skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
F#, IronRuby, IronPython, COBOL.NET, Fortran.NET? Arbitrary standards compliant C++ even compiles down to MSIL (the resulting bytecode is ugly, but works). But in any case, I wasn't suggesting we use the JVM or the CLR. I'd be fine with a bytecode that wasn't supported by either.

This would be a long lead item, but one worth doing. I know the Mozilla folks got a kick out of the recent IE9 DCE issue, but I think most people who don't really care about your rivalry, agreed with your assessment, but thought that it continued to show how broken that JS is as an IL.

The point of doing this is to really get a bytecode that will allow language designers to build performant languages that still are first class citizens in browsers.

Unfortunately, the end result, as you say, is that we as developers need to simply get over the fact that we should expect more of our vendors.

It's ironic that people speak of everyone will build webapps with HTML5, yet when Apple and Palm pushed web-centric apps, no one showed up. When they moved to a "desktop"-model, the apps came. Its apparent why. The web doesn't care about devs -- and unsurprisingly the shallowness of most web apps is the result.
I use an online account aggregator with a large financial institution, which uses Yodlee technology. Does this mean these startups have access to my financial data? What financial data are they sharing?
I totally agree. The premise is not that they can not work - rather, that many people have tried them, or thought of them, but they have not worked as of yet. Even more importantly for the article, the really do come up in every brainstorm I have ever had :)

I think social news (Reddit, Twitter) and Cloud based file sharing (DropBox) are two ideas I would have put on my list before that have been addressed in some good way....
I'm not going to be using my CC on a site designated a terrorist organisation by the US Govt. anyway.

Using OpenAuth / OpenID / Facebook login etc. would mitigate the password problem.
Ron Minnich's 196-node Gumstix Overo cluster
To my mind there are several explanations for this phenomenon. Firstly, writing in mathematics is generally more graphic than programming, which is linear, although of course, mathematical writing can be expressed linearly (in TeX!).

Secondly, of course, most mathematical is relatively informal. The large proportion of strange symbols should not overly impress us: even in the best journals, mathematical proofs are not given as step-by-step logical deductions from the axioms. This is for the obviously sensible reason that such (excessively) formal proofs would be vastly longer and essentially incomprehensible to even the most gifted mathematician. [1]

Thirdly, programs have a constructive flavour to them: we work with finite objects (floating-point numbers rather than real numbers, for example) and any object or inference made by the computer is something we can understand in a finitistic way, even if it might take us a very long time to do so. In understanding the operation of the computer (even if only through a high-level programming language, rather than machine code) we see how each step of a computation is to be carried out. The algorithmic character of computation appeals to our intuition: if we wished to sit there and perform each step in a construction then we would get the expected result.

Of course, this last reason is much of the motivation behind Brouwer's intuitionism, and there is presumably a reason that so many computer scientists take a constructivist line of one sort or another.

[1] See, for example the calculations in this Math Overflow answer: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/14356/bourbakis-epsilon-ca...
Is google censoring Alex Jones? No new articles indexed since 11/10
God yeah, I just got introduced to .rvmrc files. Talk about insane awesome.

The next programming language I use full time will have to have all the RVM features and utilities built into their RubyGem like utility, or I'm not even going to bother.
Ask HN: What's the status of your MVP for the "Launch an app" month?
(see this discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857136)

A bunch of HN users have committed to launch an MVP by the end of November. Are you on track? Have you launched yet? Please share your status and your app here.
is anyone still trying to innovate in the online dating arena? i thought okcupid has had it pretty much locked for a while.
What do you find annoying about the Crazy Egg script?

EDIT: since this person is being upvoted, I removed the script (yay?); but I'm still interested to hear why it bothers people. Thanks.
My sense is that the latest point release of the kernel is a better jumping-on point for development, rather than from -current, which is volatile & changing multiple times daily.

Perhaps when they start the branch, it's expected to be a small fix, & that it won't last very long. Making it work & making sure it won't break anything will be quick. So you'd try to keep your merge costs down by starting from the most recent version.

It's optimizing based on faulty information. Building on a dev kernel might be really hard to troubleshoot, & merging is easier than that.
Analyst finds flaws in Canon image verification system
>I am pretty sure the majority of the Mac users that I know would've bought HP.

Its funny you say that. Apple Cinema displays used to be the exact same LCD display as HP displays, except they had a FireWire and USB hub built into them. They also cost $400 more.

Even if Apple licensed to clone vendors again, it's unlikely HP would produce third third the price and one and a half times the performance. Apple's Pro lines remain competitive with the market.

Apple also led the way in doing things like putting accelerometers in laptops and swivel/tilt controls, Etc. HP could have done that with their hardware on the windows side (and written/loaded drivers for the hw) but choose instead to sell a bland box. Perhaps this is why Apple's hardware offerings continue to look interesting in light of cheaper alternatives.
#2 reminded me of Directed Edge's generalized recommendations engine (http://directededge.com/).
Robot blob pillow to cure loneliness
FYI - we'll likely be doing a pre-party on Tuesday which may be perfect for this and also an after-party on Wednesday.
Nice. :) It doesn't appear to be handling contractions well (getting "ve" and "ll" as top hits instead of "I've" and I'll") Other than that, nice little idea.
I thought this was going to be slightly different.

In Start With No there is an interesting piece of advice that in a negotiation you want to make the other side feel comfortable, and one way to do that is to let the other side feel that they are one up on you. Which can mean not revealing what you know. But it can also mean deliberately looking awkward.

For instance one excellent negotiator that I know likes to show up to critical meetings without a pen. He then makes a show of needing a pen and borrowing one. Silly? Sure. But the trick has helped him get better terms in 7 figure negotiations.
I guess we disagree. I don't find anything you wrote to be very factual.

Most networks charge their neighbors -- be them customers or peers. That means when one neighbor sends traffic to another neighbor via the ISP, they both usually pay.

If you call that duplicitous, then every network is duplicitous.

Also -- Comcast's network is symmetrical to the head-ends. It's true the head-ends are configured to allow more spectrum to be used for download than upload, but that's easily changed if people's surfing habits changed. I imagine in the future it'll be dynamic, per customer (if we even continue to use this model for cable modems, which I think DOCSIS is starting to move away from).
> Giant, Purposeless, Unfocused Machine Learning System.

There's a YC company that does this in a general way but I would not label their use cases as "purposeless".

http://www.directededge.com/
The photographs are from actual Guestlist events.
http://www.changedetection.com/
Very cool for a couple of hours effort.

However, (oh I hate to say this) there are a bazillion todo apps out there. Every programmer must have made one.

I know you made this for learning. So, what I'd suggest is you take the same code and turn it into something more fun. Have a look at http://www.thathigh.com/. Technically, it's similar to your site, but it's a very viral social app, which people love.

Good luck with your experiments!
Aw, they changed the theme tune.
- A drag and drop interface that lets you make any program you want...totally code-free!

Xcode and Interface Builder, using Core Data and Bindings. Don't expect to make a full-blown 3D video game doing that though. ;)
People use ruby-1.8 because nothing works against ruby-1.9. And by 'nothing' I mean not rails 2.3.
A few notes:

* This uses the Gumstix Stagecoach modules, each of which can hold 7 Overo processors.

* Every shelf is a self-contained unit with a power supply and ethernet switch.

Although the title says "Ron Minnich", it was actually a team effort by Dr. Minnich and his colleague Mitch Williams.
(clicky link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857136)

I'll start: well, it didn't go very well... From the start, I couldn't fully commit because I knew November would be busy for me. And it has been. So I did some, but not enough for an MVP.

For my defense, I bought a house this month :) (I also started with the new-to-me Ruby-on-Rails, so, much time was spent on the learning part)

I'm still planning on working on what I had planned, if anything because I'll use it. It'll be more of a little tool than an app and I know I won't be charging for it though. (hosting most likely provided by Heroku, unless success, high bandwidth and high usage surprisingly knock at my door)
I find PDFs a pleasure to read. They are better typeset, the lines aren't ridiculously long, the fonts look beautiful and the pages give me a feel of how much I've read.
No way to search for anyone near my area. No sorting.

How do you think this will help planning a meetup? Everyone will end up adding their plans or be overwhelmed by endless unsorted plan to look for one that is interesting.
I have not had problems running Rails 2.3 on Ruby 1.9.2.
Three Narrative Essay Topic Sources 
There are many topic sources when it comes to selecting narrative essay topics. This article will provide you with three of these sources. Having an understanding of these three sources will enable students to select any of them to write their narrative essays.
I've read opinions that seem contradictory to your thesis (these both appear to be derived from the same study). [1] [2]

While they aren't addressing the same types of discipline, I'm wondering if this sort of self-fulfilling outlook they describe can be applied to the financial situations you address, or if you can explain where they might be misinformed.

[1] http://news.softpedia.com/news/Willpower-Is-Not-a-Limited-Re...

[2] http://www.stanforddaily.com/2010/10/25/willpower-can-be-an-...
As a founder of a startup doing #3 (Stencyl), I can attest to that idea being an enormous time sink and risk. I can name at least 10 startups or larger companies that went after that idea and either died or pivoted.

What we have is working, and it's working well, but as we press forward, we find that our strongest value proposition is no longer the code-free aspect, which turns out to be just one small part of a larger puzzle. Once you remove that roadblock, other pain points come to light that are far more difficult to solve.
As much as I love to rag on education, psychologically you have to be of a certain age to really get nuance at all, and no amount of attempting to jam "nuance" into a fourth-grader's mind is going to work, no matter what you do. Monolithic, rigid thinking is endemic to pre-formal-operational humans (to borrow Piaget's terminology and to give you something you can google if you like).
It's definitely not required, but it gives you a much better case if someone files a unauthorized chargeback. If you used AVS (Address Verification System) or the CVV number, you can in a sense prove that the person who made the purchase was the cardholder.

37Signals, and OrangeSlyce (my company) use Braintree which provides a VERY innovate solution called "Transparent Redirect". It allows you to accept credit cards directly on your site, with your domain, but the form posts directly to Braintree, and transparently redirects back to your site so the customer never leaves your domain. It's very cool stuff and I don't know of any other merchants that offer this.

Most importantly, the CC data never even enters your environment.
After further consideration of your argument, I stand corrected.
A tribe would be synonymous to an individual start-up. "A network of people that help one another" would be an entirely self-forming group or collective of groups. What makes communism distinct is that there's a central organization directing the economics.

To use the old "steak and potatoes" analogy, if one person specializes in steak and the other in potatoes, there's capitalist efficiency there. But if there's a third-party saying "you with the steaks: you'll get those from this particular guy with potatoes. and you with the potatoes: vice versa.", that's when there's potential communist undertones.

Not that I have a problem with communism: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1926047
Maybe war will evolve into an expensive, highly roboticised, chess game?
Yep, I'd rather work 24hrs/day for myself, than 1hr/day for someone else.
Running is way more exhausting than weight lifting. If you're not exhausted, run faster and longer. You can't do the same with weight lifting. You can get your arms tired, but your arms will give up long before you run out of energy.
I don't see why 1 to 4 shouldn't work. How many failed dating sites are there? Also, many dating sites seem to simply be a matter of efficient advertising - even if you are a newcomer, if you can pour enough money into advertising, you are all set.

Machine learning: I hope Directed Edge is doing well (YC startup).

Social Travel: what are some good social travel sites? I don't know any.
Think of how liberating it would be if you could just write pseudo-code, and the computer would figure out what you meant, instead of complaining about a missing semi-colon.

I've noticed Lisp, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, etc. hackers don't tend to talk about "pseudo-code", and I believe it's that they think in their chosen notation, rather than mentally compiling it. I know I do. I think in JavaScript, not "pseudo-code". Not that I wouldn't opt for more elegant notation (e.g. CoffeeScript).
Apart from a few the actual years of creation helped me more than the names of the creators.
Ask HN: I want to scrape a web page...
I'm a RoR developer and have a project where I need to scrape a webpage, specifically a University's course list page, to populate a database. I've never scraped a webpage before, are there any pointers or guides that anyone can recommend? I don't even know where to start.
List of social skills a solid career requires
How I Ended Up Sleeping on Mike Arrington's Couch
The only script in your head
I hope I don't come across as negative here, but I hate lists like this.

Peopel are always raining on each others' ideas

"Oh, what, you're going to make a myspace clone? Bahahahaha." (facebook)

"Oh, what, you're going to make a facebook clone? Bahahahaha."
(twitter)

"Oh, what, you're going to make another dating website? Bahahahaha."

(Okcupid, plentyoffish)

"Oh, what, you're going to make another social bookmarking website? Bahahahaha."

(Reddit, digg, hacker news, etc.)

This sort of "You can't improve on an existing design" rhetoric is usually coming from the same people who champion companies like netflix and say things like "The RIAA suing downloaders is like wagon wheel manufacturers suing car tire manufacturers! GET WITH THE TIMES, HELLO!"

You want to make a better dating website? Awesome, I hope you do and I hope it's better than okcupid! If it fails, guess who's going to come out the other side better than they were when they started?

You want to make an abstract machine learning system? Good! I hope you do! Guess who's probably going to be learning a lot about ML when they come out the other side?

You want to make a craigslist/ebay mashup? Good! Do it today! Start it right now and, if it's better than craigslist, my friends and I are all going to use it! How much are you going to learn about interface/UX design in the process?

You want to apply gaming mechanics to exercise? Good! Do it and tell me about it! That sounds awesome! Make an iPhone app for it, make a facebook app for it, let me pick random strangers across the internet to challenge at it. Make leaderboards and lots of badgers, and blog about it. If you fail, write more blog posts about why you failed.

I'm sorry, I'm sure the author of this blog post had good intentions; trying to help other geeks, but I find this sort of "don't even try this because it's a stupid idea and you're going to fail" attitude extremely harmful.

The first project I ever did was called http://newslily.com it was a fark/reddit/hn/digg clone. Did I sell it to google for 2 billion dollars and retire to a yacht somewhere just east of anywhere on the planet? No. Did I go from knowing absolutely nothing whatsoever about web development to being able to turn ideas into things? Yes.

My current project is called http://thingist.com . Have people said "oh, psh, you're making a twitter clone...boorrrrriinnnggggggg."?

Guess who doesn't care? My daydreaming about having 50 millions users is forcing me to learn about scaling, and how to use mod_python (oh, and if I get super crazy, maybe nginx as a web cache for my 10 users!). In a year, or two months, or six weeks, or however long it takes me to decide that, yeah, well, it's just another twitter clone and isn't going to get more than 10 users, I'm going to be 1 twitter clone closer experience wise to making something people love. (Although I still think that thingist isn't a twitter clone).

My advice: make 10 twitter clones and 20 abstracted ML frameworks. NOT doing this is like a running coach advising their runners not to waste their time jogging around their neighborhood because they're really not going anywhere anyway.
Superb.net Dedicated Servers Discounts up to 70%
Take-out services / services for restaurants.
Wart: A more ergonomic common lisp dialect with an elegant implementation
Advice and a little bit of seed capital does not constitute "a central organization directing the economics." I think your conception of what YC does for accepted companies is pretty far from reality.
Sarah Palin on Obama Administration's "Incompetence in Wikileaks Fiasco"
The Real Basics of Open Source
I don't think the implementation is very good at all, but the idea is interesting.
Detecting Trademark Infringement Domains using Levenshtein Distance
The drag-and-drop interface reminds me of 280 North's Atlas. (and Cappuccino to some extent) I guess it falls under pg's "could be pulled off if done right", since they were acquired by Motorola for $20M :)
Pets as Wizards
Playing dress-up with animals can be fun, especially when they look so adorable as these little guys.
In many ways I feel glad that I live in this age and not the next.
Main GNU source repository server compromised
I don't want to spam HN, but thought this was a good deal for anyone needing dedicated hosted servers for their startups. I don't know anyone there, but have heard some good reviews about their services.

If you don't think this belongs on HN, click the flag button. :)
Out of curiosity, what do you dislike or think can be done better with Craigslist?

In other words, if you were going to build a Craigslist competitor what would you focus on doing differently?
Here are a few recent takes on it, focusing mostly on the rise and fall of Prolog:

* http://vanemden.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/who-killed-prolog/ - Discusses how closely Prolog became tied to the rise and fall of the Japanese Fifth-Generation Computer Systems project

* http://vanemden.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/the-fatal-choice/ - Argues that Prolog was wrong-footed by the increased focus in industry on data structures and interfaces, rather than program logic. Prolog proposes a better way of doing program logic, but has little to say about data structures or encapsulation. (The article proposes how that might be fixed, too.)

* http://synthese.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/prologs-death/ - Argues that the difficulty of debugging and reasoning about Prolog execution, and its slow execution (especially in the early days), are bigger factors than many Prolog advocates admit.

* http://www.kmjn.org/notes/prolog_lost_steam.html - Argues that Prolog's low-hanging fruit got poached. In the 1970s it was the only real declarative-programming game in town, but over the next few decades a bunch of more specialized declarative languages succeeded in various niches, reducing Prolog's uniqueness and appeal.
Nothing significant has changed in Perl since 5.8 so it is up to date enough. Perl 6 might be what you are referring to, but I doubt anyone is running perl 6 in production currently.
Shouldn't the parenthetical note in your title be (That Haven't Worked Yet)?
Due to the way Prolog backtracks to find a final solution, it can be increadibly slow, and it has to be able to 'undo' an operation.

On top of that, from what I recall, it's pretty easy to have the backtracking to stumble into an infinite loop. As leaky abstractions go, that's pretty severe, probably enough to make people question the abstraction's usefulness.
Social network. That tends to be a common one.

(yes, I spent a long time creating a social network, no it went nowhere special :))
another good one is this:
http://www.grubwith.us/eat/san-francisco

That's specifically to meet YC alumni. A great networking opportunity.
From what I can tell old dinosaurs like Match.com continue to dominate this field. OkCupid was the last site I heard of that people found unique in approach, but even that was mostly used for the fun tests and quizzes rather than dating.
>How many failed dating sites are there?

That's the problem, we don't know, do we?
WikiLeaks Suffers a Second More Powerful DoS Attack
If you only need to scrape one University's one course list page to populate one database, your best bet is probably copy-paste with some tidying up with your text editor of choice. If you need to do more, I would look into Hpricot or Nokogiri, both Ruby libraries for parsing HTML. Then just download the page content, pass it to your parser of choice, and go wild.
Google search goes under EU antitrust microscope
I was honestly expecting to see something about a bar revolving around gaming. I've heard it proposed by at least 4 seperate nerd friends.
Confessions of a Mac Switcher
For windows users this project
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

has 'pclip' and 'gclip' which do the same thing as 'pbcopy' and 'pbpaste'.

I have been using this technique for years (without the remote stuff described in the article).
Nook Color is now rooted.