skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This could be automated by using text summarizing algorithms which pull out key sentences. Then, when you come across a long article, just shrink the screen to summarize.

OS X has a text summarizer, which my brother used to great effect in grad school. Most of his readings were digital, and he just ran them all through the summarizer. He had no trouble participating in class discussions, though occasionally a professor would look at him oddly and say "Well, that wasn't really the main point."
We hit 40 today, but it's not possible to know how many of those are "tests" by our users.
Exactly.

One thing for people to check when choosing a new registrar is whether they have a way to "ack" a request to transfer out (in case you want to leave at some later date). Some registrars don't and that can mean either trying to get customer service to do this or waiting the default period.

Note that there can also be a delay with the new registrar that you choose putting the domain into whois as well.
It's funny - the no.1 selling point for this is that it removes Google ads and "cleans up" Gmail. But Gmail feels a lot more clean WITH the ads. Maybe you need to polish up your screenshots or add audio to the video - I see 11,000 people have this thing installed, it just doesn't feel legit.

My #1 question was "is this going to access my email" - like some Google integrated services do. Buried in your description was the line "This extension will never access, read, store, or transmit your personal data." <-- if that's true, I'd make that the first thing you tell people.

Just some feedback, hope it helps.
Stop Paying Your jQuery Tax
trogdoro, I love this idea, but I'd suggest choosing dot combinations that visually approximate the shape of letters where possible, For instance:

- lower case L (l) would be a long vertical bar

- i would be the lower two dots filled and with a dot in the second highest position

You could then make some other common letters look like a vertical cross section:

- o could be the bottom dot and the middle dot

- s could be the top, middle, and bottom dots

- m could just be the bottom dot

- w could just be the top dot

More complex letters could represent crossing lines as gaps. For instance:

- t could be a vertical bar with the second highest dot empty

- k could be a vertical bar with the middle dot empty

You could add a sixth dot underneath the normal line for letters which commonly drop down below. For instance:

- j could be an i with an extra dot underneath

- p could be an o with an extra dot underneath

- g could be an un-dotted j

- y could be a v with an extra dot underneath

You could take advantage of certain letters which are the inverse of each other by inverting the dots (white dots become black, and black dots become white. For instance:

- z could be the inverse of s

- q could be the inverse of p (but with the lower dot still filled in)

For letters which are upside down versions of each other, just make the symbol upside down

- w would be an upside down m (as already shown above)

- n would be an upside down u

You could also add an extra dot above the normal line of reading to denote capitalization (kinda like a representation of the shift key). Doing this would make for 7 dots total.

I'm sure that not every letter would be representable using rules like this, but the less common letters could get the less obvious patterns.

The nice thing about doing it this way is that some words will kind of look like the shapes we have already memorized for those words. Kind of. If you squint.

This is a fun experiment, and I commend you for trying it. I look forward to seeing vs 2.0 :)
Hilight growls from irssi with Plack and ssh
How can an engineer evolve to design great products
I'd say this if you were sitting across the table from me, only in a charming way that'd make you laugh. Then we'd get beers and sing some drinking songs.

This page: http://www.likesecret.com/pages/jobs

Come on guys, really? "potential to revolutionize online dating" Did you write that with a straight face? :P

This idea is old as heck. There are dozens of apps around the web and on Facebook that do this, some with tens of millions of monthly actives.

You're talking about building zoosk.com, at best. Aim higher. Please. Pleasepleaseplease.

Edit

Just FYI, I've built about half a dozen Facebook apps that have reached at least 10MM monthly actives. This is not your cliché HN "I hate viral and Zynga is evil" advice.

What you're doing is not original. It's also the kind of thing that awkward engineering types think is great, but most people just think is creepy.

If you're really interested in new approaches to online dating look at sites like howaboutwe.com or spoondate.com. Don't do the easy thing -- do the awesome thing.
This seems like a solution in search of a problem...
"We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”

That's what everyone should take out of this article. Even though doing something is technically legal, it doesn't mean you or your startup/company should be doing it. Always take into account what your customer base will feel.
Im not an expert, but isn't it exactly the other way round? CSS3 is usually hardware accelerated, whereas Javascript is completely CPU based
"Robot Readable World" by Timo Arnall does a great job illustrating what's behind entirely plausible scenarios like these.

http://www.elasticspace.com/2012/02/robot-readable-world
My computer screen gets dirty. At first I thought the small dot over the capital was a speck on my display. I tried to rub it off.

I came up with this line last year: "I took a polish to the Polish readings in Reading by the nice guy from Nice." I still haven't found a word which describes two words which are spelled the same except for capitalization and which sound different.
The best first step might be encouraging people to automatically post to their Facebook wall that they have submitted a name. This could encourage people who are interested in them to join the service and hope!
iTunes metadata can be exported as an XML file.
Some thoughts..

1. If PayPal wants some hacker love, they'll have to start acting more like one and less like a big corporate/bank. Start with a cleaner "developer friendly" redesigned website and API documentation.

2. Fix subscriptions (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3588446). Most startups (largely SaaS) charge a recurring amount and PayPal subscriptions are not at all easy to integrate (see how Stripe and SaaSy do it).

3. Consolidate (see Apple and Google). Remove less popular products and focus on the most popular ones.
What did you write this in?

Also, your site http://www.hashbo.com is down right now.
The Art of Business Sales Pieces
Ronald McDonald Japan Remix,Beautiful Japanese Girl
This is a cool hack! I think the next step is to think about what kind of problem this technology could solve. For example, I would use this tool if I could input a width and height to dynamically generate snapshots of websites at different screen resolutions.
OK, raise your hand if you believe the decision to drop music sharing was something they made on their own.
Houston Swim Lessons
Swimming lessons for children in Northwest Houston, The Woodlands, and Spring Texas are always safe, affordable and enjoyable when they're taken at Fun IN Swimming
Something tells me there's a subtext like that to a large number of YC-funded companies. They're clever.
One minor critique... the example placeholders are of the form "example.com" but it seems to reject domains that are not fully qualified (e.g. "http://example.com)

Neat idea though.
I needed a non-clang compiler to compile erlang and clang to translate PyPy. However, compiling gcc from Apple's open source did not seem particularly more trustworthy than "it works for me" refrain from a few developers.

I came across the following method that works on both Snow Leopard and Lion:

1) Uninstall all versions of Xcode.

2) Install Xcode 4.1.

3) Upgrade to Xcode 4.2.1.
Yeah, sorry that was another past hack :-) that’s kinda moved over to it’s new experiment at http://boardcast.it

And the app was done in (the apparently uncool :-) Java - it was just a quick hack because I noticed that snapshot services were cluttered and complicated and most folk just want a simple full page image. Anyway it was written today out of some code used in http://boardcast.it.
Hold on, I thought Gatekeeper would only give you verification that an app is secure, and you would otherwise still be free to install any app you want. Is Apple really restricting you to install only app store and Gatekeeper verified apps?
To make this more HN-centric, here's a question:

If you are a developer, and you feel uncomfortable with this sort a tracking, would you work for a company developing or maintaining software or infrastructure that does this sort of customer analysis?

It seems to me that some of the most interesting companies to work for are doing data mining like this. I would guess a large percentage of Hadoop installs are doing analytics on customer data. Are you ethnically opposed to data mining?
Ask HN: Voxel (hosting) issues?
We just saw massive load spikes and connectivity issues across all of our servers and their support console went down too. They seem to be M.I.A. - anyone else here hosting with them / encounter any of this tonight?
Most people don't install tons of apps (and many of those who do use the App Store). It's hard for me to think of seeing that dialogue once a week as onerous and I bet the vast majority of people don't install more than one app a week.
I don't propose that Dotsies is without flaws or destined for any amount of adoption. Having said that, here is my parody of the reaction the poor sap (let's call him Marcus Librus) got who originally posted the latin alphabet on the ancient Roman version of Hacker News (let's call it Papyrus Tidings):

Brutus Quidus: I've looked at your alleged alphabet for 30 seconds and have discovered all of the flaws. It is clear it will never work. First off, your O and Q are nearly impossible to distinguish. What if there's a piece of dirt on my scroll where I put the O? It's obvious you didn't do any research.

Claudius Acerbus: Is this serious? This will never ever work. Besides the achilles heel that if you have an N next to an I people will think it's an M, that circle thing looks just like a D. And if you have 2 D's on top of each other people will think it's a B! Christ! Err, wait, not born yet. You'll see!
I typed in "example.org", and got back "Please enter a URL". For convenience, consider automatically assuming "http:// in the front if the user doesn't specify a URL scheme. (Please do continue allowing URLs with http:// or https:// explicitly specified, though.) You shouldn't make that assumption if you provide an API in the future (API callers should specify full valid URLs), but it would make the current web interface more friendly.

Whatever renderer you used to render the page has absolutely no antialiasing in its font rendering, resulting in pixelated rendering.
10 absolutely shameless ways to market online for next to nothing
There are stories. Some of the recent ones:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/01/03/ataris_legal_t... http://mashable.com/2011/12/12/apple-pulls-app/ http://www.iphonehacks.com/2012/01/process-killer-app-that-a... http://www.neoos.ch/blog/30-quickpick-pulled-from-app-store-... http://lifehacker.com/5614752/grooveshark-iphone-app-pulled-... http://www.joystiq.com/2011/12/28/imame-app-pulled-from-ios-... http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/01/match-com-app-store/

Most (but not all) orient around violations of Apple's developer TOS which are famously fickle and changeable. No emulators? Can't use "private APIs"? Microsoft was hauled in front of the DOJ for better. Could those using an Apple account to sign their non App Store apps be subject to similar, shifting rules about what's kosher and what's not?

And if Atari has really had apps pulled for supposedly bearing a "passing resemblance to an Atari classic", we're in weird territory. From my POV, there's just a creepy potential for blacklist first, ask questions later style arbitration on Apple's part.

As a once Apple fanboy who's still surrounded by Apple gear, this all seems a bit weird to say, but as a developer I'm not keen on this move at all.
Thx. Really, without the http:// - darn - do you have an example, that would be awesome if you did. I just tried a few and they seem to work. But clearly there’s a bug somewhere so I’d love to squash it!
The man who hears colour
All information about software is contained in the software itself. Looking through an executable can be like reading a historical document. Programmer's quirks, late-night hacks, and beautiful insights all become visible. Eventually, the overall architecture and design appears, and we gain glimpses of the environment that produced it.

But unlike the executables, our source code is designed for humans to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. When important information is hidden away in design documents and our heads, the code slowly changes from an orchard into a minefield. When you need to ask someone how something works or how to change a module rather than glance at a few lines or diagrams, we begin to lose our status as masters, and become trespassers. When we entangle our code, we entangle ourselves.

As programmers, we strive to put our souls in the code, making it a timeless artifact that can stand on its own. Creating software that can live apart from its creators is an ideal that few reach, but it is necessary if we wish to avoid spending a lifetime on child support.
I wondered for a long time how it would be handled when screen pixel densities got high enough. There are a couple ways to handle it, and apple took the only one that seems completely backwards compatible: they abstracted the notion of "1px". I guess it couldn't have really evolved any other way, but damn that is messy.
It's going to allow for three types of permissions: Mac Store apps only, all apps, and Mac Store Apps + identified developers. That last one is the default.
I was making an OK living off of some shareware I wrote until Apple pulled the rug out from under its smaller developers with last year's App Store transition.

What? Why can't you continue to make a living selling Mac shareware?
Show HN: Mothereffinanimatedgif
Interesting that you'd switch from Skitch if it had that feature set. I can't imagine a scenario where I'd ever prefer to hit, from a page I'd like a screenshot of:

> cmd+l, cmd+c, cmd+t, sna, <down-arrow>, enter, tab, cmd+v, enter, right click generated image, copy link

As opposed to (skitch keybinds):

> cmd+shift+5, click once in my browser window, click once on share link

Out of curiosity, what is it that makes the web-based workflow more appealing to you as a user?
I like it. It's neat and fun to play with, but I'm not exactly sure what to do with it. I think a little "What you can use Snapito for" or "10 ways to use Snapito" link somewhere would be helpful. I can imagine it being useful for web designers who want to show designs to people, but how else do you envision people using it?

Also (this is just a minor nitpick), it'd be nice to not have to enter in http://. I'm using Chrome.
I have an idea for an improved pattern based on providing visual cues and accounting for letter frequency:

http://esploded.s3.amazonaws.com/anon_data/2012/eyS/-dotsie2...

Vowels touch the top and bottom of the line, visually outlining the word and providing a sense of center (vowels also use the most dots, where consonants are sparse)

More common consonants use smaller (sparse) dot patterns getting denser as you get into less common (frequent) letters

More common consonants frame the center dot (to contrast the vowels which touch the edges/outside dots) using the less centered patterns as frequency decreases

All the glyphs fit into the 1x5 grid (the letter "Z" was 2 columns wide in the original)

Also worth noting: where possible I tried to make the glyphs memorable ("i" is the best example, followed by "o" and "z")

In retrospect, it may be a good idea to swap the glyphs of my current "B" for the "Y" since y is a semi-vowel it would touch both edges, where "B" has no reason to.

EDIT: here is a second attempt where ONLY vowels touch both edges, and Y is swapped (and touches both edges as a semi-vowel)

http://esploded.s3.amazonaws.com/anon_data/2012/e5YO-dotsie3...

Thoughts?
Actually they are very well known. They are one of the largest adult companies on the web.
Josh that’s really interesting, what browser were you using, because the app doesn’t say ‘Please enter a URL’ this must be a browser feature working against input type=‘url’. I’d love to know the browser you were using. It certainly shouldn’t require a http:// at the front.

Yeah you’re 100% right about the fonts, I definitely plan to sort that out ASAP.
+1 for the anti-aliasing
It strikes me that one fallout from the US Government becoming aggressive in taking down legitimate sites (in one way or another), is that it's going to massively drive up the cost of what services charge.

One way to deter phishing forms, for example, is to charge enough for your service that it makes it very unlikely someone would use you for that. Jot mentions having taken down 65,000 phishing forms in the past year; charge $10 or $20 (or whatever, enough to wipe out the issue) upfront for each of those and that problem disappears instantly.

It's the difference between MegaUpload and DropBox fundamentally in how they deter piracy (or don't); applied to every web service.

Most of the time, when the government gets involved, the cost of a service or product skyrockets. They generate inflated costs either through monetization (eg education costs), or through regulation & compliance nightmares.

The government might just force a transition from the so called free web, to a nearly all paid services web. It would form a 'cost wall' that keeps a lot of the abuse users out.
I use PayPal every day, numerous times in a day, but I will jump ship in a nanosecond if PayPal gets a real competitor.

Here is my list why PayPal is (a necessary) evil:

- The Wikileaks blockade

- The internal staff who deal with refunds and other customer issues. They need to be trained MUCH better, and taught manners and courtesies when interacting with users.

- A lot of nickle and dime-ing me on every transaction, every which way. PayPal makes a mint off of me.

Actually, I agree with Duncan_bayne's list, except for buying firearms online with the service. I'm in vehement disagreement with that.
I have thought this should exist for as long as I can remember. I actually wrote a blog post about it 364 days ago (odd coincidences).

Regarding growth, there must be a spin you could put on the share-this-on-facebook process to make it positive/appealing. Off the top of my head:
- keep track of relationship status of the users, and if two get in a relationship after joining and liking each other, encourage them to post it.
- making something else go viral that mentions likesecret (eg. a radio station posted a photo of a lottery ticket with their logo and said they would split the winnings with sharers. they had over a hundred thousand shares in just a day or two)
- somehow taking advantage of any of the college meme pages that are trending these days... they'd hit your target audience big if you could figure out how
At the time that he said that, did Jobs indicate that web apps on iOS would ever be given hooks into the accelerometers, or GPS, or mic? Because if not, what would the point be?
Making a snapito bookmarklet seems trivial. Here, have one:

javascript:window.location=%22http://snapito.com/?url=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)

Given such a bookmarklet, the workflow becomes: click bookmarklet, click share link.
After the image is generated, I think you should put a download button as well as Facebook and Twitter buttons for sharing.
First, they weren't less safely distributed, they were less safely executed. Nothing gets sandboxed until after it's been distributed.

Well, it's a pedantic distinction if sanboxing occurs before or after. Since, sure, sanboxing rules are applied at runtime, but sanboxing is also built into the app before distribution (the developers adds the certs, the "ask for permission" bits, etc).

I'm only 25, and yet I've installed thousands of pieces of software during my brief time on this planet. Very few of them wreaked havok on my life, so you'll have to forgive me if I remain unconvinced that every single application I run must be sandboxed to maintain the stability and integrity of my system.

Well, in Windows lots of apps have wrecked havoc with my system. Malware, spyware, what have you. I've hand around 10 instances of my machine being infected in around 8 years of using a Windows machine. In OS X, on the other hand, nothing yet. And sandboxing is a way to ensure it won't be so in the future.

But there's is also another issue for which I think sandboxing is nice, besides malware. It keeps apps from spiting stuff all over the system. Like, how MS Office installs its shit everywhere it can, or how Abode Creative suite does. Same things for lots of small apps. If sandboxing can keep the confided in their own space, that will also be a win.

My contention is that sandboxing, as Apple has narrowly defined it, is impossible to implement in a large segment of professional applications as they are currently written.

Well, I think those rules can change. They already extended the period before sandboxing is applied. I'm sure as limitations are found we will see other changes too.

For some apps, on the other hand, like developer tools, rsync, git etc, they will always have to run without sandboxing.

Finally, in two weeks time when Apple begins to enforce regulations which will exclude these applications from MAS distribution, but does not remove VST/AU support from Logic Pro, Rewire support from Mainstage, or [insert your favorite hypocrisy here], they may be acting anticompetitively, which is bad news.

I'm not sure about the "anticompetitively" thing. It's their store, their rules. If sandboxing is about not trusting apps, then why would Apple require it for their own apps? One would think they trust them already.
No, COPPA doesn't basically make it illegal for children under thirteen to be on the Internet. It doesn't restrict what children under thirteen can do in any way. COPPA restricts what websites can do–they can't collect certain information about users without asking whether they're over thirteen.

Sure, you can make a case that we shouldn't burden the web with these sorts of rules. Or that we shouldn't have to differentiate between adults and young children. (You'll lose that argument.) That's not my point. My point is that legislation that differentiates between online and offline activities—and the information we collect about them—will become increasingly nonsensical as online and offline activities become less distinct.

When COPPA was passed in 1998, Target wasn't data-mining customers' purchase histories. Only websites were doing that sort of thing (or so the story went). Fast forward to today and offline activities (what you buy at the grocery store, where and when you get on the bus) are now being tracked in the same way that online activities have been for the last decade. Whatever limits you believe should (or shouldn't) be placed on tracking these activities, it's apparent that customer/user privacy is no longer an "online" issue. There will be no "online" issues in the future because the distinction between online and offline is quickly disappearing.