skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Private financing for computer startups is nonexistent.

Really? I've never had problem with this. Nor have I felt the tax system has disincentivized my income (which is well into the top bracket.)
>XHTML? RDF? FOAF? &c... huge successes

You're kidding, right?
Ever since CALEA it should have been obvious to anyone where we were headed. Only-the-fly remote monitoring capability in of all major telecoms, that the feds can turn on surreptitiously? Right, I'm sure they will only use it when they've filled out all the proper forms.
McAfee's Top Five Exploits and Scams of the Decade
I accept that's what they would claim to be doing, but I don't accept that's what they were actually doing. Not really.

You know how some people start startups and spend their time registering a company and designing a logo and imagining features and so on? Because they think that's what starting a business is, what it should be? But that's not how to actually start a successful business, building something which people value and then getting people to use it is how to actually start a successful business.
If you (re)define a word to be sufficiently broad, it's particularly difficult to find positive aspects to it.
Fair enough, but my anecdotal evidence suggests broadband in the US is nothing to be proud of by any means.
creepy that it's down now.

cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZDGnKBh...
Also seeing this. Getting "connection reset" errors over HTTP and HTTPS.
MPC-HC + RealAlternative can play RealMedia files that VLC (and MPlayer) can't. But this is the best option (IMHO): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2156494
Top Cyberlaw Developments of 2010, Plus a 2010 Year-in-Review
Someone lacks a sense of humor...
I completely agree on that point.
I've worked remotely for 10 years. 5 different startups.

Its had its ups and downs, but its working better now that ever. We're using an always-on collaborative tool that removes all the friction: Sococo.com

Our project has taken 3 years and involved Engineers/managers in 4 states. We've interacted daily and in a ad-hoc manner. Now we're doing Agile development to some degree, and thats working too.

The article mentions Skype etc. We're way beyond that. Any conclusions may be stale.
Isn't it likely that the F16s are up for reconnaissance? Any time there's a touch of trouble here (in Belfast), there's invariably several helicopters over head. Nowadays these are normally small police helicopters, but up until a few years ago heavier military helicopters were common. I imagine that a plane would be preferable in a bigger city such as Cairo, especially if the protests are spread out.
I've never seen the EFF down. Smells fishy to me. I hope it's not a case of foul play though and just massive traffic.
Bloody good on Norway. Now if you want Norwegian taxes or the Norwegian government, move to Norway. I'll take the American moral view on taxation, and fight taxation tooth-and-nail until I die, regardless of the pragmatics of it. It's about choice, and freedom, not the actual dollars and cents.

Come up with a scheme that moves functions currently executed by the government into a privately run, voluntary collective, and chances are I'd join it, participate, and pay as much as - or more than - I do now. But if you use the hammer of government force to mandate participation, I - for one - will never accept it as just.
It has not 'gone the way of hitchhiking' unless it has been made illegal, like hitchhiking.
How are those mutually exclusive?
That'll be great until you drop your phone in a river or the battery dies.
Of course Norway's way of doing things could work in the United States - if the typical American had the underlying culture, beliefs, and attitudes of the typical Norwegian.

Since they don't, and cultural change is the sort of thing that happens incrementally over a generation or more, there's no plan of action to be gained from such articles - they're valuable because they teach us a bit about other cultures, but trying to use them to make political points is silly.
The ability to link an individual's financial data and purchasing history directly to their a complete history of their internet use would appear to be the one ring to rule them all in terms of advertising and data mining.

I agree there is nothing that necessitates a phone based authentication system requiring vast amounts of PII. However, there are strong incentives toward collecting it and both companies have a history of doing so whenever possible.
The reason we're having this debate is because twisted pair easily does 20MBit these days.

Easily? Hardly. Over an absurdly short distance from the switching station, with perfect copper, as a tech trial sure. In the real world most ADSL users find that their experience is nowhere near that.

ADSL sucks. ADSL has always sucked. It is a dead technology that is constantly simply being replaced.

We're having this discussion because Bell, due to their ILEC status, was forced into agreements that favored some businesses that pandered to, essentially, the "problem users" who were kicked off every other network. Teksavvy didn't go to ADSL because it's such a great technology. They went to it because the CRTC cleared a sweetheart deal for them.
>> You've already surrendered vast amounts of data to Visa, Amazon, Google, Apple, NetFlix, etc.

Do you know 'him'?
Co-location saved a big project at a crucial point, after I had done my best to inject a wrench into the project.

A few years ago, I raised some concerns about the hacks we were doing at the end of a sprint review session. As part of the innocent "does anyone have anything else to say". This completely derailed everyone and the senior product management was surprised. This was about 60% into a 1.0 product. As a result, our scrum master and tech lead flew the other two members of our team who were remote in - and we had intense/design/coding sessions in a conference room for a very long week. We were able to address all of the hacks and get on the right track going forward. With my unsolicited comment, I was able to surface a lot of what was being unsaid (remember, techies at times of stress can tend to clam up). By co-locating the entire team for one week (on very short notice - travel arrangements were made the next day), our tech lead was able to address the problem straight on and bond our team stronger.

I can personally attest that my best coding sessions have all been pairing in person. Face to face is still the best collaboration mechanism out there. Even the best Campfire session is just a transcript of the human drama.
Ask HN: Is VC entering a bubble?
With such low interest rates in traditional investments, do you think startups and venture capital investments are becoming a bubble? Why or why not?
> Having the draft did not keep us out of Vietnam

IIRC, the wealthy were able to stay out of Vietnam by going to college. Perhaps if the children of the influential were drafted as well, things might be different. Then again, knowing this country, any law reinstating the draft would not be complete without a loophole for the wealthy.
LMAO ... I was so hoping he'd use the word "pivot" :-p
In the case of Forkly, the benefit offered in exchange for the email is being on a "priority access list". That may be perfectly adequate in many cases, but I would simply build in the flexibility to allow each startup to define the number of people needed to sign up as well as the benefit for doing so.
Landing a Job at 9 Hot Startups
Norwegian examples simply aren't applicable to the rest of the world. Here in the UK we are often compared to Norway, since we are both North Sea oil countries. Well, Norway makes 20x the oil revenue per head of the population than we do. That covers up a an awful lot. We don't have the luxury of economic inefficiencies that Norway can get away with.
IMHO the only issue with OpenID in regard to its adoption is how it is presented to the user. He/she shouldn't have to deal with URLs or even the term 'OpenID'. Unfortunately the current UIs & the whole UX are solely engineer-driven...
Most accessed links on Twitter, refreshed every 10 minutes
This reminds me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_for_the_Flowers
> The Americas, or America, (Spanish: América, Portuguese: América, French: Amérique, Dutch: Amerika, Aymara: Amërika, Quechua: Amirika, Guaraní: Amérika) are lands in the Western hemisphere, also known as the New World.

I was initially being sarcastic but if you want to get serious on the topic, let's at least admit that there would indeed be confusion for an extraterrestrial coming to Earth for the first time. Wouldn't you find it funny if people from China were called Asians instead of Chinese or if Mexican people called themselves Americans instead of Mexicans?
Is that really the reason why? I find it also possible that they haven't been able to setup the infrastructure to peer with other providers yet, as it seems they were only given 90 days before this went into affect. I don't know what sort of timeline is reasonable for them to be able to hook-up with other providers as I've never worked on that sort of infrastructure before.
Setting Up Android Dev Environment With Eclipse, Android SDK, PhoneGap on Fedora
The problem I see with this isn't having to carry your phone around everywhere - its the biometric system itself.

Biometric systems are much less usable than passwords. Users often fail them by doing things like putting their fingers in the wrong place on the sensor or by not looking directly into the camera.

I think probably that users will need to be somewhat trained in order for this to work well. Probably the hackers will train themselves too.

Stealing fingerprints from someone at a bar? Not so farfetched.
I think the issue with respect to Bell providing IPTV should be framed around whether they should be allowed to enter that market at all seeing as they have an unfair advantage over competitors. If ISPs can enter any market and just under-cut the existing players, then it we're basically stating that any content-provider on the internet needs to also be an ISP just in order to compete with the players that are just waiting to enter the market (as soon as someone else proves that there is a market).
> We do that so that you can't game the system with the same email address. + are invalid.

I'd urge you to reconsider.

I can understand why you'd do that, but honestly I don't think it'll help much. Anyone who wants to "game the system" will probably just use a couple throw-away addresses from a disposable address service or something similar.

Further, blocking the use of that character is an inconvenience to people like myself who use it to track where their mail comes from (i.e. if I get spam to 'mybox+launchrock@example.com', I know exactly who leaked/sold my address.)
Cross Linux-Distro Application Installer
Perhaps we should acknowledge that a simple single number "your speed" is a significantly flawed measure of the level of risk you're exposing the rest of society to, and while speed enforcement is a good _revenue_ generator, it does not do nearly as much to reduce the full range of risk behaviours as we might desire.

What continually boggles me is seeing people lose their drivers licence for 6 months or more for a string of speeding tickets - without having actually had an accident, while I read newspaper stories about people who actually do crash and hurt of kill someone receiving more lenient sentences.

How about we start punishing people who actually have and/or cause "accidents" rather that people we claim are increasing the risk of accidents by exceeding some arbitrarily set limit? Sure doing 90 past a school is "wrong", as is driving in a way that causes someone else to crash, but surely we're at a point where technology can help there - for less than $100 I could have 4 video cameras with ~1hr of recording time fitted to my car. Is it a crazy idea to say we encourage people to record other drivers, and pay them a commission on the fines their cameras generate from actual risk events, rather than risk behaviours?

(Full disclosure: I'm a motorcyclist. I enjoy going fast. I'm fully prepared to accept responsibility for my actions, and in one sense I don't mind current speed enforcement since my personal opinion is I'm happy to go fast where it doesn't affect anyone else, and if I _do_ get "caught" speeding it's a sign that I wasn't paying enough attention - if there was someone in position to catch me speeding I shouldn't have been speeding there. I'm not happy with cops who "hide" while doing speed enforcement, but I've also never been caught by one hiding...)
China Initiates Thorium MSR Project
I'm a developer who usually works remotely. I agree that people work better together when they are in the same place, but by having a distributed team you are not restricted to recruiting just people from a certain area and so the standard of the people in the team can be higher. So for teams that require a fairly specific skill set, teams that are recruited from anywhere in the world and working remotely would often outperform teams recruited from one area who work in the same place.
What Steve Jobs said 15 years ago (1996)
ElBaradei to US: Take Egypt's Mubarak off life support
Full size image without the checkout process:

http://jmarbach.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Hacker-News-M...

(2.9MB)

Edit: jmarbach, thanks for making this! Also, apologies for the hits to your server.
Hydroponics is hacking for your green thumb
> If you have less to lose, you're more willing to take risks.

Completely disagree, social security has rather a negative on the willingness of the population to take risks. In countries with high social securities, such as Switzerland or Germany there are less startups founded on average. People instead are in a kind of security thinking and take the most safe jobs, get an insurance for everything, etc..
LMFAO... that was choice shit. "I could be in a fucking coal mine and those damn junkies would still find me to buy my product." We should all be so fortunate...
Oddly, that's what the "edit" link means next to your item or reply when you've first submitted it. Lots of people miss it, not least because people often don't check what they've written.

<fx: grin>
actually needed this today, signed up, got some clicks on my invite URL, no feedback/response/login/invitation.

had to build my own eventually today.
Second one isn't a traditional algorithms problem, as the "correct" result is subjective.
5. By 2030, driverless cars will be commonplace.

I think peak oil, the rising cost of energy, and increasing urbanization might actually increase the usage of mass transit compared to any type of car. What cars remain, however, very much may be driverless.

9. By 2030, most film actors will be out of work due to competition from cheap computer animated actors.

11. By 2030, a large number of people will have robot lovers.

I'm sure robot lovers and CGI actors will exist, but I can't see them entirely displacing their human counterparts. Those are two places where most people will want an actual flesh and blood human, even if the alternative is indistinguishable.
Yes.

Why? Fundamental economics. Money is essentially free. People need to invest somewhere. The stock market is already over-valued. Gold and other commodities seem to be overvalued as well. It doesn't seem like the US will raise interest rates (that's what the market thinks ... see the 10 year rates on Treasuries). In theory, if you take money and make it somewhat productive (ala a hot-dog stand), you have improved things. However, start-ups are not like hot-dog stands. I think that a failed start-up produces less value than an average run hot-dog stand.

A few startups are certainly creating value. But their valuation is being bid up by the hordes of people with cash to invest. Case in point. Facebook is not worth 50 billion. If Kevin Rose invests near this valuation, does he expect to get a x2 or x5 on his capital? Seriously?? Don't give me the "if each user was worth 10 bucks a year crap". Until FB figures out how to monetize in a scalable manner, I remain a skeptic.

That's just my opinion :)
See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2158590
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that they were ALWAYS better. It was just very rare (I think 1 person) for someone not CMU/MIT/Waterloo to be on the same tier. Again, I think this is likely due to the fact that we were all in school, and we had learned things they had never even heard of. It was like comparing a college senior to a freshman. Over time after leaving universities I'm sure things will balance out. Those that continue learning will keep ahead. Those that don't will fall behind.
One thing I've learned from reading HN over the years: Few things kill the buzz of a new site like the introduction of legal/copyright issues.
HN Job: Need freelance web developer
Hi,

We are looking for a freelance web developer. Have an iPhone app that we are porting over to the web. We utilize MySQL and a lot of php. It's a social network (called Groupie). We arent going to recreate all of the functionality in the app, we just want our users to be able to do the basics (manage, find and create groups, post to message boards, view member profiles, change settings, etc). A lot of the logic is there, thus we dont expect you to change any of the existing functionality, just build a web-powered interface. We'll provide the vast majority of the artwork, just need you to make it fit, program, etc.

Feel free to reach out via email (leo@groupie.mobi) or phone: 617.488.9920. We understand full well that you get what you pay for which is why I'm not posting this to guru.com. We want quality work here.

I am going to ask for some proof of work you've done and likely a reference or two, so please be prepared for that.

Thanks,
the "scope" parameter that google included is actully from the OAuth 2.0 spec (still in draft iirc). There are a lot of improvements in OAuth 2.0 which are worth checking out, but this is one of the main ones
Complete Hacker Tutorial to getting Time Machine over NFS to work.
How is this relationship any different from saying that if two Harvard professors publish together it receives more citations than if a Harvard and non-Harvard (remote) professor publish together. Seems pretty obvious given that the quality of authors will go up, including the their ability to promote their work.

I'm always surprised how scientists do such bad social science even though they perceive social science as very bad science.
Well, it's going to be hard to say without knowing a little more about the purpose. Del.icio.us was designed so that it was useful to an individual even before the social aspect came into play; Facebook went for saturation in niche markets (college campuses) and then built out. Either of those strategies might or might not work for you, depending on what you're trying to do...
Why do you use sococo. I just visited the site and it just looks like skype with a weird Office UI ? Is there more to it?
As a CS student who is about to graduate at a mediocre school, I am inclined to agree with your assessment. I'm doing the toughest course load possible (with good academic performance) in my program, and even then, I feel inferior when I look at the basic curriculum of some of the top CS universities.

You are right. I learned about operating systems, but never implemented one. I learned about hasing, red-black trees, and other algorithms and data structures, but never studied them in depth in my classes. In fact, many basic algorithms and data structures (such as red-black trees) are not taught at all except in an elective course (which very few people take). In addition, I only had half a term of functional programming (and see no other courses which studies it deeply).

I really thought I was a good programmer until I started doing ICPC problems and going to competitions. Nothing really made me realize the skill difference between programmers--it was a humbling experience. Doing these problems have helped greatly however, and I am confident in implementing and describing many algorithms.
Wouldn't that be considered a breach of contract? I know that if this happened to me (Israel) the first thing I would do is call up my ISP and threaten a lawsuit unless they provide me the service I signed up for.
The title is an oxymoron. With socialism, you don't have private ownership of the means of production. Thus you cannot have start-ups with socialism.
Shows the need for xattr on your NFS mounts, that is not documented in other tutorials I've found.
The second problem seems open-ended and a test of UX/creativity skills: "There is no objectively 'right' answer here, and in fact there may be multiple ways to interpret a provided list of file events."

The third problem is not zero-sum, it's subset-sum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subset_sum

I never understood the value of these simplified competitions. If your goal is to test implementations of approximation algorithms, then at least make the conditions realistic, like the Netflix prize.
just bought one... been looking for a replacement for my big calendar ever since new year.
One good rule of thumb is that a transforming technology was in existence 15-20 years before it became revolutionary. Applying that to this list:

1. Machine translation already exists and is getting better. Will it be ubiquitous? Unlikely. Only tourists and those interacting with them will normally carry them.

2. No way. We cant even see the way to go. Cure a disease and another pops up to take its place. By 2030 we may know enough to start.

3. Another no. If people have the freedom to make bad choices, there will always be extreme poverty. Will the police do daily roundups to force people into shelter, into mental helth facilities? Singapore maybe.

4. No, except for a few exceptions, like pot. It's economics. Who is going to grow wheat in Manhattan?

5. Of course. Google already has the prototypes.

6. Yes, but somewhere along the line technology will enable the trend to reverse,

7. I dont think so, even if the technology. We wont see flying cars because of cost and liability issues and the publicity of even infrequent crashes. Airliners will still have pilots because of public confidence. It's possible that cargo planes will perhaps have ground based pilots/monitors. In the military, of course.

8. No way. The economics arent there, except for a few hundred rich people per year. The experimental technology doesnt exist today.

9. Yes for low budget films and a lot of TV. Blockbusters will use actors, because stars sell films. We still have theater, opera, and concerts an films will still have actors.

10. Probably so.

11. If large numbers means several of your friends, even hackers, the answer is no. I dont think having a robot, can compare to having a real girl tell you she loves you. And I dont think a real girl will put up with the competition.
While no or few lisps have that sort of thing baked in natively, they mostly have libraries that expose it, which is arguably better in any case.
Ask HN: How do I get a crowd sourced web app off the ground?
I am working on a web app that in order to be useful requires that a critical mass of data be present. The application is crowd sourced so this data will come from my users and can only really come from them.

How do I get users to contribute to the app while this critical mass is being acquired?
How's Your HTML5? App Skills in Demand
India is also working on this technology. Discussion by Charlie Stross here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/09/the-futu...
I tend to like these divisions and their respective names:
http://www.tjc.com/38states/38states.jpg