skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> is in case I hit the Google black swan and get locked out of my gmail account.

Do you think fear of a Google black swan is enough of a selling point for dropbox to survive?
Facebook fixes logout issue
I'm going to step out on a limb here, and say something that will probably be seen as unpopular, especially among you New Yorkers out there: this kind of inability to self-reflect in any way but with a Quixotic positivity about oneself may be a damaging aspect of NYC culture. To be clear, I'm not saying it's a bad thing to be optimistic, I'm saying that if you can't take criticism, it's hard to make progress. If you're sure you've already arrived, then what's the point of talking about it anymore? It makes it difficult to innovate though, individually and communally, when everyone thinks they've already figured it out and aren't willing to consider other perspectives. At YCNYC last night I felt that pg made some insightful comments. Sure, they weren't necessarily gratifying for NYC. But so what? Does that make them any less important or interesting?
> IE6 has been a source of pain for… I'd say four years.

We're in late 2011 right? That puts Paul's "IE6 being a pain" in late 2007, right after the original iPhone was released.

By that time, Firefox 2 was a year old, Firebug was 18 months old, and Safari 3 (the first version with acceptable Javascript support) had just been released, making Drosera (which would morph into the Webkit Developer Tools the next year) available.

Hell, by late 2007 IE7 was a year old already. And a significant reason why the IE project was restarted (and IE7 produced) is developers getting fed up with IE6, its bugs, its antiquated tools and its lack of progress, and Firefox had been getting more and more traction since its 1.0 release in late 2004.

IE6 has been a pain for at least 6 years now. 2005 was Firefox 1.5, the announce for the IE project restart and the grand opening of On Having Layout [0], the tail end of the long, slow and painful discovery of IE6's innumerable rendering bugs, DOM and javascript limitations (anybody else remembers Drip and Joel Webber's "DHTML leaks like a sieve"? That's January 2005), painfully slow runtime & al.

Of course it makes sense that 2005 would have been such a sticking point: the web community had been playing around with CSS since ~2003 (CSS Zen Garden released that year) and was wrapping up the IE6 CSS bugs compendium (see above-mentioned On Having Layout, pretty much the culmination of the effort).

Late 2004 and (especially) 2005 it started to turn its attention from styling to behavior, which lead to the rebirth of Javascript and the creation of modern javascript: AJAX coined (and seminal article on the subject published)? February 2005. Opera Desktop free and ad-free? April 2005 QuirksBlog? December 2004. The killing of "DHTML"? 2005[1]. http://simonwillison.net/2005/Jan/5/swissMaps/ http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/01/06/dhtml_05/index...., ... the javascript frameworks explosion was also 2004 (Dojo) through 2005 (Prototype, Mochikit) to 2006 (jQuery, YUI)

[0] http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/onhavinglayout.html

[1] http://adactio.com/journal/938
PG was correct on everything he said about NYC. When I first heard him speak at the event, I thought he was going to talk fluff about how great NYC was, but he was honest. Every point he made was true.

Haters gonna hate.
Weird Al's "Stop Forwarding that Crap to Me"
Do you feel lucky?  Well do ya, punk?
Google has also dropped support for IE7 in Apps and Gmail.
The capitalization of the headline is indicative to the quality of the content.

This is mostly just inflammatory.
New York I Love You, But US Immigration Policy Is Bringing Me Down
Tim Cook's first product reveal, and the marquee feature is based around voice recognition.

Heaven help him.
Take a look at Ghostery or Disconnect.
I actually still run 3.6 since I like the UI on it better. The speed of the browser means very little to me, I'd rather have the familiar UI. If you liked FF 3.6, why not stick with it?
Facebook has said that they retain the information for short periods to detect fraud. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/09/26/facebook-defends-gett...
This is a great start point for anyone wanting to learn vim!
Ask HN: Has this open math problem received attention from computer scientists?
Define a covering to be a set of residue classes a (mod m) such that all the integers are covered.

Example: 0 (mod 2), 0 (mod 3), 1 (mod 4), 5 (mod 6), 7 (mod 12) is a covering, because every integer belongs to one of these five residue classes.

Here are two famous open problems, due to Paul Erdos and John Selfridge.

(1) For each integer N, does there exist a covering where the moduli are all distinct integers at least N?

(2) Does there exist a covering where the moduli are all distinct odd integers (excluding 1)?

I just listened to a math seminar talk on the subject. Apparently most work on the subject involves a lot of brute force and consideration of special cases, see e.g. [1].

To me, this seems like more of a CS problem than a math problem. My colleagues didn't really believe me, but my optimism wasn't deterred. That said, I only have a little CS background. I wonder if there exist algorithmic approaches to the problem, using perhaps advanced techniques from AI such as neural nets.

Do any HN readers know of any work done on this problem from an algorithmic perspective, or know enough to express optimism or pessimism with any authority?

Thanks to all.

[1] http://www.wiskundemeisjes.nl/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/sdarticle.pdf
For the client, this might seem not serious.

Sure, but it's also important to point out that "How much is a website?" is not a serious question. The GP's answer might seem silly, but it brings into relief that you're dealing with a "how much is a car?" or "how long is a piece of string?" situation, and is merely a door-opener on par with the more-businesslike "well, it depends..." and comes down to personal style.
what bothers me most is that they made the whole top part (including title, menu bar etc if you choose to enable it) transparent. I personally just find that horrible. Screenshot: http://0.tqn.com/d/browsers/1/0/Z/c/-/-/firefox-5-show-menu-...

Here is a screenshot comparing FF 3.5 to 4:
http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/4/2009/12/500x_firefox...

(3.5 is right)
Just about nailed it.

Of course I'm mostly joking, but I hate birds and recently got a bunch of bug bites....
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Is there any front where google managed to beat a good established product

Are we already forgetting about the former Web-based email products? Before Gmail came along, some of those looked like "good established products," but now I think they are all in decline, based on what I read in the industry press and observe of the behavior of my friends and professional colleagues.
Well isn't that what's probably happening with Win8?
MS has started to send out 7.5 (Mango) for Windows Phone in US
You are only reading this because Goldman Sachs underwrote Netscape's IPO. And Google's.
Anonymous Hackers Release alleged pepper spray NYPD Officer's Personal Info
Mozilla works to fix Firefox add-on compatibility
Paul Graham disses NY
This one drove me nuts. Many developers were achieving the same result in firefox 3.6 and earlier using an XUL hack - but in FF4, the ability to do that XUL hack was removed for (valid) security reasons - but without addressing the text-overflow: ellipsis issue for which they'd had an open bug tracker entry for about 5 years. There were many complaints about this months before FF4 was released but they went ahead anyway.
Also, have a look at ETF (exchange traded funds) that are 'short'. These give you a short exposure to the underlying, while having similar trading costs to regular equities.
Idea to profitable site in 7 weeks for $470
"you either really need a great product (that can't easily be cloned) or very strong network effects."

Or a business model where advertising won't easily support the resources needed to provide the service. Theoretically storage is one such service, but I guess with dipping storage costs, the tipping point where its cost effective with advertising alone might have reached now.
Windows mobile pda
For Firefox it may take a few months since they don't do auto-updating like Chrome does, but almost everyone transitions to the latest version of Chrome in a matter of days.
Their release notes has an incorrect link for the article on memory reduction, they should be linking to:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/09/firefox-7-is-lean-and-fast/

I would request a fix but I can't find a contact on that page and I don't feel like creating another account for their bugfix system right now.
My feelings on this are hard to put into words -- Zynga is the equivalent of churning out crappy romance novels, soulless pop music, kitsch art, or even junk food (made to be addictive, incidentally "nutritious").

"Art" is undefinable, but one heuristic is something genuinely meant to evoke feelings in the audience and perhaps teach them something as a result.

For me, it comes down to intent. Zynga & friends are building "compulsion loops" which aren't meant to entertain, they're meant to addict. I don't have a problem with a diversity of games, everyone has different tastes, etc. but... some things just feel skeevy.
>Mozilla has more of a problem getting people to upgrade but I think they will if simply nudged.

I'm guessing both Mozilla and the users are holding back a bit until they get more confident with the add-on situation.
Feels like this needs more work before we can see where they really wanted to go.
I mean this with the best of intentions.

I can't decide why I would publish on ubuntu instead of Android.

1. Android: min app is $US0.99, ubuntu-app-store US$2.99
2. Android: no review ubuntu-app-store Review board.

That review board thing scares the heck out of me:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PostReleaseApps/Process#Application_...

No mention of what is banned.
No mention of time frame.
No mention of who is on the board, just 5 people...

Sorry guys, I love ubuntu, but this sounds too repressive.

Drop or limit the review and I will commit.
Otherwise, PASS.
The 72 browser versions thing is an exaggeration. For your websites, add this tag: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" /> - and you force IE to use that version's latest documents mode. So good point about IE's slow adoption, it really is annoying and holding back the web - but for your websites, you can easily force the document mode of your choice, avoiding the crappy emulated modes.
CYBRA Partners With Life IT to Distribute MarkMagic and EdgeMagic in the UK
This seems reasonable to me... like if I created a new game called "Warcraft" that let you build siege weapons and launch attacks against castles filled with orcs. I would fully expect Blizzard to come after me.

Yes, if you create a game with the exact same name as Blizzard's and with very similar gameplay, expect to see a trademark dispute. This, however, is not the guess with The Elder Scrolls series and Scrolls.
What a vast improvement! I've been using delicious for years, and as the UI has stagnated, the things that bugged me about it have stacked up. Everything I thought should be fixed, from where padding should be added to how tags should be delimited, and much, much more has made it into this redesign. Bravo, guys. Bravo.
That's so low tech, it's genius.
I attended YCNYC last night. I didn't get the impression that PG was slamming NYC (aside from the weather, which I sure agreed with this week). A lot of what he said about NYC was positive, a few things were negative, many were over generalizations but that is just how it goes when you make a sweeping, predictive, speech.

But I'm really disappointed this is the storyline coming out of YCNYC. I took a lot of notes last night during the Q&A and the founder's talks. I took basically none during PG's talk. There were great presentations from the founders of AirBnB, Weebly, WePay, and others that I really inspired me and taught me things. Talking to lots of other people was very interesting.

I spent 6 hours in my car and 2 hours on trains yesterday to get to and from the event, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. I did not go through that trouble to hear about Silicon Vally vs Boston vs NYC, and that's not what I got out of last night. Yet on the internet that's all I'm reading about. It really was a tiny portion of the night.
>The 'http:// URL prefix is now hidden by default

This can be changed back with browser.urlbar.trimURLs in about:config. They should've provided an option for it.
SEO strategies to achieve front page Google rankings
> Users of IE6/7/etc are already self-inflicting harm on their own web experience

Why would these users self-inflict harm? Unless they're the victim of a enterprise IT overlord, it's because they don't understand what they are doing. They probably don't even have a good mental model of what a browser is.

So when these users visit your web site with their old browsers, I doubt they think "Hey, this web site is rendering poorly because I have an outdated browser" they probably think "this web site is broken".
By the way, to my knowledge dropbox doesn't provide drag-and-drop of files into and out of the browser window, which I see as kind of a key feature for this type of service. I know it's possible because gmail lets you drag-and-drop an attachment into a message in chrome...
I think the world would be a better place if everyone, especially MBA's had at least some knowledge of programming. With the state of the job market in the US, wouldn't it be wise to require even two years of programming in high school?
New Delicious is a Bitter Disappointment
Economists do not necessarily have a great track record with predicting the future state of the economy. From a study by Denrel and Fang:
'Economists who had a better record at calling extreme events had a worse record in general. “The analyst with the largest number as well as the highest proportion of accurate and extreme forecasts,” they wrote, “had, by far, the worst forecasting record.' [1]

Also, this Freakonomics podcast talks about the folly of prediction in general - http://freakonomicsradio.com/hour-long-special-the-folly-of-...

[1] http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/01/09/...
Building Polyglot (Scala/Erlang) Systems With Scalang
Telling somebody something on facebook is like talking to them at a party. I actually think it's cool that this sort of serendipity becomes possible. And I don't even like facebook anymore.
Only 4? I don't think you've been watching very closely. Though maybe after deduplication...

And yes: Chrome (massive bite out of both IE and Firefox's share), email (Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, etc, take your pick), and mapping being the big ones. You could probably toss in online document editing and machine-translation too.

Google seems to do reasonably well with taking over tools, and less-so for taking over primarily-user-friendly applications or features. I'm not sure Dropbox has much to worry about.
That's one serious bug. Have you contacted Dropbox about it? What was their response?
So looking at the first question, you do a computer search, or use some sort of neural net to find a covering for every integer up to N.

What about N+1? Or N+2? You've done finitely many cases, and there are infinitely many left to do.

So you do another 10^12 cases.

There are still infinitely many left.

How are you going to use a computer to prove that for every N there is a covering?

The second question, maybe you can find a solution using a machine, but the problem is hard. I personally doubt you can find a solution without genuine new insights, even if eventually a solution is found by a computer using a program written by someone who understands those insights.

The proof of the four color theorem was, in the end, just a big computer search, but the insights mattered.
If anyone can convince the mass market that they care about a voice interface, it's Apple. But there are some things not even Apple can do, and I suspect this may be one of them.
Is the universe really expanding? Scientist thinks otherwise
Unfortunately, when it comes to business, there is no feather-weight category.
That said, Google it self overcame already entrenched competition in search through a better product and defended well against competitor with deep pockets (Microsoft).
Great. So now I have to be two versions behind if I need to use GWT hosted mode.

(Grrr... yet more evidence of G's gradual sunsetting of GWT.)
Can't speak for PowerPoint, but my company does print to web to print again and our issues with HTML were always how precise it was in terms of rendering text and graphics:

Font rendering: With flash you can embed fonts and have them render pixel perfect across browsers. Now with WOFF fonts (see google fonts, font squirrel, typekit) and CSS3 you can pretty reliably embed custom fonts in HTML.

Graphics: Flash was first of all a vector animation tool so this was its strong suit for many years. Now you can use libs like raphealjs, d3js, and fabricjs to render vectors with svg/vml or canvas.

I'll note that SVG could do much of this years ago, however IE not supporting it until IE9 pretty much killed its progress. If SVG fixed multiline text (it uses tspans to break up lines), I think it would be a better solution than canvas for rendering graphics and rich documents in the browser.
This is an extremely common problem in vim-like implementations that aren't actually vim. Vim emulators in IDEs are a huge culprit for this. Just missing one command can be very painful (for example this website doesn't enable using / as a movement command). In the end I learned to always use vim itself.
Bash script to extract a range of revision diffs
So we'll have created an effective insect repellant. Awesome.
Arguably, having the menu visible is not the default setup, is it? The default fold-out "Firefox" menu simply doesn't have that issue and is not transparent.

I agree it's a problem in Thunderbird, which has a menu by default.

I think that if you try to tweak Firefox 4+ to look like 3.6 you're going to run into suboptimalities. It evolved. I think that if you get used to the changes, they're actually changes for the better (new menu giving more vertical room, tabs-on-top, etc).
Only by making Dropbox a lucrative acquisition target to someone else.
After Bashing Boston Entrepreneurs, Andreessen Invests in Boston Entrepreneurs
Physical toys interacting with iPads
I wouldn't speculate on Dropbox surviving, but, no, it seems unlikely that this fear is big enough to be a factor.
Excellent points and I agree completely. They're also already in pretty deep with respect to privatization. Since (at least one of) the curriculum publishers and standardized testing boards (eg: Edexcel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edexcel) is privately owned.

That leads to tremendous investment in lobbying and special interest type stuff, but actually takes away an individual teacher's ability to tailor the curriculum to the interests of the students.
Yeah, you're new here, aren't you? Just today there was a thread about the Dead Sea scrolls being put online thanks to the Israel museum. One of the prominent comments there is about how Israel "stole" the scrolls. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3041572
I'm enjoying this discussion heavily, particularly your contributions to it which are great. Just a minor (but important) nitpick -

> A stock analyst is going off of timing and trends more than data.

Not necessarily. You can broadly divide analysis into two camps - "technical analysis" [1] which is what you're describing, and "fundamental analysis" [2] which is looking more at intrinsic value, numbers, assets, things like that.

Warren Buffett, for instance, does plenty of stock analysis and he's not a technical trader at all. He repeatedly says he doesn't try to time the market. [3]

The first book I read on trading - Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets [4] - was from a technical analysis perspective, and I lost money trying to implement it.

Then I read about value investing and started trying to apply those principles - only buying fundamentally sound stocks trading at a favorable price earnings ratio, either in fundamentally defensible businesses or with lots of solid assets on their books, and buying with a big margin of safety.

I haven't had a losing trade since then, though in fairness my sample size is small and I don't sell unless the price of a stock I bought gets over what I consider reasonable. I'm currently holding Microsoft and HP which are down, but both I think are way undervalued (Microsoft is extremely stable, has some upside in the way of a strong research division, and could potentially translate a hit like the Kinect into alternate input devices. HP is being treated as toxic despite owning some nice high margin businesses that most people don't think about when they think of HP, as well as a huge patent portfolio and some good assets... yeah, their management sucks lately, but who cares if a company is trading below its liquidation value? anyways, do your own research, check the financials, etc, etc)

Anyways. Not all traders are technical traders. Fundamental analysis is also analysis, and probably easier to implement to be consistently successful. The top book on that is "The Intelligent Investor" [5] by Ben Graham, which Warren Buffets calls the best book on finance ever written (I agree).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_analysis

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_analysis

[3] “If you’re an investor, you’re looking on what the asset is going to do, if you’re a speculator, you’re commonly focusing on what the price of the object is going to do, and that’s not our game.” (1997 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting)

[4] Generally considered one of the best intro books to technical analysis. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735200661/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

[5] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060555661/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
I just got excited, then deeply sad when I remembered that this is going to be without Steve.

Best of luck to Mr. Cook, but I will always miss Stevenotes no matter how great a CEO he turns out to be.
I too went through my Facebook applications recently and there was a ton of stuff in there I never intended to authorize. Using a separate browser for Facebook sounds like a great idea.
Kinda sorta.

"Edge" rendering on X browsers is still X different ways for all those stuck-in-time browsers to decide what "edge" meant at the time of their release or last update.

That meta tag is a good practice but not the ultimate solution.
Great! Love the new canvas renderer. Anyone know when they're planning to add generational GC or other improvements to the GC? It's making some HTML5 games choppy as far as I can tell.
Tab Groups are cool, but I don't think anyone uses them. If you're on Windows 7 it hides the menu bar for more vertical space. It has support for lightweight extensions (called "JetPacks" internally) which don't require a restart to install or uninstall. There's no statusbar, like Chrome, URLs pop up when you hover over a hyperlink.

The main advantage over Chrome is that it doesn't freeze up when it's loading a new tab.
Sounds like someone pissed in your Wheaties this morning. Anything to get more people to give vim/the vim style of doing things a chance is always cool in my book.
Honestly, IE doesn't worry me anymore. Chrome does. Seems like every month there's new Chrome-only experiments, and Google provides Chrome-only extensions like offline Docs. Is it too much to ask for cross browsers sites?