skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Administration tools? Administration API? (I want to click Refund on my site, not your site.)"

Looks like it's built on top of FPS:

https://payments-sandbox.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business?sn=pa...

... which has been available for some time:

http://aws.amazon.com/fps/
Pricing your consulting: You're doing it wrong
Just watched the news on TV. It seem he had shown profits as Rs.649cr while the actual profit was only Rs.61cr!!!

I always wondered why Indian IT companies pay people so low when compared to the rest of the world. May be the above is one of the reasons. These guys do this stuff to over-state their success. Now that one is now in the limelight, some govt law and commerce team should inspect other bizzardly successful organisations.
I agree. These words don't sound like the words of an entrepreneur. One becomes an entrepreneur because you every inch in your body desires it; the risks are far too great to make it worthwhile otherwise.

As for tax & politics: businesses prosper in South Africa, but we have insane taxes (most of which goes towards projects that will never benefit any business), mountains of strict regulations and political uncertainty.
that is the perfect rebuttal. thank you for bringing pure, simple logic to the discussion.the rate that we tax people may not be perfect but taxes are necessary. Guys like this seem to live for the glory years of Reagan's trickle down economics but they forget the results of that policy. The first George Bush had to break his main campaign pledge of no new taxes to offset all of the "Trickle down effects" that we were bombarded with.
Within the last few years, I've inherited a number of projects written using several of the above choices. While I don't want to appear _too_ negative, IME, apps produced using cross-platform GUI kits look bad on all operating systems.

I'd like to offer a "none of the above", which is to code the underlying "engine" of your app in C++, then connect that engine up to an OS-native GUI.

Just my $0.02.
If the guy is real it doesn't mean he is racist because he disagrees with Obama's policies.
Ask HN: Review Gmail Hack Tracker/ Burglar Alarm
While we are flooded with hacked twitter accounts this week a hacker friend of mine, Parashu has been coding away to secure ones' gmail using gmail gadgets. Please review.

The gadget monitors visits to your gmail. It then sends an SMS alert when an IP or a browser parameter appears strange.

http://dy-verse.blogspot.com/2009/01/gmail-ids-gadget.html

The gadget URL is http://gmailids.appspot.com/gids.xml. It works with
Gmail standard interface with gadgets enabled.

Would love to hear feedback from this group on improving this, limitations, why you would use it or not use it.
"Professional" engineers my ass. Up here in Canada engineering is a regulated profession, and similar to doctors, we're expected to put the interests of the general public above our own. There is a purpose higher than merely making boatloads of cash (and I honestly don't think this man is starving).
I understand what this guy is talking about. Christianity holds a different meaning some places outside the US. I've met quite a few Christians in Norway, as part of going to a Christian private school for three years. A lot of these people have a drive that you don't see so often - a sense of purpose. I'm worried that there may be a correlation/causation issue here, but it's definitely something to investigate.

There is a lot of really evil people in the undeveloped parts of Africa, and I'm positive to any idea that can reverse this trend. Nothing the Western world has done so far has worked, and it may even be impossible for us to influence the African continent to become a better place to live.

But this story supports anecdotes I have heard from people working as missionaries in Africa. Christianity does good things to the mindsets of the people who live there. One missionary that talked to us had worked for 10 years translating the Bible to some obscure African tongue. One major snag in the process was getting the tribe he lived with to understand the concept of forgiveness. After a few weeks of on-and-off talking to the people, one of them understood - he replied that "yes, we have a way to express not getting revenge for a wrongdoing. But no one would ever do that."

Africa stumps me - I just don't understand why so many people there keep doing so many nasty things to one another. It's really un-PC to claim that there is a moral and ethical issue involved, but it's a belief I hold pretty strongly. I'm not saying that Christianity is the only way to fix this, but something is needed.
That's odd because the very word "scapegoat" seems to stem from Christianity. I remember attending a catholic funeral and being really put off when the preacher suddenly started talking about sending the scapegoat into the desert.

However, I don't know much about it, never belonged to church and never received much of an education about Christianity.

Also doesn't Christianity make a big deal about Jesus sacrificing himself? What exactly do you mean by sacrifices?
Since this site doesn't have a doctype, it doesn't claim to conform to any standard. So what does validation mean if you don't have a spec to validate against?

What could be discussed is whether it's good to build on web specs or not.
CSS is so horrible for layouting that I find it hard to blame anyone for using tables.
So it is only Germany still missing out :-(
Absolutely agreed. Stop contributing to the horrid usability of each platform by mixing and matching UI paradigms in a vain effort to create something that "fits" all platforms.

Cross-platform UI toolkits are the devil for any serious app - each OS, whether Linux, OS X, or Windows, have their own UI needs and guidelines that should be respected.

It's high time that engineers started paying attention to making their software accessible and usable, instead of focusing all their attention on core "features" that nobody can figure out, or want to.
Thats quite a big fraud... I hope the chap sees some serious jail-time for this...
All data is stored in your own gmail calendar, so its kinda really transparent. The code is available at http://code.google.com/p/gids/
"So there it is. My television is now an effective Canary Wharf detecting radar. Probably the most interesting thing I've seen on TV for a long time." :)
AddressChooser: address picker in real-time
I think pg would be less happy because he'd have to admit I was right about this whole silly standards thing ;)

As for your questions: The page bloat issue is pretty apparent: it takes a lot more markup to wrap everything in tables than it does to use floated / positioned block elements such as <div/>. Individually marking up each <font/> tag with color, bgcolor, etc. also wastes a shitload of bytes.

Accessibility is another issue entirely, but is generally hindered by inline Javascript because such JS is not based on progressive enhancement; rather, it directly hijacks events on specific elements rather than improving the experience for JS-enabled browsers. In the case of HN, it appears that "vote" links work with or without Javascript, though the latter loads a blank page after voting. This is certainly better than the alternative. Additionally, superfluous markup has a tendency to disrupt the functioning of assisted-reading devices such as screen readers.

There's a whole world of people out there advocating the use of web standards, all for very practical reasons. I'm not going to re-post all their thoughts and arguments here, but if you're not educated in the matter I highly recommend becoming so, if for no other reason than understanding what we crazy people are screaming about. Many people far more dedicated than I have written countless articles on the matter; a good place to start would be Roger Johansson's blog: http://www.456bereastreet.com/ but there are many others.
I went and read the wikipedia article; I thought it was clearer. Thanks for submitting, though... I had never heard of this.
It's regulated to prevent free competition from lowering your wages. So much for the "interests of the general public"...
Let's eliminate both taxation and public sending and we'll know the answer.
Strange. I haven't used a table for page layout since the 90s and I haven't missed them, either. Yes, it takes more effort to not use tables, but since tables are not meant for page layout it makes sense to avoid them.
Agreed. It strikes me the way this one did:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/layoff.asp
First half of the article - good & inspirational. Second half - horrible.
I'm far from being militant about it, but one reason for conforming to specs is that it makes writing browsers more productive. So the people writing browsers can create new features or make their code faster instead of trying to keep up with all kinds of quirks in everyday HTML.

If one browser maker accepts a particular non-standard quirk, all others will have to follow. Sometimes this isn't a bad thing (XmlHTTPRequest) but it slows down browser development. Since browser makers can't keep up, web developers see browser incompatibilities and that makes them move to things like Fash/Flex.

So basically, the effect is that the web becomes more proprietary the more non-standard quirks have to be supported.

But still, there is clearly a tradeoff between conforming to standards, using what works to increase your own productivity, and experimenting with new things to innovate. It's not black and white in my view.
CSS isn't meant for page layout either. That's pretty obvious if you look at the kind of low level nastiness that you have to put into your code in order to get even the simplest layouts.
Keep going at it Paul
That depends on how steady your demand is. If once a year you spike to 1000x you base load S3 would be cheaper for you.

If your going to keep 3 copy's of 5+ TB over 2 data centers then S3's costs for storage is fairly reasonable but a little pricey. But if your quickly growing you need to compare the month to month cost of data storage vs the cost of new hardware.
He could hire educated employees because they paid for education; it is a engineering company, not McDonalds. While it is true that the government pays for most primary education, the vast majority of these funds do not come from federal or state taxes, but rather property tax.

If the government really wanted to create "security" in the financial system they would increase the reserve limit for banks to 25% and print bills to the difference in the money supply.

Roads, bridges, etc... do allow companies to move products - most employers are very happy to pay for these developments. Most of these, however, are paid with gas taxes and tolls (at least here in Canada).

The three points you mention cost money, but make up a tiny percent of the American budget. The main money leaches are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt, and the military. The author of that letter mentions welfare, but this minor in the scheme of things.

Don't get me wrong, I think that sending a letter like that is completely unwise, but I agree with the spirit of his letter.
Ermm, you only pay taxes on profit. Economics 101.
But if you are someone who keeps cracking into gmail account you will just workaround it (easiest way I assume will be disabling Javascript?) if you go further you can just firewall everything except gmail, or use a proxy to remove this protection on the fly.

Even though this will provide some benefit against a serial cracker this will be useless at the end.
That is a rather deep subject and the perhaps the best answer is to redirect you to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard. But I'll try a short answer here: scapegoat is the name of a general social mechanism - according to Rene Girard it is a way to relieve the violent tention inside a human group. Originally it was with human sacrifices - but later it became ritualized - and one form of this ritualization was using goats in the Jewish religion. According to Girard Jesus was a scapegoat - but the Evangelies tell the story of the scapegoating from the point of view of it's victim - showing the whole injustice of it.
Great article. Nice counterpoint to the usual "Christians are trashing our world" articles. It's written in an informal, conversational style, and the author is an outsider, giving him a different viewpoint than you usually hear.

Philosophically, switching from multiple deity worship to monotheism means groups of people begin to share common opinions about how their life and actions fit into a grander scheme. Switching further into a religion based on love and self-sacrifice means the individual is not the sole purpose of living (and neither is the state). Add to that the reformation, which underlined personal responsibility for dogma and spawned ongoing dogmatic renewal, and you've got a philosophy that puts common morals over self and continuously strives to re-adjust those morals to changing times.

This article reminds me of a comment by a Roman doctor, who observed that when the plague hit cities, doctors, priests, and acolytes would all flee into the hills for safety -- except for the Christians, of course, who would stay and tend to the sick.

Religions and the way we practice them have a lot of good and a lot of bad things associated with them. I'm not of the opinion that they are all good, or that they are all bad. I like to see opinions from both sides. I think we confuse the scientific method with the effects of beliefs, e.g., if by believing my neighbor's barn is red, I become happier and a greater contributor to society, it matters very little what actual color my neighbor's barn is. It's the belief, not the shared empirical consensus. (Of course, lots of problems occur when these clash, which means that longer-lasting faiths must rest on believing things that are not seen, cannot be observed in any fashion as one of the Pauline letters pointed out, I believe.)
I notice you edited your initial response to remove that rather imperious "hm?" from the end of it.

"I think you are reading too much into my comment, hm?"
I had my account prior to 2005, so it's likely that there have been significant changes since then, hehe.
Amen. If CSS were good for page layout, we wouldn't need special CSS frameworks just to get a three-column page. A three-column page with independent column heights would not be called "the holy grail" -- it would be effortless.

CSS sucks. (edit: So do tables. Really, HTML, CSS, and Javascript all sucks. Browsers suck. The web environment sucks. We use it because of what it lets us do, not because it's a friendly programming environment.)
Why shooting around the bush (Chrome, Router etc)

Just roll-out GTCP/GIP
Nissan GTR Forum
Nissan GTR
As earl said, it's free! But that's not the most important aspect (although nice for a student).

It's an actual programming language. Like Python, you can use both non-OOP and OOP styles. You can define your own packages and namespaces (unlike MATLAB where there's just one big namespace). There are hundreds of contributed packages, you don't need to buy separate toolboxes. Not to forget, it's GPL, you can look at the source and learn a few things from people who know what they're doing (to name a few: Brian Ripley, Terry Therneau, Douglas Bates, Bill Venables).

On the other hand, it can be a bit of a steep learning curve at the beginning, but I feel it's definitely worth it. It's not perfect, I stub my toe on obscure language features from time to time, but to paraphrase Winston Churchill, R is the worst form of statistical languages except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time...

I think that Andrew Robinson's introduction is pretty decent (http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Robinson-icebreaker.pd...), but there are many others at http://cran.r-project.org/other-docs.html
I believe Africa needs Judaism.

Because

1. Jews have predominantly high IQ

2. Jews living anywhere in the world automatically become Citizens of Israel.

You are a product of your environment. --Clement Stone
That's right. For me the new idea in this post is that after you realize that "ideas are cheap", you can continue on to see that "execution is cheap". What's not cheap is money, which you use to polish, scale up, and market whatever you're building.

With modern web startups, money probably matters less, and execution, more, than in domains where you manufacture and distribute physical objects.
It is meant for page layout, only it's not that good at it.
From what I've read, Jobs was the hard-charging, demanding, hard-to-get-along-with type, whereas Wozniak was a mellow, easy-going, just-let-me-solder-in-peace type.

But imagine if Wozniak had also been a hard-charging alpha dog type. We might not have an Apple, because Jobs and Wozniak would have broken up as a technology 'couple' early on in their work.

Maybe something like this contributed to the original poster's failure to hit a home run in his decades of work.

This jibes with something it's taken me a long time to learn: sometimes, "going along to get along" really is the optimal path.
RSStalker is a great idea. Glad it's worked out well for him.
You are right, this will work only if the gadget is enabled. Its a protection against simple password attacks. If google makes this a "privileged" app (like chat, etc) such that this always runs, it would be better.
Ha.

Newspapers have been linkbaiting since their inception.
This is definately not a "total" solution as the gadget can be disabled. Things like Basic mode wont have the gadget, and the serial cracker can get into that. Any ideas on how to prevent that ?
I thought is was interesting that the calorific contribution from oxidising the metal of the experimental chamber was estimated at 1% of produced energy. A decimal place can be, either here ... or here.

So many people want to believe that this can be true. However, like consistent 12% annual returns, and flying cars, it seems more likely that 'BlackLight Power' is more of a vehicle to fund Randall Mills retirement, than a real possibility of a revolutionary source of near-free energy.

Obviously, if it does turn out to be true, the scientific world may have to take his grand-unified theory a little bit more seriously.
In my real life? It's more likely than you might think. ;-)
There are some amazing apps built with swing...JetBrains IDEA and jEdit being two.
Unemployment is a poor measure, because it doesn't count workers who no longer qualify for unemployment, discouraged workers, people in prison, or those forced into part-time or marginal labor because of being unable to find full-time work with decent pay and benefits. The illegal immigrants would fall into the last of those categories. By the way, if all the other categories are included, we're comparable to the EU countries. The claim that those countries have horrific unemployment compared to us is false.

Comparing job growth and population growth in raw numbers is not a valid comparison, but comparing the percentage changes is reasonable. Population grows by about 1.3% per year, so job growth ought to be at about the same rate for the long-term health of the economy.
This is the first guy I've come across since reading P.T. Barnum's The Art of Money Getting (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=310056) who seems to fit the description of the "unlucky man":

The Rothschilds have another maxim: "Never have anything to
do with an unlucky man or place." That is to say, never
have anything to do with a man or place which never
succeeds, because, although a man may appear to be honest and
intelligent, yet if he tries this or that thing and always
fails, it is on account of some fault or infirmity that you
may not be able to discover but nevertheless which must exist.

The actual (?) Rothschild quote. More mercenary and off-topic:

Never have anything to do with an unlucky place, or an
unlucky man. I have seen many clever men, very clever men,
who had not shoes to their feet. I never act with them.
Their advice sounds very well, but they cannot get on
themselves; and if they cannot do good to themselves, how
can they do good to me?
http://www.crowley-crisp.com/Services/WaterWastewaterSystemD...

Looks like they do plenty of work that is funded through taxes of some kind.
Is that a bar?
A guy like Zed Shaw to reply to his posts. The CEO is a jerk, and the information he presents is skewed anyways. We don't know how many people he screwed along all the way to the top.
As soon as Microsoft or Real Video or some other big company with deep pockets took notice, that was the end for me.

Sad. Copyrights were designed to protect small authors from the massive publishing houses, with whose distribution the small author could never compete. Patents were founded on the same principle. It's pretty upsetting that these are now being used by the large corporations to establish hegemony, whereas the "little guy" almost certainly doesn't have the money necessary to hold his own ground.
A simpler way to work around this is to switch to Gadget mode. This certainly is a limitation. Any ideas to overcome this ?
Hence, if there is a way to ensure that the gadget always runs before gmail loads, this would become 100% secure.
If this letter is true, I think this guy needs a good tax lawyer and tax accountant to help him out.

The gist of his message makes sense, business and employers need more encouragement/incentives to produce and build... don't kill inspiration, innovation. The part of firing your workers near the end because he pays too much taxes is a childish. What about the employees who think they pay too much taxe. Should they all just quit and shut down the business? Two way street buddy....

And, if the company is making money, I'm sure you'll be able to sell the business to someone willing to make a go of it. Why would you just shut it down? Seems a little dumbass too me.

Unfortunately we live in a day and age of perpetual complainers. Rich, poor and everyone in between believes they are entitled to everything and anything that satisifies there primal cravings.
Dear employees,

I'm middle-aged, burned out and on the verge of a breakdown. I'm casting around for someone to blame for my feelings of ill-directed rage.

Please help me.

Love,

The boss.
AIR now works on Linux too
> With this move by iTunes, it's likely that I'll be picking up some albums on iTunes now if I can't get them in MP3 format from Amazon.

And you won't be able to get them at iTunes either, they use a latter variant of the MPEG codec. (AAC, perhaps you heard of it.)

The good news is that AAC is gaining momentum as a player format. Both the Wii and PSP play it with some SanDisk players supporting. Heck, even the Zune supports it now...
It is good to see someone from UIUC in Hacker News. Another UIUC student here. I feel like want to keep you in contact but I could not find any of your contact in your profile.

Feel free to shoot me an email. My email is in my profile.
> All you need is someone to police them [...] If I'm right, this does bust the paradox.

You completely misunderstand the nature of the paradox. Yes, if you have an authority (the "police") compute and enforce the social optimum, then more roads can only ever decrease the average travel time. That's obvious, and pointing that out didn't "bust" anything.

The nature of the paradox is that optimization at the individual level leads to a suboptimal result at the social level. That's in contrast to certain results from economics, where free markets can be proved to guarantee optimal resource allocation (in idealized circumstances).

Your complaint about the T/constant formula is downright silly; I'm convinced that an equivalent paradox can be created for every reasonable formula you agree to. (Actually, I think I can prove that.) The only thing that would change is that the "lines" on the equilibrium diagram would become "curves".
Apple Confirms $179 Battery Swap Cost for 17" MacBook Pro
Well at least he's retired...