skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you about business blogs. SvN is the same way. I find the best technical articles in ACM and IEEE publications.
I understand what you are saying. Perhaps comparing session hijacking to terrorism is a little too harsh when it is put like that.

It is still the closest word I can think of which describes what one does if they run Idiocy: threaten other people's online confidence and make them more frightened, and hence more cautious in the future.

Only time will tell if Firesheep and Idiocracy are the 9/11 of the online world, leading to more HTTPS (compared to the way real world terrorism resulted in more airport security protocols). Although it might seem harsh there are a lot of similarities.
Sencha Animator
Well said. You basically wrote what I would have attempted to write. Taking statements out of context is like overfitting the data and leads to poor generalization.
Review my startup : Yoink http://yoink.com
Hey,

Looking for some feedback about our startup http://yoink.com.

Yoink is the easiest way to get free things from people near you and give things away you don't need. Everything must be totally free, and once an item is Yoinked messages are exchanged to arrange local pickup.

Cheers!
Nice.

This brings up another question:

If Digg did indeed do this, why space out registration, as if to hide it (from themselves?).....or do it manually?

Could they not automate the process, and automate it in a way so as to do it all in one go?

This could be "plausible denial", but still it doesn't seem quite right imho.
Completely unrelated to your write up but theres a bug. In FF if I back up and resubmit it doesn't update to the new text. I still see my first submission.
Thats very true about whether I'll be around later on. It's one of the things that I guess must be built over time.

Regarding your points about a local lib, I'm not sure you're aware of how complex it is to format phone numbers. Numbers change depending on whether you're dialing within country, out of country. Sometimes there is a prefix that needs to be dialed when dialing from one city to another, within the same city, the same prefix would not need to be dialed.

Thats just for dialing numbers. Every country also has their own standard way of formatting numbers and other countries are a lot less standardized than the US, so for example, a phone number can have anywhere from 5 to 11 digits in Germany.

Basically, its a lot more work than just whipping up something locally. Thanks for the input though, its much appreciated.
we could if we charged the same $4-6 bucks per gallon that it costs in pretty much any other country
How Non-Developers Can Get Apps Made And Into The App Store – with Ken Yarmosh
I think it has to do with Heroku's target market being so similar (identical?) to HN's demographic. If that weren't the case, I doubt we would all recognize Heroku so easily.
So its just about creating trust at this point?
no, they screwed up, then told everyone that they knew better....then when they lost their business, they admitted that they screwed up.

why they are getting grilled now? because once you become the bad guy, even the smallest stuff gets blown out of proportion...and let's be honest...this isn't exactly small
Hey, weren't you supposed to be a designer :) That's pretty quick to go from 0 to launch in 5 days in an unknown language.

Congratulations!
Works great for me. I wonder what people will use this for...
Designer, developer, coder, sleep-deprived. I'm a dude of many properties! :)
I wondered when this one was coming. Furniture companies are notorious for giving you the best deal for them. Now they have exposed how to game Groupon I wonder how many will follow suit. I have always wondered if Groupon has a plan for once someone got wise and started raising rates on their items while a Groupon coupon was in effect. I figured it would be someone like a furniture company that would do so. Raise all the prices, put them on sale the week before the coupon is valid, then have the "sale" expire once the coupon becomes valid.
Lots of forum sites have polls, but over time factions skew the result. In any case, the most popular argument is not necessarily the best; I'd hazard a guess that as the size of an open voting population rises, the disparity increases.

Wave attempted to solve this problem, but the result was not very elegant on a UI level. It's hard to offer both depth and breadth at the same time.
37Signals is so overrated. I hope more articles like this help change the general perception about them.

It's not that I don't appreciate their contributions or think they're a fine/nice shop or whatever, but the hype that goes into their stuff is a little ridiculous for serious developers I think.
Great app. I love its simplicity.
This came up in a thread a while back (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1483667). Bottom line is that "MM" comes from the banking/finance world. In banking, $3M actually means $3,000 and $3MM means $3,000,000.
On Being Sufficiently Smart
You can check this here:

http://github.com/merb
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py", line 513, in __call__
handler.post(*groups)
File "/base/data/home/apps/reworder/1.345779356045891791/reworder.py", line 140, in post
synonym = synonym_for_word(stripped_word, tag)
File "/base/data/home/apps/reworder/1.345779356045891791/reworder.py", line 201, in synonym_for_word
return result.get(word_type)['syn'][0]
KeyError: 'syn'
Bemmu, we're gonna have to pay you a commission soon ;) thanks, dude.
k. i'm wondering if uploading text to the Internet, to some company, is a good strategy for keeping that text private and secret. :)

One alternative is to write a diary the old fashioned way. Paper and ink. Very simple and cheap, and you have your choice of security methods. Hidden, safe, guard dog, etc.

Another is to write it on your computer using any editor of choice, save as text file or doc, whatever, then if you want security you can ensure it's stored on disk in encrypted form, perhaps using a 'file vault' app.

On the other hand, automated cloud backup is a good feature you get from OhLife. But there are ways of doing that independently too, where I can be absolutely sure it's encrypted on my end before any strangers get a hold of the bits in stored form.
That's interesting, but it's nowhere near conclusive.

Digg just had a major update and are in a state of transition still, we have no idea what sort of banning, shadow-banning, temp-banning etc procedures are in place.

(unless you are a Digg employee, in which case please do share)
MM is the standard abbreviation for million in the financial world. "The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from."
I see, thank you. I prefer the SI, kilodollars, megadollars, etc.
This was mentioned here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1836221 and I thought it deserved its own thread.
It has to have a pretty modern WebKit build.

Compare to Windows Phone 7's IE7/8 hybrid...
What happens when you called them?
An Alt Currency that even the IRS Could Love
Anyone else think it was a reference to Kafka? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis
I think that the point of the article was that taking a stroll now and then does not offset the 'damage' done by sitting. They were pretty much tearing into the idea that you can offset the amount of sitting/inactivity in your life by exercising to try and create some sort of canceling or equilibrium effect.
In terms of color, I would say myspace created the association blue == social (eg. http://web.archive.org/web/20050104004746/http://myspace.com... ).
Thus I would even argue that facebook wouldnt have become the stellar success it is today, if its main theme was, for example, green.

From a programmers perspective choosing the right colors for your product might seem like a mundane task. but I think it is a key factor when it comes to popularity - just because the human perception relies so much on colors. Just ask yourself; would you buy a red car? What would happen if facebook changed the “facebook blue” from #3B5998 to #3B59CC?
Sucks, we are a UK startup doing online radio (www.mixcloud.com) and would love to have a look at integrating, guess we will have to go shopping.

Having run these types of competitions before I know the legals are a nightmare, (and shipping) but I would have thought if anyone google would understand the net is global and found a way.
I am in the same bind. I am wondering what a decent rate for a good design is. I need to design two simple pages ("simple" may be subjective.) I have been quoted $400 - just for design - by htmlburger (they seem good). Would you consider that too pricey?
I hope I don't jinx myself but I have been using PayPal for better part of the decade. So far there have been very few issues. No random account locks.

More recently, I had two payment disputes by scumbags. In both instances, I called up paypal and less than 2 minutes of conversation later, I had my money back in my account. Blew me away. I honestly had written those disputes off going by what I'd heard.

I remain in two minds about attacking paypal for account blocks. Almost every company that dares go after this space will have to do their fair share of blocks or risk losing money to fraud. Obviously when you do blocks, innocent bystanders may get caught. I don't think that is a paypal problem as much as it is an industry reality. PayPal's just at a scale where you hear a lot more stories.

Until there is a competitor with some sort of scale that does not need to do account blocks, I'm not sold on attacking PP.
3 ways to raise seed capital if you don’t know any investors
try this instead:

while true; do ls; sleep 5; done
Balloon filled with ground coffee makes ideal robotic gripper
I spent probably half an hour reading those comments. Good stuff. Do you have a background in cosmology?
Ah yes, I'll read more into it! thanks :)
Thankfully that bit is fine on a mac. And really - that is 90% of it there - the rest is a distraction.

Their icons are, well, tasteless is the best way to describe them.

I know people don't often talk about usability and developer tools - but it really really matters. You spend a LOT of time on it - may as well fuss over it and make it right. IDEA gets so much right.... and this is also a good example of when user experience can be great, but design (graphic) not so great.
Are you being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian?

Beside, if everybody become a programmer, who will produce the pencils?
> * Move to Southern California. I'm not kidding.

I don't think that SoCal has the space to fit the entire world (or even the nation). I would normally just assume this is tongue-in-cheek, but you said that you weren't kidding.
Amazon: Everything Grows But the Profit Margin
To wit: http://rondam.blogspot.com/2010/10/five-things-paul-graham-i...
Facebook is blue not so much because of emulating Myspace... but because Zuckerberg is Red/Green colorblind... so that was the obvious choice for him.

And Blue has been a strong color online and in the business world for a long time... Think IMB "Big Blue." Again, there are social reasons that could affect this... but there is also the fact that tech has mostly been a male dominated space and a large number of males are red/green colorblind.

And the best example of how funny the social connections are with color. Can you imagine driving a pink car? Wearing a pink suit? Sounds girly right? You'd never do that.

But it wasn't that long ago that the gender association of those colors switched. It was an old advertisement for from the 30s or so, that showed that pink was the great new color for little girls. To that point pink was for boys and blue for girls. (Because Red is a strong aggressive color and blue is a soft mellow one... and pink is just a lighter version of red.)
I need roughly nine hours a night be fully productive, coherent and happy. I can get by on eight. Less than six, and I feel physically sick to my stomach, and lose my short term memory and sense of balance (really - I tend to bump into things and have fallen off things I was sitting on).

Working alongside people who can function on 4 hours a night, I feel like my need for large amounts of sleep is a big disadvantage.

This all being said, I've started consuming caffeine again after dropping it for nearly 10 years. Consuming a small amount of caffeine in the morning after having not enough sleep does wonders for my productivity, short term memory, and happiness...
Ah yes, I randomly generate a permalink on load of the page, so it uses the old permalink, hence why it loads the first submission. Any ideas on how to change this?
It will get 'a web browser', but the experience will depend on the hardware and how it's been adapted to the larger screen.

E.g

- Is it just the stock Android browser scaled up?

- Does it support tabs, how many?

- HTML5 video?

- How is the scrolling / zooming performance?

- How much memory does it contain? How likely are background pages to be flushed?

- What's the clock speed? How fast do pages load? What's the JS performance like?
How to Get Involved with Open Source and be Successful
The whole reason I'm even interested in an e-reader is because of the opportunity to give my eyes a break. I don't care about color if it means I'm still staring at a computer screen all day. But then again, maybe we aren't the target market...?
Ugh, there's a line of JavaScript at the bottom to print the article. I guess that was necessary for the single-page version the submitter needed, but still. Ugh.
> [...] I no longer use Firefox because it takes up an obscene amount of vertical real estate compared to Chrome.

Have you tried the add-ons Vimperator + "Tree Style Tab" (remember to activate "Auto hide tab bar")?
I used to use a treadmill at about 3 mph while studying. I think you could code while walking at low speeds.
Cool! That's very generous of you.

I didn't mean to say that that's exactly what you implied, I simply meant to suggest that the postulation might have a flaw, even if it is an interesting one. Either way, I'm glad to have found your site! As someone who has difficulty with color, I'll be checking it out for sure.
Yup, very handy. I have this installed. I still wish there was some custom fine-grained controls that the user can set for their own preferences (based on brightness of their surroundings). I would definitely pay for some app that does this.

Related article here: http://gizmodo.com/5673444/why-existing-iphone-4-and-android...
11 years old wrestler without limbs
11-year-old Dayton Webber had only 11 months when he had a serious bacterial infection and doctors amputate his arms and legs.
The best way to take notes is to not do it during the class. Pay full attention only to the teacher/speaker during the class/lecture and make a conscious attempt to remember everything they said. Immediately following, get together with 3-5 like-minded friends and attempt to as a group write the entire lecture from start to finish from memory. If no one can remember something, skip it.

It takes a few weeks/months to develop your focus, attention span, and memory enough to be able to get near 100% short-term retention, but you start to see benefits almost immediately. And the long-term benefits to your memory and focus can't be understated.

Also, it's really interesting how many other people are expressing that they never took notes in college. I was famous for it in my college (my advisor wrote a paragraph about it in grad school recommendations), whereas I always thought it was common sense, seeing other people who spent the whole class scribbling, but didn't really understand a bit of what was actually taught.
Maybe they should have drawn a distinction between "Opinionated because they're ignorant" and "Appears opinionated because they're committed to principles which may be inconvenient."
Industrial Grade Barcode Scanning with an iPad
Ask HN: My company will buy me books. What should I get?
My boss and I recently had a 1-on-1 meeting where he told me that if I ever wanted any "training" to let him know, and he'd try to work it out. It didn't have to be directly related to my line of work (marketing/social media).

I found http://hn-books.com/ here a few days ago and I've pulled about 5 books off of there, but I'm looking for more!

The fields I'm looking into:

-Marketing/Messaging/Reading people

-Programming (specifically Perl. I have a year of a CS degree behind me, and I've worked with Perl on and off a lot on my own and looking at using it a lot more.

-Excel/databases (I just discovered Pivot Tables in excel and I'd love to learn more about them. In addition to that, learning the basics of how to set up and use simple databases)

-Data Analysis (If Excel/databases is the technical side, then also more the "soft" side. Things to look for, ways to improve your analysis skills, etc)

The books I currently have on my list are: Art of SEO, Art of Speedreading (People), Learning Perl, Word of Mouth Marketing.
http://yoink.com
Can someone explain to me why their site - http://html5boilerplate.com/ - uses the <b> and <i> tag?
The only way this could've been better is if a large, screaming face appeared at the smallest scale.
Have you worked at a big company before? Do you prefer that over working with a start up? I think that might be one of the biggest things to think about.
Basically, they just suck less than most other big tech companies. That's all. And that's a pretty low bar in my opinion.

1) They have tens of thousands of programmers. They're not all The Best of The Best at this point. Sure, the average is high, but there's plenty of dopes and assholes too.

2) It's a big company and their productivity is pretty low. They have more programmers and money than almost all startups combined, yet their output of amazing products is quite small.

3) There's bureaucratic bullshit. Sure, less than the average, but far more than a small company. You have to work roughly business hours, sit in a cube, report regularly to a boss, have meetings, etc.

4) Their technology stack may be cool, but you really have no choice. You have to use the tools they chose 10 years ago if you want to release anything. Java, C++, and Perforce? No thanks.

5) Their projects are failures unless they're huge. There's not much room for controversial projects or anything that starts off small. YouTube or Twitter couldn't have happened inside Google.
While I agree that a professional is capable of adhering to certain agreed disciplines, I also think that discipline is a sparing resource and spending it on showing up at a set time for no other reason then being "professional" is a waste of that resource.
Giant Blue Earthworms and Friends
Nice of Spotify to tip off TC to clinch this buyout.
(Disclaimer: I spent a lot of time recently building a site for Google TV using this hardware)

Some notes about the Revue:
1) Its bulky. The thing they don't show in the images are they two large antennas that have to be propped up in the back to support wifi access. The unit itself is bigger than many dvd players these days and so will take up a significant amount of room under or near your tv.

2) Javascript is slow. Since this topic is about web development, that's what my references are oriented towards. It plays back movies and tv shows fine, but the web experience leaves much to be desired. I ran Sunspider on Chrome(the only browser on Google TV) a couple of times.

The results are here. http://bit.ly/anyy88

Compared to an iPhone 4 running the same test it was only about 2-4x faster.

3) CSS3 transitions are the way to do animations. Don't do animations using javascript. Do them using css3 transitions. JS is so slow on this particular device its nearly unusable for much more than basic stuff.

4) Plan on building 2 versions of your project, one for 1080p and one for 720p. Chrome does some auto-zooming for websites to scale them up and down depending on the tv size. This can cause problems if your 1080p site is shown on a 720p display. You can scale the 1080p down by using the css zoom property (Yep, Google is reintroducing IE's zoom in Chrome). Don't do this. There is some bug in Chrome at the time of this writing where zoom changes the way block-level elements are rendered when zoomed. It can cause odd wrapping of child elements in the event where the parent div is set to overflow:hidden. Its best to just make 2 full-size stylesheets and use a bit of javascript to detect the current scale.

5) It runs Flash, mostly badly. If you are intending to build a web app for Google TV on this hardware, try to stay away from Flash. Take a look at some of the all-Flash sites on http://www.google.com/tv/spotlight.html if you have access to a Google TV box. Youtube Leanback is a good example. http://youtube.com/leanback.

6) If you're playing video for the GTV, pay special attention to the video encoding. h.264 mp4 plays the best. It can also play natively using html5 video element, or via Flash if that's a requirement.

7) The keyboard/remote thingy sucks. Its a gimicky little piece of plastic crap that feels like something that was too expensive to manufacture in China.

I could go on at length but I'm trying to forget the weeks that went into debugging our project for this thing. And whatever else you do, if anyone you know expresses interest in buying a Google TV or this piece of crap hardware in particular, disuade them through any means necessary. This is not worth $299. Buy an Apple TV for $99 and take them out to a nice dinner instead. They'll remember it longer and love you so much more.
Maybe you don't need money.

Could be enough to set up a website with accounts and a system that gives you "karma" for each bug you remove or a feature you add. Amount of karma depending on the bug/feature and maybe an additional voting system for users to push their favourite feature or most annoying bug.

Having a lot of karma on such a site may even be interesting for your resume when you apply for a job.
Actually, I lose less than a 1/4 cup of oil with the filter change. It all depends on how your engine layout is. For the FJ, more oil is lost from burning than from the change.
I'm trying to find out if we are already a Oracle enterprise customer if this is covered or not. Is that something general knowledge or do I have to contact an Oracle rep?
The glibc implementation of atoi basically just offloads to strtol, which just offloads to strtol_l.c, which is pretty complex at first glance.

You're basically testing to see if people know about casts, right? I'm not a big C developer and most of the languages I spend most of my time in have much less onerous typing systems than C, but if you gave me this question I would probably just write something like:

return (int) char;

perhaps including a loop to read to the end of char*. Would I pass or not? I don't think I'm that bad of a programmer, just don't have a lot of direct experience with C.
Sounds more like Expedia and Travelocity have crossed the "afraid of competition line." There's nothing creepy about Google providing flight info. These companies are just repeating any negative things they've heard said about Google, and they're not even being subtle about it.

This definitely makes me like Orbitz more.
Digg Says Internal Accounts Were For Testing Purposes, Not Gaming Its Own System
I would guess (I certainly don't know anything) that contests like these will open outside the US when the GoogleTV devices are available outside the US. I'm hoping that's coming soon...
> You might find technical folk who've been deeply involved in a business sector, can articulate that sector's needs, know how to sell to them, and have lots of contacts.

You're mixing up "able to sell" and "knowing what to build".

Knowing what to build does not require lots of contacts or knowing how to sell. While "can articulate" is required to sell, it isn't required to build.

However, knowing what to build does require knowing what can be built.

In short, "knowing what to build" is well-within the domain of technical people.

Getting "it" sold isn't.