skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My next trip is from Bangkok, Thailand to Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. Other comparison sites like Kayak found the cheapest price to be $184, this one found the correct choice which is Air Asia at $55. Currently there seems to be no site where I could go and trust that it really gives me the best prices, so getting one more option to search on is great.
I really enjoyed this video until I saw that it's actually an ad.

And I'm now just wondering if it's real or not. Nowadays you just can't tell... It reminds me of Matt from "Where the hell is Matt?"'s little experiment from a few weeks ago after seeing the viral ad for RockBand (the one with the guy on a bicycle). Basically he pretended his travel video was faked all along and the story spread.

A few years ago still, making a fake video with CGI was about as hard to make as the real thing. So real or not, it would still be kind of interesting. Now it's just easy and a little lazy. It's kind of sad, no?
Extreme Shepherding - Best Sheep Hack I've seen all day
this will blow your mind!
IBM Cloud Computing Webinar
I think you just described my entire CS undergrad experience.
Smultron, BBEdit, TextWrangler... depends on what you need, TextWrangler and Smultron are probably the simplest, although they're also limited in certain ways.
glad to know someone from devhouse is reading hacker news. Both meetups should be great.
Actually I think the main difference is that Reddit is a business and HN is not.

Reddit's management should do whatever it takes to maximise revenue, and this often means going for the lowest (or at least lower) common denominator.

HN is different, it is not directly about making money, but about getting intelligent people to have civil doscussions on tech and entrepreneurship, presumably to market ycombinator.
"Fwitter: A site that’s something in-between twitter and a forum. Get real time updates"

A chat room?
How AIG's Bonuses Threaten All Stock Prices
By its very nature, eavesdropping on P2P is a tough. How do you monitor all the packets that are routed through different paths? The only way would be Deep Packet Inspection. But again the packets are encrypted with 128 bit key. So even if you get the packets, you'll have a tough time decrypting it.

The Skype binary also is heavily obfuscated. It wont even run if a ring 0 debugger is on your system.

It definitely deserves a billion dollar bounty.
Having read a number of business books, this article fits right in. "The secret" to write a popular business book is to take one simple idea, and fluff it up to the size of a dirigible by repeating the point in different ways, and adding lots of anecdotes to make it a better 'story'.
Has anyone else noted that his name bears an uncanny resemblance to a blend of "Jobs" and "Wosniak"?
I used to despise tax evaders and considered my taxpaying obligations to be an essential part of living in a civilized society. While I didn't really think in terms of "getting something back" but I've been assuming that, in general, my own well being, especially later in life, is kind of guaranteed simply because I've been a good citizen of law obeying society.

During 2008 my attitude towards paying federal taxes has changed dramatically. What I'm seeing now is pretty much a racketeering organization where healthcare, finance and law have semi-merged with the government and are pretty much holding the rest of the population as their personal slaves. Justice and health (legal and medical costs) are out of reach for nearly everybody and, frankly, what else is a government good for? Maybe for protection from Canadians or Mexicans?

I don't want to sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist or a libertarian, but paying taxes now looks pretty much like feeding these gangsters and I'm determined to find every single available legal loophole and exploit it in full. I also like to entertain myself with a thought that ultimately, over my entire lifespan, this decision will cost US government a significant sum of money, especially if I am not the only 30 year old aspiring entrepreneur with such attitude.
I think you underestimate the importance of skype as a international means of communication, and overestimate the value most people place on privacy. When living abroad, it's the primary tool for keeping in touch with people back home or in other parts of the world. And why not? It's (mostly) free.

Even if skype came out and said they were recording every conversation, I don't know if all that many people would stop using it. There wasn't all that much outrage over immunity for the big telcos, for instance.

Or did you mean the company would be ruined for some other reason besides loss of reputation? Maybe I misunderstood the comment.
this is not really the same thing, but it can help:
"Install multiple versions of IE on your PC"
http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE

It hasn't been updated in a while, I really only use it to be able to run IE6 alongside IE7 (which i have installed in the normal way) for testing purposes.
Ha, yes, it was adjusted to per-100,000 to match the stats quoted above for Detroit. It was a lot of theft, though. I don't think I want to open a gas station there.
It appears that whoever downvoted me misinterpreted my comment. To expand the implication: you can buy zero meaningful girlfriends.
Twitter For Advertisers - It's Called Pay-Per-Chat
Absolutely love the concept.

One hangup nitpicking about grammar. See here: http://adioso.com/airport/cheap-flights-sydney.syd.html

You have "International Flights to Sydney," but then the list is {Sydney to Aipa, Sydney to Auckland} -> the depart and arrive need to be switched to make sense.

The domestic flights have it displayed correctly so it looks like something just got switched around.
Photos from YC (W09) Demo Day
>"We voters do it every 4-8 years for the U.S. government, a vastly more complex operation than AIG."

The government is not in the business of meeting any objective goals. It simply appropriates funds, does things with them, and then tells you about what it did with the best spin possible. As long as nothing too bad happens and the people in charge are serious-looking and wear suits, nobody complains. The government could be run by a ferret, as long as it had a good press secretary.

Private companies, on the other hand, have an objective performance standard to meet. They must make money, or eventually die. The pressure of an objective performance standard makes them much harder to run. The ability to achieve results is much more important, and the ability to look good on camera is much less. There is punishment for incompetence.

I suggest that firing the current crop of executives and making it clear to new potential hires that they will be underpaid and under intense public scrutiny is a good way to run what is left of the company into the ground. Given the other options available, this might be a good thing, but it could be done more directly.
Chrome Experiments: Javascript Demos in Chrome
We've been working on this for quite some time and have hundreds of thousands of rental listings on our site (don't want to spam, if interested look at my profile). We're doing well, but it's still amazing how well craigslist dominates all the verticals it covers.
Without even clicking the link I can tell the "secret" is either something extremely vague as "work hard" or something that wouldn't hold to the simplest statistical test.
Intel chip flaw (rootkit level exploit) to be posted 3/19/09
Microsoft did an internal study you might find interesting:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/abegel/papers/...

I also know that they sponsored research by the Stanford CS department where they gave pairs and individuals the same programming task (completable in an afternoon), but I have no idea what the results of that were or if they were ever published.

My personal experience is pretty analogous to other people's: it causes you to work more slowly and carefully, it's good for knowledge transfer, and some people are better suited for it (personality-wise) than others. I find it most effective when avoiding errors or technical debt is imperative or when you want to transfer knowledge, and not as useful otherwise.

I've also noticed that my perceived productivity is lower when pairing than it actually is; I'm so used to cranking by myself that slowing down so someone else can talk with me about what to do, or being the "navigator" and not coding at all, makes me feel like I'm not getting anything done. In reality, though, I'm actually getting a fairly decent amount done, and more importantly we're probably avoiding mistakes or blind alleys that would have cost me time in the long run. That makes it hard to measure the real productivity difference: if two people had coded by themselves for 8 hours, more "work" would have been done than if those two people paired for 8 hours, but how much of that would have been wrong, or unnecessary, or overly-complicated, or introduced more technical debt?

It's the sort of skill that takes work, and that gets easier as you do it, so I'd encourage you to try it out. As with any new way of working, it'll be awkward at first and then get easier, and I think it's worth at least learning so that in the future you'll be able to judge for yourself when you feel like pairing will be most useful and when you're better off flying solo.
Top inventions that changed the world
In my experience, pair programming is to programming what eating less and exercising is to obesity: most people simply can't bring themselves to do it, even after trying it and experiencing success. My advice is to just forget about it, like doctors these days who prescribe drugs for cholesterol and high blood pressure without even bothering to mention that those conditions can usually be controlled via lifestyle changes. Unless you're really lucky, you won't find anybody else willing to practice it with you.

If you actually get a chance to introduce pair programming to your organization, go for it. In my unfortunately limited experience, pair programming paid for itself by virtually eliminating some classes of mistakes. Typos and other oversights are caught faster and more efficiently, of course, but more importantly, things that lone programmers tend to put off figuring out, the mental and sometimes subconscious TODOs, get hashed out immediately. That saves time rewriting bad designs.

Unfortunately, as with lifestyle change, people start enthusiastically but quickly sour on it until the mere mention of it evokes anger and resentment.
PubSub with XMPP4R-Simple
I understand how guilt can keep a lot of people from gaming the system too hard, but what about really desperate people (homeless people, for instance)? You'd think they'd eat there constantly, once they heard of it, and drive the place under.
Young Mad Scientist Alphabet Blocks
This seems like a reliable source, but given the inflammatory nature of the subject matter I would appreciate a reality check.
Directing anger at AIG is misguided. Our government is the wrongdoer here. Failing to let state bankruptcy court and natural liquidation happen - as we did with Enron - started the problem.

The problem with exec bonuses was exasperated in the final version of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Here, Chris Dodd added the “Dodd amendment”
http://www.google.com/search?q=dodd+amendment

It reads:
‘‘(iii) The prohibition required under clause (i) shall not be construed to prohibit any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009, as such valid employment contracts are determined by the Secretary or the designee of the Secretary.”
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.1:

That amendment guarantees all bonuses that were contracted before the date of the Act.

Of course, Dodd and Obama are “outraged”. But why did Dodd add that provision? Why did Obama sign it?

Not surprisingly Dodd, Obama, Bush, McCain, and Shumer are the largest benefactors of AIG’s massive lobbying.
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?id=D000000123&...

AIG isn’t taking our money. Our government is.
Windows Live Messenger Now Lets You Add Chat To Your Website
Is this real? How can this be real? I sort of get how they did pong, but how did they do the walking sheep? How do your herd just one color of animal?
I couldn't disagree more. Obviously a bad developer is a bad developer with or without auto complete.

Where auto complete comes in is when one wants to port knowledge from one programming language to another. For example while I'm a computer science student I moonlight as a PHP developer and I don't really care to memorize PHP's perverse (idiosyncratic if you prefer) functions. But I know that array_ CTRL-Space in eclipse will tell me that array_filter takes the list as it's first while array_map takes it as it's second argument. One can blame that on PHP's designer but at the end of the day auto complete saves me from memorizing something I really don't need to know. (Ok now that I've looked it up and written it down that bit of knowledge will probably stay with me forever)

Haskell is way more consistent in that regard, but I still couldn't survive without Hoogle.

And Java without auto complete takes not only twice the time to write but would also force me to remember that Collection is in java.util while Iterable is in java.lang. I think anyone would be hard pressed to explain to me why I need to know that.

So I think I made my case that skills are not dependent on rote learning of a function's argument order or a class's namespace.

Furthermore it seems to me that auto completing IDEs actually help with remembering often used "phrases".
Nice! I'm gonna try this out on a current project this week.
This is awesome! Will there be a video somewhere of the YC Demo Day?
Anybody else getting (a lot of) errors?

All destination pages give me some sort of generic error page (Symfony PHP framework).

It seems like they try to do geolocation according to IP and international visitors trigger some untested code path.
I think you can ethically ask your friends to vote up your stories, as long as they actually have accounts used for more than voting up your stories. It would be like asking your school friends to vote for you if you were running for a school office.

I'm just not sure how comfortable I am with users politicizing the voting process. At least spam and most fluff seems to be taken care of quickly, so it isn't really a problem.
Without getting into drama, let me suggest that Schneier's personality and notoriety may not match his nuts-and-bolts contributions to the field. I wonder what cperciva thinks about that, but he's also far more polite than me.
Is the IQ of the Hacker News community as a whole = average IQ of its members?
One would expect not as collaborative behavior could result in a higher collaborative IQ than the average of its members (e.g., when it comes to determining which submissions and comments are interesting).

It might be interesting to determine the IQ of the Hacker News community as a whole using a standard IQ test and compare it to that of reddit and digg. One way to do this would be to use polls where you can see how others have voted so far before giving your answers to the various IQ test questions.
But did you want him to compare E with Textmate? His point was that he switched to a Mac and wanted to compare what's out there for RoR on Mac: in his case, Aptana, which he was already using on Windows, and Textmate.
Two different things, true, but the former is what he was used to on Windows, and the latter a very common tool for RoR dev on Mac.

As he says in the post, that kind of decision ends up being very personal anyway. I settled on Textmate recently but I'm not sure that will be the case forever. (personally, I'd go for something in between: the speed and simplicity of Textmate with functions like the navigation between classes, auto-completion but without the slowness shown by Eclipse et al)
I'm sure losing any finger would affect your typing, but with practice the human body is capable of learning amazing things (like the people who learn to write fluently with their feet after losing both arms). Of course age affects this learning process too; a younger brain will more easily rewire itself. Typing doesn't require much strength. Losing your pinky finger, for example, has a huge effect on your grip strength (see Yubitsume: http://www.japanslate.com/pinky-fingers/ ).
The overwhelming majority of "persons of interest" using Skype are on Windows, but substitute any other OS and the equation is no different: you're suggesting that the NSA would pay billions of dollars for a break in a protocol that runs exclusively on endpoints that the NSA can get a shell on at will.
IBM probably should drop AIX for Solaris.

If IBM were smart they would enable a machine compilable version of Java to destroy C++.
As a practitioner I would be shocked (shocked!) if there wasn't a way within the Skype protocol to pop a shell on anyone running a Skype-branded Skype client.
Um, the best antireversing/antidebugging people in the world still don't have casual game crackers beat. For "a billion dollars", I might substitute "free xbox".
If you listen to the NY Times, maybe the better question is "who wouldn't want to live in Pittsburgh?" (it is a rhetorical question, it should not be answered)

http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/travel/06hours.html
I love it, everybody has an opinion because in theory everybody is a part owner . . . AIG will be a great case study on why companies are best managed as dictatorships and constrained by a marketplace. It'll be interesting to see what happens when neither of those is in place.
This is a fantastic article... sometimes there is a lot of room in markets for competition. My favorite example is the Kayak.com example. They came into a space that had a lot of competition and have done a well enough job that they now are sitting quite pretty. Stay the course.
You've worked in enterprise Java shops for 2 years. I've spent ~4 years now parachuting into enterprises and doing security evaluations on Java apps. You may not like the "agile" "flexible" "dumbing down" "bunk" (and, hey, I'm not going to write something Java either), but you can safely take my word on it that the bunk is better than the empirical results of those same developers writing C++ code.
kind of interesting but needs more flights. For instance, JFK to LAX has 0 hits.
The World According to TinyURL
Two common misunderstandings about SSL
Ask HN: Web 2.0 and The Four Steps to the Epiphany
Folks,

Those of you who have read Steven Gary Blank's excellent book "The Four Steps to the Epiphany", do you think these principles apply to Web 2.0 companies. In general every commercial business entity must make profits. And most successful enterprise software/hardware companies surprisingly seem to fit the model described in the book. But the majority of the Web 2.0 companies seem to defy this model but still continue to be popular (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc). Note: popular != commercially successful.

So, my question to the startup community is -- does anyone have an opinion on how the "Four Steps ..." can be applied to Web 2.0 companies. Most, if not all (including Google), seem to have evolved using the "Product Development Model" and not the "Customer development model". Those of you who have spent time in Enterprise software know that all most all successful companies in that space seemed to have followed the "Customer Development Model".

Your thoughts?

--
PS: PG's opinion on this would be very valuable to the community.
Well, notepad.exe is not even close to being a decent text editor so that would be a horrible thing to do. (remember that you can't have line numbers for example)

But I agree with your point about learning. The trade-off is always that it takes more time to learn without help than with but later, one tend to rely too much on the help. The difficult thing is to know how to go back to basics at some point.
Costs for this particular kind of game are mostly content costs: Writing, gameplay scripting, art. The engineering effort doesn't carry over a great deal from one game to another. As well, downloadables get lower market penetration than browser-based games. All those factors go a long way to explain why he's only breaking even.

If you want a hope of success in games, either do a low-asset kind of game, do a game where big assets are matched with big marketing, or involve the users in creating content. I think there's still lots and lots of room for the third.
I was going to buy this book...but I read this review...http://eightpence.com/the-four-steps-to-the-epiphany-review/
A bit excessive IMO, but very, very cool.
http://www.prairiegames.com/

ed: the biggest issue with an "Indie MMO" is that maintenance costs can make it a non-indie kind of venture very quickly.
I have been seeing it on the sites from ages...so not sure why techcrunch is announcing it now????
It's not really unethical, but it is generally frowned upon to have your friends vote up stories. There is a slippery slope with asking your friends to vote up stories; that is basically how digg works.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196778
So, if time_management is blind because he's relying on the anecdotes of others, how does your comment help? It is just another anecdote, and one from someone who admittedly has much less experience and he knows less well than the other anecdote originators. It is presumptuous for such an anecdote to demand higher credibility.
Actually what I'm working towards is much like what jvincent is asking for:

"students need to be able to self-teach using online dynamic material (as opposed to static textbooks). Teachers would design courses from mashups and assist students individually in their progress"

Mine would be an interface for designing and delivering those "mashups".

I plan to release much of it on an MIT (or equivalent) license, so if you're a python/django coder you can contribute code to it. Otherwise, your feedback would be great, once I have something to show you - you can get in touch with me through the link in my profile.
Very good article. If you are in a market and Google is not your competitor yet, read it so you know what to do and what to look for when they enter your market.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence
Well, there was definitely some CGI near the beginning, when the sheep came together into a bigger sheep that actually had coherent legs and while walking had one leg cleanly pass through another leg (BS!), so as much fun as the idea may be I'm not inclined to suspend much disbelief.
Google's 5th Summer of Code: Meet Your Mentors
It seems, in general, that one of America's greatest assets is incompetence.
It's definitely possible. The company that made runescape started out as a small company. Now the company isn't so small, and the founders are worth tens of millions.

If you are including text based games, there is a lot of competition, but you can be successful. I played Kingdom of Loathing for a few months, and it was a profitable mmorpg. That was even entirely free. Donations were accepted, and got you special items, but those items were traded on the in game market for in game currency.
Yes, I may be overestimating the reaction that people would have but it's not so much about privacy as abusing the trust of their users. I think most people would consider it pretty dishonest for Skype to place backdoors in their client application so that intelligence agencies can spy on their conversations.

It's more intentionally malicious to distribute software with a backdoor than to do what AT&T did so I really think it would upset people more.

Remember the Sony 'rootkit' fiasco? And that wasn't even really harmful, just annoying.
its not finding any of the dozen searches I ran.

also is there a reason why most of the examples have to do with Australia?
I want to hug the divvyshot team. http://divvyshot.com/photo/hCqLm/