skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
can't live without it. now even in Safari, i sub-consciously press "d" to close a tab, "/" to search with regular expression, and most frequently "f" to jump to a link by referencing number on the current screen.

------------ hooking up my muscle memory with the web
Twittering from the tractor: smartphones sprout on the farm
The ants in a megacolony are all genetically related, which is quite different from the way in which all members of a species are genetically related.

Ants, along with bees and a few other species have a haplodiploid sex determination system, unlike the XY system in mammals. This has a variety of consequences that are hard to swallow at first sight -- males have no father, all workers in a colony are clones, and so on. This is what leads to their highly social behavior within a colony: the good of one is the good of all. I don't yet understand how supercolony behavior arises out of ant genetics, but I'm sure it somehow does.

It appears to me that this one of those evolutionary behaviors gone awry due to the rapidly changing environment. In the past, you could expect that ant colonies would migrate geographically at a fixed rate (on average); so with a constant mutation rate, you'd expect territoriality to arise from this behavior -- ants colonies in regions within (say) a 100- mile radius would be co-operative. Quite clever, actually. However, since humans are capable of transmitting the ants anywhere instantaneously (in evolutionary time), it has produced results that evolution didn't "intend."

BTW here's the original paper http://www.springerlink.com/content/u081508512u7k421/

More info. about the species in question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linepithema_humile

Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploid_sex-determination_...
Bizbuysell.com is another good listing service (the biggest I think), and while they specialize in more traditional businesses, there's plenty of websites for sale there.
For emacs people
http://conkeror.org/
Inside the Entrepreneur Mind: Could Your MBA Be Holding You Back?
Thanks - that's probably why there seems to be such a dip in prices on the aforementioned "site markets."

We're definitely not opposed to shifting the decimal point if it'd make things easier ;)
As I've noted elsewhere in the thread, Prolog and Erlang do this too. They also use commas (and semicolons, in Erlang). OTOH, their syntaxes are pretty straightforward, so it's not hard to have an auto-indenting/highlighting editor make periods more noticeable.

I agree with you, but I think in practice it's less a problem than syntax bugs caused by ambiguities in precedence, optional "else" clauses (shift-reduce conflicts), etc.
I have tried RTM on and off, but I usually end up back at this method as well (though I use x for completed tasks). Add sync with something like Windows Live Sync, SugarSync or Dropbox and it's portable enough, too.
Art-hack: Interactive mirror
Here is a rough outline of my thoughts on what do and how to do it to really build your web developer skillset.

For the front end, there are really three main components:
- HTML (make sure you learn about DOCTypes and how to make valid websites)

- CSS - How to style pages, this is really a core skill these days. Table layouts are not 'wrong' anymore as most browsers now agree on how to build them, but as you do work if you client is savvy they will be very unimpressed with them and you'd do well to know how to do a layout using just CSS.

- Javascript - As sites become even more interactive JS is a core tool that you'll call upon for almost every project.

- Javascript libraries - These are things like jQuery, Prototype, moo, YUI, things which extend JS and simplify your work in implementing different things.

For the backend, you'll be best served by picking a language and focusing on it: PHP is probably the easiest in terms of entry costs. ASP.net requires a bit more setup for learning to work with it. Ruby on Rails is up and coming as a backend coding language, quite hot among web 2.0 companies but it isn't near as popular as PHP and ASP.net.

In these languages you'll find frameworks which provide a good basis for web applications. CodeIgniter, CakePHP and a whole host of others currently exist. Again you're just going to have to begin playing around and dive into them.

At a lower level, when writing the sites, you need to understand Object Oriented programming as well as other core Computer Science elements.

For websites, content management systems are a main component in projects these days. Wordpress, Drupal, ExpressionEngine are just a few. You'll do well to research these and begin working with them. Some are rather intimidating and frustrating to work with.

The next step is to begin learning to use other sites and their APIs. Like writing a Facebook application, or a Twitter application. To learn these, a good plan is to reinvent the wheel. Want to learn the Twitter API? Build a web twitter client. What to learn Facebook? Make a simple game.

Etc.
I'm not sure how you could use the birthday paradox to brute force a block cipher. You have a message you want to decrypt, and you don't know the key. A brute force attack is trying all the possible keys (2^128 for AES-128) and on average you will find the right one with 2^127 guesses.
Ask HN: good electronics hacking course in the Toronto Area?
I'm interested in learning about circuitry and electronics, and I'm having a tough time finding anything in the Toronto area.

Do any GTAers have suggestions?
Indeed. You might notice too that I skipped over the "PB owning GGF" part in the conspiracies section very briefly. To muddy the waters even more it emerged trading was stopped on GGF shares at one point after suspicions of insider trading.

Honestly? I cant put an opinion to that angle yet: probably I'll either update or re-blog once things start to clear up. It's an important thread for certain (maybe the most important?) but one too many for the moment :P

Lots of thanks for the link, more material to wade through :)
If you're not profitable then given the current state of the economy you're probably barking up the wrong tree. Most of the buying of startups happens in a bull market, so unless you have undeniable potential then there's a large chance that you'll be disappointed. Think of it like this: if you, the founders, want to dump it then why do you think any company would have enough faith to buy you?
Architecture, design and inspiration from nature
Company hashtags could drown Twitter in spam
My proposal to create a new banking system
Either way people are going to think that they might be, fueling a speculative market on ebay. Wait to see if you can get more than the refund value on there and then dump them and try and make a profit.
Magnetic reversal of photons using nano-mirror (physorg jan 2007)
Interesting. I think where the author writes "reentrancy" they may mean idempotency instead.

I haven't thought about the "kill the whole pipeline" approach before, but it doesn't really seem that different from one of my standard techniques, which is to flag any data that was gathered under error conditions so it can be kept but reviewed for cause. Shutting down the whole process seems like it might be a hard sell to non-technical stakeholders, but I would absolutely operate that way in all non-production environments.
GigaOM: Is it time up for plasma TV's ?
Maybe it's my cheap little speakers (or my ears), but the audio is horrible. The reverb drowns out what he's saying when turned up loud enough to hear his voice. Anyone know any ways to improve the quality a bit?

I watched the first few minutes and his talk seems quite good. I'd like to be able to watch the whole thing, but it's such a chore to hear what he's saying.
Why would be the price be higher when the supply is abundant? I'd have thought it would be a lot harder to find an Elvis ticket 32 years later.

And looking on eBay, Elvis tickets are worth quite a bit more than suggested - several hundred dollars, competitive with MJ tickets (I compared completed listings). One factor in favor of Jackson tickets is that the generation that cared most for Elvis is that much older and probably doesn't use eBay as much.
Which is too bad, because it really encumbers implementing something truly novel. To be realistically useful, a tool needs to integrate with existing tools and standards, but that's a lot of work.

"I estimate that 90-95% of the work in Plan 9 was directly or indirectly to honor externally imposed standards." - Rob Pike, "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" (http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/rob/utah2000.pdf)
As long as they don't throw out the underlying idea that data can be deconstructed then reorganized into a form that adheres to mathematic principles, set theory and predicate logic in the case of RDBMS's, and from that you can perform logical operations on it that allow you to derive new, additional information from it. I think that was the major breakthrough of Relational Theory, hopefully that is built on, rather than thrown out.

Speaking of which, Chris Date, Hugh Darwen and some others were talking about a significant extension or evolution of the relational database, called the transrelational database, several years ago. Anyone heard of any progress on that front lately?
I just saw that moonfruit gave away an iPod Touch to a "creative" entry where a girl made a youtube song about moonfruit. Interesting development because at least this was more than a random giveaway, it actually took some effort.
Facebook Connect Increases Registrations By Up To 300%?
Wimbledon Semi Finals Live Stream
Some impressive number here, particularly:

"sites that use Facebook Connect as an alternate to account registration have seen a 30-200% increase in registration on their sites."

Has anyone here done this with their site? Are you seeing those kind of numbers?
Don't get too excited. The last option is not legal.
This? http://www.dbms2.com/2005/11/12/transrelational-23/
Chyrp v2.0 released
I've been working on this project as a hobby for years, and finally reached a major milestone today. Version 2.0 has been in the making for a very long time, constantly improving and stabilizing. I'm very happy to finally have it out the door. I hope some of you guys will find it useful. :)
Small Business Websites That Set New Webdesign Standards
You'd also want to make sure you're getting some benefit from your refactoring activity. Are you winding up with less code? Is it more readable? Most important: are you getting closer to Don't Repeat Yourself?
The Awesome Foundation: $1K grants every month in the name of awesomeness
Hrm. I had a paragraph of text in that field, is it not showing up because it's a link?

Edit: Here's what it said:

I've been working on this project as a hobby for years, and finally reached a major milestone today. Version 2.0 has been in the making for a very long time, constantly improving and stabilizing. Honestly it took way too long, but I'm very happy to finally have it out the door. I hope some of you guys will find it useful. :)
AFAIK, no one in my college killed any other student while we were there, whether they were citizens or on student visa.
I remember reading Mendel's Demon on the subject of sex differentiation as a means to prevent competition between mitochondrial DNA, and I wonder if there might be some interesting extensions beyond this that could be investigated using such "mega-colonies". I also wonder about the insights that could be gained into immune responses.... just makes me think there could be furious emergence at work here!
I find the statement towards the end that in the United States now achievement has been virtually decoupled from self-esteem to be both true from my own anecodotal experience, and frightening.

With no connection there at all, it removes one of the largest motivators, especially in elementary and middle school when for many people there is very limited pressure to work for academic success in the first place. This decoupling is likely to cause a decrease in the overall amount of work put in by the students.
C++ - The Forgotten Trojan Horse
If we were born with this stuff in our bodies I'm sure it serves a beneficial purpose. It's just not something that we have that limits our ability to grow muscle - there has to be other effects.

Either way, the article was very interesting.
http://www.gnu.org/software/w3/
He is selling something (he claims to be) better - Vertica.

I've no comment either way on whether it is, and I know who Stonebraker is and respect what he's done, but he has a vested interest here. Just like Netscape programmers needed to kill off their earlier work, Mosaic.
If you are using emacs, give org-mode a try. I also keep this todo lists in git repo to sync among various machines that I work with.
i've seen few times on sitepoint - most of them are experienced buyers and they dont want to take any chances - there are many frauds and scams in web business as they inflate revenue and make a story which is too good to be true, of course one should have an eye for it to know that. also this practice is very common amongst small non-web businesses (convenience store, gas station, laundromat etc.) and now it is becoming popular on web as well...
If any readers are interested in this sort of thing, then I highly (very, very highly) recommend the following links:

http://www.overcomingbias.com

http://www.lesswrong.com
My project got on slashdot:)[web2.0collage][in scheme with code]
That will only show up if you don't include an external link afaik.
"using our power of reason, foresight.."

I never said we shouldn't use our powers of reason and foresight. Reason and foresight are NOT the same thing as a fear response. They are, in fact, very different and precisely the response we SHOULD have. The entire reason for reflex action in the body is to respond to immediate threat. The fear reflex is entirely inappropriate when dealing with longer term problems that require thought and foresight.
If you didn't already know that WEP was vunerable, you probably shouldn't try anything like this.

In terms of relevant news for this site, attacks against WEP are 8 years old. Why do we care about this anymore? The types of tutorials are a dime a dozen.
They serve shitty food, charge a lot and spend millions on advertising to make you think you're buying something good.
If anything, this just reinforces the iPhone's popularity. Let's think about it. What are copycats and cheap knockoffs really doing to Apple's brand? They're paying homage. That's all they're doing.
Why does online information "want" to be free?
I would use $1000 to purchase lab reagents and host a class teaching participants how to sequence a short segment of their choice from their own genome - for free!
JQuery Conference 2009: Dates and Venue
As somebody who may apply for a job at Apple in the near future: Because working for that multi-billion dollar corporation means getting to work on possibly the best set of electronic devices on the planet. If I work for a company rather than for myself, I want my work to be contributing towards as grand a project as possible, and if that end goal is valuable enough, working insane hours to meet insane requirements sounds like a fair trade.
I'm a partner in this company. We are profitable and have very little expenses. To really take the product to the next level requires a larger dedication of time and/or resources then we are currently able to commit. A potential acquirer would be able to make that investment. We have essential put the product on the right path and taken it as far as we think we are capable, now it needs attention from someone who can take it a step further.
Hm. I mostly stick to Page Up/Down when scrolling.
Here's why you should mask passwords
They're talking about if you took samples from colonies hundreds of kilometres apart, the ants would consider each other family and part of the same colony. This is astonishing, since usually ants fight anything that is hostile to their colony.
It also keeps the price of the real phones pretty sticky because now cheep=fake in the minds of informed consumers.
I haven't tried it since upgrading to OSX 10.5 but http://trac.kismac-ng.org/ always just worked with the AirPort built into the MBP. With an idiotproof Mac GUI to boot.
Root vulnerability found in iPhone OS, exploitable via SMS
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (Ice Age 3) - Movie Wallpapers & Photo Gallery
United Air Computer Led to Delays at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport
So in reading English, you really don't use the periods. What about period-space-space? Using capitalization for delimiting code -- I'm not sure why I have a negative feeling about that.
Interesting poll - this is definitely not what I was expecting from the title. I don't consider my online bookmarks "hosted data" but I suppose it is in a broad sense of the word.
I remember a beautiful sci-fi stories written by Simak, collected under book called "City". It also talks about ants that will inherit us on Earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_%28Clifford_D._Simak_novel...
It appears you're the main developer behind Chyrp. In that case, grats! LAMP needs Wordpress alternatives.
Google vs. Bing: Bing holds its own in search-off
> I’d say that self-discipline is at least as important as IQ for earning good report card grades.

Or giving a shit. It's unfair to judge one's self-discipline based on their performance in an activity they deem unproductive. People often hold compulsory education in the same esteem as at-will employment, analyzing it as though it were the student's "job," which is an error. Juvenile studies that fail to acknowledge this critical factor in the K-12 experience are useless when applying their findings to adults and general human behavior.
A good tip, but not always an option for some people. Especially if you're interested in using some sort of niche blogging software. (As in, not Wordpress or something popular)

Not everyone has time / money to set up and host their own blog.
That's crazy advice even for MySQL. Having a DB that exceeds physical RAM is why you use a DBMS.
Breaking news presents challenges and opportunities to improve
I always hated visiting comment pages of blogs hosted at Blogspot Dot Com. And I use an old browser (Firefox 1.5).
WTF are those demographics trying to tell me? I can't for the life of me figure out what the No Kids/Has Kids metric means.

No Kids 0-17
Has Kids 0-17

No Kids 0-2
Has Kids 0-2

What?
I'll be waiting for the details of this one. I just love the idea of someone involuntarily paying $.25 to get rooted.
What's the difference between reentrancy and idempotency?
I've never heard of anyone raising money for a feature film this way, but I'd love to hear more about anyone else who has. Can you give me an example?
I built my own: http://www.reallygoodtodolist.com

It's based around how I use a todo list: I have categories for work, home, projects etc. and I add the tasks to each. I use 'Summary as Prose' as a starting point for my journal. The sign-up is low friction - a random key is generated that you can use to log in from anywhere. Features aren't brilliant but it does what I need.
Howto: Grails, REST, Google App Engine and JQuery
Yep. :) Thank you.
You mention in the blog that the changelog for the v2.0 release would be huge and so you didn't provide one.

I'm assuming there are numerous behind the scenes tweaks and improvements, but are there any up front, noticeable features that are new or noteworthy to this release?
Actually I'm currently in the prime of my hiring age, and it's not listed at all, but it's very easy to infer, particularly if an individual has dated their college history (I honestly don't recall if I did or not).
Opening it up is top on the to do list. The private alpha taught me a lot, including that the private part was not a great idea. Keeping it locked up is a huge deterrent. But even that takes a rails developer - which I am not.

There are forums for feedback, but maybe a specific feedback link would be better.
MapReduce (NoSQL): A major step backwards
If it's as as serious as the article claims, I'll be quite shocked. If someone were to release an iPhone worm that spreads via SMS, then Apple would be devastated.
Perhaps someone who would find useful ideas in the source and apply it to their own OSS projects?
This is really well done, and the demo is easy to use. A few comments:

Alternate URL is confusing. What exactly does this do? Can I use my own domain name? (it seems like it will change the Chryp URL, but not sure..

On your blog page the date is shown off the left side of my browser window. My window is 1024px wide....

Looks nice.
Depends on what version you're wanting to compare it with. 1.1.3.2 or 2.0 RC3?

From 1.1.3.2 to 2.0 it's an entirely different system, basically. From 2.0 RC3 it's just the occasional fix here and there, and minor backwards-compatible additions (like `{% url "foo_bar" in Admin %}`.

Sorry I wasn't able to get an actual changelog out, I had the release planned for today and working on a changelog (from 1.x -> 2.x) would easily add another week to the release date.
IPhone startups and VC investments
The need for optimization is just another example of "leaky abstractions." Ideally, you'd just let the JIT take care of it for you, but it's not able to do everything. There are Smalltalk parsers that use lots of if-then equivalents, because these are faster because of bytecode level optimizations, even though using Dictionary lookup would be clearer and shorter. That's an example of a leaky abstraction in the compiler->bytecode->JIT implementation of the language itself. What's worse, is that the structure of the code -- why it's written in that way -- is highly cryptic. You can't write a bunch of if-then in a way that reveals that they are faster. The Mercurial project's implementation is optimized to ensure high locality of reference for data on disk. You can't make stuff like that intention revealing. You must resort to a comment.

I think this reveals a weakness in languages in general. The issue of performance is mostly orthogonal to most of the business problems you're solving. The fact that optimization issues get embroiled in code -- this is something we should try to eliminate.

"Correct then fast" is just a compromise. You minimize the amount of optimization done to preserve as much readability as possible. We should have languages that allow us to optimize without mucking up code. (Is it possible with Lisp Macros?)
Thanks, I'll try changing the title to make it more obvious...
Great post and the comment (only one at the time I post this) doubles it's value, be sure not to miss it!
Review: HTC Magic (Google Ion, T-Mobile myTouch 3G)
There should be a little blue question-mark icon next to the Alternate URL setting that explains it, but essentially it's for letting you have a /chyrp folder with the chyrp internals and stuff, and just have an index.php where you want your site to be.

Sorry about the blog date thing, I'd forgotten to do the blog area until the last minute so the whole thing's kind of rushed. I'm planning on fixing that later.

Edit: Fixed the blog being too wide.
Well, if the ants ever start causing significant damage to humans due to this genetic similarity (attacking crops or even, in a more sci-fi spirit, attacking people), shouldn't it also help eradicate them more efficiently due to them being one large monoculture?
Higher Education Is Stuck in the Middle Ages
"I once went to Dublin for a weekend with the sole intention of eating a banana. I returned with a girl to whom I proposed whilst in Dublin and who has now been my wife for over five years."

That is the best thing I have heard in a long time. I can't stop laughing.
Direct link to the (crappy flv) video: http://68.180.132.88//s1snfs06r23/023/videosearch/88457071.f... (98.1MB)

Maybe it'll work for you. I hate watching videos in some postage-stamp sized box a hundredth the size of my screen.