skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
cellular phones, artificial limbs, space travel,
Having started three businesses with partners and now going solo I can say that this is not true.

Surely, a partner can help you out when you're in an emotional pit, but it doesn't mean you need a partner. The most healthy relationships are the ones that consist of people who don't have problems with themselves.

As for myself - I wouldn't start a business with anybody who has motivation problems. Sorry.
> You don't have time and money problem. You have priorities problem. You do have time, you just choose to spend it on things other than turning your ideas into products (for one, you're reading Hacker News).

This this this.
Fine, those things can just die or limp along.
You are overestimating XNA. Most (almost all) high quality games for Xbox and PC are written in C++. It is even more likely that they could be ported to iOS or Android more easily due the simple fact that they allow native code. XNA would be a competitor to the popular Unity game engine which at the moment has a more competitive platform to build for (webplayer, iOS, android) and also offers a superior IDE while offering the same language support as XNA. In addition to that, UDK and the ID engine are also being ported to support iOS and Android. Feel free to point me to a list of high quality in XNA produced titles.

Good game developers are able to create games regardless of the quality of the tools. Its part of the fun to create impressive games with limited resources and tools.

Other than marketing the fact that Microsoft also created a successful game console and xbox live, I don't think Microsoft has any advantage here. Xbox live could be a key differentiator but only after a significant market share has been gained. I don't think people will buy a WP7 phone for Xbox live. Currently iOS offers the best games.
I enter the site name and it works too. Google is good at data parsing :)
IANASE, but it feels pretty secure to me.

It is not as secure as it seems. Think it through. There is an 11 character identical portion and a one character changing portion.

Which means that each password differs from each other password by only one character.

If the 11 character identical portion were to ever be revealed (i.e., think site that stores passwords in the clear having their password DB exposed) then I only have to try a very small number of possibilities to guess all the possible passwords from the 11 character stub.

Not very secure at all, because the security of all the possible passwords depends entirely on that 11 character portion remaining a secret... Yet that 11 character portion is going to be handed to every site that requests a password. It is not a secret anymore once it is given to the first website. Therefore, not very secure at all.
I sense the "second coming" of the search aggregators...

Something like Dogpile 2.0?
Do your part, it'll improve: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/efinmbicabejjhja...
You shouldn't. The command-line is the less powerful tool you can use to interact with the system.

Learn a powerful scripting language, instead (Python, Lua, ecc.).

Oh, and since for basic tasks you will be using the command-line anyway, if you are using *nix, please use one designed to be used by humans, that is, Fish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_interactive_shell
How does it compare to krugle?
Ask HN: is there such a thing as a public stream of encrypted messages?
I feel like I should know about this and could probably find out with a little research, but thought I'd ask today seeing as there are so many crypto experts on HN.

If two people are exchanging encrypted email a third party could still observe the fact that communication was taking place even if the content itself were obscured. But what if a large number of people were posting encrypted data to a public message board? Only the recipients would know which messages were intended for them. Of course, this would mean attempted to decrypt every new message using one's private key, and getting nothing useful in the majority of cases - very inefficient, but also secure. For example:

pg: slkdjfbiofdnbdoibjowerni
swombat: poripmkbdoijdpohkdpjthkj
tptacek: sdflkjsdffnhhxgfjhlfkgjh
....etc.

I try decrypting every one of these 'messages' (all of which would be much longer in reality) with my private key, but only swombat's resolves to plain text. Now I know his message was intended for me, but onlookers do not.

Obviously, there is nothing especially clever about this - it's just the old espionage technique of public signalling (through a classified advertisement or visual display) combined with a dead drop. Some twitter clients allow for the broadcast of encrypted tweets, for example. But I was unable to think of any obvious streams of encrypted material like this. Do such things exist, or are most people too paranoid to use them? I have no practical purpose in mind, it just came up as a hypothetical in a discussion, for which I was unable to think of a real-world example.
where did you get the idea from that they went from <%= to <%

I could be off, but I think rails 1.2 did that.
Do RFID tags have anything to prevent a replay attack or is owning a bit for bit copy of an RFID tag the same as owning the original?
Ironically, I read this article via Google's cache. How useful!
FriendFeed is really a special place in the narrative of Internet sites with large social networks. It introduced so many new ideas and was the fastest and easiest way to get news and see all the ripples of information passing online. You would see the beginnings of viral content early on FF better than anywhere else, and its commenting and sharing features are unreplicated anywhere else. Was truly an amazing place when I used it heavily for 2 years back in 08. I did notice a heavy influx of Turkish and Italian users in the latter days of pre-acquisition era. Still a pretty good tool, but its best features were the people to follow who would help curate the news sources for you and have discussions, but most of the old English-speaking guard have left unfortunately.
It's a tongue-in-cheek movie quote (that reverses the usual "too good to be true" saying). I am infamous for being excessively honest. I also have a history of having folks tell me what a "good person" I am and such, something I call "accusations of sainthood", which I am not fond of. I guess I liked the quote for the idea of suggesting that these folks who knew me to be politically incorrect and excessively honest really should lighten up on the accusations of sainthood because "I'm too truthful to be (that) good". :-)

Peace.
RFID tags are not smart cards, they basically just have a small amount of data on them which can be read off. So yes, having a bit for bit copy is exactly the same as having the original tag.
This and http://koders.com/ (which apparently acquired ohloh.net, which has project search of its own) are the first two hits when you do a Google search for "code search."
Actually, your designer shouldn't be continuing to work on your mockups in the first place. After the mockup is complete, it gets turned into a template and then everyone works on that. The mockup was just a proof of concept to the customer. It wasn't meant to keep being used.

Also, be careful with your mockups. If you're demoing functionality, you don't want the looks of the site to be pretty, and if you're demoing the visual appearance, you don't want the site to work at all. If you mix the 2, the customer will get it in their head that most of the work is already done, when it's not even close.
I've worked with CUDA, and his negative conclusions are a little too dramatic compared to how elegantly he used CUDA. (That said, the biggest cost of CUDA development is the year or so it takes to let it all sink in. ALL of it!)
Why are Nigerian Hackers so smart? (Expanded)
A copyright is a government granted-monopoly.

Essentially, it's a little bit of the state's right to restrict other people which has been given to you for reasons that supposedly wise-people consider important.

One might argue that it is almost the opposite of private wealth.

The government doesn't grant the descendants of social security recipients the right to their forebears' pension either. By your earlier reaoning, the state is "depriving" the pensioners of ability to sell a perpetual income stream to a third party. (yes, this is sarcasm...)
Detroit in 1942:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2179089505/
any comment from google on this issue recently?
Technically competent people who want to start an online community.
Nah, install cygwin and use bash so your skills are transferable. Linux skills last for years; Windows skills tend to last till the next version. And I say this coming from a Windows background.
Neat. Please make this extension work for other search engines too. Especially DDG!
She worked for free and was upset about it? No joke! Why'd she ever do that in the first place?

And if you're fluent in 5 languages and can't find a paying job for that, you are NOT LOOKING HARD ENOUGH. Here's a hint: Look outside your country's borders. Multiple languages is something that makes you useful worldwide. There's at least 4 other countries out there that would love to have a native speaker from her country to help translate from their language into her native one.
This is why Richard Stallman recommends that you wrap your RFID card in aluminum foil.

http://slashdot.org/articles/05/11/19/149242.shtml?tid=133&#...
I think this article involves quite a lot of extraneous words .. in my opinion only the last three paragraphs say something interesting.

--

Who is truly saying that ideas are worthless? It's blatantly obvious that ideas and execution are two sides of the same coin.

An 'ideas' person coming to the table with an 'idea' (rather than resources or talent) is generally berated is because talk is cheap. Execution is generally what's lacking - so it stands to reason that people are primed to focus on getting things done.
No but experience(poundage of production) and no fear of being judged on talent(anything not bad accepted) allows for grater experimentation which directly relates to creativity.
Perhaps Twitter has the better solution? Why not direct messages to a single user, or hash tag, etc? It's basically a way of sending messages to only a set of recipients that wants to receive it. In your case though, there'd also be a level of encryption involved. I guess what I'm saying is, perhaps a real-world example could be close to Twitter?
A lot of people will pay for the convenience if the price is reasonable, say 10 cents per gigabyte.
You have the schematic, what more could you want?!

(I kid, I kid. But, I think it would be fun to put together.)
Not always darn good. Here is a counterexample: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_the_King_(1980_fi...
Rasterization is slow when you have lots of small (often sub-pixel) triangles. Mapping a big triangle into screen space is fast, but mapping many triangles per pixel (and hopefully throwing out the 99+% of the geometry that won't show up at all) into screen space and blending them together in a convincing way takes a while.

Real-time graphics does the best it can with a few big triangles (by e.g. texturing and bump-mapping them) out of necessity, but people are moving towards cases that are harder on the rasterizer.
I think even good ideas are worthless. The thing is, bad ideas are worse than worthless.

PageRank was a good idea, but it wasn't worth anything until they built Google. It was a good idea because it offered a solid foundation on which to build value.

Your bad idea might cause you to waste years of your life. Not only can you not sell it for anything, but you could pour resources into it only to see them burn up like an incinerator.

Aim for worthless. "Worthless" and "Won't screw you" is a good place to start.
I'm surprised no one else has said it, but just remap your Caps lock to Ctrl. You can then use your pinky or ring finger, as you prefer.
Trying to parse their marketing material the best I can, the 5x refers to dual-core configuration clocked at 1.5GHz. More than 8 cores are also available and with clocking from 1 to 2.5 GHz.
Don't let that stop you!

Not only do I have zero GUI design ability and no color sense, my software background is as far from web applications as it gets and I've still been working on an app for the past month. Use very basic design elements, understand the CSS box model and learn to look at everything around you -- designed objects are everywhere.

We're surrounded by design and you don't need to be able to create something from scratch, just see the elements you like around you and analyze them to understand why they're appealing. Just like programming, design can be broken down into component parts and each one understood on its own. Once you see how they work, you can put those parts back together in different ways.

...at least it seems to be working for me so far and my screens look a little less butt-ugly every day :-)
A real-life "Center of the Earth"!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Journey_to_the_Center_of_the_...
Seems like a neat project. I wonder if it wouldn't be better to use feature-based classes instead of browser-based classes though.

In the example they have IE5&6 specific code:

.ua-ie-5 .logo-area,
.ua-ie-6 .logo-area
{
/* IE versions < 7.0 don't fully support transparent 24-bit PNGs */
background-image: url(logo.gif);
}

But wouldn't it be more sensible to have something like this:

.no-png-support
{
background-image: url(logo.gif);
}

That way you hit all relevant browsers... not just the ones whose quirks you know about?
Same. I star articles from Newsrob (which syncs to Google Reader) and use a script to fire up articles / unstar while drinking my morning coffee. (Explanation and script bookmarklet here: http://bit.ly/hb0YMU )
My first reaction to this is that it is using user-agent sniffing which is always considered a bad idea. Capabililty detection seems to be the way to go for this kind of thing.

Why would I ever want to use this instead of something like modernizr.js?
AMA by owner of thathigh.com over on reddit: makes 1k usd/month adsense
Do we really need to blur difference between art and fanfics even more then?
The main issue I have with this article is that it describes a very implausible circumstance in my opinion. If you have an application with such sensitive information on the phone to warrant this kind of testing, why would you not take advantage of the device administration policies to enforce a password policy and a password timeout policy?

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/admin/Dev...

There doesn't seem to be a policy in the current API docs to prevent a user from enabling USB debugging, but there is a rather large warning when that option is selected.

Without USB debugging and using a password policy, the author's strategy would not have worked. With the current strategy, this has nothing to do with Android, and everything to do with having poorly designed and poorly implemented security on the part of the application author.
Given that most software patents are titled "an apparatus to <do X>", I wouldnt be surprised even if someone managed patents manually would be considered in the same umbrella!
But if the idea is easy to implement than anyone will be able to copy that idea and the value will tend to zero.

My strategy is the opposite - take ideas that are often simple to state but whose execution is so complex as to tax the limits of the human mind. Then if I succeed I shouldn't have to worry much about competition (at least for a couple of years).
Kinect Causing RROD on Original Xbox Models
Yes Vietnam is definitely amazing. Ha Long Bay
http://goo.gl/yu0hj is another magical place there...
5 Microsoft Xbox Kinect videos that’ll blow your mind
Nontrivial ideas are not natural resources but are created by an author; just as a physical object is the property of its creator, ideas are an intangible property owned by their author.

Can you name the algorithm used to distinguish "trivial ideas" from "nontrivial ideas"? I'm waiting... What about an algorithm for determining when "nontrivial idea A" is equivalent to "nontrivial idea B"? We're still foundering on the haltering problem here, I think... OK, now, what about an algorithm to determine when idea A is "useful"? Ah, you need... society for this one I think... Indeed, you "natural" idea contains an excess of unnatural contortions...

Even more. Let's suppose you really could determine all these not-algorithmically-determinable things and the criteria was simple. Any string X with length greater than N is "nontrivial".

What happens when every string of length N+1 is copyrighted/patented/etc? The 2^N+1 string then are contained in every possible further nontrivial idea and the owners of them can extract rent perpetually. Things are not quite at this level yet but we're getting closer (the state of video should give one pause).
IPhone 4 New Years Clock Glitch
No, thats a myth.
TiVo itself isn't huge, but pretty much everyone has a DVR these days.

I just use that as an example because 10-11 years ago nobody knew what it was, but they knew they didn't need it... until they tried it.
>I wonder if this new "Google sucks" meme is manufactured by some competing interest.

It's not manufactured by anything beyond Google sucking. I've spent the better part of a year quietly raging as an essential tool loses its edge. I wondered for a long time if I was alone. Surely, I though, I must be crazy, others would also speak out if Google were getting that bad.

And finally, they are.

I wish, instead of spraying their pants about Google Suggest and cribbing the social media mechanism of the moment, Google would focus on what matters and make their core product work as well as it used to.

Instantly returning spammy, junky results doesn't do dick to improve the search experience.
Surely this...
Stopped reading the article when I saw listed as a highly creative person the "actress best known for her awesome work in Buffy the Vampire Slayer".
Regarding 'contactless smart cards' which use a similar radio protocol to RFID:

One example being MIFARE used in the London underground, where they found a vulnerability in the encryption algorithm being used on the card (the cards are 'intelligent' in that they have a processor on board to perform the cryptography etc.). Once you can break the encryption, you can then set about making a clone.

With contactless bank cards, (which in the UK you can use to pay for the M6 toll), you could imagine people electronically picking your pocket, by relaying the signal from a transceiver near a cash point over RF to another transceiver which communicates with the card in your pocket.
(hopefully they use distance bounding protocols to prevent this!)

Karsten Nohl (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~kn5f/) has some fascinating papers on how they broke Crypto1 (the algorithm used by MIFARE). They took photos of the chip in the card using an optical microscope, after dissolving the card in acetone (They had to sand off each layer of the chip to get to the next)

They then applied image recognition to identify logic gates from their constituent transistors. And then looked for XOR gates, as they mention they're rarely used for anything other than crypto on this type of chip. Once they had found the area of the chip involved in cryptography, they converted the logic gates into the actual algorithm used, and then picked apart weaknesses with it.
I'm confused because I have seen old episodes of Explorer and similar shows about them. I'm trying to figure out if it was the same chain of caves or not, but I remember a show dedicated to one cave system that had been turned into a massive fortress that the US basically had no choice but to ignore during the Vietnam war.
IANAL. If a copyright holder doesn't effectively exist like in this scenario, how can they charge you with copyright infringement?

If a work is out of print and not findable, and the copyright holder is gone, how would you know that the work existed, and how would anybody go about printing said work again?

I also think that your statement implies that society is somehow entitled to peoples' copy written works at some point. I think it might be the prerogative of the copyright holder to discontinue (and possibly destroy) his or her work before the copyright's lifetime ended. What then?
I would assume he has given up on convincing other researchers of the validity of his views. And if you were actually familiar with how that system works (as opposed to how you think it should ideally work, or some approximation thereof), you would not appeal to the authority of those who practice "nutrition science", because it is anything but.

The way science works, in general, is not the so-called "scientific method" - most funding is controlled by people in the field who have a vested interest (ego, monetary or otherwise) in maintaining the status-quo and beliefs. While it's easy enough to practice "the scientific method" on new frontiers, it is a quixotic endeavour to challenge a prevailing concept.

In many cases, it should be -- when the prevailing concept has actually been rigorously studied and proved. This is NOT the case with nutrition (nor many specific corners of medicine and health).

I don't know what faith you subscribe to, so this example might fall on deaf ears, but PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins don't need to convince the pope of anything -- they need to appeal to the masses. Much of nutrition recommendations are based on faith (and politics) rather than evidence, and in that sense, Taubes is not wrong in the attempt to appeal to the masses. And while he might not be an established research scientist like Dawkins, he has a better grasp of science and burden of proof than those he criticizes, and at least "Good Calories, Bad Calories" is meticulously researched with hundreds of references -- which is much more than you can say about your average (and even "cream of the crop") nutritional science research.

Your argument is essentially an appeal to authority -- and to the wrong authority at that.
Detroit in Ruins
The North Face website speed case study.
I fondly remember those days when the entire database is distributed on Usenet. I have written a editor macro to "join" the tables to generate the full detail data of every movie. Of course when the IMDb website has launched, I have switched to their query web page.
I developed PDF::Writer entirely on Windows and used RubyGems extensively. With the new Ruby Installer work by Luis Lavena and others, RubyGems is now amazingly awesome on Windows.

The Linuxes are the least-well represented and the least interested in working with RubyGems developers. There are hooks to make things work better: they were first offered by Apple and subsequently modified by Eric Hodel to be more generic so that Debian could benefit. They refused to use these vendor hooks.

You're right that apps that target "desktop" users bundle Ruby, but I remember a game from 2001 that bundled Python. This is no different. Apps need to control their dependencies (my company's backup app includes vendor-locked versions of OpenSSL in the program directory because we can't trust full compatibility without that)

Edited to add:

The RubyGems multiple version feature (which is one of the things that the Debian team seems to dislike) doesn't assign any meaning to version levels. The fact that 1.2.3 usually means "major version 1, minor version 2, patch version 3" is entirely social and of no meaning to RubyGems. The only thing that it cares about is that version A is comparably larger or smaller than version B. I could have version 1.2.3.4.5 and 1.3.5.7 and it would only care that the latter is larger (because the second level of the latter is larger than the second level of the former).

Removing this but keeping "top-level" versions would encourage people to rev their top-level versions more often. This may not be a bad thing, but it won't give you the effect you think it will.