skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: Today Is Y Combinator Application Decision Day
It's that time again: The day when all of us that have applied to Y Combinator find out whether we'll get an interview or perhaps need to find a rent-paying summer job.

Alls I'm gonna say is... I already live in Silicon Valley and go to Hacker Dojo quite a bit and giving me an interview costs Y Combinator no travel expenses at all. And I'm fully prepared already for an interview. Just sayin'.
Introducing Pow, a zero-configuration Rack server for Mac OS X
Mozilla web apps
This has been my side project for a bit over a year now, working on it nights/weekends (I do Rails consulting full time). I finally thought it was good enough to get out there. There's definitely more I'd like to add to the app, such as shift trades, but I thought it was good enough for an MVP and would love any feedback.
And some people still question the value of pure math. These design tricks would anger some of my design friends, who still believe you can be left brain OR right brain.
Non Periodic Tiling of the Plane
Neden Blog Yazarlığı?
If UI what's holding you back, then you don't need Linux.

I use Linux for many reasons. The desktop environment ranks very low among those reasons.
Programming is an art
The game season 5
the game season 5 ,watch the game season 5,the game season 5 online,bthe game season 5 episode 1,the game season 4 related post now This new season to enliven
Facebook Unveils Custom Servers, Data Center Designs
Contendable -- Difficult finding opportunities? They're all right here.
Ryah speaks out on the rampant upvoting of Node.js articles on HN
I was kind of hoping to see a "shorter" window header. There's a lot of wasted space in all those screenshots. It seems many apps (Chrome, IE, Firefox come to mind) are pushing in that direction - due probably in part to the fact that most monitors are widescreen and vertical real estate is valuable.
Life in 140 - TwitterApp
I have several links to blogs entries by people that made it to an interview round over here: http://ycuniverse.com/interviewees.php

Also a live discussion on Convore: https://convore.com/yc-s11-apps/
AdMob account disabled after years of usage (and funding)
We are one of the recent "group disabling" activities of Admob.

We have 9 apps with AdMob, which generate over 8 Million monthly impressions per month. We use these impressions to launch mobile marketing campaigns for reputable brands, actually --very-- reputable brands. Additionally, we paid AdMob over $3,000 to purchase ads on their network as well. What's funny is that we disabled cpc ads (we don't generate any revenue from AdMob, we sell the ad space our selves).

Yesterday, our account was disabled with no notice whatsoever. We lost the $3,000 we paid to AdMob, we lost our 9 Million monthly impressions, lost access to the ad space in all of our apps, and all our campaigns have all been stopped, our end clients are extremely angry and starting to sue us.

This is by far the worst unprofessional act I have experienced in the media industry.
Introducing the Open Compute Project
Instagram's too pretty for Felt Tip Marker :) Nice app otherwise!
Facebook Open Compute Project
We have also experienced this. More on the topic here:

Post: AdMob account disabled after years of usage (and funding)
Link: http://mobilemarketinglessons.blogspot.com/2011/04/admob-acc...
How's that? You mean you can't run the downloaded apps if you uninstall the App Store app?

Exactly.

I have been using an app called Privacy Blocker that scans apps, reports on what identifier info apps are sending, and optional re-writes the apk to have it send bogus data. Very cool.

So I scan the Amazon App Store app. Not good. I tell Privacy Blocker to fix it. Looks fine. Later I try to run Angry Birds Rio, one of the free apps Amazon was offering. I get a message telling me my App Store app is old and needs updating; Angry Birds then exits.

I can't figure out how to update or reinstall the App Store from Amazon, so I put back the original version (Privacy Blocker saves these). Oh, look, Angry Birds works fine.

Fuck that. I uninstall App Store; Angry Birds won't run, telling me I need the App Store app. Same goes for the Winamp app which I grabbed from Amazon (also free).

No big deal, I remove those apps, then go grab Winamp from Google's app store. Free, no problem running it, no need for some intermediary grubbing my usage details.

So, Amazon App Store, good for developers, less good for users.
I didn't see any requirement there for consent or remaining uninjured and un-jailed.

Of course, the thing about actual human values is that we satisfice instead of optimizing. That's a good thing.
EFF's mass copyright litigation roundup
And oddly enough,

Recreational drugs are a place where I'd say attempts at regulation have extremely counter-productive. IE, look at the massive drug war in Mexico.

That could you buy tobacco/heroin/alcohol if you wanted it is the worst argument against a pure libertarian society.

The better argument against a pure libertarian society is that you might find heroin in your soup and your cough medicine even if you didn't want it.
Pow is a Node.js app written in CoffeeScript. It includes an HTTP and a DNS server and runs Rack apps by way of Josh Peek's Nack library: https://github.com/josh/nack

The screencast shows how it works and why we made it: http://get.pow.cx/media/screencast.mov

If you're interested, you can read the annotated source code, written in literate style and generated with the wonderful Docco: http://pow.cx/docs/
Former FTC Director Talks Online Privacy - Facebook, Google & Startups
I get the feeling he looks at how Apple is thriving on a closed ecosystem ("OS X Everywhere") and wants to succeed in a similar way, but he is utterly incapable of it.

Ah, but that's the thing-- Apple didn't go for "OS X Everywhere", they were willing to segment their OS strategy, and developed iOS for the iPhone and iPad. There's no telling what the tech world would look like now if Microsoft hadn't tied their tablet strategy to Windows XP.
Great Low Cost Web Hosting - Hosting Plans Reviews
5 Reasons I Believe in Android Tablets
Making the Roman alphabet so ingrained may make very hard to learn other alphabets, like Greek, Cyrillic, Hiragana or the Chinese one.
Feed Burner
Actual News Sites like Tech Crunch, Mashable, ...
You can also chat about applications over at the wompt chat room - we've been going strong all night!

http://wompt.com/chat/yc
both have history in NextOS/Openstep

But OS X basically is NextOS isn't it?
I dream of the day I can have work/life balance. This is a huge problem for me and it bleeds into my personal life, psyche, and creativity. Unfortunately, I am a prisoner of my own obligations as I'm sure many are. Obligations mean I need income means I need a job. That doesn't mesh well of my incredible desire to run my own business one day.

My father and his father have run their own businesses. When I graduated college, I made a strange departure from that norm to get a job. The thought wasn't particularly exciting, but we had medical bills in the family that someone had to handle. I hate it because I feel like I've let that magical time where you have no bills and can live on the cheap pass by.

So I'm playing it the only way I know how. I work at day then come home to work on side projects into the early morning. My hope is that one day these can be used to convince an investor to float my living expenses so I can take a real shot. Until that day, what options do those of us with jobs have?
"You clearly didn't read the link I directed you at." I do believe your tone is rather counterproductive to the purpose of this forum.

I did in fact read the article, and I do now agree that you only need to send MD5(username:realm:password) to the remote server to do the authentication.

The problem that I do see is that it is trivial for a MITM to either intercept the transaction and force the client into a less secure mode (ie. basic auth), and then read in the password, or else just reuse the auth credentials for another transaction.

I would recommend that you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Remote_Password_protocol and the concept of a "zero knowledge password proof" which seems to be the concept you were looking for.
I also agree with this.
Why not have requirements like "One founder must be 6'2" tall"?
Okay, it's not exactly the same, but I think the analogy is somewhat reasonable.
There are many skills required in order to start a successful business, and I question whether design skills are anywhere in there. I think having a requirement that a founder for a design business must have some design experience (either formal or not) is a reasonable thing.

It also occurs to me now that a "designer" could mean just about anything. A game designer to found a game company? That sounds good. A hardware designer to found a new hardware-oriented technology firm? Also good. A graphic designer to found a graphic design studio? Yeah, that sounds great too!
I do not much like this 'curl $random_url | sh' installation method. I am not going to be running some random script without looking long and hard at it first.
Technically you are right, but your comment doesn't add anything to the discussion. Typos happen, and I wouldn't be so anal about that. There are more constructive ways to get upvotes.
Completely understandable. That's why the installer source is fully documented and linked up for your review. http://get.pow.cx/
I prefer this chat interface over convore.
I was taught in school that there were four forces- strong, weak, EM and gravity. Gravity was the one that was always hardest to fit into a GUT model (people suggesting looking for a particle called a gravitron, for example, which intuitively I always thought was bullshit), and based on what I've read since school it's hard for me to believe that gravity belongs in the list of "the four forces."
Oh, come on. How about F# and Kinect, to name but two?
Signing up:

Timezones drop down is not tab-able, and stops at GMT-5?!?!

Speaking as a European, this is the sort of thing that really pisses us off!
Mommy, Netflix is eating my firewall
Sorry, but this argument is the worst kind of wrong - it is half true. 100.00000% consistency/availability is of course impossible in any circumstances.

'It is only relevant for a few dozen companies'

... because of size/volume. Your argument would make it relevant to all companies, unless netflix and other large companies have to live to a higher standard - which i do not think is being argued.

The CAP theory really is about bottlenecks, high volumes of possibly conflicting data to different nodes cannot be synchronised with guarantees.

It is possible to have distributed transactions on lightly loaded servers. These could complete in a timely fashion (<10 secs) 99.9% of the time with, theoretically a geometric drop off for the probability of longer delays.

The answer to the disconnected data centre is to have 3 with majority rule. Then the loss of a single link can no longer break consistency.

What is more, the article talks about the data being internally inconsistent (dangling references... etc.) this
seems to be totally unnecessary for something like private user data. For the rest (recommendations), as discussed other strategies can be employed that at least guarantee internal consistency of a node.
>Withholding taxes hurts the country's economy and only plays in the hands of corrupt regimes.

And paying taxes into the pockets of corrupt regimes?
many thanks, I used 6NKNE3LEWA36
Why not just download it and then read it yourself? Do you enter your root password when installing some GUI applications?

At least in this instance you can read over the commands that will be run beforehand—in fact, Sam actively encourages you to do so.
I believe a similar idea (use hmac(url, password) as a password for websites) is used to great effect by a firefox plugin.

Also, please do not use hash(x + y), use hmacs. String concatenation in hashing breaks some of the complexity guarantees and will lead to your hashes getting cracked faster then you'd expect.
In Tokyo, it was more like a 3.x, about a minute's worth of low-rumbling.
This is great! Had fun playing with it for 10 minutes. A UI note: a common behavior in pixel-based editors like this one is:

When you click on a blank pixel, fill it with color. As long as the mouse is held down, you're "drawing" and moving it to other blank pixels should color them as well.

Likewise, when you click on a colored pixel, erase it and stay in "erase" mode as long as the mouse button is held down.

Saves a lot of clicking, I think!
Here's The Real Reason Obama Will Lose In 2012
Hasn't spot pricing been available for quite a while (at least more than a year)? Or is this something different?
Ignighter (Techstars '08, NYC) is hiring PHP Developers
Ignighter, a 2008 TechStars company, was founded with the vision of revolutionizing the way that twenty-somethings use the Internet to date. Through our group dating model, Ignighter provides a safer, less awkward, more fun approach to online dating. Since our launch, we've been featured in numerous national publications and media outlets including the NY Times, the Wall St. Journal, NBC, CNBC, Bloomberg TV, the Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Inc Magazine.

We were voted "Best Startup in NYC to work for" by the management team of the company. Yes, you read that right. And we won in a landslide. We're a small team with big plans for growth in the coming years. We value our company culture and hope that our future hires will contribute to our hard-working, but fun-loving office atmosphere.

We're looking for an experienced engineer to build new features, squash bugs, optimize site uptime & performance, and have fun doing it! This is a senior-level opportunity with advancement potential. You WILL wear many hats - If you're killing it, you may even get to travel on our dime! <i>#lifeexperience</i>

This is a full-time, on-site position located in Manhattan, NYC. To apply, check out http://www.ignighter.com/Jobs-Senior-Web-Developer/
Levying taxes on emissions any other way would be a nightmare to implement fairly, be very inefficient, and would be ripe for abuse and fraud. The whole carbon credit system is about the dumbest thing I've ever seen.
I couldn't agree more. Without a tangible list of how I could even possibly be benefited, you probably are not getting my email. Even just telling me your going to send out newsletters would be enough.
Hey HN, thanks for all the feedback about the Tumblr theme I've selected. I've known that it's needed some love for a while, but it hasn't become my top priority yet. It sounds like it's detracting enough from the content to ignore it completely (ahem), so I'll get to that soon.
A fallacy? Sharing code between client and server is easier when the two are in the same language than when the two are in a different language. How is that flawed reasoning?

One example: you can run the same input validation in the client as you do in the server if you can easily share code between the two.

But there is way more. Here's an example of an application that shares all of its data models between client and server:
http://tilemill.com/docs/models.html
We've got a tool for it at http://www.aqumin.com . When you add a third dimension, and the ability to move around a dataset in real time, a different part of your brain kicks in. It is a part that you use all the time to navigate the world so it is really good at noticing things(signal) out of the ordinary(noise).

Here is a video we put together for nVidia's ECS last year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGrXPTShuqM

We do mostly financial data, but it is great for looking at tons of social media signals and
looking at data center performance.
As a recently departed (read 5 months) ex-PM at Microsoft, I think MS's problems, at least in my division, stem from three things: a lack of vision/leadership, too inward of a focus, and the ridiculous bevy of meaningless communication. I think the article touches on each of these in a certain way, but not exactly in the same way I mean them.

One thing I noticed about the middle management at MS was that they never defined a direction. No one ever set out a vision. The result of this was that each little section of a product would decide what the best possible direction for the product would be and build features to that vision. The summation of this effort is a frankenstein product with a user experience that is equally as scary. No one worked together unless they were forced to and even when they did, they never really worked toward a common goal. Based on my experience, I believe that a single charasmatic, intelligent, and visionary person could have easily turned our division around. All it would take is strong leadership and a crystal clear vision. We had neither.

The article makes a point of MS being focused too much on itself, and I wholeheartedly agree. One of the things I was praised for was knowing what the rest of the tech world was doing (I worked on VS). What astounded me was how little others knew about non-MS technologies. We were beaten to the punch by other products nearly every time because we only ever focused inward and not on what the world itself was doing. Moreover, when people did look out the window they focused on the wrong things and instead of trying to innovate saw it as a need to start chasing tail lights.

Lastly, I got several hundred emails a day as a PM. Despite that deluge of written communication, I felt that no one was really ever saying anything of value. Sadly, most people aren't great communicators and the result of a culture that promotes a ton of communication is a torrent of useless discussions that take away from what really matters. It seemed to me that most managers were there solely to deal with the fact that no one was working together or communicating properly. I would argue that at least 1/3 of a person's workload at MS is the direct result of this inability to communicate and it absolutely destroyed many of the efforts I would've liked to have seen succeed.

I don't believe replacing Ballmer is some magic bullet. I think the company needs to be 1/10 of the size to reduce communication and to get people working together. I think it needs someone with a vision for the way things should be that isn't based on what's already out there. And I think Microsoft has a chance if it could only take a step back and see that it's no longer an innovative company, but instead a peddler of last year's model.
Better -- just put your email address in your 'about' section as well. If not, you are probably missing out on contact from other HNers.
I'm sorry, I was commenting on this puzzling statement: "The president supports repeal of the 1099 provision, but he doesn’t like how the bill makes up for the revenue that would be lost"

How in the world could the president be against reclaiming money from people who should not have gotten it in the first place?
They bought Kinect from another company – the hard work of getting approvals and resources and everything else to start on it had already been done outside of Microsoft.

It's definitely an impressive bit of tech, but would it have been possible were its genesis subject to the byzantine internal politics of Microsoft? I dunno. I wouldn't put money on it.

Meanwhile, consumers don't buy functional programming languages.
The fundamental problem at Microsoft is that building your career is a better (more lucrative) use of your time than building your product. You can be successful there without ever making a successful product. Microsoft acquired my startup and I spent 2 years there wondering what the hell was going on until I came to that realization.
Exactly. The water level is raised, and then water "falls" along the path of least resistance, in the case of shore - it will certainly flow onto land.
say what you want about Facebook but I give them props for open sourcing so much code to the community. Cassandra, Thrift, Scribe,Hive, etc...
Flying wing to wing with a spaceship: WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo at SFO
There are several proposed mechanisms to "enable" SPDY. The preferred is to run over SSL, and to use their NPN extension to negotiate SPDY support: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-agl-tls-nextprotoneg-00.htm...

Alternatively, there is work on sending an "upgrade" header in your regular HTTP response: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=69688

The NPN route is obviously the best in terms of performance, since the protocol can be negotiated as part of the TLS handshake..

Long story short: you can definitely run your own SPDY server and Chrome will auto-detect and use the protocol.
>he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price.

and who would say after that that there is no venture investors in Russia? The guy took the risk and it just didn't pan out. :)
Yes, I know C and C is important, but not for everyone.
No argument from me, I think the focus was off a bit. This 'hack' was just a simple extension to a plugin I'd already written for parsing jsonp feeds to html. I consider the process more interesting than a specific piece of technology.
Nothing "stupid" was pointed out. It's a perfectly reasonable correction, although the original poster probably only phrased it that way since only "HNers" would see his post.

And I know what you mean, but I hope you at least realize the inherent hypocrisy in making a post only to complain about posts not yielding valid information.
Making The Right Investments
> The implication is that they concede responsibility for whatever they don't remove.

I'm not sure I agree. Just because Google is asserting the right to remove apps from the store (e.g. to keep strategic partners from flipping out) doesn't mean that they're conceding that they're under any obligation to do so.
Eclipse BIRT, is a reasonably easy one.
Prosody 0.8.0 released
Kinect is pretty impressive, and I think WP7 is innovative in its ability to display content on a small screen in a natural way.

I don't know if I agree that they are ahead of Google and Apple, but they have come up with a few cool things.
No, but the final assertion that not achieving a goal = life failure is still ridiculous.

Also the second isn't impossible either. Just somewhat silly and if that was someone's serious life goal, coming from a somewhat strange place I didn't want to get into. It very much seemed like a whim instead of a serious goal. That a whim is not always achievable is not really relevant.
blip.tv builds and maintains our own servers and data centers. We started before the Cloud though :)
World's information consumption: 9.5 zetabytes per year
There's nothing wrong with gmail, he's saying don't write your email as "name at gmail dot com" as some people do this to prevent automatic spam bots. Instead, write it as "name@gmail.com" so it's easier to email/copy+paste.
California will not fall into the ocean (and other earthquake myths)
Its not clear to me that you have to post a schedule after saving it. I saved 3 before realising I had to post them to avoid losing them.
The Startup Kids trailer, a documentary about web entrepreneurs
The majority of places I've worked where schedules were 'posted' and I would 'trade shifts' with someone else have been retail and food service jobs, not 'office' jobs. Yet the signup page only talks about different sizes of offices ('small','medium', etc). Might want to reconsider that wording ("organization"?)
I program primarily in C and believe I know all there is to know about it. But I have never read K&R. A few weeks back, I started reading it, got bored and gave up. But I keep running into people who swear by K&R. Do you guys think it is worth a read after the fact?
It is weird that it hints at good vs. bad in inband vs. out of band signaling, but it doesn't talk about security, it is mostly concerned with maintaining good speech quality, and what kinds of tones are appropriate given the other line conditions...
Not All Business Models Are Equal
How To Create Hover Areas in Raphael