skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe the response I had to Microsoft and Nokia getting together was something to the effect of "merging two entities that don't Get It together does not generally produce one that Gets It." I'd say the same thing here.

If someone is going to buy RIM and actually make something of it, it would have to be a company than Gets It. All the companies that Get It already seem to be facing the problem of having more success than they know what to do with. I don't see how acquiring RIM would solve any of their problems. But I'd love to hear about those problems if you can explain them.
I came here to post exactly that.

After reading him state how astonishing his skills are and how he'll tackle the integer factorization problem, I thought to myself, "he must be a 20 years old university student." Then he states his age.
You should submit that.
"iOS and Android devices have much less market penetration than RIM, so, of course their growth rate will be higher."

I'm pretty sure that should read "had much less market penetration", because Android and iOS both currently have larger market share than RIM (according to Nielsen: http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/03...). I'm honestly surprised RIM had any sales growth, at all. I simply don't know anyone still using a Blackberry, even among people who were formerly absolute fanatics.

I guess the enterprise market moves slowly enough to keep them afloat for another couple quarters, but it certainly doesn't look good.
I think that is an old documentation page - I know because they have had for a long time a link at the bottom of the page to one of my blog entries where I show a simple way to do indexing and search in MongoDB.
As long as you rotate the starting positions of the numbers on the ring and track both the chosen number and the cardinal position of their chosen number on their board. Maybe people are biased to numbers falling at the "three o'clock" position, that would be interesting to find out.
Correction: When a Linux user buys Apple's Mac mini in 2005

Apple and Linux have both made huge strides in six years.

Hell, it's a pre-Intel version and the article even talks about the single-button Apple mouse.
Great work but why not just contact Twitter directly and ask them to directly integrate your bugfixes?
It is kind of odd, but at the beginning of the article he states that he originally wrote and did the tests as part of his work at Ebay.
You mean like a startup that cranks out guaranteed #1 pop hits? /cynicism
In the early 90's I had the good fortune to participate in an exchange program with some kids from Yekaterinburg. I got to spend a little while in Moscow and the summer out in the Urals. It was a fantastic educational experience I draw on to this day.

One key takeaway that my exchange group all agreed on, in public, Russians will just as soon run you over with their car as smile, but once you get inside a close social circle, Russians are easily as warm, and probably more hospitable than any American -- full of warmth and great humor. Many laughs were to be had around the dinner table in a little Soviet-Era flat, drinking Vodka, eating, singing and dancing and telling tall-tales.
A webinar allows the public the opportunity to interact and partially direct the presentation. Although there should be a video recording of it afterwards.
Awesome counter.
Analysts are searching for simple analogies to explain what is happening - and in tech it is either bubble or not bubble. Nobody is bothered or able to explain in any real terms how a company like GroupOn can go from unknown to a billion in revenue in 24 months. They only know to take the easy analysis by looking at valuations and calling bubble.
Interesting post! Just wanted to note though that Sequoia didn't invest the full $41 Million. The $41M includes investments from Bain Capital and the Silicon Valley Bank as well.
If only 'twere so easy.
I think Sony may have patents on that one.
Timelords/KLF guaranteed chart success if you followed their instructions:

http://members.iinet.net.au/~ithompson/klf-book-themanual.pd...
We do and we don't. Knowing how to look closed off is very helpful for dealing with people trying to hand you things, but smiling at wait staff has always seemed to help me.

Then again, very few people I interact with in New York are actually originally from New York, so I suppose it's hard to get a clean signal on how "New Yorkers" behave.
You don't have double entendres in Russian then?
I'm not sure I was agreeing that it was dishonest but it's tiresome all the same.
Thanks, great read (and interesting eye opener!)
This was written in 2008 as a retrospective on experiences in 2005. Fairly well balanced, but many of his complaints are no longer relevant.
It's more that the risks are different for the massive revenue-generating companies. In a situation were everybody agrees it's a bubble, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon etc. will be under huge pressure to generate more revenues to justify their valuations. If they fall short, their value could plunge; conversely, they might also overreact and make tradeoffs favoring short-term revenue that come back to bite them. So yes, they're in a waaaaaay better position than Webvan and CarsDirect were in ten years ago; but the risks are still significant.
Possible flaw with the idea: the people that need it most won't want to adopt it, and forcing adoption from above is problematic. Thoughts?
Tell HN: Modifying your application after the deadline marks it as late
I just wanted to make a public service announcement here, since after reading just about every thread/comment that I could find about the YC application process, I realized that there was some misinformation being spread.

I've seen comments that say "yes, modifying your application after the deadline marks it as late" and comments that say "no, modifying your application after the deadline does not mark it as late"

Unfortunately, every time I've seen this debate, the latter ends up as the final word on the matter.

Because I hadn't seen an authoritative answer on this, I reached out to Kirsty Nathoo (YC's CFO) to ask her to clear up the confusion.

She confirmed to me that making changes after the deadline does in fact mark your application as late, so if you were planning on making any changes, make sure that they really matter. If you just forget to cross some t's and dot some i's, don't bother.

Best of luck to everyone that applied.
Thanks, I at first glance thought it was about building a DIY electromagnetic resonance device for medical usage.
It's a line from a song for God's sake
My wife grew up in South Korea, she's brilliant. One thing that she's brought up over and over again is how the educational system she grew up in does a fantastic job of squashing creativity.

I usually argue that it also produces an extremely high level of student, while the American system produces so-so output. She always responds that American kids also seem to be more creative, that the U.S. system may not build creativity, but it doesn't kill it off.

There must be some kind of middle ground.
Yes, this looks much like what I want from the outside/usage.

But the implementation of it is actually again the error-prone and slow way to generate a SQL-statement from that, then send that to MySQL and MySQL parses it back to get the original structure.

I actually want to complete avoid that step to generate an SQL statement.
Common misconceptions about plastic bank cards
No Apps, No Sale
2011 Algorithmic March Madness: Machines Lock in Victory over Humans
I've seen Keystone Light sold in bottle form at Ohio University bars.
anyone have experience selling on sites like this? I do a lot of backbone.js work now and I wonder if people would be interested in a basic backbone.js powered app to get started with?
Does an archive.org snapshot count?

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20000901083336/http://www.g...

My first web business.
I haven't read the article yet, but I do hang in poker circles and play. jungleman is an absolute legend in the online poker world - mostly because he is not the reckless Hansen type.

He built most of his roll grinding stakes lower than he was capable of playing because he understood variance, skill etc. It was only more recently that he stepped up to play durrrr et al (early last year, IIRC). Before that, he was famous for declining games with the stars

Sounds like the article didn't do him any justice
> Also do note that I'm a firm supporter of humanist interventionism, you just need to have a pretty solid plan (or aspiring-democratic opposition) in place to fill the vacuum.

Yes, but the question is still, why Libya and not Iraq?

One answer is that Iraq has shown that it's plausible.

Another answer is that the Euros think that they thought this one up. (No, I don't think that Obama thought this up - he's getting dragged along.)
Definitely won't happen at the current valuation (~30B) of RIM.
That's always annoyed me when walking through a store and seeing mannequins with clothes on that look like they are cut really nicely and aren't just made for a big fat guy. Then I walk around to the back of the mannequin and sure enough everything is pinned in place to make it look nice. I get that the clothes are made to fit onto the largest number of people, but it ends up like a design by committee type situation, where the end result is that no one really looks that good in the clothes. So yes, I can definitely see your point that the models measurements wouldn't mean much.

What I would like to see is specific measurements of the garment. The distance from the collar to the bottom of the shirt, the width at the bottom of the shirt, the width of the arms, etc. The few standard measurements that are usually provided with a dress shirt or a pair of pants are a good start, but they aren't nearly enough to judge fit. I've had shirts custom made (via the internet) that use the reverse of this process, where I provide them all sorts of different measurements and they make the garment to fit. They all fit very well, so I have hope that making this information available could help with the fit problem.
Promising new work shows that iPhone can display Flash animation.
For the Love of GOD who cares about how much money Color raised. It was nice to hear about, oh..the first 4 times here.

Deleting the huge rant I just typed up.

Anyone want to throw in ideas on why Color is such a hot topic? I might be a little blind to it due to my attitude reading it on here so many times.
I LOVE the fact that I live in a world that I get to read some hackers manifesto online:

My Rules as I rule to internet, you should know it already...

Although, I do have to agree with his points about Echelon.

EDIT: His command of the English language is irrelevant -- I stand by my comment above, which is the fact that we are even reading stuff like this makes the 16-year-old-cyberpunk-playing self from the '80s quite happy.
I posted a graph with the basic distribution on the results page (just hardcoded for the moment):

http://nfrom1to10.appspot.com/results/

A more in depth breakdown is coming. The number of responses has been far, far beyond what I expected — several orders of magnitude more. Once I get together a good way to efficiently track and display the graphs, I'll make them live.
Agreed that it might not make sense on a blog; I was just reacting to the general trasparency question. In terms of building brand confidence, my experience is that being honest about mistakes and what you're doing to cut down the chance they'll happen in the future is great from a customer relations point if you do it well.
Trending Topics on Instagram
It's like we are talking about two entirely different subjects. Let me state it as clearly as I can:

- I was making absolutely no comment about whether something is true or not.

- I'm not saying that what was written was incorrect. And I'm not saying "this is true but trivial". Again, I'm making absolutely zero comment about whether what was said was accurate.

- My point was, if you are going to answer a question asking for advice that's 'un-intuitive or not common knowledge', making over-simplified, bland recommendations on certain subjects without citation does not answer the question and actually makes things worse.

- When I said things like "where's the citation?", I wasn't actually asking for HN posters to respond to back it up. I'm not strongly opposed to, say, the reading of body language. (although it's certainly interesting to go off on a tangent and discuss some specific points - I've commented on this topic below in the discussion).

- Instead I was using a rhetorical device to demonstrate that the lack of clarification and citation just further spreads unscientific 'intuitive' folklore.

That people are actually providing citations to something and supporting a point actually supports my argument, do you see?

If you now take this understanding and re-read your first response, you can see the whole "well I feel sorry for you" thing just doesn't jive at at all to this sub-thread of discussion.
Do you think if facebook was tweeked that it could be a good CRM?
Run a Flash SWF in an iphone app?
Saw this on Reddit, there is a Youtube video after the jump. Shows Flash SWF playing within Flash Player and within an iPhone app side by side.

Does anyone know how to get this?
Freetard, iFag, luser, Microdroid, B1ff, Pointy haired, Marketroid.

The 'us and them' mentality exists across many boundaries and I don't think it's going away any time soon. Most just learn to ignore it because whatever you decide is good, someone, somewhere, disagrees with you.
This is a tricky question with no right answer.

If you are the vision guy and seek to maintain as much equity, you might want to build a prototype first.

However, you are running risks by not bringing people on board sooner. You risk speed to market, but more importantly, you risk heading in the wrong direction or spending a long time building something one way, when their might be a better, more usable way to build a part of your app. Thus, you may want to consider bringing the designer onboard sooner than your other developer friend, especially if the designer is really good with UI/UX and especially designing user workflows.

One of the reasons YC is reluctant to take on single-founders is because having two or more helps. You're much less likely to do something stupid if you have a talented co-founder you trust around to talk you out of it.

If the people you want to bring onboard are the kind that might steal your idea, then you probably don't want them as co-founders. Choosing a co-founder is like choosing to get married. It is not a decision to be taken lightly.
Fragmentation of the digital forensics community - or "Get offa my lawn, kids."
Yep. Now "Calvin and Hobbes", that would be another story.
This is where Appengine shines - it scales painlessly, so there won't be any hurt (apart from being billed for the resources).

This scalability comes at the cost of a wee paradigm shift from relational database to datastore mindsets, but is well worth it. Developers can do what they do best instead of having to become system architects and admins.
I wrote this about the digital forensics community, inspired in part by the fact that these issues are less present in the hacker, startup, and software development communities.
The article closes with the thought that there may be a related 'cognitive universal'. This list reads like a bare-bones version of the human experience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal
Thanks, yes misunderstanding: agree should be a framework protection not something developer should be sprinkling over code.
Google turned a profit every year since 2001 and earned a profit of $105.6 million on revenues of $961.8 million during 2003. They IPO'd August 2004.
Color - Privacy policy
i chose 7 too. But I would have chosen something complete different without a numblock.
Thats the best thing I've seen in awhile. I think everyone in our company should read it as a guide to when UI goes bad
I thought there was an Palm download store back in the late 90's, for the Palm V and such, but I can't seem to find anything about it.

Am I completely mistaken?? Couldn't you download apps for the old Palms?
Machine Learning had a special issue on machine learning and music in 2006, if you're interested:

http://springerlink.metapress.com/content/p59760403721/?p=39...

There's also a cool conference on bringing various kinds of technology and research methods to music:

http://www.nime.org/
Because they have done what (almost) everyone on here wants to do, get funding for their idea. The fact that the idea is "obvious" and "simple" means everyone can bike shed [1] it to death.

[1] http://bikeshed.com/
Autopilot Tractor Or Zombie Killer.
This is an Autopilot tractor out in California that drives down vineyards and trims vines. The tractor is driven by a Trimble Autopilot using GPS Satellites to steer itself. The operator simply sits in the tractor in case there are any errors.

Am I the only one who would like to see this thing in a zombie movie?
This isn't really supposed to be a proper full-text index feature, instead it's building a rudimentary inverted index using a string array property. It's possible to create indexes over array properties in MongoDB, which is very cool, and increases performance to an extent. But even with an index, this approach to full-text was much slower for me than an equivalent search against the same data in Lucene.

I'd love to see a MongoDB component that replicates data from the oplog to a dedicated full-text store like Lucene or Solr.
Yes you could. There may have been a centralized "store" at some point, but I don't remember it. Palm OS let you install arbitrary executables, so you didn't need one.
My two cents as an American: fake smiling and fake tone of voice are equally annoying, apparent, and dishonest. It creates a really unpleasant feeling to see people expressing themselves in a way that's inconsistent with their current feelings. It's logical to be wary of the person. Who knows if they might deceive you in other ways?

/me purchases a one way ticket to Russia.
The Top Brands on Instagram
It's like we are talking about two entirely different subjects.

Story of my marriage. Some folks just have very incompatible communication styles. At such times, more clarification often just muddies the water more. I hope that is not the case here.

Peace.
I'm sure it's possible. It's also possible for me to win the lottery ;)
You'd think someone with the experience of 1,000 project managers would at least have said "this week." Just for some "uh oh" room...
At first blush, looks like a 3d collision detector. (I could be very wrong, though.)
backbone.js work may suddenly become very relevant to some work I'm about to do, so I might be counted in that number. I'm having a hard time finding really solid examples with things like backbone and node (moreso node) because of how fast things move in such a young ecosystem.
>And this is with a dose of around 20,000mSv. He recommends setting the limit at 100 mSv/year with a lifelong limit of 5,000 mSv.

this article is a clear propaganda piece designed to evoke such primitive logical conclusions. But even primitive logical analysis by a rudimentary educated person shouldn't have missed the significant difference between localized deep-tissue dose delivery ("meat cooking") in the radiotherapy where 2-3S is delivered per session normally without any lethal risk and 25-50% lethality of 2-3S delivered whole-body (100% lethal if repeated several times during period of several weeks).

>be a bit more civilized in your comments

yep, taking an intentionally misleading propaganda by a professional for a blabbing of a moron isn't that civilized.
How does this show flash animation and not just a video playing synchronized?
Ok so my first comment could be downvoted because people think I'm not funny. My subsequent comment was just to clarify that the first comment was not anything personal against anyone. So why was that downvoted? An explanation from the downvoter would be nice
Germany Sets Renewable Energy Record in 2010
I like this type of research, but I think these results are not really new or surprising. In fact, there is almost a kind of "circular reasoning" at work - the Euler lattice (or Tonnetz) was constructed for the purpose of trying to represent the relationship of the basic music musical intervals. The fact that the basis of scales is the set of simple harmonic ratios of an initial pitch has been asserted by theorists for centuries, and that is what these star-convex structures correspond to. In other words, this research confirms that the established and traditional theory of scales and harmonic relationships is indeed the basis of human music of most cultures.
Customers don't buy technology, they buy ways to meet their needs.

What need was the Blackberry meeting?
What need is the iPad meeting?

From the article, it sounds like the Blackberry is being disrupted by the iPad - but I'm not sure it fits. A disruption is where the disruptive product is initially not good enough for the incumbents' customers' needs, and it has to go elsewhere and get started with other, less demanding customers, who value it for being cheaper, more convenient or simpler. Then, the disruption gradually improves til it is good enough for the incumbents' customers. At which point, it's game over for the incumbent.

I'm not sure that the iPad fits this bill. It depends on the needs of the Blackberry's customers, and what they were trying to get done with it.
It's also probably important to see the iPad not as standalone, but as "iPad+AppStore"; and as an extension of the iPhone, since it can run iPhone apps.

EDIT now I'm thinking that the Blackberry was a special-purpose solution (for the enterprise), and the iPad is a general-purpose solution. As soon as the iPad can also do what the Blackberry does, customers will switch. The odd thing is that the iPad/iPhone wasn't cheaper, more convenient or simpler - it was mainly just more general. Maybe more convenient, in being more usable.

EDIT2 The crucial innovation of the iPhone was adding a pointing device (multi-touch - the fact that it's multi is a nice extra) and a large screen. Before then, there was no mouse-like input device. Adding it was comparable to going from the Apple IIe to the Macintosh; or DOS to windows. It made the device easier to use - the crucial about this is not that it was less tedious, but that it became accessible to a new group of users, who previously could not use it. For smartphones, these people simply weren't customers before. They wouldn't have bought a Blackberry.

In other words, the iPhone was actually more convenient than the Blackberry - convenience that enabled it to target non-consumption.

At this point, the iPhone still wasn't good enough for Blackberry users, because it didn't have exchange integration, so RIM wasn't threatened. But when integration was added, it was good enough, and game over for RIM.
You cannot "decompile" C/C++ code back to the original C/C++. You can, for a fairly low cost, decompile it back to valid C code. In practice, few people bother; assembly and the control flow graph are ordinarily more than good enough for vulnerability work.

I didn't look carefully, but the screenshot in Rob's post didn't look like C/C++ code; I thought it might have been ActionScript.
YES. Please somebody make this.

Paint me paranoid, but CA-assisted man in the middle attacks is a real source of concern for me. I would absolutely love to have the SSH-style trust model for my HTTPS connections and I will pay good money for an implementation. A simple browser plugin that implements TOFU/POP on top of PKI would be an excellent start.
I have an example rails 3, backbone.js, coffeescript and mongodb app at https://github.com/codebrew/rails3-backbone-coffeescript I haven't gotten much time to work on it for the past week, but it might help you get started.