skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good analysis.

When I first read Vic Gundotra (engineering v.p. at Google) statements he convinced me. But I'm not so sure anymore that browser delivered apps will win against custom applications.

Most users don't even know what a browser is (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ - btw, this has been made by a Google intern) and custom apps already provide a better experience for them.

The proof comes from Google itself: Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Mobile etc.

Browsers could soon become obsolete for the vast majority of users - who will probably completely ditch PCs in favor or smartphones.

Edit: I'm not saying that I like it. I'm just saying it could happen.
Zero-day OpenSSH vulnerability?
The Overconfident and Unrealistic Entrepreneur
Learn how to implement integers, booleans, pairs, tuples, lists, and trees in lambda calculus (and, more specifically, System F)... and you will be able to think functionally.
"Truth isn't truth if it isn't falsifiable."

Is that statement true? Is it falsifiable? Is it useful?
Your overviews are so brief it's nect to impossible ot make serious comment but...

First up HR. You I dont think you would ever manage to sell this as a web app. Personal employee details are, well, sacrosant property at any large company. Trusting such details to a web startup is unlikely to happen.

Handytree - Im not sure I get this idea. There are a few decision making startups kicking about (hunch for a start) you might want to research. I think pitching this to people as a site to use would be harder than most.

Mathtribes. This to me seems your strongest idea - but also a hard one to make money off. Math education is usually well laid out in the National Curriculum's of individual countries so you have to make sure you focus any lesson plan material to get it right (if you dont cover the curriculum exactly Teachers are unlikely to use it). I like the Q/A methodology idea though - that could be handy. But as I said - how to monetize it is a problem.
I think you should be a little more specific in order for people to give you any real advice.

From what I can see, all of the ideas which you have listed deal with viable markets. HR, E-learning and Problem-Solving(??) are all useful domains but whether you will succeed really comes down to how you execute your startup.

But I do applaud you for sharing your ideas with the community, I've seen way too many people who are so secretive about their idea.
Don't feel too bad, Finland has been (and still is) held back too.

Although, now there's one cable ISP that offers 110/5Mbit/s for around 70 Canadian dollars per month.

That's basically the only operator interested in advancing things.
Google celebrates Apollo 11 moon landing with astronaut on Streetview
A Ruby Metaprogramming Introduction [2007]
As an MBA graduate I'd say these Cliff notes are well said. There is a lot more that goes into an MBA program, but programmers, engineers and other "non-business" people should understand what the business is all about. Saying that, it's also important for us MBAers to understand what programmers and engineers do.
Couple reunited by lost love letter finally marry
Former couple Steve Smith and Carmen Ruiz-Perez have finally married, after being reunited by a love letter lost behind a fireplace for ten years.
Wienermobile crashes into home 
An iconic Oscar Mayer Wienermobile crashed into a southern Wisconsin home as the driver tried to turn around the giant hot dog on wheels.
Wow. I hadn't seen that before... That is actually quite scary!
If somebody who has an interest makes a statement, this should warn you. But it doesn't automatically mean that it's false.
This post is a couple years old, but it's a great read. I understand a bit more about Ruby every time I read it.
"A few celebrities, like Plácido Domingo and Oliver Stone, have had the foresight to provide their own freely licensed photographs. And considering the money that stars spend to maintain their image, it is surprising that more have not invested in high-quality, freely licensed photographs for Wikipedia and other sites. Perhaps they don’t recognize how popular Wikipedia is. In June, for example, Ms. Berry’s article had more than 180,000 page views."

There we have it. If the subjects of the photographs care about how they look on a very widely viewed website, they will see to it that a good-looking photo with the appropriate license is submitted to Wikipedia. If some of the current photos are really, really bad, the photograph that would improve the status quo could be taken by almost anyone. For more image-conscious celebrities, they will still want to hire a photographer with experience and good equipment, but all it takes is a contract (freedom of contract is a wonderful thing) that the photograph will be licensed in the way that Wikipedia desires, and the photograph can go to Wikipedia.
Apple Approves iPhone App That “Promotes School Shootings”
Your comment is better than the article. Thanks.
This Google search

http://www.google.com/search?q=padded+search+results

didn't do much to answer the question, even when I looked at it on my own browser.

Your question comes up as the first result with this search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=padded+search+results+Google
113 Design Guidelines for Homepage Usability (Nielsen Norman Group)
Good link, thanks.

I think this change of the user base is backing up ideas and trends like the freemium business model. -- So what are you saying the link is between Wesch's talk and freemium?
A modern day operating system has been written in Lisp. If you're talking about x86, there is Movitz as proof of concept, but there is more to "operating system" than a bootstrapped self-hosted shell.

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

Regarding high performance numeric code in CL, you have the whole of Richard Fateman's career and body of work to peruse. Recently, Didier Verna did a few awesome things:

http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier/research/verna.06.imecs.pdf
http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier/research/verna.06.labri-sli...

There was an awesome report from a boutique audio shop that produces gear for audiophiles; they were doing some realtime stuff and they pushed LispWorks harder than anyone I know. Too bad can't think of their name atm.
I disagree. SICP uses Scheme, which is not a purely functional language. Furthermore, the book doesn't contain that much voodoo, certainly not enough to qualify as a freezing shower.

If you want to learn how to deal with the awkward situations that arise from using a purely functional language, I'd recommend hanging out with the Haskell guys.

SICP is legendary, but for a different reason. Lisp is useful for its simplicity and elegance. Modeling an imperative procedure in the timeless way that Clojure calls for is not necessarily pretty.
Some generic advice:

1. Read lots of clojure code. There is clojure-contrib which has lots of little libraries, read through them and see how things are done.

2. I will second the SICP suggestion, atleast the first few chapters. Bottom up programming, building layers of abstraction, is a natural way of doing things in the lisp world.

3. The REPL is your friend. Having a really good working environment is crucial to initial learning as well as later development. I would strongly recommend taking the time to set up one of the clojure working environments(Slime/VimClojure/Enclojure) as a first thing, if you have not already done so.

4. It takes a while, but it gets easier. Keep at it.
Try duplicating something you liked about the place you just visited. I cook, and I had plenty of new ideas to try out after visiting Barcelona, for example. Sharing a session of chips, olives and beer before dinner was also nice. The routine slips after a while, but intentionally doing something different after you get back softens the wham.
The Daily WTF: A Peculiar System
Completely ditch PCs in favor of smartphones?

'How do I type up my Word document with this cellphone?'
Personally I find this user experience annoying and counter-intuitive. It makes the links, and the scroll bar indicator, inconsistent, by destroying any notion of "how far down the page" you are. Furthermore, returning to a page after visiting a hyperlink usually induces a bunch of jumping around as the page rebuilds (and often the browser ends up showing some other view anyhow). Finally, it comes across to me as though some programmer decided to get fancy, rather than as a considered solution to some actual problem with the page's load performance. In short, to date I have always found it a flashy hack, not an enhancement of my web experience.
Facebook Dating Ad Hooks Up Married Man … With His Wife [Updated]
The page is lightweight with a reason. The documents are linked to another server with more bandwidth (but with a slight disk problem, I hope it still survives a bit).

More 'problematic' was comment of mine on reddit where I linked to some pages with images. If it is slow, then it is more especially when somebody looks at such a page.

Well, when Clinton was president, two Symbolics XL1200 and then later two DEC Alphas running Open Genera were serving the White House Publication Server (a part of Clinton's web presence). Those two machines did get a lot more hits than my home site does. I had the chance to look at the live logs during the monica levinsky scandal. ;-)

Anyway, don't crawl the site. It is for reading, not for crawling. It's up in this way since 2003 and I hope it stays this way. Thanks. ;-)
Seems to me that it's mistitled. It's only an expensive bug if they lost the contract, and the article doesn't say that. No doubt the parties involved fixed whatever layout glitch or misconception led to the platform test and moved on. Contracts that big are expensive for both sides to cancel.
About as much good as an un-shortened link to a dead site, which is what it turns into after the redirect.

That's exactly my point; you were the one who pointed to TinyURL outlasting some of the sites it stores links to as though that were a good thing.

Yeah, sometimes links die of old age; we've been dealing with that for years and it's not a new or unique problem.

Yes, but this introduces another failure mode, where the end target could be fine, but it could be the shortener service that dies. That sure is awesome if it's your content being linked, and you have no way to fix it, huh? At least with regular links, if a link goes dead, it was your own fault, and you can fix it if you want.

And yeah, sometimes people hide nasty things behind redirects

So why would you want to create more opportunities for this to happen?

We've been dealing with that for years and it's not a new or unique problem

But not on the scale that we're starting to see now. You seem to be operating on the premise that things we've seen used in moderation without too much trouble are automatically safe for heavy use, but the Digg thing shows how ripe for abuse these services really are.
Inertia and momentum are not just different points on the same continuum. "Keeping things running" and "making things fast" are, at least as the author is using the term scalability. Look at the graph of response time versus number of operations included in the article. It says "As the site gets busier, performance is impacted negatively to the point where it compromises the user experience". That is virtually the definition of a scalability problem (more scale = boom!) without ever requiring the system to stop running.

I suppose you could arbitrarily redefine scalability such that problems caused by scale which did not cause the server to crash were not scalability problems, but your redefinition would not contribute to professionalizing the field of web development.
What is the problem with inline assembly? Ever heard of LAP (Lisp Assembly Program)? It appeared in Lisp 1.5 and today every decent Common Lisp has one. The sickest one is in Corman Lisp's, where all I had to do was put parenthesis around Win32 NASM code and the fucker ran it.)
This is great, but unfortunately not possible because I'll be enrolled in classes. Are there any similar programs during either the winter or summer breaks?
Three Innovative Ways To Show Off The Social Buzz In Your Wordpress Comments
Another neat implementation - CSV Viewer [http://www.s-anand.net/csv]
Google to monetize Voice
We are thinking about it. It depends on how this program evolves. If the first edition gets some traction we'll definitely think about doing a summer session next year too.
"< [XML packet full of endpoints comes back]"

I'm going back and forth on this one. On the one hand, it is a pain to go through those steps if you already know which service you want. On the other hand, having that listing available makes the site kind of self documenting, in that you can explore the services available.

What I find more potentially useful is the idea of putting URLs into the XML for subordinate resources instead of some kind of ids or other identifiers. Then the client can follow those URLs to get a user's documents, or whatever it is you are modeling. Anything where there is a relationship but it is too expensive to just dump all the data in a single XML response.

It's pretty intuitive, and arguably easier than just supplying an id that the client must use to construct the appropriate URL.
Having recently been exposed (by a class forcing us to use pair programming) to this, I have a few insights on pair programming:

- Both partners must be fairly versed in the language and methodology of the programming. I think its fairly explanatory, but there is a definite limit to how much of a knowledge gap there can be between the experienced and un-experienced programmers. If that gap is too big the only result will be slower coding, written at about the same quality as the more experienced programmer would write on their own, but with considerably more frustration on both programmers' parts.

- Do not do a "test trial" of pair programming, working on simple projects. From what I has read about research into pair programming, the only gains come from working on complex problems which would be difficult to conceptualize entirely in one person's head. If work is only done on small projects, pair programming will look like a complete waste, since non-pair programming would have similar results considerably faster.

- Pair programming has a sort of half-life in terms of knowledge. The lower-skilled of the pair will learn half the gap in knowledge at aproximately the same rate. While that rate will be different between people, from my experience with pair programming, the lower-skilled partner will learn half the knowledge gap in 3-4 days. This will repeat, and the gap is halved every 3-4 days of working together.

On top of that, it seems to me that Pair Programming is not a good fit for long term programming. It seems best suited when there is an individual who needs to learn about a specific system, and that using it long term lessens the effectiveness it has. Once the transfer of knowledge has slowed down, and both individuals know aproximately the same ammount about the system, it seems to be much less effective. However, since their (should be) a constant learning about the system, occasional pair programming sessions would be advantageous after this point.

If I were to engage in pair programming, this is roughly how I would set it up:

Assuming that there a 5, 8-hour work days, divided into 2 4-hour programming sessions (for a total of 10 sessions a week), when a new individual is introduced they should spend the majority of their time pair programming with the more advanced individuals. While I am just pulling this number out of thin air, I would think 8 sessions of pair programming the first 1-2 weeks, with 2 sessions programming alone. As time progresses, I would shift to steadily less pair programming, with a minimum of 2-3 sessions per week.

This is largely because I am not convinced Pair Programming leads to better coding. I have not seen any real evidence to support that, in fact, from what I have seen it tends to slightly more convoluted and difficult to debug code (although pair-debugging seems to be incredibly effective). I have, however, seen how useful pair programming is in teaching a person. The ammount a person can learn in a short time, while working in a pair is incredible, and can be simply astounding.
I mean for personal use.

You will type your Word document at the office and you will bring just the smartphone with you when leaving to check email, read the news and stay connected in general.
Could you elaborate on what goes into an MBA program that isn't covered by 10 Day MBA? Case studies, exercises, networking oppos, what else? Thanks!
I used to develop some facebook apps. I think in this aspect you could process your network (and maybe their networks?) pull all the photos of those people and look for their face. Facebook doesn't share the "tagging" data afaik, but you could build a limited library of who you're going to be taking photos of. So even if the recognizing isn't very accurate it wouldn't have to be precise.
Manufactured Housing Lending
M H LENDING was established to respond to the specific lending needs of the mobile home and manufactured borrower, either for purchase or refinance.
Except it wasn't a contract, it was a sample server sent as a sales pitch. If somebody is trying to get your business and sends you a machine that purposefully checks for your flagship product, so that that machine can treat it like a second-class citizen, you probably aren't going to decide to give them your business.
Air Force Plans for All-Drone Future
You really believe that people who think heavy widespread use of url shorteners is bad for the web are too unreasonable to even speak to? Dude... alright, whatever.
First of all, thanks so much for your comment. You are right, my overviews are too brief coz I don't want to write a long essay here to scare off people or point you guys to my own blog. I want to start the discussion first.

1)HR
You're right. Personal info is sensitive but for Basecamp, Mint, and Zendesk. They also manage customers' confidential information. I believe there should be some ways to solve this problem. What's your thought?

2)Decision Tree
I am sorry that this one is a little bit confusing. The app will actually let you input your utility of each choices and calculate the best choice for you. I think Hunch is guessing your best choice. But my app will be like a calculator. You have to input other choice and path yourself. You can check out the more detailed idea on HBR:

http://harvardbusiness.org/product/decision-trees-for-decisi...

3)Math
Good question. Monetizing this could be difficult. I think I will just focus on the US in the beginning. Do you think monetizing it by related services like real-time tutoring, and premium questions and games are possible? I just think if parents are willing to pay for Club Penguin, they should be willing to pay for education as well. Would love to hear your comments.

Million Thanks!
"cost them millions of NOK in lost sales"

So, yeah, I'd call that a big loss. According to the article, this was in an evaluation period with several different vendors. This one little piece of Javascript seems to have been enough to remove that company from the running. I don't know if Opera would have liked that company's offerings otherwise, but that would probably be enough to remove them from consideration.

I guess if you're trying to sell something to a browser maker, you might want to make sure that your admin interface works with their browser.
One small click for man...
Can we please ban any TC article on HN? Nothing but FUD to generate pageviews.
Facebook hiring for mechanical engineers; following google into custom HW?
People seem to agree that it is 'too good to be true' so that is must be a hoax. I'm still a little worried and I think it is good to have some IP based access lists ready when things become more clear in the coming days.
> Seems to me that it's mistitled. It's only an expensive bug if they lost the contract, and the article doesn't say that.

It does. FTA:

> This single statement, apparently written by some sub-contractor they had outsourced admin interface programming to, cost them millions of NOK in lost sales.
Also, this job for HW engineer makes it much more obvious:

http://www.facebook.com/careers/positions.php?id=672

Funny, I can't find them linked from the careers site, just as ads in the right hand gutter.
EBay/PayPal report a guy to FBI for posting a phishing email screencap
XML is fine. Custom is the problem. A browser can't read it and the syntax is evident only by example.
IMO 2009 Q6 as a mini-polymath project
Hi, I'm the original author.

Those people weren't "thinking about more important issues", they were being lazy (or just copying what was being done already, without thinking about why). Its akin to javascript before ajax an jQuery, before we knew any better, we just copy and pasted code off the internet that worked, without spending the time to discover there might be a better way.

Because people are "thinking about more important issues", they're making it harder for consumers to write clients of their API, and they're presenting themselves with unmaintainable web services in the future.
What really works for me is just time. Give yourself extra time in the morning to sit and think. The morning is the most peaceful of day and I find that enjoying quiet solitude every day before heading to work really helps me to find inner focus.
they did lose the contract, and it was a big one. there wasn't any glitch or misconception, it was a hard-coded redirect specifically designed to kill opera usage. and, just in case you didn't pick it up from the article, this is opera trying to make the purchase. also, opera is a web browser. :)
If you have to ask HN, then you probably shouldn't.

I'll probably be slapped on the wrists for this, but if it doesn't drive you then you won't survive. If you don't have a passion for your product, then you'll be tempted to give up.
Thanks a lot for your reply. You are correct. Ideas are easy, execution is difficult. I will remember this one.

Sharing ideas is important to me coz it's hard to find like-minded people in my country. This is the only way I can learn from others.
Very true. Follow your passion...and you'll love what you do. There's no guarantee of financial success or even financial subsistence.

Sometimes you have to do things for money. The key is to find the right balance between pure passion and pure commercial interest. It exists, and working in that space is a great place to be.
3T debt held by foreigners
57T unfunded liabilities (social security, medicare)

Retirees will suffer the most.
mass overreaction to what looks much like a stock email.

I was with him that it was a bit silly till he decided to call them "retards" and to "piss off" right off the bat. He comes across as a bit of an idiot really.
Java Spring - or the Biggus Dickus effect
Toshiba Will Sell Blu-ray Player This Year
Digg's short URL fiasco and what we can learn from it
FTA:

'From the get go, the product was not task oriented (as in “I want to upload some pictures and do a blog post about it”), but very object-oriented (an hierarchy of folders, with security, objects, drag-and-drop, etc.).'

This clicked for me. Everyone probably knows it already, but I never got it this crisply until now. There is a spectrum between user and programmer. Depending on what you're building, you can build in a lot of leverage for your users by making your tool less programmable. Apple does this the best.
Watch out!

That equation for the macroeconomy (Quantity Theory of Money) went out of style in the 80s when people realized velocity wasn't a fixed constant, i.e., it only appeared attractive given the small set of data at the time.