skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree. The areas of email, movies, books, ecommerce are wide open. Even news filtering could use improvements.
I'm not sure what to make of this article. It doesn't get into much detail.

Two people are quoted. One is an honors graduate looking for a job in marketing. I'm not sure what her major was, but I'd bet it wasn't in computer science, engineering, physics, or math. The other was a contractor for AT&T - she says she wants to "user my degree", but no information was provided about her major.

The article gives a few general numbers about employment for young people and recent college grads, but again, nothing about specific majors.

I'm interested in knowing what's going on out there, but this article is pretty much useless, in my opinion.
Makes me think... maybe its time BackType came up with a widget... yes? Might save you the trouble.

www.backtype.com

Of course it won't help with your predicament, but it will be easier in case you do decide to display your HN comments.
IPhone developer profiles/endorsements wiki
Awful headline, and article could benefit from an editor and some pictures of the dances/projections described.

But, the similarity between bee dances and smaller-dimension projections of 6-dimensional shapes is very interesting... it bees have evolved an efficient storage/communication format for their path data.

And yet, what are the 6 dimensions? 3 for coordinates in space; 1 for time, then... ? Magnetic field strength? Environmental scent gradients?

Oh, I know! Just like ants leave chemical trails, bees would like to do the same. But in the air, chemicals would blow away.... in our universe. So they use their wings as tiny oscillation overthrusters and leave a stigmergic trail in the 8th dimension. Someone tell Dr. Banzai, and watch out for lectroids.
Sure, Greenspun has a rule related to Lisp, and he made millions from an internet company, but he usually just whines about how terrible American and Massachusetts are. Sure, there's a grain of truth to his posts, but his incessant whining is getting on my nerves. Could we leave his posts on http://www.nonhackernews.com/ ?
The slideshow is broken in Safari 3.2.1 on Leopard.
In most "Esc then X" cases, you should also be able to type Alt+X, which jives better with some folks' preferences.
Why is it that, more often than not, whenever someone says something positive about a Microsoft product or the company itself, they have to start with:

- I can't stand Windows but...
- I'm 100% GNU/Linux but...
- Microsoft and/or BillG can burn in hell but...
- etc.

Why the need for justification? We're all informed people here. Can we state positive facts about Microsoft without fear of backlash? Can I post this reply without fear of it being buried?
A skeltonic epic...
It's the community.

I will most likely never release a webapp (I'm an embedded kinda guy), but I like seeing what others are doing and reading about their insights and experiences. It's one of the few places I can find a group of smart people doing something I find interesting.
You May Not Be Born Into A Race, Says Sociologist, You May Acquire It
Haskell Cheatsheet [pdf]
I don't understand why so many ideas that are critical of something get immediately shot down in hacker news. I opened this thread hoping to see discussion that was going to have some depth and substance, and yet again just as I saw with the Obama thread that was critical of the United States' broadband penetration, I see very simple statements being made and entirely dismissing the person who wrote the article.

Is this being voted up because people just want to see this get ridiculed/discussed, or is this being voted up because people actually enjoyed it? I'm really curious.
7 Promising Sites That Died in 2008
Get cygwin.
Official Google Blog: Search and find magazines on Google Book Search
Backtype is nice but it would require me to replace my profile url with one of theirs. It's really geared towards people that don't have a website of their own.
Many of my comments don't make sense without knowledge of the parent article/comment.
A good example of a novel minor marketing effort for your start-up. An excellent idea. Putting together something small like the Karma Widget is an enjoyable diversion to boot. We all need those once in a while.
VC Investors Defaulting on Capital Calls
This is a smart move for Microsoft. They should have done this about 10 years ago though.
Great way to get new people to go your site!

It's lots of small stuff like this that gets people to go to your site.

Very clever way to spread your presence to other sites!
@snowbird122, yeah its a smart move, but i bet majority of YCombinator type start-ups will not choose Microsoft. atleast i think so.
I'd still do it. They are probably still intriguing, and you would provide the links for context.
thanks..haven't really checked safari yet
Evolution simply means change over time.

Your description is more akin to natural selection as a mechanism for evolution.
I would argue Microsoft are the ones that have the most to LOSE by discarding the data. Google already analyzed and mined Exabytes and Exabytes of data. They already gained much of what there is to be gained by doing this type of work. MS, on the other hand, has barely scratched the surface on what can be done, and on what they can learn from it.

Companies don't run on data, they run on information.

Discarding the data won't erase the knowledge that Google already acquired and that is responsible for keeping Microsoft in catch up mode. At most, it would keep Google from increasing their lead, but it would do nothing to reduce it.
Review my startup onehub.com
I read HN every day and would love feedback from the community on onehub.com. Onehub is a new web application for business users that provides secure, customizable workspaces called Hubs. Hubs can be used as an extranet, to send large files, receive large files, or as an FTP replacement. We have been working on the service for about a year and just finished our version 1 release this week.

There is a short overview video on the site. Anyone can create a free user account that includes one free hub and one GB of storage. Thanks and we appreciate any feedback from the HN community.
Netvibes Founder Building iPhone-Like Operating System For Netbooks
Malaria vaccine may be available in 2012
I didn't really like cygwin when on windows. For some reason, whenever I would hit delete, instead of going backwards and erasing the previous character, it just spaced me forwards. This meant I had to count the number of times I hit backspace then start typing whatever it was I needed in the middle of the next line, surrounded by whitespace.

I gave up and switched to Ubuntu.
Smart idea!
I might just try to build it. I don't have too much experience with web development, but I have some time off for Christmas and that would be a great way to learn. It sounds like you have spent some time thinking about news sites. Do you have any recommendations for language/framework/existing open source code?
Why the need for justification? We're all informed people here. Can we state positive facts about Microsoft without fear of backlash?

This wasn't the first positive post about Microsoft tech I've ever done. The answer to your question is: no we can't. :-) Just recently I got beaten to death by OSX and Linux fanboys on reddit for mentioning superior threading/process switching on Windows.
Raising money is like finding a black swan
Harlan Ellison is one of the greatest ranters ever.
When you are building for the web you make some browser backward-compatibility choices. Their implementation in that case which is build to be backward-compatible suffers significantly for being really slow.

I would not consider SVG as an option or necessary except if you are a building an well targetted network app served over the web.

Burning "money" is valid when you can't afford it. For a startup that "money" is the effort. So it's more important for a group of 2 or 3 to solve real problems.

YouOS, a team of smart guys got busted for getting caught in wrong execution.
I couldn't tell you about the runtime install, but the scare screens are because Adobe, like Macromedia before them, are EXTREMELY paranoid about security. They don't want someone downloading an AIR app, saying "this looks legit," and then it deletes C:/ or steals their identity or something. The "we have no idea who made this and have no reason to trust them" screen makes sense in that context.

Of course, the exact same warnings apply to every single app anyone has ever downloaded off the internet, so I can't really agree with AIR's stance except in the purest abstract.
The paper(s) mentioned in the article:

http://complex.ffn.ub.es/~mbogunya/home_files/0709.0303v2%28...

http://complex.ffn.ub.es/~mbogunya/home_files/0809.2995v1%28...

From the authors home page.
msft, please get in line behind sun's opensolaris, under the sign that says "CAN'T EVEN GIVE IT AWAY"
Microsoft Releases Open Source Blogging Platform
Infrastructure: Roads and The Smart Grid
Quantum memory in the cloud
Oh noes! There's no easy way to get from the widget page to your main page. Maybe you should link the top image to '/'?
Google adds print magazines to book search
what netbooks have touch-sensitive screens?
Effective teachers have a gift for noticing what one researcher calls "withitness."
I don't like JVM: I hate the mandatory 2-second startup time and "warming up" time. And the standard set of libraries doesn't look particularly well engineered to me (comparing Java SE to .NET or Python's libs). Also, despite being enterprise-tested and good at memory management with it's "best in class" generational GC, Java programs continue to be memory hogs, based on personal experience.

But you can't beat a nice piece of software (JRuby) and the huge ecosystem of high quality Java libraries. Moreover, JRuby guys are awesome at listening and talking to their community. You can go and ask any question about JRuby internals on #jruby - someone will always be there.

I am definitely considering switching my projects to JRuby, just need to find time.
It works for me for YC but not for reddit.
reddit username?
Ask HN: buying options in a privately-held company
I work at a privately-held, reasonably successful health tech company. An early employee, who recently left, called me with a proposal. He has more vested shares than he can afford to buy, and they expire in two weeks. He wanted to come up with a way for someone left at the company to buy these shares _with_ him. To simplify matters, let's say the options are priced at one dollar and that he has 10,000 options. Let's assume I am interested in part but not all of the deal, and can get others to fill the gap. My questions are:

a) what kind of contract would I create to set up this deal (he would hold the shares in his name, I presume)
b) what kinds of questions should I ask the CFO in order to come up with a fair 'meta-market' price.

Assuming the options are worth more than a dollar, I presume that a pool of people would come up with $10,000, and each person would get a proportionate quantity of options, and the ex-employee would get a quantity "for free". Does anyone have any insight into how I might do this and how the deal can be contractually structured, without getting too complicated?
Does it annoy anyone else when people say operating system, when they mean user interface or window manager? You'd think after a year or so covering the industry, they'd get their terminology straight.
Google releases MacFUSE 2.0
Sorry, didn't mean to single you out!
Azure, great. Let me know what its called next month.
Exactly... why they feel the need to go so much further than Apple or even microsoft go with desktop apps is beyond me.

The sandbox security restrictions are HUGE as it is and add days of programing time already, why halve our install base with scare tactics?
Words have multiple definitions. Yes, "evolution" simply meant change over time, prior to Darwin's publication of the Theory of Evolution. In the context of this conversation, "evolution" refers to the process Darwin was describing, but in reference to digital individuals rather than biological organisms.

Certainly, the word "evolution" in none of its permutations describes how the process started.
The real kicker here is that he's giving people incentive to group together all their profiles across the web, allowing Duck Duck Go to search people better than anyone else.

That's genius!
Pretty cool, now they just need an algorithm to optimize the garbage collection route and they will have pretty much solved that need.
Thoughts From Le Web
lazyant, duh...

reddit timed out on your initial request. Tried it again, and it worked. Maybe I can find a way to use their so-called "secret api"...
He tested Ruby 1.8.7 on Ubuntu and Ruby 1.8.6 on Windows.

Ruby 1.8.7 has added some features found in Ruby 1.9.1 in order to provide a forward path for those wishing to start adopting the new Ruby 1.9.1 features. For whatever reason, Ruby 1.8.7 has become a little slower when compared to Ruby 1.8.6, in general, at least during some testing I have done. So there's more than reaches the eyes in those numbers of the benchmarks.

Also, while Microsoft's C and C++ compiler provide lots of cool optimizations, Ruby is often compiled with just -O2 on Unix compatible systems because it's often fast enough, because Ruby is not known for trying to extract maximum performance from the bare metal anyway, so at the end of the day, things tend to a certain normalization which kills performance.

For that reason, MinGW and even Cygwin can work way too well on Windows machines with GCC, with Ruby tasks in mind. Though there might be little incompatibilities here and there with things like threading, sockets and so on.

I personally regard JRuby a great Ruby for Windows machines, because Java has great support there. More than that, though, I am excited with the work of the IronRuby guys because during my tests IronRuby has started performing within decent expectations, though it lags behind other Ruby implementations and has stability problems at this point.
Amit Singh is a machine. The OS X internals book and Mac FUSE is quite a bit of awesome work.
Better than Free - Kevin Kelly (pdf)
I didn't say there was no opportunity - just a lot of people trying to solve problems in the space.
Definitely a place for this. iPhone development still feels a bit like the Wild West -- not even sure how to compare devs.

This should help identify the good ones.
Hey Raju, we do have widgets :) and you can definitely use it to display HN comments (although not karma): http://www.backtype.com/widgets
I'm also twenty-seven, and there's nothing I'd rather do than have a go with getting my own business running. And the thing is, that doesn't mean spending all of your life in front of a monitor. Spending time out in the real world, talking with other people, is a vital activity for anybody starting a company.

It's also a great way to make friends with similar interests, which leads itself to all kinds of fun.

Too many people spend a frankly stupid amount of time worrying about wasting their youth, or make up for it by spending their twenties in a drunken stupor.

Think about it. Would you rather hit thirty, and have built a few things that you can be really proud of, and take a shot at making some real dosh, or just look back on a bunch of parties?
You don't have to replace your profile url with ours, we only suggest that for people that don't have a website.

You could claim your comments: http://www.backtype.com/url/news.ycombinator.com%252fuser%3F... and add them to your account and create a widget no problem.
Direct link to pdf on author's web site:

http://www.deer-run.com/~hal/UnixCommandLineKungFu.pdf
Economic Stimulus: instead of cash for Korean TVs, give us all fiber
All at once you brought together Occam's Razor, Universality, differential equations, manifolds, and quantum field theory into a comment I actually understand. You should teach.
Its only a hypothesis until she can find a way to test it. She discovered a similar mathematical principle that encompasses the envelope of recorded bee dances. That is not necessarily the only mathematical principle which can contain the same envelope. She then starts thinking about quantum states of quarks and such but doesn't have a valid way to test this yet. Its similar to ideas some people have that the brain utilizes quantum effects. No one has been able to experimentally prove or disprove this idea yet, therefore its still a hypothesis.

If she, as a mathematician, had at least an encompassing mathematical model that could theorize how a bee's brain could interact on a neuronal level with quarks, then we could venture into calling it a theory. She doesn't have that though, so its still only a hypothesis.
Get CoLinux [ http://www.colinux.org/ ]

Edit: even better resource: http://colinux.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
Because the article is satire (at least I hope).
"You'd have to be crazy to use anything else!"
Consolidate student loans
Well, the alternative could be more like Python.

Python supports both object methods and functions. Ruby only supports object methods. However, Ruby does allow you to define methods outside of an object - these become methods of the Object class. As such, any methods defined like functions become changes to all objects since they inherit from Object.

Python is also very explicit about its namespacing and imports. In Python, you should always be able to know where any name you're using is coming from. In the example from the article, 'to_yaml' is added by requiring rubygems. That isn't so apparent (in the way that 'gem' being added by requiring rubygems would be apparent). Names are reused all the time. Names sometimes aren't related to their package in an apparent way.

With Python, you have three options (one of which Python programmers will flog you for):
from package import name, name2
import package
from package import * -- should really only be used in an interactive python shell and not in programs

In the first one, you could then call name(something) or name2(something). BUT you can see exactly where those names are coming from -- package. Unlike to_yaml which could come from wherever, it's explicit that it comes from 'package'. In the second one, you can do package.name(something) and the like. Similarly, you can see that it comes from 'package'.

Ruby is really flexible, but I would argue that the author is correct in assessing that the ability to modify all objects implicitly is a bad thing.
IPod Nano Translucent Hard Casesq
Speck iPod Nano SeeThru Case 3-Pack - SEECBPNN/ Hard Plastic Cases Give Great Protection/ Screen Protection/ Translucent Colors/ Full Access To Contols Headphone Jack.
That the users even know something is an AIR app is an indication as to how broken that install process is. Compare with VB6 / Delphi / Qt / MFC - users who aren't themselves developers never had a clue.

Just this week, the Paint.NET folks were blogging about not being able to move to the latest version of Windows Installer because XP installs without SP3 won't have the runtime by default. For a downloadable application, extra megabytes are a big blow and extra required steps from the user are an absolute killer. Why would you take the upfront hit to people trying your software?

Java and .NET are still far less prevalent in the apps-for-sale market than they are in the inhouse-corporate market, and I think this is largely the reason why.
Yes, you are correct. But I think my point still stands.
wow, great explanation. thanks.
Last August I took a very long (2.5 weeks is long in my book) vacation. Part of it was living in a small hotel in Jamaica without a phone, TV or even an Internet access. Just books on a beach, plus a few pinacalladas of course.

After less than a week I stopped by the lobby to check my email and see "what's going on out there". They had just one lonely iMac sitting abandoned and no customers (Gustav was about to hit the island, so there were only 3 couples left in the entire hotel).

I checked the email, hopped on 2-3 news websites on top of my head, including news.yc, reading every article that seemed interesting and that was it... Took me about 15 minutes. So I left wondering how come I had managed to waste hours surfing every day.

Internet isn't changing: the web (even FIDO before WWW) has always been full of digital noise. But the amount of time you stare at your browser slowly and quietly brings your standards for quality signal lower.

Good reading material isn't growing as rapidly: not every day brings memorable/important events and the number of smart writers with something to say isn't growing as fast.

But on any given day there will always be CNN and their "breaking news", reddit with upvoted articles, startups announcing ground-breaking products that "change the way we live". And most of the time the "news" are exaggerated, articles are boring rants or pictures of fat cats, and "ground-breaking software" is probably another seven HTML-ized MySQL tables or just a web-wrapper around some open source product that would better work on a desktop, but being online allows founders to escape GPL obligation for sharing.

I guess I don't have much of a "positive attitude" today, heh? :)
You say that as if you knew it to be true. But we don't really even know if it's going to work; it's a new x86 verification scheme, and if it's somehow broken, it won't work at all.

I see how a near-native-performance plugin interface is valuable, but it's still just not clear to me why, if this was that important, it wouldn't be in the Java applet plugin's bailiwick. The same CS disciplines that make NaCL possible can also drastically accelerate the JVM.

It's also not totally clear that, when NaCL is actually fielded, the end user experience will be that much better than the applet plugin. NaCL forks off a seperate process and sets up a special runtime with a sidecar debug monitor; once it's up in steady state, I'm sure it's faster than Java, but the big issue with Java is setup time.
Also:

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/the-definitive-guide-to-bash-co...
I'm "the kid."

I intentionally restrained myself to one tip. See http://codeulate.com/?p=21 for the reasoning.
Almost every email address carries an implicit username/password as well as a degree of identity provided by dns services (where the email goes)

So thats not bad proof that the person that recieves an email to that address will receive the next one, and thats where all the login info is passed around.

Mailinator however breaks all this, you can use any email address you want, including one that somebody else is using. Maybe this blog is a little biased?
This could be useful as a backup protocol in case the normal route table / rules no longer works.
There is approximately zero advantage to being abstractly critical of something. Compare two options and pick the better one is logical, but abstractly saying X sucks has little meaning. "M$ is z SUXORS" might build credibility with some people, but saying BSD Unix is a better foundation for web services due to security issues might be useful information if true.

Now I did not up vote it, but I thought the article was funny at the basic LOL cats type humor. It's somewhat crude satire of the US owned auto industry and the US educational system. Personally I say let them fail, but due to their debt load they can't survive at 20% market share which is going to be a big shock to some groups when they fail. Long term getting rid of large poorly run systems makes an economy stronger, but few people are willing to take their medicine when times are good and they get sympathy when times are bad.
Sounds like Google for routers
You could conquer entropy in this universe by harnessing energy from other universes.