, starting with yourself, friends and family. If your startup provides something of value, it will grow.

If it's not growing at all, even a couple users a day, then that hints towards a problem with your product/service/site and you need to get some feedback from your users. Some of your assumptions when creating/designing your site may be off.
What leads you to believe it's not a focus?
Relevant link posted in channel with lots of methods listed:
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/04/in-the-pursuit-o...
Looks like I need to kick off the discussion myself :)
One concept discussed was "the velvet rope" technique where only those with personal invitations are allowed to enter or sign up.

This technique was highly successful during the original Gmail Beta launch :)
But the thing is, even with the receiver paying a fee, the caller portion of the price is still pretty high, which defeats the purpose of the idea.
"The ones who did were Saudis."

Al-Qaeda are about as Saudi as the IRA is British. The people who make that argument, and forget the close ties between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the first place, are the ones who need to read a thing or two on geopolitics.
It's much more difficult to read code than to write it. Even when using the same coding style and conventions, looking at a problem that some else solved will look confusing to you. It's easier to say that it sucks than to say you don't understand it.
if your on the iPad you can get HNMonthly via the new Magcloud magazine app and for the moment, all magazines are free
IPhone 4 upgrade hack
Here is a quick hack for upgrading to an iphone 4 and getting some additional compensation (selling your 'old' iphone 3gs for $450) for relegating yourself to a life of dropped calls with AT&T for an additional 2 years. Basically, this hack requires that you are:
1) eligible for the discounted iphone 4 upgrade price of $199 for the 16gb and $299 for the 32gb... and i feel bad for those people who preordered but are still waiting to get their iphone 4... considering you can now walk into an apple store and buy one before yours will arrive.
2) within your applecare warranty... or at least close (2 weeks off Apple will normally still cut you some slack)

The system is quite simple, make a genius bar appointment at your nearest apple store.
1) meet with your rep, convince them to exchange your phone (dropped calls, erratic phone behavior etc)... most of the time it helps if you've done a recent phone restore to prove that you've really taken time to solve this problem.
2) I also had them replace the headphones with a new set (they're staticy or they cause your phone to jump into voice control randomly... as mine really did)
3) leave the original plastic on the replacement phone they're giving you

Once you have your replacement iphone 3gs, wait in line to buy your new iphone 4. If they give you any gruff about having just got a replacement tell them you're giving that one to your mom... everyone knows family is the most important (well, tied w/ breakfast).

When you get home, find your iphone 3gs box & assemble the new headphones (if you didn't exchange these just take the ones our of your iphone 4 box) along with the new usb cable & the new wall plug from the iphone 4 box. Take a nice crispy picture of the phone & accessories with the improved camera on the iphone 4 & write a quick description of your "new iphone 3gs" (don't forget to mention that this replacement iphone 3gs has an additional 90 days applecare protection on it) & upload that shit to craigslist or ebay.

I managed to sell mine for $450 cash within 2 hours of posting my ad on CL... you might be able to get some more money out of it by unlocking & posting it to ebay but that seemed like more work than I wanted to do at the time.

Best of luck,

Grant
To clarify my thoughts when I brought it up, it seems like the canonical example of this problem is a dating site: sockpuppeting seems somewhat unethical, and somewhat impractical (can you flirt with the guys who message you, but manage to tactfully reject suggestions of meeting? Do you have multiple sockpuppets per state? etc.), but without a seed the site is worthless.

I guess it would help that when someone signs up, they don't need to come back for people to send them messages. So maybe you don't need a community like reddit did, just users. But I don't know.

Does anyone know how sites like OKCupid solved this?
I'd recommend to the book Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath here, despite it being more geared towards marketers, than website launches. Derek Sivers has a nice set of notes on it over at http://sivers.org/book/MadeToStick
Thanks. Yes, with 100k basically flying through the air, I could see it getting a little rowdy.
Only because Google did it.
The Best Magazine Articles
"Discussions" results page, for a query of "discussion".

http://www.google.com/search?q=discussion&tbs=dsc:1
Do many colleges use NAT? Every college whose network I've been on gives external IPs to each network device.
I have "Mindfulness In Plain English" (http://www.kusala.org/udharma4/mpe.html) currently open. I'm not sure, but I think I've had this open for more than one week. Reading it should help me with concentration. This seems somewhat ironic.
I'd be happy with something like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPDT21oEhW0
They also had the element of scarcity, not only did you require an invite, but those invites themselves were very hard to come by. USB's were traded for them, and sites dedicated to getting them, gmailswap.com anyone?
> A decade ago, nobody would have described Microsoft as a cool brand

I am not sure many people describe it that way now.
Interesting, but I wonder how commercial use of the API requires the license:

http://otlportal.stanford.edu/techfinder/technology/ID=24472
Ask HN: About to take on a partner, what to be aware of?
I'm currently structured as an LLC, and my prospective partner is also structured as an LLC. We are planning to combine our intillectual property into one entity. Whether we create a third entity or whether one of us joins as partner to the others existing entity is yet to be decided.<p>What are some things to be aware of? It is my intent to remain the majority share holder, but not by a large percent. We also may want to take on some investment capital, so it will probably be easier to do with a C corp, but I am no expert in that area. Investment capital is not a big priority, we need very little of it, if at all. We may want to take on a 3rd partner as well.
No worries :) I was referring mostly to the article you linked to, not to your submission.
They used sockpuppets and got rid of them once they had a high enough concentration in certain areas and it could stand on its own. PlentyOfFish did that too.
The S&P, adjusted for inflation, has returned -30% for the last ten years

But go ahead and feed the machines at goldman sachs some money.
Couldn't agree more! Most of the time I've heard people say "this code sucks" it seems to mean that it's formatted "wrongly" or that the person is too lazy to understand it, or it's not written by them!
OpenWebAsia In Kuala Lumpur: South East Asia’s Web Under The Spotlight
she was saying that at that point she was not ripping out huge swaths of code and rewriting them, 'decimate' actually makes plenty of sense in this context
Class is a false concept created by those who want to keep people stuck in one station in life. Especially those who bemoan those who had some privilege. I wouldn't waste my time arguing with the people who buy into the premise of this article, because they are ideologues who will stop at nothing in their quest to make everyone equally miserable. Pass.
I believe Facebook doesn't allow any links from The Pirate Bay.
A better question might whether you think the code you wrote 6 months ago sucks as much as the code you wrote a year ago