skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nostalgia, presumably... The atariarchives.org domain name implies this, at any rate.

I fondly remember typing in Basic programs from books like this one as a kid. I'd consider porting it to Python, except I think it would be a hard sell for kids these days.

Edit: Oh wow... I just looked the atariarchives.org main page. The site author has gotten permission to post many other wonderfully retro books.
You can have your cake and eat it too, and you don't have to compromise. All you have to do is recognize where the browser's original intent may be different from your own (doc mgmnt versus transactional database mgmt). Making the browser do the job is very doable, but it is much easier if you recognize why it seems hard.
Responding to iPhone Bug Reports Is Hard
Advice or thoughts on my startup: Vying Games
Think small: Less red tape, and more red carpets for European entrepreneurs.
I just pushed out a major update (see: http://vying.org/blog/2008/07/the-big-release), and I'd greatly appreciate any advice or thoughts.
There's an interesting trend in the computer go community away from rule-based AI, and towards a more stochastic approach. This means that where the leading developers were all 1 dan or better (very talented amateurs, by the metric of the article), it's become possible for talented programmers with a relatively limited understanding of the game to make major contributions.

Go is a complicated game, and the human response to that is to create rules of thumb and build a strong intuitive understandings of different positions. It's arguably less elegant to analyze a position by running hundreds of thousands of playouts, but it's finally a problem that resembles real computer science (though most academic papers are still of the "we tried this, and it did okay" form). It's a pretty exciting time to be involved, and I'd suggest that anyone with even a passing curiosity check it out.
GNOME 2.30 = GNOME 3.0
I think this shows how much easier it is to be a dictator. Apple dictates everything. There isn't the overhead you have to deal with when you're coordinating lots of different handset manufacturers and trying to avoid forks that lead to incompatibility.

I'm still optimistic about Android because it would be really nice to have an open device with the polish and capabilities of the iPhone. However, Google still has a lot to prove. MS, Apple, BB, and Palm all have shown that their routes work. While Google's Android isn't a radical departure, is the fact that it could be forked enough to put a fork in it? Time will tell.
People who wrote code for the jailbroken iPhone have a head start, though. The libraries are the same, you just don't get all the fancy XCode integration.
So You Say You Want to Kill XML....
Why E-Medical Records Aren't Working:  Bad Financial Incentives
Not so much the implementation of them, but the fact that the site used so many. A crawler hitting some old item page with 20 comments on it would generate at least 40 new closures, 20 for the upvote links and 20 for the reply links. That adds up, now that there are almost 250k potential pages in the site.
Agreed, but what he complains about is that web programmers are telling him that the way he makes it work is somehow objectionable. I think it's pragmatic.
That's a very different view that what's being argued in this thread, and I agree with it.

Of course, as I already alluded to, I understood you post to push this point, but felt that you sometimes got a little too close to making the suggestion that there was something inherently wrong with the way the web is set up.

Thanks for clarifying.
For Windows, you can get WinSCP pretty easily. It supports SFTP and, obviously, SCP.
Note that "SFTP" has no single meaning. Depending on the client, it may mean "FTP encrypted with SSL" or "FTP with encryption extensions of one of a couple of types invented independently by FTP server authors over the years" or "SSH File Transfer Protocol" (which is actually the real meaning of the abbreviation, and was in use for several years before secure FTP began to be common).

Historically, people tried to convince folks to call it FTPS (for FTP over SSL, which is the most popular form of secured FTP), but that seems to have never taken off. Unfortunate, since SFTP means too many incompatible things.

It's stabilized somewhat in recent years, and usually clients will do the right thing--and the most common meaning of SFTP has come to be "FTP encrypted with SSL" (which is actually one of the weaker forms of security for FTP--but it's got some semblance of "standardization", and works in lots of clients and servers, so that makes it superior). And, of course, there is no RFC defining secure FTP, so it's a de facto "standard" which can lead to buggy implementations and a lot of finger pointing--server says client is wrong, client says server is wrong, user says "I give up" and uses FTP, instead.
The 37signals Manifesto (our original site from 1999)
I'd say that the reason why people aren't switching so readily is actually a function of the human condition moreso than any technical reason.

Looking at other industries, like health care, people are more content in spending effort/money on "miracle cures" than worrying about taking steps towards preventing these problems from happening.

The exact same thing happens in say, the Automotive industry - a large percentage of consumers dont take active measures towards ensuring their vehicle is in good running order, and are more content with dealing with the consequences.

The same thing seems to happen when talking about computer security. I dont think it's because people dont care about computer security, they're just more ready to accept the consequences rather than taking preventative steps.

It's a real damn shame too.
Idea: image bookmarking service for web/ui designers
I'm not sure if I'd have time to develop this myself, but I thought I'd throw this idea out there to see what others think about it.

The idea would be to have a firefox extension that allowed users to quickly select a portion of their browser screen to save it as an image to their profile on the bookmarking service. This could be a great way to keep track of all the little aspects of websites you find interesting/inspiring (menu systems, color choice, features, etc). You could then go to your profile and browse all your images, or browse by website (so you could check out a collection of images you saved of a particular website).

Others could come to the website to browse all the UI images and even subscribe to users to keep up to date on what their bookmarking.

I find 37signals "screens around town" blog posts, where they share images and their thoughts on particular design decisions, to be really interesting. My idea would be to form a service / community around this UI sharing concept.
"Apple sold 270,000 (original) iPhones in the first 30 hours on launch weekend"

-- Wikipedia dix it
[The author is] someone who is envious of someone's superior intellect . . . I have been the focus of that sort of envy before

As to the antisocial bit, I'm not going to quote your posts in their entirety, but that's a pretty big chip you've got on your shoulder, man.
this is a matter of right tool for the job. for important stuff, everything should happen over a secure tunnel (ssl, ssh port tunneling or just using scp.) ftp is good for public file download/drop box where you want to easily support resume.
Hunger Can Make You Happy
One person's opinion is subjective, and the degree of ridiculousness as measured by one person will not be the de facto verdict of everyone.

Prior art, as defined by the USPTO, is claimed by previously published patent applications and letters patent, both here and abroad, as well as articles submitted in scholarly journals. Thus far it has not been established by any PTO Examiner I've seen that a blog/ social network/ forum/ static site is of the same measurable quality as a scholarly publication.

In the absence of this, all PriorArt (as you propose) would do is provide a submitter's unprotected intellectual property on a domain for everyone else to see and pillage.

It is reasonable to assume that trollers reading the forum/ blog could see a good idea and (if there is indeed no prior art existing for it after conducting a search) patent it for themselves... thereby restricting the orignal inventor from holding license to his/ her own ideas!
A huge success unless you consider that the iPhone 3G was launched in 20 additional markets compared to gen1 (21 countries as opposed to 1) and on sale for an additional 10 hours during the opening weekend (8am on Friday as opposed to 6pm).

It is still a truly astounding number but I'm not sure it warrants the tech blog super soak it's getting. I would venture to guess that Apple's internal estimates were higher than 1 million and that the activation difficulties hurt them plenty. Regardless, it'll still be selling like crazy for quite a while...

As for gen1 iPhone sales, I couldn't find anything concrete either. I've read numbers ranging from 200k to 700k.
Even if it lacks legal strength, the site could provide a strong message against frivolous technology patents.
One of the quirks I see is that when I click a game I learn more about how to play it but finding the actual links to play it are a lot harder. Yes, I eventually find them but I have no idea what to do when I click to the game page. Some (ok, most) people just wanna PLAY. They don't want to read anything, and will figure it out as they go.

So basically, make it easier to actually play games .. and spruce up your front page, but I'm sure someone else will give a more detailed feedback on that :)
I'd like to see an open source project to do this. Might raise awareness.
I'm not sure what out of the box means. Good clients like Coda and YummyFTP support SFTP.
The Way to Save Internet Video
An idea has to be novel to be patentable. If someone else has already published the idea, it's not novel. It doesn't matter whether they built one.

Incidentally, prior art isn't something someone "claims." It's something a patent has to avoid.
They've always struck me as being pretty similar. Although I guess pg plays down the "easy" bit more than 37signals does.

Another difference: YC's business model is actually based on persuading lots of eager young folks to attempt "it", whereas 37signals ultimately doesn't give a damn whether you do or not.

Not attempting to criticise anybody here, just making observations.
I doubt that making an idea public online will make it unpatentable

Actually it will. To avoid repetition:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=246005
Pandora for iPhone will be a huge hit
Often essays come up in talking with someone, and when you're working on them you'll often feel a need to mention what you're writing about. I keep a list of names and emails at the bottom of the file as my draft readers.
The EFF managed to fully decode the code for Xerox DocuColor tracking dots, but there are many other printers whose code is unknown:

http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/
Thanks, for the feedback. I've found links to the bot-play pages always do much better than links to the rules. I'm trying to get more people to play each other, though, so it's hard to know what to emphasize. There are probably a lot of navigational improvements that need to be made still.
What's wrong with compilation? It's just transforming a program from one representation to another, right?
I think this has been done before. For example:

http://w2.eff.org/patent/

... fairly similar.
What I meant was, if I have my 'widget improving idea' written on the website, and Joe Smith applies for a patent for his working 'widget improving device', I'm pretty sure most courts wouldn't listen to my "prior art" claim.
Netflix to Stream On Xbox 360
Implementation of World of Warcraft?
Does anyone have any links to articles discussing (or inside knowledge of) the engineering of World of Warcraft or other big MMOs? How they design the systems, how they achieve scalability and stability, etc? I'm not talking about things like the in-game economics - but the actual engineering design considerations that go into the software and hardware itself.
Sent you a message jond2062 [at] gmail [.] com
thanks for the help. the additional markets was definitely a huge bonus, but you also need to consider that 6 million gen 1 iPhones were already saturating their potential demographics in quite a few places. interesting nonetheless...
There are a few phones, the phones will be coming for Christmas, but you're right.
I agree that "simple" is a lot less significant in pg's approach.

37signals touts that Basecamp was done in 10 hours a week, whereas pg's approach seems a lot more intense and arduous. 37signals believes that you don't need to overwork yourself to succeed.
ComScore May Video Report: Hulu Enters the Top 10
It makes for boring comment threads when people post comments saying something shouldn't be on the site

That's true, it does. But if downvoting is impossible, commenting that it shouldn't be here is frowned upon, and flagging is reserved for the most egregious cases, what is the appropriate thing to do when you don't think an article doesn't belong?

(NB. I don't think this article belongs in that category. It's not a great article, but it's perfectly on-topic, and not, as far as I can tell, spam.)
The funny thing is we heard all of that in the 90s when object relational databases became popular. More interesting would be to hear how Cassandra scales across machines because that's what's so troublesome with databases, not the datamodel.

And, by the way, it's ironic that users of MySQL complain about the join performance of relational DBMS
Protocol Buffers - The good, the bad, and the… no, wait; this is a Google project.
Bionic bra - A better way to charge iPod on the go?
Almost all his arguments apply equally to HTTP.
Yahoo's Yang sends a letter to employees about MSFT and Icahn
It's not just printers. Scanners, copiers, and image manipulation software like Photoshop have all had anti-counterfeiting measures quietly added:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
TechCult’s Top 100 Web Celebrities
From the command line, yes, but not the GUI. When I do command-K in the Finder and enter a sftp://whatever I get this message:

URLs should begin with afp://, at://, file://, ftp://, http://, https://, nfs://, smb://, cifs://, or vnc://

It's easy enough to get a nice SFTP client though (I prefer Transmit. It even supports Amazon S3)
Anybody go to the last open house?
There's an entrepreneurial venture for someone. Decode the dots, and sell your services to private investigators and document companies. I'm sure a lot of companies would be interested to know who printed something. Then that article would read, "The Secret Service and YOU are the only U.S. body that has the ability to decode the information..."
I've got Pandora on my iPhone, and it's been the most heavily used application installed on it by far. They did a really nice job with the application. It's very intuitive and the sign up process wasn't terrible. Beyond that, it works great over 3G.
Netflix's next step: More, better streaming movies
How are you planning to monetize it?
My first reaction was, for a game company, the home page wasn't very much about games. You have a lot of space to use, so you should. The home page is your marketing tool, use it to promote your games. What about them is exciting? Why would people want to play? Saying you had an update is not as important as putting the games front and center. Get some bright graphics, add some promotional copy, and use your space appropriately. You have very little time to grab attention, and the current home page doesn't do it very well.
And when I say fill the page, I don't mean Gamespy style, I like clean design, not cluttered, but the page can definitely use more oomph.
But I don't need to make an impression. You are there because you want something I have, that I am giving away for free. So I get to take the easy way out when it comes to design.

If you are randomly viewing my website... well... you need a hobby ;)
It's not so great on EDGE (but fine on WiFi, of course)

It's annoying you can't have it running in the background, but that's Apple's fault.

AOL Radio is nice too.

And check out Shazam. It records a snippet of music from the radio, TV, etc and sends it to their servers for identification (it seems to be very accurate). Midomi is another similar app, but no where near as accurate, from my limited testing.
Ah, yes, that's right. It's easy to forget that not everyone is a developer.

Cyberduck (http://cyberduck.ch/) is also a good sftp/s3 client for OS X.
Just buy your printer while you're on a road trip, and pay cash. Wear a hat.
If anyone wants to play me, I'm Alex3917 on KGS. I'm still a beginner though, only 12kyu.

http://www.gokgs.com/

Also, if you want a good introduction to the game, check out this K5 article:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/7/11/62356/9269
Pandora is a great product, get to discover a lot of new music because of it.
10 ways Twitter could make money quickly
Thanks, that's valuable advice. I think I do have to focus more on telling a story. Regular blog posts about the games, strategy, why they're worth learning, etc.

Sometimes I find myself overly preoccupied with programming. Marketing seems easy until you try it! (at least in my case)
The information is really only valuable if you have the power of law enforcement behind you. What can you do with a printer serial number? You'd need to subpoena Xerox records which would lead you to Staples, then Staples records to find out which credit card had bought the printer and at which store.
what makes this better than yahoo games?
A mixture of membership fees, advertising, and anything else I can think of. Maybe some kind of storefront that sells merchandise related to the games (books, game boards, etc). Maybe an amazon affiliate setup or some such.
Sure, but writing good code isn't "elitism". There are people that program for a living, but don't really "get it". They think "the elites" made up functional programming (and similar things) just to make programming harder. That's not true, the good programmers know that these abstractions make things easier. That's why we use them.

However, if the "I hate thinking when I could be cutting and pasting" programmer is your blog's audience, it makes sense to agree with them. More ad revenue.

I don't really see this as elitism, I see it as reality. For what it's worth, I have no problem trying to educate these developers and turn them into good programmers. My blog is mostly instructional, I give free talks at every conference I can, and I teach paid classes if companies really want to make sure their developers learn good practices. Some people can be educated, and I am always happy when people realize that writing good code is fun.

However, some people really don't get what programming is about, and those people are going to criticize things that are "hard". (I really don't want to imply that Jeff Atwood is one of these types, but I don't really have any arguments disproving it.)
Yes chess isn't really interesting out of an AI-perspective since a supercomputer can beat a human with brute force + heuristics. In Go you'd need something more like real AI.
Yeah, I've been wondering when radio was going to start moving over the wireless net. How's the quality on the 3g network?
A good question. It's been a while since I played on yahoo games, so I'm not sure I can do a full comparison justice.

At yahoo games the focus is (or was, anyway) on real-time play. You play games serially. You spend a lot of time waiting for your opponent to move. Or, if you spend too much time thinking you take verbal punishment from someone who's impatient.

At Vying Games you can play real-time. But, most people play turn-based (more like correspondence chess). You tend to have multiple games going at once. When you have a few minutes throughout the day you go through your games and make your moves. You don't really spend time waiting for your opponent. You don't feel rushed. This is great for busy people who want to enjoy games a few minutes at a time.

Philosophically, I don't want to get as obnoxious about advertising. I'd rather the site have a more adult (mature?) community. And, I'd rather focus on more obscure (but great!) games where possible.
The archives of this mailing list has some good discussions about the stochastic approach:

http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer-go/

Apparently the strongest computer AI is now able to beat 1k players consistently.
is it ok if i blend an iPhone?
Thats very true. And seamlessly integrating it into your design is even harder. Blog posts can be good, but I'm really talking about visuals and copy of the homepage here. You gotta make me want to click on something.
I think advertising your own games is something you should incorporate. Get someone playing one game to also play another. So even if you don't have ads, or never plan to, building in ad space for yourself should be part of the equation.
Dyeing to Boost Solar Efficiency by 50%
Apple sells 1 million iPhones in first 3 days
Thanks, that was one of the links I remembered reading before.
Hrmm, I have always found that last.fm finds better music based on my seeds than pandora does, especially for a discriminating (read:snobby) music junkie such as myself. I remember they had a last.fm app that was usable with jailbroken iphone/touch, that was much better in my opinion.
On that note, from a Linux system, what does `sftp` use on the command line? I had always assumed that SFTP was always and only SSH transfers, just like using `scp`. Is this wrong of me to think this way?
Had not used Pandora prior to the iPhone application. I'm impressed at how well it picks songs that I like listening to. I'm happy the iPhone application even works over EDGE. Pretty amazing. To have access to the jukebox in the cloud. AOL Radio does not seem to work over EDGE.
Researcher to demonstrate attack code for Intel chips
Economics of Love
I definitely agree with you on this one patrick....

And I have done a bit of research into the "undersea natural gas hydrates"......

That is a fascinating phenomenon. Deposits are gargantuan but, man, I wouldn't want to be working the rigs that explore for them.

If you drill into a deposit the natural gas will start bubbling to the surface and when this happens your platform loses flotation and sinks. This has already happened to one or two rigs working the North Sea with loss of all hands.

By comparison, nuclear fission is much, much safer.
Which ISP do you use in SF?
We're moving from Switzerland to San Francisco in a couple of weeks and a reliable internet connection is one of the most important things for a hacker. We have a 20mbit connection which is quite affordable, 70$/mo, though asynchronus. What do you recommend? Is there something similar to Verizon FiOS in SF?
This is great news. There's a tremendous amount of potential in both the blue banana and the hot banana. As someone's who's dream it is to work for a startup located near the intersection of the two bananas, I very much hope the Mediterranean can California some competition.
for some reason I read that with a Scottish accent.
Good point, however, if you own the printer, the information is still valuable. If you have the printer serial number, and own the printer in question, you can find out who may have printed it. Or who in an opposing organization may have printed it, if you're in a legal environment and can request discovery. But you're right, if the printer in question is owned by an unknown third party, you would need the help of law enforcement or Xerox, etc. However, even this would lead to entrepreneurial gain. Without being able to decode the dots, a person in possession of the originals would still not know who printed them. Knowing what printer they were manufactured on and the serial number, a company can now initiate legal action on a manufacturer to get the required information, just like law enforcement does. Today, no one has the codes, but if you did, people would want what you have, no doubt about it.