skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The HTML5 application cache is pretty awesome, but there are some surprises. @ded and I decided to compile some of them and deliver them in simple bullet points.

Bonus: this site is also GitHub repo. Pull requests welcome. https://github.com/shinyplasticbag/appcachefacts
I answered a slightly different question than I think you think I did. You said "Well, IMHO this is a purely arbitrary cultural artifact resulting from the evolution of the keyboard (first in pipe organs). Since the octave is divided into 12 chromatic tones, you could in theory devise a keyboard with alternating white/black keys." I gave you a plausible non-arbitrary answer for why that particular pattern was chosen. Not why equal temprement is inevitable or why "7" notes in a scale are special, just why the white keys are ABCDEFG as we know them and not some other pattern. You can put more or fewer notes in your scales in stuff we still would call "Western" music without anybody caring or even noticing. (Much good Western music uses all 12 tones pretty freely.)

As for whether it's a Just So story, sometimes that's all you get. However, if it is just coincidence it's a mighty coincidence.
Game Industry: Adapt Now, Or Apple Will Kill You
One thing that hasn't been mentioned -- the philosophical underpinnings of entrepreneurship surrounding the Y Combinator organization. This is actually a big material advantage, provided there's also execution.
When you find another partner, give them a stake in the project (equity; incorporate if you haven't already - its not expensive), having skin in a project makes it more difficult to arbitrarily walk away.
Ask HN: What good are exotic financial instruments?
It seems that a lot of the reasons behind the economic issues that the United States and the rest of world has experienced is a result of exotic financial instruments created to increase complexity and thereby hide the underlying fundamental asset information. A side effect seems to be creating paper wealth that has absolutely no basis in reality, instilling a false sense of security of increasing gains until the scheme unravels.

As a result, I'm left to wonder why these instruments are not regulated in a manner similar to that of nuclear power plants, guns, or other such potentially dangerous inventions.

Is there a benefit that exotic financial instruments offer that I'm unaware of?

Otherwise, why is the US government not actively ensuring that these instruments are not allowed unless they are deemed to be a valuable financial tool?

The only reasons I can see are
1) Anyone with the domain knowledge to police these instruments are either in on the racket or get a cut for looking the other way.
2) There is actually a positive, valuable contribution that exotic financial instruments provide that I'm unaware of.

It seems that solving this problem would lead to some serious economic stability.

Any further insights would be much appreciated!
.COM domain registration: Happy 26th Anniversary
This seems like a kind of platitude; it hearkens back to writing 101 but it doesn't actually solve my problem at all.
That seems reasonable enough. I'm not sure why that isn't focused on more. Rather, there is plenty of hyperbole:

"This is an important issue for america, its economy, its vitality, and its entrepreneurial culture. "
Eight SXSW Startups That Ad Age Can Love
If you live in the valley long enough, you get involve in some wierd shit. In the pre-Internet days, I worked on a search engine that we believed was used in Echelon. Mind you my info is about fourth hand because the tiny company I worked for sold the software to a defense contractor who sold it to ... the NSA. I remember the bugs were a piece of work. They didnt give any of the search terms, let alone the documents. One was that the parser barfed if the document contained more than 4k 03's in a sequence.

The company figured out that is was Echelon after the flap emerged and Echelon was disappeared/disbanded/re-purposed. The feedback that we got was that it was the Israelis that were doing the commercial espionage. Some of the other governments were angry that the Israelis were involved at all.

OTOH we could have been given a complete pack of lies to divert our attention from the real group.
That was really the problem with having the Zune. No one ever squirted at me!
The Nuclear Century in Google NGrams
Drchrono (YC W11) is building a health care revolution on the iPad
Try to conduct an "exit interview" with the person who bailed. That way, you can find out why they bailed; if the reason is something that you can address, you'll do better next time. As others suggested, find another co-founder. Having equal levels of co-founder enthusiasm is the exception, rather than the rule, so don't be discouraged.
I had something similar happen--found out a small feature I wrote six years earlier was getting nearly 3 million page views a month from almost exclusively iPhone users. Still not sure how they all found it (if it was just search engines I can't imagine the usage would end up being 99% iPhone users considering it's not iPhone focused).
clickable link to http://ThinkTutorial.com
> I wonder what would happen

A felony conviction for campaign finance law violations. :-)
Stallman wants to see a world built entirely with free and open software - in this world cell phones would be safe, since any and all surveillance-related code and functionality would be out in the open for anyone to see. There is no getting broadsided by sneaky surveillance code you didn't know was built into your phone.
It's interesting that you say that -- and I don't mean this to be contentious -- I've genuinely had the opposite impression. Unfortunately HN's a bad place to get a sense for such things since it tends to be way ahead of the curve. (i.e. things like Node and Scala appear far more mainstream reading HN than they are in practice.)

Most of the folks I know working on Rails 2 sites have only started taking Rails 3 seriously in the last month or two and don't seem to be in a hurry to upgrade.

It'd be interesting to see a curve of when major rails deployment cut over (if they do). I wonder if there's a tell-tale Rails 3 signature that could be used combined with e.g. an 80legs crawl?
Forgive my ignorance, but after readying this article I still have no idea what it is.
I actually had the reverse chronology. I discovered how using ClickToFlash gave me significantly better battery life on my MBP, along with faster page loads and zero mysterious pinwheels. ClickToFlash has a better price-performance ratio than upgrading to an SSD – and I love my SSD.

So when I got an iPad, I was especially mystified at why anyone should complain about this garbage being missing.

edit: Useful links.

Go grab ClickToFlash (Safari, OS X):

http://clicktoflash.com/

Or the Safari extension for Mac or Windows:

http://hoyois.github.com/safariextensions/clicktoflash/

Or the Firefox equivalent:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flashblock/
Weinre - Debug Mobile Websites from your Desktop
Facebook: "Remove Adsense from your apps, or you will be banned"
The effects listed in the Wikipedia article refer to acute radioation poisoning, i.e. what happens when radiation is so intense that it directly kills so many of your cells that your body can't cope.

Even if at 0.2 Sv/d none of that happens, you still have a very actual, massively increased risk of cancer and genetic defects in future children. To declare "no health issues", you most definitely want to stay several orders of magnitude below that
More important on the cross-subsidy issue, I doubt the commercial ISPs will be banned from subsidizing the connection service with their business as a content provider. If the existing ISPs were just ISPs, then the ban on cross-subsidies would actually level the playing field, but that's not the case.
I don't think just $1B would be enough.

I don't think we would have an assassination... but I must admit I am so cynical that one would not terribly surprise me.

However, by no means would just the president be enough. You have to keep in mind both the house and the senate are just as much in the pocket of lobbyist as the white house, in fact probably more so. And the president alone can declare war, grant pardons, and not much else.

Also, we have to remember that a lot of Obama's funding, especially early on, came from true grass roots, and was in small units which added up big time. So he's as close to a people's candidate as we've had in a LOOONG time. And yet, even he black, constitutional scholar, the most charismatic public speaker in ~ 40 years, even he is succumbing to our cynical political realities.

If he is not a transformative president who could ever be?
Oh I know he passed health care, but how is more spending radically different from the Medicare drug benefit, or any of the other ways both Republicans and Democrats have grown the size of government over the years?
Their written description notwithstanding, LyX is a hybrid between WYM and WYG. It bundles up standard blocks of source code and hides it behind graphical objects which resemble the final product.

I believe that description is aimed at former MS Word users who don't even know the WYM/G distinction exists, not as a definitive membership claim by LyX.
I can believe that CTR has a significant impact, but how could traffic have an impact? Matt Cutts says explicitly that search doesn't touch any data from Analytics in any way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU
You can build stuff. In this economic climate, that gives you an advantage in cofounder negotations, as there's a huge supply of unattached business people floating around.

I've been in a vaguely similar position. Don't freak out, and don't think of yourself as desperate. Don't settle. Don't rush things either. University is a great place to meet people who could become cofounders, so meet people.
How Crafty will kill Flash
The NSURLConnection class is actually pretty high level and does in fact handle things like caching, redirects, errors, etc. for you. I have been using ASIHttpRequest for a while -- it's not bad but can feel quite heavy at times. For future projects, I may roll my own HTTP lib by wrapping NSURLConnection directly. Btw, GCD and blocks in iOS 4 make it super easy to structure your network calls the same way you would in JavaScript with xmlhttprequest and closures, which makes async code much cleaner and easier to write.
If it would have been a failure of the train, all were brought into inspection. As it has been done before when the train accident of the ICE 1 happened (Eschede).

If the track had been the cause, it would have been investigated and no train would use that track until it would have been brought up to standards.

If there were a chance to stop the train in case of an environmental catastrophe it would have been done. If there would be a technical system, it would brought into service.

Here we have a full wreckage of at least 10 nuclear plants which to rebuild and clean-up would cost upwards of 50 billion dollar. The damage that can be caused by leaking radiation to around 20 or million people can't even be estimated.

Claiming that the multiple engineering failures exposed and the multiple mismanagement is a triumph of Japanese engineering is not even laughable - it is cynical.

For example that the diesel power generators would fail has been known before and improvements had been suggested already. That there was a pool full of spent fuel is also total engineering and management failure. That the cooling failed and they caught fire is another failure. Why were they there? Because Japan does not have an idea what to do with them. They were running nuclear reactors (something like 50 at last count) without an idea where to finally store the nuclear waste. For decades! Please! The least they could have done to bring them away, provide better cooling and more space. But that would have been to expensive.

TEPCO is a company of FAIL. Multiple severe FAIL in combination with corrupt politicians.
"They know their average consumer don't know all those things and functions like tabbed browsing, so they take advantage of it by not taking some of their time and budget to develop those functions."

Wow, you just complained that a company focuses on things most of their consumers care about while ignoring things most of their consumers don't care about.
Rails 3 is a very substantial effort to upgrade to. There are definitely actively-updated apps that are doing it more gradually (add no_xss, add bundler, convert in bits) but haven't made it to Rails 3 yet. I expect that's more the rule than the exception right now, in fact.
OpenBSD 4.9 available for preorder
fwiw, I've had a good experience with yajl in the past.

http://lloyd.github.com/yajl/
I totally agree, that's when I am most focused. I get up at 5am every day now and work on a few projects to learn Django/Python, I can get in a good 3 hours of learning/creating before getting ready and heading to the office. In the evening I have time to get in a workout then head home and relax with the family.
I am all with you on using GET and POST properly, but is there any REST API that actually uses PUT and DELETE?
Could solve this pretty easily with https://github.com/mynyml/watchr, I'd imagine.
Apple Creating a Magazine Publishing Tool for Developers?
Ipad 2 gets jailbroken two days after release
you're not alone. it takes a certain type of person to start a business, let alone run one. Most get wrapped up in some romantic fantasy about what they see on TV about owning a business. Contrary to the dream, it is work.

Partners are very over rated, but YC seems to like them. I've had several, all worthless. it's tough, you got to find someone with the same passion, or there will be significant differences down the road, especially with work load and responsibility.

watch out for going into business with family members - i've never seen that work out well either.

also, verbal agreements are just as enforceable as written ones, which is why you always get a written agreement. Contracts are a tool to prevent/protect future problems/litigation. Again, this is experience talking. I made over $1M in my first business, and then spent $250K defending it from a partner with a cocaine habit. I won, but it was tough and extremely expensive. You make money with this, he will comeback to haunt you.

If you do NEED a partner/founder, be very cautious. It can be good, but more often than not i've seen partnerships wreck friendships, marriages and families...
I heard about this for the first time on J. J. Abram's Alias and researched it. I was quite surprised to see that it's real.
I'm very happily using MoDaCo custom Froyo rom:

http://android.modaco.com/content/zte-blade-roms-rom-customi...
How timely..thanks!!
Both are motivating outcomes of honest criticism.

I just pointed a few things out to a potential partner and a fellow entrepreneur. Namely, that he might have good ideas, but that he's not a programmer and it shows. Some matters of fact from our conversation:

- Does not know enough to know what's hard and what's a solved problem
- Does not have a colleague or advisor he can hash these things out with in
close collaboration and learn from
- Wastes a lot of time with underlings who just tell him "well, if you can
draw it out, we can implement it" but don't try to communicate with him further

So I just up and told him those things. I told him he needs an equal who understands the implementation end, and that a good working relationship with such a person would save him lots of time, prevent costly mistakes, and result in unexpected synergies.

In a moment, I decided that I want to see how this fellow reacts to getting a little truth-tap to the head. Unfortunately, I was disappointed, as he immediately started to puff himself up as a defense mechanism.

Oh well, I guess I'll keep on looking.
You should still check this carefully. It would suck to find out after you have started making money that you're about to get slammed with litigation.
> Herschel is cryogenic so can't last anyway.

Couldn't we ship a load of coolant?

> there is no way you are servicing something at the Lagrange point.

It depends on what Lagrange point we are talking about. It can be easier than a trip to the Moon or more or less like a trip to Mars. Anyway, you could tow it to a service orbit humans can reach and then boost it back to its original (or any other convenient) orbit. Herschel is pretty far to receive a human crew, but it can be towed to a more manageable orbit.

I like the idea of cheap satellites with high commonality, but I also like being able to upgrade and repurpose them. After all, the worst part of the work - launching them - was already done, and the cheaper each satellite gets, the more the launch weights in its overall costs.
I already live not too far from a nuclear power plant, but I'd rather not live in a major earthquake zone.

I mean, this earthquake has already killed thousands (and there will be more earthquakes in the futures). The power plant? I think a few have died from the hydrogen explosions, but none from radiation poisoning.
Unfortunately language like that is probably required to get the story in the homepage in the first place.
That's not really a GData issue. I think GData ClientLogin no longer works for YouTube accounts that are not linked to a Google account. AuthSub or OAuth should still work though.
Yeah, I've been noticing something similar. Since upgrading my Android phone to 2.2, with Flash support, browsing the web got slower and clunkier. So many pages have flash advertisements on them, and the phone just doesn't have the horsepower to render them and stay responsive. I wonder if I can turn it off...
It's not from Analytics.. Log out of your gmail account, clear your cache, do a google search for "it turns out" and then right-click -> copy the URL of the first hit. Then, paste that into notepad.
Hiding The Lockheed Plant During WW2
That takes me back to writing modem init scripts. I always laughed when my dad typed "assword" in, since he wanted to match both (p|P)assword.
Ask HN: Can Tracku iOS app do something for Japan?
I'm one of the developers of the iOS app Tracku. It is the only application that could show an unlimited people's location on a map. We also have a shared pin feature that allows users to share geographical locations of interest.

We are used in a tourism business in Florida where tour guides use it to track each other to prevent jetski collection in narrow woods.

It is this morning that it came to struck me that maybe our app could be used to help someone in Japan since it's a proven app and it seems that the internet is still working in Japan (obviously a guy kept playing an online fps game during the earthquake).

However we don't know in what way the app could be used or how do we let people in Japan know. Can some one shed a light?

The app is at http://www.trackuapp.com. It has a free version but we will be making the paid version free just so that everyone in Japan can use it if it actually helps.
2037: The US-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) has said it agrees with the assessment of France's Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) that the incident at Fukushima should be classified as level 6 on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), one below Chernobyl. Following a number of explosions and a fire at the plant which released dangerous levels of radiation, ISIS said the situation had "worsened considerably" and was now closer to a level 6 event. "It may unfortunately reach a level 7," it added.

via BBC
Someone put up a partial decompile here: http://bugix-security.blogspot.com/2011/03/cve-2011-0609-ado...
Ordering of query parameters is a W3C recommendation:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/interact/forms.html#form-content-type

If Django's ignoring repeated form fields, it's Doing It Wrong.
The capitalist system quite often also becomes incredibly incompetent and has its technical decisions made by thugs. Tepco, the company that runs the Fukushima plant, has a long history of corruption, faked security reports and blatant incompetence.

What makes nuclear power unsafe is human error more than technical failure. That's the aspect the naive technocrats (like the guy who wrote this article) always ignore.
Althought interesting product, it just makes me believe that many people are using ORMs simply because they don't have SQL under their belt.

The query they describe as 'monstrosity' is actually easy, understandable & typical stuff to do on the relational db. When I was taught CS stuff, you consciously chose relational db just because you could do things like that. If you didn't plan it, you wouldn't use such db in the first place.

My point is, why to popularize the approach that you should run away from SQL as much as possible and not tune it to your needs? Because that's what authors propose. SQL is not XX-century obsolescence and is not hard to learn. I always thought people, as me, are using ORMs to utilize some convenient coding pattern, not to be hopefully in a safe distance from all that SQL thingy. Am I so naive?
web apps on home page and apps wrapped web components which still use html, js etc are punished. so it is not a conspiracy, it is a bug but if it is intentional by apple; it is a faux pas. welcome to ie6 in ios; intentional punishment of web apps to cut itunes cannibalization.
Oh I see.

This is a Boiling Water Reactor, a variant of LWR's, it does not use Bor (in any form) as a day-to-day moderator.

However in this incident Boric acid is being added to the water to help with the process.

Pressurized Water Reactors use Boric acid, which is a different variant.
You do have a problem. He may come back later and claim half the company. He can claim verbal promises and will probably win. Best to have a lawyer draft a release and have the guy sign it.

A friend of mine hired a contractor without a work for hire agreement. The guy came back later and claimed the software. It cost my friend $20k to get rid of him. And that was when $20k was real money.

So my non-lawyerly advice is to always have some sort of simple document to protect yourself.
> I think parser-generators are unpopular because people would prefer to just write code, rather than compile something else to automatically generated code that is nigh on unreadable.

I agree that generating source code is annoying, which is why Gazelle does not do it. It takes a VM approach instead; the parser is either interpreted or JIT-ted.

> I think the popularity of regexes is due in part to the ease of which they can be embedded or used within the host language - either with syntactic sugar, or simply as a library.

That is exactly what Gazelle is trying to do.

> i'd really prefer a library I can load and manipulate the grammar from, over yet another syntax and compiler in my tool chain.

Gazelle always loads its grammars at runtime. There's a compiler also, but it just generates byte-code that the runtime loads. But you can run the compiler at run-time too if you want.

If you'd rather build a grammar programmatically than use a syntax meant for it, more power to you (Gazelle will support it). But that doesn't seem to match your regex case: people specify regexes with a special syntax, not by building up an expression tree manually. The latter seems like a lot of work to me, and such grammars will not be reusable from other languages, but that might not be important to you.

> (ps. (i'm saddened by the lack of left recursion support in gazelle))

What is a case where you would really miss it, that isn't addressed by a repetition operator (*) or an operator-precedence parser?
Sorry if someone already asked this, but could you release the source code for this project if it was just a learning experience for you? We could all learn from this and would appreciate it.