skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you are starting your sentence with "But that's just...", you fall prey to the assumption that hindsight is 20/20.

The first thing I learned in my Ph.D. program is that the most important discoveries are the ones that seem the most obvious in retrospect.
Your comment shows you don't know much about logic.
I've been following Zeldman for 10 years now, and I got on the standards bandwagon early (IE4/NS4-era). It's funny because the whole standards movement was born out the "Best viewed in browser X", font tag soup, 10-level deep table insanity of the late 90s.

However some time around 2002, 2003 what started out as a very pragmatic movement, slowly started to become a religion for a small set of web designers who became increasingly focused on the minutiae of markup. To these people XHTML 2.0 has some sort of mythic status as prophet and savior of the web.

Actually XHTML 2.0 is pretty cool, but with no vendor buy-in it's been dead in the water for forever... a w3c recommendation does not a standard make. Having been through the whole standards gauntlet before, I really don't give two rats titties about XHTML2 or HTML5, although I'd be happy for either to be viable before I retire from web development. I'm not gonna hold my breath though, too much work right now.
Transactional backbones run COBOL, not Java. Only the inter-system interfaces uses Java and other "new" languages. However, most of them run on Unix...as in, versions of Unix that are older than the internet.
Wow, $20,000 is quite a lot of money, I would rather spend it on surviving a few more months as a startup to make a better product to make my users happy. Who are really the only ones who will eventually make your product popular or unpopular.

May be they are targeting companies that have already been funded.
A brilliant analysis of a tough subject (if I could write half as well as that...!)

New Scientist keeps proving itself one of the best source of modern science and tech writing: simply because it is almost always reasoned, objective and restrained!
The Pros and Cons of Password Masking (follow-up from Schneier)
Review: this sucks. It takes 3 clicks to find out there's one event in the entire website.
As a socially interesting analysis I think there is enough of a parallel here to think of this as a flame-war between TC50 and DEMO - on the million dollar scale..

I have to say though as someone who has taken little or no interest in either event the Techcrunch "prize" seems vast... I know I'd kill for a full $1,000,000 in advertising on their sites... it could worth billions :D

I dont like Arrington much: but I have to admit he has some style :)
Have we failed to cure cancer by playing it too safe?
Now, I don't know at all who this "Stephen Woicik" is, and didn't take the time to find out ... Still, I found this passage annoying:

"One strange thing was even when the Kindle was “off” it still drained a little power. Sliding the off button on the Kindle will generate the screen to go to a picture of a famous author with a message telling you to slide the power switch to turn the Kindle on. The screen never completely went blank. Not a big deal for a device that lasts days on a single charge, but if you want to conserve battery in a pinch it doesn’t help that there is no real way to turn it off completely."

I thought the (well-publicized, main "new innovation" kind of thing) point of the Kindle's e-ink display is that it doesn't use any power while showing a static image. So this particular complaint is probably not valid.
http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=aAuzAAAAEBAJ&dq=e...

Check out the "Gold 45 Revolver" patent heard 'round the world! Happy 4th! The videogames renaissance & revolution hath begun!

Happy 4th! The videogames renaissance & revolution hath begun! Check out the "Gold 45 Revolver" patent heard 'round the world:

SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR CREATING EXALTED VIDEO GAMES AND VIRTUAL REALITIES WHEREIN IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES:
http://www.google.com/patents/about...sra=1&as_psra=1

http://libertariangames.blogspot.com

"a fallout 3 mod based on this poo poo would be boss as gently caress."
"What’s scary, for me, is that this might be exactly what gamers want." --onelastcontinue.com
http://www.onelastcontinue.com/9136...kers-patent-it/

@SIMDYNASTY: "I didn't bother reading it, but my friend (who found it) said "did you notice he quotes the Declaration of Independence, Gandhi and then talks about Clint Eastwood and Eminem?"" --simdynasty.com
"That thing is the proverbial gift that keeps on giving." --simdynasty.com
"gently caress! I actually have to come back and read this later as it will take too long right now. loving hell though!"
@TWITTER: Wow! Most amazing videogame patent ever. Save the earth from communism by not shooting the hooker! 120page WIN http://tinyurl.com/savehooker --http://twitter.com/DenUngeHerrHolm
I would like to use such a service, but I don't think any of them are popular enough. There was at least one other site that already does this; does anyone remember the name?

Edit: Never mind; it looks like there are quite a few others, but again none of them are popular.
This was indeed interesting and enriching.

(And I am not a fan of MJ!)
" ... where I can change stuff via peripheral vision."

No, I really can't do that. I can catch stuff via peripheral vision. (No edit link for my comment. I really need to read what I just wrote before submitting. My hands think different thoughts than my head ...)
I don't like Java at all, and I'm a long time C programmer, but... in the article there is at least one thing that's simply true: Objective-C is an 80s language, from syntax to behavior. What is particularly annoying about it is that's not low level enough, like C, where you manage memory by hand but it's pretty clear what's happening, nor it is more high level (automatic memory management of some kind). It's in the middle. Another problem is verbosity. It's just too verbose to create a trivial class, and the syntax is hard to remember in my opinion.
As someone with considerable working experience in China and fluency in mandarin, I can tell you that "good links with industry in China" mean absolutely nothing if you have cash. And you don't need a lot of cash.

The immediate question is why this guy wants you doing engineering work in the first place? I wouldn't. You can't even communicate with your most important business partners or with the manufacturers. Why not hire some great Chinese engineers for a lower salary and avoid issuing stock anyway? I don't mean this to come across as offensive - I'm sure you're very talented - but it is a very practical problem.

Suggests to me that your university is being hooked into a snake oil project to add prestige to the proposal and make it easier to hook Chinese investors. You guys will make your salary and the rest of the cash will be gone in a year. If the market for this product is so enormous and you're capable of doing the engineering work and no-one else is, why not simply make it yourself and outsource production? Offer this guy a percent of profits or ownership stake based on his ability to meet sales milestones.
From Liberating Your Password to Modular Innovation Trends
TC50 Ups The Previously Upped Ante: Doubles Down Demo
Getting back into Django after a long break, this jogs the noggin, thanks.
I appreciate the thinking outside the box on the security issue, but I'm really surprised anyone would even think for a second that it's a good idea not to hide passwords from those looking over your shoulder.

Maybe an option to "show password as you type" would be okay, but leave it unchecked by default.
Here's some pics - http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/04/09/crunchtablet-hits-the-n...

Here's the original post from TC that got this started - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/21/we-want-a-dead-simple-w...

I wonder if they are still planning to keep the hardware design specs open-source - that would be pretty cool

Edit: here is a video demo - looks cool! http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/04/09/crunchtablet-hits-the-n...
Where to begin :) Last time I pointed out that Nielson was out of his comfort zone with security. This time, well, damn :P have to pick it apart much more intelligently.

> I believe that shoulder surfing isn't nearly the problem it's made out to be

I dont agree with the the points one and three that he makes related to this. Firstly yes people do use machines in private: but define private. I am sat at a "private" machine right now at home. But my family could walk in at any moment (it sucks, tip 101: never move home after university, it's cheap for a reason :P) and see an important password. Now I trust them implicitly but a Facebook password is just too tempting for my brother :D And if my friends come over - I could well need passwords then, that is more of a risk. Plus of course many many people don't use computers in this much privacy (i.e. my own office). I check mail at work for example. People use cyber cafes all the time.

Secondly his third point is wrong I think. Most people type slow enough for easy reading of what's on screen. Another example: many people I know (normal people, not tech literates) will stop typing, find the mouse and click "login".

He talks about a non-alphanumeric string: Im err not sure what that means. But anyway the human brain is usually quite quick at recalling visual scenes in the short term. Especially if casually noticed. Quite long passwords could be easily remembered for a few minutes after they are gone.

He also asserts that unmasking passwords will encourage people to choose something longer and more secure. I'd like to see a study to prove that because it is a BIG statement. Besides Schneier should know that any good security system should make a persons password choice as immaterial as possible! I honestly take the opposite view - that people will just use passwords like they usually do (a memorable word and some numbers [and only the latter if forced]). Asserting that clear-text might encourage them to use capitals in their password doesn't make much sense to me.

Finally one huge issue he doesn't really address is expectation. people expect passwords to be obscured. It's how they know it's a password and it gives them silent assurance of the security of the site.

And another important point that got wholly overlooked: if we go with some passwords hidden some not that is a BIG risk. People usually use the same or similar passwords for all their services. So if "mysupersecretsite" hides the password but "myotherneatsite" doesn't then it is a big break in the security chain.

Now I am not at the core disagreeing with what he has to say about masking. HOWEVER I do think the suggestion that it is the choice of the site is wrong.

In an ideal world the site should advise the browser - and the browser should override it if told to by the user. But currently only one or the other is really possible - and in such a scenario the browser should win. Simply because on an issue like this it should be user choice, not site admin choice :)

That said nice to see Schneier weighing in on the issue: I still think he's giving far too much value to some minor benefits/points but... :)
PEG is a really fascinating development in parsing--at the cost of some memory (sometimes a lot of memory), parse almost anything in linear time. The fact that it's different from a context free grammar is especially interesting; deterministic choice etc.

That said I'm not so hot on the sample script given here. Parsing is one of those situations where domain specific languages are a colossal win. Pyparsing is a little more verbose but seems to have an easier to understand syntax. http://pyparsing.wikispaces.com/
Irrigating Senegal With Free Software
CompuServe is closing
FriendFeed Launches Real-Time Search
I like Erlang, and can read it... but not write it much. And the syntax scares me too :)
No, they are not. They can be stuffed into a cloud architecture, but they were not built with the cloud in mind. If you were to build a cloud database, from the ground up, what you would come up with would not look like a traditional RDBMS.
Exactly. By "evolution," Hawking doesn't mean "the biological process by which randomly generated, heritable traits that foster survival are passed on," he means "the gradual development of something, especially from a simple to a more complex form."
yup, aol charged me for around 16 months after cancelling my account 3 times, and stupidly not paying attention thereafter, they did very reluctantly refund around a third, although they probably kept me sitting arguing for long enough on their premium phone number to get that back.

bt have also tried to charge me ~200 to install a phone line I didnt agree to (I had already got the line installed by virgin, for free).

My experiences with telcos are the lowest of the low, I dont understand how some company hasnt gone into the market, treated their customers fairly, and wiped the floor with the competition.
Sadly they only support: X86/Linux, AMD64/Linux, PPC32/Linux, PPC64/Linux

Which doesn't help me :-(
Coca-Cola Freestyle Enables Mass Customization At Point Of Sale
Ask NH: What things do you look for when picking a domain name?
What things do you look for when picking a domain name?
This will only be useful with a decent user base. Maybe if you generate publicity in Montreal, you can get enough users to make them stick around. Expanding from there might be somewhat easier.
The concept may not be great, but it is interesting how they are using the aggregate data gathered to make decisions that impact their other sales channels. Also interesting in that they are using medical grade concentration cartridges for consumer apps. Running Windows CE also gives us the hope of getting BSOD-Berry flavored Coke sometime soon.
well, that's sad. compuserve was my "internet" before i had access to the real thing.
Are viruses organisms? They aren't, but they only have RNA.
At about 29:00 in, they ask if there is an example of a "true free market monopoly". If microsoft was a monopoly, would it satisfy the criteria? It wasn't around when this film was made, but sounds like it may be a contender.
That's an awfully long way to reach for an explanation of why teachers don't make money, when "supply and demand" was sitting right in front of you. There are lots of teachers. It's not very hard, not particularly more so than many other careers. There aren't a lot of top celebrities, since that works on the competition model (like sports).

If it makes you "feel" any better, there are lots of computer programmers, too. Saying there is a lot of something doesn't have to mean it's "easy", just... that there's a lot of it.

I'm not seeing where some sort of complicated explanation is necessary.
Hey HN, check out my new site, notoair.com - let me know what you think
And that would simply "not be a proof". That doesn't disprove my point at all. You have to try harder than that to get one of the funky edge cases.
Twitter Promotion Done Wrong: #moonfruit
I think my first isp after using compuserve for a while was netcom. No idea what happened to them but they gave me a shell account and pine and tin and gopher and the I has a very happy camper...
Michael Jackson Memorial Service Free Tickets | Buzz Online 24/7
user 70611,3101 password "sleeve!coast"

Last login: circa 1988

I'm stunned that that's still in my brain. I never would have remembered it my brain not been able to pattern match
against the ID number in the article.
Right now, the big winner is the startups... The more money and goodies going their way, the better off they are.

The more noise about launches, the better for entrepreneurs.

disclosure: we were a tc50 company last year (this only minimally impacts the content of this comment)
"Mystique" is a good word, since they have this mystique about being this egalitarian, community driven organization, but in reality, Mozilla is a fairly badly run open source project. The 40% number in the article counts localizers, doc writers, and other ancillaries, so it seems high, but the vast majority of core code changes are done by Mozilla Corp. employees.

The project is really quite insular. Straightforward bug fixes may go in smoothly sometimes, but try to get any feedback on feature suggestions, and you'll often find deaf ears, even if you're willing to do the implementation. Or may submit a patch to bugzilla for a bugfix, and it'll just get ignored. But then a year later someone at MoCo runs into the same bug doing Firefox work, comes up with roughly the same patch, and it hits the tree within a day.

There's also significant components where nobody in the organization actually understands how they work, so if you submit a patch to say, XPConnect, it won't ever go in because nobody feels confident enough to review it.

WebKit is actually more vibrant in terms of non-Apple code contributions than Mozilla.
The article you reference doesn't reinforce your point. It basically states that preventative care is not a proven solution.

If you take the safeway example mentioned in that article. They have successfully reduced health care costs internally:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124476804026308603.html

One point made in this article is that most health care costs are in fact preventative.

"Safeway's plan capitalizes on two key insights gained in 2005. The first is that 70% of all health-care costs are the direct result of behavior. The second insight, which is well understood by the providers of health care, is that 74% of all costs are confined to four chronic conditions (cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity). Furthermore, 80% of cardiovascular disease and diabetes is preventable, 60% of cancers are preventable, and more than 90% of obesity is preventable."

Given this statement, the money spent preventing these issues will be far less than the amount required to correct these issues in people once they get to the point of needing some type of hospital procedure or operation.
Customer service is marketing. When will people learn this?
Directories with huge number of files are slower to access. You could look at extended attributes (xattr) feature of most *NIX's. This is user defined information which could easily be used in the manner that you suggest. A modified file manager would be able to handle the additional capabilities. Some music and photo management programs implement something similar so perhaps that could be used as a strarting point.
That looked like an interesting talk... is there any audio to go along with it? The current state of the slides looks like it made a killer talk but only mildly useful notes.
That Mikey Arrington sure is a scrappy little thing, aint he?

Honestly, though, I can't believe anyone would pay to play at DEMO.
A few months ago, I was in a similar situation. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=502641

Once I started insisting on a fair stake things didn't work out and I walked away finally. I don't regret it (building a different product now, will take it market without the named partner).
but it's the first time someone didn't make it sound scary.

The future is going to be relatively great. Just like the present is great relative to the past.
yes, I agree a lot of apps have fake 5-star reviews and this is unfortunate. Of course, some apps are also targetted with fake 1-star ratings.

Imo the fake 1-star ratings are worse than the fake 5-star ratings.
That was my first thought as well. But it I'm afraid the "right now" is the key part of your first sentence.

It doesn't really seem like TC is trying to help startups with the prize. It looks more like an attempt to push out DEMO so they can become the only major startup demo-event.

The article is written as if DEMO added the prize money as an attack on TC50 and as if DEMO is trying to trick entrepreneurs with fake rates and hidden expenses. None of it backed up in any way.

To me the article look like FUD and the TC50/DEMO war fairly one sided.
Did Nasdaq get rid of the hp/tandem nonstop backends then? I don't think they did. As of 2008 they were still running them. They might have windows frontends and middle ware, though.
I don't get it - why is this cool? Isn't "mail" one of those outdated meatspace idioms we can finally allow to die?
* Spellable over the phone.

* .com

* Memorable.

* Less than 3 words.
HubPages has been doing quite well even in this economy. May was our best month to date.

But to accomplish that, we've really had to grow our traffic. Today, we are top #150 destination according to Quantcast with over 12M unique visitors a month.
I like the compromise that the iPhone has made in this regard.

The iPhone will show the last letter that you typed while masking out the previous characters, so only one letter is visible at a time.

This way I get some confirmation that my password is correctly typed without giving away the farm.
Well, to play devil's advocate:

Attendees looking to invest in new companies probably like DEMO because the presenters are convinced enough they have a great product that they'll come up with the funds to go there. They're showing both a solid demo and enough leadership/backing to procure the money to play.

At TechCrunch50, investors can see a different sort of startup. One who has a lot of potential, but may not have had the drive/opportunity to gather any real money in the first place.

From a purely investment risk perspective, companies that are already finding capital with a good idea and a good demo have more going for them than startups that merely have an idea and a good demo.

Because of this, perhaps VC firms (and big business partners) like DEMO more and angels/seed funds like TechCrunch 50 more.

(again, just playing devil's advocate here)
Dandruff Home Treatment
Dandruff home treatment remedy to stop falking, itching and dandruff problems today. Natural remedies for dandruff here.
I would focus it all on Montreal before you expand to any other cities. Once it gets popular, expand it one at a time, ala facebook. And I would make it look a little nicer.
I started out on Prodigy, in 1992, but Compuserve (started a year or so later) had much better discussion. I made some good friends there.
Use the existing K-12 system to teach people the basics of medicine and nutrition. The only thing that a person owns is this world is his or her body so we should do this even if we have to get rid of some other subject (though I don’t see why we’d have to).

Not sure how feasible this is but my idea is that everyone would graduate high school with the equivalent of two years of medical school. In addition to the current post secondary education options afforded to high school graduates (college, vo-tech, military, work force, etc.) offer a government-run quasi vocational program that completes medical training. Graduates of this program would have 14 – 16 years of training in medicine and would then be licensed to practice.

This scheme would increase the number of doctors, decrease the need for them, and decrease the extreme asymmetry in medical knowledge between doctors and patients. Furthermore, with nearly ubiquitous medical knowledge we would undoubtedly see more entrepreneurial activity in that space and give innovation a chance to drive down cost and improve care.
I gave that answer up-thread. I think people interpreted it as a political post. (Personally, I had nothing to do with flagging that thread. I didn't even notice it until it was dead and the metadiscussion began.)
Anyone wondering how this can be a profitable decision for TC?
Do they gross so much off TC50 that they can afford to give away $4M for an edge in a contest they were already winning by a landslide?
Didn't they own the GIF patent? Wonder what happened to that - expired, hopefully? Not fondly remembered.
VCs pass $100M in iPhone funding
I hope they don't start to make computers from bird's eyes now.
You're right, I misspoke when I said "NASDAQ runs on Windows".

The information dissemination system runs on Windows, the trading system run on Tandem.

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1290967&cid=285...