skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is PowerPoint the only option for creating slides to pitch a VC with?
Is it acceptable to create a presentation (to pitch your product) with LaTeX + beamer? Here are the pros/cons as I seem them:

Pros:
- PDF files can be opened on any platform
- If you only use vector based graphics in your presentation it tends to look cleaner
- You have more control over how to layout your presentation

Cons:
- You have more control over how to layout your presentation... wasting time?
- Not immediately obvious that what you are sending is a presentation?
- Everyone expects powerpoint?

What do you guys think?
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The new and improved Euro Extender comfort-engineered penis enlargement device is taking the male health world by storm. Never before has there been an extender so versatile - in the medical history of penis enlargement.
Wait a minute, they are suing Scribd for "building a technology that's broken barriers to copyright infringement on a global scale"??? By that count even Google could be sued. Seriously, this is getting to the point where every Tom, Dick and Harry comes along and sues someone. AFAIK, Scribd is quite rigorous at flushing out copyrighted stuff from their service.
Hey friends of wattvision! Yes, it's been a while -- we've been working hard on the hardware. Send an email with a digital photo of your meter to info@wattvision.com, and we can put you in the queue to get hooked up. Expect something soon and thanks for the support!!!
Old-Model TVs Are So Toxic, You Can't Give 'Em Away. Literally.
Car sales spike in Beijing, capital nears 4 million auto mark
How to Use Scheme
Wallace Calls Obama Administration "Crybabies" on O'Reilly | America Outspoken
Apple working on full-blown speech-to-text for iPhone?
GTA: San Andreas PC Game Free Download
Mars and Moon Are Out of NASA's Reach for Now, Review Panel Says
I'm going to get downvoted for saying this but this article is clearly diggbait.
One of my favorite Greenspun pieces, but it's important to note that after the mess described in that article, Philip did end up with several $million, while the rest of the founders got nothing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun.
Urban Hopper robot can leap over 25-foot walls
I'm interested in why it's not working on for me.

I'll edit this to update on problems as they come. For people trying to run the existing webgl samples (using something like utils3d.js) that are out there with the nightly ff build:

1) canvasElement.getContext("moz-webgl"), not "webkitwhatever"

(Conflicts w/presentation slides pdf on the khronos site, which says "3D" with a capital D)

2) context.clearDepth(...) -> .clearDepthf(...)
3) CanvasFloatArray -> WebGLFloatArray

That's how far I've gotten so far.
Much more perplexing to me is a case where their code seems (I want to stress, seems!; maybe it's staring me in the face and I just don't get how they changed it) to break an opengl function: glBindBuffer. http://www.opengl.org/sdk/docs/man/xhtml/glBindBuffer.xml

The specs say, call glBindBuffer with (arg, arg2), and arg2 will be an unsigned int which refers to a buffer.

The reference above says, calling it with an arg2 of 0 and it'll reset. The webkit examples use it this way. But, their implementation of the wrapped BindBuffer method doesn't like this; if you pass in 0, it gives you an error that suggests you mean null. Pass in null, and there's an uncaught exception and an error in glBufferData, telling you that, surprise, you want an Unsigned Short.

In their code,

NS_IMETHODIMP
WebGLContext::BindBuffer(GLenum target, nsIWebGLBuffer *buffer)
{
WebGLBuffer *wbuf = static_cast<WebGLBuffer*>(buffer);
...

The typing of the args won't let you pass in a zero, and the typing on the constructor for the cast is what kills it if you pass in a javascript null (it wants an integer).

And if you try to instantiate a WebGLBuffer instance with javascript -- whose constructor expects an int -- it won't let you.

nbuf = new WebGLBuffer(0);
-> [Exception... "Cannot convert WrappedNative to function"...

You could try calling glGet... on the buffer early on, caching the default value it returns to you and then using that to invoke bindBuffer (just to be sure you're not calling it with something it shouldn't understand) but this doesn't wrap opengl directly enough; it's just whatever you see implemented here (http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/content/canvas...). Some functions, like bindbuffer, are implemented. The others are named very differently, and look like this:

NS_IMETHODIMP
WebGLContext::GetCurrentArrayBufferBinding(nsIWebGLBuffer **aCurrentArrayBufferBinding)
{
return NS_ERROR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED;
}

Heh. Well ... I guess I'll see if I can find an example that never needs to reset the buffer binding. :P
The identity of those responsible has been discovered: http://is.gd/3sLvM
I thought I could add this interview with Hans Rosling (which I referenced on TED.com), if anyone ever reads this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=831958

I might also add to the long list of onreact's problems that the first quote made it look as if I wrote the first sentence ("That's due to technological progress").

Quotation error, too! He he, sometimes the trolls are more fun for us trolled, than the other way.
"The move to an open source business model is allowing criminals to add extra features to their malware."

So now open source coders are considered "criminals". Is it bad editorial or just being dumb?
The Tornado part of the test is mostly useless (and misleading) since he's running it with select instead of epoll.
I love Erlang--don't get me wrong--but this is flawed. He uses Tornado on a system that doesn't have epoll() so it uses select() instead, and then the author continues to show how Tornado will fail at higher concurrency levels. This is not a problem with Tornado but with select. I imagine that Erlang will still generally rout Tornado when using epoll, just not as significantly.
Arsdigita ACS was a cool product back then. We actually used it in a few projects. I remember coding in TCL..
I think I was 10 or 11 when I realized that things can only make the tiniest and most temporary changes in one's level of happiness. (No kidding; it's not an especially novel idea.)

Anytime you're dealing with "doomsayers", you can almost bet that that person actually wants their variant of doom to occur, often for the tremendous corrections required. The effect of a real economic collapse would be:

1. A great reduction in "things" (read: toys) available.

2. A greater day-to-day struggle for necessities.

3. A replacement of humanity's highly variable yet trivial problems with one big, common problem.

There's every reason to believe that the above three things, if not taken too far, are actually a prescription for happiness. There's a forth one, of course:

4. A fundamental change in the ruling class.

That, of course, could be bad or good, but it explains why the government is happy to spend 100s of billions to fight every dip.
On Michael Jordan:  "It's not enough for him to beat you. He wants you dead."
An amazing insider picture from 2001 about how VCs can take only a minority (30%) stake in a company and still manage to twist the terms of a shared-control agreement (executed during the funding) into a vehicle by which to take absolute control and run a company into the ground.

This is of course only one side of the story but it is presented in horrific and convincing detail.

An insightful story for founders who are considering doing a VC funding.
"If for some reason I can't be on the trail I'll hole up indoors next to my air filter."

I appreciate his concerns for the environment, but isn't this taking things a little too extremely? Judging by the comment he makes about the pollution of his urban area by fireworks, I'm assuming that he has to drive to the trail... presumably past houses where people are sitting next to their domestic air filtration systems, in the hope that they can breath air with all the motor vehicle toxins removed.

We should all be concerned about protecting the environment, but maybe a campaign against the pollution caused by international freight shipping may be a better point to start than with fireworks.

FYI ships at sea create more greenhouse gas emissions than the whole CO2 output of the UK, yet there is no fuel duty on the fuels used in these vessels.
It says in the article that the administration at MIT has had a "crackdown" on these "hacks"?

Pardon my language, but, are you fucking joking? If this is true, it is one of the most depressing things I have heard in a while. To me, these "hacks" represented a seemingly long standing tradition of "let the geniuses do whatever the hell they want, they're geniuses!".

This doesn't hurt anybody, doesn't damage anything, why on god's earth would you ever want to punish them? If nothing else, this is bringing more good publicity to the school. These sorts of things are exactly the reason that I daydream about being able to go to a place like MIT.

'Tis is a sad state of affairs if these people are looked at as scoundrels and not heros.
Almost none of the content is actually present --- there are merely placeholders. It looks like a good table of contents --- but I'd hope that some more actual text would have appeared since 2001.

This is maybe useful if you are unsure of basic file i/o in scheme and have some reason not to use a more comprehensive resource?
Jet Powered Porche on Ebay
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/Porsche-928-Boeing-Gas-Turbin...
this is so inspiring... I have followed his research and he is truly an awesome scientist and extremely well known in the research community..

now.. i wish.. obama government can act upon the founder's visa.. .:)
I think this represents a wave shift in the social identity landscape - certain types of users want to share everything, and make that public. Sites like Facebook with their 'walled garden' photos are missing out on a great opportunity. I'm glad to hear about DailyBooth as it's a YCombinator participant. We're applying to participate in their next session.
One way they can start monetizing now is by partnering with our company, PicWash.com. They can add a link on their toolbar for users to get their photo retouched by our professional graphic designers. It's a revenue share model that can help get a new stream of revenue on their books. There are lots of other more traditional revenue models that can be done as well (advertising, freemium, etc).
I'd argue that's what business partners are for. You simply can't be good at everything. I tend to have the opposite problem this guy has - I see the big picture, but get impatient with the details.

I can code (well, sort of anyways...) but the thought "Is jQuery’s $().keydown routine hogging too much processor time? I need to profile it." will most likely never cross my mind.

However, I think I suffer from the same problem in that I'm continually trying to get myself to think this way and learn this stuff, just so I can try to implement my ideas.
epoll() matters.
Ah... The difference a day makes.

The ECC idea could work, but it would be best to build it into the drive's firmware. This way the drive would get read errors less often, could attempt to rewrite the block or to relocate it somewhere else in case of a "bad enough" error.
I can't seem to get "about:internets" to work in chrome on any os. Anyone else having any luck?
"make it work with the autotools" ? The auto* family of tools have a ton of complexity to make things work with non-GNU tools. Automake would be vastly simpler if there wasn't the specific design goal of working with non-GNU make.
There is now, but barely. The vast majority of cell users don't know about it and most people I have talked to that moved their number said it wasn't that easy. Google may both make it easier and certainly raise awareness.
I doubt it. The admissions office uses these hacks as a recruiting tool. There's a big long corridor documenting famous hacks from the past that they take all tour groups through.
So, by "these articles," you mean... HN? Why are you pontificating here, then?
Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy?
I would highly recommend "How to design programs" by the same authors. Such a good read, and also teaches Scheme (as a side-effect).
You wouldn't just have to take away all the laws that created the monopolies, but also all the money those monopolies earned. Right now, they have accrued fiscal resource to the point where they no longer need legislative resource; they can simply buy their competitors (or the things their competitors need to get started) rather than relying on any governmental body to stop them.
The first version of our website was running OpenACS, when we launched Virtualmin as a product. It's suffering from second system effect in pretty terrifying ways. Of course, we then jumped ship to Joomla, which has a nice core but the modules are of wildly varying quality, and so ended up regretting the move, as its problems were even more pronounced and harder to fix than OpenACS. We finally settled on Drupal earlier this year, and have been mostly happy with it.

That it was written in Tcl was actually not among my many complaints about OpenACS (though there are languages I prefer, Tcl is acceptably sane and acceptably powerful).
List of fractals by Hausdorff dimension
maybe you should update your blog every now and then ?

By the way, you are no doubt aware of this, but just in case you are not, there are now also meters that indicate consumption using a blinking LED.
I must say, I love how she starts her posts with "Hello, kids." I was as first offended, at least until I reconsidered what we look like from her perspective.
Tornado failing at high levels was a secondary point. The main point was the performance. I have serious doubts as to whether epoll would make a significant difference there, but I'd love to see someone making the claim prove it.
So why did .dmgs become the preferred method of delivery in the first place? I'm assuming it has something to do with the fact that there's an HFS filesystem inside, so metadata/resource forks/whatever are transparently retained? Or is it just because you can run programs from within it without extracting them (which is quite useful when you have, say, the 1GB XCode .pkg)?
Yeah, don't see why you couldn't use a .pdf, I would just make sure to refer to it as your slide deck in the body of the email.
+1 makes me hang my head in shame.
good luck guys, you'll kill it =)
My Software Business
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It's a lot easier to industrially design/engineer a bike than a car. The work you're suggesting probably would have dwarfed the actual jet-engineering. However, unlike jet bikes, we see real jet cars all the time—being raced for the land speed record. The fact that it's possible to add this after-the-fact to a car you own was the novel property here, not the combination of jet engine with car.
I think the reason investors are so excited is that the users are. Experienced investors have seen this pattern before. Occasionally a startup will hit a previously undiscovered spot in the periodic table and just take off. The end result is almost always good, unless the startup commits suicide like Friendster or gets offed like Napster.
Ubuntu Privacy Remix: UPR 9.04r2 released
Because they get tons of traffic.
And people will start wearing skin tight jumpsuits.
Lifecasting in pictures... what's next lifecasting in audio?
Is The Clock Ticking on Skype?
For some reason cnet pages show without any style or graphics here, no idea what causes that, anyway, a video is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDGP8IBs6fk

not quite 25 ft but impressive nonetheless.
The man who sold his 10% share of Apple for $800
Bingo. If the rationale for the program is to feed the market for technical and entrepreneurial talent, then the program should trust market mechanisms for the allocation of limited visas.

And each year, the cap can be reevaluated: would a larger number have generated more jobs (and auction revenue) without the social costs that usually feed anti-immigrant sentiment? If so, revise the cap upward.
Wow - that document serves as a really good example of the kind of information investors might be interested in.
Questions for PG/ Jon: How many active users, and founders did DailyBooth have when it applied to YC?
counterpoint: http://michael.yoon.org/arsdigita
> He claimed that he didn't regret selling the stock as he had made "the best decision available at that time."

Fantastic attitude.

I think the article actually does him a disservice by stating that it is just a 'claim', that suggests that he feels otherwise.

To suggest that he should feel different does not feel nice to me. I think it is wonderful if someone can stand by their choices simply because they figured that was the best they could have done with the information at the time.

Hindsight is 20/20, easy to say now 'you should have stayed on', when in fact it could have gone the other way as well and he'd have been on the hook.
I think the key thing they hit was, doing what the 13-18 age group want. A lot of startups don't get that because the founders are 25+.
Pretty weak post. Not much to it.
Also, HAL 9000 was "born" in Urbana, Illinois. I doubt that sheds any light on why the author included the reference, but it definitely overlaps. (EDIT: Dennis Baron, the author of the book discussed in the article, teaches at Urbana-Champaign).

I think you might be onto something with the way 2001 depicts communication. I think the film is so ingenious in its presentation of "future technologies" in a mundane context. The movie has aged so well; I think that's a pretty accurate representation of some video chatting I've done, even though it took more than 40 years to materialize.

It's pretty hyperbolic to call 2001 a dystopia, especially if they're referring to the apparent lack of enthusiasm that accompanied communication.

Yes, HAL went on a murdering spree, but if that's all the Rossmeier (the article's author) is talking about, then he's missing the point of 2001.

Anyway, I agree: it's an odd reference. I think 2001 is one of the best movies I've seen (no joke), so I have a few thoughts on the matter...
OpenACS is a bit of a beast. AOLserver is a very nice bit of work, though. It's a pity it wasn't released as open source sooner, as it is a very nice system for creating dynamic content.
I agree completely.

BTW, there's more about this story here: http://extras.denverpost.com/books/chap0411h.htm
Faster growth than Twitter, and hiring php hacker. I would be knocking these guys' doors down.
You need to have the "pipes" screensaver installed.
...Yeah it is. The generation using twitter is not the same generation using daily booth.
He's actually given three talks at TED and one at the US State Department which is accessible from his TED bio page, http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html. The software is using is available at http://www.gapminder.org/, which was bought by Google about 2 years ago.
Back in 2000/2001 I was reading Greenspun's book and was strongly considering applying for ArsDigita University's second year, but then it was shut down (because of company problems). It was a very cool idea and I was planning to take a year off anyway.

http://www.aduni.org/~abangert/adu/
It is not so easy to switch the field. Like almost every kind of business activity you need some knowledge of a theory along with actual experience. That means you ought to spend plenty of time - learning of an alien skill is a very slow process, and that's why it is so boring.
It is very good idea to start exploring new fields, but you shouldn't expect a success which could be compared with your primary skills. So, I think the good idea is to find and hire someone pro and learn from him. You will save the time and money.
> Faster growth than Twitter

Sorry ?
There is a small mistake in the description of the Free subscription : the broadband is 20 Mbits per second, not 2.

Personal remark : this guy is freaking awesome, always seeking to disrupt markets to lower prices. The Free triple-play subscription (unlimited broadband, cable TV + free phone calls to most of the world) is so cheap it's a freaking no-brainer. Before, it used to be an exercise in comparison shopping : what operators are available in my area, are they good, what are the prices. Now, you just get Free and stop worrying. They have a bad reputation for customer service, because, just as Google, they like to automate everything (heard that their back-office is huuuuuge).

If he could get the license and disrupt the mobile telecom market, that would be great.

About the Freebox, the set-top box they provide to subscribers : as if everything they do is not hard enough, they designed custom hardware and software for their combined set-top box/cablemodem. Ok, the UI is not Apple level, but it provides lots of awesome stuff : a TiVo like DVR, video broadcasting, FTP and HTTP servers, a Wifi (802.11-N !) access point, a router and more.
Over generalization of two really diverse cultures, then a huge leap to a conclusion that has no evidence backing it up.

Flag?
They had (and still have) two founders. According to Compete, they had on the order of 40-50k uniques a month, but that may be US only.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/dailybooth.com/

I just went back and looked at their application to figure out how we realized they were good. Their answers were very clear and concise; they obviously understood their users well. Plus they had both done interesting stuff before.
It's like a more civilized version of 4chan.
So how does he manage to cut his prices so low? Does he use automation and other methods to improve efficiency?
This is not an analysis, just a polemic full of words and expressions like "hysterical", "luddites", "hogwash".
I agree that they shouldn't be punished or anything.

But calling them heroes is a bit of a stretch.
I'm not sure people are less happy now than before. There was no golden age.
How to win quiz with python and semantic wikipedia
Task: Give the names of all Polish kings that died in a battle.

Python:

for king in history.sets.PolishKings:
if king.died_in_the_battle():
print king.name

Where one can find such set: history.sets.PolishKings?
No, it isn't. On the other hand there is no reason to blindly believe that the Web will make us communicate better than in real life. This guy hasn't been in flame war yet I guess.
I think this piece sets new world record of over-generalization per written word.
What statistics, exactly?

If you want to know how happy people were the good old days, try looking at old photographs. Most people don't look happy at all. Not even rich people.

It wasn't just that the convention wasn't to smile in photographs. You can tell by looking at people's eyes. Life was hard.
For 29,99€ you get:

28 mbit/s
Free calling to 90 nations
HDTV 100 channels and more pay channels
Video on demand
remote access to the video recorder
Access to 3 million wifi spots in the country
@2gov - Visas for startup founders movement
More Evidence That Apple Really Did Reject Google Voice
There's also a great interview on BigThink w/ Dan Gilbert, here's an excerpt on whether Technology makes us happy: http://bigthink.com/dangilbert/can-technology-make-us-happy