skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> JavaScript is just not natively capable of working with numbers as high as this.

Implementing multiple-precision multiplication is hardly rocket science.

> Why reinvent a great and secure technology like SSL? The overhead of SSL would pale in comparison to rolling your own DH in JS.

I'm not trying to reinvent it. I'm just trying to make a very lightweight alternative for protecting your password and nothing else. The DH in JS would just be just be run once when you logged in, not for the entire session like I'd like to do with SSL. Obviously SSL is preferable if it works.
On "kept a scorecard on which he graded himself on how well he realized [self-improvement exercises]", I'm reminded of Personal Unit Tests: http://hober.backpackit.com/pub/1233865
One has to earn every thing. Let us not pretend that we are doing anyone a favor by contributing.
How to "get across the moat" with potential investors
Wow, looks like Nicholas Carr picked up on the launch:

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/10/mugr_from_faceb.ph...
Will I be able to multi-table drafts? What's the official stance on bots? Just kidding. Halfway. This is a great idea and I hope you guys do well. Is there a friendly rivalry with Chris Fargis going on?
DH without authentication still fends off a large class of attackers. Spoofing IPs is hard. Typing 'tcpdump' is easy.
Agreed, they have ugly Ui's but that's not Qt's fault. When you want an "Ok" button, a dialog or a check box in Qt, it's calling the EXACT SAME function that get's called when you do it without Qt. So by definition it is native. You should check it out. You might change your mind.
The point of getting rid of the WHOIS database is to make it harder for people to see what the large businesses are doing with domain registration, etc.
As a professor, you're probably in a pretty good position to start a family. As a professor, you're probably going to have to give the university a big cut of whatever benefit you generate, but at the same time, you probably have more freedom and autonomy than most. Plus, you have a steady salary. On the down side, I don't know how hard you're working to get tenure - maybe too hard to launch a meaningful effort at a startup.

I read that at Stanford, it's pretty common for a CS professor to have started a company, almost a rite of passage. So maybe this would work out for you...
I'm sure my desktop would look pretty stark to most people. That's the way I like it though. Basically I only ever have two windows open, both maximized - Emacs and FireFox. I spend 90% of my time in Emacs - this is what it looks like:

http://abstractnonsense.com/desktop.png

(that's not my code btw - it's a random python library).

If I knew of a way to hide even more superfluous stuff (window decorations, the menu bar) I would do it.
Hm..I put in a name without a space and it worked fine..? What error msg did you get?
You would be surprised how little sports you need to know to compete.
It's strange - I have the same attitude to new ideas now at 42 (with a wife and young child) that I did in my early 20s. If anything, I'm more open now to transformative ideas then I was then. I've started a startup :) I think maybe the "advantage" I have now is a career in another field, so that the programming world is to me now as it would be to someone in their early 20s.

As far as the stamina argument, as a building architect, I have evolved a large ability for extreme focus and no sleep. Multiple all-nighters are not uncommon on project designs that inspire me, but in terms of sheer productivity, I think all-nighters are not a good plan unless you are riding a wave of energy and creativity, in which case to stop would be foolish.

On the LISP argument... I'm having alot of fun programming with it, and it's doing everything we could possibly want, so I don't see a need to change except for the herd instinct argument. And whats really nice, the further we evolve our application (now well over 26K lines), the easier it is to change the app and add features. :)
Yeah, we are going to operate in 39.
OpenSocial is great news!

It's also the first step towards semantic web!

Web is changing for sure
it's working now, wasn't earlier
Wow - couldn't you squeeze in some more emacs windows on the right to visit more files at once? Or is that kind of thing just noise/distraction? I could certainly see some people preferring the simplicity to my more noisy 3 emacs windows and 4 rxvt's.
I'm in Branner. Is SAE on the row?
Unfortunately that's not true, I have domains with two registrars/hosts, neither of which offer private registration at all.

When registering UK domains you can opt not to show private information while leaving the tech/admin details in there, I'd be pretty happy if they introduced something like that universally.
Yup, it's just noise to me. I prefer to have the other buffers loaded in Emacs, but not displayed on the screen where I'll be distracted by them.

My perfect dev environment would go as far as blanking out everything in my peripheral vision too - maybe a set of VR goggles that only displays an Emacs window, dead center ;-)
I'll check out whether Kaiser serves Phoenix to get a hard number and I will also check the Redfin model.

This is very helpful, thank you both!
you vi/emacs/console guys can hate, but deep down inside you wish your ide was as tight as this :) :)

http://img49.imageshack.us/img49/4349/desktopel7.jpg
here's mine:

http://img161.imageshack.us/img161/3408/picture2jd3.png

Sorry for all the obfuscation.

Tiger, TextMate, Terminal.app, Locomotive, Firefox, Thunderbird, Adium, Twitterpod. A few more in the titlebar (Desktopple, SpritedAway (obviously turned off for now), MenuMeters), and plenty more in the Dock.
Digg 'will grow by letting others copy us'
Here's another response to the Larry Summers incident.

Why are there more men than women in mechanical engineering?
Elizabeth Spelke debates Steven Pinker:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html

(watch the whole video, it's brilliant)
I agree with Philip's basic observation that scientific careers are overrated, but a lot of his arguments would appear work against academic careers in general. The "scientific careers suck but men are irrational" hypothesis doesn't explain why there are so few women in mathematics and chemistry vs. history or English literature, or indeed why there's so much variation within science, with plenty of female biologists but very few female theoretical physicists.
What part of a history or literature career involves insane hours? Those fields are a perfectly good thing to do during the day if you don't need money.
my work workspace (OSX) http://nikolajbaer.us/media/desktop.jpg

at home its similar, but xfce4 terminals and pidgin on xubuntu.
I keep a couple scorpions loose in my house. Getting ready for work in the morning is always a thrill.
Yes, you can multi-table. Bots aren't really a worry in this, since you can already set a draft queue, and soon we'll have customizable rankings. We (and all other FS sites) basically have a bot built in for you.
yuck.

stuff like code folding and automagical code generation encourage all the wrong habits. Simple, readable, and reused code is "tight".
I do the single plain window of emacs thing too (though I use Terminal, not the built-for-mac Emacs GUI, and I only go 90 chars wide on my window). I usually run three UNIX shell buffers inside of emacs, in addition to all the source code buffers. I never go to the mouse while in Emacs (because it doesn't do anything), which helps me move quickly.

<snobbery>I get a bit frustrated when I need to look over someone's shoulder while s/he is doing some programming related task. So many people move very slowly thru their environments. I want to show them the way...</snobbery>

I wasted about 2 hours of my life once trying to trick out my Mac to be that "one Emacs window and nothing else" setup that you're talking about. I never really found anything that worked, though.
The end of this article basically justifies the existence of YC.
Luckily for me, I thought about the problem and came up with an answer before I hit the comment section of this article. There's a spoiler in the first comment.
Heh. I think it's funny that the trend in modern IDEs is for your code to get squished into a smaller and smaller box in the middle, surrounded by a ton of random crap. It's the exact opposite to the environment I strive for.

(also, "Solution Explorer"? That was the best name they could come up with?)
I wonder what a 50% failure rate says about the level of success among the remaining companies. Traditional conventional wisdom was that only 10% of startups suceeded, but they succeeded spectacularly (more than 10x return on investment).

Does this imply that a lot of "successful" companies are generating very modest returns on investment?
Need to increase test coverage :)
http://andrewfong.com/stuff/Picture%201.png

Firefox is hidden and gets called up as necessary. If I have access to a separate monitor, it gets shoved onto there.
That's a good point. The large number of women pursuing Ph.Ds in English literature and Bio does tend to undercut the argument that women are avoiding Ph.D's in math and hard science because they are more rational.

That said, we do need to distinguish between fields. Phil argues that "Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States." Would you make the same statement for jobs in literature? Are Lit professors as capable of pursuing these highly paid alternative career paths as the Math/Hard Sci/Engineering Ph.D's? It's a highly contentious question, I know.

I'd say that most lit Ph.D's probably don't have strong quant skills, nor do they have much of a science background. So they clearly are not choosing lit over a career in high finance or medicine. However, law is probably an option, so the women who pursue a lit Ph.D may be exhibiting at least some of the "irrationality" that the men are.

I guess it comes down to how you feel about the Science Ph.D vs Medicine, Finance or Law relative to the Humanities Ph.D vs Law only. If the situations are analagous (which is open to debate), I'd say you've uncovered a major flaw in Greenspun's "men are more irrational" argument.
is that adium as your chat window? if that is ichat how'd you get it to be borderless like that?
Two big suggestions:

1. Have a more specific headline. "Design" will be taken by many to mean "aesthetics."

2. Use a specific system to illustrate the principles. Generalized essays don't stick in a reader's mind without a concrete example.
It's schizophrenic to say that Microsoft "overpaid" for Facebook because they'll be getting indirect benefits. It seems to me that their overpayment should be judged on whether they'd be better off with a) the stake in FB, or b) the cash.
Switch to Linux :)

http://akkartik.name/desktop.html
Code Changes to prepare GMail for the Future
This caught my eye:
"One side effect of this change is that if you're using third-party Gmail extensions, they're likely to stop working."

I assume that means GMail Drive?
Does each container expose the same interfaces? Since each social network is implemented slightly differently, I'm guessing we'll need to modify the app for each container we're adding it to.
You're right, thanks. I've changed the title.
yep, it's adium. "concise" contact list style, "group bubbles" window style.
Every time you misuse "semantic web", Berners-Lee kills a kitten.
To be fair, he seems to have enough space for code. horizontally at least. Monitors today have plenty of space for random crap. But the bottleneck isn't real estate anymore, it's focus.

What we need is for the other windows to gradually fade out when focus is in this one for a while. One of the video plugins/sites on tv-links had this feature - as you watched a show for a while the rest of the screen would gradually fade out.

Or we could go with two vertical panes:
http://akkartik.name/desktop.html
:)
http://64.74.153.35/~zak/screen.png

Normally 1680x1050, but I'm using an external monitor until I find time to get my laptop's LCD fixed.
Mine: http://labs.diffle.com/screenshot.png
Compiz has an option to do exactly that. It's called ADD Helper. Unfortunately, XGL doesn't perform very well on my laptop.
Motorhead Messiah - Turning a Hummer into a 60MPG Green Machine
viewbug?
The Significance Of Grey Hair To VCs
One reader asked whether VCs think talented young entrepreneurs are sufficiently qualified managers. The answer to this is 'it depends'...
I hope this is true. I just started using coRank.com to attempt to open a social news site for a niche market. Digg's platform is just much better. We'll switch in an instant if this happens.
Can you live with that font? No anti-aliasing and Courier New?
I seriously don't understand how you people can work with all the visual clutter. I like a much more naturalistic approach:

http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/217/workspacefh6.gif
An upvote alone cannot express how much I agree. I spend a lot more time reading code (even my own) than I do writing it. Code generation and concise languages reduce the effort of writing code by similar amounts, but concise languages reduce the effort of reading code by an order of magnitude or two.
That's an utterly bizarre font you're using - otherwise... nice!
I did not feel anything either..but wait, I'm in New York :)
Never thought I woudl hear anyone describe an earthquake as cool..Last I heard an earthquake was something that killed people.
SF residents - get notified of emergency & disaster warnings by SMS
It was good enough for...

Actually, yes. It's quite readable and fairly compact. I've tried a few other fonts (most of the ones mentioned in the fonts thread on here) and found most of them take up more space or are less readable. Dejavu Sans Mono might look better with anti-aliasing turned on, but most of the time I've found anti-aliasing just makes fonts look blurry.
Women don't go into science because the behavior of inanimate objects doesn't interest them.
As a native of the southeast U.S. getting ready to move to San Francisco, earthquakes terrify me -- I've never felt one before. Hearing about last night's 5.6 quake doesn't make me feel any better. I just discovered this emergency alert service that will at least help to keep us informed.
SDF has something like this: http://www.deskshots.org/
http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/ion/screenshots/ion3-2.png

OK, not really my desktop. But ion is quite cool.

About 50% of my programming time is spent staring at a maximized vim instance, and about 30% staring at a maximized firefox instance: http://jey.kottalam.net/tmp/screenshot.png
The "Lead Investor"
My Worst Day in Business
So 20 seconds after the earthquake has stopped you get a text message that says "RUN!"...nice!
ah, a project for a client.. damn i tried to snuff out things like that. It's just yet another media sharing site, we (I) built it in django with ffmpeg.
Such a service is good for things that can be forecast like tornados, storms,fires(like the recent one in San Diego), tsunamis etc.

It is however of doubtful value for earthquakes. Last time I checked no one had the ability to know when the Earth beneath them will shake.

Too bad for you!
I'm partial to the japanese curry donut ("curry pan"):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/roboppy/64673933/
Wow, Mac OS X in non-widescreen. For some reason, seeing it like that is a jarring experience.
I like modd. No other font is as legible at 9pt. I like that 0 and O look different, as do 1 and l. I like that all characters have some slight asymmetry - characters with character ;)

http://www.jmknoble.net/fonts
More Tickets for Boston-Bound TechCrunch MeetUp 11
TechStars Summer 2008 program announced
I wish it had more glyphs, though. I like typing math symbols into my code comments. Terminus can't display them.
Semantic Web as Tim Berners-Lee visions it, is not going to happen overnight and assuming Google's reaction to the whole concept very recently due to the possible vulnerability of their search is surprsing that they do take this way after all.

Applications opening their data to others through a general api is the first step towards semantic web.

So where is the misuse exactly?

I didn't describe OpenSocial as the Semantic Web.
W3C XForms were beaten thanks to the workaround of AJAX applications. which are not even supported in IE7.

Obviously the Web is not commercially mature to grasp Semantic Web in its whole.
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/133/396296975_1f2e6f41a6_b.jp...

Linux running Xfce.

Couple of VMs a Xnest and DVD player.

And I say again the current way we layout apps is broken. I have a wide screen monitor and most apps do not resize. I anybody working on something to fix this so that an app designed for 640x480 renders a reasonable size on my screen.
We'll be supporting web, email and mobile-based searches to identify people via headshot, however, we don't crawl the web or search photo album sites for subjects. The only way we'll actually store (and thus be able to search for you) is if you have profile on Mugr.com.
http://www.intriguing.com/mp/_pictures/grail/large/HolyGrail...
Wasn't that time last year? Or before?
Yes I did, and I thought it was awesome.
Disqus: Awesome-izing Blog Conversations, Creating Communities
All jobs in academia demand long hours if you're serious about getting tenure.
PaperBack: Back up your code to paper (seriously)
This would be better:

http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/screenshots.en.html
All true. It also doesn't explain why there are so few female programmers or engineers, given those fields offer much more than the academic payscale.

Greenspun's points are well worth thinking about (as a grad student, I ponder them frequently), but the rant is a complete non sequitur. It offers nothing to explain the gender difference.
i know i'm getting flamed for this but holy cow, this is the type of crap that YC funds? man ... this is so bs.
what! it's so typical web 2.0ish crap.. and u think it's nice?
huh? are u kidding me? u think this design is great? man you really need to get out and see the tubes
Low Buzz May Give Mice Better Bones and Less Fat - New York Times
man... a lot of "sucking up" to the YC winner .. nice design , cool design, great design.. man .. i don't find the design great .. it's just average.
Certainly they fund some sites that don't go anywhere, but this site has a very clear potential for profit. It's the best one I've seen come out of YC in a while.
Care to show us your startup?
My setup in Mathematica...

http://www.programnature.org/Screenshot.png
Got mine.

Anyone else going?
I suppose I'll be able to find some tutorials somewhere on the web, once I have some spare time. It certainly has several interesting aspects.
Ed, thanks again for the feedback.

One of the reasons we're doing a limited beta is to give us time to find and work out stuff like this. Also, it takes a little while for your profile images to get indexed. Thanks for being patient with us.
Privacy groups target online advertising - want 'do not track online'
My emacs-centric working environment:

http://brlewis.com/y/2007/devscreen.png

It's slightly contrived, in that I usually have only one buffer open. I wanted to show that my environment involves switching back and forth between my ideas.txt file where I aggressively prioritize, and the actual BRL and Scheme files where the real coding is done. A large portion of my work is done in 35-minute train rides.
So this is for web 2.0 collaborative mugging then? If I put up a pictures of myself plus relevant details of the valuables I'm likely to be carrying then potential muggers can check me out before hand and decide whether or not it's worth it.

Awesome
I actually do run ion3. The only problem I've had so far is that some of the Alt+ keyboard shortcuts interfere with some Emacs shortcuts. One off the top of my head: Alt+G.
I don't know if that's true. What reduces the effort of reading code is using the right abstractions in the code. Concise languages can make some code incredibly hard to understand. I'm switching between Python and Lisp these days but I have never had problems reading things like Java because of the verbose syntax. I do however have problems reading Perl or badly written code in any language.
I don't know, in my 1900x1200 window I have quite a lot of room for things besides the code on the side, like a REPL window, etc.
I used to live with visual clutter before I discovered virtual desktops. I now usually keep my windows maximized and just switch desktops when I need to go to a different window.
Zipcar merges with Flexcar
earthquakes keep rents here bearable.
He suggests that young women have better perspective, plan more for the future, and don't consider themselves bulletproof like young men do.
Who's partying with reddit tonight?
Anyone else from News.YC getting sloshed tonight in Davis Sq?
2008 Presidential Candidate Website Assesment
Cool look at the "grades" of some top candidates sites.
I'm going to assume for a second you're talking about software projects not hardware, so with that in mind here are my comments (I know nothing about designing hardware)

Well, for one I don't like all this talk about "design", It reminds me of engineering. I like the sketching part. It's much easier to start writing, implementing one small subset at a time and take some time to re-evaluate your assumptions before going forward.

I don't know about the "beatuiful" part. It might work well for UIs but I don't know about architectures. I've seen many beautiful designs fail miserably because the truth is most of the real world is not perfect and beautiful. Real world code grows hairs and it's always tempting to rewrite it to be more beautiful. The best way to write code is to keep the code easy to modify.

I don't mean creating a scalable and extensible architecture. That kind of goal leads to over engineering. Keep the code easy to modify though (things like unit tests help, so does writing things in small decoupled components). As long as everything you want to accomplish can be done in small incremental steps you can always improve things going forward.
I don't think it can, but I tend to copy and paste code from Nedit into a REPL.
What does everyone think of this concept?
I thought this was pretty awesome. Wondering what everyone else is thinking?
Yeah, especially because the "standard" allows any social network to extend the API with their own proprietary ones. This could be the IE browser compatibility nightmare all over again.
He does suggest it so I guess I shouldn't say he lost track of the point of the argument.

But he certainly doesn't show it. If that were the difference, women would avoid academic humanities and biology jobs, which they don't. And they wouldn't avoid programming and engineering jobs, but they do.
HackrTrackr Adds Disqus forum for meetups for YCombinator Readers
I wish I could go
I created a forum for meetups real fast to test the disqus software and I gotta say thats some pretty sweet stuff. This should make getting meetups planned a little easier I hope.
I think that they paid too much also
during the San Diego wildfires, lots of people subscribed to KPBS's (local npr radio station) twitter stream as a way to get updates on evacuations. KPBS also had a really good google map up in the first few hours, and was way ahead of everyone else in keeping it up to date. (fwiw i live in SD, work in an area that was under threat of evac).
I think you should use a descriptive title.