skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
what a frigging cock-up. VMWare is essential for my work but their customer service is a joke. Clearly their QA testing team has issues as well.
I think by markup language he means SGML or its derivatives.
Wall Street On Demand, a Boulder-based startup, seems to think so (for financial data, anyway)...

http://www.wallst.com
Related to this, when we talk about a nation falling behind in math and science, what we actually care about is applied math and science (technology innovation) and how it affects economic competitiveness. A nation of Grothendiecks, Erdoses and Perelemans would not be a huge player in the world economy.

What these metrics don't measure is that a lot of people who create important technology advances and businesses are dropouts, misfits, guys who did bad on their exams and people from completely different fields.
Why is a self-signed site insecure? Why isn't an HTTP site with a credit card prompt equally insecure (please, don't try to tell me that users look at the yellow bar -- we all know from direct experience that they don't)? Why is a properly certed site known to be secure for password use and credit card transactions?

You're assuming all kinds of facts not in evidence. My point was simply that the FireFox tradition (now enhanced) of warning about secure transfers to unverified sites was dumb: it creates a clear incentive for sites not to use HTTPS, so as not to scare their users.
Wow! I really like that idea. Now what would be great is if I could hook it up to my Facebook account so that as my friends are adding pictures on Facebook, they show up on my Picwing frame sitting at home automatically.
Indeed.

Russians speaks the Russian language most of the time. It easily explains the search density results for Russia and Belarus.
Well, they don't care about complexity per se. But Red Hat wants, when the geeks say "let's just use Debian" for the suits to reply "no, it's not Enterprise enough".
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=277112

This comment was at -8. Its text was invisible in this thread.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=277053

No problem. However, I expected to see the text when I clicked on the link for the comment. As it is, I can't metamoderate (by upvoting, disagreeing with the -8 if it was in fact unfair) or read an Evil Comment that spawned an interesting thread.

An option to turn off (or adjust) the fading/invisibility for negatively modded comments, or a default to show text when a comment's link is clicked, would leave the current system relatively unchanged but allow determined users to read the forbidden content.
This is absolutely awesome guys. Congrats. Great idea.
What makes you think it's less efficient? They are driving all around the city. The system organizes the deliveries into an efficient route that favors right turns.

I'm sure the system is smart enough to not have them go all the way around the block to backtrack. It just has them hit that location before advancing. I would love to see an illustration of the type of route it outputs.
I guess they shouldn't have fired the CEO who built the company and replaced her with a suit from a company that's widely acknowledged to have screwed the pooch on virtualization.
Bigfoot Discovery Unveiled In Palo Alto
Dude holy crap! I was totally thinking of this! I'm definitely going to get a few!
Sometimes, it just seems like the universe is trying to send us a message. Take that in a spiritual way if you want, or take it in the sense that a cataclysmic (relatively speaking) forces us to reevaluate our priorities.

Certainly, if this happened to me and I came to that decision, I'd put up a forum for everyone so that they could engage and figure out post-startup plans. But that's me.
Myspace vs facebook: the facts
All that's require are scanned documents. And these documents can easily be tampered with or photoshopped. You may think your company details are checked before the cert is issued, but that's crap. We email our docs to a US company, and all the docs are issued by Irish government departments. There's no way in hell that some guy in what amounts to a call centre in the US has access to any Irish database to prove or disprove their validity. SSL certs are a crock of shit - all you need to do to get one you're not entitled to is to be slightly outside the norm, and claiming any small country as your location is good enough for that. Hell, you could make up your own government departments and documents, and that'd be good enough for must of these companies.
this one is awesome. I'd get one for my mom when it gets cheaper. =)

Have you guys thought of sync-ing them with flickr and facebook pictures? Or you guys are already working on it?
That does not seem to be to be typical XML, and if it is, it's really being stretched to do something it's not intended to do, IMO. XML's strength is in representing tree-based structures, but that appears to be an attempt to represent an associative structure. With Sexps, this is just as easy:

(sizes (dress . 5) (pants . 7) (shoes . 11))

But in doing that, the structure really looks off, even though it's almost exactly mirroring the XML. I think this is a clue that the XML is a bit of a stretch. Much better (in Lisp code) is:

(let ((sizes '((dress . 5) (pants . 7) (shoes . 11))))
; do something with sizes
...)

But I guess the real question is what this is trying to represent. If it's the sizes of various people, then the Sexps are quite simple:

(sizes
(sally (dress . 5) (pants . 7) (shoes . 11))
(suzy ...)
(alice ...)
...)

Of course, this could be expressed in XML, but how to do it best?

<sizes name='sally' dress='5' pants='7' shoes='11' />
<sizes name='suzy' ... />
<sizes name='alice' ... />

But then perhaps all these sizes should be wrapped in another tag:

<sizes-list>
<sizes name='sally' dress='5' pants='7' shoes='11' />
<sizes name='suzy' ... />
<sizes name='alice' ... />
...
</sizes-list>

But now we're getting away from the structure we defined using S-expressions, and besides, name='...' seems to be distinctly different information from the sizes themselves, so something else is strange. Perhaps

<sizes>
<sally dress='5' pants='7' shoes='11' />
<suzy ... />
<alice ... />
...
</sizes>

Well, that looks nice, and closer to what we are trying to represent, but of course it's impossible to validate (at least from what I know of XML), since the person names are not part of our schema. We'll have to do something like:

<sizes>
<person name='sally'>
<dress size='5' />
<pants size='7' />
<shoes size='11' />
</person>
<person name='suzy'>
...
</person>
<person name='alice'>
...
</person>
...
</sizes>

But now we have the problem of having to place every type of clothing in our schema. We better change it some more

<sizes>
<person name='sally'>
<clothing type='dress' size='5' />
<clothing type='pants' size='7' />
<clothing type='shoes' size='11' />
</person>
<person name='suzy'>
...
</person>
<person name='alice'>
...
</person>
...
</sizes>

Great! Now we have something that matches our desired structure and is easy to validate. Of course, it's much more verbose, but that made it easier to read and write, right?

Part of the problem with XML is that it causes these huge debates about how to structure and name the data. Another problem is that attributes don't nest nicely; that was the main problem in this instance. In other words, XML can be used nicely to represent a tree structure and reasonably well for lists or simple associative structures. But as soon as those associative elements need to map to something more complicated, you start having issues with how best to structure everything.

With S-expressions easily able to express assoc-lists while also being trivially nestable, these issues don't come up.
My parents limited me to 1 hour per day of computer / video games. I was allowed to watch TV pretty much as long as I wanted to though. Funny enough, I spent most of my time reading programming books and making designs all day, and then furiously coding for that precious hour. (And of course finding all kinds of hacks to get more than an hour in - waking up extra early, jumping from the chair to my bed with a book in hand when a parent walked down the hall, etc)
Personally, I wish we could de-normalize the data, and compare countries in raw quantity of queries. Its not entirely clear how the data is being normalized at the moment, but its certainly imperfect.

As far as I can tell, the way it is being normalized is relatively popularity for the search term within search terms in that category. I.E. that 'Python' was the most popular (relative to other programming search terms) in Cuba. This means that it is, in a way, trying to normalize over programming population (if we accept the somewhat plausible premise that only programmers are searching for programming topics), but the results still aren't great.

It would be nice if Google made some raw data available, but I'm not holding my breath. :/
Without authentication, it could be your cash-starved ISP, or the government, which is generating a self-signed certificate.
though this article starts out well, I seem to be missing the connection to the conclusion Adam (the author) draws.

He seems to be insinuating that the Pioneer mentality should bootstrap, while Settlers should go for Investment/Acquisition.

Buy I really don't think these things are as seperate as Adam insinuates. What about bootstrapping until you are ready for investment/acquisition? Isn't that the more common path? Are these things really that different.
I gotta remember Tinkering School with Gever Tulley for when I have kids. I just pressed Ctrl+D in my head :)
Firefox's Ctrl+F and ' almost allow you to browse with no mouse interaction at all.
The World's First Penguin to be Knighted
Keeping in mind this is a naive analysis of the problem, here's how I think would first try tackling it:

I would first presort the stops in clockwise order around their common centroid, then optimize it with a stochastic algorithm like simulated annealing. Assign costs separately to distance travelled, right turns, and left turns... something like 1 point per kilometer, plus 0.5 points per right turn, plus 2 points per left turn.

Anyone with more experience with optimization problems, feel free to show me up :)
How are you going to handle security? If I'm sending my files to your UniversalAPI server, and then you forward them on to S3, are they stored in my account or yours?
I bet a bigger part of the answer is that I live in an environment where becoming rich is the only measure of success. That is West Los Angeles.
We realize that there is sort of a disconnect between the people who buy this thing, and the people who this is intended for (i.e. grandma with no wifi).

We're exploring possible avenues for this, including having low cost GSM connectivity so you can send upto a certain number of pictures w/o a fee
Class-action lawsuit filed against Facebook over Beacon
It’s official: OOXML is a standard
Thanks! We are actually hand-building these things right now, which is why it's taking so long to ship these out to people. They're very far from perfect, and most of our hardware will probably change in the future, but we wanted to get them out to people as soon as possible to get some feedback on them.
Do they really expect us to believe that they couldn't get AT LEAST a decent photo of the damn thing?

I mean, a cell phone's camera has higher resolution than that 10-dollar-webcam image capture... yet they expect us to believe they've had it for 2 months!

More importantly, what the fsck is this doing on TechCrunch?!
TSA declares some laptop bags 'checkpoint friendly.'
I don't fully agree with what you are saying. A self signed certificate DOES provide 100% cryptographic security, in that nobody sniffing on the the wire, or whatever open wi-fi I happen to be using can see my data.

Securing the connection from 'spies' is only one part of an general SSL certificates function - the other is proving the identity of the site you are connecting to. A self signed cert provides zero use here.

So a self signed cert has some uses - that said, perhaps its the more techy person who would ever care about encrypted connections but not identity, and they can probably work out how to get FF to accept their cert anyway.
Dell, Intel cut out Microsoft
New Apple patent applications reveal basic science R&D
DRM: screwing over genuine customers since 1996.
> The system organizes the deliveries into an efficient route that favors right turns.

Yes, I just wonder how much less efficient "the most efficient route with only right turns" is than the true optimal route. Based on my limited experience with optimal TSP problems, I bet they're fairly close.

I'm imagining a route which gives each driver a chunk of several blocks, then has them hit all locations within the chunk with a right-hand spiral inwards... But I'd love to see the actual routes.
New, conductive, rubber "skin" for robots
Product review: Netbooks for business -- Asus Eee PC and HP Mini-Note
The HTML of your comment, with some formatting added:

<span class="comment">
<font color=#000000>
You are right about text-editors. XML was designed to be reasonable
easy to write and edit by humans without specialized software. The
redundant end-tag helps to catch errors and make structure more
explicit.
<p>
Sure everyone could just use a fancy specialized editor with paren
matching auto-indentation. But one of the goals of XML was
precisely that it should not rely on specialized software to be
able to read and write.
<p>
Your example with the table is a lot clearer with sexpr syntax
<b>because you don't actually have any content in the table.</b>
Try again with a few sentences of mixed content, some bolded
words, a link, and so on, and you will get my point.
<p>
Note that you would also need to gzip your s-expressions if you are
concerned about size.
</font>
</span>

The same thing in S-expressions (an invented syntax):

(span (class . comment)
(font (color . #000000)
You are right about text-editors. XML was designed to be reasonable
easy to write and edit by humans without specialized software. The
redundant end-tag helps to catch errors and make structure more
explicit.
(p)
Sure everyone could just use a fancy specialized editor with paren
matching auto-indentation. But one of the goals of XML was
precisely that it should not rely on specialized software to be
able to read and write.
(p)
Your example with the table is a lot clearer with sexpr syntax
(b because you don't actually have any content in the table). Try
again with a few sentences of mixed content, some bolded words, a
link, and so on, and you will get my point.
(p)
Note that you would also need to gzip your s-expressions if you are
concerned about size.))

It's really not a lot different. Of course, parens would need to be escaped, but this is no different from needing to escape < and >.

But one of the goals of XML was precisely that it should not rely on specialized software to be able to read and write.

But this is the problem with XML... it does rely on special libraries to validate and parse into reasonable data structures. It requires special heuristics to describe how to recover nicely in the event that markup isn't valid. It requires a document describing exactly what the XML needs to look like.

S-expressions are easier to parse, less verbose, and can accomplish all the same tasks and more, all while being more flexible in general.
Talk about lack of redundancy.
You should talk to Amazon-- they cut a similar deal for Kindle.
Fine, but if anyone copyrights normal human reasoning, you're in trouble.
God, that article was awesome. Though Friedman seems genuinely affable, and though I bear him no ill will, every time I see his face or hear his name I reflexively exclaim "That guy is such a fucking hack!" I'm so glad I'm not alone: I'm happy as a clam not to be nutty as a fruitcake.
Yeah it's a branding issue. The yellow bar or the lock at the bottom should indicate a "secure" site. A self signed cert is no different from a fraudulent cert.
I hadn't but I did later - my point still stands.

I've pulled group all-nighters before, and - again - you needn't do anything different than during the day. A pizza around 2am is good for the stomach and great for the morals :)
Freebase mashup: restaurants ordered by health department score
According to the article, the system doesn't really plot an only-right-turns route, it's more like an 80%-right-turns route. But the fact that the software knows enough to know that left turns are worth avoiding is a pretty good piece of work.
To borrow from Eliezer, if you really can't believe something that is happening can happen, then your mental model is wrong.

I originally posted: Every time I have hit this message, it has been mostly irrelevant to me and disrupted what I was doing

[I'm no longer so certain - I can't be sure my router configs haven't been stolen by a MITM attack. I suppose I really ought to find out how to generate and install SSL certificates from a trusted root on them, and post them to someone at the remote sites on an encrypted pen drive.]

I manage a fair amount of networking kit, I find Google results to mailing lists with mysterious and pointless SSL connections. As someone posted in the "End of the Windows Era" thread: "I don't care what OS you have, as long as you have a reasonable browser". This isn't reasonable behaviour.

SSL does not prove anything useful - at the very most that you are connecting to the site your browser intended to connect to, assuming the site DNS hasn't been hacked.

Anyone can pay $20 and get a valid certificate and that doesn't mean you should trust them with your bank account details. Any site with a valid SSL cert might have been hacked behind the SSL termination. If you're scared of MITM attacks, aren't you just as scared of valid SSL certificates on sites with fake DNS or hacked servers?
If you want the best, Aaron Wall's SEO Book is IMHO unsurpassed: http://training.seobook.com/
without putting too much thought into it. i would assume that the most common route looks like a inward decaying clockwise spiral.
"...We have retained the professional 'Gold Support Service' of MySQL..."

It is interesting that if MySQL had built-in measures to prevent this kind of disaster, MySQL would have never got any money from them.

That is the problem I see with commercial FOSS: if your product installs easily, runs perfectly, and is easy to use, there is no way to make money.
good question. maybe most people don't know what Linux is because they don't have a shiny music player. ;-)
One possible solution: use two icons

Since SSL covers two cases of security, both encryption and identity, maybe it's time to invent a new icon - i.e. this web site is secure (a lock) but its identity could not be verified (an id card).

Self-signed certs wouldn't show warnings, but wouldn't show the ID-verified icon. CA certs would show both.

If they're worried about user education, the first time firefox encounters a self-signed site, it could provide a permanently dismissible dialog.
Quite an unfortunate bug.
Well, you can't really blame QA all that much. This would have only been caught if the QA team decided to turn the clock forward a few days just to see what would happen. This was the Developer's fault for not checking the code for expiration on a BETA. Glad we waited to Update to U2 tho!
But their suggestions had nothing to do with making Flickr and Delicious better - only more conformant to REST. Which was just my point: you have to assume that "REST = good" in order to call that "better". Personally, I'd rather learn about web app design by studying Flickr, Delicious, and Gmail than by making an assumption like that and then limiting my thinking to what it allows.

Another amusing thing about that book is how hard they had to struggle to find real-world examples that passed their REST purity test. If I recall correctly, that's the only reason why Flickr and Delicious even came up.
The first 40 Fibonacci numbers are calculated on my laptop under 5 milliseconds using the Erlang code below, i.e. more then 2000 times faster then his measured 10.xxx second on an 8 core server. Erlang has an edge for sure, but you need to implement that few lines in a proper and efficient way to prove it and a meaningful test is a must.

ffib(0) -> [0];
ffib(1) -> [0, 1];
ffib(N) when N > 0 -> ffib([1, 1, 0], 2, N).

ffib(R, N, N) -> lists:reverse(R);
ffib([H1, H2 | _] = Prev, C, N) ->
ffib([H1+H2 | Prev], C+1, N).
MobileMe Phishing Attack Nets Hundreds Of Victims
use the star (*) symbol on both sides of the text to italicize.
Facebook is for connecting with your friends. MySpace for for hooking up with the opposite sex. Unless you're a musician, MySpace becomes useless once you're no longer single or married - that's when Facebook kicks in, IMHO.
http://SEOmoz.org (as mentioned by others) is certainly one of the best.

http://Websitegrader.com provides a quick and dirty analysis of your site.

The SEO Web Developer's Cheat Sheet is very handy:
http://seomoz.org/user_files/SEO_Web_Developer_Cheat_Sheet.p...
Engine Yard experiencing serious downtimes
LOL, agreed on all your points! 2 Months in a cooler??? TC has a slow news day and the Bigfoot crew decided Palo Alto was a good place to have a press conference? My guess is www.Bigfoot.com is coming back from the web1.0 days!
IE8 isn't out properly yet. Maybe with enough fuss, it can be changed before it is.
There is also at least one excellent book on it (probably lots more). Joe Armstrong seems to be a good writer and communicator, it really is a pleasure to learn.
What about that Tumblr debacle? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=164422
The foundation of this whole bubble is too much (often its not that much) growth and no revenue or even future hope of revenue what-so-ever.

In short, there's a lot of bullshit start ups out there.
Unmentioned but also significant: avoiding left turns means fewer accidents.
You might be overestimating the intelligence of your audience. Reddit, one of the ycombinator startups, famously kept all its users passwords in clear text, as 'using hashes was too hard' - until they were hacked.
Starts out good but just chooses and explains a "middle-ground" and then goes into "just be yourself, the situation will dictate the strategy to use". That's how I feel, but its a little bit drawn out.
Sure, you can blame their QA.

QA for such a big company, with calendar-sensitive products, should be running full acceptance tests at a number of dates in the future. Malware researchers do this with honeypot machines to see if certain actions are triggered at upcoming dates.

VMWare should be doing this even if for no other reason than to verify that their intended license-expiration works as expected.
If they go back to their home countries, well, we're in a heap of trouble.

Maybe not. Maybe they can improve the quality of living there which adds to social stability, or come up with an innovation that can be shared with the planet, as information as easily shared these days. Things may work out in any case.
This sucks. When I first heard about CouchSurfing i wrote it down on my list of "Ideas that will change the world". Maybe someone can make a new version and integrate it with Facebook?
I simply could not appreciate mathematics until university. Memorizing times tables and repetitive drilling is not the way it should be taught at the earliest introduction. I don't know how it can be done properly, but the way it is done at the early phases bored the hell out of me. Later, much later, I learned to appreciate it's power and beauty.