skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think going into messaging at all would be extremely risky and you'd need to have a really fantastic product and a clever business plan to make it profitable. The space is already dominated by free options - all of which are funded by giant companies that make their revenue on other products.

The only paid client I know of is Trillian Pro. They've been around for quite a while but I have a feeling it's a small company with low overhead. It would be interesting to know what percentage of their revenue comes from the paid pro version vs the ad-supported free version.
>> Supposedly we are related to monkeys in 98% genetically wise, but yet monkeys still have their children. They don't give birth to human.

Wow! If your understanding of evolution boils down to "great monkeys of old begat humans", well peace bro... Long live the USofA!
Bangladesh travel package
Microsoft to repair Internet Explorer fault discovered at hacking contest
The reward is a successful project. Would you chip in $50 bucks to help someone build some interesting widget that otherwise wouldn't get built?
I think the idea was more: "too many" taxis hit the streets, and while they make a living wage, traffic doesn't move. In fact, as a taxi driver, with a time-based meter, traffic congestion may not decrease wages at all. Given the density of Manhattan, it wouldn't surprise me if there was more demand for taxis than the road system could support (I'm not saying that's true, I don't have the data, just that it's a third factor besides supply and demand).
http://www.noob.us/humor/the-office-dwight-faces-nerd-tortur...

Who's smarter the boss or Dwight?

God says...

49:24 Damascus is waxed feeble, and turneth herself to flee, and fear
hath seized on her: anguish and sorrows have taken her, as a woman in
travail.

49:25 How is the city of praise not left, the city of my joy! 49:26
Therefore her young men shall fall in her streets, and all the men of
war shall be cut off in that day, saith the LORD of hosts.

49:27 And I will kindle a fire in the wall of Damascus, and it shall
consume the palaces of Benhadad.

49:28 Concerning Kedar, and concerning the kingdoms of Hazor, which
Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon shall smite, thus saith the LORD; Arise
ye, go up to Kedar, and spoil the men of the east.

49:29 Their tents and their flocks shall they take away: they shall
take to themselves their curtains, and all their vessels, and their
camels; and they shall cry unto them, Fear is on every side.
Everyone is saying "nothing", but I reviewed the patches (I did /not/ bother watching the video, however, as it was long and I was in a place where I felt uncomfortable playing sound; so maybe the video says "we didn't do anything" ;P), and what they did is to remove all of the non-strict pointer aliasing (one of C's optimization weaknesses) and thereby were able to kick the optimizer up to -O3, which is helping some already tightly-coded algorithms actually avoid touching memory.
If you fire well enough, you don't have to worry so much about recruitment. You can either fire well or hire well, ideally both, but it can't be neither.
A business exists for the benefit of its customers, and so do the jobs at that business. The health of a good business is a reflection of how well it serves its customers--and I'd say the kind of business that is healthy despite failing its customers is not only probably evil, but more likely than not needs to fire a lot of people, starting at the top.
The problem with "more money" is that the educational system seems to have a sort of hull speed when it comes to adding money.

I'd guess that the same or less is being spent on actual education today and the excesses, whatever they may be, are simply siphoned off by the parasites in the system.

It doesn't seem to matter how much $ per student gets added, teachers still end up buying classroom supplies with their own money. The system just has more $180k "administrators" now than it used to.
Those taking offense are on too much of a hair-trigger.

Take it in context:

• This is in Norway, a very gender-egalitarian place (but also more open to sexual topics). They have the confidence to understand – and shrug off – things that are meant as goofy jokes, even if, when forwarded to a different context for the specific purpose of triggering a reaction, some can then find offense.

• The music is definitely in the style of the (big-in-northern-Europe) band 'Scooter'. (A commenter at Geeklist implies it is Scooter, I think it's just in their style.) That style is over-the-top, self-parodying. (See for example the music video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KL5bw6Mbho which mixes the lyrics of a campy 1979 european disco hit, acid-trip religious imagery, topless revelers, rapper braggadocio, a cryptic shout-out to art/music-pranksters The KLF, and a key quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince. Yes, The Little Prince!) No one familiar with the style would take any word of it more seriously than a Stephen Colbert monologue. (When Colbert in character says something 'offensive', is it really 'offensive'?)

• Even so, I've watched it twice and can't find any implication that all developers are male. The lead voice in the song is male (and speaks the 'penis' line about himself) but the chorus auto-tuned voice is vaguely feminine and the dancers seem to represent 'developers' and are (mostly?) women.

• It's in a nightclub/danceclub, kicking off the conference party. Almost certainly alcohol was being served. Topics wander a bit from the button-downed professional voice at such events... in fact that's the very reason to have such events. Crude jokes about body parts aren't for everyone, but they are likely to come up in nightclubs and in spoofy music lyrics. If they're not specifically denigrating anyone they're harmless and non-exclusionary.
Dude your service is awesome! I signed and loved it. I also think the UI is kick ass!
I'm perfectly happy with your average Redditor thinking HN is not a worthwhile destination. While there might be a grain of truth in the accusation of our tendency to sometimes argue over small details, I have learned a tremendous amount from the discussions I've had here, not only about the subjects covered but about how to form well thought out arguments. Discussions on other sites rarely maintain civility long enough to prove useful in that manner.
ProFontX is the monospace font I have been using for the past few years. It has served me well, although I also do love the default Monaco.

http://faisal.com/software/profontx/
Hello Kitty Reddit Roommate Prank Turns Manly Computer Into Sparkly Creation
How to create and design an optin box for your website
Optin is very important in lead generation. It lets you capture your clients contact information.

200dollarsite will help you create and design a simple optin for your business
Discussing hashes internally with Commander Adams, among the reasons we use unsalted hashes for internal passwords was that Google Mail for Domains (with which we use an SSO tool) doesn't work with salted hashes.

Or should I be siccing Krell monsters on the good Commander again?
Thanks for the comment. Yeah, you're right, it's just something you can come up with researching tv tropes. Basically it's like the story teller's technical manual, and again, being annoyed at stupid characters will be something you fix by reading tv tropes.

In some fringe cases you want the reader to "get the idea" before the characters do.

One reason is to annoy them and create stress, which is often used in thrillers, where you can see exactly the character's going to die.. or are they? Yep, thrilling.

Another one is to give the reader a feeling of "superiority", in the meaning of seeing a grander scheme of things. By making this level of reasoning fairly predictable you can use this as fundament and build more complicated meaning on top of it.
If Medallion simply represent a permission to drive a taxi, it should be virtualized. It mean replace the physical object with a soft-state of a taxi. By doing that drivers can form a team of taxis that roam around the city and assume "medallion" state only when they provide service to the customers. It would increase the utilization of the medallions to 100%. (more like threads competing for the processor)

That way, for example 5 drivers can lease 3 medallions and pay less to gain the same profits.
Interesting, that is a great point - doesn't this make it a diving bell technically then?
UN Proposes GLOBAL TAX on Internet communications [Leaked Documents]
Android updates embarrassing, but do users notice?
Completely agreed. It's basically the 'buy it for life mentality'. But a very high quality product once, take good care of it, use it for life. No more crappy throw away culture.

If it's any indication of that being a budding trend, there's even a subreddit for it:

http://reddit.com/r/buyitforlife
Yeah. Now that I live in the city, I am perfectly comfortable saving $35 and just take the bus. Slow, but I'd just be reading my book in the terminal anyway.
Mailinator has an interesting approach to solving the problem , to my taste it's not as simple to use as Air Mail but 1 and 2 are a big plus i must admit. I will see how to add these.

Number 4 I didn't understand what you meant.
My own personal attitude is that I'd prefer having independent, unlinked accounts among various service providers, for which I use long, randomly generated passwords.

My risk from any given service is relatively low. My passwords are strong enough (trillions to quintillions of years brute-forcing time per the online calculator's I've checked -- with similarly constructed passwords, not my actual ones, natch) that risk of bruting a hashed key is low, and I don't re-use passwords. For services that store passwords in cleartext (still fairly common practice on mailing lists), no big loss either.
> With a little bit of retrospection, this seems to be one of the most powerful factors separating the films I've liked from those I haven't.

In light of what I said above, it's not surprising the top commenter didn't like movies where menial work has not been performed. It's basic housekeeping. If that is missing, I can easily see a lot of other stuff missing too. Impossible coincidences are a symptom of illness, there are many other symptoms too.
I'm amazed at how many HN readers have turned out to also be sword fighting experts! :)
I've been a human for most of my life, and from what I can tell, this is a pretty typical reaction to losing all your possessions in a foreign country.
Yes, pretty much. If I look at analytics for Spades there are around 77% returning visitors, but I'm pretty sure they originally came through Google, since the sites aren't really advertised anywhere. They're linked from my own site, and I got one site that has card games rules to link to some of them, but that's it. They're not linked from any gaming sites or anything.
Sounds like they're not looking to bootstrap a business that would produce a return on investment. Instead of making a commercially viable game, they're talking about founding a platform and cultivating a market for sword fighting games.
> "that's not what you said. You said it was NSFW"

Yes, and that's what I said a second time as well: "could certainly qualify as NSFW in some work settings". I even described such a setting, which is where I actually worked -- in a public school classroom. You say it's ludicrous to call it NSFW; I say it's ludicrous to think a teacher wouldn't face immediate firing if an elementary student saw that image on his screen.

But I didn't just say it was NSFW; I said it was unnecessary, which is what I clarified in the comment you now take umbrage at.

> "Trying to whip up a storm"

what I initially said was "seems a bit unnecessary to make the TV image NSFW"; that's hardly an attempt to whip up a storm. More like a gentle reminder that people making webpages, as well as those linking to webpages, should carefully consider the content, as some part of the audience may work in environments where "women in lingerie" on your screen is a firing offense.

The only reason it got "stormy" is because you deemed it necessary to suggest there must be something wrong with me (that is, you made a personal attack) because I've worked in settings where that image would be NSFW, and therefore incentivized me to clarify.

> "you just assume the author of the page is a guy."

There's a picture of the person who made the page at the bottom of the page, named Brendan Charles Chilcutt. It's possible I've misidentified the gender of that individual, but it's unlikely.

> " Because, y'know, only guys can make web pages, and only guys would read hacker news!"

This is one of those pointless cheapshots you can only get away with on HN if you come into a thread five days after everyone else left (I wouldn't have even seen this comment if I hadn't happened to be looking through some history for an unrelated comment.) So, as long as we're dropping pointless cheapshots days after everyone else has left: my wife not only reads HN, she's got 5 times as much karma as you do. Also, since you seem to think [0] time on the site is important, we've both been here considerably longer than you. So maybe you would do well to calm down, take a chill pill, and pay attention instead of getting all upset over a suggestion from someone who used to work in an elementary school that certain types of images are both unnecessary and unsafe in certain work environments.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4073974
OMG. Seriously. I am going to go make a pitch for VC money. Thankyou.
Thanks. I used to pretty paranoid about the source, running it through my own obfuscator that changed pretty much every identifier to a $nr, but that kept giving me problems, and in the end I figured there aren't really any secrets in the source, so no it's just minified with the disclaimer that you can't republish it as is, although you're free to use it for inspiration.
National Academy of Sciences: Microbial life could survive on Mars
This. And try downloading a driver to run a HP printer and you will be forced to download a 750 MB "HP Digital Solution" crapware.

Thats why I avoid HP printers.
Toxic Pattern:
1. Government Restricts the resource artificially
2. Sells the rights to that resource to private owners permanently.
3. The resource owners exploit the population by the scarcity and protects the laws that protects their interests.

How many such patterns can we find in the US ? It should be cataloged.
Some great suggestions here, but I find the best method for me is to just crank some music, down a couple swigs of coffee and dive in. About 95% of the time the issue isn't about getting stuck partway through, or approaching the problem wrong, it's about getting through the first ten minutes of work. Resistance crumbles after that and motivation and focus kick in to full gear.
Sadly, that's not the way it's being marketed to the masses of developers. You're talking about what seems to be a technical detail to someone who's been corporate-brainwashed by the apple reality distortion field (maybe they're keeping Jobs in stasis in order not to lose it?). Then, SURPRISE!!! it's not such a technical detail after all, apple has tricked you so! It's like a surprise birthday party, except your gift is a burning bag of dog poo.

Typical corporate trickery. The reason a lot of people fall for it is because they have an open mind (definitely advocated by Apple) and therefore are gullible (definitely wanted by AAPL).

Having written something somewhere doesn't make you less of an asshole for handling in a dirty, asocial way.
University education has been going up at 10%/year for decades now. Way above inflation.

It is clear that it is going on an internal dynamic until those dynamics finally conflict with reality. That collision will be..painful. Given the crushing levels of student debt in this country it may happen sooner rather than later.

If I were in charge, I'd institute a simple change. Improve financial aid. Beef up the federal loan guarantees. Only make either available at schools whose tuition was in the bottom 70% when you applied. With that incentive, I think that a lot of schools would find ways to reduce tuitions towards what (inflation adjusted) was more than sufficient several decades ago.
OS X on Intel, as told by the engineer's wife
I'm assuming there will be competition among the companies who develop such software where, periodically, schools will re-evaluate their provider and select the best one. Company A will demonstrate their competitive advantage by showing how Company B's software incorrectly grades as "Excellent" an essay that looks like English but reads as gibberish.

Company B will correct their software, but meanwhile Company C has come along and introduced a sophisticated analyzer which is able to grade the presence and quality of the logical argument being made in the essay. Company C will demonstrate how Company A and B's software grades as "Excellent" an essay which is correct English and isn't gibberish but makes no logical sense.

After an indeterminate number of iterations with the software getting better and better at finding issues, the only way to game it will be to write a great essay.
sometimes it's so good to listen to your feeling. I switched from meebo to other chat services very, very long ago.
I've opened an issue for this at:
https://github.com/WindowsAzure/node-sqlserver/issues/17

Cheers,
Will they? They already have GTalk. To me it looks like they just wanted to take out competition.
I think because of it's age, the pitfalls and limitations of the language may be more well understood, so it may suffer from a sort of 'grass is greener' effect.
Indeed; incredibly difficult to master keyboard controls though. For those interested, gog.com sells it still:

http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/die_by_the_sword_expansion
If most employers were making the outrageous demands the article author does, I'd perpetually be out of work.
Well, IRC and email might exist longer then you are old now... (guessing that a lot of people here will be around 20 years old)
On the front page of a website named Hacker News, there is a link saying that people should learn to code?

Excuse me, but shouldn't we expect hackers to already know that (or at least be knee deep in Thinking in Java or it's like)?
Any idea if the new version will use a mini-dp port for the thunderbolt output? I think that might be a bit unreasonable for such a platform where the connector needs to be fairly robust? I can imagine a lot of those hanging by the cable.
This year has been an exciting one from the very start!

I've had several successful (read: awesomely profitable) new ventures this year, such as an ad network that I established and sold to a private party for a solid 5 figure amount within a month.

On one of my more established networks, I was able to grow the unique impressions by over 100k a day within 2 weeks of focusing on it. I also established a domain parking system that already has over 500+ domains parked on it and growing quickly.

During a random latenight coding session, I created a unique new channel/model of selling category related emails to advertisers bidding on a CPM basis real-time, and lining up another venture to integrate with this platform.

These are but a few of the cool things currently being worked on by myself and my growing staff. Hoping to be hiring on more talent on soon and probably getting a swanky office in La Jolla, CA soon.

Have some pretty exciting plans for the year!
His 'evidence' seems to have been fairly thoroughly debunked all around.
I've never actually scripted with VBA but I have looked at the VBA environment. Does using IronPython mean basically giving up that environment? Is that environment (easy form creation with point and click event code attachment) important for VBA devs? It has certainly always looked compelling but since I'm not a VBA dev I have no idea.
Red light coming up in the back of my head. Wouldn't the MD5->scrypt pipeline expose new attacks that scrypt doesn't have? Maybe there's a higher collision probability or some known-text attack, but I'm really shooting in the dark here.
Been available in perl for years.
Founder of Drupal - Why PHP and not Java?
Geeks on a Plane is doing an Eastern European tour...and the president of Croatia personally appealed to them to make a stop in Zagreb.
Maybe cartridges are full size physically, but are not filled with the same amount of ink.
CNET is Apple's b*tch, remember.
It is interesting to note that Brother and Kodak didn't even seem to put a dent in the market leaders with their "rational" business model.
An interesting insight into a culture that normally has a reputation for being far ahead of the curve in adopting new technologies.

Also kind of makes me think about how there must be a lot of software, and a lot of code out there written in other languages that has no real visibility in the west at all. Interesting thought.
That's why PostScript was invented. All you need is the PPD (if that).
It refers to the controversy started a few months ago by NYC mayor Bloomberg saying people should learn to code, and then Jeff Atwood insisting the opposite (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/05/please-dont-learn-t...), and the countless follow up blog posts debating the issue
> I imagine any one small-claims proceeding would cost them several hundred dollars at least.

Yes, but it would also cost that much to everyone suing. Would you lose a day of work (Say, $20/transport + ~$150 if you're make $40K a year, ~$400 if you're around $100K) to recover $10, even if you knew you had 100% chance of winning?

Almost no one would. (And almost no one does)
I'm not sure they would force new transactions to use the new hashing algorithm. Bitcoin uses scripts (a little state machine) to embed verification behaviors directly into the blockchain. You could only introduce the new hashing algorithm to the protocol, and by natural incentive to upgrade (more security), expect more transaction outputs to use it. I'm not sure the Bitcoin developers would force clients to ignore certain hashing algorithms -- scripts can be very dynamic and the smaller the hashes are, the cheaper they are to add to the blockchain.
Steve Keen: Why 2012 is Shaping Up to be a Particularly Ugly Year
For reference, the iphone4 has a 264 dpi display so we have come a long ways in the last few years since this article.
Would it be super hard (and, illegal) to port upper iOS layers as binaries?
I have to put my vote in for Dan Bricklin's Note Taker HD (for iPad). I've taken close to 100 pages of notes with it. It's great for packing lots of info onto one page, and it's very versatile.
I have a relative who owns a townhouse in Brooklyn. When they bought their place, they got a substantial discount because it came with a couple of un-evictable tenants who were paying under $100/mo in an area that would have bore $1500/mo otherwise for those apartments. They literally spent more on utilities for that apartment than they received in rent.

In looking for apartments in NYC, I ran across at least one other that was rent controlled and was absurdly cheap, and the person living there was subletting from the person to whom the rent controlled place was passed down to for more than he was paying, but still less than market rent.

I don't think it's a defensible system, at all, and I'm normally relatively in favor of welfare programs. This one is just completely broken.