skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Spot on.

The whole "Fraudclosure" thing is a bit of a red herring. Yes, banks should be made to pay for their negligence in complying with basic mortgage laws, but does their negligence change the fact that the occupants of those homes have not and cannot pay their mortgages? The mortgages are delinquent, no matter who the actual owner of the note is. All the controversy has done is slow down a process that will eventually happen either way.

TBTF needs to go. Many banks, including big boys like JP Morgan and Bank of America, probably need to be recognized as insolvent despite the bailout money they took. The foreclosure mess in its own way probably only slows this down by continuing the cloud the status of the properties in question.
This is a bit of a mis-title, but has been Don Normans theory for a long time.

People think that attractive things work better != Attractive things work better.

I believe this is a huge part of Apple's success (and Donald Norman was head of design at apple for a time). People think that Apple products work better because the products look like they work better.
Isn't the poor refresh rate one of the disadvantages of e-ink displays? And isn't the long battery life a function of use (ie. e-ink displays only use significant power when refreshing)? Writing on displays also has texture and resolution issues that can't be ignored: it needs to look and feel like a paper drawing.

Lots of hard questions, but if they pulled it off, I'll be first in line.
>Interestingly, whereas open-source code expands the market (and rates) for programmers

Has this been proven?
On the road map
What Is Influence?
Hi I'm selling a productivity boosting technology called "internet blackout", it will improve your company's output by about 3-4 fold while this technology is turned on.
Exclusive Interview: Rule.fm Co-Founders, Patrick Carmitchel and Mark Nielsen
Is this a joke or is this really just a legal pad for $99? (Serious question.)
Reminds me of bloxor in the early days of feed readers, good ol' days
Actually, we are not based out of valley/US and finding the right kind of lawyer in our region for such a situation may be hard.
This seems absolutely perfect for note taking during lectures
Right now I either:

Use a pad of paper and lose all my notes over time
or
Use my laptop and cringe every time the professor uses a symbol I can't easily type

This seems perfect
Thank you for following up on this! I read the original thread and pondered all the crazy details. I want to apologize for all the flak you're catching about minute details, of which most are meaningless, and wish you luck in your current and future endeavors. Not sure why the trolls are out in force today, but you've managed to do something many startups fail to: produce revenue.
World's Most Powerful Desktop Supercomputer
I said it's a sign, that there's a correlation, not that one causes the other. It's one of the questions that doctors will ask when diagnosing a sleep disorder, there are others. By itself, it's meaningless. It might just mean you've been in the military.

If you want to impress people by pulling out big words, at least pull them out in appropriate situations.
Handoff - great way to push content from your browser to your iOS device
Wow this is pretty, this is the tablet I actually want to use, the price is just the icing on the cake!
So it somehow eluded them that most of the searches done anywhere are done on Google? I don't buy it. If you have a "search signal" it's going to be effectively a "Google signal," and they aren't being honest if they contend otherwise.
I am a college student who is extremely interested in startups and would like to work at one when I graduate. Further on down the line, I would like to start one as well.
Here's the real reason: this dev is an jerk who thinks postgres users get too much sleep.

My experience on 8.4, within the last 3 years: a query that is run hundreds of times per second with an average run time in milliseconds and a max query time of .3 seconds suddenly starts taking 100 to 1000 times as long to run. Six hours of debugging later starting at 3 in the morning when systems started failing, we figured out that some magic in the query planner had tripped over and changed the query plan to something that is at least two orders of magnitude worse. No indices have changed. No schemas have changed. Data grows by maybe 30k rows per day which is very reasonable given table sizes and the 128GB of ram dedicated to pg.

Of course, there's no way to specify the query plan. Instead, we ended up fucking with configs until the query plan swapped back.

That's why people like locking query plans. Not necessarily to control the best case, but to control the average / worst case.
The bottom line here is if your site suddenly goes down because PostgreSQL changed its query plan in the middle of the night, the answer PostgreSQL has for you is "sorry, you're stupid and now you are fucked." Until you can decipher what exactly is happening and make an appropriate fix, which can take days or weeks, your site is effectively dead.

Nobody disagrees with the noble goal of building the best query planner, or thinks that index hints are anything less than a hack for dire siutations. Where we disagree is if it's OK for the sites we're responsible for to go down at the whim of the query planner. PostgreSQL's decision to not provide hints tells me they care more about the purity of their query execution engine than the applications that rely upon it.
Sorry, I didn't get that from the article. I use nginx to do all my redirects to https if someone changes an https link to http. But, that means keeping the nginx config up-to-date.
Yes, hashed with a salt, as in sha1(password+salt). Of course, then they start hunting for your code/config file/whatever, to find the salt; but it's an extra barrier.
Here we go:

Connecting with more and more services is becoming do or die for new products. There's no point in creating the next big thing and then letting it starve to death in a locked closet. But the headaches involved with Facebook's
documentation, LinkedIn's XML, and pretty much every part of Google's APIs are hobbling the progress of the social web.

And then there's rate limits, constantly changing methods, and the huge inefficiency of having to write up calls for
each service separately to grab the same type of data. That's why everyone is saying "I'll connect to Facebook, and maybe Twitter, but that's it!"

The Windsoc API is a unified social API designed and built to handle getting data, posting data, and even sharing data
between two third-party services. Developers use their own keys and oauth callbacks, but Windsoc distributes the API
calls between apps. Windsoc calls are consistent, discoverable, and based on community standards. The next Facebook, the next Groupon, and the next Flickr will all be built to run on top of the services that came before. Windsoc provides the tools to make it happen.

We'll be ready to launch both the Windsoc API and the Windsoc Social Client (our showcase of API functionality at http://www.windsoc.co/) in time for Launch.

Coming another month from now is BetaRev, the first complete Beta Launch and Analytics tool, built using the Windsoc Social API.
Interview w/ Rule.fm Co-Founders, Patrick Carmitchel & Mark Nielsen
Given that Bing clearly uses the clickstream to influence its results pages, at what point to SEO folks run farms of machines in a network which resolve 'google.com' to a process that returns a fixed set of results for a given query?

Imagine this scenario, I create 10,000 VM instances of windows running IE8 with the Bing toolbar. I create a local host to 'stand in' for Google such that it emulates the actual Google site (one could even used scraped Google content) and for my 'target' query it returns my spammy results, and then my VM machine clicks on one of the spammy links.

It seems that Google's sting worked because their queries had small return rates, but with some resources it would seem a viable way to inject SEO love right into the bloodstream of Bing's ranking algorithm. As I see it, a whole new front just opened up for spammers.

--Chuck
Need Tech Reviewers For A Proposed Book On Archaeopteryx
You can also use OpenNIC and get .geek, .free, .bbs, .parody, .oss, .indy, .fur, .ing, .micro, .dyn and .gopher domains.

http://www.opennicproject.org/
Making the first offer can have a strong anchoring effect on the product's perceived value (to both parties).

Here's a good article on general negotiation from HBS: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/4302.html
I used to have do something similar (on a whiteboard, though) whenever I needed to write some slightly complicated concurrency code (I'm a systems developer). However, after years of writing multi-threaded and synchronization code, I've learned that the trick is to.... abstract (?) the representation in your head.

If you try to "flatten out" the concurrency, it'll be this HUGE representation that'll never fit in your skull. The trick is to think in multiple dimensions instead of flattening it out. Sort of queue the other threads in the back of your head, and pretend you're the OS. Whenever you reach a line of code for the current thread you're "imagining/debugging in your head", loop over the other consumers/producers in your model and ask yourself "what happens to this guy at this moment, or what happens if this guy was doing x, y, or z?"

Basically, don't hold the structure, hold the events. Expand the other objects as needed in your head, then stash them away. Don't try to hold them all in there, because they'll never fit.

Incidentally, since adapting to this I many times still get the urge to pick up a pen or marker and scribble down the concurrency model - except 2 seconds later I give up because it's so hard to efficiently represent multi-threaded environments/code in 2d. And that's the same difficulty you have trying to jam that representation in your head.

Remember the description of the components, not the components themselves, I guess. I hope this isn't as confusing as I fear I've made it out to be!
I've been looking for a web based accounting solution ... but I can't tell from your site what features you actually have. Do you support multiple currencies, budgets?

How do you intend to monetize it with an 'always free' model?
Wondering how many people use the consolidators who promise to manage down your debt by acting as midddlemen between you and collectors? What advantages (if any) does Ready for Zero offer over this method?

It took me 11 years to pay off 2 credit cards, and I'm still petrified to go into CC debt again. Will Ready for Zero also eventually offer planning tools for saving up for a big ticket item like a new MacBook Air so that I don't have to pull out a CC to purchase it?
Bad experience? Well, if you find the right IB, it can make all the difference. (from my experience)
GSI's CFO, Michael R. Conn, to present at Goldman Sachs Tech & Internet Conf
There are some other networks around: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_network_42
In my mind, this proves how important it is to hire people that can hit the high notes

The Creative Zen team could spend years refining their
ugly iPod knockoffs and never produce as beautiful,
satisfying, and elegant a player as the Apple iPod. And
they're not going to make a dent in Apple's market share
because the magical design talent is just not there.
They don't have it.

The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that
the top talent hits all the time. The number of divas
who can hit the f6 in Mozart's Queen of the Night is
vanishingly small, and you just can't perform The Queen
of the Night without that famous f6.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html
Well be sure to post when you finish the iPhone version, I'll be first in line to buy it :).

Out of curiosity, will you be able to activate the alarm even if I don't have the app "open"?
Written in 2006.

IronPython was quite young at the time (1.0 only made it out in November of that year). As far as I can remember, IronRuby didn't even exist at the time, and the CLR had no dynamic language support.

So he's probably correct in that the .NET developer community hadn't yet significantly embraced dynamic languages on the platform.
I think this has a LOT of potential. As a web developer, it would help me make quick wireframes and share it immediately with my client. This is priceless.
I'm recommending that you be open and honest with your revenues as they fall into the context of a potential sale. Once you've been able to pull all of the information together (year over year revenues, adoption rates as compared to the total market, etc.) together and undergo an audit for the true value of the business, you'll be in a better position to negotiate a sale to one or more parties.

If your suitor doesn't come right out with a great offer and their own NDA accompanying it, which should go hand in hand, I wouldn't recommend entering any type of secrecy agreement with them and open up a potential sale to other suitors, if they do exist. If this big company you speak of will not prove to you that they're serious at the outset, it's probably just a cursory fishing expedition to begin to assess the market and you'd just be a starting point, so yes, I'd keep my pants on until you know they're serious. After all, they're approaching you. Let them do the talking for awhile.

But the best piece of advice which is echoing in the thread is to lawyer-up asap, and don't go buying that new piece of shiny consumerism just yet.
Currently a startup employee who plans to eventually graduate to startup founder.
Sure, please do. It would be helpful to exchange ideas.
I would wager most of the people commenting don't work in search and how to use datamining to improve search. I think it is useful to see the perspective of someone that actually thinks long and hard about building these types of systems before commenting on whether it is fair or innovative or just plain stealing.
http://hunch.net/?p=1660
Nokia suffers from the mythical man-month. They've only recently discovered that throwing 6,000 engineers at Symbian didn't make it better.
Ask HN: Challenge me
Apologies again for posting from a throwaway, but my current employer knows my username.

From the responses in my previous thread [1] I think I might be underselling myself a little. Problem is, I want a job but I don't really know if I'm a good coder or not, or how strong my various skills are. All I know is, either I am arrogant and delusional or every professional coworker I've had is a much worse coder than I am.

I'm not really looking to reach hundreds of people, I'm just hoping there's one or two hackers out there who could help me "calibrate" my skill level, so to speak.

I guess I should give an overview of what I know so people know what to test... I have a CS degree, I know my algorithms and complexity theory fairly well, and have good knowledge of computer graphics and cryptography. I also know a little AI, basic classifiers and a little GAs.

On the practical front, I'm great at Java, good at PHP, ok at C. My C++ knowledge is very limited, and I don't have much functional programming experience. I have some experience in web dev, and I have knowledge of pretty much the entire stack there. I could build a decent PHP site top to bottom, setting up the webserver (Linux or FreeBSD), designing the database, coding it up, HTML and CSS (I kick ass at front-end, except at JS), caching (memcache(d) and a reverse proxy). At least, I think I can. But I'm fully aware of the Dunning-Kruger Effect [2], and so that's where you come in to help me know my place.

I realise it could potentially be a big time investment if one person goes through all this, I wish I had the means to compensate you fairly for your time, but perhaps I could offer a small gift as a token of my appreciation.

Thank you.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2177370
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
I came in here because I wanted to comment that I think that this has a lot of potential, alas I'm not the first one to quip that. Given how many people already wrote that they like the idea or could imagine working on such a project I'd wager that there's huge growth ahead. It would be incredibly awesome if this project would gain lots of traction.

Mozilla Labs has something vaguely similar (albeit only for messages) called 'Raindrop' (http://mozillalabs.com/raindrop). I played around with that when it came out but didn't like it too much.
If it actually did what it says well, $99 would be a reasonable price.
I love this idea, but I've been getting "We're sorry, our server is under heavy load. Please try again." during the verify phase for the last few days.
Ah, true... what I said makes no sense. Thanks.
Isn't live really used in instances where an element is being added to the DOM after the page has loaded? with delegate, it is attempting to check an event click on an element which does not exist in the DOM.

I'm far from a Javascript expert, but it seems to me that .live is just so much easier to understand conceptually. jQuery is always looking at the DOM.
Errr, thats incredible.
Employees Rank Fortune's Best Companies to Work For
I'd make two points:

(1) I find handwriting a very very efficient way to take notes. I choose that over typing.

(2) Its not just about writing - sketching, wireframes, doodles, ideas, diagrams in a format I can email and save - very useful to me
From what I read they are partially doing it actually, I mentioned that the services were too overpriced, and this is cheap, and that backups, high availability with replication and automatic failover, redis cluster management, should be the interesting parts of this kind of offering.

It seems like they have plans to do part of this stuff for the small price they as: "without the hassle of setting up backups, monitoring and replication", but I think ip failover is an important option that should be added eventually.

That is, as a user of a managed instance I want a master <-> slave setup that is totally transparent to me, I just know I payed for this optional service, and that if something goes wrong with my master I'll receive an email message with a warning and automatically the IP address (or all my requests at an higher level) is routed to a different instance (a slave elected to master).
I wrote a preemptive multitasking one for an AVR in about the same amount of code :-)
As a commenter mentioned above, the weak point here is the fact that you only enforce HTTPS after the user has logged in. Since your login page is served insecurely, an active attacker could modify it to steal passwords. A well known tool to do this is SSLStrip: http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslstrip/

The Tunisian government recently took advantage of Facebook's insecure login page to steal passwords for _everyone in the country_:
http://blog.jgc.org/2011/01/code-injected-to-steal-passwords...

Protocol-relative URLs may be useful while migrating to HTTPS, but should not be needed long-term. All content should only be served securely.

Once a site is fully functional over HTTPS, adding the HSTS header is an important last step to further mitigate active attacks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Strict_Transport_Security
Keep talking, but don't let them distract you from the main work of building the business.

If you really want to have an exit then you need others involved as well - other buyers and smart experienced people to help with valuation and legals.

DEcide what you are worth - and use gut feel (your number) and someone that can give you a quick and dirty valuation. If you actually have revenue or even profit then this stuff is easier, but mainly it's doe by comparing you to other deals.

Reach out to other likely buyers and let them know that these guys (named or not) are sniffing around.
The code words used by big companies are that your are 'in play' and you want to court the decent buyers before creating an auction situation.

Control the process yourself once you have the buyers lines up. Give them consistent information, deadlines for tabled offers and then start playing them off against each other. YOu'll get a great understanding of how they operate and can choose the company with the best money AND fit.

Before you share anything too private then do make them sign an NDA - you should have a stock one, and the negotiation process to get them to sign will be a good telltale.

Oh- and the unsolicited offerer should always come to see you - at least at first. No acquirer is too important to come to see you.
From the article (about spell correction):

> Well, above is the same situation where Bing gets a misspelled word right — a link to a definition of the correctly spelled word at the top of the list. But it’s very unlikely it figured this out from Google, given that for the misspelling, Google doesn’t auto-correct the word nor provide the same answer.

Perhaps because people first click on the spell correction and then on the result - so maybe they don't yet copy also the spell correction, only the results. I think this is even stronger that they copy the results, not weaker.
I think you'll find you have the wrong demographic here on HN. You need a bunch of 14 year old girls to get this one to go viral. Of course, you've got a great viral loop if you can actually get it going.
Gamers Whiny Crybabies Because Game Developers Suck at Games
Why is that an excuse for bad copy? If you're marketing it to the Angloverse, hire a fluent-English copywriter.

Besides, it's a wall of text. That's bad no matter the quality of the writing.
"it needs to look and feel like a paper drawing"

Why?
>I'd use vim on my Nexus One if it weren't such a damned hassle to hit Esc and some of the other special keys

I run emacs on my N810 (Nokia tablet). I haven't yet seen another device with a good enough keyboard, though. The N810 has Esc and Control, and has () and <> on the keys, and I've configured the terminal for one-touch {}, [], and |.
...or in DEMO terms, you can buy a table every year for the next 12 years at LAUNCH (if you don't win one on HN).

Or you can go to DEMO this year. :->
Advice for AI aspirations?
I'm an undergrad in Computer Engineering, and I find the fields of AI, Machine Learning, and HCI EXTREMELY interesting.

Do you have any advice for important skills or things to learn, people to talk to, or things to read that would better prepare me for this field? Any advice is welcome.
Startups, Think Again: Writing Code Is Not Your Biggest Challenge
I quit linkedin when, while trying to send a single person an invite, it sent one to my entire gmail address book. Since I didn't recall ever giving it my address book, and it was a seemingly almost purposely bad UI design that ended up with me spamming my friends and family, I promptly quit, in the middle of a job search nonetheless. There's just something about these worlds that seems unreal, or a slight version of dishonest.

Never have joined facebook and time has made me happier with that decision every single day.
Inbetween your second set of quotation marks.
Why this rather than Camlistore? Are there major differences in their use cases? I really want to write a "platform" on top of either Camlistore or Locker.
I was going to submit a comment about how poorly written the article is. Instead I will just mention that this has always been one of Apple's best qualities. They have managed to stay lean and capitalize on the inability of their competitors to do the same.