skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... for non-minified source you probably need to checkout the source from their repository instead of downloading releases ...

Didn't try this, thanks. Why would the releases [0],[1] be minified? I would have thought the source would be untouched. Who cares if it's 2 X the current download? .... some time later: I've just tried "svn checkout http://datejs.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ datejs-read-only" I've just checked out revision 93 and the source code for datejs-read-only/src/core.js looks exactly like the shot of the source [2] for the Datejs-all-Alpha/src/core.js [3] The svn release is the same.

Now I admit I could just as easily contact the author to get a non-minified version. Why do I have to (or need to) ask permission?

[0] The svn repository online http://datejs.googlecode.com/svn/

[1] Access to the source http://code.google.com/p/datejs/source

[2] http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/2070134059/

[3] http://datejs.googlecode.com/files/Datejs-all-Alpha1.zip
> After that, it's just a matter of how/where you display the NMS screen.

The most appropriate device would be Microsoft's Big Ass Table. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY)
That's not a very effective defense of domain squatting. The idealistic sex educator should just as rationally say, "I'm not making $1.5m off this site, so I should accept that bid and sell it, and use the money to get my important message out some other more efficient way."

The domain squatter serves no beneficial function at all to society, so nothing is lost by banning that behavior except a sliver of economic freedom. If economic freedom is a very high priority for you, of course you're going to be against regulating the registration of domain names. You're entitled to your principles, but don't expect everyone else to share them.
Can you print 1st class USPS stamps remotely without paying a monthly fee?
I already have a scale, I know that's offered as a freebie at stamps.com... but it seems most places have a minimum purchase of $19.99 a month and I don't ship that much first class.

I mostly ship Priority because it interfaces with Paypal so easily, but every now and then I get orders that have to be shipped 1st class and I hate going to the post office to do it.
Outbound v. Inbound Marketing
Article espousing a modern way of thinking about marketing that I thought woudl be interesting to the news.ycombinator crowd.
The Frugal Billionaires
"... In most cases, exercise alone, according to a team of scientists at the University of Missouri, isn't enough to take off those added pounds. ..."

Horse crud.

Exercise is the best way to reduce weight for all but the most unfit. My guess the real reason why you get statements like this is because they are factoring in the time you have to take to exercise. How much? Well minimum 10K steps. For me thats 7 almost kilometers per day. If you walk, thats about an hour. Less if you run (20-30 min) or ride (20-25 min). Remember thats a minimum. Couple that with a reduced intake of food and you will loose weight. But work gets in the way of this. Ever tried exercising 1Hr+ per day during the working week? Every day?

For most (unless you create your own job) this is not possible because your work requires your presence in one spot working hard for longer hours. [0] Thats why this kind of research could be important. It is hardly a substitute for regular exercise and movement.

[0] "1982 and 2002, the proportion of full-time workers working a 40 hour week declined from 39% to 24%" ~ http://www.deir.qld.gov.au/industrial/family/overview/statis...
Who is right? Bruce Bueno or Nicholas Taleb?
Bueno, a smart, respected person claims he can predict world events with game theory, and apparently has a track record.
http://www.goodmagazine.com/section/Features/the_new_nostrad...

Taleb (smart, respected, etc) says it's impossible because you need "infinite precision" in your data. His track record includes the meltdown at LTCM that borked the US markets for years.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/play.html?pg=6

Who's right? Why?
Judging by the popularity of sites like partypoker and pokerstars and ESPN's constant coverage of WSOP, I don't think poker is that niche or long tail anymore. You picked a rapidly growing market that was fast moving up the "tail".
It's not actually THAT easy to earn money with your own startup. There is no guarantee for success. And it isn't that cheap, either - you still have the living expenses. Both factors combined can make a hacker accept freelance work from time to time.
I have an adjustable height desk from Ikea that goes from sitting to standing with the touch of a button. It has a little electric motor that moves the entire desktop up and down. The motor system is just a different base for their GALANT line of modular desks, so you can configure it any way you'd like. By far the least expensive adjustable desk that I've seen...
Programming less
This is something of a "big deal".

Disney has not traditionally been in the acquisition game since the ill-fated go.com acquisition of the Eisner era. Also, 20 small acquisitions (vs. the $650m one of Club Penguin) is a very interesting strategy for such a large company.

I'm really curious to see what kinds of companies they are looking for. If I were building a kids-oriented service I'd be pretty ecstatic right now.
As the author pointed out, the domain was registered five days after his site launched. The domain was registered in bad faith. The owner is now soliciting the author for an offer on the domain name. According to Wikipedia, cybersquatting is 'registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else.'
I've looked into this myself, and I wasn't able to find any company that offered 1st class stamps without some sort of recurring service premium.

If you do a lot of shipping, I really recommend getting a Pitney Bowes machine to ship stuff first class (and all the other classes as well). But, of course, there's a monthly rental fee (roughly the same as stamps.com), and you said you wanted to avoid that.
Then to answer your question, people look to capital costs for the cost of energy. Considering the rate of expansion of energy demand, it is the only number that matters.
At the point when Facebook was a viable substitute for posting signs, there must have already been a lot of people using Facebook.
"... Who is sending the email is becoming more important than what the email says ..."

So why the brochure in the mail instead of short punchy messages with a link to a brochure?
Hi BitGeek,

Safe to say you and I don't see things the same way. When I read this post, I felt so compelled to respond that I slowed down and then realized that you are the same person I "debated" with just the other day in the Crappy Programmer thread. You referred to the work of Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (Structured Programming) as "idiocy" and presumed to know what I thought (which included a "borderline" personal attack). I responded to your last post here

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=83191

but never heard from you again.

You did not know what I was thinking then and you do not now. Here IS what I think...

"Do you go to work each day primarily to benefit other people, rather than yourself:?"

Both. I don't give away my work for free, but the day I begin doing what I do WITHOUT providing (highly demanded) value for others is the day I hang it up.

"The problem here is, that you regret not registering it, and so you, rather than accepting blame for your own failure, are blaming the person who was smarter or faster than you."

To use a phrase you like, "LOL!" I regret nothing. I accept blame for nothing. I failed at nothing. I blame no one for being smarter or faster than I. I provide value. They don't. That's all I said. That's all I meant.

"Where does this sense of entitlement come from?"

I'd respond to this remark if I had any idea what you were talking about.

You are certainly entitled to your own opinion and I imagine we'll get to see more of it here. I suspect though, from your point of view, you will get lots of "debate" from others here. Don't expect too many people to see things your way, and don't ever presume to know what someone else is thinking. There are better ways to show your underwear.

Or maybe you just like to argue. Fine. But I have much better outlets for my "energy".
I think my photo-sharing site's use of HTML in email is justified.
"... for non-minified source you probably need to checkout the source from their repository instead of downloading releases. ..."

Damn. Would you believe I checked the only file in the repository that was minified, core.js. The rest it appears are quite readable.
> Horse crud.

> Exercise is the best way to reduce weight for all but the most unfit.

Not so. That hour of walking you suggest is easily replaced by simply reducing caloric intake slightly. In fact, you have to watch intake anyway, because when you exercise, your body automatically increases your appetite to compensate for the additional energy expenditure.

http://nymag.com/news/sports/38001/

"He will have to climb twenty flights of stairs to rid himself of the energy contained in one slice of bread!" Newburgh observed. So why not skip the stairs, skip the bread, and call it a day?

The reasons to exercise include all sorts of health and fitness benefits, but losing weight is pretty far down the list. Even top athletes always have to be careful with diet and often weigh their food with gram scales.
Ask YC:  How do you embed an image or video based on a keyword search? Are there copyright issues?
I'm looking for something like Google's "I'm feeling lucky" but for image and video embedding.
> The beauty of Justin.TV is that everything anyone broadcasts on our system is archived forever.

Really? Because a friend of mine was playing with it and there aren't any archives. Does this mean it wasn't saved, or that it was manually deleted (by the account owner)?
dicts FTW.
Speculating in physical goods does generate wealth.
Try RentACoder: http://www.rentacoder.com and oDesk: http://www.odesk.com
When Steve and I started reddit, he was dating that same girl (now his fiancee). She was always very supportive of him/us, so I'm not sure where you got your data about him potentially not doing reddit because of her.

And yes, I am indeed wearing a FogBugz Kiwi T-shirt. It was a gift from FogCreek and it's my second favorite shirt of all-time.
Agreed. Whats being missed here is this:
Registering a domain you think will be profitable in the future : enterprising.

Registering a variation of a domain that someone else just registered because you think you might be able to extort some $ out of them : rotten. No cookie for you.
I'm way, way more excited about the Peter Seibel talk coming up after this one, but I will still be tuning in live tomorrow.
Google's "I'm feeling lucky" feature just takes the first result. If there's an image search API you could just use that, taking the first result.
I honesty didn't realize I was on the 2nd page when I submitted it. I read the article and thought I was on the first page when I submitted it. I will be more careful, sorry.
I found this:

http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/multimedia.html

So I guess there are no copyright issues? This is for a facebook app. Doesn't Facebook have strict requirements on image copyright?
If you want to give me the channel name I'll look into it (email me at bill@justin.tv if you want to keep it private).

It is possible to delete archives, so that could be what happened. We also have problems from time to time with archive playback even when the archives exist (obviously improving that is a big priority for us).
"... That hour of walking you suggest is easily replaced by simply reducing caloric intake slightly. ..."

One thing I have found is exercise done before eating reduces appetite. Slight reductions in food is difficult if there is an abundance of high fat/high calorie food. Especially if it tastes good. One insight into the relationship between food, exercise and culture is the Japanese in places like Okinawa [0] & Sakaemura [1] who have:

- low calorie, low fat diet

- high energy output (mostly via farming & activities such as karate)

- social networking

contributing 4-5 years on average longer lifespans it is thought through leanness. [2] They key thing appears to the combination of diet, exercise and societal connection. Exercise is one of the keys to leanness but not the only one.

One thing you can bet on. If you don't exercise, eat the wrong foods and too much of it you will loose fitness.

[0] http://www.abc.net.au/sydney/stories/s1329191.htm

[1] http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/09/1089000356464.html

[2] http://sciencelinks.jp/j-east/article/200704/000020070407A00...
buy your keyword on google
"when you launch your startup, buy the keyword on Google (and the other engines). "

interesting idea.
Awesome. Feel free to ask questions in chat and I'll do my best to relay them all to Leah in the q&a at the end of her talk.
I wonder if kneeling or lying down has the same detrimental effects as sitting.

At home, when I am coding on a laptop, I often alternate between sitting in a chair and kneeling at the foot of the bed. Oftentimes, kneeling feels better until my knees get sore, then it's back to the chair.
The World's 2,000 Largest Public Companies
A libertarian would think this kind of thing is repugnent as well. The difference is that a libertartian's first response would not be "we should pass a law forbidding this..."
Thanks for the comments guys, it's been really helpful. We're planning a revision in a few days that'll fix a lot of problems, including:

> Better instructions

> Option to reverse the controls

> Remember high score on main menu

> Continue from within the game
Toxic iPhone
iPhones kill trees! Rawr.
Has anyone written a Facebook App that gives Usenet access?
"this is called enterprising. "

this is called being a jerk
Ohanian says it took several months to convince Huffman that "he didn't want to take the very appealing job close to his girlfriend back in Virginia, and to instead try living with me in near-poverty for some indefinite period of time."

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/sep2007/sb20070...
Is this software you install on your phone or do you just have to go to that URL?
Will it work on the iphone?
What's a good phone and plan that will give me unlimited internet access? I couldn't figure out how to add it to my tmobile plan.
If you use Entourage on a mac then, this script will be helpful: http://scriptbuilders.net/files/sendcomplexhtmlwithinlinefil...
I have used it and it works wonderfully well.
They wrote over 10 KLOC of straight JavaScript (in addition to all the backend serverside stuff), so you're right, they'd be insane not to charge.
The cartoonish font and color scheme remind me of Team Fortress 2 (the typeface looks very similar to what TF2 uses). I like.

I also like how apparently to make a color theme you only have to choose 5 colors. The programmer-y decision is to let the user have full control and make them make dozens of decisions they didn't anticipate.
Investing is not speculating.
"The design of the central data structure of an app determines the quality of the app, in every way."

Wow!

As Edward Everett wrote to Abraham Lincoln the day after the Gettysburg address:

"I wish that I could flatter myself that I had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes."
nintendo wii?
who builds webapps in java anymore?
There is no science before Thales, 600BC. There is general agreement that Thales is first to deduce certainties, implicitly building on inductions. So, the key to explaining the Greek miracle is an inspection of what we know about Thales. Pythagoras reversed Thales in that he took the integration of induction and deduction and when applied to numbers reified them making them subjective. The history of mathematics argued over the source of a numbers certainty (cardinality) for 2350 years which mostly consisted of arguments to explain the relation between god and cardinality. God is a bogus concept, it has no existential content. Kant refusing to accept the obvious devloped an argument that took the god/cardinal problem and made it impossible to integrate them in the hope of saving the god part from reasoned inspection. From Kant developes a new aecular, subjective view of cardinality. Excepting Ayn Rand, no one has ever gone back to Pythagoras to correct his mystic error.
They should license it to other websites perhaps.
Crashing into one of the big hot air balloons is not nearly as satisfying as it should be :)

Just an aesthetic note, but the yellow smoke trail is a bit unappealing. A red color might show up better against the background, and the color does add a hint more excitement.

Or perhaps some simple customization where you choose your smoke color at the start (also functioning as the start button).

Other than that... very fun. Definitely could get popular on facebook with challenges and best scores/times for each level and overall, or just as a fun way to pass time.
This is about the most bogus test the author could have constructed. You have to explicitly memoize functions in languages that aren't purely functional like Haskell. Fibonacci is around O(1.6^n) if you conveniently "forget" to memoize it, or else O(n).

So the upside of a pure functional language is you don't have to explicitly memoize. To see the downside, try explaining monads to an undergrad.

Haskell is a cool enough language that it doesn't need misleading hype like this post.
and maybe I didn't get far enough, but this type of game definitely needs moving rings. Adds tons of extra challenge and excitement (and if you have some smooth rotation effect for the rings as they move it would look pretty cool too).
Ditto. The standard overly shiny Web 2.0 look is getting old but this cartoonish adds some new life to it.
When i got a business license a couple years ago, someone bought my company's .com domain mere days after i registered the trade name. The domain is absolutely useless to them, but they keep it in hope that ill pay them big time for it. not in their lifetime...
I just registered a new, really good, 6 character .com domain and the .cn is already gone...
Ask YC: Searchable, obfuscated location-based data?
I'd like to be able to encode geospatial coordinates in such a way that:

1. The encoding is computationally hard to reverse (one-way function).

2. Encoded locations are searchable by proximity in an index without revealing or using the plaintext location data. This rules out a simple shared-secret-offset type-solution.

I have a perhaps naive solution in mind, but I don't want to re-invent the wheel either. Anyone know of something that does this, or have any ideas? Is it even possible?
It's software. Google Map Mobile, a java app in most cases. I just downloaded it but unfortunately the my location feature is unavailable om my phone.
The imagineers are pretty cool. I can think of a few robotics and video game groups that would be appropriate acquisitions.
Evolved Virtual Creatures
Am I the only one who hates corporate email so much? Even for companies I like, I hate receiving email from them.

I'd love to have a no-email policy. Email scams could then be avoided, unless people respond to phishing despite a declaration, "we will never email you".
It's a dual-core machine. The par annotations get you a factor of two at best.

Dons is still arguably pulling a fast one, though. Even though the Haskell program looks like it should behave in more-or-less the same way as the other two, the semantics are actually quite different. Haskell defaults to lazy evaluation with memoization -- hence the "naive" recursion isn't really naive. That's where the orders of magnitude come from.

That said, Haskell is still a pretty fast language, on par with Java.
That is an interesting situation where a group of users might opt in and HTML could be a useful thing.

Are you sending photos via email? Aren't browsers generally a more pleasant way to view photos than mail clients?
Circular Money: Facebook And Yahoo Advertise Their Advertising Platforms On Google
Ning CEO Calls Flux And Viacom To The Mat
Is it possible to make these kinds of games multiplayer? I think dogfighting would be fun, or co-op stunts. Maybe a sandbox mode?

Anyways, I like the game, and echo the request for level unlocking.
Do you have any online references for this virus-ecosystem? A name, at least?
PyPy - Automatic Generation of VMs for Dynamic Languages
I don't know, I registered several domain names recently and did not get any .cn emails. Maybe my Gmail junk filtered them away.
I really love my height-adjustable desk from ikea: http://lifehacker.com/software/coolest-workspace-contest/coo...
Multiplayer is definitely possible, but it opens up a few issues that we're not really happy dealing with yet. After a few games, definitely.

The first multiplayer games we do will probably be something far less twitchy, because lag between countries won't be so much of a problem (we simply can't afford to go and rent servers in many different countries, which we'd have to do for a twitch game).

But something like a multiplayer strategy game, we could just use EC2 to spawn instances to handle it. I'm not sure whether we'd make a profit on the traffic at the time that they're actually playing the multiplayer games (it depends how many people per server can be hosted), but I'm willing to be that it would still be worth it all round.
this is sad. the good news is you probably don't need a .cn domain name. what registrar did you use? Some registrars are a bit shady and will pull this kind of crap on you.
Tools, Talent, and How-to for agile teams
I just signed up for an account with assembla and I am truly impressed. Besides the free SVN hosting they've got a bunch of other tools that'll be very beneficial to the project I'm working on. Has anyone else used this site?
How to Get the Most Out of a Startup (talk by  Glenn Kelman)
I just signed up for an account with assembla and I am truly impressed. Besides the free SVN hosting they've got a bunch of other tools that'll be very beneficial to the project I'm working on. Has anyone else used this site?
Some people get too excited by micro benchmarks.
Loopt, you guys need to react quickly.
Google, EBay and Amazon, to name three.
How Zuckerberg "hacked" the residence networks to build his photo database. (Scroll down)
What gives you the idea that Haskell implicitly memoizes functions?

And it obviously isn't memoizing. If the function were memoized, the timing would be much, much less than 0.48 seconds.
I have to agree with him on that. I joked to my mother before that: the East Asians culture takes failures as disgrace and encourage "Failure is not optional" mindset, but U.S. culture takes it more lightly and as long as one can learn from mistakes and not cover them up. That's why high tech inventions are mostly happens in U.S.
Upload high quality videos to Youtube
It isn't memoizing anything here. If it were memoizing, do you think it would take 0.48 seconds? Laziness is not the same thing as memoization of function arguments.
My intuition says it's not possible to get 1 without destroying the ability to get 2, or vice versa. But I'm no expert. The solution that leaps to my mind is to use a locality-sensitive hash function. It would make search stochastic, which means reversing the encoding would be easier. Seems like any hash-based solution will involve a tradeoff between 1 and 2.

What did you have in mind?
Facebook's Billion Dollar Valuation Hinges On Apathy.  *Our* Apathy.
The more you learn about Zuck, the more you start to dislike the guy :(
It gave my location to within a few blocks. In a small town without a car, though, "a few blocks" is significant. Not obviously useful to me, yet.
In Eastern Europe, P2P transmissions account for 95 percent of Internet traffic at night
http://www.scribd.com/doc/531743/1140
At least it seems he's an emacs user... can't be all bad ;-)