skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i didn't get that at all from this. this talk seems like the least arrogant thing i've read that wolfram has written.

of course he is going to talk about his own experiences with feynman, as opposed to the completely impersonal view; what would the point of that be?
The 24 hour Business Camp that took place in a Japanese spa in the archipelago outside Stockholm in January was one of the best, most fun, most inspiring things I've done:

http://www.24hourbusinesscamp.com/

We were 90 people that worked for 24 hours to build 52 "startups". The list is here:
http://www.24hourbusinesscamp.com/2009/01/vote-for-your-favo...
(Some of it in Swedish.)

It was an eye opening experience to build something in such a short timeframe. To say you have to focus on the essentials is an understatement. I think I slept for 2 hours before finishing the last touches in the morning. Afterwards I felt a high that lasted for weeks. This event changed me.

Here's my Flickr-set from Yasuragi where 24hbc took place:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/erikstarck/sets/721576128250229...

Note the Japanese bath robes.
If we can achieve critical mass (enough people take the test), we will be able to do more sophisticated results. We want to be able to email you a profile of your tastes, which we automatically infer.
I like this theory, but would propose a variation:

The problem isn't necessarily that mobile devices aren't powerful enough to run browser-based apps. The problem may be that browser-based apps suck for other reasons. There are really only three ways to build one:

Plain old HTML pages over HTTP, with optional CSS. As has been said many times over the years, this is the IBM 3270 model with additional chrome.

Flash. Proprietary. Resource-intensive. No UI standards.

Javascript/AJAX. Better than it could have been, but relatively slow (modern JS interpreters are faster by leaps and bounds, but as usual their deployment rate is limited by the existence of IE), confusing to program, no UI standards, relatively poor tools (witness the recent complaints about Firebug), an evolving diversity of frameworks and practices that will take time to sort out. (The term AJAX is not yet five years old, and this stuff doesn't happen overnight.)

These problems, which have existed for years, have led some to predict that desktop apps would experience a resurgence. By and large, this hasn't really happened, because though many desktop apps are great they still suffer from some big problems: They're hard to install and keep updated (not as hard as they used to be, but the gold standard here is now the iPhone App Store) and they're dangerous (click on a phishing link that installs an app and you'll belong to someone's botnet).

The iPhone platform succeeds because: installation is a breeze, security is not much of an issue (every app gets screened by Apple; trojan-horse apps will, when discovered, be unceremoniously tossed out and their developers blackballed); there's a critical mass of customers that are on the same platform and using the same interface; there's a fairly coherent set of UI standards and practices as demonstrated by Apple's own apps; there's the full power of a native development language, platform, and environment that has been refined for years by dedicated engineers at Apple and NeXt.

I'm still not convinced that the iPhone platform will grow to the point that it poses a serious challenge to the freaking web. But the possibility exists. We'll see how well Palm succeeds in using web standards to sell mobile devices. We'll see how well and how quickly the browser platform continues to evolve.
If you can, it'd be great to see the lessons you learned (or even some code) for Twitter-OAuth-Django.
seems much more relaxing than what we did!!! thanks for all the links and the heads up for other similar events.
Some people did, yes. There were still quite a few people working when I went to bed at 6ish, though, and some of them were still there when I got back 3 hours later to finish up the last pieces.

And if they did: so what? It wasn't a competition and if it was it would be impossible to decide what level of preparation would be "too much".

I'm hoping for a sequel next year.
A really good wargames sites used to be pulltheplug.org, I had some fun playing around there 5 years or so ago.

They seem to have moved to http://www.overthewire.org/wargames/ .
I've seen other websites and organizations do this. I think it's a great idea and a great way to build skills.
Much discussion already at
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723573
"They had a sort-of false-start called the MacBook Air, something that I think everybody would agree is an example of just how much of a failure apple can produce."

The MBA is a lovely product. Easily the best of its breed (ultra thin full size) It just happens to be a niche market. It may very well be the same situation with a tablet. Small, but profitable, market. Keeps people in the Apple camp who might otherwise jump ship. This is as close as Apple gets to a loss leader type of product.
For those that are interested, I found the Wall Street series on hulu to be absolutely captivating.

http://www.hulu.com/wall-street-warriors
As the Crowe sings
Please don't take this the wrong way.

I get inquiries like this every day "I have $1k, build me X." Where X is a moving-target project.

The fact is, I don't even look at a project where the budget is under $5k. Every project expands in scope as it goes along. Every change, feature request, "misunderstanding" adds to the time to put together an app. To a developer, somebody who's trying to put something together on a shoestring budget is sending off vibes of unreliability, of focusing on cost over quality, is going to nitpick and obsess about every little thing. I realize that's a little unfair, but that's how other developers are going to perceive your request.

There's overhead too. I have to do an estimate; I have to research whether we can really use that control, how do we do this so that the numbskull apple reviewers will pass it, have to budget time to wrestle with the gnarly Apple bugs, have to walk you through signing up as a developer, getting the certificates, filling out the forms right, setting up codesign chains, helping you understand app submission... Doing a "hello world" app would probably have 10-15 hours just of overhead, and that's without researching anything complicated like how to do SOAP requests or whatever technology you're using.

Also, what I have said, and what others have said: lots of people want iPhone apps, and there are a small number of developers. There's lots of reasons with for this: one is that (at the risk of starting a flame war) ObjC is harder than some more modern languages because there's a lot of crap you have to think about (memory management) that you don't in, say, Python or Ruby. I bet a third of my time is spent worrying about memory. Plus there's a lot of Apple hoops to jump through that forms a pretty high effective barrier for developers.

And, when you think about it, all of the good people are working on their own apps. The only way to get anyone's attention is to pay them more money then (they think) they'll make spending equivalent time on their own app. Either that or pick a developer so incompetent they can't write their own apps, and obviously that's not what you want (but you'll find an awful lot of them below the $5k price point).

If your budget is that small, do what others have suggested and pick up a mac and some books and do it yourself. It will take you a lot longer than someone who has 5+ apps in the app store, but at least you can do it right within your budget.
Soccer-Fun: Teaching Functional Programming
One interesting thing about the article is pointed to a specific, one-way path. Sons of high government official became wealthy entrepreneurs. They didn't and apparently couldn't become high government officials themselves. Their offspring perhaps also cannot become high official. Moroever, they will eventually have to compete with the sons of new high officials, since the high officials themselves are apparently drawn from all over.

An interesting trend and perhaps more interesting than just the simple concentration of power - though power often likes to concentrate.
Kind of expensive for anything short of consuming interest, though.
Not necessarily. What about exploiting VPN clients?

IPSec is a disaster, one aspect of which is having a client daemon listening on an open port for isakmp/ike key exchange.

There's also the configuration to consider. Using PSK or aggressive mode for VPNs can be considered bad but are you really going to deploy a full RADIUS solution just to access a web server?

Provisionally "yes", but I'd actually use OpenVPN, wired into our existing directory infrastructure.

Compare this to using public key based auth on SSH, I know which one I'd rather have for a web server.

Why do you consider it a net win to reduce the entry barrier to only one exploit, one bad user password, or one misconfigured host?
At first, I wished Inc's dashboard section would also tell us exactly what Altametrics made or did. Then I went to altametrics.com's About Us page but there, I found that the BuzzWords:English ratio approaches 1 (seriously, go read it).

The best I can do is "We write software that helps restaurants become more profitable by controlling costs"
Exactly. We're talking about download ratios, not sheer number of apps available. And the total numbers are extremely lopsided in favor of free apps.
$700 is probably optimistic, especially for the first generation.
This was great fun to do, and I am planning to keep http://qitika.com/news going, 24 hours is just enough time to build a foundation and get a concept together...the hardest part of course is keeping the momentum going....
Another context where you can take part in sandboxed, organised hacking contests -- sort of -- is some ARGs (alternate reality games). I've not seen anything recent that involved true hacking skills, but sometimes there can be some wonderfully fun puzzles (you know, beyond guessing that a fictional character's password is the name of their fictional pet). Laying the trail for these is also fascinating work.
The problem starts before the leaky abstraction. It is putting a bad or mal-fitting model over a problem to make it easier for non-experts to work with the tool.

This is a commonly-made mistake and comes in the form of using a GUI for large documentation project that is really batch underneath, putting a nice GUI on a commercial application that is high-throughput when done on green screen or equivalent, using a big hairy IDE when vi or emacs will be higher throughput, using a mouse when the keyboard is demonstrably faster.

Seems like we need a good treatise on how adding features or layers weakens rather than strengthens a tool. This article shows one of the perils.
Hm well professor is not exactly middle class either... Actually children of professors are probably the best prepared to make a great career more than anyone else. Parents with connections, lots of knowledge and more time than people working in the industry - that's the perfect mix. I know a few sons of professors, they just surf through life.
Fiction again?
Are your dreams more real than reality?
You're not doing a real favor to science.

Science always has to be concrete and repeatable (as you well know).
You already make my head ache, really badly...

Please remember: science can reach only that far, it has real limits, which nobody is able to extend, and which we all need to respect.

P.S: The principle of any life in Nature is called it's soul, which is invisible, and which only lasts as long as the life persists. So, every plant has its (simple) soul, and science until now has no clue whatsoever what even the simplest form of these souls are consisting of -- as they are, in fact, outside of our physical universe...
It sounds like a cool idea, but when I started actually looking at the interface, I thought: "god, I'd rather code than use that".

Not sure who the target user is, to be honest. Coders want the power of code; non-coders, IMO, won't cope well with something like this as you still have to think in a codey kind of way.
Hate to be a jerk, but I really don't see what <address> adds over <div class="address">

It is was an actual microformat for addresses, that makes sense, but it's not. It's just a tag that implies that some kind of address (virtual, physical, who knows) is contained within. Who does this actually benefit?
He's not really talking about his own comments, though; more comments on professional news publications, which aren't usually fanboying to him ;)

An excellent argument against comment sections on newspaper articles is http://www.dailymail.co.uk, however.
Now is an incredibly cheap time to construct. 3 CVSs are being built in my area.
Erm Firefox 3.5 has been released: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/firefox.html
errmm... does this count ?

A casio fx something or other clone.

The binary was 61107 bytes long (statically linked).

http://ww.com/qwmcalc.txt

Took about a week. I don't recall claiming it only took a weekend.

Apologies for the 'classic' style coding, it's pretty old code. The window manager this talks to was for the Qnx operating system.
I used the directions in this blog for Django-OAuth-Twitter: http://agileweb.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/step-by-step-guide-...

It took several hours to get us to authenticate. The next several hours we couldn't get it to serve requests, even ones that required no authentication. We kept coding hoping that the problem would magically go away, but that never really happens.

It's conceivable that both of us were both doing something stupid, but it's also equally likely that the implementation was not simple.

My collaborator, @ricree, has some refinements to these instructions on the blog post above, following on what he did to get the authentication working. I am asking him to write those up. But we could not, I stress, make nearly all subsequent API requests, even ones that didn't require authentication.
I hope they'll simply restart the contest with the new record holder as the benchmark and another 10% improvement (or 11% to keep it linear and to avoid getting into deminishing returns on investment territory).
FPGAs are impractical. They are designed for integration and custom design rather than performance. Any data processing tasks are probably not worth it. Intel i7 series CPUs are probably a better investment as they have native text-processing instructions!
That's a limitation of the platform, not the calculator. The CPU in the first-gen and second-gen iPhones is pretty slow. There is essentially no such thing as an iPhone app that loads instantaneously.
I'm assuming some of those still employed switched to other lines of work.
It's a pretty solid reminder to all those that claim there is no money to be made in open source and that it is somehow 'communist' to be doing so.
US to increase funding for 'hackivists'; aiding Iranians
> It's just the type of thing that Chinese communism was supposed to stop from having, so if anything you'd think they would be sensitive to this.

You're assuming the people in power in China are communists, which is a pretty big assumption.
I don't know - there was a site back then (died because of admins, not hackers) called, I think, Digital Evolution (dievo.org?) that hosted a lot of security-related games, covering web-based stuff like SQL injection and going on to shell-based games where your focus was to elevate your privileges, usually by exploiting a small program given to you - sometimes with the source, sometimes without it.

And as far as I can remember, they never got "really" hacked. Damn, I miss that place. There were riddles, math games, sigh...
Yes, yes, and the maligned hockey stick graph swifted through IPCC and made it to justify Kyoto protocol.

I'm actually in favor of Kyoto agreements, but please, it's more complicated than Al Gore vs. ignorants.
Second that. I'm absolutely amazed at how in-productive I am in a java/eclipse environment vs straight C, vi and make. It's like I'm continuously scanning either the documentation or some obscure error.

Of course I pretty much grew up in C but the difference feels larger than can be explained by that fact.
It's a bad smell for many devs (not just iPhone devs) when a client says something like "It's not that hard" or "It's simple". This comes from managers, too, and it's a good indicator that the person belittling the work that goes into building software knows little as to what is involved.

You get what you pay for, so you should be looking for a developer that charges a fairly high fee.
I think they are as much 'believers' as religious leaders are 'believers'.

Self delusion goes a long way towards apologizing for taking a bit more than you're giving, especially when you don't respect those that you are taking from.
new mashable idea: articles like this meet http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html.

your goal: pick all the fallacious arguments that can be used to categorize a particular blog entry.
I remember reading something (it was decades ago and I can't remember the source) that said indentured servants, especially short-term indentured, were treated worse than slaves. The slaves were an investment, as were their offspring, where indentured servants' children were free and short-term indentured (the more common kind) had to be freed at the end of their term, so their masters tended to use them up since they would shortly become valueless to the masters. That was also why Irish immigrants (free men) were used to build the railroads, the work was too dangerous for slaves, since they were a substantial investment of their owners. (The last part about the railroads is common in many libertarian books and I think, but am not sure, that it was in Fogel and Engerman's "Time on the Cross", an economic history of slavery.
This pretty much sums up why I'm sometimes hesitant to use frameworks: should my problem evolve past the boundaries of the framework it can become more of a pain to use the framework than the raw constructs.

When it's no big deal to stick to the framework's boundaries, or the framework interoperates well, clearly and easily with custom lower-level code, then it seems wise to use such a framework.

The latter--interoperability with lower level code--does not seem to be true for ASP.NET based on my brief experience.
The old Dark Signs were a lot like that - you "hacked" into computers by, say, finding bugs in the scripts they ran. It was really fun.

You can still find the game by searching through http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://darksigns.com - amazingly enough, the files are still present on the present-day site, they're just not linked anymore.
Network Solutions breach exposed 500k credit cards
hehe... oops. So much for me being able to spot humour, apologies.

In written text I find it a lot harder than in spoken word.
It only took us nine years to become an overnight success.

that's something a lot of people don't understand
The Netflix Prize Comes To A Buzzer-Beater, Nailbiting Finish
In France they got a law to help restaurants. Effect of the law? No additional employment - and - productivity decreased. Why? Most restaurant used the additional money to hire officially people working unofficially before that...
Gambit & Goal
I have to mantain a 1000-line CSS for a social network. I use this specific hack always followed by /* IE6* / , and only on cases of rendering discrepances (for example: checkboxes in IE6 have additional padding). I always try to solve rendering differences by altering the markup, not hacking my way in CSS, but there are a few cases where this is necessary.

This setup brings me these benefits:

* I can see at a glance where a particular attribute is tailored to IE6.

* When I have a problem with IE6, I just Inspect the suspicious element with Firebug on Firefox and look at the stylesheet. No need to open a different file and find the selector there.

* When this awful program dies, I'll just scan the file and delete all occurences of /* IE6* / (not many).

(Sorry about my broken English, it's not my first language)
EDIT: Formatting -- my first time here :)
Just-Too-Late (JTL) compilation
There are "Capture the flag" contests at DEFCON and other hacker conferences where teams each need to defend a machine and attack those of other players: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_the_flag#Computer_secur...
Ok, so let me try to spell this out to see if I understand what you mean:

You are basically saying that whatever is primitive to the languages is irrelevant because the language that has the best libraries will win such a contest hands down because what needs to be re-implemented in one language is a primitive in the other.

That's true as far as I can see, but only for 'domain specific' problems. By running a benchmark that contains samples from many domains it should be possible to average out those factors.

Another way to deal with it would be to limit the code to code written in primitives.

Still matlab would handily outperform any other language not endowed with primitives for matrix manipulation, but that's exactly the whole point of such a test. To figure out given a problem for a certain domain what would be the most expressive platform to solve the problem in.
Nice site! Can you clarify what friendbinder has over Friendfeed? Also, I wished you used OAuth for Twitter, not asking for a username/password.
Cute, I wish I new more about the people who love people who...
For me, none of this cleverness really solves the problem that regular expressions represent for building a large application.

For example, I found code that generates expressions like "(^|)Terminal(|)" in running mono code in a project I'm working on. I have played with REs a fair amount and I don't know exactly what this should do or why. But it's been doing it for a while.

Sorry, but most Regexing should be avoided unless you have a really good reason. Use system calls to parse file paths, use a really parser to parse a DSL, and so-forth.
How to Make Website Buttons that Initiate Phone Calls
I couldn't help it but upon reading the title I was instantly reminded of the 'Babbage' language which has amongst other gems a virtual time feature and conditional threats...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=257291
How do any of those break any limits of science? Please, I'd love to know. Maybe you think I'm talking about Matrix-style robots and have decided that I'm just being silly. I'm not. A simple bot that has the capability of manufacturing more of itself won't be that hard, consider that most modern factories are highly automated.

Oh, as for your soul principle, do you have any concrete evidence, any proof?

Are you actually saying that science has limits because it doesn't conform to your belief system?
Are technological lifelines useful because we don’t want to face people?
I think a lot of people understand it, but they still think that the court ruling is wrong.
... maybe that's all it is. And?
jperla please
Yes oauth is on my todo list - it seems to have settled down now. We are different to friendfeed in that you friends don't have to join in order for us to aggregate their content your friends are imported from the networks you are on like in a twitter client. Also we can fetch protected content such as flickr family/friends photos, private twitter and facebook content that you have access to.
Are you suggesting that the next contest should improve the winner of this contest by 10%? That seems like you're already well into diminishing returns territory.