skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They should get Tim Ferris to invest if they are looking for "fitness-oriented" investors. Although I think he may have bigger fish to fry.
Most US states have breach notification laws. It does vary from state to state quite a bit but in most cases they would need to notify you if the knew that someone grabbed your credit card details. Here is a list of the laws http://www.ncsl.org/default.aspx?tabid=13489
Good point. I will definitely be providing an API at some point, and will also open source everything after some independent code reviews. The design was an afterthought. I spent so long gathering data that that was my main focus. Now that I am done, I can really focus on marketing and design.
Probably not much. According to the blog, this was a lower-energy explosion than, say, this one[1], which was aimed right at us.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=himC51J23vQ
"By the time you are betting the company, it means you haven’t invented for too long."

See: Windows 8?
Anonymous message to NATO
In the last hybrid I got a ride in, if you were drawing too heavily on the gas engine, the console backlighting would go from a soothing bluish-green to an angry red. Rather dramatic feedback, but I could feel myself responding to it - and I was a passenger.
I agree with your tax greed argument. In Poland, the state will take any and every opportunity to increase tax revenues, while doing nothing to cut expenses. I'm not sure how it works elsewhere in the EU, but here you have to pay VAT on unpaid invoices as well, effectively making you liable for your customers' inability to pay. This, coupled with the fact that courts are inefficient and generally extremely slow in rulings (in the case of delayed payments), is a sure recipe for disaster.
It's an extension of the Nintendo DS formula. Except the top screen is the TV and the bottom screen is embedded in the controller. The controller's cost will be a huge factor. It could be as much as $100 ... or more.

Nintendo just needs to make a phone. A Nintendo DS with a cellular antenna that's free after carrier rebates. How could that not work? Every kid would get it. A lot of adults, too. If you really wanted an iPhone or Android, you could just buy a normal Nintendo DS. There's so much opportunity there, it's baffling. Even if all it did was play Mario and have the same features as a flip phone it would sell.
You've almost just described E (http://erights.org). The recipient of a message sent with "." must be in the same E process (called "vat"), while with "<-" the recipient may be remote (but needn't be) and the value we immediately continue with is a promise for the eventual result. (Each vat receives one message at a time and runs it to completion before taking the next off the queue, Actors-style.)

This was the language that taught me what Kay was talking about.
Didn't hear a thing.
Thanks for the feedback. I didn't know SnapEngage, I'll look into it.
The fact that you can analyze the types doesn't necessarily change the fact that the language is dynamically typed (accepting that the terms are kind of wavy to begin with, and I've heard people mistakenly apply the D-word to very strongly statically typed languages with type inference).
Jared,

I'm pretty sure your assumptions about what it means to have The Members Group as an investor need to be double-checked. I believe you're still going to need licenses to operate in most states.

Aaron
This looks like the most uncomfortable thing in the world to hold. It looks expensive, gimmicky, and prone to breaking.

By the time they launch this, Microsoft will be announcing new firmware for Kinect with even more extreme fidelity than they have now, and Sony will start hyping their next console.

Add to that the lackluster sales of the (gimmicky, low battery life) 3DS, and I'd say Nintendo just jumped on the fail whale.
Do you eschew the use of typographical techniques that aid reading, both speed and comprehension, such as emboldening, headings, breaks, italics, font and colour changes?

It is interesting to note that some of the most important works produced by mankind can be reproduced in essence without these aids [1]. Moreover, these well-meant aids are perceived as undue distractions and hence disabled by many [2], most of which are not die-hard plain-text users.

[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/

[2] https://www.readability.com/
Yes, actually. Thanks for explaining!
The Downside Of Being A High Achiever
The Axis of Eval: WADLER'S LAW OF LANGUAGE DESIGN
Very cool. Its amazing what we don't know about the star sitting just 8 light minutes away from us.

For jnorthrop generally these events are effectively deflected by the Earth's magnetosphere, however we don't know what we don't know. Its hard to estimate whether or not any one of the extinction events this planet has experienced over the past was caused by solar activity.

I would hope it would add impetutus to efforts to surviving large changes in the Earth's envioronment by creating completely controlled environments (ideally across several planetary bodies) but I have low expectations that it will.

One of the science stories I've been following for a while has been the growing body of evidence that a magnetic pole reversal [1] is becoming more likely. (Note there was a hoax around it changing instantly in 2012 which has been pretty thoroughly debunked). One thing that is pretty well understood is that during reversals the magnetosphere is greatly reduced [2] which suggests that the simulataneous occurence of a CME and a reversal of the poles resulting in a reduced magnetosphere would be something to write home about.

[1] http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/29dec_magnet...

[2] http://www.off-ladhyx.polytechnique.fr/people/willis/papers/...
In my experience, the best designers bristle at the notion that they "just get on with it". They consider being learned in design a great badge of honor, as important as their innate sense of style. To them, the worst design transgression is harboring any strong artistic opinion without being well-read, theory included.

Loosely related thought: My favorite magic vs. method treatise is Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition". How seriously he hoped to be taken and how ingenuous his motivations are fun to debate, but I love the piece.
You'd have to line up 100 Earth's end-to-end to fit inside the Sun. This was reportedly about the size of the Sun itself, so it would engulf 100 Earths. It would probably destroy more since even planets on the periphery would have all life destroyed.
Oh, it's not that tricky....

I only have one Facebook profile but I certainly know others with more than one. I do, on the other hand, have two Flickr photostreams for very different categories of work.

OK, the websites only cache one login via their cocokies, but that's a solvable problem. I use Firefox for one profile and Chrome for the other, works well enough for me...
Usually. Apple hasn't talked about iOS 5's impact on the AppleTV, other than a mention that the iCloud photostream would be accessible from there as well.

The previous gen AppleTV is still running the equivalent of MacOS X 10.4, so hopefully the new one won't get the same neglect.

I'm thinking that at most they'd work with other large content providers (Hulu, etc. in addition to Netflix), or will push Airplay + other devices as solutions on the AppleTV.
I do appreciate the silver-lining attitude, but this really only applies to risks that are marginalized by the amount of success you're already experiencing. It wouldn't be all that great a day if say, we were talking about how much more expendable income you have now that you've foreclosed on your house.

Still, I think that's a big part of his point.. to take risks early and often enough that you can (afford to) think about them this way.
From that article it says "A good flare can release up to 10% of the Sun’s total energy" but they mean power, not energy, right? Because 10% of the sun's total energy released in that time frame would wipe us out, right?
I think you're taking a shorter view than the OP. Today's smartphones are 2020's "WHOA, you're still using that relic?"
JavaScript interview questions
Ask HN: Where to buy a bike online
I make a promise to myself every so often to get more fit. Its sunny and now I want to try and make good on it.

So, anyone know a place where I can purchase a bike online fit for an HN reader? What gadgets would you put on it?

For your recommendations, I'd prefer to give my $ to a local shop (NYC) or a small shop with competitive prices. Seeking a bike for daily use with trail/road tyres.
Probably because the iPad has an SDK and the comment didn't make sense as a result.

HN tends to be kinda rough on technical inaccuracy.
Google Holding A Scavenger Hunt On The Web For Early Chromebook Access
The only people I call which don't have smartphones are my grandmother and my father in law. I got one friend with a blackberry and one with an Android Phone. Every other one has an iPhone. This includes friends of my wife, mom, dad, even my mother in law who is close to 70.
Granted I am from Austria where cell plans with data are 15 dollars a month and which has the second highest iPhone penetration in the world. But usually what happens here moves to Germany 3 years down the line (in mobile phones only). SMS are virtually free anyway as we get 100s or 1000s included. The network is good and the companies still make money so I guess the carriers dont need to move anywhere if they are content to be a commodity business.
They will need to sell some of the swanky shops they have on the streets and become a little more like my ISP.
No word on gamecube backwards compatibility like the Wii had.
Build a Startup Team of Waifs and Fatties
I think the main question now is not if webOS can climb up to challenge Android or iOS, but rather if it can manage to take RIM's place by successfully beating Windows Phone.
No, no worries. Not a dumb question, especially considering how we phrased it on the blog. I think we got used to people being really familiar with our product, so launching right into a big blog release like that (which is our style) threw a lot of new people off.

To answer your question, we do work with the ACH system to load a Dwolla account, and yes, we work strictly in the US as of now.

Steps to do so:

1.) open account at https://www.dwolla.com/register.aspx
NOTE: AFTER THIS, YOUR ACCOUNT CAN NOW RECEIVE DWOLLA PAYMENTS. Cool, huh? Feel free to follow @dwollaX on twitter to get a few bucks free and demo our social integration p2p feature.

2.) Verify your bank: security is obviously a top concern of ours, so we will make two small deposits into your bank account, which you will verify (this will take 2-3 business days). This is a one-time occurrence.

3.) Initiate a load to your Dwolla balance: This will take 2-3 business.

We're working with new banking products to make this process speed up exponentially, but so far, we've seen tremendous growth with Dwolla Spots and our flat 25 cent fee. Checkout our map: dwolla.com/spots.
Two problems with this:

1) Not everyone has time do to do this kind of fact-checking/analysis.

2) Epistemically, there's no difference between reading Wikipedia (an, at best, second-hand source itself) and the New York Times.
Oh, so now Apple pays salary for Foxconn employees? That's an interesting piece of news. How about HP, Cisco, Intel, Acer, Asus, Dell, Nokia, etc?
How is suicide rate among Foxconn employees compared to average?
It's too much work to keep track of what phones your friends have. I have 200+ people on my contact list, and I think maybe only 4-5 of them don't use smartphones. It may take off if Apple makes their messenger available for all systems, and people actually download it.

You also need to remember, that a large amount of texters are students. Many of my friends send over 4000 texts a month, while I'm running slightly under 2000. On a student plan, unlimited texting in Canada is just bundled into the voice+data package. I haven't been to the states for a while, so I'm not quite sure how they're doing it.

Even if texting does die, it'll die slowly. It's just too much of a hassle to be a hardcore first-adopter for these changes, even if it is cheaper.
Spaser on a wire: the road to itty-bitty lasers
It's still dynamically typed. The dialyzer ("discrepancy analyzer") can detect many kinds of type errors statically by doing dataflow analysis over the possible types yielded by successful execution, but it's an external tool. Like lint, not part of the core language.

For a good overview, check "Gradual Typing of Erlang Programs: A Wrangler Experience " (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.160....) and/or "Practical type inference based on success typings" (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.62....).
I use fastcgi, and it's a painless deploy + configuration as far as I'm concerned.
I wish there was a way on HN to easily find out submissions that have videos in them. Often times, especially when I'm eating at my desk, I'd rather watch interesting videos than read articles, and such a feature would be of great help on HN.

Maybe there's a way that you guys know of (besides reading cues from the title)?
Inspiring and moving talk: "The Internet is my Religion."
Actually your comment is the one that is technically inaccurate, why would Apple wait a year and a half to launch an SDK. All I pointed out was that Apple's big launches come in 3 year cycles, it wouldn't fit for a TV SDK to launch now, or anytime soon.
I stand corrected. Thanks for the snapshot.
BetterYoo Giveaway - 5 Lifetime Pro Accounts
This was a 'coronal mass ejection'. Inevitably, you're right - particles will no doubt make their way towards us.

These incoming particles will probably cause an increase in Northern/Southern Lights (Aurora Borealis/Australis). The earth has a 'Van Allen Radiation Belt' surrounding it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_Belt - which takes magnetically charged particles, often fired from the sun, and blasts them back down to earth. Upon impact with the planet's atmosphere, beautiful Auroras can be created.

However, satellites can't orbit anywhere nearby the Van Allen Belt, as obviously these radiating particles can damage sensitive instruments. I'd guess by the size of this mass ejection, a geomagnetic storm will be created. Wikipedia has a good list of the various negative effects of these things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_storm#Geomagnetic_s...

Of course, it depends on the direction the eruption was aiming as a primary factor. This wonderful image - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Magnetosphere_rendition.jp... - shows a perfect example of the Van Allen Belt. If you tip your head 90 degrees to the left, it kind of looks like an angel around earth - the 'halo area' is the main Van Allen Belt loop causing Auroras by firing the particles towards each polar cap.

(Disclaimer: I have an interest in astronomy, but nothing to put to my name except for a B-grade Astronomy GCSE - it's likely much of that explanation is scientifically inaccurate, but, I tried my best! :)
The First Rule of Tweet Club
Newer benchmark from the same author:

http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/serving-small-static...

This GWAN thing looks rather interesting. A bunch more benchmarks can be found on http://gwan.com/.
It doesn't clarify anything for me, really.

I feel like your PR is ahead of your product.
Very real and legitimate objections based on a right to privacy aside, the main flaw with this point of view is this: "If there's almost 0 chance..."

Almost 0 is not zero. If you're monitoring 300 million people, and the chance of a false positive is, say 0.001% per person per day, that's still 3,000 false positives every day. The false positive signal far outweighs the signal from the "real" dangerous people, making the system pointless and useless. Even if it works 100% of the time on the intended targets, human operators will become too fatigued from dealing with the false positives to deal with them effectively.
> If you're like most people, you probably bike once every few months

If you're like most Americans. In much of Europe, cycling is seen primarily as a mode of transport rather than a leisure activity. Rohloff's target customer rides several thousand kilometres a year, often because cycling is their sole mode of transport or because they live long-term as a cycle tourist.

There's a term in the bicycle trade, "Bicycle Shaped Object". It refers to bicycles built as cheaply as possible for exactly the customer you have in mind - people who ride a few times a year, usually buying a bike on impulse at a supermarket. Most BSOs are built to such a poor standard that they are unsafe to ride in traffic and will last no more than a few hundred kilometres.

To a lot of people in the bike business, the BSO represents everything they loathe in the world. The bicycle is a machine of pure liberation - a mode of transport that is practically free, that prolongs your life, that doesn't harm the environment and that helps you better engage with the world around you. The BSO crudely imitates the bicycle, selling a vision of freedom and health to people who will never experience either.

I'm not a leftist, in fact my politics border on Thatcherism, but I believe that business exists to serve humanity and not vice-versa. We get the sort of business we demand. Personally, I prefer businesses that treat their employees properly and do right by their customers, that value sustainability and longevity, that seek to serve their community. Rohloff care about cycling and see profit as something that allows them to continue doing what they love. If that isn't worthy of admiration then stop the world, I want to get off.
Seriously, OS X is UNIX, I doubt you told the news to them.
That color scheme may backfire though...

Seeing the color red increases testosterone production in men, which might then in turn increase the aggressive driving behavior.
So do U and CTRL+R now properly undo and redo? When I used it, if you used U to undo, there was simply no way to ever redo anything...
Power isn't correct either, because power for how long.

I can't figure out what they mean.
I am glad one-button mouse is not mentioned any more.
Or maybe it's because there are no buttons on Apples' latest mice…
The only innovative company in my view is ArtLebedev studio (which does all the UI/graphics design for Yandex and probably sole reason for their success) and most people who work there clearly see the same picture and hate it, albeit not as vocally.

Yuri Milner - CEO and Managing Partner of DST (Digital Sky Technologies) is doing well because DST invests heavily outside of Russia, namely they are one of the largest institutional shareholders of Facebook.
tptacek,

This comment is not meant to be dismissive, but your advice is imho a recipe for dismal placement in the App store. It makes it much less likely that anyone will find this guy's application and will produce a bunch of 1-star rankings from those who do because "app didn't work" or "requires Internet" or "why do i have to register on server after buying app". Your proposal for server authentication also risks violating Apple's new TOS regarding subscription apps unless he moves to in-app payments and goes freemium anyway (which is part of the more realistic solution).

There is a non-obvious case to be made that this guy's Asteroids clone should be a paid webapp, but the suggestion is so counterintuitive to actual iOS marketers that summarizing all advice to the contrary as "blah blah blah" is not helpful. And I suspect that if you or Patrick had experience developing for iOS you wouldn't be so quick to believe that any strategy that doesn't involve tethering applications is "pointless and exasperating".

Piracy does not help with pagerank, but total downloads do wonders for visibility in the App Store as do the "others also downloaded" buttons. If Patrick is advising killing that marketing channel, he will need to come up with something else and if it isn't SEO I don't know what it is. This guy needs to leverage his freeloaders to promote the visibility of his stuff and be smarter about providing people with opportunities to pay him. For an example of a better approach look at the strategy of this company. Not only does free promote paid, but the price of the paid app is higher because it doesn't need to compete with other paid games for visibility in general channels:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/sillysoft-games/id29253857...
A blinking one-pixel-wide bar is OK, when in focus. What drives me nuts is a blinking block like in consoles or Emacs: to me it's jumping up and down shouting "look at me, look at me!", and I came up with that description completely independently of breadbox here.
It's big, but it's also dilute. It would not destroy any planets even if they were right inside it.
Ultimate Mass Traffic is Coming
Why is Bezo able to take risks into new territories? Because "we can analyze quantitatively rather than to have to make intuitive judgments." What's so great about this type of business model is that it does not rely on luck throughout the process. It only relies on luck at the front end of the risks, minimizing the risk throughout the enterprise. Bezo is the current king of data driven decisions, and I think that over time it's enabled Amazon to not only pass it's many competitors (buy.com / half.com / yahoo.com / google products etc.) but also quickly overcome dis-advantages. Compared to the amazing roll of luck, insight, cunning, and high risks / high rewards culture of Apple, Amazon is really the company to emulate. Without Jobs, can Apply keep it's streak alive? No one is certain. It sometimes feels that with each not product Apple is betting the company. That's certainly what people were saying about the ipad. And that's what makes watching Apple so thrilling. Without Bezos, Amazon appears to be poised to continue it's great leadership. Watching Amazon might not be as thrilling, but the details are simply spectacular. While Jobs may get the accolades, I think think that Bezos deserves the crown.
Anatomy of a privacy nightmare
I kept thinking about the iPad as I watched the video. Nintendo sees opportunity in freeing users from the TV, Apple sees opportunity in freeing users from desktops.

Nintendo, being a game company, keeps the console as the focus, and has the controller as the accessory.

Apple, a device company, has the smarts in the controller, and AppleTV is the accessory.
The Sun you mean is now a white dwarf inside a black hole. If you want to know when you might find closure, you need to ask an Oracle ;-)
16K regular users, or 16K signups? if the latter, it's not that impressive
This post is an example of how a sensational title can game the HackerNews up-vote system.
I need to blog. I could have called all this crap ages ago. iMessage is amazing, but not one person has mentioned Google Voice.
Yea, most people are already using it because of CSS 2.0. The problem was that it had many problems, leading to no browsers that fully implemented CSS 2.0 (and keep in mind when IE6 was released, CSS 2.1 did not exist at all even as a draft).
Yes they did provide a raise. Here's your interesting news. http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?s=&threadi...

You can find other references to that raise by using a search engine.

You mean you have no control over a factory that you're the primary(or only) customer of?

>How about HP, Cisco, Intel, Acer, Asus, Dell, Nokia, etc?

I was replying to your GP post that stated that Apple and Jobs weren't after profit margins only. So you mean Apple is as mindlessly profit driven(if not more) as all those other companies you just listed? Thanks for proving my point. http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/06/02/foxconn-pay-rai...

Oh, and sorry downvoters for insulting your religion with facts. I should have known better, I will toe in line so that I don't get banned due to bad karma. http://articles.cnn.com/2011-05-19/tech/apple.religion_1_app...