skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First you write a book about how these selected companies are really great. A few years later you write a book about how they took their eyes off the ball and now they are in the tank. Case in point the once wonderful Circuit City. Never wonderful in my book. I always found high prices, poor service, and poor selection. Maybe I should have interviewed the executives to see how great they were for myself.

But I did like stage four: the charismatic new boss, the new new direction, the silver bullet.
Google has the O3D API, browser-based access to 3D graphics, presumably hardware-accelerated for machines that have it. http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/.

3D in the browser will be viable in a few years.
That's what - one Empire State Building worth of cabinets ?

100 floors * 100 offices/floor * 20 cabinets/office = 200k cabinets ...

Hmm. Off by a couple of orders of magnitude. More buildings or squeeze until the pips squeak.
> with bonus frown on apostrophe style

It appears to be correct with The Economist's own standards, since Mr Collins is singular. (http://www.economist.com/research/styleGuide/index.cfm?page=... )

I think I agree with you though, it looks awkward.
The 1998 price seems way off. IIRC I had a 4GB hard drive that year in a computer that cost at most $2000. I doubt more than half its cost came from the hard drive.
Chrome OS Partners: Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, HP, Lenovo, Qualcomm, TI
Guess the Swedish Army doesn't want colorblind people.
any idea about the author of stringbuffer?
It's not so much getting to your destination that is the problem, but storing your bike once you arrive.
All the Web's a Database: Yahoo Extends YQL With Insert, Update, Delete
The fact that they stumbled to the mat after being KO'd by MS does not mean they failed because of their failure to withstand the punch.

I think the blow was big enough that Netscape/Mozilla would never have been as important as their 'network pc' model ideals. They would have had to exist in a much smaller market even if they were to 'succeed'.
Government marketing sites tend to be well done. The information and business critical sites are lowest bidder wastelands.
Looks like the default XP background, no?
lately youtube has been inserting overlays on top of playing videos, a highly annoying feature. If they ever do that to google docs there will be a mass exodus.
How about "don't run that story about Monica Lewinsky"? That call was taken seriously by Newsweek.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewinsky_scandal
I modified his code to do the iPhone style masking. It masks everything except the last character. Demo page is unmodified. You can see it here: http://nirmalpatel.com/hacks/halfmask/demo.html
and a diff of the code:
http://nirmalpatel.com/hacks/halfmask/jquery.halfmask.js.dif...
Here's a point-free version in Factor. It looks a bit different from the original formula but once you get used to it its very quick to read; I prefer it to the Lisp code since there are fewer parentheses to track:

: entropy ( n -- e ) [1,b] [ p dup log * ] sigma neg ;

Note that [1,b] is a word which makes a numeric range from an integer on the stack, and [ ... ] is a function object (quotation).
I was below average.

Hope it was because so many people do the test many times, not because I<am stupid.
Conversation with Stuart Halloway (author of Programming Clojure)
Further information:

"We spoke about Relevance's model as a lifestyle company, working with Clojure, and, of course, random other things."
No liability for the negligent accountants?
What is a petabyte?
The alternative of not having a military sucks a lot worse.
The biggest point in my mind:

"You also may not have noticed, but nobody uses Chrome. I mean think about it. Do you know anyone who uses Chrome? Really?"

Aside from the stat-based argument (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=694756): I've been repeatedly surprised by the non-technical people around me who are on Chrome. My girlfriend downloaded it literally the day it came out, when I had read just a blog post or two about it. My parents, various friends' parents, the list just goes on and on, and none of them are nerds. It's startling how effortlessly Chrome has permeated public consciousness.

I don't hate the article, but I think fake steve jobs has jumped the shark.
Microsoft is shipping Windows 7 without a web browser in the EU, after several years of legal fuss largely because they bundled a browser with their OS.

I wonder if Google will consider shipping Chrome OS without a web browser in the EU?
I graduated last year, in England. In journalism. (In hindsight, perhaps not the brightest of choices.) I freelanced for a while, not earning nearly enough to live, before landing a job on a brand new small radio station. The station was a spectacular failure and went amazingly tits-up (I'm talking people removing equipment in front of us) after just six months.

Since then, I've been working a succession of shit temp jobs in supermarkets, fast food and so on. Next month, I'm moving to the Scottish islands. I've always wanted to, but I never have because "the opportunities aren't there". But now I've got a choice between working a rubbish warehouse job on a miserable industrial estate down here and working a rubbish job serving meals on a ferry surrounded by some of the world's most beautiful scenery, it's a no-brainer.

I could stay here in the hope that the radio industry picks up at some point, but why bother? Our industry is all but dead and we've got so little to lose that it's worth being radical, leaving the career treadmill behind for a while, going somewhere different, trying something that's off the heavily beaten media industry track and maybe, just maybe, finding that one thing that stirs our individual passion in a way that the trendy career we picked under pressure at eighteen never has. (Personally, I can't believe universities are still churning out broadcast journalists by the thousand, but that's off the point.)

You might as well grab your dream, run with it and see where it drags you.

(Posting under a false name because my main account's under my googleable real name)
Extreme Ventures launched an incubator program in Toronto last month also. http://www.startupnorth.ca/2009/06/03/extreme-university/

It's good to see something in the Waterloo area, but I'm reserving judgment until I see what they're offering. They've been a bit quiet considering they are launching a pilot this fall -- perhaps they already have the first batch companies selected through their network.
Google Chrome OS - FAQ's
Announcing Ubiquity 0.5
Not that this was difficult or anything, but here's a list of all of the links as links. Easier to investigate ;)

http://dpaste.org/TqnU/
Seems the E.S.B. volume is about 1 million cubic meters and a 4 drawer cabinet is about 0.4 cubic meters. So, ten buildings filled solid.

Incidentally, data via Google. Wolfram Alfa pouted on the building query.

(Yes, I'm easily amused. Or distracted: http://xkcd.com/356/)
That's interesting .... who next? Microsoft to release a RoR framework?
And by apparently nobody else; read the cited Drudge piece.
I actually like a bit of humour; when applied correctly it can accentuate the gist of an item and throw into sharp relief what the "community" really thinks. In this case: facinating story, but, come on, it's from the "Daily Mail". Humour, quite simply, is required.
Pre-order Your .CM Domain Now, Start Making Money Off Domain Typos Soon
Milw0rm Shut Down By Owner
Or you could just do this:

double entropy = -1.0d * mydata.Select(x => x * Math.Log10(x)).Sum();

Where 'mydata' is of type IEnumerable<double>.
In the comfort of my privacy I want to see what I am typing.

There is nobody shoulder surfing, no cameras recording me.

A check box for unmasking will suffice.

Cool hack nonetheless.
Link is to the Google cache with the following message:

"Well, this is my goodbye header for milw0rm. I wish I had the time I did in the past to post exploits, I just don't :(. For the past 3 months I have actually done a pretty crappy job of getting peoples work out fast enough to be proud of, 0 to 72 hours (taking off weekends) isn't fair to the authors on this site. I appreciate and thank everyone for their support in the past.
Be safe, /str0ke"

It's been written about on several sites as well:

http://www.darkreading.com/blog/archives/2009/07/milw0rm_clo...

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Milw0rm-To-Shut-Down-116112.s...
No, the point is that unhedged systemic risk is only one component of the crisis, despite what the rest of the media is blaring. The other, and perhaps more important, component was zero down mortgages and cash-out refinancings that left borrowers with no equity in their houses. Borrowers were just as irresponsible as bankers and haven't gotten the bad press they deserve. "It's the leverage, stupid" should be the mantra of this crisis.
Quick summary: Guy starts a successful business but outsources the accounting to his wife's friend's brother. The accountant books unfinished business as money in the bank. Economy sours and the truth comes to light. Guy goes out of business.

So the "dark side of entrepreneurship" is losing your business because you outsource a critical component and don't bother to double check the results?

I often wonder if the high 90% startup failure statistic is a result of negligence and lack of common sense. I hope to put my money where mouth is and find out on my own in the near future. Can anyone on the other side of the fence chime in on this?
This shows two important rules of running your own business very clearly: You need to understand every aspect of what's going on in your company. And don't hire friends and relatives.

Had the subject of this story kept at least some basic track of his financial position, I am sure he would have been able to flag the problem much earlier and probably avoid the disaster. Something basic like how much money comes in, goes out, what's owed to you and by you.
Helpful submission, but this pricing tier has been available for years.
It always amazes me how the best social commentary comes from those who have the least to lose. Without the artificial constraint of professionalism (or, I guess, the need to be factually accurate), Lyons somehow manages to be more honest and credible, not less.

Take his Fake Steve piece on the Microsoft-Yahoo merger: http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2008/02/ballmer-im-completely-... which I felt was the most succinct and insightful piece on the subject from any journalist.
But correct me if I am wrong--doesn't the Y Combinator model depend on some very seasoned VC guys, namely pg? Waterloo certainly has serious technical talent, but one thing sticks in my mind is PG's suggestion to the startups that a weekly email to them can be key to their success. Without that or its equivalent, it might not quite be the Y Combinator model.
Designing lenses and mirrors for things like telescopes and lasers, I'd imagine.

Also, a slight adaptation could be good for radiation and electromagnetic research (e.g. how well a material blocks beta radiation, etc.)
I stopped answering questions pretty early on, as I was getting tired of clicking randomly at yet another colour test.
"freetard" seems pretty in character for Jobs to me.
Ask HN: US based iphone developers (companies or individuals). Anyone?
Do you know some US based iphone developers (companies or individuals)?<p>Looking to develop an application but don't want to start learning yet another programming language...<p>Thank you.
Agree, a waste of time and licence payers money.
Scheme's dynamic-wind is a rather general form of this; PLT documents it pretty well http://download.plt-scheme.org/doc/103p1/html/mzscheme/node8... . It's designed for use with funny control structures, like continuations, so that should sit well with Ruby types.

I must confess, I had no idea what the combinators had to do with the Ruby. "It looks a little different than the combinatorial version" is a bit of an understatement. And real men program with nothing but X.

EDITED: to fix a link and add a note about continuations.
We need more articles like this on HN. Pursuing a career in entrepreneurship & startups is a long, hard, and unglamorous road. If you're prepared for that at the beginning it won't make things much easier but it might give you the resolve to not give up.

I've see too many founders (myself included) quit this lifestyle because they weren't an instant success.

Beware the "trough of sorrow."
My above comment "I enjoyed your narrative." is meant in a sinceren and non-cynical, non-subtext-whatsoever, non-ironic way. I wrote it to express a bit of appreciation towards Micand for crafting his imho good summary on the topic.

Can anyone explain to me, what is worth downvoting about it? Thanks.
Do you give your password to Outlook?
I think this is pretty cool. I could imagine it being even more useful (at least to me) if it were one of those iPhone-esque websites. That way I can lazily grab my phone, tap my bookmark for your site, and then flick through the schedule.

Some development ideas: cookies to remember your zip code (a la goingtorain.com), way to mark or flag certain channels as "favorites" and a corresponding favorites view that shows just those channels, a cool but short name :)
Your whole life recorded on video.

That much.
Thanks mace. It's hard to see the slides they are discussing, and was about to come back to this post to comment about if anybody had a link to them :)
i think the key is the last sentence:

"Was it worth it? It comes down to deciding what horrifies you more: the possibility of waking up one day and realizing you never took a shot at your dream or the possibility of losing your house."
I seriously doubt Google will be charging any money for Chrome.
I'd love to see a comparison with varnish which has extremely similar aims.
copy google reader....except don't delete things I haven't read that are 2 weeks old, and allow me to mark all items unread in a feed I just subscribed to...so I can read old posts when I have time....
Is this really micropayments? I've always thought that the goal of micropayments were fractions of a cent.
I don't think anyone has suggested individual sites should override the browser behavior.

The interesting question is whether client software (browsers/add-ons) should offer another option. And if it did, would the Payment Card Industry auditors demand a site override the user's choices, for example by simulating a masking password field outside the default HTML widgets?
Correctly firewalling IPv6 (it's harder than you think)
You can change the layout -- click More -> View Mode -> List Mode

will do vertical scrolling, not book style L/R scrolling.
All these games need to be developed for the iphone. They are missing out on a huge opportunity.
I haven't seen that. Guess I need to go downtown more often then.

The mall cops at Westfield use them though.
How about www.prweb.com? Seems to be very used...
You can see the comparison here between Arrington's vision and Google's post.

http://crunchpadfans.com/2009/07/08/google-steals-fusiongara...
I wouldn't have a clue what Steve Jobs would think, to be honest with you. However, I can comb through the work of Lyons and see that, yes, outside of the FSJ context he harbors great, almost excessive, disdain for the free software hardcore.
Google Chrome is a browser, not an operating system. Linux is the operating system. No matter how much people want to think the browser is one, it doesn't change the facts. It is as much an operating system as wifi is. The browser hosts remote apps and provides a runtime environment, which to the non computer science trained out there might appear to be an operating system, but its still not. Chrome does not, for example, implement create_process (fork). Linux does. Chrome, uses fork, its an , or maybe another way to think of the browser is as a UI VM, much like the JVM run s bytecode, the browser runs 'WebCode'.
Except it's really hard to know the quality of the page until you actually crawl it. PageRank graphs only take you a small percentage of the way to judging quality.
Wow that article is a perfect example of how people bastardize statistics. Correlation != causation, people, say it with me! It's also pretty clueless in general.

Stuff like:

> But the focus on subprimes ignores the widely available industry facts (reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association) that 51% of all foreclosed homes had prime loans

Yeah, that's because only a small % of all mortgages are subprime! But a huge percentage of subprime mortgages have defaulted, much higher than prime mortgages (as you'd expect).

> The analysis indicates that, by far, the most important factor related to foreclosures is the extent to which the homeowner now has or ever had positive equity in a home.

You mean the most "correlated" factor. This doesn't imply causation. But of course, if you have to ask which borrowers are most likely to just walk away, it's the ones with nothing more to lose!

Such a sad, pointless article. If he is on to anything, you can't even know it because his analysis is so poor.

If you really dig this stuff, follow this blog:

http://www.fieldcheckgroup.com/blog/
It still has a pretty mediocre takeup rate, regardless of the people around you that are using it. The latest stats I've seen (posted on HN) have been that Chrome is less used than Safari. FF seems to be the bigger winner at the cost of IE.
YQL is definitely shaping up to be a very interesting wrapper for web service API's. I would like to see it become more of an open standard that can be implemented on any system, but that's unlikely :(. However, the API limits are pretty generous so it's worth testing out.

Being able to run a simple query via the uri without having to deal with the intricacies of various API's definitely has potential.
Is obesity an oral bacterial disease?
Chances are you won't make _this_ mistake, but if your company gets off the ground, you'll make a couple of big mistakes that lose you customers, cash and pride.

And you'll look back on those mistakes and wonder to yourself, much like the hero of this story, how could I have let this have happen?

It's embarrassing and humbling, even more so when it's written up in the New York Times.
What I really want to know is why there are no micropayments currently? Is it just greed on the providers side or some kind of technical limitation? I am not trying to be inflamatory but I am genuinely curious what is holding this back.
Fabric is in a wild state of flux right now. I used it a bit -- then a bit more -- then I backed off entirely. It has promise, but it seems a bit young at the moment.
It still sounds pretty far removed.

Release an OS that will drive traffic to your spreadsheet app that will drive traffic to your search engine where you can sell ads.

*Gmail still doesn't really makes much money.
Another important rule: don't borrow money.
All of those criticisms apply to Safari 4, tho.
Well, I don't disagree...

It's an example of moral hazard. How much is your pristine credit rating worth? If your house is under water by $100K maybe it's worth taking a hit -- it may be easier to rebuild your credit rating over five years than to repay $100K.
I asked Jimmy about it. Here's his response: http://mixergy.com/wales-wikipedia-rohde/
Politically correct ones, at that.
hey Fake Steve Jobs, I use Chrome too :(
"The Swedish Army has not actually fought a war since 1809"

Well, they're doing something right, then.
Which may have been intentional.
Sorry, but I wonder what you're talking about. Package managers are designed exactly for this purpose.

It's not even hard to leverage the power of apt (the most advanced of the bunch) for your own deployments.

In essence you setup a local mirror and add that to the sources.list of all your hosts. Then you learn how to roll your own debs and push them to the mirror. The actual deployment happens via apt-get - which can be triggered by cron, a shell-script, puppet, a sweaty admin at 4am, or whatever fits your bill.

Working with the system this way instead of along with it (or even against it) has various advantages. Most importantly you get proper dependency management. Need to roll back to app version 2 from version 3, whereas version 2 depends on an older version of foo? No-brainer, apt takes care of that for you, both ways, also in much more complicated cases. Need a package or package version that's not in the official repos? No problem, roll your own and make your application package depend on that.

With a bit of elbow grease you can also have it mangle your database and other auxiliary infrastructure appropiately, within the respective pre-/post-install scripts.

Fabric and capistrano are just expressions of the old "if you don't understand you're doomed to reinvent, poorly" meme.
But how do you type the Σ?

You simply define a keyboard shortcut.

For very common primitives, a special character can work nicely. We use λ in our Common Lisp code instead of typing lambda. Actually, our λ is a macro that does a couple of things besides expanding into lambda; if it were just the latter we probably wouldn't have gone there. Once we did, though, I was surprised at the improvement in readability.
Is this a white hat site? Are the exploits posted without notice to the newly exploitable? I am obviously not a security guy, anyone here know more about?
There's a reason why the puzzle-writer used those 5 digits in the final question, so that you can spot the pattern and find a shortcut. Spotting the pattern is not brute force. To check your formula you have to do some calculations, but that is something you cannot avoid. By going over the numbers, what I mean is confirming that:

1x3 + 2x1 + 3x4 + 4x1 + 5x5 = 1
5x3 + 4x1 + 3x4 + 2x1 + 1x5 = 2
...

You can do that manually or mentally, so it is not what I call brute force.

And if you do not spot the 3 1 4 1 5 pattern, or just do not want to use the shortcut provided, there is another way to do it. First let's find the second digit. We only need our known digits and the two lines

2 2 2 2 2 = 1
1 1 2 2 2 = 6

Since we know that the multiplier of the first digit is 3, we can calculate the value of 1 2 2 2 2 = 2 2 2 2 2 - 1 0 0 0 0 = 1 - 3 = 7. Then it follows that the multiplier of the second digit is 1 2 2 2 2 - 1 1 2 2 2 = 7 - 6 = 1. The third digit can be found by changing the line 1 2 3 4 5 = 1 to 3 3 3 4 4 = 3. You can do this since you have the multipliers for the first, second and fifth digits. We already have the line 3 3 4 4 4 = 7, so the third digit is 7 - 3 = 4. For the fourth multiplier, change the line 1 1 1 1 1 = 5 to 2 2 2 1 2 = 0. Compare to 2 2 2 2 2 = 1 and you see that the fourth multiplier is 1. So now you have all the five multipliers, 3, 1, 4, 1 and 5.

But we are not necessarily ready yet, we may need to add a constant, c. So pick a line, the easiest seems to be 1 1 1 1 1 = 5. Now, since we know the five multipliers, we can say that

1x3 + 1x1 + 1x4 + 1x1 + 1x5 + c = 5
5 + c = 5
c = 0

The constant is 0. So just multiplying each digit by its respective multiplier gives the correct answer. You still need to verify your formula by calculating the right hand side of a few lines.
Google doesn't force its products on anyone, Microsoft does. Windows still comes preloaded on most PC's sold, even if you don't want it and don't want to pay for it. Then vendors aren't doing that to you, Microsoft is making them.
Microsoft ran afoul of anti-monopoly legislation. Google (a) do not have a monopoly of the desktop OS market and (b) Chrome OS will be open source, so people would be able to legally distribute Chrome OS without a browser (or more likely, a different rendering engine).
Do you mean credit cards? In many places (like Germany) commercial banks are the main source of funding for businesses.