skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if Reddit is susceptible to the same kind of gaming that top users did on Digg? Or is this something they've planned for? Methinks Reddit has been spared since it's been out of the lime-light until recently.
It really isn't held as a major sin by the general public in the US. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/b... http://www.slate.com/id/2198597/
Flying a C172 G1000 is not the same as flying a 737-600. You're not shooting RNAV approaches, CAT I ILS, or low alt routes. You shouldn't even be looking at the instruments (I'm sure the CFI has told you).

How about that annoying click/buzz in your headset from the phones TX? It's easy for you to ask your friend/CFI/passenger to turn off their phone but how about a cabin of ~100 people...while flying your approach?
According to the Wikipedia article on the Analytical Engine, some other chap called Ludgate designed a streamlined version which could do a 20-digit decimal multiply in about 6 seconds; its volume was about 230 litres. (He made detailed plans but never actually built it.)

20 decimal places is about 64 bits. One design for a 64x64->128 multiplier is described in http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5912832/description.html and takes about 33k gates to achieve a propagation delay of about 200 gates. I'm not sure what propagation delays are like on modern CPUs; let's suppose it's 20ps per gate, so that a modern-silicon multiplier can do a 4ns multiply in 33k gates. How much space should we think of that as taking up? Not just the volume of the gates themselves; we need some volume for circuit boards, cooling, power supply, etc., etc., etc. A small modern PC might be a litre in volume and contains maybe the equivalent of 200M gates (CPU, memory, whatever else). So 33k gates corresponds to maybe 1/600 of a litre. So, in volume per unit power, modern technology beats Ludgate's version of the analytical engine by maybe a factor of (230 x 6) / (1/600 x 4x10^-9) or about 2x10^14.

(Don't take this too seriously; there are a lot of very dubious assumptions in the above.)

Now, let's say Google has 10^5 machines occupying 1 litre each. The equivalent in analytical engines would be 2x10^19 litres, or 2x10^16m^3.

The radius of the earth is about 6.4 x 10^6 m, so its surface area is 4 pi r^2 ~= 5x10^14 m^2. About 1/3 of this is land, so let's say 2x10^14 m^2. So we'd need to cover the land area of the earth 100m deep in analytical engines.

Dubious assumptions or not, I think I agree with your guess.
I've had my cell phone on during a commercial flight before. I had it off on the first leg, turned in on to call my wife during a layover, then forgotten I had done so when they asked me to turn the cell phones off on the second leg because mentally it still was off.

Given the number of flights I have been on (not all that many) and assuming I'm not particularly more or less likely to have this happen than anybody else (I'm feeling comfortably average here), and given the number of cell phones on a flight, I rather suspect that the average commercial flight of a big plane has at least one cell phone on for the duration with probability approaching 1.

Make of that what you will. My point is mostly that the odds that this debate are entirely academic and in fact flights routinely fly with cell phones on are in fact very good.
All of those would be interesting posts, but I don't really have a problem with them. I do have a problem with the way Facebook treats their developers, so that's what I wrote about. I'm sure the post could have been better, and I'd enjoy any specific suggestions you might have. Thanks!
McIlroy is not claiming to have done what you call "breaking randomized quicksort". Therefore the fact that he hasn't done that doesn't mean that he made a mistake or said anything untrue. That is all.
If there's 0.000000001% of anything happen, why risk?
Have to agree with the pricing model, I would host here 100% but when I hit the price, I can't validate the enormous cost - and this is coming from someone who has spent $220 getting my blogged fixed after incorrectly changing something and not being able to correct it.

Now, I'll have to be reminded of this down the line by some extraneous source if/when the cost drops.
Your figure publishes the data well enough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Taylor
The threat isn't about damaging the plane or forcing it to crash, it is about potential interference with electronic guidance and instruments, especially in the event of an instrument landing.

With a 2 degree glide slope during landing, even a 0.05% change in the radio signal can see a plane hit a mountain as opposed to safely clearing it. Here are two relevant accidents where the instruments were just a fraction off and caused a collision:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_801

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Inter_Flight_148
> got it for my son and he rode it to school his senior year in high school

So, what was his weekly wedgie average?
lars: can you explain #1 a bit more? how is a simple widget/affiliate button spam?

just trying to understand this a bit better, because we are planning on doing an official mozilla mdn affiliate campaign to promote other parts of our documentation.

thanks!
- jay, mdn product manager
I agree. You could do both for a while -- stay with your full time work and take on some freelancing jobs. Even the small freelance projects will be a good learning experience on how to manage client expectations, create estimates, and determine your pricing. With the day job as the backup, your early mistakes as a contractor won't have nearly as big of an impact.

If you go that route, be sure to monitor your workload closely -- don't overestimate your ability or underestimate the complexity of any given project.
Mobile Internet apps moving e-commerce off the Web
Did it turn out that anyone actually had his phone on?
Yes, Tropo does international voice and SMS. We've got numbers in 36 countries and speech recognition in 9 langauges.

If you buy a number from us outside the US, we can't do SMS on that yet, but we're working on it. In the meantime, feel free to send texts to and from anywhere from your US number. We won't even charge you any extra for the international sending.

Teleku is now owned by Tropo and as such can do international SMS as well. CloudVox doesn't do SMS worldwide, but I was talking to one of their founders recently and he mentioned they're working on it.
Not even close.

Google's estimated amount of servers [1]: 450 000. Let's say they each have at least a 2GHz CPU = 2 000 000 000 computations/s.

That's 9 * 10^14 computations/s. Let's be overly generous and assume machine can do 1 computations/s (although it is normally much less for multiplications) as estimated by Babbage himself [2]. Let's again be generous and assume an analytical engine's surface on earth is no more than 1m^2. To attain 9 * 10^14 computations/s, one would need at least 9 * 10^14 engines. Those machines would occupy an area of 9 * 10^14 m^2. According to Wolfram Alpha [4], this is ~1.8 × land area earth.

Also, consider the amount of energy this would consume!

[1] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/14/whos-...

[2] http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/authentic.html, http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/lpae.html#SpeedOfComputation

[3] http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/DanielChen.shtml

[4] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=9+*+10^14+m^2
Segway company owner rides scooter off cliff
Because you have to live your life? The risk of getting killed in a car accident on the way to work is probably higher than that.
Great Article! Obscene title. Best of luck with it.....
thanks bobds.

we are definitely looking for ways to improve seo on the mdn/mdc website.

not much has been done in that area for a while, but that is going to change very soon.

- jay, mdn product manager
This is a bit impractical.
Recognizing the food with few errors would be horribly hard. I think it is sometinhg like speech recognition or automatic translation: yes, it is easy to create some simple not very good speech recognizer or translator software, but it is incredibly hard to create a high quality one.
The only remaining option is to create a user interface where the user can type-in his daily food intake very easily/intuitively. Maybe most users would want to do this on their computer's screen and not on a phone.
Of course there are plenty of calory-tracker, 'diet organizer' software on the market like http://www.dietorganizer.com/. But I am not an expert in this market.
Q&A with uTest's CEO and Co-Founder Doron Reuveni
TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay – Away From Keyboard has raised $48k on Kickstarter
Just made my guess before reading yours. Some of my assumptions are more generous than yours, but the conclusion is the same: not enough land area on earth.
Totally agree. What is the point of this article? To have a laugh at the "airhead" that didn't understand what plagiarism was? This article reads like a chain email for "darwin awards" to me.
How to automate business processes using Ruby and Markdown
If you want to be cynical about it, then the FAA also wants to stay out of the public eye any way possible, so it has less paperwork, less scrutiny, and less overhead to deal with.
At least it probably landed right side up....

:(
This is just spelling / grammar, I have no problems with these errors, especially when the main documentation is wiki-based (this may be because I'm not a native speaker). In my limited experience with Facebook docs before the Open Graph API, I haven't seen factual errors, but there are a lot of omissions.

Open Graph API seems very clean and it also seems like it doesn't need much documentation... if the API calls actually worked. I haven't used it and I don't plan to start using it given these reports (in the old API there were also quite a few things that break occasionally and take forever to be repaired).
Ask HN: Confirm email or password?
When a user is signing up to a new service(twitter, forum) the standard is that they enter their email once or twice, and their password twice.

The only company to lean away from this that I've noticed is Facebook, who have you enter your email twice and password once.

Which would you do if you were starting a project? I can understand that many Facebook users will be reusing their dictionary-word password everywhere, but I can see both pros and cons to only asking for a password once.

WWHND?
>If it seems impossible that an app could recognize food types, consider that software can already recognize faces, voices, specific songs, and fingerprints. Recognizing broccoli can’t be that much harder.

Assuming "broccoli" is a stand-in for "arbitrary food", that's one of the most wrong things I've ever seen Scott Adams say. Vision is a really hard problem, and there's far more variance in the appearance of food than there is in those of faces or fingerprints. (Recognizing songs is a non-sequitur.)
Despite economy, Americans don't want farm work
This takes "feature X shouldn't be too hard to implement" to a whole new level: "Recognizing broccoli can’t be that much harder."
While there would seem to be some lower bound under which it would not be possible for a country to have any education at all, it would seem there is some upper bound beyond which it can afford a bureaucracy - and as such, poor countries actually have an advantage which makes up for the lower budgets.
Why Most Acquisitions Don't Happen
Serial entrepreneur John Warrillow speaks with Beringer Capital's Perry Miele about what drives a buyer to walk away from a deal.
Paid apps coming to more nations, Google tells developers
I'm curious to hear what early users we got that may have helped us. OK, Arrington was a good one. =) Others?
Should hoteliers bring music to our ears?
There are a lot of people (of varying degrees of foolishness[1]) who want to work at Google or Apple but wouldn't even consider the companies you listed.

[1]Prefer working at Google to Oracle? Fair enough. Rather work at Apple than Microsoft? Ha, have fun with that.
Former avionics tech here. Not scientific, but I've seen CDMA devices interfere with nav equipment, and GSM devices interfere with communications system (ala the infamous dat-dit-dah GSM sound over speakers). And these on nuke-hardened (EMP-shielded) military systems.

These issues aren't going to crash the plane, however with the sheer variety of cellular devices, it's just a good idea to keep them off.

Besides, you people who can't seem to shut them off are an annoying lot, so there's also a co-passenger sanity aspect to it. Just leave them off, are you that addicted to Farmville?
The Known History of Quarter Shrinking
this was my thought. unless the third party comment is from someone famous (which is to say, someone I know of; someone who has a reputation. Recommendations are worthless without a reputation to back them up.) my assumption is that they are made up. Really, they might as well be.

Now, if your marketing to less technical people, or people who are less sophisticated when it comes to seeing through advertising, then maybe quotes from joe random guy right next to some nice looking stock photos would be useful? I know of several real-estate ASPs who did rather well for themselves with the quotes from joe random guy plus stock photos.
Python idiom for taking the single item from a list
https://twitter.com/signup

Username once, password once, and email address once. If by some twist of fate I enter my password wrong, they have my email address. They send a confirmation email right away, while I'm still on the signup page, so if I got my email address wrong and that confirmation bounces, I get notified, and I have a chance to correct it (since I'm logged in after account creation).
They don't pick on phones over other electronics. On every flight I've been on, they ask passengers to shut off "all portable electronic devices," including things that often don't even communicate over a network, like CD players.
More info here:

http://lifehacker.com/5154698/sync-files-and-folders-outside...
Gravity doesn't pull you forward, it pulls you down. Unless a particular human never learned to walk or sit upright, their natural tendency in balance is to hold themselves in-line with gravity*, not necessarily at a perpendicular angle to the surface they're standing on. (There is some input from the eyes, which trick house attractions and the like exploit, but we're usually pretty good about it.)

This is what learning balance is all about, and most of us pick it up by the time we're two years old. Segways detect the human riders' effort at balancing (which most do without effort or awareness), and exploit it.
To me going to university isn't the surprise. But that Sarah was apparently picked as the subject matter area expert for this topic.

This leads me to think that maybe there was some confusion going on. Is it possible that Sarah actually wrote the source article and thought that her seminal work in the field would be good background information?
What's wrong with "it"? It's gender neutral. Life neutral, even, can't get more neutral than that.
We are going to be doing some basic SEO very soon, but some of the current issues are due to the wiki platform we are using. We'll be investigating way to improve the overall markup for all docs.

Thanks.
- Jay, MDN product manager
If you don't feel safe enough flying in US under FAA you can try some more liberal on safety places like Africa or Indonesia. Your survival chances decline can be calculated quite precisely though.
Node's strength are in doing streaming UIs. Like realtime twitter feeds that push new tweets to the UI the moment they come in. It also does allow sharing code such as client side and server side validation. And if you use require.js you can develop modules that work server aide and client side.

Node.js does add new features, it's ease of use is a feature. Server side push used to be more complicated than it had to be. Python has twisted which I found difficult to setup as it required Python skills which I was rusty on and was more abstracted than I needed.

And of course server side JavaScript really is great, I don't see how it's that hard to understand two environments. You can't get rid of that they are different environments but they can share much code and does require one less language to use than most web app frameworks.
Who is Beta?

But, seriously, isn't this just an export of the functionality (and interface, even!) that's been in GMail for ages?
git --bare init

and push to it, then can share with collaborators, use from different computers or use it just as backup.
Depends on your audience.

For a tech audience, maybe one of each is fine without confirmation. Technical users would be more careful.

For a much less technical audience (at least 50% of FB users) you can never be too careful. FB would probably ask the user 3 times each, but they'd be guaranteed that their users would then enter it once incorrectly, and may never be able to correctly submit the form.

Seriously though, it does depend on the audience, imo.
It's a little bigger consideration in this case imo, because one of the big selling points is the ability to do "JS everywhere" and share code between the browser and server side of apps. Not that that's the only reason node.js exists, but it's a nice aspect that becomes harder if the server and browser sides diverge more.
Most humans are capable of eating healthy. As most humans are capable of recognizing faces. But not all.
Startups: Not For Women.™
Hopefully sites like http://www.glassdoor.com can help to even out this imbalance.

Agreed. I'm a huge fan of glassdoor and would encourage everyone (including managers/founders) to participate.

They seem to encourage balance and only criticism that is constructive.
I hope the US doesn't import the madness that already afflicts many parts of the world.

http://rechten.uvt.nl/koops/cryptolaw/cls2.htm
Well if we limit the visual input to the realms of visible light then maybe not, but what if your camera could recognize other frequencies, like infrared and the brocoli gave off a unique set of frequencies that allowed it to be identified. Also the app doesn't need to know about everything, just everything food related, and not even all of it just the major.

It would also need a way to measure weight. It's all fair enough saying it's broccoli but you also need to say how much.
Exactly -- big difference between a 2-seater flying VFR vs. IFR conditions.
U.N to appoint space ambassador to act as first contact for aliens
Newsflash:  Founders Don't Really Care About AngelGate
> strongly recommend against building your entire business around a single platform

I see this statement a lot and I never understand it. If you're Zynga, should you build Farmville for OpenSocial and as an independent site too? The cost of doing this seems prohibitive.

Most businesses built on Facebook can be taken elsewhere if the cost of the Facebook platform starts to outweigh the benefits. Even Farmville can be ran independently, but consider how many users they'd lose in the transition and afterwards.
I just started noticing that about two weeks ago. What an monumental pile of failure those docs are.

Why they dumped the only hope they had -- the wiki -- I will never understand.
If your co-founder put in significant work before you started, then you should expect less than 50/50 ownership.

It sounds like you both put in equally developing the idea, and equal risk of your effort having no payoff (a very high risk for any startup). I can't see any reason from your description that you should expect less than 50/50 split of the reward. (Maybe 40/60 depending on some contributions before you got involved).
Does this person believe the unwashed masses think it's absolutely acceptable to plagiarize?

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

when someone claims "if A then B", they don't necessarily mean "if not A, then not B" :)
So awesome that his contributions to charity play such a prominent part in the article announcing his death. A life well spent.
I submitted my YC app since Sep 7th. None of the links in the app has been visited yet (including the website). I guess they received plenty of applications.
Study: Microsoft has 'fallen off the mainstream media’s radar'
Why? You can have arbitrarily complex logic and computation in client-side JavaScript. Whether it's a good idea is another question.
Reddit is somewhat susceptible. I have no inside track on my info, but the admins seem to have built some sneaky mechanisms for dealing with problematic users. My favorite is the practice of "ghosting" accounts, where it looks to the account user like their comments, upvotes, etc. are being counted when in reality they are invisible to the rest of the community. It seems to work.

Of course, for all Reddit's antipathy toward Digg, they had the advantage of learning from Digg's mistakes.
NY Bar: Lawyers may comb social media for dirt
Whoops, my bad. I was running on memory there
The Frontal Cortex: How Much Should We Practice?
And in that thread he did confirm they only make $250/month, split two ways. That's sad. I bought their first game years ago (I forgot it's name, but it doesn't appear to be for sale anymore). It was really good.
The situation where you can (could?) get screwed by AMT is if you exercise and hold, and the value of the stock drops. This isn't universal and there are different rules for different types of employee stock options, so make sure you know the rules that apply to you if you are considering an exercise-and-hold.
It would be a pain to pull a smartphone out before each meal to snap a picture. To put some UX polish on this idea, it should be an embedded appliance fitted inside the stomach or other suitable organ. I'm not a doctor, but installing a device that "reads all input" would be more accurate, user-friendly, and not require food photography 3-6 times a day.
I guess sarcasm is a big no-no around here (for various reasons.)
gitref.org makes it really easy to understand and use git, at least it did for me. No graphical tools required.
The Hacker Milieu as Gift Culture
Yes, convincing each other is pointless. ;)

At the same time, I'm still curious what could be learned from the data? What are the real usage/access patters of mobile devices on such sites? --Mostly due to always wanting to know more about how most people use mobiles. I think it would be fun to analyze the data just to see what I could learn from it.

Since I'll probably never get access to the log data, I'll be left wondering. Oh well. I guess I'll have to find some other curiosity to occupy my time, but luckily I have a lot of them.
I just had a client asking for this service. Companies are completely price-insensitive about blog hosting; most of the time, they're getting screwed over by contractors building "custom" blog solutions. For sites with custom domains and no branding, you should price this mid 5-figures annually.

My only nit: I understand the high-wire act you're performing to message "security" on this, but your story on security (summed: "FUD. Everything's insecure if it's managed poorly. That's where we come in.") was a huge turn-off. Wordpress is distinctively insecure, which is why it needs hosting solutions like this. Your security graf made me think you don't actually know how Wordpress security works.
Seaside running on Gemstone's OODB/Smalltalk VM combo > http://seaside.gemstone.com/

The combination of Seaside w/ a scalable object database completely changed my view on how web development can be done.
AngelGate: Is It Time To Consider Alternative Funding?
Seems like GPS for landing is poor dependency, considering how easy it is to jam GPS...
I amuses me to no end how everybody assumes that the reason we eat unhealthy food is that we don't know any better.

In reality, it is because unhealthy food taste better (not always, but most of the time) and is a lot more convinient.
May I ask on what experience and evidence do you base all of your conclusions on? I assume you are or were a military pilot, or an analyst?