skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is Flash not installed by default?

Downloaded FF4 and several sites won't display.

Ex: Youtube says "You need to upgrade your Adobe Flash Player to watch this video."

Other sites just don't work.

Maybe I'm out of loop and need to update my desktop flash.

Man, chrome has ruined me with its auto-updating.
Could be, it doesn't become really legible until I have zoomed up several times. This is FF4 running on Win7.
Considering it's his first project and he just started, there's no reason to not be using the latest.
I'll hit up Google and go find some. Are there any specific forums/sites you can recommend?
Quite difficult to tell unless you actually dive into building and creating stuffs.

Only through some experience (which could take a lot of time) would you be able to determine whether programming is actually for you.

A lot of people did not started out programming, or have been through your shoes, but they made programming a part of them through their continuous drive to learn and embrace the aptitude of coding.

You would only know unless you try.
I'm a "startup lawyer" in a different sense - I am a sole practitioner in the worst legal job market in our country's history that has been forced to get out there and find my way without a map. It's tough, but just like any other startup you get out of it what you put in - hard work in school and hard work on the ground have put me in a position where I can get by and probably pay my student loans off in 30 years or so.

Let me say that again. I will probably be able to pay my student loans off in 30 years or so. I have an LL.M. in tax and am hustling for every dime I can get.

The lawyers you're working with in a transaction like this are doubtless badasses. They work for a big firm, in a tall shiny building, with sexy secretaries and bookish paralegals. They have continuously updated libraries, and conference rooms, and expensive subscriptions to LexisNexis and Westlaw. They wear $1000 suits and fly to meetings on a private jet. These things cost money... lots of it.

As a VC investing in startups, you know you have the choice in which companies you trust. The same can be said for attorneys. If you choose flash over substance, you're going to end up paying big bucks every time.

Should it cost $17,000 for a transaction that probably didn't take more than a few hours of an attorney's time? Nope. Whose fault is it that it did? As with any product, the lawyers you've selected are charging what the market will bear and billing you what they know you'll pay.

Spend some time finding an attorney that you can trust that cares more about doing quality work than a fancy office. In NYC, there are some really amazing LL.M. programs - find a recent grad from a tax program. They're certainly able to put together a 'standard' deal and incorporation, and are better equipped to help a startup plan intelligently anyway. They'd be thrilled to have the business and the experience, and you'd get much better service at a reasonable price.

And if you ever decide to invest in an Indiana company.... look me up.
Gemvara Raises $15 Million for “User-Generated” Jewelry Making
Where I live it's customary for the police to announce the locations of DUI checkpoints on days that people are especially likely to be drinking and driving (e.g. New Year's Eve). For awhile I didn't understand why they would do this (and I know a lot of people who still don't get it).

If your goal is to catch people driving drunk, then no, it doesn't make sense to announce the locations of DUI checkpoints. If however your goal is to prevent people from driving drunk in the first place, it might make sense to announce checkpoints at a number of locations throughout the city. If the potential drunk driver knows he can't go too many places without passing though a checkpoint he may decide to just stay home.
Nice, I'm writing up about EC2 as well, though in a different context ... I'm very fond of it too (for these small projects).
Not that interesting because they'd be obvious trolls. How about an app that purports to give support and counseling people who are questioning their sexuality, in two versions, with one for straight people who think they might be turning gay, and the other for gay people who think they might be turning straight? If one of them is denounced as homophobic and the other is approved, you could be on to something.
Do you have thorough unit tests for the code that you are trying to refactor? If not, be aware that there is no way to know for sure that your refactoring won't break the functionality of the code.

If there are no unit tests ... the original coder didn't care about correctness, and refactoring towards testability is a good thing.

The more people you will need to interact with, the more damage you will do to yourself and your reputation. Others will resent working in panic mode to clean up after you (now widely known as the "rogue" programmer).

I'm in two minds about this. Yes, you will need to be careful about not introducing changes, and yes, occasionally fixes will be needed. But better code should be a plus to reputation. If it's not a net plus, be more cautious. If that can't be done, I'd be thinking that I was in the wrong job, and my reputation with those co-workers was irrelevant.
Yeah I agree with everything you said. I wish I had had the balls and/or forethought to do that when I applied. Kudos to you, sincerely.
John Sculley On Steve Jobs, Apple and Microsoft
I call BS to some extent, to both the original post and this comment.

I went to a major Ivy. I know firsthand of someone who got early admission without doing senior year (from an elite foreign school); in honors calculus we had a high school kid who ran circles around us (not a full-time degree student IIRC); in our CS program we had a Doogie Howser type who was admitted in his teens and last I heard was some kind of security guru.

I'm sure any top school has a small number of brilliant students with oddball backgrounds. In other countries you have to get the piece of paper, but in the US no one cares about a HS diploma. If you can show you've got the goods, it doesn't matter how you show it.

(Although MIT is more likely to care purely about ability to be a great engineer as opposed to a well-rounded human being - to that extent I can believe other schools would not have been receptive to a candidate based on code LOL)
Still, you have to understand a lot of very abstract stuff to get what _ means in Jquery.

There is a world of difference between that and 8-bit BASIC.

While learning 8-bit BASIC may not be the optimal path between a neophyte and a computer scientist, it strikes a nice balance between high and low level.
Looking to work at a Startup in Boston? 14 FT roles, 16 Internships at Gemvara
War is a Racket...

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

by Major General Smedley Butler...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler
I confess I kind of cheated. I used William F. Luebbert's "What's Where in the Apple II" to find routines in ROM suitable to what I wanted to do.

You can grab yours at http://apple2scans.net/apple-ii/whats-where-in-the-apple/
What if people simply want to avoid checkpoints and not have the interruption in their day?
With security that lax at PHPFog, it was inevitable that someone would have broken in. In that sense PHPFog was lucky... had these security problems not come up now, and be exploited by little punks with no larger agenda than vandalism, there could have been much more more serious damage later. What if some cyber criminal gang had turned their attention to PHPFog, and been a bit more subtle about the breakin?

I was appalled at the frequent mentions of 'luck' in that blog post. Your job as a sysadmin is to eliminate luck. To eliminate chance. To make _sure_ everything stays running, everything stays secure, everything stays confidential.
Did anyone try this; seems like a cool option?
The entire example is contrived to talk about testing. Not much about UserRepository is ideal.

I think out and ref are pretty horrible. I understand that the pattern is convenient for the BLC *.TryParse methods, but it should really stick there. Your signature tells me that you'd likely return false rather than throw an exception. I'd agree that returning null isn't the best, but I'd favor returning a NullObject that true/false with a out parameter.
Installing Dovecot 2 on CentOS
My understanding is that it's easy to track the transfer of bitcoins to accounts, but very difficult (impossible) to figure out who is behind an account unless they choose to reveal their identity. Since accounts can be generated on a whim, and with no identification, the upshot is that taxation would be unenforceable.
‘Making it in America’ (By the Fin who sold MySQL for a billion dollars)
I don't think I can agree.

I'm 29 and learned BASIC on an Apple II. While remembering what it was like makes me nostalgic for simpler times, I don't kid myself. It sucked.

I had to read out of scrappy library copies of Byte and Compute magazine. There were hours of trial and error. And worst of all, it all went away when you turned off the machine unless you had one of those notoriously unreliable tape machines.

Contrast that to my first experiences with Linux nearly a decade later. I had man pages, Usenet, IRC, and the web; better hardware, an operating system, developer tools, and free compilers! I learned about Perl and dynamic languages (I was into C at the time). I slowly started learning about how operating systems worked. It was a far more conducive environment for learning.

All of this information was right there on the computer. No more trudging down to the library or throwing away my money on thick technical manuals and trial-version compilers.

I'd say modern FOSS computing environments are the most conducive to learning. The Apple II was a toy compared to what we have now.
I think no serious customer for this technology would require open source, they would be happy to have it in commercial terms.

However, non-customers can be a lot of people which would spread the name by word-of-mouth. Also those customers who intend to buy it will get a feeling of what they are getting, instead of you describing a black-box with significant marketing efforts.
The part you should have highlighted at the end is where I predict collapse, not where I predict it'll have a confidence issue at some point. There's no way BitCoin will avoid some sort of issue at some point and just monotonically increase in value forever and ever, amen. If nothing else, after its inevitable and mathematical wild success (cough) BitCoin will one day attract the attention of the IRS who will decide they need to tax it. If you manage to get that far without a confidence crisis, that's an automatic one. You'll lose a chunk of people for whom the primary draw was that the IRS didn't care about it. Confidence crisis isn't the question, collapse is.

(And that's the gentle one. There's also "The US government has decided that BitCoins are primarily a money laundering operation" and it starts throwing people in jail for using them. I consider this a less likely outcome by far, but still on the table.)

When I say confidence crisis, I do mean that as a distinct thing from a collapse; as I said, all currencies face confidence crises.
i always felt that "lifestyle business" implied a business that not only was bootstrapped, but also wasn't really high growth/pressure. something that you could do to make a living and spend your time however you like, not something you push really hard to grow and succeed like you would with a standard startup, bootstrapped or no.
I just don't see the "plot" by VC's.

A lifestyle business is one that isn't meant to grow beyond a certain point because it's "enough". Obviously, a business like that is not likely to "change the world" ala Google or Apple or something, but it's probably more realistic for many of us.
Browsers: A Brief History
Comments critical of this article acknowledge the existence of people for whom this is good advice. The comment I see failing to acknowledge the other side is yours. "This is certainly not bad advice.". For whom?
Can you point out the diff between that and the stock market? Isn't a stock in the stock market not really backed by anything other than people's speculation?
Building a Cross-Platform Game on PC, Xbox, and WP7
But I have to ask whether the US is in the best place to intervene. Like Scott said, $100 million buys a lot, and that $100 million could do a lot of good in other ways at home.
I'm very confused as to why my previous comment got downvoted. HN confuses me occasionally. Is it because I use WOT? Or because I brought attention to an issue with the site? Or "playas b hatin"?

Also cdevroe, here is the WOT rating--my guess is someone didn't like a post or two:
http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/cdevroe.com
Agreed, it has a very steep learning curve. Once you understand it (and understand how to think in map-reduce), it's pretty awesome -- and easy to extend. Rolling your own definitely makes the learning curve easier, but you can miss out on some of the M-R efficient algorithms that are built in it.
While I certainly don't condone driving while impaired - I feel like the government trying to outright ban legal technologies that allow citizens to avoid government authority sets a dangerous precedent.

this technology should not be promoted to your customers--in fact, it shouldn't even be available.

It shouldn't even be available? That sounds sketchy to me. I know slippery slope is a logical fallacy, but if this line of reasoning holds, couldn't you say the same thing about encryption? It enables people who wish to engage in illegal activities to avoid government authority and thus, shouldn't even be available? Scary.
Ask HN: How to sell a good domain?
I've got some nice (read: coherent, catchy) domain names having to do with parallel programming. I've also got absolutely no time to do anything with them, and it's starting to bother me.

How does one go about selling a domain name? I'm not looking to retire on the sale of these, but I also think they're worth something to the right company and don't want to just let them lapse only to find out they could have generated some income.

The domains are: parallel.io and concurrent.io, in case you're wondering.
> A hard worker does work that he/she is assigned

Maybe. But a smart worker evaluates what's important and what's not. Formal education and learning are sometimes completely orthogonal to each other. You might be thinking "well, how do you know what's important?" and the answer is that it's a gamble and decisions like those are not for everyone. There is no virtue in simply doing what you're told and being passive in your own education.
I'm working on code that's over 10 years old (Java) and it's grown organically throughout that period, meandering through whatever technology is trendy (Servlets -> JSP -> JSF -> Dojo).

The problems have not gone away and are, in fact, getting progressively worse. On the other hand, cleaning up the code is a massive effort with little or no perceived benefit to the customer so it won't get done :(
i don't entirely agree fourply. there are benefits that come from working with startup lawyers who are part of the "system". they can help a young company in many ways. but they need to figure out how to work more efficiently at the startup phase.
It matters some. I've done some hiring, and in a technical field where the BS is commonly done a BA makes me a little skeptical. Like you couldn't handle or avoided the spectrum of harder science classes. Might not be fair, and it wouldn't rule you out in my book, but it matters some.
My assumption was always that they did these announcements so that people would be inconvenienced and could avoid the checkpoints. The rationale being that if you're too drunk to drive, you probably forgot about the checkpoint anyway and are likely to get caught.
Ways Retailers Are Winning Big With Facebook Commerce
Kalimah Priforce (Qykno | Career Matchmaking 4 Kids)

There have been several discussions about this topic, including my own: "Startup America Should Look Like America" http://bit.ly/fuqcBB.

There are groups that are forming to address the need for diversity in the tech world.

The "Black Founders" Kickoff Launch Event is on Thursday, March 24th, 2011 at www.meetup.com/BlackFounders/events/16882191/
The Plancast event details are here: http://plancast.com/p/4cq2

We've recently launched four "Building While Brown" groups on facebook: Bay Area: http://on.fb.me/hyJJhM, NYC http://on.fb.me/fF2lXW, DC|VA http://on.fb.me/gf4beu and the RTP http://on.fb.me/dZCrnj
Question for YC folk, it says in the application "After you're accepted, we'll immediately get to work helping you set up your company, if it isn't already."

What does this cost or do you provide it as part of the package?
Speaking as a former Apple engineer in Core OS, this is a bit too glowing. Serlet wrote quite a bit of code in the NeXT days, much of which does not meet what you would call modern best practices, and even when written was fairly unusual.

However, Serlet, despite no longer writing code, was incredibly stubborn about any changes to his pet implementations, even 10-20 years later. This included large changes, such as updating malloc to a more modern implementation (see Jason Evan's later work on jemalloc), and small changes, such as updating top(1) to better match its Linux and BSD counterparts and implement a standardized library (libtop) for accessing process/host statistics (he wrote top, too).

Serlet was like many technical individuals that graduated into fulltime management; stuck with the last technology they'd worked on, as it was when they last worked on it. Avie was the same with his fixation on Mach, and Mac OS X was honestly poorer for it.
Are there really still shops that don't? It's not like it costs money.
I believe it serves several purposes:

1. It hops to discourage people from drinking and driving in the first place by planting the idea that there will be checkpoints. The best time to avoid DUIs is before the driver starts drinking. Ideally, they'll make alternative arrangements to get home from wherever it is they're going rather than taking the car and figuring it out after;

2. To enable those capable of driving to avoid the checkpoints. The premise for this is that those who are drinking and driving either are capable of making this kind of rational forethought or they're not and the police are largely interested in catches those that aren't; and

3. Possibly to divert those that are borderline cases from driving through areas where they might cause the most damage if something does go wrong.

I know people like to see speed traps and DUI checkpoints as cynical revenue-raising initiatives but you'd be surprised to learn that some people just don't want others to act irresponsibly by driving several tons of metal at high speed while impaired, possibly harming or killing themselves or others.
Amazon Web Services: An Overview
NetFlix, Rhapsody, Linode. If the free versions were not adequate (they are), I'd pay for mint.com, lucidchart.com and OKCupid.com.
Firefox 4 is the first release to support restartless add-ons:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Extensions/Bootstrapped_ext...

Add-ons written in the traditional way will still need a restart, until the authors adapt them to the new bootstrap API. Here are some add-ons that are restartless already:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/tag/restartless
Loved the “If I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like, they couldn’t have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it, so I had to go and create it, and then show it to people, and say now what do you think?” quote.

Now I have something to go along with Henry Ford's one.
Most of the people involved are Ruby people, but we'll look to bring in new authors as the site grows.
I'm normally not that cynical about things but here I have to agree for the most part. It's hard to cite humanitarianism when the world community allowed Gaddafi to bomb the rebels by plane for over a month (the uprising started Feb. 15th and the Allied Assault began March 21st). Not to mention the fact we're ignoring an almost identical situation in Bahrain.

In the end this seems to have a lot to do with politics. Sarkozy needs to move the discussion away from his personal life, Obama needs to repudiate Bush's methods, and so on. Humanitarian concerns are at best secondary.
They do not think so[1]. It is easier to fail than with the old-fashioned money, given that all the transactions are publicly logged.

http://www.bitcoin.org/wiki/doku.php?id=anonymity
That's exactly what it is. I don't know where they got this tinfoil hat definition from.
We didn't pay a dime for any of the legal help that YC gave us.
I upgraded an fairly complex application used in production, from Django 1.0 to 1.1, then to 1.2.

Changes between successive versions rarely have backwards-compatibility issues and fixes are easy.
I totally agree. I recently wasted a whole month refactoring some code (not without permission) whilst working on a defect so that the 4 main UI's of our product had roughly the same code structure -- even if that code isn't actually shared between them it makes things infinitely easier if they behave similarly. Unfortunately, although the refectoring fixed the defect and allowed us to progress with some features, it broke lots of other vital functions and after 3weeks I had to make the call to revert back to the original.

My new plan to fix this massive code smell is to leave the company :(
I think the answer is that multiple competing currencies give stability. Hayek wrote a book about it. So Bitcoin by itself might not be stable, but Bitcoin in an economy that also has other private currencies might do just fine.
IANAL, but it is my understanding that police announce checkpoints for legal reasons. And if that is the case and the reasons are based on Federal Law or Constitutional decisions, it makes the request by Senators entirely inappropriate.
Isn't that similar to a basic affiliate program, but maybe on the micro transaction scale?
The part you should have highlighted at the end is where I predict collapse,

Fair enough.

Since your argument is so good, I linked to it on the bitcoin forum. http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=4832.msg70583#new

I don't know who the bitcoin advocates that hate hearing this is coming from but the bitcoin community had always debate possible attack vectors and ways to counter it, if indeed it was a problem. Indeed, the government's response is a constant worry and there had been various opinions as to how big of a problem it is and how to win.

Running away from problems does not help us or anybody. It's best to confront it head on.
You can easily get from the quad-core Java:F# to quad-core Clojure:F# by changing a drop-down but that isn't what you did.

You do seem to be using the what you dislike and what you are not presenting as reliable to suggest "F# on mono and Clojure (which is slower than plain Java) look pretty similar".

If you really dislike the benchmarks game, don't look at the benchmarks game and don't show it to other people :-)
I have the same setup, and can't duplicate the issue.
This is based on research IBM did back in the 1970s on mainframe applications written in COBOL and IBM 360 assembly. Since then, we have 30 years of experience and tools for making software more flexible and easier to change. It worked, although people like Barry Boehm seem not to have noticed yet. We now routinely change the requirements and design of software that has already been deployed.
> Would you really expect someone who scored below 700 to have otherwise impressive credentials?

Errrr. I think I got a 680 and I'm pretty sure I got a 98% in Calc BC and a 5 on the AP. I also know a friend that got a 750 on the Math SAT, dropped out of Calc because he didn't understand it, and I had to tutor him.
How to Find Great Blogging Ideas