skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I still don't even exactly know what web 2.0 means. Though I'd guess it was a term invented to sell books/consulting services - like most stale business buzzwords.
Do Meta-Shopping Engines Find Better Deals?
Top 10 Web Platforms of 2008
if you need to support technology that brakes combaticility because you think thats the future and thats what stands between you and your productivity or success you may as well use flash which happens to be available today and cross platform.
I disagree. Doing something in a new (and curious) way is definitely a worthwhile venture (if not an accomplishment). There is a very good chance that new way can inspire other people do something the better way. New ways inspire ideas in people, which is good.
It is used everywhere so how can knowing it be a bad thing?
> [...] and very very verbose

it's possible to write compact SVG. For example, it has a simple and very compact sub-language for specifying paths (with one-letter commands):
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/paths.html#PathDataBNF

What do you mean by 'not as well supported'? SVG is supported by Firefox, Opera and Webkit (Safari / Chrome).
I'm not aware of any Browser that supports Postscript.

As for turing complete: SVG is fully scriptable with Javascript, which is turing complete and built-in in every browser.
Computer Security – Always Be On Your Guard
All of us enjoy the benefits of the latest technology, high-speed internet connection, ability to gather all kinds of information instantly, communicate with people from all over the world, online entertainment, convenient shopping, etc. The internet that has changed the entire world and our life style so much has also become one of the sources of extreme security threats.
Ok, Lets do that.

1) The anecdote about flying over Germany: Flotation might be required even if the plane were to slide into a shallow river or lake. I doesn't much matter if the water is 10 feet or 100 feet deep, drowned is drowned. I have it on good authority that Germany has rivers, even in the middle part. Flotation is always a good idea since it can sometimes be difficult to choose exactly where to have a plane crash... which brings us to:

2) The life jackets on a plane aren't stellar. They are likely barely adequate. A tradeoff was made between usefulness as a flotation device and extra weight on the plane. I hear pilots are picky about the extra weight thing. I don't care if they're ziplock bags with straws. It beats nothing at all. The fact that they're yellow and might help rescue workers see me is just an added bonus.

3) Terminal velocity is the constant maximum velocity reached by a body free-falling through the atmosphere under the attraction of gravity. Its where air resistance and acceleration from gravity are in equilibrium, producing a constant speed. This speed is much higher than the stall speed! (The stall speed being the slowest air speed above which a plane will continue flying) That's just nonsense. Why even bring it up?

4) The duck and cover isn't to protect you from the firey mother of all crashes, its to protect you from that oversized tote crammed into your overhead bin by that idiot sitting next to you during emergency maneuvers. (And, I'm told, other misc debris). I've been on a plane where we were asked to do this in preparation for what was expected to be a particularly hard landing due to a nasty crosswind and blustery conditions. In said firey mother-of-all-crashes, the final resting place of your teeth depends very little on their initial position.

Oh and, dilapidated means "run down". (Now I'll grant you, some of the folks I see hoofing it though the airport may fit this description, alive or dead...) He was likely trying for decapitated, as in "without a head". This raises the question: Is the decapitated corpse the best place to be looking for teeth for a dental match? No? Then why bother with the duck and cover?

It would be interesting to ask the guy who sent in the letter about his opinions on the grassy knoll and area 51 as well. Actually, no, on second thought, it wouldn't.

Now, if you will all excuse me, I really must go and remove my tongue from the place in my cheek where it is so firmly planted.
Does it cost twitter to receive SMS?
Just trying to get my head around twitter's SMS costs. I know it costs to send them but is it costing them each time they receive one?

Thanks HN
Hydrogen Cars
Hydrogen Cars: Is It The Future?
Knowing it might be OK, the horrible part is actually programming in that environment. It is totally locked down, you have to buy certificates and sign your applications and stuff. Without that, your application will be almost unusable (unless you only use the games APIs, which can't do much except storing high scores). Even saving a file to a directory turns into busywork for the user, as the run time system will ask for every single directory on the path if it is OK to access it... It is a bit more liberal with actions that might cost you money like dialing, sending text messages or establishing data connections (it will ask you only once), but it is still annoying.

It is a trusted (by the network operators, not by you) computing environment.
No, there are special plans for that, but also in a lot of countries (Italy for example) we never pay for receive sms or calls, so they could have a foreign plan (very common). Anyway, they may have a server that handle the traffic of the sms, and that is costing money for sure
Those guys should be in jail, not paying fines. It's too bad it took a foreign country to even levy a fine.
I think this frame is pretty exciting, even if the Chumby is more cuddly.

I was going to buy a Chumby a while back, but they never made one without leather, and I don't buy animal products, so I think the Picwing is more cuddly than the Chumby, since I don't want to cuddle with dead animal parts.

My first reaction to this video was, "Ooh, now I can finally have a totally awesome alarm clock, and it's not a leater-encased Chumby!" Unfortunately, though, I just got a nice iPod docking clock radio for Christmas from my folks, so I'm not really in the market anymore.

If it's priced at $249, I'll probably pass, since I already have too many random small computing gadgets around the house (XO, G1, DS, Chinese pirate game console portable, Wii, and several regular desktops and a laptop). But, I think for the folks who would be buying a picture frame, spending an extra $100, or so, would be a very easy decision to make. At least, if those folks buying can be made aware of the Picwing.
I assume that if cell phones were even a little likely to cause plane crashes, passengers wouldn't be allowed to carry them on planes at all.
Take a look at this: http://www.appsamuck.com/
Feed frame? Stream frame? App frame?

How about...Picwing?

If we're making up words, let's make up one that is defensible, and can be an "iPod" or a "Kleenex" or at least a "Palm Pilot" (ten years ago) or a "Blackberry", etc.
Blogs Find Favor as Buying Guides
SVG itself has no good implementations. Does SVG mobile?

Writing a specification with awesome capabilities is a lot easier than writing the software.
Some parts of SVG are supported by those browsers; other parts aren't. Generally the implementations are pretty slow and, last I checked, unstable too.
I saw this the other day: http://rhomobile.com/

"Rhomobile's open source mobile application framework Rhodes lets you quickly build mobile interfaces to enterprise applications. These are true native device applications: they work against synced local data and take advantage of device capabilities such as GPS and PIM access."

I didn't look into it much, but it might be worth your while to investigate.
Python-style colon + whitespace.
I've tried using it, and at some points it starts to break down. For example, if I want to change just one point on a path, I have to parse through the entire string instead of just setting a property to a value.
They pro-rate based on days of usage, it's not hourly billing like EC2.
I can guarantee that the CFD and FEA used to design said flying cars will be done with FORTRAN.
I don't follow any line of thinking that presumes widespread adoption of anything on the basis of HTML/CSS/JS being inconvenient or impure. As if that has ever stopped us. Time has shown that the collective energy of a million developers butting their heads up against those limitations is enough to keep things moving forward an inch at a time. The web is a messy and inconsistent place and will undoubtedly remain so for a long time to come.

As for Silverlight and AIR, well, they might taste like pumpkin pie, but I wouldn't know, etc.

( p.s. for anybody using WebKit nightlies: http://webkit.org/blog-files/animation-demo.svg )
No, Steve Dekorte is the creator of Io. I work with him on some projects (including Io).

I'm not sure about vim. I use TextMate (there is an Io bundle).
before we all argue this with our own experiences, we need to first put the "human variability" into account...
The raphael library he writes about looks interesting, it uses vml for internet explorer and svg elsewhere.

I had never heard about vml. According to wikipedia it is used by google maps as a replacement for svg in ie. That surprised me too: svg is actually being used by a very useful site.
Making of the Star Wars Holiday Special
Every self respecting nerd has seen this dud of a TV special (whether they want to admit it or not).
http://code.google.com/p/svgfig/

I just found this one.

Cheers!
The Perfect Desktop - OpenSUSE 11.1 (GNOME)
"security is a process, not a product" - Bruce Schnieir
A New Jersey Newspaper Shuns the Web, and Thrives
Why does PHP need to use crap like echo and all those dollar signs instead of something more universal?

This strikes me as a bizarre statement. What's more universal than "echo" and "$", which are found in nearly every UNIX shell? UNIX has always been the backbone OS of the Internet, thus a language designed specifically for that purpose would naturally bring along some of those conventions common to administrators experience. (Technically, it probably happened this way in PHP because of the restraints of the way PHP began, but that's not to say $ and echo wouldn't have been natural choices, even if PHP had been more ambitious early on.)

There are many things to complain about in PHP, but these two conventions were not invented for or by the PHP developers.

I get your point, of course...but when you use examples like this, picking on what is very likely the most popular language in the world for developing web applications, it just makes me think you're really saying, "Why does PHP suck?"

Why doesn't Ruby use PHP syntax? After all, if we're going to agree on syntax, shouldn't the one that the largest number of people are already fluent in be the one we choose? Should we go back to earlier languages? Should Python have gone with C-like syntax, like Perl, since C syntax is far more common? Who decides what the right syntax is for all languages to converge on?

I think I have to conclude your question is invalid.
Could someone provide more up-to-date Windows binaries of both the core and the addons?
Hi koraybalci - thanks for commenting!

I agree with you totally and echo your sentiments. There is no one absolute right way. There is a bunch of relative right ways - some more appropriate than others. Given enough vigor, perseverance, sweat, tears, luck and timing, the right team can make most things work.

The thing which quantifies how "successful" they are is the equity they walk away with. It doesn't have to be 100% (because 100% of nothing is worthless), but you sure hope it isn't so diluted to no longer be worthwhile.

I subscribe to delaying external financing as long as possible to build up the business and maximise the mileage of the equity (ie trading 10% when you have nothing costs more than 10% when you have a healthy/profitable business).
Or even, why isn't every language written using the latin alphabet?

To which an answer might be, latin doesn't support certain sounds, can't represent tones... and if it did, it would break chinese language interoperability.
http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html is a must read.

Then you should probably listen to http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Talks/SwineBeforePe... by Shriram Krishnamurthi (I've met him - He is a really cool guy). At that point you have the ammunition and the gun loaded. You just have to fire it.
Give me a break. What are you running the tomcat on? an 386? let's go back to Assembly yeii! eat some stones baby
I use http://clustered.net/ for a VPS. Pretty good, but not quite as automated as providers like slicehost.

They're in the UK.
Traumatic Brain Injury 
Scarlett Law Group, San Francisco Personal Injury: with outstanding results in cases involving traumatic brain injury, auto and trucking accidents, head injury, personal injury, catastrophic personal injuries, mass torts, medical malpractice, professional negligence, class actions, civil rights, environmental disasters and wrongful death
Designing tomorrows change .....
"money management"

Actually money management is something a lot of people miss to understand.
I suspect that this is your hypothesis, rather than your theory.
Because functional languages are a good choice for extracting as much parallelism as you can get from your algorithms.
On a hacker mailing list I subscribe to, there is a long thread going on about how crappy Flexiscale is. Regular downtime seems to be the issue.

A rep from Flexiscale did come on the thread and state they've found the bugs and will be updating their virtual server software soon.

I can't comment beyond this, but hope this helps.

Pierre
Not a problem in Safari 3.

URL 1 in Safari: http://img.skitch.com/20081222-kr2k6gwm1b8cbt3i7xqy6n5x9c.pn...

URL 2 in Safari: http://img.skitch.com/20081222-dk57nxe9epdxx9u5gt71gu1u4p.pn...

Please report security bugs at http://support.github.com - not in old Hacker News comments which may never been seen. Thanks.
The pre-college education in the US really is that bad (pg references it in one of his essays). I took a typing class in 9th grade (closest thing we had to computers in my "backwoods" school). I was typing up to around 115 wpm or so, maybe faster, but the teacher was so awful I didn't take any of her classes again until 12th grade. By then, for some reason my speed had lowered and after years of touch typing I've never got the speed back to what it was.

Lots of people remember some specific quote a teacher said that effected their life in some way. The quote I remember from this teacher was "I don't know and I don't care, I'm just here to get a paycheck".
"bug" is a very "late 90's" term for these things. I think people just accepted that they could be tracked on the internet and mostly forgot about them.
Don't forget the most important and IMO best option:
3) Do just enough busy work to get a decent grade, and don't whine about it too much.

That's my method. If I have a 100% in CS, what's the point of doing all the pointless busywork? Just relax for a month until your grade drops to a 92%, then you have to start working a bit.
The "Perfect" Desktop? This makes the assumption that everyone wants the same exact form of Desktop. I'm much happier with my tilling window manager and hodge-podge of command line applications and a few X applications, than I ever was on a traditional desktop.

Aside from the ridiculousness of the title, why is this on a social news site? This isn't anything remotely complex computer wise. This isn't even anything super interesting or providing any insight.
Seconded on Rimu. Brilliant customer service & support
Hội thảo về giải pháp thu hút du khách quốc tế đến Bình Thuận
Sharon Osbourne Height/Biography
Inventor's 2020 vision: to help 1bn of the world's poorest see better
Josh Silver was one of my tutors at university (a very smart, friendly, approachable professor).

He has indeed been pursuing this idea for a good while, quite passionately. This is one case where entrepreneurship in the western world can really help poorer countries, imho.

It's also a good example that it can take a lot of perseverance and more than just cool technology to make things happen on a large scale like this. The science to make these glasses was already pretty much done 10 years ago when I did my degree, but unfortunately it's still not widely distributed to the people who need it most.

I know there are many people on this site who are looking for interesting, socially constructive projects to back - this is certainly one of them.
Will orders be limited to US or will it be international?
I am from Canada, the land where most cool tech gadgets dont end up or are a year late :(
It depends, but the answer is probably not. Most people operate shortcodes through an aggregator (OpenMarket, mBlox, Ericson IPX) that has direct binds to all the telecom carriers in a given country.

For the most part, aggregators charge a monthly fee usually tied somewhat to system throughput. For example, OpenMarket charges $1500/mo for 10 messages per second outgoing and $20,000/mo for 100 messages per second.

On top of that, they charge for messaging. Rack rate in the US is often $.035 outgoing and $.005 incoming. At Twitter's scale, they're probably paying a fraction of a penny per outgoing message and have most incoming fees waived. Some of that is carrier specific however. T-Mobile often doesn't waive the incoming message fees.
Posterous (YC S08) launches dead simple group blogs, raises angel round
SaaS delivers return before investment
In many countries it is already common practice that poor people buy glasses on the market without any prescription. They try on several different lenses and buy the one that seems most suitable. In essence that's what the doctor does as well.
I discovered the fountainhead last year and I found it fascinating although it becomes more and more awkward as you progress. At the end it seemed to me like a journey into a sick mind, which makes it all the more interesting.

I would recommend semi-autobiographic books by sick minds.

Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, by Robert Pirsig who was actually treated by electrotherapy in a psychiatric ward. He ended up writing a not so sick book with a philosophy I find a lot more convincing than Ayn Rand's.

Valis, the novel in which Philipp K. Dick describes how he more or less fails to make sense of his religious (or whatever) experience. It's sold as science fiction, but that's just a weak way of saying that book is completely crazy. Since it is semi-autobiographic, the characters are much more alive than in anything else I read from Philipp K. Dick.

And if you want to know why Howard Roark has a low life expectancy:

Loneliness, human nature and the need for social connection, by John T Cacioppo and William Patrick. This is non-fiction.
Don't you know that 2009 is The Year Of The Linux Desktop?

LOL!
Too bad, they looked great. Thanks for the data point!
What is viral marketing?
Security surveillance systems
RSS CCTV is your headquarters for Security surveillance systems and CCTV camera. We also carry CCTV camera equipment, security cameras, Geovision & dvr.
11th grade for me seemed quite intellectual. In those 1300 hours of busy work I learned about infinite series, analytical geometry, differential calculus, basic group theory, basic linear algebra, and this is just maths. While I had to relearn most of this in college in more rigorous format, most of my intuition in maths I have from this time.
Awesome. Why is there a limit of 3 blogs per account though?

Also, is there a way to merge two existing accounts (I signed up under different emails so that I could create more than one posterous blog)?
The (derisive) saying used to be "You can write FORTRAN in any language" but you can also write Lisp in any language.

Not that I completely agree with the GP's point.
> Call me crazy
Ok, you're crazy.

The problem is, learning Perl allowed you to essentially get a fish for a day. Perl is not going to last. What you learned was essentially how to get a Rube Goldberg contraption to do what you wanted.

The symbolism in Huck Finn, however, is eternal. You can then read any great book, or look at any work of art, and understand it at a better level. What you've done is learned how to fish for yourself.
The transformation of Reddit
I've noticed a shift on Reddit in the last week or two. It's had a sense of camaraderie for many months due to the growing catalog of native memes, but lately it's become literally a lovefest. There are now several personals sections, and the snowstorms have temporarily increased posting volume. Also, the end of the year is a slow time for news, so it gives way to chatter.

And the amazing thing is the level of interaction seen. A traditional dating site has you set up a profile and browse others', which is inefficient compared to reading coherent banter until your interest is piqued and you jump into the conversation. It all takes advantage of the dynamic sorting based on voting. The less witty or sensical a comment, the further down it sinks into obscurity.

Reddit may have truly found its calling. Whereas HN is (I assume) mainly dudes interested in programming and web apps, some older and in stable relationships, Reddit brims with eager singles ready to hook up.

I know kn0thing reads here, and my suggestion to you would be to spend a week or two trying to make this into a real feature. Have a checkbox for "single", have a form for basic demographics (sex, age, location, orientation), and structure the site so even more people can hook up. I'm not sure how keen the folks at Conde Nast, a news organization, would be, but you don't get many opportunities like this. Otherwise, some clever hacker is going to jump in and use the Reddit user base to his own advantage.
expected. congrat!