skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was under the impression that you could access files but not edit them. That was how it stood the last time I used Docs, and a version of Gears then wouldn't allow for editing.

I use "inefficient" because when I look at SSBs I tend to look at them as a whole. When you open an SSB, it creates a separate process for that one browser. (I haven't tried this with Chrome, but that's how it works in Prism, Safari 4, and Fluid.) That means, among other things, that when you go to pick default browser and other various browser commends, you get a cluttered list of documents taking up space where your various important browsers ought to take precedence.

Of course the SSB defaults to offline. Isn't that the point of Gears? I never suggested that Gears didn't work as mentioned.

And I've used Docs. I'm aware that there are good things to it. That doesn't mean that it has no flaws, or that it's actually a decent replacement for Office. It doesn't have nearly the power that Office does. That's where Microsoft excels. Every small thing you might ever need to do, you CAN do. It's bloated but it never lacks a feature. Docs still lacks a decent page arrangement tool. And I know that some people don't care about page layouts, but that's the point. Docs is extremely lightweight and it helps people who need a generic word processor. That doesn't make it an Office competitor. And I don't think it wants to be an Office competitor, which is the point that I made when I posted.

I'm not saying this as an Office fanboy. I use TextEdit and Pages for my work. (I'm pretty sure that I can actually do more in TextEdit than I can in Docs, by the way: just to make a comparison point.) I use Dropbox to sync up my files, which is nice because it's much more intuitive when it's already installed on both computers, and because I get to use the more potent desktop editors.

I won't begrudge you the ability to make angry posts, but for the love of God: make sure you actually know what the other person was talking about before you make an angry response. I used Docs intensively for 2 years with a group of people; I used Gears over the same period of time; I'm a huge fan of Chrome. I disagreed with the central point of this blog post. Not over everything this post mentions or stands for. Cool it a bit.
> it's making the argument that college is taking advantage of unprepared students.

How is that inaccurate? They are allowing people to blow tens of thousands of dollars knowing it is for naught. It is fraudulent to admit many of these people. It's not so different from suckering fat people into your diet program.

The biggest problem with college education is the inflated prices, which have been caused by the subsidization of the student loan market. As the student loan market dies universities will be forced to cut costs and tuition DRAMATICALLY. Silver lining on every cloud...
Good article, but I still vehemently hate people who turn adjectives into nouns. I can't have a "horrible" therefor I have determined I am perfect at everything.
That's not the entire reason. Firefox defaults to Google as the front page and as the search engine. Unlike Chrome, it doesn't even ask if you want to use a different search engine.

Of course AdSense is a part of it. But assuming that they needed to invent a browser just to get AdSense revenue is stupid. There's more to Google's strategy to that.

Docs: again, it's not just AdSense. It's letting Google index more. It's giving them primary control over content. No surprise Docs lets you publish directly to BlogSpot. It's all about keeping it in Google and giving it primary access to indexed material.
Your comment doesn't address any of the arguments in the article.
Absolutely correct. Part of the reason for the post was to show how obvious it is (during our current gas shortage situation) that there are more gas stations than consumers really need. If there weren't, there would be lines and shortages until all the gas stations opened back up (or perhaps we were at 90%). In fact, things went back to "normal" when there were about half of all stations back open.

This is the same thing you see with Internet (and other) businesses. As entrepreneurs we should all try to be a little more intelligent about what arenas we're entering so that we don't waste our time and lose (admittedly lemming like) investor money.
Future of Search Won’t Be Incremental
Yep, you are your 'Horrible'. Deal.
http://forum.slicehost.com/?CategoryID=7

...especially..

http://forum.slicehost.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=853&...

Here's another I dug up:
http://chrisjohnston.org/2008/configuring-a-lightweight-apac...
i don't think i missed the point. i understand what he's saying, but he jumps between two points and fallaciously labels it.

a bachelor's is not overrated. nor is a masters or doctorate. the issue is that technical and vocational schools (the 2 year degrees) are underrated. people view them as for the stupid kids, which is patently false.
It doesn't simply say that students are unprepared; it says that colleges do a bad job of teaching, because they staff teaching jobs with people who are trained and competant only to do research work. When it asserts that colleges take advantage of students, it backs it up with arguments like "students end up in large lecture classes" or classes taught by grad students.
How do you prevent against CSRF attacks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery) if you don't maintain any state server-side?

The classic (and best) method for foiling these attacks is to store a special/randomized token in a server-side session, and require that token to be submitted from the client via a standard form, essentially making forged attacks impossible. Take away the ability to store these tokens in some sort of server-side session, and you open your site to attack?
I played around a bit with Io not too long ago, after someone recommended it to me over python (in general) for doing async network i/o. It seemed like a pretty solid language and had a decent library, too.

I don't have much to say about Ioke other than the fact that, personally, I doubt I would have chosen to re-write the language for some arguably minor changes. Of course, I'm sure the article doesn't get into all the differences.
the next DreamIt program will be (or include?) “Hacker Track”, which will address the problem DreamIt noted that was there were a lot of great ideas, without the technical developers to implement them. Steve mentions that this Hacker Track will allow hackers to apply and they’ll be teamed up (I’m assuming) with teams with business skills, but in need of technical assistance.

As someone from the Philly suburbs, I would say this sums up the problem. How is this that different from a consulting gig from the point of view of the hacker? I can already see the nightmares of business-bred founders bombarding the hacker(s) with requirements that reflect their understanding of computers as some sort of magic box. I wonder how often this sort of situation occurs at YC.

That being said, if anyone can bring decent tech entrepreneurship to Philly, I support the idea. God knows Philly needs it in the worst way.
how about this, then:

i agree with a lot of the facts, ideas and arguments presented, but i disagree with some of the conclusions.

a bachelor's is not overrated. the technical and vocational schools are underrated, and american society has put a bit too much pressure on students either continuing to a 4-year university or jumping straight into work, totally ignoring the other options.

because of that, substandard schools and garbage degrees have come in to fill the gap, babying people through a bachelor's degree as long as they're willing to pay, giving them a feel-good degree that is almost worthless in a competent workplace.

imo, the solution is to make the 2 year degree a more standard educational choice, removing the stigma associated with it.
> You get a lot for your money here.

Rents are cheap. Taxes, insurance, and any sort of labor the unions control are absurdly expensive. You have to be crazy to start a business downtown rather than just outside the city. If you're a major corporation you can negotiate special terms so it makes sense to locate downtown, but that's more of a bad sign than anything.
Always be looking, especially if you're not happy!

1) Perhaps something out there is better and you'd leave the mediocrity you're in now.

2) Perhaps nothing else is better or other stuff is worse in some way, and this might help put your current situation into perspective.

The economy sucks now, something else will suck later. If you haven't put anything on your resume in the last year you might as well have not been working at all since then.

This isn't meant to be a piece of puff optimism advice but courage-up and fix your situation if it sucks. It sounds like you have a good attitude about it overall (helping your coworkers), though.
Open-source server appliance is "free"
I'm in full agreement with him within the frames of the shopping cart analogy/function. I'm trying to think though, of things I currently use a session state for that would suffer under this process.

The cart on client scares me when it has to do with data that isn't trivial. (ie, personal data etc) I don't have these concerns with the "cart on the server" idea, but it does create some interesting issues where devs need to be explicitly aware of who is accessing this data at any given time.
Ideas Are Worth Twenty Dollars - Revisited
Actually I think the umbrella concept is really just that that colleges are businesses. So it is illogical for customers to think that these entities would NOT run as a business i.e. streamline customer turnover, optimize resources, cut costs where possible, market like theres no tomorrow, and MARK UP. This is a gross oversimplification but the point, which i think people really do miss, is that college runs on money, they want your money, and they will do what they need to do to get it.

Post secondary education is not some altruistic gift sent down by the Gods; its an industry that has managed to market a product as 'indispensable' to your childs future; the college degree.
The author is simply saying we should treat this consumer product like we would treat ANY OTHER consumer product. Look at reviews, consider cost/benefits, value propositions, long term worth. We should do our research and shop around. We should know not all brands are created equal. And of course we should all take a step back and realize that 80% of what we are seeing is a finely tuned marketing campaign. I hope more people read this article, not because 'degrees are bad' but because all consumers should do their research.
And that, my friends, is branding.
It's Here. The New Ask.com
Sergey Brin descends from Mount Sinai with Android API
Good points, but there is a tacit assumption if we were to use these ideas as basis for large changes.

The exploratory aspects of the "passion communities" requires self-motivated, creative individuals with a sense of individualism. In other words, they are producers by nature: if you leave them to their own devices, they get urges to make stuff. "Closet engineers." My feeling is that this mode of learning isn't for everyone.

There is a definite, strong case for a multifarious educational system, but nothing is definite. IMHO the key word isn't the passion community per se, but choice is. Give them the options, and let them pave the way. For those who aren't self directed, and/or prefer being passive receptors of information (i.e. the prevailing system now), you still need to provide it for them.
Perhaps they mean an advisory board rather than a board of directors?
I'm sure that there are some colleges where other factors have greater influence on the behavior of the college. But for the vast majority, all that I've seen, the schools are operated exactly as you say.
Yes, some taxes and costs are higher, but I like living and working in a big city instead of the suburbs. There's a lot of incentives for businesses moving into the city now. Property taxes are insanely low here (a fraction of surrounding locations). I've seen huge improvements in the last five years. And I don't think it's fair to write it off so easily. You have to factor in quality of life, and Philly has a lot to offer. And it's just plain ridiculous to say Philly is boring with the amount of nightlife and culture here.
A website full of cool things you've built.
12 Tools To Decrease Website Load Times
A small asteroid (~5 m) will hit Sudan on 2008 Oct 07 0246 UTC
January is a heavy vacation month...?
Wasn't this the incubator that lifted YC's application form nearly word-for-word?
In theory by using a cookie which can be verified by any server, but which can only be generated with the user's password (which is never stored in clear text).

There is an article here, http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2008/05/16/hardened-state... but the PDF link seems dead.
What will the impact be?
A little animation http://www.astronomy.ru/forum/index.php?topic=45265.0

Minor Planet Electronic Circular http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/K08/K08T50.html
Recruiting Top Technical Talent
Emacs Org Mode actually is really good.

It would be better if there were more reader/writers for it (because it essentially is a file format) so that I could interact with normal people (who don't use emacs).
"whether you’re an individual or a manager, your job is to scale at what makes you great"

Great quote from the article, I have always wondered about scaling what I'm good at.
And if we substitute religion with faith?

We all know (from daily experience) that we need to trust / have faith / etc. in someone or something. No single human is able to start from 0 and to do it all by himself.

Now, the current faith of 'modern' (non religious) people seems to be one of: Science, Politics, Evolution (in the sense of: Nature will solve it all for us).

But: if the solution to a human problem can't really be found inside himself, that fact already excludes any possibility of being the human itself something similar to God (Batteries AKA All Solutions To All Problems Already Included).

Concluding: it's much more reasonable to actually believe in some God than the opposite. (And I really appreciate the intelligence/knowledge/wisdom of past generations.)
You will probably find that both tasks are easier in, say, Lisp.
ASK HN: What do you think of mind.some.head ? (social network connecting minds and ideas)
I think Miguel's post is far more informative: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Oct-06.html
These are people who hate all the regular languages and love the obscure ones

Yes, this is all true. Being different is fun!

But some people use real programming languages because they understand programming, not because being intelligent is "obscure". It is possible to get started with PHP quickly, but I can hack applications together very quickly in Perl and Lisp too. The difference is that these quick hacks turn out to be maintainable and extensible. Hacking around PHP's brokenness gets very tiring very quickly. (PHP is like writing C that executes 1000x slower and requires more use of the shift key.)

Just because PHP is easy doesn't mean that it's the only language that's easy -- pretty much everything but Java and C are just as easy. (And with the right tools, these are pretty easy too.)
Browsers have that functionality built in as long as you are using RFC 2617 authentication.
He said he received 90 resumes.

From people that can't spell.
I agree, their customer service hardly did anything when those pesky nigerians kept messing up my auctions.
What would persuade the hiree to actually go to that website?
And the point of this comment is... what, exactly?
Looks like I missed a sentence from the article. However, the difference for FTMs was only 1.5%. I'd have to presume that there was a job change involved for all these people, as anyone who received a 32% pay cut in the same job for going MTF would certainly have a winnable case for discrimination.

Aside: "RTFA?" Seriously? I mean, despite the clear evidence that I'd at least (mis)read the article from my post? I thought I needed to relax because someone was wrong on the internet.
Thomas, my company (Serious Business) is looking for a front end engineer. Are you in SF or willing to relocate? Shoot me an email at siqiBUNNY@seriousbusiness.com (minus the furry animal).

We're a venture backed startup developing social games. I also used to be a YC founder for about a week so the engineering environment doesn't suck.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=head

Edit: okay, this is just a ning setup.
Anyone know if this is something of significance, or is this just going to put a little hole in the ground?

Aside: Poor (people of) Sudan. Like that country needs more issues.
In my experience, there is a large gap between the smaller, liberal arts "teaching" college and the large, research institution. I did my Bachelor's at the former and had great teachers and small classes (no classes with more than 30 students in 4 years). I did my Master's at a Research I university and there the undergrads are put into huge classes taught by professors that couldn't care less about them and grad students who are overworked and underpaid. Of course, at the graduate level the tables turn in the student's favor again: the Research I university offers small classes taught by some of the foremost experts in the world.
sure, but the average hacker is smart enough to do most jobs, including ones they aren't technically qualified for. It has been my experience that most of the skills vital to any particular job will be learned on-site anyway. Experience is just shorthand for "are you basically competent?".
Sony Ericsson W980 Black Unlocked
Sony Ericsson W980 is the first phone to feature 8 gigs of storage space which is a must for multimedia phones that double as portable mp3 Players. With all this space to store music you’re going to want lots of things.
Green datacenters: is striving for 1.0 PUE the new `five nines'
Nothing serious.

"Small Asteroid Predicted to Cause Brilliant Fireball over Northern Sudan" http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news159.html
Good point. I was trying to convey that, taken all together, the code was an unmaintainable mess of spaghetti. It was difficult to read and it was difficult to change.

When done right, all of those things have a place. My point is usually (with PHP at least) it's not done right.
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/K08/K08T50.html

"The absolute magnitude indicates that the
object will not survive passage through the atmosphere."
"It is very unlikely that any sizable fragments will survive passage through the Earth's atmosphere."
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news159.html
Me: 2
it's certainly possible, although "board" usually refers to the board of directors.
See this press release: http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/2008/pr200819.html
I learned SML which was OK, but it didn't change my world.

This seems odd to me. Working with Haskell for a while changed how I think about state. I usually avoid (non-trivially) mutable objects now, and instead return a modified copy of an object. (For an example, see the process method here: http://git.jrock.us/?p=Template-Refine.git;a=blob;f=lib/Temp... )

Also, Haskell's type classes (and CL's CLOS) are a different approach to OO compared to Smalltalk-style "send a message to the object". It is definitely good to be able to think about OO both ways.
I guess you have to avoid circular dependencies between the different languages, then its doable.
While I agree with your sentiment, could we not start with the "upmod if" posts?
Not So Secret Apple
1) Not seasonally adjusted.

2) Alternative headline "Mint's users now include not only affluent early-adopters, but people with very slightly lower incomes, too!"
Try reading it as an adjective with an understood noun, kind of in the spirit of an "understood subject."
"You’re uniquely good at them and you not quite sure why."

I don't know of anything like that... I know some stuff I'm pretty decent at, but there's thousands that are better than I am at each of them. So how can I "scale at what makes [me] great"?
C and Java?... Not exactly a broad spectrum. Try Common Lisp or Haskell or Forth or something else that will really expand your mind.
I actually have a very similar situation. Even similar amounts of money. We got two more developers and a manager doing the trendy cool research-y stuff.

A year later the whole group closed the working product discontinued, and I ended up leaving the company.

Don't get me wrong, I hate the Google wanna-be companies. If wrongly applied creates an environment of primadonnas and self-appointed gurus. Been there, too.

Still, it is very hard to find how to have good programmers happy. Perhaps the best thing is start listening to them. In the right amounts. And make whatever is given valued, humans tend only to value what they miss.
In his example, where the server maintains the state of the basket, all the requests from the user require a user name and password which will be used to authenticate the user and thus prevent identity forging.
Give a ticket with each response, require a ticket with each request. Tickets are signed with HMAC, dated, and individualized to the user login. Creating a ticket, the server forgets it. Receiving a ticket, the server checks it, creates another, and forgets that.
Um, what is it?
13. Don't use Rails.
It would work for me.
wrong title imho; seems to me it's a list of monitoring & testing tools than tools which actually decrease website load times.

(i was expecting thing like gzip, use of cdns, memcache, js compressors etc)
Learning Python did the same thing for me. Infact I'd go as far as to say Python has made me a significantly better programmer.
IPhone doubles Pandora usage
Again I see nobody is mentioning http://www.tntnet.org/
Security Flaw in Mifare Classic RFID chips
Ask HN: Demotivated Founder With Lost Passion Seeking Advice
Posting this for a friend who is CEO of a startup, but wishes to remain anonymous

The past few weeks, I've been demotivated. Our product is done and we're ready to launch, but there's a bigger problem, I'm just not passionate anymore. The current cons:

a) My cofounder doesn't have it. He's not tech savy at all, doesn't contribute the way he should, and has turned everything into a two person bureaucracy. Just not a motivating person to work with. He also hasn't made any real sacrifices. I've left school, moved across the country, and a lot more for our startup.

b) It's been close to two years of work, and not a whole lot of momentum. We've bootstrapped the entire time, with a small amount from a customer. Bad part is, we don't have any money left for new development. I've handled a good portion of the tech issues, except for the core programming of the app: interface design, database design, sys admin/config, some bug fixing,etc. Think of it more as a CTO role, than a lead dev role. At the end of the day it's still 2 of us, that's a troubling sign. I'm a pretty motivating person, and the fact no one else has really shown interest in helping out or getting involved is scary.

c) I'm not overly familiar with how to run an enterprise/business software company. I've done consumer tech, this isn't my first venture, and I know enough (and yet have a shitload to learn). Consumer web companies seem much more straight forward to me. Business web apps are a different beast to launch.

d) this isn't a question of lack of traction, is it a good company, good product, etc. maybe this is the scary part: the product is awesome, the market were going after is a good one, and there's a lot of opportunity. the problem lies more with the co-founder and the overall energy/excitement of the company.

So my question is:

a) Do I bail out and start something else/ join something else that is in its really early stages?

b) Is there a way to get motivated again/fix these problems?

Many thanks in advance.
More info:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/7655292.s...