skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I argue this one all the time, just look at my post history. The fact is the world moves on and this is the way of the future whether one likes it on not. It is happening, has reached critical mass, and users are demanding the increased usability that it provides. Further marketing and accounting departments are crunching the numbers and finding that you spend more chasing this small sub-set of the market. When faced with spending 25% of your budget chasing a slower development model to support 5% of the market or to spend that 25% adding revenue streams or increasing conversion on the 95% then it becomes a no brainier.
Just pushed out a minor update for Backbone 0.1.1: If you define an "initialize" function in your Model, View or Collection class, it will be now invoked when an instance is created.
Fast blurring algorithm written in JavaScript and demoed using YUI
Proprietary trading does not necessarily involve insider information. "Insider" refers to those privy to exclusive data about a public corporation that have not been publicly released. Insider trading laws do not preclude trading on independently drawn ideas, and do not entail publicizing one's own reasons for deciding to invest, because those ideas do not originate within the company being considered for investment. An investment bank may trade away with whatever methods they have in-house, as long as they have not gained via information about the company that is not publicly available. “Private commercial sources” is vague, but if you mean paid databases like LexisNexis, Hoovers, or even 10kwizard, those just consolidate already public information in a more convenient formats. They don’t draw from insiders.

Of course, it's an open secret that insider trading is rampant in all major stock markets. You can’t police every pair of CEO golf buddies. I can’t provide a cite, but a study done a few years ago confirmed major movements shortly before (hours) major announcements with the vast majority of stocks in the Canadian exchanges. I’d expect the problem to be greater in the US markets.
Microsoft Research in Redmond
Distributed Version Control Systems: Working with Cloned Repositories
With Their Own QR Code Trick, Bit.ly Eats Google’s Balls
Thing will NEVER go according to plan, this I can be sure of. One of the + pts of being in a startup is its flexibility. If things go wrong, you can act swiftly to correct it. There's no need to go through rounds and rounds of approvals, PR, etc.

The more important thing to know is that remind yourself it's still a new baby/product. Things will go wrong, you just need to spend a little more time to make things right with it. Dun give up, you will do fine.
In memcached, caching smaller things should allow more to be cached. On the Postgres side, when the disks are hard at work any access is expensive but reading less should still help. Depending on the query you can try to get it to read less.
In other situations maybe just turn stuff off. I don't know the specifics but simple things like not displaying the exact number of comments may help (counting stuff can be frustratingly expensive sometimes).
Positive HIV test halts porn shoots at companies
Harvesting the power of government stimulus.
I firewall off the SSH port for one minute after 4 unsuccessful logins in one minute:

-A SSH_CHECK -m recent --set --name SSH --rsource
-A SSH_CHECK -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 4 --name SSH --rsource -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-port-unreachable
-A SSH_CHECK -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT

This is in addition to default REJECT for everything that I don't explicitly allow.

(Incidentally, the kernel I'm running doesn't support this for ipv6 addresses... so you can bruteforce my ssh server over ipv6 for as long as you want. But fortunately, it's hard to automatically scan the entire ipv6 address space :)
First off, your feed won't provide a full copy of your data, just a summary and a link. Other protocols may not work that way, though, but that's how Appleseed's protocol works. If access is rescinded, that user loses access to view that data. If I post a journal update or a photo, and it shows up in your feed, and then I restrict access to it, if your feed doesn't properly delete the entry, then you can still see the summary or the thumbnail, but clicking on it results in an access denied error.

Well, let's focus on your premise: This is all based on a node turning evil. That's a very big problem, and one not easily solved.

There is a basic issue here, in that users, when they trust other users, they also, on some level, trust the that user's community (node). I'm open to suggestions on how to mitigate that.

With social networking, there is always a level of trust that has to be human-based, not tech-based. But tools can be used to help humans determine trust.

Appleseed has node control, which means that administrators can "block" whole nodes if they're behaving badly. This usually means spam, but it can also mean if a node is acting in bad faith (ie, it's revealed that AppleBook is selling non-local user data), or if they're abusing the protocol. That can act as a certain type of social "shunning" on a node-to-node basis.

Admins can also "trust" nodes, which means you inherit their block list. This means, theoretically, if a node goes bad, and some nodes realize this, it'll propagate through the Appleseed network until that node is isolated.

I think there are other approaches, and some we haven't thought up yet, but one thing I'm most interested in is social pressure, and how it can easily be applied to bad nodes.

I think encryption is interesting, but I think we'll actually have to move into the browser space in order to have a reasonable UX.
Writing a simple table view based app can be done in a night.

Making something that is actually useful, beautiful and performs well will take much longer. This is where things like writing the API consumer bits, handling persistent data stores and so on come in.

Then you need to polish it.

It's not so much about the language or framework as they are great once you learn them, it's just that the standards are set very high in the App Store (at least if you wish to be taken seriously).
Incidentally, access to my server from China has proven indispensable. I was trying to read a bunch of blogs that were blocked by the great firewall while I was waiting for my plane at PVG, so I had to ssh in to my server and read them from there.
When I first understood Cantor's diagonalization argument, it blew my mind. It remains one of the most clever pieces of reasoning I've ever seen.
I'm pretty sure both of them were seeded by crowdsourcing..

One good trick is to tap into the Google AJAX API, there is also SimpleGeo, but its more meant as a method to push your checkins to, than being a datasource of business geo listings

Also, this just came out but I'm not sure if it does what you need: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/24/placecast-debuts-all-in-one...

I'm eagerly awaiting the day there is a very simple reliable worldwide API that I can punch in "Steves BBQ, Podunk, NY USA" and it gives me geocoords, an address, phone #, hours etc. If such a thing now exists, love to hear about it...
Just a note on this, you are taking issue with Javascript when in fact the issue is bad UX design.
If you're doing the work for a flat project fee, ask for 20-50% of the fee up front before doing any work. If you're going to be paid hourly, you probably would have provided at least an estimate of hours that the project will take. Your retainer should be 20% of the total of your rate times hours estimated.

Always request a retainer. Especially for new clients. Even more so for friends and family.
Eh... good enough. I'd do it if I had my advisor's approval (I really doubt he'd give an OK that would get me in trouble).
AFAIK many energy/utility companies have trading divisions, and navigate the information restrictions successfully enough to not get shut down.
Explain that to a potential investor.

We snubbed 2% of our potential user base and reinvested the money we saved in increasing the conversion rate of the 98%. Further we are going to use some of that money to chase additional revenue streams. If we exploit all available revenue models and hit a wall with upping the conversion rate, we will look at creating a separate none JS version of the site with reduced functionality, so that the two distinctive development models are not intertwined therefore reducing out maintenance burden.
I don't think fremium is even slightly believable these days as a language license. Even Java and dot-net claim to be free...

Maybe for a web service...
So you were able to tap into SimpleGeo for business listings?

I was under the impression their business data layer wasn't that useful for something like looking up a business by name/location and getting the geocoords, name & address etc. Like it is mostly for keeping track of your own geo records, right? But I haven't looked at it in a while...
I read those two sentences as independent assertions, but you seem to be conflating them.
Why not just collect their credit card, but don't bill them initially so that the barrier to entry is low, then notify that they'll be charged at the end of the month. If they're pleased with the service, they'll probably ignore the email.

Requiring the user to remember to cancel or downgrade seems potentially sneaky.
> The only function for a roof mounted solar panel is to look really cool in concept art.

Not true. The Prius has a solar panel option to power cabin ventilation when parked in warm climates. This makes a lot of sense because the aircon load required to cool down a hot car quickly is huge, but the power required to prevent the heat building up is not.
Rock! Congrats Ed and Francis on the launch. FWIW, Ed and Francis are incredibly great guys...
> This is coming from a guy that got burnt really bad on the 68-PPC conversion a while back (had basically a brick within 6mo of buying a new 68).

I assume you mean 68000 series to PowerPC transition? I lived through that and thought it was handled even better than the recent PPC -> Intel transition. Programs were compiled as FAT binaries for years and years because of the huge installed base of 68k machines. I don't see how you could have had a "brick" after just 6 months.
Cash Basis is so much less work. I don't find the analysis any different really, but the paperwork is so much less.
I'm not convinced you need battery swap stations for personal vehicles.

The Nissan Leaf has a 500 VDC, 125A quick charge connector, which allows 80% charge of its ~23 kWH battery in a half hour. If you have a similar wattage charging option in a car with a 200+ mile range battery, it may turn out that the time that you will spend for lunch/restroom breaks in a typical 500 mile day of driving will be enough to recharge your battery enough, assuming you start the day with the battery topped off, and all of the restaurants and rest stops have charging stations. (But I suspect the restaurants will see early adoption of charging stations as a way to attract customers/advertise their business.)

The trucking industry may well benefit from swap stations, though. The Tesla Roadster is something like 1/4 or 1/3 battery by weight. The entire tractor of a typical tractor trailer rig is probably a bit less than 1/4 of the total rig by weight, and the tractor can't be 100% battery. This will probably translate to a somewhat shorter range.

On the other hand, at 60 MPH, wind resistance is probably what consumes most of the energy, and that is not strictly proportional to the weight as you scale up from personal automobile to tractor trailer.
I really hate the video.. to much sound, so loud and after watching 10 secs with Partition CLINGGG I stopped.
They've got Firebug with 400k+ LoC, Firefox with ~60K LoC, and Chromium with almost 4 million LoC. That doesn't inspire much confidence.
iOS, android, typically media centric applications, never games.
The cheapest nokica
I couldn't decide whether to vote you up or down.

Agree that there's crying need for some other way to fund infrastructure software projects.

Disagree that Full-time FLOSS development has been rare since since Linux became what it currently is through a lot of full-time, paid work.

Etc...

I'm pretty damn impressed with the directions and comments of Zed. He's by far the "realist" person in the industry.
Not only do these search companies collect and manage more data than anyone outside of the Federal government

I would be surprised if they don't collect and manage more data than the federal government.
I don't think this is true.

You can't trade on insider information, i.e. information you've gained from a corporate insider who has a duty not to reveal it. If Steve Jobs tells you he has cancer, it's insider trading to short AAPL. If you pass Steve Jobs on the street and think "holy shit, that guy looks sick", you are free to short AAPL.
What if you surveyed 100 Fortune 500 CIOs to figure out how much they're planning on spending with Oracle next year, and used that to trade Oracle stock? Is that illegal? It's certainly not coming from an Oracle "insider." That's what Google would be doing, but instead of 100 CIOs, they'd be aggregating data from millions of ordinary people.
Chargify does not store the CCs it is stored with the gateway so you can use that data again. This is said a number of times on the site.
That's http://sharesleuth.com/ FYI.
That depends though, if you are in school and your alternate job is flipping burgers for around the same pay it is more attractive. Sure you could get more but there is a lot more in running proper professional freelancing, if your learning along the way and your client knows that life/ school will get in the way frequently it's a decent deal.

Of course one you get to the stage of having a business with all the proper overheads and spending fixed hours with good programming knowledge it becomes next to nothing pay.
Peace, I was trying to agree with you on that point...
I'm hoping the next version of OS X will finally bring us true resolution independence, to correspond with some high DPI "Retina" MacBook displays.

I also expect they'll provide new ways for developers and/or users to leverage both iOS and OS X; perhaps that's where cloud computing will come into play.

Other than that, I don't think we're going to see any more huge innovations in desktop computing, from Apple or anyone else. All the action is in mobile (and development tools).
Yes, and the "not that hard" remark was in reference to their deep experience moving from 68K to PPC to x86. So, having fat binaries is not a foreign concept to them at all.

Apple has filed a patent on OS-level advertising.
http://ipwatchdog.com/2009/10/22/jobs-and-apple-seek-patent-...

Integrating iOS apps (where users are already conditioned to being exposed to advertising) with some version of OS X would not be a big leap from a technical or business strategy perspective.
If we manage to get cheap solar and cheap batteries, the usage pattern is probably going to be more like: top off batteries at work during the day, drive home, partially drain car batteries out to grid while the sun doesn't shine overnight, drive to work on what remains in the car batteries.

NIMBYism wrt adding new long haul transmission lines is likely to favor solar cells on many roofs if the cost of the solar cells come down enough.
You don't rent your kernel in a SaaS sense, such that every kernel syscall involves a trans-cloud RPC.
This is a straw man argument that is not grounded in fact:

http://www.dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/dijit-a11y-statem...

I have built many sites with the specific criteria that it work with JAWS. I do not use Server Side web frameworks and my UI logic is implemented entirely in JavaScript. I am an authority in the usability and accessibility field and am hired as such by many of the big boys. JavaScript has nothing to do with accessibility and in fact can be used to increase usability for the disabled. People confuse JavaScript with bad UX design that hinders accessibility.
The event isn't for another week. Are we going to be subjected to a steady stream of contentless speculation from the Apple pundit set for the next 7 days? I'm actually really excited for the announcement, but I couldn't care less what MG Siegler's opinion of it is.
Paul Smith Cufflinks blue lattices with signature pattern
Do you really think that poor support for non-standard music library locations is a legitimate complaint? What's so horribly wrong with ~/Music/iTunes as the location for your iTunes music library?
Congrats on the launch!

One thing I thought I'd mention (which might be a bit off topic) is that I recently contemplated the use of the "Zilla" suffix for a project name. But after doing a bit of research, it sounds like the owners of the Godzilla trademark are quite aggressive with when it comes to this. Particularly so if the logo/mascot is also some sort of reptilian creature.

Just thought you might want to look into this now before your service grows (in case you haven't looked into it yet).
Writing a Technical Book (by the authors of "Erlang and OTP in Action")
What's bizarre about the Kickstarter model is that for the most successful projects they end up acting as a blocker — if you reach your goal in a few days and you set your deadline to a month away, there's no way for you to get the funds until it passes — even afterwards it'll take a while for Amazon to let you cash out.

There's no way for the creator to say 'we passed the goal, that's enough money, lets get to work' — something that set Diaspora up for a far more epic failure.
>the formula to overtaking Google is blindingly simple: change the game to make everything as unrelated to search as possible

Search is the act of finding info on which to verb. Facebook and Google Search are not strongly substitutable goods. To eliminate google and bypass web search, you are looking at integrating better information retrieval services directly into the operating system. Google has already predicted this though. Chrome OS will be already be out and have established market position by the time everyone else realizes they need to focus on this.

Eliminating the OS interface and the web browser interface binary distinction will be key.

Google is so far ahead of the game that they're dealing with robot cars, if we want to find a chink in the armor we need to think 5 steps ahead.
Programmer/Jack Of All Trades Seeks Employment 
(Read to the tune of Unannounced YC Company seeking first hire (programmer/jack of all trades))

I’m not highly publicized but you may have heard of me (some have). I’m employed, and I’m looking to move to a more challenging position. It’s cliché, but I want to tackle difficult problems. Not everything I work on is hard, of course, but I like doing new things in new ways and pushing my boundries.

Depending on the task, I usually program in Perl (fluently), Python (basic) and know my way around a Linux system; I like programming /and/ systems administration. I’m flexible.

I like companies who do interesting things. I like writing software that doesn’t explode, but understand the pros of getting something written quickly to prove a point.

I don’t like being put in a box, and like to work on systems administration, server optimization and programming. I’m not a Rock Star programmer like Matt Trout or Randal Schwartz, but I can write PostgesSQL, MySQL and SQLite schemas, and have a keen intuition that helps when solving customer-problems, or debugging odd situations. I want to learn more.

Are you profitable? Run by really smart people? Do your customers love you? Do you like pina coladas?

If you’re interested in hiring someone who’s pretty decent and work around Santa Monica send an email about your company to symkat@symkat.com
Artist Creates a Profitable Online Niche [2004]
Indeed, I had no idea who David King was, but ketralnis is familiar.
Consider: A phone company has a legal obligation to keep conversations private. But suppose one didn't. If ATT started a hedge fund to leverage conversations they skimmed from all of their customers, ATT would not last long as a phone company.

Google has gotten as fair as it has by being seen as "fair dealer" regardless of its legal obligations. They're smart enough to want to continue that way.
Software Licensing State of the Union
Speaking of webforms, how would you treat a webform that has a variable number of fields? The non-js way I've seen this treated is to have like 5 fields and then reload the page if they want more (i.e. multiple files uploads), but it seems like there's no non-icky way to do this sans JS.

I am open to suggestions :).
Ask HN: Startup Funding Avenues
So, I've heard a lot about the seed funding incubators recently, like ycombinator and techstars. However, I'm curious, how does a normal startup get funding?

How do they first get in contact with VCs?
With many smaller market areas, a lot of the same car manufacturer's dealerships are usually owned by the same larger company throughout the city. Is there someway to ensure there's no colluding going on between them?
HasWifi Shows You Which Flights Have Wifi
Is J2ME dead?
Hi, HN,

do you see any possible market for Java Mobile Edition (J2ME) apps as of today?

I mean, everyone's talking iPhone apps, Android apps... But all I can think of is that there are 50%+ Java-supporting phones in any given market. Could there be any business in it?
I was expecting the new release to be named Maine Coon or Cougar, jokes apart I hope some new improvements in Finder, file searching, some cool features for new hardware and a complete system compiled by clang. Maybe a bunch of small new software, I particulary would love a serious package manager, a interface to deal with launchctl and a working useradd that works with DirectoryService.
No, I don't think I ever said JS was bad. I said I'm saddened by developers who use hovers, and by developers who think it's too hard to do non-JS versions of sites. I personally love using JS to improve the user experience. I think it's pretty damned cool because of the way I can use it to transform a very dull, cumbersome postback interface into something wonderful without nearly the effort that people claim it takes.
Marketing Genius Tim Ferriss Does it Again
Try playing on a Huge map :)

End-game means 20-30 seconds wait for turns to complete, even on a Core i7.
This is great, just in time for my testing :), I'll definitely give it a try! I would love for one of your pricing packages to include speaking directly with an optimization consultant, or perhaps receiving a detailed report that includes optimization recommendations.
Where do people get customers willing to pay $150/hr? Or is it a san francisco/new york thing and for the rest of north america/europe it's more like $50? (canadian here)
Yes, it does depend on what the site is trying to achieve. I should have been more clear and said that I can't stand when I am brought to a blank browser (not even a "You need javascript enabled" message). I guess it's not so much that I'm anti-javascript as I am completely anti-stupid web design.
or work with almost anything coded in C or C++

Right, and I agree 100% I would not do sys-dev on OSX unless it was OSX sys-dev. But he specifically listed an array of web-dev technologies not sys-dev and that is why I made the recommendation that a MBP would suffice. He did not mention Photoshop but I assumed if he is doing web-dev he will need it at some point unless he works with a team and has a dedicated graphics resource. Anyway, the list of technologies provided by the poster leaned heavily to the fact that he would be doing web-dev and for me the MBP works as a web-dev platform.

If he would have asked about embedded, I would have said hell no, I have suffered first hand (as a hobbyist) at the utter lack of serious PCB design software, or dev kits available on the Mac for embedded work.

And if he would have said, I want to do C dev on an open stack, I would have also said you many want to look at a Sager Notebook as opposed to a MBP.

BTW, I apologize for jumping the gun on you. I mistook the context of your wording.