skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bad Habits that Crush Your Creativity and Stifle Your Success
SSE4.2 and the new CRC32 instruction
I think what he's saying makes sense to an extent. I'd argue that nearly all of the large (based on valuation anyway) startups recently have made "something for everyone".

Just to name a few: Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Skype
Startup Location
I don't think that's what Tichy meant. That's just a wrapper library to make error handling easier in a coroutine-based event loop.

If you're not worried about being "web scale", it's not hard to write an async socket server using luasocket's sockets for nonblocking TCP IO and luasocket.select for scanning for active connections. It gets bogged down once you have > 100 or so idle connections (the usual trade-offs with select apply), but it's easy to write, very portable, and (on x86) LuaJIT is amazingly fast. Contact me if you want example code.

I've been working on an actual framework for async servers (libev-based), but haven't had much free time lately.
Are you getting the Bay Bridge confused with the Third St Bridge?
I'm pretty sure the era from 1860-1900 was generally deflationary in the USA, and I don't think that there was much of an issue with people taking cuts in nominal wages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907
That was mostly my point to begin with. At best, these new "security" controls prevent attackers from stealing my account and defacing my data. Facebook loses the confidentiality battle and thus the war.
Add an 'upload pitch' feature to the website so that you don't have to call a phone number and can try a couple of times without wasting trans-atlantic phone calls if you are in some place other than that US?

I'm sure people in the developing world with good stuff would like that too.

Very nice concept!
How are string ops tricky in Lua? Patterns and table.concat can get a lot done, and when you need more power, there's LPEG (which is also quite speedy).
Unfortunately, yes.

PHB: "We need to get this in here! It's UNBREAKABLE!"
IT Guy: "Sir, I assure you, it's breakable."
PHB: "That's not what the shiny pamphlet says."
IT Guy: Facepalm
How Changing a Button Increased a Site's Annual Revenues by $300 Million
Charlie Stross asks what's happening with higher education
Facebook to Update the Commenting System with Votes and More
That we differ only 2.5 percent in our DNA from mice.

It still blows my mind.
From the article:

"There was a time in my life, he says, when I was independently wealthy. But that time has passed"

Sounds to me like he has sunk a lot of his capital into his ongoing research projects.
I think the key factors are politics and managerial ignorance - there appears to be a general consensus that the most qualified person for the job is the a. biggest suck up and b. the least technically knowledgeable guy/gal available.

The problem with having politicals in senior positions is that they will, by their nature, happily abandon honesty + humility - the two most important qualities required by devs/management for any software project to even have a chance of something approaching sane completion.

Unfortunately politics and honesty/humility are not compatible.

Luckily there are companies out there that 'get it', but depressingly few.
Changed the host, should be fine now.
"If brute force doesn't work, you're not using enough brute force." -- anonymous
Ask and ye shall receive: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l...
So he was the friend of someone that the FBI was concerned about? That's how terrorist cells work. Friends.

Yeah, they should have obeyed the law, but I don't have a problem with them watching him, so long as they don't actually disrupt his life. (They failed at that, too, though.)
KF| YCom| Winterreifen: Günstiger Reifenservice
Wer einen günstigen Reifenservice und eine Möglichkeit zur Einlagerung von Sommer- und Winterreifen sucht, wendet sich an Autofit Borrmann: http://sites.google.com/site/kfzborrmann/reifenservice<p>Reifenservice und Reifenlagerung bei Autofit Borrmann in Dortmund – Derne
Facebook Dramatically Upgrades Comments Plugin Features
Condone as in overlook
Ask HN: Recent valuations for startups seeking angel rounds?
I know that valuations have been going up for startups, but I'd love to hear scuttle butt on what kind of valuations people are getting?

If you can't talk about the startup name, that's cool. If you're worried people will track it back to your user name, create a temp UID.

I'd love to hear a couple of things: What type of traction you had, and how much (paying customers?, exponentially increasing traffic?, pre-sales of a product?), where your technology was at (prototype?, full fledged product?, wire frames? ) and what kind of pre and post money valuation did you get.

Information from "A friend of mine told me..." is also okay.

Also: Is there any place to find this type of information? Is there anything like The Funded that has this type of information? Or, is all the information available through personal chats with founders that recently raised money?
Text Voting, Text Message polling, SMS voting and polling
Txtvoting is a worldwide sms polling, Text Voting & polling service provider Company. We like discover to provide latest and better feature, tools and software to my customer. You don’t need any additional software or hardware for polling; you can display your PowerPoint presentation in your browser.
I used to worry that I spend too much time here, then the pay-offs started coming in and now I don't worry about it any more.

I have found:

- people to work with

- concrete knowledge that I didn't even know I was missing

- instant help

- advertisers

- friends

Through HN, which is more than I can say for any other online community that I've ever been a part of.

And all that for 'free', if you don't count the time spent on it. If you would count the time then the 'investment' side of it (I estimated that at roughly 4 months full time) at a 'regular' salary (say 100K per year) would equate to about $30K, I would say I'm more than break-even already in a direct monetary sense but that's not where the real value is, the real value is in the increase of your potential by being able to tap in to this resource.

Time spent on HN to me is now a form of investment with a completely unknown return, both in kind and magnitude and I don't mind spending time to give others back the same that I have received.

HN is a pay-it-forward scheme if you 'use' it properly.
He covered some of the same ground in his talk at the Watershed in Bristol last week.

A video of which is now available if folks want to watch
http://www.dshed.net/william-gibson
That's not a problem. It's an opportunity/challenge. See what I did there?
The best site choosing christmas gifts for your Family
UK infrastructure faces cyber threat, says GCHQ chief
Gawker Stalker, then.
I haven't, but I've used more than I care to.

However... I am NOT giving someone else access to my account. That's crazy.
Hire me: The Rails Frontend Guy
Howdy!
I am looking for a job that will harness my skills of Ruby and Frontend development to build great products and actuating great ideas.

Maybe you are an Entrepreneur or Tech lead that needs an extra hand to build your great product. Or maybe you are part of a Rails consulting company looking to subcontract some projects. I want to speak with you!

A little about me: 6 years Web Software Development 3 Years of Ruby on Rails Development BA degree from UC Berkeley

Acronyms dear to my heart: Git, HTML5, CSS, SASS, JS, JSON, SEO, MYSQL, CS3-CS4, *nix, Ack Acronyms I can tolerate: SVN, PHP, XML Misc: Selenium IDE, Linux server hacking, Facebook Integration, Wordpress Hacking, Sphinx search

What I have done: Been part of several startup tech teams Helped scale a major Rails Ecommerce site from 0 to 1.5 Million uniques a month. Built custom storefront applications using Sinatra for Fortune 500 Companies. Built an email templating and tracking system and integrated it with a major ESP API Built interactive financial tools with Ajax, Flash, HTML and Ruby Coded integrations with a bunch of different API's

Why Rails Frontend? I have built Rails apps from end to end and been part of a number of teams building Rails or ruby apps. Whereas hardcore backend programmers seem to be in abundance, I think that there is a real lack of quality developers who can really build quality UI's on top of Rails while being able to dive into the Controllers and Models to make magic happen there also. I think I fill that niche really well.

I am seeking: A remote web job. I live 2 hours outside of Chicago, so I could potentially travel to Chicago once a week or once every other week if you are located in Chicagoland somewhere.

If you want to fly me out to CA or NY occasionally, if that's where you are head-quartered than that could work also.

I could do a fulltime salaried position or a contract position with a minimum of 6 months, prefer a 1 year though. My salary needs are pretty reasonable for a great Rails front-end dev with good communication skills and startup experience.

I am not interested in working for solely equity. Been there, done that. I need to eat.

Anybody have any thoughts, suggestions, or job offers regarding this?

Drop me a line to learn more and see examples of my work: rubyfrontendguy@gmail.com
"'If you build something that people value, something that is unique, and ahead of the others, then you will make money.' – Ev"

Mmh.

I agree with Ev.

But I live in Italy, and if I build something that people value, unique and ahead of the others, but I don't know how to make money from beginning, nobody going to listen my idea.

I like the way of thinking of US.
DeNA Co. buys S.F. social game firm Ngmoco
Someone complained yesterday in #startups that they wanted to live in the future and that was exactly my response.

You could have said that if you were born at any point in time but I think anybody alive right now that happens to be lucky enough to live in the developed world is already living in a time that science fiction writers wouldn't have trouble accepting as 'the future'.

Gibson being one of the best in the field is a strong hint that others will likely agree with him.

So many things that were 'distant future dreams' when I was a child are everyday reality right now that I feel as though the future is 'happening' at a faster pace than my life is progressing, it is overtaking me at a clip that I worry if I'll be able to keep up with the rate with which new technology is coming out.
Social Security isn't "good" for last year (FY2010) and so on, let alone 2040. Those funds in the "lockbox"? Spent on the general budget as soon as they were received, and right now SS expenditures are exceeding their dedicated taxes, requiring money from the general budget.

(According to this source http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/index.html the projected deficit was going to be $41 billion as of the beginning of August, a couple of months before the end of FY 2010).

According to Wikiepedia FY 2010's DoD budget, all categories except the black budget was $663.8 billion; that's a bit less than the year's Social Security expenditures. As for it's relationship to the whole budget (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_defense_budget#Military_budg...):

"The U.S. Department of Defense budget accounted in fiscal year 2010 for about 19% of the United States federal budgeted expenditures and 28% of estimated tax revenues. Including non-DOD expenditures, defense spending was approximately 25–29% of budgeted expenditures and 38–44% of estimated tax revenues."

The "including non-DOD" apparently includes:

"This does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget, such as nuclear weapons research, maintenance, cleanup, and production, which is in the Department of Energy budget, Veterans Affairs, the Treasury Department's payments in pensions to military retirees and widows and their families, interest on debt incurred in past wars, or State Department financing of foreign arms sales and militarily-related development assistance. Neither does it include defense spending that is not military in nature, such as the Department of Homeland Security, counter-terrorism spending by the FBI, and intelligence-gathering spending by NASA."

A substantial fraction of which can't be reasonably scored as "military spending".
I had a really cool idea for your game, have some time to talk about it?
Echofon showing trending topic tweets in realtime
To anyone else who's trying: you can use Google Voice to make free international calls. Something I sadly only found out after spending some $$$ while building this thing.
This looks more like perl scripting than perl programming.

If I put all those functions into a class and then called $class_object->can($method), I get the same effect, only without the crazy hash. Perl has built-in dispatching.

I can add new methods to my perl classes at any time. Better yet, if I do it all with Class::MOP (and/or Moose), I can make it cleaner, since then I can choose to add methods to the object vs the whole class. In addition, my "dispatch tables" get the potential benefits of inheritance, roles, and other abstraction tools.

It might be a good starting exercise in rolling your own dispatch tables, but you would probably get a lot more out of reading Art of the Metaobject Protocol and trying to implement a good class system (aka reimplement Moose).
The only real theme is that we haven’t bought any companies yet to get the company. It’s always been because we have a lot of respect for the people involved.

So basically, if you care about what your startup is trying to accomplish, don't sell to Facebook.
Kind of funny, but not really meaningful. There are different priors. Prior probability that water is actually medicine: ~0. Prior probability that repeat head trauma causes damage: >0. If you'd ever seen an MRI of diffuse axonal injury you'd have a different perspective.
I came to post this exact comment.

I built an pneumatic cannon to launch tennis balls and rockets etc with my kids and I want to figure out the height and speed of various projectiles and air pressures.
Windows Phone 7 Needs Hard Reset When Swapping SD Cards
WRT the "mini version" you are thinking of the pre-WWII BS 546. BS 1363 was introduced in 1947 and does not have a mini version.
Get Google Maps on your Nokia N900
This is pretty cool. I like the simplicity of the whole thing. It definitely makes you cut down your pitch to a handful of words. Check out my pitch here:

http://pitchpower.appspot.com/pitch?id=agpwaXRjaHBvd2VychILE...

I definitely think embedding the audio in the page somehow should be your next step.

I was messing around with Twilio last week for AgileTask. It is pretty neat, and has some really cool functionality.

Best of luck.

*Update: Make the "PitchPower" text at the top of the permalink page into a link back to the main page. If I post this on twitter or facebook, some people are naturally going to try to click that heading to see what PitchPower is.
Ask HN: Web app for non-web savvy audience
Going along with the general consensus of those "I'm working on a super-secret-confidential-double-dodeca-awesome project and I can't give anything away" lines, I have a question for you HNers. This isn't a throwaway, this is my account. Mind you, I hardly post, but believe me, I browse. I browse like a badass.

I'm working on a tracking tool and social network for a very (very) specific niche market. It's not particularly small, but it's a market that isn't intimately familiar with the concepts of Web 2.0. I'd wager most of them still use antiquated versions of IE. That being said, most of them are involved in forums of some sort or another. In fact, what I'm trying to do is centralize and standardize what they do in some of these forums. I'm unsure how my notoriously stubborn audience will adapt from phpBB to my proprietary tool.

The purpose of this project? Well, I'm part of this community (not the web-illiterate part). I wanted to build something for myself (started in Excel, years ago, ugh). After speaking with a bunch of people also involved, it seems that virtually everyone I spoke to is enthusiastic about my idea. I've gotten a group of beta testers that I define in a range of browsing skills to see how my program works. It's an interesting challenge, building a web app for people that barely understand the concept, let alone the definition. I've never built a site this large all by my lonesome, so I'm excited to see how I manage, from conception to production without a cofounder or team. This is more of a portfolio builder that I scrape a few hours a week together to work on than a business venture, but it wouldn't be terrible to earn a little advertising revenue.

Have any of you dealt with a large, decentralized, and non web-savvy audience before? If so, any advice?

EDIT: from my comments, revorad broke me down and got me to spill the beans on my project. It didn't take long. I would make a terrible spy. Here's the project info, in a little more detail.

It's a target score tracking tool for gun owners, built around aggregating scores, ammunition makes/types, individual gun scores, etc to let individuals track how well they do (in general, with one of their guns, etc) and track performance metrics across the user base to determine which ammo works well, which guns perform best, etc.

So, a tracking tool mixed with a social network. I guess.
It started as something to help me track my scores and see how I progressed. I made a score calculating algorithm just using Excel that factored in ring size, distance, wind, and a whole load of other factors and it worked really well. I had one of those "this is madness" moments and started porting it into a CakePHP app.

There are a ton of AJAX page interactions, UI/UX elements, etc that are very different from what traditional message boards and forums use.
Caring Award Winner 2010-Peter Thomas
Peter Thomas is the Winner of “International Caring 2010.My motto has always been, “first you learn, then you earn, then you return.” I was taught no matter what your circumstance, you have something to give to others. As a successful serial entrepreneur turned social entrepreneur, I didn’t always have an easy road. I lost millions in 1982 with the first real estate crash and in 2000, personal tragedy struck with the suicide of my only son Todd, at age 36.
Not so here in Norway. I've observed this behavior on several occasions when visiting Spain though.
Too young to know it can't be done
Ah I see. Good luck in your chessboxing career :)
And Backgammon with Russian Roulette.
I just came here to post the same, I think that could actually work. Maybe there's some other value add that could be done that would make it not just a straight "I don't trust your opinion" thing. Like maybe it's useful to have these things stored so you can see something or other over time. The second use doesn't need to be hugely useful, it's just a polite fiction for the patient-dentist interface :)
RTW claimed to be of top pedigree, yet spent a long time and a lot of money to make a horrible game. Led by pretenders, I'd say.
By The Numbers: Seed Funding is The New Black
Given some of the hype they come out with about the game and the IP it was a given they were going to get a heap of people to give it a shot, same with Age of Conan, it sold a heap of copies initially.

Once you lose the player base it's a real uphill battle to retain them, if Age of Conan released in it's current state it would be a different story for them, would have kept a lot more people initially.
If you'd like to read a more substantiated account about the pace of development of modern society I suggest that you rather read this: http://hanson.gmu.edu/bigthing.pdf
Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?
What's a good laptop to install Linux (Ubuntu) on? I'm looking to buy a new machine for work. System76 seems to make good laptops. Does anyone have experience with them? Is there anything else you would recommend?

People seem to rave about their MacBook Pros. Is it easy to make the switch from Ubuntu? Do I easily get all the software I'll need (svn, git, django, python, vim)?

Essentially I think, my question is, is the experience on a MBP so much better, that it's worth having to learn the MacOS platform?
The answer to your question about working families is that they simply wouldn't go because of the cost. The last time I had any dental work done (root canal + crown) I paid over $1k total, and that was WITH dental insurance. Teeth or rent - choose one.
GreenPois0n and Limera1n: Let's Clear the New Tools to Jailbreak iOS 4.1
Is the sound quality of a google voice connection comparable to an MP3? (I haven't used it GV)
Yeah really, I was kinda hoping to read through some relevant posts, but it's just been taken over by a bunch of tards concentrating on his SWTOR comments.
Please just show us what you built. Don't waste time.
Indian Rupee Sign Added to Unicode Standard
Haskell. Faster than java, easier than java, safer than java. And it even has a centralized repository of libraries.
From the article:

There was also another reason why setting a story in the present day is more attractive than looking into a future even half a century away. This was because, said Mr Gibson, using that setting would necessitate explaining away present-day problems such as global warming.

"If I write something set 60 years in the future I am going to have to explain how humanity got there and that's becoming quite a big job," he said.

Ouch.
Have someone in the room to pitch to while you make the call.
Why has Lua adoption been so slow outside the game world?

No libraries.
Node's API was frozen with the 0.2.0 release (for most parts). Things were indeed very rocky before, but most libraries have been updated now and are unlikely to break again soon.
"It's a chicken-egg situation", as they say. We have to break it. This cycle of perpetuating and supporting horrible consumer-grade technologies five, ten, and fifteen years after its obsolescence has to stop, or it'll always take fifteen years for any advances to manifest in a meaningful way.

Yes, it can be painful, but the minimal level of such coaxing that has occurred has been helping -- IE's marketshare is shrinking ever smaller and currently stands in a place that people would have thought impossible just a few years ago.

We can make a difference if we try. We just have to be willing to act boldly wherever we can. Personally, it is my opinion that every developer should find the investment in eradicating IE extremely worthwhile even if it costs him some sales or pageviews. The masses have proven that they will switch if something they want to do asks them to do so, so let's get it started. It is really silly that we don't do this already.
Life expectancy is a somewhat crude tool for prediction.

In the US over the past 20 years, quality of life as a function of age has become an important area of study. HALE (Health Adjusted Life Expectancy) may be a better predictor of future geriatric needs.

http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/4/1/14
How about using one dentist to recommend what work needs to be done, and checking the quality, and using another dentist to carry out the work?
One defense would presumably to have coordinated publication of contrary data through multiple channels to an extent that the "real" data is drowned in a sea of noise.

Reminds me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Execution_Channel where there is a blogger paid to post conspiracy theory nonsense by state security services to obscure the reality of various undercover operations.
Smart phone will come down in price to the point where all phones are smartphones.