skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is not the transport format - HTML is no worse than JSON or XML - it's the lack of a standard schema.

For e.g. Wordpress to import Tumblr blogs they need to write an importer just for Tumblr's format, whereas if Tumblr used a standard like RSS, WP could use a generalist importer.

Don't underestimate the value of standard formats; the transport mechanism (XML/JSON/HTML) is a small detail.
Interesting. Well, be that as it may, I'm still surprised that Apple doesn't track the owning iTunes account, and validate it. I'm cool with shared games, I think that functionality is great, but I should, as a dev, still be able to expect GameCenter to refuse data from pirated apps.

Seems like it would be trivial to log both the owning itunes account and the user itunes account for those systems.
Anecdotally, my mac is absolutely horrible at connecting to my wifi. I often have to try multiple times and some times I give up, have to walk over to the router and restart it before I can get on. Probably an issue with the router ultimately, but I don't have this problem with other devices.
Agreed. After over a year of 14-16 hour days (often 6 days a week), I'm done with that crap. If a startup can't succeed without burning out its employees, it doesn't deserve to succeed. At least not with the measly amount of equity we were given.
Tried cranking up the number of buildings...

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18782/durp.html
Show HN: A simple site to help you plan games
Lower effort per interaction is only a net win if the value of interactions remains constant and the number of interactions doesn't scale up to compensate for the decreased effort.

In short, my experience has been that as communication in general has gotten easier, the average individual communication has gotten more trivial, and the signal/noise ratio has worsened.

I'm not at all convinced it's a net win.
@miky: I responded to (the copy of) this comment on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/in84h/monads_in... .
I just registered for the beta a few minutes ago, and based on first impressions, I can give you one very, very good reason. This organization seems to actually give a shit about the design of their product. I'm talking the Steve Jobs definition of design: "design is how it works". To be clear, a products appearance is a huge part of how it works. The WebEx dashboard and meeting management tools are straight out of a 1997 enterprise intranet. Not only do they look terrible, but the layout is confusing, labels sometimes don't make sense, and finding settings is like digging for a proverbial needle in a haystack.

The only reason WebEx stays on top is because their sharing client is top-notch. The ability to select and share specific apps is a huge plus. The current meeting burner sharing client is simplistic, but the ease with which participants can get logged in to a meeting is a big up side. I can't tell you how many times it's taken 10 minutes to walk users through all the "allow" prompts required by WebEx or GoToMeeting.
brilliant article very clearly illustrated.
Periodic Table Of The Social Web
For Athletes’ Peak Performance, Age Is Everything
The thing I keep finding confusing about these companies is: did anyone who cares about performance bother coding their app to use MySQL in the first place (as opposed to a database like PostgreSQL or Oracle, which have better index search and lock algorithms)?

This is really important, as MySQL has a weird dialect of SQL with all kinds of broken MySQL-isms (including fundamental things like not using the SQL-standard meaning for the various forms of quoting) as well as drastically limited support for supposedly-advanced things like sub-selects and truly-advanced things like windowing and partition functions...

Seriously: I don't think I have any apps that would actually /run/ on something that spoke MySQL without recoding all of the data access parts (and that's pretty much what a web backend is) from scratch, swearing and cursing the entire time about why I don't get to use X or Y or Z feature.

To me, this is just "yet another of those MySQL optimizer companies" that we see come and go year in and year out, and one that is almost certainly going to experience the same fate as all of the other ones: they are a dime a dozen, and almost always fail. The failure rate on PostgreSQL optimizer companies, however, seems much lower, despite the fact that they don't seem to get the fancy funding (probably because, if you don't take into account the underlying demographic of "performance-savy" from "database user" it looks like a smaller market).
Prepare Your Network for Unified Communications Projects
It could be even worse things: http://pentest.snosoft.com/2011/06/24/netragards-hacker-inte...
A few months ago, I went to dig up some of my early music-making efforts (burned to CD-R in 1999), only to find out they were unreadable. It turns out at least 10% of my "old CD pile" is already dead or damaged. The ones with stick-on labels are especially difficult to read.
I completely agree.
Hacker News is supposed to be an open, intelligent community and we really shouldn't tolerate that kind of bullying.

It's amazing how some people react to acts of public good.
Unfortunately, the reality is that we’ve collected less than $800 in sales for FingerKicks, and Apple’s policies (or lack thereof) are the primary reason for the huge losses.

Wow, I really have to disagree -- piracy is the primary reason for the losses. Even if the Game Center app worked the way the author wished, I don't see how that leads to more sales of their game.

It would have given the developer a more realistic idea of how many people bought the game, and that's certainly useful. But does that really put more money in their pocket?
Surely a boring business is only good, if the actual area is of interest to you. A boring business will surely not keep you working as late or as hard, a boring business will not stay in your thoughts all day, or jump into your mind when you should really be enjoying a night off?

A boring area, where your project is a more innovative solution and you are excited about the area in which you can carve out in this area I would consider a good business but one in which the sole reason for pursuing is that its a good business prospect makes no sense to me.

I'm not saying you won't make money, but I want to do that while pursuing something which I then want to be able to explain to someone with wonder and obvious excitement.

Also regarding the iPhone mention in the article, I could be wrong but as far as I know, the opening demonstration of the iPhone was met with a frosty representation.
Do you find it easier or harder to read under fluorescent lamps?
> This network recognition technique allows the Mac to very rapidly discover if it is connected to a known network. If the network is recognized (and presumably if the Mac knows that the DHCP lease is still active), it immediately and presumptuously configures its IP interface with the address it knows is good for this network.

Ok, seriously? That isn't a bug in an implementation somewhere, but in fact a feature that Apple actually is proud of? Am I the only one who finds that if you get a room full of people sitting around with Macs at least one person gets their IP address stolen by someone else?

(edit: I just got downvoted, and then asked the people in the room with me, and they seemed to agree with my perceived correlation regarding the "another computer is using 192.1.0.1" issue... instead of just downvoting, maybe reply? It is actually quite common that DHCP leases on a network get reset for various reasons, and if you just jump on the network without revalidating your lease, you are actually quite likely to just "presumptuously" steal someone else's IP address.)
Question 1

I find the font easier to read, but I became and avid reader after getting diagnosed and given private reading lessons in the 2nd grade (circa 1977). I suspect I retrained by brain with constant reading from that point onward.

By contrast, my sister who is 11 years older didn't get diagnosed young, and still struggles to read. Though she can read these days, she has a strong preference for audiobooks. When studying, she listens at 3x to 4x speed. Crazy fast. For personal reading she uses 1x to 2x.

Today here's what I can see (and since this is self reported, take it with a grain of salt):

a. I'm a slow reader compared to other avid readers. I read much faster than people that don't read often; I read about half as fast (or less) as my college friends that are avid readers.

b. For sentences or paragraphs displayed briefly (as happens in movies or TV shows), I get so worried about finishing the sentence, I often can't finish in the time the wording is shown. (So in this case I'm guessing I'm much slower than average.) I'd guess this is "test anxiety" [1]. Taking tests as a kid was torture. Example, I was relaxed taking my SATs and got 1250 (did it in one shot), for my ACTs, I was distracted and buzzing around in my head, and scored below the 50 percentile.

c. Answer "right / left" question is not automatic. I always have to think. I imagine pointing from my shoulder through my arm in the direction I'm thinking. (Perhaps every one does this.) I just know there's a small mental pause.

d. I struggle with unfamiliar but initial concepts or names. For example, when learning object-oriented programming, it took a bit for me to grok class vs object. Usually this forces a deep understanding, which in the end is great, but can be a slow learning process.

Question 2

I certainly read by whole words today. The problem (major difference) with dyslexics is the process of learning to read. When learning to read, dyslexics read in "chunks" and by word shape - basically seeing the word as whole, not the individual letters. I recall the uneven scanning. I also recall thinking "who the heck are these other kids learning this?" because I could see no rhyme or reason. AFAIK, kids normally clearly see the letters making up the words. I needed intense phonics training to "get" this.

Education (phonics training) is absolutely critical. Your "mouse"/"house" examples are exactly the kinds of intense flashcard things I went through. Day after day, card after card.

The Dyslexie font should be complimentary. I seriously doubt it would be a substitute. Many fonts explicitly emphasis readability - Dyslexie attempts to increase legibility for a non-standard brain type.

I think the font rocks, and I've love to get my hands on the font to live with it for a while.

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Test_anxiety
It makes sense to have a dedicated kiosk machine, hardened, connected to nothing, and regularly re-imaged, to test unknown USB drives in. That's a little different from plugging one into the computer you do your work or finances on.
Hi, just contact me by email: contact _at_ watchlaterapp.com
Definitely. The can happen whenever a company with a large user base launches a new product. Google Maps, Apple iPhone, a new series on HBO, etc.
The Huffington Post is trying to be more serious-- like a real newspaper
Ah. Ok then.
I spent another few minutes with it after I posted that and made it a little nicer, but not particularly faster: http://pastie.org/2202963

May want to use that instead.
I was looking for this type of comment and I'm baffled it's a single one. None of my macbooks are that exceptional at re-connecting to wifi spots, especially the 2007 laptop. Coincidentally, I bought a linksys usb wifi adapter that could pull my neighbor's wifi from across the street. Just saying.
Yeah, I really like the ability to make certain sections of the roadmap public.

Good luck to the Interstate guys!
Ask HN: I Found My Competition.  Now What?
"The idea" hit me about 9 months ago. In that time, I've been very busy with grad school so I haven't built much, though I did have a chance to experiment with a number of technologies and so I now have a pretty clear vision of how to build the site.

About a week ago, I discovered that 75% of my idea has been implemented by a site that's been around for almost 3 years. Last month they had 100k unique visitors and about 4x as many pageviews. The missing 25% is, however, non-trivial. I think the existing site is not as clean and clear as I would have liked. There's less of a focus on media and more on text (my site would ideally have both). The ads are somewhat annoying and not helpful (I have some good ideas for making money that is actually useful to my users).

On the other hand, my idea is very much dependent on a strong community so my competitor's existing userbase is a huge advantage. Now, my question is: How do I proceed?

As I see it, I have two options:
1. Carry on. Slowly build the site, initially invite-only, and just bank on it being all around better.

2. Contact my competitor (a very small team of two or three devs) and offer to join the team.

Of course, if I contact them, they might choose to reject my offer so I have to be careful about what I say to them. And if they accept-- what is a reasonable way for me to be compensated? I obviously want a piece of the pie here.

Another thing that will have an impact on my decision is that I wasn't really looking to dominate the market with my site. I would be happy to make a modest income while helping my users. On the other hand, I don't know how happy I would be being in the backseat on the existing dev team vs. the driver on my own project.

I'm obviously not the first person in this situation. Does anyone have any advice or experience they are willing to share? Thanks in advance.
./data_mining_job && growlnotify -m "Success!" || growlnotify -m "Failure :-("

(season with while, read and grep to taste)
This person is/was not your friend.
So next quarter then?
how much has been offered?
I am not a networking expert, and I haven't looked into this in any greater detail than what was in the article. However, it is possible that the Mac doesn't wait long enough to see if an address is already in use before using it. As such, it may end up essentially being an ARP cache poisoning attack.

How this works out in the end may depend on the DHCP server in use. Perhaps the server may discover the broken ARP resolution and invalidate the lease, allowing the Mac to jump in and steal the address while the other device is still trying to figure out what happened.
Netflix: Because you love DVD, we'll make you pay for it
In France, we set up that a long time ago. Presumably, the amazing effect it had on child pornography convinced US representative to try the same…

Sarcasm aside, I'm saddened to see my country set the example for something opposite of the universal human rights declaration.
Tandem Launches Mobile Incubator; Will Invest $200K In Each Startup
Would this solve the real mistrust between bitcoin community members?
Why would that be the case? Assuming it only does this if it knows its previous DHCP lease hasn't run out, it's very likely (unless the DHCP server has been rebooted or has otherwise lost its lease table) that no other device is using that IP.

And even if it screws this up, it looks like it does a proper DHCP request about a second after the interface comes up, so the problem will be fixed quickly.

Do you have any evidence that Macs in practice tend to inadvertently boot people off the network when they join?
I use Xmarks to sync both Firefox and Chrome. Then I can keep my bookmarks in sync between browsers instead of having to have a different set for each browser.
5 Best, cheap and unlimited web hosting.
direct link to site http://www.bittrust.org/
Yes, that's the idea
This is more a bug in Hacker News than a bug for google. HN should definitely be displaying subdomains, at least for google properties. They have so much under that umbrella it doesn't help me ever to see that a post is from google.com.
Wow, a lot of people are unhappy here. I suggest that you try the OpenMoko, if you want more freedom: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Main_Page

I for one am extremely happy that google exists, and is pushing a linux-based, mostly free operating system. The fact that it's gaining so much traction and market share compared to the linux desktop is a dream come true.

To develop an app for your mobile device, Apple requires you to:

1. Pay them $99 / year.
2. Use a language mainly specific to apple development
3. Buy their IDE through their App store (or download an older version from their password protected developer website.
4. Run development software on their proprietary operating system.

I don't know what Microsoft and other giant companies are doing, but I imagine the development process is not much better.

Conversely, I can download eclipse to any computer and write and android app in Java for my phone for free in about an hour.

That feels a lot more free to me, even if there are a few locked parts under the hood.
Sure, all managers answer to another manager, except the CEO. But it's also normal to delegate responsibility when it comes to hiring and working assignments in projects. If you're sufficiently high up in the manager hierarchy (which shouldn't be that high up IMO), you should have the power to make decisions like that.
It's pretty neat that category theory is seeping into more programming languages. Even if Haskell doesn't survive, the functors and monads might live on.
Huh, interesting. I have my Mac set up to require a password coming out of sleep. 90% of the time, by the time I've typed my password and hit enter, not only am I reconnected to my wifi network, but even Adium has had time to reconnect me to GTalk and finish fetching online contacts. It's amazing. When I'm in Linux I can't do anything with the network for a good 15 seconds after unlocking my screen.
On Freenode:

##java

#spring

#eclipse

#jboss

#hibernate

#lucene

are ones I sometimes lurk in, that are fairly active. The Triangle (NC) Java User's Group also have a channel, but it's not terribly active most of the time.

#trijug (again, on Freenode)

Also, if you're not already in #startups, it's a channel full of HN users... might be of interest to ya.
The hardest part of Cover Flow is getting the side elements to mimic perspective, and that's still really hard to do in JS without resorting to Canvas.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cover_Flow
I said what I meant. When you buy an iPhone, not only are you paying for the hardware, you're committing to a monthly fee. A $0.99 app is not even a day of cell service, let alone a 2 year phone contract.
A lot of people will assume "hashed using SHA-1" means simply SHA1(salt + password) but in practice many password hashing libraries use SHA-1 with a work factor, similar to bcrypt. I think NIST currently requires at least 100,000 rounds of SHA-1.
I don't want to skew the responses by sharing that - i'm hoping for back of the napkin calculations by those with experience in the area.
Backlit keyboard expected to make triumphant return to Macbook Air
So how should I try to recover data from my floppies without sending them to this polite gentleman? Do 5 dd images and do a bit-for-bit comparison? I would imagine that there are already utilities out there to do this (though probably with a focus on hard drives). It will also be interesting to find file formats that have long since died and require the original software running in a VM to read.

This reminds me, I need to ping the pbForth [0] author to see if he has an old version of his software. I would like to see the first code that I ever wrote - a line following Mindstorms robot programmed during a summer computer camp! That camp was a large part of why I'm getting my PhD in CompE today.

[0]: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Lego/pbforth.html
Very true, having lots of work doesn't mean its not lots of boring work.
How not to design a CAPTCHA
'Tis true! https://github.com/mozilla
Whatever it solves, I would love to get in on it.
If someone sends me an Xbox 360 I'll try.
If I don’t have a lot of work to do—or if I know the work that I do have could be done by someone fresh out of college—then I assume that the next time there is pressure to reduce staff, my name will be on top of the “to be laid off” list.
How mobile has changed the way I read
Project 2000: A Team of UIUC Students Predicted the Tablet for Apple
They embraced Windows Mobile the poor bastards. Might as well give the Grimm Reaper a hug.
Didn't know that, thanks. When I go to grooveshark.com I get "We had a problem loading Flash." on a mostly blank screen, which is pretty much exactly what I get on RDIO.
I have seen this question come up on HN countless times, but I have yet to see a good answer. Why hasn't anyone written a good web design tutorial/book? I've read quite a few Photoshop/css tutorials, but none of those helped me understand the fundamentals of good design. The only thing that helped me suck less at designing was the "Non-Designer's Design Book", so I suggest reading that for starters.
The article should definitely have been clearer - we're not a plugin to MySQL by any means. MemSQL is a completely new database built for modern hardware scenarios. That means lock-free data structures optimized for DRAM, access patterns, among others.

We maintain the MySQL protocol on the wire to minimize friction for existing applications.

We really see ourselves as a counterpoint to NoSQL, which has traditionally offered speed but sacrificed functionality. MemSQL is as fast, scalable, yet retains SQL.
Anonymous need to read some books on strategy, because this just doesn't make any sense: what are they trying to accomplish? With their previous targets like HBGary, at least you could say that they were taking down corrupt and/or incompetent contractors, but this is different. Booz Allen is a much bigger organization, not some fly-by-night that can easily be folded up. Furthermore, while this does demonstrate that their security had serious problems, it does not demonstrate the kind of gross malfeasance that could actually take a company down.

As for the U.S. military, this is certainly going to cause the U.S. military some inconvenience, but not any serious long-term harm. What will happen as a result of this is that federal law enforcement will now start going after Anonymous in a way that they have not previously done: federal felonies have been committed, and further such crimes are highly likely. Serious resources are going to be devoted to tracking down the responsible parties. Anonymous have developed a false sense of security because nobody has yet gone after them with the full resources of the federal government, and because their interactions have largely been limited to exceptionally inept contractors. While there are plenty of incompetents working for the government, there are also lots of people who are very talented and capable, and Anonymous is now going to find themselves dealing with the latter category.

In summary, they have not done any lasting damage to the government, but they have turned themselves into priority targets. I don't see the upside for them.
By the time the problem is "fixed" the other computer on the network has already detected that its IP address is in conflict by ARP, telling the user what happened (interrupting them) and has shifted to a new IP address (losing all of its active connections in the process).

(and yes: some routers hold on to only a certain number of inactive leases, and routers actually do get rebooted in home, office, and hotel environments quite often, crossing the boundary of the 1-2 day leases that are often given to clients.)
Karoshi: How Chronic Long Hours May Kill & Startup Life May Point to the Future
I do not appreciate when my Mac just guesses a network setup and lies about being online instead of just waiting to see what is really there.

It not fun to delete or rename a wifi network while debugging connectivity issues, only to have m Mac lie and say it is still connected to the network that no longer exists.