skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Chrome has traditionally been considered the browser to beat when it comes to speed."

Traditionally? It was first released on windows only 2 years ago...
It just occurred to me that there's another reason: in programming, it is relatively easy to detect a bad programmer.

Consider another complicated profession, like securities analysis. As long as they know the jargon and have some reasonable-sounding opinions, you cannot determine who is skilled and who isn't with a five-minute interview.[1] It might take years to separate skilled people from the lucky, or even the unlucky!

So it may be that in other professions they have similar difficulties hiring good quality workers. It's just that it's impossible to know with a five-minute "fizzbuzz" type test.

[1] I'm just guessing here; maybe a Wall Streeter can set me straight?
Many times technical cofounders are used to basically "develop" the founder's idea. Anybody looking for a technical cofounder should give more than just ideas. Ideas are just 1% of the total work.
Honestly, if you're storing sensitive user information, or site access information in your cookies, then you deserve the resulting exploits.

I agree, unless this attack completely crashes the .Net stack to allow privilege escalation or similar, it's complete hyperbole.
I'm not even sure it's worth submitting patches to Diaspora, both because of the fundamental problems with the code, but also because of their "Open Core" licensing scheme (AGPL + contributor agreement): http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2009/10/16/open-core-shareware...

Looking through the code, it looks like Diaspora is really just putting a front end and "aspects" on top of OStatus. I think it might be good at this point to just scrap the Diaspora code and start over from the basics with a good OStatus-based reference implementation in Rails.
They do not advertise that feature as much though, and by using email, wouldn't you miss out on at least some of their main social networking selling point?

A lot of what makes them popular can only be found on their site. You don't get any engineering vibe from them, they project a very sensitive image that appeals to the heart. By not visiting their site, you are not participating.

I think the posterous offering is not diluted by email posting, and it would at least appear to me to make more sense if more people on posterous use email posting.
According to Groupon's COO, the redemption rate is "north of 80%."

http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=145552
There's a lot of negativity and "I told you so" snickering floating around Diaspora on Hacker News.

I'm putting it down to envy: these guys have shipped some pre-alpha code that's interesting to a large number of people.

Excellent marketing in the open source community for developer eyeballs, perhaps not so good in terms of end-user experiences, but that's not the point at this stage, numbers will be low and the perceptions of the dumb early-adopters (of pre-alpha distributed social networking code, ffs) shouldn't leak too badly into the mainstream.

However, people are now eating the dogfood, and I expect to see fairly rapid improvements in the code: not unexpected for an alpha drop in my experience.

To the people who are moaning, would you like others to see your alpha code and laugh bitterly about you being a young (or old for that matter) upstart?
While I somewhat agree that Apple's licensing of OS X is overly restrictive (though the reasons for those licensing terms are fairly complex), the OP is specifically talking about testing web apps in IE, which is the only browser with >1.0 percent market share that does not run on both Windows and OS X.
I am not the usual Anti-Microsoftie you see around these parts. I love many of their products. Many of my gripes over the years have slowly been fixed, but there are still some:

- Windows does not have a strong history of (non-half-assed) interoperability. This is a hinderance to using Microsoft products in many projects. Use the same technologies as everyone else and do it right! Screw XPS, Screw WinRM (or tunnel it over SSH like normal people). We're too busy to learn The New Way To Do $foo This Year.

- Stop reimplementing the wheels everyone else uses. A good example is the XPS vs PDF war. Everyone else uses PDF, it's a reasonably open standard, just USE IT. Do go create your own "value-added" garbage.

- Your enterprise products are not only not free, they're costly. I can use a free open source web application stack that is at least as good as ASP.NET/ASP.NET MVC. I love Visual Studio though. BizSpark is a start, but what about those of us doing large scale community/"hobby"/not-for-profit projects?

- Ballmer's leadership sucks. Every time I read one of his stupid quotes about his stance on $foo, I cringe.

- blogs.msdn.com is gold. Keep this program and the openness from the engineers going!

- Stop the inter/intra product group fighting that ends up hurting the end users. Get some stronger leadership.

- Stop trying to make Windows more simple for grandma. You're making it harder to navigate for the rest of us (see the Windows 7 control panel as a perfect example).
Then you should gently persuade them away from JavaServer Faces and Rails too. The same vulnerability exists in both.
First impressions are important. Just as I was excited to hear about a decentralized, privacy-aware social network back in May, I am now worried when it's made available for us to watch its course.

The fact is, the implementation is obviously problematic. I won't go as far as saying that the design is flawed, although some security vulnerabilities are certainly pointing that way. It's obvious that Diaspora's developers are inexperienced, and therefore could use all the help they can get from us. This is one point in favour of an early release, in my book. On the other hand, early design and implementation decisions have profound implications during the lifespan of a project (this is especially true when it comes to security), and I will not trust my personal details to Diaspora in its current form; the project still has a (very) long way to go before being technically up-to-date.
Being inspired just means hating/loving something so much that it causes action. You don't hate your job enough to leave it so try thinking of something you love so much that will cause you to leave it.

From your other comment - you want to work for yourself and not for someone else. Search for a person who is doing such cool stuff, or owns such cool stuff, or is surrounded by such attractive people, etc that owns their own business that it'll get you moving.
A very specific subset of 2d graphics performance it seems: 2d animation using certain kinds of transforms. Rendering large/complex SVGs isn't getting 60x faster.
Microsoft should prepare itself for a world in which the consumer computing experience will no longer be dominated by a single player. Apple, Google, Palm/HP, Blackberry, Nintendo, Sony and probably many others will grab a share of the time and money that in the past would've gone to newer Wintel PCs.

Ms should target Windows as a strong business-only brand, and this focus would probably make for a better product. It's probably wise to still play in the consumer market, with XBox and Windows Mobile and whatnot, but expecting lower margins and increased competition.

Also, please hire someone to come up with better names for your products. It's getting ridiculous.
Nothing has been said about the content of it yet, so it's a little early to speculate, but I suspect it's basically going to be some sort of music/comedy thing with them MCing. In other words, more of an anti-rally than a counter-rally.
One thing I really liked about this post: most people readily complain about something, yet only a few like Steve actually do something to help fix it.
> MS needs to really decide how much longer they want to push an OS that is based on Windows/DOS heritage and not unix.

Some of us have the audacity to believe that NT OS might actually be superior to UNIX-like OSes. Sorry, it's true. And this coming from a "UNIX-like OS guy". I'm all for stripping away the DOSification of NT, like drive letters, instead of native (and UNIX-like) paths, etc though.

Edited slightly due to formatting errors on my part
http://www.dillerdesign.com/experiment/DD_belatedPNG/

(a PNG-fix for IE6)

// PLEASE READ:

// Absolutely everything in this script is SILLY. I know this. IE's rendering of certain pixels doesn't make sense, so neither does this code!
Taming the Textbook Market
I always knew that Stewart and Colbert were leftists. But it was easy to ignore the soft overtones of progressive bias and enjoy the show. First they were comedians, illuminating the insanity of our political class as only comedians can.

Now Stewart and Colbert walk the dangerous line between comedian and just another partisan water carrier. They should be careful lest they lose what made them popular in the first place.
Microsoft has been advertising that IE6 is being depreciated with their support agreements, any company migrating to Vista/7, and through IE7/IE8 and IE9 developer previews. Any IT department that hasn't picked up that hint that's been running for the past 4 years has no excuse. Just like Microsoft doesn't support Win95 anymore, they do have explicit ends to the support of their applications, and IE6 is certainly one of them.
Here you go! There's not just one, but a whole bunch!

http://gitorious.org/social/pages/ProjectComparison
Since you are testing all beta versions here, why not use Chrome 7 beta for a new benchmark ?
Mild Memory Loss Is Not a Part of Normal Aging, New Research Finds
[HTML 5] Car racing game
one pragmatic idea I had was to help support colinux efforts. There's been a lot of debate in that community over getting support for x64 revisions of windows.
The subreddits are fantastic! It's like they have created a community inside of a community.
> I don't see this as a problem; I like the stability of MS vs. Linux (having watched the rise and fall of devfs and hal now, along with the death of gnome-mount, gconf, gdm theming and xdmcp serving, etc.)

The problem that I see is that "stability" in the Microsoft world is entirely conditional on your willingness to upgrade everything all of the time since the whole toolkit is in a constant state of flux. Sure, you get working and officially-supported frameworks, but the goalposts are always shifting further down the field, and I think that's intentional on Microsoft's part.
I evaluated both of these platforms without really thinking that either were competing with each other (although, I guess it's obvious). I found that, yes, Tumblr is huge, more user friendly and community driven, but it's also over-run with 13 year olds posting Twilight pictures, whereas Posterous just felt a little more focused on the single user blogging experience. A lot less clique-influenced. I liked that. It's disheartening to know they're going for the same things Tumblr is.
Yeah and how much code is being used now that existed when they didn't have security? You can't compare this and what Microsoft, Apple or Twitter have done, I'd be very surprised if any of those companies continue to use code that was developed at a time when they didn't consider security. Although thinking about it, the software industry is questionable... maybe I'm wrong, it just seems a very bad start.

Twitter has had major security problems, same with many other "big" companies, shouldn't this be a lesson that security is the primary concern especially for an open source project?
NT is not legacy software by any means. If anything, they are bolting legacy crap onto NT OS (such as the concept of drive letters, where the NT OS natively uses more UNIX-like paths)
http://www.tumblr.com/directory/erotica (NSFW, FYI)

I guess you could argue erotica isn't porn, but yes, they like it. The notion actually extends beyond sexually explicit material, as many popular tumblelogs in the directory has porn or something that alludes to porn in their title even though they have nothing to do with sex.
Ask HN: Do I need to register with the state to be a freelance programmer in US?
I am located in the US, and have a green card. I have a fulltime job and am looking at doing freelance on the side.

Do I need to do anything official such as register with the state or setup some separate bank account to be able to do freelance programming and accept payments?

I searched and read that unless you incorporate you will need to report taxes as a sole proprietor. Do I need some legal stuff to work as a freelance programmer?
Because momentum and attention are more important than maturity. The qualities that come from maturity can be built with work; momentum and attention aren't as much of a function of hard work and are far more difficult to capture.
I think that e-commerce is a bit different if it deals with physical goods. $15k in revenue may or not be significant depending how much you are investing in acquiring the goods, and how expensive they are.

Making $15k in revenue from HDTVs might mean you are in trouble. Then you take into consideration costs of direct marketing, telemarketing, display ads, SEM, etc., and you may be in a really tough spot.

However, if you make $15k in the first month for a scalable software product, then you are in a good position to start growing.

I think it's not so much about the launch, but about your first 10 or 100 customers. Regardless of the TC/M!/RRW/HN posts, if you manage to get 100 or even 10 customers, you already have mitigated a lot of the risks that make companies fail: Finding someone that will pay for your product.

I think it was on a steve blank presentation that said something along the lines of:

The reason of why most companies fail, 90% of the time, is not their technology but failure to find paying customers.

Thus, if you launch AND you have paying customers, it means you must be doing something right. Launching alone does not mean anything.
I don't know if this can even be considered a political story. I expect it will have all the political potency of an Improv Everywhere skit.
First people bitch and whine because they are working "in secret" and not releasing code. Then they release and everyone freaks out because it's not finished. I guess the only way everyone would be happy would be if they released a completed project after a week.
And then, Visual Studio raises itself on activation, making focus-follows-mouse too frustrating to keep using, so you can't even use one of the focus-follows-mouse apps if you use Visual Studio.
Ask HN: Health insurance plans for startups?
What plans do people in startups usually go with? Do people go without health insurance sometimes if they feel they are healthy?
Resource Friday: This Week's MUST Read Posts
Coffee shops are interesting because the food / pastries are low-margin while the coffee is high-margin. And people are much more likely to just buy coffee than to just buy a pastry. So as your average check increases, your margins go down.
This code was written by a bunch of undergraduate college students.

This is hiring a bunch of interns (with near zero experience) to implement your product, giving them three months, and then being shocked -- SHOCKED, when the code is not professional grade quality.

I was shocked when everyone and their brother was willing to shell out money to a group of completely unproven college students to produce a distributed open source 'Facebook Clone', that is also 'private'. My inclination is that the 'distributed' and 'private' parts of the description push it into the oxymoron tier of product specifications. I would have expected this alone to give people pause about what the architecture would be (somehow it didn't).

Honestly, at least they have produced something, and for the most part, it works. Hopefully they haven't burned through too much of the $250,000 that they started with. 3 months of development time is honestly nothing.

Presumably, they could get comments on this, throw the entire thing away, re-write while fixing the various issues, and be well beyond where they are now in another three months. (If this is as bad as Steve says, I hope this is the case). Presumably the development will go faster because previously they were learning and developing at the same time (presumably).

Hacking together a prototype that you then throw away is a perfectly reasonable development model. I'm impressed (and pleased) that they have produced anything.
At its core, the real value in something like Diaspora is its protocols. If you disagree with the license, or the language they chose, why not make your own implementation from scratch that can federate with it.

If it survives, I might do this... I think their approach is fine for rolling out a private enterprise FB or creating an alternative hosting solution, but I'd like to see an even more decentralized solution. Ruby isn't a good choice of language for mobile, or native compiled "IJW out of the box" deployable solutions.
Boeing gets $89M to build unmanned aircraft that can stay aloft for 5 years
"BCC sucked at launch, but no one saw it"

Strange thing is, the advantage Facebook had is that it launched to a small audience initially with very limited functionality.
Your comments on IE9 only reflect the user interface. Writing off the whole browser as non innovative because it _looks_ like Chrome is FUD.
At least somebody's got a sense of humor:

Github issue #8: "Facebook has a majority market share"

http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues#issue/8
Wouldn't this still put chrome behind ie9 and Firefox 4? Chrome's rendering perf has been traditionally terrible.

This article is very misleading - acting like Chrome's been ahead of rendering perf this entire time when it is in fact been in last place.
I do think this adds noise to signal, because what people who answer questions are there for is to help people who need it. You didn't, and thus it seems more self serving.

This is interesting. When I said it didn't add noise, I was specifically thinking of question-askers. I didn't consider question answerers.

On the other hand, with a very specific title, people who are just browsing should be able to make a snap decision about whether to read further. Also, it takes much more effort to compose a good answer, than to quickly validate an existing answer.

Consider, that once an answer is there, it's there for all time. We don't know how many people searched for this in the past, but gave up due to poor results. We don't know how many people this will help in the future.

Why wait until they ask the question? When I was learning Lisp, I just used "(+ foo 1)" to increment a number. It was a while before I realized that I could just "(incf foo)". So, in that sense it's a genuine question on my part, just time-delayed from a past self.

Part of good teaching is anticipating what questions will be asked, and answering them before-hand.

What bugs me here is that I've created something. I've organized information -- decreased entropy in the universe. I did all that, but now other people want to bury that information that took energy to create, and that could be useful for all future time.

I'm perfectly okay with someone saying: "this is trivial to me". What I don't like is that someone can say: "this is universally trivial, for all users", let's bury it.

Corrupting search terms can be seen as adding entropy, while improving the likelihood that information will be found is a public service. Picking good search terms is key to the long-term survival of an idea.
I'm currently reading the biography of Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. It's a compelling look at the origins of the American experiment, and it makes me feel hopeful seeing just how similar things were at that time. These are all complaints people were leveling then, just as they have been since the beginning of government.

"If men were angels..."
...if you have a GPU in your netbook
I've found that if I wake up with less than 7-9 hours of sleep, that I get really tired around 4-6pm or so and I end up having to take a nap. I've stopped using an alarm clock and I just get up when I wake up by leaving the blinds open and letting the sun wake me up.
Yes, I programmed it purely with opcodes. The machine was just running a very basic "monitor" that let you write instructions and data into memory in hex and then let you run them.

At first the machine did not even have a cassette interface, so there was no way to save programs and you had to type them in every time. The machine came with some examples, like Conway's "Life". Given that the machine really only had about 256 bytes of usable program storage (half the 1k was used for video) this wasn't quite as bad as it sounds but still pretty tedious.

Actually when I first got a cassette interface I still had to type the cassette loader in by hand to boot :( Eventually I got the rom expansion that included the cassette loader and an assembler.

Obviously writing a program directly into memory in opcodes does involve some upfront thinking, but you'd be surprised how "REPL-like" the coding experience could be :)
Similar threads: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+hours+s...
Is it less work to find a reliable, very part-time assistant than to just do the menial stuff yourself?

Serious question, because I'd love to be pointed to a way to do that.
That's what I love about HN. It's not just the "How I made a bazillion dollars and so can you" its experiences, however limited, even failures, from entrepreneurs - as they are growing. Wonderful. I love seeing specific examples.
I would totally love to do that. Except the protocol is undocumented and unstable.
And this is just one part of page rendering. This part may already be neglectable, representing fractions of a second, drowning in the parsing and structuring of the output done prior to actually rendering it.

To me, all of this is just windbagging and vacuous marketing - just like the (almost entirely) pointless Javascript boasting.
Looks great, looking forward to reading what people have put up.

My initial reaction is that there is way too much stuff going on right away. Make your key graphics and call out much bigger.
It is a bad idea. High probability of pulling down the kernel even if one d-bus enabled application starts spewing crap. May be a bit safer if it was implemented as a module... but overall, not a good idea at all.
Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence.

Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.

Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.

Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.

Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

--Calvin Coolidge
A properly managed S corporation avoids double taxation while providing the liability and legitimacy benefits of doing business as a corporation. That or an LLC should be in place any time someone is doing business; if you aren't working for one, make one. The benefits vs. the ~ $250 a Delaware corporation costs are huge.
Statistics vs. Machine Learning, Fight
It's an awful lot easier for a bunch of third parties to refactor and fix something that's bad, a piece at a time, than for a bunch of third parties to create something from nothing. Diaspora is a good thing, even if it's bad: the mere fact of its existence and the enthusiasm around making it better gives it a vector of development that a mere idea would never have.
http://textpattern.googlecode.com/svn/releases/4.2.0/source/...

$html = parse($html); // the function so nice, he ran it twice