skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
...and acquaintances, enemies, people you're mad at, ex-whatevers, businesses you refuse to do business with.

And then when we start to admin all these relationships online, we will realize, "Why don't I just do this in-real-life?"
So you can use it like Twitter?
The only problem I can see with focusing on interest is that I'm acutely aware of how good some people are at faking interest. I'm probably aware of this as I'm actually pretty awful at faking interest in things I find boring... (notably pro sports).
Bad Design Practices to Avoid on Your Home Page
Are most people really so insecure that they would be bothered by not being a "top tier" friend to everyone they have ever known? Surely you can name a person with whom you have a cordial acquaintance, but are quite obviously not in their circle of "close" friends. I my case that's the big majority of people I know. So what?
I don't know where you read that. Here is the question:

"Is it hard to build, market and maintain a web app that makes at least $1000 a month? For a single, skilled web developer."

You might consider that splitting hairs, but I think the question was quite clear, and very precise. Basically, he's interested in capitalizing on an existing skill set and wondering about the business side of things.
There is no way he endorses this type of behavior. He may be an investor, one of the many (http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/19/unvarnished-honestly-kazanj...), but there is not a chance in hell that he is cool with spam like this. He's been adamant against spam in the past, and has a track record of very ethical behavior.
HBGary?
"Convore is a quick way to instant message with groups of friends in real-time. Join public or private groups and talk about anything!"

It's a chat. But I meant something like improved Google Groups fully focused on programming
The Illusion of Social Networks
How often do you need to endure that 20-30 second startup time? Is it every time you change anything?
Netflix might be getting into the TV show salvage business
So ... I ask not being a FB user myself: if I have some kind of facebook "toolbar" (I assume there is one?) installed in my browser, and it's configured to automatically log in, then I am an "active" user even though I may not be interacting with FB in any other way?
Sell drugs.
Marketers Facebook's New Photo Tagging is Big Opportunity. Get On It
"Big Pharma" have to invest a lot of R&D in cancer drugs. Do they really make profits in the "greedy" realm on this effort overall? I'd think they rake in the $$$ on stuff like Viagra and Rogaine.
students sitting on the floor or at a side table

That's not a class size or teacher problem, that's a furniture problem.

and their preparation time has been eliminated

I call BS. Does somebody come home with them and prevent them from preparing. As a manager and software developer, I spend a fair amount of my own time researching a prepping. Why should teachers not do the same?
Interesting, though I no longer use ActiveRecord in my largest app because of how slow it is (even in Rails 2). Try checking the overhead of instantiating (no save or db lookup) a simple model instance with 2 fields for example.

If you manage to avoid that, you've beaten the slowest parts. The view engine is also slow but I tend to do rendering in the browser these days so that barely matters too me.

If you are careful, it is very realistic to have response overhead from rails hover around 1-2ms for simple things and maybe up to 10-20ms for the most complex business logic (expensive validations). It's kind of odd that people who care about performance assume they have to take the whole package as is.
I'd start by asking the right question.

Hint: It is not "how do I most quickly earn $1M in profit".
How did you check (historically) ?
Once again, government funding changes the cost/benefit equation for the worse. Education is no longer about getting the most education for the time and money invested.

Its not that amenities are bad. Its that the heavy thumb of government is on the scale, obscuring the actual cost of things. So we don't make the decisions we would have made.

And those ultimately paying the bills for government programs have very little input on what investments are made in "education". Mostly because they haven't been born yet.
Didn't Plaxo already get bought by Comcast for +$100MM, or am I thinking of some other company?

There's 'make the world a better place' successful, there's 'make something people want' successful, but there's also 'make some cash for yourself and your investors' successful. Sometimes invite spam can get you that last type of successful, which is why we'll keep seeing it.
If At First You Don't Succeed - Four Decades Of US-UK Attempts To Topple Gadafi
I'm not buying cloud-based music as the future ... yet
Reason 3 is why I am constantly advising friends not to take "promote your business on Facebook!" classes, especially when there are other, more direct avenues available to them. I've come to the conclusion that social and marketing are an awkward mix, and most people route around attempts to inject the latter into the former.

On the other hand, social media is a great way for your customers to tell their friends if they've had an exceptional experience with you. So I believe making it easy for your customers to talk about you is far more valuable than building on Facebook itself.
It makes sense to me. We want to attract the 'good' immigrants while keeping out the 'bad' ones. I don't think that the two campaigns are really linked though.
You can drive a car without knowing how an engine works. But you can't design a [good] car without that knowledge.
Obviously, I didn't form my opinion on that attitude based on this particular issue. But maybe you're right and the Rails leopard has actually changed its spots. Apart from that, it's unclear whether the slowdown in NGIN is caused by this one line of code alone.
And Richard Branson's prize for technology that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is a bit bigger at $25 million, which is slightly more important to the world. Approximately 2.5 times as important, at least.
Chrome is the only major browser (apart from Opera, depending on your definition of major) that I've found "non-deterministic" rendering bugs in.

What I mean is that Chrome's rendering is not "stable". For a given, fixed input of { html, css, browser window size } there are multiple renderings possible, and dependent on some other conditions you won't always see the same thing.

I intend to write this up better once I've turned it into a minimal test-case, but one website I made had some pretty weird background alignment tricks going on, which were only displaying incorrectly in Chrome.

There was a white space in the bottom-right where there should have been something rendered. However, the size of this space seemed to be dependent on /how quickly I was reducing the horizontal size of the browser window/. I could have two windows open, the exact same dimensions, HTML, and CSS, and see two very different things in each of them.

I've also run into some other things, like interactions between the edges of elements with non-integer sizes / positions which other browsers handle fine, but Chrome messes up - in a manner which smells very much like over-optimisation.

Internet Explorer 6 & 7 on the other hand, while buggy as hell, are fairly well documented and never change. If something is going wrong I can normally find it and identify a solution without much difficulty.

Chrome keeps changing, keeps evolving, and keeps adding more rendering bugs as it goes, most of which are extreme edge cases and so not well documented.

Other browsers are no paragons of virtue either, only the latest version of Opera can handle some aspects of position: fixed (which IE7 can do!), just try implementing a lightbox that works well in it (you might be unfortunate enough, as I was, to find bugs where the rendering of the window was not updated until you scrolled!)

Firefox's behaviour if you add padding to a <textarea> is absolutely ludicrous and always has been, and their behaviour around padding on a position: relative <button> with position: absolute elements inside is definitely contrary to the specification.

In my opinion while IE6 & IE7 are definitely worse than any other browsers, the others are still far from perfect and they are starting to seem complacent about their compatibility.
An Open Letter to Matt Cutts & the Google Web Spam Team
Yes it is real. You can read the review article here:
http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/v99/n7/full/6604554a.html

The only problem is that most cancers develop mechanisms to block or inactivate apoptosis pathways of which there are several, so DCA will not work in every type of cancer since these apoptosis pathways need to be intact before cancer cells will die. It is never that simple and some scientists tend to oversimplify the story.
I don't think the problem is that "this is completely unscientific."

It just seems really silly ;-)
My bad! Thanks for the correction :)
You can't compare apples with oranges, the rent on your old place is a different place, so you can't use those figures. You could be renting the home you're in now, that figure is the only figure you should be using in comparison.

You also don't seem to be taking into account that interest rates are very, very low at the moment, you definitely can't plan around those rates. Sometimes renting is cheaper than your mortgage payments, sometimes its more expensive. It depends on interest rates.

A lot of lenders also have heavy penalties for early payment. If you don't it probably means that the lender has given you an overall worse rate to compensate for the fact that you're probably going to pay early.

They always get their money. That's how banks work.

Buying a house has been a disaster for some people, causing some serious financial difficulty because they bought when they couldn't afford to, ending up with interest-only mortgages and are now in negative equity.

All because they believed that renting is throwing money away. I just wanted to clarify that it's definitely not.

I also want to point out that the tax-break you're currently getting is by no means guaranteed to remain for the lifetime of your mortgage. Governments use that to encourage home ownership. After the recent disaster it's only going to be a matter of time before someone starts questioning why this amazing tax break exists. Abolishing it is also a politically easier way to raise tax revenues without actually raising the tax rate, which allows politicians to say they stuck to their promise of not raising the tax rate. Here in the UK it was got rid of long ago. This also applies to any capital gains tax relief you think you'll be getting in the future.

Buying a house can be just as expensive, if not more and in fact carries far more risk as you can lose all your initial investment if you end up in negative equity or suddenly find yourself at flood risk due to rising sea levels or whatever it may be.

All you can lose renting is your deposit.
The inhibitor to free phone calls using data, rather than traditional voice minutes, is not the technology; it's the carriers (ATT, Verizon, etc).
First off, it seems that lets me "store" a RAW but that I have to attach that to a JPEG. I'm lazy enough to want to be able to upload the RAW and have it do the conversion for me.

Second, and the bigger problem for my use case, is that there is no "forever" or "lifetime" account option. I want something where I pay the equivalent for a few years cost, and then as long as I have someone who has the username and PW and checks in at least once a year, I don't have to pay again. So a $599 account that has the Pro options as a single payment. Of course cheaper would be fine too :-)

Lastly, and this is probably "just me", I'd like something that will let me do at least simple retouches on my Motorola Xoom.

Build the service, or get SmugMug to extend theirs, and let me know so I can sign up!
A bit off topic, but what justifies paying a realtor 5-6 percent in real estate commission anymore? Actually last time I talked to an agent about listing a property they quoted 7.5% but obviously that's negotiable.

Before the internet, realtors were the gatekeepers of "for sale" property information. But that's all online now. What do they really do to justify such a large cut on the transaction?

The times I have bought and sold a house with a realtor they actually did very little. They helped prepare the offer (using boilerplate that can be easily found online now, or you can pay a real-estate attorney a couple of hundred to prepare one) and introduced me to a couple of lenders, then showed up at the closing to get their check.
The title was misleading. I assumed a "Web App Hacker" was someone who creates web apps, not someone who breaks into web apps ("Web App Cracker"). AFAIK, hacker news is not a news site for people who break into web apps.
Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles" (TED talk)
Theorem without proof is unsatisfying.
Never forget: Although HN may look like reddit, HN is not reddit.
A lobby needs to be created to educate the public that each cancer is its own disease, and there can never be a cure for all cancers in one magical formula.
An In-depth Look At Isilon's Scale-out Storage Solution (used by Apple)
Savvy fighters of asymmetrical conflict don't announce their location to their enemies. Savvy fighters are prepared ahead of time and have security in place before they open hostilities. Savvy fighters of asymmetrical conflict compartmentalize their assets, so losing one doesn't entail the loss of others. Savvy fighters of asymmetrical conflict have contingency plans.

None of the above applies to HBGary.
Trying to imagine Keith Moon hunched over a keyboard, laying out drum tracks... nah, can't do it.
Someone who creates web apps should be intimately familiar with the techniques used by people who break into web apps.

Dafydd Stuttard (book author) / PortSwigger created the Burp Suite web application security testing program, which I've found invaluable in performing security analysis of web apps during development.
Anyone willing to pay for a Google Streets version of National Park Trails?
Since I have been bothering people (including Google) for some time about this, and no one else seems willing to do this, I guess it's time to see if it's "just me".<p><br>My middle daughter is handicapped, and so I've always wanted some way to take her down a virtual version of the trails I've hiked. I take a lot of photos, but it's not the same. Also, sometimes when I get frustrated, it would be nice to take a virtual walk down one of my favorite trails and recharge.<p><br>I doubt that this would be something that could be ad-supported since you kind of don't want that type of distraction. So I presume it would have to be subscription based - perhaps $X per park and $Y for all of them that the service makes available.<p><br>Startup costs are going to be a bit of an issue also. You effectively need a backpack that has cameras attached at all four cardinal points, and that is somewhat stabilized. Then you need someone like myself who is willing to hike 20 miles a day wearing such a thing.<p><br>SO, anyone interested in such a service?
OK, I'm glad that their banks are insured, but if Dwolla goes bankrupt are you sure I'll get my money back? I'm not.

PayPal does the same thing, but at least they're upfront about how it works: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/travelers-ou...

And I don't keep money in my PayPal account either.
Post.fm - Email Reinvented
Are nurses and PAs licensed?
Question: What is the next thing most companies will use to market themselves? Banners, emails, and Likes are becomingly increasingly worthless, so where do companies with marketing budgets turn to get customers?

Sounds like a market where people could start making pickaxes now.
Lenticular printing
I thought that it was much more interesting that they had hardly any data for students with a SAT-m under 600, which makes the conclusions slightly less convincing.

That said, there is a clear wall in the data they have so far. It would definitely be interesting to look into this further and see if that is the case, and also investigate more fields (I didn't see anywhere in the paper a complete listing of all the subjects they compared, which was a pity). I know I would not be surprised if a similar pattern was found in Computer Science!
My previous comment is a little tongue in cheek, but it would be cool if they weren't perpetuating the media stereotype that hacker == cracker. A bunch of other sticklers on "Hacker News" bring it up when people misuse the term.

http://searchyc.com/cracker+hacker
It's perfectly logical to use those functions when comparing them as booleans.

But it's confusing that they're being used as booleans at all. They're converted because it will let the types match even though the conversion doesn't make much sense.
Good article. It seems incredible that, while we're evolving in a lot of fields, we're clueless(not all of us, but a great percentage of the people in the world) about what leads to a great life, what makes a life worth living.
another good thing is that you don't have to make copies of physical keys.
Maybe in 1998. Computers don't go "out of date" as fast as they used to. I bought my desktop in 2004 and it wasn't top of the line then. What's it got? Dual core 3.2 GHz, 2G RAM, 400 Gig HD. 7 years old and it still comparabe to what I'd get if I bought another one today.
You could be criticising any memory managed programming language.

No, I'm explicitly criticizing Ruby. I've spent years in Python-land and the average code quality (and btw documentation standard) is much higher over there. Which is not to say Python doesn't have its own problems, but less so in this particular area.

say that the average rubyist is much more concerned with good design than, say, your average java dev.

Good design is a relative term. In ruby I frequently see it interpreted as: Pack as many layers of magic as possible, and then test that with as many layers of testing-frameworks as possible.

That's not too different from the common architecture-astronouting in java. One could argue it's just a different flavor. In either ecosystem the implementation of the actual business concerns ("What does this code actually do?") too often feels like an afterthought.

Disclaimer: I'm not condemning either language. I like Ruby and use it a lot, but this is one aspect that I can't ignore.
To summarize the approach in the PDF, they reverse-engineered the wire format used to update the client. The extension encrypts small sections of the document (as small as individual characters) with block ciphers. The ciphertext is then sent to Google over the reverse-engineered wire format.

Since they aren't sending actual text to Google, they don't have access to server-provided features like spellchecking or exporting, and they didn't try to handle simultaneous collaboration. However, they assert that if you share your extension's settings for a particular document, your collaborators can all get updates, they just can't type when you type. They also found they hit Google's document size limit pretty quickly, since encrypting individual characters makes the document 16x larger.

In exchange, they claim this gives them enough security to update documents over an insecure channel (they cite China blocking https access to Docs as a compelling example), and Google only stores an encrypted form of the document, so the contents are unrecoverable by Google.
>> I have family who are on 2GB plans for $50/mo, and they regard that as fairly good.

> Eg, I get 30Gb/month on Internode for $40. (I live in Australia)

Is one of you talking about bandwidth (and types 2GB instead of 2Gb) and the other talking about data quota?
Interesting comment. IMO using a virtual machine to abstract away the hardware is what an operating system is all about. Microsoft has done a lot of work to prevent any competing middleware (Java, Internet browser, Flash, OpenGL, ...) from challenging their position.

http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepape...
Ars has stepped up its game.
very interested to see if he responds.. and what he may say to the Hours of Operation question.

From a usability perspective, it does make alot of sense to use that as a signal, but what about when someone is researching for something on mobile the DAY before they want to use the service?
Indeed, detours/hooking is the correct terminology here. I've never heard anyone ever refer to this as monkey patching when it's done on with a compiled language.
Criminal background checks are a common concern when licensing adults who work with children.

DUI history is a common concern when licensing occupations that involve driving niche equipment under challenging circumstances, such as a truck in a throng of tiny jaywalking pedestrians.
Be aware that this "it's unpatentable" thing is bullshit.

If there is a huge market for X, there is an economically feasible "unpatentable" enabler of X, then someone is going to make money doing X, and even the law won't be able to stop them.
Well, I said they'd be in a better position. I didn't claim that they wouldn't #^%$@& it up.
Great read.

I'm currently putting my startup together while being full time employed and it is quite hard.

If I would only give one advice to anyone looking to launch his/her idea is to do a market validation survey before anything else. You can do it for free and you'll be amaze to see what kind of result it can yelled if you ask the right people.

I did mine with google form and post the survey with a bit.ly link ( to track sources and geolocation ) in comments on blogs, forums, etc that I knew people that could be interested in my product frequent. in a week I got 100+ good quality answers to my survey. It took me 3 Hours top to create the survey and post it everywhere.

Finally, it can also help you to decide between features you have to cut for the release. In my case, I though a chat in my Web app + mobile wasn't that important and I could release it down the line. Well it seems my market though otherwise. My survey showed me 78% wanted a chat from the get go :)

Cheers,
OT: That's where I buy my socks! [1] Unfortunately, there are none near me, so I stop in when on a trip. Next trip, I'll have to head over to Electronics.

[1] I've found the Browning socks to be quite durable, although -- while my exact memory fails me -- their price seemed on the last visit to have risen to the point where I no longer felt they were a real deal (but I was still willing to pay -- and anyway, I'm a bit sick of bargains at the cost of "the other guy").

Man, you're getting old when you get excited about socks...

But, "hacking" your wardrobe becomes its own little diversion.
Agree.

Simple 4 steps:
1. try
2. try again* (optional)
3. try again* (optional)
4. try again* (optional)

Just start it up.
I agree. I think a sense of community is the main driver of quality comments: that's why news sites and YouTube have such poor comments, because most people followed a link to that specific article/video and have no long-term relationship with the site; whereas forums on a site devoted to a single topic do much less badly.

But I don't think real names are strongly causally connected to a sense of community.
This is why the industry needs stuff like Thunderbolt.
During deploys, running a test, configuration changes, starting anything that loads the whole rails environment.
Working on anything cool that'll get traction? You'll get cloned in China.
Tweet from @christinelu:
...so that no one's surprised. i've heard of a clone for AirBnB, Uber, Gilte, Instagram, and [insert your favorite new app] in China.
To be fair, Plaxo's core value proposition is in address book management, so it is in each user's interest to convince their contacts to join.
That said, I do have dim memories of Plaxo spam from around 2005, which postponed my Plaxo registration until 2007ish when I found they have the best (only?) Mac AddressBook integration, in the stone age before Google/Gmail took overrun the world.