skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know about this interpretation of "just start". My take on the "just start" thing is to avoid procrastinating forever, and feeling like it's not the right time, or your idea isn't good enough, or you aren't ready.

The point is nothing will get your idea honed and your skills improved than just starting. Maybe it won't succeed... but that's actually not the point. I don't think anyone is saying "just start" is the key to success (though clearly a prerequisite). I think they are saying that trying and not succeeding is better than never doing anything. The startup's take on "better to have loved and lost, then never to have loved at all"
This looks more like a "labs" feature than a real improvement. Doesn't add any value to me... glad they allow us to disabled it.
Spot the Australian: Four Weetbix, and Orange Juice.
It'd also be nice if you could also pull iTunes data straight from a iOs or android device. I don't believe the APIs exist to do that via a web app, but it'd be nice.
The overwhelming dominance of Zope back in the day really held back the Python web development world and I worry the same thing is happening again with Django. Django could really benefit from a Merb breathing down its neck.

The Rails core team and the dev process is totally open and the DVCS-centric model makes it really easy for anybody to jump in and contribute. I can't see why this wouldn't work for Django too.
If only I could install an alternative syntax...
I found it well written. Since I don't code the technical side was, eventually, lost on me but I think I still managed to understand the vulnerability, how you identified and tested it, and the solid job you did bringing it to their attention and being heard.
Tax evasion hurts when a government owes tons of money that it cannot pay back with the current tax revenue coming in.
Do you know how long it will be before the actual video is up?
Maybe we're seeing a downside of the YAGNI, shoot from the hip, do the simplest thing design philosophy.
If it's not directly measurable price it however you want. But if it is measurable say a vps provider good luck charging a premium, you'll be out of business once your cash flow runs out.
That's a pretty terrific idea — and you could make it harder to game by having the page view count be a sum of how many logged in users over a karma threshold had viewed it.
We can assume that she/he is being compensated through stock/equity. So they are being paid - just not with a salary.
I think you underestimate the value of stopping smaller impacts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event#Sizes_and_frequenc... claims that an incident on the size of the Tunguska event (would could take out a large city) happens every thousand years, and to prevent it we need to move an object with a diameter of 50 m or so. A object on this scale might be in the 10,000,000 kg range. We'd like to deflect it 6000 km or so (ie make it miss the Earth). We have about 600,000,000 seconds to do so. If we can give it a sideways momentum of 100,000 kg*m/s, we'll be fine. While difficult, this may be within our means. (Tapping it with a nuclear bomb is only the most obvious.)
"There were a few who admitted that their success was mostly due to other people and luck. Now that I'm older, this rings more true than anything else."

While luck and circumstance tends to be a factor, I believe that a different person given the same circumstances might not have succeeded. So, you can't just throw up your hands and suggest that it's out of your control.
Arbitrary semantic data on the web at large is DOA, just like the semantic web.

If you think about it, a big part of the appeal of facebook is that, for many people, it solves all the actual problems semantic markup is supposed to be able to solve.
Warning, WSJ paywall.
Not only no on-board fuel, but no on-board propellant, either. There goes everything I learned about rockets from Heinlein. Slick!
>5 monasteries said that they evaluated the value of their properties at around 20b of today's euros (this is just for 5 monasteries). You can imagine how taxing the church would pay off a good chunk of the debt

So are you proposing that they instigate a one-off property tax on everyone in Greece or just on the monasteries. The reason that 5 monasteries have so much valuable land is not necessarily that they are rich (the meals described in the article and lifestyle aren't exactly lavish either) but because they own large areas of land which when they adopted them 100s of years ago were probably unwanted, but now (speculating) are probably places where holiday resorts would be built.

Demanding a piece of a valuation of the properties would I imagine mean many such properties would be sold off and a great swathe of Greek heritage from the last millenium or so would then be following all the unpaid taxes and disappearing.

Perhaps you could explain further how you propose to get cash out of monastic property?
This is just a pointless blog post which steals an image from the esquire article discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672624
How to build Apache and mod_wsgi with Python 2.7 on FreeBSD
You're hypocritical with your anti-flaming flaming.

Oh, I agree to an extent. But I have never seen any website have so many troubles. If I coded a website as half working as that (and here people will mention that my 3 day old website had an issue of an overlapping div) I would be ashamed of myself. Yet they are egotistical and rude, as I have shown. They have no lack of resources (10 million in funding) and a ton of staff.

The community as a whole is quite unhappy. Yet they focus their time on getting famous people joining rather than trying to satisfy the people who stay.

I would call myself a Power User. I have used it more than your average user and so I do experience a great volume. But tell me this; how has Twitter never been as bad, when it has served so many more requests.
That's not entirely fair. "Weakly held" can mean "based on limited information". E.g. if you are views as credible you can bring to light information that allows the person to change to a more strongly held opinion (that is not "stupid"; yes, your point about conceit does have some merit).

You can also do this sort of thing by providing another way to look at a broadly accepted set of facts.
Looking at the browsers it lists IE aside it seems out of date. I don't know but I'd speculate most chrome users are on v5. I'm running v7
People value someone who works hard and is reliable. Even if your project fails, those traits will attract good people to you. Sure, some people are lucky -- but you can always try to maximize your "luck"!
Matt Cutts: Is it OK to sell links as long as we use the nofollow attr? [video]
> But tell me this; how has Twitter never been as bad, when it has served so many more requests.

Twitter has been that bad. Probably worse, in 2008 and parts of last year. Even 2010 has seen its fair share of fail whales.
Hmmm. More news that makes Scala and Clojure look more attractive than Java for new development.
They're covering this like it's a new thing... At least at the end they mention this:

>The rocket traveled 1.2 meters into the air - the world record for such a craft is 72 meters and 12.7 seconds of flight, accomplished in 2001.

ie, 9 years since a massively more successful demonstration. Slow science news day?

edit: the ones I've seen before were essentially two cones, one upside down and inside the other. It was spun, and lasers / masers were shot at the bottom, creating a bit of plasma near the joint of the two cones.

/\
/ \
/ \
/ \ / \
^ \/ ^
│ │
└────┴── plasma
There was a trend recently for rolled cuffs on jeans, started because people wanted to show off the inside seam of their $200 'selvedge' denim. It helps me out a lot because my inseam really is that long.
This feels contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. Not that there aren't good points here, but it just seems like somebody had to knock them down a peg.

And you know, for all of the weaknesses with code pointed out in this post, the reason that the site has taken off is really its design and functionality. Fact of matter, no other hosted blogging platform offers its mix of simplicity, customizability (you can do a CRAPLOAD of stuff with this platform that you can't do with the free version of Wordpress.com, including ads) and user interaction.

My guess: They'll solve the downtime issues. They'll solve the more technical issues. They'll even solve the customer service problems. The design backbone of the product is why. Twitter had the right design mentality and that's why the technical problems have slowly gone away. Weaknesses in design are harder to solve than technical problems. Unless you're Digg. Then you're screwed.
The real reason for this, IMHO, is one of the last points of the article - No major browser has embraced it as a core feature. Getting this into say Mozilla or Safari would go a long way to make it standardized.

Also, I'm waiting for a usable "Receipt" microdata - imagine buying something, then when you get to the receipt page, it gives all the information about the transaction, ready to go into your financial management software, or into a program to keep track of the packages being shipped to you.

Then again, this may be because I hate Intuit with a passion...
But it doesn't predict what you are most likely going to search for...
Separation of concerns at the OS level involves the creation of shared DLLs, and people complaining about bloat inevitably complain about the many megabytes of DLL files that the simplest program needs nowadays, even if it only uses a vanishing fraction of them. People slinging bloat accusations around seem to want a program in which every byte loaded from the disk is executed with high frequency or something.

In my opinion, you're totally correct. This is part of the reason I'm not very sympathetic to the bloat argument. The megabytes of libraries are there for good reasons.
The major problem of nuking something like that is that you can get more pieces that are out of the control. The goal is just to deflect. It's harder than it appears.
My experience with Twitter in 2008 was a blessing compared to what I have dealt with using Tumblr.
Posterous is hiring Rails, Infrastructure and Android Engineers
But this is not the cause of the economic problems. The more appropriate solution would be to shut down the money-loosing public businesses (like the train org) and lay off as many people as needed from the public sector.

This way, they will reduce government spending and will also allow people to do something more productive.

More taxation will just slow down the economy even further.
Great post, keep them coming
Digg v4's Problems are not Technical
An interesting point about Jehovah's Witnesses
I am one of Jehovah's Witnesses- we get a bad rap online. So here's something about us you might have never thought about
>>Personally I think the best solution is to make it a matter of law that the sizing be accurate.

>legislating that the dimensions of clothing be declared actually defeats the purpose of sizing

He said what you said he didn't but should have AFAICS.

He didn't say that you had to measure the circumference of the waistband in a pair of trousers just the size of a persons waist that the trousers were made for.

>And it's only misleading to people who don't own a ruler, which I think is a fair burden to place on the consumer.

You seem to be suggesting that when purchasing clothing online one should buy all the clothes, measure them yourself and then try on the ones that are the right size. Or that in a store one should measure the clothes on the rack to find the right size and then try that on. As the manufacturer produces the clothing to a specific size and has already designed the article to fit a particularly body size would it not be easier if they honestly labelled the size the clothing had been made for instead.

Do you really think that fraudulent retail should be allowed because people are able to test things for themselves.

Tins of tuna with dolphin meat in that was labelled "dolphin friendly" - are they OK? People can simply do a DNA test and determine the species of animal the flesh comes from, no?
That's a great question.

The financial goal of a startup is (often) to generate a lifetime of wealth in 3-4 years of intense work. After 3-4 years, a startup will either succeed or fold. Because the timeframe is bounded, it's possible for a founder to forgo any personal savings without irreparably damaging their personal finances.

For example, speaking for myself, at my last job I was saving about $60,000 per year. Not contributing that money to my savings over the next 3-4 years isn't a huge deal. If my startup fails, I've only lost 3 or 4 years of savings.

However, it IS a huge deal for our STARTUP to save $60,000 per year. That's a full-time junior employee. If not spending that money increases the likelihood of a successful exit, then it's a prudent financial strategy for me. The effect is multiplied if the other cofounders forgo their savings as well.

Note that this is only my second VC-backed startup. Others with more startup experience may very well have different advice or reasoning.
You make it sound so easy :)

Just matching direction and velocity with a specific 50 m asteroid alone would be a major technological feat, currently not within our capabilities.

Galileo did a 'flyby' of an asteroid but the relative speed at the closest approach was still 8 Km/second.

And that was an asteroid 18 Km in diameter, which we passed at more than 5,000 Km.

The best we've done is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEAR_Shoemaker

A landing on a near earth asteroid, 34 Km across, with a 56 Kg payload. Eros is one of the 'easiest' (for want of a better term) asteroids you might want to visit.

The two asteroids this article is about were discovered last week and are here now.
Get Your ZumoCast T-Shirt
It feels like he was looking for a reason to disagree with Dijkstra instead of trying to understand what he wrote.
Faster results may mean better results in an indirect way. If you accept that some searches will require multiple tries before getting what you want, then If you can see the quality of your search results as you type, you can get to what you want faster. Of course you may disagree with that premise.
Heh, I'm just old enough to have learned the log table method in high school Algebra II; that was right after scientific calculators hit $90 in 2010 dollars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-30 at $25 then) but of course the books hadn't caught up yet. And the trick is indeed very useful.
You sound like someone I would not like working for. And that, maybe, is just as valuable as anything else. You've got a process that identifies the type of person you've had good luck with in the past. Your process also identifies you as the sort of person I've had bad luck with in the past. It works both ways. You're missing some excellent developers who maybe are not articulate at the whiteboard but do fine at the keyboard, even under pressure.

If you think this is "draconian and insulting", just wait until your knee deep in digital shit with customers barking at you all day long.

How many times do you have your customers in the office, throwing out arbitrary programming challenges for your developers to solve on the spot at the whiteboard?

It's fine if your methodology works for you, but you might consider that it's not the only approach that could work.
Posting on HN is a good start, enough folks potentially interested will see this.

Have you tried asking folks at YC to put the buzz around the office? I have heard a few of the Mixergy interviews where someone (or a group) was going through the YC process, and mid-project either met someone or had an epiphany and changed direction with their project. I only say that to mean that you have a fertile environment of tech folks there that may be wanting to bite into something else or have some ideas to meld into yours to spark something exciting.

Other than that, SF and NYC have huge tech communities, it sounds lame, but maybe put together some form of meetup and see if anyone stands out to you guys? Like a tech in realestate to pitch your existing idea?

Not really sure, but it seems you'll have to come at this from the "organic" angle. Monster.com likely won't get you the folks you want :)
Andrew, this is cool. Love the name, by the way - "Quirk" for a QR code company is very memorable.

A few suggestions:

1) Agree with the other posters about an explanation on the home page.

2) The process by which I had to choose a permalink was confusing - why do I need to choose a permalink before I get my quirk? It would be way more dramatic to have the QR code pop up immediately after I FB connect. This could also help with (1) - you could caption it "This is your personal QR code!"

3) With FB Connect, you can import not just name, but profile photo and other public data. I'd expect you to generate a profile page at my permalink seeded with that information.

4) Obviously, the mobile apps are pretty key. I sent the QR code to my phone via text (I like that feature, btw). But pretty soon it will get buried in my SMS inbox. I need a way to pull it up immediately, like a Quirk app would do.

5) I like the idea of getting conference organizers to embed quirk codes in name cards. But before I would actually do that, I'd probably want:

a) Really good profiles at the permalinks

b) Customization / branding. It's my conference so I want to promote myself, not getaquirk.com. Branded profiles and conference-specific quirk codes would be key.

c) Analytics / insight into how people are using it.

Of course that's just my guess - you might talk to some conferences and go through the exercise of selling them on the product to figure out what's truly important to them.

(edit - formatting)
Ask HN/PG: On App Submission
Question for HN Alums or for PG himself-

If one submits an app, and is actively developing a site but that site is still really in the early stages (read: janky/still needing work, sometimes broken as new things are added), is it worth including the site at all?

I ask because every time I push updates I worry that the site will break, and that will be the minute my app is reviewed.

Thoughts?
Scientists identify sexy dance moves
Milk and cereal. Every day.
I do believe we could simulate that, for some users, but we could never do it in any meaningful way in the context of this discussion.

For instance, we could make a language that interpreted "plus", "+", "adds", and "pslu" as addition operators. But that would only be increasing the amount of operators.

Even if we had an adaptive algorithm that would figure out what people meant in context, it would only reduce the amount of syntax errors.

What is really referred to here is the elements of the program. In this example, it would be our decision to add. If that elemental decision was wrong, the program would flip.

Another case is to consider numbers. If a letter needs to be mailed to every fifth address, and the elemental data, 5, is altered in any way, the program will fail. So while our algorithm could pick up 'fiev' and 'fifth', 4 or fourth will blow it.
My problem with OpenVPN is that you cannot access it from an iPhone.
Sergey Brin on User Generated Content & Local
I was at the Google Instant Launch and Sergey Brin answered my question.

"Less than 1% of the users generate content that is consumed by the rest of the 99%. Google does an extremely good job of serving this 99% with the content already generated. What is Google doing to help with changing this ration to more like 5% of the people generating content?" He replied that "Ad sense was the first product that helped with increasing content generation as more people saw that their content can be monitized. Similarly we have Blogger and a bunch of publishing tools."I replied back " What about with local & recommendations where Yelp and Quora etc are doing a great job. Google can use its reach to collect more data in local. So when some one is browsing a map for restaurants they can also quickly add ratings and stars for a few restaurants." He said " We partner with other people in areas where they are good. We do recommendations but it's buried. You will see a lot of innovation from us in local soon."
[1] For example, why do many people go through long training programs “to make money” without spending a few hours doing salary comparisons ahead of time? Why do many who type for hours a day remain two-finger typists, without bothering with a typing tutor program? Why do people spend their Saturdays “enjoying themselves” without bothering to track which of their habitual leisure activities are _actually_ enjoyable? Why do even unusually numerate people fear illness, car accidents, and bogeymen, and take safety measures, but not bother to look up statistics on the relative risks? Why do most of us settle into a single, stereotyped mode of studying, writing, social interaction, or the like, without trying alternatives to see if they work better -- even when such experiments as we have tried have sometimes given great boosts?

Because thinking is hard and suffering is easy.
Most clothing sites have a sizing table, that lists the hip, waist, inseam, neck, etc for each of their sizes. The hips for women's large seems to vary from 30-42, but if the sizing chart matches my measurements, the clothes usually fit.

For women it's also confusing because it's often not clear if something is in juniors, misses, or women's sizes. But the size chart usually makes it clear.
There is absolutely no reason for a law like this to ever come into effect.
Could anyone explain what Dijkstra meant by

>It is misleading in the sense that it suggests that we can adequately cope with the unfamiliar discrete in terms of the familiar continuous, i.e. ourselves, quod non. It is paralyzing in the sense that, because persons exist and act in time, its adoption effectively prevents a departure from operational semantics and thus forces people to think about programs in terms of computational behaviours, based on an underlying computational model. This is bad, because operational reasoning is a tremendous waste of mental effort.

I don't get the part where thinking in terms of computational behaviors throws something off (and more).