skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, it would not surprise me one bit if all this mayhem in Iran is eventually found to have America's fingerprints all over it.

Remember the Orange Revolution and Yushchenko (the acid-on-face guy) in Ukraine not so long ago?

Quote: 'an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing…'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.usa

The situation in Iran, esp. the reaction to the Twittering, strikes me as the exact same thing, especially given the US history in the region covertly bringing down the democratic government of Mossadeq. Israel and therefore America want to destabilise Iran at any cost. They don't want democracy, they want a 'friendly' democracy -- that's the key.

It's been going on covertly and not-so-covertly for a long time:

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2002/09/12/Netanyahu_US_should_a...
That's because they are trying to make simple examples. I've wanted this functionality in CSS many times, and in my real-world CSS, it would have made it a _lot_ easier and shorter.
I would presume that since the announcement came straight from the State Department any potential consequences of such an announcement were considered. I also think any propaganda value the announcement may have is negligible if there is any value at all. If they're going to claim a link between the protests and a foreign power I would think they'd have to come up with something a little more substantial than the State Department asking Twitter to postpone maintenance. Could you imagine some diplomat going to the U.N. with such a thin story? I can't.

In fact, it would probably be even more effective to claim foreign involvement without any evidence at all. If they make the case using the Twitter story many people would quickly dismiss it as a weak theory. If they, instead, make bold claims and then are unable to substantiate them due to national security reasons it can't be disputed.
I'm not sure if you're serious. First, there are going to be differences between header and footer styles, which means you're going to have to declare them once as you say, and then at least one of them after that for the differences. Second, this offers the opportunity to do things only once, which is helpful for maintenance (though Firebug helps a lot, in my experience, in telling you exactly how you got this style).
I think you've missed the point. They are trying to show you that you can define variables for use throughout your CSS, so you aren't forced to search and replace every time you want to change something. Their examples have higher line counts than the pure CSS because their examples have more functionality than pure CSS.
Aside the self-response and copy-pasta, here is the snippet of text and in where I got this from.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18524911.600-13-things...

_______________________
MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.

You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.
MySpace will never run like a startup, no matter its size.
The same way talent finds top jobs - by being active in the community.
Well consider that those companies charge $10 per credit rating lookup...

Credibility/trust tracking is huge. Ebay's seller/buyer trust data, if tied to SSN (or better) would be worth Billions.
The most surprising thing about the MySpace layoffs is not that they fired 500 people but that they had 1500 people to start with. Facebook is bigger (worldwide) and significantly more complicated and has fewer people than they have, even after the layoffs.
Just to back you up, naloxone blocks placebo morphine.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=567913
wow nobody using engineyard! I guess the YC stipend would only cover one month :)
U.S. residents unsure about the country's ability to remain a top innovator
I noticed this effect very early on as a kid, where I was often hacking away at some new project or trying to undermine some system.

Some of my ideas were pretty exciting, so usually I'd be bursting to pass on my excitement to someone else - usually my parents. (As any entrepreneur can confirm, coming up with a great new idea is very rewarding) However, I never failed to feel like I lost some intrinsic level of motivation whenever I explained to someone else what I was working on.

It felt like holding a secret only you knew and then letting it out spoiled it. After awhile I learned to contain my enthusiasm and direct it toward making a functioning product before telling anyone... this probably explains why I tend to be much more independent when it comes to my startup ideas...

Working in secrecy makes you feel like you're about to pounce a revolutionary new idea upon the world and take it by storm.
From what I've heard and read, it tends to have more to do with the manager either not working closely with the individuals and/or not understanding what they are doing. This is especially common when it's a non-developer managing the group.

The best measure of productivity is the amount of functionality added and the number of bugs produced. Secondary metrics would be the same two numbers for when someone else makes the changes. Of course, the real trick is in accurately gauging the difficulty of the tasks.
The RADOS distributed object store
I don't see this ad in Safari 4 on Mac.
Receiving MMS on the iPhone (on AT&T) has been a total joke so far.

You get a text message that says to go to viewmymessage.com with some ridiculous username & password pairing. Since you can't copy & paste, or multi-task, you have to somehow remember what that combination is. Of course, once you've managed to pull up the page, you find out that the multi-media part of the message is a SWF... Which the iPhone doesn't support.
First of all, I was immediately turned off by this article when it cited a study from 1933. Sure he used other evidence later, but I've come into the habit of being seriously skeptical of any scientific work done more than twenty years ago.

I may be reading this article wrong, but this seems to fly in the face of Steve Blank's customer development model and other wisdoms that are being thrown around these days. To me, part of putting your plans out there is the resultant pressure from peers to see them through. When an idea is just in my head, nobody knows when I abandon it for no apparent good reason. But when I tell my friends, family, and everyone I meet what I am planning to do, then I better follow through or risk hurting my credibility. I like to call this "going balls deep."
This can't be said enough, especially on this board.

Being successful is not about cool languages, or neat P2P source control, or cool machine learning, or any of that.

That's just the stuff we like talking about. Why? Because most of us have no idea how to actually make something cool that makes us money, and it's easier to talk nerdy stuff than business stuff. It's the "geek dance"

Being successful is about doing something that people want and then telling a lot of people.

I've heard (here) that the develop-to-promote ratio should be about 1:10. In other words, for every hour you spend developing, you should spend about ten promoting. I believe it.

We don't like to hear that, and it's not fun and cool to chat about. Somehow it's not even mentioned that much anymore around here. The ratio of develop to promote articles is the inverse of the work involved! In fact, people who self-promote (like me, or jgrahamc) are sometimes looked down on.

Sounds like a cool book, and thanks for the reminder. I look forward to ordering it with my next Amazon purchase!
Cool stuff, but I disagree with Lance's last word. The public (not the technically inclined) is going to expect "bullet proof" performance, so saying you aren't is going to hurt you.
I wonder why no YC companies are on Google App Engine.
> I'm talking about motivation, not about safety directly.

As am I. I'm pointing out that people don't just see cars when they think of safety so it's absurd to think that their safety motivation would be just cars.

I've actually talked with people about this. The ones who express safety concerns tend to be concerned by trucks and most don't consider cars at all. Maybe they're wrong, but that's their motivation....

You have actually talked to your target audience about this, right?

>>> I wouldn't see so many small single women driving around alone in Suburbans, Expeditions, and other SUVs if there wasn't an on-road arms race here in terms of vehicle mass.

>>You're assuming something about them that's false. The fact that someone is driving alone doesn't mean that said someone always drives alone.

> Uh, you're assuming the opposite? I'm not assuming anything about a particular individual.

You were asserting something about a broad population that isn't true. The stated basis for your assertion is your observation. I'm pointing out why your observations are inadequate.

I know a lot of people who have these vehicles, so I'm not assuming anything about them. I know that the vast majority use close to their vehicle's capacity an interesting amount of time even though they also do a lot of single-passenger driving.

How do you know which of your fellow travelers also do kiddie runs or other activities where they need more than a single passenger vehicle? (Kiddie runs tend to be disjoint from commute-corridors in time if not space.)

Let's get specific. My vehicle carries 2-3 divers and their cold water gear fairly often. How do you identify such use when I'm driving alone, which is the majority of my driving?

You can argue that they don't "need" a large vehicle to do their kiddie runs. (I certainly don't know why taking a couple of kids requires more equipment than invading France.) You could also argue that they should rent for fairly rare "very heavy" tasks and buy a little smaller. (However, be sure to run actual numbers.)

Either way, you're going to have to deal with the fact that they have these needs and acknowledge that their vehicle choice is driven by the totality of their use and your observations aren't seeing that.
Ten Things to Demand From Design Thinkers | Design Finds You | Fast Company
just as i switched to Compass/Sass...
Hey man, got any examples? This seems to me a pretty interesting topic.
No one has replicated her results. Fourth paragraph from top of the section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory#Subsequent_researc...
The Opera Unite API might be the other salient feature what everyone here is missing. Opera is likely counting on 3rd party developers on making the cool/killer apps.

If I wanted to build a desktop app that contains a Web server, why would I use Unite over Jetty/Mongrel/etc? The proxy is adding some value, but how much?
Not a YC company but I have sites on Slicehost and FDC Servers. Slicehost was nice for setting up my first Linux server - now that I've done it, I'll be using FDC as it's hard to beat FDC for the price/bandwidth.

If you can stay under 3 TB/month 1and1 also has some decent servers for the money.
That's an incredible personal account.
Ask HN: Bug?
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=biohacker42

This guy is generally one of the most insightful commenters on HN. Why do his new comments show up as dead?
I think it is important to differentiate between HAML syntax and SASS. Even though both are part of the same package, SASS syntax is actually quite minimal and closely follows CSS syntax, without the extraneous syntactical elements like curly braces etc.

Chris Eppstein, the inventor of SASS has stated elsewhere that one of his primary goals is to make SASS friendly for designers to use, and he claims to have sought feedback from designers as well. See comments here : http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2009/may/20/applying-oop-concepts-...
BitTorrent is for file transfer. P2P HTTP is for anything, e.g. chat or games.
I was about to boast about something... but never mind.
'Reality Browser' matches real-time info to video captured on your phone
Hmm. Weird.

I do remember that the WBC/histamine test and water test were different, but I thought the WBC test was shown to have some kind of an effect.

And then, 20/20 goes and debunks the water memory. Now, how trustworthy is 20/20? And it gets deeper and deeper with one side saying nay and other saying yea.
A better approach might be to define overriding classes and include different stylesheets.

I coul have a .sidebar class styled one way in one stylesheet (say base-stylesheet) and the same .sidebar class styled another way in another stylesheet (skin-stylesheet).

This is a much better way of skinning things than using the other approach where you have to modify the markup and add a new class for every new skin/page. In the overriding case, one has to make sure to load the stylesheets in a specific order.
HN giveaway: SnapTwitter.com to any who can pitch an idea for it
I've owned this domain name for almost a year and it's going to expire soon, so I thought I'd give it up (registrar transfer) to any hackers who might want it.

So, if you want the domain, pitch a cool idea for it in the comments, and the best pitch wins :) You're not actually obligated to make the idea, this is just for fun.

I'll pick the best at the end of the day my time (5pm NZST) and give you my email address. Make as many pitches as you like.

Just a heads-up: transferring to a different registrar (I'm on NameCheap) usually costs ~$5-10.
I noticed that as well, and wasn't sure why his comment (in the Iran thread) got [dead]-ed.
When I did the Ironman last year, I told everyone about it: friends, family and co-workers. I did it on purpose. It was a risk I took, because would I have failed to prepare for the race or finish the race, everyone would have thought I'm a "looser" or "quitter". I used this fear as additional motivational fuel. Also, to my surprise, most people told me I'm an idiot for even attempting an Ironman and that I wouldn't be able to finish it. (Lesson learned: Culturally, here in Eastern Europe 'we' don't have the 'can do' attitude.) That was another huge boost, showing these people how limited their mindset is. It's kind of cheating, because you're using external factors to motivate you, but you need all the "help" to do extraordinary things.

Think of Ali when he was preparing for the Foreman fight --- he used an entire nation to motivate him for the Rumble in the Jungle. Whenever he got a chance, he went on TV and said he would destroy Foreman. He absolutely commited himself in front of the entire world and it worked for him. Foreman, on the other hand, was different, he was more introverted, and although he lost that fight, he was still a great boxer.

So, on a personal level, I strongly disagree with this article. I'd rather strive to be like Ali than accept some mediocre average.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5o-yxwBJuk
Interesting reviews at Web Hosting Geeks:
http://webhostinggeeks.com/

*edit--damn no one likes sarcasm around here
The author emphasises: "Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed."

This is one of those sentences that seem to make sense but don't. It's a oversimplification at best, psychobabble at worst.
Your information is out of date. We outgrew EC2 a while ago.
The similiarities between GC and STMs extend beyond this particular debate as Dan Grossman describes in his 2007 OOPSLA paper:
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/djg/papers/analogy_oopsla...
same here. i've been profiling this past week trying to see if i can trim cpu cycles or whether that's just how the game is played.
For once, I'd love to see one of these things built with a proper parser. The regex madness has to stop!
This looks promising and seems to address a lot of the objections I hear to compass and sass. I do really like the superset syntax approach where css is legal syntax in a less file.

So I will be following along the development. There's still a lot of features that would be required of less to support a framework like compass. There's currently no arguments for mixins, no way to extend the language with functions that call out to code, no macro syntax allowing branching/looping and generation of selectors and properties. Such features aren't needed by your average user writing their own content, but they are absolutely core to building reusable design that can be configured and applied to your code using a simple and intuitive interface.

Anyways, it's really great to see new ideas and innovation in the css compiler space. We all win as these ideas mature and gain acceptance in the web development community.

-chris eppstein (sass core team)
Is the Rock toast? Sun reportedly nuking high-end server CPU
1) You appear to be unfamiliar with the game "sardines", or Times Square. People don't take up much space, especially when standing up. There are 27,878,400 Square Feet in a square mile. Each square foot can hold a person, standing up.
That means in a square mile, you can fit up to 27 million people. (not pleasantly or comfortably, but it can be done.)

2) Police have guns and fire hoses. Any of these alone is enough to control a crowd several times the size of the police force, especially the fire hoses.

3) Amanjeed (mispelled i know) is not known for employing logic. Indeed, the primary reason given by many of Mousavi's supporters was that Amanijeed was too capricious and arbitrary in his decision-making. And when you control all of the important offices and agencies (i.e., the state police and military), politics is just for show.

4) This is incorrect; the Ayatollah did not approve of the election; that is why they have launched an investigation into irregularities.

You clearly didn't put much thought into your own claims.
Microsoft's new Anti-Virus, 'Morro', revealed
OK, here is my pitch...

A Twitter interface/client/search that shows #awsnap hashtags.

Basically, you can play the dozens with someone via Twitter, or just trade (good natured?) insults via snaptwitter.com
I went with linode and used the slicehost tutorials for setup. All good. I definitely feel more loyalty to slicehost, but I was already set up on linode and it is cheaper, so momentum kept me there.
I don't see any reason to downvote this comment. I think it's fairly accepted that both Facebook and MySpace were hiring ahead of their growth. Neither site seems to currently need its entire staff, and could probably run at 50% staff capacity.
It's questionable how valuable those metrics are, considering that a number of Twitter clients follow the shortened links to get the real URLs for their users, which means a hit doesn't necessarily translate into a view.
Funny, I have noticed this exact same phenomenon in bars.
It is just a useful summary of the many academic studies.

The article's links point to the actual studies for those who want the details.
Could you please drop a few words on how you fight credit card frauds and chargebacks ? This is the real and the only problem with CC processing we faced. We could not handle it, so our merchant account was blocked six months after we started due to high ratio of frauds. So now we accept through Paypal and Google Checkout only. Everyone who is going to start accepting credit cards directly must pay a thorough attention to CC fraud problem and there is no any ultimate solution for it.
SH are definitely good people, but are they better than Linode in terms of support? That's difficult to determine and quantify. The only support request I filed was asking if they'd be adding 32 bit instances any time soon, and they said no;-)
The problem is template rendering, string handling is a (relatively) expensive process. I found utf8'ing my entire workflow (instead of decoding to unicode then reencoding to utf8) drastically affected performance (using python).
Good luck to you! It wasn't until this past semester that I developed much better sleeping/study habits. Trying to be a superstar with 5 hours of sleep is dumb (unless that's enough for you =P .) Actually being a superstar with as much as sleep as you need is much, much smarter.

Also, this made me chuckle a little bit, just because, coincidentally, this is on the front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=660720.
Please see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=660795
...It's kind of cheating, because you're using external factors to motivate you...

It's just a tool, and an effective one at that. I use it all the time, especially if I am facing something that scares me a bit.
"those who kept their intentions private were more likely to achieve them"

Or they forgot about or lied about having those private intentions? How do you know that someone had private intentions?
WTF! Is HN now the default Iranian-Elections forum? If I want to follow such news, there are hundreds of other news outlets. Let HN be about hacking.
Another good point to note is that the winner of this election has little to no power at all within the Iranian state. In fact, I think he has close to zero say in any policy making. The Ayatullah runs the show people (completely). Does it really matter who won?
This is a real shame. Hacker News is one of my favorite sites. I respect anyone's right to dock my comment.

But to dock a comment where I am interested in feedback is a real shame. It goes against the culture here.
Well lessc is just a replacement for the sass compiler so far. It lacks the project management and ruby framework integration features that you get with compass and sass.
Well one side effect is that magic water displaces real medicine where it really matters.

Such as:

The recent case of the child who died of eczema,

The recommendation of many homeopaths to avoid anti-malaria drugs,

And the campaign against anti-retroviral drugs in South Africa.
I associate it with the Perl Apocalypses. I think it predated Parrot, whose popularity makes this hard to search for, & the languages I'm surest of are Python & Perl, unfortunately. I think it took place at a conference, possibly OSCON.
Hi Jon,

I was responding to a quote in the article:

"Our intent is to return to an environment of innovation that is centered on our user and our product."

I took this to mean that they are trying to move to a start up environment.

From my experience, layoffs don't lead to innovation or an ability to center on users. They just reduce financial overhead and greatly impact short term morale.
thanks for the waste of time...