skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The removal of NAT, IMHO, is a major ache in the market. What used to be purely an annoyance to developers and technologists has now become a serious stumbling block for users.

The internet is no longer the download-from-website model that it was years ago. There is a massive amount of user participation now, which is why upload caps are increasing as services like video chat, peer-to-peer gaming, etc take off.

And now you tell them only one person can initiate a video chat from behind a single router. The user is annoyed. Or you tell them that you can't both be playing the same game at once on two computers due to a port conflict.

IMHO there's a real need to get NAT out of our system, and there's a very real consumer benefit to doing so. It directly opens doors to services and products that people are already clamoring for.
i think its someone trying to make a quick buck and create a small media storm to attract the users.

having said that, i think that if something like this were to become truly successful, it would probably make me a little sad at how society works.
There are a lot of "what ifs" in the history of web tech, and considering this article, JSSS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets) versus CSS springs immediately to mind. Using Javascript for styling pages in 1996 may have sounded like needless complexity, but in retrospect it seems like it would have been a much better choice. Whole-page layout deserves a true programming language.
http://groups.google.com/
The recent decision of Jacobsen v. Katzer (different jurisdiction) held that violation of an open source license can be a copyright violation, which is what is being claimed here. This filing suggests that they FSF was emboldened by the Jacobson case.
Awesome job guys. This is fantastic.

I'm curious about payload. Looked to be close to 160K for the "runtime"? How is the objective-j parser done?
Lab work tends to be more solitary; startups more team work. Which one do you like?

Yes these are not absolute rules, but definite observations.

The rewards are also different: does publishing a paper float your boat or do you want to change the world? Again, academia does produce great companies and products but it's a slower process.
I think the fundamental problem is that the html/css/javascript/server stack needs to get simpler. For some apps, you are best off abandoning html entirely, and doing everything via javascript. Eventually we might be able to unify client-side and server-side code with approaches like Google Web Toolkit or YC's AppJet, but it is not quite simple enough yet.
If your goal is to have sex with many hot women, then I think time spent practicing and refining your pick-up skills would be much better invested than time spent at the office.
Much better than Amazon used to have, definitely.

Though I'm not so sure it's really as impressive as I first thought. It seems to heavily weigh the beginning of the search text. Here's the same search you used, but with the beginning part moved to the end:

http://ri.ms/vl7

We do a lot of this full-text search optimization at bug.gd-- we focus on parts of the text that are the rarest in the corpus/index and provide a higher weight to matches on those keywords (also factoring in phrase/proximity).

I thought Amazon was doing something similar, but the change in moving around the words either means they have a maximum number of keywords they actually pass to their engine, or they're using a bias towards words at the front of the search (which is interesting itself).
The problem is, to make $120k you typically have to move someplace where rent alone may exceed 20k/year.
CSS does have its limitations, however I'm not convinced providing full DOM manipulation is a good idea. I admit it does solve the problem and provide greater flexibility, but the downside is that it'd be very quickly misused with content and presentation becoming more tightly coupled as people start using the convenient CSS DOM manipulation with dynamic pseudo-classes for interactivity and removing many of the accessibility advantages that CSS has. There's also very real unaddressed problems in terms of creating a readable syntax, maintaining CSS code with injections all over the place and potential browser rendering issues. To me, the cure seems worse than the disease, and the Advanced Layout Module, despite its ugliness, is probably a better solution.

CSS3 has gone a long way towards improving selectors, and I'll be the first to admit calc is undoubtedly both necessary and long overdue. I'm not fussed either way by CSS variables - I can see both sides of the coin.
Just like in any industry, a good product + favorable market conditions + publicity = success. Obama had more of the above, and in a single mandate election, that's all that matters.
Actually, you said that the one button mouse was a BIG issue. It isn't, and that was my point.
Obscurity does increase security. The problem is depending on obscurity for security. The article mentions camouflage on tanks. The tanks don't rely solely on the camouflage for protection. It merely augments their protection!
when its ajar?
Can we can it with the damn "where are the women?" crap already?
Inhaling Fear: Those Graphic Smoking Ads Potentially Encourage Smoking
What is happening to auto is mostly caused by
1) the financial crisis making credit scarce and
2) a huge drop in demand (30-40%) that no industry could sustain

If this were true, all auto makers would be going bankrupt. But, it's only GM and Chrysler. The well-run auto makers need to expand, the badly-run ones need to contract, and we need new entrants into the market. I don't want the industry to be destroyed, but change is inevitable.
This seemed really surprising to me since I'm disgusted by those ads but I'm not a smoker so I wouldn't know about the craving.

I guess the question is whether to get people to quit or to prevent people from smoking. The ads might work for the latter but not for the former.
Generally a bad idea to quote 4chan on Hacker News...
My understanding is that the telephone monopoly is what made basic research so valuable to the company. They had a long horizon (b/c of no competition) and use for lots of innovation (lots of technical challenges in a huge market). Deregulation -> competition -> shorter time horizons and smaller scope -> no more Golden Age Bell Labs. Kind of sad, even though I assume we're better off post-deregulation.
I don't know what the majority think, but I tend to ignore all IE plug-ins because I am afraid that most of them may be virus and backdoors.To install plug-ins on IE, you will see a strange warning on the top first and then click many allow buttons to continue. For firefox, the install process seems safer.
The auto industry is not doing that bad. It's just GM and Chrysler that are bankrupt. Ford will survive on its own and so will Toyota and Honda. If they were all in danger of bankruptcy it would be another story.
Comfort with meaninglessness the key to good programmers
(Safely) Lazy Loading JavaScript
Lessons From Entrepreneurs: Zoybar
MySQL creator: version 5.1 released with "fatal bugs"
"3) Move away from the model of getting a 30 year mortgage, which over-burdens young people. Rather, develop low-cost, pre-frame housing, and make that as an available alternative to the traditional mortgage. It is easier to finance a 30K pre-frame home, then a 150K fossil that may or may not appreciate in value over the decades."

If by 150K you mean 150,000 US dollars, it might interest you to learn that the average UK house price is more than twice that:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/in_depth/uk_house_pric...
The version incompatibilities are a large part of why I respect Sun's commitment to backward compatibility. Even when it means that I can't use things like generics, that backwards compatibility also means that I can use the same applet for almost all browsers made in the past 10 years. Of course, you can't write a browser plugin in Java too easily...
Google's adsense for domains now available for all domains
I wanted to say that Firefox users "mess with your business model" because they have plugins for that. If you will give IE users a set of plugins to choose from, the most popular will be AdBlock. So main benefit they are referring to will be gone.

Sorry if my English is a bit confusing, it's not my first language.
It doesn't seem to hurt for straightforward programs, but it's much easier to make bad design decisions while drunk. It also takes me forever to debug while drunk. I don't really think it helps me in any way.
Grad School can induce quite a bit of burnout as well.
Firefox plugins are easy to write if you know where to scrounge for documentation. :P
[Please, if you're easily offended, don't read further.]

Cool. I've got a date tonight, so I'm going to take my chica out onto my balcony and enjoy a few romantic minutes. Then I'll bonk her.

Who says being a geek isn't useful sometimes? -- thank you hacker news! ;)
Wow, I was surfing last night and thought that it was the best sunset / moonrise I'd seen in years. Not surprising that there was an explanation.
Another idea: convert the city into a giant "grand theft auto" theme park. Some "Gotcha!" guns, plus the unused cars that are already there, would be the perfect setting.
The funny thing is that if we look at 2007, there is no fundamental difference between Obama and Clinton, other than initial support for the war. John Edwards disagreed with the war from the beginning as well, and was more polished. Many progressive leaders preferred his message.

Obama had a better product than McCain, but so did Clinton, so did Edwards. Obama's only real differentiation was his intangibles. (Not a Clinton, black, that preacher vibe he gives off) However, he had a few major negatives as well, namely being so new on the national scene.

It was the machine that he and Axelrod and Plouffe built that pushed him past Clinton and Edwards.
> "Legal use will be possible after buying an annual license from us," he was quoted by Kommersant as saying. "It won't cost that much — tens of thousands of dollars."

I will trademark all variants of "LOL", and collect every time he tries to...
Consider Australia as the 51st state of America, except everything is extremely expensive in Australian dollars. Developers there don't charge pennies, if that's what you're asking.

If you're really looking for outsourcing, check out high quality Indian companies. They're a lot cheaper than what you'd find around the country and they're excellent at what they do.
Common Lisp came out of ANSI, and I'd say it doesn't look like C++ ;-)
No, it is completely relevant. The BBC should not have spent taxpayer's money on any of this. Everything they needed to make the archive available for download in MPEG is freely available. Expending vast resources to solve a non-existant problem in an overly complicated manner is the exact opposite of the hacker/startup ethos.

Not only that but this is the BBC publishing an article on how great the BBC is. That alone should set the alarm bells ringing.
The problem is that Microsoft inversely gains from improving the ease of browser development. The easier it becomes to develop software using open source tools(No Visual studios) on an OS-independent platform(The web with browsers) the less money they make.

Google's recent project (Native Client) is what I've been waiting for as a C++ developer. It basically allows you to run native code(assembler) in browser. But then has security mechanism so that the code cannot do anything to the client computer unless the user of that client has given the container(Sandbox) that runs the code permission.

This will allow people to build their own UI frameworks, that render much more rich graphics and hopefully behave the same no matter what Browser/OS combination you are running on.

References:

Announcement:

http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/12/native-clien...

Native client code base hosted at Google code:

http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/

Ars Technica review:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081209-safer-than-act...

Do people really think we'll ever reach a point where different vendors building code-bases based on documentation built by a committee will ever behave even remotely the same? Have you read any of the W3C documentation, it's fucking ridiculous. We should be sharing implementations, it's the only way to ensure bit-level identical behavior of a target system(Performance characteristics aside).

I really hope Native Client takes off. In combination with Gears for client side storage it would allow us to build desktop quality software but with the web advantages of cross platform development, zero install applications(well as long as you don't consider caching a form of installing), user's pulling down the latest client at all times, and etc.

Awaiting our new Google overlords.
Endergen
Scheme would be a better example.
If we're talking about fundamental problems, then the only fundamental problem is that we're using document markup tools to build rich UIs, which is super-retarded even comparing to early 90s VB6 era.

WTF is <p> or <ul> or <div> and all that crap? I haven't seen an HTML template that looked comprehensible after a year in development.

What do they have to do with UI programming? What we really need is something like MXML or XUL, only cleaned up and widely supported by all browsers, especially IE9.
I've worked in both and I prefer the startup. In a startup, you're a fast-moving cutting-edge company with people who really believe in your product or idea. Every meeting is energetic and your input matters.

In a research-heavy institution, it can be fun, but the scientists get most of the glory and creative work while the engineers just put the tools together for the customer or scientists. Research money tends to be less than startup money if the startup prospers.
How much closer is it than the closest point last year?
Google is the #1 resource if your question is the sort that can be summarized in a few words. Like if you want information about a particular function in a particular library, or to read how to integrate two different systems. Google is also the way to go if you have an error message and you can quote it to find people talking about the exact error message.

For some problems, though, it's harder to search for an answer. For example, a question of good javascript style for a particular thing you are trying to do. For this sort of thing I ask friends of mine.

There's also generally mailing lists and forums that are appropriate for your specific topic. Stack Overflow too if your question doesn't fit nicely into a topic. The problem with these is that you generally don't get an immediate answer, and you might not get an answer at all, so you have to kind of ask your question, then keep trying on your own anyways, or do something else for a while. So this is definitely not as good as the instant methods. You also are more likely to get bad advice if it's not from someone you trust.

I never use books to solve specific programming problems. Much too slow. Maybe if they were searchable.
The most salient point, to my mind, was this line: "they didn't care that they saw it work in practice, since they already knew it couldn't work in theory."

That, and "Perl is a Shinto shrine." Larry Wall himself could hardly spin a better catchphrase.
I have been working part-time in fairly fast paced Japanese startup, and next year I graduate and choose to enter a company in research area. My decision is mainly because of culture and demand from my parents (the type of parents that ask you why you work at home instead of applying to "real" company like IBM, etc). One will learn more in area that suit him, no matter it's a startup or a company's research laboratory. One thing for sure before you make the decision is that you have to know exactly what you're going to do/face and whether you're going to like it. I learned a lot from startup but I felt that you don't get much time to learn deeply about new concepts and implement them. In startups, you get limited budget, limited devs team and basically you don't have enough time to implement/test new ideas. The most important factor for me is: since I'm not the kind of top level coder who knows everything, I feel insecure working at startup with lack of assistance from someone who really knows what they're doing.
Well they are not the same because your first million has a lot more utility than the second for most people, unless say you need 2million to start he company you always dreamed of starting or to do a surgery in a foreign country on your child that is superexpensive and if not the child will die.
I might be downmodded to hell with this message, but whatever... I feel about the same.

Do you have some sort of nobility in your ancestorship (or in the army) ? I noted that this feeling would be more frequent among descendants of aristocrats. During the Aristocraty paradigm, work was despised more than anything else. We are now living in a bourgeois world, where work is sanctified as the alpha and omega.

I don't like work. The one thing I dislike more than work, are the people who try to make me feel guilty for it. Usually, these are the same people who do not know how to enjoy life outside their work. They are hypocrites, because work is their escape route from boredom rather than a burden, and the truth is that if you allowed them to quit, they wouldn't. Or not for long. Because the true burden to them is exactly doing nothing special. They don't understand people can be different and actually enjoys spending time doing nothing special. As your nickname suggests it, we have a word in french for the vertuous laziness : flanerie. While these people find it intolerable when they don't work, we are pretty much the opposite. The zeitgeist is certainly on their side for now.

I have a true respect for hard work, but no admiration. I am deeply unimpressed by success stories and rich people who worked hard to climb to the top of the ladder. This kind of satisfation is foreign to me. I don't ask for your admiration, only for the respect of who I am whatever might be my activity and my aspirations. I doubt I'll buy all your products, but I won't harm your family or ask for your money, and I despise the nanny state as much as you probably are.

Go in peace, my brother ;)
Not by a long shot. I'd argue by that metric Labs are hundreds of orders of magnitudes better. A few of the big ones (in recent history) off the top of my head:

-Norman Borlaug invented Dwarf Wheat while at a lab in Mexico. It has been estimated that this one invention saved well over a billion lives.

-The transistor. Depending on who you believe, it was either invented in an Austrian Lab, a German Lab, or at Bell Labs. Either way, it has revolutionized the world.

-The Internet. Came out of a combination of labs (defense contractors, CERN, etc)

-Penicillin. Discovered in a lab, and easily saved 100's of millions of lives.

The list could go on for another few hundred items pretty easily too. Do you seriously think that Startups help more people?
Objective-J (the "runtime") is 76k, 13k gzipped (which is smaller than jQuery).

The two frameworks that make up Cappuccino weigh in at about 800k uncompressed, and about 150k total compressed. It's not a trivial amount, but its equally not very unusual. We're also not adding any html or css size to that, since you don't use either when using Cappuccino.
It was the machine that he and Axelrod and Plouffe built

Translation into startup rules: execution is more important than idea?
It's interesting to contrast the comments in this thread to the comments on Bruce Schneier's review of the book:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=376380
So easy, even a caveman can use it.

It's literally the same argument.
Cool- however

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=215536
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97515
Why do you feel disincluded?
Ok, I get it now.

Because you included this "They tend to install things like ad blockers, whereas the Internet Explorer user is more mainstream."

I exclude the possibility you implying what you actually meant, because that phrase says IE users are mainstream therefore they don't care installing ad blocks etc.

Therefore the assumption was that you implied, that wanting IE users is meaningless which contradicts what the phrase says, which didn't make up.
I wish I lived a couple thousand years from now.

I think mankind is really going to be able to do some great things once we understand the brain fully.
In the two universities I attended, the Technion and HUJI, it was as I described. In fact, I did not know there existed such a thing as a first-year calculus course that doesn't include defining "number" and "addition" from the ground up.

So maybe not just any university, sorry.
Um... I think GWT will kill them all.

http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/12/google-web-t...
I don't think "meaninglessness" is the right word for this. It smacks of journalistic spin. I wonder what a better word would be... maybe just "abstraction"?
Probably because it's not trivial to support i18n in Cappucino?

Try GWT, it has wonderful i18n support.
Twitter's newest real-life celebrity: NBC's Jimmy Fallon
It doesn't make sense to use CLR for a browser plug-in. It is a whole layer of abstraction you don't need. I've done this, using VC 6 and ATL as a way to implement COM interfaces.
On the contrary, my mind brings me to the "blue ocean" concept.
Remember, almost all companies start as startups. For example, startups get to claim Ford, inventing the assembly line.

Of course, the potential for work in a research lab is huge too. So I think it's more about the specific opportunities. A web2.0 tagging social network is unlikely to change anyone's life right now, but startups like Kiva or 23andme might.
Zoetrope: Back-Button to the Future (video)
Article: http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.asp...

Publication: http://www.cond.org/zoetrope.html
Prince of Persia: A Touching Tale of Two Characters
There are many objections I have to raise to your post. But let's just look at the first thing you say.

You say that SR can't handle acceleration. I disagree. Let's examine this issue.

My first question about it is:
Assume you have a "twin paradox" situation. One twin stays on earth for a year, while the other twin goes somewhere far away in space and returns, in relatvistic speed. The travelling twin accelerates smoothly in his journey.
Given the twin's trajectory, the mission is to calculate in how many years he has grown old.
Do you think that SR can't handle this case?

Second question.
Observe the Lienard-Wiechert potentials. They say the exact value of the EM field at any given point. What is the significance of the value of the field E, if not the chrage of the body times the force that acts on it? If it does mean that, then "force" in which context, if not SR? Newtonian? GR?
I love such bold claims from a 32 person study. :(
Yes, the ability to write code once that runs on either your server or the client is amazing, something Fog Creek implemented in Wasabi. But as JavaScript matures, it makes you start to wonder why you even bother with HTML at all; you can simply dynamically generate DOM nodes in JavaScript. And once you start doing this, most of the things you wanted to do running code on both client and server disappear.
Ofcourse that's extremes to everything. If you develop while trashed I doubt its gonna turn out well.

However, I do find myself programming better with some beer. I actually feel a little more relaxed and focus better. Strange I know.