skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having a Unix layer on top of Mach is very convenient from an application development point of view. This made the Unix userland able to run on the NeXT's OS we currently call OSX.

I am not sure about the relationship between NeXT's OS and OSF/1, but OSF/1 shared the BSD-on-Mach nature with it.
What you are doing is very cool. I once tried to teach my girlfriend's little brother (~13 years old) "how to make websites" but it didn't work out so well. Please keep us posted on how you approach the situation and how it goes.

I agree with atgm that having a "final product" which they will be able to write from scratch or tear apart. What I did was go to a page, view the source, and explain what each line meant. It got pretty boring after spending 15 minutes explaining what Doctype is and how browsers "do stuff" so I'd say leave that for later.
Here's my version: NO! You should always get something in return for your hard work.

Of course, in a few cases on there, you ARE getting something for your hard work (or repaying favors you already got), it's just not cold, hard cash.

Any trade that isn't in balance is bad for both sides. It may not be immediate, but it will be eventually.
I mostly agree with you, but I'm wondering what precisely you mean by 'hard-wired to be impulsive'.
It's bad for the business of programming because now customers expect to be able to find a free solution to every problem.

Here's the dirty little secret about B2B software:

It's not about the money.

It's about the risk.

I tell my customers that if they can find a free generic horizontal piece of software that provides them value without risk, then by all means, use it.

Then I ask them to consider questions like these:

- Is the website up?
- Is the fulfillment system up?
- Is the phone system up?
- Did we get that order?
- Did that order ship?
- Did the customer pay?
- Did the bank get the money?
- Did the material get received?
- Did we make payroll?
- Did we get the best price?
- Where are our revenues below plan?
- Where are our margins below plan?
- What are our numbers for the day? Week? Month? Quarter?

Then the killer question: "If we don't know the answer to any of the above because of our free software then who are you going to call?"

If you have a good answer to that question, then you may want to consider a free software alternative. Otherwise, paying for legitimate software and support is simply the price of doing business. The risk to your business and its stakeholders is simply not worth the couple of bucks saved on free software.
PCI compliance audits require at least v. 1.0.0 of OpenSSL.
Selling in the boom and then stopping and doing something else when the boom busts is, to me, evidence of having a knack for getting money.
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
...because how could counterfeiters possibly do their job when deprived of the ability to add lens-flare
Suheir Hammad: Poems of war, peace, women, power
interesting article. i have similar thoughts. Seedcamp team is awesome and visionary selecting finalists. but when it comes to selecting winners, they have voting, and only the minority would vote for a non-consumer web startup that they can not be confident that it would win, or for a team on a too early stage, while there are products that are almost ready. that what i think, i may be wrong.

in some situations, groupthinking can't help find the really big thing early.
I think the real problem you could face going open source, isn't just that someone will rip you off and sell it for money. It's that the person selling it for money can now afford to advertise and spam google, which means your free software is going to rock-bottom out of the search rankings and only a committed person will be able to find your free software.

Also I never got that bizarre entitlement that comes from free software users. I almost feel bad for asking about problems when it comes to free software, just because I know the effort that goes into it.
Interesting, I didn't know that.

Seems like a flaw in the PCI requirements to me, do they really demand the "latest" version instead of the stable, time-tested one?

It certainly can't be in the spirit of these audits to encourage people to move from Debian stable to a distro that's based on Debian unstable...
YC has actually become much later than it was originally, many companies going through YC already have a working prototype or even a fully launched product before they start on the YC program.
I think your position is much easier to understand when broadened beyond the software field to any creative endeavor: An artist or musician may choose not to pursue a career or specific genre, yet make reproductions available for free. This doesn't mean they would be comfortable with someone profiting from their work (or a plagiarized version of it). They may even take on a free commission or perform a free concert. In the end, it's a labor of love driven by the passion to create. In the arts, ego and control are merely contributing factors to individual expression, which is highly valued. It should be no surprise when this type of motivation appears in software development.
Seedcamp and YC follow different models, some startups get the mentoring of Seedcamp week without the funding and so aren't included in the list, but's it not clear they should be excluded from consideration (AdTaily and Zoombu are two startups which fall into this category and have since exited)
> I tell my customers that if they can find a free generic horizontal piece of software that provides them value without risk, then by all means, use it.

No software is risk-free, regardless of the licensing terms. One big risk is you'll find out, after weeks or months using the thing, that it doesn't do all that you want it to do, and getting it to do the rest is costly and time-consuming.

> Then the killer question: If the answer to any of the above is "no" because of our free software, "Who are you going to call?"

Literally millions of businesses do well using Linux, Apache, PHP, Perl, Python, Django, Ruby, Rails, MySQL, etc without having problems. (My answer to that question is "do a Google search on the problem and find the solution thast way).

> The risk to your business and its stakeholders is simply not worth the couple of bucks saved on free software.

If you want personal support for your software, you're going to pay a good deal more than $2 for it. And paid-for technical support is available for open source software too, if that's what you want.
EaselJS has a nice abstraction over canvas. Look on his charts (the source with the code to create it is very readable): http://easeljs.com/examples/barGraph.html
Ask HN: Feedback on my app, badg.ly, a free badge/achievement service
Android On Top
"US authorities had begun another round of domain name seizures, this time against sites connected with sports streaming."

I'll just assume the fact that this is Superbowl Weekend is purely coincidence here...
"Some minds are like concrete - thoroughly mixed and permanently set" - Benjamin Franklyn or Karl Marx or John Lennon (or insert any other name you like)

We're hoping to get code up onto the git today, maybe tomorrow. The guy who's volunteered to do it spent the evening at a party then the night at the New Cross library occupation. He's just gone to bed.

I'm sure you'll find something to moan about in the code when you see it - i read negativity towards the entire project from your very first paragraph.

When you trawl through the code you'll note that no personal identifiers are stored anywhere. We had to finish the proof of concept in a rush so you'll also see function stubs that do nothing, inconsistencies in APIs, poorly commented code and incredible inefficiencies. These flag some of the areas of future development. But you'll also note that the unfinished or inefficient bits are to do with user functionality. Anything to do with security is not compromised.

But I'm not sure any of this is really relevant. The key question is: how sensitive is the data?

Sure, we don't encrypt the SMS messages we send to old phones - if we did the users couldn't read them so it would be pointless sending them in the first place. But the content of those messages is innocent.

Likewise we don't encrypt tweets (in or out). What would be the point? If you lose the original then I'm sure our friends at Cheltenham will have a backup....

We can do nothing about the telcos using their geolocation features to track the whereabouts of phones. But that's really not a Sukey issue - cos the same issues apply to anyone using a mobile phone for any purpose at any dem. You could of course advocate people leave their own fones at home and buy a disposable and untraceable (yeah, right!) phone just for the dem. Good luck with that one.

You "continue to urge nobody to trust a protest tool until these concerns are properly addressed" - yet I'm still to see a concise description of what these purported concerns are. A cynical man might say: "I would urge nobody to take any notice of a self important pompous windbag who seems to want to obstruct something he clearly doesn't understand".

I've extended an invitation to you privately to come along to a hackathon and to help us. And I extend it again. This genuine and heartfelt invitation remains open - come along, understand what we're doing, add your experience and knowledge to the pot and help to shape the design. Get into a positive frame of mind and be a part of this.

Make something happen.

Gausie
asking a prototype helps to understand how the team can execute. as far as i understand, the point is that the costs of having a prototype have reduced dramatically with all opensource and cloud hostings, and that's why investors gave money for YC, TS and SC. (imho as usual)
I used to write free software, because I like programming. It was fun to write little utilities, and the fact that people actually used them as well was a bonus. Lots of times I would write software because I did not want to pay for software, so I wrote my own version.

Apple made it to easy for me to make money doing this, now I write iPhone apps, have just as much fun, and made quite a bit of money at one stage.
Those born deaf and not taught sign language might not learn a language to think in at all. http://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-languag...

I walked up to him and signed, "Hello. My name is Susan." He tried to copy that and did a sloppy rendition of "Hello, my name is Susan." Obviously he didn’t know what he was doing. It wasn’t language. And I was shocked. He looked Mayan and I thought, well, if he knew Mexican sign language, he wouldn’t try to copy. That’s not a normal thing to do, even if you don’t know the language.
Intentions aside, Cuil was presented as a "Google killer" to orders of more people than know about DDG. But higher level, I don't think DDG warrants their engagement at all. There are much bigger fish to fry, so-to-speak, and yet I don't see them on all the higher profile search engine stories out there across the Internet.
Yes, but it is not spent on DDG. We live off my wife's salary.
At the risk of becoming too meta, I'd like to ask anybody who is about to bookmark this "for later" to consider what would happen (viz. procrastination) if you didn't.
It occurs to me that governments and computer programs are not that different. Both suffer immensely from code rot.
You bought this you got that you have the technical skills.. but do you have a plan? do you have a design on paper or whiteboard which you can implement?

Here's something I did to get past my own wall two months ago. I told myself to shut up, set aside some time each day (after I started working it was a lot easier. The only time I had was after work hours till 10 30 in the night) and then follow these steps.

1) make sure you are fresh, preferably having had shower
2) phones, distractable media all shut off and put away. block everything except your resources on the net if you have to
3) put down what you are going to do either on a small A4 size like whiteboard, or an A4 drawing paper (blank white is best to focus)
When putting down the stuff do it this way
a) write down the features you want to implement in your current development cycle
b) draw up the screen designs if you need to
c) think through the logic and put down what's needed.

Get to Work!

Methodologies are there for a reason. They do actually work. Btw, before starting. Make sure you have a clean overall view of the project as well. Not just the 'pitch'. Put down your main use cases and the features for each use case there (two levels max you can elaborate during the main cycles).

What's wrong with you is not lack of motivation. It's a lack of focus. I've dealt with it when learning languages too. I'd spend hours reading the material and come away with nothing. You need to know what you will achieve and that within a practical time frame. If you are having a really bad case of not being able to focus, I suggest a maximum time frame of two days. I currently work on a functionality a week/fortnight basis.

Good luck :)
JQuery constructor pattern
Ask HN: Are avatars so important?
Hi folks,

me and my friend always asked us, how important avatars are on the websites where people participate in discussions. Nowadays all the forums around uses avatars, all the IM clients uses avatars, skype and so on. Yes, even stackoverflow uses them. So, it seems, that everywhere, where people tend to communicate or maybe interact with each other, avatars are used.
(HN doesn't count here, because it goes a really really sparse design paradigm)

However, I also know people which hates them. In some case this is also a good point, since avatars could break the design experience of a website: imagine a pink pig as an avatar on some more serious site, e.g. like stackoverflow.
In my case I often just ignore them, however, I found my self putting an avatar representing me on a lot of sites and im-clients.

So, what do you think: How is it important for a website to provide avatars support to their users, if the website is going main stream?
What is a benefit of this? Does it increase 'user come-back' ratio? Or is it just a question of: "Everybody uses them, so let us also use them"?

thanks in advance
Isn't the mobile version still a paid application?
Starting android application development
Good grief, did you just advise someone you've never met to take a shower?
That doesn’t make any sense, does it?

They don’t have to market it, why not just make it available everywhere? I’m not in principle opposed to the App Store but this is one of those stupid things about it. The cool thing about the web is that by default, everything is available everywhere and it is hard and not foolproof to make something not available everywhere. I can read nytimes.com in Germany despite clearly not being part of the New York Time’s target group.

What reason could there possibly be for not making The Daily available everywhere? Sure, hardly anyone will buy it outside of the US but at least Apple is footing all the bandwidth costs and making it available everywhere must be a matter of clicking some checkbox. Wired and Popular Science are, for example, both available in the German App Store. (Not that I would ever want to buy The Daily but this is just so stupid.)
What are Lagrange points?
Draw a box. Write something in the box. Draw an arrow.

There. You're using UML.

Yes, the guys who spec out UML -- and many of the practitioners -- think of it as a do-all, end-all language of goodness and OOP.

But read your quote again. It's a visual language. A purpose of a language is to communicate. Who are you communicating with? Some folks think you're communicating with the computer itself, and their UML looks that way. But the language communicates to other people. You can be as loose or as detailed as you like, as long as you are communicating. The language spec simply provides you a range of depth in formality to use depending on your circumstances.

I teach this, I use this, and I've coded both OOP and FP for years. I think I know what the hell I'm talking about. Yes, according to the authors it can be used with all major OO systems, but that's a far cry from meaning the two are inseparable. It can also be used with railroad design, or industrial lighting systems.

I get really tired of dogmatism in programming. The idea that you can quote an authority as somebody who somehow controls the everyday practical uses of a thing. It's almost like we think of standards bodies as the programmers and people as the little machines that run the standards. UML is a tool. Pick it up. Use it. Understand what the tool is used for -- in a practical sense, not in a technical one. The definition of the tool is in the hands of the wielder, not some standards group. They just write specs. No one tool can do everything, and the directions that came with the tool were probably written by folks who see the entire world in terms of their tool.

If you're not designing your functional structures in some fashion -- including just in your head -- then I don't want to be maintaining your code. Whether or not you draw pretty pictures to do that or not is only important if you need to communicate that design to somebody else or sort it out in your head. And that's not even getting into all the other uses of UML -- component modeling, network diagramming, etc -- that have nothing at all to do with programming. If you think of UML artifacts as directly relating to OOP, go talk to a business domain modeler who uses UML, or a network analyst, or a BA.

It's a modeling language, not a coding language. You use it when you need to model. Modeling can help you in all kinds of situations. Or not. Draw a box. The rest of the discussion is around whether you need to draw the box or not, and it's so dependent on particular situations it's not germane to this conversation. Simple as that.
Ask HN: What is a startup?
On "How to make wealth" [1], pg defines A startup is a small company that takes on a hard technical problem

Eric Ries' definition is: A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty

And Steven Blank's [3] definition is: A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model

With these different definitions, I ask: which definition of a startup, NOT limited to these 3, most accurately reflects, in your opinion, what a startup is?

Links:

[1] http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

[2] http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2010/06/what-is-startup.html

[3] http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-principles/
There also wasn't a lot of time before the freeze--- OpenSSL 1.0.0 was released on March 29, and the Debian "Squeeze" freeze was August 6. Dropping in a new version of OpenSSL four months before the freeze wasn't considered prudent. Even if OpenSSL itself could be tested in that time and considered rock-solid (probably possible), a lot of different packages depend on / link with OpenSSL, and linking them with a new version might expose subtle bugs or incompatibilities in those apps, which you'd want some time to notice/debug/fix, especially since it might require waiting on upstream developers to debug/fix things in their apps.

Post-release, OpenSSL 1.0.0 will now be migrated to unstable, and then any problems that causes or exposes can be found and fixed on a more generous schedule.
I think the issue is similar with bilingual people. Since I started speaking English, my thoughts regularly switch from one language to another, especially when I can't remember the word I want in that language. It's also a great exercise during the learning process.

But what caught my attention in the article was the link between language and self-awareness. I think it makes sense: the more complex ideas you can convey to other people, the more complex ideas you can convey to yourself too.

Maybe that's what make us different from the other animals?
Your opinion on findero.us please
Hello All,
I am working on a new location based short QnA website: www.findero.us and have put up a minimal functionality web page which uses HTML5 geolocation feature to render the basic question/answer model best viewed in Chrome/Firefox).

The main features of findero.us are:

1. People can follow questions.

2. People can follow places they are interested in.

3. Questions are associated with intents. So each question can be categorized with intents such as shopping, travel, food, etc. These are not customizable right now.

4. All the questions/replies are anonymous.

5. Each question/answer has a character limit to make it short, crisp and to the point.

I would really appreciate your opinion and inputs on findero.us before I go ahead making it a fully functional website and develop a mobile application.
Those of you who want to try out the website, you will need the exclusivity code to get to the login page. The code is "l5ckey4HBN*JEX" without the
quotes.

Once again, I would really be grateful if you could throw me some ideas/suggestions.

Thanks
Vikrant Ramteke
We also fall into this category. We get all the benefits of being a Seedcamp winner but without the funding.
2 yrs is a massive amt of time for something like this. I built and deployed my first web app (which had greater complexity than this one...) in 3 weeks starting from close to zero knowledge. All it took was determination and the willingness to work around the clock for a brief period of time. I gained a huge amount in that short span so my advice to others would be to stop talking about it and just do it.
One thing that jumped out at me here is the 'many irons in the fire' aspect of hustling. This seems to go against the grain of 'focus, focus, focus' to which I think many of us ascribe, or at least aspire.

For example, YC is supposed to be about entrepreneurs not ideas... I wonder what YC would look like if accepted teams were told to start pushing on their three best ideas simultaneously?
It depends on the level of abstraction and the view of the system that should be described. A model of the structure of a system with components, subcomponents and their relationship with each other does not include any information about the actual implementation of the components and the programming paradigm being used.
Also, a data model of the business domain is not concerned with any technical detail such as the components or subcomponents the system. You can model all these artifacts using UML.

Of course, using an UML class diagram for a detailed design describing the implementation of a component does not make sense when using functional programming.
I think it's a great resume. Does the job quickly: Do I want to schedule an interview with him/her y/n? y
Cracking the Male Code of Office Behavior
The article represents US social science at it's worse - trying to map mental and psychological states onto purely skinnerian behaviorist model. In doing so, it ignores vast amounts of non-conforming data such as homosexuality and the courtship of post-menopausal women.

To the degree one can discount women having desires, perhaps the models may apply to human mating behavior. But women select men for the purposes of sexual gratification, social status, basic companionship, and many other reasons -none of which are centered around gift giving.

Despite model underlying the paper assuming a such a passive role for women in mating, it also assumes a model of courtship in which women have a far more active role than they have historically had. Even today, arranged marriage is not uncommon in many cultures and even within the United States, familial and religious obligations can effectively determine the outcome of courtship in a similar manner.
Interestingly enough, yesterday (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2183183) there was a Show-HN for a website designed to perform textual analysis and render the top few most-relevant sentences:

http://www.bookshrink.com/

I tried it on this article, and it was neat, but I realized that part of the reason this is so hard to skim is because of the information density in each sentence.

Try bookshrink on it and you'll see what I mean after trying to read its output.