skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I try to avoid rebutting sentence-by-sentence. I think it encourages people to quibble about minor points instead of focusing on the point as a whole.

Context is important, but the best approach is to integrate the context into the reply.
The Future of Computer Applications: Help Me or Entertain Me
Sigh. Obviously, if you're working on a website that is just ludicrously simple, you want to pretend that simplicity is difficult. Get behind the search algorithms at google or the scheduler in Windows NT and tell us about how "hard to build" simplicity is.
Why Should I Care What Server My (PHP) Application is Running On?
A friend suggested Dynadot. They accept Paypal, which makes it easier to not bother my parents (I'm 15-years-old).
There is already a rate limit for new accounts. Banning submission entirely would discourage legit new users.

BTW, they don't get any Google juice, because links are all nofollow unless they have a certain number of points.
Shuttleworth: "Apple is driving the innovation"
It would be nice to be able to back-test screens over specified time periods.
PC Mag Writes Up New, Unique Job Site
Okay, so my neighbors officially hate me
I summarize Foo Camp 2008 activities so you don't have to
Ask HN: Best books/source to learn about investing?
I'm a college student with well managed debt (I saved fairly well and have manged to keep my debts well within range for paying off within 2 years of graduating) and I'm considering taking some of my paycheck and investing it as opposed to saving it. This includes both retirement funds as well as general stocks/bonds/etc...

I'm wondering what advice you have as well as what sources (I like books) you would recommend for learning about how investing works and how to invest intelegently. I'm really looking to go for lower risk stuff, but I'd also like to do better than the just-under-1% my savings account gives me.

Thoughts?
I've met him, he's pretty cool.
I'm doing it now. It's a little like arbitrage. I hired someone on Rent a Coder to keep my project moving while I finish a consulting contract.

The key is finding someone who's good. I have some tricks for that on Rent a Coder:

1 - Spend some time building a private invite list of coders who have something similar in their work history. Pick only people with a 9-10 rating, and 10+ projects. Make sure at least couple of those projects are decent-size. Give preference to similar time zones unless you work either early morning or night hours (like I do).

2 - Invite your coder-list to a private auction, and don't worry about the price of the bids much. Instead give it to the guy who asks the most questions.

3 - Have well defined specs (as you have), and create unit tests or test stub names that are required to pass for the project to be considered "complete" and put this in the requirements.

4 - Outsource discrete chunks.

If you've got a great coder, #3 is less important, but some people have low attention to detail and try to turn the project over ASAP. So they'll lob something over the wall that doesn't work fully, and you lose time investigating and complaining about each item--they make you drag it out of them. I make automating the required tests part of the project, and then I spend less time verifying their work. Call it test-driven outsourcing.

I've found that outsourcing a project takes anywhere from 10-30% of the time doing it myself would have, but it's still a win.
The Problem with Trying to "Spread Virally"
Here are Warren Buffett's recommendations. I hear he knows a thing or two about investing... ;)

http://www.businesspundit.com/10-investing-books-recommended...
Rethink Web Analytics: Introducing Web Analytics 2.0
Pretty hard, right? Isn't that his point?
Wow, asking for coldfusion? You might as well build it with classic ASP. In a matter of years you will not find any host but your own to support your end-of-life legacy product.

I'd go with COBOL and RPG. They represent the most solid UI kits available with many users (i.e. Banks).
That's quite a list! Looks like good stuff though. Anyone actually read those?
May I cordially hijack the comment section for this, to ask what will be next place we go to, when HN succumbs to the eternal September crowd?
Because when people see complexity, they assume it was difficult to program. When someone sees simplicity, they assume that's just how computers work. For example, how does Google work? It's an incredibly complicated problem, but Google puts a nice front-end on it that makes it all look like that's just how computers work.

In my job capacity, I often have to create custom search applications. As a whole of the project, this is given very little time and money. What is given time and money are incredibly complex interfaces with lots of options. I have to assume this is because a search interface often has one (or a small number) of inputs (therefore is easy) while an interface dealing with categorization on multiple facets, tags, etc. has lots of complexity (therefore being hard).

Simplicity is hard to charge for because it looks easy. When something looks easy, we don't value it highly. Basically, we understand the work that went into cludgy, complex interfaces because we see it. We* don't understand the complexity of something simple like Google.

*The "we" is meant to be the public, not really people on news.yc.
Soundcloud expands the audio player
I have a couple of the on my "To Read" bookshelf. Haven't gotten around to them yet, though.
Yes you may, but do not expect a good answer.
I realize that the general problem of object recognition can be arbitrarily difficult, but so is the general problem of text recognition: How can a computer determine if a downward stroke is a one, or a lowercase L, or an uppercase I? And yet the text-recognition captchas have been broken -- not because the problem is easy but because captcha breakers have exploited artifacts of individual captchas to get a correct answer a modest percentage of the time. The 3D captcha (as the article author described it) is highly constrained -- a small library of objects in static poses -- so it has similarly exploitable artifacts.

The captcha-breaking computer has no need to infer what an object would look like from another view if someone has already manually reproduced the library of models; in that case the problem reduces to identifying which models from the library are in the picture and what angle they are being viewed from. Although the problem is no doubt difficult, the silhouette strategy I described is similar to other published object recognition approaches known to work, e.g.:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/bandlow98recognising.html

And the approach doesn't need to work perfectly: the captcha breaker is only interested in improving his chances of guessing correctly. If an automated approach only guesses correctly even 20% of the time, the captcha is effectively broken.

In the case where two images of objects are very similar -- like your CRT vs. LCD example -- even a human would have difficulty differentiating. By definition that makes these objects bad for the captcha, so the captcha author would either leave them out of the library of objects, or he would need to make the captcha more tolerant of human error, which makes things easier for the captcha-breaker.
Funny, but not hacker news.
Not true, at least not recently. With just an Apple ID (the same one I use for iTunes, etc.) I was able to download the iPhone SDK, look at tutorials, build apps and run them on the simulator. I haven't tried to put anything on an actual device, I don't have one yet, but the promised-in-the-future ad-hoc distribution should make that doable for me and my family.
See the "Why would I use this library over other others?" section. But chaining is the best reason. The jquery ecosystem is also growing very quickly. You can always give jquery a try alongside Prototype...just set the noConflict to some other identifier since by default jquery also uses $.
Q: Both hands came from an honest deal, which one are you more likely to get?
Is there a website anywhere that tracks what Gartner (et al) predict and what actually happens?

At least Wired are consistent. A cover story predicts the technology is doomed :-)
For savings, I use FNBO. They have an online presence (FNBO Direct), where everything is done online. https://www.fnbodirect.com
The nice part is, they adjust your interest rate as it goes up and down. So when it goes up, you don't need to look around for another bank, they automatically raise it for you. Not all banks are so kind.

For books, try Bogle on Mutual Funds. In the end its a let down excitement wise, because his main advice is basically "put it in an index fund and let it sit for 40 years." He makes a good case that you'll do better than most people this way. Of course, most people don't do this because they want the excitement of trading, watching stocks, etc.
I was going to suggest:

This problem has me: <dropdown> or

This situation has me: <dropdown>

It's a support request, so people are certainly having a problem. Although "situation" might be more neutral. I think my way is the best, and it doesn't sound so drab as "Input Emotional State Parameters Here".
As an aside, my etrade savings account yields just north of 5% interest. Might be worth looking into in the interim and even more so if you plan to trade yourself. Is etrade a safe bank? Well, I've had money there for quite a while and in this day and age what bank is safe?
Reality rarely fits into 140 characters.
If you could only subscribe to 1 feed for tech news, what would it be?
The choice excludes mixed feeds like Hacker News, FriendFeed or a Google search feed.

So, if there was only one publication source for news and opinion for which you could subscribe, what would be the choice, eg a personal blog (Web Strategist), multi-user blog (TechCrunchIT, Inquistr) or a mainstream media site (NY Times Technology Sub Feed).

The focus is on original Tech/Web/IT news and opinion.
The first and best book on investing that you should read: A Random Walk Down Wall Street (http://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down-Wall-Street/dp/039306...). This book has great investing advice; is funny, interesting, and well-written; and clearly explains what's going on behind different investment approaches. In other words, it doesn't just answer the "what" question, it answers "why" and "how".

As for specific advice, investing isn't that difficult. The best approach is to be lazy: decide on an asset allocation (e.g. 50% US stocks, 30% international stocks, 20% bonds), buy index funds, and rebalance to these percentages every now and then. Vanguard (https://personal.vanguard.com/us/home) is probably the most respected provider of index funds; give them a shot.

Check out David Swensen's lazy portfolio if you want something more advanced: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6203264.

For investing discussion, try http://www.bogleheads.org/.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel

It starts with a brief history of market bubbles, moves to an explanation of the the most popular theories of stock forecasting (and why you probably can't use them to beat the market), explains and argues (quite convincingly) for the efficient market hypothesis, and concludes with lots of practical personal investment advice.
FWIW, I flagged this, but despite (or maybe because of) that, it remains on the front page.
I have alway's done that- the 'not prone to misdirection' type's of tasks I always outsource.

It worked so well I have started recommending my partner-in-outsourcing to other startups with incredible results...

not only is it more convenient- it just makes good business sense.

let me know if I can help anyone..(marco@incredicorp.com)
"Codes" is the common usage in the engineering sector, probably because "code" was already in-use to identify component items.
I've got to agree. All I can think of when I see a bit of fluff like this is : Yo ppl, where da digg button at?"
Well there are 9 circles of Hell: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Divine_Comedy#The_Circles_o...

Guess which one we're at! :-D
The idea presented in this article that /dev/urandom output is predictable is completely wrong. It is simply not secure from an information theoretic perspective: if an attacker had some amount of previous /dev/urandom data, and no new entropy was introduced into the pool, they could derive future output. However it is still cryptographically strong/computationally strong: actually doing this seems to require knowing how to invert SHA-1, which is apparently a difficult problem (I believe the best anyone has done is to invert 2 of the 3 rounds of MD4, which is a much weaker hash).

For much the same reason, RSA is not information-theoretically secure (if you have the public key, you have all the information you need to get the private key: you 'just' factor the modulus). That does not mean it is insecure, it just means you must make sure that the computational effort required is greater than the expected maximum computational effort anyone might expend (or, preferably, the maximum computational effort that might be feasible within your security lifetime).
How to Change Someone's Mind
Not even _that_ funny. There's lots of better (in my opinion) quotes on bash.org. I really don't want to see them each submitted individually.
I too am doing this now, though it is still too early to evaluate.

I deeply agree with 2 - prefer people who ask a lot of questions. In my case for some reason this is always Russians, while the bids I've gotten from Indian companies without exception:

1. Assure me that they can do my project with excellent quality and proceed to list a bunch of portfolio projects that have nothing to do with what I am doing.

2. Name a price without a single question asked about the requirements.

3. Are represented by someone with zero technical knowledge who hands off any request for details to tech people. It then turns out they have no idea what I want and need lots of further details (nothing wrong with that, but how the hell did you name a price in the first place then?).

Indian outsourcing companies seem really top-heavy in the layers department. As a technical person I want to deal with developers directly.
There it is again
Rent A Coder (www.rentacoder.com) and I also went through university student web pages and cold emailed people. That didn't work quite as well, though.
The best book on investing that I've ever read is this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Buffett-American-Capitalist-Roger-Lowe...

It's a biography, but there are lots of anecdotes about specific analyses. Nobody can invest like Buffett, but just about everyone can benefit from reading about how he did it.
May be this, if it were in place, would have helped?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121398
Ask HN: what language should I learn next?
I'm a Ruby developer, and cut my teeth on Ruby/Rails after a bit of PHP. I love Ruby and will continue to use it at my day job. But I'm starting a side project and want to learn something new. What should I try?

I've always wanted to get better at C and Lisp, but building a database-backed web app in either of these seems like a lot of work. How is Weblocks? Any other worthwhile web frameworks for Lisp?

What about Java, or a JVM language like Scala or Clojure?
Ask HN: What do founders of failed startups do next?
I was wondering if any founders of now defunct startups could share what happened next?

Was it easy to get back onto the startup wagon, or did you realise it wasn't for you and move onto something different?
the internet does the job just fine, imo. there are some good investing blogs that will give you good information for the beginner investor.

if you want my 5 second pitch for what you should do, here it is:

open up an online savings account with HSBC direct or ING direct, so you're getting 3%+.

save up money so that you have padding for 3 to 6 months worth of living expenses, in case of emergencies. i'd suggest 6 so that you have 3 months of living and the other half is for monetary emergencies (big car problems, etc).

put your long term investment money (401k/roth) into index funds with low costs. keys are diversification (50% domestic, 30% international, 20% bonds is what i do) and long-term. despite short term drops, over the long haul, the market will grow. set it and forget it.

after that, if you still have some cash left over, you can pick up some more riskier stuff. just make sure that you fulfill your "safe" investments first. ensure your long-term riches and safety first, then go for short-term stuff.
I agree with you strongly. When I build my coder lists, I actually only add individuals, to help avoid those pointless bids.
Yahoo finance has message boards. They're very sticky -- when I used to visit them in 2001-2002, there were people who had known each other on the boards for years.
sunk cost are sunk cost. after launch they don't matter, so I think he is on target for leaving those off. Oh and congrats
on this early milestone. I'm wondering why your going to focus ads on the low performing market, why not hit where the iron is hot (i.e the market where you are gaining customers)?
exactly ... speed - perfection compromise cannot be applied in all cases even when you are small...
AVC.BLOGS.COM would go for $5MM? Why?
Hadn't seen that one, thanks. The most thorough review I've found so far is the Ars Technica one, which is older but comes to similar conclusions:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/open-moko-software.ars
How about Italian? In terms of computer stuff... C is always a good one. Erlang is something kind of "new" and different, but at the same time quite practical for certain kinds of applications. Java's not a bad language to know, but it's not that exciting.
I remember getting into an argument with a sociology professor (in hindsight, probably a Marxist) who stated that there are no instinctual behaviors. I gave a simple example--babies suckling--that just angered him more.

Obviously, all behavior is partly shaped by instinct. But the connection is so non-deterministic that it's pretty easy to completely deny it. Sometimes the dog goes to his foodbowl at 2:00, sometimes at 2:10. Or, sometimes he smacks his lips, sometimes not. Ergo, the dog does not have an instintual urge to eat. At least not in a particular way. If nothing else, you could probably teach a dog, BF Skinner-like, to have anorexia nervosa. Behavior can be engineered. No doubt about it.

The problem, of course, is that personality qualities are partly inherited just like intelligence. This is problematic for a couple reasons:

1. The practice of measuring intelligence is well-developed and the results have been carefully studied. This is not the case with vague behaviors like "hardworkingness".

2. Traditionally, when coming up with excuses for why different groups have different levels of intelligence, other types of behavior are brought up: "Those Asian students spend all their time studying. Of course they succeed." This suggests that studiousness is the prescription for fixing bad students. But, in fact, that very studiousness is largely shaped by genetics. Sociobiology kills off the last fantasies of Marxism.
Three people have upmodded you, which means that there are at least three people here incapable of reading and processing very simple sentences:

Complexity is easy to build

That is what I am refering to. The search engine behind google and the scheduler in NT are COMPLEX, and to suggest that they are EASY TO BUILD for that reason is a suggestion of almost blinding stupidity.
What do you think of ETF's as opposed to regular old index mutual funds?
Looks like a great book, and generally good advice. Thanks!
8 Mathematic Tattoos You Need to See
Random walk down Wall Street, then the Graham books (look for things that are written by the people who taught Warren Buffet).
BRL
He's saying simplicity FOR THE USER is tough to build. I'm sure even more so when they are backed by complex logic that make them magic for the user.

Maybe you should work on your own reading comprehension skills before you go insulting other people's.
Hindi! Everything will eventually be outsourced to india, anyway.

Seriously though... Python is probably the best option, followed closely by Java.
this is too situation-based to answer, really. they do what they want or need to do. maybe that's start another, or maybe its work at a more normal job.
Pope blasts Internet and violent video games
Details of Execution
It would be great if (ex)founders could share a little bit of their situation too, for context.
And I'm sure that the Pope is a valuable and reliable on these things. Given how technology-savvy he must be, and how much he knows about the influence of these things.

Is bashing technology popular or something?
</flame>

How about all the other things that the Internet, TV, and video games promote? I'd say the positives outweigh the negatives, so unless the Pope has suggestions on how to prevent the negatives, his point is moot.
This is true in architecture (building) as well. It's far easier to pile forms together and not worry too much about how they integrate together. Well designed plans are hard to find, but very easy to enjoy when you find them. Radically harder is to integrate the entire work into a unified whole, which is how architecture moves into the world of aesthetics. In the tech world, Apple strives to make this same move - the results speak for themselves.
well, i'm currently working on something that i do after my 9-5. if it goes under, its not much of a loss -- i'll probably do another. however, if i was working on it AS my 9-5 and it went other, i imagine i could be in a bad financial situation and need to get a solid job.
bogleheads guide to investing
Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders by Jack D. Schwager
Stock Market Wizards: Interviews with America's Top Stock Traders by Jack D. Schwager
I think that, in part, it is related to the consumer's natural preference to keep his options open. A big part of making something simple is to decide things for the user. At first glance, the user is likely to prefer the item with all the bells and whistles, even if he never rings those bells or blows those whistles.

I think it takes a lot of effort and courage from the designer to decide some - and hopefully the right - things for the user knowing that the risk is to provide a product that might not meet every user's needs. The timid and lazy will push the decision and effort off on the user.
Emastic - CSS Framework
I have read many of the recommend books. Here are my two pence.

Books on Wealth

1. "Rich Dad Poor Dad"
and find out exactly why someone becomes rich.
(if you like this one, at some point you may also
want to quickly scan through "Cashflow Quadrant
Rich Dad's Guide to Financial Freedom".)

2. Also "chapter 6 - How to make wealth"
from "Hackers and Painters's chapter 6 - "

3. "The Way to Wealth by Benjamin Franklin"

Investing books in this order

1. Peter Lynch's One Up on wall street
2. The Intelligent Investor (Ben Graham)
3. Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits
4. Security Analysis (Ben Graham)
5. The Warren Buffet Way is a famous business read not exceptional but read it if you have some time left
6. A Random Walk Down Wall Street (Read it for a good laugh)

Do NOT read

1. AA- The Motley Fool Money Guide
2. How Gerge Soros Knows What He Knows
3. Investing Online For Dummies
4. Malkiel Burton - A Random Walk Down Wall Street
5. Cracking the millionaire code
6. Joel Greenblatt - You Can Be A Stock Market Genius
Facebook Releases Connect API Privately, Week Before f8
I agree with this advice for the most part. Nevertheless, I would insert insurance (health, disability, auto, etc.) between emergency savings and long term investing. Choose policies that are appropriate to your life needs, but definitely do it. It's harder to do when you're living hand to mouth (e.g. running a start-up), but it's a means of protecting your life, assets and investments. I've had people close to me who had their net worth wiped out by an accident. My $0.02.