skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you very much for the elaboration.

> ...the voltage at the top of the thermistor is always 5 volts, and the voltage at the bottom is always zero by definition. (Because we're defining it as ground -- ground means "the point which we define as zero voltage in this diagram", although sometimes it also means "a point which we literally attach to the earth" -- darned EEs with their crazy terminology!)

Isn't what you're referring to rather a "common" than a ground?
Unless the developer is particularly talented, they most likely outsourced it to a company that specializes in graphic design / icons. A very good (and expensive) icon making company is Iconfactory (http://iconfactory.com).

However, I think you were asking how to learn on your own? In that case…

Short answer:

Pick your tool and get to know it very well. Photoshop is my recommendation.

Get on twitter and follow some graphic designers / icon makers. There's a lot of very good artists on twitter who don't seem to mind answering questions about starting off.

Longer answer:

Pay close attention to detail. It doesn't matter if you won't see it 99.99999% of the time, the overall icon looks better if you act as if that .00001% will come up daily. You know how you want to account for every possible edge case when coding? Do that, only with art.

Know what you want from the icon. Match it to your product. I don't just mean what you want it to look like. What about your app do you want it to represent? Will your icon have a Dock badge that shows off information? etc.

If you start with a vague goal of "Making a realistic looking icon for my program that does $foo", you won't get a very good icon. But if you start with "I want to make an icon for program $foo that identifies it as being an app for $bar", you'll end up with a much better result. Look at Pages.app. Gorgeous icon from Apple. Its undeniable that its an inkwell and a pen. But its not very realistic. But it fits in well with what Pages.app does; Typographic layout and creation.

Few examples of details. Since you mentioned Cultured Code, we'll look at Things.app:

- If you open the App.icns it comes with in Preview, you can see lines for individual sheets of paper in the front of the tray, and if you look at the back corners of the paper, its not perfectly aligned.

- Lighting. Theres a ton of attention to lighting in this icon. The paper has a slight gradient around the paper, so its not one consistent shade. The tray keeps up with this lighting as well, if you examine how the tray looks in the front left corner vs the front right corner. And if you look at the back corner of the tray (or the bottom dip in the front), you'll notice there's a slight highlight in the left corner, but not the right corner. Even the check mark on top has a gradient on it.

- The curve on the corner of the icon match the curves found in Mac's (same curve in iPods and iPhones, if you're curious).

//edit: The link tvon gave to a thread on MacThemes is full of great links to read.
What's the best way to stay in a conversation on Hacker News once you've commented?
Is there a way to subscribe to a convo via email or RSS, or do you just constantly have to come back to check for replies?

If (as it seems) there's not a way to subscribe to push notifications once you've joined a conversation, does anyone know if this is deliberate, or just something that hasn't yet been implemented. If it's the latter, I vote for setting this up ASAP. I'd love to be able to subscribe to Hacker News convos via email.
This is more than 11%. It's the FIRST link
I'm also extremely happy, especially since just today I watched a Walter Lewin physics lecture from MIT's OpenCourseWare, and a History lecture from Yale via Academic Earth.

The more people can read primary sources for free, watch lectures online, etc, the better off this civilization will be.
We were looking to add scripting to one of our products. The choices ended up getting narrowed to Lua or Python. Microsoft's support for Python (as IronPython) tipped the scales for us (we're a Microsoft shop, so if MS makes/supports it, our boss goes that way).

I thought Lua was a better fit, but I got overruled.

>Is it fairly easy to get rolling with?

Yes. I thought so.

>Is there much of a community of Lua hackers?

I suspect that since it is a Brazilian invention, that they're be a lot more down south.

If you look for books on Lua, there aren't a lot of them.
Is there a way to subscribe to a convo via email or RSS, or do you just constantly have to come back to check for replies?

There's not really a good way. You just check back every so often, and even then, there's not a good way to view the comments that have been newly added. This has been discussed here before, but HN deliberately tries to keep things simple, so I wouldn't bet on this feature being added anytime soon.
Despite economy, new startups retain optimism (AP on Demo Day)
One-week side project: a javascript audio player with timecoded DOM modification
It depends on what you mean by "reasonable." Yes, it works. As the paper suggests, it is a variation on steganography that hides a small stream of information in a large body of noise and uses a shared-secret (the MAC key in this case) to filter the information out of the noise. OTOH, it is really more of a mental exercise to show how US crypto-export rules were easy to get around if you were clever: according to the rules at the time you could "export" a cryptosystem that just performed authentication as long as it did not encrypt data. This particular bit of subterfuge is no longer necessary so no one is going to bother with it now and there are much better ways to do stego if you need to hide a message; you can also take the probabalistic encryption route if you need deniability...
There is that 'threads' link (http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=<userid>) on the top menu which takes you to your latest comment threads, works pretty well for me. :) No way to get this into email/RSS, though.
Definately not.
That sounds like a lot of rigamarole for a paper that might not even be worth reading.
Which VC would you like to flame?
Khmer New
If your only reason for quitting smoking was because you dislike the concept of addiction, then I suspect you were never a smoker in the first place and are making this up.

Smoking is expensive, unhealthy, inconvenient, and stinky. That's why there's a big push to get people unaddicted to smoking, but not so much push to get people unaddicted from caffeine.
That was a good read, thanks. Has it been submitted to HN?
Your summary is misleading. "Not investing enough" is based on an actual analysis of firms that haven't raised new funds and haven't made new investments, many of which have apparently conceded the point that they're no longer active. It wasn't subjective.
I generally won't submit my own stuff, but that post is also pretty old. There's stuff on the blog I'm much more proud of that hasn't made it here.
I understand the problem in the article but the solution doesn't necessarily seem to be better hardware (though, that would help).

From what is described, it sounds like the problem is with the poor block provisioning algorithms that the drive controller uses. Where is the operating system in this? Why can't frequently updated files be put on blocks of their own? Why can't block deletes be done online? Why must file modification modify the block(s) where the file currently resides and block for delete instead of writing to empty space and deferring delete until the controller is idle?

Anyone?
It's not that much harder than having to VPN into the university in the first place.
Congrats, they seem excited.
To understand circuits, you really have to become familiar with some common building blocks. When I saw this circuit, I didn't think "okay, a couple resistors in a configuration"; I thought, "oh, a voltage divider."

So read up on voltage dividers, RC circuits, pull-up and pull-down resistors, and diode current-limiting resistors. Google them right now and start reading. That will make you dramatically better equipped to understand real-world circuits.
You're using 'x' as the multiplication operator in some examples and '*' in others.

Stay consistent for goodness' sake! (Or someone might confuse 'x' to be a variable)
A glimpse of the future: Attending YC demo day by robot.
Ok, so a little more: 11.\={1}\%
I created Get Rich Swift a few months ago to inspire others. I've already inspired one start up. http://getrichswift.com
I was just asking myself this question the other day. I really hope to see some good responses here, soon.

+1, for sure.
Madoff Employee Breaks Silence
You're missing mine, I'm afraid: I've made no claim about anyone having to do anything. Indeed, if I was in Charlie's shoes, I wouldn't be working on spec.

Let me put it another way.

There are two markets for exploits: the legitimate one, and the criminal one.

Charlie is participating in the legitimate one. He's going to get paid what the sole counterparty wants to pay him. We can argue about what the counterparty should pay him, but that's up to Apple (in this case), and there are a lot of different things that might enter into their calculation.

An argument that uses the value of the exploit in the criminal market in an attempt to set a value in the legitimate one only makes sense in one of two cases: (a) you're going to take your work and sell it over there, or (b) you claim that someone else either has already discovered or will soon discover the same exploit independently, and will choose to sell it on the criminal market, and therefore the value of your work should reflect the danger of that happening.

In the first case, you're engaging in blackmail.

In the second case, it's just not a very good argument -- because the chance that each element in the chain of reasoning about the value (it's about to be or has already been discovered by someone else, it's going to end up on the black market, it's a substantial risk for a 0-day, etc.) is not true represents a probability that reduces the overall value of your exploit in the legitimate market. Plus, there's the additional reductions in exploit value that come from the vendor not actually caring that much about fixing problems until they're in the wild, or having already found the issue and decided that the particular problem isn't worth fixing for a variety of non-technical reasons, or any one of a dozen other external factors.

Working on spec and then demanding that the vendors match the exploit values that the criminal market is paying is just a Bad Idea, morally and practically.
Those on the list can go on to start theflamed.com.
This technique is entirely reasonable, although not incredibly efficient. There are several ways of converting between symmetric encryption and authentication; the only reason we talk about using, e.g., AES and SHA256 is that AES is much faster than any block cipher you can build out of SHA256, while SHA256 is much faster than any hash you can build out of AES.
Greasemonkey lets you do it - with GM_xmlhttpRequest:

http://diveintogreasemonkey.org/api/gm_xmlhttprequest.html
and if possible without using Flash (maybe it could be done with canvas)
Amen. I never understood why they place the boxer weigh in date so far away from the actual match. Seems like a stupid Idea that is mainly kept for the media-hype.
although mentioned in the article, this article by jeffrey-pfeffer et al. (http://www.aomonline.org/Publications/Articles/BSchools.asp) is very, very good.
Yes, that's how better FTLs work, but the details are difficult. You have to have a logical-to-physical mapping table and keep it consistent.
Plaxo? Am I the only one who thinks that doesn't fit in with the rest of the companies in that grid?
the greater consumption of cars in the years following the great depression were due to having suppressed demand for all those years.
as for the scenario you seem to be saying that the government needs to step in and take up the role of the counterfeiters. Why should the supply and demand structure from the time of counterfeiting continue on? those demands were artificial and the market met those demands with artificially inflated supply.
I confess: I have a problem focusing.
well they had a good exit and a decent amount of usage.
Can 3-D Save Hollywood?
The policy on which the MIT faculty voted allows opt-out provided the author(s) provide a reason. The new policy is a great step for MIT and the research community as a whole but still requires MIT to stand up to journals who demand exclusive rights. It will be interesting to see how much backbone MIT asserts.
And Apple gets 8.3%
The notion that child abuse would end because there would be no market for commercial child abuse is a stupid idea. [...] Going after the producers/abusers is the goal. Going after users do next to nothing to protect exploited children.

Agreed, but that's exactly what I just said, lol :)
Lua is my favorite language to use when I need to make some systems level code configurable or extensible in simple ways.

Based on the traffic at http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l I'd say there is a small but healthy and growing community.
I get the "Y" but the peach squares around it just seem like a waste of screen real estate.
Do I generate massive amounts of business ideas? No. Do I create massive cloud-based high-touch paradigm synergies? Yes. Do I like buzzwords? Massively. Do I always talk like Donald Rumsfeld? Yes.
Ruby for Penetration Testers: Announcing Ruby Black Bag
every business lives and dies by its client list. managing that client list is your primary business. everything else is secondary.
the person who is the best at managing clients will make more money than the person with the highly efficient technical solutions.
The main point of the 'warranty voiding' would be to get a ton of hype from "hack your ssd" blogspam, which would instantly distinguish them in a crowded market.

Being able to extract more money from PHBs is just gravy.
I must admit, the "aversion towards business people" critique of HN is not my experience - I'm a business coach, and for me C+ was a grade I got once in Phys Ed.

I enjoy the start-up culture, and especially the tech focus of our community, but if you guys didn't love business like I do then I would have grown bored 340-something days ago.
Apple pays zero for vulnerabilities, friend. They get them for free. Charlie Miller is saying he's going to stop doing that. Can you blame him?
Write a little script that pulls http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=<username>; and does some magic to pull out the info into an RSS feed (yes, ideally pg can add this as a real feature, but I'm being pragmatic here ;-)).

Just a messy Ruby-based example I threw together. Works for me.

require 'rubygems'
require 'open-uri'
require 'hpricot'

username = 'petercooper'
uri = 'http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=' + username
doc = Hpricot(open(uri))

puts %{<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Hacker News responses to #{username}</title>
<link>#{uri}</link>}

(doc/'td td table').each do |post|
content = post.inner_html
next if content =~ />#{username}</ # skip if we posted it
next unless post.inner_html =~ /vote/ # skip if it's not a post
id = content[/\_(\d+)/,1]
comment_text = (post/'.comment').first.inner_text
commenter = content[/user\?id=(\w+)/,1]
puts %{ <item>\n <title>Comment from #{commenter}</title>}
puts %{ <link>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=#{id}</link>}
puts %{ <description>#{comment_text}</description>\n </item>}
end

puts %{</channel></rss>}

It'd be better, but the HTML on Hacker News is from 1996. I was too sloppy to bother fetching the title of the current thread ;-)

With just adding a shebang line and a content-type header line, it works no problems on Dreamhost as a CGI script. Example: http://bigbold.dreamhosters.com/hnc.cgi

Anyway, thanks for giving me the idea. I'm using that now myself.. lol.
I am not sure of the answer you are expecting to your question. Or if you expect one at all. Here's my amateur take.

One way is to do nothing and let the chips fall. I imagine this as the economic equivalent of a broken chain in the anchor room of a battleship. Disorderly with lots of collateral damage, wailing, and gnashing of teeth.

There is the Andrew Mellon approach to "liquidate! liquidate! liquidate!" the misallocated capital and redeploy as quickly as possible. This means accepting that some portion of the productive capacity at peak monetary supply was based on phantom demand and it needs to be torn down and converted to something productive that will have real demand going forward. Yes, a whole lot of hard-working folks literally wasted years of their lives. I don't know what the collateral damage would be -- probably nasty. This is actually the function of recessions, and a fierce but orderly unwind with social support for the displaced would seem preferable to the constant terror and confusion of attempting to delay the inevitable liquidation and redeployment.

Another option is the path we are taking (I say 'we' grudgingly because I disagree, but I am a passenger aboard the United States of Titanic). Attempt to keep the monetary base stable, even though half of it is based on phantom demand. 'Legitimately counterfeit' the balance, theoretically giving businesses and individuals enough cover to pay down debts and become net savers again, then wind down the monetary base to equilibrium. This really hasn't worked for Japan. I'm just speculating...without a market incentive to liquidate and redeploy capital don't we just end up with zombie industries serving the same old phantom demand? Everyone has a job building shit nobody needs, and nobody has a job building shit everyone needs. The remaining productive industries get crushed under the tax burden of supporting the zombies, until it all ends in tears and there is nothing left to redeploy anyway ('Ayn Rand Endgame', anyone?).

There is no policy cure for massive fraud and theft. Neither is the tinfoilers' favorite a cure: 'gold-backed non-fractional banking'. There is no magic economic triple antibiotic that will make the owie go away. There is only facing the truth -- you got duped -- excluding those responsible from society, and directing our future efforts to things that actually raise our standard of living (I may be biased, but to me this means technological increments that help us use our limited energy more efficiently).
Interesting. Not sure how often it updates, but seems reasonably current. Doesn't know who I am, which is the best giveaway (eg, my login id doesn't appear, and I have the option to upvote stories / comments I already have - or which are my own).

Actually, when I go to vote, it asks me to login.

No thanks.
and a much-criticized, fairly annoying "viral" growth strategy.
Free Bollywood Movie Download: Aa Dekhen Zara [2009-MP3-VBR-320Kbps]
Wow, that's an excellent response. You're right. I can't think of any means of easily accomplishing that - if at all; which I find odd, because I would think that would occur at least a few times.
Coding To Music - TFMSC: The Bikeshed Formula
It's an A record, not a proxy. Still abusive but the owner would have to point it elsewhere.
Yeah, the threads link is also good in case someone comments on something that has already scrolled from the front page.
To say that something like internet addiction has no physiological component is to vastly understate the power our brain has over the rest of our body. If your method of getting a dopamine rush is the internet (or world of warcraft, porn, gambling, etc), you are still going to get physiologically attached to that dopamine rush and will suffer negative physical reactions (poor mood, etc) if those things are taken away.
hackerne.ws.	1722	IN	A	174.132.225.106
news.ycombinator.com.	835	IN	A	174.132.225.106

You really should check the Host: header that gets sent and if it's not a host you recognize, redirect to one you do recognize. Do not allow people to create aliases to sites you control. This is dangerous.

Users can log in and register with it. After a while, he could redirect through a proxy, and catch the cookies. Search engines might crawl you through this domain name, which can later be re-pointed. There's all sorts of abusive or inappropriate things that can be done here; don't allow it.
Has anyone seen any of the new crop of 3D films?

Are the results good?
Not that I'm saying that whoever did this intends to do so, etc etc, purest of intentions, etc etc. Even so.
Great story. This style of exit strategy appeals to me, but I would find the actual deal process of acquisition extremely daunting.

I think having Y-Combinator in your corner would be one of the truly great benefits of being funded by them; their experience with what's what, contacts with lawyers and so on, but mainly just the moral support (not trying to talk them up; this article just struck me powerfully. For half a billion, it's going to be serious negotiations).
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I still use Chrome even though its become less trendy lately. Beta version has some great features.

I know many people are mad that the linux/mac version isn't available but if you think about it, the reason is the sandbox. Google loves quality and won't release something if its not of high quality. Sandboxing on windows I'm positive is different on a unix based system. And security is key.
It's easy to come up with ideas. Hard to come up with good ideas. Almost impossible to come up with the killer ideas.
94% of users are afraid to change.
It's polling reddit - every 30 seconds by the looks of the code. Fairly standard AJAX approach to grab reddit's JDON data via their API.
I was surprised once, but I think that's a natural reaction for geeks. It's hard to really get a feel for the general economy and what the average Joe wants.

Just because I don't buy anything from spam, would never buy food from a roadside stall, click on banner ads all day, or go do drugs or whatever.. doesn't mean the majority of the world isn't doing all that stuff each day :) Once realized, it's a pretty powerful thing.. yes, you can produce some really odd stuff and it will still sell!

The underachiever method is really just a market research technique that someone gave a name and made money from. As a market research technique, though, it works. It's just a variation of asking people what they like and then providing that.

It's better, though, because you've actually picked up people from Google who, in the main, were ready to buy! (Or at least read what you had to say about a product.) The opinions of these people are far more important than just general opinions from the market. These are folks with problems who are ready to put down cash to read stuff that will help them out.

The number of responses is small in a classical market research sense, but that's why it's usually done in a very small niche. 50-100 responses to, say, "Why do you want to learn French?" are going to provide enough of an indication of the general market groups.. expats living in France who want jobs, kids at home doing homework, rich guys wanting to pick up chicks in Monaco, etc. These answers can then significantly direct your product.

The alternative is to just build a product then hope the people clicking on your ad want to buy it. Doing even basic market research with something like the underachiever method will put you streets ahead of that point by at least giving you an indicator of what even a small group is definitely going to want to buy.
I mostly use the "threads" view, and sometimes click on the story title to see whether someone has added a new interesting comment there.

It's a shame there's no way to visually identify new comments, though. When I post up an article and I'm interested in all the comments, after it goes past 50 or so it becomes very hard to track new comments.
What criteria do you think that Sequoia uses for highlighting companies? (They've funded far more companies than the ones listed.)