skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Things like SproutCore really are the future of the internet. Within five years, I think the true web operating system will be born; and it's not like YouOS or any of those other pseudo operating systems in browsers. Why do you need contextual menus and a proprietary file system inside a browser? That's what the desktop operating system is for.

The internet operating system is going to be driven by these richly interactive and dynamic web applications built on top of Javascript in a web browser. Finally, it seems people are starting to realize that there's no reason for the user interaction and interface gap between desktop and web applications.

Sadly, even though the internet is relatively young, the interface paradigms of how web apps are supposed to be built have already been engrained in the minds of web developers. Still, I hope someday there will little difference between a Cocoa app and a Web app. MobileMe and 280Slides are just the first batch of these.
John Galt games? Still, the idea of a MMORPG taking place on (and for) well-known webpages is intriguing.

Though it doesn't actually say what his alternative business model is (apart from reducing costs). I'd guess advertising.
Even if Macs were more expensive, I think OS X alone would justify the price difference. I'll leave Windows to my grand mother thank you.
I use PeterBlum.com's controls for ASP.NET plus some hand-rolled stuff.
Ask HN: Our new logo — Tell us what you think
We'll see if YooPlace can do more than the others have, and get real traction with the new features before Hacker News sues them and wants their interface back.

:)
Eight ways the iMac changed computing
Reading mathematics is always a huge ruse. Every part of it is designed to make years of sweat and blood look like a 15-second insight of vast subtlety.

By design, of course.
Er. No.
yeah articles like this that hit front page annoy me (although i know this comment is helping it stay) .... still it says basically cause x (a person) is leaving the business model is broke
The article talks about children and pre-university education. In my opinion as a foreigner, the USA fails at pre-university, scores ok at undergrad level, and excels amazingly at grad level and afterwards.

The USA imports people all the time, including thousands of graduates. Like you and me. Very few countries do it at a comparable scale; perhaps only the UK and Switzerland.
Only 3 points? I was hoping for a little more content. But Ron Pauls campaign was inspiring and relevant to underdog start-up founders.
Yeah, good point. What I guess this boils down to is, if quitting is the right decision, quit. If it's the wrong decision, don't quit. Don't rule it out, and in general, try to make the right decisions. Not super enligtening.
"There are probably rather fewer mathematicians who conceive of themselves as artistic mathematicians."

I know there are a number of people on HN running around who are accomplished mathematicians. I'm curious if they know of any mathematicians around who think of themselves as "artistic mathematicians" and focus on communication with laypeople of the deeper parts of math.

Who around tries to sell math?
"Today, certifications like the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert, and the Red Hat Certified Architect certificates are sometimes worth more to an employer than a four-year degree in computer science." Um, no.

Or at least, I think that in fact higher education is completely in step with business practices, it's just that those business practices are also outmoded. Especially the insistence that everyone work in a office ("tethered to a place"), fit into rigid hierarchies, job descriptions and roles ("the experience is closed"), sign NDAs, non-competes and closely guard intellectual property ("each student/employee is isolated though surrounded by peers").

It's ironic that Deming is referenced at the end, because he was all about building quality, no matter how hard, long and laborious that is, and I think this article is all about scare tactics driving quick fixes while protecting the people in positions of power and the hierarchy they've built. The goal is obviously to make higher education more like job training, which is going to make it easier to fit people into cookie cutter roles that are even easier to ship overseas. "The World is Flat?" Please.
Google ranks top ‘Torrent sites’
I didn't mean it was real science (the physical part of it), I found it fun and amusing, like a mind trick.
I agree - we're working very hard to get concerts and theater events added asap. Regarding selling tickets, then we have to add our own massive customer service department and handle outgoing payments, both of which I have no idea how to do and have no interest in doing.

However, Stubhub is pretty great for selling your own tickets. https://www.stubhub.com/sell-tickets/

Email me if you need any help.
Hi,

We are very sorry for Friday's downtime on one of our clusters in Sacramento.

We take downtime seriously and we learn from each incident. Yesterday's incident appears to be the result of a software malfunction in 2 or more of 4 switches that handle traffic between a group of servers and their SAN shelves. The switches are from Extreme Networks, which has a good reputation, and they are helping us debug error logs.

Organizationally, we are making changes to reduce the incidence of such problems and to always improve how we deal with them in the future. We're expanding the group that focuses on infrastructure design and management. This group looks at ways to improve our technology (design and vendor choices) and human processes. For instance, one of the top people in that group visited a SAN vendor earlier this week to review their latest offerings.

If you were affected by this downtime, please contact your account manager to discuss service credits. If you don't know your account manager, please send an email to 'info@engineyard.com' and your message will reach them.

Thanks for being our customer, and again, sorry for the downtime. Believe me, when I hear about downtime while on a week off with my dad coming this weekend, it is not pleasant - it actually hurts!

--- Lance Walley, CEO
--- Engine Yard
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=mininova.org%2C+thepirat...

check out the regions, pretty cool.

And according to http://twitter.com/mininova , it says "Mininova in July: 35.6MM uniques, 105.2MM visits, 512.1MM pageviews. 7.6% increase compared to June"

Thats some serious traffic.
I don't get it. The conclusion doesn't follow from the arguments.

He writes: "Jennings points to the ballooning costs of MMORPGs-- World of Warcraft is estimated to have cost $40 million to $50 million to develop, and while Age of Conan cost just $25 million, the game is having retention issues, largely because the budget wasn’t big enough, he says. By contrast, he notes, small companies produce low-budget web-based MMOs like Club Penguin and RuneScape that post far higher profits."

How does the fact that low-budget MMO's are more profitable than high-budget MMO's mean that the subscription model is broken?
Not better, just jaded.

If you suck at math, you feel better by blaming the problem on the people who are good at math ("they didn't teach me well enough!"). So, self-loathing rather than coming to grips with one's mediocrity and doing something constructive about changing it. There could also be a feedback loop that gives others an excuse for failing: it's a failure of 'the system' (the competent people), not a failure of those who won't keep up.
An employer who values an MCSE more than a university degree in computer science is most certainly one that I don't work for.
Lecturefinder. Indexing college and academic grade lectures and presentations.
Until the Bubblyfish clip, I thought, "So this is a movie about people who suck at chiptunes."

I will be the old guy, and point out that folks were making chiptunes in the 80's and early 90's on Amigas and Atari STs and C64s...and most of these guys seem wholly unaware of that history, and are showing their musical immaturity because of it (i.e., they're still at the "Hey, look, I made music with this cranky little thing!" phase).

Nonetheless, I'm fond of chiptunes, and I'm amused to see that in NY, pretty much anything novel can collect a "scene". Obviously, these sounds are going to find their way into popular music in the near future. Though they'll be assimilated rather than take over--just like electronica and punk rock.
First article with "Ron Paul" in the title that I've upvoted.

Iteresting question. I know I'd be crazy happy if I had a few Paulites as customers.
typedef std::list<std::string> StrList;
Just in case anybody can't indentify the red thingy — that's a headset (The ones that real customer support warriors use).

In my case, this comment was sadly perceptive. A play-by-play of my thoughts:

1) "Oh, no! Smiley has been injured!"

2) "No, wait, Smiley is putting on clown makeup"

3) "No, he's licking something off his face!"

....

735) "Ah, the text tells me that the smiley is using a headset!"

I'm no artist, but my advice is to play with the colors of the headset. Red evokes too many other things, including makeup, blood, and a tongue.

It is challenging to convey the notion of a headset when your character has no ears or head. It's like trying to create a still photo of Homestar Runner juggling.
Computer model of bees probes the hive mind and provides insights for swarms of robots
TvTorrents does a lot to organize the chaos of bittorrents of TV shows. There's only one torrent per episode for 'normal' reolution and another for high-def. Episodes are organized into TV series. There are categories and ratings as well.

If this sort of site was combined with an app that packaged this information to users, you'd have Tivo-like functionality.
"REST seems to work well for most web applications because they are typically document-oriented. "

Can you (or anyone) give examples of things on the Web that are not concerned with the transfer and manipulation of resources?

"As Paul and many others point out, the web has gotten along fine with just the POST and GET verbs; but a good web application is built upon sensible and addressable URLs."

URLs do not have to map to the underlying architecture of a site. They are orthogonal if you provide a routing layer, something pretty common and easy to manage in most modern Web frameworks.
Mmm, linkbaity title. Tasty.

From the outside, the subscription-based business model seems anything but broken. You get your players to pay $15 every month, for many of them over a period of one or two or three years, you get a much longer shelf life than regular games which likely make most of their sales in the few months after release, and in some cases you can have your cake and eat it too - if you manage to get away with the $60 upfront purchase AND the $15 monthly fee.

Sure, it's competitive. Sure, some studios end up spending millions on crappy games that no one wants to play. How is any of that different from regular, non-subscription based games?
Thank you! I'm a former financial analyst too. The change was worth it 1000x.
You don't get it's a headset unless you know it's related with helpdesk.
Elevator Psychology or the Power of Group Pressure.
Malcom Gladwell's writing is chock full of them, but here's one that's cute: http://www.davidgalenson.com/malcolmgladwell-lecture.pdf
Propel Your Blog with Propeller | TechJaws
Agree, though I also think:

- SproutCore may not be the best, most persuasive or most powerful example of / driving force behind this
- this evolution will see less apps mimicking native desktop-OS-imposed widgetry (like 280slides trying to look like MacOS), resulting in a soup of shades-of-gray --- and more like the many usability-centred, colourful web apps out there. Desktop apps will rather tend to mimick that than the other way around.
- There is no good reason for 280Slides and other Office-on-the-Web solutions to so closely resemble the desktop experience of 90s-style applications (other than, perhaps, customer expectations and user acceptance). GUI is something that can, and should be radically rethought and evolved, all-the-time.
Dell’s New Studio Hybrid Good or Bad? | TechJaws
If it's a *nix system, why not setup a cron job to do it for you? I have a Python script in /etc/cron.daily that performs a mysql-dump, tars it, and uploads it to S3.

For total completeness and peace-of-mind, you could have the script add anything else you need backed up, like your projects or public_html directories, configuration files, etc.
Out of Control, The Illustrated Edition
You Have to Experience It
I agree... a friend turned me onto EXT, and it's quite impressive but hardly gets the same attention and coverage as some of the other frameworks simply due to its cost (which is extremely high! tears).

http://extjs.com/products/extjs/

http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/desktop/desktop.html
I couldn't say I'm a mathematician myself (or in any case I'm an amateur), but I try to sell math in courses, conferences, and so on. I really love maths and I believe in their beauty and power, and I always try to show that. Or actually, rather than trying to show that, it's that I just can't stop relating the things I like to mathematical matters.
Yeah, that logo definitely needs some work. Sorry guys, but its true.
Another post along the lines of "Don't mistake your ignorance of X..."

A great collorary to this is chapter 14 of Huckleberry Finn. I forgot how many times the n-word was in there, however.
Trust customers over VCs
Actually, its kind of encouraging that a site with exactly 33 reviews can get on TC.
Forensic science is badly in need of reform. Here are some suggestions.
Generate HTML from a JSON Without any Template but HTML and Javascript
I don't know if the business model is broken NOW, but perhaps the guy he was interviewing (or quoting) was saying in the future it will break from these cracks. He's saying that the huge budget is causing the subscriptions, but there is no true innovation in the actual product. Therefore, the fact that businesses have to charge monthly to post a decent profit margin will be their downfall. Interesting theory :).
Try Miro.
I know lots of senior citizens who have broadband and/or wifi. I guess not any who have grandkids my age, but lots of people who have children my age who have children themselves.
Ask YC: How to Dazzle?
eversince I have seen http://tinyurl.com/6ddzjh , I have always wanted to automate creation of such images. such an attempt is http://ideamonk.blogspot.com/2008/08/trying-to-dazzle.html
But I am wondering how to perfect it. Right now it's just a rand() doing the magic. But there is something more to the original art. It seems that "the edges have a nice particle effect, the size of squares vary according to either luminance or similarity of neighbor area... and there might be a lot more to watch out! Boxes don't overlap much in the original work, and smaller tiny boxes play very significant role in giving life to the guitar kid..."

So, fellow hackers please help this kid as to what he needs to know in image processing to be able to do the trick. Like how to detect uniform areas in an image... how to detect edges. For example if i have a photo of a shirt, I wish to detect where it is crumpled where it is plain. If I am able to do this, I will put big squares at plain areas and small ones at non uniform areas. I think that might reproduce the effect!
Thanks!
Didn't they take money from Bezos' fund?
We're dealing with this right now.
I grew up with MSX. I never really made music on it though, that started later on PC. But anyways, loads of MSX nostalgia lead to this:
http://zwizwa.be/staapl/sheep
Though I at least partially agree with the overall sentiment, he seems to be forgetting two things.

1) Much greater than 1 in 10 VC-backed companies succeed (from the founders' perspective). 1 in 10 return the fund, as Fred Wilson would say. Many others score a multiple that is lower for the VC, but in general if a company returns a VC 2-3x, the founders made millions.

2) Many startups change ideas midstream. This is largely why VCs invest in people. Whatever that silly game that eventually became flickr was called, it had users. But it wasn't going to make anyone rich.

Of course past performance doesn't indicate future results, so you can't simply say "50% of the startups this firm funds get rich, so my chances are 50% if they fund me." But I'd guess that the average funded startup still has a much higher EV, from the founders' perspective, than ones that aren't.
Shouldn't the headset be either over or below the mouth?
History is back
eversince I have seen http://tinyurl.com/6ddzjh , I have always wanted to automate creation of such images. such an attempt is http://ideamonk.blogspot.com/2008/08/trying-to-dazzle.html
But I am wondering how to perfect it. Right now it's just a rand() doing the magic. But there is something more to the original art. It seems that "the edges have a nice particle effect, the size of squares vary according to either luminance or similarity of neighbor area... and there might be a lot more to watch out! Boxes don't overlap much in the original work, and smaller tiny boxes play very significant role in giving life to the guitar kid..."

So, fellow hackers please help this kid as to what he needs to know in image processing to be able to do the trick. Like how to detect uniform areas in an image... how to detect edges. For example if i have a photo of a shirt, I wish to detect where it is crumpled where it is plain. If I am able to do this, I will put big squares at plain areas and small ones at non uniform areas. I think that might reproduce the effect!
Thanks!
VC investment should be a strategic decision, not a confidence booster. If VCs give you access to resources that you need to have a successful exit, then go for it. However, if you are willing to give up control of your company for outside validation, you have big problems.
Basically reiterates Adams points.

But at least Adam and Heroku get more exposure via the 37Signals blog.

Perhaps all startups should do this - disagree with 37Signals/DHH, post on YC, await blog attention.
Hi, thanks for your feedback! Here are our planned changes at the moment:

- Change the color from red to something else, as it is not well-perceived. Somebody actually mentioned Tampax after seeing the logo...

- Make the microphone more understandable, add more depth and a texture like the one here: http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/4161/sppechiconnh9.png

- Probably add the headphone to the microphone to make it clear it's a headset
Top 7 Internet TV Startups
In my opinion, self-signed SSL certificates shouldn't cause this. If I want to use an SSL connection for my users to sign in with, I shouldn't have to pay tons of money for a wildcard certificate for my domain (they charge a large amount more just to add *. to your certificate). SSL is to SECURE THE TRANSMISSION, but these companies have turned it into a certificate war, where you must have one signed by a "distinguished" CA or the browser will tell you that you're visiting a "bad" site (Mozilla has a stopping guard, IE has attention images).

So don't even show the user that it's SSL. I don't care if my site seems more secure to the end-user, it just should be SECURE without regard to the mindset of the individual operating on it. Heck, even hide the https! Banks and online stores, sure, they should buy SSL certificates so they ease the end-user's mind. That is a relevant operating cost to incur for those individuals.
Edward, apologies for assuming you weren't going after the baby boomers. My parents have wi-fi but one of the painful things was configuring the frame. Aside from configuring how the frame connects to the Internet, I would love to have a frame that was completely configurable via the website, from the power-saving options (sleep times) to the daily widgets (my mom loves the word of the day type things).
Beauty and the Geek Game Theory: Answering the Freakonomics Challenge
Club Penguin and RuneScape post far higher profits than World of Warcraft? Does somebody have a source for that? Based on a quick Google search it's estimated Blizzard makes about $100m a year off WoW after costs. I can't imagine free MMOs matching that unless they have paid memberships that offer all the stuff people actually want, which doesn't really count as a "free MMO" anymore
I think my definition of project varies from yours. For instance, battling my shyness and/or my tendency to be a wallflower are my life-long projects. Individual experiences are softened as failures, the more it occurs. And I'm the first to say, I avoid failure.

It's easy to feel like giving up after asking a really good dancer to Salsa dance and having a brain freeze and reverting to the basic step and/or seeing her give you a bored look while doing basic moves, but I really intend to become a really good dancer. It's easy to feel like turning down an invitation to go out after a long week (but accept all invitations) and its good to put yourself into uncomfortable social situations (sometimes).

"Success is the process of living your life working toward worthy goals. And here is the brain tweak: once you reach your goals, you are no longer a success! You must set new goals!"
You should only fully trust the opinion of a VC if they are the target audience of what you are building.

Otherwise, they're just some person with a lot of money. The fact that they have a lot of money actually makes them a worse source of advice, compared with your average Joe.
I thought this was a well thought-out article. Thanks for posting it.
Kevin Kelly has added photographs to his 1994 book "Out of Control" and made it available as a free PDF download. He's experimenting with contextual ads, displayed alongside the document. They are opt-in, which is cool.
When people are learning something new, they often go through an opinion-forming phase where they internally argue the merits (or not) of what they do. Hence, the need for vocalisation?

Once they know something well, or are happy with what they know and the decision they have come to for themselves, they do not feel the need to talk about it?
This was one of those books that I picked up because it was a 'classic' and I found it unreadable. Not sure pictures are going to help.
Interesting implementation, I do like how they've kept the node graph simple. They've made the classic error of forcing you to register before you can play with the application. It's also little cumbersome to add nodes. A better interface might be to double click on the parent node to create a sub-node or something of that nature.
Ask YC: How does your startup send e-mail to users?
Just wondering how you send e-mail to users? Custom application/code, third party web app (are there any??), other methods?