skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did the same as this guy.

My conclusions Flot (mentioned in his previous article) still kicks ass but needs a bit more work.

Emprise is really nice if you are happy to pay. Personally I think Flot does an equivelent job for free. Although, Emprise also includes some stuff to compute trends which flot doesn't.

Raphaël is totally bad ass, but it's for hand rendering specific data more than just charting since there are little in the way of helper functions for that. That said check this out, it's awesome http://raphaeljs.com/github/impact.html
Wine has an implementation using Gecko.
There's always the web 2.0 expo ... not purely hackerish, of course but there could be some worthwhile speakers and/or connections to be made
http://www.web2expo.com/webexsf2009
I think this is an awesome way for people to remind the government about the way things like property and monetary policy should be handled. The government is only screwing things up anyway: case in point, not a single bailed-out company has recovered.

In fact, the bailouts have only increased the madness, leading to speculation of cronyism and further-reaching nationalization, among other things. We're nearing the 15th month of the recession; at this point most of the other recessions we've been through in this century have ended by their 15th month. The only one, to my knowledge, that was worse, was the great depression, which was filled with government intervention.

This isn't about the economy to Washington. It's about power, and increasing that power over our daily lives. If we want to be free, all we need are liberty and the ability to place real value on goods and services. When the Government interferes, we can't do that.
Www.1000beforeyoudie.com-1000 places to see before you die list
Verizon Customers - Just Say No
I assume you had a WP caching plugin installed?
In my experience, there is a pretty enormous difference between doctoral programs in the humanities and in science/engineering. For that matter, there's a big difference between doctoral programs in something like chemistry (or physics, I'd guess) vs. computer science.
Bootstrappers Breakfast Mar 13, 17, 27; Apr 3, 10, 21, 24 http://www.bootstrappersbreakfast.com/

Fibre High: rent a cube for a month as home base http://www.fiberhigh.com/

Hackers & Founders Mar 25 http://www.hackersandfounders.com/

New Tech Meetup Apr 7 http://www.meetup.com/svnewtech/

Plug & Play: rent a cube for a month as home base http://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/

SDForum Cloud & SOA SIG Mar-24 http://www.sdforum.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.viewPage...

Silicon Valley Startup Entrepreneurs (many events) http://www.svase.org

Workit: another good calendar http://www.workit.com/
The old Gecko ActiveX control was designed to be a drop-in replacement for the Trident one. There was an IEPatcher which worked in some cases, though not always:

http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm#usingPatcher

This is, of course, only applicable to programs which use the ActiveX control. It's also a really old Mozilla version.
"I grew up on a farm in Nebraska, where we grew mostly corn and soybeans." is the best opening line ever. So redundant.
Is this going to be a huge issue for you? I can see these applications taking up 1-2G at the absolute maximum, more likely in the hundreds of MB. If those margins are significant for you, then you're probably already going to be seeing system slowdowns due to low disk space.
Chickenshit.
There probably will be a solution to remove the staging "cache" but features like "help" uses ie's rendering engine which I'm sure most users won't mind loosing.
Speaking only for myself, I anticipate the greatest of times ahead.
Nope.

Previously a few of my other PHP sites had problems under load on the same box (GoogleBot, or something identifying itself as GoogleBot, went wild once with 100k requests in a day and the Apache child spawnage caused the machine to swap, starve, and die).

I bumped it up to 512 MB ($250 a year extra cheaper than irked users emailing me) and added the following to httpd.conf, on the advice of some Slicehost-related blog post or forum thread or something, can't remember.

http://www.pastie.org/410707

No problems since. (I was watching on top through the night, and while the CPU was spiking up to 25 ~ 50% the memory usage never exceeded 400 MB, and it ended up not using so much as a kilobyte of swap.)
I agree that it's not a conscious process, but I don't know if it's a matter of efficiency -- a lot of high-value work gets done cheaply at Universities. There's plenty of competition for grant money, too.

The inelasticity seems to be on the labor side of the equation -- no matter how badly students and post-docs are treated, they keep coming back for more. My intuition is that stricter limits on fellowships (i.e. at most X years of government funding; more like the UK system), would provide less perverse incentives for everyone. But any politician to propose such a move would be pilloried for opposing science.
The last will and testament of Circuit City
Facebook Status and Twitter Updates
"It's not even correct to say "the probability of this being from a random generator is very low" because that's not true - it either was or was not randomly generated, that's not open to probability."

This isn't true when you take a Bayesian approach, where probability is a statement about your knowledge rather than reality. In fact, it seems like the whole issue could be greatly simplified/rationalized through application of Bayesian ideas - "Color" then being determined probabilistically (in the Bayesian knowledge sense) rather than absolutely.

Interesting article though.
This article is an oldy but goody about intellectual property law and how programmers, et al, routinely fail to understand it because of a paradigmatic difference in how they view data versus how other people (and the law) views information.
I hate to shamelessly self-promote, but I've actually been working on an event search web app: http://www.gocerebro.com

It still has a long way to go (right now only about 10 other people know about this), but hopefully it helps. Any feedback would be welcome as well.
Short answer: yes.

I'm not an expert on the ethics, but pretty much every vaccine trial faces this dilemma. The solution is to make sure that the trial participants are fully informed (i.e. they've got to know that they may not be getting a real vaccine), and to make sure that the vaccine in question doesn't make things worse.

If you can do those two things, then in the worst case, the participants are no worse off than if they hadn't participated in the trial at all. But as I said, clinical trials for things like HIV vaccines tend to go above and beyond, and do things like safe-sex counseling for every participant.
How to rewrite files in Linux
I still prefer Gist (gist.github.com) for things like this--I like the fact that the code sticks around.
American engagement in recent conflicts has been enormously unpopular. There is a sense that the Armed Forces no longer serve to protect and defend America, her peoples and her ideals, but the political and economic aspirations of a very few.

If trust in the government and its goals can be restored, then a belief that the Armed Forces are an honorable and worthwhile avenue of service will also be restored.
You can just run it as a headless daemon on a server somewhere.
I left out informed consent -- that's really a key reason why the experiment is ethical. The subjects are informed that they might not get a real vaccine, and they're given the choice to participate.
what's up with the strip-o-meter in the side bar? wacky.
Today I walked to the top of Mount Royal in Montreal. It doesn't quite qualify because its about three miles in length, but it does qualify in that its a road (snow/ice covered today) about 20 feet wide. I found it fascinating - the mix of tourists/locals/dogs/snowboarders/ in the middle of a city.
The CS perspective is correct though. IP law is truly absurd.
Pivotal Labs does quality (and catered) lunch tech talks every Wednesday. They tend to be web/ruby-centric.

Update/Edit:
NoiseBridge has weekly meetups in machine learning, synthetic biology, and other subjects. https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/NoiseBridge
I would make MaxRequestsPerChild nonzero, something like 3000 to 10000. Even Yahoo, which employs the creator of PHP and several Apache committers, restarts their Apache children every 8 hours. Otherwise you are making yourself vulnerable to memory leaks or bugs that might take weeks to manifest.

I would also bump up MaxClients. If it's too low you will refuse connections under load and never know it -- there will be no records in your logs.
Understand Normalization Before Denormalizing
What you say may well be true. But Google was not willing to send a representative to say that in court, or have someone type it into an email, or have one of their many automated systems put that into an email. Google is certainly capable of communicating it's side of things, yet they did not.

We should not have to construct Google's side of things for them. Google is not a retarded person facing the death penalty, unable to defend themselves. They are a multi-billion dollar company with an army of lawyers and an even bigger army of computers, and if one of those computers had displayed a message to this person explaining their side, it is likely we none of this would have happened.

Legally speaking, I think the judge had to rule this way. He didn't contradict the part of the contract that says Google can terminate any account; he just said that regardless of any account termination, Google still has to pay you money if they owe you money. Duh. The account holder presented evidence that Google owed money, and Google presented no evidence that they didn't. End of story.

I remember when Paypal seemed like the most awesome idea since the invention of money, and I remember when they waited until there was a lot of money in my account and then tried to close that account. Is Google only examining accounts to see if they fit the terms of service once they owe the account a lot of money ? It would seem uncharacteristic of them, based on what I know of the company, but it is not implausible. It's the type of shitty thing big corporate bureaucracies do.
Every Wednesday we have the Open Hacker House in San Francisco from 8am to 6pm: http://archivd.com/open-hacker-house
That service does look pretty nice, thanks for the information.
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This is really wierd ...

At least after 2009 01 01
Real article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03...

The CNET posting is a short summary which doesn't bring much new material to the table.
Considering the kinds of things I've seen people put in spreadsheets, and the way they format them, I'm sure I could dig up a few examples of spreadsheets NOT fitting the way non-programmer's minds work, because they try to make it do things it wasn't meant to and it ends up being MORE work.
I went and checked out this 'sale' many of the items like ethernet and TV's cost more with the 80% 'off' than to purchase said goods on newegg or other places on the internet.

I really wanted to ask the associates if they were aware that fraud is illegal in the united states.

Either way I say good ridance.
Thanks for the plug, Sean (skmurphy).

I host Hackers and Founders (www.hackersandfounders.com), and we get together every couple of weeks to tip a pint and have a chat about stuff. About half of the people that attend are pretty active on Hacker News.

If March 25 doesn't work for you, drop me a line, I might be able to schedule a meetup for you that works with your schedule. It would be a shame to come to Silicon Valley for a while and not be able to hook up and chat with interesting people. That's really why you're here.

The New Tech Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/svnewtech/ happens fairly often and seems to pretty popular. If you can't get in via RSVP, just crash it. A lot of other people do that and they don't seem to get hassled.
Not true. We've funded people with all sorts of backgrounds. I was a philosophy major myself as an undergrad.
I don't doubt that such examples exist, but I'm adamant on this point: the spreadsheet is the invention that gave non-programmers the power to define their own computations. That's why it was so successful. It's the only "programming for non-programmers" invention I know of, of the zillions that have been tried, that doesn't suck. Can you name any others? The ones that come to my mind are the laughable boxes-and-lines "visual programming" gimmicks.
Check out this user's threads page with showdead on: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=wernerv0nbraun -- all of their comments get deleted.

If the site has a honeypot system that shows the autodeleted comments only to the user that made them, that's clever, if a little much.

If it just instantly deletes them, that's lame, it'd be better just to ban him.

If this is being done by a moderator manually, that's fucking awful, and the moderator should be banned.
This is quite well-written. I like his quoted description of the entrepreneur as "not worrying about the resources they lack, but about the resourcefulness required to get the big idea done." Seductively complimentary.

That said, I'm skeptical the first-order problem is really keeping a sense of the "big idea". Grand ambition is not uncommon - look at the amount of armchair quarterbacking that happens on this site alone. I think most organizations have a definite sense of possibility and fail more from an inability to either manage change, or to connect their ambitions to the more prosaic reality of the paying market.
Dolphins blowing bubble rings, and playing with them [video]
I realize that this is hardly traditional HN fair, but watching amazed me. I had no idea that bubble rings could exist, or that dolphins would play with them like this.
Notes From Angelconf
In honor of the time change this weekend, I'll be super pedantic and point out that the YC application deadline should probably be 10 pm PDT on March 18, 2009, not PST.

My actual comment is: don't forget the time change tonight (in much of the world) and good luck to those applying!
but if this became widespread it would then become advantageous to be able to fool other people's sense of trustworthiness by displaying the trustworthy physical characteristics while actually being untrustworthy. ad infinitum...
Written by Ted Ts'o, the author of ext4 (among other things), who's been a linux kernel developer since the very beginning.

Even more approaches to rewriting: http://bitworking.org/news/390/text-editor-saving-routines
YHBT
I think when Ev said that he was either being self-deprecating, or judging himself against his own lofty ambitions, or both. I've worked for him and would actually characterize him as extremely focused.

Blogger was close to the brink and only survived because of his dedication. I think Twitter is another example of him getting more focused over time.

Maybe he's not overly engaged by mediocre opportunities, but that's a long way from saying he isn't able to focus.

I just wanted to point this out in case there were any potential founders who thought their ADD was an asset.
I was once told directly by some faculty when I was in grad school that programs in the natural sciences will often intend for a 30-50% dropout rate for grad students, because they need lots of TA's for large first year undergrad classes, but don't have funds/means to graduate all of those students as PhD's. This wasn't along the lines of plan for such a dropout rate, but actively desire it. It was a pretty disheartening thing to hear. I think most faculty would like to be able to graduate all of the students, but they also see it as an additional way of weeding out the bottom half of the class.

I also discussed this with some other professors in chemical engineering (a much smaller program, with very few TA's) and they told me that their dropout rate was essentially zero.
One might nitpick and say that the relevant issue is whether he would be correct to do so, rather than whether he has done so. I am fairly sure he is correct.
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Not much of a vulnerability -- the attacker still has to guess the victim's password.
Excellent point! The old evolutionary arms race.

I think in the end, the set of genes that wins this game of cat and mouse will be the one that has the strongest selection pressure. For example, being able to detect untrustworthy people might increase my survival chances by x%, and being able to fool people might increase my survival chances by y%. If x >> y, then one would expect that most modern-day humans would be good at sniffing out untrustworthy people; if y >> x, then modern-day humans would have difficulty doing this, since the untrustworthy people have evolved an extremely strong ability to escape detection.
Gmail asks old password before allowing to set new one, so the attack script is brute-forcing the password by submitting requests from a hostile page visited by the victim. It will take 150 million HTTP requests to brute-force a 6-letter password from 26 possible letters.

I suspect red flags will come up at google after first couple million requests. Or the victim will leave the hostile page he was lured to.
There probably aren't more than a couple hundred serious angels in the whole Valley, and yet they're probably the single most important ingredient in making the Valley what it is. Angels are the limiting reagent in startup formation.

If there are only a couple hundred serious angels in the Valley, then by deciding to become one you could single-handedly make the pipeline for startups in Silicon Valley significantly wider. That is kind of mind-blowing.

Wow. Mind blowing, but a great insight. I'm really amazed at how few Angels there are, and what a huge disproportionate influence they have on the world economy.

Personally, I think that angel investing would be an absolute blast. Just got to get that, "rich" bit figured out so I can start doing angel investing. :)
A really fun one that will be going on soon is Startup Weekend. Here's the URL: http://sf2.startupweekend.com/. It's from April 3rd to 5th.
What Investment Earned A Staggering 500%, In A 2 Year Period, During The Last Recession?
It is also true that if you were an ordinary retail investor who bought at $700, you haven't "lost" anything until you try to sell at $300. That's what the article is getting at.

Option repricing is a moral hazard; the point of options is that it aligns the interests of employees with the interests of the shareholders (who are the owners of the company). A situation in which the employees want the stock price to go down is directly contrary to that supposed alignment, and once repriced, the incentive to claw back to the original price is reduced.
But by the time you started up Viaweb you already had many years practical experience, no?
For approach #2, can you lose the file completely or only the new version? In many cases it would be acceptable if the old version was still there after a crash (ACI semantics).
What's the general way to draw these charts in javascript? SVG, Canvas, VML?
You went too far -- education does open doors, and if we're going to have any hope for the future, we need to continue to strive for a world where that's a fact

Some education does, some doesn't. You can't conflate EE with Gender Consciousness in Mediaeval French Poetry, or whatever nonsense is being taught in the humanities these days. The flawed ideas is that all education is equally worthwhile and I'd argue that infact, that was never true.
Now I know Mr.NNT has been given his due attention on this site several times already but I can't help thinking (and commenting).. Black Swans!
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Hack your life for fun & profit with Mitch Altman (creator of the TV-B-Gone)
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Yes, but I started a sw consulting firm (there were no Internet startups then) right out of college.
Copyright makes the act of copying something illegal. The only thing the bits might give you is evidence of copying. Trying to think about the law governing human actions only in terms of bits unsurprisingly fails.
Not this one, unfortunately. I blew out the first draft the night before the conference after getting 4 hours sleep the night before that, and I just opened up vi and started typing. It's a good thing this was one I could write in my sleep, because I practically did.

There are some others I wrote on Etherpad though, which we'll be able to see animated versions of once they release playback.
I'd be interested in the matplotlib code if you could put it on your blog...
Anyone else think his "presentation" enunciation is strikingly similar to that of pg?
He said he lacked focus when he was talking about his career before 1997, not at present. When did you work for him?
Also, knowing how to deal with people, focus, and discipline.
Some open source library like Laconica?
If the cracker gets to send a couple million requests per victim, I won't be surprised if she manages to crack passwords of many users. Blind brute force is definitely not the sharpest knife in the drawer; Dictionary based attacks might prove much more powerful when it comes to cracking average Joe's password.
I thought it was beautiful. Youtube for no preroll ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMCf7SNUb-Q
This film was obviously made before skateboarding took off.
Why? Doesn't seem technically impossible. Proxy servers could just pass it through like they do SSL. In fact if it was SSL the proxy wouldn't even know it was happening.

Sure, it'd require people to upgrade, which could take years, but that's always the case with this kind of thing.
Thank you for the kind words. Made my day.
great find. absolutely fascinating observation on social dynamics in a small space. i found the physical features that affect the interaction to be particularly interesting (about 7:00 in).
The "data" prefix is indeed for the sake of namespacing. This is actually quite useful since you can validate and e.g. find typos in ordinary attributes while still having your custom data attributes.

If you have some good ideas for HTML5, you just post a well-argued message on the open mailing list (http://www.whatwg.org/mailing-list), and it will be considered.
Trailer now available for Ray Kurzweil's movie, "Transcendent Man"
Isn't it the act of redistributing that's illegal?
Of course I remember you and Dave. We should separately catch up. Wondering what you did with the LLC and the other "founders."
Why not? Packaged as an executable, double click to run? It's not that hard. All those iPod users managed to "install a new filesystem driver" just fine.

Not as convenient as the "just works" FAT on USB, perhaps, but hardly an insurmountable problem. I'm surprised they're not bundling some kind of management program already - asking users to manually arrange files on USB sticks seems a bit fiddly.
Amazon.com/wii is not a reference to the Wii itself. The article's author got it wrong there, or at least fudged the truth slightly. It's a category on the Amazon site. Thus, amazon.com/books works (as someone else said), but shamwow doesn't. Shamwow isn't a category, after all. I assume they do have shortening for categories, and they just keep their structure consistent.
could someone postulate on the physics of this? What causes them to remain stable... I've never seen a bubble not float upward...