skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"DeviceJS is a JavaScript based development platform for reacting to sensors and controlling devices. It’s built on top of Google’s V8 JavaScript engine, Node.js and a real-time JSON database."

Fascinating. JavaScript really is slowly becoming the lingua franca of everything.
My favorite part of this writeup is the revelation that the "TIMESTAMP" type in MS SQL Server is not what 99.9% of reasonable, non-insane people would consider it to be – namely, a timestamp. From the MS SQL Server documentation the author links to:

"The timestamp data type is just an incrementing number and does not preserve a date or a time. To record a date or time, use a datetime data type."

Seriously? In what way is that even remotely acceptable? How many PMs and QA engineers saw that and were like, "Cool makes sense SHIP IT."?

If MS SQL Server were a person, he'd be a colossal asshole.
Copyright is recognized as an explicit exception to free speech, but the boundary is not clear. Links to infringing content live in that gray area.

One of the earliest DMCA cases, ALS v. Remarq, involved Usenet. Usenet has the same "whack-a-mole" problem as P2P and cyberlockers where deleting infringing content often results in a different user re-uploading the same content (perhaps with a minimally different file name) within hours. IMO this kind of situation is handled very poorly by the DMCA, but I don't have any specific suggestion about how to fix it.
Let's not forget about the legalization and destigmatization of birth control and abortion. Unwanted children born to poor and desperate mothers led equally desperate liveas and often ended up in prison.

Also the awareness of the hazards of lead, such as in lead paint and gasoline. A study showed the stunningly high lead levels in the blood of the prison population.
Everything there is to know about startup competition.
Let's do it. I had this idea that each medical field could have a sort of Global Subject Expert AI online to make diagnoses, and the more people using it, the more sublime it would become in its assessments.
Seriously, why do you need 1920x1080? 1280x720 on a 5 inch display is great, even 960x540 on a 4.7 inch display (Optimus L9) still looks great, I just don't see the point unless you want to deplete your battery as fast as possible...
Ask HN: Is it safe to (temporarily) ignore efficiency in your product?
tl;dr down below

As a university-trained, big-company-bred, C-was-my-first-language, I-think-about-data-structures-and-algorithm-in-the-shower engineer, I've always built everything I did with a very specific thought in the back of my head: "Is this solution efficient?"

However, as I've started getting more and more into developing web services in my spare time, I find myself struggling not with a mandate for speed, but rather with the sheer complexity of the system I'm trying to implement. Web applications are complicated beasts; there's a lot going on that you need to fit in your head all at once, and thinking about efficiency only makes it worse.

Therefore I ask you: How much "fuck it, I'll use off-the-shelf components" and "fuck it, it'll run in linear time" can I get away with for the sake of pushing something out there? Does the quality of modern frameworks and hardware grant me a certain amount of slack for free?

tl;dr

I have never deployed or supported an entire user-facing web application. Can you please give me an idea of the sort of load you can handle with a typical application framework and a typical hardware deployment? Bonus points for numbers like requests per second or concurrent connections. I'd really love to know how many requests you serve with how many machines.

Edit: I anticipate the "Why worry about performance when you don't have users?" response, and I thank you in advance. However, the last thing I want to happen is to gain users, only to discover that my potentially popular application is crippled by its being too slow and my being too busy to fix it.
There has been somewhat of a stigma associated with it. I was the guy telling my friend in Illinois about it when we were planning a trip to LA with some other friends. I also told my parents when we were planning a vacation. Once you experience it, it's awesome and people will talk about it.

You can find this pattern in other markets, like online dating. A lot of people were initially hesitant (and still are), so there are social forces at work. Once the lid comes off that, I think it'll blow up.

I have the urge to box Airbnb into this "paid couch-surfing" category, but that's not really what they are. They positioned their company as something greater than that: all of the services that went along with their experience. Funny enough, the investors didn't buy it because they were tunnel visioned by how big it could be and whether it would scale at the seed stage. Those are the wrong questions to be asking at seed, and actually I don't think many founders could have pulled off starting Airbnb. The team clearly was the overriding factor in Airbnb working, followed by their excitement to be doing that startup.

I liked the Subject: Airbnb "essay" which showed how true this was (http://paulgraham.com/airbnb.html).
This objection doesn't make any sense. The status quo is that if you tug on a Lightning cable, your phone will be tugged along with it, and will likely fall off the surface it is on. If you make it a MagSafe connector with appropriately weak holding force, and do the same thing, your phone will be tugged less hard, and will thus have less of a chance to fall off the surface it is on. It can't help but be an improvement, even if it's not a perfect solution.

The objection that actually does make sense is to point out that Lightning is a) reversible and b) has 8 separate data contacts on each side. It's not just a power connector. Can't really duplicate this with MagSafe or anything similar.
Yeah I'm an American who went to school here in Vancouver, started a company, doing well, but probably moving myself and the company back to the States soon as it's very difficult to get a VISA. The new startup VISA only applies to companies that are fundraising.
While crime rates are at their lowest since the 1970's, it should be noted that most cities are a lot smaller than they were in 1970. Chicago is down 650,000, Philadelphia is down 400,000, etc.
Regardless, I still don't want a big magnet in my pocket
Yes! That's exactly why I would love a slightly more rugged Galaxy S4 Active - what's the point of an edge-to-edge display if you're going to crack it on the first drop (which happens even if you're super careful and have ninja reflexes)...
It seems fishy to you to do a 50% storage improvement, when we just saw a 100% storage improvement to 128GB on the iPad?

Not fishy at all. Quite plausible. If anything, it's reasonably likely that there will be MORE of an improvement than the concept predicts, in this case.
I honestly find it dismaying that the Economist could publish a story specifically on the recent drop in crime and never have heard of this study.
Fire Sale on Windows RT
Wouldn't it be brilliant to recover some of those sunk costs and penetrate the market before anyone else? Re:Hp Touchpad
Most remarkable to me is that their success required so few conceptual shifts (but important ones). Time-shares and couchsurfing and vacation rentals already existed. I'll try to remember this the next time I think something's 'obviously' been tried before.

It also seems like there was a large shift in (or discovery of) the willingness of individuals to participate in the way that makes sharing work. I suspect that many other innovations will be primarily social ones enabled by the internet (the watsi model?), and that these will be just as powerful as, say, graphene or spacex.
Hey Jeff! Jerry here.

Sorry to hear that. Should catch up soon!
Runs horribly on the world's real best browser.
It's more likely that the next iPhone or Galaxy S will have the home button removed (finally), the speaker squeezed as far to the top edge as possible and the screen will fit all that new empty space, with 1-2mm borders.

That's doable in the next 1-2 years, this design isn't.
Airbnb closed my account for “No Reason"
We Make Nothihg
I looked into selling insects as food last year. There's definitely a market for it, but I'm not sure what would stop a well-established existing insect farm from getting into the business the moment it looks viable and crushing everyone as they're already equipped for huge amounts of production, shipping and handling.

There were some disappointed people when I ran my test and they tried to buy crickets or mealworms just to find out I didn't actually have any.

Ultimately I decided not to mess with it because I'm not very excited by eating insects myself. I've tried a few things (crickets and mealworms) and while they didn't taste bad, they didn't taste like much of anything... I foresaw the eating of many insects in order to make it succeed and it's pretty tough to get excited about :)
God damnit, script kiddies like this really piss me off.
I hope that Twitter has some sort of IP logging for logins so that they can at least start to attempt to catch this guy.
He broke the law, and he should be charged as such.
From the states ? Because from europe you can go there without visa.
To me, the problem is that torrents are descriptions of how to get the content, not the content. It's like banning a chemistry textbook because you could learn how to make a bomb.
Carnegie Mellon and Princeton, which had a relatively low number of funded founders and a relatively low number of total capital raised, instead have a significantly higher amount of average first funding. UCLA also placed. Perhaps the students from these three universities tend to have more ambitious startup ideas?

The field of endeavor may have more to do with it than ambition. Pittsburgh startups are disproportionately in biotech, for example, which tends to be capital-intensive.
I don't have any specific suggestion about how to fix it.

Make it easy to obtain the content legally?
Maybe IsoHunt should demand a $10 million bond be posted against the release of their very proprietary and important intellectual property?
10 Urban Legends about Famous Scientists
Folks, stop bitching and complaining about this or that idea being good/bad/impractical etc, etc. It's a designer's demo portfolio work.

http://www.johnnyplaid.com

Designers do this stuff because they have ideas about how devices and interfaces can change and they explore those ideas. It doesn't seem to me that Johnny is making claims about inside information. He's using his visual talents to create mockups of what might be possible in the future.

The medium is different, but the process isn't any different than sci-fi writers setting stories in the future or me making UI wireframes for an application. It's just ways of exploring what could be done.

The last point is to realize that this is most likely just personal portfolio work. Some of us have github profiles and others have PSD's. Just think about the exposure Johnny is getting out of this and how it might get him more work in the future. That's the best reason for him to make this.
Plasma ultra cooling! Probably still need to tack "gamer" on so you can double the price and use cheaper materials, as long as it is black and red.
To my knowledge, that's sadly true of any PHP based message board (phpBB, SMF, etc).
If this is an advertisement, then all it advertises is that he is incompetent at industrial design.
Why Detroit's bankruptcy filing is a business pivot
Echoes of gabocorp.
>The passwords are not stored in plain text. However, if you were using the same password as your Ubuntu Forums one on another service (such as email), you are strongly encouraged to change the password on the other service ASAP.

Translation: the passwords were stored using dumb MD5/SHA1. Seriously, it's 2013, why can't 99% of the web get their act together when it comes to password hashing?
And price competitive enough that it wouldn't be worth pirating. Having a restricted digital copy that I can't play on my TV and Phone doesn't help me.
I find it hard to believe you couldn't attend a conference and visit a couple of startups on a normal entry from the US, unless you are not a US citizen?

I've been to Vancouver many times as a tourist, a few times for conferences / standards meetings, no problem, no visa required.

This doesn't sound right.
The backlash exists because most of his writings consist of regurgitated ideas plucked from elsewhere that he attempts to pass off as his own as though he's some sort revolutionary thinker in the modern era. Then he sells tickets to his Friedman Forum for $1K a pop to people who aren't read-well enough to realize as much.
$25 gadget lets hackers seize control of a car
NASA Uses Sanskrit To Program Artificial Intelligence
It would also be interesting to see the stats weighted to account for the much higher levels of obesity in the U.S., which has to bump heart disease and cancer deaths significantly.
I don't live there, so maybe I'm missing something, but is Silicon Valley really something to glamorize and try to replicate? I always thought that technology is supposed to be distributed rather than centralized. Centralizing something allows you to exploit economies of scale, but also invites parasites in to free-ride. And the Valley does seem to attract a lot of parasites.
How Firefox OS plans to kill — not reinvent — the app store
Wow. This post is a journey. I haven't digested it enough yet, but I'm loving the trip!

EDIT: found http://www.ribbonfarm.com/for-new-readers/. Onto the Kindle you go.
With that design of touch sensors on the edge, it would open it up to support being used as a chording keyboard in the style of the classic DataEgg - http://xaphoon.com/dataegg/DataEggNewShape.jpg
In my mind, the end user wouldn't pay $400+ for the device, it'd have wifi and whatnot built into it. The content delivery system would subsidize the cost. And honestly the majority of the market could give a shit about being locked down.
In the area of bank robberies, one wonders if it has become so easy to rob a bank using re-created ATM cards or stolen credit cards that its simply not worth driving up and taking money out of them. Besides you can rob a bank in New York from Lithuania, talk about your easy getaway!
Agree with comments above- doesn't even run in my Chrome, Ubuntu 12.04
Simulation of Blackjack: the odds are not with you
It would drag down Windows Phone 8 with it IMO.
Friedman is a skilled writer, but most of the backlash is from him taking well established ideas and presenting them as if he discovered them. For instance, his books "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" and "The World is Flat" are basically just standard treatises on globalization, but reading them you'd think Friedman has done years of painstaking research to uncover this new, previously unheard of trend.

Not all Friedman books are like that. "From Beirut to Jerusalem" was excellent and should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to get a better grasp of the conflicts in the middle east.
i read the title as "welcome to the sharding economy" - oops - but still, looking fwd to reading that post somewhere.
Actually, I read "Save the Cat!" last night, just for fun. And while the rockstar geniuses here on HN were enlightening us on "pathologically risk averse" studio execs, "perspective scripts", "Hollywood's struggles", and "roller coaster rides of the visuals", I actually decided to give Mr. Snyder's beat sheet a spin, on the admittedly pedestrian "Jack Reaper".

And so, with my stop-watch and kindle at hand, I ticked off, one-by-one, every single major element predicted by his beat sheet -- a dozen or so --, and they were all within a minute or two (that's a page or two) from where they were supposed to be. Theme stated at 5. The debate from 12-25 (IIRC), "fun and games" from 30-55, "whiff of death" at 85,... you get the picture.

Now, before all of you monad-wielding virtuosos retort -- "well, that's a crap blockbuster movie anyway -- his silly beat sheet that would never work on truly original films like Pulp Fiction": he specifically mentions Tarantino films. Ditto Scorcese.

So, maybe a guy who regularly writes spec screeplays at $1MM a pop, who's worked with Steven Spielberg (as he humbly mentions twice -- whadya know, looks like the hacker community and "Hollywood" might have something in common after all), and who's had at least one movie grossing $100MM domestically, is a total idiot and doesn't know as much about "how to write a story" as you. Alternatively, is it perhaps possible that your towering authority on the matter of how "to be a good screenwriter" is just a tad oversold?

In all seriousness though (no, really!), I can definitely recommend the book; it's a light, entertaining read. (It is movies we're talking about, after all!) And having read what he writes about the preferences of nerds, I'm having a blast reading this entire thread. Thank you, HN!
You have to be careful about cancer statistics, because in many cases the US diagnoses early-stage cancers that would never get recorded in other countries. Some of those cancers never progress to the point of being life-threatening, making the survival stats misleading. Others do but because they're recorded earlier US patients are recorded as surviving for longe when in fact they're just being diagnosed ealier and dying at the same time as similar patients in other countries.
> Is that not enough?

Nothing is ever enough these days. People that exercise 5 to 7 times a week used to be considered healthy by all: now they are called "active couch potatoes" or something like that by some people if they also happen to have some sedentary hobbies when they are not working out. Recent studies have shown sitting a lot to be unhealthy in the long run: just sitting! Regardless of whether the person is active or not.

It feels like there is almost nothing that you're doing right, if you're living in the modern world. It's like we benefit from the actual services of a modern civilization greatly, but also suffer greatly from working and supporting that very same civilization (as opposed to a primitive one). I guess we ideally should all be working at standing workstations, rotated with a treadmill workstation because evidently standing too much also hurts you, and then in our leisure time we should spend it on some games/activities that boils down to jumping through the hoops that our ill-fitted-for-modern-civilization bodies and minds need to live a healthy life in a modern context.

Sorry 'bout the rant.
What's the airbnb equivalent for renting a drill/lawnmower/weed whacker/snowblower from a neighbor?
Not only is there not enough space to fit powerful enough magnets

Make it an electromagnet powered by the USB host/power supply, and use the iPhone accelerometer (or more than one) to detect being yanked by the attached cord and disable the magnet to disconnect easily.

(or do what everyone else is and have an inductive charging matt with no connector).
I think technology should be distributed to leverage the economy of scale. But here, I am talking about the startup ecosystem. If you look at the big Internet companies, you will be amazed to see how many of them come out of the valley.
That's why the rest of the world is trying to jumpstart this. The problem is it's not as simple as copying what's working at the surface.
One thing that is rarely stated is a California law that things you do on your own equipment and time belong to you, not your employer. (Conflicts of interest aside.)

This let people experiment on the side, which sometimes failed, but sometimes discovered something useful. It takes some of the risk out of startups in the very early stages. By contrast my employer in the UK at the time claimed that anything I invented while employed by them (eg new cat food) would be owned by them, no matter how unrelated and no employer equipment used.
In Gladwell's example of KAL801 the captain and first officer were in their forties (not to mention there also being flight engineer his late fifties) and had ample hours of commercial experience and military backgrounds; certainly comparable to Greenspun's examples of that required at US majors.

If I was to do fact checking with an actual airline pilot I certainly wouldn't choose Greenspun either, not with statements like "Unless the country is very large, there won't be any regional airlines"
Here's a link to the actual talk: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/35654239
Sorry, to me this is absolutely nonsense. Your keywords is also syntax. That there are only two "syntax characters" is not an advantage - it forces you to make the grammar for your DSL's vastly more verbose by using keywords for all kinds of situations that could otherwise easily be expressed with syntax. As a (programming) language geek that cares deeply about syntax and writes compilers for fun, the very idea is abhorrent to me. It sounds like COBOL for the new millennium.

And that you "groan" from looking at BIND zone files tells me that you don't understand the underlying data model, rather than that the zone files are complicated - they map very well to the data model, and there are very few caveats with the format. (The one big one that tends to trip people up is the full stop vs. no full stop at end of host names).

Further, I think you still are confused about the importance of zone files here: If you don't like them, don't use them. Use software that gives you a nice fussy interface instead. Zone files are only still important because people still pick software that uses zones files.

A new format here would change pretty much nothing: Those who run bind will not change software because of a file format change; people run Bind because it has a track record, and is well understood. People switch from Bind because they have different needs. Many of those who pick something else pick DNS servers that don't even store records in files, or in other formats, so a replacement for the zone file format is irrelevant to them.
A visa is required for business visits, unless all you are doing is "meetings". However they'll usually sell you one at the airport.
The Wheelchair Is 2,300 Years Old. There’s Finally A Better Option
e-mail sent! thanks. ;)
hardwairbnb :)
Great concept, but in Marin county I would get a huge fine
for doing this. My neighbors would turn on me in a second.
A combination of factors:

1. I hate having a "boss" in the traditional sense. I'm a very independent, unruly and sometimes obstinate person, and I chafe at being told what to do. I like being able to "call my own shots" to a greater degree. I also like not having somebody micromanaging my every decision.

2. I'm a horrible employee. I'm insubordinate, arrogant, brash, outspoken and highly opinionated. Nobody in their right mind would hire me.

3. I like building things... in the case of a startup, I get to build both "product things" and the company itself, so it's like killing two birds with one stone.

4. I like challenges.

5. I like the idea of having a big exit and gaining a measure of independence by at least being independently wealthy. In other words, having "FU money".

6. I want to build the kind of company that I'd want to work for, if I wanted a job in the first place. Or, at least, the kind of company I want to see exist.

7. I think we can do some things to make the world a better place. I reject the notion that capitalists are just selfish robber-baron types who just want to accumulate as much wealth as possible at any cost, with no concern for the welfare of others. I like the idea of building a company that will be socially conscious and actively do things to try and make things better outside of our doors.

8. I have some ideas I'm really passionate about exploring, that I think may have some commercial value. At the very least, building a startup in this space gives me a platform to research stuff I'm interested in. Worst case, if we fail as a startup, I'll have learned some neat stuff.