skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd offer my space if I were in your area :(.
I'm in friggin' Ohio.
Thanks for your insights. I too might be skeptical if the shoe was on the other foot, but I did my best to convey my message and the general responses seem to indicate that I did a pretty good job of that.

My advice? If you need help, email me and we'll talk. As I tried to make clear above, I won't be pitching anything to anyone unless they specifically ask me to. In my experience I find that entrepreneurs generally enjoy talking shop. In discussing my idea (with someone who I have just helped with their own startup, mind you) I am not expecting them to flip a switch, close up shop and found a business with me. I am looking for valuable feedback from active founders and leads in the event that someone has a contact who may be interested in working on such an endeavor.

That said, I'm also perfectly happy helping with the job at hand and going our separate ways. "That's ridiculous," you might think. It's not though. I've just helped an entrepreneur move one small step closer to his/her vision, challenged myself in the process, added an item to my portfolio and gained a contact that may prove valuable in the future on any number of levels. I've also just begun to build a solid reputation here on HN, which is hardly a trivial thing to do. That may sound crazy to some and it may be unconventional but the fact is no one has anything to lose.

So if you email me and I try to sell you on my "million dollar idea", go on about your business and you've lost five minutes of your life. If I help you, then you've gained the assistance of an experienced marcom voice and you might just benefit from it. You have also gained a contact yourself who may prove useful again in the future.
Print version, easier to read,

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/upgrade/4273674.h...
Why does this make me feel like they are children who need to be helped by their more intelligent overmasters?

Is there no way to teach them how to come up with these ideas? I don't mean school, I mean the mindset of coming up with solutions for problems.

What is missing? Is there something special about Europe that made them pull themself up, or is it just a matter of time?

I look at history (>500 years ago) and I see two areas of the world that consistently created technology. China and Europe, and China always managed to forget the ideas after a generation.

It's like that drive to improve the world just doesn't exist in some cultures. It's not the land, american indians had the resources to do it if they wanted. But they didn't. Almost no cultures did, except Europe.

Now of course it spread, and most parts of the world do that, but not everywhere. Why is that?

(If you don't understand what I mean - take that example of the ring that shells corn. It's simple - but why didn't people who had been shelling corn for thousands of years ever try to invent something like that? That article doesn't say who invented, just that she found in it zambia. Do they manufacture plastic in zambia? I know very little about them.)
This means that all real-time communication on Android not using SMS or HTTP must pass through the Gtalk servers.

Well, it's an open platform, right? So just install your own XMPP library and use that.

Edit: in fact, Google has said that they encourage this:

http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/standards/2008-February/018...
java is a good, safe choice. it makes sense from the standpoint of a high school, because corporate america likes java and the point of high schools are to prepare students for getting jobs.

consider yourself lucky you have a class in java. i went to a big high school and there were no compsci classes at all.

edit: oh, and uphills both ways, snow, etc..
Take a look at the mattress industry if you ever get a chance.
Lifehacker Faceoff: Outlook vs. Gmail—The Definitive Comparison
Newer versions of Flash Player and FMS include remote attestation aka SWF verification; AFAIK it hasn't been cracked yet (but it hasn't been reverse-engineered by Red5 either).

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flashmediaserver/3.0/docs/03_confi...
My Dell Inspiron 600m has a keyboard that I would consider better than passable by my standards, but I'm supremely finicky about my keyboards. I'd give it a 7/10 for feel.

I'm unusually fast on it for a laptop keyboard as well, it seems well-laid out.
crikey. either my timing was poor or no one cares about font rendering like I do.

Thanks for the reply and the xterm options. I'll use them on my debian machine.
You're authenticating the client? Not the person? That's impossible to do.
With the exception of stricter typing, these are problems of the new Flash runtime, not AS3 (even the ones labeled as AS3). As a language, AS3 is far superior to its predecessors, but because of its simultaneous release with the new runtime the blame is often misplaced.

As far as missing runtime features go, most of the points are very valid. Top of my list: sandboxing of external content and cloning movie clips (which would presumably be implemented in a cheaper way than just creating multiple instances).
haha,thanks, I'm currently in FL now.
As someone who is trying desperately to get back into school, do as brianr said.

Stay in school, throw ideas at the wall, see what sticks, go from there.

By all means though, try to finish your degree though.

Even the greatest of minds can fail due to circumstance, when it comes to things like a start-up.
Game Developer Salaries From H1-B Data
If you can trust the client by having them enter in a password, can't you then set up a system that uses the same idea as public-key cryptography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography)? Once the user has logged in and authenticated with their password they generate their public and private keys and send the server the public key while keeping the private key local. This method would be processor intensive, but good security usually isn't cheap. Or maybe my understanding of how public-key cryptography works isn't accurate and someone can explain why it wouldn't work?
Yaw, I wouldn't ever call YC an angel round.

Whether you call it an angel round or a seed round, I don't quite understand how the investors control the agenda. My experience (which at this point is fairly intimate) with sub-$1m rounds is that you generally give up 20-30% of your company and no board seats. In the rare event that an investor takes a board seat, you can generally argue for the board should reflect the cap table and there will be 2 co-founders on the board and 1 investor.

Of course, all things are different and some investors can be predatory.

Now, when you get into big Series A/B country, I think things change. Board seats start flying around and the founders can lose control.

But in the first round of mid-low hundred thousands? Not that I've usually seen.

Prior to funding (an interesting point) I haven't seen any influence whatsoever. We've marched to the beat of our own drum, clearly explained the vision we have for the company, and taken advice/feedback when we agreed with it. I HAVE heard of investors saying stuff like, "I'll invest IF you go in the direction that I want".
Yes, we're wrapping up a small round right now. We have some pretty awesome guys involved-- we're very excited.
Normally, I'd agree with you but this apple, they'd have their lawyers all over this.
Last.fm - what a gift to humanity
Maybe this doesn't fit here but everyone likes music and this site ist just the most awesome ever and I just recently found about it(through hacker news!) though it has been around since 2002.

I have been searching for something like it but it doesn't come up in searchresults.

You just type in music you like and you don't only get played that but similar music that people like.

I have already found new bands that I love.

Pure awesomeness.
Caught! ;-)
Here's the attack: The user writes software which performs the same authentication handshake as the official client, but after the handshake it starts sending evil messages to the server.
It is indeed one of my favorite web services out there. You've come at an interesting time as they've just undergone some major design revisions. If it's a bit slow at times, stick with it because it'll be back to normal soon enough. Make sure you download the desktop app as it will scrobble music that you listen to in a variety of standard players.

Also, if you end up being as enthusiastic over time as you are now I definitely recommend a paid subscription. It lets you stream your loved station (worth the money right there) and has plenty of other perks. A year's subscription by the way, is $36. :)
Dual quad core xeons, 4 gigs of ram, and a RAID 0 dual 2.5" SAS drives, 73gb 10K rpm solved that problem for me.

Also, I hate how much hardware it takes to make anything run well.

Moore's Law is wrong about cost, it takes the same amount of money as before to make things run as well as it used to.

Honestly, if we're going to use languages like Ruby/Python/Perl which are so expensive on cycles it's ridiculous, can we save ourselves some computation pain, and skip the rest of the way to SBCL? Please? It's a minor speed penalty compared to ruby.
It's a great service, but I think it's kind of funny how exponentially more complex Last.FM is than del.icio.us, their redesign came out first.
There are at least two great examples in "Freakonomics": the price of life insurances, and selling your own house (think real state agents.)
Django newforms-admin branch merged into trunk
My instinct would be: don't bother. If the data you are protecting is worth enough to someone, they will decompile it anyway.
The popular book (and television series) Guns, Germs and Steel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel) addresses the reasons why technological advancements tended to occur in particular cultures and its title provides the short answer to your question.

You may also find it interesting to read up about colonialism -- some of the statements you've made represent attitudes that are considered somewhat dated by modern standards; it's almost as if they were cribbed from "The White Man's Burden" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_man%27s_burden).
> standard in software development

Can I please have whatever you're smoking? It seems good.
if last.fm is news to you, you might also enjoy pandora. http://www.pandora.com/
Hmm... The fact that you're so concerned about requests not hitting your web app without going through your Flex front end raises a red flag...

Anyway, you can obscure the key into the code all you want. If it's a string value there's only one place it will ever be when the .swf is decompiled and that's in the constant pool. If it's a number value stored in a variable or even a few concatenated strings it might be a little more difficult since it's not going to come out and slap somebody in the face, but to say it's trivial to retrieve the key would be the understatement of the decade. Before going this route it might be a good idea to decompile some .swf files to see what it looks like. Check out a program called Describe SWF and take a look at the documentation for Flasm. Lots of good info there.

There's no good way to secure your Flash/Flex code so it's not worth the effort to even entertain the thought. I develop a bot with a custom Flash player and I'm just amazed out how many people do stuff like this. The best advice I can give you is that anything you put in a Flash file is there for the taking as if you were advertising on your home page. Bad idea.
These look high, from my perspective in Toronto, Canada. That said, I've only worked at smaller studios. The two large studios near Toronto, Rockstar, and Koei are famously secretive.

My experience in Toronto has been that at most companies you take a salary hit versus non-game-programming, because of the sexiness of the field, and the small industry here.
Isn't that where the password comes into play? Basically you authenticate once by passing the password and the client generated public key to the server. The server checks the password and then if it matches it sends all future communication to the client encrypted with their public key. It can generate a new "public" (in quotes because it will only be shared with the client) key specifically for that client and send it encrypted to the client using the public key passed along with the password. All communication from client to server will be decrypted with the private key that matches the public key given to the authenticated client, and all communication from server to client will be decrypted with the private key that matches the public key the client gave to the server with the password. This is probably more like TLS or SSL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security) than I suppose. Which makes me think you could just use an SSL connection since it is supported (http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/2/docs/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/...).

Or am I really missing something and should just stop commenting? :)
Works for an individual, but more tricky for a publisher.
It's quite surprising that they are making that salary table public. I can name 2 people that I know on HB-1 from that table just by looking up the company name and job title.
No, I think it's cool. My comment was just in contrast to the doom and gloom about rich foreigners and sovereign investment funds buying prominent US assets.
Hmm. The Apple I/II wasn't just a cheap and ugly knock-off of another product though, it was an innovative machine that changed the way computers were built. It challenged the existing notions of what a computer had to be and how much it had to cost.

The closest analogue I can think of in recent years is the Eee PC, which interestingly comes not from China but from Taiwan. (Support for the notion that innovation comes more easily in democracies? It's only one data point, but still...)
Wouldn't H1-B salaries be lower than non-H1-B salaries? I thought companies liked H1-Bs since the employees don't ask for as much money. (Plus, they have the "if you dont like this job, you go back to your home country" leverage, which probably makes the H1-Bs not ask for more money.)
Video Streaming over BitTorrent networks
From my experience, these salaries are also 15-25% higher than what you get in most Montreal game studios for entry level engineer positions.
Point one: the temperature of deep space isn't really all that well-defined.

Point two: this isn't all that cold -- temperatures in the microkelvin range are routinely obtained in the lab. Admittedly, this is a pretty big thing to be cooling down that low.
Bummer. No one responded when I asked if this was an issue.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=241245
Composing and valuing financial contracts with combinators - video + slides
Personally I'd be happy to unlock my house the same way I unlock my car -- by pressing a button on a device in my pocket. Better still, it would be the same device. Better still, I wouldn't have to press the button at all, it would unlock as soon as it noticed I was approaching, and then re-lock itself as soon as I was inside. That's probably the best solution in the longer term.
What's funny is that good is expressed in infinitely diverse ways, while evil is pretty much expressed in a very narrow range. (Something of an obverse to Tolstoy's observation.)
"People who are normally circumspect may, when describing their commutes, be unexpectedly candid in divulging the intimate details of their lives. They have it all worked out, down to the number of minutes it takes them to shave or get stuck at a particular light. But commuting is like sex or sleep: everyone lies. It is said that doctors, when they ask you how much you drink, will take the answer and double it. When a commuter says, 'It’s an hour, door-to-door,' tack on twenty minutes."

Quite reminiscent of "Two-Fisted Tales of Commuting":
http://archive.salon.com/comics/boll/1998/06/src/04boll.gif
But first, find the next Steve Wozniak.
Yahoo Will Sell to MS for $33/share
I read the cover story about them in Inc mag - looked very cool. Haven't used them though.
I respect Emacs, but the fundamental problem is that I want to get things done, not play with the plumbing of my editor. That can be interesting, yes, but I have many other plumbing projects with higher priority.

I liked using Emacs + SLIME in the Practical Common Lisp LispBox bundle, but didn't really feel like I was in control, because I simply don't know Emacs well enough.

Actually, about every 6 months or so, I go on an Emacs kick, but stop after a few days. Hmm, maybe it's that time again.

At work, I use Visual Studio. It's annoying, but with Visual Assist X, it's good enough. The devil you know, and all that. I can do almost anything I need to, without mousing.

At home, I've switched my main machine to a Mac Book Pro.

Hmm. That's where some of the recent dissatisfaction comes from: I'm using a notebook keyboard.
Actually, the article did explicitly distinguish between unit growth and percentage growth, noting that:

> More surprisingly, Apple outgrew HP--the world's largest PC vendor--on a unit basis as well:

...

> Q2 U.S. Mac sales grew by 386,000 computers year-over-year, handily beating no. 2 HP, which sold just 222,000 more computers in Q2 2008

...

> Looked at differently, the Big Three sold 1,165,000 more computers in the US in Q2 than they did last year...and Apple sold a third of these additional units.
If you're looking for a place to stay, I love, love, love Dinah's Garden Hotel (although I don't know how close it is to where you want to be). It's actually one of my favorite hotels inside the contiguous: http://www.dinahshotel.com/
Genghis Khan? Muhammad? Cheops?
I'd be careful in telling people EULAs are not enforceable. Case law is all over the map on this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EULA#Enforceability
My parents have said that it's so they can travel without worrying about someone breaking into their house.
1. install eMule (from emule-project.net) or aMule (for mac users)

2. put pics in your shared folder (do not share or download ANY other files)

3. go to shared files screen, select all, right click and select 'copy ED2K links' iirc.

4. send links by email

5. tell all the others to not share or download ANY other files.
If you're ok with not being able to see each others' original out-of-the-camera-full-res files, you can
1) first use Irfanview to batch resize them down to 600x400 or something. Irfanview is so much more lightweight than Adobe CS and does batch resizing beautifully.
2) upload the small sizes to your free Flickr a/c (100MB max/month)
3) still get all the goodies of favoriting, commenting, discussions etc.
As for me, I learned a lot of the concepts quicker and got more things done in Python than in Java. Why can't schools change the curriculum?

They will, with time. Colleges are slowly moving to Python instead of Java. With time, so will employers and the AP's. Then, slowly, schools will.

This is one thing you learn painfully as you get older - there are a million changes that should happen now, in a perfect world. In the world we live in, change happens slowly - money needs to be allocated to hire new teachers, which takes time, new teachers need to be interviewed and hired, which takes time. Old teachers need to be trained, which takes time, etc. A new teacher has to prove herself as being competent before a high school introduces a new curriculum only she knows, because they don't want to invest developing tests/homework problems/syllabi that will be useless if that teacher quits/gets pregnant/gets hit by a bus.

Java isn't so bad, it definitely has it's place, once you "get it" - it's great for creating concrete specs and controlling large numbers of developers (some of whom may be of intermediate quality). Try working with a crappy code base in Python, JavaScript, or Ruby, and you'll be ready to pull your hair out in a week.

If you're serious about programming and programming languages, though, forget about learning a thing in high school, work for the grades (if that's your style), and learn things on your own. Don't do it to show off to your friends - they're an inexplicably minute fraction of the world at large - impressing them is like a minnow trying to impress his puddle. There will be a lot of people much smarter than you if you get into a good college.

Save up your lunch money for these books, and get through as much of them as you can before grad school (or work):

http://www.amazon.com/Compilers-Principles-Techniques-Tools-...
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Thomas-H-Corme...
http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/

That gives you 5 or 6 years, not nearly enough to really get these things, so make time. And... GO!

PS. consider it a big step in the right direction when you "get" Lisp.
First person I thought of when I read this was Steve Yegge. Sometimes bad apples just need to find the right role.

Then I thought of (sorry for the sports analogy) Randy Moss and Terrell Owens. Bad apples, lousy attitude, careers just about done, until they found the right place.

Yes I'm contrarian. Perhaps a bad apple.
Check out: http://wishlist.com.au/ (it's almost 10 years old)
Yep, 20% efficiency is pretty normal in an internal combustion engine.

Burning the same fuel in a power plant, on the other hand, you can get 80-90% efficiency.
I would think companies like H1-Bs because it allows a bigger talent pool to choose from, not because they can exploit foreign workers more easily.
Well, this is actually an indication that the law is working as intended for this industry - the employer can't find a permanent resident for this technical position at market rates, so is sponsoring someone from overseas to meet that need.
I commented on the blog, but really my comment probably belongs here.

This is a great advertisement for SeedCamp, but I find it strange that SeedCamp/Y-Combinator/TechStars focus on people with ideas, pre-launch.

Is there anything like this availble to first time bootstrappers who have just gone and gotten it done?
Build/Launch/Revise - but it would be great to have access to these kinds of resources - lots of knowledge and a bit of money.

Seems to me that once you've got a product out there, it's difficult to get small amounts of money to keep things going, and the publicity that YC etc. provide is unbeatable.
I suspect most bad apples are named Joe.
I need to do a tiny bit of flash development for a larger project that's mostly not flash. Would you be willing to answer a couple of questions that I can't find definitive answers for? I'd really appreciate it.

I would have emailed you, but I don't see an address in your profile. If you've filled in your email address, well, that field isn't visible to anybody but pg and the editors. You have to put it in the "about" field for everybody to see it.
Given all the developers I see bitching about this restriction (almost every iPhone one I know/know of, especially high profile ones..like apple design award winners (craig hockenberry of twitterrific fame)), I'd be surprised if everyone just forgot about that wee little detail. :)

I was flabbergasted to see the NDA restriction still applying after the final SDK was released (http://lists.apple.com/archives/cocoa-dev/2008/Jul/msg00855....) and since Apple is still pretty keen about the NDA, I have a feeling it's not that :)
The password as the basis for authentication and generating the encryption is useful in this instance to be able to "blame" someone when they are using your service incorrectly. At the very least, you can notify someone to change their password because their account has been compromised. You know _who_ is responsible for the request because it was authenticated.

In other words, your EULA/terms-of-service is a long the lines of "you are responsible for the user of this service using your login credentials, which can be revoked at any time if we perceive you to be violating the terms of service". Then becomes a little more manageable as a social problem (which it is), rather than solely relying on a technical solution to a social problem.
I can try. I'll send you an email.