skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We've past all the long hanging fruit. Everything from here on forward is going to take more time, money, and people than. 100-200 years ago there were thousands of people at best with the education to push things forward. Often they were experts in several fields. Today we have hundreds of thousands of people pushing on these fields (of which people are only an expert in one or two things). All of the easy answers are gone.

This is compounded by the bar being really high and the regulation really thick. What counts as a great innovation in alternate energy today requires at least being competitive with existing technology, which has almost one hundred years of development by tens of thousands of engineers at thousands of companies. It is no wonder it takes longer. And you have to worry (rightly so) the environmental and safety aspects of things that wouldn't have mattered 150 years ago.

All of these things slow down progress and make it more expensive. One of the reason progress was cheap in computer science was because the field was young, but as it matures we will see a slow down in innovation. Only fools will continue to believe Moore's "law" has any truth looking 20 years into the future.
Clickable link: http://yuffizi.co.cc

(MVP = cheap as possible = free domain/hosting) I will run it on something meatier when necessary.
It makes sense if you are using C.
If you are using something like C#, compiler will throw an error (not warning) if you write

if(str = "hello")

See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/655657/0-variable-or-null...
stories about the little league, usually submitted by the little league itself or a coach or something

Another anecdote that indicates journalism is only profitable as aggregation of Public Relations? Even at the hyper-local level!
counterpoint: http://fredwilson.vc/post/117874217/when-we-talk-about-innov...
If you don't know Lua make sure to follow the first sections of the tutorial. It is not as dynamic as you can think (that is, if you think is as dynamic as Ruby you are wrong). The authors of Lua did a wonderful work with optimizations, but it is more doable compared to other languages. Also I must admit I don't like the language a lot...
The Short Life Span of the iPhone
I interned for a health care company where the lady in charge of my work had a Microsoft Access database with a single table.
That table had something like 500 columns.
I spent a week or so understanding and created a decent normalized relational database model.
I was not allowed to make any changes. The reason given was 'You will leave, who would understand and maintain all these tables'
Why Things Become Unpopular
Articles being voted up/down is kind of a revolutionary idea, in that it could have been developed years earlier, but it wasn't. Why not? (maybe people tried it, it didn't take off and so we didn't hear about it)
Seems like a very gloomy view of start-ups. I'm not quite sure in what kind of universe the founders are last in line to take in profits from a start-up. If that is the case anywhere, I'd strongly encourage those founders to get out of there and come to backwards old England and start a start-up without professional investors. However, I don't think that's the case. The evidence doesn't support that idea.

Certainly, joining a start-up as an employee "to get rich" would be the wrong idea. But I imagine many of us here are founders, and though we're not doing our start-ups for the sole purpose of getting rich, the fact that it's a possibility is certainly important. Would you bother working on your start-up if you knew for sure that it would never make you more money than you could make burger-flipping? (directly or indirectly)
You don't do that - i.e. you don't use a single desktop that you need to clear. That's a Windows thing, where multiple desktops never worked right, and always needed add-ons.

You put an extra Gnome toolbar on your screen's right side, and you add a "Desktop-switcher" applet (I also like the "System monitor" applet there, and a couple other gewgaws).

Then you keep a desktop for each work topic (web, docs, mail, whatever), and a clean one for the visitors ;-). All one click away, generally work flawlessly.

But there's also a "Show desktop" applet, to add to your single-desktop toolbar, if you insist.
We'd become ramen profitable from our licensing work with Conde Nast before the acquisition and had enough to live (modestly) on for another year.

We were slow to put ads on reddit, putting FederatedMedia on only the comments pages, and generating a few thousand a month from just those pageviews (a small% of our traffic).

That said, if that deal had fallen through, we'd have likely just powered on. I can't speculate whether or not we'd have gotten acquired by someone else, but I'd been discussing the idea with a couple other properties.

Maybe we would have gotten serious about selling merch sooner ;)

For reasons I hinted at in the interview, it really was the right time for an acquisition.
also, aren't the parens redundant?
The piece of paper wasn't my point but rather if there was any standard of performance to be met.
Advertising that their application is incredibly insecure?

Even if they fix this, I wouldn't trust a company that claims their product is very secure, offers a $10k reward for hacking it, then gets exploited in less than a day by (most likely) the simple XSS vulnerability mentioned in another comment.
I'm not sure I understand. Is it free or not?

==== from the FAQ ========

How much does Utilium cost?

The Utilium platform is free for instructors and students.

If you adopt and deliver a ready-made Study Pack to your students, there is a cost for your students to access these Utilium materials. Please note that students can access ready-made Study Packs for free during the spring and summer of 2009.
it's like any discipline, the best ones appreciate how little they truly know.
This question was previously asked here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=640289
They may not have had a viable business, but enough gloss and marketing could cover that up.

This? this is straight up public humiliation.
Five or six hours nightly during the week, generally some more on the weekends. Pretty typical for 22 years old I'd assume.
Well, according to the name, it's actually a polynomial improvement on old-fashioned search.
You thought you have the worst version control story? What's version control?! Seriously. All edits made locally and "tested" by direct upload to the production server. Different "commits" tested by file renaming. file.asp.old, file.asp.old.xx, file.asp.5.25.2002

"Hey Tony, are you working on blahblah.asp? Oh, no?, Great, let me just pull a copy, don't work on it until I say I'm done OK?"

I was fortunate enough at the time (circa 2002) shortly after my arrival to put svn into place. I gotta say though, once you now how to do something the completely wrong way, it's much easier to do it correctly. Ugh.
Anomos: Censhorship-resistant, Anonymous BitTorrent (Made by a HN'er)
Google Opens Up Internal Speed Tool To Developers
In my opinion, the 37signals style of displaying a product works so well is because of amount of information readily available with such little effort. Your design looks pretty attractive already and is in a similar sales letter type layout - consider adding a tour with large screenshots. It may also benefit you to mimic the style of their pricing page with each plan laid out, even if the primary one is free. There's a sense of mental relief if the customer knows what he/she is getting into at a quick glance and that pricing chart helps a ton in providing that.
Google Page Speed: web performance plugin for Firebug
The True Value Of Social Networks: The 2009 Updated Model
http://www.grooveshark.com/ and/or http://www.pandora.com/
Believe it or not, this is still better than ClearCase.
The government doesn't give all of its money to space exploration (or other worthy causes) and spends money on entertainment for the same reason you don't give all your money to space exploration (or other worthy causes) and spend some money (including time) on entertainment.

The only way that could happen is if we, as a species, could somehow dedicate all of our time to "worthy pursuits", but we can't. We need downtime and entertainment, and by "need", I mean, need.

My first paragraph is not sarcastic. It really is the same reason, just writ large.

(This argument is one layer of "why?" beyond the more obvious, but less interesting, point that these stadiums get built because they pull enough in tax revenues in to justify it, or at least so the municipalities assume.)
Ask HN: Digital Globe of the World
I'm building a game, and need a 3D Model of the world, like the geographical data from Google Earth, but at much much much lower resolution.

All I can find on the web (searching via images.google.com) is maps of the earth, but I'd like 3D data.

Thanks!
I'm sorry I have to extend this to hardware/environment issues. Four tech people in company (including a web designer). One guy managing the network remotely from some other office location. Only access to production servers off-site was through VPN, common enough right? Fine, but instead of figuring out how VPN passthrough/NAT/ports worked on the Cisco sitting in the closet, the sysadmin settled on getting everyone who needed access to the server their own static, external IP addresses. Not only were they paying extra for these on a monthly basis, but we had these poor early XP boxes sitting on direct connections to the internets. Firewalls are for jerks, eh? Oh, and to make matters even funnier, when you were connected to the VPN, you couldn't get email or go on the internet, because no one had ever figured out that the "use default gateway" option maybe meant something.
CEOs Without College Degrees
IE 8 notices the XSS attack and tries to safeguard the user.

http://imgur.com/FzN1f.png

I verified that the latest version of Chrome and Firefox doesn't prevent the XSS attack.
A company I was at created huge arrays of data structures, many of which contained nested arrays of data structures, which were eventually serialized and rpc'd to another server. Since this was written in C, and they felt malloc was too hard to do correctly, every structure was stack allocated, using a MAX_SIZE number of elements per array, all memset'd to zero.

It didn't take long til everything started crashing from buffer overflows, so they just increased each MAX_SIZE definition to some ridiculously huge value. This made some of the top level data structures hundreds of megabytes. Developers complained that memset would take multiple seconds to run, and so they suggested just removing the memset calls to make the code "more efficient". Another developer suggested replacing all calls to "abs" with "if (n < 0) { n = -n }" because it would also be faster. I quit soon after that.
That's "systems" Hungarian, developed by the one and only Microsoft. Putting the variable type inside the name is redundant, I think everyone can agree.

"Apps" Hungarian, on the other hand, is a wonderful system where the prefix describes the purpose of the variable (such as us for "usafe string" and ss for "safe string"). It also describes function naming convention (ss_from_us for "Safe string from unsafe string") so that you can easily tell if you're making a coding mistake. Compare:

$ss_username = ss_from_us($us_username_field);

$ss_username = $us_username_field;

Real easy to spot the mistakes.
To make things even worse, sea water strongly attenuates electromagnetic radiation at radio frequencies...
oops, as of Thu June 4 8pm EDT,
the main page displays the same content twice

did you duplicate your HTML or PHP?

I am using Firefox, Mac OSX, ... if it matters.
We know that the jet was in a severe thunderstorm when it crashed. Severe thunderstorms have brought down many airplanes over the years.
I think the Indiana University Entrepreneurial MBA requires something similar. Don't quote me on that though.
One factor might have been ajax. Being able to vote without having to reload the page is a big deal, but it's only relatively recently that the techniques to do that have become common knowledge.

Not that that stopped slashdot from doing it with comments. It could probably have been made to work with articles as well; quite possibly everyone just thought editors were better at selecting interesting links to publish. The innovation was social rather than technical. (HN's system of articles selected primarily by voting, but with more than cursory editorial oversight, seems to be another social innovation. Did any earlier site do the same thing?)
uploads to youtube are growing at an enormous rate and the more google penetrates into the american and global markets the more the rate will increase. The question is when will broadband get cheap enough to mitigate this? and how long is google willing to cover youtube's cost in the short run until broadband gets cheap enough?
This particular instance involved a very modern plane piloted by a very experienced crew. Google the kind of stress tests they put plane wings and such under. A wide body fuselage should not come apart in a thunderstorm.
Explain this: http://google.com/trends?q=uggs&ctab=0&geo=all&d...
What bugs me is that these questions are framed differently when it's people copying MSFT. EG - Google spreadsheet's interface. EG - Writely. etc.

Good UI's are copied relentlessly.
Who sleeps at night?
I think there needs to be more on the site to draw interest.

Tell a story: Liz is an executive with a new office. She's in the market for an abstract acrylic for that blank wall.

Jake is a digital artist whose colourful and intricate work is visually engaging.

When this site connects Liz and Jake, Art Happens.
Further Review of N97
Well, the interests of small and large groups of people do not always align perfectly. Ain't life a bitch.
Not really security-related, but one related "honeytoken" trick I have done in the past (for wikis, blogs, forum software, etc) is making account activation emails send a fake URL first in the body of the email that is clearly marked not to be clicked by humans as a bot trap.

Then the real activation link is down below that, clearly marked as well.

The majority of spambots and exploit worms, etc, just have a simple regex for parsing out the first "right-looking" link in the activation email to get their account activated.

On one forum I dealt with, this caught 100% of the hundreds of spambots hitting the forum each month.

Kind of interesting that bots can have some of the best captcha-guessing algorithms, but change up a little of the expected flow from the most common and you can quickly notice which visitors are bots or otherwise.
Adding unnecessary code in critical-to-security sections of your application, like this article suggests, is not a good way to make it secure. All code is going to have bugs, and the more code you have, the more bugs you are going to have. You don't want those bugs in your session or authentication-handling code, but this article suggests you add more code there... mostly "for fun".

None of these suggestions will help you solve actual security problems that your users will face, like stolen session cookies. Implementing these suggestions might be fun, but it will probably make your app less secure.
thats strange, theres only a slight formatting problem when I view the site in FF on my girlfriends Macbook. I suppose I'll have to play around with it some more then...

As for telling a story, I agree that would be an interesting way to connect with (potential) buyers. "Hmmm, that wall at the end of the hallway does look a little plain..."
I agree that 90% of the stuff on youtube is crap not worth looking at. However, 10% of it is superb. Do you know of an algorithm that can sift the 10% before uploading?

Furthermore, I doubt much bandwidth (youtube->viewer) is wasted on the crap.
This works for five minutes until the bot-operator realizes the auto-activation isn't working, and writes 2 lines of code to fix the problem. Now you annoy legitimate users, but don't stop bots. That's good for your competition, but probably not so good for you.
Is the goal to encourage casual developers to try to hack/probe around your site? Or is the goal to fool/deter legitimate hackers?

I think the former is more likely to happen with the tactics mentioned, and the people who want in are going to just be slowed down a tad trying that path before going another route.

I know a lot of curious people who would try to "probe" around those sorts of fake entrances just because they saw them and not because they really cared anything about attacking the site.
Yeah, I get why the loop is there. But I still think it increases the probability of a collision by nearly 1000x over the probability of a collision without the loop.

Maybe a better way to explain my concern is to consider hashing something once versus twice, rather than 1000 times.

Let h be a hash function and p be the probability P(h(x) = h(y)) for randomly chosen x and y.

Say you have unique inputs a and b.

Obviously, P(h(a) = h(b)) = p.

Now consider P(h(h(a)) = h(h(b))). h(h(a)) = h(h(b)) if:

h(a) = h(b) [probability p]
OR
h(a) != h(b) [probability 1-p], and
h(h(a)) = h(h(b)) [probability p].

So the total probability when we repeat the hash is p + (1-p) * p

Since p is small, the probability of a collision has nearly doubled just by applying the hash function again.

[note: Higher up in this thread I mistakenly implied that the probability increased linearly. With a low number of iterations and realistic values for p it should be close to linear, but not exact.]

[edit:formatting]
House of Troy GP14-7
Ample light at an inexpensive price! FEATURES: 120 Watt capable fixture using &#40;2&#41; 60 Watt T10 Bulbs 10 Gooseneck Shines.
Indeed - http://www2.telesign.com/login.php?loginerror=yes&user=\...
About ten years ago, a telecom company (which no longer exists since it was purchased by a larger company) I worked for refused to allow us to use anything open source.
> 4. Add “spider loops” ... be nice, and add “NOFOLLOW” tags to not annoy legit search engines too much.

Honeypots are always dangerous because they can end up ensnaring good visitors & bots with the bad. Yahoo, MSN, and ASK all follow links even if the rel="nofollow" attribute is set. One should at least disallow these loops in the sites's robots.txt file.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow#Interpretation_by_the_...
Firefox+NoScript does
This should be corrected (thought I updated it a while back, info is certainly there). If not, send a tweet to @robgomes.
It would be interesting to see the same model with revenue and profits instead.
And it only pings for 30 days.
It seems to be a common problem that, although the will is there to improve practices, persuading higher-ups is almost impossible.

Although many of like to think that cold, hard logic is the only suitable method of reasoning with somebody, the reality is that even programmers are somewhat human. We're all proud, emotional souls.

If, like me, you've spent half a lifetime on your own, hacking and tinkering with computers, your skills in handling people may be somewhat underdeveloped. I've recognised this in myself and have been trying to do something about it. I can thoroughly recommend Dale Carnegie's classic book:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influenc...

In most cases, it should be possible to win over the stubborn manager or sensitive programmer who's blocking any progress towards sane development practices. There's plenty of material in the Carnegie book suggesting how one can gently persuade people, i.e. how to win arguments. In hindsight, a lot of the book's advice seems obvious and corresponds with my own experiences, but I needed somebody to make it all explicit.

I have first hand experience of having to placate a sensitive, confidence-lacking programmer. A few times it's been necessary to reject his ideas or code, and he's taken it very personally, being unable to separate in his mind an 'attack' on his work from an attack on him. Once you know how, it can be fairly easy to reassure him.

I've never had the problem of a stubborn manager who thinks he knows better, but I have a good idea of how I'd approach him and try and persuade him of the right way to do things. Then again, I still feel like my people skills are great only in theory, and somewhat lacking in practice.
"Quit being offended."

Who was offended? Not me. I'm pointing out a false view of gun owners. If Peter had in fact said "people completely at random" or "but they're not geeks", that would haven fine.

But emphasizing gun ownership as if it were particularly relevant (e.g., they are more likely than people completely at random to have trouble with the CLI) is bogus.

Oh, and quit being touchy. :)
The Impending Demise of the University
I've heard that before with other airfare search sites. The funny thing is, when I worked for Yahoo Real Estate back in 2007, they looked very similar to this too. The ideas used here are not new, especially not to the Travel industry. In fact, refinements with drag bars for time and price are available on many sites.

I feel like this is saying that IE and FF are too close. No one calls foul on it (at least not too often) because there are some paradigms for how browsers work, just as there are for "best deal" price aggregators.

The real money-makers will be the ones who can ignore these paradigms and find a more innovative way to do things.
Wow. I just realized you were the same person I sat next to in CIS 3020 at UF - what a terrible waste of a class. You switched my keyboard to Dvorak :(

Nice to see you're doing well, I recently joined a startup myself.
I needled the stadiums because they were an easy target. Its more of a philosophic rant stemming from a disappointment in overall resource allocation. We spend so many trillions on entertainment like football. We use our land, our human capital, our tv transmitters, our precious time... on giant zero-sum distractions. Our heroes play games.

Space flight is life. Will the last humans have to admit that we didn't make it off the planet in time to save our species because we were too busy watching football and getting drunk?

Even if we never "make it to the stars", there are countless worlds of resources just floating around in asteroid fields in our own solar system. We just have to go get them. I'm not advocating we go "all work and no play" here, I just can't help but think we should be trying a little bit harder.
Since uggs is a winterboot it's pretty obvious that it will be searched for in winter time. If you take this into account the graph shows a slow and steady increase in uggs searches.

Interestingly it seems that uggs are more popular in the northern hemisphere since there are not a lot of searches in what is the northern hemispheres summer and the southern hemispheres winter.

Accorindg to the theory they should have a good chance at making a valuable brand, since their growth is slow but has been increasing over the last four years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugg_boots
Los Angeles Attorney
Based in Las Angeles, California, Erik S Syverson is an Attorney at Law, specializing in entertainments law.
Will it explain this? -- http://google.com/trends?q=twitter
Not that I want to give any credence to this theory, but actually the statistics are better (or worse) than he thinks, because meteors are believed more likely to strike at the equator than the pole.

[Horrid URL follows, sorry]

http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_quer...