skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
there was a panel discussion on how to get the public excited about theoretical computer science.

Forget it. Nothing is going to make the general public excited about theoretical computer science. The general public wouldn't be excited about theoretical computer science even if they did understand it.

For the general public, the question of theoretical computer science is as interesting as the question of how plumbing works. My computer, they would say, is like my toilet -- it does what it's supposed to do most of the time, and when it breaks down I pay money to get some random jerk in to fix it. I suppose there's some quite interesting details involved in how rainwater that falls into the mountains manages to find its way through a complicated series of pipes to come into my toilet whenever I press this button, but there are far more interesting things to think about, so let's leave those details to the experts.

If a prophet of plumbing did show up to explain all the presumably-fascinating-to-someone details of how the city's water supply works then it would probably hold my interest for the duration of a half-hour documentary, but then I'd get on with my life with only a marginally-increased respect for the plumbers who make it happen.

I'm sure that waiting for messiahs to show up is a pretty normal sort of human activity, but I'd hate to encourage it.
I've always found the shower to be effective for thinking because the combination of white noise and the routine of washing occupy the mind so well that deeper thoughts can emerge.

Taking showers to mull over problems is one more advantage to working from home :)
“Never trust Australians. They live a whole day in the future and they never tell us what’s going to happen.”

(I bet Samoa will join this conspiracy of silence when they make the jump.)
Except is has nothing to do with physical objects, only bits and oscillating electrons.
who says startups are hard...then he's a 'fool' with his 'eye's shut...it's really much to do about nothing if ur'something' ehh? ;) lol....that's the 'key' boys & girls
What kind of cloud computing environment do you get for $6M?
Lithium Battery Industry Keeps Going, And Going ...
You can't sever a word from its connotations just by pointing out exceptions.
How to get reviewed on Mashable, TechCrunch, AllFacebook etc.
I was just wondering if anyone has any tips on how to get a website covered on one of the premier tech blogs. Do you need to know the writers on a personal basis? Does it need to be a slow news day? Do you need to secure funding from a VC? Does it help to phone a writer personally? Can you pay to have your website reviewed?

I recently launched the website

http://www.musicstalk.com

and have been getting many repeat customers through search engines and facebook, but a review on one of these sites would take it to the next level. People who have found my site continue to come back on an almost daily basis, so i know i have a product that people like. Any suggestions on how to attract press coverage would be greatly appreciated.
I would agree with you if it wasn't the case that you can easily switch to "ubuntu classic" which is very similar to previous desktop experiences. Also I'm not sure if upgrading from 10.xx to 11.04 takes you unity or to ubuntu classic, it should be to classic in my opinion.

full disclosure: I'm a 10.04 user and plan to stay that way until the next LTS.
I don't get you guys. I think this is a very reasonable question.
Dear past and present employees of Jason Calacanis
Please leave feedback on Jason so future employees don't make the same mistakes. This maniac needs to be stopped.
> Deniers will try to justify its value but honestly, when you look at the hole you choose to fill with TV, there are so many more productive you could be filling it with.

Like pontificating on Hacker News from a pulpit built of gross generalization? Not everyone who watches TV wastes frightening amounts of time on it. I watch relatively little, almost all of it ends up educating me in some way, and that which does not gives some highly desired chances to shrug off stress and laugh a little.
Sparkfun sells 434 MHz transmitters for $3.95 [1]; just hook it up to a coin cell or four, and you should be good to go.

[1] http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8946
There are other solutions:
http://brandon.pulpexplosion.com/index.php/2010/05/javascrip...
Talk with a dolphin via underwater translation machine
The Contract and Fee-Setting Guide for Consultants and Professionals: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003U8ADM4/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
Short Haircut for Girls
amongst them would undeniably be the short haircuts for girls. For the number of reasons girls are increasingly persuaded towards keeping the short hairstyles.
While I agree with most of that, there is a lot of value that you get out of it that you may not directly perceive. Making contacts with all these fellow classmates and professors is worth a lot. Sure you would have met a lot of people skipping college but it's a different class of people.
Related is Paul Graham's essay, "The Top Idea in Your Mind" [http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html]. He doesn't address the question of why but proposes shower-taking as a litmus test for finding out what the top idea in your mind is (or your ambient thoughts, as he dubs it).

First paragraph:

I realized recently that what one thinks about in the
shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought.
I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go
further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on
anything you don't think about in the shower.
Agreed. The problem with politicians (in places where they are democratically elected) is that they are concerned only with short term solutions because they are only concerned with getting re-elected and scoring political points. So when new and unique situations presents their selves and certain interest groups and parties feel threatened (especially those with any semblance of influence), the politicians apply older and inapplicable methods because it provides the image that they are "at least doing something" about the supposed threat.

The Internet is still a completely new, ever-changing landscape and politicians are stuck spinning their wheels in the mud as special interests (such as the MAFIAA) demand something, anything be done when the new model does not run parallel to their profit motive. So the easy solution is to just slap older laws and regulations over the top like an ill-fitting band-aid and hope it works. MAFIAA wins. Politician wins. Citizenry loses, as per usual.
It's not exactly fair to call either technique pointers, but the original could be useful for more things than just this (though this is probably the intended use case).

The linked article, however, makes no sense. The author does not seem to understand how JavaScript works. Arrays are not copied when passed to another function.
The difference, though, is that past a certain distance there is no good alternative to flying.. You either take a plane or stay home (more or less).

Movie theatres are fighting all sorts of alternatives. They can (and do) gouge on some things, but that only works if they can get you into the building in the first place. Gimmicks like 3D and shake-O-vision or whatever are meant to just that.
Of course this is not exclusively using box shadow but all kinds of clever CSS3 properties such as transform, gradients, etc - non the less very well done.

It really shows what kind of freedom CSS3 brings to the web.
> Did anyone have a reasonable-looking website in 2001? How is that an American phenomenon?

Yes. European websites at the time were reasonably modern.

e.g., a web shop
http://replay.web.archive.org/20010614234849/http://www.bol....

American websites were always one big mess, lacking any form of tasteful design or functionality.

http://replay.web.archive.org/20000516060156/http://www.amaz...
I'd like to see what this does to a night-time skyline of a major city.

Edit: turns out does http://i.imgur.com/EK0cO.jpg -> http://i.imgur.com/wOWje.jpg
The only problem I see with this approach is the Javascript-interpreter seeing through your pointer system and holding a reference to the object pointed to - which defeats the purpose of creating a possibility to segfault...
I'm sorry but I don't agree with some of the comments I'm reading: I think the easiest part is the start up & the most challenging part is maintaining,stamina, endurance & persistance...stickin' it out 'til the end...when ur business turns over a profit or 'til u get bored, sell it or other factors outside of ur control that cause u to say 'start-up' is hard...start ups is actually 'soft' the 'cozy' fuzzy' part then comes the 'hard drive' dynamo elexctrifying maintanance 'GO' part, ehh? do u agree? show of hands? ;) lol...
It's not always useful to call bullshit. Specifically, when confronted to that kind of emails, the best policy is not answering.

Calling bullshit out loud is useful so that others can know it is bullshit. Otherwise, the energy is best spent elsewhere.
> This code and the [...] underlying vulnerabilities will not be publicly disclosed. They are shared exclusively with our Government customers

And the vendor, I hope? Of course, we know HBGary was developing private exploits, but it wasn't exactly blogging about them.
Yometa.com Visual Search Launch set to improve upon Google, Yahoo and Bing
Love the UI - well done!
Funny enough, I have written a piece of a web application in C, connected by JNI. It's even easier with CPython. Certainly, you can't do that with client-side JS, but could you imagine mixing desktop-side JS and C++ in the view?

That said, the piece that is in most need of performance in a desktop application is often the GUI itself. Imagine Microsoft Word taking a split second more when it updates the ribbon, for example.

Perhaps there is an exception for desktop apps that need direct connections to hardware.
"There's a difference between the quality of a business and the quality of a management. If it's a strong enough business, it should be able to withstand poor management. If you gave me the number-one pick in the CEO draft, and said he had to run Ford Motor, I wouldn't do it. It would be too tough. A CEO depends on too many things happening that are outside his control, even if he's the best in the world."
-Warren Buffett
I bought a Palm Pre (1) for Sprint about a month after it came out. I still think the operating system, WebOS, is great but Palm really let me down with the device. It was just pure crap.

Despite its sleek design, the craftsmanship was poor and the phone cracked in multiple places. The plastic screen also scratched very easily.

The worst part of it all is that the phone is underpowered. The processor is slower and has less RAM than its competition. This is why the phone performed so poorly despite having a great operating system.

I hope HP can make the next generation WebOS powered devices perform better because it really is a great OS.
You just have to time your trips right, so you can, for example, trade a Wednesday for an extra Saturday.
I use bitcoin and I don't jailbreak my iPhone.
> I don't really agree with the comment that the icon shouldn't include any details other than the bare minimum needed to convey its function.

"Perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add but when there is nothing left to remove." ―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Welcome to the future of video. Please stay a while.
I think Sample code has its value. It helps you learn stuff rather quickly. Just because some people push sample code to production does not justify not providing/ using sample code in the first place.
But to agree with you, thanks for spotting the perils of sample code. I guess it can be used as a gentle reminder to every one using sample code...
austin has an order of magnitude less VC money and much less of a startup culture than SV (but better than most other cities). Austin is extremely weak in B to C companies and the VC's and overall community are geared towards B to B startups. Im not saying that there are no B to C success stories, just that there are extremely few.

Austin has a great quality of life and you can definitely create a successful startup here, but there is just simply less opportunity to "run in" to national stage movers and shakers. In SV there are constantly talks by CEOs of brand name startups at casual groups. In austin you would typically have to go to something very formal to get the same caliber of talk.

For example, the talks at SXSW are great and attract CEOs of great startups. But you can get those same talks in the bay area throughout the year.
"Even a mouse can understand it, with a little coaching"
Yea, I know. Here is one article on it:
http://www.channelvmedia.com/blog/office-oversharing-social-...
Haml on coffeescript
This article is incorrect, arrays are passed by reference since they are objects. I've added a comment on the blog.
You can still have a null pointer exception.
I'm not too sure that's the business VUPEN is in. Sure, it doesn't hurt them much to share their latest Safari exploit given how slow Apple is on the fix, but with Google their window has the potential to be very short.
I don't think it's a joke. We don't have much context to go on. I get the feeling the author was just exploring/experimenting. Implementing "pointers" and some sort of malloc in javascript probably has very little practical application, but the author may learn a bit more about how memory works. Maybe that is his real goal.
"Trying to follow your perspective. You likely assume that every node has a dossier tracking every single coin. That dossier is summarized as a hash table. Right?"

Now I've had chance to think about it, it's probably a tree rather than a hash table, but the general idea is the same. There's no way you'd do a brute force O(N) search if N is very large.

"Does it mean a transaction needs 1 hour to settle or I'm confusing something for something?"

Yes, but it depends on how important the transaction is to you. If you receive the equivalent of $10, you may consider 1 confirmation enough, but if the amount was $10,000, then you'd probably want to wait for 6 confirmations just to make sure.

The Bitcoin client tends to err on the side of caution, and considers transaction unconfirmed until they have 6 confirmations.

"Well... suppose I'm an attacker who briefly mobilized some significant CPU resources (a GPU cluster, a million zombie PCs)"

You'd need a lot of resources. The Bitcoin network currently runs at 17190 Tflops, which is about equivalent to 2.5 million desktop CPUs. If bitcoin ever becomes a major currency, this value will be much higher, and out of the range of most botnets.

"I make nodes face two chains of equal length. Once new block arrives and nodes rush to the "winner" branch, I help the other branch win, so they rush back."

What would be the point in doing that?

"BitCoin weakens it to a majority vote in terms of CPU cycles uselessly burnt."

What's the alternative? A centralized server is likely to be far more vulnerable to attacks (just ask Sony!).
But if the author redefines a word within the context of an article or other piece of work, it seems a tad trite to continue to complain about how it's use doesn't agree with some standard definition.

So yes, I would argue saying a word means something can make it true with the context of the author's writing. It basically becomes variable declaration at that point.

Do you disagree?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy,_Sr.
Werkzeug (The Python WSGI Utility Library)
Ernestine Fu: Stanford student, co-authored a book and youngest VC at 19
Inception explained with the OS X Finder
Merely disagreeing with a law doesn't lead to eventual change. You have to break it more and more visibly until they prosecute you, and then get enough people to rally around you and win the case, and the appeal, etc.

No, that's one way of changing a law, and I generally don't think it's the best. The best way is to go round persuading people of your case.

If you declare that it's morally alright for folks to break laws just because they happen to disagree with them, then the biggest problem you encounter is that folks' opinions on what laws are unjust are often just plain wrong. For instance, if Fred Bloggs believes that it should be legal to beat up queers, then he's perfectly entitled to that opinion, and to try to use his free-speech rights to persuade others that we ought to change the law so that it's legal to beat up queers. But it doesn't make it on some level okay for him to start beating up queers.

Or a more morally neutral example: some people think we should drive on the left, some people think we should drive on the right. But civil disobedience is really bad way to sort that one out.
Ask HN: What project management / ticketing app do you use?
Basecamp is bloated. Lighthouse is too complex. We're happily using Sifter at the moment.

Project management apps need discussions, with statuses, responsibilities and milestones.

Who does this best in your opinion?
Quick + cheap to transact over distances without requirement of a trusted third party
Whether or not this exploit is impressive, using the term "pwnd" comes across as incredibly unprofessional and predisposes me to perceiving this whole article in a negative light.
The poor are a parasitic element, if we're talking about the same "poor". I'm not talking about the hard-working folks who bring in a crappy wage because their skillset sucks, I'm talking about the folks who have decided that it's a better idea just to stand on a street corner with their hand out hoping to take advantage of the compassion of others.
@joncrawford has been compiling this list based on his needs: http://t.co/6LSV0j5
sure but many websites use the useragent to alter the presentation for the device...this would diminish the experience for the lay user when tethering
FAIL #1: If you like bitcoin, then you must think the gold standard was a good idea.

Complete and total straw man if there ever was one.

FAIL #3: The whole technological basis is flawed.

Followed shortly by:

"First of all, I admit, I don't totally understand the bitcoin algorithms and systems. I don't really need to.
"
If you are crazy extreme, the Motorola Defy (android phone) is waterproof (they only claim "water resistant" but people have used them underwater in swimming pools, check youtube).
Their site seems to be going down, so here's the text:

---

Hi everyone,

We are (un)happy to announce that we have officially Pwnd Google Chrome and its sandbox.

The exploit shown in this video is one of the most sophisticated codes we have seen and created so far as it bypasses all security features including ASLR/DEP/Sandbox, it is silent (no crash after executing the payload), it relies on undisclosed (0day) vulnerabilities discovered by VUPEN and it works on all Windows systems (32-bit and x64).

The video shows the exploit in action with Google Chrome v11.0.696.65 on Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 (x64). The user is tricked into visiting a specially crafted web page hosting the exploit which will execute various payloads to ultimately download the Calculator from a remote location and launch it outside the sandbox at Medium integrity level. Note: The Calculator is used here as an example, it can be replaced by any other payload.

While Chrome has one of the most secure sandboxes and has always survived the Pwn2Own contest during the last three years, we have now uncovered a reliable way to execute arbitrary code on any installation of Chrome despite its sandbox, ASLR and DEP.

This code and the technical details of the underlying vulnerabilities will not be publicly disclosed. They are shared exclusively with our Government customers as part of our vulnerability research services.

The video in question is http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=c...
Legacy designs should probably use a legacy version of Qt.

That's not an argument to keep Qt5 in the past forever. They rightly should look ahead instead of back.
>You are making the mistake of conflating "the most successful authors" with "authors who achieve major success with their first books."

No I'm not. What I'm saying is that the home-runs will move over to self-publishing, reducing the profitability of traditional publishing. Say you're a new author, why not release your first book online under a pseudonym and see how it does. If it does ok, why go to a publisher? So now if you're a publisher you have to make do with the authors that need development and you're hoping for Dan Brown sized successes in a market that is tending towards more, not less, diversity. The successes you do find will now be competing in a much broader market that is priced at a fraction of what you're used to. Doesn't seem like a great place to be.

> I also firmly reject the notion that "truly great" authors will necessarily lower their prices of ebooks when they transition to self-publishing: they will charge whatever price the market will bear.

The point is that as an author you can charge a third or less of the price and get the same money because there are less middlemen. Since buyers will buy more of your books if they're cheaper you'd be crazy to charge the same price when you move to self-publishing. As a buyer I'll also spend more on books if they're 3$ each than if they're 15$ each so for the industry this may also be a total net gain.
hmmm. do you get as many, or as good ones?

[also, maybe i'm just jaded, but the way i read your reply sounds as though you're indignant - as if i've committed some terrible (almost racist) offense by making assumptions about other people. if you are offended, i apologise, but i mention it more because i wonder if it's just a curious consequence of the kind of society we now live in. i have no idea how you would phrase what you said to avoid giving that idea, for example...]
There will certainly be maintenance costs during that 20 years though.

I do like the idea that as PV efficiencies improve you only have to swap out one cell per dish
Citation needed for such a serious accusation. They claim to be ethical. From their about page: "VUPEN follows a private responsible disclosure policy and reports all discovered vulnerabilities to the affected vendor under contract with VUPEN, and works with them to create a timetable pursuant to which the vulnerability information may be publicly disclosed."
All Prius Models Will Be 'Plug-In' Starting in 2014
I can understand their joy but the last sentence in the post and the Twitter update: "Sorry Google...we have officially pwned Google Chrome and its sandbox with a 0-Day." [1] seem rather unprofessional for the "world leader in vulnerability research for defensive and offensive security" [2], a company with "Government customers".

[1] https://twitter.com/VUPEN

[2] http://www.vupen.com/english/company.php
like it or not, it's been vernacular for quite some time. how do you feel about pwn2own? the pwnies?
Games have used scripting for GUIs forever. If performance is important somewhere it's in games. So I wouldn't be worried at all if it is used for "boring" desktop apps.

As long as the drawing is fast (which is the case, as it is handled by the GPU), it really doesn't matter in human time whether it takes 0.01ms or 0.001ms to react.
http://www.vupen.com/english/services/

> As the world leader in vulnerability research, VUPEN Security provides weaponized and highly sophisticated exploits specifically designed for Law Enforcement and Intelligence Agencies to help them achieve their offensive missions using tailored and unique codes created in-house by VUPEN for vulnerabilities discovered by our researchers.

Note also the "under contract with VUPEN" part of the disclosure bit.
Not saying this isn't true, as I'm sure VUPEN is quite legit, but what stops me from creating a keyboard shortcut to calculator.exe, opening a random website which loads for a few seconds, and then pressing ctrl+alt+f6 or something to open calculator?
Show HN: my new app (this time, months of work)!
Lies; Lets see code or it never happened.
Bugzilla[1] and Icescrum[2].

1: http://www.bugzilla.org/

2: http://www.icescrum.org/en/