skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The handpuppet background cracked me up. To the haters: just skip around the video, and/or watch more Wonder Showzen.
I think you hit the nail on the head - it really just sounds unworkable. Just getting civic approval seems unsurmountable, the system seems frail (breakdowns, capacity, misuse) and all it is going to take is one person to have a serious medical issue with no chance of early responders being able to address the issue for this to get shutdown.
Having personally used it to brush up on my calculus and differential equation skills, I have to agree that it's money well deserved. Google is saying that the $2m will go towards translating the core videos into other languages, which I think is an excellent move. If this can help students in English speaking countries, why not others?
Housing prices are generally less volatile than illiquid start-up stock.
Unless my interpretation is wrong, I'd say that almost all the comments in this thread are based on a misinterpretation of the article (or based on assumptions that are not supported by any data in the article)

Notice these key sentences in the article. "If a person had divorced and remarried by the time of the Census, they would be counted as married. So it could be the case that people in some occupations are just quicker to jump into the next marriage than others. "

The numbers don't suggest that engineers divorce at a lower rate than others. They suggest that engineers are less likely to be in a divorced state (but this could either be due to less engineers divorcing or more engineers remarrying quickly).
My 5 year old son is significantly ahead of his peers in terms of reading. We do play video games together in moderation (Minecraft!), but we also read together _every_ night. Fortnightly visits to the library, and modelling good choices by reading ourselves instead of turning on the TV, seem to be cultivating both love and respect for books.
I understand your intent, but under no circumstances (that I can think of) is it okay to change the expected behaviour of the back button.

The back button should always do just that ~ take the user back to the previously viewed page.
I agree, the current system is flawed too. However, under the "No new software patents" policy, lets say company A has x number of preexisting patents, and a new company wants to get into the field, they can't leverage and of company A's innovations, but company A could use anything company B comes up with however they like. That seems like a dealbreaker for any new company trying to raise capital.
msluyter linked it below:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/09/low-divorce-jobs.html

There's an Excel file halfway into the article. I'd copy the exact figures on here but it's getting Websense'd :(
So, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Dangerous_Visions will never be released?
After watching it, the word "pizza" has turned into a strange, meaningless word-sound.
>this process will be overseen by David Kappos, the current director of the USPTO and formerly an attorney at IBM in charge of their heavy-handed patent strategy.

Looks like the deck is already stacked. Are there any companies or elected officials with significant political/financial capital aggressively campaigning for this? This movement needs a champion to make this topic relevant to bureacrats and I don't know if Stallman's the guy.
This is more or less a linkbait headline. Regardless, if those who are successful listened to those who told them they would fail, they wouldn't have been successful.
I'm sorry if it didn't make sense to you. I posted it, because I would find enjoyable reading it. Maybe you're just not kind of reader I tried to target, but I believe there are some.
How ZipZapPlay Saved Itself With a Hit Facebook Game
Flagged: "Postcom and Ofcom could be merged" which to me means a reduction in overhead, not it "going".
I began to have serious concerns about this article when I saw the author allocate and then immediately leak memory in the first example.

I agree with the message: don't use strtok, it has unpleasant side effects that you probably don't want. I do not feel this article does a good job of presenting that message. It spends too much time on pathologically bad examples of strtok usage while only briefly mentioning (and providing no example code for) any of the alternatives.
Agreed. Competition validates a market. It's easy to get discourage by competition, but entrepreneurs need to let competition fuel them. Fuel them to work smarter, harder, and faster.
I've heard lots of dev teams gripe about strsep(3) because it "isn't standard" or "isn't cross-platform". Preposterous! strsep is a ~20 line ANSI C function; it will compile and run flawlessly on any platform that doesn't natively provide it.

I agree strongly with the other comments on this thread that strsep(3) is just peachy, even though it "alters its inputs". Unlike in functional programs, reasonable destructive functions are to be preferred in C programs; it's easier to work around destructiveness than it is to track state (and/or to go through contortions to pretend that you aren't tracking state).
I thought about doing this a few months ago and tried to register gitlaw.com but that domain was already taken (but inactive). Looks like someone else had the idea too.

However, I not only wanted to put the current US Constitution and Code into git, but every version going back to 1776. What an amazing data source that would make, to be able to see all revisions and additions to the US legal code since inception, how it grew and changed over time. The data visualizers could have a field day.

However, that's a massive project, and I'm not sure if all that data even exists in portable electronic format, or just the recent versions of the Constitution and US Law.

It's still in the back of my mind and if I figure out a way to do it I'll probably revisit it.
I am curious about why Netflix has succeeded so well with regard to streaming movies and so much TV content. There are competitors, Hulu and YouTube, but Netflix seems to be winning. I think there are three possibilities:

(1) They got lucky. Netflix made the good deals early on. After a few of these, the deals simply snow ball.

(2) Netflix has a captive audience created through their DVD rental service. Netflix gives us DRM'ed content we can view online and we applaud it because we already love getting those red envelopes in our mailbox.

(3) Their distribution network is superior and is the best to deliver all this content.

To me (2) seems the most likely. Perhaps is a combination of all 3.
Netflix Hasn’t Won the Great Digital TV War Yet: We Have
In that vein, you might like the game UFO:Alien Invasion. It's a rather playable open source clone of X-COM.

Granted, they have a long way to go before they match up to the original and there are quite a few bugs if you get far enough along to disassemble UFOs, but I've been having fun playing it.
You want to make an IRC network, but don't have the killer features yet.

Is this idea the right way round?
Google Labs - Breadcrumb
Doesn't that require he rely on the true owner of the business (the person whose name is on it) not cutting him out of it, completely legally? He can't start his own business, he can't be a partner in a business, he can't be an owner in a business... because then he'd be a principle and the company's merchant account application would be denied.
the was the coat before that, a water bottle later, kermit the frog, he then gets a massage, then a hotdog.

There I watched it so none of you have too :)
Worked perfectly on Chrome for me.

PS> I am on Windows XP.
Oracle seems to be too focused on acquisitions and litigation.
An amazing writer passing on his own terms... he'll be missed, even if it's not as bad as he thinks it is.
Bingo ... :-D
Auto Refreshing News System With Built-In HTML Search
Microsoft was once charming and sexy?
Your design definitely doesn't fall into the "looks like crap" category. These sites fall into the "crap" category:

http://www.mylanguageexchange.com/

http://www.sporcle.com/

Your site strikes me as in the "good enough" category. The design isn't anything special, either good or bad. This means that there is nothing bad about the design to bring your product down and I think it also means that the law of diminishing returns may apply to putting resources into making the design better.
A follow up post touches on this:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/09/24/130107647/what-doe...

There are different classes of bond holders within their bond fund. Toxie was a lower ranked class that was assuming more risk, and we've now reached a point where a sufficient number of mortgage holders within the bond fund have defaulted, that there will never be enough mortgage payments coming in to pay the holders of Toxie-class bonds within this fund. Other people within the fund are still getting paid.

If I recall correctly from earlier Planet Money podcasts, this was part of the problem. The overall fund would receive a low-risk rating, and those parts would be bought up by the really big institutional investors. The crappier bits of the same funds would then be sold to your local teachers retirement fund or similar, bought by investors who were savvy enough to realise they were assuming more risk.

(I've almost certainly got some of that wrong - someone correct me!)

Regardless: listen to Planet Money - it's 12-20 minutes 3 times a week, and they make a lot of complicated stuff relatively easy to understand and accessible.

http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=944...
He does make that point in the article: "An old dog senses when it's his time -- dogs have that capacity; nobody doubts that. Nobody. But everybody doubts when you say, 'I'm dying.' They think you're being a Victorian actress. They think you're doing Bernhardt."

Not exactly unheard of, maybe you feel like your battery is just running out. Reminds me of a footnote from "Three Pillars of Zen", p31:

"Yasutani-roshi died in his temple in Kyoto on March 28, 1973, at the age of eighty-eight. He was about to take his breakfast when he toppled over and, without pain, passed away. A week earlier his strength had begun to fail and he took more rest from his heavy teaching schedule. Three days before he drew his last breath he administered the precepts to twelve persons in a forty-five-minute ceremony called jukai. Afterward he confided to a close disciple, 'That is my last jukai. I went through it on sheer willpower.'"
New $250K for 500 Startups Twilio microfund
After 4 weeks of fund raising, I wasn't able to raise the full funding target amount. I've written a blog post on some of the things I learned from having my project on Kickstarter.com for those of you who might be interested in using it in the future.

3 Quick Lessons from My Failed Project on Kickstarter
http://www.plinan.com/3-quick-lessons-from-my-failed-project...
It would be interesting if one could attach a karma system to an IRC network. The #perl channels have long had infobots hanging out in channel recording karma informally. (You simply say [username]++ to increment karma).

Before you object, yes I know everything is gameable. I'm just throwing it out there. We have karma systems for async discussion, and they work at least somewhat well. Why not synchronous too?

There is no such thing as sorting messages by karma for synchronous chat but perhaps other analogues could be found. Maybe in the same way that Slashdot has "browsing at +2" you can choose to receive all messages or just messages from higher karma people.
Brad Feld on the gap between Washington, VCs, entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley
Google Apps highlights – 9/24/2010
The man page covers the problems with strtok pretty well. I found it useful enough and while the code that uses it is pretty awkward it works well enough and gets the job done.

I think I that I have used it in shipping code two or three times. These days I don't do much in C so it's unlikely I'll ever use it again.
I think this "minority/majority shareholder" business is probably a misleading red herring. The point is that the company's creditors agreed to do business with a corporation, which is a separate legal entity from the officers of the corporation. Full stop.

If you personally guaranteed any of the company's debts --- and don't ever do that --- the story is obviously different. But if Rackspace invoices your company, you could own 99.9999% of its shares and most probably not owe a dime.

There are situations --- they vary from state to state --- that "pierce the corporate veil". Fraud is one of them, so is negligence, and so (in some crazy states) is payroll. What they tend to have in common is a tort: something an agent of the company explicitly did wrong to cause damages to another party. Signing a contract and not being able to live up to it is almost by definition not the same thing as a tort, which is why law students have separate classes in "torts" and "contract law".
Seems pretty logical to me. As much diversity as Google has, they are still a search company. A lot of the tech they leverage in other areas seems to come from competencies they acquired while improving search.

I never understood why people think they are positioned against FB.. Google and FB don't solve very many of the same problems.
I'm coming at it from a technical background, but something that excites me from a business perspective is developing a business system that is able to efficiently execute plans in a certain space. However, just as I'm about to do that, I find there's one particular plan that's got the potential to make it bigger than all the others, and I make an "all in" bet...
Thanks for the response. Yah we've considered meeting with the small businesses individually but that's just really time intensive. But we'll definitely take it into consideration.
A thousand times this.

The whole point of incorporating is to provide protection to persons in this exact situation.
Did Percona help Facebook troubleshoot their recent incident?
Making the World’s Data Computable
I'm thinking if they are storing 3 million tweets that's got to be about 900 customers meaning $9000/month in revenue.
An excellent documentary on Harlan Ellison - Dreams with Sharp Teeth.

Streaming on Netflix.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1018887/
Point rss2email at the rss feed of your twitter account, and then set up your mail server to filter those emails into a special twitter folder. Job done.
strtok() altering the source string is a natural consequence of null termination. The traditional Pascalian equivalent (put the string length at the head of the string) creates a symmetric problem at the head of the string. My (perhaps naive) idea is to use a struct containing the string length and pointing to the beginning of the string data. Nondestructive tokenization becomes simple.

This post actually gave me an impetus to go back and add tokenization to my string library that's built around this idea.
How did you decide that price point? Are your operating costs very high?
In my case, Colemak was declared the best even though Capewell had less travel—because, I believe, Colemak had a considerably greater proportion of index-finger use. I reckon that because the Personalized layout clearly aims for maximum index finger use, with a slight favor on the right.
I think you are probably just dead wrong here. I'm prepared to find out otherwise when 'grellas comes in here and stomps on all our crazy speculatifyin', but I'm willing to stake some personal HN reputation on this assertion: what you are saying is crazy-talk.

What's at issue in this situation isn't the size of the stake in the company you own, but rather the fact that (say) Rackspace agreed to do business with your company and not you. For you to be on the hook for Rackspace/Company debts, Rackspace will have to convince a court that both you and Rackspace had an understanding that you were the one making a hosting agreement. Against that will be the fact that they invoiced your company, accepted payments for your company, signed a contract with your company, and that the service they provided was used solely for your company.

Since companies go out of business all the time, my guess is that this never happens. Why would Rackspace waste time going after company debts when 99% of the time they'll never see a dime, and, on occasion, may risk legal action themselves by bringing frivolous lawsuits?

There are situations where you can slip up and obligate yourself to your company's creditors; if you Google, you'll find out for instance that in Iowa you want to be very careful about how your company's checks are layed out and signed. But it is not the case that "if you just slapped something together on Bizfilings.com you're probably not protected". Generally, for contacts: limited liability corporation is a limited liability corporation.
What's strange is that the commercials for Chrome are pretty good. This ad is painful to watch. I kept seeking around to see if it got better or at least was different after awhile.

Do the people who made this think that everyone wants to find pizza all the time? It seems far more likely is that you're in Newport RI and you want to find the best Lobster Roll or you're in Memphis and want to find the best BBQ nearby. That's how I end up using the location features of something like Yelp.
I thought this ad was excellent. I chuckled at first, but 10 minutes of entranced viewing later I felt vividly confronted by the absurd and actually had to go lie down. Taken in a very broad context it actually feels like a modern internet art house film.
Ask HN: Help with procuring a laptop for someone in New Delhi
Hello HN, I have an unusual request:

An internet friend of mine in New Delhi would very much like a laptop of their own to work on a little start-up idea full time in stead of in fits and starts, but shipping one internationally is going to be fraught with risk (theft, damage, etc).

So I'm wondering if anybody in or around New Delhi has a laptop that they would want to part with for a fair value, anything from a netbook or larger would be good.

If you do, please let me know and we'll arrange for payment and pick-up somehow, my email is j@ww.com

thank you.

Jacques
Can't remember who it was, Bradbury, Heinlein, possibly Spider Robinson, who gave the advice:

Make your kid the deal that they can stay up as late as they want as long as they're reading. Kids will fight bedtime by any means necessary.
Actual user review I once received - "Even though I could not start your program on my Windows 98, I still give it 4 out of 5 stars, because it looks awesome" (on screenshots).

So, yes, design matters :)
It's exactly the same thing and one of the reasons distros should get the hell out of the business of shipping stuff like this.

I'm on a mission. Distros that like to use languages, say like python, for system level stuff should stuff that shit somewhere isolated and ONLY use it for system level stuff.

Then they can provide or not provide a native package for python2.7/python3.1/ruby1.9.2 ... you get the point. With distros like RHEL and Ubuntu LTS, they lose ALL value as a platform for ruby or python development because they don't release often enough or worry about breakage to keep those languages up to date.

This is why companies like ActiveState are making a KILLING providing supported after-market dynamic language binaries.

What the distros should be doing is, besides isolating any dynamic language they use for system-level configuration, providing with the support of the language vendors an installable local package repository. I.e. you should be able to install a base RHEL provided python 2.7 RPM + local PyPi server and grab which packages you want to standardize on. Same goes for Ruby and gems.

This would solve the issue entirely and keep LTS distros like RHEL and Ubuntu from being irrelevent in 2 weeks when a new version of a gem comes out that you have to have for app X.
3 keys to success with the Freemium Model
Hmm. I'm going to get crucified here but we've come up with a little
language we call L (for little language. Really :)

http://www.bitmover.com/lm/L.html

It's not really that interesting to most people, it was designed to be easy to read, easy to maintain larger programs in, in particular, it was designed to be easy to read and review, that was the point.

It was not designed to be interesting to hackers like the folks here, I strongly suspect that 98% of you will go WTF? You based this on top of tcl? Are you retarded? And the answer is "well, yeah, sort of. But it fit our needs".

Anyway, we're in the midst of a commercial product release but after that I can see about getting the source out for anyone who wants (BSD license or whatever tcl is, I know it's BSD or BSD like) as well as prebuilt images for all the common platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, *BSD, HPUX, Solaris, AIX, even IRIX and SCO for the 3 people in the world still using those).

If anyone has constructive feedback, bring it on. It's a moving target which is why we haven't released yet, haven't nailed down 1.0 hard enough that we want to live with it. We are using it internally.
You guys are missing the point. Microsoft did something like this a while ago (I think it was microsoft?). The idea is to make a an so horrifyingly bad that it gets covered in "the news" and viewed by millions and millions of people who then spend several minutes reading comments about the commercial and thinking about the product.

It's brilliant.
Why You Should Always Annotate Your Wireframes
This is great. It's going to be a goldmine for historians in a few years. Twitter is becoming a finger on the pulse of the world.
Has Eduardo Saverin gotten a bad rap with 'The Social Network?'
I'm not sure what law books you are reading, but when a person commits fraud it is one thing, when a company defaults it is entirely another.

First, one is a criminal offence, and the other is most certainly not.

The act of incorporating is exactly the act of replacing personal responsibility with that of the corporation. He isn't even a majority owner.
What would you recommend for a younger boy, say 5-7 years old? Harry Potter might be too complex to catch on at first read IMO.
And with grains and agriculture, it barely can! I don't think the issue is diets...
HTC CEO: 'initially, we don't have time' to put Sense on WP7
...all this industry gossip, fanboy-bait, and the lack of user-generated content drives down the quality for me in a big way

The more mainstream adoption HN receives, the more the stories will degrade to the lowest common denominator—that of gossip, fan-bait, and chop shop content. I returned to my feed reader for the majority of my interesting articles a long time ago.

The "new" page is basically a feed aggregator of tons of individuals' posts, most of whom don't have the notoriety or baiting title necessary to stick on the page long enough for the few people who read "new" to see them.

Like any other public link sharing site—no matter how niche or well-seeded to start—it will increasingly pander to the 90% who come rather than the 10% who started it. And it'll keep doing that until it becomes reddit (no insult meant; reddit is a great public link share). But at this stage I'm pretty confident it'll always have better discussion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation
What got me was the video of the dog sticking his head out of the car window, with his lips inflated from catching air. I bailed after that though. I suspected that I should quit while I was smiling.
Web frontend.
Persistant users, where you can leave messages for people.
Notification of interesting channels also on the network.
Let me get it on my phone.