skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This only matters if your backend is going to set a header that contains a null byte. Since some people echo back user data in headers (ugh) this could cause an issue. Rails is more than happy to let you put NULLs in response headers, btw. Of course, all of the ASCII CTL characters (0..27) are forbidden by the spec: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2068.txt
Algorithms for generating new ideas for startups: servicing trends
Indeed, I was trying to be conservative with my assumptions.
What has become of the Slide properties that Google inherited? What do they do with Slide stuff now?
For clients expecting estimates, I tend do these in days or weeks; but these are still (best-effort) estimates.
I detect that you bring this to our attention because it's bad in some way, but I don't get why. Google invested in his company. Now he works at Google (with 30,000 other people). Who cares? Why is this good or bad?
Another good post that talks about git add -p is Ryan Tomayko's The Thing About Git[1].

[1]: http://tomayko.com/writings/the-thing-about-git
I think a number of terrorists are going to be willing to figure out how to hook such a system up to a gun on a $300 RC quadrocopter. I hope it's a small number. It's going to be interesting.
Every time a new Google Reader client comes out I go check to see if it has the "Sort by magic" feature. It appears this app doesn't have it either.

I'm curious if this isn't exposed in the API or if coincidentally none of these apps' developers deemed it important enough to implement.

For those who haven't used it, this feature is really helpful when you don't have time to sort through everything and just want to get to the most interesting things.
Also similar to the trick of using a credit card to buy dollar coins from the mint racking up frequent flyer miles in the process.

http://news.consumerreports.org/money/2011/07/travel-hackers...
Great point. I love the fact that Alexis also documented all of his start-up ideas on his blog. Interestingly only a few came to be successful.

However, if I had to bet on which one had staying power, it'd be Alexis. I have a lot of respect and admiration for him.
Dig through the comments to that post and you'll find the quote on page four: http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/06/microsoft-expands-interne...

That's one damn misleading citation from Microsoft. Almost makes you think they couldn't find a decent one...
They are solving a problem that doesn't exist. Coding from localhost is fucking fantastic.
A PR move? Do you think anyone that hasn't heard of Google has heard of Kevin Rose?
Feed Demon
Youtube Downloader 3.5 on Downloads App
Many of them are an expansion on a good long-form magazine article, and the material doesn't really merit book length. But the author certainly is not going to say that. So you end up with an uncut version of the article, plus some chapters on related stuff to pad out the page count.
Super-secret Google builds servers in the dark
Lame hacker tool or trojan delivery device? Hands on with Anonymous-OS
Eliminating the merchant account is the stroke of genius. The benefits will outweigh the drawbacks for many people, sellers and buyers alike.

And if you don't want to give someone an imprint of your credit card, you can pay with PayPal, and you are protected against fraud up-front (as opposed to after the fact, as with credit cards). That is an improvement.
> initialize function sets $el.data('view', this)

Whoa, you can do that? Huh.
More efficient only in your oddball unit of pixels-joules/second. I'm not interested in arguing about features or the design tradeoffs of an Apple device, that always leads to a platform flame just like this one.

I'm saying that the actual power draw of the iPad is much, much closer to that of a laptop than most of us expected.
Hehe - I remember my first freelance contract: I quoted 6 hours, and it ended up being 36 hours.

But then if the scope and environment and almost everything is crystal clear etc, it's totally doable :)
What is a "google reader client"? Is it a bad name for rss newsreader? Or am I moissing server side features of google reader?
Introducing atfight.me
We just launched the beta of atfight.me. We would love to get feedback! We have a short blog post about our launch here: http://blog.atfight.me/
all i use:

git add . && git status

git diff --cached | mate

git commit -am "this is what i did"

git push

and when it hits the fan...

git reset --hard
Hi Annie,

As a beginning programmer without many programmer friends, I suffered through many of the obstacles that you did when learning how to code - from figuring out which text editor to use to figuring out how to run a program. Most tutorials assume you know these things!

You mentioned Zed Shaw in your article, and he addressed "the little coder's dilemma" in his own way, and I think in the best way. If you feel the urge to learn how to program again, you should check out "Learn Python the Hard Way" by Zed. Zed doesn't assume anything. LPTHW starts with installing a text editor and running a basic program. No shortcuts! He is undoubtably inspired by those who came before, but his sympathy for the novice coder is unmatched.
We have a short blog post about our launch up at blog.atfight.me as well. We would love to get your feedback!
The reasons there is no sort by magic is that there would be no efficient way to sync, as you cant store dates of what you currently have if its magic, as all the dates would not be relative to each other, means you would have to grab all of the items every single time you sync. Super bad.
Definitely agree!

Extra related point: some clients will really appreciate to have a higher quote that doesn't risk to go up afterwards, because the budget will be locked at project startup for internal reasons (vs. having a lower cost planned, but extra cost afterwards).
Not startups, founders.
Picturefill: A picture element polyfill
Why is this relevant to hacker news? This piece of news is something I'd expect if I went to reddit, but this shouldn't be anywhere on Hacker News at all.
Technology Entrepreneurship Free On-line Stanford Course
Next week Charles Eesley's (Assistant Professor @ Stanford) Technology Entrepreneurship course will be starting - check it out and let us know what you think: Will it work? Is it of value?
Other than the data gathering/entry part it'd be a pretty fun project. Anyone interested in working on it?
Until that happens, we cannot claim that luck has nothing to do with it.

I never claimed that. This argument's always been about "how much", not whether.

I believe luck has a small part; you seem to argue that it has a huge part. I argue that in light of all the explicit decisions that facebook made, the role of luck is smaller than you appear to suggest.

You state that other facebook competitors also took explicit decisions. Merely taking explicit decisions does not provide results. You also have to make the right decisions and execute in the right way.
I agree that in many cases this meticulous approach is overkill. But what it demonstrates nicely is, as the man says, 'Git means never having to say "If only I'd realized sooner."'

When you do need your commit history to be as neat as possible, git gives you plenty of tools to make it happen. Imagine the nightmare a task like this would be with Subversion. (I haven't used Hg a lot so can't say how it compares in this regard--I'd be curious to know.)
Show HN: httpng - Design iOS interfaces in HTML, export elements to PNG.
Reminds me of http://barkles.com/
Microsoft Builds a Browser for Your Past
> And how does the right to control the downstream copying of the work emanate from the right to enjoy the fruits of your own labor?

Because the fruits of my (intellectual) labor are the (intellectual) property of the book itself--the unique arrangement of words and images and so forth. Since I created that arrangement, since that arrangement is the fruit of my labor, by natural law I have property rights to it.

Keep in mind, I'm only arguing that such an argument could credibly be made. I'm not committing to the idea that it works out in the long run--part of the problem with the natural law approach is that you get caught in all kinds of logical ruts without any concern for what works, and frankly there's a lot about copyright that doesn't work.

> The point I'm making is that the direct product of your work is the book itself and nothing more; the right to enjoy that product literally cannot be taken away from you.

Property rights extend beyond private enjoyment. Asked and answered.

> Other people's copying activities do nothing to diminish your ability to enjoy the direct utility value of the book itself - copying can only diminish the potential return available to you from selling your book to others, but you never had a positive right to a market return in the first place.

I never said there was a "positive right to a market return"; that was the entire point of the house example. Asked and answered.

> The argument you're making requires that there's already some legal mechanism by which you can restrain others from copying your work.

All property rights require some legal mechanism to be enforceable. Without deeds and titles I couldn't even own my house. Asked and answered. You're just repeating yourself without understanding any of my points.
Inside a data broker profiting from Your personal data (infographic)
Expectations for D3 have gone from out of this world to all over the place lately. On top of the release pushbacks and feature cuts a few weeks ago one of Blizzard's PR people said essentially "don't get your hopes up for D3" (Google Bashiok Diablo 3). That furor was a bit overblown but still expectations are down for many people.

I think D3 will be more of what we got in SC2: essentially the same game but prettier. Which is sad because Diablo, WC2, SC and WoW were blockbusters (edit)in large part(/edit) because of their innovations.
Original post: http://kurtvarner.com/post/19347794553/man-car-startup
After seeing PaintCode on the HN front page I decided to do the opposite: let developers design in code and export to PNG. It makes interface design as flexible as HTML but allows for use in native apps.
I came across Barkles recently. I really love their sense of branding across the functionality of the site.
Appropriately enough, I read about half his article, thought "this is quite interesting, but I think I've got the message" and then stopped reading any more.
CVS is still a pilot program, and the technology is pretty recent. PayPal at the POS (with phone number+PIN, not email+password) has been in full release at all Home Depot stores for the last month or two, after an earlier pilot program.
Yammer Giving 25k Signing Bonus to Yahoo Employees
You see my point exactly, if you could find 10 people in March, I'm sure April has 10 more. Or 100 more.
> These are companies that are hired because they are licensed to do something.

What fraction of GS biz actually involves licensed activities?

Yes, stock brokers are licensed, but bankers aren't.

Most types of financial advisors aren't licensed.

Are any traders licensed?
They added a picture of the chip with the heat spreader off. It's one massive die.

http://guide-images.ifixit.net/igi/i6ZlJCQfdaHyktRY.medium
Ok, you'll need a source to make claims involving either the Unabomber or MK-ULTRA.
On blog comments
"The Big Short" provides a great deal of context to the behavior of financial services firms, and Lessig's arguments seem to completely align.

The problem with financial services companies being public is that the investors aren't leveraging their own money when they make risky bets. If a bet goes sour, the stockholders are ultimately responsible for absorbing the loss.

Goldman and its ilk are scrutinized for good reason. It's strange that you should compliment them for exiting the CDO market. Shouldn't they instead be condemned for entering it in the first place?

What about the SEC investigation into Goldman knowingly selling junk securities to customers [1]? The fact that they were only fined $550m suggests that - as Lessig argues - we are under-regulated. This shouldn't be allowed to happen in the first place.

1: http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2010/2010-123.htm
The wonders of hStore
Here's my thought process on this:

Most of our projects run in week increments.

We do "a couple day" projects sometimes, and somewhat more commonly do projects that are longer than a week but don't end on a week boundary.

If I sell you a day of my time, the remainder of the week is then shot for my more typical N-week projects.

That doesn't mean we round 1 day to a week (nothing is more miserable than being stuck on a project that "morally" already ended but demands that you find something to do for the remainder of the time) but does mean we avoid proposing work that is likely to fragment our schedule.

Now, take that logic and apply it to hours: none of our projects are for N hours. There's no such thing as a "partial day". Almost uniformly we'll just do something and not charge for it instead of billing for half a day.

Furthermore, context switching is brutal to hourly schedules. It can take more than an hour just to mentally switch from one task to another.

So it makes absolutely zero sense to bill hourly.
Hard Truth on the Sheer Difficulty of Making an Impact
>And if you don't want to give someone an imprint of your credit card, you can pay with PayPal, and you are protected against fraud up-front

Does the process for doing that involve typing my PayPal password into a device I don't control?
Why?

Not only does the Obama campaign plan to allow donations like this, but the last time I went physically into an Apple store my purchase was made that way. A PDF was emailed to me for receipt and I liked it.
Are you serious? Do you honestly think a $300 RC quadrocopter can handle the kick of a gun?
Visual Studio 11 Beta: Is Metro UI That Bad in a Dev Environment?
Indeed's stats show people look for jobs in new year - oldschool infographic
If you're actually a good developer (and easy person to get along with, not a serial murderer, etc) and in the bay area and can't find a programming gig... I don't know what you're doing wrong.

I'm not the best developer in the world, and I practically get offers in just going to bars in SF...
If the definition of sustainability that you are using is "sustainably living" then it isn't [insert ideas associated with the sustainability movement here]. Not automatically, anyway.

If all we care about is continuing to live (excepting the limitations imposed by entropy) then continuously importing resources from somewhere else is a perfectly valid solution. For that matter, no amount of efficiency will ever eliminate the necessity of importing resources.

Pushing that necessity into the future is probably a good idea, of course. Continuing to live is not all I care about. But mature space infrastructure would positively contribute to doing just that, even if a colony on Mars might not in and of itself.
It's unfortunate with all the tracking and data-mining going on that once information enters the public sphere, it's there to stay forever. Why can't we DMCA our own private information?
Asteroids yes, comets not so much. A long period comet could hit the Earth with a warning time of only a few years, and could easily be large enough to destroy human civilization.
I've seen that once. I also saw a person use a PayPal credit card in real life for the first time a couple weeks ago. That one threw me! I hadn't realized the market penetration had reached that level.
I don't say this enough to people like you, so THANK YOU SO MUCH!
I was hoping this would have the feature I can't live without, clicking on the article in the list pane opens the actual article. No mac rss client has this and it drives me nuts ... Its the reason I'm running a 1.5GB VM Ware windows instance with Feed Demon in it.

sigh

PS: This looks and acts an awful lot like Reeder http://reederapp.com/mac/ ... I wonder if its going to cause problems with its developer
Would be interesting to get a perspective from whoever manages email for Pfizer corporate. How many spam filters out there must they have to battle against to get their legitimate email about Viagara through?
Prior art (also mentioned elsewhere in the comments): http://likethought.com/opacity/
I remember cheating on Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. If you've never read the book, it's spent in double and triple flashbacks: "To understand where I am now, I must tell you about that night in the observatory. // There I was, cowering in a telescope, and I thought back on all that had come before, especially the job as an editor that I used to have. // While I worked as a publisher I remembered how I first met Jacopo Belbo...". I suppose we would describe it as a stack data structure, you keep pushing a new "present" onto the end of the existing one.

So here's how I cheated. At one point the main character suddenly takes a trip off to Brazil, and I thought, "man, this is getting ridiculous. I bet if I just skip ahead to whenever he comes back from Brazil, I won't have missed much." It turns out that while I had missed some important things, like a new girlfriend who becomes a major player in the story, I saw enough of them afterwards to conjecture about what had happened in Brazil.

What's more interesting to me is the set of books that I keep returning to. I have probably read Zelazny's Great Book of Amber (which is itself 10 novels) five or six times in my life, maybe more. It just captures me and takes me on a ride, each time.
Very good article. Using AJAX with Django always feels a bit unnatural, as there's no standard way to do it and everyone has its own way of dealing with it, so it's interesting to see how others do it (in particular utility functions). I think there are also django packages that provide an AJAXy layer (but never used it).

It's already hinted at in the blog post, but for writing clean apps using AJAX a lot, django-tastypie and backbone.js really do work well together (I've just started using them in combination in my latest toy project).
Can you please provide some advice on how to transition from my dead-end career as a programmer into a lucrative and fulfilling future in sales or marketing?
10 Hours of Darth Vader Breathing
Good luck, Kurt! You'll be missed in LA

Out of curiosity, what is your monthly burn going to be with this plan? Seems ~ $1500 / month (which is great)
Like 'git add -p' but much much better:

http://porkrind.org/missives/commit-patch-managing-your-mess...
> you are completely ignorant to the contributions that skilled businesspeople can make to a startup

In this case, can you please list the contributions that you think were made by the non-technical, strategic members of this team, and why you think they should share in 80% to 90% of the company vs. the 10% to 20% that our esteemed colleague who actually built the feature did?

And I call it a feature because a one-page that tracks your likes and posts them to your timeline making very basic use of Facebook's API is a feature, not a startup and it certainly isn't a going business concern that may turn a profit large enough to grow beyond its current MVP.

Bandpage.com very well may be a product, but what we have here is a very basic implementation of the API and nothing else aside from a horribly-conceived design. I won't even mention the uselessness of the so-called awards or even ask what prompted the use of Disqus for a Facebook app. I guess those were all consuming business decisions that took a year to hash out.

tl;dr: Exactly what value did the layperson add to this thing?
A low number of false positives with a water pistol is an impressive engineering feat. A low number of false positives with an actual gun is a disaster. The technology is still a long way off.
I am loving this.
Yes, quite a lot of notebooks (not to mention netbooks) still use XP around here (most were upgraded from Vista); usually not directly exposed to the internet. They're sloooooowly getting replaced with new hardware with W7, but yes, XP is still the predominant OS around here. For the users, "nuke and reinstall" is still faster and cheaper than "buy a new OS, and install"; and there is a significant "screw this, I'm getting a Macbook" crowd amongst those who would consider an upgrade.

As for me, personally - I use XP when I need IE, and then in a limited VM, for as long as needed; so the scenario of always-on, open-to-internet XP box doesn't apply. (I would still be using XP today - but for a new laptop with Vista and no upgrade options some time ago: it drove my frustration high enough to leave Windows as my primary OS altogether.) So yes, I use XP in a limited way, if I need it.
Entrepreneurs Must Love Their "Hats"
Publishing his name and especially the name of his employer didn't advance the story, screwed him over in google results forever, and is basically just doxing to show she can dox him. At best, a douchebag thing to do. It doesn't matter how great the rest of the article was.
it's funny, because, I think Batman would be considered a "joker" as well, he regulates defectors in his own trying to rationalize it while the joker creates chaos. Obviously, the batman prefers no loss of life.
> I am against the occupation

Unless you're one of those evil "By any means necessary" folk, that statement tells us nothing about whether these NGOs are evil.
Medical Acupuncture Scottsdale AZ
Do you really think discouraging enthusiastic designers and developers from building innovative things that push the boundaries of what's possible with browsers is the way forward?

... for the sake of preserving the status quo of default scrollbars, no less?

Come on.
If you are on a mac, Gitx works nicely too. You can see each file, and state "hunks" as you go.
From the FAQ:

Why do you not accept pull requests?

Pull requests can change while being reviewed. This makes it impossible to ensure that the code being merged is the same code that has been reviewed and discussed, which compromises integrity of the codebase.

If only Git had some sort of cryptographically secure token that would uniquely identify commits, and make tampering evident.
...really? How many cities run on recycled air produced from rocks? On recycled water from melted permafrost? With 100% solar power? Eating entirely food grown using the same? With the risk that if any ine of those things fails, everyone living there will certainly die?

To this you compare the fact that I eat cows fed grass from a hundred miles away, brought to me using energy we literally just dug out of the ground? That I drink water piped from a giant lake all of halfway across the county?

If anything, you support my point: what passes for "remote" and "inhospitable" on Earth is unbelievably luxurious by the standard of anywhere else. Even Death Valley gets rain. Even Antarctica has oxygen. Talk to me about your plans for a self-sustaining colony in one of those places, and then we can talk about how many times -- how many orders of magnitude -- harder and more expensive it will be to do the same thing on Mars.
اقوى عروض فودافون 500 رسالة مجانية مقابل 2 جنيه فقط
In his case, it seems to be making him dumber. Sloppy. He's starting to believe his BS. Doesn't matter now, but if it keeps up..
Idea: A campus library for online education
In college, the best things about going to the library was interacting with people studying many different subjects and being able to find further resources to develop your knowledge. With the rise of online and OPEN online courses like Codeacademy and Udacity, why couldn't there be an online library for the students involved?

I imagine a site where each lesson is indexed so that if I search, say "Recursion" I would get results from "books" like "CodeAcademy Java Script 101". I would be taken to the lesson and dive into learning all about recursion from the lessons and Q&A.

Since these sources have the goal in mind to get people learning, I'm sure it wouldn't be very hard to get them to participate in indexing the material.

Let's hear your ideas for an Online Campus Library.
The #1 Mistake Many Start-Ups Make When Managing Growth-Remember the Garage?