skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
MIPS processors are a tad bit more exotic than CISC or RISC architecture, but hardly mysterious. Hell, the PS2's main CPU was a MIPS processor and plenty of people have tinkered with it for various things, including a super computer: http://www.geek.com/articles/games/researchers-create-a-play...
Aro, a Paul Allen mobile startup, comes out after 2+ years in stealth mode
I would consider paying for VPN access. I travel a bit and use Witopia for this. It's not very expensive and is quite convenient.
It's impossible to "know everything about web development". That's not the point; nobody is demanding you become supreme master of every programming discipline.

But by being afraid of dabbling outside your comfort zone (because mastering things fully is "hard"), you inherently restrict the solutions you can possibly even conceive of to an incredibly limited set.

It's a sort-of Dunning-Kruger: You don't even have the basic knowledge to evaluate how often a better solution than "throw more javascript at it" was available to you and you didn't know it.
I spent almost an entire day doing this today, and in the course of getting documentation the traditional Rails way -- Googling for blog posts from 2007 and finding what changed right after it took the site down -- got a little frustrated. To vent a bit, I wrote it up cookbook-style so that someone in 2014 can curse my name.
Ask HN: Professional email address
I've been using my University e-mail address for everything for years now, but with graduation nearing, I'd like to start transitioning to a more long-term professional address. Unfortunately, a quick perusal of gmail shows that every permutation of my name, initials, etc. are taken.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get a good professional email address in a world where nearly everything on gmail is taken? Should I try some other email service (Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.?) Are there clever but still professional combinations I haven't thought of?
> "when in doubt, pick C"

I spent like five minutes trying to figure out what a programming language had to do with engineering dynamics.
Ask HN: Just how bad is the Valley economy
So last night (Sunday October 24th) I was watching 60 minutes and they had a 20 minute segment on how the SV/San Jose area was in complete and utter economic meltdown. They were talking about the 99ers (99 weeks unemployed) and interviewed all these PhDs and other qualified older people who had lost their jobs, couldn't find another, and had burned through savings.

I've looked at moving there but wonder now just how bad the local economy is. Here on HN it's all rosy (bootstrapped but rosy) with VC cash being talked about every day.

What's the real story? Seems people can buy homes in San Jose for far less than renting in SF.
I run a http://www.pfsense.com/ firewall w/ VPN server and proxy enabled at home. My portable system is setup to deny everything that doesn't hit the proxy.

Very similar to ax0ns setup.
Tell HN: we are hiring (LAMP developer/Minneapolis)
Looking for one good LAMP developer to join our team. Musts: strong OO PHP, strong MySQL; big pluses: Flash, Zend framework (or similar), Memcached, JQuery; additional pluses: experience in e-learning.

Great environment (think start-up within a large stable company), great team and outstanding life-work balance/schedule.

Position starts asap. Full time onsite Minneapolis only (no sponsorship).
Skip the MBA - It's premature optimization for your start-up.
I'm not familiar with Rails, but in Django you are 100% tied to SQL databases. There are some efforts to make talk to NoSQL databases (like App Engine). Google actually gave up those efforts.

In Rails, I believe the database backend can be either. Look at Twitter - their using Cassandra.
Anyone has RTL for such design? I'd be curious to run it and report real-world performance results.
My background is visual design and I've worked at a couple agencies in NY/SF.

I think this site does a couple things pretty well:
- Really easy to implement Q+D ideas
- Linking to images online in a great idea.

Why I wouldn't use it (Just going to focus on my big deal breakers):

- Where I start to think this breaks down is working with a lot of layers. In Photoshop I can group things together into layer folders and either drag all layers at once, delete them all at once, or lock them so that I don't accidentally drag them. In here, I don't have that option. I know you can use the mouse tool to drag a marquee that selects multiple objects but at a certain point that isn't a great option, such as if I want to keep the background container but not the foreground content.

- Keyboard Shortcuts: This is something that most professional designers use as it speeds up the process tenfold. Keep in mind that designers have been using said shortcuts for years so by changing it up (so that I have re-learn new shortcuts for the same functions) or not having them at all is a very large dealbreaker.

- I don't like the element adjustment menu that follows me whenever I click an element. I prefer having tools docked to the side so I can view the canvas purely even I'm clicked on something.
Of course, that whole 2048-CPU IRIX machine was probably about as fast as a modern high-end video card.
uthash - http://uthash.sourceforge.net/

Dead simple hash data structure, just drop the header file into your project. I used this for almost every C project I did in school (outside of data structures).
I don't, and since I stopped trying, my life has been a lot smoother. Instead, I play to my strengths and weaknesses. If I'm feeling hyper and in the zone, I'll work as much as possible. If I feel crap and need a week or two of barely doing anything, I'll do that. Incredibly self indulgent, but it works far better than the years of trying to have a system or "rules." This is only possible because I run my own business, though.
I would create a web presence (starting with a resume, portfolio, blog, whatever) and be ben@ or ben.morris@ that domain, with the actual mail provided by Google Apps.
I think there's nothing wrong with the color as your brand logo, but perhaps think of making another color accent it nicely on your home page or making it a more subtle part of your color scheme. The way you have it set up on other pages is a nice compromise (even though I think it's still a bit too yellow):

http://www.happybuy.com/product/Apple-iPad-MB292LLA-Tablet-1...

I just want to reiterate: everything else on your site looks awesome (really awesome)..but that giant yellow block really hurts my eyes.
I wish they would copy Windows 7 a bit... a lot of the features in Win 7 that don't conflict with GNOME are really nice.

Unrelated: GNOME still doesn't understand the concept of "chunking": You only want 5-7 items in a group for people to comprehend it best. When Ubuntu's System > Preferences drop-down has 25 items in it, you have a bad UI.
It seems to me that some of what WSJ shows here goes against RapLeaf's privacy policy.

Specifically:
"We don't collect or work with sensitive data on children, health or medical conditions, sexual preferences, financial account information, or religious beliefs."

The WSJ article shows that they are collecting religious beliefs, income, children, and detailed data on how you spend your money.

Seems to me that they are violating this both in spirit and in specific wording.
CloudHarmony Blog: Introducing Web Services for Cloud Performance Metrics
> The easiest way to tell if you are eating healthy is to see if the plate is "colorful" as opposed to all looking the same.

This is an example of "common knowledge" that may actually be incorrect. While it's important to eat a variety of foods throughout the day, I've heard that eating a variety of foods in a single meal makes digestion more difficult.

(Sorry for the lack of references. My Google-fu is failing me right now.)
If you get rid of the "Why" and "so", the queries become much more interesting, albeit somewhat garbled:

programming languages: http://www.technomancy.org/google-suggest-venn/#start=is+X&#... (s/c/perl)
operating systems: http://www.technomancy.org/google-suggest-venn/#start=is+X&#... (mac and ryan back together? is linux illegal?)

etc.
I wrote a similar tool in 2001, and had a tough time with it. My findings at the time were that there were 2 crowds: One who wanted an entire template laid out for them, and another that was willing to design everything from scratch.
For the first crowd, tools like this are still too much. For the 2nd crowd, they had no resistance to just learning HTML and CSS, so they didn't care for the tool either.

I pursued that tool for about 6 months before shutting it down.

You may get a different result, as that was almost 10 years ago...
Hmmm. Could this possibly be something to do with US supercomputer export controls? Don't know much about this but a quick google showed that the US has been tightening controls lately.

I wonder what people are using supercomputers for in the military these days anyway - UAV? Crypto? I'm guessing ballistics is pretty well solved. And you hear the occasional story about suits showing up and requesting that labs disable-in-hardware the execution of Shor's algorithm on their quantum-related tech...
I work really hard on my side projects in the winter, and enjoy the summers. There are only so many summers in one's life and it's good imho to enjoy them.
Metaphors are necessarily colored by our perceptions and preferences. For instance, I'd say a set theorist is more equivalent to, say, an area specialist like an embedded systems developer, whereas a "javascript programmer" is like a mathematician who insists he's "only an addition guy".
Try http://jaconda.im which does exectly what you want.
very cool site!

Can i ask how you are "getting" the data? Are you compiling the data locally (i would assume via scraping/APIs) and putting it in a full text search engine or are you hitting various services for every search (via APIs?) for every search?

love the site -- its simplicity and bareness have a certain charm.
Here's an annoying Gnome Panel bug that's been open for years:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-panel/+bug/4...
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341441

Changing the resolution of the display (ie., dock/undock laptop) causes the panel icons to shift around. The bug is marked fixed, but it isn't.
Executed properly, it might be an awesome hack!
I love where this is going. One thing that I would like to see included, which is absolutely essential for the way I design website is line-height: it is the core structure of my design and layout. (Read more about line-heights and vertical rhythms here: http://24ways.org/2006/compose-to-a-vertical-rhythm)

At this moment in time I feel trapped using Adobe products to produce my layouts. If jMockups solves the following problems in priority, I will make the switch!

1. Render fonts accurately
2. Render line-heights accurately
3. Better drawing path tools
I've done a lot of Django, Rails and PHP. The choice always depends on what your app looks like.

If your app has a lot of non-user facing CRUD (i.e. a CMS or publishing app), Django offers some incredible shortcuts with the built-in admin app.

I also think Python is a better systems programming language (i.e. calling out to unix during web stuff), due to it's scientific background.

Otherwise RoR and Django are roughly the same MVC frameworks -- opinionated conventions about models with a database abstraction layer, and views and controllers (templates and views in Django terms).

Likewise, Ruby and Python are roughly the same -- object oriented scripting languages.

But for your specific questions, I'd say Rails wins by a long shot. There are a lot more Rails companies/jobs in the Bay area (though more Python than Ruby jobs, again because of science). Rails 3 shows the community is still going strong.

Sinatra is the most fun for simple web services and it integrates with Rails no problem.

And most importantly, you can use Heroku for Ruby deployment, which is an incredible short cut for launching a site and its impossible to go back to being a sys-admin once you realize it's not necessary.
Apple open-sourcing their work to be included in OpenJDK would also require copyright-assignment to Oracle.

Not going to happen.

Also, get the crappy APIs out of Java SE, like AWT and Swing, then the Java SE "standard" and the TCK needs updating, and then you've got a subset suitable for mobile phones, for which Oracle cannot collect revenue anymore.

Not going to happen.
Found no results for <?=
Agreed, it's very much about the applicability of the reputation/traffic. An example of maximum reputation value would be the launch of Basecamp. Although relatively unknown in the startup world, 37signals had a tremendous reputation among UX professionals and the creative agency set. When Basecamp launched it was pretty much guaranteed to succeed or fail on its own merits, because there wasn't an A-list agency in the country that didn't know of it from day one.

Another powerful example would be pg and yc. Not only did pg have a devoted following by potential entrepreneurs, but judging from personal experience, he actually did a lot to grow the "market" of potential founders with a very powerfully inspirational mix of narrative and common-sense reasoning in his writing style.
There's a lot I dislike about Photoshop but saying that it's terrible for designing websites and applications is slightly exaggerated.
Clojure + NoSQL + functional JavaScript for HTML5 Apps
It launched 2007, but it really took off in 2009. I'm still in school so I haven't had that much time to work on it.
I'm doing ok from ads now and it is growing fast, so when I finish school in 2 months, I'm going to work on monetizing.

You can see the growth compared to Dropbox.com and Ycombinator.com: http://icnf.me/brcjhH
No, the point is, he can never evaluate if he'll ever need to know it, now or in the future, as long as he doesn't know anything about it.

It's impossible to evaluate the utility and applicability of knowledge you don't have.
The Eight-Word Mission Statement
Ready.js - prepare your js for production
A penny is "worth" one cent in that it is the value it represents. However, it can be exchanged many times contributing value in each exchange. Also, there are many other coins that likely cost less to mint than they are "worth". I think you need to look at the overall cost of minting for all coins and blend it together to get a more accurate view.
For quick and dirty connections out, I use PuTTY to Set up a dynamic local SSH tunnel to a host of mine on the Internet. Then I use the tunnel as a SOCKS proxy. It's fairly straightforward to set up.

For remote access and Internet access over wifi for non-SOCKSable stuff I use Strongswan. I have a small scale darknet set up with it (just me and a few friends) so it's already there for me, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you know your stuff.
What? The biggest problem startups we've funded have is hiring.
The praise that techcrunch gives it almost seems like parody:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/25/ray-ozzie-dawn-of-a-new-day...

"Below is a short excerpt from the end of the memo, as I wouldn’t dream of stealing the man’s thunder"
Professional almost always equals having your own domain. There is pretty much no way around that this days. Unless your already famous.
We've spent about a year collecting data and developing these web services. I'd be very interested in feedback and suggestions from the HN community.
Re: "Specialization is for Insects"... Two extremes in one thread. :) There is a middle ground, where we have different levels of knowledge on a great multitude of things.

The other day, for example, I patched a hole in my own tire, rather than taking it to a shop. What if (a hypothetical) I, a self-proclaimed C programmer, needed a bugfix in a tool written in python? I can get my job done much quicker if I make a quick patch on my own, rather than wait for someone else to fix it for me.

Specialization is great; it is nice to have experts. Knowing many things is great; it is nice to have people who can do more than one thing effectively.

Just as a basic life survival thing, btw, you probably want to learn the basics of hunting, gathering, and farming. Some things are more important to know than others. :) Insects survive well as a species and much less well as individuals.
I wager this system is very popular with house guests...
I tried signing up, only to be told

Could not complete registration: The captcha was not correct.

Only one problem: there was no captcha. Maybe adblock is working too hard ...
I have made a blog post related to the choice of metaphors for icons: http://www.iconfinder.com/blog/4/
Lucky people notice more opportunities and take advantage of them, according to this article by Richard Wiseman:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3304496/Be-lucky-its-a...

Key points from the article

"unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else"

"lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good."
In case this gives you an idea: in my linux laptop I just have two different users in the laptop, one that is configured to use a local tor proxy and another "non protected". Depending of if I'm out in the open or at home I use one of another. When I need some data from my protected user when in "unprotected mode" I sftp:// myself, but usually I do it the other way (unprotected data from protected mode). Much simpler, I think...
This is one of my beefs with ORM -- in order to use the database layer properly, you need to expose at least as much complexity as the database itself provides. We use Sequel, which is fine as far as it goes, but it ships with a stupid DSL that is a) as complex as SQL and b) significantly less capable. You end up with shitass queries and many more database round trips and for what? Method call syntax?

Sorry. Rant.
‘Sponsor an app’ model coming to Ubuntu Software Centre in 11.04
use SendGrid
when you're using a chisel on stone. you need to hit it straight down, creating a divet (the serif) to get the cut started.

If you put the chisel diagonal and hit it with a hammer right off the bat, it just slides across the stone, and you usually hurt your thumb ;)
A DNSCurve Forwarding Name Server
I did but they didn't answer. I really think it's a waste of time. Even though they have some users I can't see any effect on the growth on Iconfinder.com

I have chosen to focus on delivering the best service and hope the users will notice.
Much of that discussion is crap. They're wasting effort bikeshedding about local network sniffing. You have to assume that anything of value sent over the internet might be sniffed or at least could be sniffed by a well placed attacker. The last hop connection between your PC and the AP is hardly the only point at which your data is vulnerable. To assume otherwise is foolhardy.

That's why I said that the only additional risks I can see of an public Wifi is local attacks directly against your machine such as someone port scanning your laptop to look for vulnerable service or open fileshares, etc.
I'm shaking my head right now. Literally 5 seconds before checking out the HN home page right now, I just finished the checkout process for yet another sideproject domain :)
I think I was fourteen, playing an online space-sim with my older brother. Because he decided to join a clan with mostly US-based members we had trouble being present at the moment that clan-wars where fought. Lucky for us these would mostly be decided days before actually going to war. I found that some guy made a simple helper javascript that used an XMLHTTPRequest to automate one or two actions.

Flash forward a few weeks... I built a sidebar that would be active in the browser, quickly showing stats and allowing you to automate entire battles. Ah, fun times :)

(I've learned quite a lot of javascript those days, and still wish I would've used that knowledge to build something awesome. I've had multiple prototypes of AJAX-chat clients but never finished any one of them...)

---

A few years later we reverse-engineered (just about) the entire economy of another on-line 'learn economy' game. You would compete with other players in a city, buying shops, selling goods, etc. A new game would start every month or so... it took two months to figure it out. First try was with excel (why on earth did we do that?). The second one was a script that would scrape the data of a few thousand people every day, then compare how their actions had resulted in a lower/higher score, etc :) We went on to more shady tactics to gain points, altering input values to buy goods cheaper than possible from the dropdown-boxes, selling them at a better margin, etc.
The one factor I haven't seen mentioned so far is that Python has more math and science libraries. So if those kind of problems interest you, that is worth considering.

On a semi-related note, at Art.sy we use Zend, a PHP framework, for our web app (all our AI is in a separate Java service). We've found Zend to be great and I've noticed that large companies like AppNexus, NextJump, and (initially) Facebook use Zend too. Yet I've never seen it mentioned on HN. Curious if anyone can explain this.
You probably want to use tsocks. It LD_PRELOADs the socket related functions and does the necessary work.

http://tsocks.sourceforge.net/faq.php
Flash Player "Square" - 64-bit on OS X and Linux
The issue is the way that the position of the icons is set by the user. By default, gnome sets the left-most icons to negative numbers as a position, and the right-most icons to some very high numbers. When a user clicks and drags their own applets to the panel, they are considered absolute positions and set their position in pixels.

The fix would involve an overhaul of the interface used to add icons to the panel, and it would not fix any existing panel configurations. It would also require at least some sort of an extra step of understanding for the user (Do you mean left justified, right justified, or absolutly positioned?) and some interesting Gnome-panel rendering hacks.

This is a lot of work for something that doesn't affect a lot of users, as most users do not customize their panels, and of those that do probably are not changing their resolution often. If someone who wanted to work on user interface hacking worked on other parts, such as improving file system access, preferences configuration, or even login screens, it would be more appreciated by more users.
Computers store information in parking lots. Each space has a number. Most cars fit in one space, but some RVs and busses take up two or four spaces. If two cars are parked next to each other, one might be in space 4, and the next in space 5. But if two RVs are parked next to each other, one takes up spaces 4 and 5, so the other takes spaces 6 and 7.

A stupid parking attendant might count cars by asking: "what car is in space 4?" "An RV." "What is in space 5?" "The same RV."

But a smart parking attendant would obviously just ask "what care is in space 4?" "An RV." "Ok, so what car is in space 6?"

There, now you don't have a toolbox but at least it's a squeaky toy hammer.
Yeah, 2008 Macbook Pro, using this enclosure from iFixit: http://www.ifixit.com/Apple-Parts/9-5-mm-SATA-Optical-Bay-SA...
In no time flat it will be filled with apps copied from someone else, and the people hired will be unable to do any useful work at all.