skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The interesting part is not that they can briefly go faster than the wind, but rather that they can keep this speed up. It's easy to briefly go faster than the wind: use some gears to connect a windmill to a heavy piece of metal rotating on the end of a long pole. Assuming a strong wind, low-friction gears, and that you've chosen the gears such that the metal rotates faster than the windmill, the machinery will soon be spinning quite rapidly. Now, just put a hapless pig in the way of the rotating piece of metal, and you suddenly have a slightly-dented pig flying at greater-than-wind speed. ("With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine", although this will definitely annoy the pig.)

I'm sure you can think of other ways to store the wind's energy and use it for a speed boost; the interesting thing is that this vehicle can consistently outrun the wind.

Also note that my explanation does not require the vehicle to be on the ground instead of in the water - think "water wheel".

With respect to "tacking": you'll find that Chu-Caroll's article, which smanek linked to, provides the same explanation as I did (skip the initial part where he explains his error and start reading after "let's look at a new diagram"), and mentions the similarity to "tacking" (start at "Once it's moving, what's going on can be described in a bunch of different ways.")
However, note that not even the "perfect" sail that Terence Tao assumes in the article linked above achieves more than 2x wind speed; clearly, there is something about this real-world vehicle that makes it move faster than even theoretical (fixed-)sail-powered cars. I think my comment above is a plausible explanation for how this can happen.
It's a great idea but honestly, I can't see this working in practice: the suggested time frame is simply too small. For all but the most trivial projects, you'd need at least the first night/day to get familiar with the code base before you can start doing anything useful.
Yeah, I don't like Tcl either. :)
It's just a little joke. There's no unwritten law that says smart people aren't allowed to crack jokes in serious discourse.

In case you need an explanation, the joke is based on the commonly held notion that men have trouble understanding women. A few people might consider that sexist, but it reflects more poorly on men than on women, and as a man I don't find it offensive.
I wonder how much of it is that if you bill $175 an hour, they instantly compare it to their own salary.

If it is someone in purchasing, it is higher than them. If you bill someone at an executive level it is equal to them (and they will think of this as below them), if you bill an engineer they will think it is higher than them.

Now, I'd argue that is a fair rate if you are that much more productive than the average developer, but it instantly makes people offended.

I still like the idea of billing by the hour though.
Making RSpec stop immediately after failing (Ruby)
Though the ratio of "Dropped out" to "Graduated" is much higher than I thought it might be. As someone in the former group, almost reassuringly so.
HTC Developing Their Own App Store?
Same story from different sources:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1880489

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1880263

No comments on either submission.
Perhaps you're right. But most people were still on dial-up in 2005 and most DV cameras were bad and expensive. Who really could have known that would have been enough? I'm sure people earlier thought that the proliferation of webcams meant they would succeed.
Waning, maybe, but it powered boatloads of phones, employed armies of people, and made David Potter insanely rich, so I'd say Symbian hasn't been a failure at all.
nice, what a great movie this could be
After coding on Android for a bit, I've long given up on little things like that since so many other things just stink.

For example, I love that I can stick in a UITableView in iOS and actually get a decent looking table, while the Android table looks like something from MS-DOS circa 1994.
Also, take a look at the Lua 5 compiler. That fucker does matrices on par with Fortran, with just 500k worth of compiler + runtime!

I particularly loved their hack for sparse matrices; they're implemented as hash-tables where the indices are zero-based integers, so only the indices that are initialized are created. Meaning, you can have an array with a few indices without having to create all the empty cells in between. I benchmarked it and it's far more than adequate. Makes graph algorithms breezy.

Lua is very much an acceptable Scheme.
Android development in Visual Studio. Am I crazy?
Splitting Startup Equity for Your Piece of the Pie
It was more a "plus ca change" thought, I actually liked the idea of CoffeeScript, although for my personal work I came to the conclusion that it's not that necessary.

Ratfor itself was mostly a stop-gap solution. Fortran 77 made things a bit easier, and a quite a few developers migrated to C.

I'm actually surprised that there aren't more preprocessors like CoffeeScript. Yes, there are a few languages that compile to JavaScript, but most of them don't aim for ease of integration of existing libraries. So it's just you, your language and the DOM. And if it's just there to supplement your usual backend language (Lisp, Java etc.), you probably don't care that much about node.js.
I've never used Mac OS X Server so can't comment on its worth, however... based on the hardware specs and the prices, I can't work out how they ever sold a single one (except to huge lovers of Apple who wanted to look geeky and hip at the same time by having one of these in their home.)

edit: If the price was only a bit higher than what I'd expect to pay for those specs with 5-10tb storage in it, then I'd probably be ok buying it as a home storage device, much the same as I'm ok buying an iPod as an MP3 player. But there's a point where "sexiness markup" becomes "double the price and slap on a bit more".
It seems that if lowering your "production values" makes your product more appealing to consumers, you were using the wrong production values to begin with.
Will Ballmer bail after banking big bucks?
My principal goal for submitting this is to get your opinion on the project. It will be a lot of work. Much more work than just adjusting to Eclipse. So, am I crazy? Is there a market for this? Would you use it?

I know about and have used MonoDroid (I'm a part of their beta and it is awesome), but I'd like something that doesn't require an extra runtime on the phone.

Thanks for your input!
If you'd like to browse an example Todos application (with annotated source code) that fuses Backbone.js and HTML5 local storage, here's a good place to start:

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/examples/todos/inde...

The particular Backbone/LocalStorage integration works quite well for this little app, despite being simplistic:

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/docs/backbone-local...

Edit: There seem to be a lot of folks who think that Sammy is the only way to get client-side routing -- nothing could be further from the truth. Sammy asks you to structure your entire app around an inappropriate faux-server-side API, and Sammy apps don't work correctly in Internet Explorer because Sammy doesn't use an iframe to set history in IE. Doing hashchange events yourself only takes about a page of code, and handling hash URLs is a relatively tiny portion of a client-side app:

https://gist.github.com/624773

That said, so many folks have asked for hashchange routing that perhaps it would be wise to build a Backbone plugin for it that smooths over the difference between pushState and hashchange...
I would have thought any computer connected the internet would get hundreds of attempted attacks an hour.

Perhaps they don't count those that are blocked by a firewall. Does anyone have a clear definition of what they mean by "attacks"?
Why bother. Just front-run Amazon with your own affiliate code. Then you could collect the spiff on everything that goes thru your portal.

and, oh BTW, people are already doing this ;_;
How to hack football (only works on the middle school level)
No one ever argued that it was impossible to use wind energy to move faster than the wind. The real problem here was describing the effect as sailing directly downwind. The "sails" (on the prop) do not go directly downwind, and there's stuff going on that isn't best described as "sailing". But by describing it that way, people managed to extract blustery pronouncements and explanations of why it was impossible (which sailing downwind faster than the wind is).
Some HN users motivation for side projects is to impress other HN users, "make something really impressive". Others are trying to make money and this is how Kreci succeeded (a la Notch).
Yeah, this is interesting, but there are some annoying realities:

1) If you make something like 3 intra-day trades (buy and sell on the same day) in some defined period (a week?) the SEC will classify you as a "pattern day trader". To be allowed to do that, you need an account with something like $25k USD min.

2) There are a few items that people often forget in simplified models that will completely eat any theoretical profits: brokerage fees, taxes, and currency-exchange effects (e.g. if you're a Canadian trading US stocks).

3) After all that, you're competing with the big guys who have a deep knowledge of how trading works, and fast access to more information than you do. It's an insider's game.
In many cases people simply don't understand or think about what data is collected and out there. One of my friends at work was shocked when I informed him that our IT department might theoretically be able to check what websites we visited, and probably does. This friend was a software engineer.
Didn't you opt-in when you signed up for HN?
Aspect-oriented programming in Django with signals
blog > twitter
The thing is, anybody could just use a crawler and get the data directly from HN. Downloading the bittorrent is just a shortcut.

Since you published your comments here, I think they are free for everyone to consume. Now to republish them somewhere else is a different matter. I guess publishing a torrent could be counted as republishing the data, but what would be the point in refusing it? The publisher is not making any money from it.
Let me reword that to 'useful' instead of impressive.
Gosu is gunning for Groovy and Beanshell, not Scala or Clojure.

The later two are bonafide programming languages, not improvements on Java.
I completely agree. Usually the client will say YES! to each and every new feature idea that pops up during meetings. Forcing an explicit list of NOT-features might be a good excercise... I have to try this next time =)
My guess would be that it's from the November 15 issue of the paper Time magazine.
I'll do a weekly/fortnightly "look at this photo and details of all the random stuff I have" post, and do the day to day stuff automatically on twitter.

Should be the best of both worlds.
Virginia Tech bought 1100 of them, then the world's third fastest super computer:

http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2004/01/2004-233.html
Having an Xserve with Mac OS X in a company that uses Macs because it all integrates and it would provide email, chat, directory, wiki, and other enterprisey stuff. I've also seen universities with full racks of them to use for distributed computing (I believe using the Xgrid utility.)
Thanks. My understanding is that it's hard to compare US secondary education to European-style because in the US there is very little (maybe even no?) differentiation between students and material taught, out of an 'equality' social norm. (from what I hear even people who are mentally not very well developed and would in Europe be send to a 'special' school are mixed together with all other students in the US). Did you feel this difference? I suppose that in the Atheneum you had mostly fair to good students around you, from middle- and upper class families (I'm not familiar with the school itself, just extrapolating from similar ones). That may have been different in a public school in a more urban environment. If you would have gone to a 'beroepsschool' downtown Antwerp, the contrast maybe wouldn't have been so big :)

I'm not sure yet if one system is better than the other though. Empirically, it seems that somehow US universities come out on top in the end after all, considering that the quality and amount of research products is higher in the US than in Europe (even when restricted to EU-12 to account for the historical disadvantage Eastern Europe had and compared on a per-capita basis).

I also have no reason to believe (haven't read any research) that the quality of life or psychological development is better or worse (for any objective measure thereof) for US vs European high school students. 10 years ago when Slashdot had several 3000+ post threads on Jon Katz' essays on bullying of geeks in US high schools (after the Columbine shootings), a popular complaint there was that the US system somehow exacerbated bullying because of this mixing of people that put the future convict in the same class room as the future professor. Reading those stories however didn't seem worse than what my high school (in Belgium) was like.

Sorry for derailing the thread :)
Maybe if Apple cared about selling servers they would have. It was obvious to anyone that they never actually tried to build a real server offering. Apple did a good thing by killing this product, preventing a few people from making the mistake of buying these things.
> build something the size of a star

It will even contract all by itself and ignite.
Who defines what is 'useful'? I have a cousin, he sits at home all day, watching TV. When he buys apps, he does not want or care for things like 'currency bot'. Why would he care about that, he never needs to convert currency. But if he sees something like the x-ray stuff, he'd be quite entertained by it.

For him, it's much more useful than a VIM clone for android. Your definition of useful is not the same as most of the worlds definition.
This used to happen on the Apple app store as well, but they stopped it to prevent spurious updates. It was getting out of control. Expect to see this happen in the google marketplace as well.
You just gave me an idea, but I don't have time to implement it so I'll give it away. Maybe if someone makes money with it, they could sell me my bill.

$1 bills priced at $2 w/free shipping.. the hook, the bills are listed by birthdates contained in the serial number. heh
I recently set up my personal web page at www.prgmr.com. For $8/month for 256mb/6gb, I have no problem paying that much. It's been a great experience, trying to get everything set up and running the way I want it. I couldn't be happier with it. I really enjoy running my own site, and getting to choose when and what gets upgraded.

You can always integrate external services as needed anyway. I use google apps for mail. I wanted to use Google App Engine for another project, but being restricted to Python 2.5 was a bit of a deal breaker for me, so for now I'm just testing it on a sub-directory on my personal site. When I'm ready to launch it on it's own domain, I will simply get another VPS and push the site over to it.
Analysis here.

http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/e2ouv/a_middle_school...
Except that was one cluster, no one else tried it probably for good reasons. Had that cluster been replicated I'd believe their claims. I don't see what they meant by innovative management software.
Safest Neighborhoods in American Cities
Un-Friend Day
Saw this today: BlackSheep - http://www.zscaler.com/blacksheep.html

Similar idea to FireShephard: "BlackSheep, also a Firefox plugin is designed to combat Firesheep. BlackSheep does this by dropping ‘fake’ session ID information on the wire and then monitors traffic to see if it has been hijacked. While Firesheep is largely passive, once it identifies session information for a targeted domain, it then makes a subsequent request to that same domain, using the hijacked session information in order to obtain the name of the hijacked user along with an image of the person, if available. It is this request that BlackSheep identifies in order to detect the presence of Firesheep on the network. When identified, the user will be receive [a] warning message:"
Why just restrict the search to buy-now items? In my experience more of the esoteric stuff seems to go on straight auctions and buy-now is used mainly by commerical retailers.
No, I am serious. The graphics were not your standard clip/stock art I thought they added to the message. If you don't, that's fine but there's no reason to be rude or disrespectful about it.
It would be really nice if Apple allowed OS X Server to be virtualized on bare-metal hypervisors.
So "it turns out"[1] that Coffescript will make the process of developing good JS needlessly complex and fragile.

Would you care to elaborate?

From the coffeescript site :

> it compiles into clean JavaScript (the good parts) that can use existing JavaScript libraries seamlessly, and passes through JSLint without warnings. The compiled output is pretty-printed and quite readable.

[1]http://jsomers.net/blog/it-turns-out
Steve missed the point with the Xserve. Like all his other projects he should have create a unique solution that integrated with the Mac and iOS platforms.

And if Xserve did provide a unique solution then this is a marketing failure. Regardless Steve didn't follow his standard operating procedure for product development.
Show HN: Our little html5/js dungeon crawler.
founders behind citydeal in Germany a group on knock off made lot of money by using similar approach. they knocked off several successful business models, got traction and flipped for millions of dollars. unimpressive? not useful? I don't think so.
Hubris Versus Humility: The $15 billion Difference
Gift Ideas for Her
Unique Gift Ideas for Your Loved Ones are Just Around the Corner! As a leading producer and distributor of quality art works, we offer a variety of works that you can give as a special and romantic gift idea for her and him.
It was our submission to the 4drl challenge[1].

Here is the success post:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.roguelike.developme...

What do you think?

[1] http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=4...
Ask HN: Session stealing prevention, possibly naive idea
Went to learn a little bit about web security after the posts about Firesheep (I know the problem is old but I'm new to web development).

I'm wondering if the idea outlined below would make session stealing a little harder. I'm probably missing something, so would love if you could tell me where I'm wrong.

Server would send a new cookie with each request, suppose it is a sequential number which is the only number accepted by the server for the next request. When the session is stolen, the attacker uses the valid number, incrementing the server counter. The original client then tries to use it, but the counter is now invalid, so he is logged out and has so start all over again. Attacker is also logged out.

Of course this would fail when the client just stops using the website and the attacker continues using it...
Got 10min? Short survey to guide creation of soft dev tools.
Not to content being republished anywhere, no.
I'm curious on this too. I wasn't even aware it was possible to implement ads into an Android app. How would views be tracked? Is it a pay-per-click system? Passing just over $1k for October is impressive in such a small (but rapidly growing) mobile market.
Symbian will be around longer than one would expect, due to the fact that it will receive life support in the shape of Euro22M (US$33M) from the EU. Or as burst out when I saw that "WTF? Symbian gets 22 M Euro from EU... What a colossal waste of money."

http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/11/02/symbian.gets.3...
Yes, I plan to support things other than buy-now. This was just the simplest way to get something running.

My plan is to have it wake up every hour, check if it's won something in the last 24h, and if not then do a search for items to bid on that are closing in the next hour.
I'd be (much) more impressed if he implemented this one: http://xkcd.com/816/
I hate to rag on TW, and I know they're good folks, but I've had about six teams that went through their Agile Inception process, and I was less than impressed by the results.

Don't get me wrong -- I think these are great questions. I think you need to ask them. And the TW guys meant well. In fact, the teams really enjoyed the exercise. It just wasn't as helpful as it could be.

I think that this is not related to the questions per se as much as it was related to the focus on the Questions rather than the goals. In other words, people love checklists, and even a checklist of simple necessary questions can be abused. What I see over and over again -- even from experienced practitioners -- is the focus on the checklist rather than the problem. They'll get through an exercise with TW feeling great, having all the questions answered, even making some cute diagrams. But the whole project is fracked, and everybody knows it. The team is just happy that they're doing what they were told to do, and had a good time doing it. That's not what I consider a successful result.

Taking dozens of teams through kickoff, I've found that the initial week or two is the most critical time for the entire project. Many times I've had managers ask for a schedule or agenda for each piece of the kickoff -- couldn't I provide just a list of questions we'd be going over? Looks like this list might do that. I always refused, however, because once I started asking these questions, we'd almost immediately run into business organizational issues: the customer wasn't present, nobody could make a decision, conflicting demands that couldn't be met, etc. And it was these problems that "Inception" is really supposed to be fixing. Not just question-answering or game-playing.

Of course, that's in an environment where the problem is fixed by the business and the teams are supposed to solve it. In a startup, it's much more experimental-based and there is no set problem. Still, asking questions like this can be very useful. Just be careful to keep addressing risks, not just answering questions. That's the whole purpose of the questions, right? To find risks so you can get to work.
Organizations Struggle with Database Security Responsibility
Homeschooled, Dropped out of highschool
So I take it you have the product all wrapped up and have the marketing all done too?

If not, why are you wasting your time worrying about the domain name?

If you bought vulsdkjn.com, I bet you could still build a web app on it.
Teen Promoter Raking in Cash w/Drug and Alcohol-Free Parties
Yes. Ads are paid per click. I just implement a library provided by a paying company and it loads banners from their servers.
That's peanuts compared to amount of money Nokia put into the platform.
And these subjects had not been conditioned by years of authoritarian leadership. These subjects were free people raised in a culture of hero-worship of dissenters and free-thinkers.
My guess is that Apple will open up OS X server up to a small number of non-Mac units. They did something like that when they discontinued the Xserve RAID: http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/

That way they can keep their server software around without having to spend money building immediately uncompetitive hardware.
Rabi Cycle is not a guy with a beard on a bike.  Yes, it is revolutionary
Inline content modification is one where I suspect the legal territory might be murky, however not propagating replies is almost certainly legal.

While posting on usenet gives an implicit licence to allow servers to to copy the message, there's no explicit or implicit legal requirement for an individual Usenet server to propagate replies. Indeed even historically there have been many usenet servers that were one way only due to the nature of peering arrangements.
It'd be nice to hear how to made it, what language, any problems etc etc.
Compiler Benchmarks Of GCC, LLVM-GCC, DragonEgg, Clang