skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's the downside of having VM-based system emulation easily available: People who think that userland scripting is too complex take this complex functionality that occurs in semi-critical areas into C code, possibly into the kernel. Because they can debug it just fine when they're trying it out in the VM.

Fast forward: the thing gets deployed by default on Ubuntu (or SuSE, or Fedora ... whatever), and people start getting hard-to-debug crashes. Someone, somewhere, will run into an ugly corner case. Or some app that has been quietly chugging along in the corner suddenly causes serious breakage.

That's the moment when you get all those bugs closed with WORKSFORME, INVALID or other non-solutions, because users can't get the debugging info on their production system, and the enthusiastic developers can't reproduce it on their system and are not as enthusiastic about figuring out which obscure corner case caused the sytem to misbehave.

As an example, see here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ureadahead/+bug/48...
Under various conditions, the boot process just gets stuck (e.g., when something has juggled the hard drive letters and what used to be /dev/sda is now /dev/sdb and vice versa, or you have a routine fdisk check, or something else), and when you switch off the splash screen (or don't have it switched on at all, for obvious reasons), all you see is the (spurious) message from ureadahead-other. Net result: this kind of spurious hangs on boot, which were reasonably easy to diagnose in the time of SysVinit, are now a serious PITA and the developers which are responsible for the boot process don't give a fart because people don't have the knowledge that's needed to debug the subtle interplay of dbus, upstart, plymouth (it's obvious that "plymouth" is the splash screen software and not a device driver for a CRT-based face tanning, isn't it?), and possibly others.
(Full disclosure: I twice or thrice spent a whole morning figuring out a random boot problem without getting anywhere. After several hours, I found out that part of the problem was caused by mountall not finding something, then asking whether you want to continue booting without actually displaying a prompt that says so. Back then, I managed to find the corresponding bug on launchpad among the 5+ bugs about weird, hard-to-diagnose boot problems where all you see is the ureadahead-other message).

TL/DR: if you consider moving X into the kernel, please imagine yourself in a situation where X breaks in production and you have to guide a user through the debugging of X and various assorted components that talk to X in order to find out whether it's X or Y or ABC and what exactly is breaking. If that thought would give you a bad dream, please refrain from putting X into the kernel. Thank you.
I think it is incorrect to assume an immigrant kid faces adversity. Most of the emigration to SV is from well-off families with well-adjusted kids and they settle in well-off areas.
Frank Talk About Site Outages
Excuse me, but this post just doesn't cut it. He seems mystified by the bad experience although such stories are too often heard to be a rare, mystifying occurrence.

Actually, this is a very good opportunity for Groupon to create a new revenue stream. For a (small( fee they can offer consulting services for small business. Say, for $250, before you invoke the Groupon horde, you have Groupon prepare a brief case study on your with expected numbers of customers, expected revenue, etc. It's easy for Groupon to create this, since they have all the data. Not only this will stop the bad publicity ("Hey, you had a chance to get consulting, but chose not to"), then they can turn around and sell these reports to larger consulting firms, too.
Wow. This pretty accurately describes my feelings as an "independent contractor."

"A vacation day is a day you’re making zero money." For anyone looking into becoming a freelancer/independent contractor/consultant/whatever you want to call it, I cannot emphasize this enough. I've been doing this for a little over a year now, and I cannot even begin to describe the feeling of "Hey, a day off! Wait, that means I'm making a big fat 0 today." Yes, you need to unplug and get away every once and a while, but vacation time starts looking very different when put in that context.

That being said, if you want to be your own boss, live by your own schedule, not be beholden to anyone else, etc start a business where you can make money when you're NOT at your desk.
http://techstartu.ps is starting to gain some traction and is significantly more focused on startups than HN is.
Sure you can shame people for exercising the right to control what goes into their body. It is just as much your freedom to criticize them as it is their freedom to not vaccinate. Just because something is not illegal doesn’t mean you can’t shame it. (I agree that you can’t shame people for decisions their parents made.)
I think the point is that the article itself is not making sense, not the news it is trying to report.

When I read the article I also thought about just normal browsing page load times. That is already so fast that a 60x increase is hardly noticeable. That just makes the news trivial and the chromium team look like freakish geeks with nothing better to do than crunching numbers that only a machine can read.

That is until I looked at the demo video, which I missed on the article and only found about here. I can see that, particularly with that photo wall and the painter thing, snappiness is what would make them work.
Not especially surprising, nor damning of american-borns. Those with the motivation, skills, and education to move abroad (to anywhere!) and start a business are going to, on average, outperform the population which was born there. Not because they are naturally better, but because they were self-selected by being there in the first place.

Just like I'd be willing to bet that americans living abroad are overrepresented as entrepreneurs wherever they happen to be living.
Have you seen http://joey.kitenet.net/code/mr/ ? You just put all your repos in a list and it can keep them all synched at one command, independent of what type of repo it is.
So far, Dropbox has never corrupted anything. I don't think I've ever heard of it corrupting someone's files, either.

Plus, factor in the fact that Dropbox keeps backups of all your files, so in the worst case, I'm guessing they can restore anything that breaks.

Put that against the fact that not using Dropbox means I'm trusting my hard disk not to die on me, and I think Dropbox comes out ahead by far.

Do you know of any reason I should be more worried?
The more interesting next step is that the matching is being used to send advertising revenue to the copyright owners. So instead of taking down your video, the copyright owner can opt to leave it up and collect on the ad dollars.

The recent example of this was the clip from Mad Men about the carousel (if you haven't seen it, look it up). Uploaded by an ordinary user but AMC left it up and instead collected on the ad revenue.

So the tech isn't just being used to prevent any clips from reaching the web - it is actually enabling copyrighted content to be shared and quoted on the web with a sustainable business model - a whole point that Jeff missed.

The Economist wrote about this a while ago.
a) Zero cost deployment. Create some minimal shell version of windows which will allow me to basically compile a few applications into an OS image that I can deploy on actual hardware machines / virtual servers.
b) Have open source software available via a package manager which takes care of dependency resolution. One click install of apache , python etc.
c) Embrace popular languages like python/ruby.
d) Learn to obsolete old stuff strategically.
Since this is a rendering improvement, I hope this will be merged back or developed directly into the original WebKit, so everyone can benefit.
could this feature be used in a denial-of-service attack? i.e., induce errors in the Tarsnap server or it's supporting environment (such as DNS) so that it shuts down for everyone?

If you can impersonate an S3 server, yes.

But if you're impersonating an S3 server, I want Tarsnap to shut down pending investigation.
MPLS app developers to fly balloon 20 miles up to test mobile tech
BackType Co-op Program (interested students should email jobs@backtype.com)
Amazing mobile phone concept
Arg, I'm missing it AGAIN. :/
Hey thanks. It matters!
I put 8 but I averaged 7h49m per night in the last few months.
If farmland is as scarce as Monbiot proposes then vertical farms could work. Most of the value of a $1000 a month apartment is in consumer surplus. Yes, a vertical farm in manhattan will probably never work, but one on some existing farm land in New Jersey probably will. Vertical farms currently won't work but any real scarcity in farmland will drive up prices until it becomes economical as the price of food is highly elastic.
Tumblr Doesn't Leave Posterous in the Dust
3 comments in 24 hours ?

The articles are ok though (but quite a few got posted here as well).

But the discussion is just about non-existent. I've gotten a bit wary of HN split-offs, they tend to be very short-lived.

I don't know what the main reason for that is, possibly it is simply that HN is 'good enough' and that a splinter of it does not carry enough volume for long term sustainability.
I've been using Sleep Cycle (iPhone app). It's 99c and if you don't mind sharing the bed with your iPhone it's pretty much the same thing. I can't say it's my favorite app in the world just that it's well worth the 99c.
Yes, P does indeed stand for product. And this is not a product. Not yet, anyway.
I agree with this. Also, I have seen many of the yc companies post job ads here. Have they been successful in recruiting? If so, that is another way HN has helped yc.
Linkrot on MSDN is a serious problem, as is the MSDN search.

I've resorted to using Google to find documents on MSDN because its index seems to be more up to date and tends to give me the non-broken links (why doesn't Microsoft use Bing to power MSDN search!?!?).

Navigating MSDN for documentation is painful at best.

Also, it would be really nice to have all of the .net exceptions well documented in one place.
The profit margin for a grain farmer in the US is about $100/acre in a good year. There are 43,560 square feet per acre. The ballpark estimate for construction of 10-20 story office space is $125-150 per square foot.

To break even, you'll have to build something that requires zero maintenance that also lasts about 60,000 years and of course you'll need zero point zero interest rates over those sixty millenia just to break even.
When the 9/11 truthers were spreading their bull and it finally managed to touch a few of my coworkers, I found my indignant attitude that anyone could believe something so obviously false was far better at convincing people of the truth than reasoned argument. Unfortunately, people are pack animals before they are rational beings. Probably the best way to respond to such claims as "vaccines cause autism" is to just say, "Wow, I didn't realize there was anybody left who still believed that." It's mean, but it's for their own good, and it works quickly. They don't get as upset as you think they would.
6502 simulated at transistor level in Javascript
I've been doing quite a bit of work with SVG maps in Raphael and I have to say that relative to that, building maps is dead simple with this (and renders amazingly quickly).

However, I'm having a pretty tough time getting this stuff to interact dynamically. Do you have any examples where you're interacting with the maps with javascript (i.e. changing colors, etc.)

All in all, awesome work, though.
How To Protect Your Facebook Places Privacy
Still we have great successes like Skype & Playtech, or on earlier stage Spotify in Europe, just to bring a few examples. There are thousands of other exciting startups.

Seedcamp had 10+ events this year with 20 selected startups presenting at each and hundreds applying to some of these. That's up to 1-2 thousand ambitious startups out there. Each of the countries, even the smallest ones like Slovenia and Estonia, have tens or hundreds of exciting teams.

Valley has huge pluses for growth. At the same time, it has cut throat competition for getting noticed or even getting meetings with investors.

Getting traction depends on product. In Valley you understand, how competitive it really is to get traction.
"Hopefully they haven't burned through too much of the $250,000 that they started with."

They mention at least two large cost items - luxr (basically consulting by Janice Fraser, it says around $10k on the company page) and pivotal labs. Pivotal is the huge one, I once got a quote from them on a project I was working on and they basically said they don't do less than 6 figures. So unless they got some kind of insider discount, the back-of-the-napkin math says at least half of their cash is gone.

Whether it was worth it or not is a separate matter. As a resume builder for a young team: sure, why not, you could do a lot worse. As a product for end users: you might support their cause, it depends on whether you're 1) a Facebook-hating neckbeard-sporting privacy nut - excuse me, libertarian, or 2) willing to cut them slack on an early release because there's some interesting technical challenge they're tackling.

For everyone else: no thanks, Facebook's fine and we'll stick with the real thing.
Thanks, I'm now going to cringe every time I hear someone use "sorry I'm getting old" as an excuse for forgetting something.
I really try to do around 6 on weekdays and as close to 8 or better as I can on the weekend.

6 During the weekdays is an optimal number for me, as it allows me to get in to work early (7:30 or so) and leave and a decent time (5:30) to sync my schedules with my fiance who works 8-4 and then I can have supper and relax a bit and then have time to do some work if necessary before I go to bed at ~12-12:30
I see your point, but the request was for "a library of the 'best' startup focused articles written across the net", not commentary on those articles.

The comments will come with time; right now there aren't many contributors, but the site has been around long enough and been updated frequently enough that I believe it will stick around. HN was kind of slow moving when it started, too (although not that slow, to be honest).
it's insulting to refer to them as kids and criticism like this is only helpful if you give examples: this article does not do that, just making wide sweeping statements about "how bad" it all is. i had a quick look at github, it didn't look like it stunk, but i don't know ruby nor the framework they use.

they didn't appear to use pbkdf2 or similar to derive their crypto keys, so that isn't good. but at least they didn't make up their own algorithm (though maybe they're making their own crypto protocol--hopefully not--i couldn't tell from the code).

it's very easy to say "this sucks", it's harder to say "this sucks and here's why" and it's even harder to say "this suck and here's why and here's how i do it in my deployed product"
"As a side note, you probably don't know shit about vaccines. What makes you think spacing them out will improve her reactions to them?"

For the same reason that I let my toddler eat dirt if she wants to. The longer her immune system has to build up a defense, the better it will defend against something in a vaccine that causes her medical or allergic distress.

If your kid was allergic to peanuts, would you be allowing your neighbors to force her to eat peanuts?
I don't want to disclose too many details

I thought the idea of a developer release was to do exactly this.
"It can't be bolted on after the fact" doesn't mean it's impossible to take an insecure codebase and make it secure. It means that you can't leave it to the last thing and then just toss a few security things into your product. It means you have to rearchitect major pieces of the product, possibly all the major pieces, possibly switching around what the major pieces are entirely. If you want to show that in the "vast majority of cases" that happens, you need to start by establishing not merely that a particular codebase went from "insecure because nobody hardly thought about security" to "reasonably secure", but that the transition was easy.

Facebook probably isn't the best starting point because anything working at that scale is a challenge no matter what.

(Edit: Though if one measure's Diaspora's eventual size if it reaches its goals and considers what percentage of the man-hours have been put in to date, this is still early in the process and major rearchitecting of every component was inevitable anyhow, so hopefully with one of those they can install some security too.)
To be fair, Chrome beta channel is still v6 series (6.0.472.59 beta). The dev channel is v7 series already though I believe.
As important as the specific theme (Vertical Farms are a crock) was this line, "Magical thinking is a universal affliction. We see what we want to see, deny what we don’t. Confronted by uncomfortable facts, we burrow back into the darkness of our cherished beliefs. We will do almost anything – cheat, lie, stand for high office, go to war – to shut out challenges to the way we see the world."

So many of the inane approaches to solving some of our economic and environmental challenges make absolutely no sense, have almost completely consensus that they violate laws of physics, and quite often result in Net-Negative results. "Local Growing", except as a hobby, is one of those insane ideas that seems to be underlying the silly "Vertical Farms" concept. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/opinion/20budiansky.html)

Ironically, if there is government funding, the fact that an idea makes no economic sense doesn't mean it won't be pursued. There may be peripheral advantages or developments in technology that take place, while we tilt at these windmills.

So - I say let's build a couple of these vertical farms, see what we discover, do the math and realize it will never make sense, and maybe discover something else that we never even considered!
I don't think you can say Linux is better in that regard. Every 6 months, there's a new Ubuntu or a new Fedora, and within a couple of years (except for Ubuntu LTS releases, which last three! years on the desktop) they're gone again.
Vertical farms are kind of a crock, kind of. The idea of indoor agriculture is not, however (just look at Thanet Earth), and there is an advantage of building up a few floors and using grow lights to supplement the loss of passive lighting.

A series of low-rise warehouses using hydroponics in the outer rings of a city makes a lot of sense.

However, the architectural games people are playing with huge spires in the center of Manhattan, those are ridiculous, and always have been.
I'll look into this, I can see how it'd be annoying and confusing. Thanks for bringing it up.
Nope, for that you'll need to remove AACS, not HDCP. AnyDVD HD can do that for almost any disc http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvdhd.html , and the free BackupBluray can do many older discs. http://wesleytech.com/backupbluray-guide/
Pixel Qi Tablet Availability, DIY Screen Success and other updates
Product photo reconstruction software
Hello,

I want to if any of you know any good photo reconstruction software or script. Or do you know any PhD paper on that.

Thank you for you help
This is something we're actively working on, you'll be glad to hear. After all, if we're launching an OS that's Chrome-on-Linux with huge memory leaks, we're screwed. ;)
Ask HN: Can we please stop editing stuff after you've received comments?
This is happening more and more often, people will say something, get a response and then change the meaning of their original comment to make it look like they said something different, leaving the 'child' commenter look like an idiot.

Be graceful, when you edit, at least add an 'edited' or better yet, leave it as it is an add your comments lower in the thread rather than revising your old ones.

This could also be an Ask PG: Can you please disable comment editing after a comment has received a child comment, or only allow appending but not editing.

Ditto for 'deletes'.
In reality, for a vaccine to be effective, the portion of the population that needs to receive that vaccination is significantly less than 100%.

Irrelevant. In reality, for a vaccine to be effective, public policy must target 100% vaccination.

(this isn't intended to be an endorsement of those who refuse to get vaccinated)

You may not be endorsing it, but it's important to point out that this argument is ethically dubious.

My favorite ethical test is Kant's categorical imperative, which is briefly that an act is ethical if everyone else can act the same way. For example, if you're wondering whether it's ok to slip onto the subway just as the doors are closing, delaying the train by just a second, you can ask: what if everyone boarded the train that way? Of course, the train would never depart, being constantly delayed by each as-the-doors-close boarder.

If everyone thought that vaccines are ok for others but not themselves, then no one would be vaccinated. Thus this argument is unethical. Let's go beyond "not endorsing" it-- let us all actively condemn it.
And what if the vertical farm and office building idea were combined, so that you had alternating floors of greenhouses for plants and office workers that ate them?

It takes 1-2 acres of farmland to support one person's eating requirements, which is two floors of the Empire State Building. Alternatively, there's 21000 people working in the ESB so that's about 200 people per floor. If you devoted every second floor to agriculture (and magically solved the lighting problem) then each worker could acquire 0.25% of his daily caloric requirements from the floor below... maybe a couple of strawberries?

Oh, and the ESB rents for $38 a square foot, so working out the effective cost of each strawberry is left as an exercise for the reader.
I'd wager you are getting downvoted more for how you are saying things, rather than what you are saying.
It didn't work for me at all. I created a new task, and would edit the title, and description. As soon as I would click off of the task all my changes were lost.
Hoping to drop by. Happens to be the week I have friends in town, sigh!
What about opium?

Maybe roses or saffron?
Good idea, but lacked 'pizazz' for me.
What gives these Europeans the right to come over here and take Americans' land? That leaves less land for native Americans!
Verizon LTE in 30 cities by year end, AT&T aims for mid-2011
I call everyone 'kids,' it's not meant to be offensive. I'm 24 myself.

The 'here's why' part gets tricky with security stuff. I don't want to be complicit in people trashing accounts. And if you read, I did submit patches.

And they are making up their own protocol. It's currently not documented.
"But a startup was probably the worst first endeavor for them. I think it's better to go through your male-programmer-humiliation on someone else's dollar."

I don't know. It seems like they are earning their "male-programmer-humiliation" in the most efficient way possible. If having an article about how atrociously buggy your code is at the top of Hacker News doesn't teach one instant humility, nothing will.
Besides what storm said: decrypting isn't the problem, being able to encrypt a new cookie is. If I can "bradhe" as my username in my own cookie, the default ASP.NET forms auth will consider me logged in as you.
Even if you can't decode it real-time without a chip, will this at least facilitate ripping?
Maybe this is a good time to toss up the half-finished 6502 simulator I have kicking around.
userscripts.org has now stopped working

either get 500 internal server error, or please wait message
It would allow you to encrypt new cookies. The default authenticated cookies for ASP.NET forms auth is a username. If you can encrypt your own username/id values into your cookie, you can effectively make ASP.NET think you're logged in as whoever you want.