skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That certainly can happen under some circumstances, but for it to work, a number of factors have to be true.

For one, the shortage has to be a real one, and not directly caused by hoarders, as happened with toilet paper during the 1973 oil crisis. In this case, the hoarders pretty much hurt everyone (other than providing a very clean and clear example of the Thomas Theorem).

For another, the hoarders actually have to sell around the height of the shortage. If they sell after the shortage is resolved, then they took what they were hoarding off the market only to resell again when it was no longer needed and probably took a loss in the process.

So, hoarders can certainly help smooth out a shortage, especially an unexpected one, but it will not always work out that way.
thanks for the article as I knew about Forrst but not Dribbble.
Have you ever used one of the Xerox PARC machines? I have, and I would hardly call it a "half-assed UI". In many ways, it was better than the Mac OS until OS X. The main problem with the Xerox PARC machines is that they couldn't/didn't get the cost below $20k. IIRC, the Apple Lisa also suffered a similar fate, and the 128K Mac was little more than a doorstop. The Xerox GUI instead was saved by Moore's Law, when the hardware could be made cheap and fast enough to make consumer products.
AOL keywords all over again?
I'm pretty sure that the contest is hosted by the University of Waterloo's Computer Science Club; Google is a sponsor, UofT is definitely not a host -- http://aichallenge.org/faq.php
Thank God. I'm not used to stories like this having this kind of ending, so this is a welcome sigh of relief.

Seeing how her friends and coworkers cared enough to start a massive online campaign to help find her reminded me of the importance of making connections and having people in my life who are looking out for me.
Nothing is entirely secure. We're two guys with no ulterior motives that take all reasonable precautions to keep the data safe. For most people that's not only enough, it's much better than having their passwords stored in their email archives and chat logs.
The point of the debt analogy is to communicate that it's something long-term undesirable, although it can be a short-term expedient. Where the analogy falls short is that real debt almost always has to be repaid. In a startup searching for product-market fit, the opposite true re. technical debt.
So what are you doing obliging them?

"I'm sorry, but we recently reviewed our security practices, and we've found this method of communicating passwords to be incompatible with our dedication to protecting the confidentiality and integrity of your business data. Please use the the password reset form at .. "
Debugging Jasmine-Node and CoffeeScript Specs
Its possible. Songbird does it. I think it would be really difficult to get right though.
This has been well covered - but the odds of someone finding Voyager, as compared to the approximately 30 Light Year Radius of Radio Energy we've been pumping out, is a number which pretty much approximates zero.
Using Veri to Understand Term Sheets
Google Pages Is "Ready For Everyone" Now
Eeek! Thanks. I hope I'm not the only one who has ever confused Canadian universities :D
It's probably better not to ask...
Show HN: The reverse package manager
Tasting Fractals: True Confessions of a Synesthete
I'm very confused. Did you think this article was about "people who do things" or about "people who talk about those who do"?
I've made a polish job board for programmers. When it comes to the location we didn't just ask people where they live, but also - whether they're ready to relocate.

Another thing we asked - are they motivated by pay, or can they take a job in a startup with minimal pay. Also - whether they'd consider telecommuting.

By the way - check out Codility - they're Seedcamp winners, and they handle programmer testing. You might be interested in cooperation with them perhaps somewhere along the way.
All of those objections boil down to not trusting a 3rd party service.

I wonder objections there are to running your own service of this type? This way you could guarantee the physical security, keep up with regular patches, manage your own logging, and securely delete the secrets to your satisfaction.

The only real objection I can think of is that writing software without security holes is hard. This applies to any security related software however, and the solution is to use 'proven' apps that have survived scrutiny. This type of app is pretty simple, which would ideally be relatively easy to audit.

In principle, a read-once URL that you can safely send via email seems to be a pretty efficient way of dealing with sending passwords or other keys without having to deal with GPG or similar. Just tell the client 'Click on this link, that's your password. This message will self destruct'. If it's intercepted, you can detect this, and change the password/revoke the key. I'm sure I'm missing something, but if not, it would be nice to have this become the standard way of distributing new passwords or keys for services rather than sending by email (for those services where you have an initial password generated for you).
Nice UX!
Very cool! A few things for you to consider:

1. Consider putting preferences in their own window. This is the standard Mac behavior, and it's a little confusing to have your app do something different. You could also use the standard preferences toolbar look.

2. The artwork for your playback controls looks off. Specifically, I think the anti-aliasing of the circles looks uneven.

3. For the gear menu at the bottom left corner of the window, consider adding a little arrow like in Mail.app. That helps me know that this is a dropdown menu.

4. I had no idea what the X would do in the bottom left corner of the window the first time I pressed it.

5. Tooltips would help. You don't seem to have tooltips anywhere.

6. I was very surprised that spacebar didn't control play/pause and was even more surprised that there is no keyboard shortcut for play/pause. EDIT: It appears that spacebar does control playback. Maybe I had a focus issue before. But it would still be nice to see it in the menu. :)

7. Having "Library", "Playlists", etc. at the top of the window is interesting, but ultimately I think you'd do better with a standard look/feel. Consider using the standard selected toolbar item look. (See the preferences of almost any Mac app to see what I mean.)

8. This is very minor, but you have an extra menu item divider at the bottom of the View menu.

9. The album artwork of the currently playing song (top left corner) looks very slightly off-center. I think there's one more pixel on the right side than the left.

Overall, it's very impressive! Good work. :)
Oregon looks to iPads to help disabled people vote
Gamers create recipes for protein-folding algorithms
Does anyone know how much data can be passed with this tool? Also, what data is logged?
>> "The testing fetish is a response to generations of kids who can't think taught by teachers who said "we're teaching kids how to think"."

> Funny, I thought it was driven by too many politicians who'd taken management 101 and learned to "measure everything". Do you have a cite? (Honestly wondering).

You haven't seen the "Asian kids are doing better" and "schools are failing" stuff? Really?

> The easiest way to pass a multiple choice test is to memorize a bunch of crap and not bother thinking.

How would "memorize a bunch of crap" work for an algebra test? Unless "crap" means "rules of algebra and how to apply them"....

How about three examples of this "learning to think" that can't be measured with a test? (Skill in playing a musical instrument is arguably one, but mostly at the extremes. However, ranking Carlos Santana vs Jeff Beck isn't the problem.)

I suspect that your definition of "test" is too limited, which says more about you than it does about testing.
Short Haircuts for Round Faces 2011
Or if she fell victim to a crime - sadly more likely for a woman gone lost in a bar.
For computation-heavy apps, probably. For others it'd probably come down to something at the framework level, such as the efficiency of the OpenGL bindings or event/callback infrastructure.
When I was in Catalonia, they said that this container and way of drinking are both local customs.

They explained it's a heritage from times of plague - this way you drink without touching (thus contaminating) it.
As a programmer, I also think they are quite ugly. Unfortunately their ugliness is pretty much baked in as it is what makes them work effectively (annoyingly high contrast, unbalanced, etc.)

Yes, I do realize there are QR Code "hacks" where the codes are colored and/or integrated with logos, etc to look less ugly and those hacks do look good (or at least less bad) on a web page, but they destroy usability of the codes in the real world (by removing data redundancy, killing the contrast to the point where devices with cameras with low dynamic range won't scan it well, etc).

I don't mind so much the other issues, I like that they can be used flexibly for just about anything from encoding a url for marketing to doing internal inventory management.
I'm already becoming dissatisfied with my Nook over B&N's failure to really come to terms with the rest of the world. The number of non-North American authors I follow whose work is for sale in Kindle editions but not Nook editions isn't exactly zero.
What can I tell you here? You're right, of course: most apps don't care about performance at all, either in space efficiency or time efficiency. Those apps shouldn't use C, and should certainly use a GC'd language.

I'm only reacting to the idea that (pp) "because it's 2011, nobody should be using ARC". Well, a statistically tiny number of apps may require the bare-metal performance that hand allocation provides, but they're also disproportionately important apps.
Then the receiver reports to the sender that the link didn't work. The sender, not knowing if the password was compromised or if it was a situation you mentioned above, changes the password/revokes the key and generates a new one. This time, the receiver doesn't access it at closing time in Starbucks/doesn't switch tabs, and gets the new password correctly.

Unexpected behavior doesn't happen every time.

As an optimization, if you have a self hosted service of this sort that gives proper logs, you can probably verify that the link wasn't intercepted by looking at the source IP and comparing to what the user reports (if they're able to do that, if not, you fall back to assuming it was compromised), and if so, skip the revocation/regeneration procedure.
Man I'd be thrilled if everyone just thought "SHA=bad, bcrypt=good".
http://re-lab.net/welcome/images/image108.gif

Should've had words "Oh Shit" placed at top, and some graphical representation of defecation.
Professional House Cleaning and Window Washing
I'm clear on all that.
My point was simply this:

PV is not efficient/cheap-enough to catch on in the developing world, yet.

As the developing world cannot subsidize/commodify something it cannot afford, by definition, the only way PV becomes more efficient and more inexpensive, is by chasing western demand/subsidies.

Which then means that for PV to ever be big in the developing world, there is a precondition of substantial generating and production capacity for PV in the developed world.

Given that such installations must exist for PV to even make progress toward the developing-world-changing tipping-point, it seemed strange to me to say that Solar will never be "a big deal" in the developed world.

One could likely do the math and determine approximately how much installed generating capacity and how much production capacity the industry would need to have created, to drive price-per-watt down to rates that are attractive to the developing world. And I'm thinking the numbers you'd come up with amount to "a big deal" by any reasonable objective measure.

(Though I do concede that such a substantial number may still pale in comparison to fossil fuel usage in the developed world.)
New Steve Jobs “Movie” Hits the Screens Mid-November
Show HN: prognostr.com - effort estimation made easy
Hey HN!

I wrote a mobile web app to estimate the effort of projects - well, kind of...

Most of the times when we need to estimate a projects effort, there aren't almost any requirements. Sometimes a single title is the only thing known. The effort is needed nevertheless. If you're familure with these kind of scenarios then prognostr.com is here to help you.

What do you think? Critique / Suggestions appreciated!
Do One Thing Different Daily
Out of Ubuntu’s Bed to Hairy Arch Linux in a Dark Alley
It's reasonable to expect that apt's Ruby/Rubygems works with Bundler in the same sense as it's reasonable to expect that apt's Apache will set the right MIME type for a ".html" file, and not set it "application/binary" by default because some configuration file some Debian person thinks should exist isn't there.

Put more simply: if they can't package a rubygems that actually works with the rubygems ecosystem, they should not package rubygems at all.
So glad to hear this news.
You can become President of the US with only 22% of the vote.  Here's how:
B&N simply cannot afford (financially) to take a loss on the hardware.

They're doing this already. People with Nooks make follow-on purchases too.

Over the past couple of years, I've seen B&N upgrade their tech and product teams and lay the groundwork for a future where they - like Amazon - have no physical locations but offer far more than books over the web, and make much of their money through the sale of digital goods.

I'm skeptical they'll catch up with Amazon, but when the actual physical bookstore is a quaint and obscure relic, I think they'll still be trucking along quite nicely. The company's already massively undervalued given their share of the ebook market.
Any plans for native Airplay support?
Does more compact folding mean better?
Or does faster folding mean better?
What is meant by better folding? Does is look like what they can get from x-ray crystallography ?
I'm sure that's a huge component.
Amazing demo form one of Cinder's co-authors: http://roberthodgin.com/cymatic-ferrofluid/

He says that he started with Processing, so I'm guessing that at some point he felt limited by the performance he could get out of it.
Chrome is testing pre-fetching in beta builds and its expected to become part of the mainline product soon.

I'm sure there are other issues. GETs are kind of unreliable. Better to do this stuff via POST.
In the NYTimes coverage (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/google-lets-in-the-...), Horowitz says:

“Over time, I expect ‘+Pepsi’ to emerge on every can, on TV spots and on the Web site and become a cult phenomenon…Over a couple of quarters, brands will learn to utilize this.”

I somewhat doubt that, unless Google offers big cross-promotional subsidies. Which they might, but is sort of the antithesis of a 'cult phenomenon'.

I do find it interesting that Google, the infovore behemoth that killed various 'reserved keyword' schemes (as at AOL and RealNames, and even to some extent domain names) with flexible full-text-search is now reintroducing reserved keywords with 'Direct Connect'.
Drawing DOM elements to Canvas
I'm not sure you're seeing the core point here.

The newcomer technology displaces the incumbent by making a concession the incumbent can't make.

Here, solar can, in the developing world, make the concession of providing less power, less reliably. Since the developing world often lacks any power, bringing reliable high-output power to a region is likely to be more expensive than bringing in low-output, low-reliability solar.

Maybe you already get that, too, but I don't see you addressing the point in your comment.
I'm lost here as well. Let's imagine I have COUNTER table of one numeric field VAL. All I do in transactions is:

update COUNTER set VAL = VAL + 1

Let's assume the initial state is one entry with VAL = 0. If I run the update statement in two concurrent transactions I'd expect the result to be 2 when both transactions complete. However, I don't understand how that can be achieved without serializing those transactions.
Dollar Loan Center Recognized As National Industry Leader
"If this is unacceptable to you, then you can run MongoDB with W=majority mode, but with MongoDB W>=2 modes (so-called consistent replication modes) are very slow."

Serious question: are the consensus modes slower than for any other system (e.g. HBase, Cassandra), or is this just a re-statement of the fact that writing to N > 1 machines is inherently slower than writing to a single machine?
Why do prices have to go up with productivity? To take a toy example, let's say that the entire economy consists of nothing but producing TVs, and that enough TVs are produced for each person to have one TV per year.

Now some massive productivity increase comes along and doubles output with the same workers. Now you're producing enough TVs for each person to have two TVs per year. Either the price of TVs will drop by 50%, or salaries will double. (Or half of the workforce will be fired....) Approximately. If everyone produces more then everyone has to be able to buy more, otherwise there's no reason to have the additional production in the first place.
SC Property Pros
Homes For Sale in Charleston
Huh, neat. I made something similar recently (but a web app instead): http://www.recordr.net

Still need to add Gmail (et al) contacts importing / syncing - until then, I think it is just a bit too arduous to get the basic info in there.
11/11/11 Nerd New Year: Robot Hackathon
> It's not terribly difficult (or expensive, comparatively) to store energy when size and weight are not a concern. You can use huge tanks of molten salt, for example.

Yet, PG&E pumps water uphill at night so it can get more hydro during the day. Maybe they made a big mistake, but I'd like to see some actual numbers.

PG&E isn't perfect, but they're not obviously incompetent either, so ....

To put it another way, if you're correct, you're ignoring gobs of money.

> The nice thing is that in a lot of places where it's hot and sunny often, electricity use tracks sunlight due to air conditioning.

Most places don't have air conditioning.
When I was about 14, I was cocky as hell. Finally I was given a dressing down. Best thing that happened to me.
If you are on HN and work at or with said hospital, stay off these threads. Even an inadvertent indirect information slip could be enough to get you fired under HIPAA and other similar statues.
They really need to get that gauntlet under control. In the past, there have been times where I was on the fence about a purchase and the tie-breaker was that I did not want to deal with getting pestered about the loyalty program yet again.
how gullible most of you are

That's an unsubstantiated, and probably false, assumption. There are a lot of people in this thread debating the merits of the complaints and most doubt those merits. Even more people are not participating in this thread at all and you don't have a clue what they think. If they're anything like me, they thought "another day, another complaint about product X." and didn't draw any conclusions from this post.

You seem too convinced of your own greatness to seriously consider the possibility that maybe most people here are actually sensible and don't rush to judgments. To me, this post portrays you as an 18-year old that was the smartest in his highschool, but has yet to realize and accept just how awfully many people out there are smarter and wiser. God help the people around you if you're older than 28.
Knowing Important Things about Food for Diabetics
I don't know if they've updated their chart since your observation, but the math looks right to me at this writing.

The WD10EARS drive (first row) was selling for $60, now sells for $140, and that is indeed an increase of 133%. The MP4 drive (last row) has risen from $50 to $100, and is noted as a 100% increase.

I think the chart would be improved by showing both the old price and the new price, making it more obvious how they arrived (correctly or otherwise) at the percentages. This way, checking the math requires visiting Camelegg oneself.
Why My First Indie App Will Target Only the Barnes & Noble Nook
Handle Incoming Emails like a Pro (Mailgun API 2.0)
Creating Firewall Rules for Freshclam
Steve Jobs and openness
I thought it started in comics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_(person)#Fanboy.2Ffangirl

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanboy_(comics)
New Enterprise API Management Solution Called Atmos.phe.re
Agreed. One need only look at the Apple/Google/Microsoft flamewars that occur daily on this site in order to realize this.
I'd love to believe that scenario, but R&D on spinning platters hasn't stopped, or anything. Solid state drives will get cheaper, but so will the mechanical ones.
2600hz - Erlang-based open-source VoIP system
thanks, I was worried I wasn't getting the I/O references :-)
Lisp isn't worse at path-finding; it's slower at path-finding, simply because it's slower at everything.

Lisp has its place; performance-critical code isn't it.
I would assume that Apple doesn't support QR codes because most consumers don't particularly have a use for them.

I see QR codes everywhere in NYC, but actually getting one onto my phone involves stopping, taking my phone out, spending 10-30 seconds with the QR code.

If your advertisement is capable of inducing me to do that much work, that's a pretty fantastic advertisement. However, despite the QR codes being damn near everywhere, I've still not bothered to scan one.

QR codes are, in my estimation, a fad.
Short term Redis plans
I would think that can be a wildly inaccurate statistic. Some people may click into the email, scan it within a second or two, and click out.

That would count as a delete?
The Gmail blog is one example.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/p/as-you-may-have-noticed-gmai...
Great execution. I wish there was like a $10/month option though! Or student discounts or something...

But the content is well worth the $25/month and up. Loved ThinkVitamin Membership, this looks even better.
If the link is sent unencrypted a potential email relay or packet-sniffer could scan for the links related to your website and open it before the recipient. It would be easy to automate at any level. They wouldn't have context, sure, but they'd have whatever it is you wanted to send and your recipient wouldn't.

I don't think this is likely to happen.

Is your delete permanent, if not secure?
I wondered myself why it would take so long to find someone in a hospital -- that she checked herself in recently makes a lot of sense.
I'd be interested to see some stats from some a/b testing on this.
>a rockstar designer should take more stake in a company than a >rockstar developer.

That made me laugh. I imagine the post was written by a designer.

I understand how important design is, it's as important as the backend. But somehow the OP believes that it's only the design that made some apps successful. He also undermines the countless sleepless nights the "engineers" at Apple spent trying to make things work to fit the design. Without fair share of both, it's impossible to make a product successful.

>A web site can be as clunky as it can be in terms of back-end
>but if the front-end kicks ass,

The OP also makes the mistake of thinking, that design is only buttons and borders. Front is a fairly delicate balance of UX, UI. Without an appropriately "designed" backend which is equally responsive, all falls apart.