skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Typically I'm not patient enough to learn a new language very systematically, so instead I find myself following a pattern like this:

1. Hear about how great the macros are that Lisp has or the monads are that Haskell has enough times that I decide I need to try it

2. Independently have the idea for some new weekend project / mashup / potential startup and start obsessing about it

3. Persuade myself that this new language and new project are a match made in heaven and compulsively try to build the one with the other while furiously multitasking through tutorials

4. Get a little wiser and more sober about both of them through the experience

5. Hear about how great the asynchronous I/O is that node.js has...
> Does Mozilla offer any officially blessed way for third party applications to install extensions?

Yes: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Adding_Extensions_using_the...

> Why is it even possible to silently install extensions in the first place?

It isn't possible for a normal user-level program like Firefox to prevent other programs from messing with its storage. Those programs would just modify whatever on-disk state necessary to install their plugins.

The reason most browsers offer blessed ways to install plugins silently is because developers who are going to install plugins silently are going to do so one way or another. It's better to offer a maintainable, supportable, stable way than have developers hack something that doesn't really work.
I suspect at this time Groupon would be a better business model.
I look at how it does strings as it seems everything practical involves strings.

If string handling sucks, then I'll probably skip it.

If string handling rocks, then I'll look at IO. If the IO libraries are no good, then I skip it.
The men who posted the ad would have laughed their socks off if a woman responded. Sure, it's immensely inspiring, but I wouldn't have been allowed to go on that expedition back in the day and it kind of makes me feel like I wouldn't be allowed to work at AdGrok as well, or at least looked down upon ("A woman programmer? Psh! Get back to the kitchen.")
This is a more detailed account: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/11/security...

In short, private Japanese individuals would no longer be allowed to send packages over 1 pound to the US.
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For those watching at home, 100k from 13k in 92 years would mean 2.24% annually, 500k 4.05% and 1M 4.83%.

I agree that over 5% is optimistic, but 3% for the century might be achievable. Note, though, the given that the rate of growth isn't constant, the most impactful rates are the ones we're getting early, i.e. now.
Ostensibly, if I want to learn two languages, I write an interpreter for the one in the other. In reality, I try to make a habit of using it whenever I need to do anything small (from simple arithmetic to implementing some graph algorithm I don't understand yet). Couple this with a habit of looking for better ways to do things that come out clunky and you're off! In real reality, I usually dismiss languages on first sight because I don't like their complicated syntax.
If you're a top performer, unless the place you are at is losing money you aren't subsidising anyone's paycheck - I assume that the people skimming the cream off your contribution do exactly the same to every employee and anyone that isn't contributing (the value of) at least their own salary (should) would be shown the door.

I suspect it gets diverted to senior management (founders?) and shareholders. Given we are commenting on this at ycombinator.com, I don't have a problem with it, since I'm hoping to end up in either or both categories at some point.
"We buy companies to get excellent people" @ Mark Zuckerberg

May be the same holds true for Google & Groupon?
Those guys love Whiskey. Except for Tom, who loves Whisky. (That's Bourbon vs. Scotch). I'm with Tom.
This would work reasonably well. It is still circumventable by "attackers" (eg by replacing or patching firefox.exe, modifying /etc/hosts, etc), but the bar is higher.

On the other hand, it also requires Mozilla running and maintaining a service, which is a pretty resource intensive solution for such a minor feature.

Also some users do not like their browsers phoning home for any reason whatsoever, so they would want a way to disable the feature. Of course, once there's a disable switch, attackers can flip it as easily as users.
Design was done by Dragon Interactive ( http://dragoninteractive.com )
Google bought youtube for 1.65$ billion and is now paying 3 times as much for something which is basicly an email marketing list and who get all their customers from aggressivly marketing on adwords? They have an good idea but the price is pretty steep. On the other hand they have been good at buying up local companies doing the same (they bought mycitydeal which operated in scandinavia/germany)
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The Star Trek Computer Is Stupid
Here's my app for the month launched today. http://www.previouslook.com. Makes it easy to look back at the snapshots of popular web pages over time. So far it's a proof of concept with couple sites. Will expand to include more web pages.

Here's my other HN post about it, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1953087
Puzzle: a drunkard and a cliff
Thanks. I'll try it out in Chrome to fix it.
And Jason Fried is on the board of directors??
Pure vpn
VPN technology is based on the idea of tunneling that involves establishing and maintaining logical network connection.

With this connection, packets constructed in a specific VPN protocol format are encapsulated within some other base or carrier protocol, then transmitted between a VPN client and server, and finally de-encapsulated on the receiving side.
Yep, if I recall correctly, expiration dates are just there to get people to get new cards for accounts because the magnetic strip on the plastic fades after a number of years.
This looks like a political move to me.

By the time the US responds to the current leak, the bank leak will be ready or nearly ready. The public will see it as a response to the bank leak and ask who is really in charge.
Linkable: https://signup.37signals.com/basecamp/Premium/signup/new?sou...
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$ uname -a
OpenBSD lynx.foo.bar 4.7 GENERIC#642 i386
$ firefox -v
Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3, Copyright (c) 1998 - 2010 mozilla.org
$ date -u
Tue Nov 30 08:21:05 UTC 2010

Yes, I need to upgrade this particular box.

Tested with you "HackerNews Newest" snapshot set.

As previously stated, only the 'forward' link appeared, and the 'back' was just plain characters rather than a link, when the omega (first snapshot) was initially loaded. Yes, I noticed the hover.

Since you mentioned making changes and rebooting your app/site, I just gave it another try and the behavior has changed. Now both the 'back' and 'forward' links exist on omega (most recent snap). Both of the "Previous Time Slot" and "Previous Batch" links work now.

The only thing left to fix is the handling of 'forward' links ("Next Time Slot" and "Next Batch") and the 'forward' key-press (right arrow key) when already displaying omega (most recent snap).

On the other hand, if you have some magical way to display snapshots of stuff before it happens, then you really need to start tracking stock symbols. ;-)

Most importantly, congratulations on delivering your November app. It is very nicely done.
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> Also rich people and corporations are leaving the state
> and poor people, mainly Mexican immigrants, are moving
> in.

My take-away from the blog post is that most of the hand-waving about California comes down to people making generalized statements like this, but when pressed to come up with actual data, they start to squirm and weasel out of making a more fact-based statement.
NTFS: A File System with Integrity and Complexity
"two planets"? Is he is writing from the perspective of a future event of life being discovered on another planet besides Earth, or is there some underground news about life being discovered on another planet besides Earth?
The Vickrey/second-price auction helps a sealed bid auction behave more like an iterative escalating bid auction, and helps encourage bidders to reveal their true reserve value.

But, it does not directly address the "winner's curse", which is that whatever the auction mechanism, the winning bidder(s) are especially likely to be those who have overestimated the value of the item at auction (even if paying the next-highest-overestimator's bid).
Wow...better work hard....
Ruby 2.0 Refinements in Practice
I too have developed a mouse life-extension technique. Trials show that the simple, low-cost measure of removing mouse traps from your home can increase mouse life expectancy by up to 50%.

It's too soon to say whether this same technique could be applicable for humans.
The defining characteristic of hacker culture is the awe of beautiful code. When the unforeseen side effects from feeding a program with edge case input are as deeply gratifying as these, it instills a sense of beauty and awe of the underlying code.

As is shown by the number of upvotes, people don't come to HN to educate themselves. They come here to be awed. Education is a side effect.
A different approach for online RPG
DIY universal robotic gripper
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Language by the Numbers
> Take a look at what the market thinks of the chances
> for a California default.

This assumes that 'the market' is a rational actor. But it's proven time and again that it isn't.
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This is BS. If Level 3 is paying Comcast why am I paying Comcast?
The site is fine. It's just me.

Good to hear that you have a plan to develop it further. One problem I have with my site is to give too much features which are not required, or I dun use myself. Do guard against that too. Less is more.
Europe's broadband bird goes up tonight
Every serious programmer should learn assembly language (and the underlying machine language too) for a variety of different machines and architectures. There are times when it is the appropriate vehicle for expressing a program. Programming languages and their compilers, optimizing or not, generally do not allow easy, efficient access to all of the capabilities available in the machine; assembly language does.
On the face of it this is hard for me to understand.

Here's the way I can rationalize it: imagine Google spends $20 million (or whatever) to build underlying technology. Then spends $2 billion to roll out a nationwide sales force sufficient to saturate all cities of some threshold size, and another $1 billion for a nationwide marketing campaign to introduce the project to consumers, all over the course of 1 year.

On the surface this is a better deal. But does it remind you of anyone? Microsoft. This is what Microsoft does when they try to do something new. And all too often, they fail. One reason they fail is that it's hard to effectively mobilize thousands of people and spend gobs of money in a short amount of time. The effort is so big it threatens to crush itself under its own weight if it is not properly managed. And management is hard.

Google is essentially sidestepping this management risk by spending a ton of money. They get something that is in a working state, rather than trying to quickly deploy something huge and new. Money is (relatively) cheap to Google, but opportunities for low risk, significant growth into a complementary space are rare. So this makes sense for them.

Here endeth the half-baked disquisition.
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Aha! My apologies, I should have realized.
What do the Microsoft plugins have to do with developing tools for the open web or not? The plug-ins you're complaining about:

* The Windows Live Sign-in Assistant enables you to automatically sign in to Windows Live websites when you're already signed in with, say, Messenger on your PC, something that's a net win for Messenger users and which really has no web-reasonable implementation. Why is this evil, exactly?

* The Office Live plugin allows users to open documents saved on SkyDrive from their browser in the Office clients. This also works with Office Live Workspaces (for users of that older product) and Sharepoint. Again, why is this evil?

I'm pretty sure that if there were a way to make these things work without needing to use plugins, that's something the team would pursue. But there isn't, so to make the experience of Windows Live and Office users better, these plugins get installed with those products. This seems to be pretty intuitive to me.

(Disclosure, I work at MS.)
Funny thing though. Some people that aren't as aware have nothing but praise about this plugin. I once built a web app that displayed customer phone numbers. The client using the app called me one day to thank me for integrating skype into the app. I had to convince him I was a good developer even though I didn't put Skype into his app.
Thanks, it was really useful for me too.
Write the fucking manual.
Very close relatives, yes. But not the entire species.

It strikes me as highly implausible that suicide would benefit your close genetic kin more so than staying alive in order to find food and care for offspring, for example.
The whole FU money is mostly a fallacy. If you really love filesystem hacking, and you live in Silicon Valley and are really good at it, you already never have to answer to anybody you don't like, ever again. If you don't like your boss, you can quit, and do this 50 times if you want.

And people shouldn't work for a "possibility, however remote." That's called playing the lottery and is generally foolish.
Google-backed satellite provider O3b raises $1.2B to bring the world online
I have to say that this article succeeds at saying nothing.

It starts with a invalid premise (that 99% programming advice amounts to "Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work") and then "criticizes" DTSTTCPW by bringing up completely unrelated issues (thinking vs. coding ratios), along the way making vague and disconnected distinctions between systems and application programming (is MySQL a system or an application? What is the crucial characteristic between those that makes some programming advice applicable to one but not the other).

The opposite of of DTSTTCPW is either doing things that don't work or things that do work but are more complex than necessary. There really isn't room to disagree with DTSTTCPW.

Thinking vs. coding is a false dichotomy. At the end of the day I don't care if Richard Hipp thinks for 8 hours and types for 10 minutes or if he types for the whole day without thinking first, as long as SQLite is a kick-ass software.

Personally I found that there's a (very small) limit to how much I can design up front (thinking phase) before I start implementing my ideas (coding phase). I invariably find that coding improves my understanding of the problem (often forcing me to update my designs) as well as giving me more ideas (it's not like my brain shuts off during coding - thinking is going on in parallel).

This is the core of agile argument: we're not smart enough to think about everything up front so the only realistic option is to start small and simple and build more complex things as we go and learn.

The author might be content with the fact he hasn't shipped his software in 9 years but I wouldn't take his opinions as relevant to what I aspire to do: writing useful software and shipping it.
I think it is a fair comparison based on this statement:

"The iPad was crowned the fastest-adopted consumer electronic device ever last month, stealing the title from the once-coveted DVD player."
I was curious how this compared to other acquisitions in terms of ROI for the investors. Here are a few I drummed up (from Crunchbase):

Groupon: 171m => 5b = 30x
YouTube: 11.5m => 1.65b = 145x
MySpace: 21m => 580m = 27x
AdMob: 47m => 750m = 16x
GeoCities: 40m => 2.87b = 71x
Perhaps buythissatellite.org (previously discussed http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1942899) should plan to buy people access through this rather than DIY the whole thing.
In the 20th century. Also, I wonder how much increasing access to information increases amount of news. If one were to count today, or any day within a small radius of today, how much would be considered newsworthy in 1954? How would the reverse be true? What events significant be today's low standards were missed?
> For that matter, what is your character set? Are you using just letters, or alphanumeric characters? Again, I'd prefer the former since you aren't going to get a significant boost from the extra choices. You might also want to take out 'O', 'o', and 'l' so its unambiguous when written out.

I'd suggest using New Base 60, which has some smart readability built in: http://tantek.pbworks.com/w/page/19402946/NewBase60
So it won't be Renren, StudiVZ, or Yammer, then?
Probably because they didn't want someone else to buy it?
Humans Can Only Walk In Circles and We Don't Know Why
My point is that in the time between now and when all governments and powerful organizations on Earth are open and honest (likely to be a fair stretch of time) organizations like wikileaks cannot help but discriminate in the organizations they shine a light onto. There are innumerable reasons why this is so, starting with the mere matter of random chance and limited capabilities, moving to the matter of the nature of the organization and the opportunity for such leaks to occur, to the interest of the "viewership", the consequences of getting caught, etc, etc, etc.

This discriminatory coverage has the potential to create a false portrait of reality. And that has consequences. Imagine two magazine covers, one photoshopped and immaculate the other completely "honest". To most uncritical observers the "honest" cover will appear vulgar and ugly in comparison. Only a few people will take the time to appreciate that the perfect cover is an utter lie. How do such dynamics play out in society, business, and geopolitical relations? In a wikileaks future a brutal dictatorship that can maintain utter control over its media image might be able to appear better than an honest and open, though flawed, country of liberty and consensual governance. Indeed, this is already a problem to some degree today. Idiots who don't know better imagine that life in dictatorial regimes might be exactly how the regime and its sycophants portray it (all the more believable without any dissenting voices), whereas every gritty aspect of life in western democracies and every flaw down to the least consequential is revealed in gory high-definition detail.

To me wikileaks specifically seems very much biased by the "point spread" problem, of judging America and the west by a much higher standard than the rest of the world. There's nothing wrong with holding America to a higher standard, but there's everything wrong with losing sight of the fact that the standards are different and then falling into the notion, as so many have, that, say, America is as bad as the Iranian regime, or that American troops are no better than the Taliban. The consequences of such discriminatory judgments and of such imbalanced worldviews are dire indeed.
Comparing France to the US is nonsensical. US is obviously way bigger and thus the network infrastructure required is much more complex, which greatly increases the cost to provide connection to each household.
And this is why I like dynamic languages.
I just got The Land of Lisp yesterday, but I've also got Learning Python and REST in Practice from that list from previous 9.99$ deals.
Try translating to spanish or french, they are a little bit interesting.
I'm sorry, as someone who works on a production operating system that a planet full of people use, I respectfully disagree - the hard part of systems programming is making sure the application API is 100% semantically correct, since it is written in stone once you release it - architecture and programming advice is absolutely for you if you're one of these people.

Running usability tests with real developers on your API is extremely important to understanding how understandable and straightforward your design is - if you're an OS or a platform component, you don't get a 2nd chance to design an API; you do it right the 1st time or you live with the consequences for years to come.
Part of my interest in _why's project Potion was the use of scoped mixins. Seeing that Ruby will have a similar capability soon is exciting to me, as I can think of several instances where I've wanted to avoid leaking a localized monkey-patch.
Buy me a beer and I'll tell you the story of my worst interview ever. I'm nice enough to the founder of that company not to name them here, but it was incredibly bad.

In fact, it was so bad I later got a written apology for what happened.