skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mini webapp/startup, would love some feedback on the idea
Protovis can do candlestick charts: http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/ex/candlestick.html
Fantastic stuff for certain communities. Using Google to site-search SO.com is a wonderful resource. I'm not a .NET developer, but if I were, then I'd appreciate this data-aggregating shortcut.
This is why I don't bother with Microsoft's development platforms. They are always moving the goalposts.
Ask HN/PG: YC applications - any successful cases with part time co founders?
I have applied for this round. I know that single founders (for logical reasons) are not likely to succeed. But what about part time co founders? By part time, I mean folks who would work part time for the duration of 3 months (put in may be 20 hours per week) till we raise money. Were there examples of such cases or are these rare?

Reposting - for some reason this did not come in the "ask" tab. I deleted the original post - apologies for any confusion
Good. By the way, having OR in the middle column and AND in the right column seems a bit strange.
If XP is old, then Microsoft should stop supporting it. They should stop selling downgrade licenses.

But they don't. They still support it and they still sell it. In fact, they will keep selling it until 2020. That's 10 more years! Source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9179109/Microsoft_ext...

Now, can you seriously sit there and tell me it's reasonable for MS to sell an OS for ten more years (totaling about 20 years!) without releasing a single HTML5 capable browser for it?

And then comment that they're "embracing" HTML5? Ridiculous.
According to a couple friends from UCSB, the school is now quite behind in terms of offering useful online courses and services to students. Ironic.
HTTP Authentication is dead and is never coming back. Leave aside all protocol design elegance arguments and think about the situation for app developers; form auth is simply better:

* It has a simple reliable log-out button.

* It gives app developers more reliable fine-grained control over the login process because it in no way relies on browser chrome.

* It better supports advanced security and UX idioms, like signup-or-register or SMS-me-a-one-time-login.

* Virtually every web app in the world needs a session-keyed store anyways, and authentication is the easiest of the AAA problems anyhow, so building that one tiny piece into the protocol doesn't solve any problems.

* [ps]

Doubtless there are a myriad of nitpicky arguments about how HTTP Auth can be massaged to mitigate these problems, but who cares? Cookie auth works for everyone. Basic auth manifestly does not. Why would anyone want to expend major effort to take an archaic protocol and make it asymptotically as good as what every web app stack already provides?

[ps]: Cookie auth schemes can also be extended without getting Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, and Apple to agree on anything; this is the [end-to-end argument in systems design] in action.
When advertisers realize that 75% of their clicks are from children fat fingering their parents mobile devices, this well will dry up faster than you can say iAd.
The debt settlement/counseling/management space has been around for over 60 years (since the 1950s), and like other billion $ industries it has gone through a variety of "regulatory" reforms and legal shake-ups. Every industry goes through that.

The debt counseling industry and, in some cases debt settlement, benefit creditors by providing an alternative way to recover funds as compared with bankruptcy or collections. In fact, under what is called "fair share" creditors give these companies direct kickbacks. The % has been reduced significantly because companies were making too much.

If you dig deeper, you will find many creditor and bureau executives working at these non-profit counseling organizations. The business model is a critical aspect in understanding how this industry works.

With all that said, we do not plan to do any debt settlement.

For additional details on the history, take a look at the Uniform Debt-Management Services Act paper (http://blog.readyforzero.com/industry-research/).

Thanks for the comment.
Also vbell off. Incidentally, byobu is an excellent wrapper around screen without all the problems he mentioned. One caveat: it was made mainly for ubuntu, so the ports for the rest may not be of the best quality.
It's not beneficial to the applicant to be very specific about skills -- the applicant would much rather you were in the dark about it, and had to interview him to get a specific idea of his skillsets.

In other words, the incentives just don't line up, so this will never happen.

You could FORCE applicants to fill something out, but people would still game the system just by marking everything 777 or marking everything to a pattern determined by the job posting etc.
It's nice to be able to go to one place to look for some .NET API. I no longer need to Google search a topic, and then open multiple tabs, each for MSDN, SO, experts-exchange, and other forums.
Don't ba absurd. He didn't rule out the possibility of a time traveller with an AM/FM radio, just that it's not a 1928 era radio. Let's keep this grounded in reality. ;)
Ask HN: Possible startup idea, mobile ad network with captchas?
I just wanted to put this idea out there for discussion.

Would a mobile ad network startup work if it ran ads in apps, and if clicked, the user has to fill in a captcha, and only then would the clicker get through, and only then would the advertiser pay.

The first question is, why would I run these ads?

Could there be a much smaller amount that's paid on the click, then the remainder paid on entering of the captcha?

I could see the startup that implements this doing well because why would advertisers want to advertise anywhere else? And once this startup has all the advertisers, do publishers have any other option than to use the service?
HTML5 support on the windows phone would mean Windows phone devs could support other phones, and would unify the market. Fracturing it helps increase the value of niche apps, while unification would only level the playing field and leave the windows phone at a disadvantage.
Ycombinator
im from india can i apply for ycombinator
Ah. The truth hurts.
Verizon iPhone Release Confirmed, Fortune Reports: Inside The Verizon-Apple Deal
I've done quite a lot of Protovis charts and should say that they are really great, but have quite steep learning curve. But after making few first steps it starts to make sense and are quite convenient in terms of maintainability and extensibility.
How Your Startup Can Deliver Support That Will Increase Sales
Django has a roadmap at least.
While I think Marco probably has it right long-term, I think he's actually pretty wrong in the short-term. The difficulty of porting an iOS app (or even writing a Mac app from scratch, given that a developer only has iOS experience) and the nature of the device (mobile is clearly a growing market--is the same true for the desktop?) means that I think we'll see a lot more trepidation in entering the Mac App Store.

Traditional Mac developers (Panic, Omni, etc.) will obviously move their apps onto the store, but I don't think we'll see a whole lot of new entries--most iOS apps don't neatly transition onto the desktop, besides some games. I know my couple iOS applications don't have an obvious Mac version, just as my Mac applications didn't have an obvious iOS version. If the Mac App Store is to reach anywhere near the popularity of the iOS App Store, it's going to take a long time for companies to decide that the desktop is even worth it.
The answer is to fix the patent system. But then the question is how do you do that?

If we add compulsory license system similar to what exists for copyrights, some pains maybe alleviated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license#Compulsory_L...
Agreed, I've been using it for a project and have been very happy so far. Lots of options, and looks great. I've been using the GoogleVisualr library for Rails, so writing them in Ruby is nice too.
I'm missing the point. What's the deal with language designers wanting to have just one version of a language? Why can you mix and match Python and C while still not being able to mix and match Python 2 and Python 3? Just stop improving and adding features to the Python 2 side.

Of course people want backward compatibility: don't you know that developing software is hard work? Even old and stale libraries can be useful: why should we discard them?
Like many, I've been meaning to learn [some kind of] LISP since I first heard of it. I use OS X, though, and it seems Apple has decided that Java is on its way out. Should I be worried about Java-related incompatibilities or hassles in the future if I start writing a lot of Clojure code?
Historically finance is done with integer multiples of some fraction of the currency. This allows for easy balancing of both sides of any transaction without things getting too out-of-hand. It's common to see $0.001 as the minimal unit in the US, for example.

If you used a decimal fractional representation instead, then one transaction of higher precision would contaminate all accounts it touches, making printing exact balances a pain.
It's not like Djangonauts are against moving to 3.x it will happen, and probably sooner/faster than you think.

As for universities upgrading, it's like people who still use Windows XP and IE6. Most people have already upgraded but the long tail will stick around for a long time for no discernible reason.
Tasty Together
I am interested in use of data visualization of information that has an endpoint of simple dynamic well known picture/image. Every item in the picture is linked to the data.

Imagine a picture of a harbor with boats, calm water, clear sky,etc.. (Still looking for the specific tech talk)
Every distinct visual category in the picture should have a distinct data link.

I would model it in the same way as Protovis http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/
But with pictures linked to the data.

Some links:
Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y...

Digital Arts@Google: W. Bradford Paley, Martin Wattenberg, and Fernanda Viegas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRrmE7BFdJs&feature=playe...

http://www.slideshare.net/fichter/data-20-harnessing-new-dat...
Mini webapp/startup, would love some feedback on the idea
Just a web app to rate and compare other web apps
http://reliefapps.com

I actually wanted to use something like this myself but couldn't find it.

Initial plans for the app is to filter by the tags to get more relevant findings and make more relevant votes.
Instead of telling your ideas to friend and family, ask for theirs. Go to the mall or other public place and ask people. Want to go all out? Take a cooler of ice cold beer and a big sign saying you'll give out beer for great web app ideas. If you do it on a slow news day, some tv reporter might put you on the news. Someone watching might call you with the best idea ever. Embrace serendipity and seek out new sources of ideas.
This doesn't make much sense, it's their phone software. All they have to do is leverage their own browser tech for IE9 for their phone. It may not be easy, but if you can't get all the legs walking in the same direction in your own company, why should people have faith in your ability to deliver a good user experience.
China’s Music Scene Thrives in Unruly State-Supported Festivals
The skills section of a resume serves two masters, the HR Dept/Recruiters, and hiring managers. You need to list out every keyword ever to get through the first, yet somehow signal to the second which skills are more prominent than others.

A pie chart, tag cloud, or some other visualization would probably go a long way - just don't get too obfuscated, or HR will just get confused & move on to the next guy.
Why aren't there more startups in Michigan?
If you're only developing one application, I believe you can just buy the $80 license. That's amazingly inexpensive for such a stellar piece of software.
The limits of the RDBMS are orders of magnitude greater than the NoSQL crowd think they are.

Agreed. There's a couple of orders of magnitude just from I/O improvement in hardware, using conventional[1] hardware, configured intelligently.

There's at least another order of magnitude in optimizations that aren't possible in NoSQL's strawman[2], such as separate tablespaces for data and index, partial indexes, and a galaxy of query tuning from an EXPLAIN that actuall provides a query plan.

[1] Meaning commodity-priced, nothing fancier than $400 RAID cards and spinning disks.

[2] MySQL
This is fantastic news, and with the new changes in Maemo PR1.3, any N900 can dual-boot with MeeGo 1.1. No need to wait for compatible hardware to try out the handset UX, it's here now!
Not using the card, its gone in the shredder after I maxed it out to pay for back surgery. But without a doubt the balance goes up every month. I'm not a computer with a PDF reader at the moment but my credit card statement shows that if I continue to pay the minimum every month it'll take over 2600 years to pay off and I would have paid over 2 million dollars in interest by the time its paid off. This is for a US card as well.
It sounds like Microsoft is adaptive and pragmatic. What's not to like about that?

If everyone was using Silverlight today I suspect they wouldn't be saying the same thing. Instead it has virtually no traction among devs (aside from a core group of hardcore Microsoft boosters), it has little legitimacy, and the smartphone explosion has rendered it dangerous to choose.

If Flash is a relic of the past (true), then Silverlight is a relic that didn't even have relevance in the past.
Serial, Michigan-based entrepeneur Dug Song has some insightful comments.
Django will be a tricky beast to port due to the fairly large ecosystem.

For my web projects, I almost always use at least django, fabric, djang_extensions and django_piston. If even one of these is unavailable, I'm sticking to 2.7. I use other django libs as well, and python 3 doesn't offer me enough features to make losing those libraries worthwhile.
Unfortunately Psyco is 32-bit only and not being actively developed (http://psyco.sourceforge.net/psycoguide/req.html). On the plus side, the author is now focusing on PyPy.
Amazon is violating its own privacy policy by allowing users to interact with its site insecurely.

Two wrongs do not make a right, but when you can implement a technical measure to protect your users from rogue ex-employees, you should do it. A legal contract does not prevent data loss, it merely allows you to punish the person who stole the data. SSL prevents the data loss in the first place.
Basic auth is only simpler than cookie auth if you (a) aren't using a modern web stack (ie, you aren't using ASP.NET, J2EE, Rails, Django, &c) and (b) have only a few users.

If either (a) or (b) do not hold, Basic Auth is at least as hard as cookie auth.
It's "very painful?" I can't imagine how you'd describe cross-browser HTML/JS in 2004.
You can use the HttpOnly flag with a cookie to prevent JavaScript being able to access it. Here's a good summary:

http://www.owasp.org/index.php/HttpOnly

If you are serving a cookie, and JavaScript doesn't need to be able to access it, you should set it to be HttpOnly to try and reduce the effects of an XSS.
I'd say this assessment is largely spot-on. By introducing the App Store, Apple could channel the large community of developers churning out commodity software for iOS towards the Mac. Now they just need to make porting from iOS to MacOS X really simple, and the ecosystem will flourish.

One addendum, though: Existing applications won't benefit from the App Store, yes. Existing Mac developers, though, probably will. If you know Cocoa forwards and backwards, then making little (store-exclusive!) apps isn't challenging, but potentially lucrative.
Well, basic utility service isn't such a good comparator: in fact it's on the opposite end of the spectrum from a magazine subscription (which is essentially a fluff purchase, in the vast majority of consumer cases).

In fact with gas providers (or at least my own) are required to keep service running even in the presence of events which might normally trigger a cancel in other commercial contexts (customer in default for multiple months, not reachable or even apparently "dead" according to public records, etc). At least until the warm season starts.

Magazine subscriptions are at least in grey area, as far as this goes.
I don't get all of the animosity toward the OP. He has taken all the risk by documenting everything -- essentially saying "I'm doing what I believe is right, and you can prosecute me if you want." Making him "aware" of what he's done (and the possible consequences) seems redundant.

We can go back and forth on the white hat/black hat issues, but I think we need more people who are willing to raise awareness on this.

The animosity should be reserved for those who use Firesheep/Wireshark for completely malicious purposes.
can we not call things "power law curves" just because they are curved like that? all distributions have underlying reasons. arrival time? mean reversion? preferential attachment? go looking for and describe the underlying causes.
But what if the venture capital model creates a situation where outcomes must be bi-modal? Consider the case where a CEO goes to a VC (either on the board or in the fund raising process) with 2 plans

Plan A has a ~90% chance of slow growth
Plan B has a ~10% chance of explosive growth

The VC will point you towards plan B, because plan A isn't a win given their investment structure.

If this is true, then you cannot conclude that investments are always bimodal, just that in the past they have been due to structural reasons. And this is relevant because investors could create a model where they foster and profit from non bi-modal companies.
Some of older API methods seem more natural to rails developers since they were basically just returning xml/json from existing routes. But the REST API is platform/language agnostic so use the tools that you know and work best for you project.
Thanks everyone but it's not wordpress, it's magento. Otherwise I will follow your advice, thanks.
I don't know the answer, but I am right there with you. Solidarity!

I submitted days or weeks before the deadline and have not heard anything.
Anybody know of any studies correlating GPA with job performance or whatever GPA is supposed to be useful for?
That's awesome. We had a customer who would call in about once a week just to say hi and thank us.
It's not supposed to work this way - but I guarantee she got the best service of any of our customers.
I once had a customer call me back after a bad call, and apologize for being rude. It did nearly make me cry.
Securing the connection layer doesn't matter. With a $10 Wifi card I can create an infrastructure access point called "Starbucks Wifi" or whatever I want that's encrypted with anything (WPA2, WEP, open... doesn't matter). Then when you connect to that, I get all your packets and can steal your session.

Now, sure, this attacks costs me $10 for the wifi card and it's not as fast as connecting to Starbucks' wifi and opening a Firefox tab... but you will still get a lot of data.

Link-level encryption is not the same as session encryption. For your link to be secure, you need link-level encryption. For your session to be secure, you need session-level encryption. It's that simple. Facebook is a session, not a link, so Facebook needs SSL.

There is simply no other workaround.

(And oh yeah, you need to authenticate who you are talking to. The access point asks you for a password to prove that you are allowed to talk to it. But you don't ask it for a password to prove that it is allowed to talk to you. Connecting to an access point is like giving your credit card information to the call that starts like, "Is this jrockway? There's a problem with your credit card...". They know who you are, but you have no idea whether they are actually your bank.)
Declaring variables isn't hard.
However, in Postgresql one can use many languages to write stored procs. I prefer plpgsl but TCL, Python and Perl are also available in the stock distribution.
Yes. Click the "Apply" link at the bottom of the page.
India's Major Crisis in Microlending
State of Windows Phone 7 Apps at Launch
Neat. I was wondering when that patch would work itself into the main line. I had been running a locally compiled version for so long that I forgot to check back on it.
Ask HN: What data-integration  platforms and technologies do Telcoms use?
I'm looking into data-integration and data-warehousing for telecom service providers.

My questions are:
What data-integration/business intelligence solutions or products (Informatica, Oracle Data-Integrator, Ab Initio, SQL SIS, Pentaho Data-Integration) are most prevalent in, top-tier to mid-tier, Telecom service providers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Rogers, Orange)?

What data-warehousing solutions and platforms (IBM InfoSphere, Oracle Database, SAP BW) are most prevalent in, top-tier to mid-tier, Telecom service providers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Rogers, Orange)?

What are the advantages of each of the data-integration platforms?

What are the disadvantages of each of the data-integration platforms?

What programming languages are the data-integration products primary written in?

How much does each data-integration platform typically cost and what is their pricing model?

What are the advantages of each of the data-warehousing platforms?

What are the disadvantages of each of the data-warehousing platforms?

What programming languages are the data-warehousing products primary written in?

How much does each data-warehousing platform typically cost and what is their pricing model?

If anyone can answer even one of these I'd be eternally grateful, I'm not having much luck looking through Gartner/Forrester or Google.
>it seems like the true hacker ethos is not to swim with the stream

I don't think so. The hacker ethos is about being clever and hacking stuff.

Hackers don't do things differently just to be different. They do things differently because they see the world differently. The reason there is a "hacker community" is because hackers meet each other and say "No shit! You do that too! I thought I was the only one!"

Like any good community, it's about commonalities.
It sounds like Microsoft is adaptive and pragmatic. What's not to like about that?

I really wish this was all there is to it, but their behavior doesn't qualify as adaptive and pragmatic as far as I'm concerned. It qualifies as aimless and schizophrenic.

It's one thing to suggest, fail and then drop technology. Google does that. Even new Apple does that from time to time. It's another thing to suggest, fail and then keep developing technology in some state of semi-cancellation while backing a completely different approach at the same time: for instance, Silverlight. Right now, it seems like a classic case of throwing stuff at walls and seeing what sticks. That's part of the reason why Microsoft is struggling in any area except for its core business.
Windows Phone 7 doesnt yet support copy and paste. I would not look at a lack of 'HTML5 support' as strategic.
It's bad that they don't already have that (auto-debit) in place, but they use the same sort of thing on toll bridges and so in California. Look on the bright side; UK governments (central and local) are on a big money-saving kick right now, so there's a lot of opportunity to disrupt the status quo with a more efficient solution, and as you can see they're rather behind the times.
Free anonymous phone calls to anybody in your browser
It's fixed for me now, it may have just been my net connection. The descriptions are awesome!
It doesn't seem like Michal is sold on HttpOnly and I definitely am not either; most everything you can do with a stolen cookie, you can also do quickly and silently using a captive browser during an XSS attack.
Seed investors are not gone - ignore the hype
Instagram, Flickr’s Likely Successor