skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, "IBM Compatible" is it exactly: modular vs. integrated.

Integrated components (hardware and software) enables them to work very together, in terms of efficiency as well as usability. To make something as tiny and as fast as the iPhone means you have to squeeze every last bit of performance out of your components. Apple have done such a brilliant job, it is not at all apparent that the iPhone processor is on the slow side (about 600MHz [1]).

Modular design becomes possible when the components become faster, because you don't need to integrate to get adequate performance. You can slap things together, even mix and match. Anyone can do it. It get customizable, but the most significant result of fast-enough components is that it gets cheaper.

Faster components are inevitable. When they're fast enough, the iPhone acquires comparable competitors. How fast is "fast-enough" for a smart phone? I don't know, but according to Moore's Law, smart phone processors will hit netbook speeds (1.6GHz) in a bit over 2 years: 27 June 2011

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/01/iphone-processor-found-62...
The Heinz ketchup bottle: a good design?
I don't see how this is an argument against entrerpreurship. Every existing company started out as a new company at some point. If anything this is an argument for entrepreneurship.
The main problem here is that there is no need for founders to move to the USA to get funded by the US investors.

How would such a visa benefit foreign investors? If there is a shortage of good entrepreneurs in the States, wouldn't it be easier if the VC's start fishing around the world instead of waiting for all the fish to come to their own pond?

Y Combinator should take a hint from their UK/European counterpart, Seedcamp. Starting in London two years ago with a similar model as YC has in the US, they have started organizing local mini-Seedcamps throughout Europe to make it easier for the startups to apply: the first mini-Seedcamp was last year in Kiev, Ukraine, while this year they have a tour of seven cities -- Tel Aviv, Paris, Warsaw, London, Helsingborg, Ljubljana and Berlin; check www.seedcamp.com -- where local startups may apply towards the main event in London later this year.
From his description I doubt it's synaesthesia. Usually it's a crossover in a fundamental perception (taste, smell, etc.), rather than an elaborate sensation "feeling as if it is jumping out." Also, it varies per-individual, suggesting that "eager" could have just as well seemed to, for example, "a monster that eats everything in its path."

My feeling is this is just a very strong "coupling" of vocabulary to the emotional centers. Fast activation, in other words. If this is the case, I also suspect it wouldn't correlate very much to anagram-solving ability.
The Parsec manual. I wrote a fairly simple log file parser as a practice project.
Fair enough. You're probably right. I haven't tried it, after all.

I was actually thinking in terms of personal loans, which have less onerous collateral requirements since the debtor can't simply walk away from the loan, but I guess I am making assumptions about the creditworthiness of the founders in that instance, too.

It does kind of beggar belief that a couple of smart middle class kids with an obviously working business plan couldn't get someone to loan them a few grand. I guess you can't count on it, though. Point ceded.
Minor typo:

"Here’s the problem: If your site ends up on Digg, visitors using the Diggbar will not visit your URL"

The italicized "not" is omitted in the actual article.
Would you mind looking at the questions I raised for the OP?

I heard a story about one of the pioneers in genetics around Watson's time; a woman, forgot her name, who once walked into a room where two researchers (also forgot name) were building a physical model of the double helix. It was at least a couple thousand plastic molecules. She took a look, said that there was one mistake, and turned around and left.

After studying the brain for years I still can't tell why this happens.
It's not that easy. Just being nice will probably not make you gain any friends. It's a "mixed-martial art", a combination of stuff: the right socio-economic status, the right age bracket, the right education, looks, health, personal taste... everything.

Advice to just smile at people and they will like you is bogus. There aren't any tricks... and if there are any, they are not this simple.
It's called being sociable.

Nobody will develop a deep friendship with you in the first few minutes of conversation. On the other hand, you might miss out on potential friendships if you are aloof and off-putting in the first few minutes of interaction.

Just get something started and iterate. The relationship may never amount to more than an acquaintance, but at least give it a chance to get off the ground.
Build Your Own Linux Distro
Good insight, thanks.

I find cutting clock cycles quite gratifying. Admittedly there is less math in that than having a bottom-up understanding of what's going on. But you could also reframe it like any other optimization problem, given some number of inputs of a certain type. You can also prove your solution correct. It is a math problem all over.

Is it safe to say that those that despise programming, also despise certain branches of math?

I should add a little story. I once asked one of my friends who is very gifted in math why he prefers CS instead of pure math. His answer was something like: CS is the only field where mathematical truths can be immediately applied to reality (within the machine). It's a good balance between limitless mental masturbation and unpredictability of nature.
That has been my every day for 4 months. I work from home with only a 4 month old baby and a couple dogs to keep me company. (My wife works out of the home all day.) The numerous random outbursts utterly destroy concentration each time they occur. I'm honestly not sure I can do it this way much longer. I wish daycare wasn't so damned expensive...
Another 3 cheers for HN!

Obviously, this place is full of PG worshippers. Therefore, the fact that this article made the front page, while disagreeing with PG, suggests that lots of people vote up based on thought-provoking-ness, not on agreement.

And if so, that's cool. :-)
Cory Doctorow: How to survive the Web without embracing it
> Do you know any language where it's not bulky?

Good question. Off the top of my head, I'd say, "no".

OTOH, one can look at relative bulkiness. E.g., I've found that dealing with exceptions in Python is significantly less work than in C++.
Ask HN:  Why is "exploiting" a website illegal?
This is in reference to the Twitter worm, and the Samy Myspace worm awhile back.

MySpace filed a lawsuit against the virus creator, Samy Kamkar. He entered a plea agreement, on January 31, 2007, to a felony charge.[2] The action resulted in Kamkar being sentenced to three years probation, 90 days community service and an undisclosed amount of restitution.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(XSS)

I'm not sure what is going to happen to the kid that did the Twitter worm.

On what grounds is what these people did considered harmful? It doesn't harm any end-users... at worst it only modifies their profile page. It's a bug (or feature) in the web application, not exactly a virus that affects other peoples computers. I guess my point is, it's all encapsulated to the website.

Furthermore, it just seems like they're taking advantage of the features the developers created. If you can execute javascript, why not force people to friend you? If the developers included a big button that said: "Delete a random user's profile" and you pushed it... would that be illegal? What if instead of a button, there was a hidden URL that did this? What if you needed to provide a 1 digit password?

I just don't get how fooling around with a website can be considered illegal, and what defines the line between legal and not.
Germany deletes WikiLeaks.de domain after raid
Remote MySQL Administration With MySQL GUI Tools
What do you do when you realize you invested in a stupid team?
A counter argument: if they are getting the PhD as evidence of mastery in a topic they love, it doesn't matter what comes after it, unless circumstances will force them to give up what they love until they die.

The intrusion of bad "circumstances" is the norm in academia. Actually, it's the norm in life, but academia is set up in a way that makes it nearly impossible to recover.

Also, the "love" people have for a subject or field is highly conditional (not that it should be any other way; that wouldn't make sense). This is mere attachment. Unconditional love for something so abstract probably cannot exist, and if it can, is not desirable in any case. It's legitimate to be intellectually fascinated by finite fields or 19th-century literature, but to say that one loves these things is a stretch. A person who's capable of developing a fascination with X is equally capable of finding a "love" for Y; that's a core trait irrespective of niche-bound particulars.

So when someone is forced into an unappealing niche by academic politics, lives a crappy lifestyle on account of the university's stinginess, and has a fractured family life due to overwork and constant geographic uncertainty, all while having to cope with distracting administrative and bureaucratic chores, it makes sense that this "love" of subject matter would disappear entirely. Most people realize, upon growing up, that they love their families and decent lifestyles more than intellectual abstractions.
Can anyone think of a wonderful business (think truly great) that couldn't get funding until they were in the US?

How would you know? You only hear about the success stories and the spectacular failures, not the full spectrum in between.

But, ask yourself whether you want to be doing a bleeding edge business (e.g. based on twitter or facebook) or one thats more likely to make you wealthy (B2B).

Just because you'd prefer to do a B2B startup you want to deny others from trying to go straight to the top?
Based on our knowledge back when Bear Sterns was still alive, yes. It would have been our best guess as to what is in the national interest. It turns out that the best guess would have been wrong, but that's unavoidable. Perfect information isn't available, and people make mistakes. Our central planners didn't know any better than the markets (Bush, Clinton and various other politicians tried to inflate the housing bubble).

As for those who don't pay up, immediate deportation without the possibility of re-entry. Combine this with a policy of enforcing immigration law, and we might get a workable system.
Word by word, the best response to why WE don't develop for platforms other than iPhone.
Double ditto to the parent...

"The problem with the immigration debate in the US is that it's fundamentally dishonest. Employers lionize immigrants, but the last thing they want is a system that treats them fairly."

Say the above magic incantation three times and the shills turn to smoke and drift away ...
A more comprehensive look at hosted DNS performance
In academia, or overall?

I agree that this is true within academia. The maximum accepted age for a first-year graduate student is about 27; first postdoc, 32; tenure-track, 36. If you don't have tenure at 40, you're flushed.

This does not seem to be true outside of academia. If you're good, your career does not take a dive in your 40s. However, the mediocre or uninterested programmers need to move into management before this, because management is more ageist than technology.
US Captain Held by Pirates is Rescued
A bar on a corporate campus is rather different from a bar on a college campus. My university (albeit in Canada) had 3 different bars on campus, but I can understand Microsoft's reasoning, although I disagree with it.
Is it safe to say that those that despise programming, also despise certain branches of math?

Yes. At the graduate level, the various branches of math are quite different, especially between pure vs. applied. A logician would probably not enjoy a course that involved a lot of PDEs, for example.
I don't disagree with you, although that doesn't contradict what I said: I use "love" in a very strict sense, in the same way you use it in the unconditional sense.

So another issue I didn't make clear was that many people who declare their love for a subject don't really know to what extent this love stretches. In my book it means being alive implies doing X, until life ends.

Difficult for most, but not impossible :-)
>Organizations that wish to block the distribution of IE8 should have their blocking in place by the week of April 20th.

Fulfilling Hitlers old plan to take over the universe?
Actually even better solution that the one mentioned by PG is already in place:

Anybody can open US based company without even holding an US visa from any place in the world.

My brother opened his company via internet in Delaware. Makes quite good money, has his customer base in the US, but produces his product (software) back in Eastern Europe. Has US looking phone numbers via Skype and virtual office "just in case". According to the law doesn't need to pay US taxes as long as isn't hiring Americans here in the US.

This also has advantage of not having to leave your home country and moving to backwards America without appropriate health care and ultra-expensive cost of living compared to abroad.
How to look at billboards
doing anything on someone else's account without them aware (or in control) has to be illegal ... ?

my concern is that its myspace one day, my bank the next. Stemming this in the bud is of value for everyone.
After Early Fame, DataPortability Project Matures
It's fine to say that having a PhD in the humanities for the "love" of the subject is enough, but in at least some of the humanities, that won't get you anywhere. Philosophy, for instance, is an ongoing discussion, and unless you're in academia attending conferences and writing papers and getting published in the same journals that everyone else is, you're not really participating in the field. And you can't really do that unless you're faculty somewhere. It sucks, but that's also where the good philosophy gets done, and you can't do renegade philosophy outside of academia without losing a lot of important context and good work.
Too bad you signed off man. I've had a look at your comments and I must say I've learned more about modern India from reading through them, than most books on the subject.
IMO, if you're looking for a free/open source VM solution for Windows hosts, VirtualBox is really the only option.
Liner notes for Spore from one of the game developers
Generally I am against sneaky upgrades such as Apple's iTunes update that installed Safari, but IE8's standards compliance (though not perfect) is so much better than IE6 that this is a great move for the web as a whole.
I should note that the author must be reading this since #15's description has been updated
Does php really deserve a sob?
it is sad that the same land which gave us one of the ancient world's greatest universities -- Nalanda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda_University produces these dingbats.

That said, plinkplonk's analysis of the situation is very accurate.
What about the Facebookbar? Why is no one complaining?
This is very true.

In my academic career, I've worked on foundations of quantum mechanics, numerical scattering theory, and now I'm working on medical imaging and computational geometry. On the side, I'm doing some web development (database stuff and also business optimization). I could do basically any technical work and enjoy it. There are some things I like slightly more and am moderately better at (not always the same thing), but those differences are marginal.
I have some contrary anecdotal evidence. I have seen/know dozens of people who carry their work phone (usually a blackberry). And then they carry the phone they really want along with it: the iPhone.

Windows mobile is a joke. Hardly anyone installs apps with it or uses it for anything other than a phone/calendar/contacts. Android could be strong though.
"Kids from the law school were starting at $125-150K/yr."

That's only for people coming out of top law schools and going into top corporate law firms. The engineering analogue would be a Stanford or MIT grad who works for Google for 3 years and then joins a well-funded startup. Considering that it's not unusual for people with 3 years experience at Google to pull in $130-140k including bonus, and someone else on-thread was saying that he knows lots of firms that'll gladly pay $150K+ for top engineering talent, and I don't think $125-150K is unreasonable for a top engineer.

The majority of law students - the ones that don't go to a big-name law school - often end up setting up a private practice or working for a boutique firm for much, much lower salaries. Small-town divorce attorneys often make only about $50K/year, according to some of the alums on that thread, and it sounded like lawyers at "boutique", non-big-name law firms pulled in about $80-90K.
That last sentence is a bit troubling, are you serious? Think about a situation for example where all of your income comes from a website you publish and someone else does (without your permission) something to change/destroy the content, how that can be legal? If a car has unlocked doors and the keys are in ignition is it legal to take that car?
VMWare player - http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

It is also possible to create new images with it, just search for "vmware image creation" ;)
Hi All,
Please don't get me wrong, but I don't get what hackers interest HN user can get from this article. I am from Russia and there's enough crazy politicians in my country as well, but I don't feel like it's the right place to post their ideas here.
Flagged this article.
Yeah, I was mostly talking about China, as that's (half) my cultural background. I think it applies in Japan/Vietnam/Korea as well, knowing some Japanese/Vietnamese/Korean families.
I think it is interesting to see some of the design decisions, the algorithms used for example, from the guy that actually implemented it.
I wasn't trolling. I was just pointing out that it seems like a subjective distinction as a practical matter and asking if there was a way to make it less subjective in the context of online comments, argument rebuttals, etc.
Isn't it really better at this point to spend the effort identifying and directly assisting developers whose apps are totally IE-dependent? Marketing to users will probably only cause them to break apps that they may really need to do their jobs (and make them hate their IT staff more).

The big players who stand to gain significantly from removing IE6 (which at this point include Microsoft itself), should be doing everything they can to encourage developers to move on, and leaving users alone. Heck, even if Microsoft offered free classes or donated development resources to help de-cruftify IE6-only apps, at this point it would be well worth their investment.
This mathematical illiteracy is a pet peeve of mine. It's unfashionable to talk in a meaningful mathematical unit (percentage). We see this crap in global warming propaganda (tons of carbon dioxide emitted or kept from being emitted) with no mention of what this is as a percentage. You see it in vaccination schedule defense. (1000 kids died of this disease in the last 5 years because they weren't vaccinated). You see it a lot with state and government budget issues. (This program brought in $1.2 million to the economy of state of California, and now they're cutting it). None of this sounds nearly as sexy if put into the perspective of percentage, but of course, then you couldn't stir up the sheep.
Why are there so few games that manipulate time and/or space in interesting ways?
Portal and Braid come to mind. There's also an upcoming time travel RTS. But why are there so few such games?
Even reddit has one; it's just disabled in the user's settings by default.
Column-oriented dbs are essentially a "heroic engineering" way to optimize a datastore for a particular workload -- continuous-read-heavy-batch-processing -- by engineering around the performance peculiarities of traditional hard drives.

Another way to view this is simply that column stores are a more appropriate storage technique for read-intensive workloads on magnetic disks. When you characterize column stores as "engineering around" the "pecularities" of HDDs, you make it seem like column stores are a workaround and row stores are the "natural" approach, which I don't think is the case. Implementing a column store from scratch is not significantly harder/easier than building a row store from scratch, AFAIK (albeit there is probably more expertise on how to do the latter).

the rise of ssd may make this engineering effort essentially useless outside of a handful of niches (essentially, the niches reduce to: data volumes too large to economically fit into ssd within the foreseeable future)

Given the daunting rise of data volumes in the data warehousing market, that makes for a pretty big niche. It will be a long time before SSDs are cost effective for the DW market, I think.
Mixing it Up - Programming Language Choice
Three observations.

One: There are specific laws against unauthorized access to computer systems:

http://www.ncsl.org/programs/lis/CIP/hacklaw.htm

These acts are generally considered illegal because... they contravene laws!

Two: "What defines the line between legal and not?" The answer, ultimately, is judges and juries. These people have a wide range of discretion and are often surprisingly reasonable. (Although certainly not always. And they cost a lot to convince, and they can be randomly unreasonable, which is why there are a lot of jury-trial horror stories and why lawyers prefer to avoid jury trials whenever possible.)

If I leave a loaded gun lying around and you pick it up and shoot me dead, the legality of your action is going to depend crucially on what you can make the prosecutor and the jury believe. If you convince them that you did it by accident -- that you were honestly just playing around with the gun on the assumption that nobody would be dumb enough to leave a loaded gun around -- you might be found innocent. If you had a documented motive for killing me, or were arguing with me at the time in front of witnesses, or if there were no witnesses... well, good luck.

Finally, when you say:

It doesn't harm any end-users... at worst it only modifies their profile page.

You are making a lot of unwarranted assumptions. For one thing: If you publicly deface a website you advertise the existence of an exploit which someone else might then use for evil purposes. But, more importantly: Who says that an edit to a user profile is always harmless? People have lost relationships, job leads, careers, and reputations over such "trivial" things. Remember the poor teacher whose Windows box got infected by a virus and spewed porn links all over the screen in front of the students? The woman who lost her job and narrowly missed being convicted as a sex offender by a crazy prosecutor?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10107743-83.html

If I were a teacher and someone defaced my online profile with a porn link I'd consider it a direct threat to my family's life.
A few people in this thread (and elsewhere when the topic of IE6 comes up) bring up the problem of applications that are dependent on IE6 as a reason why many business users cannot upgrade.

I'm curious, does anyone have any actual experience with such applications? Do you use them yourself? Do you work for a company that uses them? Did you develop them? Are you aware of any statistics that cite how prevalent these applications are?

I'm beginning to wonder whether these IE6-dependent applications are widespread in reality, or whether they server more as a rhetorical rejoinder anytime someone brings up the idea of forcing people to upgrade.

It certainly feels more and more to me like progress on web applications is being highjacked by an extremely small minority of enterprise IT departments.