skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Own programming language, own templating engine - looks like NIH syndrome. But with 37signals' developers they could afford it.
> you know you have built a very big company.

Or, at least, a very overvalued one.
For me it is a lot more specific. I wouldn't have a big problem with enhanced interrogation in some contexts (I think torture is a bad policy and a losing strategy for a country, but in a classified interrogation context, wouldn't rock the boat). I have certainly been around recreational bdsm scenes which were fairly intense as well. I just don't trust doctors (psychologists, MDs) to be competent -- I have seen too many fuckups. Plus, there would be little personal risk in standing up to them.
In the ww2 context, I am kind of ashamed to say I would have been an amoral defense contractor, doing whatever made me the most money with access to the best technical challenges and toys. I wouldn't have been initially willing to start off with war crimes, but I could definitely see using slave labor, overlooking virtually any other crimes, to ship, especially if it seemed like losing could lose the war. Or, if not a defense industrialist, a soldier.
I'm pursuing an LL.B.
With their main cash cows being Windows and Office, both with close to 100% market share, it's not very reasonable to expect a huge growth.
Amazed it took so long for someone to do this! Start a blog with a post for each item that it buys!
I don't think that's the main difference. I think the main difference is that one works on just about every Desktop and smartphone OS, while the other only works on a single minor desktop OS and a single minor phone OS (albeit fast growing).

And I'm not an Apple hater. I love my Macbook.
How much could he sell before crashing the prices?
Browser Underdog Opera Fights for Survival
Icons are ripped from KDE too.
The trick with NIH syndrome is balancing, as with any other syndrom. Once you know about it, you can also detect situations where it's worthy rolling your own (GitHub's Resque is another successful example of that).
People pay 50% more if physically present
Coderloop is the coder's gym
Hi everybody,

we're working on a community for developers where coders can practice their skills by solving programming puzzles. Coders can earn "skill points" (programming, knowledge of algorithms, etc) depending on the puzzles they solve and on how good their solution is. We currently support submissions in Java, C/C++, Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Fortran, Erlang, C#, Objective-C, LUA, Javascript, Scala, OCaml, Clojure and Common-Lisp.

You can check out the site at http://www.coderloop.com/

If you want to give it a try, I will appreciate any comment/feedback or suggestion you may have.

thanks!

-
Federico Feroldi
This is excellent, I was very surprised at the result. It's made me rethink some basic assumptions. Thanks very much! :)
I took the basics of this to see what email addresses it really grabs:

https://gist.github.com/667651

I don't think it's as bad as the author thinks, given that the GitHub account settings page has "Email (publicly visible!)".
They provide e-mail addresses over their regular web interface as well. That's why the e-mail field in the account settings says '(publicly visible!)'. This guy is not outing a dangerous, unknown vulnerability—he's just making it a little bit easier for people to behave like obnoxious asses.
I agree that HIN is not always bad, Joel has good article about this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html
Sleep Better, Eat These 5 Foods
JavaScript supports dynamic typing, functional programming and prototypal inheritance. IMO, these are great tools for creating games!
I hope that they fix that UI issue where an unchecked box has a grey-ish checkmark in it. Stuff like that just kills me.
support Haskell
Or just follow his twitter account ;)
You can write an academic paper with a finger tap: The Postmodernism Generator
The human brain is fascinating. But I think the article could be slightly misleading; the fingers do not do any of the "processing" of information. It's a part of the brain below consciousness that detects the problem, probably as it tries to map the messages received from the fingers to the ones it expects to receive from a given word as the fingers touch the keys.

Not that I'm a neurologist...
Are you sure that is correct, that the wheels are powering the propeller at some point? The article explained it completely differently. The article said that the effect is similar to when a sailboat tacks downwind sharply, they can briefly accelerate beyond wind speed. The propeller is essentially shaped as if each side is a sail continuously tacking, so the force from each of the two "sails" drives the propeller in a circular motion.

I don't believe the wheels are providing any energy into the process, but I could be wrong. I think it is the shape of the propeller that causes the effect. The article also said it could most likely work on water as well.

The wind energy applications of this propeller design are intriguing.
Ah, Coffeescript, the Ratfor of a new generation…
Very well written - this was one of those posts in which the graphics really added to the message.
I don't think websites should protect users that don't have AV, firewalls or share user accounts no. I also don't think websites should protect users who cross the road without looking both ways. None of those things are relevant to protecting the communications between the website and the user.

If the users machine is compromised, that's the users problem. If the users machine isn't compromised, yet the website can't be accessed over an inherently untrustable network like the Internet, then the website has some flaws that it needs to deal with. SSL is a start. DNSSEC is becoming important too and I will be using it on grepular.com when Verisign signs "com" at the beginning of next year.
Ethan Zuckerman: 'Time to break the cyber-utopian myth'
The bot has a Twitter account: http://twitter.com/trademe_xkcd576
> is being used in production by multi-billion dollar companies around the globe

Is this a joke? Citation?
A classic case of arbitrage. But it seems to me that it would be quite hard to achieve on ebay. You need to have very little overhead, mailing stuff isn't usually that cheap.
Drop shipping --send things directly from seller to buyer-- is allowed on ebay but has many restrictions.

It would be very interesting to see if you could get some heuristics that choose products that are at least moderately useful instead of screen protectors and (exploding) batteries for various mobile phones.
Awesome. I saw around a dozen jacquesmatheij.com articles hit my RSS at the same time a few hours ago... after the third one on the list, I got excited that a new guide had come out. The be a consultant guide was brilliant, looking forward to this one too.
So, from this blog I learned that there's a "Agile Samurai" book. Which is somewhat ironic, considering that hyperbolic job descriptions like this are kinda driving me towards seppuku…
A little while back I got an email from someone using this feature to send out his résumé! Quite an ingenious use I thought, find all X developers near Y and send them a friendly form email customised using other details available from their account (like their name) with your résumé and contact information attached.
A year ago while still in a closed beta, Google Voice had 1.4 million users, with 570,000 using the service 7 days a week.#1

Skype added 39 million users in Q4 2009, to come to a total of 560 million accounts.#2

Its still early for facetime, but I wouldn't discount Apple, especially with over 120 million iOS devices sold.#3

-----

#1 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/business-week-14-million-googl...

#2 http://gigaom.com/2010/04/20/skype-q4-2009-number

#3 http://mashable.com/2010/09/01/apple-ios-downloads-stat/
What happens when a startup is shut down? Or which job to pick?
I'm 22, non-American, hoping to move to the US, and I have two job offers and I don't know which one to pick.

Job 1: Tiny startup (~10) in Palo Alto, working primarily on something I'm not super-excited about, but looking to start new products. 100k + 30k.

Job 2: No-longer-a-startup in Boston, working on something I'm somewhat excited about, but the pay is slightly over half of Job 1's pay, in first year.

I hope to start on my own some time soon. Is it okay to risk it and join the startup? I don't know much about their funding, but their team sounds awesome, and I'm excited about moving to the Valley.

If I were an American, I'd pick Palo Alto without really looking. But I'm not and will be on a h1b visa, and I can't stay in the US if I'm fired because they ran out of funds. The Boston job is really safe, and everything I've heard about them is great, and they just got acquired by Google.

What happens when a startup is shut down? Are the employees told in advance so that they can find jobs?
We could also grumble something vague about how weird it is that a platform which makes such a big deal about its openness is being developed with such a 100% opaque model that we must resort to wild speculation to discuss a major update that's supposedly just a few days away.
This simultaneously sounds like a fun idea, but I can't imagine any project owners/maintainers being too happy about this being applied to /their/ project.
Employee Equity: Restricted Stock and RSUs
who i am - well... um... complicated. best left unsaid.

-2 1/2 year old MacBook Pro 15inch. Still works ridiculously well
-2 1/2 year old 1st gen iphone. I want to replace, but still works ridiculously well

Chrome,
Notational Velocity,
Notational Velocity (full screen mod) - separate instance for my dissertation notes

Google Docs for writing my dissertation. It's handling of footnotes FTW.

Thats abooot it.
I write primarily in Notational/Quickcursor/Writeroom
Very nice.

I'm not sure the ability to sort users by name is useful.

People may possibly be shy of showing how many times they've failed. projecteuler.net only displays the number of correct submissions for each user, and I'm personally very glad, as I can then try a variety of techniques without fear of losing "rating".

Of course, this may not be the way you wish to go, but I think many people would appreciate the option of hiding the number of failures.

In fact, if I may be pessimistic, I predict that if your website becomes popular, you will find people start opening multiple accounts in order to test solutions with one, and keep a perfect score with the other.
Especially if you delay sending the seller a postal address long enough to find a buyer.
Oh hi, you must be new here. Welcome to the Internet!
There is a need for Coffeescript; programming Javascript directly leads to cross-browser issues. Something like Coffeescript can abstract away the per-browser style issues. (The main annoyance I notice is the behavior of trailing commas in lists. In Firefox, it works. In IE, it silently breaks. Coffeescript avoids this issue, since the code you type never sees the browser.)

I would personally find a Javascript->Javascript compiler more compelling, as it would mean I wouldn't need a new editor toolchain. But that wouldn't be as fun to blog about, becuase you would still have to type $("DOM") instead of $ DOM!
Except it's only a dollar cheaper than getting the actual, physical book shipped to your house the very next day (without any S&H charges) via Amazon Prime.
First section: "Such moves can be quite fatal." quite => quit ?
Tryptophan in milk? I thought the whole tryptophan->sleepiness connection was an urban legend.

Also this article recommends consuming these foods 1-2 hours before bed, which is probably good advice, but makes this not very useful to anyone who is actually struggling to get to sleep.

As long as we're planning that we want to go to sleep a few hours in advance. Here's a tip: An hour before bed start turning off lights/ dimming screens. This helps simulate a sunset and should prompt your body to produce melatonin naturally http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin#Light_dependence

So don't bother eating all those grapes, just install some dimmer switches.
quite |kwʌɪt|

adverb [usu. as submodifier ]

1. to the utmost or most absolute extent or degree; absolutely; completely : it's quite out of the question | are you quite certain about this? | this is quite a different problem | I quite agree | quite frankly, I don't blame you.
• very; really (used as an intensifier) : “You've no intention of coming back?” “I'm quite sorry, but no, I have not.”

2. to a certain or fairly significant extent or degree; fairly : it's quite warm outside | I was quite embarrassed, actually | she did quite well at school | he's quite an attractive man.
I just submitted this to the App Store, so it should show up in a week or so.
Ausin-based Infochimps Raises $1.2M for "Data Marketplace"
http://www.coderloop.com/
Man, it must be hard to run an online business from Nigeria. Huge stigma and lots of the internet ip-ban it, won't ship equipment and gear there, banned or at least heavily scrutinized on many banking/payment sites... must be a hassle to deal with.
Windows Azure Platform Introductory Special Extended to March 31, 2011
Thanks for the feedback, I didn't thought about that. :)
We were thinking about two things:
- public/private profiles
- replacing the success/failures count with just a success rate
Fun fact, defense spending was always criticized and cuts were always proposed, even at the height of cold war. But since 9/11, it's never considered because proposing something like that would label you as soft on terror.
will do! :)
I have a feeling I will get addicted to this.

Add more problems and you win me over.
It's mildly annoying. Unlike Fortran, JS doesn't desperately need a preprocessor language. Adding another layer of "abstraction" and some syntactic sugar will make the process of developing good JS needlessly complex and fragile.
Awesome - thanks for that, Dave.
Turn Your iPad into a Netbook with the Crux360 Case
Uh ... I kind of interpreted the headline as saying that this was, somehow, a Nigerian (aka "419") scam. I guess it isn't, it really is an impressive startup, that just happens to be based in Nigeria? Cool.

I hope (for their sake) that not more people have the same unfortunate prejudice.
RSA Animate: Changing Education Paradigms [video]
How about K? It's a functional, "clean minimal core" APL with ragged arrays and lambdas. Lisp-influenced, but much less Lispy than one would expect if it's "impossible for people who know Lisp to design a language that isn't Lisp(y)".

"I much preferred implementing and coding in LISP (sic), but once I was dealing with big data sets and then having to do fairly simple calculations, APL just seemed to have the better vocabulary." - Arthur Whitney (http://cacm.acm.org/opinion/interviews/26246-a-conversation-...)
New Extension Detects FireSheep Hijacking
Hey folks, there's nothing to see here right now. We spent three weeks experimenting with some new tech to see what we could build, and ended up with something that looks a bit like Rails, but entirely client-side and written in CoffeeScript.

The project driving the framework—an HTML5 mobile UI for Basecamp—has been on hold for about a month now, and we're still a ways off from having anything to show. It just isn't a priority for us right now. When (or if) we do have something we'll be sure to post about it on our blog.
Link to actual post:
http://nuigroup.com/forums/viewthread/11154/
This is the same person who wrote the Windows drivers for the PS3 Eye. That code was released since ( http://nuicode.com/ ), so I have hopes for this one too.
No, not quite :)

But thanks anyway, keep them coming!
I don't know what I will be worth but if anyone wants a person who can think up processes and flows and things like that. (Even I don't know what I can do but still want to get onboard on something).

I can do some RoR programming, I made this uvaa.heroku.com in a few hours or so. Added a forum on my local copy but work halted so I never updated it.

Disclaimer: I am not an designer, I cannot tell you what color to use where or what your logo should be like (well I can make a rough sketch of it). I didn't write the css for that Heroku site. I just have opinions about how something should work.

If you are interested in such a guy, my contact details are at my profile.
Why ? I would say: "Focus, focus, focus"!

After doing my experimentations with various mobile stuff, I tend to think I'd prefer investing time in something specific to mobile like this or sencha, and rely on a (Rails or other) app with JSON API for the site or back-end.
Open-Xchange Introduces Its Own Web Desktop
true... the most impressive 'african' startup would have been a 'clearer' title..
My Android development income report
Free Creative Commons pictures for bloggers
I think this is what TarSnap http://www.tarsnap.com/ is meant to be for.
It's a good way of getting your SMTP server blacklisted.
You just supported my arguments, silentbicycle; it's "much less Lispy" but not "orthogonal to Lisp". Small, expression based, self-hosting, declarative, has a core-data structure it uses to represent most of its input ..

APL, Forth, and Smalltalk might not be proper functional programming languages, but they're of the same "spirit".

Now compare this to something horribly broken, like Basic ..
The Game You Can't Stop
My friend and I released this game today and are looking for feedback!
Versatile Algorithms for RF Design
The mailing/shipping could be handled by Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/seller/fba/fulfillment-by-amazon.ht...
Its overly verbose, doesn't allow you to override operators and doesn't even have proper types.

Not exactly my favorite language.
To be fair, I think I'd rather control Cambodia (2009 GDP $10B) than Facebook. Jersey and New Caldonia would be nice as well.
I find ESR's style quite irritating, though this book has enough good content that I would still recommend it.

His points about Unix usually stand on their own, and the polemic about Windows distract from them.
The post makes a muddled point by creating the scene as strawman for folks who do nothing but self-aggrandize within their own echo chamber. I agree with how dangerous that is, but how concrete a thing is it? The good and bad of networking all blend together in one big mess. You have to know the good from bad in every interaction you have, and you won't get to know the people you need unless you're critically and self-consciously engaging with the wider tech community.

So I don't honestly think that the scene will kill you all by it's lonesome. It will mess you up if you don't have a plan, and don't know why you're playing in it. The scene will kill if you ignore what Chuck D said: "Don't believe the hype."
Great thanks! Currently almost all the problems are algorithm based (you can solve them with any language).
Since we have the ability to have language/framework specific puzzles we will soon implement more language/framework specific puzzles (i.e. java, ruby, rails, etc) to let you test your knowledge of a specific technology.

If you have any suggestion for kind of puzzles you would like to see please let us know :)

cheers
Let's start a new monetarist paradigm: low frequency trading.
I have always wanted to try something like this with stocks or commodities. Make a bot watch the market, and buy and sell. I even got far enough to imagine some sort of genetic filtering, aka give the master bot 10k, then it distributes it to 10 bots, all which are slightly different, they spend it, the master takes any profit above 1k and invests it in another bot that is a combination of the best 2. Etc. That way your max loss would be 10k, and you might make some money.
Come up with a similar idea using Apple's Bluetooth keyboard and we're talking.
They may be getting additional information about the product if it's in front of them, e.g. how comfy a shoe is.

This certainty in knowing that you won't have to return the item may well be worth a premium. Also, they're paying to get the item now, rather than in a few days.

I'm surprised the difference is 50% though.
Comments welcome and very desired =)
Are Serverside Web Frameworks Becoming Irrelevant?
Things You Should Do Immediately After Launching a Website
Heh, cool - I was going to submit this myself after it bought a few more items, but I guess I was beaten to it.

Any questions, or suggestions for smarter ways to select items to buy, feel free :)
Is There A Place For a Premium JVM?
Is HIN a reinvention of NIH? :-)
YEAH
Original Mobile Phone Photos Only. If you would like to anonymously contribute mobile phone photos to YEAH.YEAHYEAHYEAHYEAHYEAHYEAH.COM, text or email original photos to YEAH@YEAHYEAHYEAHYEAHYEAH.COM
Scientists Turn Skin Cells Directly Into Blood Cells
Wow!! Live already. That didn't take very long ;)
They may also be less worried about defects in the product. Allowing someone to actually touch the product before purchase shows more confidence in the product than locking it in a glass cage.
>As to whether these people are innocent or guilty of anything

If there is no evidence what so ever of their guilt (and obviously there isn't or they would be tried) why would it be rational to assume they might be guilty?
Steve Jobs on Xserve: Hardly Anyone Was Buying Them
Yes, the wheels drive the propeller directly. Read the articles posted in the first comment. They will explain it. Very short summary: The prop creates an air cushion that acts as a virtual sail.
How Microsoft Hit CTRL+ALT+DEL on Windows Phone
Good luck for that. Time for battle of the bots ...
From what I can see it's developed by guidewire who list these companies as their customers, http://www.guidewire.com/our_customers
A Brief History of Time-Traveling Gadgets
I suspected as much. "Lispiness" is a fuzzy concept, though - Lua is Lispier than Python, but is Tcl more or less Lispy than SML? Etc. K is probably the least Lispy language I can think of with that pedigree.

Joy may be another exception, but it's mainly an experimental / research language.
A Parents' Guide to Facebook
How about a $1 bill priced at $2 w/free shipping? From every angle, it would be an interesting experiment. From the consumer's standpoint, it challenges the notion of free shipping. From a seller's standpoint, it challenges the notion of easy money (would you really want to stuff a thousand envelopes if the item sold well?). From the middleman's standpoint, it might help to identify bots (or possibly even money laundering).
Royal Navy website attacked by Romanian hacker
Discuss Organism Behaviors in Biology Term Papers
Students writing biology term papers should be familiar with what type of topics they should discuss in their term papers. As biology is a vast subject, students need to select topics which are interesting. With interest, they will be able to write excellent biology term papers.
Is it a good model that all the money is actually coming from ads?
That is a neat trick but highly unlikely.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4918184.stm is impossible.
I am not able to sell via Android Market as I am not allowed to do it by Google (developers from Poland still can not sell their apps...).
Symbian OS - one of the most successful failures in tech history
Any reason for not open sourcing the development? It seems to me it could use a helping hand of additional features and wrappers.
Ok so the elevator pitch template in point 2 is exactly like the vision statement template from RUP, probably older than that. The in scope/ out of scope /unresolved table is also commonly sen in many standard templates. 5 and 6 7 and 8 are also oh so common. The whole list just look exactly like what you'd find in a vision or charter document in typical methodologies.

This doesn't mean its bad or wrong just that this is clearly geared at people who have never been through software projects using any methodology.
In section 2, 'Moving to Freemium':

"Keep in mind that these 'freeloaders' are the people that brought you were you are"

...should probably read 'brought you to where you are'.