skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure I believe that this was posted by an innocent bystander. Marvin85 appears to have been created for the sole purpose of posting to HN, it's only submission and comment both belong to this thread (although I can't explain how old it is, 220 days). I'll buy that a staff member (tomazstolfa) happened to be watching HN and was able to respond within minutes, but that's dubious, presumably there are more important things for a startup to be doing. My real concern is that the link given here is an invitation link, and not the real homepage of vox.io . I'd assume that normal invitation links only work for a single user, and this one appears to be able to absorb quite a few people, I was able to sign on without any hiccups.

Now there's nothing wrong with plugging yourself on HN, if you've created a useful or interesting service people are glad to pay attention to and, more importantly, discuss you. However misrepresentation is not something that I think I can endorse.

With all that said, I like the idea of vox.io . I think I'm going to stick to my unhappy combination of google voice and skype for now though. vox.io doesn't seem to provide me anything I don't already have except shady marketing techniques.
And Thus Dies the "VON" Name...
I started off doing software tech support. While doing support I built tools to streamline and automate things. Managers took notice and offered me a job where it was a blend of coding, system analysis, and handling escalated support issues. I automated pretty much everything in that job as well. At that point I had some useful experience on my resume so I started interviewing for "pure" software engineering jobs.

I've been a software engineer for the last 10 years. No CS degree (though I did study engineering), but I love building stuff and I think that passion came through in my interviews.
A few ideas:

1. File a report with Amazon.
2. Block the IPs using iptables
3. File a DMCA complaint against them with Amazon
4. Send a cease and desist letter to them or offer to sell them data.
> Apple could still choose to WebM support.

In fact, Imagination Technologies, the people who make the GPUs for the iPhone(and the iPad as well, I think), have already announced full vp8 support in their next-gen hardware decoders, so it would be really easy for Apple to include webm support in the next iPhone or the one after that. And they're safe from any patent threats as well, since they're already MPEG-LA licensees. It will be interesting to see if they do.
F# in the Enterprise
Get a $20 Amazon Gift Card for $10 today from LivingSocial
We have launched a similar website, currently in beta: http://www.zombal.com . Maybe, just maybe you can start using your secret lab in the coming months.
Coffee shop
I want to start a coffee shop called the Java Joint in the Gulfport/Biloxi Ms area sometime in the next 8 months.I would likep to know where to find someone to invest in my venture.I would only need about 30,000 start up money.
I disagree that gaming the system implies most people wouldn't do it. It is just manipulating the rules in place in a way to give yourself an advantage. Basically, following the letter but breaking the spirit of the law. Tons of people do that everyday. So yes, Steve gamed the system. But I don't begrudge him for it. Gaming systems for personal gain is the hacker way, honestly.
Precisely what I came here to say. There's a lot that can be said about the news this week, but accusing him of gaming the system (rather than just using it to his advantage in what was possibly a life-threatening situation) is not one of them.
Clients you should avoid
This was the first time I've used LivingSocial, but we all can usually find a way to use $20 at Amazon, right?
Short answer: Yes.

And so would everyone else with access to his kind of resources. Should he have done the fair thing and died?
I disagree. You cannot have a revolution without at least some pain.
Just as a counter-point to this stupid title, my workplace has 50% more Female Software Developers than Male Software Developers
Ask HN: I just lost a few databases. What to do
Hello there!

I recently cancelled my MediaTemple account, because we decided to host the sites ourselves. We migrated the sites, assets and databases..

But we forgot about one client. A sleeping one. I tried to logon the MediaTemple panel, to retrieve it, but sadly, the account has been cancelled, and thus I cannot login, nor can I create a new ticket.

Any tips, hints or ideas on how to handle this rather critical problem :(
Most Common Responses About Android
If it were that simple, we wouldn't have people going bankrupt from paying their medical bills.
2010: Year In Review
hint: don't use facebook.

I know a lot of people. I don't have an account on FB. Absolutely zero % of the people I know have stopped talking to me even though 95% of them all have an account.

I trust FB far less than any site online.

Fun Fact: pretty much every other social network, HI5, Tagged, MySpace etc. were all started by spammers. Friendster and FB were just started by douchebags.
npmtop
WebKit Updates CSS3 Gradient Support, Matches Mozilla Syntax
Winklevoss twins announce new endeavor
What to Ask a Client Before You Start Their Project
Which Metrics Matter for Measuring User Engagement?
Amazon recently invested in LivingSocial, so this is their way of driving business to that investment. Seems like a smart play.
The Cook Doctrine
Backbone.js is easily one of the finest products I have had the pleasure of using. There is a small learning curve but after that, it's butter. The best part, imo, is that more than teaching you to use some foreign dsl, using backbone.js makes you just better as pojs because it teaches modularity, sane callbacks, and a whole mess of other stuff. jashkenas and the other guys behind backbone did a really good job at making a tool that felt like native javascript.
IOS users download about 5 apps every month
Or you can have some balls and not have an account and tell your whole family "If you love me, just call me, or email me at Supermighty@gmail.com"
Word Lens is an Awesome App
Congratulations to you & your wife. :) Hopefully she's getting some sleep too!
Do you have any other web services connected to google that are not proxying through the ssh connection?
While I love Steve's blog, he doesn't share what advice he gave his former student. Mine would be this:

I don't know what the power structure and equity structure is in the organization, so I don't know how vulnerable your job and your ownership in your company is. But in general boards can't simply fire people without cause. I would strongly suggest that you start by documenting absolutely everything. Make sure all meetings are minuted and keep your own copies of those minutes. If the bad board member says something to you outside a meeting that has some bearing on your relationship or the company, find an excuse to get him to email it to you. You can even record phone calls in many states with only one party privy to the fact the call is being recorded. (IIRC California is not one of these states).

Secondly, get chatting to a great corporate attorney. Email me if you need a Seattle reference. You need to get a deep understanding of how vulnerable you are and what levers you have to protect yourself and your business. Then (and I say this again) keep records of everything in the context of knowing what will help your situation.

This quote suggests that you are kicking ass at your business:

"We went through the status of the company, and at least from the outside it sounded good. In fact it sounded great: three major versions of the product shipped, multiple iterations and a few pivots under their belt, revenue was growing even faster than plan."

The key here is "...even faster than plan.". You and the board agreed to a plan and you over-delivered. It's important that you document your own performance - get hard evidence of the success story above.

Other than that, keep doing the great job that you clearly are doing and save the war chest you're accumulating for the crunch if it ever comes.
I don't know much in the way of 2D collision, but I did want to say that I played Pistol Slut a bit this morning, and besides having an awesome name, I really enjoyed it. Great work.
I was curious why Amazon let Heroku be acquired by Salesforce late last year. Now I know it's because they were already working on Beanstalk.
Learning Lisp the hard way
Having added $20b last yr, Apple’s cash growth suggests $100b next yr
I filed an abuse report with Amazon on Friday; I have received no acknowledgement.

We blocked all the EC2 IP ranges (much as I hated to do so; and did you know how big a chunk of the Internet that is?). They responded by re-routing through anonymizers, especially TOR. We could play whack-a-mole with that, but it's a manpower-intensive arms race.

File a DMCA complaint against them with Amazon

Can you explain to me how DMCA comes into this? I think that, although there's nothing specific in our T&C (yet) disallowing this, the fact that it's arguably at a DoS level might push this into criminal territory.
I've managed to arrange for one of my New Years' resolutions to be met: I'm working about 20 hours a week now. Let's see if I can keep it up for the year.
The Front End Engineering Spectrum: The Roles
I don't really think your snarky attitude is adding to the discussion, but, more than that, it's not even correct. The vast majority of replies here are decidedly anti facebook, and the ones that arent tend to be luke warm at best. Additionally, if you look at the front page over the last couple days, he popular facebook related articles have been very anti facebook.

I'm not trying to make any claims about face book's virtue (as a future facebook engineer, I doubt I would have much credibility anyway), but it is unfair to be so dismissive about people who might argue that it isn't completely awful, when they certainly aren't just part of hn groupthink (as you seem to have suggested.)
I agree with this, but would take it a step further: Jobs' influence on many people has been profound. I'd argue that his staying alive has increased the quality, if not longevity, of many lives.

I do not mean this to say that his only contribution has been great product direction, either. He drew a new picture of acceptable and standard corporate culture, an achievement which has likely changed the way that thousands of businesses operate and contribute to society.
A lot of the credit for the ideas behind backbone should properly go to Robert Kieffer (https://github.com/broofa), an old hand at building JS apps.
No, I used unity in the netbook edition in both 10.04 and 10.10. I switched when I heard it would become the default.
Well, it's like this. With invitations one receives 0.15€ of credit for every new registered user (similar to some other services, which reward you for bringing in new users). Marvin85 obviously tried to cash in by posting invite link. But I don't see anything terribly wrong with that.

There are no hidden marketing techniques and I am not aware that Marvin85 is in any way connected to our team.
If an Apple or Microsoft blogger finds themselves taking a more hardline stance than the FSF, it's easy to conclude that they're trolling/astroturfing.

However if we're talking "childish", then the "Plugins! I thought the point of HTML5 was to avoid plugins" argument wins by a mile. People, including Google, have been pushing HTML5 via various plugins, fallbacks and shims for a good while (e.g. Chrome Frame, Google Gears, Flash Vorbis decode, Java Theora decode etc.)
By far, the most gruesome example of this was the Salem Witch Trials, which lead to the deaths of 51 innocent people. This was a clear case of children sensing fear in adults and using it against them. The driving force of the murders (for they really were murders) was a few girls in their early teens. Past a certain point, the judge and some of the town elders almost certainly knew that the girls were lying, but none of the adults could afford to appear to be soft about confronting the Devil. Each adult needed to appear, to the other adults, as if they were taking a strong stand against Satan, and the young girls sensed this tension, and manipulated it in gruesome ways.
Is AMD’s new CPU/GPU chip an Atom killer?
It's beginning to look like a quartic function.
Music. Sweet music
Moral of this story: get a commitment from the VC team member you want to be on your board - don't get it shuffled off to someone else on their team who is just looking to prove what a hardass they are.

Or don't give up that board seat, but that's pretty much not viable once you take VC.
I am the founder of a purely Python based startup. We will be attending Pycon and most likely Startup Riot as well. Is there a way for us to apply to be part of Startup Row?
I think the coarse grain comparison of this site makes it pretty poor. Comparing the whole of one country to another is naive. Different areas of each country can have totally different living conditions. Also, your social class has a lot to do with your position in a country.
My wife and I submitted a proposal for an Innocentive challenge sponsored by the local science museum a while back. The task was to design the next great traveling exhibit for science museums, and we had fun writing our proposal. A few months later we received an email announcing the names of the winning teams, and that's all - no details on the winning proposals, no feedback on our submission. I understand that they can't give everyone customized feedback, but I was still left feeling like I got absolutely nothing from the experience - I have no idea what parts of my proposal needed improvement, no idea how to make my next proposal better. For a different kind of challenge (say I found a successful way to "convert lactic acid to acrylic acid" but my solution still wasn't chosen), I'd probably be angry about the lack of transparency. So yeah, that was probably the first and last time I'll try to solve one of their challenges.
Show HN [Again]: My Side Project, Thingist.
This feature makes me want reply to the comment at the top page. Even if my comment has nothing to do with the parent comment, at least people will read it.

I don't even hit the "more" button on the homepage to see older stories; there is no way I am going to hit the more comments.
Love = facebook accounts now.
The iPad really should have supported High Profile. No-one's going to encode a 3rd version for the iPad when everyone else jumped straight from Baseline to High, which means it's effectively Baseline.

Seems strange that the iPhone 4 got better specs so shortly after (much like the 256MB memory). I'm sure they'll fix it in the next rev though, which just increases the chance that rev. 1 devices will be served Baseline.

edit: I just checked and the iPhone's only 720p Main Profile too? I'm confused now, I was sure iPhone 4 went to High Profile.
Walk into a hospital - they're obligated to treat you. If you're poor, you can ignore the bills. (Or you can go to a public hospital and they likely won't bother if you fill out some forms first.)

This is simply incorrect. Hospitals are only obliged to treat emergencies. They will not treat anything else if they think you cannot pay them.
I've done some interesting applications with Backbone.js over the last 2 months or so (for anyone that uses uTorrent, here's one: http://apps.bittorrent.com/ucast/ucast.btapp all in about 800 lines of code, just unzip the btapp file if you'd like to see the source). After trying other things like SproutCore, Cappuccino or Evently, I'll never go back.

I actually ended up being surprised by how backbone changed what I do with javascript. With backbone, you can create views that are really just widgets. For example, if you have a list item, you can create a view specific to that list item. Then, all the events and state for that list item are encapsulated right there. No need to store state in the DOM, you can just fetch it from the model when it happens. This then allows you to bubble events up through the parent views to change the entire page's state. Because of the separation, you really end up having little pieces of javascript that only know about themselves and the whole picture ends up being considerably less fragile and easier to debug.

I'm also a big CouchDB fan. Since backbone models are just documents, the integration with CouchDB is very minimal and you get instant serialization of user state (it really is that easy, to pimp one of my projects: https://github.com/pyronicide/backbone.couchdb.js). There are no server handlers you need to write (hell, don't forget you don't even need to run a web server, Couch'll do that for you!) and you end up with less complexity overall.
Dude, he's unwell. Seriously, people "can" fall sick and when they do, they need good wishes! PHEW!!!
How old is Dr Chrono?
The webm spec is frozen, and all patents are irrevocably licensed. Webm is not 'controlled' by Google.
I'd identify them and then deny them.

To identify them, I'd use a few tricks. One would be to place invisible links on some of your pages. These could be empty anchor tags, or hidden by javascript so that normal users don't click on them. If someone clicks on them, they're probably a bot or something odd. Give them a particular cookie, or mark their IP address as problematic. Another way to identify them is to look at browsing behavior such as requests per minute, browser name, not fetching images, and the "other patterns in their requests" that you mention.

Denying them is probably easier. Put in an entry for their IP in iptables, or your routing table, or use an apache module to serve them something that doesn't require a lot of computing power. Deny them for some period of time, like a few minutes or hours.

You're right that you can offer to trade data with them directly. Build an API and ask them to use it. If it's easier for them, they'll do it. I'm not sure if this undermines your business or not without knowing more details.

If you don't know who the competitor is, put some bogus items on your site. Let them crawl them and put them on their site. Then, you can search Google for those oddly named items. Anyone who has them on their site has been gathering data from you.

This is an arms race. You can't really stop it, but you can make the desired behavior easier for them.
SlickGrid is excellent.

I didn't like how coupled everything seemed (model, Pagination, etc) [as of 6 months ago, so it may have changed]. I ended up rolling my own remote model, editors, and pagination stuff, but it ended working like a dream. By far the best tableview I've used in a project.

Cappuccino's widgets UI is gorgeous though.
We do have a CI server, and as you said it works well for catching failing tests. However, it requires that you commit and push your changes in order to test them, which means you are effectively publishing untested changes to your entire team. The same for any kind of distributed testing, unless you are using a shared volume to host your sandbox.

I'm running a Mac Pro with 8 cores, so there is a fair bit of parallelization I can do locally too. Unfortunately, the tests all depend on the database, and while I can certainly use tools like deep-test to spin up separate DB's for each worker, I've found that doing so adds a full 60 seconds to the test run. I fear that until we eliminate the database from (most of) our tests, super-fast runs will continue to elude us.

CI and distributed tests are good things, no question, but I'm still looking for ways to make it possible to run my tests locally in TDD-fashion. I'm far from out of ideas, it's just a matter of making time to experiment.
There's actually a gem for your edit: https://github.com/jasonm/parallel_specs

Then there's hydra: https://github.com/ngauthier/hydra

And the excellent presentation on speeding up your tests with hydra that I can't find. It was one of those showoff presentations on GitHub somewhere...
If you divide each area into four, recursively, then its a quad-tree and its a fairly standard partitioning scheme (in 3D, you would need to partition in 3D so each node generally has 8 children: an oct-tree): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadtree

I don't have time to read your approach right now, but I look forward to finding out how you solved the collision detection "problem" later :)
T-shirts For the Hacking Community
Thanks, Jacob! We're hoping to branch out into all aspects of "hacking." Christina had some great ideas involving grub - we've got enough of a network here in NYC to bring in some awesome people (we had a pair of LEGO execs come in from Denmark for this one) but we're hurting across the pond.

We're very interested in opening up the model (TEDx style) and will be publishing our "here's how we haphazardly put this together" tutorial in the next couple of weeks. Please drop all@breadpig.com a note if you're interested in hosting one of your own.
Few (subjective) thoughts about NoSQL database systems
At least it's possible to get a software update to the Youtube player on your iPhone. It's not like, say, changing a battery.
MySpace isn't dying because they gave up on competing; they're dying because they didn't compete fast enough.

MySpace was like the Titanic. Big, and thought to be unsinkable. They saw a Zuckerberg in the distance, but refused to change direction. They hit it head on, and began leaking users too fast to recover - they were sinking. How did they react? They built the Titanic 2.

But the brand's destroyed, and everyone is left with a bad taste in their mouth. No one's running to hop on the Titanic 2.
Yeah, the percentage statistics are worded kind of oddly. I tried spain, which has about 18% unemployment rate vs the US's 9%. It tells me I have a 94% greater chance of being unemployed in spain. It took me a couple seconds to get my head around the meaning of that.

It seems like a better wording might be something along the lines of "You're 2x more likely to be unemployed", or something to that extent.
"Gaming systems for personal gain is the hacker way, honestly"

This rings very true for me. And if 'personal gain' = 'extending life span' who the hell can criticise that?
I think people are getting a little tired of blog posts that follow this pattern:

1. Argh, I will finally join Facebook even though I hate it.

2. OMG, I cannot believe that Facebook does something a way that I don't like.

3. Facebook sucks, I am quitting. You should too, obviously.
Graphics chips with built-in WebM support are slated to ship this quarter. It's not hard to imagine that the 2012 iPhone hardware will get this ability for free, even if it's only a side effect of using the same graphics chips as Android devices.

Then it's just up to Apple whether to turn it on. Google appears to be laying the groundwork it can now so that the answer is more likely to be yes.

This will take a few years to play out.
It just shows how much that health (insurance) system is in need of repair.
I'm in the same boat; learning about Node and NPM. However, I am at an enpass with an error about 'isConfigurable' method on the Chaos library. Any clue about how to fix it?

node.js:63
throw e;
^
TypeError: Cannot call method 'isConfigurable' of undefined
at Function.seal (native)
at Object.<anonymous> (/Users/rnhurt/.node_libraries/.npm/chaos/0.1.6-pre/package/chaos.js:40:10)
at new <anonymous> (/Users/rnhurt/.node_libraries/.npm/chaos/0.1.6-pre/package/chaos.js:87:20)
at /Users/rnhurt/.node_libraries/.npm/chaos/0.1.6-pre/package/chaos.js:64:40
at /Users/rnhurt/.node_libraries/.npm/helpful/0.0.3/package/lib/login.js:205:23
at Object.<anonymous> (/Users/rnhurt/src/js/maptail/maptail.js:57:5)
at Module._compile (node.js:462:23)
at Module._loadScriptSync (node.js:469:10)
at Module.loadSync (node.js:338:12)
at Object.runMain (node.js:522:24)