skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Again and again, the things that fundamentally change our lives and our culture looked like toys when they first started. That doesn't mean every toy is worthy of our attention, but people in tech should know better than anyone that you simply can't tell which toys will be important.

When the radio transmission was in wide use, radio as we know it today (as a music box) didn't exist. When it was proposed, a potential investor asked of the inventor:

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"

Fast forward a couple years later, the inventor of the radio music box said of the television:

"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming."

So it is with software and hardware, and now social. If you're interested, I've written about it before: http://iamwil.posterous.com/who-would-pay-for-a-message-sent...
Tweet aggregator according to city
Rate my startup: AudioOrchard.com
Hello HN,

We’ve just launched a tool for musicians that puts traditional home recording software online (i.e. Garageband or Pro Tools). The goal is to make collaborative music making super simple by…

1) Creating a free, cross-platform, tool that manages all files in the cloud, so working together is easy

2) Building a community into the tool so musicians can record music, invite others to add tracks, see other artists work, see how they made it, and even make “remixes” of it.

3) Make it simple to publish completed works to Facebook, Twitter, Sound Cloud, etc.

We’ve been working hard over the past year to create what we think is a MVP (minimum viable product) for the recording tool itself and are now focusing our efforts on the community/social side of the tool.

The question for those musically minded entrepreneurs on HM is, is the current tool sufficiently robust enough in its current incarnation to be useful? If not, what’s missing?

Our tool is at http://www.audioorchard.com

Thanks :)
I also highly recommend watching this 2 videos from 500startups: PR secrets for startups. http://blog.500startups.com/2010/09/24/startup2startup-pr-se...
A lot of useful advices on how to get the press to cover your product.
It may be what people do on there is silly, but like this article says, the infrastructure software released by these companies have to deal with the number of users at scale is no easy feat.

I know facebook and twitter regularly release open source software for infrastructure. Thrift from facebook (and I think Cassandra). And FlockDB from Twitter, if I'm not mistaken. Every other startup's boats rise due to these companies dealing with silly things.
Clickable link http://www.audioorchard.com
I suppose everyone has forgotten about all the privately developed and deployed networks before the internet as we know it - BIX, Prodigy, MCImail, Fidonet, UUCP, Telenet, the BBS systems, etc. To presume that without the ARPAnet there would be no internet is a huge stretch.
No. Can we stop asking stupid questions?

"Why are platform vendors so keen to promote their own Linux distributions?"

Guess not. Here goes: Because it's a lot easier to do your own thing than try to get everyone else to do it, too. The changes they have made are freely available if any other distro (or the kernel itself) wants to make the changes.
Another dimension for compatibility:

- religious beliefs (Emacs or Vim)
This seems to be a very promising and well designed project. However, there one part that puzzles me. On the one hand,

> SQL's declarativeness is preserved, not encapsulated in a lower level API that requires imperative and procedural code to get things done.

but on the other hand

> A significant part of optimizing a database abstraction layer is to choose for every situation the right balance between fine and large grained retrieval, and the optimal mix of laziness and eagerness.

Why is that even relevant? If the possibilities of SQL are preserved, why can't you simply let the database aggregate your data and make it return exactly what you need? ... which will be what you'll send to the user, after some formatting/templating, so the really wanted result can't be too big.

In other words, the difference between fine and coarse grained retrieval only matters if you have a big intermediate result that you have to process aside from the database because your ORM doesn't allow you to do that within the database. Since Squeryl claims to be different in that regard, why does the retrieval strategy even matter?
Really? In what way? There are actually many methods available to track users of said deals and determine who is a repeat and who is a new customer.

You are missing the point of running a daily deal, it is not to increase demand so much as it is to increase exposure. Obviously no business could survive on these deals alone, which is why they are designed to only be for targeted periods of time and to targeted areas. The whole point is to get people in who are already in the market, but are tentative to try something new, or otherwise unknown to them.

Sure someone who buys a massage deal is probably going to buy a massage somewhere, but the beauty of running a deal is you have a better chance to expose that customer to your business instead of where they might have otherwise gone. The same can be said for any business.

Increasing exposure is the point. If this can be accomplished with no money up front(unlike traditional marketing) and with guaranteed usage(unlike print coupons)the business comes out ahead.
The misspellings missing from the second email are easily explained by the likelihood that this email was "proofread" by several people beforehand (since it was known to be going public), whereas the other was a quick personal email with no intention of going public (until it was leaked). I believe pg mentioned that Ron would review the public emails several time with others.

Also... the 2nd email, Ron mentioned the first. So the first is real, straight from his mouth.
With an idled worker population it is obvious where the bulk of the resources can come from.
I see what you're trying to say.

In Buddhism, a lama assumes responsibility over his followers. The followers have a responsbility to hold the lama in check from becoming an egomaniac.

Startup CEOs should assume a similar responsibility over their users. If the entrepreneur really cared about the people, not the money, he/she wouldn't have a problem. If you watch how previous generations built their wealth, most of them did it by providing value and service for a fair price. Most of today's startups care about what's the new gold rush and how to get the most out. What really matters is how do you create the most value for society. If you do that, you will live a fuller life and people will respect you. Money usually follows if you stick to your principles.
I just want a better market search. This is Google, for crying out loud! I want to be able to sort and filter by rating, date updated, price, alphabetically, permissions required, etc. Also, I'd prefer to display all prices in my local currency, so I don't have to look up how much a .99euro app costs based on today's exchange rate.
Human Trial Suspended Animation Treatment Set to Begin at Mass General
It also uses a strange apostrophe replacement in words like won't and SQL's. That is, it uses an accute accent over a space (’) instead of a simple apostrophe (').
Is It Sunday Already? Seems Like Only Yesterday It Was Saturday
Patients to be frozen into state of suspended animation for surgery - Telegraph
This all very useful information and well written but I have to ask, do undergraduates really not know this or at least figure it out very quickly? I would expect students who are investing large sums of money to be better prepared than just turning expecting High School plus with a generous helping of A's them a nice job? Perhaps it is different in the USA than elsewhere?
His reasoning is described perfectly well - first strike is not done by sending five missiles - it's done by at least half of the active arsenal (which is counted by both sides really well).
I agree with you in the context of a single table. Introduce something a little more complicated, such as master/detail relations, however, and things aren't so straightforward. The mere fact of a foreign key in the child that the ORM can pull out of DB metadata (or have manually described to it, etc.) isn't enough to know if it's reasonable to be lazy or eager in retrieving child rows when getting the parent.
Avatar therapy: From couch to cyberspace
Haskell is a research language - it was built by programming languages researchers, and lots of researchers now work with it, extend it and so on. As such, it is not "nice" in the sense that it is easy to learn how to use.

In fact, there are a lot of assumptions that Haskell throws out that you may be used to. One example is strictness. When you call a function in most programming languages, you can assume that the arguments to the function are evaluated before the function is called, but that's not necessarily true in Haskell. In fact, nothing is evaluated until its result is needed for something else -- such as adding two numbers; if you need to evaluate + (an addition), then you need to know what the values of the left and right hand sides are.

However, there are advantages to such assumption-breaking ideas. For example, you can have a function which produces an infinite data structure, and another function which consumes pieces of it at a later time. The functions need not know about each other at all. Such a system would be much more difficult to implement without this intrinsic laziness feature.

There's a lot more to learn, much of it quite mind-bending. If you grok Haskell, you won't design programs in other languages in quite the same way, because you realize what silly assumptions were being made before.
WSGI isn't a web server, nor is it transport technology, it is a gateway interface. Even with Mongrel2 and ZeroMQ you can and would probably still use WSGI.
I agree.

You have no expectation of privacy, but I think an expectation of respect, politeness, and reasonable behaviour is OK.
CIA used 'illegal, inaccurate code to target kill drones'
I agree any news we receive right now will have a gossip feel to it. Nobody is under oath, after all. However, I think we can learn some relevant (even if speculative) information from those closest to the situation.
You design your application as if it were to run in a server but... but... it runs in the client.

Nice idea. I wonder how this could interact with a nodejs implementation on the server side.
"Ask me every time" would just lead to people click "Yes" every time just like on Windows.
Some areas don't have scenes relevant to a particular idea. Believe it or not, random small towns do occasionally produce the odd skilled hacker, who is then geographically isolated and needs an online way of connecting with the rest of the tech world.
What I don't quite get is... how angel investors can collude effectively. It reminds me a bit of having a 'monopoly' on advertising. I suspect there are good arguments to be made, I'd be grateful if anyone could shed light on them.
Get Schooled: Gizmodo University.
It's an interesting technique to claim that your opponent is worth rebutting but not worth linking to.
Computer Worm Hits Iran Power Plant
For another example, the telegraph and telephone networks in the US were built with private funding. Even the transatlantic cables were private ventures (at enormous cost).
David Pollack, Lift founder, has this to say about sticky sessions and scaling (paragraphs added):

"In practice, scaling a Lift site is much much easier than scaling a LAMP site. Why? Well, state exists someplace. If it exists in the JVM, you get a lot of performance benefits and stability as well as, in Lift's case, lots of security.

Contrast that with sessions in memcached. "Whoop, memcached went down, there go a pile of sessions." "Whoops, we've got a new memcached hashing algorithm, there go all the session." "Whoops, Google just crawled us creating 200,000 new sessions pushing all the but the active sessions out of cache." "Whoops, the Ruby runtime just went wild, ate all the VM on one of our boxes, memcached went down..."

So, you try storing sessions in some wacky shared version of MySQL. This solution requires tons of hardware and a team of make sure that the sharing code is correct, etc. Contrast that to using Nginx, Jetty and session affinity. It's about 4 hours of setup time and it just works. See http://blog.harryh.org/post/7550...

So, talk to a Facebook engineer about the challenges they go through to manage state between the front end, memcached, MySQL, etc. Compare that to Twitter with the famous fail whale. Compare that to Apple's store and the iTunes store which are written on WebObject (which is highly stateful.)

Lift apps running at scale typically require 7% of the front end resources of LAMP app. The Lift apps that are running at scale (Foursquare and Novell pulse are two) do not have the kind of scaling issues associated with LAMP sites that have similar traffic patterns. Scaling with Lift is neither tricky, nor risky. It's simple. It's known. It's proven. Scaling with LAMP is playing whack-a-mole with state and that only becomes a problem at scale."

See his comment under Jackson Davis's answer to this question:

http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-advantages-and-disadvantag...
That might make an interesting court case. How would that be different from the journalistic exception? After all, newspapers make their money by selling ads too.
and should know that whatever money they recoup from selling the deal will at least cover their costs.

I'm not sure if this is possible with Groupon. Between a discount good enough to be accepted and Groupon's cut taken out you'd have to be running an extremely high margin business to still cover costs.
I'm quite enjoying it. It seems of interest to the startup world, and I personally don't twit or facebook or go directly to techcrunch if I can avoid it.
wait, why his post is +8 while mine is -3?

is it because I was only wondering if it was a good or not? Oh, HN...
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

I think the simplest explanation is that Conway either wasn't aware of the agenda or wasn't aware of the scope of it. That would explain his regret for Lee being there.
You need to POST instead.
Makes you wonder if the creators of Stuxnet were spooked into trying to trigger its payload by all the coverage of it, or if it's just a coincidence that the Iranians admitted they were infected after info about it started to get out.
Why? Perhaps his name is Steve Jobs and he was born before the "famous" Steve Jobs. I'm only slightly kidding here.
WiseDame - a “black box” recorder like they have in planes, but for real life
What's the connection between Arrington and Conway? Someone told Mike about the meeting (as he wrote, he wasn't invited). Then someone told Arrington about the content of the meeting (Mike wasn't there). Connect the dots.

It's possible that Ron Conway intended to blow it up from the beginning, including his own plant there. But as it always happens the shrapnel takes the unexpected course. Consider this a badly botched operation.
Yes, I see something similar. The page appears and then gets overwritten by a Reddit voting widget. I'm using Chrome under Mac OS X.
You generally, at least in the USA and UK CAN use a person photo for commercial use without their consent - otherwise crowd shots of a game would be impossible,
The only limitation is that you cannot imply they endorse a product unless they do. Even then a shot of them actually using a product - a celebrity with a can of your soda in their hand, would be acceptable as reportage.
What is the problem with students skipping classes and learning the material on their own? If they like it more that way and have good results, why should they be forced to attend the classes they do not like, or do not find helpful in absorbing the material?

Universities are supposed to do the research and help students learn things. If the students learn things and scientists do research, everything is all right, I guess. No need to impose a military regime.

However, it might not be true for high schools, for it is more supposed to gather students in one place and keep them from fooling around, than actually teaching them stuff.
This is worse than tvtropes.
I guess it could be because IE9 is probably built upon new APIs that came only in Vista, where Windows switched to HW accelerated windows management (which was pretty fundamental system-level change):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model
NO U.

Whining about downvoting, especially twice, is pathetic. And I'm willing to risk five points to say this.
That definitely does happen, but there does seem to be a decrease in companies built on tech innovation as their product. Infrastructure innovation while scaling up a product is still great, but somewhat different from inventing a technically new thing as the product.

Not that classic Silicon Valley necessarily got the balance right, either: Xerox PARC is the canonical example of a place that was closer to 95% R&D, and 5% shipping profitable products based on that tech. But it seems at least possible that many companies are now swung towards the opposite side: 5% on inventing new tech, and 95% focus on productifying/monetizing existing tech by making nicely polished implementations, pushing it into new market segments, etc.

That might also be fine so long as there's a bunch of unexploited tech lying out there, waiting for someone to turn it into profitable products, but who's going to keep replenishing those stocks of unexploited tech? Will that kind of R&D come exclusively from academic research and a few big industrial labs like MSR?
Ads are the last thing I want to waste limited smartphone screen real estate on. I'll happily pay to avoid ads, but there's no way I'm going to pay for something that forces me to wade through ads. If your app isn't profitable, raise the price.
Startups Should Say No to Most Opportunities
grab a book.
SEO warrior is OK
Stephen Colbert addresses House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration
The best overall Scala support in an IDE is currently in Intellij IDEA. The Scala plugin works in the free, community version as well.
I'm curious about all the downvotes with no comments. If the facts are wrong, say so.
"Even the invisible hand doesn't want to pick beans". Classic stuff.

In an age when there are so many people in politics who ignore rationality, humor can sometimes be the best argument.
Future-Proofing Your Passion: Using Tech to Stay Profitable
Well, it's not for a lack of trying.
Conservative culture definitely makes a difference. It's hard to suggest to parents any slight deviation from the script of college degree (focal point being good grades, not necessarily the experience), stable job at established company (preferably close to home), wife (nice girl from nice family), house, kids, ...
It is indeed poor form but all you have to do is to follow the first link which will show you the one in question.

It's sufficiently vile and inaccurate (the guy's a small time Smalley who even ends his essay with a quote from that liar) that I can see why he refused to directly link to it. Plus since it's mostly a hand waving attempt to deny all of what Drexler has been saying, the author is not addressing the essay so much as pointing out why Drexler's proposition has never been tested (it's never been funded).

ADDED: On the other hand, I suppose all this is only fitting, given Drexler's belief back then that rational science policy was possible and his enthusiasm for mechanisms that would enable this. In the '70s and '80s there were clearly aspects of human nature he just couldn't wrap his head around.
> I agree with you in the context of a single table.

I actually had complex joins in mind.

A good ORM (in the sense that most ORMs aren't good by this definition) should retrieve the child rows if and only if they are required for the final result. And it should request exactly the columns that are needed by the result. And, as already pointed out in my previous comment, it should hand over the aggregating to the database - that's one of the main things databases are good for.
There were several websites where the book was available--Amazon had a few copies which sold out and doing a quick Google search showed a few other websites with it available.
Edit: apparently Amazon has some in stock: http://www.amazon.com/Operation-Dark-Heart-Frontlines-Afghan...

And here's another: http://www.booksamillion.com/product/9780312603694
Interesting article, but the title of the post here obfuscates what it's about.

The story is actually about firms having to disclose what they might get sued for, making it easier for them to get sued.

Original was:
Pointers for predators
Proposals to make firms’ legal liabilities clearer will make them heavier
EDIT: The parent deleted their reply; since I took the time to get all teacher-mode here I figured I'd include it, cut and pasted, but without their username.

> If you know the URL of the form, isn't it as simple as using Javascript to pull up the page, parse the token variable out of the page, and then using that?
>
> Right now, the Javascript just has to: 1) post to http://www.form.com....
>
> Now, the Javascript has to: 1) fetch http://www.form.com... 2) parse the response, find <input name="authToken" value="ohSoSecureAuthToken" 3) post to http://www.form.com... with the authToken
>
> Sure, its more steps, but isn't it just as insecure?

You're missing a concept here, and it's one of these two things (most likely the 2nd):

1) The form (& token) is generated server-side based on the currently logged in user, as determined by a cookie (or http authentication, or https client certs, etc.): So each user gets a different form+token, and is only generated with a valid current session. In other words, you can't get this form unless you are successfully impersonating the victim or forcing the victim's logged-in web browser to make the request.

2) In the case that you do force the victim's browser to make the request, the browser security model has a whole bunch of restrictions on what javascript can read which data, collectively known as the same origin policy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same_origin_policy).

In particular, the same origin policy will make your step two, "parse the response", fail: javascript running on a page from a.com has no access to responses from b.com.

Without the same origin policy, we'd all be hosed. Imagine code on a hostile web page that scrapes your contact book if you're logged into email on another tab, your bank account, etc... all of these follow the same basic pattern as steps 1-2 in your reply.

Assuming no other security flaws and verifiable and non-forgeable form tokens, then the same origin policy will effectively protect third party websites from submitting requests on behalf of a victim.

Note that those are both very big assumptions, e.g. it turns out that you can forge 'secure' tokens from ASP.NET because they screwed up their crypto. (I think the tokens in question are typically used for session cookies, but same general idea.)
I'm not sure if you can call it a checklist, but I find that the basics are well covered (a bit old though) http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimiza...
Politics as Charity
Yes, but that's not what the people who responding in this thread are saying. They are saying that they can NEVER gain weight no matter how much they eat. The study clearly says something different in relation to NEAT:

"About 30% of a person's daily expenditure comes from NEAT. (The other portions are from basal metabolism and thermic effect of eating). Those who are active have higher percentages of NEAT. This is the factor we have control over."