skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
$300 is a completely awesome price. The closest alternative (Wifi touchscreen PC) is Asus EEE Top PC at $500: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883220...

And CrunchPad sounds a lot more usable than carrying a bulky touchscreen.
There is a small aircraft manufacturer, Cirrus that puts a parachute recovery system right on the aircraft itself.

Notably, reviews have been mixed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_Recovery_Systems

Cirrus, it should be noted has an below average crash rate compared to other aircraft in class. Clearly, the small total of 18 deployments compared to the crash rate leaves a lot of work to be done.
The HN heading is misleading, The article is totally NOT about using a wiki to manage a software project, only documenting a project. It's not quite the same thing.
The qualities that make a great developer and a great professional security researcher are about the same.

Both involve taking hardware, a programming language, an API, an application or something else that someone in the computing industry had one purpose for, and bending it in a way to produce a rather unexpected, very unique result.

A great developer builds Web 2.0 with something as novel and limited as JavaScript and HTML.

A great security researcher made your toaster catch fire from a different continent (didn't they always say our toasters would be internet connected?).

I, personally, think the latter is more fun provided it doesn't cause any actual damage (and I think that was demonstrated ... a whitehat makes his own toaster catch fire and sometimes tells everyone who has that model of toaster how to fix it).

Nicely done.
I expressed two contradictory points of view in my comment (or possibly three). Which one are you agreeing with?
This doesn't seem to be consistent in the way it is trying to help me; for example, a search for "tympanuchus cupido" (the genus and species name of the greater prairie chicken) returns only phasianidae, the family to which prairie chickens belong. Meanwhile, a search for just "tympanuchus" (the genus, which includes more than just prairie chickens) returns Attwater's Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge, which seems only tangentially related. Terms with multiple meanings (which is precisely what structured search is supposed to help with) don't seem to recognize this multiplicity--consider a search for "peripatetic", which is both the name of a school of ancient Greek philosophy (which is recognized in the results), and a term meaning wandering or itinerant (which is not recognized, even when the search is changed to "peripatetic definition"). Even the most straightforwardly categorical queries don't seem to work that well ("dungeons and dragons classes" returns a list that is neither complete, nor correct). Speaking of neither completeness nor correctness, if you think my query choices were a little too farfetched, consider the query "search engines"--it returns none of bing, Duck Duck Go, and cuil in the first 50 results (although, somewhat entertainingly, Yahoo is the first result and Google is the second).

Is there something I'm missing that this engine actually does well?
I don't know if we read the same article. This article compares NILFS to btrfs (favorably, I might add.)
Its good to see some more options but it still does not compare to jQuery UI with its unified styling and theme roller.

I like having jQuery UI components standalone and using them as needed, relying on compression and merging tools like yui compressor to do their job.

Being a smaller core set of components is not really a big benifit.

They have a good point about the api improvements over jQuery UI but i can't see it being enough to switch.
Mozilla's nonprofit status key to its growth
There are a number of reasons. I will list some here:

1. Operational knowledge is lacking.

2. 300 people trying to jump from a plane through 2 3 foot doors will probably cause a crash alone.

3. Pointless at > FL 10. There is no oxygen up there.

4. It's also about -50C ish > FL 10. You would fall as a frozen popsicle.

5. Would add about 1000lbs of weight to the aircraft.

6. People floating around in the Atlantic isn't really an improvement.

7. 95% of all aircraft failures result in a safe landing. Only a small percentage result in crashes at the commercial aircraft level.

8. People hanging in trees all over the province of Alberta isn't really an improvement.

9. People landing in traffic in Denver isn't really an improvement.

I think you get the point. The answer is that parachutes are completely impractical for 90% of all aviation uses.
It looks like flowplayer built custom animations for themselves and decided to release it as a library. Good publicity and a well designed website.

I think the library itself has great video support but not much else.
I think the main issue is Hulu used to have full seasons, now with TV networks / Cable operators fighting back Hulu only has the most recent 5 episodes of anything... Also, Hulu seems to be removing movies faster than adding them now... It was so successful that it kind of freaked the industry out and they are now shrinking it...
I don't see how. Accelerated rusting? Transition to a different crystal structure?
Completely agree.

He mentioned Pandora and that was the first service that came to mind for me. I wanted a way to donate to them, but couldn't find it (frankly, I didn't look very hard either, I'm sure if I sent an e-mail they'd find a way for me to send money).

A year ago I purchased a "registered" copy of 7-zip for $20 some odd dollars because I wanted to support the development of that application. It afforded me e-mail support or something like that, but I have never bothered the developer. I just loved the application.

I don't command a six figure income. I'm also the sole financial provider for a family of four. I recognize value when I see it. It is a sort of "tip" to the people who I'm reaping benefits from and I have no problem showing my gratitude monetarily.

So ... another way to look at this is ... you have a winning product if people are asking for ways to pay you for what you're giving away.
You can't be incredibly disappointed in someone for not doing something you didn't ask them to do. You can probably let the issue drop there. I'm glad you're taking the flaw seriously.
> Microsoft has made a LOT of innovations. A massive amount of modern computing is based of how accessible microsoft made computing - if we still had to recompile our kernel to enable sound, I don't think we would be near as far as we are.

Sure , they've enabled innovation. How much have they actually done ...
/security, security@, the "security" tab on the front page.
I disagree. I am almost guaranteed to use this in the near future because it's so ridiculously cheap. At $50, I'd think about it a lot more and probably attempt to do it myself. Are there more people like me, or more people who wouldn't use it because it's too cheap to trust?
There actually is a limit of 100 pages per submission, however it is obviously not storing the data for those 100 pages too well.

Looks like tomorrow is de-bugging day!

I wrote this app over the course of a day a couple of months ago and it's been languishing on my server since then. At the moment it's written in PHP and is not exactly what you'd call 'well tested'.

I'm considering migrating it to Rails (or Camping). Any suggestions for mini-frameworks (like Camping) suitable for a single-page app would be welcomed!
If you go that route, make sure to make it more discoverable. If people write off your product because they need more responses, they're never going to figure out that they could get more.
I want to sort apps by highest reviewed followed by descending sort of number of reviews. E.g., I'm more interested in apps that have 200 5-star reviews than apps with 2 5-star reviews.
SQL is popular because it was the query language that was available in the Oracle and IBM relational databases, which were the first relational database products to come to market. SQL subsequently became an ISO standard. Eventually all relational database vendors switched to SQL. Other DBMSs (Ingres, Informix, Postgres) originally used QUEL which was thought by many to be superior to SQL eventually switched as SQL became dominant/the standard. (Although QUEL can still be used with Ingres). There may be other reasons, but I think that in large part these are the reasons why SQL is dominant today.

Relational databases became popular because the declarative high level query language was less time consuming to write queries in than earlier non-relational database.

SQL is far from the perfect query language though. It's syntax is often bizarre and confounding, and has many non relational extensions (column ordering, duplicate tuples in a relation).
Hardware Hacker/Entrepreneur Develops New Tools For NIN and U2
I'm not sure it could. That is, it would sell some at many ranges because it's unique. But I do think price sensitivity will be huge here. In other words, I am guessing every dollar they knock off the price tag will mean a big difference in the number of sales.
I enjoyed that essay, although he never cleared up my confusion as to what he meant by libertarian. I generally use it as a synonym for anarchist, but he sounds (and I could be wrong) more like a right libertarian. Is this right?
I see the USB port is still there :)

Wonder how they will handle storage - suppose I see an image I want to save or stuff I wish to copy/paste and send via gmail. I get that there is no local storage but I hope it will allow inter-process operability.
D.B. Cooper. Allowing people the means to parachute from airliners only enables hijacking as a means of escape from the law.
Ask HN: What can go wrong with stock options?
(posted anonymously for obvious reasons)

We're looking at stock options as a possible means to compensate people in our start-up, such as very early employees and founders who didn't get enough initial shares.

I'm interested in knowing what the HN community has observed in terms of problems that can happen with stock options, so that those can be covered in the options contracts that we end up creating.

Obviously this would all be checked with a lawyer eventually, but we'd like to avoid involving lawyers in the initial drafting of the conditions and the initial discussions of them.

It'd be great to hear stories of what can go wrong from the point of view of the company executives, from the point of view of the persons receiving the stock options, and from the point of view of more distant shareholders/investors. Any relevant links would of course be very welcome.

Basically, what should we worry about?

PS: Alternatively, if you know of other share transfer mechanisms that would be useful at a stage where just diluting the stock and buying the additional shares outright is too expensive, please do mention those too...a
Interview With Jack Dorsey (Twitter Co-Founder)
Great idea guys! If you have to time to come up to SF you should definitely drop by our Crowdsoucing Labor/Mechanical Turk meetup on June 10th. You can RSVP here: http://www.meetup.com/Amazon-Mechanical-Turk-Crowdsourcing-W...

The Amazon VP of Mechanical Turk is going to come by to answer questions, and I'm sure she would love to talk to you all.
People like things.
Digg Ad Model: Pay less if you get dugg more
Is it true that in US we didn't have restrictions on imports? I am genuinely curious on why we (in US) don't have:
1. Micro cars (things like KeiCar or Tata from India)
2. Japanese-brand Washer and Dryers which are clearly more efficient.

But then again you use past tense, did you mean the US used to NOT have restrictions?

Just curiosity.
IMO, you should write your own code, instead of relying on someone else's possibly buggy code. If you are going to use somebody else's code, you should at LEAST look at it to make sure its correct, especially something as terse as this.
Phish Fan Live-Streams Concert via iPhone
This certainly seems to be true of some people. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard the phrase "retail therapy" used.
I think you have crossed to arguing about words.

What do you mean innovation.
Future tip for any other blog authors with code: don't make assumptions about people's browser geometry/fonts.

Even worse than the horizontal scrolling (a link to a popup or plain text would've been better) was the fact that you couldn't have the horizontal scroller on the screen at the same time as the top few lines of code on many screens (like mine).
Really? Downmoded because of the comment "awesome! :)"? Pretty harsh.
great post. on the readability - i think the screenplay makes it more approachable but the visual formatting makes it rather hard to read. It seems like the slightly shortened, indented lines that run into the hard vertical line on the right, combined with the center aligned names, disrupts the eye flow. my eyes are drawn immediately to the center/end of line because that's where the most tension is but that's not where the line begins. i found the hex dumps to be the easiest part for my eyes to latch on to because it felt consistent.

all that is a long way of saying, in spite of the visual formatting, it's a very interesting article. and personally, i think the the screenplay itself works.
kool game
SF: Free Opera AT&T Park Friday Night - Puccini's Tosca
I know it's not exactly Hacker News, but for start up founders needing a distraction or date night at minimal burn rate, here it is.
Well one reason is that black boxes are probably more reliable than a satellite link, and can operate when the plane splits in half. Also, the previously mentioned issue with the large amount of data that would be generated by all of the airplanes.
Everything they picked seems really expensive, tshirts for $40+

For $40 I can get an "EL Lit Glowing Equalizer [that] animates to ambient noise or music" on thinkgeek.com

I thought it rather amusing though that half the comments were about spelling errors :)
Surface shipping already uses something similar, mounting buoyant distress/telemetry beacons which automatically deploy in an emergency (I don't know the exact mechanism, but I'd assume it's triggered by water pressure or something similar).

Some modern recorders on board aircraft can apparently do similar tricks, but I'd imagine it's more difficult to make it work reliably; the stresses involved in a plane crash are likely far greater, and I'd suspect the number of places from which a device could both survive and get free to deploy is much smaller.
Let me make it more clear:

- assume that a company is worth X amount, meaning there is an offer for X amount.

- let's say that both founders decide not to sell it.

- for some reason, founder 1 decides to quit. 50% of his shares have vested. other 50% have not.

- does the unvested stake from cofounder 1 goto the company or the other cofounder?

what i'm getting to is if the cofounder that did not leave sells the company for 100 bucks, and let's say he had 50% stake before cofounder 1 left, how much of the 100 bucks do each founder get? cofounder 1 at the time he left had 50% of his shares vested...meaning he owns 25% of the company.
This is the real answer to the question.
No. Part of failure analysis is understanding what led to the failure in the first place. If you only transmit when something goes wrong, you may end up knowing what went wrong, but not why And why is usually just as important.
They do that, but it's not called an "airplane" anymore. I think the usual term is "submarine".
Thanks for the feedback! I thought the same thing; I think I'll mod my hacked-up version of Markdown to dim the center lines.
There's probably two sets of people at work in the statement.

The people who made the frameworks would require a good understand as well as the idea that an abstraction might make life easier.

The side effect is that if you create a good enough abstraction you'll get people who can handle the abstraction but are a little shakey when dealing with what is abstracted.

See, you can both be right :)
I agree, it's sleazy as hell. Who gave you permission to copy comments written here onto you blog? I don't care what they're "reacting" to, those comments were not written by you and you have no right to republish them.

Example of this behaviour: http://thenextweb.com/2009/06/03/bad-news-ibm-apple/
Slicehost is smarter than I am
I would say some kind of second derivative positive, quadratic function.

/
/
/
_________/

(That's the best I can do for the -decay- rate).
Try adding these columns: Paradigm, Typing Discipline, Designed By, Major Implementations

Impressive.
"I still feel it's discussion based on our content and rather reasonable to have there"

By that logic, any and all of the companies you discuss on your site have the right to republish anything you write, since it's "based on their content" (press releases/announcements). Is that "rather reasonable" as well?
Always Innovating has a detachable-touchscreen netbook for $400

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=abba+albums
Very cool tool. Useful too. =]

Framework isn't the issue in this case, it just looks like you're loading all 100 pages into memory at one time? Or keeping the previous pages in memory as you go "deeper" into the hierarchy.

I recommend you just keep a few pages in memory at any given time, keeping a simple list of the URLs scraped out of that HTML. If you're using PHP remember to unset() the variables storing the HTML and so on.

I haven't used PHP in a long time and of course I'm just speculating based on the error message, so slight disclaimer there.
He's mentioned in the article along with another guy.

> The concept was developed by John Ousterhout of TCL fame and Fred Douglis.
Google Wave - a developer's eye view
Strike price being set too high is one thing. The ability to sell those options (rather than having to exercise them) -- this is an issue with the liquidity of stock options. Rights after an individual leaves the company.

For the PS: There could be some financial engineering involved with creating convertible bonds and selling those at a discount to employees. Again, we run into liquidity issues.
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Even if this (dubious) claim is true, it doesn't negate Matt's point.
Here's something from the wikipedia page on Convertible Bonds:

Hybrid bonds typically are issued as loan capital, but the issuer retains the right to exchange or convert the bonds into convertible preference shares with similar conversion rights and income. The purpose is generally to ensure that the bonds (as loan capital) have the tax offset-ability (against taxable profits) of loan interest, and perhaps pay gross to qualifying investors. At the same time, the ability to change the bonds into cumulative or non-cumulative preference capital should mean that they pose less balance sheet risk. The issuer only achieves the best of both worlds if the hybrid bond is structured so that non-payment of interest does not constitute an event of default.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convertible_bond
hack: buy from them, return your stuff and get it on Amazon.
Re: non relational extensions
I believe it was Ted Codd who said "No real application runs in third normal form".

The relational model is great, and it's important to remember that the things that make it great are that it is simple, dynamic, easy to understand and helps ensure you get correct results. IMO the two most common mistakes people make are being overly worried about breaking the model where necessary, and conversely, not realizing the benefits of things like human readable keys.
Typically they go back into the equity pool of the company as a whole. Whether or not you get to keep your board seat is dependent on how the corporation and your employment agreements are structured. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to these questions, the solutions are unique to each situation.
Replying to ieatpaste because of nesting limits:

The Always Innovating Touch Book looks pretty good but it's on Pre-Order. Asus is currently available in the market.
Google unveils Android 2.0
Convertible bonds would still require paying for the shares, right?

Part of the problem is that the shares are too expensive for the recipients of them to just buy them. Essentially, they should have been allocated as initial founder stock but weren't (due to various reasons that I won't go into).

At the moment, from what I hear, stock options seem to be the best way to allocate shares without needing a large transfer of money from the recipients of the shares to the company (or some other party).
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Sorry, I would really be using a proper RFC 2104 HMAC implementation (eg. python's hmac module).
absolutely! as long as they link back - for sure.
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No offense, but that's stupid. Apple doesn't need to spend a dime "making sure people want to listen to 'the right song wherever they are'". People have probably wanted that since wars were fought with sticks and have expected it since the Walkman in the '80s. That's like saying Coke's ad budget is an attempt to convince people to drink something when they're thirsty.

They spend their money on branding ads, to make sure that when people think about "listening to 'the right song wherever they are'" they associate that with an iPod. That's the only explanation, since everybody has known what an iPod is for years and yet they still spend literal hundreds of millions per year on ads for them.
While crossing the ocean aircraft are generally out of easy contact with ground stations for hours at a time. They're using long-range HF radios or even the data-only CPDLC system.

Some comments I've in other discussions brought up plane-to-plane communications, but other craft aren't commonly close enough to have any relevant weather information to share. (I'd extrapolate to think you'd have similar issues reliably transmitting data.)

Some fascinating comments below this post by the way: http://www.weathergraphics.com/tim/af447/
No, no radio beacons. If they are on land, an exhaustive search finds them. For underwater search, they have battery powered "pinger" beacons. That is the cylindrical item in the picture on the Wikipedia page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grossi-7.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_box
I believe they do, but maybe not whatever they may still be attached to.
WebNotes Pro: Rethink Research, Sticky The Web
... and while you're developing / debugging? I only know I do it a lot in any significant Python code. If there's a secret I'm missing, I'd be glad to know what it is.
Monetising your content with ads, and setting rel="nofollow" like you do? I have a hard time believing you'd be as delighted as you claim.
> Obviously, the crunchpad has lots of other things going for it.

Maybe. I'll believe it when I see it: I don't expect this thing to make it to market.
Abstraction is good, but I think the problem is that ORM is not a good abstraction for anything but the trivial case of a table. As soon as you want to do anything actually relational, I have yet to see an ORM layer that comes up with an efficient join.

The reason, say, C++ is a good abstraction for machine code is because it simplifies what's going on to the point that you can write something very complex in fewer lines of code, allowing it to fit into the human brain better. I'm willing to be shown examples to the contrary, but ORM layers don't simplify or compress relational queries, they just change the syntax to something more "object-y".

So maybe my point is that abstraction is good, but ORM isn't really abstraction.