skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Last week, I was going to register a new web service (forgot which one) and after the third captcha I couldn't get right, I just quit and decided to use a competitor instead.

What I'm trying to say is that ideally you shouldn't use a solution that is less user friendly and possibly infuriating for your future customers/users.
Mine are 9 and 7. If your 11 year old isn't already using the word "fuck", I would be concerned about social norms. The fact is, the Internet is a big scary place, and Hacker News is the very least of the problem, so let's not bother addressing this issue.
I'm looking for a co-founder on a project I've been working on for some time. If your interested shoot me an email. Mine's jklub at live.com
Okay, that's one question answered, but there are eight others.
as far as i can tell, carbon trading is not directly subsidized by the government as lovelock seems to imply.

the closest thing i can find is subsidies for emissions reductions equipment (which could allow the company purchasing the equipment to then receive some compensation by selling capacity). am i missing something?
Typically the learning curve on a new language goes something like this.

1. Knows old language

2. Learns the syntax of new language

3. Writes old language style in new language

4. Through continued practice and learning in the new language, starts to pick up the idioms and styles of the new language.

5. Becomes fluent and well versed in the idioms, styles, advantages, and flaws of the new language. Can contrast old language with new language well and use the style most appropriate to the problem.

6. rinse and repeat

Not everyone progresses all the way through the process when they pick up a language. In fact I'd argue that some people never even pick up the idiomatic way of doing something in a language even if that is their only language.

I think you could think of this like an english-spanish dictionary. It's not going to teach you the idiomatic way of speaking, but it will give you the correct word to use. Which I would suggest is a milestone on the path to idiomatic speaking.

* edit for formatting
The key is to ignore CO2 and focus on the much more potent ones, because you can sell credits for equivalent tons of CO2.

See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Greenhouse_Gas_by_Sector.png

Step 1: Collect Nitrous Oxide in giant tanks.
Step 2: Store the Nitrous Oxide
Step 3: Get $$$ from CO2 market
Step 4: Use portion of money to buy 30 year government backed securities to cover maintenance of the tanks/land. Keep the rest as profit.

The key is to get your storage/transportation to a minimum. High compression, or piped to the ocean floor, maybe.
Ugh, privacy issues...
Hey, I'm one of the guys who built WhoShouldiFollow. Glad the recommendations are working out for you.

The Twitter API rate-limiting makes things harder, but as a whitelisted app we haven't (yet) run into any situations where we've hit our quota or get throttled in any way.

It sounds like Alex is working on a new method to retrieve a users followers/friends in bulk which should help out a lot: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/msg/...
Symfony rocks !
But I'm moving to Grails soon.

Grails is so powerfull
Are you interested in telecommuting from home for an OR-based company?
Cute idea, but it sounds like a nasty way of introducing non-native microbes and insects to new places and would likely do far more long-term harm than good.
...that's kind of the joke...
>_>
It sounds really great. I didn't say all users use a word processor.. just that a lot of them do. Besides that, writing content for the web has been around for a very long time, and people have seemed to managed to write pretty good content.

I like how you've realized the challenge of "education your market," very strong words there, and it sounds like you have some plan put together.

I think 2) is the greatest draw, the convenience factor.

Best of luck.
I’m far from being an expert on this, so take it easy from a fellow parent. There’s a huge difference about you reading or using profanity near you child than him/her hearing it on TV or reading on the internet.
It really doesn't look to me like megaupload worked too hard on their captcha. In the general case, this is apparently a difficult problem because of the character segmentation step. So, my guess is that if megaupload did something to decrease the distinction between characters (script letters, for example), the feasibility of a javascript implementation would break down.
No. The Python programming language is a great advertisement for the show. Especially in areas in which it wasn't aired. I would have never heard of the show if GvR didn't name his language after it. Its said that its named after the TV series in every book about the language, on the website and in Wikipedia.
Interesting but I think this would be helpful if I could click the school, view the contents inside it and see which HN handles are associated with this.

For instance, I added "Georgetown University" as my alma mater and wasn't able to see inside the link. (Granted, I'm the first person to join under this school).

I wanted to view New York University since it's right down the block from me and I want to meet more hackers here in in NYC, but I wasn't able to see which HN users attended the school.
we took the approach of not making them 100% human readable.

Sounds like a great way to make sure neither bots nor humans use your service.
advogato tried to do this for open source developers. http://advogato.org/trust-metric.html
http://gaza.freehost123.co.cc/glipe/
you are correct. I posted this far too many hours after I should have gone to bed.

My point is the same. For a spam filter to be effective it should not penalize you for email you get from a new source that you truly do want.
Smash Lab Sucks: An Open Letter to the Discovery Channel
I honestly don't think the average, non-technical, sub-intellectual person puts that much thought into these things.

What is happening here seems pretty clear to me:

People are looking for entertainment, they are finding some on YouTube, they see an ad for more of the same enjoyment, they whip out their credit cards and pay for it.

If this story happened in a college dorm room and the entertainment-seeker's roommate had them all on DVD already, he would have said "Here, watch mine." If he had them all on his hard drive, he would have said "here, plug in my external".

It seems like people are simply following the path of least resistance.
Hmmmm. I entered my email and hit create account, got the email with my password, and tried to login but it says the username/password do not match.

Looks like a cool idea though, I would like to be able to sign up.
Hi all,

Just thought I'd take a moment to explain why I posted this here.

When we started our firm in 2000, there were no other groups in the world named "smashLAB". A few years later a band called their rehearsal hall “smashlabs” and someone else did something with it, but we weren’t particularly concerned.

When the Discovery Channel poached it though, we were a little choked. These guys seemed big enough to perform due diligence and come up with something original. That being said, we're small--what were we to do?

Month after month we watched as more people commented about what a horrible show the Discovery Channel had churned out. As a result, a Google search for smashLAB didn't just turn up results on the television program; it also brought with it numerous blogs and posts about how badly "Smash Lab sucks".

This morning we pondered changing our name; but instead, decided to have some fun. Visit the site and see what we did to amuse ourselves. :-)

Eric
Have you ever used Prolog for a practical problem? (This is a sincere question.)
I have no ill will toward FedEx or Memphis. You are correct, but only to a point. If it wasn't this guy in his position that said what he said, it could have easily been someone else. The best solution is to fix the root problem. If people get this feeling from landing in Memphis airport, thats the key problem to be addressed.
Does it matter whether they are testing it in a VM or a "real machine"?
I couldn't really find much in what he had to say about WHY it is a "scam." The linked article requires registration and is cut off before it starts explaining why "this approach is misguided."

While carbon trading may not be a solution for global warming, it is one of the few models we have for using market incentives to curb carbon emissions in the short term.
Ask HN: Where to form an LLC
I send you this file in order to have your advice.

I am looking to form an LLC for software consulting purposes. I do not expect/intend for it to grow into a VC-backed entity so I am not considering S-corp. I am the sole proprietor of this LLC-to-be.

I live in Massachusetts, and I expect most of my work will be in MA too. But I hear that it can be advantageous to form the LLC in another state; Nevada and Delaware come up most frequently.

I would love some tips, stats, suggestions, URLs, horror stories, relevant code snippets, or anything else that might help me on this quest. Thank you News Hackers!
I've got it: A sombrero helmet! I'm going to be rich!
Personally, I really like merge sort. It makes few assumptions, it's stable, it works well with sorted inputs, can be split across multiple CPU's, and it works well with sequential input streams. Radix sort tends to be faster especially for strings, but it does not work for many data structures without adapting the algorithm. EX: Radix sorting doubles requires bit manipulation of the data.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

It is a logical fallacy to beg the question.
Everything is good in moderation. If you spend 24/7 on HN then yes its a bad idea. But if you spend 1-2 hours per day its really not that bad.

+ with HN you get to read a lot of stuff that you yourself wouldn't have found otherwise.
experiment with drastically reducing your productivity. if no one notices great, you now have time to spend on personal projects and get paid. If people notice look for a new job.

I don't understand why everyone doesn't do this at jobs they dislike.
Indeed. It's a balance. Three failures is way too hard. Ours is a fairly simple captcha -- 5 letters/numbers, and our logs show that somewhere around 94% of attempts are correct, and we see few abandoned signups during the captcha answering phase. We could probably improve that further, though.

The primary defense against OCR is to make the segmentation attack hard -- pushing the characters together somewhat. With more tweaking we could probably get closer to a sweet spot of just enough overlap. Not even all of the characters would have to overlap to be effective.
Yes - but contemplate trying to get VC for that. Volunteers only, I suspect.
The nice thing about it here is that it very effectively conveys the frustration that underlies the value proposition for the site.
If my son is reading over my shoulder, the bad language I'm really worried about him picking up is Perl.
Actually the most interesting point brought up in the article wasn't about carbon trading, but about the future of our species:

"I don't think we can react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what's coming up" - James Lovelock

vs.

"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." - Vernor Vinge
Find me five examples of where it has worked. Can't be hard if it's true.
Given your parameters, the thing to keep in mind is where you are incorporated in case you need to defend yourself in a lawsuit. It is almost always better to defend on you home turf as opposed to taking trips and hiring lawyers in Delaware.

IANAL, but I have been involved in lawsuits. Home turf advantage can be a good thing.
If you think you can buy every thinking hour of anyone, you are just kidding yourself. Someone that wants to start a business on the side will do that if you want or not. If this hurts your feelings, maybe you should reconsider your ideas about work.
Creating scarcity of a good available in the commons is pretty straight forward. The devil is in the details though, especially for something like carbon which affects pretty much everything.

I would generally prefer a tax on coal and oil, which is easier to account for, and doesn't pick a winner. The main problem is that taxes like this typically go into general funds, rather than helping the problem with, say, investment in research into alternatives.
"But when you're a bunch of pricks, people go to The Pirate Bay and think of you as the enemy, and then you don't get any money. Take notes, you idiots."
v. funny indeed
I am failing to see a point in this post. Would it have killed him to write:

Microsoft should lay off 50,000 employees because...[his point].

The closest he comes is this:

Instead of 5000 positions, the company should drop 50,000. It should decide what businesses it is in and close or sell the rest. It should be a lot better than it is at running its true core – the muscle that’s been hiding beneath all that fat.

But that omits a why.
ok dude, what's your email
Oh, I think what I meant was "how the fuck" was not idiomatic English, and that what he meant to say was "what the fuck." I more meant the "proper" way to say the phrase he was referring to.
They still have people and can buy weapons with their superior economy.
This is a very good point, and one I had failed to consider.
"It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that just ain't so."

Like everything else about building software, you have to test it. Watch the logs and see where people abandon the process. If it's a problem, fix it.
X-Plane is much more accurate. It's frame rate is much higher as well. Check out the X-Plane demo: http://www.x-plane.com/demo.html

There's also an iPhone version: http://www.x-plane.com/iPhone/iPhone.html
CSS-based sites are also supposed to be better in terms of accessibility as screen readers etc. can separate out the semantically distinct parts better.

CSS layouts take some practice, and they made some design choices I'd describe as bizarre, which make your task more difficult, but now that I've got a good grasp on it, my markup is much more compact and I wouldn't want to go back.
Who cares? It was just a goof in the first place.
SUMO Paint: Online Image Editor (Photoshop-like)
You want to form the LLC in the state where you live and do all your work. There is no advantage to forming an LLC in a different state. Other business entities (S, C corp) are a different story.
How mature does their business have to be? Markus Frind (of plentyoffish.com) doesn't have an outside full-time job, but from what I hear he easily could. But the issue is not whether there are examples. The issue is that you shouldn't need to know whether an employee his a business or not. You look at their performance and nothing else. If you're right, their performance will suffer and you have reason to let them go. If you're wrong, you'll never even realize they have a business on the side. However, the converses of these two statements don't hold.
Building a Web App in 1 Hour For Promotional Purposes (IsHilarySwankHot.com)
Well HN

Hacker News?

I am a bit disappointed in this "cant be done" give up attitude.

What are you referring to?

I assure you it can and will be done.

What can be done? Orbital launch from a balloon? If the subject is orbital launch from a balloon, why did you post a link to the Wikipedia article on CU spaceflight?

I assumed you'd have the initiative to follow the links and read up on CU Spaceflight

Which links? The Martlet Project link http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~cuspaceflight/martlet.php says, "The aim of the Martlet Project is to develop a small sounding rocket system that will be launched from a helium balloon." There is nothing there about orbital launch from a balloon. Do you know what a sounding rocket is?

Please post the specific links that you think have to do with orbital launch from balloons.
It doesn't necessarily start out as a waste of time but it can become one if you spend too much time on it. I try to restrict myself to reading YC when recompiling stuff on my powerbook. At the beginning of the build I use

open -a Opera http://news.ycombinator.com

and at the end I have

open -a Opera make.out

That way the browser automatically takes me to the build output when it's time to get back to coding.
If you have the time, use CSS. For prototyping you could use tables perhaps, but for the real thing, tables are considered bad form and inflexible.
Anyone using Grails ?
Right now I'm using Php Symfony but I'm thinking seriously about switching to Grails.

Is there anyone using it in enterprise application ?
I tried to add my school, but it says my school already exists. On the main page, my school isn't listed and there is no "+Join" link on any of the schools. WTF?
In the "Vista Capable" class-action suit, Microsoft is Wile E. Coyote
CSS layouts offer a whole host of advantages over their ancient table-based brethren. Historically, there has been a lot of discussion on this, but the conversation has basically been concluded with CSS layouts overwhelmingly recognized as the best option.

A CSS layout lets your site be flexible, scalable and semantically pure. When you do a table-based layout, you're basically locked into that presentation unless you choose to overhaul all your files, and chances are good that you've also partially destroyed the semantics of your document, which ruins accessibility and can be bad for SEO. Tables were basically a layout hack that let designers solve a presentation problem for which adequate tools didn't exist; their true purpose is to display tabular data. When browser support for CSS became relatively ubiquitous, people gradually switched over because there was no longer any reason to suffer the inherent inadequacy of table-based layouts.

Once you learn the syntax and the basics of how the box model works, CSS makes everything faster, easier, and more precise. By all accounts, it's the standard for web design nowadays.

I think the proof is in the pudding though; csszengarden.com is a shining example of the benefits of CSS. Surf there, and you can select different stylesheets to be applied to the page. Same HTML, different CSS, hundreds of designs.

alistapart.com is a great resource for discussion on the benefits of web standards and how to apply them. quirksmode.org has technical tips, and w3cshools.com has quick descriptions and examples of most almost everything web-design related.
I get that too. Bug?
Adam Bosworth's classic talk on the Web as the "simple and sloppy"
France's birthday gift to 18y-olds: A subscription to the newspaper of their choice
Very cool - how do you do Java interop? Also, Java has the curse of portability so you can't assume a unix, which Arc does, I think. How has that worked out?
This is a great idea. You should do this for more celebrities.
> Microsoft would fail if all hard drive production suddenly stopped

The likelihood of "all" hard drive (or PC manufacturing) ceasing is a very different proposition than the likelihood of a single, unprofitable company taking an action that puts you out of business.

Most business rely on private 3rd parties, but there is a reason that companies work hard to have multiple sources of supply for critical goods and services.
Ask HN: Is there "security issue notification for dummies?" (I discovered a hole...now what?)
Pardon me for this question, but I recently discovered a major security issue in OpenWebmail (it gives out full access to users' mailboxes in referrer URL), and I don't know how to handle it. How should people notify security professionals about such issues?

I notified one of the providers that uses OpenWebmail about this, and I tried to find contact information on OpenWebmail website, but couldn't.

So my question is: how people outside the security community should handle important security information? Should we disclosure it? Should we notify security experts? Websites?

Maybe I did a mistake writing about it? :-) I don't know. Please educate me.

Thank you!
I'm not a lawyer, but I definitely agree you should form an LLC in your home state.

For CA, I thought forming an LLC in another state would save me $800/year. But after some research, it doesn't matter where you form your LLC. If your business is operating in California you still have to pay the $800 yearly fee.
Automobile ownership happens to be discouraged in Denmark. Naturally, people bicycle in a nation in which it is essentially illegal to own a car. http://www.google.com/search?q=denmark+car+tax
The logitech remotes are great though. You really should look into them.
http://www.giveupandusetables.com/

http://shouldiusetablesforlayout.com/
PBS interview with Warren Buffett
Are you sure you're human?
I know of an unadvertised opportunity with an extremely interesting team for a talented front-end developer/designer. HN folks can Send an email to reg@braythwayt.com for details, it isn't up on their web site yet so I'd prefer to keep the name off the web until it is public.

And in the mean time, HN readers get a head start on the opening :-)
Now Is A Good Time For Gap. Sale and recommendations from His Catalog
Cheat. Use Blueprint, from Blue Flavor, which gives you semi-semantic layout in table style using DIVs and spans. Blueprint actually gives you more layout control than tables do --- your stuff will look better --- but gets rid of almost all the CSS headaches.

Standards zealots get all up in Blueprint's face because it's fundamentally non-semantic (you end up putting presentation details in your markup). But now you're splitting hairs. If you're using Blueprint, you get to call yourself a CSS designer.
I know couple friends who are using Java applications and combine nicely with Groovy/Grails, though, as for the trends -- it's loosing it's place. I hear more and more about Scala/Lift -- but personally do not like Lift. It's not ready for the prime time (in my opinion) -- very young and productivity not even getting close to PHP/Symfony or Ruby/Rails.
Why would you choose Grails? Scala does better integration with Java. JRuby works fine in container too. Is Groovy superior language? I have doubts. Just another one. Not too popular, even.

I do not think that there is something embracing in doing PHP coding, but I would choose Zend probably. Symfony's productivity is high, but performance - in many tests it goes beyond (slow by itself, we all know that) Ruby/Rails. Zend is good, but with more flexibility it gives more chances to make mistakes. ;-)

Enterprise applications mostly run with Java, no matter what. ;-)
Be informed. Don't rely on YN only. And use it only if you can't get the same content through easier ways.
Yes but there needs to be a protocol not just a competing server.

It seems like the older internet protocol standards like SMTP work better. At least some of this generation of protocols seems to have played out in horrible ways like the IM market where one or at most 4 vendors have walled gardens and an open standard doesn't win. I guess in the early 70s when SMTP was designed there weren't a bunch of big corporations looking to "monetize" every new feature, just some bearded coding gurus in academia who wanted to build something that worked.
I've yet to read a single real-world example of a person who has a full-time employee on staff working on their own business

That they know of! It's not exactly the kind of thing most sensible people would draw attention to.
I'm not sure you read the whole article; it's mostly about how Microsoft is overstaffed, and that if you conservatively assume a 10 year average tenure for FTEs at Microsoft, they're losing a multiple of their layoff size every year just in turnover.
+1 for The Office (and the site is great, too!)
Let's see. How can I get the press to write nice things about me? Oh, I have an idea....
certainly spend as much time as you can afford to reading HN if you find it enjoyable.

the line is drawn differently for everyone, you'll have to decide for yourself what constitutes as wasteful