skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Such a purchased private network is what I meant by "owns the lines" (even if in practice such connections are rented from telcos).

Which leads me back to my main point: why should 'neutrality' regulations care whether a telco offers a 10 gbps dedicated line, or preferential routing for 10 gbps worth of traffic on their shared lines?

And if the motivation for buying either of those is the exact same value -- snappier service for your end users -- that Akamai sells, why is Akamai's service celebrated, but alternate services based on traffic shaping considered a 'neutrality' violation?
It would be an amazing resource. However, you cannot really anonymize that kind of data because if someone knows only a few facts about your medical history they could discover your identity. Still, the benefits probably outweigh the risks.
While I wasn't assuming that, good catch that I neglected to mention otherwise. That said, we don't have a measure of the positive externalities to ones life, whereas we do have karma.

So, fully recognizing that there is more to HN than earning karma, I'm still intrigued by what these graphs might look like.
Shrink your browser window, or increase the font size.
"I've gradually come to realize that there is nothing really risky about starting a company these days. There are billions of not-very-smart venture dollars out there looking for somebody to spend; [snip] working at 4 startups over a 10 year period, there is a fantanstic chance that you will make a big buttload of moolah."

Ahhhh. Remember those days?
Buckminster Fuller kept an exhaustive journal from 1920 until he died. He called it the Dymaxion Chronofile.
You can read more about it here: http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/spc/fuller/about.html

Granted, not as tidy as 85 notebooks, but I read he kept it as a "scrapbook" and documented his life every 15 minutes.
Hmm... not sure what justified the -1 on this. Perhaps that in some languages if (a) can be used as a shortcut for if (a != null), where a is an object and not a boolean. So, as a correction to my previous comment. If (typeof a == "Boolean" || a instanceof boolean), I still stand by reducing redundancy, but if a is an object, then fine, if (a) return true;
Good commentary. Apple has kept Microsoft on defense with its PR for so long it's pretty hard to imagine Microsoft mounting a successful counterattack against them. Still, that begs the question, what COULD work for a Microsoft ad? The "I'm a PC" ads do have the weakness you mentioned of not saying a thing about Microsoft's actual products, but I think they've started to tap into Microsoft's biggest advantage by showing such a diverse range of people and professions; its ubiquity, its presence in just about every field related to computing.

There's a fine line that can't be crossed to avoid just making it creepy, but I'd like to see, say, Vista, Live Search, Windoes Live Messenger, an Xbox360, and a Zune all in the same ad tied together somehow and everything just working. Make people think "Microsoft = all computers" again the way they used to.
And "25 things" is great for eyeballs.

My 25 things post on my blog has ended up #2 in Google for "25 things about me" and I am getting 200 or so visits a day to that post.

Now, I am not monetizing my blog and don't gain anything from the traffic, but it is interesting to see how much attention this meme is getting all of the sudden. Especially since it is nothing new.
Ad Agency Wins Twitter Business Model Contest
That was tougher than I anticipated...

Maybe have the speed of addition ramp up.

And make it easier to clear out blocks.
This rant seems like it's more about the difficulty of compiling & configuring open source tools on the Mac than it is about Mono in particular.

For a non-specialist programmer like me, almost no open source tools Just Work on the Mac. My experience is very often similar to the one described in the rant.

In contrast, I can get work done with Ubuntu. When I need a new library, I install it, and it usually Just Works.

But, I have a Mac, I like my Mac, and I don't want any other kind of laptop. So, I'm starting to think that the right way to get the broadest range of stuff done on a Mac is to have OS X run the nice hardware and Apple's vanilla productivity applications, then run open source tools and libraries in a VMWare-hosted Linux installation. (Also have a Windows installation, for the apps that Windows runs best: Photoshop, PowerPoint, and a few niche apps I need that will never be ported.)

In the meantime, my current world Parellels, ssh+screen, and occasionally a MacFUSE mount, let me get a lot of work done. I've learned to just route around the kind of hassles this guy describes.
Load Balancing in Amazon EC2 with HAProxy
Naan Kadavul Review, Naan Kadavul Movie Review, Naan Kadavul Film Review
Check Director Bala's "Naan Kadavul" movie review exclusively onyl on Galatta.com.
It's very satisfying working with pen and paper at times. I try to keep notebooks of ideas and projects and am marginally successful at it, but this guy was dedicated. It's really cool to be able to see your work like that.
Run SimpleDB locally for development.
His Guitar's Got Game
That's not necessarily true; for things like designing proprietary languages themselves optimized for financial risk modeling, yes, you better have a CS Phd. But it's definitely not the case that everyone who touches functional programming on Wall Street has a Phd, and if you interview with the right group within an investment bank, the technical interviewer might very well be impressed with your Haskell experience, especially if you're going to be working closely with quants (provided he knows what it is; there's a really massive range in CS know-how within investment banks, but that's another story)
>“This is America. We don’t disparage wealth,” Obama said. What Americans won’t stand for, he said, are “executives being rewarded for failure,” especially when the taxpayers are doing the rewarding.

An unusually sensible thing for a president to say. Broadly appealing, yet so smart.
I would love to see some sort of executive pay regulation. I don't think that pay should be limited, but rather execs and traders held accountable for losses (vesting??).

If you keep 10% of winnings and are fired (with no personal loss) upon losing, the Martingale sure looks like a good strategy. That's a problem.
That's going to take a change to the way the whole mutual fund system works. People that buy into mutual funds (typically because it is their only choice in their work 401k's) don't vote. Fund managers do. There is a whole good 'ol boys network between fund managers and corporation managers that has perverse incentive written all over it.
I can't believe how much I enjoyed reading the 25 things my friends posted. As time goes on, people lose track of friends, but my friends shared enough for me to remember why they were my friends. Their personalities came out in ways you never see with the boilerplate profiles and status updates.
Ask HN: rules for storing banking info?
There are a lot of rumors about rules that companies must abide by security-wise to store banking information - say, checking account and routing numbers. It's very difficult to dig up anything factual on the matter, though.

It seems to me that it must work one of three ways:

1.) The government provides a set of security standards which must be met to legally store banking information.

2.) Banks provide security standards which must be met to retain their business.

3.) There are no specific standards, but you are liable to be sued for any breech in security.

I know how important it is to have near impenetrable security when storing important information. I'm looking specifically to demystify the legal end of things. Have I hit the target with one of these three theories?
It sounds like pg just implemented something like this -- grayish-orange vs. gray -- a qualitative measure ...

The metric is slightly different, but the author basically got want he wanted.
I'm not sure it discourages long posts. The writer doesn't see it's gray until the text is posted.
Difficult to play on a Dvorak keyboard. :(

Perhaps you could add the arrow keys in addition to WASD?
My new favorite TED.
Interesting series of blog posts on combinators
And he should be given some more high-level organization (i.e. five SKIMMABLE steps, not hidden in prose).
Not those ones, the other ones made by companies like Pfizer and Eli Lilly. The "legit" ones.
The big fat lie about battery life
i've not seen something specifically like this in the past, and i don't think the idea is outdated. i think its a good idea and i would consider using it, myself, if it were to work out well for you.

i would've definitely used something like this when i went to japan for a few weeks on vaccation last year, if something had existed.
Google puts 1.5 million free books on your cellphone
CSS keyframe animation: Apple mirroring Core Animation in WebKit
I have envisioned a similar system for about a year now. Except it uses a semi-transparant display over one eye and a camera mounted to that. You wear a glove over one hand and you interact not with a projected display, which I find to be shockingly impersonal, but with a 'virtual' display that could handle depth as well.

A nicer way to interact with your environment, I'd think, especially as when processors get stronger you could handle an entire virtual 3D environment overlaid over one eye.
Indirect link to the actual paper: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=195430
You know, if they're having such a tough time staffing C-level positions at these companies for 500k/year, I'll just have to make a huge personal sacrifice and take that CEO job at General Motors.
If you are thinking about doing this yourself, I would hire some programmer who used to work for a bank (lots of those around nowadays).

I don't recall if there are any Federal or industry guidelines for banking encryption, but there is FIPS for general security. There is also explicit law about audit trails, chains of custody, access controls, reporting breaches, etc. In general you are legally obligated to know you were pwned and how.

Access to a system must not allow access to data. Access to one account must not allow access to another (ie, use a different encryption key for each account). Physical access to a system must be secured and audited, etc.
Coming Soon: Google Chrome Extensions
The interviewer has failed to assess the candidate in the interview.
Making an activity into a game is sometimes the best way to get what you want. The trick is to reward people for doing the right things.

The problem is that no one has yet invented a karma "game" that can't be manipulated. Still, when you're dealing with a large community the karma game is the only system that has shown promise. It would be great if just having clear guidelines was enough, but it doesn't work that way.
Apple fanboy as I am, I'd argue that they can't make good ads until they have a decently competitive product. It's possible to beat Apple; it's not possible to beat them at their own game. Microsoft is constantly playing feature catch-up, and they can't win; Apple has thoroughly dominated at the things they do, and anything Microsoft does to catch up will only be catch-up. They could design a minimalist theme and it's catch-up. They could slim down their applications and release a software suite and it's catch-up. So either they make a new desktop metaphor and begin developing an alternate system, or they pray that Apple makes a major mistake, which is risky, because Apple is pretty cautious.

Stuff like 360 and Live Search are hard to integrate together. They're so different! Microsoft would be hard-pressed to unify the two. And that's the problem. Apple has this obsessive integration: you get OS X on the iPhone, you have the same volume buttons on that and the computer, you get visual designs gradually blending through, the featuresets are all called the same things... it's all tight. Microsoft doesn't control that stuff. Apple has the rare ability to be uncompromising in design and get away with it.

With the features they have now, I think Microsoft's best idea is to strip down. Avoid fancy things, deal with the really important thing. We have these great games, we have this evolution-not-revolution interface, each time we make something it's a little bit better. They're the dominant player, so their best bet is playing it safe and trying to outlast Apple. It's still hard, but they've got an excellent team. If they try they can create something good.
John has such an awesome job. I'd love to work with Javascript all day long... which is in fact what I do... except get paid for it and have a sweet title.

I love Javascript so much. The fact that it has "function.call(object, other, params)" pretty much sums it up... a function can work with any object, and vice versa.
I have a similar problem. I had this brilliant idea that I would keep a collection of my thoughts in a Moleskine notebook. I bought the standard pocket size notebook and a pen set.

To make a long and boring story short, I wasted $15 on the notebook because I've yet to use it for something other than collecting dust. I'm just not a pen and paper type of person.
I hadn't seen what raganwald was up to since he stopped writing at his blog... Turns out he's still hacking in Ruby and writing interesting articles :-)
I wonder if this is typical of google products where the changes are not as visible, like search.
Hey John, while I've possibly got your attention, I've got a question regarding performance on IE. This one, to this day, I cannot explain.

The gist of it is: I do "document.attachEvent("onmousemove", fn)" where fn resizes a div based on where the cursor is. I then test it out, and it's slow as hell, especially when the div gets pretty big. In fact, the event only seems to fire when I move the mouse slowly.

Now here's the catch. I bind the event again so that the function is bound twice to onmousemove, and performance is vastly improved!

How could it be that binding a function twice to an event speeds it up? Three times has no further effect... beyond that I haven't tested.

EDIT: Go to my profile to see the bug in action. While resizing a div (which contains 2 iframes), it's much much smoother with the "mousemove" event attached twice.
Why My First Business Failed
Ask HN: Any advice on legal agreements for user data hosted across the Atlantic?
I'm working on a project that will require me to be able to host UK (and possibly other countries) user data in the U.S. I'm not ready to do launch announcements yet but I was wondering if people had advice on how this works.

I want to go talk to my lawyer armed with some idea of what to expect. I know there is the Safe Harbor agreement which helps with the UK Data protection act, but is there anything else that I should know about? Do people have advice on getting this kind of thing sorted out?
function.call(object, other, params)

Can you explain what this does? It sounds interesting, but I don't know Javascript.
Solaris has had this (zones/containers) for about 4 years now and it works well for a certain class of issues.

I do wish though that they would have copied the Solaris way of doing it - under Solaris there is only zonecfg for configuring a zone, with a simple file format for describing a zone; and zoneadm which lets you list, stop, start, etc. an already-configured zone.

It is kind of funny, in that Sun is using Xen more now, while Linux has had Xen already and is now doing stuff with containers.
Basically,

foo.barMethod("Hello", "World")

is identical to:

someFunction.call(foo, "Hello", "World");

(assuming that foo.barMethod === someFunction)

This is a little weirder than it seems, because of a variable called `this'. You see, `this' is set inside of a function whenever you call it, based on how you've called it. It can be set a couple of ways:

foo(arg1, arg2, ...); // sets `this' to the global object (in a browser, that's `window')
foo.call(o, arg1, arg2, ...); // sets `this' to `o'
foo.apply(o, [arg1, arg2, ...]); // sets `this' to `o' (same as `call')

None of these are the way you usually set `this' on function invocation, however. Usually, `this' is set automatically when you invoke a function which happens to be a property of an object. So, for example:

bar = { foo: function (x,y) { var thatThing = this; ... } };
bar.foo(1,2) - sets `this' (and `thatThing') to 'bar'.

However (!!!), if you say:

foo2 = bar.foo;
foo2();

The `this' inside of your function, as well as `thatThing', will both be set to `window'.

details here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Referen...
USA Swimming bans Phelps for three months
Thank you! The first reply is the most important!
Have nice day!
Well, the main difference in my mind is that the government can legally apply force to make someone stop doing something.
The x-domain stuff is very cool and will be extremely useful. I'm scared what black hats will do with it, though.
Agreed that Harvard (and Ivy League colleges in general) can offer great financial aid. But the offer is based on demonstrated need, or, as one old Harvard document said, "ability to pay, not willingness to pay." That's why a student whose parents don't agree to step up (the situation I am asking about) is hosed. Families with low incomes and assets, who apply, are likely to be bowled over by the generosity of the financial aid offer. See the Princeton online estimator

http://www.princeton.edu/admission/financialaid/estimator/

or Dartmouth's cost estimator

http://www.dartmouth.edu/apply/financialaid/calculator/index...

for examples. But please note that if the parents have some estimated family contribution above zero but are unwilling to pay that, the student is stuck. I'm asking about the plan B in such situations here, on behalf of a friend and similarly situated young people.
The phrase you want is "PCI Compliance"

http://www.pcicomplianceguide.org/
When I moved to my current apartment I went from 8' to 10' ceilings and I noticed an improvement like that. My office building has ~25' ceilings and I've always felt I think better there than at most other places. It has an excellent natural light system that helps a lot too.
The Personal Genome Project takes this idea one step further. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Genome_Project
It sounded like they'd already had kids together, in which case breaking up opens up a whole other can of worms...
I have not seen as many people with orange nicks posting lately. I had an orange name earlier today, but my high-scoring comments have fallen out of my recent history.

Are the orange users being very stringent about what they post? I don't blame them.
VCs do this sort of thing all the time. But, maybe YC didn't do it intentionally. Maybe someone overhead your idea at a party. Maybe it was a coincidence.

Who cares? Get over it. Do it anyway. If you can't do it better, do it cheaper with less effort to starve 'em, or go somewhere they're not looking. Why are you giving up so easy?
Trent Reznor And The Formula For Future Music Business Models
Unix time 1234567890
He releases them at 5:10... but it's a great talk, be sure to listen to the whole thing.
It's not that. I could read it. But psychologically I need that border. When text gets on the edge like that, it hurts to read.
Isn't it ironic how you say you love John's job (above), then throw an IE bug question at him? I wonder how many JavaScript questions he has in his e-mail every morning... shudder

Aside, though: your e-mail isn't in your profile, and I'd like to chat - could you e-mail me at anfedorov@gmail.com, please?
var foo;
foo.name = "Hi! I'm foo."

var bar;
bar.name = "I'm bar."

var alertMe = function(){ alert(this.name); }

alertMe.call(foo); //calls 'alertMe' setting 'this' to be foo
alertMe.call(bar); //same, except setting 'this' to be bar

Pretty cool, right? Methods can inherit objects! You could always have done:

foo.alertMe = alertMe;
bar.alertMe = alertMe;
foo.alertMe();
bar.alertMe();
It's a lesson, but not necessarily a lesson for the U.S.
Afaik, this isn't felons building building bridges to nowhere. 2 bridges collapsed in 2007 Indiana and Mississippi (I think) killing people. Our highway infrastructure is kinda fucked. The deal was we paid taxes to support the interstate highway system. those taxes are going to build highways in Iraq.

Our energy policy was written by Ken Lay. I'm sure he's lovely in person. He also sells dead animals on ebay, as though they were alive. I would rather not go through the parrot sketch every time I want to by gasoline.

I said, here on HN, that the bank bailout wouldn't fix anything. I said that it was a temporary move to slow the collapse of the economy, while people figured out something better. I think this is the something better.

This article seems to be about how japan built a bunch of boondoggles to stimulate the economy... I don't think that's what's happening. The worst of the stimulus package, money for movies, still creates a ton of jobs now. right now. If you look at studios, one hit is all it takes to make all that money back. California is so bad off, they aren't paying back overpaid taxes.

Sorry for the rant, but this seems so far from how the money will be spent. It's not marina's in Oklahoma, it's replacing govt. cars with more fuel efficient versions.

Ah well. I guess none of us really have a say in the matter anyway.
Google can afford a lot of false negatives, but it can't afford false positives. And from what I've seen, the interview process does a fairly good job of screening them out. Maybe it's just my team, but I don't see a whole lot of deadwood around.

FWIW, they hired me and I have nowhere near a 4.0 (it actually was a 3.0 + interesting projects).

And most successful products are just incremental improvements on what's out there. You really don't want to be a true innovator: who uses an Altair, or WWW (the browser, not the web), or AltaVista, or CP/M, or Visicalc, or Betamax, or a Xerox Alto, or Xanadu? But if you put enough innovations together, you get something really kickass like GMail. Going after established markets is just prudent business sense, it doesn't mean they aren't innovating.

(And there are some pretty crazy off-the-wall experiments that go on inside Google to, it's just that nobody can talk to you about the ones that haven't launched, and it's a good bet that 99.99% of the crazy stuff never will launch because it's basically useless.)
Why Obama's green jobs plan might work
Let's make it tangible. I'll upvote comments for $0.005, and posts for $0.01.
Beluga whales Blowing Bubble Rings on Yahoo [video]
Well, I considered that before posting... it's not a bug, it's just completely unexpected behavior. Performance related, too, so it's on topic.

Anyway, I've updated my profile... let's chat
This is a 'great' line because "the point" and "the score" can be anything you want it to be, and you can change contexts whenever you want to, so nothing ever really disproves it. But this analogy breaks down I would argue even within tennis, but certainly amongst other games and absolutely in life.

Tennis is a game of endurance: if the score is 30-love and you can expend a disproportionate amount of energy to get it to 40-love or hold back, store that energy, and let it go 40-15, you should if you'll need that energy later. On the other hand, if it's 40-love and you can clinch the game, there's a far higher payoff for that effort.

Similarly in football, if there's 48 seconds left in the game, 4th down and 1 yard on the 20 yard line and you're behind with a score of 13 to 14, you better be "playing the score" and kick a field goal, not go for a touchdown pass.

Strategic concessions and strategic fights are the true key to success. If you're in the battle, be in it to win it.
I use this site a whole lot if you measure it by page view, but when I was running Rescue Time, it showed I spent about an hour a day actually on the site. Residual browsing takes up more time than that but it beats watching tv.