skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Last time I tought about trying to make OpenCola with a friend the ingredients looked pretty expensiv. It didn't seem very viable to produce on your own.
Okay, i'll buy that. Reflection without regret and self recrimination.
Another path that you can use if you are already at a big company is to try and distinguish yourself there and move up within that organization. Of course this depends on the people you are working with, but if you have a good manager and are really interested in improving the state of software development at your shop, they'll notice.

For someone who may not be a political animal jumping into a new situation can be challenging. The benefit of working in the same place for a while is you get to know everyone there. Sometimes at a big company that means realizing that everyone there has rotten zombie brains, but there are usually some core of smart interested tech people who are influential.
JavaScript does have a just-in-time compilation step in most implementations these days. A quick scan of llvm-bc by a back end would be equally invisible to the user.
(1) Orkut is not a "failure"—so Google didn't "fail." They just didn't compete well against Facebook. But no one else did, either.

(2) Having just one email address lets you connect with everyone you want to connect with—it doesn't matter which provider you choose. Social Networks aren't like that. If there is one that dominates, you can't get on a competing service and get the same utility—the people you want to connect with aren't there. Being an existing provider of a large network is a HUGE advantage.

(3) Facebook has crushed previously successful networks. Expecting a company to create a NEW network to succeed where EXISTING networks lost ground to Facebook is a ridiculously high bar.
The 2006 UN world population report says so: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wpp2006/WPP200... - I believe that was the first statistical indication that the growth rate is easing. Certainly I remember feeling distinct relief.
I was starting to get excited about neo4j until I saw the pricing list for closed src apps & that you have to register with them to use just one instance of the free commercial server
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And so the pendulum has swung back. I believe Mozilla's action is rational assuming my logic is not flawed. See if you can unravel it.

Premise: The more indistinguishable a browser gets from its underlying operating system the more of the properties of said system it must share. Thus stretching the nature of the abstraction, making it shallower (till the machine) hence also increasing the probability of leaks in said abstraction.

Speciation will occur across system architecture peculiarities and cause splintering of browsers. Destroying their main advantage - which is the strong guarantees it makes on your deployed code being accessible across a vast range of platforms. That is, physical constraints and combinatorial considerations will make it very hard to write code that uses architecture specific optimizations and assumptions while still falling back robustly across all devices. And if it can work everywhere then it must not be directly exposing such a hardware layer and then, what is the point. The same can be acheived by optimizing javascript JITing. The JITter can take care of that optimal device specific optimized code generator. Google wants to create an OS, Mozilla wants to improve the browser.

In particular, as margins from speed, ui and features decrease; each vendor will become incentivized to avoid commodification and distinguish themselves from their competitors by moving faster than the glacial speeds of standard bodies and introducing incompatibilities. While being slow to pick up those of others. In essence each browser would basically evolve into and become indistinguishable from a current OS with all its pitfalls (isomorphic rather than homomorphic as currently). And if we are targeting specific VMs then we may as well factor out the browsers as they are no longer a vital component of the equation. Completing the cycle. To be restarted with metabrowsers.

Seems to me that pushing for native into the browser without carefully considering the tradeoffs is foolish. You cannot have uniformity without sacrificing diversity. This seems like the original Java dream rebooted. But it seems to me that wanting the same UI and code to work everywhere while taking advantage of underlying hardware, while automatically adapting and falling back on visuals and optimizations is a pipe dream. That is of course, until OS's and programs become intelligent and partially alive. At least microbe level intelligence. And virus like adaptibility.

Aside: NaCl appears to have a decent amount in common with silverlight. Particularly in terms of tradeoffs, weaknesses and gains.
That is the recipe for "New Coke". Coca-Cola classic has no sperm, AFAIK.
yeah, a heartbeat where if it loses contact with ground control for months it resets itself.
In giving this advice is he assuming that the end goal is to garner some kind of senior technical director position at a large company? It seems to me there are a number of potential career goals one might want to maximize for. For example; job title, salary, employer, company size, or cool factor.

It's not clear to me that all of these are parallel goals. For example if all you care about it optimizing for salary then getting a job at a small obscure company is likely not the best way to go unless it's all you can swing. Likewise I can think of a few jobs that have a high "cool factor" but make it hard to break out into other areas if you ever want to change paths.

That is to say that depending on what you want you might need to go about it in a different way. The bit about learning new things though is solid advice.
Its the junk food of experiences
> NativeClient is not a way to make the web more open, in fact it's a way to make the web more binary/obscured.

I'd disagree. Minified JS source is about as "open" as LLVM bytecode - you won't read both with your eyes. And they are both standardized, have FOSS implementations etc.

Openness vs obscurity is almost completely irrelevant to Javascript vs PNaCl. One can obfuscate code in any language. Openness is important, but it's a completely different matter.

> Low level memory access, pointers and the likes are the 'horrors'

It seems that everyone are missing the main point of PNaCl. PNaCl is NOT a tool to give programmers a headache with manual memory management. It IS a tool to give them ability to write in Python, Ruby, Perl, Haskell, Go, C++ and so on - in any language that can be compiled to LLVM bytecode. And mix them to their heart's content.

PNaCl is - as I see it - primarily, an attempt to get one important thing right - to not misuse JavaScript as a weird sort of bytecode. And to give Web-as-platform so much needed language diversity instead of The One Standard Language (JavaScript).

> This seems to imply that the browser should have a compiler that complies the low level bytecode

They already do that for a long time. V8, TraceMonkey and Carakan are the examples. The whole point of PNaCl is to give browsers a proper bytecode, and use JavaScript properly - as a programming language, not as universal assembly code for the web.

There are many obstacles, unsolved problems and distractions (like x86-only NaCl), but the overall direction is right.
16,330 76,30 293 308 1.79% 0.40%
A New York City Weekend for $100
As ever, I will point out that Malthus was right. It's a deductive argument - unless people exercise restraint, horrible things will happen. We call this restraint the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition .

The transition is a weird phenomenon historically, and in the very long run, like Einstein's cosmological constant, Malthus's mistake (in being pessimistic that people will exercise restraint) may yet be vindicated.
Hacking dance
Revealed: The guy behind IMDb
I heard about the MS inaction from many sources now. For example IKVM.net developer wrote a couple of times: "P.S. By my new policy, I won't be filing a bug with Microsoft since they have amply demonstrated not to care about external bug reports."
Sometime miracle is just around the corner ...
That's liberal crap. Everybody is in charge of exactly one thing, and that's themselves. The difference between good people and bad ones is dependent upon exactly one thing, and that's how they treat others.

The idea that there's some truer "deep down" person vs what you see, is also crap. Sure there's potential in everybody, but your true, real self is what you show to everyone every day. That cool deep-down person you never show? That's the imaginary you, not the real you.
I just meant the user has to compile their language of choice to the llvm byte code, as I don't see browsers hosting a bunch of interpreters for different languages.
The evolution of hard drives
As I said, 0x lambdas can do that...

... but you probably shouldn't: don't use a macro where a function will suffice, and if you need to use a macro, write a macro that syntactically wraps around a function if possible. C++, especially 0x, provides a lot of metaprogramming functionality you can use to avoid writing macros in many cases. Using this functionality will give the compiler more information about your program for analysis purposes, which means the compiler can help ensure correctness and better efficiency.
Gorgeous cover!!

Minor error in the blurb though... there's a double "the" in the first sentence: "SR-71 Blackbird (cover) is making a comeback since the the launch issue."

Also, I think "new year issue" should be rendered as "New Year's issue"? "AWK, Python and the Immortal Hamburger also make their way into this new year issue."
Yeah, so relentless efforts to improve any other tools than those are just missing the web.
I don't think a million years of sexual selection is going to be overcome by clever arguments. Any sensible, workable path forward just has to include accepting that men and women have strong urges to treat one another differently.
Interactive Comic
isohunt is an aggregator not a tracker. Your friend was probably downloading a torrent which used lots of trackers (usually piratebay, demonoid, etc.. you can see them in the torrent description)

It makes no sense to recomend people to be careful using isohunt when bittorrent itself is the problem. Anyone downloading that torrent, doesn't matter if he got it from isohunt or TPB will be able to see you in the swarm. Even if you use an isolated tracker, isohunt and other aggregators usually add all the trackers they find to the torrent to have only one multitracker torrent per hash.

That way even if the sources are on an isolated private tracker they will spread using PEX to the public trackers the moment one peer uses a multitracker torrent.

I've run a tracker at http://tracker.frozen-layer.net:6969/stats for the last 7 years. We used to have 250000 peers in 2005 and I think that the decentralization of BT has become more of a problem than a solution. If you have stable trackers you don't need DHT or multitorrent trackers.
As I understand it, the JS DOM implementation does not have the quirks of the different browsers. So theoretically, you could write a test that passes and works in browser X but does not work in browser Y.

My understanding is that jQuery spends most of its time dealing with these quirks.
Some of this is a restatement of the "bike shed problem". Just as true today as it was 11 years ago in another open source discussion at the time.

The tension with open source projects, and poorly run commercial project too, will always be that you don't get great results from committees. It takes a strong intent combined with impeccable taste to achieve great results.

That will always be difficult to orchestrate, but fortunately an increasing number of people seem to be up to the challenge. 2010 felt like a pivotal year in open source development stack components to me.
In which case why call them cars that run on water?
Very informative post in the beginning of the new year. Hope will help entrepreneurs execute their plans in 2011.
As a man, I never, ever worry about being beautiful at all. And it never, ever causes any problems in my working life.

If you worry about 'towing the line' between beautiful and anything else, maybe its your own priorities that are the issue? Why is 'being beautiful' even in the equation? Because you put it there. So you have to deal with it. But its absolutely not other peoples' problem.
See instead this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2057704
Thank you!

Wrote that blurb very quickly before published and the proofreader didn't have the chance to see it. Thanks for the correction.
Mozilla would be happy to replace Qt/Cocoa/... with HTML+CSS+JS (or XUL). So it's obvious they'll be highly reluctant to have the exact opposite.

Microsoft once tried this in Windows 98 (thanks tightly-integrated IE) - and fairly succeeded. Since then, the attempts to "bring the Web to the desktop" are fairly constant.
What's up with the spam reports? (See Darren's comment.)
Although MS' reaction does appear to be irresponsible, a browser crash is hardly the worst security issue I can imagine. If that's all this guy is finding -- it's all he mentions in his post -- then this sounds more like security for security's sake than anything practical.
Games should not run in a browser? That's a funny claim. Try telling that to:

1. Millions of users, who play them happily each day.

2. Sites like Kongregate, Armor Games and Newgrounds, whose business is to publish them.

3. Sites like FlashGameLicense, whose business is to help the business of developing and publishing games that run in browsers.

If something can be done, someone will probably try to make a business out of it. If it catches on, then people who say "just because something is possible, doesn't mean it should be done" are wasting their breath.
You're saying this to the wrong person. I run mail systems for a living. IMO, it is a trivial task to send tens of thousands of emails.

What hardware are you running that supports sending out tens of thousands of emails, handling the inevitable DNS errors, timeouts, bounces (yes yes, I've read about the RFC ;)) and that manages all of this in a reasonable amount of time? Genuine question, I'm curious.
Thanks for letting me know.. I never thought to check if a domain was abused before buying it. I just registered the domain last night.
2011 is a Sexy Prime[1] too.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexy_prime
Just replied to his comment.. I just registered the domain last night, didn't check if it had been abused previously. :\
Great reply. I have sent that along to my friend. I enjoyed it as well.
Happy Full nibble day. 255
I would be interested to hear from YC companies (or companies at SF incubators) that are looking for tech co-founders.
I just find all that engineering effort such a waste when it is optimizing Javascript of all things. I've seen a lot of arguments of why Javascript isn't "that bad" but few about why it is actually good when compared to comparable languages.

I see a lot of good coming out of building VMs for more dynamic languages than Java, but there seems to be movement in the direction of running away from writing pure Javascript (CoffeeScript/GWT/etc) that if you're going to build a JS VM you might as well define a strict subset of the language that will be optimized and let everyone target that when building VMs and languages.
Maybe we need a section of "good news" and a section of "bad news" that are listed equally.
I don't know the details, but a fully attacker controlled EIP sounds likely to be exploitable doesn't it? Possibly data leakage from the browser, maybe arbitrary execution if the attacker is lucky. This sounds likely at the least to put an attacker in a better place to socially engineer a user into installing malware.
Network neutrality : A tangled web
What is a browser?
Right, that's the one I was thinking of.
The craft of breaking stone to make useful tools
Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google
1. Make it easier for people to comment on your text--- some sort of wiki perhaps?
2. Beginners forget, so telling them that you won't repeat information (key strokes to evaluate an expression) isn't going to help.
3. In the line 'The way in which you evaluate the expression determines where the output goes. Alos notice that the previous examples used integers like 1 and 2 and returned an integer value. This expression uses floating point numbers like 1.0 and returns a float as the result.
' Alos should be Also...
4. If you can get to a feature in the editor with key-strokes list them. If you can get there using the menu say so. If you can get there both ways mention that.
Startup Quote: Tony Hsieh, co-founder, Zappos
Don’t play games that you don’t understand, even if you see lots of other people making money from them.

- Tony Hsieh (@zappos)

http://startupquote.com/post/2554539600
The shift could feed Amazon, Apple *and other survivors*
with extra customers.

As the market for physical copies are dwindling, total profits in the industry decreases and some companies will decide to exit. This will reduce the decline of profitability for the remaining businesses and thus reduce the rate of companies exiting the industry.

The local book store may survive yet.
mP3: Song Search [A Weekend Project]
"With all due respect "I hae ma doots" - show me such a beast as this eight grader. (as a non-American I don't even know what an eight grader is? a 14 year old, a 12 year old?)"

I'm referring to the teach scheme[1] project of Felleisen et. al.

"I don't know what eLisp looks like.
I don't know how different the various dialects of Lisp are from each other."

I see, sorry, I misunderstood. So you're learning elisp by writing a book. Great idea, truly, I always found teaching a subject a good way to learn it better. Writing a book is also good for that. All the best and happy new year!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeachScheme!
To me applied minimalism in whatever endeavor just means finding the simplest possible thing that works. I think most of us can see the value in that.
That is horrible. I like to name my classes e.g "Object" and call instances of that class with the lower case equivalent.. "object".
It's not all that he's reporting, he's just assuming some hacking knowledge I guess. Every time you see a crash which is caused by jumping to some unknown address, there's a pretty good chance that the crash is exploitable - but you can't tell that easily without going through the source / poking around the binary.

Basically in many cases the jumps into non-code areas mean that some buffer overflowed (or some pointer got corrupted) and overwrote the stack frame return address. As long as you can control what was overwritten, you're likely to be able to point at the data you supplied yourself (back at the stack with some text you control). If that condition is true, you can provide new code for execution straight from html - that means the crash is exploitable.

Then again, even if you can't see how is that specific crash exploitable, it doesn't mean it isn't. For some time double-free crashes were just bugs. Then someone found out you can manipulate the pointers in possible later reallocations. What I'm trying to say is that every crash caused by user supplied data should be looked at from the "might be exploitable in the future" perspective.
compromise.
I'm looking for a tech co-founder for an education software start-up. Location will be either Boulder or SF.

Interested in learning more?

Contact me: letsdobigthings [at] gmail
What was it like to fly the Concorde
So it's one guy? Where does he get the data? What happens to all the IMDb Pro subscription money? Does he really run it all alone?
Thanks for the link, and sorry for the double post!
Ask HN: Please, help me to choose a GPS app to develop
During my Winter-Spring 2011 Term at the university I have to develop a GPS application (Lin&Win) that helps a user to play geocaching (it must take coordinates in a LOC file and guide a user to find all hidden geocaches).

Since I have to spend my time on it anyway, I want to develop some additional features that will make it useful to the real users. And probably I will publish it under GPL.

So the question is: what GPS application to develop in these 3-4 months?

The most obvious answer is an Android app, but I think there is a lot of geocaching apps already, and new features needed instead.

Or maybe there is a piece of GPS software that has no open source alternatives? I would gladly consider that.

Any ideas?

Thanks!
Interesting. Could you elaborate on how Facebook could create more profits by opening the graph? How would "opening the graph while maintaining the largest node" look like in practice?
SVG animation with SMIL
The argument isn't "What is minimalism." The argument is, "What are these people doing that they call minimalism?" Vivek's criticisms are mostly valid for his perception of the movement, and I think he's a reasonable guy, so I tried to update and correct his perception.

This is not a sisyphean task unless Vivek has a very strong motivation to ignore my explanation.
The way we're using "meaning" in this discussion is improper, and I regret not pointing that out earlier. It's improper because the word is not (and cannot) be defined.

I guarantee there are people who find WOW to be far more meaningful than building a career in the health field.

I can't argue that because "meaningful" is not well-defined. However, I can make a related statement, as follows. Building a career in the real world is far more valuable to a person, as a human being, than building a "career" in WoW, because it allows a person to achieve real values in life--e.g. monetary wealth, respect from peers, self-sufficiency, and ultimately self-esteem and the genuine, pervasive kind of happiness that self-esteem makes possible. Wow does not allow one to achieve those values.
Another alarm clock bug in a very short time. When such a (seemingly?) simple feature turns out to be buggy, it does start to make you wonder about the quality of the rest of the OS.

Apple must feel the same way. I know they take pride in sweating the details and having stuff "just work", so that makes me wonder if some heads are gonna roll over this...
Between Bath and Bristol, possibly relocating to Bath, England.

Looking for a PHP developer to join a small web design agency.

Email: andrew [AT] moresoda [DOT] co [DOT] uk
That is a major bummer! Although the Neo4j team didn't exactly make this information easy to find.

Neo4j is released on AGPL. Their subscriptions allow you to pay to legally (IANAL so anyone want to step in here?) circumvent the AGPL and buy support

Price list: http://neotechnology.com/price-list
HTML+JS libraries -- such as jquery -- are just fine for interactive document publishing, but are no replacement for Cocoa, Android, or Qt. The lack of common re-usable and extensible UI components is a travesty.

Cappuccino http://cappuccino.org/

SproutCore http://www.sproutcore.com/

Ext JS http://www.sencha.com/products/js/
Ask HN: Who Is Hiring Remote Workers? (January 2011 Edition)
Similar to the "Who is Hiring" thread but, please remote positions only.
I find this reasonable, I wouldn't expect to get something for nothing. I would do exactly the same thing.