skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
DEMO Trend: The Smarter Web
If you think about options as a form of insurance, then we can infer something about the marginal investors beliefs about various scenarios by the price they're willing to pay to protect themselves from them.

Right now, the risk-neutral expectation is that the S&P will appreciate by 5 to 30% over the next year, but the strong concern that the market will drop catastrophically drives up demand for insurance against a depression. So on average the options market looks pessimistic even though in some sense the median belief is that the market will go up.

This is not the way perceptions have to go, for example the greatest mass of investors might have been around -5% to -30% but a smaller group, convinced the market would quickly rebound to beyond its former glory, might produce a net effect of slightly rosy.

So in essence using options prices we can determine that in general investors are not thinking "yay, bargains" rather "yikes, mattress"
And it's not just bugs, but lack of features. For example, I have requirements for simple 2D graphics with client-side interactivity. If we only had to support Firefox/Safari/Opera/Chrome, we could use SVG, but for users with IE (which has neither SVG or Canvas), that means Flash. Doing simple graphics with Flash is well over 10x more work than just splatting some XML inline into your page (which I've also done for personal side projects).

Consider, for example, that Flash/IE is a completely different plugin than Flash/all-other-browsers. We've definitely had Flash compatibility bugs between major versions, between minor versions, and even between the "same version" on different browsers. I can think of a few that took many of us more than 30 minutes just to trace through, much less come up with a workaround. And all of this only because IE (even IE8, AFAICT) doesn't natively support any kind of client-side graphics.

I don't know where the 30% overhead estimate for IE came from -- maybe a simple site? That sounds really, really low to me. I would put it at least 100% overhead for the kinds of things I do.
Native Client Security Contest
How the power management works on this thing will be very interesting -- how long does the battery last with the screen off, or with the CPU in almost-asleep mode? How much would WiFi or 3G being on take away from that?
Exactly.

Countries such as India and China have done very well in large part due to investments by Americans and American companies. Even during Japan's recession, the US economy helped keep Japan going. People and countries all over the world invest in the US dollar - Even today, when interest rates are at an all time low, T-Bills are still considered safe investments.

Will the economy continue to change and evolve? Of course. But America's place in the world economy is not likely to change in the near future.
What the future will bring us: nobody knows, there has never been anything really similar in history...

The causes are very simple to describe: our (temporary) so successful economic system didn't follow many moral rules. And now we are all (the responsible and non) forced to pay for that (silly) mistake.

You may not agree with me, but I'm convinced that this will be the summary of our current situation, reviewed in about 50 years.
I carried the EEE 701 over about 8 months of travel and it was great. Bump the RAM to 2GB and install your OS of choice and it's really a pretty capable machine. The screen is a bit small but the new round (EEE 90x and stuff from Dell and whatnot) look like they solve that problem. Two tricks I learned:

- The 701 fits inside a one gallon zip lock, letting you transport it in the rain and on boats without too much worry.

- There's a extension for FF 3+ called "Default FullZoom Level" which lets you change the default page zoom level. On a small screen that makes a big difference (think about all those 850+ pixel grid layouts on a 800px wide screen).

- Compiz works great on the GMA950 and the Expose-style window switcher works really well for small screens. On GMA950 Compiz breaks GLUT but other than that I didn't run in to any problems (or: make sure your code builds _and_ runs before you leave town).
Internet Explorer ?
> if everyone is leeching and nobody is paying how will we get movies like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or a game like Halo (they cost millions of $ to produce)?

Whoever wins this trial, P2P filesharing is unlikely to go away. So I think filesharing will have a number of effects:

Movies and games will get cheaper to produce

People will make less financially ambitious movies and games

Some movies and games will be funded by varients of the Street Performer Protocol -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Performer_Protocol

Some movies or games will be funded by the state. Organisations such as the BBC do this today. Possibly there will be a broadband tax to fund the creation of downloadable works, along the lines of this proposal: http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-fo...
> the Swedish authorities and judges know they're being watched closely by an international community

Do the Swedish authorities particularly care if a group of people who they consider to be criminals and pirates don't like them? I doubt it.
Thanks! I knew about the single click, but not the double...
Je suis d'accord.

This is hardly something something I'd want to appear on my alma mater's web site (as it does here for ucalgary.ca). Perhaps there is a uHollywood.us? Further undermining the list is the journal which provides its single reference:

Schulman, E. 2009, "Measuring Fame Quantitatively. IV. Who's the Most Famous of Them All?" Annals of Improbable Research Online, February 28.
I'm under the impression that this site doesn't do all that much. Ok... you store URLs, then mark them as "read" and "unread." Not necessarily a good or bad thing.. I'm sure it's incredibly useful. That's not my point.

My point is, how can a 2 page website drop support for a whole browser? Just seems like laziness to me.
Its the word "indie" that confuses me. If its taken from the music world, then I think using google would be like signing a major label.
The Flaw in the System: The Bankers Don't Care About the Banks
I don't like this, but yeah, go ahead, do it. Only, kill them by being better, not by governmental decree.
But that was trolling anyway, wasn't it...
There are people who buy a netbook as a complement to a full size laptop or desktop. And there are people who buy one instead of a full size computer. I have friends in both categories.

I own one, which I bought as a replacement for my MacBook when that died. I love being able to use it on the bus. I was pleasantly surprised at the screen not seeming tiny. I slightly regret not buying a Dell netbook, because that doesn't have function keys I can accidentally press all the time.

I may yet buy a full sized laptop, but I am managing without one for now.
Rate your site
Just found out that he's the guy who launched popurls.
Buy mobile phones 
buy mobile phones from our website.
I, for one, find a dosage of both Glenn Beck and Nancy Grace really gets me a better grounding to how to live my life.
I would have expected music to be more weakly correlated with intelligence than books. Smart people can enjoy low-brow music as well as high-brow music. But smart people rarely read low-brow books, and dumb people rarely read high-brow literature.

However, I guess he wasn't looking at their whole collection but just the stuff they mentioned on facebook, which reflects their social aspirations. So, for example, I have both Lynyrd Skynyrd and Chopin in my iTunes collection. But people who mention one of those in their facebook profile are probably very different from those who mention the other.
That's a pretty silly thing to say. The prose may not suit your literary tastes, fine. But you will still agree that the Nazis and the Soviets were both the real templates for her 'evil collectivists'.

And collectivists they were, not just in their party name ('national socialists'). They more or less nationalized most of Germany's industrial private properties, some of it sooner, the rest of it later. They implemented most bullet points of the Communist Manifesto, only in a brown flavour and with a lot of add-on horrors on top of it.

Yeah, her 'heroic romanticism' style may resemble some of the red and brown 'romantic' literature. But her content is vastly opposed to theirs. If anything, she took a style that appealed to the masses in the 30s and 40s (including America) and showed that the same devices can be used to convey the opposite message, radical individualism and libertarian capitalism.
I am developing a web application using php language.I want to integration sms in my website.what should i do?cost is no problem?
One-on-One with Jim Breyer
Are entrepreneurs born or made?
It’s a combination. There are some gifted entrepreneurs who have an intuitive sense of how products, customers, and markets will collide three to five years out. They bring intellectual leadership combined with an extraordinary feel for how markets evolve.

In all cases, however, these individuals are among the hardest-working executives in the portfolio. The balance between optimism, candidness, intellectual honesty, and integrity results in a virtuous set of characteristics that are shared by all exceptional entrepreneurs.
The elephant in the room - virtualization and license management
Many have expressed the notion that creating a virtualized server environment would result in a significant savings because the technology makes it possible to operate using fewer, albeit faster, systems. While it may be true that approach offers the opportunity for savings in the area of hardware acquisition and support, it may do little to nothing on other fronts, including software license acquisition. It all depends upon the virtualization technology selected, the licensing conditions imposed by software suppliers and a few other categories. Steve Butler, CEO of ManageSoft, and John Emmitt, ManageSoft’s Director of Marketing, presented a pretty compelling case for acquiring the appropriate tools to keep track of software licenses, inventory of licenses and a number of other important details about the environment in each encapsulated server lives.
There are even more people sympathetic to pot smokers facing jail time. But authorities don't seem inclined to soften the sentences.

Courts really shouldn't worry about public reaction. That's the job of lawmakers.
I believe that this group of Chinese students are brilliant as I used to be one of them. They all have goals, some goals are even ambitious. They want to help poor people, make a more balance world. The thing of why they want to make money by making illusion because they see money as a method to achieve their goal, that to say, the process to make money is irrelevant to what they really want to do. They just want to get rich quickly and then distribute the wealth. Of course now I know that it is a naive thought but many still believe this kind of financial freedom. They have to be given more time to figure out that by distributing money will do nothing to the world as this happened all the time. By making real thing, through value creation, in the process of making huge amount of money, the world become much better.
So you'd agree to the try-before-buy principle for oh, say, condoms?

There was no obligation to "try-before-buy" policies handed down to sellers of wares by Moses, you know.

I fail to understand how paying for the music that you listen to is a sub-optimal arrangement. All this talk about obsolete business model is just bullshit. If you dig underneath all the "freedom" hyperbole and "fat-cat record companies" self-righteous finger-wagging, what you really have is desire to rationalize behaviour whose analogue in the real world nobody has any difficulty whatsoever to see as stealing.

These self-described pirates deserve nothing less than jail. I say that as a musician who in an ideal world would find record companies that can finance producing or promoting an album, and instead finds a record industry hollowed out by a 50% decline in revenue within a decade. How does the idiotic "expert" professor for the defense explain that figure in the context of massively more pervasive access to music? It just doesn't compute. People are stealing music. Period. We need to stop it, so that the whole ecosystem of jobs related to music (most of these are not fat cats. People like mixing and mastering engineers, session musicians etc) is allowed to flourish. It's currently the case that a lot of the talent in mastering, for example, is being lost. Simply because it's too expensive to have it done by these people now idea. Result: over-compressed albums with totally fake dynamics. I'm an example: I'm a programmer, who would really love to be able to do music. But I don't really want to live on a tour bus the rest of my life. Now, ten years ago, you could go the Steely Dan way and just record studio albums; no touring. That approach simply doesn't work now, and inevitably that means that some real talent is not coming through; the incentives simply aren't there.
Ask HN: Innovating under pressure
Hey guys,

I'm currently taking a class where we are supposed to invent thing. There are many problems with it.
However, most unavoidably, no matter how many ideas I come up with, a google patent search turns out an applicable application.

I know that the ethos here is that everyone can come up with lots of ideas and turn it into a company, but have any of you ever run into this problem? What should I do?

Thanks for any advice guys!
I wish I had never used the word: I really dont see it as particularly strong... perhaps it is cultural differences getting in the way. But a single word is getting in the way of a good debate elsewhere in the thread - which is a bit sad.

(for the record I think I did back up my statement: they are idiots because they are helping and encouraging people the steal with no thought as to the consequences and believe they are above the law to the point of being. And, importantly, refuse to be reasoned with - and yes I have tried.)

I agree with the good arguments - but respect should not be automatic. I would look for it to be earned in an argument (probably I did not do much to earn any yesterday). My other point, of course, is that TPB (at whom my remark was directed) are not here and so are not one of the debating parties... :)

EDIT: I am not particularly worried by the downmods. People can express their opinions. However downmodding based on wording feels a bit short sighted... downmodding based on percieved bias (which a friend of mine pointed out) I would agree with (because it did introduce a bias.. which was a mistake).

(Also it's a bit sad to see this bumped up to the first page... this surely is stuff for the "back room")
Doesn't tracking millions of torrents require a massive amount of bandwidth? I'm no expert on bittorrent protocol, but I'm sure millions of clients pinging "I'm a seeder" or "I'm a leecher" adds up.
It directly applies to the skilled immigrants in question. Since there are many better places in the world to live than in the US - what I said listed some reasons why the US is not a very good place to live.

Why are highly skilled immigrants choosing to go elsewhere? The reasons listed could be why they are leaving, and some of the reasons I listed are mentioned in the article.

As a highly skilled immigrant myself(who isn't in the US), those are a few of the problems I see with the US. There's lots of other good things, and bad things about it of course, those are just some important reasons not to live there.

I notice how you made a personal attack, rather than address any of the (true) facts I listed. You're also living in the US, which makes your comment even more questionable.

If you'd like to check what I said, the links listed have references to back it up.
You guys are missing the point. This guy is doing this by himself. It's hard to be good at both server backend AND well versed at front-end work to be able to work around IE6/7 problems quickly. And he's making the right call if his browser demographics are correct (which I'm assuming they are). You have to determine what to allocate resources to on a daily basis in this business. There's always more work and not enough people to go around.

I'm pretty close to pulling the trigger on dropping IE6 support on the sites I run. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask our users to upgrade to a better browser. And believe me, my company is NOT targeting the corporate user at all. :) The amount of time I spend fixing IE6 issues is just insane. I could be doing so much more that helps other users and if I can get them to upgrade to a better browser in the first place then so much the better.

I will close with this: It wouldn't suck as much to fix issues on IE6/7 if it just had decent development tools such as Firebug, Tamper Data, and Web Developer.
That’s just the starting salary at the base rank; you wouldn't be there for very long! It goes up incrementally every year and jumps when you get promoted. Promotion is good and can go up to over £40k if you make it up the ladder. See link: http://www.rafcom.co.uk/pay_allowances/pay/2008/raf_air_08.c...
All the perks that the Army get are the same for all 3 services: Job security, free uniform, Forces discounts, expenses, cheap food & accommodation with all utilities included in the rent (free while on operations!), free medical & dental, excellent facilities including: (catering, social clubs, activity clubs, gym), excellent pension, great holidays, world travel, lots of opportunity for sport or expeditions etc. But everyone, including the Army, pays tax! It’s a pretty good life that has a load to offer in addition to a good pay package.
Reid Hoffman: Let Start-Ups Bail Us Out
Unless your class is to "invent a company," I wouldn't sweat the fact that there are patents on the ideas you've come up with. At any rate, I've been told that it's not too hard to differentiate your idea enough to file a new patent yourself. If you can significantly improve the existing patent, or implement it through different means, then you should be alright. Of course, it wouldn't hurt to have an awesome IP lawyer.

I have no personal experience on the matter of patents other than filing a provisional patent.
Did you read the post? He said less than 10% of his traffic is IE6. I'd say he is making the right call based on those demographics. When you look at resource decisions you have to look at the target market...and somehow I don't think it's corporate. If he was targeting corporate users he'd probably also build a Crackberry app.

And your 40% is just way off base unless you're writing salesforce.com apps or something like that. We see about 20% of our IE traffic at IE6 still and dropping fast. 18 months ago that was still at 50%.
I think you'll find two major problems with a blackboard competitor.

1. Low value of products to users

Blackboard, WebCT, and other similar 'Learning Management Systems' are products of a standard response to new technology in an established area. Essentially attempting to copy the existing way of doing things into the new mode and thus make them more efficient. Moving from the existing systems to internet systems might reduce costs by half or so, if you have a really good system, but it isn't 'disruptive'. This isn't spreadsheets or email. It isn't 1000 times better than the alternative.

2. Institutional inertia

Mentioned by others already, you're going to have a hard time selling to institutions. You're competing against a bunch of giant vendors with existing relationships, and FOSS solutions which are backed by and used by multiple universities. My university struck a committee of a dozen people with little to no knowledge of eLearning and spent probably $50,000 in employee time before deciding to maybe try moodle, or just stick with WebCT.

If you've got an idea for how to meet the real needs of educational users several times better than blackboard go for it. Personally I'd love to see something blow the existing junk out of the water, but think carefully about what people actually need and how you can serve that need don't just make a better blackboard.
I dont really follow that argument. Copyright doesnt cover ideas - purely creations (like music, software, artwork, films). Ideas do require patents etc.

If you have an idea you have to take steps to protect it. If you create a working product based on the idea that specific design is protected by a modicum of copyright.

I do see where you are coming from with the ideas thing (the free-software side of me wants me to agree fully that ideas/processes should never be protected).

(this is in the UK of course: in the US things might be different)
I've seen something like this before.

http://whois.domaintools.com
http://quarkbase.com
http://urlmetrix.com
http://cubestat.com
...
There is an easier way to produce sophisticated second stage shellcode than simply writing it in C and compiling it?

There are certainly more tedious ways to write shellcode such as hand crafting position independent assembly code like it's 1997. Also, there are some failed experiments like writing a crippled C --> shellcode compiler in Python, but I'm not aware of anything that is simpler and more general than userland exec. You write the loader once and you're good to go (at least until Ulrich Drepper breaks your loader by refactoring ld.so).
But IE6 isn't 70% of your userbase. Maybe 70% of your userbase is IE but only maybe 20-25% of that is IE6 so spending 30% more time/resources on IE6 is what I would call a major fail. But hey, that's just me.

And have you ever tried to develop complex ui sites on IE? I'm sorry...it just sucks and there is no good way around that. And I'm someone who knows IE6/7 quirks pretty good. Their script debuggers are utter crap and their developer toolbar is the most ancient thing out there. At least in IE8 they are copying Firebug...at that point it might not suck as much but who knows until I use it a while.
BlogRollr - Firefox Extension that monitors the blog posts you read
Coffee By Week, 2009
Webpages as graphs - an HTML DOM Visualizer Applet
Beijing has gotten quite a bit more expensive in the couple years that I've been there. On top of that the currency exchange rate has gotten considerably worse. Probably in total a 25% difference since I arrived in 2006.

Most people reading this would not be happy at all living off of $400 per month, that's noodles for lunch every day. I'm in my late 30's and don't feel like living like a student nor having to, I spend $2k USD per month for a very comfortable lifestyle, $1k in rent and $1k on food/misc, about 25% less than what I'd spend back home.

In China it is not legal to employ Chinese people as a foreigner operating a business in China unless you're a Registered Office (RO) or a Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprise (WFOE). It is not legal to draw a salary personally unless you have a Z visa (not L or F), you need an RO or WFOE to get a Z. Furthermore the RO can not invoice Chinese customers, it is only an expense center (and is taxed on expenses). A WFOE requires registered capital typically between $10K USD to $100K USD depending on the business. Setting up one of the two can take several months depending on your luck with the government. As I understand it your LLC would be illegal to operate in China without either being an RO or WFOE (or a JV which is unlikely). You may be able get away with ignoring all this and many people do but if you're caught you can face stiff penalties and be ejected from China and are going to have a hell of a time getting more than $50K USD per year in or out of the country.

The labour laws basically require you to provide contracts to all of your employees or face stiff penalties. There's a number of pitfalls. See http://www.chinalawblog.com/ for more details, there's lots of discussion.

The women are very nice indeed, I'll never go back to American women...