skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not in a startup currently, but the individual coverage I can purchase is better than what my employer offers. I'm paying ~$140/mo for a HDHCP PPO with United Healthcare. It has a $1900/yearly deductible, and I am putting an extra $220/mo into an HSA. This provides: 1) relatively little cost when healthy, with a maximum healthcare cost of $1900/year deductible+$140/mo payments; 2) tax deductions & savings via the HSA, which also helps in reducing other insurance expenses (since HSA funds can be spent on dental/vision/OTC medicine, separate dental/vision insurance isn't a necessity).
I would recommend they continue doing what they are doing. No complaints.

The only thing that bugs me is their lack of concern regarding dead links. So much of their website and MSDN has dead links, especially anything relating to 'codeplex' and 'gotdotnet'. Why acquire something just to destroy it? If you're going to move URLs around, why not redirect?
I saw the same . I understand his attitude somewhat - imo, too much of the economy is focused on marketing unnecessary products to people that barely want them. That said, making and moving things is a critical element societal of advancement. The entire reason people can read his blog post is because some companies decided to make some things. I consider myself an academic at the core as well, but the world runs on more than just ideas.
What people will say: read the comments in this section.
Reality: Mail room.
Dear Microsoft,

Can you please, please, please, create an emulation mode where file name paths use forward slashes instead of back slashes? Bonus points awarded if you also consider getting rid of the c:\ "disk name" file system conventions.
Did you mean 4/6/8?
The 40th SuperHappyDevHouse is tomorrow in Mountain View
Why is no one talking about this site?
Well, I mean for an Asian news site. Pretty fantastic contributors and original content for once. Damn slick.
http://www.jwz.org/hacks/mork.pl

# In Netscape Navigator 1.0 through 4.0, the history.db file was just a
# Berkeley DBM file. You could trivially bind to it from Perl, and
# pull out the URLs and last-access time. In Mozilla, this has been
# replaced with a "Mork" database for which no tools exist.
#
# Let me make it clear that McCusker is a complete barking lunatic.
# This is just about the stupidest file format I've ever seen.
#
# http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/arch/mork/primer.txt
# http://jwz.livejournal.com/312657.html
# http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html
# http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241438
#
# In brief, let's count its sins:
#
# - Two different numerical namespaces that overlap.
#
# - It can't decide what kind of character-quoting syntax to use:
# Backslash? Hex encoding with dollar-sign?
#
# - C++ line comments are allowed sometimes, but sometimes // is just
# a pair of characters in a URL.
#
# - It goes to all this serious compression effort (two different
# string-interning hash tables) and then writes out Unicode strings
# without using UTF-8: writes out the unpacked wchar_t characters!
#
# - Worse, it hex-encodes each wchar_t with a 3-byte encoding,
# meaning the file size will be 3x or 6x (depending on whether
# whchar_t is 2 bytes or 4 bytes.)
#
# - It masquerades as a "textual" file format when in fact it's just
# another binary-blob file, except that it represents all its magic
# numbers in ASCII. It's not human-readable, it's not hand-editable,
# so the only benefit there is to the fact that it uses short lines
# and doesn't use binary characters is that it makes the file bigger.
# Oh wait, my mistake, that isn't actually a benefit at all.
#
# Pure comedy.
I always assumed that the light would be artificial. And that they were relying on hypothetical cheap energy of the kind that reliable fusion would provide. This may be possible a hundred years from now but surely not in today's energy economy.
Nice work, I agree its a little busy when u first load it
The lamest part of this whole thing is that the shots she cribbed from the other photographers are easily reproduced by even an amateur photographer.

From what I saw of the shots she stole, every professional photographer specializing in baby/maternity work has a similar shot in their portfolio. All she had to do was copy the pose and lighting and take the snap herself instead of taking credit for someone else's output.
It's true that this won't make Javascript or HTTP any faster, but it's still very exciting to me. This is about making Canvas faster. That's great because nearly all of the canvas games/demos have been spending around 90% of their cycles waiting on Canvas and only 10% in Javascript. As great as Canvas is, so far it has only been able to replicate games from the era of the 2Mhz SNES. With this change, we may be able to reach the 30Mhz PlayStation 1 era (only 15 years behind the curve!).
Mine is extremely messy at the moment; it's currently centered around what sort of VCS I decide to use / pull code from.

With that said:

~/repos : root directory of all of the repos I'm using.

~/repos/git

~/repos/svn

~/repos/cvs

...

And then underneath those, I have a smattering of repos from various sources. It's ugly as hell, and I'm really liking this thread mostly so I can get a better idea on how I should reorganize my stuff. :)
Totally irresponsible journalism. This is not all or .NET or even a tiny fraction. It is one control that will be rapidly patched.

This allows the end user to decrypt their own "encrypted" cookie, not an attacker. At best, if the web app writers were stupid and put truly exploitable data in the cookie, they'd be effected.

It is horrible that MS missed this, but calling .NET broken is probably actionable libel.
"The network is the computer", eh?
Running scripts in WebKit
I do best with about 10, but I have an infant, so it doesn't always happen.
The way someone explained it to me is that the Linux kernel loads the hypervisor "under" itself.
CouchCamp Highlight Video
To decrypt it you need an exception message...so turn on custom errors and you're protected it seems. Assuming you don't do that, once you decrypt it you get what, a session ID? Then what?
If anything, the hype might end up making some other better implementation actually have a chance of succeeding. If anyone else out there was thinking about doing a distributed social network, now's your shot at the limelight. You've got about a week to come up with a basic OStatus-based social network in Rails that isn't full of security holes.
Education As a Customer Acquisition Strategy: Jason Fried – 37s
And with that number in mind, you also see another problem with vertical farms: pure space availability. Modern farms are hundreds and even thousands of acres to grow enough food to feed the masses we have today. You would need > 100 of these buildings (ignoring all the other issues for now) to be able to replace one major farm.

Frankly hydrogen vehicles are more feasible than this, but only barely.
The writer rambles on with setup and indirect arguments for a couple of paragraphs before even mentioning what he's attacking, but he raises some excellent points once he actually gets going.

This bit was witty:

"The only crop which could cover such costs is high-grade cannabis. But a 30-storey hydroponic skunk tower would be quite hard to conceal."
These ideas aren't new. I doubt that they are impossible but we haven't yet solved the technical problems that would make 'vertical farms' cost effective over regular farms. If farmland became expensive enough (really expensive,) I could see them seeming more viable.

If these were to happen, my entirely uneducated guess would be that it would start with rooftop farming, and that extending to storied greenhouses at the tops of skyscrapers. Depending on your crops, these both don't need artificial light and could lead to solutions for other engineering problems such farming would involve.
A Creative Handmade Lamp
Being creative can benefit you in many ways and you don’t even need to have much money to make your living space beautiful.
IMO the Wikipedia definition is too restrictive. SSE is common even if the first design wasn't small, elegant or successful.
doh! (thanks)
On a corporation-wide strategic note, I have two thoughts: Embrace maturity. Expand only in limited, strategic ways.

With apologies to Mitch Hedberg, if you follow the tech industry long enough, you start to get mad at Microsoft. There's Microsoft's iPhone (Windows Phone), Microsoft's Google (Bing), Microsoft's iPod (Zune). Someone needs to tell Microsoft, "man, just be yourself."

Microsoft seems obsessed with coming up for a "killer" for every hot new trend. If some other company's product gets buzz and "relevance", you can expect Microsoft to come along 1-2 years later and try and compete with that product. By the time Microsoft's product is any good, the buzz moves on to something else. I'm waiting for Windows Live to try and remake itself in Facebook's image.

Microsoft is a mature company. They pay dividends. They're not going to compete in terms of buzz, "relevance", or potential for future growth. They're not in the same league as Apple or Google--but in the league they are in, with companies like maybe Oracle and IBM, they're at the top of the league. So stay in the league that you're winning. Remember, the point of growth and relevance and hotness is to get into the league you've been winning for over a decade.

Yes, Apple is even older than Microsoft and is growing fantastically. That's because Apple had nothing to lose. If you want growth, you have to roll the dice and reinvent the company from the ground up. That's easy if you're Apple and you're at the bottom of the league, struggling to break even. Microsoft is a different story.

Microsoft knows which of its products are worthwhile, which isn't necessarily synonymous with profit. (Visual Studio isn't a big revenue source, but you have to have developer tools for your platform to get developers.) Focus exclusively on those.

Handle extensions in two ways. First, instead of chasing every trend, chase maybe one or two opportunities at a time (company-wide) and focus your best efforts on them. Opportunities aren't trends. Once something is a trend, the opportunity is lost. That's not your league anyway.

Second, don't always chase an opportunity by building something. Like any population, you need fresh infusions of DNA every so often or you will suffer from the effects of inbreeding and die out. If a startup demonstrates a profitable business model that can benefit from Microsoft's scale and stability, buy it. Become the best "pooled-risk company management company" (http://paulgraham.com/prcmc.html). Once you buy the startup, don't destroy or assimilate it. Don't require them to build on your technology stack. Don't move them to Redmond. Carefully control the mixture and interaction to protect the startup's culture and DNA. Over time you can integrate more if it will provide a benefit, but some businesses will have to essentially remain separate companies. Embrace that.
How to Write an Effective About Me Page
In outlook, if my boss clicks send and the email has the word "attachment or attached" in it, ask him if he wants to add the file he forgot to attach.
Paul, you mention that you weren't motivated to make the business succeed: "[O]ur motivation to make a successful company got destroyed by all of the above." But you also mention that you were working 100-hour weeks. Do you think you had sufficient motivation to work, say, 60-hour weeks?

This is roughly what WePay, another YCombinator start-up, worked and called "Khang's hours".

http://blog.wepay.com/2010/09/the-obligatory-wepay-%E2%80%9C...
I don't suggest just reading code, I suggest reading code
critically, with an eye to how it can be improved.

You're right that casually reading 10 blog posts doesn't help one's writing. But reading them carefully and critically, trying to concretely identify how the author has crafted the language to support their goals? I believe this absolutely can improve one's writing; indeed, I think it's an important part of improving.

Yes, of course, you still have to knuckle down and do a lot of writing at some point, too :)
Thanks, ahi* , for linking to this.

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1701684
Feds Working on Apple, Google Anti-poaching Deal
Online content syndication, aggregation, or publishing schemes tend to see alot of troubles because the founders make the technology the value proposition rather than the content, which is relegated to commodity (at best) status.

I mean, look at how low an opinion brandnewlow (haha) has of veteran journalists. "Working with journalists is tough because almost all of them overvalue their work to an extreme degree". Oh, but I'm sure "digg knockoff + Chicago" is an earth-shattering technology well worth its price in Flooz.

As soon as you realize doing a content play based on writing is very similar to any other creative industry like movies, TV, or music, the sooner you'll respect the people who write for a living. They're not just replaceable crotchety cogs that make your content engine move. They're your sole source of revenue (if you do make an money at all).

Sincerely,
A writer.
Yes they are supposed to do it differently, at least if they wanted to keep me as a customer. While I use Posterous just for pushing to multiple destiantions (which it does brilliantly), I moved the primary site I was using Posterous for back to Tumblr specifically because of that campaign.

As s product manager, I've worked on switching campaigns before, but the manner in which Posterous chose to do so made me lose all faith in whether they cared about their customers or was it win at all cost.
Since I've already brought this up on Reddit...

For example: http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/blob/master/app/controll...

There's no check to see if this is your photo or not. And before you mention it, the before_filter only checks if they're logged in, not permissions.

There are many, many similar things to this. Check out lib/encryptor.rb and shudder. I'm no security expert, but...
> However for all of Posterous' hard work and bluster, it's been Tumblr that has grown exponentially over the past year.

For very linear implementations of exp()
What you say is correct, but in a way that is disconnected from the user's POV.

Consider: the command line is a major drawback of Windows, and that's the most obvious manifestation of the Windows/DOS heritage. In addition to its lack of power, the Window doesn't even resize properly.

Plenty of tools that port easily to OSX or Haiku are difficult to port to Windows. Look at the situation with git.

The situation is poor. Technically, NT (and NTFS, etc) might be great, but aspects of the user experience is awful.
"You would need > 100 of these buildings (ignoring all the other issues for now) to be able to replace one major farm."

So what if it didn't replace one major farm and just a small local one? 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?

I'm surprised I haven't seen the ideas brought together before, it seems more pragmatic than a dedicated building just for the farm and there's a growing movement to eat healthier at work. We order from FarmFresh at my offices, which supplies us with fruit and veggies from a local family-owned farm and we've been loving the results.
Correction, the app is called zcorder

http://www.precentral.net/zcorder-brings-voice-recording-web...

It can't record phone calls though, but I imagine that was some sort of security precaution on the part of palm.
Based on the limited set of reactions I've seen so far (for instance, http://www.autismweb.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=23104)?

No. This won't change a damn thing.

When you're that committed to a cause, every scientific result that comes out against your cause is easy to dismiss as either wrong, a deliberate lie, incomplete, not 100% proof, etc.

This is especially troublesome in areas where the True Believers invert the burden of proof: rather than asking for proof that vaccines cause autism, they'd only be satisfied with proof that they don't, which is a much more difficult task (and don't get me wrong - I have no doubt whatsoever that even if rock solid proof was offered, they'd still reject it outright).
This is going to be pretty Epic!!!

Can't wait!
Production prices for solar energy are now below $0.80 / watt (http://www.123jump.com/market-update/First-Solar,-Inc-Q4-Ear...), although skyrocketing demand has caused wholesale prices to remain much higher. It seems likely that we may in the next 10 years be in a place where we can turn sunlight into electricity, and then electricity into the exact wavelengths of light used in photosynthesis more efficiently than allowing the plants to sit in the sun.

If this is the case, than we may be able to grow crops more efficiently indoors than out. But we will be replacing acres of crops with acres of solar panels. And it's unclear to me why we would want these buildings to be skyscrapers, which are much more expensive per square foot than large warehouses in the middle of nowhere.
I've always really enjoyed reading your posts on HN. I saw that you were quoted in The Register with some identifying information, and I finally put 2 and 2 together and realized that you were the author of some of my favorite posts over at TMF too. Those were some hilarious stories. I hope you find the time in the future to share some more of them over there, but can completely understand what a time sink it is to write material for an audience of strangers on the interwebs. On behalf of those strangers, I would like to say that it was much appreciated while it lasted. Thanks for all of the laughs and knowledge that you've shared.
Asking that here is sort of like going to a KKK rally and asking if anyone has any questions for Jesse Jackson.
Yes, there are: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1699782
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/tumblr.com+posterous.com+wo...

ahem

I know people get worked up about new stuff, but that doesn't mean the new stuff is better than the old (often far more reliable, featureful, etc. etc). I went with wordpress.com a couple months ago, and have loved it (with email posting and excellent code highlighting, even for Clojure :-P).
Plus, the researchers didn't destroy the security. It was never there in the first place. And I doubt they were the first to exploit it, either.
But I'm not talking about a "weekend" - What if you had 2 years to do this, with yourself and a technical co-founder? Wouldn't it work with proper project planning? I'm not sure where the "weekend" vibe came from?
This means EVERYONE needs to be vaccinated for the disease to not continue to find hosts to pass along to.

This is not correct. In an extreme case, if there is only 1 left unvaccinated, the disease won't spread. If there are two left unvaccinated, the chances of one having the disease and the other being initially uninfected and then subsequently infected by the one possible vector is astonishingly small.

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

Moreover, vaccines based on attenuated vaccines (e.g., the polio vaccine) actually infect the recipient with an impotent version of the virus. This virus will be transmitted to others in the community through normal contact, thus conferring immunity to many that did not receive the vaccination directly.

(this isn't intended to be an endorsement of those who refuse to get vaccinated)
On Android OS phones the first letter of the password is shown but turns into a star/dot after 1 second.

This approach helps with both usability and security.
Or pipe a fifo to x264...
Comments on the crypto: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1699782

And I'd say having no authorization in a project that's supposed to be about privacy is missing a fundamental.
"50% of firm founders [in Silicon Valley] are foreign born"
I am not anti-vaccine. However, my toddler had a very severe reaction to a vaccine she was given at two years of age. This led my wife and I to decide to not allow our daughter to have all of the vaccines at once. She is not completely vaccinated but will have them all before she turns five. We feel that staggering the vaccinations out as much as possible allows her immune system to respond better without severe reactions that cause very high temperatures, which could lead to brain damage and/or death.
1. Please create a public/private App store so I can easily install a WPF app. In general, make it as easy to install a desktop app as it is right now to install an iPhone/iPad app. Not just the mechanics of the installation, but also the friendly discovery process with descriptions, screen shots, reviews, etc.

2. Windows 8 needs to run well on tablets and touch needs to work just like it does on the iPad--don't show me the cursor. I don't care if they cost 3x what the iPad costs, but I need a good tablet experience for our business clientele. And I definitely mean full Windows 8, with MS Office. If the early releases of Windows 8 don't run well on tablets, we'll be writing iPad versions of our apps.

3. Keep up the good work with WP7, C#, Visual Studio, WPF/XAML, Dynamics and Sharepoint 2010. Please make SharePoint interoperability a priority across your entire business product line. Good call on killing the Kin.
It's not about you thinking you are a good developer, but about the employer thinking you are a good developer (i.e. you are a good fit for their purpose -- not talking about your actual skill itself).
porn has always been a great early indicator on the web, and the fact that blogger porn sites have exploded on Tumblr indicates that is usability, and social features are superior.

I'm a big fan of Posterous but the social edge on Tumblr means more traffic and exposure for the blog which what attracts and keeps people on the platform.
~/Projects has legacy projects and stuff in SVN

~/Git-Projects has almost all my current projects which are on GitHub

~/htdocs is my local Apache root and it used for testing front-end work or simple PHP stuff
About IE9:

* add support for websocket

* add support for webgl

* make it cross-platform

* make trident open source

Yes, I do realize the last two are very unlikely and probably webgl too as MS tends to boycot everything opengl but if they added SVG maybe there is hope for this one.

Also, try to stop BS marketing such as:

* http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/product...
SF (& Woody Allen) Tribute Video by Startup, Shot entirely on iPhone4
Maybe those companies that have trouble finding good developers are using HR-bots and headhunters who are looking in the wrong places, focusing too heavily on checklists, and asking the wrong questions?

The funniest trend I notice these days is that headhunters do the reference checks for hiring companies. It's in a headhunter's best interests to make sure a short lister gets hired. Yes, headhunters have minimum-term guarantees to keep their fee, but I do notice that many companies are also slow to fire someone who isn't blatantly incompetent, so there's a good chance that a headhunter will still win by placing a dud.