skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It won't happen, the regulatory hurdles are too great. Also, maintaining physical and geographically disparate infrastructure is expensive. An infrastructure company is "bound to the land" and therefore more politically (regulatory or otherwise) vulnerable.

Being AT&T is no picnic.
I don't see why access control (i.e. unix/db users) should be any more lax for a staging server than for a production server... After all, it's got your whole application on there. If you're running a rails app, that means it has your whole source code.

The solution there is to have robust access control to all of your servers.
The list on that pastebin is only a sample of what they bothered to crack themselves (easy passwords like "password" and "qwerty"). The torrent posted in another comment contains the entire database.
Definitely good points.

Regarding education at the high school and middle school level, I never had required programming courses, but we did have a Pascal course in middle school, and in high school we were offered (and I took) C++ computer programming courses at the Honors and AP level. This was at a public school, and I don't see why that can't happen at more schools.

I think introducing some type of programming into the college level for ALL majors would be valuable. I don't know if you need to inject that directly into the curriculum, maybe a series of "Development For Dummies" clubs taught/marketed by young CS and Engineering students could help bridge the gap. Maybe in exchange those students could run clubs that might open CS/Engineering students to more than analytical thinking as well.
So what is the consensus about what time is? Is the following a valid understanding of the post title: "No evidence of stuff going on before stuff existed" ?
plus stuff with 500 points stays on the list longer, can get too stale
>"But you have to defend your trademarks or they become worthless!"

This is an oft repeated phrase - "Please acknowledge our trademarks by using 'IdiotGaming is an RTM of Acme Company' on your pages, thanks.".

There you are, protected.
Ask HN: Any cool examples of Aural CSS?
CSS properties for specifying how a page should sound have been around for a really long time (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/aural.html), but I've never seen/heard it used anywhere, at least to my knowledge.

Do standard browsers even support these features in some way, or do I need to use other software for that? Any information I've found about this seems really outdated.

Are there any sites that do particularly interesting things with aural CSS effects?
If it helps color in my picture a bit, I go to sleep listening to (spoken) podcasts every night. I can be asleep in minutes even listening to reasonably interesting content. I suspect this will bite me in the ass if I ever decide to go back to university ;-)
I still don't understand how RIM ended up deciding on Flash for the Playbook SDK. Flash has never been known for its performance. They might have been able to get away with it on overpowered desktop machines, but performance is critical on a CPU/memory/battery limited mobile device.

Even on with Objective-C on iOS there are a bunch of tricks you have to employ to keep things running smoothly, and if you're not careful you can still end up writing fairly poorly performing apps. I can only imagine this being much, much more difficult if you're working with Flash.
I wonder whether this particular patent (and its licensing unavailability) is what is holding back micropayments?
"They are making boat loads of money http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=AMZN+vs+GS+vs+GOOG "

I'm not sure what the point of comparing Amazon to Goldman and Google, as the latter two are way more profitable than Amazon is. Is the comparison to show that they're in the same league as these two companies, or are you just looking at the stock price alone?
The problem with design versus programming is that there is no "right" way of doing something. There is a right way of doing the Hello World program, because otherwise the program won't work. But no matter how your design looks, you're still designing. What you're asking for is the basics of designing well, which is a lot harder, since it's so subjective.

Start looking at the basics of graphic design: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_elements_and_principles

I'd also look at well known web designers and note what works and why you think it works in their designs. If you see a website that's particularly readable, try to notice all the reasons why. Pay attention to elements that you like and don't like. Read about web design elements like grids, then when you get more comfortable, try breaking the grid (helps with emphasis — I find a lot of programmers who start using grids treat them like hard and fast rules that they should never break).

Bottom line, there isn't a yes-or-no answer to design, just building up your "design eye".
In a related note:

Has anyone founded a company in the EU while on a student visa from the US (or elsewhere)?

I'm currently studying in Lithuania and am hoping to come back to Europe post-graduation, but I realize the difficulty in that (for more then 90 days) without a work visa. Founding a company would solve that, and there's more then enough things for me to work on, I just have no experience in European company founding and requirements.
Has anyone done this?
Java as an applet host has been effectively dead for years. I would be very surprised if Oracle were trying to resurrect that. Seems more likely that they'd be trying to replace the server JRE with a server-side JS interpreter.
I think we all feel this way sometimes. After a good event or conference, I can be all pumped up. Call it an event high fructose corn syrup high. The key is having a purpose - working towards it - on and off, all your life - you all know what you are good at. Some of you are excellent communicators, hackers, designers. Some of you don't know yet. That is fine.

All of us change the world. Some of us have a bigger platform to do so. All of us can make a bigger platform for ourselves. Fame, wealth, personal power are all ways to increase our platform. But the best way to increase our platform is to encourage and inspire others, to bring together people, to build a community.

For example, do you want to speak at Ted? It's simple but not easy. Become one of the best in the world in your particular field. You can have a much more direct impact by simply taking time to volunteer with those who don't have the skills you take for granted. That's a cliche. But a lot of people don't have your skills and you might be able to work in symbiotic fashion. Similarly, you can ask other people who have the experience, connections, skills for help. People love to help. In fact, it is a psychological conflict that asking someone 'higher' than you for help makes you look better than if you were try to do something for the person higher (asking a favor vs doing something for them).

As software developers, as another HN commenter said, we have unprecedented access to power to affect the world, to grab a bit of its attention. Most of us can or know someone who can create a website/app that can be scaled up to be used by thousands of people, within hours of its genesis.

Aim for being the local maximum. Be the guy or girl who co-organizes events, throws parties, brings people together. It is very hard to be the global maximum (that is like POTUS - President of the United States). It is definitely attainable to be one of the local maximums (leader, board member, advisor).

It is very hard statistically and numerically speaking to be a Mark Zuckerberg or a Jay-Z. They are literally one in hundreds of millions or one of a billion. But you can affect the world around you, in a positive feedback cycle. Stop fearing what you fear and do it. Keep the motivation going (take it with a grain of salt, particularly the self-help blogs/podcasts - realize that not everything is sunny-side up all the time), listen to Ted videos, Charlie Rose (rocks).

For more inspiration of the entrepreneurial kind, check out Stanford's mother lode of entrepreneur lectures and interviews:

http://ecorner.stanford.edu
I assume that the patent is generic enough that I couldn't have a "slide to buy" mechanism?
"So honestly, I don't think your approach is too bad."

You mean in the sense that both approaches work horribly?
VC: Rumors of Its Non-Brokenness are ... Wrong
This is not strictly auto-stereoscopy (glasses-free 3D), it's just a movable 2D window in a 3D space; like walking through a 3D scenery with one eye closed.

Possibly useful for "augmented reality" scenarios.
From what I can see Epic has a landfill of problems that probably aren't related to just hiring liberal arts majors. Moving from that particular example, I think that most startups are not willing to take the risk of hiring someone right of of college who doesn't have an incredible personal portfolio showcased on their amazing website, with years of internships/personal startups.

I agree with the blogpost that colleges aren't doing a good job of transitioning students to the challenges of startup/modern tech workforce. But, it seems to me that the solution would be a number of big employers like Google and others who are more able to take the risks should hire up the most qualified and teach them those skills. Simply, if the undergraduate education isn't good enough, someone's gotta teach em.
Gawker Media's complete infrastructure owned, dumps posted
It looks like gawker, and their media empire suffered a HUGE breach. Supposedly all source code, logs, and username/pw's have been compromised and posted to torrent sites.

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6034669
You miss lacker's point, labor intensive goods actually become more expensive as society becomes more productive. Check out Baumol's Theorem on wikipedia.

Basically, as technology makes us more productive in a lot of industries, the opportunity cost of work that cannot be easily made more productive become very high. So, we can expect the cost of things like nursing care to get more expensive over time.
True, but if the first humans on Mars were to find the complete works of Shakespeare buried under the Martian soil, it probably wouldn't be prudent to dismiss it as a cosmological fluke.
Capitalism that is uninhibited by the rules made by the state or government.
Thanks! Just bought the "Ordering Disorder" book from link 4 on Kindle for iPad. That's a great start, doing the first layout seems to be my main problem.
Whey supplements lower blood pressure
2600, Hacker Magazine condemns DDOS attacks, Anonymous changes strategy
Come on, you'd have to be soft in the head to do that. The novelty would quickly give way to frustration.
Has anyone compared Tropo and Twilio in these 3 areas:

(a) Speed of SMS deliverability (# of SMS that can be delivered per minute)

(b) Confirmation of SMS (i.e. can we be sure that the SMS was indeed delivered)

(c) Availability of phone numbers in different area codes
agreed - it was initially developed in about 10 days of caffeine, and it shows.

gorram it, jwz.
True, but try sampling the CMB for long enough and you would find a few lines of Shakespeare in some encoding somewhere.
Many of the claims of the patent have been overturned. The interesting part is the legal way that this was accomplished. Instead of using lawyers, the person responsible here (who was mad at amazon for slow deliveries of a book) paid for the USPTO to reexamine the patent with new evidence of prior art submitted. Here is the post of the person claiming victory over amazon:

http://igdmlgd.blogspot.com/2007/10/amazon-one-click-patent-...
The Paywall may be journalism's Maginot Line
The university I attend, Taylor, just began a track in their Computer Science major a few years ago designed for this exactly. It lets students work in a team atmosphere, and get a few major projects under their belt before they graduate, with critiques and advice from professors. I have a few friends who chose that track and are learning how programming really works, getting a little bit of class credit, and getting an on-campus work study job out of it as well.
I asked my astronomy teacher about this a week ago and told him the same thing you said- I asked him if it would be any harder to find concentric pentagons (if that's what they're called) in the WMAP since it is such a huge data set.
My teacher told me that he didn't read the paper, but one of his grad students read it and pointed out that the man doing the analysis of the data didn't account for the probability that those patterns would be there anyway, apparently a common mistake. I wish I knew the proper term that he used, but the semester is already over.
That would be an interesting experiment in preventing the "snowball effect" of upvoting things that a lot of other people have upvoted. Enabling this on the front page, but leaving it on the thread itself would be an interesting experiment.
I think this is great as an option where we can fill in our own threshold. It's another way to play with the feed. I prefer the "newest" setting myself. It's incredibly quick to scan the headlines to see what I'm in the mood for that day. Or I can search with "news.ycombinator.com: searchterm" if I'm looking some particular subject matter. But sometimes it's fun to visit the lists too. news.ycombinator.com/lists Perhaps a couple of those options should go on the top menu.

Maybe the top menu should be Hacker News new 100+ searchterm best active bestcomments etc.
I'm getting sick of hearing about bitcoins already, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to get more sick of hearing about them over the next year or so. (Then, one day, I'll mysteriously never hear about them again.)

Why? Because everyone who owns some of this intrinsically worthless asset immediately has an incentive to start working on talking them up. Social news sites are the front line of this battle... write a story about how they're going to be the next big thing and submit it, and you can be guaranteed a bunch of upvotes from everyone else who owns some bitcoins. This story alone probably caused at least a 10% increase in the value of 'em.

Personally I'll buy some bitcoins the moment they become exchangeable for pogs.
This post itself has almost 100 points. Soon it will be on the 100-point threshold page!
Apple's market is high-margin products where they can differentiate with superior design, marketing, and so on. Not low-margin commodities where they need to compete on price with everyone else.
The results look amazing! I've always wished SimCity had done this.

The semantics for describing buildings seem a bit clunky. CityEngine uses (or used) shape grammars implemented as stochastic context-free grammars for building generation.

Suppose we want to design some buildings:
Building ::= [1.0 First Floor + Rest of Floors]
First Floor ::= [0.4 Door | 0.6 Door + Windows]
Rest of Floors ::= [0.6 Roof | 0.4 Windows + Rest of Floors]

With three rules we can churn out buildings, where 60% are 1 story, 24% are 2 story, 14.4% are 3 story, and so on.

Here's a video of Pompeii built from a shape grammar. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDsSrMkW1uc]
Relevant article: http://openp2p.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2003/bountyquest_10... Tim O'Reilly: "some months after we'd awarded the bounty, splitting it three ways for prior art that wasn't completely on the money, someone sent in a killer piece of prior art. I still have it on my bookshelf, in the odd event that Amazon loses its senses and sues anyone else over 1-click."
Lorem Ipsum.

http://www.lipsum.com/
I wouldn't call enforcing consistency in a primary interaction mode "silly." There would be a considerable increase in cognitive load if a user had to parse what they're seeing every time a keyboard appears. You'd benefit the tail (e.g., people who want to code on an iPad) but reduce utility for the majority of users. Like most things, it's a trade-off, and Apple usually (almost always?) lands on the side of simplicity in that trade-off.
Brendan, right? http://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-...
> I've seen misunderstandings that could waste literally weeks of programmer time get corrected by a 15-minute pair-programming session.

Are they things that wouldn't have similarly been resolved by remote pairing?
I have to say, this is one of the best "I need a tech guy" post I have seen and for two simple reason, you can see the authors passion, and he clearly explains what he is going to do, how he is going to chip in to make the company succeed and what he has to offer to make a go at it. He shows his value and realizes that the tech guy is an important part of the equation not just an after thought.
Instead of importing an entire team to NYC, why don't they export a team leader to Omaha or Tupelo for the duration of the project, or at least until they feel the team is groking the gist of the project.
I have never heard of University of Maryland College Park.

I had a course in OSes. And a course in databases. And a course in graphics. And a course on compiler design. So on and so forth. All part of the curriculum. They taught us to be computer scientists, not systems programmers or web engineers or whatever fancy title is nice. I should add that the university I attended is one of the top in the US for CS.

Also, in interviewing candidates, I did see that there are several schools that do teach about the toys rather than about CS. I generally ignore that and look for good developer qualities instead.

Your second sentence is pretty personally insulting, beyond the call of simply disagreeing with me. Please consider an edit?
Gawker Website source, databases & passwords now on BitTorrent
The ability to generate more offers the ability to make up for lost coins, and slightly mitigate deflation, and not much else.

It's also a key part of the marketing spiel -- selling people on the idea that they can get bitcoin-rich for free is a key part of getting people hooked on bitcoins. If I tell you "I've invented a new currency, want to buy some?" you'll tell me to sod off, but if I tell you "I've invented a new currency, you can mine it yourself as a background process" then you might be persuaded to give it a go. Pretty soon you've got some bitcoins of your own, and every incentive to start talking them up to everyone you meet.
The problem with deflation though is that it encourages people to save them and not spend them. Why would you create a currency which is meant to deflate? In most cases, deflation is worse than inflation.
It is usually a trait of critical systems, imagine a similar disaster on the space shuttle, while being exceptionally reliable software I would imagine the same kind of issues with ease of use. Although you may have more mechanical control there.
Mostly revenue / employee, stock price.

Bezos' lack of interest in profit is well-known, e.g.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_46/b4009001.... (2006).
And now it's been released on TPB
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998642
Not that this type of experiment is bad, but why is the UI so completely neglected? Is this a matter of thinking it's not important, because it's not fun work, or because it can all be customized with grease monkeys? Or what?

I think the quality of stories on HN is pretty good. What I'd much prefer to see any amount of attention given to is things like:

1) Let me take back a vote. Particularly on mobile, I misclick those tiny arrows a lot.

2) Let me comment inline. Having other comments, besides the parent around for examination while commenting would probably help overall comment quality.

3) Fix the mobile interface. It's impossible to use HN on mobile iPhone and Android handhelds. Making a slightly modified styled sheet with JavaScript is trivial.

4) Support someone making an app, or commission one. As far as I can tell, the current HN apps are all kind of buggy and have little updating. There are lots of young neophytes who'd love to work on this, particularly if sanctioned, and a funded effort would lead to a better product.

These basic UI improvements don't even seem to be on the radar. Also, I'll add, the story-killing on this site is pretty heavy-handed, yet capricious. Same with the title-editing. What constitutes a "hacker-centric" story changes with the mood of the moderators, and the tendency to just change each title to the original headline is misguided. I also think that the special privileges given to YC companies corrupts the whole system.

If there were any other community like this, people would be driven away by the neglected UI and the Star Chamber that governs the content. But there isn't, so there's no pressure to do anything but midnight HN science experiments. I should just pray for some competition I guess...
I think the reason that a lot of people have trouble trying to understand monads is that they don't really understand type classes. If you understand type classes, then the definition of a monad is pretty obvious, although you might have to think about it for a little while to see how it relates to computation and how to use it. (Another issue is that people are introduced to the Maybe type in the context of monads and latch onto the mistaken idea that the Maybe type is the Maybe monad... just look at all the blog posts about it.)
The default browser on a platform is basically the only thing that matters, from a pragmatic web developer’s POV.
Ah yes, the "visa discount". The legal part of our immigration regime is exploitative, humiliating, and such a great deal for employers that I don't see it changing any time soon.
And if you read that file, you will read that they used DES for hashing. Reminds me of the LM hash. The LM hash generated two hashes using DES from two 7 byte parts of a 14 byte password. Basically they use each individual 7 byte part as a DES key to encrypt a fixed string. Repeat this twice for each 7 byte part, and concatenate the results, and you get the LM hash.
Thanks.

I am learning and will continue to learn. I don't think you can be an effective seller without understanding how to build and vice versa, empathy matters. I've thought about the design and ui stuff for years for this product mainly because the existing options are such piles of shit. I've never formally studied programming, just picked up bits and pieces over time, but I want to jump in.
The content just has to be good enough to be worth paying for. The internet is not killing newspapers by "stealing their news", but by raising the bar. In other words, the internet's supply of poor writing has made classical newspapers obsolete. Raise your standards!
Ask HN: All the sudden faster?
This past week, HN has been pretty slow in returning pages.

All the sudden, I've seen at least <500ms response for the site and it's pages.

pg, can you tell us what has transpired over the past two weeks? Us architecture folks love to see problem/solution type postings. This one could be a good one!
While I agree that the job listings I see are lackluster and not enticing at all, it's partly from lack of information. Saying your work environment is great is one thing, but having me believe that is another. I did see one recently that made me believe it, but that wasn't a startup.

Another piece of missing info is always salary. I'm supposed to put in some correspondence, a custom resume and cover letter, 1-3 interviews and THEN you'll tell me how much you're paying? Sorry, not worth my time because you very likely aren't paying enough to dislodge me from my current comfortable, safe job.

And another one: Job description. Telling me I need to know X framework isn't enough. What do you expect me to be doing with it? If I'm just slicing PSDs and formatting HTML for use with that framework, forget it. If I'm getting down and dirty and really testing the edges of the framework, I'm a lot more interested.
Upvoted just 'cause it was at 99 points. [Added: I think the temptation to do this shows a (minor and obvious) misincentive, like we used to see on IRC when I published weekly stats on the chat in #C.]