skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These resized-by-the-browser images are getting really annoying, I've noticed an uptick in it the six months or so. That image is completely unreadable with the explicit height and width in the layout, and it's not overly big that including it all without resizing would matter. Additionally, you have to click /again/ to see the actual content.
Great article, but the one point it glosses over is how to get the first customer on board. It talks about how to identify good markets, as well as what to do when a company is already interested in buying from you. But getting a big company to come to that stage is non-trivial, and requires several meetings with their management for a big, enterprise sale.

So how do you do it? You can't point to a track record, or other customers, but what you can give your customer(s) is comfort with the sales process, and transparency. Still it's an uphill battle, and usually you have to talk to a lot more than a few companies to get a contract of this size.
Agreed, POWERPOINT?!?! Where's the scribd link when you need it?
Venture Investors Wrap Up an Unusually Bleak Quarter
I'm curious to hear what everyone thinks about this, especially from those who have raised $ before and are now doing it again - has it become more challenging in recent months?
Long Tail = Rebranded, trademarked brand of Zipf's Law
Anderson collaborated with Prof. Elberse and she consulted on the book and came short endorsing it (strange, don't you think?) so Anderson didn't come out with any hard-hiting arguments against her well-researched piece.

Incidentally, Lee Gomes of WSJ pretty much nailed it two years ago:

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115387606762117314.ht...

Also, Lee told me that he wrote a new article on this and it will be published this Wed in WSJ. We'll see what he's come up with.
I absolutely agree, but if a hacker can accept the fact that their code truly has value, they can bring in someone they trust to sell that to companies.
I don't get the allure of Twitter but I know that's because I haven't made the investment to figure it out, and don't actually know what it does. If I signed for an account and started using it I'm sure I'd figure out a way to make it give me some benefit.
This author seems to be writing software for money, not for love. You can try to achieve both but ultimately one will have to take priority.
His regex for adding commas to numbers is a little obtuse. I would just write:

scalar reverse join ',', split /\d{3}\K/, reverse $number;

The reason why people hate regexes are because people use them as a general purpose programming language instead of a concise way of matching strings. Note that the regex I use just says to "split the string every third digit" and the rest of the logic is actual code.
I was just going to say this.

Two striking examples:
1) Last week my girlfriend, by far not a hacker or nerd, said she wanted to join Twitter. She's joined, and found many of her also non-technically savvy friends on it as well. It's becoming mainstream now. Once it starts hitting critical mass, it'll be much harder to slow.

2) Out tonight with a bunch of geeks, and almost every single one has started to use Twitter. Only a few didn't. These are Amazonians, Microsofties, startup folks, etc. That is, these are early adopters. I was shocked by how often Twitter came up in conversation. However, not once did anything about Twitter's downtime come up, and not once did anyone even mention FriendFeed.

So, on one hand you have Twitter beginning to go mainstream, and on the other hand you don't see the early adopter types leaving.
This would be pretty awesome for celebrities tired of the paparazzi, or for Britney to revisit 2004.
I used to be like that. It very confusing to an outsider what the allure is, so it's more a call for an explanation.

Personally, I didn't "get it" until I signed up and had a couple of friends on it. It's kinda nice to see what people are up to without having to read a blog post about their life or whatever.

Because its short, its easy just to glance at and see what the other person is up to.

Its a good place for a quick discussion or poll, ie. you can broadcast, what mail software do you use? and have your friends reply and possibly other people.
What's your end goal? What do you hope to achieve? For me, I wanted to get to be good before I had kids, so I totally immersed myself for a little while for fun. Now I have a 2 month old little girl and I've backed off, but I'm happy with the photos I'm taking of her.

The suggestion of http://photo.net/ is a good one. I'd also recommend http://dpreview.com/ for gear and http://photosig.com/ as a place that you can see other peoples' work, critique and be critiqued.

The "National Geographic Photography Field Guide, 2nd Ed." was an amazing book that got me started in terms of understanding photography. (And it looks like it's been replaced with the "National Geographic: The Ultimate Field Guide to Photography".) The book essential is in two halves. The first half talks about the mechanics of photography... how shutter speed relates to aperture relates to film/sensor sensitivity (ISO) relates to focal length relates to distance to the subject relates to... etc. All of that is half of what I think you really need to know in terms of the mechanics. The other half is light. The second half of the book talks about a myriad of photo subjects and the approaches to photographing them, rules of photography (in terms of composition) and so forth.

As you get to know more, you'll see that your question is kind of like "How to get started with computers?" There's so much to it, it's hard to say. Perhaps your goals warrant a Digital SLR, perhaps they don't. I can tell you this, though... a good photographer with a bad camera can take better photos than a bad photographer with a good camera.
Thanks for the link. The info on the site wasn't quite clear on exactly how calculations are made or how the process works. Can you explain a bit better for us? For example, is the $9.95/month a flat-rate regardless of traffic or do you give an assessment and determine the amount based on monthly traffic? Also, is this just for the server or do you provide offsets for the rest of the business as well? Thanks!
Cool Features & Shortcuts in FireFox 3
There would be nobody left to care...
There's a difference between invading a country and using surgical strikes to decapitate the senior leadership of a terrorist group that has bombed places from Istanbul to London to Jakarta.

I don't think most of Europe would be against a limited attack like Obama has hypothesized, nor would most of the rest of the world. The main difference is that Obama would represent a shift to a more inclusive foreign policy, and 'coalitions' put together under his Administration might actually be meaningful. Despite all the cries to the contrary for the sake of the news cycle, the rest of the presidential candidates, past and present (Clinton, McCain, Edwards, Romney) have all stated at various times that they would do the same.

As an aside, the US is already attacking Pakistani territory with Predator drones, it's just that it's with tacit permission from the Pakistani government. I read one report that alikened it to how the Vietnam War spread to Cambodia and Laos secretly.

Even when used as a flippant example to provide a counter-point to McCain's hawkishness, the Pakistani flareup only servers to further dilute the real issues and contrasts at play in this campaign.
I can think of half a dozen ways to defeat this, as any hacker could. Seems to me to be much ado about nothing.
Packaging Rails apps for offline use
Isn't there already hard, well-known scientific facts about the maximum temperature of kerosene and minimum melting temperature of steel?
Doing good by doing very nicely indeed - In support of profiting from the poor
Terrorism has always been around, from the anarchists around the turn of the century . 40,000 people die every year from car accidents, only 3,000 died on 9/11. The fact is, terrorism isn't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. It's an issue, but it's not a big issue. It should be death with in the same way that it was dealt with during the Clinton administration- as a crime problem.

Are there people that want to kill Americans? Yes. Are there white supremacist Americans that want to kill Americans? Yes! There are lots of people that want to kill lots of people, and that's a problem. However, it shouldn't be the driving force behind our foreign and domestic policy- that just leads to the erosion of civil liberties. Those who would give up freedom for security deserve neither.
> But again, it's the boy who cried wolf. Even if they claimed the Earth was going to end 100 times, and 100 times they were incorrect, that doesn't mean time number 101 is incorrect too.

The fact that a stopped clock is correct twice a day is no reason to consult it.

It's both efficient and good to scorn and ignore folks who get it wrong consistently.

> And given that both are currently cost-competitive (or nearing that) and will only get cheaper, now is clearly the time to begin the process.

If they're really cost-competitive today and getting cheaper, no govt action is needed.

If govt action is required to make it cost-competitive, it isn't cost-competitive.
Which reminds me - when was the last time that the north pole was wet? What were the ill effects?
Right, well, people who have even a bit familiar with photography know that, but most people with their point-and-click digital cameras don't.

They'll still get, er, fulgerated.
I use Twitter as a sideblog (a part of my blog sidebar where I put any posts that I don't feel like developing past the 140 character mark.) I've never once gotten into a conversation on Twitter, nor, I think, would I want to. But, of course, I still use it, because it has a killer app that none of the other sites seem to appreciate: it's embeddable without needing a whole bunch of gaudy "widget" framework.
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Utterly convincing documentary!
I'm not much for global warming debates, but I did find this sentence from the article particularly ironic:

"If it happens, it raises the prospect of the Arctic nations being able to exploit the valuable oil and mineral deposits below these a bed which have until now been impossible to extract because of the thick sea ice above."
I've never seen such hype. Does anyone actually think "the possibilities are endless," that this device "is a prankster's dream" and "could destroy photography"? I am skeptical of the physics described but since I'm not a digicam expert I will just have to trust von Bismarck solved an apparent latency problem. (When my digicam flashes, the fulgerator has to receive that input and respond with its own flash, all before my shutter closes.) Ambient and direct lighting would both have to be below normal daytime levels and the subject needs to be dark enough to contrast the fulgerator's light. I wish this guy all the luck due a man caught adulterating vacation photos but I don't see how he has developed a viable tool. Maybe if I followed his über optics hack, I'd understand the secret implications of his toy.
Problems that seem easy in theory are so much harder in practise. Like the other day I thought I'd write a quick piece of software in java to automatically navigate from one spot to another and avoid obstructions. Sounded like a 15 minute job, lasted 3 days. It's the same problem all AI creators have, but with them, it sounds like 15 minutes, lasts 3 years and still doesn't work.
Right. It's maybe nationalist, or even a bit solipsistic, but I don't see isolationist.
I, I think so Brain, but burlap chafes me so...
Ever watched a trained parrot? Birds imitate all kinds of sounds. Doubtless a cell phone ring is in the avian call repertoire. The Lyre bird can perfectly mimick lots of man-made sounds: camera shutter, camera with a motor drive, car alarm, chainsaw. http://youtube.com/watch?v=VjE0Kdfos4Y
Chad Hurley: How We Did It
AI is especially funny that way. You always feel like you're almost there. Since 1965 I think.

In reality, AI is like jumping across the Grand Canyon. You either jump all of the way, or Wile E. Coyote it.
"It's becoming mainstream now. Once it starts hitting critical mass, it'll be much harder to slow."

It's easy enough to slow if Twitter can't deal with it still, and just disable things, or put a cap on number of users or something.
I tried twitter for the first time last week. It was unimpressive.

It showed me several pictures of whales, and then finally I got to type in 140 characters.

IM/IRC is just a lot more useful IMHO
I'm guessing it's http://flickrslidr.com/
I agree. The current twitter course is straight to the dead pool.

They have the money to scale. They have the users. They just don't seem to have the brains.
I think it doesn't, actually. It's sort of in between the subscription model and the utility model. Which goes to show, there's more than 9 - so the reduction to 3 is a little absurd.
Magic Mushrooms will do the job nicely and are generally easily available. Make sure to read up on whatever you put in your mouth though.
It's a great read, though I'm not sure how to take his words in the engineering domain (e.g. what does "3/4 complete" exactly mean?). I don't doubt he is a vary smart guy and also had amazing people; but many years of software engineering have made me quite conservative in terms of estimate.

If all the planned components are written, and you can feed the real data into the system and get the reasonable final result out of it, then I'd call it, say, 50% complete; there'd be tedious works after that to make things robust, or find users have unusual settings and you have to adapt to it, etc. Borrowing his rocket metaphor, the rocket without the nosecone is less than half way in terms of development...

Of course it really depends on the nature of the product; maybe things like AI engines you can convince the client to pay in the state of "it basically works" and then gradually adapt it to the client's needs afterwards. Also his writing is sometimes sarcastic (which makes the writing enjoyable), so I'm not sure he uses "3/4" or "almost finsihed" in ironic way (that he knows it wasn't "almost finished", but he thought so back then).

Anyway, it's so easy to criticize retrospectively. I still respect them for having tackled to such a big problem.
hey, email me please, or post an email in your about me area
The feature I want most in Firefox 3 is "don't crash every 15 minutes". Is there a plugin for that?
That's true, but we get so many Twitter articles posted in here, that it must be important. I am trying to understand why do some people feel it is important, and how it is useful to them.
That's why each of the arguments is supposed to be a string of Python code, instead of raw Python code. That's also why the Python "solution" is much uglier than Lisp macros.
I tend to do the opposite. Even if I somewhat agree with a comment, if it has a higher score than I think it should, I downmod it. Ditto for bad comments, but in reverse. I pay special attention to the 1 point comments that I like... they definitely get an upvote (note that "like" does not necessarily mean "agree with").
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Gone?
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US Air Force Militarizes Cyberspace, Seeking Control Over All Networked Computing Devices, Worldwide
It would not function in that environment as hundreds of flashes are going off all at once.

This hack is one camera, one flash, one angle, close range, once every 30 seconds or so.
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Or Flash.
There's a big difference between buying carbon credits and actually reducing carbon emissions over time. You need to investigate your carbon credits to see if they actually are reasonable. The best thing for offsetting carbon is running an environmentally friendly tree farm. It's good to cut down the trees because then they never catch on fire and release all of their carbon again.
FriendFeed is very impressive - among other things, I like that it posts my reddit upvotes and Amazon wishlist updates to my facebook feed - keeping my friends up-to-date on what I'm looking at.
Ghostly threat to internet security
When the Ghost comes back to haunt you.

"Gates benefited enormously from the willingness of the government to ignore violations of anti-trust law during his rein at Microsoft. If he had tried the same business practices at other times, he might be going to prison rather retirement."

http://www.gototheboard.com/articles/Bill_Gates_Secret_to_Success:_Cheating

http://www.ph4nt0m.org-a.googlepages.com/PSTZine_0x02_0x04.txt

http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/923508
You're both correct of course. I used the term isolationist because America has a reputation for outward generosity. If you ignore the past 25 years where all aid (generosity) has been tied to extraneous religious/political demands America has by far been the most generous world donor to disaster relief and other world development programs (again I'm ignoring the accusations of world manipulation that any super power does as it 'polices' the world).

More and more frequently I hear statements from Americans about looking after 'home' first despite the fact that looking at the statistics Americans should lead an idyllic life while many go hungry every night.

Being the only world super power (at least for the next 20 years) the world can't afford America to constantly look inwards. If it does, it will loose it's super power status even more quickly.
It is really hard to write a generic precise GC (knows and follows object structure) that you can open source because every project that would want to use it has a different object structure. So pretty much every one has to be written from scratch. It is cheap and easy to throw in a conservative GC. It just isn't as good.

Squeak and the other smalltalks pretty much all have precise GCs. I'm not as familiar with the GC systems in the lisps, but I'd guess that they're all precise because the memory structures are so damn simple/clean. It is the scripting languages that start to fall down. Perl used reference counting for years, prolly still does; same with python. Ruby has a mark/sweep conservative. But hey, they work well enough. shrug
Ask HN: How to fight Javascript memory leaks?
Hi all, my webapp uses JS to manipulate DOM heavily, and leaks heavily as well. Do you know any useful resources on how to detect and eliminate memory leaks in JS/DOM environment?

Some links that I have:

http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/closuresleak/index.shtml

http://blogs.msdn.com/gpde/pages/javascript-memory-leak-detector.aspx
The Perfect IT Workplace
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This is one reason I like Tcl, it's not far off Lisp in the sense that it's a "programmable programming language" and I can get away with using it at work because they think it's just fancy shell-script :-)

For an example see http://wiki.tcl.tk/917
It seems to me that this could easily be defeated by switching on 'red eye reduction' to produce a smaller flash moments before the main flash.
FriendFeed: One Feature to The Tipping Point
Why Some Succeed Wildly
Google Plays With Your Living Room TV
Draw excelent pictures by writing javascript
"You couldn't take a photograph of a tourist attraction ever again without worrying that some marketing crap would be pushed into your camera."

Ooooh! Look! Those guys from Coke f*cked up all my photos. Guess I'd better go and buy lots of Coke then.
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Digg hack to get in the front page
Digg hack to get in the front page
Ask HN: Idea for privacy-enhanced web apps
I have an idea for a business that makes privacy-enhancement
technology for web apps. I'd love to hear comments and criticisms
about it.

Web applications today rely on a "trust us" model for safeguarding
the privacy and security of users' data.

I propose a technical means of using a web app that's better than
"trust us".

Most individuals don't realize that there's a privacy risk to web
apps or they simply don't care. But I think that corporate customers
do realize it and do care.

Why do companies purchase desktop apps when an equivalent web app is
cheaper and more convenient? One reason (of many) is that they want
control over their data. They know that it is trivially easy for
service providers to copy, leak, or spy on customer data.

I propose to create a trusted computing environment specifically
designed for web apps. A service provider would run his web app
inside this TC environment on his server. (The service provider
can continue to offer an unsecured version of his web app as well.)
A corporate end-user can verify that he's using a privacy-enhanced
web app by checking a certificate in his browser.

This TC environment would be free to service providers but I'd charge
corporate customers for the ability to use privacy-enhanced web apps.
I actually prefer the simplicity of Twitter over Friendfeed. I find Friendfeed to busy and takes away from conversation and interaction.

This really looks bad on the Ruby on Rails guys as well, makes me hesitant to want to develop on their platform when I see scaling _nightmares_ like Twitter.
Not only that, but I've been using replies these last few days and they worked fine???
UPD:

http://www.squarefree.com/2006/01/13/memory-leak-detection-t...

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Using_XPCOM_in_JavaScri...

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance:Leak_Tools
He wrote the software and then showed it to potential buyers. The latter doesn't seem more difficult than the former ç:-)
How would that work? The AVG robot probably only fetches the page's URL. By the time you serve up a JavaScript, you've already lost the ability to redirect the robot.

Also, once enough people start redirecting the AVG robot to the AVG website, they'll just update the robot to ignore those redirects. It's antivirus software so it gets updated very often.
The Merge of SaaS and Open Source
I have a problem with the $20k+ business software industry: if you spend time adding anything to the software that isn't part of the checklist of features the customers want to see before, you're wasting time and money.

The customers make decisions in terms of things like keeping up with competitors ("we have to upgrade because they did"), and risk to their personal careers ("I dont want to rock the boat"), and compliance with industry standards/buzzwords ("Your competitor supports XYZ, why don't you?")

They want to hear that your software is scalable, easy to use, secure, and well-designed, but they don't actually care if it is or not, and won't even check.

If I had to sell a product that had sub-standard usability or UI response times, I'd feel like an asshole. To others, its just how you do business.
Ex-Sprint Nextel Sales Representative Says Sprint is Corrupt
Can you ask them to watch an episode from the first season, then straight away an episode from the most recent season?

I hope that the shock from seeing how much the quality has gone down might prompt them to do something about it. The new ADD friendly format is still better than anything else on television... but that isn't saying a lot. With a bit of luck they might fire the producer who believes in the myth of appealing to the lowest common denominator.