skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Getting on a plane would be a fairly common use case, and independent of the 'power' level of the user.

Disclaimer: I don't own an iOS device, so don't know how intuitive it might or might not be.
This probably isn't the right crowd to test this out for you :) I'd wager a non-trival percentage of us use text-only email settings or clients (long live mutt).
I don't see how that would stand up in court, but I'm sure that ISPs will enforce this more strictly. I believe most ISP agreements with homes already prohibit operating a publicly-available hotspots, anyways; they just need to crack down.
I have a rock that keeps away tigers.
Automating complex custom server builds
I was expecting the "features" page to show the functionality. Without any information about how the program works, why it's so great, etc., you're not creating enough incentive for anyone to go to the trouble of creating an account.

Your features page claims "easier, easier, easier" without a real explanation. Show, don't tell.

Suggestions: 1. Add screenshots; 2. Hire a copywriter; 3. Hire a designer.
Just one question:

Are these two statements different or restating the same thing with a different perception:

>> after years on OS X, I still discover hidden elegance

and something like:

"It takes me years to find some features because they're so well hidden, and perhaps unintuitive."
Iranian Man-in-the-Middle Attack
Twitter is an easier-to-use, web-enabled IRC. I suppose if you were to add a slick Twitter-like interface on top of an IRC with permanent handles/profiles then you'd end up with a real-time Twitter.
I read this and immediately thought of a recent freakonomics podcast: http://freakonomicsradio.com/the-power-of-poop.html

As someone who suffers from IBS and lactose intolerance, I am excited about the possibility of this field of research.
Would you have the controls also be reversed (left becomes right and vice versa)? I'm not sure what makes most sense. Maybe you'd get used to it after a while.
Just tested it with my gmail account but didn't receive the email. Is there a way to request that my information be deleted (especially the association between email, name, and phone number)?
I am planning on applying this round, but I have to admit that I hate making presentations, in fact I am dreading the 1 minute video I have to make for the application. I imagine that I will get over it.
As someone who sits on the other side of that equation, $9/month basically translates to "1 support request per month".

I've been meaning to do a blog post on such, but an average single support request costs us around $8. So if you've got a business where the average number of support requests per user are dramatically less than 1.0 per user per month, then it can work out, but I suspect there's a proportional support load to those SaaS systems that you're looking at where it's closer to, say, 0.5 per seat. If you lower the price beyond $9/month, then all of the sudden your profit evaporates.

It's non-obvious until you run the numbers, but it goes something like this:

Support Person Salary	$60,000.00
Fully Loaded Employee Cost	$90,000.00
Per Hour	$46.88
Support Requests / Hour	6
Cost / Request	$7.81

That's actually why we removed our $9/month plan. It was just hard to get excited about helping someone out when you realized after the first mail you were going into the hole for such.

The interesting thing for where Bushido fits into that is that in some ways it'd be pushing things towards utility pricing (the same way a lot of the cloud sort of stuff has done) -- i.e. the cost of supporting a software stack would be proportional to the cost you generate further up the chain, rather than based on some metric of an "average customer".
I like it a lot but can you support private rooms? People jump in my room and mess up my sweet track. :-0
Ask HN: Is there anything like techcofounder.com for marketing?
> DRAM architecture fu is just as important, IMHO

Well, I happen to know about that stuff out of interest, but I wouldn't claim it's very useful knowledge for a programmer. The top-level cache (L2 or L3) communicates in big chunks with the DRAM controller so that you are insulated from the details of modern DRAMs like double pumping, burst mode, page sizing, channels, banks, etc.
Sorry for being an asshole - it's actually quite readable and gets the point across, I just meant to comment on the somewhat dire tone. Says something good about your writing if a quick draft gets the point across and people want to read it.
By the way, do not use that Trim Enabler. If you want to and are aware of the risks, use this one, especially if you plan on using it with Lion: http://digitaldj.net/2011/07/21/trim-enabler-for-lion/

What this does is actually pretty simple, it replaces the string “Apple SSD” (used to identify for which drives trim is turned on) in a file in the relevant kernel extension with zeros. It also creates a backup copy of the original file.

The Trim Enabler you linked to replaces a whole kernel extension (meaning you might end up with an older version of a kernel extension) which is obviously monumentally stupid.
Google Explores Re-Ranking Search Results Using +1 Button Data
Funny. I found out about that early, merely experimenting.

I rarely use it nowadays tough. I used to use it for stuff like "delete up to the next dot" and the like. But that was until I learned about f and t. :)
Cool but doesn't work very well. On Chrome and W7.
There was an interesting article in this last weeks New Scientist magazine entitled "Befriending the Body Snatchers" which talks about parasitic organisms that take over their host's brains. I can't find an online posting of it, but it talks about things like ophiocordyceps camponoti-balzani (http://www.impactlab.net/2011/03/06/zombie-ants-controlled-b...), Gordian worms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nematomorpha), Entomophthora (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophthora_muscae), sacculina (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacculina), and also the use of things like Beauveria Bassiana(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauveria_bassiana) as a way to fight malarial mosquitoes. Interesting stuff, now if only it was posted online... :(
Voyeur: distributed network monitoring
Sure.
Send me a email at admin@gotcha.io with the email address you used and I will remove everything associated with it, including the email address of course.
What "advanced" things are you talking about that a regular user would need?
Google Identity Toolkit - Google Code
Unfortunately we didn't get time to add any private room functionality. Though as an unintended feature, the rooms list doesn't scroll so once it is past the fold users would have to be in there already or know the link.
Obviously it depends on the person. A self-taught programmer is likely to miss out on the idea of abstraction (data and code) early on. Lots of things might just seem arbitrary or "magical". A solid CS curriculum will do a good job of showing the "big" picture that can be missed by a self-taught programmer.

That said, there aren't any magical skills taught in CS courses that you can't easily find online. Teaching yourself gives you the advantage of being able to focus on what you find interesting, and can get you in the habit of continually learning. You can never know enough, so getting in the habit of teaching yourself something new all the time is great.

Things you might have missed include pointers (how they work), thinking recursively and building a compiler. Those are all used to weed out weaker CS students. I think the key for self-teaching is to get to a point where things no longer seem arbitrary or magical. From there it's easy to see what you like and don't like, and focus on what you're really interested in.
Those kind of things make me think we shuold self-impose tight dealines more often.
What I am planning to do is make it like in games that have fixed cameras: When the camera changes, the character keeps walking into the same direction unless the player presses in another direction.
More generally, I can't imagine why anyone would want to build on Facebook's mobile API instead of Apple's given how crappy Facebook's API has been historically. (And Zuck endorses this: "Move fast and break stuff.")
> aren't we sending the message that all it will take to completely cripple the US is to kill 25,000 of its citizens?

We peace-minded Westerners are an incredibly naive bunch. The world is a brutal "eye-for-an-eye" place -- has been and will always be.

Terrorism has impact not only in the number of people killed, but also (1) probably much larger economic impact (people minimizing travel or any other activities that involve risk, even if they are not conscious they are doing so because of terrorism), (2) acts of terror that go unpunished will usually raise the position/status of the terrorist who committed or organized those acts in the internal power hierarchy he's embedded in (that's how fame, or rather "infamy" works), which in turn could lead to an extremely precarious and expensive situation of having to deal not just with a lone terrorist group but with an entire terrorist government, (3) if there is one thing most people want from their governments, it is protection against external threats, and failure to act can be perceived as failure to protect, which in turn will increase risk-avoidance and thereby have an economic impact (see first point).

Saying that nothing should be done when terrorists strike is like telling a kid who is being bullied to simply ignore bullies and expect bullying to stop -- it's something that's never said by someone in the position of being bullied, but always by someone who is not impacted by it. In addition, such a statement rests on the false premises that (1) bullying is mostly harmless (it isn't), and (2) that bullies are primarily interested in seeing a response from the bullied kid -- and that they are not bullying him/her for some other purpose (such as scapegoating, or deriving pleasure from the act of bullying itself).
Are you referring to the sounds not appearing after you drop them? If so, that is a known issue, and sadly something we caught too late to fix completely. Luckily when you drop them, even though they don't appear on your end, they are being sent to the server and a refresh will most times have it where you dropped it.
"Believe nothing that you hear, and only half of what you see."
If I built a product that allowed you to answer support requests 10% faster, then logically you'd be happy paying an additional $750/month per support person for the software?
I think others have explained this, but I'll give it a try anyway.

Plug an SD card with photos on it into the iPad camera connection kit, and plug that into the iPad. The Photos app opens, you tap the photos you want to import, and you're done.

Your other cases are simple extensions of this example. The fact that an iPad can't do this right now with more file types or with a USB drive is not an inherent limitation of the approach.
Give me feedback on my machine learning pricing website (spring/summer project)
Ask HN: What is your ideal laptop?
There has been some good discussion here on HN about laptops recently, and I'm in the market to purchase a new computer, but I have yet to find anything that satisfies all my wants. Most websites (most) are pretty much impossible to deal with all the options and model numbers and comparison is just a mess(I'm looking at you, Dell and Lenovo), there is no way to sort through the crap out there, unless you know exactly what you want, or unless you want a mac, in which case what you're getting has already been decided.

Maybe you like the Macbook Pro, maybe you're a Asus or Lenovo kinda guy? Maybe you run Linux, maybe windows? Maybe you're on a tight budget, maybe money doesn't matter? Either way, if you had your choice of ONE machine, to do whatever you do on it, which one would it be?

I just want to hear what the crowd here thinks about the current state of laptops, and which way they would go (and why) if purchasing a new one. (for the record, I like MBP's design/aesthetic, which does carry some pull with me, but I really think I want to run Linux. And I dislike the idea of dualboot/VMware, cuz that just goes back to my current problem, of having too many computers, all too slow, and not one perfect one...)
I have dev partition where I keep my libraries and projects. Most of my projects are on some sort of source control but I also rsync the whole partition to my dev VPS every morning. The initial sync was some 30+ gb.
There was a previous discussion of this last year: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1537825

I also recall (but can't find) another discussion of screen scraping where the consensus seemed to be 'be very careful of the legalities'. If you are small you might fly under the radar, but if you are successful you might just be opening yourself up to a whole can of worms.

Regardless of the outcome of any battle over this, the battle itself would be a severe distraction.
If you have to give me steps, then I think you've missed the point of the Ribbon!

The Finder has a lot of places you can perform operations on a file: the menu bar, the toolbar, the Get Info inspector, and the context menu. All the Ribbon does is turn them into buttons and put them in the same place. There's no remembering how to do stuff - and yes, some people can't remember how to do basic file management - because it's all done from the same row at the top. I could say the same thing about "Every function in the Finder I can do without having to use menus".
Startup Quote: Aaron Patzer, Founder, Mint
Cmd-C, Cmd-V.

Works like a charm.
It's strange the way people have different reactions to the SSD performance factor. I'm a rails dev too, and for me the SSD was nothing short of life-changing. When I have to go back to a non-SSD machine I get cranky.

I think the difference is because if you only do one thing at a time and you have sufficient RAM, than an SSD does almost nothing. Whereas if you have a lot of processes running and accessing files spread around the drive, and HDD will quickly send you to beach ball land.

Parallels in particular will do you in in a hurry.

I'm in the habit of running a IE7/8/9 in separate Parallels instances, Photoshop, Safari/Firefox/Chrome/Opera, MacVim, MySQL w/ 20GB of data in it, local rails server, local rails console, and iTunes or Spotify.

With an SSD I basically just run whatever I want and things slow down only very slowly and linearly as I add processes. Without an SSD I feel like if I listen to music it's going to slow things down, it adds unnecessary mental overhead to my whole workflow. The mental factor is I think why people may overstate the absolute benefit of an SSD.
You're missing the point. iOS devices have file systems. The simple fact is that people just don't understand them very well. Most normal users just put everything on their desktop because it's the only way they can ever find them again.

Maybe you can provide a practical example of a case where you need to move files onto your system that can't be opened by any of the applications installed on your system. I can't think of a single time I've needed to do that. Files don't have inherent value. They're only useful if you have software that can make use of them.
If you are so inclined to vote, it would be appreciated. Sometimes the vote link/widget on the site doesn't work, but feel free to use the direct link: http://nodeknockout.com/teams/sponoders

There is also more information about the project and the other guys that helped build it.

I had fun, I kind of wish competitions like this came up more often.
Recessions are great because they unlock the best people.

- Aaron Patzer (@apatzer)

http://startupquote.com/post/9572197724
Yeah, I have to refresh it constantly and then it works.
ITunes Match goes live for iOS developers
BoltJS by Facebook. A JavaScript framework. Which will rock, soonish
Ask HN: Applying to Y Combinator if your company is already profitable.
My partner and I started a mobile game company about 4 months ago. At the moment we are generating enough money to be able to pay ourselves a decent salary every month and have a couple grand left over to re-invest in our company. All while working full time at the company.

Would it still be worthwhile to apply for Y Combinator Winter 2012? We would love to accelerate our startup up to the point were we have more employees and are able to have more resources in order to develop more games at a faster rate. This is both mine and my partners first startup, we are both in our early 20s (24 and 23).
Thanks for this. I swear the mental gymnastics people go through to convince themselves their biases aren't about race are amazing (note I'm not calling anyone racist here).

First thing we all need to do is be willing to flat out admit our own faults without any rationalizations. That's the only way we'll ever be able to overcome it.
>Do most YC company founders go in debt / use savings / use most of the YC money, to cover personal expenses while they do this?

For us Yuri and SV money investments covered everything and gave us enough to stash.
It would be a lap top with a screen good enough for professionally working with graphics. Lap tops are currently unsuitable for this type of work.
It comes from training in flight school, smaller planes, the air force, etc. There are lots of ways to get quality experience before making the jump to the big planes.
The only thing I felt missing that I needed from OSX Finder is "Rename All". Do you have any other examples of this?
Steam is a content delivery system. It does not prevent me from adminning my own computer or 'sideloading' other programs. It doesn't tell me that I don't need -foo-, only to tell me that I do need -foo- once it's implemented there. It doesn't force me to use certain hardware. Steam doesn't even dictate what major consumer OS I should use. Steam is a content delivery system, and apart from license control for the content that I purchase through it (and only that), Steam does not mandate my user experience to behave in any particular way.

There isn't much of a wall around the Steam garden.
> Most don't know that (I am one who does) and I never hear it advocated that they should.

You and me must not be hanging out in the same circles. I hear it advocated all the time. You can't claim to understand how CPUs work if you can't design a simple CPU. Just as you can't claim to understand how compilers work if you can't design a simple compiler. The inevitable objection to this line of thinking is, where does it end? Should you also have to study device and semiconductor physics to understand how computers work? Yes, you probably should, but you can terminate this recursion any time you feel you're not learning anything sufficiently enlightening or helpful compared to other things you could be learning.
So you're upset about the syntax? Seems like an odd complaint.
Google Explores +1 Button To Influence Search Results
Well, for plane use, it has "Airplane Mode" as the first option of the Settings app, so at least for that it's covered.
I think pricing by logins for a support tool is just dumb and prevents you from delivering great customer support. That's why we are working on SupportBee - http://blog.supportbee.com/2011/07/28/why-pricing-by-logins-...
MacBook Air. Incredibly thin & light. SSID helps deliver surprisingly good performance considering the CPU. Terrific display. I run Ubuntu on VirtualBox effectively. But MacOS being *nix-based is pretty great.

The other thing that makes Macs easy purchases is that they retain 60-85% of their value.
A 15" MacBook Air with the hi-res 1680 x 1050 of the current 15" MBP and 8GB of RAM would be my idea of ideal. I hope that when the MacBook Pros refresh, it will be in this general direction.
Well, you can also look it in opposite way. Why is everyone on twitter? There must be something that twitter is doing better than others? Ease of use? simplicity? better marketing? hype? Why are you on twitter?

Make something that makes each one of those "everyone" to leave twitter and join your site and you'll make it irrelevant.
Even funnier if half way the level or something, Mario "escapes" and then we get the fun portal oriented levels.
Cool!

I'm about to launch something (hopefully going live tonight, announce tomorrow) with a similar philosophy - the economic engine of Open Source needs some more octane!

Hope this takes off, I hope I can partner with these guys in the future.
I felt they entered that realm a while back. One of the reasons I switched to Mac.
Why HJKL?
Yeah, I've been kind of teetering on the brink of MacBook Air v. Pro. I guess my big concern with the Air is with it being able to keep as time goes on, especially as I'm limited to 4GB RAM. And I'm the kinda person who usually has 20 different tabs open in chrome at any given time... while I'm multi-tasking somewhere else, while working on code.
Apple's Steve Jobs Hates Buttons (2007)
That's 14%. What % of applicants were single founders? I know you have a predisposition against singles, but that's actually higher than I would have expected.
Using remote tracking software to find stolen laptop may violate wiretap law
Well, it's a tad better than "Sanchez: the quick and dirty Mustache implementation"
I ♥ where it's going! "Nhaa, I won't use a statically typed language.. I prefer javascript with coffeescript syntax. But, I'll use contracts and tests to make it robust." Hands down, it's great and I'll definitely use it.

Also +1 to be able to define your own type.
Seconded. Always loved the form factor, but the rebooted version has enough horsepower to do 90% of the computing I do daily. It's no longer a novelty.

Went from a 13" MBP to the 13" Air with the i7 and haven't looked back.
back in the day when i was "bootstrappping myself" i decided the answer was functional programming and compilers. i don't regret for a minute looking at both of those (i was a hipster haskell programmer - using it way before it was cool... ;o)

these days functional programming is pretty much mainstream, but more declarative approaches are still quite obscure - i think learning a little prolog and datalog helped me better deal with sql, but i still don't feel comfortable with these topics so have recently been trying to understand more using stack overflow as motivation (latest attempt: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7076349/is-there-a-good-w...). i also feel i am slipping behind on distributed computing, so i guess i should be looking there next.

(i only started using stack overflow "seriously" about a month ago and i think it's great for learning - you can treat questions at the edge of your expertise as homework, or just read other people's answers).
ROP does not need a variable-length instruction set. ROP is a common exploitation method for iDevices...
Ask HN: Does my homepage need a "How It Works" video?
We just launched our site and we are constantly conducting user testing. I was hoping to get some feedback from the HN community. Does our homepage simplify what we do? Do you understand immediately what we do? Do you think a "How It Works" video is required? We are about to test all of these things but I prefer to hear from HN first to better frame our testing.

The URL is http://www.Jobzey.com

I really appreciate any feedback you guys can provide.
That is cool. I am really liking the democratization of information and (to a lesser extent) knowledge that the Internet has brought.

Very neat to see this in the CS department, with the added technical aspects the art school would miss.
I think it is inappropriate to draw attention to somebody's personal life like this. I wonder what the results of someone analyzing the author's charitable giving would be.
Time Warner Making Money from "Anonymous" / ‘V For Vendetta Masks'