skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Part of the problem is that people don't do business with a company because of the intangibles. Even in technology, people look for things that can appear in lists or price.

We really need a better way to measure the intangibles of businesses we work with, how we're going to be treated, etc.
Know ye verbs!
Maybe it had something to do with the Europeans controlling much of the resources in the world since their successful invasions, and we're now seeing the rest of the world catch up at last?

I guess we'll know in a few decades if the balance of power has shifted over to Asia or not.
I understand your sentiment, but you can override a lot of things in rails. On the whole 80/20 percent thing, your 20 percent might going against the grain of the core ideas of rails, but you still can get around it. If rails isn't a fit for your project/product I don't think you should force it.
Perhaps someone familiar with this can explain.. but I installed and ran this up and it says "Click here to download iPlayer shows" (or whatever) and that just opens iPlayer in my browser. I don't need an app that just opens a browser window for me and I don't see how the site and the app link together..
In those cases, the security schemes are somewhat weak. A proper sandboxing scheme wouldn't need a .tmp file remover. Once you removed a given application, all of the .tmp files it produced would just disappear with it.

The only reason you'd want to run such a utility would be to clean out the .tmp files within a particular sandbox. In that case, you'd give permission for it to operate on the whole of that particular sandbox's contents. Worst case, it trashes that sandbox, then you roll back to your previous backup.

They were supposed to have a sandboxing scheme along these lines in the OLPC.
Google Exec Brian O’Shaughnessy Leaves To Run Skype PR
If an email service thinks your email is spam, shouldn't it ask you to solve a CAPTCHA?
Moreover, you could have two folders, "Potential Spam" and "CAPTCHA Solved" say.

Instead of a CAPTCHA, you could also have the receiver ask something, perhaps related to his/her area of work.
MIT Admissions Office sets up forum for rejected applicants
Some of this just seems silly. Google's doodles don't do anything harmful which is in stark contrast to rebates which often go unfulfilled and basically work on the hope that you'll become lazy once the money is spent.
Your Choice: Ignore Dream Killers Now Or Ask Yourself "What If?" Later
Symantec's new Mac security suite: a different side of Norton
I have lived on less than 12K US a year in the American south, yes. My 2007 income was under 12K, even including borrowing to pay the mortgage, etc, and my wife and I weren't uncomfortable (absent stress about where the next month's mortgage payment was coming from). High-speed internet: check; SUV: check; enough food that we were both still fat: check; a home with over 1500 sq ft and a third of an acre: check.

The only thing kings had more of was power and land, and kings had nothing like the entertainment possibilities we had, and most kings had nothing like the variety of consumables we had.

Today's (first world) poor are wealthy beyond the dreams of those from most earlier eras.
I just don't get this stuff. The browser just isn't a great place to be running applications like that. It's a good place for consuming document based data. At the point where you have delivered an application that doesn't need to transfer any data as html-over-http, why would it be running inside the browser?

Maybe it's just that quake is a bad example use of this technology.
"Did people become twice as cautious when life expectancy doubled in our fairly recent history?"

Yes! Very much so they did.

So many sports have been gutted due to "safety", chemistry sets have most of the good stuff gone for the same reason. Kids can no longer just go and do what they want because it's "not safe".

People took far far more risks in the past.
I find python's clarity lacking in comparison to ruby, at least in terms of making classes and iterators. Why are all those underscores really necessary?

No mention on your other points here because I either agree or don't have an experienced opinion on the matter.
I agree in a general sense, but do you think it's worth measuring how we're "treated" in terms psychological devices such as minimum payments? (since this is what the story is related to)

I don't see these psychological devices as nefarious at all. Some stores use scents or music to encourage sales, some use layouts, displays, or loss leaders to persuade people to buy things.

Sadly, the word "fiendish" in the title is a real misnomer. Is the 99 cents (rather than pricing at dollar amounts) device "fiendish"? Sounds like people are just looking for scapegoats in a crisis.
don't know what you're trying to say, really.

but if you're wanting inboxes to be request verification on incoming mail, it's not going to work very well for the service mails that are truly useful, like bill notifications from your creditors and the like.

and it will inconvenience the hell outta your friends and family...
Map of European Genetic Substructure (Genes show North/South, East/West)
Okay, well, if he's gonna' complain about naming OS X after cats, then he should also complain about Ubuntu's alliterative 'adjective + animal' naming scheme.
I agree, by the way, that today's American poor are trapped by how much they do have. I would say that they're unwilling, for the most part, to give up the luxury they have for a good chance of more stability later. For most of them, though, this might well be the right choice: as far as I can see, people who make what I make now (around 75K) live lives of about the same happiness as the poor, but with more stuff that they mostly don't care about unless they might lose it suddenly. For someone who finds themselves making this after a few years of 10-25K a year, however, it's really awesome. I still haven't gotten over how great my life is, after half a year of the new income level.
For the religious point of view:

I hold that if god did not want people to live to 1000 he would make it impossible to do so.

If it's possible, then god must be OK with it.

He was pretty specific about all the "possible but don't do them anyway" things after all, so no need to add some new ones.
You can give on tipjoy anonymously. Give the the url twitter.com/wellwishes
I guess 'open source' narrows it down too much, but a bunch of guys who go around trying to 'do less' ( http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Build_Less.php ) can't be that hard to undercut as far as their products are concerned (they would be very difficult to beat, though, in marketing terms). You could offer a product that people only have to buy once, for instance, instead of slowly bleeding them month after month.
Objective-C has weak and dynamic typing, and optionally static typing information can also be added to variables.
Here are the direct links to the jobs:

http://startuply.com/Jobs/Client_Engineer_Intern_Flex__768_2...
http://startuply.com/Jobs/Server_Engineer_Intern_768_1.aspx
Eric Drexler: The Technology Tree
It's arbitrary. A lot of people call the first small equity round a Series AA. My guess is that their first round was either a convertible or a Series AA that was mislabeled as a Series A in Crunchbase. Or this one was a Series B that was mislabed a Series A.

Either way, it doesn't really mean much. And "seed round" is more of a general term. Your Series A could be your seed round. It doesn't have any specific meaning, though in their case I'd assume they would consider the YC funds the seed round.
AFAIK seed rounds are usually $1 million or less.

Venture hacks is a great source, but I unfortunately couldn't find an exact answer to your question:

http://venturehacks.com/
'...a willed suspension of disbelief.' Interview with Bill Janeway, on Finance
The internal memo I got said "Anonymizing user log data". I doubt we are going to try to put it back together. You give us too much evil genius credit.
I too used to program in the Swarm platform with Objective-C.

Off-topic, but if you are interested in frameworks like this, also check out the MASON Multiagent Simulation Toolkit (which is based in Java):

http://www.cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/mason/
Now, it isn't an OS, but ZFS really does address some of these ideas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

It shares some of the features of other versioned filesystems, but with other nice additions. I know I'm planning on trying Opensolaris or Nexenta sometime soon.
Also see http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/18/friendfeed-says-sup-to-a-n...
It would have request verification only when it already thinks your email is spam.
Simple Pseudo-threading in ActionScript
It indicates that there's nothing particularly special about cryptography. People make dumb mistakes, but that's the same in every field.
If you think KeyKOS's security scheme was "somewhat weak", you should read the DTOS review of it (in http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/fluke/html/dtos/HTML/final-docs/...), which was mostly positive. It includes a pretty balanced picture of its pluses and minuses, although it doesn't seem to have been based on experience actually using KeyKOS.

If your files belong to your applications instead of to you, or if your sandboxes don't nest, then your sandboxing scheme is pretty lame.

Most of the time there are worse cases than just deleting your documents: the utility could send all of your documents to its owner over the internet. You can prevent this with sandboxing policies too; KeyKOS solved an analogous problem in the context of a multiuser non-networked mainframe. More difficult is to keep it from inserting backdoors into your programs or subtly corrupting your files.

I don't see how the solution "then you roll back to your previous backup" is dependent upon only the utility only having access to a single sandbox. It seems like it works just as well if you give it access to everything except your basic UI (and the TCB it depends on, e.g. the kernel, the bootloader) and your backups.
I'm surprised there are so few mentions about that.

I smashed an ankle a few years ago racing a motorcycle. The ankle is mostly fine, I can walk, hike, climb a mountain, lift weights, or just stand for as long as I want. It doesn't hurt. Jumping though is not OK, and neither is dancing (not that I dance anyway, but still) or running. It looks like it can't be fixed 100%.
So, if such a comparatively trivial thing can't be fixed, how can they talk about immortality?

I don't see immortality becoming less than a dream until we are able to fix the vast majority of diseases and health issues. The simple fact that we can't do that is a sign that we're pretty far from understanding our biology.
There's also a famous line from Max Born (or was it Planck) who said: New ideas are accepted in science not because anyone changes his mind, but because old scientists die. (I'm paraphrasing.)
Unalone, I apologize for being a dick.
Peace.
But they didn't have a choice.
The Quarterback Problem
From the business perspective, what's the advantage? If you sell a product once, I feel like it becomes more difficult to have people pay for an upgrade. If you spend a lot of time developing updates and improvements upon your product, I feel like you'll find fewer and fewer people willing to pay for them because whatever they have "works fine".
Rich-GUI SaaS/Web 2.0 Apps Should Not Be Considered Harmful
Apple: French Competition Council Rules That Any Carrier May Sell The iPhone
Do you know of a general purpose cryptographic library that has done a better job than OpenSSL at hardening against side-channel attacks?

No, I don't know of any better cryptographic library. (This is why I said a few days ago that writing a better cryptographic library was something I'd like to do if I was rich.)

Doesn't seem to me that OpenSSL developers are careless and indifferent about side-channel attacks.

They're playing whack-a-mole. There are over a thousand conditional branches in the large integer arithmetic code alone. The fact that nobody has pointed out how to exploit them yet doesn't mean that they're not exploitable.
19.20.21.
Chrysler shuts down all production
Meetcast (YC S08) Seeks Client and Server Engineers (Seattle)
Client Engineer Intern (Flex): http://startuply.com/Jobs/Client_Engineer_Intern_Flex__768_2...

Server Engineer Intern: http://startuply.com/Jobs/Server_Engineer_Intern_768_1.aspx

Meetcast.com makes real-time online collaboration easy. There are no downloads, everything is completely in the browser and conferences can be created and joined with a single click. We're looking for a very talented hacker to join our current team of two.

We are a Summer '08 Y Combinator funded company and recently closed another round of angel. We're located in Kirkland, WA (10 miles east of Seattle) and we prefer someone local but we're open to telecommuters where we would communicate using our product.

To apply, please send an email to founders@meetcast.com with your resume, cover letter and anything else that you think would "wow" us.
I wasn't implying anything about Merb community, just pointing out that switching to a new development platform can bring surprises from quite unexpected angles.
Seems to me that they won't be able to enforce it. If Apple only sells the iPhone to Orange, Orange's competitors can buy the phones and resell them free of Apple threatening them, but this doesn't force Apple to sell them phones at wholesale.

Hey, Apple could just offer the iPhone to Orange's competition at $1,000. It's no longer exclusive, but I'd bet the competition wouldn't be clamoring for units. There are always ways around these things.
Ah, I didn't stick around long enough to notice they had one. Such bad taste :)
Mathematics and chemistry need to be bigger.

Hell, maybe they are and its really the map that is inaccurate...
My point is that we learn much more about neurobiology from a biological viewpoint than by studying artificial networks from a computer science perspective. If anything, the biology informs the computer science as you suggested.
I think you're misunderstanding the role of "neural networks" in academia. NIPS has a lot of value to the machine learning and AI communities but, beyond vague inspiration, it has almost no connections to neuroscience. There is a substantial body of work in computational modeling of neuronal behavior, but this stuff is much messier (PDEs with biologically determined constants) and limited in scope than the papers that appear at NIPS.

edit: Relevant conferences in computational neuroscience -

* http://cosyne.org/c/index.php?title=Cosyne_09

* http://www.cnsorg.org/2009/

* http://icms.org.uk/workshops/mathneuro2009
Signing requests with an HMAC provides end-to-end authentication, which is vastly superior to transport-level authentication such as HTTP auth.
There are a number of systems like this in use. I've sent mails to people and it's come back with a link to a URL with a CAPTCHA. I fill in the CAPTCHA and it says it has then delivered my mail to the recipient.
I find it hard to talk about "the nature" of a company the size of Yahoo

I don't. I noticed years ago that organizations have distinct characters that seem mostly to trace back to their originators. Sometimes the connection is so strong that it almost seems the company itself has a personality. It's true the effect may weaken as companies get big (bureaucracy is depressingly uniform), and we're talking about patterns not laws (lots of room for individual variation), but what's striking is how noticeable the effect is despite those caveats.
Howto Design with a Simulator
Usually a traditional control system requires a regulated power supply (5V/3.3V), controlling the lighting loads via an opto-coupler. Another approach is interfacing the microcontroller directly to the main supply. Philips Semiconductors/NXP released several application notes for the latter approach, which was named as easytriac. It allows a low-end microcontroller to be embedded into the casing of each incandescent, CFL or LED lamps.
It's completely in the business' interest to keep going back for more money every month. However, perhaps with the economy headed south, people will look at that flow of money and think twice about it.
I don't really know much about neuroscience proper. I tend to look at the simplified artificial models and synthesize what might be possible, rather than look at all at the biology.
In terms of marketing (well, if you care about that), I think you need something a little bit more compelling than 'designed to be modular'. Show people what modular might mean in terms of lean, fast and low memory requirements. Demonstrate some projects that would have just been using 5% of Rails that can take advantage of how slim Merb is. That kind of thing, I guess.
NeXT Computer Unboxing, Twenty Years Later
This thing suggests there's an unpleasant space halfway between a web site and a movie. It's not random access enough to be a good site, but not engaging enough to be a good movie.
"...I've yet to even try suicide because its patently moronic..."

Alan Turing committed suicide, mostly thanks to the pressures put upon him by British society at the time... because he was gay. I sincerely doubt that Turing was a moron. There are many factors that lie well outside the realm of intelligence, that have a profound effect on whether or not people one day decide that they can no longer go on with their lives.

Boredom may very well be a motivating factor, especially for someone who can live as arbitrarily long as they wish.
Snipt - Like Pastie, but for your own commands you frequently forget
How about a direct link to After Credentials?
12 Steps to Starting a Successful Business
That's a very interesting question. Above all I'd have them build things. We like anyone who's created an open-source project we've heard of, for example.

I'd also try to get them jobs at existing YC startups. Then they'd both learn how startups work, and (if they were good) get recommendations from people we know.
Why doesn't gmail do this?
One question: If they are using 80386 memory segments, how do they cope with systems like AMD64 and the linux kernel both of which have flat memory systems? Besides, normal desktop OSes already isolate programs in their own memory segments. Its the device access permissions and systems syscall accesses that cause all the problem with secure object code usage.
How do you find the COBRA health care costs of current employer?
Let's say you are an employee at Yahoo and have a great health care insurance plan, but you are afraid of having a COBRA qualified event (like many other employees have had recently) and want to know how much your COBRA health care insurance plan is.

How can you find this amount out? A friend of mine at Yahoo tried to contact her insurance carrier and HR department anonymously, but they wouldn't tell her. Is there a legal requirement that companies should be forced to disclose this info to current employees?
Just ran across this blog entry from the marvelous James Fallows: Jon Favreau is not the youngest chief presidential speechwriter!

http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/12/i_am_sh...

(I almost submitted this to HN but it's not really worth a post of its own, so I'll put it here.)
the goal of this auction pricing is not to increase occupancy, but to maximize profit especially from the customers that can afford it
I posted a comment about this on another thread. Basically < $1000 allows a middle manager to purchase it without VP approval.

If you have several competitors and yours is somewhat better, price in the middle. The lowest price will be perceived as the stripped down model even if it is the best. Think refrigerators or televisions. The highest priced one will raise the perceived value of the class.

OTOH if you are selling against an entrenched corporate seller, try an entirely different model. If he is selling a license for $50K per machine, try per seat per year. It lowers the cost of entry but has the potential for huge revenue.

In the software business cost has nothing to do with pricing except that eventually you want your revenue to cover your cost. Cost is for atoms. Software is electrons.
No, it doesn't matter that they were European per se. Let's say they were people from planet X who showed up on planet Y, built a load of stuff and then left, and the people from planet Y have no idea how to operate any of it. You know, like in Stargate: SG1. The point is that the people who built it are often the only ones who can operate it.
PowerShell ABC's - E is for ExecutionPolicy
I believe there is some debate about whether that was actually suicide.
Doubt it. Population control laws are too unpopular and anybody over ~300 is probably very rich thanks if nothing else, due to the magic of compound interest. Since rich = powerful, it is unlikely that any population control measure would hold up well.
HG is crap. Ever tried checking out the mozilla-central tree?
Am I the only one who saw the "Ask YN" instead of "Ask HN" or "Ask YC"?
Better medical technology = an accident that is fatal now may not be fatal a hundred years into the future. All these studies are complete bullshit because none of them can predict the social factor and over a period as long as 2500 years, it dominates everything else.
Give me a break. You think you're still going to be running around with fleshy arms and legs and a meat brain after one thousand further years of technological progress? Do you realize that the whole scientific revolution only started five hundred years ago?

No, you will not die "crossing a red light" after living a thousand years. Sheesh, talk about your failures of imagination.
How would you feel / how would the conversation change if, for instance:

- the $10 / mo charge came with a one-time, upfront cost of $24.99?

- what if that upfront cost is $14.99?

Any difference?
What makes you think that a person planning on living for 1000 years would go retire for 90% of their life? What makes you think that a person who lives from paycheck to paycheck would be able to afford anti-aging treatments which are likely to be (at least initially) very expensive. Lastly, I doubt that a centenarian (or multi-centenarian) would be stupid enough not to save a $100 in an index fund to come back a century or two later to find a sizable amount in-place waiting to be used?

It is very likely that anybody over ~300 years will be filthy rich because they have had hundreds of years to build up interest on their investments and they have several hundred years of experience in what does and doesn't work in life, not to mention 300 years of contacts.
Well, it loads now. Previously I was getting a DNS error (all other tested sites working fine).
> They're trying to control their burn rate (of cash). We really need credit markets to free up. Banks need to lend again.

You seem to be assuming that lending to GM makes sense.

Can GM repay new loans?
The creativity of web developers in solving problems continues to impress me.

But it makes me think, what amazing things could these clever developers do, if they weren't forced to solve "manufactured problems" like Microsoft compatibility?
GitHub Launches Pages: Static Project and Personal Hosting
Facebook Is Gaining Ground On Google In Time Spent On The Internet
It could be a problem for device vendors, but it shouldn't be a problem for web sites that want to serve ARM9 devices with MMUs, such as Intel's StrongARMs; the Native Client approach will work fine on ARM, although it will take some work to make it happen. The bit about "Intel's ARM chips" is pretty goofy, though.
> There are now 52,000 apps on Facebook, created by 660,000 developers.

That doesn't add up!! If that's true, then it's about 11 developers per app. My experience, at least in SV, is that it's more like 11 apps per developer.
The article does indicate that the rural roll-outs will be wireless.

Also, the money is not all spent on them, it is also meant to improve current services. Compared to countries like Japan, for instance, U.S. "high speed" is like a 9600 baud modem and could really be better.