skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had always secretly hoped Allard was being groomed for the role eventually, but of course, that hope went the way of the Courier.
EwanG, you must already know about SmugMug (as I imagine you've looked at all the image hosting services online multiple times if this is a big pain point), I'm curious why it wouldn't fit the bill?

(I have absolutely no affiliation, shy of writing their Java API)
Ask HN: Typography—How?
Beautiful websites nearly all share one common characteristic: amazing typography. I want to make beautiful sites, so I set out to learn typography, only to find it difficult to find quality resources.

If I wanted to learn a new programming language, I'd find a project and start hacking—is that a good method for typography? Should I look for classes/books/paid sites to teach me?

What do you HNers recommend to learn typography?
My two biggest/best calming tactics:

A) A good sounding board to hash things out with.

B) Work on resolving (or at least addressing) whatever problem is inspiring the feeling of Doom.
I know I'm replying to my own post but just remembered that after I started working after college - I set up a "candy store" in my cubicle at work. I sold candy that you couldn't get in the vending machine and all for cheaper - everything on the honor system. That led me to becoming good friends with the company lawyer who ended up being one of my co-founders of my startup (Digital Envoy). So another bump for using candy as a gateway to entrepreneurship.
The Importance of being punctual - AMEN
Ask HN: Co-founder Speed Dating in Atlanta, GA
In my never-ending search for a co-founder I stumbled upon this - http://dating.startatlanta.org/ - and was both intrigued and appalled by the idea.

The speed dating part seems kind of fun but the $25 most certainly does not. I am of the humble opinion that great movers and shakers of the world should congregate in a friendly environment not barred by monetary restrictions.

Plus I'm broke.

So I'm curious if anybody in the HN community (who lives in Atlanta) would be interested in participating in a co-founder speed dating event for FREE.

(Oh and has anyone actually participated in a similar concept before?)
A bit laggy but amazing that it's even possible. Can't wait to see what this looks like in the future. I hope we'll see something like CS Source or a similar title ported over in the next couple of years.
I have worked on Wall St for over a decade at this point.

And yet you say in this post that you're in the midwest:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2507002

The reason I criticized your post (and I'm not the only one)
is that I don't want a young'un to read this and believe that's the right way to be thinking about career or business decisions.

You interviewed somewhere that isn't for you. So try someplace else. Whining on the Internet about "teh M$" doesn't make you look like a brazen intellectual.
I'm sorry, he lost me at comparing Microsoft stock to Apple and Google over the past 10 years. In retrospect, those are two of the most successful publicly traded tech companies of the period--not a fair comparison.

Not to mention those were small companies in 2000. For Microsoft stock to have increased 1200% (as Google's did) it would have probably had to grow into some very significant portion of the world economy.

Obviously Microsoft hasn't outperformed over the past 10 years, and it looks like the rest of the article gets into actual substantive critique, but it's hard for me to trust substance from someone who starts out with such an unfair introduction.
No suggestion as to which to go with, but if you go with C, drop me a line when you have an MVP and I will promote it a little. (I still belong to some homeschooling lists.)
They claim to be making strategic purchases in bulk of some component (rumored to be displays) in order to get low prices and crowd others out.
Slightly off topic but does anyone know what the color scheme is for the code examples?
As the article mentions the job of a CEO is to increase shareholder value, dividends are part of that value. MSFT has issued quarterly and sometimes annual dividends which are currently at 16 cents a share. In total, MS has issued $6.35 in dividends since 2005, this is fully 25% of the current stock price.
Why should they have to follow the rules, laws are for everyone else. Certainly not a FBI bureaucrats.
Exactly - its a common practice to use DNS servers to spread load across backend instances. Example djbdns/tinydns by default "only" returns up to 8 IP addresses so if you setup more then that those IPs will be randomly returned.

http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/balance.html
and at least they aren't myspace.
Ask HN: Webdev Consultants, what hosting do you recommend to clients?
I've have done consulting in a number of years, but I'm bidding for a project as we speak. I'm wondering what hosting options make the most sense for small to medium sized green field projects. I'm leaning towards heroku or google app engine since they require zero maintenance and offer many additional services like full text search, background jobs, etc. What are your thoughts?
I think a) is the most unique - there are already quite a few companies going after b) (FengOffice, Zoho Project, etc), and c) seems like it would be more difficult to monetize. It also might be easier to develop and market a Facebook App, depending on your skill-set.
well they probably were using a code (not a cipher). "when will the next batch of loaves be ready?" etc.

[i am disappointed the article doesn't even mention that kind of detail; never mind describing how they avoid traffic patterns (presumably they have protocols for changing email addresses, times and subjects)]
By "shortly after" you mean 1 year after, I take it? Which also makes that available just under a year on AT&T today as well. So it hasn't really been that long and now we are hearing about a new OS and new hardware. Not sure I know anyone that would pay $150 for an outdated phone.
Searching for "ipad rivals the year of the clueless" with or without &pws=0 I get 5 scraper sights before ipadinsight.com/category/ipad-rivals-2:

1. usedipadforsale.net/ipad-rivals-this-year-the-year-of-the-copycats-or-the- clueless.htm

2. www.ipads101.com/ipad-rivals-this-year-the-year-of-the-copycats-or-the- clueless/

3. ipads2nd.com/.../ipad-rivals-this-year-the-year-of-the-copycats-or-the- clueless/

4. catsmakemebats.micasaessucasagermania.com/.../ipad-rivals-this-year-the- year-of-the-copycats-or-the-clueless/

5. ipad.thedailyglobe.com/.../ipad-rivals-this-year-the-year-of-the-copycats-or- the-clueless/

6. ipadinsight.com/category/ipad-rivals-2

That looks pretty bad to me.
People invest in stocks in order to get a return. They pay the price of the stock because they believe the current and future value of the company is such that they will receive a higher amount of money when they sell the stock. Stocks that issue dividends modify that arrangement because one doesn't need to sell the stock at a higher price to receive a return, since the dividend is providing a return all the time.
I'd say A, though I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook were working on something similar as we speak.

B meanwhile, just bothers me (I wouldn't want to work under such circumstances), but perhaps there is a market for such a thing. If I'm not mistaken, ODesk has a similar, Big Brothery package of their own....check what theirs does, and see if you can improve it.

I can't comment much on C, so I won't.
Go read Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Type-2nd-revised-expanded/dp/...

Then go and get a Typekit account http://typekit.com/ and start experimenting.

Good design (any kind of design, not just web design) requires time and iteration. It's a skill, you have to practise it.
Funny thing...it is more open than the open source alternative.
> Microsoft could have built a skype clone in-house for far less than $8bn. But would people actually sign up and use it

Yes. MS has a massive installed base. If they can't leverage that to get people to use it, they are clearly incompetent.
CEO doesn't control the price of his company's stock. It's silly to use stock price, which is set by the market as a performance indicator. It's makes more sense to compare metrics like net income, free cash flow, etc.

And Microsoft isn't doing that badly on those: http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/net_income#compCos=AAPL,GO...
anyone know when the pace of evolution of scala will drop?
Blogger is Down
Ask HN: Best way to accept payments for a product over a term
I have a product we currently sell locally and are planning on taking nationally. Right now we only accept paid in full via credit card or ACH debit but we would like to be able to accept payment over a term (6 months / 12 months) which is often requested by our customers. Is there a good service that provides this functionality? What if any experience can you share about how to do this?
rails 3 makes strings safe by default. PHP doesn't.
Not (B), the space is already over-saturated. Every second designer on Dribbble appears to be working on some sort of online collaboration / team management / invoicing something for telecommuters.
A. Interesting idea but how would you make money? Advertising inside an app that carries advertising itself doesn't sound viable. If you charge for subscriptions how do you compete when Skype comes bundled into Windows?

B. I've looked hard at that space. Software isn't going to suddenly make managers become telecommuting friendly. I thought the market would eventually make it happen but that doesn't seem to be the case. There's a pretty large differential in coders wages between the Valley and the Midwest but you don't see companies embracing telecommuting in large numbers.

C. This is the best idea in my opinion. There are multiple revenue options but you've got answer how you will distribute it? I would also consider seriously marketing to the school at home market. It's a sizeable niche that you could target inexpensively and once you're successful you can build out from that beachhead.
Are there any great examples of this besides Steve Jobs and Apple? Didn't seem to work too well for Yahoo.
Simple Harmonic Motion (kinetic art)
How it works: The period of one complete cycle of the dance is 60 seconds. The length of the longest pendulum has been adjusted so that it executes 51 oscillations in this 60 second period. The length of each successive shorter pendulum is carefully adjusted so that it executes one additional oscillation in this period. Thus, the 15th pendulum (shortest) undergoes 65 oscillations. When all 15 pendulums are started together, they quickly fall out of sync—their relative phases continuously change because of their different periods of oscillation. However, after 60 seconds they will all have executed an integral number of oscillations and be back in sync again at that instant, ready to repeat the dance.
Beautiful. I want as much of this lovely style to be converted to the Django admin page!
Pre-antitrust days, that would be exactly what MS would have done. But it has been battered and bruised by the investigations and must have sworn to themselves "never again" will they ever devote managerial time to do what could have been solved by an outright purchase.
Why did they use USB sticks and not something that courier can chew/swallow, like MicroSD?
IBM doesn't care about node.js people
Argh! If I'm in the midwest now can't I have worked in NYC before I moved here (which is what happened btw, now that you are so curious about my antecedents). And M has taken so many $ from me in the form of numerous OS updates & backups that I can justifiably call them M$ :) Should one be an intellectual to play around with scala ? Jeez.
When comparing a dividend-paying stock to non-dividend paying stocks, the dividend-paying stock's price per share should be adjusted to incorporate the dividends paid (for comparative purposes only). As someone else pointed out, even if Microsoft's stock didn't gain a cent you would have made over $6 since 2005 from the dividends paid.

Since the comparative price of the stock would get adjusted to reflect this and market cap is a simple product of the price and shares outstanding, it does tangentially impact market cap (again, only for comparative purposes). Though a more direct way of stating this is that the value of the stock should be adjusted to reflect the returns from dividends.
Reuters: a failed takeover of T-Mobile would cost AT&T as much as $6 billion
"are there any examples of these amazing things you can do in JRuby that you can't do in PHP?"

A big one, you can use native threads.

you can also grab a java machine learning library and use it directly in jruby, you can use lucene directly in your process, you can write hadoop jobs in jruby without using the streaming api, etc, etc.

Just think of java libs that don't exist in php and that's the benefit.
IMHO you first need to understand design, its various sub fields (i.e. typography, colors, layout), user experience design/interaction design/usability, and finally how all of this applies to the web. You can learn the basics by reading books but the only way to truly understand and master is by study this things in the world and by practicing them. Start thinking about design, analyze it in your daily life, do your own makeovers of sites you use, design a blog theme, etc, etc.

As for web typography, you want to check of the latest generation of font embedding because that's where the real magic's at. The most known web font solutions are: CSS3 (font-face), typeface.js, cufon, flir, sifr, Google Font API, Typekit.

Here's a list of quality books on design and typography:

A History of Graphic Design
Before & After Page Design
Designing Brand Identity
Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
Graphic Design Solutions
How Designers Think
Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data
Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop
The Complete Manual of Typography
The Designer's Guide to Color Combinations
The Elements of Graphic Design: Space, Unity, Page Architecture, and Type
The Elements of Typographic Style
The New Typography
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Thinking with Type: A Primer for Designers
Typography Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Using Type in Graphic Design

Books on web design:

About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become
Bulletproof Web Design
Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide
Designing Web Usability
Designing With Web Standards
Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design
Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction
Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web
Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction
Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems
The Essential Guide to User Interface Design
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology
Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks
Howard Schultz and Michael Dell come to mind first. Larry Page is the most recent.

Yahoo is a good counterpoint, though I'd suggest externalities like a lack of visionary leadership or a lack of intellectual capital, compared to their rivals, are more to blame.

Edit: Schultz wasn't a founder, but I believe he was their first visionary leader.
I just saw the 120"x30" print rolled out in front of my office a couple days ago. I think the biggest challenge is figuring out a way to mount a rolled print that big without stabbing it with pushpins.
Ask HN: Any alt. to recording video in a cross-browser way without using Flash?
I want to record people in browser from their webcam. Am I stuck with Flash?

Details are appreciated for hack solutions.
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20100820PD215.html

It doesn't sound like Mirasol will be produced in volume until 2012. Given the necessary lead time to stock components for a major device launch, devices that use Mirasol will be late 2012 at best, definitely not fall 2011. At least that's what it seems given the available information.

I do think Amazon will make a color Kindle eReader using Mirasol eventually. But they are obviously doing something strategic with Android and can make an LCD tablet without waiting on Mirasol.
Continuous auctions have the advantage of being continuous at the expense of volatility.

You could instead have a single auction every day and this would be more fair but less available.

Your example is not unlike how specialists control the price for markets.

You should probably look into how these things actually work.
Particularly heinous for the Skype purchase: it's amazingly buggy. It's gotten shinier over the years, but they still payed 8.5 billion for a POS.
Skype already has enough market share that bundling with Windows is not likely to generate enough growth to justify the purchase alone.
Finally signed on for a Netflix trial so I could try this on my rooted Incredible running CM7. Works great.
I think strong crypto + several VPN providers would be as safe and easier to automate.

(This, BTW, is why I am generally against anti-piracy enforcement actions and warantless wiretapping. When you force normal people to use strong cryptography and VPN providers or mesh networks, the terrorists are much harder to pick out. They just look like kids downloading movies.)
Why rely on digesting electronics when cryptography is just as secure?
The book list in readable format:

Before & After Page Design
Typography Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Using Type in Graphic Design
Thinking with Type: A Primer for Designers
How Designers Think
Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data
Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop
The Designer's Guide to Color Combinations
Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
The New Typography
I basically read this as, "I want everything I could every possibly use in the global scope so I don't have to think about imports". Modern web development revolves heavily around open source frameworks. You can't escape the need to know about libraries outside the core language you program in, even with PHP.

If you are writing a trivially simple webapp, then you would be correct that you could hack together something with just the core language features of PHP.
VWAP is "volume-weighted average price," not "average price". Therefore, to replicate it, you need to participate in line with volume-at-time, not 1/N per time bucket. This requires you to estimate the volume envelope over the time period of interest. (Often a day, or in the case of hedging certain new issue convertible bonds, up to several days.)
Apple Loses Ruling in Kodak Patent Case
C) especially if you can do it as an iPad app or at least iPad friendly HTML site.

Have "daily features" and my kids would be going there a lot.

I'd open my wallet for that.
I've seen so many of these VPN-for-rent services that this is becoming an obligatory reply. But I don't see anyone saying "ssh" on the comments yet, so:

Here's how to tunnel on OSX via ssh:

ssh -fnNMD 8080 -S ~/.tmp-ssh-socket you@server.you.own && sudo networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxy Airport localhost 8080

Then when you're done:

ssh -S ~/.tmp-ssh-socket -O exit localhost && sudo networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxystate Airport off

That will set your ssh server as the system-wide socks proxy.

Granted I don't have the time to wrap a pretty UI around it, but those commands work, and I trust my own servers more than any service.

If anyone does have time to wrap a pretty UI around it... OpenCloak could exist mere hours after the commercial project went into beta :)
How does the running performance of WebGL compare to what would be possible if it was a native app? Are there inherent limitations of implementing this in the context of the web that will keep it much slower or will continuing optimization and things like hardware accelerated canvas elements allow achieving near parity (>80%) in performance?
non-enterprise is scary to the enterprise
Entirely bootstraped. We had some personal savings that allowed us to run real lean and build up revenue slowly without trying to out run burn. We hit a tipping point about 8 months in where the momentum started to carry us.

We are an orignial anchor of Gangplank, but never utilized any funding but am thankful for the community support. Gangplank is a great collaborative workspace, in the early days though there was not the formal mentoring or incubation to speak of that has become available over the last few months.
Your comment below has been killed, either by a moderator or because it was downvoted. Because of how the current system works, it might be the case that every subsequent comment you post gets killed automatically. You can't see this, but to people who don't have the "showdead" option on, your comments will be invisible. If this is the case I hope you create a new account, instead of becoming another innocent victim of a broken system.
I find it callous for you to brush aside the suffering of thousands of people by "The situation isn't good".

Just because all of Japan hasn't been destroyed doesn't mean that therr hasn't been significant damage done. Lies, corruption/amakudari and incompetence has all been unearthed in the nuclear disaster. In what sense is it hysteria to point this out?

(Oddly, I feel the Tsunami disaster itself was handled quite well by the gov't)
RON CONWAY: The Scariest Man In Silicon Valley
I'm not trying to be snarky, but is your disappointment that it's turning out that nuclear power may not be as safe as we hoped? It seems that this is a valid data point to look at when considering whether or not we should deploy nuclear power more widely. Even if it hadn't happened, from our current vantage point it's obvious that it _can_ happen.
I recall so many people here asserting absolutely that fukushima wouldn't be a problem at all. Those people should reflect a bit.
Deniable.

Cryptography doesn't do you any good if there are guys with a car battery asking you very pointed questions, like "where did you get this encrypted disk"?

With MicroSD in your mouth, they wont even get the idea to question you.
Doesn't this system still lead to a large trail of emails going back to Pakistan (assuming the courier didn't go all the way into Afghanistan to send each email). Presumably, some of the computers that were on the receiving end of those emails have been seized by US intelligence in various raids. The IP of the sender would be easy to trace for the CIA, and the content of the emails would have at least indicated that the sender was in a key decision-making position within the organization.

Without some other security steps, like VPNs or proxies, the US would have certainly been able to trace the country of origin of these communications.
Hardly, here's why: If you can link the phone with desktop
applications you have a hit that neither Apple or Google can duplicate. Think of you desktop as a server for your phone.
Who better to coordinate the operating systems of the two
than Microsoft. If that's what he is thinking, I can't wait
to watch the dog fight between the three of them.
Then the question becomes:

Would the drug problem exist without the CIA?

a) Yes.

b) Yes but slightly less bad.

c) No.

'c' is unreasonable 'a' and 'b' are reasonable answers.

Now:

Would the concentration camps exist with or without the North Korean Government's help?

'c' is the only reasonable answer.
No amount of money in the world is going to make any difference for the problem of cracking strong encryption.