skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This won't help me learn a new technology, build my startup quicker, or even introduce me to others who are trying.

But it is pseudo-science babble that I might find in an e-mail forward.

Not Hacker News.

(Hit my 365 days yesterday so I am officially "allowed" to complain.)
Well, the sections are marked and you can just ignore everything else and walk straight to the couches section without stopping. One thing that does irk me about IKEA, atleast here in the Netherlands is that I first walk through their section with a bunch of model rooms, then I walk through the section where they display everything. After that you generally go downstairs (passing right by the restaurant), and walk through the "shopping" section and then the warehouse. The result? I see the same products 5 times, which is exactly what they want.
Paul Miller on Startup Britain: The trouble with one ring to rule them all
How do you know that the Montessori method is what makes Montessori good, though, rather than the GP's theory?
Interesting that Google plans on throwing money at the established players in the industry, while Amazon attempts to change how projects are selected and funded: http://studios.amazon.com/
This, the Montessori view, is really accepted wisdom now. It was only in the crazy days of New Maths that any educators thought that the right way to teach children was to give them a "foundation" consisting of the most general abstractions possible that everything else could be built upon. Think Bourbaki for children.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki
I'm weeping. I had this idea around an year ago and I didn't do anything about it even though I kept thinking about it for around 2 months.

You have done what I couldn't do, congratulations :). I have signed up and hopefully I get to test the platform soon.

Best of luck.
Compiling documents online
I suspect you're going to get very different answers depending on what people consider "hard".

Continuations took me months, as did monads and typeclasses. Largely because there were preconceptions about programming that I had to unlearn before I could learn them. Continuations essentially require that you descend to a level of abstraction below structured programming and think "what is the computer actually doing", and then re-ascend the abstraction ladder with a new way to structure that. Monads require that you understand typeclasses, and typeclasses require that you think in terms of sets of types and the relations that govern them; it's not enough to import familiar OOP concepts.

A bunch of papers use such obtuse mathematical language that I couldn't hope to understand them without a grad degree in math.

OTOH, reading something like Lisp in Small Pieces (or even SICP) now is considerably easier, because I'm familiar with the basic concepts.
Why is this a typo? No monthy fees. Ever.

There is no barrier for entrance. We do not require a credit card. Using the system will never have a monthly fee or ridiculous setup charges for getting started.

If it is economically feasible, we would like to take as little as between 10-15% commission on sales (compared to envato's - 50% http://wiki.envato.com/selling/getting-paid/payment-rates/). In addition, we will offer a tiered service plan.

And also remember, there are many ways for you to earn money! We have an affiliate system where you can earn cash by advertising other merchants' products, and you can help invite new users to our store. In the near future, for every merchant you invite, we'll give you a fraction of the commissions we earn on their sales. Fair for you, fair for the seller, and we're okay with it. We'll put an announcement on the site when we're ready to launch these features. Feel free to email us in advance at team@babolabs.com if you'd like to be kept in the loop!

Thanks so much for the question!
Do it! Material cost is minimal, put up a board and some chalk and see what emerges.
Plus educators at Waldorf schools tend to talk up Steiner's poisonous Anthroposophy.
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Why not do something today, especially now that you know this idea is viable?

(Not being facetious, serious question.)
HN: How do I know if I have a worthy idea to implement?
This post is inspired by PHP Fog news. I had this very idea (almost 100% the same) around an year ago and I didn't do anything about it. I didn't know if it's any good and so I let it go even though I thought about it every now and again.

How do you know if your idea is good enough to actually implement? Implementing every single idea that you have is simply not possible. I get like 10 ideas per day! (I know the number because I write all my ideas down in fear that I might forget). There must be a way to know that an idea is better then the other.

I'm kind of lost in this realm. Any input? thanks.
There's essentially two major types of fraud that could occur with this system that we've thought of.

1) Seller fraud, bogus items, imprecise descriptions, etc. This is relatively easily prevented with our reputation system as it stands. A user will less likely to buy if a seller has a negative reputation, and hopefully that provides enough of an economic incentive to prevent seller fraud.

2) Money laundering (Malicious Molly creates two dummy accounts and makes a purchase on one and moves the money towards the other)

This is a big one. One of the things we were thinking about regarding this is to analyze payments and see if there is suspicious activity (multiple recently or nearly registered accounts all making purchases around the same time/date range and then the money being pulled out would be a strong sign that the behavior was money laundering. But that's more of a payment system problem.

3) Buyer chargeback fraud (Malicious Mark makes a purchase, receives the download, and then calls his credit card company up to reverse the payment. Mark has the good, the payment gets reversed (it's difficult to dispute digital goods) and Mark has the money & the product.

There's not much that can be done with this one from a technological point of view, however, we have considered creating a user reputation system that could let sellers rate buyers' behavior. The reputation itself is vulnerable to a sybil attack, but that vulnerability is a yet unsolved problem (if we are to maintain the ease of use in creating an account).
Who would you hire?
The OCZ Vertex 3 Review (120GB) and the 25/34nm affair
This is a call to ycombinator and programmers to get involved and to help change china.
Looks very slick. Thanks!
This does not work on Chromium 12.0.712.0 (79102) on Ubuntu 10.10. Everything just silently fails with "Error creating WebGL context." in JS console.
Mobile Design and Development (2009)
O'Reilly book available for free online.
"monthLy."
> It was unclear when Google would begin spending the money to create the new programs, but the source said that Google has visited top Hollywood talent agencies in search of ideas, and will probably end up making deals with production companies and directors to produce the content.

Buy rights to Firefly and make new episodes.
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Ah! Thanks so much! Fixing it now. :o)
thank you for this reply. I didn't think about it like that, I think I was blinded by jealousy! I will do just that and see how things will go.
I'd argue that being in javascript is an advantage rather than a disadvantage. Sharing code between server and client (browser) is much easier, and there is no alternative to javascript in the browser.

I'm not saying javascript is the king of languages, just that we're limited to it because that's what's in the browser, and writing server code in the same language simplifies things.
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France outlaws hashed passwords...
Slightly dramatic, slashdot style, but it's an extremely disturbing development nonetheless. Especially considering data retention has already been ruled as being unconstitutional in a bunch of EU countries.
Assembly language is generally easy, excepting only that it typically doesn't insulate issues of memory addressing, &c. The big advantage of C over assembler is portability.
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We're actually doing something similar. Accidentally swapped our config files when the dev conf was added to our mercurial repository. All better now!
Wanna be a hacker
The most interesting job in the field of computers is being an Ethical Hacker; this course has a vast demand now.
=3D indicates quoted-printable encoding for 7-bit transports.
I've found Sawfish+twm to be a sufficient window manager for my purposes.
It can be really hard to get your bearings sometimes if things are all the same shape/size, especially if there isn't many people in the app. It needed a central location or gathering point so I figured why not throw a giant obelisk thingy in there?

Its fun watching what people say about it. They want to know why its there, why its black and if its real.
One benefit of living in the holy mother land of IKEA is that we have stores that are from before their discovery of the one true store layout, and they are much easier to navigate because you have more freedom to go between sections.

That said, watch the video in the article, it shows how "brilliant" the standard layout is, and how it forces you into a state of mind that makes you shop more.
Talk to the people for whom you think this will solve a problem and find out if it solves a big enough pain that they would be willing to open their wallets. Word to pg. Make something people want.
Anyone care to sum up what they have to say?
Totally liked the "Before I Die... Make a difference" message.
Net giants challenge French data law
Cat vs. Computer
<i>"monthy"</i> should be monthLy
What is this "interval time" he refers to, and how does it differ from wallclock time?
Common nanoparticles found to be highly toxic to Arctic ecosystem
That's a pretty bad misreading of the situation. There's nothing in the law, as far as I know, outlawing hashed passwords-- just that the passwords need to be able to be handed over to the proper authorities upon request. A hashed password should work just fine, as long as law enforcement can use that to gain access to the system.

In short: there's plenty of reasons to be against this law without constructing new outrages.
I think Jeff Atwood is pounding his head against a wall about now: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/09/youre-probably-stor...
What if the site is hosted outside France?
It's not that sequential access is difficult; it's that random access is much more efficient. But obviously IKEA doesn't want you to be efficient in finding what you're looking for.
Does it really say you cannot at all store hashed passwords, or does it mean just that you have to give the authorities the password for a user account if they ask you to? After all, if they want a password that can access a user's account, they could get that but that doesn't mean that it has to be the exact same password that the user uses, does it?
I am pretty skeptical of the Montessori approach.

Take kids from wealthy, well-educated families and put them in small groups with educators that also happen to be very well-educated and very passionate and you will get great results whatever the pedagogy.

Contrast this w/ poor kids whose parents had low educational attainments, stuck in giant classes with poorly-paid teachers.

If you put 6 well-off kids with 1 passionate, well-educated teacher, you will get good results almost every time.

Montessori approach may have its merits but I find it very hard to separate them from the demographics of its students and teachers. The study in Milwaukee does not seem sufficient to establish a link. Those passionate about teaching are probably more likely to be attracted to the Montessori school than the regular public schools because it has a distinctive approach and probably more liberal management.

I would love to love to know if the Montessori schools in teh Milwaukee school had the same teacher/student ratio as the other schools in the study. I am betting they didn't.
The guidelines suggest different criteria for what constitutes "Hacker News" [1], specifically the first paragraph: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Also in the guidelines: "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

[1]: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Netflix, too, is getting into the production business. http://blog.netflix.com/2011/03/house-of-cards.html I guess it is inevitable, but it makes me sad. What makes either of these developments any different from Comcast trying to buy NBC, something that most observers seemed to think was a bad idea? I think this is bad for a couple of reasons.

First, production seems way outside their area of expertise. These companies are primarily good at distributing video, secondarily perhaps at negotiating for rights with production houses. Producing video is a completely new endeavor.

Second, it changes the rules of competition between today's video services. Instead of competing on prices and business models (monthly subscription vs. ad supported vs. owning videos outright) they may now be competing more on what actual videos are available. If a number of different distribution channels all end up with some hit exclusives, we'll want to pony up for several mostly redundant channels. Seems pretty similar to the setup we have right now with cable.

Meet the new boss.
I really don't understand the question "is gravity a force?" It reminds me of the Feynman story:

> "Say, Pop, I noticed something. When I pull the wagon,
> the ball rolls to the back of the wagon. And when I'm
> pulling it along and I suddenly stop, the ball rolls
> to the front of the wagon. Why is that?
>
> "That, nobody knows," he said. "The general principle is
> that things which are moving tend to keep on moving, and
> things which are standing still tend to stand still, unless
> you push them hard. This tendency is called 'inertia,' but
> nobody knows why it's true." Now, that's a deep
> understanding. He didn't just give me the name.

I don't get why this is "a deep understanding." Why should someone have to have some deep reason for believing that something at rest won't spontaneously begin moving? Should you also need a profound explanation for why things don't spontaneously change their mass or sprout kangaroo legs and start singing "La Bamba?"

And what does it mean to ask if "gravity" is not actually a "force?" The idea of a "force" is just an abstraction we use to describe our observations. How is it a deep question to ask whether we give gravity the label of "force" or not?
I love http://iamstarting.com/ for covering Indian entrepreneurs- it's a 30 minute talk a week.
I certainly wouldn't. And if I really wanted to, I'd talk to a lawyer first. Facebook has a army of lawyers at their disposal, and had been pretty aggressive in the past about protecting their trademarks.
Are you really sure that hashed passwords are not outlawed? They're pretty specific about handing over passwords instead of having, for instance, a "police-only" password that gives access to every account.
Crazy, stupid law. Reading this, I kind of feel ashamed to be in Europe with them.
From HN guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I, for one, welcome posts of this kind
Wouldn't accepting 1000 applications, and teaching Montessori-style to 500 of them and traditional-style to the other 500 pretty accurately control for all of those self-selection biases?
I'm sorry but what kind of people I should be asking? I don't think asking my friends will be actually beneficial?
Did you watch the video? That was exactly the point being made: IKEA is designed such that you're pushed along a specific path where you have to see their entire showroom before you're taken to the part where you actually buy the products. This gives you subliminal hints for what things go together and triggers a marked increase in impulse buys.
Why desktop rather than web?
I don't think you'd need infinite monkeys to come up with that. It closely resembles what my dog produces when laying on my keyboard.
You cannot gain access to a system with the hashed passwords, unless you modified the system to accept them. In that case you could just modify the system to not require a password at all. In fact, that is in a sense what you would be doing anyway.

It does outlaw hashed passwords in practice.

EDIT: as others have pointed out, you could simply store the plaintext passwords in another file with greater security, and have hashed ones in the DB. An even better option would be simply to get the hell out of france.

Or, start a consulting business in france to help people comply with this, and rake it in.
The GAC? You actually use the GAC? Successfully? You're the first person I've seen that does that.
It's bad enough that the ACM charges $25 for papers that can be legally found by Googling the name of the paper, but they also can't keep their website alive during a Hacker Newsing at 3AM.

Is there a cached copy somewhere else? Google doesn't have one.
Everyone seems to be overlooking the privacy issues here.
The main problem for me would be that even after I delete my account on some website they will still keep all of my data for one year.
A web startup, circa 2004
From the first few minutes:

He loved Heroku, but wondered why there wasn't anything similar for PHP. Posted a trial signup page at HN, got over 800 signups, which encouraged him to pursue the idea.

(I suspect this was the post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1414560 .)
I use node.js for batch processing: it's just fantastic. Instead of ugly bash scripts that are absolutely unreadable and therefore unmaintainable, I get to write beautiful Javascript and lightning fast JSON processing and transformation. This is an area where node.js really shines and that is not often mentioned.

As for client-server development, I think the future is going back to the client. Instead of "dumb clients", what we have now are extremely powerful and fast clients. It's much cheaper to send raw data to the client and compute it there, since as a web developer you pay for server CPU, but not for client CPU. (Of course, it's a little wasteful since the computation happens many times instead of one; but you can always send the results back to the server for caching, if that worries you).
Server side logic is usually radically different. And given that you usually share information between the server and the client in a language agnostic manner (e.g. JSON) and that the client (browser) cannot be trusted with other than view logic, I see few cases where implementation specific code sharing contributes greatly.

The server and the client has such different concerns that code sharing probably wouldn't contribute that much.
Challenge accepted:

http://www.challengelistcreator.com

Actually it was started like 3 weeks ago.

It's (very) rough around the edges, but usable.
If this ridiculous law goes into effect, and I were to operate a service in France, I'd still keep the hashed passwords in the database.

Then log the plaintext passwords to a different file, encrypted with a public key. The corresponding private key would live on a separate machine (without internet access), and would only be used in cases where it's inevitable.
How will they be able to login with the hash without modifying the application? If that's the case, they'll also be able modify (or force to author to modify) the system to login without the password, so it's irrelevant to request the password.
But law enforcement _wouldn't_ be able to use the hashed password to gain access to the system, would they? Otherwise there would be no advantage to hashing over storing plaintext. Am I misunderstanding you?
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Thanks for the feedback. What you've said is true, and I should have included a clause asking what the answerer's background was.

Personally, I started out programming with Lisp, and hence got introduced to the functional style early on. So that was 2 years spent with Lambda's, and a year with laziness, type classes and purity (Haskell) before being introduced to Continuations.
I think a lot of us have been feeling that for a while. This only adds to it.

Well, if it comes to pass it will only last a year or so until the french government realises that every single server in the country has been savagely violated by every enterprising blackhat on the planet. It will start to become a game for bored script kiddies. I can see them on IRC now, "dude, you wanna go root some frenchies?"
Mono for Android Ships, Now .NET Developers Can Build Android Apps
The most obvious problem is probably that it's way easier to develop bots/cheats for those games.

Since I'm currently developing a WebGL game I'm actively searching for ideas to detect that behavior.

The only solution I can think of is, to capture any data with timestamp coming from the client and applying some tests to it like "is the client sending more messages than a normal client" or more advanced: sending the input through a statistical filter to detect possible cheating and investigate from there on.
I think we'll differ here - but it's a nuance really. In .NET your BuildServer has everything to do with deployment by necessity - that's not the case in other frameworks.

It does work, it is convenient, but that's not a Build Server's function in concept.

Which things RE deployment did I leave out? I was considering the config as part of the coding...
I assumed they had outlawed simple hashed passwords as too insecure, but it goes the other way!

Crazy.
I hate the IKEA layout, so I shop at the competition (here in Europe it's KIKA).
Then they can't do anything. This law is of abysmal stupidity but everything coming from Sarkozy is made of the same stuff: publicity stunt and utter nonsense.
A better response would be to bite the bullet and refuse to comply.

Wrap it up nicely if you must, say you've lost the key or something, but the important thing is that you don't lay down to fools.
Agreed. I've setup my own based on SSH, bash, Perforce and rsync.

That said, Rob has a good point about MS owning the entire stack and it's pretty odd how they can't seem to put together a working deployment-process.

Whatever you do: Don't say MSDeploy. It's a joke and getting it working requires more voodoo than cooking together your own ad-hoc stuff, like I did.

One of the comments on the blog made me lighten up though:

Rails Developer: if only you had a good MVC framework!
MS: Done
Rails Developer: if only you had a good View Engine, none of that aspx crap!
MS: Done
Rails Developer: If only you had a good pacakage manager like RubyGems!
MS: Done
Rails Developer: If only you had a good depolyment tool like Capistrano!
MS:...

Who knows? It might right around the corner ;)
Indeed. This crashed my browser (Dolphin HD).