skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the "what the office uses camp". Interestingly, you like Windows primarily due to the manageable power that it gives you over other people ('s computers). Fixing the user experience at the expense of centralized control would not be an improvement to you (but it probably would be to your users).

BTW, having worked IT I fully agree with you. Mac OS X has a good notion for how one might manage groups of computers (NetInfo), but it isn't as pervasive at the application level and so it isn't as powerful.
You are right, it is a pretty confusing process. Here is the best docs I could find on the topic. You basically setup your domain first with Google Apps for your domain. Then you link the Google Apps for your domain account with your Google App Engine project. The additional issue is that you can't map naked domains (http://domain.com) to Google App Engine directly. Instead you have to do that within your DNS provider (I set it up in GoDaddy).

http://knol.google.com/k/larry-h/google-apps-discussion-grou...
DC is regularly one of the top 3 school districts in the country in terms of per pupil spending. I don't think you would want to send your children there.

There are fundamental incentive problems with public monopolies. When you have a group of dedicated, wealthy, involved parents, these negative incentives can be overcome. However, the system fails your average person, and it surely fails those who need the most help even when a lot of money is spent on them.

Those of us who advocate market reforms simply want the incentives of the system to be a help, rather than a hindrance. But we're radical right-wing nazis who hate children and eat puppies, so I don't think our plans are going to be implemented any time soon.

Also, it's funny that we are characterized that way in the United States, when such right-wing countries as Sweden and the Netherlands already have universal school vouchers that can be spent on private schools.
Who is working on a compressed air scooter?
Good Article. 2009 will be cloudy. That is for sure.
Flagged. This ain't Reddit.
There are two possibilities when you pick door 1: either you've picked a door with the prize behind it (33%) or you've picked a door with a goat behind it (67%).

Assume you stick. In that case, you have a 33% chance you've picked the right door, as before. Opening another door doesn't change whether you've picked the right door or not originally.

Assume you switch. In the case you've picked a door with a goat originally (67%), you will necessarily switch to the door with the prize. In the case you've picked a door with the car originally (33%), you will necessarily switch to a door with a goat. Therefore switching gives you a 67% chance of picking the door with the prize.

Another interesting strategy to consider is "randomize" - what if you picked randomly between the two remaining doors? Then you'd have a 50% of getting the prize, since you're selecting randomly between two doors, one of which you know contains the prize.
Well Denmark has it easy. It's full of Danes. We have lots of new immigrants and people climbing up from underclasses which don't have a tradition of educational excellence. That part of the solution will take time.

Edit: Let me clarify. Denmark has a small homogeneous well educated population. I would expect that the parents take an intense interest in their children's education resulting in high achievement. In contrast in California we have a much more diverse population with a large proportion of recent immigrants. The parents are not well educated themselves and the kids are struggling because of poor English. This makes it difficult to have a high achieving school system. Sure wealthy communities have excellent schools and can attract the best teachers, but the poorer districts can't. This is not a racial or ethnic problem; it's economic.
I am not insulting Phil Greenspun. But do you know how many personal political manifestos are on the internet? What are the chances that this one will be more valuable than average?

I read through the first page or so, it didn't seem like it was going to offer any new or interesting ideas. And that's fine. Phil can post his opinions on his web page all he wants. It's a free country. I just don't think it should be the #1 story on the front page, or that it will engender good discussion.
Parcourir la catégorie Alertes et mises à jour: Modules pour Firefox
I think that the dynamics of the latest bubble burst had more to do with psychology, sociology and the moral questions of old than economics, and increasingly people are viewing it that way. What we're dealing with is to a large extent an emotional phenomenon. Trust has flown out, fear has arisen, panic has set in, assumptions are being reanalyzed, and blame is being placed.
Student's startup promises fast Internet speeds even with dial-up connections
I started www.FlyingCart.com its good if you want to create your own online store. It is not a market place like ebay or etsy. We also don't take a cut of their sales.
Although I agree that Etsy is the best for this particular situation, Shopify is great for larger-scale sales. We're filling 500-1000 orders per month with their software and having no major issues, except for quibbles about missing features. And since they have an API we can't really complain too loudly.
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=DaniFong

http://www.google.com/search?q=danifong+scooter

http://lightsaildesigns.com
This sounds fantastic- congrats!
Ask HN: how fast can you create a CMS for the Web?
Please include the basic features, platform (along with framework if applicable, if not include language/s), order of operations (this part is most important), and how long it took.
But, then you've got to keep track of this "private key" thing that's completely intangible to users. What happens when they switch machines? What about when they accidentally format their hard drive? I think having a physical USB dongle would really be the way to go. Plug it in wherever you are, swipe your finger to unlock it. You've got two-factor right there in a simple, easy package. Now all we need is an operating system and environment that would support such a device...
Can iStanford Take on Facebook Mobile?
Current top comment on the blog is a good one:

"Keep your mistakes cheap."
Twitstat Study: BlackBerry Users Are Totally Addicted To Twitter
I agree the little chuckle is pretty dumb, but it points to an important discussion for technology people: how do we do AAA in a way that actually works? OpenID and Facebook Connect seem like good steps to me, but we're not there yet. So many web apps totally ignore AAA and just throw some pre-packaged solution with it's super-amazing-secure 256-bit salted hash and walk away. There's opportunity for innovation in this space. The bash.org quote is just to get the discussion started and highlight the pathetic state of things.
A gentle reminder that RAID doesn't make offsite backups
Assumptions:
They have limited funds. They lack the ability make a presentable site based on one of the many open source commerce platforms. Their lack of skill (and presumably cash, too) prevents them from gaining traction with Google Adwords and/or equivalent(s).

This leaves public marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon, Overstock, Etsy, etc.

eBay and Etsy sound like the best options. Etsy will be good because of its focus on small, handcrafty items. eBay will be good because of the sheer size of its user base. I don't have any experience with Etsy, but I'm assuming it is similar to eBay in many ways. The key to success with eBay is to not just pick what you want to sell and list it and hope for the best. Instead you need to spend time analyzing how other people are selling identical and similar items. What are they titling them? When are they scheduling the auctions? Are they bundling multiple items? How long are their auctions? Fixed price? eBay store?

Analyze the hell out of your competition, and experiment. You can use one of the bulk listing and schedule management tools like Turbo Lister, but you'll likely want to record information in Excel (or equivalent) and start parsing what's going on. The improvement yielded by careful analysis and experimentation over simply listing what you want to sell is tremendous. The people who succeed on eBay by selling a lot of items have optimized their strategy based on detailed research. They don't simply use custom html templates for their auctions, and diligently respond to customer inquiries. They analyze everything to death and adjust their methods based on what they learn from their extensive analysis.
ah yes, selling Christmas ornaments in January. Business will be so hot it doesn't matter what website she uses.

But seriously, I don't know much on the topic, but ebay will almost certainly get them the most views. A lot of people use just the buyitnow feature, so they get all of the traffic of ebay but are selling for a set price.

Main drawback is that they probably take a bigger cut than other sites.
sounds interesting. maybe it has legs.

This part does not:
"Like Napster, this can be used extremely badly with the wrong technology," he said. "Right now we have a user agreement that holds each user accountable for copyrighted material. ... The way we have it structured, there are only certain things people will be able to share. It's like an honor system among the users."
Mostly it's the administration. Somebody was hosting Trac on her Joyent shared account and didn't want to go through the hassle of moving it, much less continuing to maintain it. Plus we had no GitHub integration. Of course, that's a pretty easy fix, but somebody's gotta actually go and upgrade it.
I'm not sure he's doing enough about entitlements. Even if taxes were lowered and the social security age pushed back a few years, we're still going to be eaten alive in 20 years, or so it appears to a lot of people.
"Besides empirical studies show that a good education system requires considerable public investment, and thus a larger percentage of GDP spent on government."

Citations to the studies, please?
"licked"? How does 37 Signals(!) have any chance at scaling beyond the relatively tiny business they have now?
Agreed. It should be obvious from Twitter by now that folks like building services. It would take a few days of engineering to create "temporary" logins these services could use.
"What our software does is creates a 'virtual desktop,' so your Internet connection isn't used to actually download a file," Pronovost said. Instead, the file is stored "out there" on Microsoft's massive servers. So when a user logs onto his or her Powerband account, the Internet connection merely views the movie or runs the files - much faster than downloading.

wow. what? viewing a movie isn't the same as downloading it?
"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the ever expanding bureaucracy." -- Quoted from Civ 4 (and google didn't find me a source straight away)
Bad News for Workers Is Good News for LinkedIn
I mainly wanted to submit this because I liked the quote: "LinkedIn is the office, Facebook is the barbecue in the backyard, and MySpace is the bar"
plase don't paste paywall stories - your uni may have blanket access but the rest of us don't
I've seen it before. Sometimes it's actually not bad at all (person A takes over posting to person B's mailing list), and sometimes it's horrible (selling the email addresses for your webapp to spammers).
and having a girlfriend as opposed to paying the usual hooker?
I'm considerably more familiar with countries that have great innovation and great economic growth without unionized teachers. So how do we tease out the effects of unionization? What kinds of contracts do the teachers have in each country, and what kinds of choices do the parents have if the local school down the street isn't helping their children learn?

See Choice of Schools in Six Nations

http://www.amazon.com/schools-nations-Netherlands-Belgium-Br...

(published as a United States government document in the 1980s) for more information about Europe than I know personally.
200 PS3's Break VeriSign's SSL
"You have a point, but unfortunately, the only discipline which claims any real insights into fixing the economy is economics."

I've asked this question recently here on HN,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=415683

so I'll follow up in this thread. What would you recommend someone read who wants to learn something more about economics?
Or on-site backups, for that matter.
Ask HN: Best HN threads in '08?
There was a ton of hacker news in 08.
What were your favorite threads?
"The 'good' schools would then be overrun with perspective students, requiring a selection procedure to determine who to accept."

Are you saying that no other school could learn anything from the better schools? The "good" grocery stores don't have to sell admission tickets, because other grocery stores learn their techniques in a free market.
An obvious overcomplicated interface is still an overcomplicated interface.
No, _people_ are putting people's passwords at risk ;) That said, I completely agree. Especially sad since Blaine Cook was involved with creating the first Ruby implementation of the protocol, more than a year ago.
I think it largely has to do with time. It was easier to not get "turned around" by this sort of thing when we started. It was back in 2000 and I was 26, with no kids. Plus, we lived in an inexpensive city. I gave up a good job, but that was all.

I'm now 35 have a second child on the way, and don't spend nearly as much time with my family as I'd like. My partner and I have been working on our businesses for 9 years. That's almost a decade of consistent 70+ hour work weeks and 4:50 am wake-up calls.

I have peers who take holidays with their kids, have two weeks off at Christmas, and own houses. I love being an entrepreneur work, and have no intention of changing anything. That being said, I must note that I’m sometimes envious of those who have more time to spend with their kids.

My dad's a marathoner. He often remarks that the first few kilometers seem easy, but that there are some really hard bits after that. With time, doubt can become more powerful, and you have to work harder to keep it under control, no matter how focused you think you are.

I suppose the thing that I'm finding is that the longer you're in the game, the easier/harder it seems to get. Some things are certainly better, and you learn a lot, but the cost of your decisions sometimes seems different too.
10 karma points to the first person who can find an article with at least 7 of the same predictions from 2007; 11 points for 2006, 12 points for 2005.

What's that, you say? Virtualization is a big deal in the enterprise? Fascinating! Intrusion detection? You don't say?
I don't mean to be rude, but I've seen horseshit that had less horseshit in it.

Anyone else reminded of "Adam's Platform"?
"However, these reassurances come from many of the same economists who said that a nationwide fall in American house prices was impossible and that financial innovation had made the financial system more resilient. Hopefully, they will be right this time."

I hope they are learning something from current events.
Ask HN: What is the best way to promote your new fancy web application? (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341138)

Ask YC: What would you tell your younger self? (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=372573)
oh come on, it wasn't that bad. At least it wasn't as bad as that darth vader management secrets article that's also on the front page.
Which languages do HN readers know of that already have predictive texting? Traditional Chinese script (and presumably "simplified" Chinese script) has had it since the turn of the century, at least.
"Obviously there was a time when nobody used Windows, so what made them buy it before it was "what everyone uses"?"

It just came with their IBM compatible PC. Oh yeah, and it ran their software.
Google have a made big step in the right direction, ten years ago Bill Gates promised us a Windows version running on every appliance, Android looks closer then Windows Mobile to achieve that goal.

Android looks like a good platform for small devices, it runs on a linux kernel (which makes it cheap), and the application layer is implemented in a Virtual Machine (Which makes it more stable and secure).

We shouldn't try to compare netbooks applications to desktop applications. Netbooks should come cheap, which mean they are down on resources, but on the other hand they can come with features that are missing on a desktop (3G embedded card e.g.). Its a matter of time until Android devices would be Office enabled (If the S60 can do it, then Android for sure) which is for me a big hurdle that Google needs to cross. Other then that its all a matter who can come up the right applications that will make the netbooks a valid market (A lack of applications is what drove down the Tablet PC market, in my view anyway).

One more thing, since the Android API is Java like and straight forward (my opinion again), the amount of web based applications converted into native code is currently one of the main drives for building Android applications. As cool as it is this is not enough to make the Android ground braking platform.
Start here: http://www.ninsight.at/tsunami/howitworks.shtml
Reasons Tech Products Fail
I really have a hard time imagining someone I actually wanted to "hook up" with ever using a site like this.

In fact, I'd be surprised if a single female signed up for this.
It almost sounds like he's talking about "lazy evaluation" of downloads. But when is it the case that you download something you don't immediately intend to use?
Needs a lot of work, to say the least.
the first thing I'll do is download all the movies on piratebay... then they'll have to rethink that strategy. Technically, they can't come after the user because the user doesn't own the file, it isn't on the user's machine, and the user hasn't viewed the file yet. Seems like a quick way to tank a company.
Not even a dev server or QA server with some version of the database? Not even a one-off manual backup from ages ago? nothing?

Pretty amazing.
Honestly the bandwidth on HN is pretty low. You still have huge advantages if you're meeting or working with someone in person. Written communication is different though. Like photographs, sometimes the snapshots of written thought are more expressive than the moving, interactive thing.
Who's Hiring? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375410

Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250704

How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=338286

I'm out, baby http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=300960

Start a side project, says GitHub founder http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=282158

Balsamiq hits $100,000 in revenue http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=364254
I find it funny that pretty much everyone with an opinion on the matter wishes IE would just die already, yet the thousands of companies who still use it won't do anything to help make that happen. I guess most corporations are just masochistic or something.
In my mind, a web-app requires interaction... otherwise it is just a website.

Now, the website can be backed by a rails-app, but to call this an app bit much. In my mind, it's a dynamically generated website.
DC spends more on administrative costs and less in the actual classroom than most other school districts.

The fact that DC's money is misspent does not automatically mean that the problem isn't money. And sure, one good way to raise money for the DC school system would be to streamline their administration.
Again: there's more to the funding situation than this factoid. It remains entirely likely that our schools are underfunded, in which case all you're pointing out is one of the causes of that underfunding (that school administration is sapping funds needed for teachers and classrooms).
Ask HN: Insurance?
Do those of you that have an internet service site for the public or for businesses have insurance to protect you against claims made if people lose data online or data is hacked and becomes public (or anything else similar?)

Thanks!
raid 1 mirroring is pretty much only used to prevent downtime. So if your hard drive physically screws up, you still have all the boot sectors intact on the other drive so even a restart wouldn't kill you. I only use mirroring on disks with spinning platters, for solid state I just ignore mirroring. Solid state can go bad, but not as easily as magnetic metal spinning at 7200 times a minute.
Ask HN: light mathematical/scientific reading with computer exercises?
I'm looking for books that discuss neat topics in math or the sciences which are oriented around computer experimentation.

One examples of such books are The Computational Beauty of Nature. Another is From Calculus to Chaos. A third I've recently enjoyed is Daniel Ashlock's book on evolutionary computation.

I also tremendously enjoyed Steve Skiena's "Calculated Bets", which discussed his use of mathematical modelling to gamble on jai alai with real money.

Any other suggestions?

No dry theorem-proof-theorem-proof-lemma-proof stuff like the kind I suffered through in college, I tried reading that in my spare time outside of classes and I failed miserably.
Can we not use shorthand from a blog post where well-established terminology already applies? Almost any fallacy you'd like to point out in someone else's argument here is better explained in the Nizkor list.
You need to recognize that he's coming from an aviation background, where multi-million dollar awards against parts manufacturers for pilot-judgment accidents were routine, and in fact did chase businesses (both manufacturers and service centers) out of the business as they couldn't afford liability insurance.
We'll probably find out more about this stuff in the coming year as Popeye falls into the British public domain ( http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertai... ). Pass the popcorn, this should be good.
Let me paint a picture for you:

You've been slaving away for 6 months on a site you believe will change the world (because everyone believes their shit will change the world). You're finally ready to launch - you painstakingly paid attention to every little detail to make sure your site is perfect/viral/fills a need/etc. You're finally ready to take on all those users.

And on day one, your traffic is crap (or, if your selling a product, you maybe make 1 sale if you're lucky). Ok, not bad you tell yourself. Things will pick up.

3 months later, your traffic is flat (or, if your selling a product, you've make 1% of the number of sales your business plan said you would).

You don't think you'd freak out just a little bit? You don't think you'd have just a little bit of self-doubt in your site/product/idea to make you want to stop?

I know Tipjoy is probably pretty successful, so it's hard to visualize, but trust me, it happens.
Facebook Defends Its Turf, Sues Power.com
At best, this is poor journalism. At worst, a badly misguided company.

> "Downloading that [10 GB] movie onto a "virtual desktop," Pronovost said, would take about 10 seconds."

Really?? I can't even transfer 10 GB onto a flash drive quite that fast.

After finding the following on their website, I don't think I can take them seriously:

"Pronovost diagramed the internet structurally and found the low and high parts of the internet. He concluded by implementing the technology that he had diagramed. He hypothesized that not only would internet speeds be faster than fiber-optics but it would surpass speeds faster than 6gbps, the previous world record for the fastest internet, called “Internet 2” which was created by a network of students at Ivy league colleges."