skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A good point, well made.

My opinion is that I don't think that IE will disappear. But chrome may make IE6 disappear earlier.

The increased competition from Firefox and now Chrome will (already is, to an extent) force Microsoft to improve rendering standards, and javascript speed. Which may make your life easier.
A social network for bird watchers???
No, I treat websites with the benefit of the doubt. If they provide advertising that is useful to me, I click on it.

By blocking all advertising on all websites you're sticking your fingers in your ears.

Personally, I find adverts useful. Websites that resort to crappy user experience adverts - popups/unders/flash etc usually aren't worth visiting in the first place.
I dreamed about tetris while working on a tetris ai project in school.

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/punkball/tetris/
You've never seen a useful advert? What websites do you visit???

Not one of the advert results on google/ms/yahoo has been what you were looking for?
"Who has committed more murders and violence in the past century?"

Just googling around, looks like communists governments, by a long shot. Made Hitler look like a boy scout.

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.FIG1.GIF
The technique presented today makes full use of database server abilities to create a password reset system that is highly resistant to forgery, interception, and evil-admin meddling.

If you for a second honestly believe that this design will stop admins from being able to tamper with the process, you should be fired on sight.

If you are going to design a secure process, I'd say you should focus more on security outside your system, and worry less about keeping admins out. If you're an admin, you have full access, or the ability to give yourself the full access needed to tamper with this system.
Can you put "(old)" or something in the title if the article isn't new? I almost always like these articles, but then feel silly when I realized that it's 2-3 years old and that I've read it before.
Top 10 Unethical Psychological Experiments
Is this even an accurate comparison, considering that movie theaters only show new movies, and iTunes sells both old and new music?

Wouldn't it be more accurate to compare the pricing strategies of iTunes to, say, Blockbuster Video?
My point was more that when Apple forces you to use their software to be able to do anything with their hardware, they could at least put some effort into making their software not suck.

iTunes in Windows on a modern 2GHz Core 2 Duo is still slower than Winamp was back on a 66Mhz Pentium. There is no excuse for this shitty performance.
You have a lot of competition, but hey, that's not always a bad thing!

The website looks very neat and clear, but you need to do a better job of conveying why ActionGear is better than the other options out there, from Things to OmniFocus to other GTD implementations. At the moment it's not clear.
I'll say the same thing I said last time I read this: Brandy isn't a bad song, dammit!
Some of the demopit companies are good ideas. For example, this is the first I had hard of www.expensify.com:
http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference/demopit_company....

Probably a number of gems in there.
The point is that the expected value for making a few investments is higher, if you put any effort at all into picking them. I just mean that if you have twenty people with five stocks each, versus one person with 100, I am betting that the latter will have more disasters, and fewer great picks. Although from one day to the next, 100 will show lower volatility.

Sort of like how if you decided to pursue your MD, JD, MBA, and PhD, this diversification would insulate you from the risk that you're not cut out for legal work. But would still be a terrible idea.
So your theory is that no matter how people organize themselves they will always commit mass atrocities? I can agree with this on some level, there is a lot of psychological disturbance among human beings and has been throughout history.

I'm wondering if you are aware that there is ample evidence in the work of Adorno and his collegues (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_personality), Lloyd deMause and the Institute for Psychohistory (http://www.psychohistory.com/) and Alice Miller (http://www.alice-miller.com/index_en.php) that political and military disasters are not linked to something intrinsic and inevitable in human nature, but rather to childhood and even prenatal experiences that can be avoided?

If you haven't, you might take a look at Lloyd deMause's book "The Emotional Life of Nations" (readable online: http://www.geocities.com/kidhistory/childhod/chindex.htm), which I think traces this ability of humans to murder and pillage to it's source and provides a plan for how it can be eliminated in the future.
Amazing 70-year-old color photos
I've always had a problem with procrastination and I've always known it's nothing more than fundamental laziness. Perhaps combined with my heightened sense of self-preservation it's why my ancestors managed to survive, after all a few of them fought in world wars and had kids afterwards. My lineage wasn't conceived by a lack of birth control and horny teenagers, my genes actually come from survivors of WW1 and WW2... and as I'm English likely the survivors of many, many more wars, as we really liked them.

Anyway, I'm losing my point. At the moment I'm trying to type up some of my work, which I'm completely ignoring. However, I found a great radio station that's not available in the southern Toronto region (thewolf.ca). Sadly the bastards put a tic-tac-toe game on the audio player, I never knew how distracting a simple game could be when trying to get something done.
He's made a point. Finding its users is the most important tasks for a startup. Startup events like TechCrunch 50 or Demo may become a flash in the pan that cost lots of energy and time to participate.
Google's data navy
You probably did dream about it & just forgot.
Being one of 50 startups, even at a very highly promoted conference, isn't exactly what I would relish.

If you know your customers and marketplace (and have a good marketing effort), an official launch should be irrelevant.
Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (in Ruby)
Tiny nuclear reactor looms large at UMass.
Despite these military improvements, the largest empire ever was built on bow+arrow ... and such barbaric nation lasted for centuries
Google's Floating Datacenters (Think Oil Rigs)
... and carefully vet who your admins are.
love the link,

[...]/Error.aspx?msg=You_Cant_uTag_a_uTag_Thats_Crazy_Talk
Coolest programming convention...
If Microsoft integrates MSN search or other services tightly into IE, it will be harder for Google to cry foul

I say let Microsoft try. They've grown so large and ossified to such an extent, such an attempt would end up a move in Google's favor. If Microsoft wants to create their own controlled, sanitized version of the Internet, let them. They'll fail to respond to the market, and the market will move past them. AOL's already been done, and its time is past. Kids now grow up with the Internet, and shepherding by marketers is just seen as an annoyance.
It seems odd to me that this isn't coupled with a network host of some kind. Organizing my tasks is rarely the hard part. It's remembering them from anywhere that proves tricky.

Perhaps instead of a network host, something better integrated with an iPhone would be good..?
Large Hadron Collider to Go Online This Week Despite Death Threats
YUI Powered Pacman
"How to make your user interface CARP on at people about what they should do."

CRAP isn't ironic, it's crap.
The headline says it all. Solve a real problem for a group of people who care and will be the foundation for your product. (And that group of people should not be Arrington and Calacanis!)
Techcrunch 50 Live Stream
The “Alfred Hitchcock” Guide to Branding
Obama is running on internet money. The internet might determine the next leader of the free world.
Damn it! I haven't paid my parking tickets!
The Best Referral Traffic | TechJaws
Given that about 14 hours of my average day is spent on the Internet - because I work with it, not because I have no social life... well, maybe that too - a hell of a lot of websites.

And how would I know if one of the adverts were what I was looking for, if I don't click them? I find the organic results always meet the criteria I've searched for.

TBH this is getting into a I do this/you do that debate on personal circumstance - not why I entered the discussion. I don't see the point in going 'round in circles all evening. I think we've made it pretty clear where we both stand on the subject.
Dude, you have to start some blog or something to disseminate more stuff like this. Classic.
Intel Xeon Gets Greener and Faster | TechJaws
Den: http://s3.amazonaws.com/2008/office.jpg Notice the hard wood floor I built on top of the carpet so the chair's casters would glide smoothly. Cost me $50 in wood and an hour's time but it beats those plastic mats you get at office supply stores which inevitably fail on thick carpet. The photo was for a recent craigslist ad to sell the display and MP. Hence why the MP is on the desk instead of the floor. And why the display shows stock Leopard, and why the keyboard and mouse are stock and why it appears I'm using that goofy keyboard tray. At one point, I had the MP in the right side compartment but when I closed the door the fans blared and I realized there was no ventilation - so I nixed that soundproofing hack. I prefer the mobility of a laptop now but miss the extra productivity of the desk setup, particularly when coupled with a Logitech MX Revolution mouse (not pictured, highly recommended).
Seeing as its a Mac app, you might not care, but the site doesn't look very good on Windows XP + IE7 (I'm using someone else's computer). The font(s) look kind of 9-pin dot matrix, and the screen shots are not very clear (it's hard to see what the text says in them).
I agree with you except for the warrantless searches part. I think they did indeed have a warrant, which they were able to obtain by infiltrating the RNC Welcoming Committee and getting enough evidence to get a warrant from a judge.
It fouces on a niche market. Plus in the corporate environment I think they will be more open to using Icharts then hosting their apps on Youtube as it is open to anyone. Icharts may have privacy features.
API is the problem. I think API is a gateway but not a end result. You have to give users something they don't have to write a line of code for.
Beautycheck - Human Facial Attractiveness
How we judge the attractiveness of human faces and what are the social consequences?
ASK HN: Can we run a Mac OS as a VMware appliance ?
I am trying to do an iPhone Apps development. I only have access to PC and Linux boxes. Is there a work around ?
To have the top 50 companies seems does more of a disservice to the people named in the top. 50 is just too many! After that it just seems like you lose the attention, impact and intensity of being on top.

What is the success rate of the companies that have participated in the past? Does anyone have stats on that?
Doesn't CSV work for you? I think Excel even parses formulas in CSVs.
I was under the impression that participating in these events is primarily to help get funding, not to help get users. From that perspective, these events are clearly valuable to startups.
Ah thanks, I'll probably fix the site in IE7 tomorrow. I googled about the blurry screenshots, turns out PNG looks bad in IE7. I'll try converting the images to JPEG..
My point was that this isn't an urban legend, though my parent post is still being upvoted. /boggle
Give corporations power and an absence of government and it does happen. Look at the industrial revolution prior to workers' rights, or even look at telecom and communications monopolies today.

That law that the store owner doesn't dare break is what holds him back!
coz there are many of us who would like to read the details on linux. that's one reason.
Thanks swombat, I do have a lot of competition =].

I think ActionGear stands out by being a background app, like Quicksilver, instead of being a full blown GTD implementation. I'll try to emphasize the difference more.
Steven Pinker does a pretty admirable job of running down some ideas on swearing:

http://www.tnr.com/currentissue/story.html?id=246c0071-a9cd-...
Chatbot Game Update: "trending topics" give you suggestions for chatbot rule submissions.
I completely agree with you, I'm definitely going to make an iPhone version that syncs with the desktop app. It's very useful to have your tasks on you all the time, so you won't forget them.
Environment-Friendly Inexpensive Electric Airplane
Looks pretty slick. I really like the minimal, "lurking in the shadows" sort of approach. Would integration with iCal be something feasible/desired?
Social Media ABC's - A is for Aggregation
The idea is to have a chatbot capable of discussing current affairs.
The sad thing abut the TechCrunch50 is that it seems to be almost impossible to get coverage if you want to launch something yourself (even though it might be much better than a few of the startups listed there), because they don't even seem to read emails... :(
Haha.. At least he's honest with both TC50 and DEMO.

You could say the same about a lot of sites out there that launch, but knowing your site is going to get this much publicity and you don't do anything to at least grab some emails, subscribers or have some content that makes you want more... What a waste!
So your theory is that no matter how people organize themselves they will always commit mass atrocities?

Not quite, my theory is that the ability to commit atrocities is (much like I would assume your evidence would suggest) certainly evident in every being on the planet.

Mass atrocities and murder on large scales is simply a result of many people getting together, regardless of how they do so. Because it's the individual, and not the organization that is the actor, your point that "governments have murdered more people than corporations" is bunk. Given more power, any organization is capable of such crimes. For example, the Catholic Church.
Mint, last year's winner, had already raised a big Series A and were probably in the process of raising their Series B before the conference started. They donated the $50k to charity.
Obama is RESTful
Yeah - binocular companies have been looking for a niche social network to advertise on FOR SO LONG.
I dunno.

Cars still travel more or less the same speed for the purpose of personal transport, etc. Getting to Alpha Centauri is going to take a fundamental change in space travel technology.

Also,
a) we had diesel/electric/gas motors a century ago,
b) would you believe that we had FWD/AWD a century ago? We did!
c) we've always had engines with insane number of cylinders d) i'll admit turbos are newer -- 1930's planes first used them
e) i still don't want to be in them and they're not foolproof as we as having different engineering goals than a normal car.
g) no comment. :)
h) so could the original jeep (GP)
i) have you seen the inside of a chevy recently?

Our current space travel tech needs a couple of orders of magnitude in improvement before we can just travel to distant stars at will. Your examples are incremental improvements to practical problems. In the mean time, I say we send a probe! :)
This "mockup" looks like a screenshot of the current version with a couple red boxes outlining the areas where new things will be. How is this news or even remotely interesting? Is anyone actually reading the articles on here anymore before voting them up?
Placebo Effect In Depression Treatment Much Larger Than Previously Thought
I have already seen this post before. I am glad it was re posted since every time I ready it, it allows me to reflect on this.
I think its really nice, thanks. I'll continue to test it and compare it with Check Off, which I use now.

A few suggestions:
1. Really crank out the keyboard shortcuts. Things like Delete on a group would be good.
2. Small thing--when you create a Group, go ahead and make it editable so that I can just start typing its name.
3. Support colored Groups, tasks.
But there's certainly also the possibility that the parent thinks he believes it, although all of his actions and other beliefs reveal that he doesn't believe it.

Daniel Dennett has addressed this well. No one debates the existence of Mt. Everest, and nobody has to assert that they believe in it. To identify yourself as someone who believes in something, there must be some question as to whether or not you would. People who say they believe in something which is at the core of their group identity, and for which there is no strong evidence, are rather obviously choosing not to question those beliefs the way they would question any other belief -- including the very similar beliefs of other people's religions.

So the fact that the parent "believes" in holy reincarnation or holy levitation or holy mindreading doesn't necessarily mean that he is being honest when he tries to raise his kid to believe in such things. Do they really believe those things to be real the same way they believe Mt. Everest to be real? If not -- if there is any hiccup to his belief -- then he is lying to his kid as well as himself.
Because it beats browsing on the iPhone or even through iTunes. This hack is so much faster. I love it.

(And i mean 'hack' in a GOOD way.)
a Mac Mini is probably cheaper than a VMWare + OS X license :-)
Well if you ever have some time to kill, check out some of those links, they provide a way out that isn't easy, and is probably mulitgenerational.It seems pretty solid to me and would get rid of the ability to commit atrocities not by a new form of organization, but rather by curing individuals.
What is the product you create?
Its not recommended but it does work! We managed to get MS Office to kick out around 10-15 documents per second on a single IIS server running ASP.net without much optimization. If you wanted to go crazy you could just load-balance the servers and kick out way more docs.

We tried to use a Java lib for Office docs but it was a pain in the neck. We had some very specific requirements for embedding an ActiveX control into a document and the OSS libs just weren't going to cut it. If your volume requirements aren't too high, I would just start with interoping with MS Office.
learning lisp is my refuge from my VB6-centric workplace.
Why, do you find that very surprising? I've done some birding on and off and I know that many birders are very passionate about what they do and would love to sync up and go to a particular spot where some rare bird has been sighted - and what better way than some website/social network kind of thingy to keep up-to-date and share stories and photos?
BigDog: The Most Advanced Quadruped Robot on Earth
Ask HN: Making money on Facebook with ads?
I'm considering doing a little side project on Facebook. For fun, but it would be great to also generate some revenue.

My question is: does anyone know of success stories of Facebook apps that are ad-supported?

People keep telling me that you can't make money with ads/banners anymore. Is this really true? Would it work on Facebook?
The 'One Page' Term Sheet for Angel Investors
not so fast. There are companies whose data is very sensitive. Financial, highly sensitive law firm documents, etc. And a large of percentage of data thefts is from inside jobs.

Not everybody is doing only web 2.0, where the data secrecy is not a big deal.
How do you get at that plist?
Thanks for the suggestions!

I wanted to let you know that I'm working on (1) more keyboard shortcuts and (2) making items/groups editable after adding them. Both features should be in the 1.0 release.

In fact, if you're a TextMate user, there's this "Go to File" shortcut that I enjoy so much I wanted to put in ActionGear. The idea is: user hits hotkey, window pops up, user types in group name partially, ActionGear takes you to that group.

I'm a big fan of keyboard shortcuts too =]. I even dedicated a page to them:

http://gearsquare.com/actiongear/hotkeys/
What's new is where a lot of independent programmers are. Tons of people are coming off of a Ruby and Python high and wondering where the cutting edge is going.

Scheme is positioned to be that next edge to cut with. It's very much like Python and Ruby, with similar usage properties and library distribution practices. But at the same time it's got a simpler core and a more powerful syntax layer.

If we can just get people to stop discriminating against parenthesis and maybe get a nice web framework and a good deployment tool, we could see an explosion of usage in the Scehme world that inflates the space much like what happens with Ruby.

I yearn for the day when using Scheme professionally is No Big Deal.
Canon CanoScan Lide 25 Flatbed Scanner
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Cmd-T is the greatest keyboard shortcut of all time in TextMate.

What is the Inbox for in your app?
I don't think the quality of the posts have gone down all that much, just the quantity. I imagine he's just run out of things to talk about that he hasn't already covered.
I love how there is something practical about building floating data centers, as if the coolness factor wasn't enough.
Thanks jobeirne, I was hoping that people like the minimal approach.

I use iCal too, so I think integration with iCal would be a really useful. I'm putting it on the back burner as a 1.1 or 1.2 feature.
Most of the really profitable FB apps incorporate some form of virtual currency system. Fluff friends is one.
Prime record broken?
TechCrunch 50 Live Stream
For the schedule:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/08/announcing-the-techcrun...
That video has been around for a while and is actually very out of date. Here is a more humanized version of it now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXJZVZFRFJc
Techcrunch 40, where are they now?
Which companies from Techcrunch 40 besides mint.com are doing well? And is mint.com really doing all that well?
Calling Common Lisp Game Developers 
We are currently seeking talented Lisp Game Developers who are passionate about game development and want to play a major role in developing and maintaining new features for one of our persistent browser games.

This particular title uses Hunchentoot, but all other code has been developed in house using the Mnesia database for persistence. This particular game is not released yet but has already generated interest from over 35,000 players globally.

If you’re interested in developing Persistent Browser Games using SBCL and want to know more then send us an email at lisp@omacindustries.com

The preferred location for this role is in Dublin, Ireland but we are also open to hearing from anyone who prefers to work remotely.

http://omacindustries.com
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On Lisp available via Lulu http://www.lulu.com/content/3060872
USB I/O Board (Microchip usb port drive)
Usb i/o board (based on a Microchip microcontroller featuring an usb port) allows you to drive relays and read input status, easily and at a low cost.This board is similar to a PLC (Programmable Logic Control) yet, it receives commands from a Personal Computer using USB bus.
Judging by the second-hand prices, there would seem to be demand.

See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=264296
Wow, you know you're in for a hell of a list when the Milgram experiment is only #3....
Chief allegations in San Francisco's case vs. IT admin Terry Childs may be false