skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't see this as a criticism of the HN comments at all, but as just an excuse to restate that a business (or even just a product) is much more than code.

That said, there can be some competitive advantage due to code, and businesses and products vary in how important the code is. eg Google's pagerank was important (perhaps all important algorithms are only valuable if they are patented... because otherwise they just aren't that hard to copy). For a web2.0 site like SO, I think the code itself is fairly minor, and even the user experience (UI layout, interactions and features), though much more work, is also not that hard to copy. But to copy the business is hard.

The most important competitive advantages for SO are network effects (and potential for further growth); and that people are continuously working on it to improve it.

EDIT this makes me realize why an academic at uni doubted how much of google's success was due to the algorithm - I now think he was reacting to people in that environment who tend to give too much emphasis to code and to algorithms. In my view, it's clear that a better way of doing things (such as a new algorithm) can be the basis of a product or business. Of course it can. But it's not enough on its own.
Cool story. I learned something else from the comments-- the Apollo missions left reflecting mirrors on the moon and we have been pinging them with lasers ever since. Good ammo to debunk the Apollo hoax nutters.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/21jul_llr.htm
I don't live in the Bay area, but i think Microsoft's problem concerning startups is that they haven't created many exciting platforms for some time. Take for example the activity around iPhone and Android. Apple creates more roadblocks for developers than Microsoft ever did and Java is not the most interesting language to program in. But both platforms are attractive so developers keep developing new applications for them.
I interpreted repeating 9's as:

the function that writes some number of repeating 9's (replacing the zero in the last decimal place with a 9). This function approaches 1, does it not?

f(1) = 0.9

f(2) = 0.99

f(3) = 0.999

so f as defined above approaches 1

I interpreted the question in the context of numerical precision. Since we are usually not dealing with infinite precision, the two are not equal.

I am familiar with the obvious: 1/3 == 0.3333... and 3 * 1/3 == 1 so 0.9999... == 1
I would be interested in a web framework that included OpenID login/session management, voting (with several "hot"/"new"/"fabulous" ranking algorithms), user reporting, content tagging and fulltext search, threaded comments, a moderator (not admin) interface, and all of those other things the original response post mentioned as "the stuff you forget about."

I do believe there's some way to stuff all that in without creating a central business-object model (i.e. turning the framework into a CMS.)
kiddies with brains and technical knowledge to actually write their own exploits are not script kiddies... This term is used for kiddies without brains that just learned to run a few scripts to attack others.

Just clarifying the term.
KING of Facebook: 6,000+ Jackson comments per minute on Facebook
The two projects have had very different aims and constraints. The iPod definitely would not have satisfied many of the aims of OLPC. Whether those aims were sensible or realistic or competently executed is an exercise for the reader.
It'll go both ways.
Ad. OP's link:

OMIGOD, just noticed, its a 389-page thread!

And I thought 1st page was already pretty epic..
Ideally yes, but most new yorkers only go on a few lines regularly. I've only been in the city for a month now, but going to lines that you've never gone to before gets a bit confusing.
Sounds like a cool book. I'll have to read it after I finish the 2-hour manager.
The gold standard requires faith there isn't going to be a major unregulated discovery of new gold reserves in the near future.

This was actually a problem with silver in the late 19th century (hence why we are on a gold standard and not bimetallism).

It also requires faith that a government with significant gold reserves won't sell them all off.
The kid is full of win. A+++, I bow to you.
Tom, did you know there are extra filters you can use to search Github.com?

Try "tlrobinson package:github.com lang:javascript"
Glad to see that the poll is nearly unanimous here.

Btw, the naive perspective on this issue is because people intuitively perceive the hyperreal numbers. In the hyperreal number system, .9999999999999999999999... and 1 are different. But in almost all phrasings of this question it is implied to be talking about the real number system.

Specifying it gets rid of all ambiguity. The real numbers .999... and 1 are equal. The hyperreal numbers .999... and 1 are not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreal_number
I'm not in any way meaning to imply that real estate agent and vc partner have similar competency requirements or barriers to entry. Rather, I'm implying that the fees of both are now highly out of sync with the current reality, where neither listing houses nor getting startup investment capital are as under the control of these middlemen as they used to be.

Furthermore, in both cases the fees bear no relation to the value-added provided by the real estate agent or the vc partner on the particular deals they make. This is the aspect that feels especially archaic to me.
The naive perspective on this issue is because people intuitively perceive the hyperreal numbers. In the hyperreal number system, .9999999999999999999999... and 1 are different. But in almost all phrasings of this question it is implied to be talking about the real number system.

Specifying it gets rid of all ambiguity. The real numbers .999... and 1 are equal. The hyperreal numbers .999... and 1 are not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreal_number

reply
that's harsh, bro :) I can smell the axe body spray all over your remark.
For google, "beta" is purely a PR label; this is because what "beta" normally is is an HR distinction, and Google doesn't work that way.

In more standard companies, the R&D team writes software up to, and including, the beta. Once the software is "released," the maintenance team steps in and the R&D team moves on. Google doesn't do this, so there's no meaning to a Google product being "in beta" or "out of beta."
Marijuana sellers misusing MySpace, Facebook, Twitter for their trade
A lot of fellow arachnophobes on HN - interesante.

Mine: Spiders, settling, not achieving the goals I make for myself.
They're sold as one big SaaS package to companies. They're taking the "beta" label off so said companies will stop bitching.
The current fee structure allows bad VCs to survive. Just because it works in the ideal case doesn't mean it's not a bug in the system. Wouldn't it be an improvement if the industry standard fee structure only rewarded profitability?
Has the poll locked or hit a maximum? Lots of good suggestions in comments aren't yet poll options.
I only see one problem with this: During rush hour trains, choosing the optimal exit location is a good way to not get on the train, because people that take the same line every day know where to stand.

Maybe a "Overcrowding" mode that does the exact opposite and shows you where the least crowded cars are likely to be?
Cleveland, OH
That's amazing.

If someone guesses your random number in DSA, doesn't that reveal your private key? r⁻¹(s·k - H(m)) mod q or something like that, where r and s are the two pieces of the signature, k is the random number, H(m) is the hash of the message, and q is the modulus from the public algorithm parameters?

Does Keyczar generate DSA signatures that are revealed to untrusted parties? Because if so, it just leaked your keys to those parties.

Maybe you (a) shouldn't use DSA and (b) shouldn't use Keyczar. Who's the Rivest grad student Thomas keeps going on about? Did Rivest award him a Ph.D.?
That does searching of text, without generating an index. While this is fast, you are still have search time linear in the size of your searchable text.

If you used a suffix tree as an index, you'd get time complexity strongly sublinear in text length.

In summary, if the regex matching complexity dwarfs the corpus size, you want Thompson NFA. If your corpus size dwarfs the regex complexity, you want suffix tree indexes. It's not clear to me if the two approaches can be combined, but if they are, I'd like to know.
This makes sense and it could work :) I imagine you would have to spend time tuning the tokens you map out. I think this would break down pretty quickly with moderate or complicated regexes, but those might not be the majority of searches.

Is there any trickery you could do with the inner nodes on the b+trees? I spent a few minutes thinking about tokens mapped out and intermediate reductions but didn't come up with anything.
i suspect you are just not looking at the right file (auth log vs. a daemon log) and are only looking at the authentication requests that get passed down to your authentication library (pam?).
stepped away from the computer. going to add in some new ones.

Update: done. Geez polls get killed in terms of staying on the homepage rankings.
I imagine that it has no value to them. They're not out to create any new algorithms/systems/compilers/languages, simply to make proper use of the ones in existing libraries. To put it in the way they'd likely say it: "Ninja don't forge katana."
I haven't bought it yet, but I probably will for my work Blackberry. A suggestion: mark where the elevators are for all the subways too. It would be useful for disabled people and also anyone carrying heavy items or bags. Hopefully you wrote down that information so you don't have to search all the stops again!
If the IP is spoofed, how are your reply packets getting back to it?
Your sshd is probably configured with tcp wrappers (My RHEL4/5 were). If you only log in from a known set of static IPs, you could add in /etc/hosts.deny:

sshd: IP1 IP2 .domain.com

The .domain.com allows any IP which reverses to .domain.com.

I ran:

grep Accepted /var/log/secure*|grep ssh2|perl -lne '/for (\S+) from (\S+)/ && print "$1 $2"'|sort -u

To find all IPs/users that logged in.

This may give you trouble if you SSH from e.g. some mobile connection or from random wifis around the world.
So long as the exploit doesn’t require multiple login attempts at all (which I assume it wouldn’t) yeah. MaxAuthTries protects against other things.
I don't like the way he refers to "Premature CHD Mortality" as if having CHD which kills you at an older age can be dismissed from consideration.

He also doesn't mention that another thing the groups all have in common is being alive at the same time - if treatment for symptoms improved, all ages would benefit, e.g. with the creation of the National Health Service (NHS) in Britain, starting with legislation in 1948 and presumably taking a few years to ramp up to nationwide usefulness.
Four years ago in 2005, Schwarzenegger gave it a try, with his special-election propositions to (1) reduce the political power of the public employee unions who've helped lock-in high spending (prop 75); (2) cap spending growth and increase flexibility, and provide for automatic-continuation in budget stalemates (prop 76); (3) restore some level of competitiveness and partisan responsibility to the state legislature with a redistricting less-captive to party gerrymandering that protects incumbents (prop 77).

All were reasonable ideas addressing long-term distortions in California's politics and budgeting. All went down in flames at the polls.

He knows "I told you so" doesn't work politically, especially as a lame duck, but he'd be within his rights to say it.
http://www.startatspark.com/ was what I had in mind.
Feeling nostalgic? New Gmail Beta called "back to beta".
How does that help here? My query doesn't contain any directly-searchable strings, unless you start abstracting things by treating all alpha chars as the same, etc.
And what do we mean by vegetarian? There's got to be a massive difference between living on bread, potato, cake and nut-roast and living on salad, fruit and steamed greens. "Not eating meat" really doesn't say much about what you do eat.

Raw foodists claim there's a lot of denaturing and damage done to proteins, enzymes and more when food is cooked. There are differences in composition between food that is cooked until done and food that is cooked until blackened (e.g. on a barbecue). Some claim there is measurable damage done when food is blended compared to chopped or juiced 'gently'. There is lots of skepticism about microwave cooking versus traditional ovens. As well as eggs, popular advice zig-zags on soy and types of fats. So...

>> zngtk4 is basically saying that nutrition science is sampling at too low at resolution to make definitive claims, I buy that.

I buy it too.
Love finding other Pittsburgh YC'ers. Drop me an email sometime - I'd love to get together and shoot the bull.
seems more like a CRV quick start type program?
Lucky me I'm using GWT and ImageBundle

http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/wiki/ImageBundle...
If all the teacher is doing is repeating the book, then sure, a lecture is just a terrible way of republishing the book.

A real lecturer, however, should be able to tailor the lesson to the level of the students, fill in holes in the assumed knowledge, and bring their personal experience to the the material.
It's a good read.

It looks like we now have a face to blame for the crisis: Joe Cassano, and he did it thanks to his incompetence and insecurity.
I'd buy this t-shirt.
Most Printers Secretly Add Their Serial # to Everything They Print
Are there any counter-examples to Gall's Law?

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.
wow I never realized that. thanks!
The first thing I thought when I saw this was:

"Oh shit- now nothing is private."

Don't get me wrong- it's amazing stuff, and I'm all for the advancements it can bring. But the mind really is the last bastion of privacy in our increasingly policed world.

Think about it:

1) When you make a call, it can be logged and recorded.

2) When you walk into a bank (or a million other locations), your actions are on camera.

3) When you visit a site, your IP address, as well as other information, is logged.

Almost everything is monitored.

Granted the advancement of technology has brought FAR more benefits than costs, but sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live in the 1800s, when you could do something and not have to worry about your actions being "logged" to some eternal database.

Of course, it's fairly easy to control actions. Don't send really personal stuff via email, don't scratch your crotch in front of a security camera. But when it comes to thoughts, it's a different story. Try not thinking about something, and you'll find you can't do it.

I'm sure every single person in this world has had thoughts he/she would not want to reveal.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. It will probably be a while before we have to seriously worry about the implications of this technology.
Boots perfectly on VirtualBox: http://skitch.com/joelf/bshj1/android-on-virtualbox
Ask HN: YC-like in Europe/Germany?
I wonder if there is any YC-like incubator in Europe, especially Germany.

I don't know one yet and I still wonder why nobody starts one (as I could not find one).

To me the German web startup scene seems to be mainly a lame copy-cat biz driven by some smart-ass MBAs...

Help!
ahhh No the OP was referring to the value at the limit as x->inf of your function f.
alternate headline: you lowly investor vs Goldman Sachs
10 Wordpress Themes For Your New Lifestream Blog
But you'd have to do that separately for every language.

Edit: the OP is such a great question. I've been saving up the joke of commenting "How is this Hacker News?" on the most literally appropriate HN post I run across... and almost used it on this one. Sadly, I probably never will.
I don't understand, they don't care about cs principals, rather they want a 'ninja' who is able to write obscure code in languages people rarely use and is hard to understand.

WHY would anyone want this?
IMO port knocking isn't good defense, people can always use nmap to scan for open ports then try some combinations on them. Certificate authentication is way better (in combination with disabling password login)
What's wrong with the thread object
"Nothing that pointed to a fundamental flaw in the design of Native Client".

No, just many flaws in the implementation that allowed unverified code to be run and make sys calls.

Seems like quite a disingenuous statement.
Baltimore. Relatively low rents for the East Coast, culturally unique, and has low-cost access to DC, Philadelphia, and New York. Not to mention there's huge numbers of technical people around here because of the federal government.
Ask HN: Boston Startup Community?
Just moved to Boston this weekend. Where can I find like-minded, scrappy entrepreneurs?
I don't believe in "magic" or "destiny" - that's not what I'm referring to here. I'm also not talking about knowing you're "great" for another person.

I'm talking about knowing you're _committed_ to another person. When you know you're _committed_ to another person you don't have to wonder if French lessons should go, or the startup should go, or the girl should go.

In theory I could know that I'm great for 314 different people, but that's a lot different than knowing that I'm committed to one.

This isn't fantasy and it's extremely representative of what goes into making a working relationship.
Even if they use SSL to encrypt your credentials before sending to Google, and keep your credentials encrypted on their server, they must surely have the ability to decrypt them at will...?
OCR Software for Windows, Software for OCR converting
OCR Software for you to convert your image documents and PDF files to electronic files you can edit on the PC. With +99% accuracy, the output digital files looks as the orginal ones, including color, table, bullets and graphics.
There's no need to downmod someone into oblivion just because they're not aware of a not-very-significant fact.
Open Coffee. I think it is every Wednesday morning at Andala Cafe in Cambridge. It was started by Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital and Nabeel Hyatt of Conduit labs. I think somebody created a meetup for it.

Some weeks are better than others, but there is usually a good crowd (although, I have not been there since May, so it might have changed).
Grooveshark is an awesome service. Especially now that Youtube muted all the copyrighted songs.

Its a good place to go when you want to find that one song or artist.
wow, great idea. I was in NYC the other weekend and this would have been handy.
If you just want to test static pages in different browsers, you can use this site for free - it's what I used to test my site (there are probably others):
http://browsershots.org/
Here's an anagram-sorter. (I'm no Python ninja, but I quite liked my idea.)

def sort(s):
listt = list(s)
listt.sort(cmp=lambda a,b: cmp( ord(b)%len(s) , ord(a)%len(s) ))
print ''.join(listt),

sort('Oh,well')
sort('lord')

And this is the rather succinct Ruby version:

def sort s
print s.split(//).sort_by.with_index{|a,i|[-(a.ord%s.length),i]}.join
end

sort 'Oh,well'
sort 'lord'
I bought it, and I have to admit, I'm a little underwhelmed.

A basic subway map would have been useful.

For the extra points, a schedule would be wonderful.
Wow. I can't imagine anyone getting a tattoo of Hostgator on their neck. That's just insane. Your body is the only thing you truly own in this world.
>Pirate radio could never come close.

On hackernews, I believe that's a challenge.
Heyzap (YC09/USV) Looking For Summer Intern!
Heyzap (http://www.heyzap.com) is looking for a summer intern to work on tech or business development.

If you are in the SF area and are interested in working on challenging problems with a fun YC and Union Square Ventures backed startup in the gaming space, let us know!

Send your details to intern@heyzap.com to apply!
If she's a part of the startup, then you all should spend time together working. If can work together as a couple(especially on a new venture), then you can probably last a lifetime. I'm sure French lessons don't last all day. Spend the evening as a date night. (I am female btw)
Entrepreneurs [Youtube vid]
Irvine, CA (Orange County)
This is the first chance I've had to be able to talk to someone that works in the wall street environment....I've been following the "alternative" economics blogosphere for many years now (globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com, market-ticker.denninger.net, etc)

I'm not sure in what capacity you work, but do you see totally corrupt (opinions may vary on what is corrupt I suppose) things happening on a daily basis?

To be honest, from what I read, it seems like a den of thieves....any chance you could spread some light on this issue?
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi
Our plan to grow
I miss the days when I could sell my GMail invites for $10 a pop. (Easy high school money!)
> In WW2, the U.S. was attacked.

Not by Germany or Italy. (Yes, they were attacking ships that were supplying the UK, but that's not really an attack on the US.)

> In WW2 it was quite obvious there was a threat to the U.S., and to the entire world.

Revisionist twaddle. I think that WWII was a "good war", but by the standards you asserted above, you don't. If you don't like the results of your standards, you have to change them, not ignore them.

> It's tough.

It was easy just a message ago.

Decisions can't be made in hindsight.

> The U.S. needed to kill the entire population to win [the Vietnam] war.

Nope. The US merely needed to consolidate the Tet gains, which wiped out the VC. The NVA wasn't ready at the time. (What? You think that Tet was a US military defeat? It wasn't. It was a US political defeat in the US, but that's a different argument.)

I'm not going to call you on the back-pedaling but I do suggest a bit of research.
You'd rather they make or dispose of an undecidable claim? Everything has implementation flaws. They're right; nobody came up with a way to beat the simplified, scrubbed x86 subset they came up with to run NaCL in.
Pimp My Lock: A case study in Scala API design
Alex Payne — The Tapir Book
Most qulity copiers won't xero you a banknote bill: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
> PS: Bulk fresh water still tends to run at thousandths of a cent per gallon in most areas.

The marginal price of water in San Jose is around 0.3 cents/gallon. However, the "connection charge" and various taxes and fees end up doubling the "as delivered" cost.
Spoofed is probably the wrong word - through an irrelevant IP address is a better way to put it(perhaps someone's compromised computer on a botnet acting as a proxy).
> For all we know, extracting energy from wind and waves could counter the recent perceived increase in hurricanes and tropical storms

The recent trend in hurricanes has been a decrease. (We can spot storms in places that we couldn't look before, but if we look just where we could look before, there's a decrease.)

The middle of the 20th century was far worse.
I'm helping Betaspring in Providence RI get off the ground. http://betaspring.com. There's also Bootup Labs in Vancouver, Junto Partners in Salt Lake City, Good Company Ventures (for social enterprise) and DreamIt in Philly , Next Start in Greenville, Alphalab in Pittsburgh.
Pardon me if I've missed something, but I find that link totally unsolicited and it adds nothing to the conversation here.
This is great! I only wish I had thought of it first :)
Meet The Green Celebrities
Federal Web sites knocked out by cyber attack