skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sorry, I meant paypal alternative for payments and money transfers through internet, not as a collection/donation service for groups. Sad fact is that nothing is as widespread as paypal. And even paypal doesn't have an option to receive money here (Croatia) because national bank (governs bank policies among other things) wants them to be regulated like other banks here, so they're "talking about it".

To me, it sounds like a pretty obvious route for a startup disruption opportunity. I guess bar is set too high (financially and logistically) for a small-ish startup to make a significant entry to that market (global). There are compatible businesses that could make a significant entry/impact, but they didn't do it (Western Union, Moneybookers, Google Checkout, Amazon...) - I always wondered why (if we choose to ignore the stronghold of ebay paypal has behind it).
Don't you think these companies are turning them away not out of a moral or legal judgement on Wikileaks, but because they know that as USA companies they're likely to be subjected to legal shenanigans asking for donor lists, server logs, etc...? And if they were forced to comply with those types of requests, they could do a lot of harm to something they didn't intend to be involved with in the first place.
Or maybe he just wants to park his car? Why should "proles" feel resentment for his success or parking place choice?
10 Things You Never Noticed in 2001: A Space Odyssey if you didn't watch the movie.
I'll agree that embarrassing information was released.

But I think the allegation of "eleasing classified information, treason..." needs to be proven ( at least better evidenced ) before suppression by governmental (quasi-governmental?) retaliation.
See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1968171 - HN discussion about the system (>15 comments)

http://www.markforster.net/autofocus-system/ - The actual system

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926313 - iPhone app to implement it
For Perl based solution have a look at Continuity (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Continuity/).

I have posted some Continuity code here before (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1686177 & http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006071).

Also check out Squatting (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Squatting/) which is a RESTful MVC micro framework which (by default) sits on top of Continuity.
So, what do you actually do about that
I don't think I'd park an Aston Martin at a meter, particularly in SOMA; I'm perfectly comfortable parking my $4k used Jetta there, but I've seen plenty of cars significantly less awesome than a DB9 vandalized on the street.
For something to be treason you have to meet certain criteria, wikileaks meets just about 0 of those.
Not everyone is American. Not everyone is bound by American law.
If you can tell me how to parse HTTP in GPU faster than in CPU I would be very interested. Right now even uploading an HTTP header to GPU takes more time than parsing it in CPU.

MySQL is heavily disk-bound. It is not CPU-bound except for things like sorting multi-gigabyte datasets, which people rarely use MySQL for. For most purposes you're better off installing more RAM than offloading computations to the GPU, otherwise MySQL has to spend all its time waiting for the harddisk.
I don't afford a Porsche. But if I could afford to buy one, I would still not buy it unless I could afford to park it anywhere. That is, there is a difference between affording to just buy a Porsche (perhaps as a status symbol), and affording to buy a Porsche and use it without care. I don't think that it takes a lunatic to park his DB9 on the street, just someone who bought the car just because he likes it and can do it. The feeling I get is that you are implying that a Porsche is a status symbol, whereas the owner thinks it's just his car, and does not care what any of "us proles" think.
The hard part about running a Tor node for me has always been that you're helping the bad guys just as much or even more as you're helping the good guys, make sure that you know what you are getting in to before running a Tor node.
Isn't this all part of the hustle that it takes to be an entrepreneur?

- You call youself an entrepreneur because you aim to be one

- You call your one person a company a startup because you want it to be one with employees

- You call your startup a business even though it makes no money and has no business model

Most people I meet doing 'projects' exaggerate how far ahead they are numbers, traction, staff (i.e. count freelancers as staff) in order that people want to work with them.

People don't say come work with us - we reached a peak of 10 new users last week after a year of work, we don't have a clue what we are doing and have no money or contacts.
Okay, got it now. Thanks!
Write to your politician/newspaper in support for wikileaks
Wishing it to be so doesn't make it so.

I'm all for humoring people when they fortify their dreams but it's a fine line between ambition and delusion.
i18n: Title should read 'Speed-Freak American Football'
How much space does the mirror take?

Edit: not much, <15MiB. Got some torrents seeded now, thanks for pointer.
Things I Didn’t Learn in Architecture School
Ditto... Unable to login with flash block enabled.
In practice? I've done this. The controllers change only as much as needed to accommodate the new views. If your model has differences you've coupled it too tightly.

"only thing stopping this awesome revolution in software development"

I thought you said this wasn't slashdot? Who is talking about an awesome revolution? I am talking about a smarter way of building software across different platforms, a way that worked then and would work now to solve real problems that we have.

The fact that the solution is in a space that has long been occupied by the type of wishful thinking that has clearly hurt you in the past doesn't mean you get to write the entire concept off.
Andrew Mason: CEO, jester
When I try on my iPad, it says I need flash...
The OP implicitly differentiates a small business owner from an entrepreneur. Your friend is a small business owner. When he raises money to hire employees, buy advertising, and expand his product line, and his daily responsibilities shift from actually making the product to financial planning and risk management, he has become an entrepreneur.

Most hackers probably want to be small business owners. An entrepreneur engages in "real" work only tangentially. They will use domain knowledge to plan effectively, but someone else will be making it happen.
A quarter million dollars? You can get them second hand starting around 60k USD:

http://www.autotrader.co.uk/classified/advert/20104737389528...
They're still using flash for the sound playback.
If you ask Tor exit node operators, they all share the same experience: Abuse is very low in comparison to the traffic they're pushing as a whole.

And yes, technology can be misused. So can a hammer. Tor protects everyone. Who is to judge about what is "bad" and what is "good"? US Government? Google?

There's an estimated number of at least 10,000 bridge users EVERY DAY. I don't think any criminal would go through the pain of using bridges, so that must be people behind firewalls in totalitarian countries.

Also, if you're up to something not good, it's always easy. As a criminal you can buy bot nets, pay servers with stolen credit cards, etc.
I stopped going to pure networking events and just go events that teach me how to do something, I meet more people interested in projects that way and get more out of it.
"When as a country did we become a place where the government gets upset when its secrets are revealed but has no problem knowing all our secrets and invading our privacy?"

http://www.nationaljournal.com/columns/common-sense/maybe-th...
I didn't make it up, can't remember where I stole it from - but I definitely can't take the credit :)
You can only really tell in retrospect if they were deluded or not based on weather they succeeded or not.
Jessica Simpson No Clothes
American law has not been broken by Wikileaks. There are some ignorant politicians beating their chests about charging Wikileaks with "espionage", etc. but no charges have been filed, and the people calling for such charges are, frankly, idiots. If Sarah Palin is the banner-holder for a cause, the cause is probably based on ignorance and fear.

What Wikileaks does is protected free speech in the United States. What some of their sources do or have done, might be illegal.
I'm in LOVE with this paper.
Can't wait to make my company more like that.
The problem at the moment is that wikileaks can't handle the growth both in terms of submitted documents and volunteers lining up to help.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg said in a german interview a few months ago that they have a full inbox for programmers willing to extend the plattform, but they don't have any resources to review the applications nor the "middle management" to coordinate them.

Also Assange has put no effort into changing this in favour of releasing these "big" scoops. So: at the moment there probably isn't much you can do in terms of direct involvement.
Why is it that these are a mystery to most command-line users? Any linux documentation that would be useful to intermediate users, like this article, is scattered across the internet. Even published books don't seem to cut it, and man pages are often too terse and dense to be readable. Is there a thorough, concise linux documentation that I don't know about?
Do you really think that the typical Groupon customer, who is extremely cost-conscious and willing to jump on a deal like this, won't switch to another coupon company if given a better deal?

Say Groupon offers a 50% off $10 coupon for $5, and keeps the $5. The business is out $10 (for the goods).

Now Soupon (fictitious name) comes along, offers a 60% off $10 coupon for $4; but keeps $2 and gives the business $2. Now the business is out only $8; the customer gets a better discount; and Soupon still makes money.

Don't you think most of Groupon's customers will move to Soupon in a heartbeat?
> Evidently you are not familiar with how many Lisp compilers work.

It would be better etiquette not to assume such things. A cursory google for my name (available from my HN profile I believe) would reveal that it's very very likely that I am familiar with how Lisp compilers work.

> You don't need an interpreter anywhere, just a compiler.

In Lisp, sure. But Lisp is not Python. Lisp's eval is structured, making it far simpler to compile than Python(/PHP/Perl/Ruby/JavaScript)'s unstructured eval, which takes a string which is may be constructed at run-time. Even so, Python(/etc)'s semantics lazily look up imports, which means that an imported module may be changed at run-time.

The crux of the issue is that in Python the dynamicism is actually used by lots of modules and programs.

> Note that eval(), as much as it makes sense in the C language, can be implemented in C too (inject the text into a stub, compile it into a shared library, dlopen(), dlsym(), call it).

C's dynamic loading has significantly less scope than that of Python or of Lisp. C loads already compiled code, meaning that the C implementation is not required to have a run-time compiler available (the user may decide to compile C code using a compiler already on the system, but that's for the user to implement, not for the C compiler writter).

Furthermore, almost none of the work of the compiler writer is affected by dynamic loading. Sure, it means they might not know all the entry points of some externally exported symbols, or they might not have a complete call-graph, or they might not be able to statically-infer all the run-time types or aliases of some static name. However, this limits the scope of optimization, it does not hamper implementation. And even then it rarely hampers local optimization, which the Python dynamic loading does (see my PhD chapter 6 for a discussion).
This really reminds me of Zappos's Culture and the great stuff that Tony Hsieh and others have been working on for the past years.

I strongly recommend Delivering Happiness by Hsieh to anyone who is interested in this type of approach to employee care. Very inspiring stuff.
http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-P...
Facebook Director Of Monetization Tim Kendall Steps Down
Honestly, who cares! I'm a "projecteneur" looking to incorporate my "project" in what people may call a "startup" to get rid of my day job and make money with what you can call a "business plan" (that I have not written down... and probably won't ever). I have the guts to not ask for VC/Angels money for an "idea", that, IMHO is ridiculous. And I don't plan of having an office ever because I hate offices and I think everyone should too!

Can we make the word official? "projecteneur" or "bootstraper" :-)
That is very helpful context; thank you for sharing.
Here's an idea - pledge your startup will make money and survive. Keep the wikileaks/politics bullshit out of your startup.
Timetric - the economic data you need right now
Show HN - My Weekend Project: Twitter Secret Santa
TL;DR: http://blog.mattlanger.com/post/1516687187
Ah, the primetime show with Regis. How many times I played their phone game. I went on the syndicated show, where they got rid of the qualifying round and now award everyone $1,000 even if they answer the first question wrong.

However, they do annuitize the million and half-million dollar prizes and don't pay for your travel expenses (but again, everyone leaves with a $1,000 minimum).
It sounds like that's what she's saying at first, but then

> Someone (customers or VCs/angels) gave you money for your idea (or you’re actively trying to get money from customers/angles/VCs).

A bootstrapped business would fulfill the or clause.
Smartphone concept for the visually impaired
I'm definitely partial :) I was relying on my profile to make it clear, but that's a bit buried.

BTW, you're profile has me cracking up in how you share your email. I tweeted it here: http://twitter.com/melonakos/status/11101399047737344

Do you think GPUs in R would be useful? We're heading that way with LIBJACKET.
Professor Surgically Installs Camera In Head, Starts Tracking World Behind Him
Best 2001 review with tons of insights:
http://collativelearning.com/2001%20analysis%20new.html
This is really good. I wonder if you could apply the same philosophy to business or start-ups: Focus on doing what you're doing again and again, really fast, with no breathing room for your opponents, and they will wear down.
You can say "Agreed." by upvoting. :)
Absolutely. My inspiration all along has been Tony Hsieh. Such an incredible entrepreneur. I am just adding a few more ideas I have about creating a happy company culture.
The discussion forums seem to be the place where the ideas are being iterated.

Here's how 'Super Focus' differs from Auto Focus :
http://www.markforster.net/forum/post/1317396

But there are iterations from there... ('approved' current summary from forum): http://www.markforster.net/forum/post/1321345
Exelent UX, but the flashblock problem is anoying..
I think they sould put some empty flash animation somewhere on the main page so that you could hit "play" on flashblock.
Awesome Paolo. I'm just starting with this venture too so I'd love to hear how it goes for you. What idea/startup/company are you working on at the moment?
iPhone toddler flashcard app outsells WP7 version 10-1
I’m not smart enough to think of a solution. Interface builder in Xcode works because everything’s based on cartesian coordinates, but other than pages starting from top-left, HTML is really based around flowing and cascading.

Maybe it’s possible, CSSEdit works great, but requires the HTML to be set up. Espresso’s node layout works well to show hierarchy, but still requires manual HTML editing. One solution would be similar to creating nested NSViews, but turning off {position:absolute} by default. This would force the designer to think in a way that’s similar to how web pages flow in the real world, instead of throwing absolutely positioned elements into a static frame.

I’d have to say some sort of blob state file would be the best bet. The designer works in a vector environment that emphasizes mutable viewports, elements and element amounts. Basically dashcode with vector built in.
How to get programmers (or yourself) thinking like a user: The Bank Analogy
Thanks for the helpful tip.
Actually, we haven't had any (volentary) turnover in about a year. Ever since we did our "culture document" and started hiring based on it, we've had an almost flawless hiring process. I'm going to write a newsletter on building a culture document, so you might want to signup for my newsletter at www.jasonnation.com.
In general, do that then run some compression on it. That will do better if the data wasn't random.

Or if you're expecting random data, invent a biased compression algorithm and use that (e.g. one that has shortcuts for storing any multiples of 3). Most of the time it will do nothing and a few times you'll randomly get data it's good at.

Actually on second thought I'm not sure if that works or not. You'll need a header to identify if the compression was used or not. So the compression has to save more on average than this header info costs.

This header problem becomes clearer if you try to chain thousands of special-case compression algorithms that map a single input to one bit and otherwise are unused. Seems to save space at first (at cost of CPU time, and space to store these algorithms), but actually identifying which are used or not will be a problem. Since they all need unique headers, you need just as many header possibilities as there are numbers in the range, so you must as well just use the numbers for the headers, at which case you're actually not doing anything since the header is the data.
Why did he feel the need to explain the difference between revenue and profit in such a basic way?
I never have a startup or call myself an entrepreneur, but this post makes me despise these 2 words. Whatever they want to call people who tinker with projects, work a lot, and take risks (hackers?), I want to be in that club. If the money comes that's great. I don't want to act all serious and write business plans, get an office, raise VC money in order to become an entrepreneur. If these constitute an entrepreneur, I'm fine with not being one.
Good, Google seems to have acquired M&A fever.
Groupon reportedly spurns Google’s billions
Ah, the implicit syllogism is "if rampant child porn and neo-nazi content is what we'll eventually end up with, that's bad."

It was too subtle for me, but it didn't deserve downmods; I'm upmodding it.
Not exactly my point.

a) We have amazing job conditions: organic food cooked all day by our chefs, laundry service, car washing, personal trainers, unlimited monitors, killer espresso machine, developer-driven product design, etc.

b) My point is it is fine to care about your own interests--but not more than the mission and success of the company. There is no 'i' in team, and you either succeed as a team or you fail as a team.

That's the reality of startups, so the players who are concerned with their stat line are not the players you want on your team.

About 2/3rds of the Gen Y folks I meet at thinking of themselves first and the company 2nd or 3rd--if at all in some cases.The other 1/3rd are hard working, dedicated and have a sense of Giri.
an HTML5 playback fallback for devices that don't have flash would be amazing (and doable).
Boat and Pushchair Blog
What's wrong with property software?
I consider myself an open source fan but I'm not addicted to the idea. I don't think open source is the answer to everything and property software is all that is wrong with this world, but when I hear how some people react when they hear about property software it makes me a bit angry. Those are the same people that have a 700$ iPhone and an overpriced mac by the way, just because Linux isn't cool enough.
Open source is not the answer to everything for one simple fact: many take advantage, very few contribute(donations, code, etc.). There are projects for which open source is the way to go but there are some for which open source would do less good (to the developer/(s) that made the product). So, for all of you who state "open source is the way to go" I really hope this turns on you some day and bites you hard.
Good day.
I am curious: what do you consider the most impressive but underappreciated measures of progress in the past 100 years?

I like measuring the old standbys: Pestilence, War, Famine, Death. All of them are radically better, by any objective measure, in 2010 versus 1910, virtually regardless of where you look.
What, you're not just a group of one? ;) But yeah, dunno about Croatia...

The bar is extremely high, mostly due to fraud, from what I understand. We only hear about false positives, but it's a huge problem.
ding, ding, ding!
Particularly timely in the wake of PayPal's decision to suspend payments to Wikileaks ...

EDIT: I was surprised to see this comment voted down. PayPal suspending payments to WikiLeaks is a clear signal to any startup hosting potentially-controversial comment needs to be concerned about it happening to them. The article, written earlier, doesn't mention that, so my comment adds value to the conversation. What was the reasoning behind downvoting it?
Agreed on your second point - I don't care.
Who cares if I am or am not an entrepreneur, or a startup, as long as I'm building something cool, having fun and maybe making some money. After all, isn't that how most entrepreneurs and startups got started? At some point, my project may or may not become a startup, and people may or may not start calling an entrepreneur. Why waste time trying to pinpoint when that happens?
Keep in mind that the square root of 2 is rational in some fields, for example (mod 7) where sqrt(2) = 3.
Austin Co-Founders Meetup is this Monday
great suggestion. and phone them, too.
John Boyd would be proud. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
send a holiday card to Bradley Manning (the alleged whistleblower, currently in the brig in Quantico)

http://www.bradleymanning.org/15364/holiday-cards-for-bradle...
It's vaguely related to the concept of being able get inside your opponent's OODA loop, with the added bonus of physical fatigue in addition to creating situations where the opponent cannot adjust.

I can't say for sure (never played football, but I do play fairly high level ultimate frisbee), but when a team starts upping its tempo, it pushes both your mind and body's ability to adapt. Usually the first thing to go is your mind. You start losing your ability to predict and anticipate as well, and as a result you have to work your body even harder to compensate, which gets you tired even faster etc etc.

I guess there's a business analogy where, where the mental aspect becomes business planning, and the physical, is the actual creation of the product/service. In fact, I'm fairly sure that OODA loops and all that jazz are (were?) fairly popular in all those business books and mags. The question is how many people can actually successfully implement it.

For context, OODA loops (uh, observe orient decide act) were originally created by John Boyd in the context of war fighting, drawing inspiration from Sun Tzu and von Clausewitz. The idea's been sitting around for decades, and 'officially' part of how the US Military is 'suppose' to fight. But even though everyone 'knows' about OODA and maneuver warfare, it's still not always pulled off.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop]
You've mentioned twice now that GPUs can't do conditional execution; that's incorrect. GPUs have had branch instructions for quite a while now.

The limitation is that every thread on a core is executing the same instruction. If some of them take one branch and the rest take another, both branches have to be executed one after the other while masking out the threads it doesn't apply to. That reduces the performance you get, but it's certainly possible.

It's also worth pointing out that GPUs these days have a number of independent cores, each of which can execute different instructions simultaneously.

Hope that clears it up for you.