skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would it have been too much trouble for techcrunch to put the emails back in actual order?

Anyway, this isn't a particularly interesting story, and I'm tired of every email exchange Steve Jobs has with the outside world becoming a news story, but Steve is right here, and the woman has a severe entitlement complex.

update: I googled her name. While her facebook page is locked down, I did find a bunch of apparently self-written blurbs including a now-deleted eight-paragraph Wikipedia article about how awesome she is. There's also this page:

http://wikibin.org/articles/chelsea-isaacs.html

Chelsea Kate Isaacs (born December 14th, 1987) is an American actress, model, and poet ... In 1998, Isaacs was the most desirable hand model in the United States and Canada. Isaacs has been described by the Cantolino Press as having an "electric presence that is both entertaining and very believable" with "an extremely evolved sense of the human psyche... Since then, a number of internet blogs and websites have formed whos members post listings of Isaacs' mysterious underground music projects in which she prefers to be involved with anonymously"

This is followed by a single comment from her Auntie Elvie "Wow! I didn't you are so famous!"

Anyway, in conclusion, this woman appears to have some serious ego issues. If you're familiar with John Fitzgerald Page, I'd say she's the female equivalent.
~/i # internal (stuff I made)
~/x # external (stuff I downloaded, etc.)

# exceptions to the above:
~/i/collab
~/i/mashup

~/bin
~/tmp

That's it for top-level directories.

I also really like the (new?) trend of programs keeping their dotfiles in ~/.config/program-name/foorc
two floors of the Empire State Building (two floors)

(two floors) x 200 people = 400 floors

(two floors) x 300,000,000 people = 600,000,000 million

Hmm, the world must be really big, or the floors must be really small. If we double that number to include Europe, indeed, lets increase it slightly as Europe has a bigger population, that is 1.5 billion floors of the Empire State buildings to feed only about 1/6th of the world. That does not sound right to be honest.
You guys are awesome! I just book round trip flight to Pasadena in less than 10 minutes.
Perhaps it's just me, but this sounds like Joel is trying to recreate a web-based, centralized Usenet.
Cuil Goes Down for Good
What about slowed down or sped up video? The chunks would be of different size, I suppose cropping would be less of a problem as it would still match up best to the same movie. The shazam paper may have covered this but I read it a lot time ago, can't remember.
... I'm jaded from a year of commuting daily on Caltrain. :(
Put mirrors on the walls and ceiling and put reflective particles over the soil. That should let more light eventually end up on the plants.
Ask HN: Review my Twilio SMS app, friendpods
This app is only a few days into development, but I wanted to get some feedback as early as possible. There are some important features that are obviously missing, like the ability to edit or leave friendpods. If you need anything like that done, please email friendpods@gmail.com and I'll take care of it.

All feedback is welcome, but what I'm most interested in is if/how you could see yourself using this. If you need some inspiration, try making a friendpod for people you go out with on weekends, and give it a whirl tonight.
That's strange - my Firefox 3.6.6 on Ubuntu works with it OK. I wonder if the browser detect script I'm using is having issues, as another poster said that Chromium was failing, where it doesn't on my machines :\

Cool domain name; wish I'd thought of something that short.
Marketing plus creating better entrepreneurs and thus in the end making better ideas/companies for YC to invest in.
It was Eisenhower.
I filled out my profile completely. How does joining groups help?
These stories of the work gene therapy researchers are doing remind me of trying to work on someone else's code, with no unit tests. You change one thing, which you think does what you want it to, but you don't really know. Nerve racking.
"... What about these thing, can they be counted as 'living'? ... it takes a certain mindset and definitely a conscious effort to live well."

If you have live a sheltered life, yes. The mindset comes from realising the "living" bit and the circumstances you live for most is (often) taken for granted.
Not sure that's a bad thing. Many innovations seem to be about recycling old communities for new mediums.
I was being honest about my prejudices and examining them. I think yes, from the finish of my comment, I should assume either the best or the worst of both of them.
I'd pay you $24 a year (what i currently give to flikr) if you can compress my large jpg images into something smaller (currently it seems to be maxed at 900k) another one of my favorite features of Flikr is the ability to view exif data.

Love the project!
Becoming a 20-Something Family Man: with a PhD and a Startup
The Next Web has just released official extension for Google Chrome
Especially with people's lives at stake, a la Thalidomide.
I don't think it's damning of American-borns, I think it's actually the opposite. As a foreign-born founder of a US startup, I wish my home country was as attractive as the US for starting my business. I think America should be proud of its capability to attract top talent.
their requirements for data engineer make no sense. why would you need to know html, css, javascript, and web frameworks to do data mining?
I have a banking background, and the articles greatest argument is that 2015 is too far away. Although I agree it's far away, banks rely on so much leverage that unwinding assets can take some time. Mainly mortgage and other long-term loans make 2015 relatively short notice.

Mildly off topic, but still looming large is the bonus system within banking. I know that across the board bonuses are centered around short-term goals. From the CEO all the way down to the lowest teller, the majority of employee and management incentives have to be aligned with the long-term viability of the company. Until this is fixed, the financial sector will continue the boom and bust cycle.
Mmm why not use http://WikInstant.com ?
Making It Big in Software interviews Peter Norvig
Take cues from existing paradigms:

A successful competitor to eBay would have completely disrupt eBay's current business model -- ie the level of disruption Craigslist has caused for the classifieds industry. That probably means some sort of free service - perhaps with only specialist categories requiring a listing fee/cut of final sale (in the same way CL only charges for jobs and a handful of other categories).

A successful competitor to eBay would have to have a very clever strategy to overcome the network effect eBay has. Look at how Zuckerberg launched Facebook in the face of MySpace and Friendster's network effect. He concentrated on a niche (just Harvard, than just students), owned it and then enlarged. I would therefore specialize in a niche area and then once you have pwned eBay in that area, expand out.
For the record, this is absolutely NOT us promoting the extension on here. I assure you. /Zee.
Scale is almost always something you should ignore completely while building an MVP. It is trivial to build a web app that can handle enough users to prove the product. There are exceptions, but they're very rare.
Top right image should show user being awesome, not you being awesome, because you are boring compared to the user (in their mind).
Not as cool as watching the CPU do its thing while playing a game :)
I agree. Maintenance is crucial. Not always fun, but crucial. Really like the last line: "The difference between luck and skill is consistency." Well said.
Very great! Love the easy way to use it without having to log in to try. Simple approach. Keep working on the idea.
Good point, thanks.

edit: Improved it a bit based on your feedback
Linux Distro 3D Benchmarks (TLDR: Chakra fastest, Ubuntu slowest)
Great submission, thank you! May I ask, how did you hire the support team? Did you outsource your helpdesk or did you hire the support team yourself? How do you handle accounting? Finally, what resources helped you the most with SEO?
Ask HN: Were titles always formated as questions which are not really questions?
Or is it a recent phenomena? I am genuinely curious.

Questions like why your Start up will fail? to which my automatic reaction is to start answering, probably by saying I don't know, it might because of, or maybe. And if the non question question is something which I have no idea of, I still have to answer well I don't know, supposedly you are going to say why, so then why ask me?

It is quite annoying, but what I was more interested in knowing is if it is only me who thinks so and if it has been so always and somehow I have not noticed or if it is a recent phenomena.
Outdated software is still holding back the Web
Halo Nets $200 Million, Bigger Than Any Movie This Year
Writing for Others
How are you determining which browsers are compatible with it? It seems like the best way might be to use modernizr: http://www.modernizr.com/. Or are you using more than just the html5 drag and drop API?
I'm sorry to say it but they never stood a chance, i'm not sure if a company will ever be able to take on Google in search directly.
Yes but percentage of CS students actually finish with low debt? I would imagine it's lowish.
Corporate blogs exist solely for marketing purposes. There's nothing wrong with that.
It doesn't compute to me that a feature you call a deal-breaker can be found in a device you already own, but ok.
If that's true, then the story boils down to what Lawrence Lessig and others have warned about for years: you can't depend on the inherent nature of the internet or any other technology to nullify bad laws.
Cool. You should check out GroupMe -- they have been working on a similar app based on twilio.
Bing seems to be doing a pretty good job.

With google's privacy snafu's and other mishaps, I could see them getting upset within 5 years.
Especially not something funded to this degree, the barrier to what is a success is way to high with Google Search as a direct competitor. Something like the one man startup DDG can redefine success as a much more manageable target, allowing a lot longer to compete without going under.
I remember the days when so much hype was around it and now when I read the title I thought to myself, hmm, I remember that name, but who are they exactly?

It feels like they were one of those x factor winners or big brother winners who have a lot of media attention to start with and then become complacent and do not keep up of playing the game of keeping the attention of the public. Marketing is not just five minutes of fame.

I think also that what the above teaches is that there is a lot of hype in social media. Sure there are real serious and enlightening conversations, but much of it is hype and trends and discussions. Maybe it is best to retreat from mass communications like the internet and focus on your projects only. Better be an actor in my own show than a spectator in others.
There's something bigger that stands out about this whole episode to me. It's not just that they never stood a chance. It's that if they were smart enough to build an even half-way functional engine, they should have been able to see from long before launch how things were going to work out. I'm very interested in whatever organizational or psychological dysfunction lead them to releasing the product at all.
If I remember correctly, this is what Twitter was when it started. You may want to see what issues they ran into that caused them to change their product. Maybe that will help you know what to tackle and what to avoid. This seems like a service that could be useful. Mailing lists for SMS.
A solar cell collects energy over a range of frequencies, while a plant (if I recall) uses only two. You can think of it this way. Wheat is say 1% efficient at solar collection, while even crappy solar cells are like 8%.

Of course you need to transmit electricity and re-emit the light efficiently. You will still end up with acres of solar panels, as I said. Before you jump on someone for getting their science wrong, make sure YOURS IS RIGHT!
My pictures were too big. > 900k.
Strange how an unfunded startup with a single founder (DuckDuckGo) is getting better results than a $30million backed one comprised of a bunch of ex-Googlers.
Bing is the default search in IE, it had a significant chunk of the market with Live Search previously and started off with a $100 million dollar advertising blitz. Add to that the number and talent of the employees working on it and you have something no startup could hope to replicate.
"Adopt the habits of those you admire the most" - this presumes that those with exceptional qualities are also better at optimizing what they have, and that this optimization is somewhat universally applicable.

I'd say: try to understand the habits of those you admire the most, and try them yourself if it makes sense.
Congrats! How are you liking the twilio API? And what is this built in/on?
$33m sounds like a lot to burn through to get to the gut wrenching point of being down to last pennies.

But for those saying "no one can take on Google" and "search isn't an interesting space any more", remember Google got told the same things about the incumbents and "the portals" when it started.

There is always a better way out there. Someone just hasn't found it yet. Chances are low that Google will still dominate search in 10 years, or that most people will search the way they do now.
I think that you have a really exciting idea on your hands. I can't wait until the product matures and you can offer some case studies of cool widget dashboards that people have assembled. That way, I can just copy their setups instead of having to wrap my brain around a new technology. Once that kind of thing is ready, I would love to receive an email blast about it on your newsletter. Thanks!
So why on earth does AJAX exist? To solve such bottlenecks. Do AJAX calls for 100 cells instead of 10K.
How to Change or Remove Windows 7 Password?
Ask HN: Can noise cancelling headphones decrease costs and improve productivity?
Can giving noise cancelling headphones like Bose's Quite Comfort 15 to employees (those who would like to use them) improve productivity (letting them concentrate or overcome noise distractions better), while allowing the use of 'open hall' environment that can keep costs low?

(open hall vs individual offices, which are supposed to help in concentrating better)

Would it be justified investment for a low cost operation (thats what my outfit is now and they cost $300 a pop)?

(I swear, I am not plugging in for Bose :). I did buy one recently though and it helped me quite a bit. That's what gave me this thought)
Personally, I think it would be a shame. You're only on the hook if you want to modify their reference implementation, and aren't interested in sharing your changes with the community.

Write your own implementation under whatever license you want (and once they're a little farther along with actual protocol documentation, that ought to give you everything you need to make it happen), or share nicely. I'm not sure how that's a problem.
HRP-4 Humanoid robot unveiled-- will sell for $300k
Looking at the code you just posted it looks like this is what you did:

// HAMLET HAMLET HAMLET

function isValidBrowser() {

var browser = BrowserDetect.browser;
var version = BrowserDetect.version;

return (
(browser == 'Chrome' && version >= 6) ||
(browser == 'Firefox' && version >= 3.6)
);
}
Best scaling advice I've ever read:

http://teddziuba.com/2008/04/im-going-to-scale-my-foot-up-y....
Ask HN: Do you know any useful "Back of the Envelope Calculations"?
Intrigued by the recent HN submission regarding estimating the revenues of a company, does anyone have any other useful back of the envelope calculations? Anything that you find useful for quick mental calculations - preferably for financial applications (but any are welcome).

Thanks
If I'm not mistaken, early Twitter allowed you to follow people, so it was still 1:many communication. I thought of the idea for friendpod because it seems like "few:few" communication isn't very well addressed.
I loved it. My only suggestion is making the non-focused images slightly opaque. I was left wondering if the severely blurred images were loading.
I voted you up but I don't find it strange. yegg only answers to himself and his users while operating with tight constraints. Cuil, however, had a bumper budget and a cadre of smart people with a plethora of ideas and directions in mind.

To me, Cuil looked like a prime example of design by committee whereas DDG is clearly opinionated but thrives because of it.
Bah, instead of running my own app instance, do you mind if I make a Chrome extension on top of it, and you can push the code you like back into the running version?

Meta-question: if a Chrome extension uses significant server-side resources, should one ask the site host first? (legally, I think the answer is "no")
Amazing, great user experience. One detail though, wouldn't it be nice to have less blur on the thumbnails?
chip-u-licious! kudos to the creators. i'll check out the Python one tonight. old time 6502 hacker here...
The Hamster Wheel
The Twilio API is fantastic; I was able to build a basic demo in an hour or two. The combination of the simple API with the knowledge that they're doing all sorts of crazy stuff behind the scenes is pretty impressive.

The app is built using PHP/MySQL and a bit of jQuery. edit: and Google WebFont loader, just to try it out.
Assuming three billion years of evolution is beatable is generally a fool's game. I do like the idea of chlorophyll-tuned lasers, though.
What led you to say that it was?

Section 5.1 of this whitepaper[1] by Rizzo and Duong, that lists Ruby on Rails as one of the web frameworks vulnerable to this attack.

Granted, this paper was published in May, and I'm not a Rails guy, so it's quite possible this has been patched as well.

[1]http://usenix.org/events/woot10/tech/full_papers/Rizzo.pdf
Beware: sarcasm and paranoia contained within.
<sarcasm>If I didn't know better, this article is prepping the public to think of polymaths and autodidacts as abnormal in a bad way...</sarcasm>

<deep sarcasm>"Quick, he's thinking too much! Better medicate him!"</deep sarcasm>

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11340881
Never have I been so forehead-smacking jealous that I didn't think of something first. kudos.
Archives: Mao's Great Leap Forward 'killed 45 million in four years'
It's a good point - that means a select group of youtube engineers have access to a roughly comprehensive collection of digital media. I'd be interested in hearing about their mp3 collections ;)
The only lasting legacy of Cuil may be its use in expressing orders of abstraction away from normalcy:

http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory
I believe GNU Electric does what you mention. http://www.gnu.org/software/electric/
Imagine a discovery would allow people to routinely live to 120 years, or more. The financial black hole that is social security NOW would suddenly spike to an even more frightening mass.

When government payments fund the livelihood of retired folks, there is a financial disincentive to fund "anti-aging" research.
Huh. You don't normally see a classic flounce like this around here.
Not related to post, but that is a really beautiful web application.
I don't know how YouTube does it in practice, but you could either

- make the chunks small enough that they are essentially static images (one or a few frames)

- use some form of dynamic chunking where a chunk lasts until the image is sufficiently different according to some metric.

In both cases the chunks are fairly resistent to changes in speed, and the worst you need to deal with is that multiple chunks in clip A may map to the same chunk in clip B.
Yeah. Let the record show I've got nothing against strippers, just people who take medical advice from them. Except I suppose maybe the ones who are just doing it to pay their way through med school...
Twinkle Twinkle Little Meryl
Can you remember what you ate for breakfast 5 months, 3 weeks and 2 days ago? Unless you have a small set of habitual foods for a good chunk of time, I bet you'd forget too.
Puma Men's Repli Cat Shoes, puma olympic repli cat shoes
Gmail uses Flash (Adblock shows block Flash thingie).

----

Edit: upon further inspection, it seems Gmail indeed does use Flash [1], just for a different part of the upload process (progress bar?).

Drag and drop is only supported in Chrome and Firefox [2], so I suppose this is HTML5.

[1] https://mail.google.com/mail/uploader/uploaderapi2.swf

[2] http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/drag-and-drop-attachme...
Who's writing recommendations that say "switching ciphers fixes the problem"?

Visual Studio Magazine [1].

I've enjoyed reading all your comments on this thread. You clearly know your stuff. Based upon what you've seen so far and what you know about the ASP.NET framework, do you see any way around this short of some patch from Microsoft?

[1] - http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2010/09/14/aspnet-s...
Yes, people can, and should, take on Google.

At the same time, I happened to be on eBay today and noticed that I've been an eBay member for just over 10 years. Why is it that we haven't found a better way to run auctions online? Most people still list and participate in online auctions almost exactly the same way they did 10 years ago.

I do agree that the pace of innovation is increasing, so maybe 10 years starting from 2010 is the same as, say, 20 years starting from the year 2000.

But I think chances are high that Google will dominate search in 10 years. If someone discovered a better way (and there are many, they just haven't caught on yet) they would just buy 'em out, right? ;) Or maybe Bing will win. But then it's Microsoft winning, and Microsoft is older than me.
Yeah, I think he likely made them shut up about it rather than changed their minds.
Very nice visually, and incredibly slick workflow, though it renders pretty slowly at full size. Poking in the code... are you blurring the images in JS at every level? Since you're using webkit + mozilla + IE specific CSS, why not use CSS transforms to do the same thing, but with hardware acceleration? I haven't done it myself, but I'd assume blur is one of the filters possible, and I know you can do those transitions.

edit: oh, and you might want to make sure the images in the "back" are (proportionally?) smaller than the ones in front - if you shrink your window a lot they're actually bigger.

edit 2:

Gets stuck occasionally, though so far only while loading, and doesn't seem to respond to any interaction. The drop-down still works though, so it appears it's not just spinning.

Anyone else, and/or any info I can provide to get you info on why?
That's because cuil was building a search engine from scratch rather than relying on bing's/yahoo's index to do the underlying scoring. Maybe they shouldn't have started from scratch, but they were certainly tackling a much harder problem (maybe not the right one.)

I've heard through the grapevine that they were able to index and serve 100 billion documents on 100 machines, which is a pretty impressive technical accomplishment if true. I'm surprised they weren't acquired for that. It's unfortunate that their search quality wasn't up to snuff yet.
Their comment about MessageEncryptor is accurate, but I don't believe the bare #encrypt (which could create a vulnerability if exceptions weren't laundered) is used anywhere. Rails sessions are encrypted and then HMAC'd. This pattern isn't susceptable to padding side channels.
Session Hijacking - Man-in-the-Middle Attacks (Explained)
The grandparent wasn't talking about startups, though:

i'm not sure if a company will ever be able to take on Google in search directly