skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) If they had planned for platform independence, they wouldn't have been able to release anything for a long time.

2) Since Chrome relies heavily on process isolation, I would think that a lot of the architecture of the browser is tied to the platform. Even the html rendering pipeline (based on WebKit) runs out-of-band and the rendered bitmap is send to the browser window via IPC. (I don't work on the team but from my understanding of someone's comments, this is how it roughly works)

3) Regarding extensibility, I agree that I doubt Google is going to provide much extensibility of the actual browser chrome. Google's interests are in the web sites themselves and as such, the greasemonkey-like extensions are what they're probably going to promote. They want to hide the browser container as much as possible and move the focus to the web page inside it.
Execution porn? When did executions become porn? And if possession is illegal, better round up everyone at Youtube, because I know they've distributed videos of people getting killed.

Your argument that creating a community and market creates demand has some merit, but note that I specifically specified anonymous downloading with no ties to the "community" whatsoever. Would that render it OK, then? If not, why not? And why doesn't your argument apply to, say, news coverage of school shootings, which definitely creates a "market" for horrible crimes?

And your argument about individuals with "inappropriate thoughts" (how sad that we even have to type such a phrase) who "could well be encouraged to put thoughts into action" - perhaps, but our entire legal system is supposed to be based on things you have done, not things you may or may not do in the future.

You cant pin any specific blame but removing them from society is always going to help :)

Plus of course you dont know what they may do in th future. Looking at images may develop into actual abuse.

I cannot disagree strongly enough with the above. If you can't pin specific blame, what that means is that they haven't done anything. What they may do in the future is not something you can arrest them for today.

Using your logic, why don't we, say, go and arrest anyone who looks like they might be in a gang? Who knows what they might do in the future!

You disagree with that, right? So why does it suddenly become a valid argument with child porn? And "because I really, really hate them" is not a good enough reason.

It's a circular argument. We make having these files illegal, because they show someone might do something wrong. Oh wait, they have done something wrong, they have these illegal files! Do you see what's wrong with that?

Rehabilitation? For what? They haven't done anything! Look, if they rape a child, punish them! Throw the book at the bastards, lock them up for life! You have my complete support!

But locking people up for things they haven't done yet is wrong, wrong, wrong. That is not how our legal system works, no exceptions, not even if we really, really hate the accused. That's why, in case you didn't know, Lady Justice wears a blindfold.

You've taken off that blindfold, and in doing so, corrupted the system. That is what makes me angry enough to "come out in support of" something I personally find reprehensible. I don't love child porn, quite the opposite, but I do love the legal system, and this kind of thing is fucking it up.
"In short, welching on these debts would likely lead to exactly the problem that the government has decided must be avoided."

I think this is true of the payments made to AIG's counterparties, not so much of the bonuses being paid to the financial services division. Pretty much everyone on Wall Street's compensation has gotten hosed so I don't think trading partners are going to flinch about seeing employees go bonus-less.

There's a bit of irony in me saying this (think about who I might be doing technology for[and it's not AIG] that would make my words the most ironic...), but bonuses only work as a positive motivator up to a point. Past that, you end up getting people doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons--there were a few good HN posts about this concerning case studies conducted on bonuses and why companies should pay above the market average but not be at the top percentile.
I agree. If you lose your users' trust by succumbing to a security breach, especially one that could have easily been prevented, it's extremely difficult to get that trust back. At the very least security should be #2 as long as it swiftly follows #1.
The argument was made that Skype is a hard target, in part because they went through some trouble to obscure the binary. I'm just refuting that portion of the argument.
I don't think there's anything adblock does that a chromium extension script (or a greasemonkey script) can't do.
You can write a script that just looks for the html fragments that represent ads and nuke them before the page renders, right? - in the same way adblock does
Right, so this is why this doesn't matter much to 99% of the world. Your phone sex and plans to kill people are still safe.
Unfortunately, installing both IE6 and IE7 on the same machine causes IE6 to mishandle cookies, among other problems. You won't be able to log into many sites (Drupal sites, for example) when using this method.
Uh, actually I don't. Maybe I signed up at the wrong time or something. Big enough, but definitely not unlimited.
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=522634
Crawl http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=XXX using your login cookie.
To wit, here is my current status:

Total Bandwidth Provided:	13128 GB ($0.1/GB over)
Total Used So Far:	1.362 GB
Estimated Usage For Cycle:	2.484 GB
Estimated Overage Charges:	$0.00

Obviously that's not the "unlimited" plan.
"Meanwhile, for individual developers, the process disproportionately favors development of so-called 'crap apps.' Why should developers invest time in developing complex apps that might take months to review, when they could develop simple apps of limited utility that are more likely to get into the App Store in a day or two?"

This point seems spot on. Has anyone else been afraid to devote months to an app for the same reason? Seems like a scary investment given that you will just be subject to Apple's whims indefinitely.
Rotzy - An iPhone App with a backend on Google App Engine
Using Hadoop to fight spam - Part II
Ad-free web browsing for Chrome
I think if Microsoft want me to test websites on their browsers, they should release a free or minimal cost developer's pack containing several actual versions of Windows and IE versions that I can run in Virtual Machines.
Find Out How Much Traffic a Website is Getting
Biology students should definitely learn how to program.

I'm in my 4th year as a bio major and have been involved with several research projects. The first involved inducing schizophrenia in rats, and recording their movements in reaction to a set of audio stimuli after being given a set of varying medicines. We had folders and folders filled with spreadsheets of data -- data that would have to be manually inputted into some crappily obsolete software. Even with somewhat specialized software, each run was saved as a separate file, adding to the clutter. Our research would have definitely progressed more quickly had we had programmers that built the appropriate software to aggregate our data.

In my second research project, our team was trying to, and still is, find the metrics to 'the beautiful face.' This requires morphing pictures of women together, presenting these synthetic images to a focus group, who then rates the images. After the pictures are rated, they are subject to a natural selection type algorithm we developed, and the beauty evolution is done manually. We would've definitely found much value in recruiting a programmer who could've written a program to automate the selection process, and perhaps built an app that brought the focus group rating aspect of our research to the web. We do use hotornot.com, but it's not ideal.

I'd like to add that additionally, medical students and doctors should learn how to program. There are many many many areas in medicine and healthcare generally that are behind the tech times. Coding doctors would definitely expedite the progression of the medical field from within. At least I think so. That's what my med school personal statement was about. :P

As someone who has studied biology/medicine, and has a definite interest in programming (teaching myself currently), I hope to find myself helping in the progression of the convergence of these two fields.
Some of these are pretty cool for javascript.
I don't understand what you think the point of the competition is, or what the point would be to concealing latent vulnerabilities introduced by older versions of Safari that remained present in newer versions.
6 months later, the Intel SSDs are still massively better
Have you listened to The Glitch Mob's most recent mixtape? It's the pinnacle of this genre. I wish they would come to Pittsburgh.

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/101698/The%20Glitch%20Mob%20-%20C...
Hey, I totally went out and bought that title. I just never got around to it. If you wanted to call me out on it, you might be doing me a favor.

[edit]

Context:

http://rdist.root.org/2007/04/19/anti-debugger-techniques-ar...
buerniasipjnl bhj gldhdfj<h gnknmjxhgcvukygfigs
I'd extend your comment to "Everyone should learn how to program". When you look at the number of repetitive tasks that take place in a typical office environment, it's amazing at how much time could be saved with a little programming.

Macros were designed to accomplish this, but they're still way to complicated to be used by most people. It would be great if there were some sort of easy to use third party system that could integrate with a number of products (Word, Excel, Websites) and provide an easy environment to build macros.

Edit: I'm basically thinking of OS X's Automator
Thank you for an insightful analysis. It's somewhat interesting that HN'ers believe they are super smart but downvote anything that goes against the mainstream dogma. Finance is complex. Even a smart guy like Philip Greenspun made a fool of himself in this article. Better not make strong statements when one is treading outside one's area of expertise...

I would argue that many allow emotion to cloud their judgement. Of course that taxpayers are not happy to see their money being wasted on bonuses, but shouldn't we analyze the situation in objective terms? Your analysis was one of the most balanced I have read in recent times. Sometimes one must choose between two evils. Things are seldom black & white.

I liked your take on the need to compensate and keep AIG's traders, in order to avoid them going elsewhere and start predatory practises against their former employer. Makes sense. I wonder why no one had mentioned it before.
Can't agree more. In my undergraduate research in the Cognitive Neuroscience labs at Berkeley, it was disappointing to see how much effort was wasted because people avoided technology instead of embracing it (in neuroscience!).

The work done there was incredible, but as I was passed around to researchers in the lab, programming the experiments they had designed (have to pay your dues to get into research), I got a chance to see the methods they used before they were able to get competent programmers. Manually marking spikes and anomalies in EEG data when there was an api for the program to allow access to recorded data for just such a purpose, dealing with timing issues because few understood the difficulties of achieving high-precision event timing, etc.

It was depressing to think of how much further it could have gone. When I left to pursue my startup, I was working on some automated techniques to remove noise from fMRI data. That type of work will speed up research and allow researchers to spend time on meaningful things.
Agreed. 2 decades ago "thoroughly excellent" meant "IBM". We all know what happened there. Those who define the word "excellent" always tend to be a couple of decades behind what's happening in the real world.
Does anyone know how to add a right click menu item so I can invoke a external download tool for URLs?
Freeware Design Comp alternatives
I cannot afford Adobe Photoshop and find Gimp quite intimidating to use. Are there any other freeware alternatives to these two for creating design mock-ups and comps?

Preferably easier to use than these two?
Why would one assume a random distribution of colors?
This is an interesting discussion.

One of many articles on Greenspan's resistance to the regulation of derivatives can found in this NYTimes article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/business/economy/09greensp...

A google of "Brooksley E. Born" will show a considerable amount more.

Perhaps we could each start a blog to debate the various point here. They are interesting enough to warrant more exposure than a fading thread on hn.

Best,

JTU
As much as I like Apple and OSX, I see some of the same kinds of mistakes Next/NeXT made with NextStep, being made with OSX.

(I used to sell Next software for about 6 months and got to use a NextStation every day. Very cool - later at another company I got to speak with the GUI designer Keith Ohlfs and personally thank him for the best copmuter experience I ever had.)

For instance, NextStep's POSIX interface was broken and thus, Next was not able to compete against the then-very-inferior SunOS in government contracts (because POSIX compliance was a requirement).

Instead, Next did win in CIA/NSA and other exempt contracts where the solution was considered to be "custom" and thus didn't have to follow the standards.

It probably would have taken a competent Next programmer a few weeks to fix the POSIX layer - but since POSIX was viewed as "dumb" it was never made a priority.

Apple is letting some of the boring stuff slip - which is a danger sign. Programmers at Apple can't all be programming the cool CoverFlow stuff and ignoring the "guts".
Open Source Hardware Hackers Start P2P Bank
Ask HN: Channels to Venture Capital
Two part question.
How are you deciding what VC's to pitch?
How are you getting an introduction so they listen to your pitch?
Oh I agree with you. Use the best tool for the job I say. But man I'm blown away by the OP's example.
Join the Lean Startup discussion at Web 2.0 Expo for free
Anyone know the Sikh guy in this picture: http://divvyshot.com/photo/6sM0Y/ As a fellow sikh; I'm curious.. Thanks!
Consumer Confidence Makes Up Huge Ground
You might want to try Vim.
The thing about Shaun of the Dead is that it transcended "genre" - that's the key. It wasn't a zombie movie. It was a comedy ... with zombies. Transcending is always worth big bucks.
As long as the server is working under the belief that quality service = bigger tip, the system works in favor of the customer. Whether that belief is rational or irrational is of no consequence.
Plus, I'd rather see a company encouraging people to buy local and depend less on high-energy infrastructure. I suppose specialty food shops could themselves buy local and avoid supporting mega-corp farms, and there are likely other 'goods' I'm not seeing right now. Nonetheless, this strikes me as the wrong direction. Maybe I'm temporarily blinded by recent 'rebuild better over the recession' optimism.
How long though before a company like Google throws their weight behind number porting?
Linux Kernel Temporarily Receives New Mascot/Logo, Tuz
OT, sort of, but thanks for linking to the printer-friendly version.
Create a new social networking site in few hours using django pinax platform
Here's the list: http://file.sunshinepress.org:54445/acma-secret-blacklist-au...

Wikileaks page: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Australian_government_secret_ACMA_...

Note that some are hostnames but others are actual URIs, not just domains. So not only are they filtering certain hosts, they are presumably sniffing HTTP packets.
Is there a compelling reason why the biologist and the programmer need to be the same person?

It looks to me like researchers have figured out specialization of labor: one well-educated researcher to make the theory, several low-wage grunts who get to feed the rats. (Whether this relationship is fair to graduate students is outside the scope of this post.)

I think we're suggesting people learn programming so that they can do tasks which are of comparative complexity to feeding the rats. Converting data from one form to the other? That is feeding rats. Iterating over data to produce summary statistics? That is feeding rats.

(I know biologists work with really big data sets. So maybe they're not feeding rats, they're feeding monkeys. Disgustingly parallel algorithms are getting easier and arranging the hardware for them is getting easier: in a few years, the monkeys will be about as easy to feed as rats are today.)

Biologists don't have grad students scratch-build their own microscopes, do they? That would be silly. Why not have the scientists and proto-scientists concentrate on science and outsource the feeding of computational rats to someone who doesn't really need a graduate degree in bioinformatics.

Plus, if using cheap outsourced rat-feeders achieves comparable quality to graduate students, there will be less market need for a permanent underclass of rat feeders with crushing debt loads and stipends that make McDonalds look generous.
Anandtech doesn't even have prev/next links, you have to use the <select> every time!
The writeup describes Wattvision as being "whole-house only". For all I know, that's true.

However, if it's got sufficient resolution to give "15 second" updates, it seems you could train it to recognize certain draws: holding everything else constant, turn individual items on at exact cues given by the software.

(The software might even be able to form hypotheses about individual draws before they're exactly named. Then the user just goes in and recognizes certain steps on the constructed timeline: "oh, yeah, that's the hallway light I turn on when I get home from work, and that's obviously the electric dryer, and this random thing must be the refrigerator compressor coming on and off through the night.")
Really? Why is that? I always thought Amazon was a great place to work in.
Do tipping customs vary widely within the UK?

In the US, as far as I know they are quite stable across the country so it doesn't stress me out. If I traveled to another country, I would consider learning the tipping customs to be just another thing I need to learn, along with the electric system voltage and whether or not to shake hands. But if it varies widely within the same country, I could see how it would annoy you.
RICHARD GIORGIO AKA PRETTY BOI is a twenty-three year old Hip-Hop artist/lyricist
Wattvision: what are you guys doing differently then Googles plan for web based energy readings?

Well, for one thing, Wattvision exists. Google put out a press release. For another, Wattvision works with existing power meters. Google (and pretty much everybody else) is waiting for the magical day that everybody gets new meters.

(Just to be clear, I'm not part of Wattvision.)
After crisis: creative construction
1. http://ycombinator.com/topvcs.html

2. Find the shortest path in your network of friends to someone who is a founder or early employee at one of their portfolio companies, and ask them to introduce you.
I would set each sales guy up with a small site, point them in the right direction and have them learn the basics on their own.
Twenty Hot Young Entrepreneurs Under 30
http://goog-perftools.sourceforge.net/doc/tcmalloc-opspersec...
had not, thanks for the link
The bloke in my next cubicle practices it and I hate it!

All day long they are always discussing where to put an if condition, assert or what to name their variables. And fuck I cannot concentrate.
Your decisions can be affected by fleeting images and what you currently see
Quote "SSDs make Vista usable."

I guess the best thing to do right now is to have your OS (or multiple OS's) in an 32GB SSD for instance, and a big HDD as second drive for multimedia and general storage. Right?

Edit: Like other people say, thanks for linking to print version :-)
Is there such thing as cycles for the world economy?

I'm guessing Perez cycles (covering an 'installation period' and a 'deployment period') would be laid out as such:

1870-1920 (from severe recession towards the Belle Epoque)
1920-1980 ("canal and railway manias ending in panics, the roaring twenties ending in the crash of 1929", followed by the booming post-war era)
1980-2030 (dot com bubble ending in the 2000 NASDAQ crash, and financial bubble ending in the 2008 crash, probably followed by a booming period in the forthcoming decades)
Almost wonder if this was deliberately leaked so that everyone looks at the list and goes - "oh okay it's just porn etc." and stops thinking about the real issue.
it was more cool than i thought it would be.
Word...which is strange cuz I've heard that MS is a great place to work in especially for hackers.
With every twitter account I feel like squatting on (and, oh , btw, yes everyone does it), I create a not-too-close gmail account for use with just that twiter account (for verification), and use that to test the 3rd party apps that "Must" have your twitter creds in order to work. What I have found, by trial and eror, is that over half of ALL the currently available (and some beta) 3rd party apps work PERFECTLY WITHOUT any signup or twitter cred. So why do THOSE particular 3rd party apps need the info? I doubt they need it for future growth of the app or "extra features" later.
You might be reading the article too literally -- you can test more than just tcmalloc, of course (ned, ptmalloc*, libumem, etc). It is -very- possible that one of these allocators will handle our memory footprint more gracefully than say, libc. There is only one way to find out: via A/B testing.

I think the important thing to keep in mind is that assertions like:

"I think this is pretty key, because otherwise TCMalloc is somewhat of an overhead."

are a bit subjective, IMHO. Allocators are different from one another, and of course they react to a series of allocations/deallocations differently. We're trying to find out if the way we use our heap is better suited to another allocator like tcmalloc, or nedmalloc, or whatever.

And RE: multi-threaded - I don't believe it will be particularly difficult to get a representative sample, but working on that isn't very high on my list right now.
I appreciate your past experience with NeXT, but I'm going to have to disagree with your extrapolation: http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html
Nice. Here's more detail, following my thought process:

On first glance, it seems that any prisoner would gain no information on seeing the other prisoner's caps. Therefore, it's just a 50/50 shot, so the best strategy for the prisoners is to pick one ahead of time who will flip his switch (and the others will not).

However, when you enumerate the possibilities (BBB, BBW, BWB, etc.), you can see that following frankus's strategy will provide a 3/4 chance of survival.

This apparent paradox goes away once you recognize that, in fact, seeing the 2 prisoners caps does, in fact, provide information to the 3rd prisoner. That information is not the color of the cap, but whether another may have flipped his switch.

For example, if I am a prisoner, and I see two black caps, there are two scenarios:

- I'm wearing a white cap. If I don't flip the switch, we all die. If I do, we live.

- I'm wearing a black cap. If I flip the switch, we die, but if I do not, we die anyway (since other prisoners incorrectly flipped the switch).
Awesome thanks :-)
whoa -- good to know, I was merely pointing it out since I know they do claim to have 24/7 support, if it's useless then my point is invalid!
Announce that you're pushing for Skype to be banned...
Are you sure it's tipping? How come the sales staff in some supermarkets in the US are nice, even when they don't work on commission and tips?

Perhaps it's a combination of many factors: tips, commission, weather, culture, religion and guns that makes Americans nice (For the record, I'm not religious)