skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The important thing to remember about $100 knives is that if this is all that is available, only certain people can have knives at all.

The really great thing about the "cheap asian manufacturing revolution" is that it means that nearly everyone can have a whole bunch of household goods that they may not have had before.

My grandfather had to pay nearly a months salary for a circular saw in 1958. I now have and use this saw all the time. Its so well made that my children will likely use it as well. I didn't get the saw until he died. Before that I had a $30 "harbor freight" saw. It was awful but at least I could have a saw at all. It certainly allowed me to fully appreciate the good one.
I'm happy. They got rid of the auto-playing video side bar.
Press the button to cross the street: a puzzle
More users -> more attackers -> more holes found.
Changing Emotions
Is there anyone at all writing about this kind of stuff other than Eliezer?
GOOG and MSFT were founded in similar market conditions.
Don't think so, Chocobean. I've lived with guys for years and it didn't change it at all, regardless of their (very varied) spending habits. And when I lived with this one, too.

I'm 100% sure it's a cultural/environmental difference.

Also, I'm not talking about hobby supplies or stuff I might have a real reason to actually want, either. I could drop $200 at Target without even breaking a sweat. Or buying fun things.
I bet the only reason is because it is Cisco...
Lots of stuff here that resonates with this some-time CMS architect and soulless corporate wage slave, but I missed the part where Zed was able to provide an easy-to-use UI to allow non-programming sysadmins to change the security rules. That must have been so simple he didn't need to mention it, right... right?
HN Loading Slowly For Others?
takes 5-15 seconds to load a page, started a few days ago
Interesting problem: how can you get to having backups if the person whose responsibility it would have been to take care of backups is the one who screws you over.

I guess this calls for technical CEOs...
A lot of patents about nothing?
Right you are, I always mix up the fictional Stuart Smalley with the real Stuart Smiles, who wrote "Self-Help" in 1859.
I would have won a paper airplane contest in elementary school if the teacher hadn't been lame about it. The rules were to build a paper airplane with paper clips, paper and tape. Clearly, most of the kids were going to build silly airplanes that barely flew, with the best sticking to more or less standard designs that still wouldn't go all that far. My design was very simple: wad a lot of paperclips up into a compact ball and wrap it with paper and tape. I knew I could hurl it a lot farther than even the viable plane designs would go, because I could sink way more energy into propelling it. It was clearly superior, so the teacher disallowed it:-/
Sure. A great thing. You read the articles here, right? They propose ramen profitability, along with a dorm-style living space, as a lifestyle choice.
There are other ways to determine whether someone is a student or alumni. I'm not saying its a GREAT way (or even scam-proof), but Facebook Connect comes to mind... I'm sure there are others.
Good article on Bloomberg: Steve Jobs’s Weight Loss May Have Been Spurred by Tumor Surgery (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aWiP...)
I think Lewis' point is that regulation we have today has gotten into a position of disguising real risk when it should be exposing risk so it can be fixed quickly. If we don't have failure and risk then the market can't work. The liberals want more regulation while the libertarians want less. If we had regulation that could drop MBIA's triple A score when it started doing more risky investments, or a SEC that investigated fraud when someone basically handed them all the facts that they needed to validate then wouldn't those problems be contained to a much smaller impact?

What I hear Lewis saying is that we are over-regulated with ineffective regulation. All the institutions are there, but they don't really do anything to protect the markets from financial meltdowns like these. If you're still asking what are the weaknesses of the system, and what are the points of failure I'm not sure you read the article.
Possible due to higher traffic from people checking out the new site. Personally, I like it, especially compared to the old site (though I think they could do without one of the page-wide ads).
There was a story on HN several months ago about a guy on vacation in Istanbul having someone sell him a rug even though he never had any intention of getting one. It outlined a whole lot of non-bullying sales tactics that had nothing to do with the actual product, it was more about putting a person in an environment and state of mind where they felt like getting the product, even if they never really wanted it.
First you warn about forgetting non-US colleges and then you suggest Facebook Connect? :P
Reading your post and considering it further, I guess his message is less about starting up than about how to survive a day job and continue to grow as a human being by doing interesting work at night.

Blub work on a startup at night could be another path away from employment that isn't really addressed in the presentation (though it's very difficult to pull off, IMO).
Plus, it would take some kind of international war to really do something about it. Some of the countries that contribute the most CO2 are the least likely to be concerned about the consequences, and will only take advantage of the surplus energy left over by countries that do try and reduce their CO2 emmissions.
The background fade looks like hell at ~1600px wide and doesn't even matte to the correct color on the right. Guess color correction took a backseat to ad planning.
It would be a bit like investing in your customer's business. You want to, but is that the business you're in?

Besides, the two all important questions: How do you decide who is deserving of the free account, and how do you know when they should start paying. You need to cover these both rationally and legally.
I agree that a specific lifestyle should not be forced on others. Unfortunately, many of the costs of the average American lifestyle are externalized through our government. We are all forced to pay those costs.

Examples:

* subsidies which allow extremely cheap processed "food"

* tax funds used to pay for sports stadiums

* tax breaks for energy companies

* tax funds used for environmental cleanup
There don't seem to be new facts in this article, but it discards the "catastrophic OS flaw" theory and selects the "disgruntled employee" theory though it appears to conflate it with a historical disgruntled employee. It seems this is possibly shoddy reporting rather than new information.

Back at journalspace, I notice that if you buy their domain names they will throw in 6 months of free hosting on the same machines that destroyed their business. How generous.
Parrot: The Vision for 1.0
I would - good hearts and minds.
I haven't personally worked there, but from everything I know I have to second his idea that you shouldn't work for a big huge video game company (chiefly EA) because you like games and want to make your own. If you have the capital and the skills to make games on your own and/or with a few friends, go for it! The late 2000s are proving to be a sort of golden age of indie gaming from both ends of the transaction.

edit: Also, unrelated to this, another question/answer pair starts around 66:00 which I think is a pretty good idea.
It looks like automated backups is an add-on service, not part of their base hosting package.
Twitter Accounts Hacked by Phishing | TechJaws
having no tape backup is a crime
It sounds like your reference is to ideas predicated on melting arctic ice, which is not happening. Everything I've read on co2 theories and models only predicts increased warming, never cooling, so since 1998 the climate reality seems to be diverging with increasing acceleration away from any predictions about co2. The solar scientists, on the other hand, have been predicting global cooling given the recent extreme lack of solar activity with very good accuracy: http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/01/peer-reviewed-global-cooli...
I'd just offer it as student account with one private hub, but don't check to see if they are students?
are you racing to support git? seems like you released a few months before the git craze swept the internet.
There's a qualitative difference between "pay" and "no-pay", particularly among students with no income.

When I was in college, I had essentially no cash flow. Nothing in, nothing out. The college dining hall was open 7 days/week, so I always ate there instead of eating out or cooking. (The only times I ate out were the TYPO - "Take Your Professor Out" - dinners, which the school paid for.) Room & board was completely paid for, and we weren't allowed to live off-campus. Internet access was provided by the college, as was webhosting. Student activities (I did sailing, orchestra, taiko, some artsy-crafty stuff, and a variety of other things that would've otherwise been expensive) all came out of the student activities fund, which was paid with our tuition. I bought books once a semester with a credit card that went to my parent's account. After the first year, I didn't bother signing up for a room phone, instead using my cell phone, again paid for by my parents. The only thing I ended up paying for was ordering Wingz or pizza at midnight, or alcohol contributions to parties.

There were many purchases that I could easily have afforded that I didn't bother with, because it meant I would've had to worry about money. They included Starbucks, going out for meals or ice cream, paid LiveJournal accounts, actually buying music, and basically anything that required a credit card (I didn't have my own until I got a job after college). If GitHub had existed back then and charged, I would've said "Screw it, I'll setup my own git account on a college server, and we can all pull from that."

The cost isn't just $7-12/month. It's all the time spent balancing bank statements or checking over credit card bills that you wouldn't otherwise need to worry about if you never use money.
Scott Adams Blog: Testing the Illusion Hypothesis 01/05/2009
I love it. MAJOR improvement on the old version, even though I prefer sites like this to be aligned left.

I always keep my browser at 1024 wide so the fixed size is perfect for me.

They got rid of the flash sections that cycle through headlines, which was a major peeve of mine. I couldn't right click them to open in new tabs.
The best glider I've seen -- supposedly designed by a NASA engineer, although I have nothing to back that up -- is also one of the simplest.

Fold an edge over itself a couple of times, about a cm or two, to create a weighted edge. Then crease the entire sheet at regular intervals perpendicular to this edge, so it forms a curved surface. That's it!
I completely agree. How can anyone look at this fact and not see it as totally undermining the intent of bond raters?
VixML a simple iPhone "app" development tool for non-programmers
but the expectancy of a working-age adult ... has barely budged since before Social Security was invented. Lifespan from birth ... has risen almost entirely due to lower infant mortality.

This is not true. While it's true that infant mortality rates in industrialized countries have decreased a lot since the 1930s, so have mortality rates at every age.
Thank god they did, I avoided ESPN.com like the plague just because of their annoying auto playing videos.
Why not time-limit student accounts to a year or so? And require a .edu address to signup?

A year's a long time for a student. It's plenty for any coursework, and should be enough time to decide if a project will become a startup. And the hassle of moving things over gives people an incentive to switch to a real pro account instead of just mooching off the student account forever.

And you can get folks hooked on GitHub, so that's what they go for when they enter the working world.
Good update, atleast a step in the right direction; the auto play was annoying... although it now looks like ford owns the page - guess they have a "look like you own the page" ad package...

- espn.com comes in at 213 objects, 200 images - and If I'm correct I have 1.3mb in size - this is horrible I used

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
Not that great, but an improvement in its own right.
Yeah, but they didnt depend on the existance of another product(like Outlook).
Will Meg Whitman Be The Next Governor Of California?
Try tweaking down the trailing edge of the wing and/or the trailing horizontal edge of the tail, to counter it. Mine was diving, and tweaking these surfaces upwards made a dramatic difference.

He talks about this after the instructions: http://www.zurqui.com/crinfocus/paper/air-fly.html
I've been using the beta for a while. It's changed a lot from the original implementation. I still hate how the two pulldown menus are right next to each other - try reaching "nfl" on the list of sports with the mouse coming from the top of the screen - it's an exercise in frustration.
If the admin tools are behind a firewall, then I'd say they are 100% secure, apart from obviously someone breaking in and using a machine in the company, and assuming no other machine has been compromised.
If external access is required, then of course some sort of secure vpn, locked down to certain IPs etc etc.

Of course we don't know the full facts of how they were able to access the admin system, so it's all pure speculation. It just struck me as a funny statement.
"the IBM PC", "the consumer internet/www"
The Black Book (graphics tricks of Quake guru Michael Abrash)
Mind Flex: Use your brain waves to float a ball through hoops
Writing Effective JavaScript Unit Tests with YUI Test
The Daily Routines of Interesting People
Quick Ma, get back into the Y2K bunker! In 29 years Starcraft will stop working!

But really, in all seriousness, the singularity will come in 2032 and we won't have to worry about any of this stuff.
Re: - how do you keep focus, avoid distractions, and keep attacking the goal?

Keeping focus researching/browsing often is for me the hardest thing (http://xkcd.com/214/ describes it best). I built this mini-mini-mini webapp for myself called defumble.com to remind me of what it actually was that I set out to find.
Ask YC/HN: How do you help your job-hunting friends out?
Hey HN,

So I may not have a problem with jobs, but many of my friends do, especially a few talented ones that I know would perform fantastically almost anywhere. I tell these friends I will help them out, but I'm still not sure the best way to help them.

If they know the company they want to work for, that's easy. But what about people who just want a job in a specific industry (i.e. consulting, start-ups)? Do you message a group of friends? Share it via social media? Figure out where they would fit in and call your friends at those places?

I'd like to know so I can be helpful to these really talented friends.

Thanks.
Stuff that lasts vs disposable junk
Inspired by the "Year of living smaller" thread...

The other day I was reading this article about stuff that lasts vs disposable junk (my paraphrase): http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/upgrade/4273660.html

Which got me thinking: what would it take to make a computer that is useful 25 years from now? Would it even be possible, or would such a machine become obsolete way before that?

Maybe some type of machine with a reduced capability set. A text editing-only, or a teach kids to read-only appliance (a souped-up Leapfrog perhaps).

But then, after some years, you would have the problem of communicating with the external world. Owners of some "vintage" music samplers have that problem: the instrument may sound and play fine, but if they want to load new samples they need to use Zip drives or SCSI.

Opinions?
I tried that article, and clocked myself at about 730wpm (in your face! or something...). But I was deliberately trying to read fast, although I do read pretty quickly.

I am able (obviously) to skim read things quickly - I would read slower when reading for pleasure though.

I've never tried speed reading techniques, mainly because the one person I talked to about it said they found it hard to 'switch off' speed reading. e.g. I was asking him about 'Watchmen', and he couldn't remember some of the stuff I was talking about - he thought it was because he speed-read it.

I'd rather enjoy reading than focus purely on speed.
Most big companies unprepared for IT risks, survey finds
You mean the second coming of Jesus Christ, surely?
In this particular case, it was abandoned by its owner, but not by its users.
It wasn't in development at all, it was just a simple install of open source software.
Further, the owner didn't seem to know how to monetize it, and was losing money paying the server bill for it.

I was, obviously very surprised and pleased to get it for such a price though.
With the removal of the auto playing video and cleaner overall design, this is definitely an improvement. We blogged about it a few weeks ago: http://www.newmediacampaigns.com/page/top-5-improvements-of-...
For a guy that got his name by cutting corners in clever ways (2.5d engines we see in Wolfenstein and DooM) I find it really odd that he's sort of going the other way.
I'm generally wary of Cisco, and hope it doesn't end up affecting Xobni negatively in the end. We used to use WebEx until CISCO bought them which bolstered them to jack up prices, fortunately, Citrix updated their GoToMeeting product, which is better and more cost effective solution than WebEx. Hopefully, something like this won't happen to Xobni, I would hate to see a $579 bill for an hour of xobni usage.
From Twitter:

"We plan to release a closed beta of the open authentication protocol, OAuth this month but it's important to note that this would not have prevented a Phishing scam nor would it have prevented these accounts from being compromised."

I have several friends who work at twitter, but I'm sorry, I have to disagree.

The fact that they use http auth for api access means that hundreds (or thousands) of people have had admin credentials with which they can go in and wreck havoc, doing exactly what we have seen today.

I like to integrate admin control into the normal site, so my lesson from this is: make it so the admin only portions of the page only when you are viewing through a VPN...

It isn't quite 2 factor (2 passwords - vpn then site - is equivalent to 1 password) but it makes it so intruders have to jump through two hoops - of which the VPN is normally harder to do)
Agreed. As I mentioned above, I can read pretty quickly, but if you find yourself speed-reading, say, PG Wodehouse, then it's just possible you may be missing out :)
congrats matt and adam (and the entire team)! excited to see what you guys do in 09
Well it also helped that the price of Ghosts was very reasonable. People who wanted to spend $300 on the limited edition everything-plus-trents-nail-clippings set could, and those of us that just wanted the mp3s only had to spend $5.

I think if most bands sold album mp3s at $5, people would be more likely to buy them. When I have to spend $10-20 for an album it starts to become worth the time to find it on a torrent tracker.

Edit: Meant to add that I did know how to get it for free, I paid for it because $5 is worth it for an uber-fast, high quality download, rather than dealing with bad rips and low bitrates and such.
Absolutely not. I'm a student and it's easy enough to come up with $7 dollars a month for something you care about.
Disposable doesn't necessarily equal junk. In some situations it may be better to design things not to last. Perhaps not even to be physical-- to be a service.
If you want a computer that's useful 25 years from now, your best bet is probably to sign up for AWS.
Just because you are in your mid-30s and have a family doesn't mean you can't be thrifty. That's a lifestyle choice. Nobody has forced anyone to buy a $750,000 house in the valley and drive 3 SUVs.

If your family understood your dreams and was willing to support your ambitions and was ultimately willing to eat Ramen, anyone could make use of this model.
+1 for alliteration though.
Just out of curiosity, why does this get modded so high? A tech company takes investor money, great! But is it truly hackerous?
Any site that uses an interstitial on its homepage deserves to be beaten over the head. This breaks usability rules left and right.

Hopefully this is just for the launch of the site and not permanent.
"Drunk Dialer" iPhone App Economics
I'm really glad they point out that implementing OAuth would have done nothing to prevent either the phishing attack earlier or this breach. People keep waving OAuth around like it's some kind of panacea for security.
Interesting model! Would like more details on the site, though.
I agree that management applications should always be out-of-band, but what do third-party applications have to do with the internal applications Twitter's support team uses to handle email address resets?
I guarantee you that being in your mid-30s with a family precludes you from living in a "Hacker Hotel" on $3000 a month. Way to exclude the middle.
Yes, but an HSA is explicitly not an insurance account; it's a tax-advantaged savings account you use to cover routine, predictable medical expenses while a high-deductable insurance plan covers broken bones and gigantism.
Well, the problem is that as your data set grows, you're likely getting more queries as well. So, you end up with m x log(n) where m is the number of queries that users are making.

you're conflating complexity analysis and issues of concurrency. the number of queries to the database (even concurrent queries) has no value in assessing the upper bound of the complexity of the b-tree search algorithm.

complexity analysis measures algorithms, not systems
the "internal application" is http://twitter.com/admin and inline admin controls on the normal pages.

they might have more but in the past when twitter employees has showed screenshots at talks that is what they use.
I'm sending their resumes to some recruiters I know...or, if I hear about a job somewhere I send them the link to apply.
It looks similar to Google App Engine Datastore [1] or Amazon SimpleDB [2], so I guess it could have similar use cases.

If you already architect your application to use these cloud services, it should be easier to switch to/from MemcacheDB on your own servers.

[1] http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/datastore

[2] http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb
"...re-define time_t as an unsigned integer instead of a signed integer...This doubles the range of numbers it can store."

I don't think that's how it works...
Editor's: thanks for cleaning this up and making it useful to HN. Sorry for the originally lame submission.
My favorite maths book is "little rudin" - Principles of Mathematical Analysis by Walter Rudin - you can just spend hours reading the same page over and over ...
Fraunhofer IIS to push MPEG Surround as next big downloadable audio format
It seems thinking outside the box isn't encouraged in schools. Is this because schools (especially schools for children) are more about socialization than they are for learning?
Xobni is a YC company.
Yeah, what I'm not following is what this has to do with OAuth and third-party applications.