skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a question of the best default. I think it's ok for people to try to change things, and let the checks and balances stop them when they go overboard.

From what I gather you try to stop people from even thinking about possible solutions, on the grounds that solutions may be worse then the disease. In some (most?) cases that's true, of course, but I still think it's better to have many ideas to chose from, even if most of them are useless and some are dangerous.

In the end I think it goes to how scientifically literate are the politicians. If they're smart enough not to implement stupid ideas then we're safe. If they're not... I think the problem is with the politicians, not with the ideas themselves.
Pithy and sounds good, but totally discounts network effects. Programming languages are subject to network effects -- users create libraries in the language, increasing the usefulness of the language. Of course, interoperation between languages is possible to some degree, but that doesn't detract from the core statement.
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Well, as long as there's some consensus that that's the future direction, I can sure live with it.

I guess I hadn't noticed it in FF because the increase for photos with each cmd-+ seems much smaller than in Safari. ...which brings up one more form of inconsistency among browsers. ::giant sucking sound::
Attention Frontier
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Surely you kid:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-ch...
Firewalls work in some situations. Saying firewalls do work, without qualifying when and how they work is problematic, I think. Just like anti-virus; they perform a useful service in a very specific set of circumstances.

We see a lot of superstition about firewalls (and AV, for that matter) on world-facing servers in our support forums. Folks seem to believe that just having a firewall running on a world-facing server will somehow protect from random attacks...but, the reality is that every service you provide to the world is one that cannot be firewalled. And if you aren't providing that service, why even run something on the port? So, the majority of firewalls I've seen configured on web, mail, DNS, etc. servers are effectively a no-op. They block ports that aren't listening and leave the listening ports wide open. You can, of course, make use of stateful features to provide some protection against some types of attack (brute force, in particular; DDoS, as long as it isn't too widely distributed; etc.) Even more disconcerting is when I meet "system administrators" who believe that having more than one firewall makes them even safer, even though they don't understand enough about either of them to have them actually doing anything. This superstition is good for Cisco and the host or ISP that is renting the user the device, but really bad for security.

It's worth railing against firewalls because there are firewall products being pushed by the same snake-oil industry that pushes AV and other band-aids and using the same misleading tactics, furthering the level of ignorance in the population at large about what a secure network actually looks like.

So, yes, put a firewall and a router performing NAT between your local network and the world. It will dramatically reduce the number of attacks on those machines and dramatically improve the security of that network as a whole. But, don't believe that a firewall is a solution to all security problems (or even a majority of them); just like anti-virus, it's got a time and place, and the way it is often pushed by the industry as a generic security "solution" is a problem.

Speaking of superstition, I've met folks running insecure PHP scripts on a Linux box that got hacked (user-level access, spambot running, etc.) who believed that it happened either because they didn't have the right firewall or the right anti-virus configuration; and they'd spent a bunch of time already on trying to figure out why those tools "didn't work"; and their questions to me were in the form of "Can you help me fix my firewall|anti-virus because we got hacked?". This is the kind of superstition I think is really harmful. Folks spend so much time fiddling with things that aren't even related to the actual security of their systems, and ignore the important stuff (don't run old crap, use strong passwords, don't run things you don't need).
My former roommate recently got a Golden Doodle. It was cute as hell as a puppy, but now that it's a little older I see what you mean...
A desktop client on the web
Is the whiteboard by the toilet just for blocking the window, or do people actually use it while on the toilet?
Yes, the one problem I have with this MO is that it introduces more room for only vaguely parallel ways for browsers to implement it. Not what the browser-design world needs.
Truly it is off-topic.

Yes I do indeed. Wanna visit south of Italy around Naples? Or maybe residents of Grdelica, south of Serbia?

The waste is exported to other countries to deal with or just dropped on them through "bombing" or buried under the ground. Inform yourself or go for a road trip with a geiger counter.
The volume is not what really matters. Nuclear waste isn't recyclable.

Misinformation?

Yes you are right. I also think A. Graham Bell was an idiot not using a cell phone instead, as well Morse not using binary codes. =)

I think you should visit the building behind the second out of the two identical Tesla seated statues (first one being in Niagara).
On a machine that's not constantly being defragged, temporary files will be spread out all over the place. No way can you read 240 MB of fragmented files in 4 seconds after a cold boot. Simply not possible on consumer-level magnetic spindle media.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_selling_proposition

haven't heard that term since advertising 201. what a bullshit class. i spent hundreds of hours creating hundreds of bullshit "thumbnails" for bullshit weight watchers campaigns.
Most consumer product categories seem to have a magic price point. For video game consoles, that price is $200. Consoles priced below $200 account for approximately 80% of their total sales. I think the magic price for cell phones is under $100. It's entirely possible that AT&T knows that, from data, the magic price point is $80.
This is just like YC clone except asking for 20% of share in return... i think this is a lot for a startup to give away... i'm not saying its wrong or bad but can't justify it either ...
C++, Java, Python, Perl, Php and Ruby are all based on software technology dating back to 1972. Switching from one of them to Mythryl means leaping forward thirty years to thoroughly modern technology, yielding a quantum jump in expressiveness and flexibility.

Robin Milner started working on ML around 1973-1974. Finished by 1978. So it's a 6 year leap at best.
Google Stealing Apple’s Ideas, And Tales Of Accidental Corporate Espionage
Thanks, saw it long ago; it's pretty hard to miss the hottest topic on HN.

The comment was only to point out Google Chrome OS comes at really fitting time. Five year ago, perhaps only a bunch of geeks would install it.Today, every other casual user will be interested.
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Was this a country?
Paint that turns walls (or any surface) into a whiteboard.
Uh, right. Because l-a-m-b-d-a says so much more than λ.
Feedback: PDFAmigo.com, easy, online PDF form creation
Hello everyone,

I would very much appreciate your always thoughtful feedback on my web app:

http://www.pdfamigo.com

Please use the invite code "hackernews" (sans quotes.)

This is the very first public release of the app and I am sure there a lot of things to be improved and fixed. Frankly, I am feeling quite nervous submitting this for public scrutiny. At the same time I believe it's at a stage where user feedback is crucial both for fixing bugs and determining where to go from here.

I have tried to test the app with FF3.0/3.5, IE 7 and Safari 3/4. If you are using other browsers I'd love to hear about your experience. Honestly, I am not very optimistic about IE6.

Eventually, this is something I'd like to charge for. What are your thoughts on that? Would you pay a few bucks per form? Do you think a subscription model would work better? I am all ears.

Many thanks in advance.
I'm Not An Uberman, But I Did Use jQuery Last Night
Extreme thinking, by Michael A. Nielsen
Databases! It's where theory and data structures meet in practice.
It's actually the opposite; you use TLS exactly because you're not supposed to trust the TCP stack.

But your basic point holds. There's lots of Win2k deployed in sensitive production locations, and if they didn't have secure random numbers, we'd have bigger problems than Firefox.
1. Mission/What is It?
2. Current Market (competition)
3. Need left by current market
4. Why this is the solution to current need
5. How it works
6. Pro forma
7. The team
A document to synch up vision and goals between partners doesn't look very much like the standard business plan (or what's been proposed so far here).

With partners you should have a mutual understanding of:

- Risk tolerance. How much of their own money will they spend? How long will they go without a paycheck? How cheaply can they live?

- Contribution. How much time/money will each partner contribute?

- Equity. Who owns what? I'm a huge proponent of getting equal partners. If they don't deserve an equal share, punt 'em and find someone who does.

- Vesting. How long will it take before everyone owns their share (should be 2-3 years - you don't want someone quitting early and leaving with 33% of your companies stock)

- Goals. Do you want to build a happy little income producing side project? Or a monster business? Or do you want to change the world?

- How to leave, gracefully. There should be a written agreement that has rules for when a partner leaves voluntarily, or when two partners want to push out a third. It's a lot easier to write this down NOW than when your company is worth $10m.

- What you're building, who you're building it for, and how flexible you are on the idea. Ideas change, a lot. You should be passionate about the same things.

- Authority. Does anyone have it on design decisions? Code decisions? fundraising decisions?

- Horizon. How long are you committing to the project before you punt it or pivot to a different idea?

In terms of business plans, it's a great exercise to discuss stuff like development process, roles, sales/marketing, pricing, etc. But don't spend any more time writing the document than you HAVE to to get a shared understanding. 99% of the value is the process-- they usually collect dust once they are written.
From a design perspective, this is more ideal. At least for me, I want the entire layout to zoom because otherwise things tend to break. Look into Elastic Design for more info: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/elastic/
This video is a great reality check. The people in this video are probably quite adept at getting around online, but have no idea how it actually works.

Many people refer to the address bar as their "google bar." I've heard seen this in several customer service e-mails.

They may well be predicting the future. Google has combined web address and search into one box, and with Wave they're bringing IM and e-mail under the same roof.
When I think about the great hackers I know, one thing they have in common is the extreme difficulty of making them work on anything they don't want to.

Ay, there's the rub: keeping highly productive people's interests aligned with the goals of the organization can be hard, particularly for tasks that don't take advantage of whatever it is they like about what they do. Organizations need to realize that this is the same for all great individuals, hackers or otherwise. The type of people ISVs like SourceGear need for success is probably different from the type needed by YCombinator startups.
Why Sarah Palin really quit us. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine
Now you do! Well, I don't use it, but I work in Ann Arbor, and a guy who sits about 30 feet from me uses it in his product.
The UI is super slick. In that regard, I would say I like it better than something like Adobe's form Designer.

I would suggest trying to add more objects, like tables and such to make it easier for people to make the form they want. Maybe something like an option to make custom objects made of other objects? Also, being able to fill the form from existing data is useful too. If someone wants a form that dynamically grow depending on how much input there is, I'm not sure how PDFAmigo handles that, if at all. For instance something like an order form, where a user would want to be able to order 1 thing or 100 different things (which could mean multiple pages, etc...)

With all that said, this is a really nice polished product, and the interface you have so far is a pleasure to use, great job!
Tiburon may install license plate cameras
Instead of releasing the tracks without drums, you should release the mixdowns of each instrument individually. You could even charge a few bucks for it.

Let fans play their own instruments, re-mix, and upload. Have a contest for the best interpretation.

Doing it for all the tracks might help offset your drummer's aversion to the idea.
Boryas thanks so much for the feedback.

These are all really great points you are making. I am indeed working on adding UI features like the ones you mentioned. I just want to make sure that they are built on solid foundations and that's why I asked for feedback at this point in time.

As for the 1 vs 100 lines in a text field, good observation. It is an omission on my behalf as I forgot to enable multiline text fields. I will fix it asap.

Thanks again!
It's really not hard to use C libraries from Lua, and its design for embedding / use as an off-the-shelf extension language has made interfacing easily with other languages a high priority.

There are projects that supposedly allow interoperability with Python, Perl, and several other languages (http://lua-users.org/wiki/BindingCodeToLua), though I have only used the C API thus far.

The core language is also small and simple enough that adding major language extensions, such as Erlang's concurrency model (http://concurrentlua.luaforge.net/), is feasible.
link: http://www.pdfamigo.com
I dunno, barking always helps me get people when I'm trying to recruit for my student group (or do anything involving people for my student group). Say something interesting, act crazy, adopt fake accents, look people in the eye, smile, try to make contact in any way possible. These are my tactics, and as far as I know, I'm the most successful at these tasks among my group. Another thing I do is to poke fun at people a bit ("You with the weird hat! I bet you love Final Fantasy!" (The group in question is a VGM-playing orchestra))

It's entirely possible, though, that this kind of thing ceases to be true in non-college environments where people don't have an overabundance of time on their hands. But my techniques even work with the meek geeks, so I don't believe it's anything concerning the shyness of your target audience.
Actually you need to give away knowledge in order for people to know you have it. It isn't really the explicit knowledge you have that is valuable; it is your skills, the implicit knowledge that you cannot give away, your ability to use explicit knowledge that is most valuable.
"Worse is Better" is just an inaccurate way of saying it. More accurately, "It's the Culture, Stupid!"

No, this is an oversimplification. Richard Gabriel's original essay[1] says it best near the end:

The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing.

1- http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill Part 2: The “Scale Treadmill”
So working on weekends, getting smaller salaries, having to code in C++ instead of some high-level language... I don't know, as cool as it would be to do games, I think I rather do lame business software (which can have challenges too!) and do something fun in my spare time.
Google accounts on Twitter
Those hubs can be online. Hugh is always on Twitter and often in the bay area.
Debate: Is short term planning in humans due to a short life or due to bias?
> How is your average personal going to tell whether a program with a strange name is part of iTunes or malware?

Personally, I think the OS should stop asking the user to authorize programs, and start asking to authorize companies (i.e. master per-company application signing certificates). You would get asked once that "Apple Corp." or "Adobe Inc." or "The GNU Foundation" would like to install something on your computer, and then it would be okay from then on. It would be alright to accept further products from the same company without confirmation because, if you stopped trusting the company, you'd stop trusting all their programs, and would thus uninstall everything by that company (i.e. under that signing cert) at once.
Good idea, but if you're erasing often, you will have funny colored carpets in a hurry.
Thanks, I've always kind of grouped the business plan and this process into one thing. Makes sense to separate these two components.
not really. typically people at these firms make most of their money from bonuses rather than salaries.

Driss Ben-Brahim received a $100M bonus in 2007 from GS as a prop trader. I would guarantee his base salary is much smaller.
Not if you paint it on the floor!
Seconded. Very well written introductory text.
If you aren't able to paint a wall, you can grab a 8' x 4' sheet of Melamine from Home Depot (or similar), which works quite well as a whiteboard. It isn't as robust as the expensive whiteboards, but can be replaced as-needed since it's so cheap.
This article is not only a content-less unoriginal smear, its Not-Hacker-News.
Don't start users with a blank sheet of paper. Give them some indication as to what to do next -- for example, starting them off with an in-progress document or giving explicit "Click this, click this, click this" direction on the sidebar.

If you're worried about screwing up their work flow you can use heuristics to figure if they're still newbies and, if so, give them the prompting. (My online app figures you're a newbie until you save your first document, and continues prompting appropriately. Five lines of Rails code plus the template, doubles the percentage of users who successfully save a card.)

Can you figure out a way to do live preview prior to hitting the Apply button? I know, having done it, that it is NO FUN whatsoever to code, but it is a HUGE win in terms of usability. Users are spoiled by years of using MS Word which gives instant visual feedback for every action -- you should try to be more like Word.

You might consider a drag&drop metaphor for putting elements on the page. At present you click a button and they get thrown into the top left corner, which might cause them to cover an element already there and will always require repositioning. This is friction, consider eliminating it.
Wait, are you saying you don't normally erase the bash history after downloading some "open source" software off your employer's server?
I would love to see a room with nothing but the paint. Floors, walls, ceilings, door. No furniture. My future conference room?
> On a machine that's not constantly being defragged

Windows does "constantly defrag" in the background.
Thank you patio11. That's a great tip (starting non-empty) - more so given that it's backed by actual data from your site.

[I have edited the following paragraph a few times revising my understanding of the definition of live-preview as I go along]
With regards to the live preview: by live-preview do you mean editing the text in rich-text editor fashion within the actual page? Or, just applying attributes as they are changed in the attribute editor without the user having to click the "Apply" button? The former would be hard I guess. The latter should be easy.

Regarding element placement, it can be confusing right now. You might be scrolled down all the way, add a text field and not even notice because it's placed in the top-left corner. Drag and drop would be the way to go.

Thanks, these are subtle yet crucual points you're making - your experience is invaluable.
Reals form a group under multiplication. Integers don't, but they do form a commutative ring (addition, negation, multiplication).
I don't see how his life is ruined. Charges were filed against him, he was questioned by investigators, and he is free on bail. He is getting a fair criminal trial, one that the finance industry's money can't really affect.

This is what happens to everyone that is accused of committing a crime more serious than jaywalking.

(As for his credit rating, what does it matter? If you're making 1.2MM a year, you can probably live without borrowing money.)
It shouldn't really be that surprising.

C/C++ are generally still the "fastest" languages in terms of final application performance. And, I am pretty sure that all of the DirectX/OpenGL APIs are still tied pretty tightly in with C/C++ libraries.
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A four-by-eight sheet of formica is a lot cheaper than that "paint" too ($3.99 per square foot??). For that matter you can often find whiteboards on sale for less than that paint.
Hmm... kind of off topic, but just realized a DIY idea offshoot from this.

Plane of Glass
UV reactive Dry/Wet Erase Marker
UV Light From the Back or along glass edges
* Five year ago, perhaps only a bunch of geeks would install it. Today, every other casual user will be interested.*

I would like to think this, but Android isn't really enjoying the success of the iPhone. People like Google, but are still happy with alternatives.
Twitter's hyper-short recipes
Create an ebook using images on GNU/Linux in two steps
Would be seriously cool if there is no gravity.
"Wednesday, August 04, 2004"

Pretty positive it's been posted here before too.
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Not surprising, since the paint is better than an actual whiteboard: it fits arbitrary, irregularly-shaped spaces, and doesn't itself take up space.
Twitter Tweaks Web-Based UI, With Generally Positive Response
Cool idea, but at $3.99/sq.ft that's hundreds of dollars per wall. I bought an 8'x4' sheet of melamine for less than $10, which would have been over $120 for that much paint.
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The thin panels from home depot are cheap -- ~$12 last I checked -- but don't erase nearly as well as a high-quality whiteboard surface, especially if you leave writing up for a while.

So if you're propping whiteboards against the wall of your flophouse while you hack, they're great. If you want something for permanent installation, you get what you pay for.
There's magnetic primer, too, so you could have a magentic whiteboard wall with two layers of paint. Here's one of many sources:

http://www.lyt.com/servlet/the-Magnetic-Paint/Categories

(Don't know what a room with iron-shavings magnetic walls does for cellphone reception, though.)
White boards are so limited in where you can put them. I think if the purchase decision is "do I paint this 4' by 8' patch of the wall" or "do I install a 4' x 8' white board" then the choice is easy. But having paint that can go on any surface and that will clean after every usage opens many possibilities. My home office, for example, doesn't have space for a 4' x 8' whiteboard but otherwise has good space.

Also, have you used any of those $10 sheets of melamine? They ghost up after a couple of months of use...
Cool. You could do all your brainstorming in a Faraday Cage which would keep out Magneto and lightning (not to mention phone calls from your wife! ;-)
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Steve Mcnair funeral photos
Thanks for making me laugh!