skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A super fast broadband network will make entirely new classes of applications possible - applications that cannot be envisaged today.

Unfortunately many people are unable to see beyond the needs of today - they can only imagine that tomorrow's Internet will be largely the same as todays.

If all Australian homes had 1 gigabit Internet then this would form a platform - a framework upon which new ideas can be built.

It's like the iPhone - a lowest common denominator of power enables developers to exploit that computing power, safe in the assumption that end users will be able to use what they build.

Tomorrow's Internet is not just the same stuff as todays but faster, it's something different.

Consider this: every night, 2 million Australian households go home and watch TV. Effectively commerce has stopped for the day.

Imagine if instead that audience of 2 million homes was interacting. Think about hundreds of thousands of people watching Masterchef, and being able to stop when they see a recipe they like, bring up coles online, order the ingredients for the recipe and return to Masterchef. Coles Online pays a referrer fee to Channel 10 and to the producer of Masterchef.

Think about TV holiday programs like Getaway showing destinations around the world. The viewer stops the TV program, books a flight with Qantas, books some hotels and returns to watching Getway. Referrers fees from Qantas and the hotels go to the Getaway producers and the TV station.

Every night miilions of people would not be passively watching but would be interacting in a vibrant online community.

This sort of stuff only becomes possible when everyone in the country has a predictable high speed broadband connection - the NBN offers this. A hotchpotch of ADSL, fibre backhauls and wireless does not.

We should be garetful and thankful that we have a government with enough foresight to build such critical infrastructure.

If you are not the entrepreneur to take advantage of these incredible opportunities then someone else here might be.
I don't know for sure, but here are my guesses:

* Talent
* Cash flow
* Category-leading brand name
* Gain strategic leadership position in rapidly growing market

Assume you were to create a Groupon competitor that could potentially overtake Groupon. How much funding would you expect to raise to fund such a startup?

Yes, Groupon has a strong position right now. But so did the established search engines when Google came on to the scene.....
Article from NPR a week ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1929267
Did you use non-SSL gmail over a suspect wifi connection?

My account got hacked a month ago. Loads of spam emails were sent out from my account, and I had a login from china in the access log.

My password was strong and unique to gmail. My list of most likely attack vectors they might have exploited to get me are:

* Non-SSL gmail over compromised wifi

* Logging in when travelling on a compromised PC

* There was a story that gmail had experienced a security breach and some passwords had been 'stolen' in early 2010. Not sure of the details.
How to make a rails app (back when scaffolding was wiz-bang):

1)

rails blog

script/generate scaffold Post

script/server

http://localhost:3000

Look at your pretty blogging engine

2)

Delete all the generated code and write an actual blog engine.
Just for clarity, the EU has a law similar to the DMCA, called the EUCD and it is called the DADVSI in France.
Looks very interesting and this could finally address the biggest gripe against Ruby, which is uncontrolled monkey patching leading to interactions between libraries.
The major difference is that Groupon has revenue estimated around $350m, and is profitable ($50m/year).

As far as I can tell, GeoCities never turned a profit and only had something like $30m in revenue their last year.

That said, buying a company for 100x its annual profit still seems pretty steep.
Why? Can't you use browser's print button?
Facebook app companies can be very different (team, expertise, products), so comparing valuation just based on number of monthly active users is pretty inaccurate. Google's acquisition of Slide is an example where the valuation (nearly $200M) was based on the founder, the team and their experience -- not their MAU.
Where does all that revenue come from? (I'm not in the US so I don't use the site). Forbes is reporting $500mm annual sales.

Boston, for example, has a deal today for 150 * $15 meals at a restaurant.That's $2250 revenue for a day or about $800k for the year. Assuming there are about 30 large cities in the US thats $24mm annual revenues.

Even if the average deal size (item price * count) is FIVE times that its about $110mm annually.

Also kind of tough to scale when the USP is ONE deal a day right? I mean will this work with two deals a day?

What am i missing?

Thanks.
This part was new to me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_Transport_Security

This is an additional (draft status) header that tells the user agent to always (or up to X seconds in the future) use HTTPS for that site and it seems, to disallow any connections using bad certificates.

Currently only Chrome and latest dev version of Firefox seem to support it. Chrome apparently has a pre-loaded list of always-https domains, like www.paypal.com -- who are also the people behind this draft proposal.
I didn't say he was autistic. I said the described behaviour is autistic. Which it is.

Sociopathic is what it isn't.
I remember the proposal of "ruby behaviours" from david black about ten years ago[1] which allowed doing the same.

Nice to see it finally being implemented in the core language.

[1]http://www.wobblini.net/ruby/behaviors/
The original article was about growth, so absolute size is not relevant to the argument.
I agree. But are teachers in K-12 aware of this when doing CS? I'm afraid they inadvertently enforce monolithic thinking in the youngsters.
Instagram Captures Their First Big Brand Partner: National Geographic
Posterous does the hard stuff while this eliminates the hard stuff. There's a subtle (and interesting difference).

Posterous makes all sorts of decisions for you giving you a good default, eliminating and deferring choices. Here is no hard stuff to do for you. Simple vs easy.

I think this way has a much lower overhead and I wouldn't be surprised is link-less posts make use of this.
I love this! Tons of places to dump text on the web but I've never seen one that gives you a clean page. Suggestions:

- Set a cookie and let the poster edit/delete the page after it's published. They will make typos, mess up the formatting, post while drunk, etc.

- Markdown formatting. You need at least bold and italics. You could even have a small toolbar. I don't think the editor needs to be super minimal, just the viewer.

- Make sure the branding and links at the bottom are visually distinct from anything the user could enter. Maybe give it a grey background or invert it or something. Fixed positioning is also an option, but might be too annoying.

- Remove the Feedback tab from the viewer.. really spoils the aesthetic.
Keep it as simple as possible. If you do implement any features make them as near invisible to people who aren't interested as possible. eg markup rules on a link somewhere else, 'tiny more options text toggle,' etc.

Don't compromise simplicity.
> Futher Drupal is essentially written in a functional style

I did not know this. Could elaborate or possibly share an example?
Why Do We Admire SV Entrepreneurs But Hate The Ones in Our Own Backyard?
Hilarious to see the questions about Mudge in there. The interviewer is a sharp guy.
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes launches Jumo, social network for activism
Ask HN: How would you explain Turing completeness?
As I understand Turing completeness can imply that somebody can "translate" one Turing complete programming language to any other TC language. What are the conditions for TC? Rigorous definitions can be of help, but I am asking the simplest possible explanation(not necessarily the shortest) that a non-mathematician programmer can understand.<p>Are there any languages that are not TC? Beyond TC everything else is just libraries?
I also got upset by how whimsical js2-mode can be at times. Espresso-mode (now just js-mode in emacs 23) indents perfectly, and is generally very sane, albeit somewhat boring. I use that as my major mode. However, to get the cool static analysis that I miss from js2-mode, I have flymake set up to us jslint.

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FlymakeJavaScript

The combo of espresso-mode and flymake is like The Good Parts of js2-mode. Now once I add this in to the mix...
This happens quite often. It's just done in multiple rounds: Seed (<=$100K) -> Angel (<=$1M) -> VC

This is more comfortable for both sides I think. a) The investor knows how much equity he owns. b) The founders know how much runway they have.
The one problem nobody talks about is that browsers won't cache content served over ssl, which means your website will be a lot slower to your users. That will directly costs you money.
The fact that its so heavily dependent on Flash sort of kills it for me. But maybe i'm just weird.

It's a cool idea and nice implementation
Hands-on With Diaspora
My way of thinking is that this actually provides a great opportunity for more enlightened individuals & organizations. If you embraced FOSS 10 years ago, you're at a clear advantage as a dev now. So it will be the same with this new kind of security/privacy openness: embrace it now & you'll have a massive advantage in the future.
Sleep Hacks: The Geek's Guide to Optimizing Sleep
Do Virus Scanners Slow Down Your System?
The Wikileaks mission is not just to release information but to release it in such a way as to maximize political impact. The hype machine is not going away anytime soon.
Convertible debt!
LOLCode
I find it funny and amazing, though. I like HN for its diversity. Every time, I find something new, but I also want it to be different. I'm just starting my day (morning here) and this post made laugh and in good humor.
I do miss funny pictures of cats on Hacker News.

(here's one from this week, by the way: http://pudgykitties.tumblr.com/post/1662418075/why)
I really need that :).

Too tired to read and apply them now, too insomniac to sleep.
In an ideal world:

say -v joshua Shall we play a game?
Drum and Bass anyone?

http://translate.google.com/#de|de|bvf%20tkçshsht%20bvf%20tk...

edit: correction fr|fr => de|de
"j u l i e n @ post.harvard.edu"

I didn't know he was affiliated with Harvard in any way. Interesting...
A lot of people are simply curious, and like to increase their understanding of the world/universe we live in.
Do you only care about things that directly and immediately impact your life? Why are you on a news site at all?
IBM 02K6632 battery,
5400mAh IBM 02K6632 battery/AC DC Adapter, IBM 02K6632 Li-ion Replacement Battery

Battery type:Li-ion Replacement Battery
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Capacity:5400mAh
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I'm out amd about just now and currently lookimg at this on my Kindle browser. looks fantastic! i'll check it out more when i get home.
"Earth has all those potentially great features but the UI feels like such a huge step back from Maps."

You mean, for you.

On the contrary, I find Google Earth UI way better than maps. I have continuous zoom, continuous panning(you could use a joystick, multitouch or mouse wheel easily), huge screen(you could hide left tooltip menu with a simple key).

I just can't understand any of your comments, maybe you have a bad graphic card,I don't know but Earth is way way faster than maps and awesome.
A (Universal) Turing Machine is a computation machine that can simulate (virtualize) the operations of any other computation machine, including itself, given enough memory and time.

A Turing-complete language is capable of functionally expressing a Turing machine. That is, given the theoretical construct, can the language encode it? An equivalent framework is lambda calculus. Any Turing machine can be expressed as lambda-expressions and vice-versa.

The physical world analog to the Turing machine is the Universal Constructor, a machine that can construct a duplicate of itself or a functional analog of any other machine that can duplicate itself, given enough time and raw materials.

These concepts are relevant because it's not clear if there is a class of problems not solvable by Turing machines (but solvable by another class of machines). As far as we know, human beings themselves are Turing machines (and constructors) and nothing more.
...and so continues the long slow decline of hacker news...
OK, on the serious side, is the most upvoted story ever? If not, what is the most upvoted story ever? How about a list of the Top 25 All Time?

Can I pay to see it?
http://news.ycombinator.net/lists
That's recent, that's not ever. I'm talking all-time Hacker News stories.
HN Meetup in Beijing prior to Christmas?
Not sure if AskHN is the best way to post this but here you go.

I'm visiting Beijing in December (17 - 22) and would love the opportunity to hang out with fellow hacker news readers.

A little bit about myself ... Currently doing my PhD in computer science in the San Francisco Bay Area, I grew up in China and spent the last 6 years in North America (school & work). I like to build stuff (who doesn't?) and enjoy systems hacking.
Name some technological advance or achievement that has only been possible through the creation of a new programming language.

edit: Thanks for the downmod to 0. It really does speak volumes.
Does anyone have a download link to this?

I would greatly prefer to read this on my Nook instead, but it seems you can't download from Scribd without a subscription..

Thanks
That's a bullshit argument. If we find life very close to us, it's very likely there is a common origin, and this gives us no information on the Great Filter.
Can anyone please explain why ruby-core prefer refinements over classboxes?
Winterferien klosters
Der Schnee liegt, einige Bergbahnen sind bereits geöffnet, die Bettdecken im Zimmer sind frisch bezogen, das Holz liegt im Kamin bereit und wir freuen uns auf die kommende Wintersaison.
2 planets? what would be number 2? Martian life has never been confirmed if this is what is being referred to.
Is Wikileaks legal
I hate this divide between "applications" programmers and "systems" programmers. Really good systems programmers will either have worked on applications themselves or will work in close proximity with application programmers. And really good application programmers will have deep knowledge of the systems stack under their app.

Which category would you put Linus Torvalds into? He wrote Linux, but he also wrote git. How about Jeff Dean? He wrote MapReduce and much other core Google infrastructure, but he also played a large part in the indexing & serving system. Guido van Rossum? He started Python, but he also wrote Mondrian.
I understand where you are coming from and I just hate this fake hiring "voodoo" of trying to predict the future of a candidate by asking oh-so-elaborate questions and relying on oh-so-psychologically-awesome tricks.
Yes you can do it easily since WWII era,now with computers is easier, I suppose they will use brute force as usual for Google.

You could do it just taking infrared and ultraviolet photos, and comparing it with red, green and blue versions, leaves have their specific wavelength response, and some trees leave theirs on winter with specific yellows and browns. They could use it to segment for the tree specie.

Now for the three trunk position I suppose they will use their cars and bikes with LIDAR(very easy at ground level, think on a big kinect), or a very expensive plane with 3d recognition but this is problematic with trees that grow together and you don't know when one ends and the partner starts.

PS: I'm trying to detect trees position myself since a few years ago using aerial photography and ground cameras. I'm finishing a model of Casa de Campo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_de_Campo
I realize my short and trite answer might, at first sight, seem like I'm just being an ass, but seriously, the very first thing one should do with a new language is read the documentation. If the documentation is poorly written, you can expect the same of the language it describes, and you are most likely wasting your time.

If the documentation passes the initial sniff-test, then start reading some code. Since you've just learned the basics of the language from reading the docs, code should make sense when you read it. If small programs and algorithms don't make sense, something is wrong, and your second sniff-test has failed. Of course, this might be your own fault if you didn't study the docs well enough, but that's another type of problem.

The third sniff-test is reading the language implementation code itself. Pay special attention to the bootstrap code.

Before you start writing code, you should know how the language is put together and how to use it, or else you'll waste eons digging for your bugs and trying to find the docs to explain what you did wrong.

Most people wouldn't eat sausage if they knew how it was made.
Now waiting for Radiohead to pull out something based on this.
I'm a bit amazed that something that seems lame and is useless to me personally as a potential enduser is worth $5 billion to Google. Goes to show how "scratching your own itch" is not the only way to build a profitable new business.
We've been told for around 10 years now that we'll soon have 128 cores in our laptops. It hasn't happened yet.
What interests me personally, also in light of this snarky comment here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1924487 is whether Ruby 2.0 will do away with reopening classes and only allow the much better Refinements.

This will break most of the code out there, but in light of doing it cleanly, it would probably need to be done. On the other hand, a change like that will make sure that we might never see significant adoption of Ruby 2
Firefox does cache content - I just ran Firebug to confirm. I can only assume from how fast my site works in other browsers that the same applies to them. What browsers are you referring to?
Ray Kurzweil's Slippery Futurism
Fatzke, Blitzkrieg, Hupverbot.
UPS Mobile App
When I print preview in firefox, the margins seem to big. All the text is squished into a narrow column.
Nice!

How about a script for a *NIX command line?

$ tidypub -t 'Any Title' < foo.txt
http://www.tidypub.org/wHzf3
$
Rightly or wrongly, Groupon is a cash-cow. If they're making $50m/month, given the profit margins (which must be high given that revs are 50% of inventory value which they don't even have to buy/manage/warehouse/distribute!) $5bn doesn't seem too bad. It's a solid multi-national brand with proven scalability, and I'm guessing Google see plenty of more room to expand: given that a large %age of the internet uses Google services, and given all that Google know about their users, they can efficiently and accurately market to a huge number of people. Plus that reach means they can easily defend against competition.

So yeah, I reckon this is a pretty solid deal for them.
If it's for optimisation, why introduce another method call (ArrayUtil.createArray) instead of using new Object[] { .. } directly?

I can understand the backwards compatibility argument, but I just don't see the need for this ArrayUtil class.
True religion Shoes On Sale
Good idea but logo not readable. https://skitch.com/jm3net/rnqge/logo-not-readable
Isn't the difference just that Apple excels at marketing while Google sucks at it and know it ?

Google would be acquiring a great marketing team by buying GroupOn.
We'll see what Apple is going to spend its cash on, but it could be something that Google already has or could replicate easily but Apple can't generate on its own.
It looks like a Great Horned Owl, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Horned_Owl. They usually just sit and stare at you so drawing them should not be too much of a problem.
http://top.searchyc.com/
Use bugmenot. ;) http://www.bugmenot.com/view/scribd.com
http://download.cnet.com/40-Sleep-Hacks-Geek-s-Guide-to-Opti...
Hotpot is cool. I just took 5 minutes to invite all my friends who live in the same small tourist-rich town that I live in (Sedona Arizona) and also rated some restaurants.
from what I've seen of their UI and feature breadth, a site like Groupon should not require many web developers. It's so limited and "canned" in it's look. Now having several smart engineers to help make it highly performant and scale up -- that would be useful, and would be something Google could obviously help with.
Html5 meets world: oh, the irony ...
Every technology in Star Trek works this way. Everything is borderline magic and incredibly overpowered up until the point that it just doesn't work. Many Star Trek episodes careen between negative to positive deus ex machinae until the plot is finally resolved. The fact that somehow out of this sludge good story writing can even occur is a marvel.

As to the "Semantic Web", it seems to have become this generation's AI future. In reality the semantic web is likely harder and far more limited than anyone has given credit. People have fallen victim to the same old confusion of computers and the human mind. Merely because computers are able to perform quite sophisticated and complex tasks does not mean that they will be capable of performing any and every thing a human mind can. Computer systems will likely work along lines of shockingly different characteristics to the human mind for some time to come. Furthermore, we should not be stacking the future on unproven and questionably useful panaceae. Remember when the future of the web was VRML? Remember when it was "portals"? Predicting the future of the web more than a few years out is a sure fire way to lose a lot of money, time, and effort.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945670 <- Lots of comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=556993 <- From 18 months ago
I'm sure most people have their own mental blacklist of people never to work with, i bet theres a lot of overlap, but i doubt its something people would allow to be written down.
I have some problems with this story. It highlights a potential problem, but so little information is given it is hardly more than anecdotal.
Why not do some deeper analysis?
What process is using all that CPU? dropbox or apache?
Is this also an issue on *nix or os x?

I believe that the hacker mindset is about confronting problems given a toolset, and using said tools to come up with a solution. In no way is that reflected in this article. So you tried a new workflow, and it caused your CPU to spike. That is hardly newsworthy.
You can see the top 100 here: http://top.searchyc.com/submissions_by_points

Google's New approach to China article is #1 atm — http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048800
Maybe I don't understand these investments but I don't think that makes any sense. Presumably the 171m that's been invested in Groupon hasn't bought the whole company, only a proportion of it, so the investors only get that same proportion of the 5bn. For example if that 171m represents only 10% of Groupon's shares then the investors only get 500m back; a 3x return rather than a 30x return.
Lessons I’ve learned working with Flash File Uploaders