skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read "To Kill a Mockingbird" in fourth grade. I liked it. I still like it.

Personally I think it's a book that grows with you.
Average users are not going to visit a blog to determine if they should use a service or not, or if they should use some random feature of a service or not. FF's blog, or any company's blog, is not their main marketing channel, mainly because the blog is not the reason people know of the site/company or visit the site. So while you're correct that 95% of the people have no idea how it is vastly different than email, the quality of the blog post as marketing material wouldn't serve to inform them anyway. If FF is serious about "marketing" this, if a new feature of this simplicity (removing the restriction on post attachments from just allowing images) even requires marketing, this most definitely isn't, and I agree, shouldn't be it.

Fact is, FF provides structure to content streams that generic email and chat don't (gmail comes close to providing some structure, but it is still in the email paradigm). It's one-to-many, many-to-many, one-to-one, real-time-based and archived, and encourages succinctness in a way that neither email nor chat can be.
Google BigTable works this way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigTable
People are taking this too seriously. Buffett probably sees Jobs as a rival (perhaps not a direct one) and it is instinctive to highlight the flaws in your competitors. Furthermore, I don't know if Buffett stands to gain or lose depending on Apple's share price but he is probably more concerned with the general principle of disclosure. The use of "material fact" was probably used by Buffett to make it clear that there is an obligation (at least ethically and potentially legally) to disclose this sort of information (i.e. that Jobs was putting himself at a much greater risk (transplant) than implied and disclosed).
Hm, actually I said that because the first time I read Cyberdyne I just thought it was something Orwellian, and used the powers of Google to realize it was from Terminator.

(And I'm too young to have seen any movies with HAL in them ;))
Whoah, you're right, I'm wrong --- I misread the first graf of the article, and thought "The Toaster Project" was actually called "I, Toaster".
The author's last book was a complete fabrication of the MIT Blackjack Team's escapades. The real life counterparts from that book pointed out multiple scenes from the work that never occurred and direct quotes that were completely made up. The author defended himself by saying, "The idea that the story is true is more important than being able to prove that it’s true." Minispeak, if I've ever heard it. Ick.

This book will be sensationalist entertainment posing as non-fiction. It will probably be a good read, as Bringing Down The House was, but it had nothing to do with the reality of the situation, and it will serve to further distance the current image of the web entrepreneur from reality.
I think I agree with you about English class?, but I'm sure I disagree with you about whether this is fit for HN. Geeking out about books from grade school is absolutely stimulating: it made you talk about the meaning of The Giver, Ann Frank, and Catcher In The Rye.
Hmm. Somebody wrote your text editor.

Another wrote your kernels, plus an army of programmer.

Some guy halfway around the world wrote the Ruby intrepreter more than a decade ago.

Another wrote your build tools.

Several indiviuals wrote several different package management tools and you use it all. (apt-get, rubygem...)

Somebody wrote your browser and someone invent the language in which Hacker News was written in.

Yeah, even as hackers, we are all "helpless" and that's a good thing. It mean we can focus on writing new software instead of reinventing the wheel.
Generalizing from a small data set is always dangerous. But seeing as you have, I will counter: I am British, I have traveled a lot in America, in the company of other foreigners, and I have never seen a shred of evidence that airport security is anti-British, nor that they suspect foreigners (and only foreigners) are potential terrorists.

Are you being as fair to them as you expect them to be to you?
'If the world could remain in a single frame, like a painting on the wall..
I think we'd see the beauty then, and stand staring in awe'
Hedge fund managers betting Twitter will give them an edge in rapid trading
Which still returns a flat data structure that you have to manually use to rebuild the tree you're looking for. I you really need the ability to easily store and retrieve trees of data, don't use a relational database.
Which still means that monetizing software requires dealing with piracy.
"Useful" is questionable; it certainly does not apply to all of them. Having said that, there are some real jaw-droppers in this collection. Well worth a look.
Try using your imagination
This looks like a place to joke about finding a spanning basis to build a curriculum.
James Cameron has earned the right to take as long as he wants on his projects; he has one of the highest signal to noise ratios in Hollywood.
As a web designer who turned developer, someone who is exclusively producing Photoshop comps is not a web designer. They may be a graphic designer or creative director, and they may be in charge of the brand, but they are not qualified to design a website.

If you take such a person and you have them pass comps off to a developer you are committing a double sin because even though a web developer will know some HTML and CSS, they probably won't know it well and the core competencies of the web--information architecture and interaction design--will be completely neglected.

If a "web designer" creates a comp with no awareness of HTML, CSS, dynamic content, or interactivity, and a developer converts into the minimal HTML and CSS he can use to get it to function correctly you're going to get crap. It's not fair for either one to blame each other, they are both failing because no one knows how to do the job.
So, as a curiosity, I decided to run the SunSpider benchmarks on my MacBook Pro 2.4GHz 4GB RAM machine. Safari fared better at 1.1 sec. Firefox 3.5RC hit 1.4 sec. Then I downloaded Firefox 2. 13.2 sec for Firefox 2 on my MacBook Pro. So, the Phone 3GS might not hit MacBook speed with Safari, but it fares very well against a browser that many of us used not so long ago.

It isn't like Firefox 2 is some terrible browser and since Firefox 2 is handily able to execute the JavaScript contained in most pages on a MacBook Pro, it stands to reason that JavaScript performance shouldn't be a barrier on the iPhone on current generation web stuff. Granted, I'm sure Google and others would like to push the envelope, but it's good to see that mobile browsers aren't so behind.
I guess, but I'd rather geek out about something other than what I disagreed with in an article.
Decoding Battery Life for Laptops
Apr and May Data emphatically suggested economy is no longer going down.. question remains.. when will we see bounce. traditionally it has taken 1-2 yrs before real bounce happens.
he's been using it since 1985:
http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1985.html
Facebook Style Overlay in YUI 3 & CSS 3
14 year old Girl Making Easy Money from Home and Earning over $124.15 an hour
HN submission of link to New York Times article on same archeological find, with perhaps some different details:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=672935
This was and interesting article, but there I would have a significant quibble with it.

His list of "symptoms" that a relational database is not right for you are more often symptoms that your relational database was not well designed (or that the problem you were trying to solve changed along the way) rather than that the relational model itself does not fit your needs.

I think this applies to all his "structural symptoms" but especially with "Do you have tables with lots of columns, only a few of which are actually used by any particular row?" This is more often a sign that the database was not properly normalized than anything else.

This of course is not to say that the relational model is right for everything. In some cases, object oriented databases are the way to go and if you truly need a vast level of scalability and you can afford to relax the ACID standard then it makes sense to look at non-relational options.

There is room in the world for both relational and non-relational models, but I do not think fashion should play a role in choosing a technology personally.
That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Sorry.
I should have been clearer: I thought it was both funny and insightful that he didn't pretend that babies arrive out of thin air. The usual way I've seen that cliche is more sanitized, ala "Mythical Man-Month": If one woman can have a baby in nine months, nine women could have a baby in one month.

Buffett didn't neglect the demiurge.
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To play Devils' advoate (although I think this is an excellent essay) I think the point of the toaster project was to question the amount of effort that goes into producing cheap toasters, which are of relatively narrow utility. There's a lot you can do with a pencil, as with any general purpose tool: the production of pencils (or keyboards, or CPUs) is an example of capitalism at its finest.

A toaster, on the other hand, sacrifices flexibility for efficiency. It's faster and uses less energy than opening up your stove and making toast on the broiler (a Good Thing), but that's all you can do with it - toast bread products. If you want to have egg with your toast, it's no help at all (unlike your stove, which allows you to cook things in many different ways). If you follow the toaster approach, you end up with a kitchen full of one-purpose appliances which are individually excellent but ultimately cater to peoples' inability to cook. At some point it's worth asking the question of whether having multiple specialized appliances is really more efficient than having one or two that can be turned to many different ones. If you look in the kitchen of a diner or restaurant, there are relatively few fancy appliances but the cooks really know what they're doing.

There's room for both approaches. Programming everything from scratch without libraries would be terribly wasteful. On the other hand, you probably wouldn't respect a programmer who relied solely on library functions and was unable to derive any algorithms of their own, no?
Ask HN: Google results rendering oddly?
Not sure what the cause of this is. I deleted cache/history, and I've had several people next to me pull up a Google search and they're not seeing this. Anyone else run into this before?
hard fail, should be at least 126.71 an hour. oh yeah, flagged.
The New Daewoo C920 Tablet PC
A close look at the new convertible-style Daewoo C920 Tablet PC.
I agree with the original comment. I don't have any problem with talking about books from grade school, and I do agree with you in that this has started an interesting discussion.

But I'm pretty much only finding the discussion interesting. While there is nothing wrong with the list of books, the article seems to be mostly listspam. It seems like he just gives a brief overview overview of the book and then complains about how inappropriate it is for grade school.

For example, I haven't read The Giver, and this article doesn't really give me any reason to do so. There are no themes discussed, well except that it sounds like the book might involve free will and predestination. All I really get from the description is that the book paints a really depressing picture of the future. I am more inclined to read the book from its description on Wikipedia.
Ok, Streambase, maybe you'll pick this up. Most of my money is in the Royal Bank of Canada and

"Streambase – whose client base includes Royal Bank of Canada"

makes me, for the first time in a decade, want to switch.
Print Isn't Dying, Serious Journalism Is
Ah, well. It was an attempt at saying "Harmony first." Verdamung babelfish.
tl;dr headline says it all, except for this:

"Markets tend to buy on rumour and sell on facts," [Nasir Zubairi, a trading product developer] said.

This deserves widespread replication.
I don't like to read about movies that are supposed to be good.

It raises my expectations, and then I enjoy the movie less when I see it.

I think there are some in the movie world who take note of this. I think the previews for The Dark Knight were made with this in mind. In the first trailers there is very little pre-view and much more building of anticipation without building expectation.
Nope: http://imgur.com/gEVPe.png
Try being nice :(
Try emptying your cache with ⌥⌘E in Safari.
At the end, the author talks about the free market versus central planning and how the emergent, chaotic nature demonstrated in I, Pencil renders futile any efforts to manage. It seems like a bit of a fallacy, though, to say that because it didn't work in the past, it's been proven hopeless. Soviets didn't have the Web, for instance. Still, it is good not to underestimate the self-organizing intricacy of the ad-hoc situation we have, especially for people who think it's simple to replace with a managed solution without all the information.
Pleased to Meet You: Tips for Interviews
"Some people are little more than herd animals, flocking together whenever the world becomes uncomfortable for any reason, seeking the comfort of those who agree with them, do not contradict them, and take care of their emotions. I am not one of those people. If I had a motto, it would probably be Herd thither, me hither."

Truly great.
One of the take aways from this post is something that's been talked about on HN for quite some time: the call for quality content.

It would be a better world if the amount of people who knew what they were talking about was directly proportionate to how much they talked.
Some of the buttons on there don't look too great.

I guess it is easier to notice when they isolated.
For terribly depressing books aimed at kids even younger than grade school, check out the Thomas the Tank Engine series.

The basic lesson is that any deviation from the rules will be punished severely. One of the trains likes flowers so he leaves the tracks to smell them. Punishment: the entire village jumps out of the field to scare him. Another train gets vain about his new paint job. Punishment: he is bricked into a tunnel for a year, until he rusts. Oddly, little kids eat this stuff up.

I don't know if it's blind allegiance to trains, or if they really like the moral world portrayed.
My experience has been similar. Because of this I've removed ads from all lite versions of my apps. I would rather the user have a better experience then make $.38 per day.
iPhone OS 3.0 Adoption Rate
Bottlenecks That We Need To Anticipate In Sports Fundraising
Sports fundraising is a very interesting task as it poses a number of challenges. When we meet those challenges and successfully overcome them, we feel a great sense of satisfaction. Without exception, every fundraising campaign will have its own bottlenecks. It is therefore imperative that we plan for those bottlenecks. Our fundraising plans should have room for such bottlenecks. They should in fact anticipate certain bottlenecks in our fundraising campaign and have strategies in place to overcome them.
This is needed satire on the sad state of investigative journalism.

> Print media isn't hurting because it's an outdated business model, print media is hurting because it's boring. Blogs and Twitter are succeeding because their shit is clearly not retarded. And you know what? I love it. Intellectualism is dying, and the news is now anything we want it to be.
I wonder if there might be an entrepreneurial opportunity in this. It'll be basically a ping service, but an automated system will ping you - via SMS or email - to see if you're OK. If you're, you respond back saying yes. If you don't, your case gets escalated to human operators who will try real-world approaches to ensure you're OK.

The daily how-are-you emails can even be a bit Eliza-like, simulating a real human on the other end a little.
If you can rebuild the tree using only the information returned in that flat data structure, and the database performance is good, then why not just rebuild it in code?

It's trivial to scale out stateless code; databases are the hard part.
Really?

I hate to break it to the author of this piece, but toasters and pencils do not magically spring fully-formed from the uncoordinated, joyful, dignified labor of confident Ayn Rand heroes.

A company decides to get into the toaster business. That company then deals with coordinating everything needed to bring the pieces together and put toasters on the market. That company places orders with others which provide raw materials. That company builds or acquires factories and machinery. That company gets workers to build toasters, probably on an assembly line. That company sets up distribution channels.

In other words, the toaster company has to -- gasp! -- engage in centralized planning of how toasters will be produced, distributed and sold. Fortunately, centralized planning and coordination is only doomed to fail when the government does it, right?

And the odds are that most of the people in the chain are not working with much joy or dignity, especially the closer you get to the manufacturing and raw materials. They most likely work not because they find their life's purpose in mining the ore that furthers the wonder of captalism, but because mining the ore is about the only option in whatever place they had the misfortune to be born into.

Of course, when you put it like this it's not a juvenile libertarian's wet dream anymore, and Reason wouldn't want to publish anything like that. But ideology and reality don't often match up (and, to be honest, I've no doubt that if the author of this piece had been born in Stalin's Soviet Union, he'd have used similar logic to extol the wonders of the Glorious People's Ore-Mining Facilities, which bring raw materials from far-flung places to produce the Toaster of the Motherland, in a striking blow to the decadent imperialist capitalist pig-dogs).
ECB, CBC, CTR, CFB, and OFB are all "XORable", although if you're pointing out that CTR ciphertexts that share a keystream can be XOR'd to decrypt streams, that's a valid point, and one that a MAC (of any type) doesn't solve.

You're so far better off not trying to implement any of this stuff that it's almost not worth studying. PGP at rest, TLS in motion. Spend your time and heartache on something that will make you money, not something that will get you laughed at by asshole pentesters.
Apple iPhone 3GS: The sum ($) of its parts
Catalyst::Helper overhaul for the Catalyst web framework
Or scribd free:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil
The problem with CGI is that it (almost) always looks fake. Cloverfield was a good movie until that goofy CGI monster came into frame. If Cameron figured out how to make CGI look real and I mean really real, Avatar will truly be a breakthrough.
I didn't mean to imply that it is no longer a useful or interesting piece of software; just that it is not a simple migration for some project that specifically use MySQL features.

I did the same thing in SQL Server, too, so it's not a new concept and the other RDBMs with that ability still have a use for traditional stored procs.

My experience with both stored procs and running actual programming languages on the database is that one does not replace the other; but I'll wait with an open mind to see.
http://www.commonsenseeconomics.com/Readings/I.Pencil2006.FE...

There's a link to the downloadable PDF (it's disabled on Scribd) for the pack rats.
Dealing with Divorce
One of the problems that is haunting the Indian community is the increasing rate of divorce. It is not an easy phase to go through for both partners as divorce brings problems at different levels. It certainly brings heart ache to the partners in most cases though both have asked for divorce and made their decision independently without any external pressure.
I think I'm missing something really basic here. If you encrypt-then-mac, what is to prevent an attacker from appending a valid MAC to a forged ciphertext (in order to mount a DOS attack for example)?
Who did not know Jobs had cancer? Who did not know he could have died from that or related complications? The precise details are unimportant. A workaholic like Jobs doesn't take 6 months medical leave unless its serious. Apple clearly setup a line of succession. What else does an investor really need to know?
My concern is that not using a standard HTML password field will break the 'remember password' functionality built into browsers.

When you log in to a site, all the major browsers automatically ask you if you want to save your password. But if you display the password in plain text then the browser doesn't detect it as a password... and it doesn't offer to save it for you.

So what is that likely to result in?
• Users getting annoyed at your site, and thus lost business
• Users writing down their password somewhere else, resulting in a loss of security

These outcomes are exactly the opposite of what Jakob Nielsen is trying to achieve!
Perez hilton getting punched photo
It looks like someone was building a gas station, then changed their mind and put a house there instead.
YUI 3.0.0 beta 1 Available for Download
Django Request Response processing
I've had problems with MemcacheDB and I'm curious to hear about other people's experiences.

Basically, I've found that under high read/write loads I get occasional socket timeouts (tested on linux/osx). I think the underlying reason for the timeouts are Berkeley DB locks when data gets flushed to disk. Beyond the hassle of getting intermittent socket timeouts the real problem is that the memcache client API fails gracefully because it was specifically designed to be fault tolerant. You can check for socket errors and retry queries but you'll still get unpredictable query times.

I'm coming to the conclusion that it's an architecture issue - MemcacheDB is a persistent database abstracted behind an interface specifically designed for non-persistence. The abstraction leaks when the database locks.
As far as I know, that's because the Skype call isn't actually routed over the data connection, it transfers the voice via the existing voice network and the other end is hooked into a Skype gateway.

[Citation Needed] but I don't have time to dig one up at work
What other films has he made, out of curiosity? This is the first I've heard of his name.
People win arguments on the web all the time. What's rare (and different) is at argument that persuades some of the participants.

Are you certain that you don't want to argue that "just", the word on which your argument and position depends, actually has a useful and good meaning?
You're not going to get better performance by tearing apart a tree, sticking into a database that doesn't store it well, and then taking it back out and rebuilding it from scratch every time. If you want performance, use a database that will store your data structure as is and avoid the disassemble/reassemble step as well as avoiding writing the extra code to do it.

Relational databases didn't win because they're fast, they won because they're flexible for querying and language neutral, both features which necessarily slow the database down.

> It's trivial to scale out stateless code; databases are the hard part.

Not really relevant to the conversation. There are databases that can store trees of objects just fine as is, not all databases force you to store everything in tables.