skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting point. I tend to agree with you. I find myself hesitant about putting my business logic essentially on the front-end. With the current model we can hide some of the "secret sauce" that makes our applications unique on the server end. With something like Cappuccino (or Sammy.js, etc), how do we keep our secret sauce secret?
[citation needed]

This is doubtful. If this woman had lived a month longer, that would have extended the gap between her and the death of the oldest person before her by a month.
The problem is he's incredibly eloquent and it's hard to believe that he's anything other than a decent bloke. It's only by personally experiencing the promise of "I'll check in the completed work tonight" for two weeks that I actually believed my friend.

Also, If I was to in any way publicly denounce another person it would probably have more negative effect on me than them :)
You know how often we hear about this, and yet everybody cares. I just don't get it.
I really love your site, and it would appeal to women. I was just helping my friends decorate and we were looking for something like this. I also think it would be good for small business owners, since it can be a cheap alternative to getting a door sign.

I like the site's design, and if I had to choose between Ltlprints and you, I would go with you guys because your design is better, and as a design site, it should look good.

Overall, great job! I will have to upload some designs myself.
SEC compliance has value for a public company; it reassures investors. It has no value for a private company.
Very fair point and I'm sure my advice is only reasonable in quite extreme situations. Did you try approaching him directly and ask what was up? Also, were completion dates mentioned at all when he was being hired? Maybe he technically didn't do anything wrong from his perspective.
Nominations for the 2009 Free Software Awards
unlike rssCloud, which Winer says is frozen and a "done deal"

Yeah, right — this is Dave Winer we're talking about — specifications are meaningless to him, he'll just edit the canonical version live without bumping the version number, much less telling anyone. It doesn't help that on top of all the asshattery, he's terrible at spec-writing.
Congrats to Facebook (and to the Facebook employees on HN)! This is exciting news and somewhat unexpected.
I don't agree that there are implied contract limits on your use of a CD. I also don't agree that there are normally any express contract limits on your use of a CD.

The OP references a letter from a poster who got his terms mixed up. He equates copyright law with a license/contract. That's not true. There ARE copyright laws which attach to the creative work and that would limit the use, but it's not a license.

In the end, the OP's premise is flawed regarding the music on a CD having a license attached to it.
Given a decent budget this doesn't sound like a tricky record to break. If you set out to build a purpose-built electric motorcycle dragster for the purposes of setting land speed records (as opposed to this, which actually looks like a street-usable vehicle), it should be possible to get up to 200 mph without too much difficulty.

By comparison, you can stroll down to your local Suzuki dealer, plonk down a mere $14,000 for a Habayusa, and ride away at 188 mph, or 206 mph if you remove the limiter.

Hmmm, anyone got a couple of million spare and want to sponsor an electric motorcycle land speed record attempt?
Okay I understand where you're coming from. I'm really curious though, what were some of the bugs that showed up? Were they easy to fix or did they require adding a lot of special cases and patchwork to the code?
The rssCloud reference implementation runs on Frontier, which Dave Winer wrote himself in C. I am very curious to see how long before we see an exploit.
The reason that they're considered too big to fail is the % of the market they represent and to a lesser extent the actual dollar numbers. This being said I think you'll find that if you look at both the actual numbers and percentages they have been growing in a number of metrics especially after the consolidation/failure of those like Bear Stearns and Merrill.
PSHB doesn't have the David Winer ego feature that RSSCloud supports.
Is there any way to do this without changing the user Apache runs as? I'm having problems with that...
Yes, but somehow that does not hold. These 'oldest person in the world dies' reports are coming with quite a high frequency.

It may have something to do with their newfound status, all the excitement around being the oldest person in the world can't be too good for the health of the oldest person in the world.

To increase the frequency a bit further there is the 'oldest person', the 'oldest female' and the 'oldest male' (this doubles the number of reports).

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

This year alone there have been three such reports.

It's also a fact that someone has to be the oldest, who it is is not that important.

Just like the tallest tree in the forest is not very significant, it's just another way to look at the bell curve, there will be a few short trees and a few of them will be tall, most of them will be in the middle.
Open Source Robotics would rely on having access to lathes, milling machines, electronics equipment, etc. that most interested people don't have.

There are cottage industries of hobbyists that will supply the electronics and sensors at very reasonable cost, but the high cost items are always the mechanical bits.

The thing with hobby robotics is that it's very easy to build something simple; the problem is once you go beyond a little rugrat robot that scurries around the living room avoiding obstacles and annoying the cat, the next stage requires vastly more resources and a lot of commitment.

My personal problem is that I have the resources (lots of tools and misc. electromechanical hardware in my "lab"); I just don't have the time to build something I would think of as "cool."

Having a day job where I write code for complex moving mechanisms takes away from the "cool factor" of anything I have time to do at home :-(
Facebook Launches Its Own Labs Product, Called Prototypes
Agreed. That bit sounded a bit pathetic when the issues were clearly technical and not ideological.

Are we really to believe that EY would have facilitated GitHub's growth had the repos remained overwhelmingly Ruby?
Indeed. There was an article posted here not long ago about Dubai which included a photo of a solid gold Mercedes. This car is understated by Dubai standards.
Except for the incredible price of EY, of course.

It's probably coincidence, but I noticed that all of those other beginning technologies you mention are cheaper than the next step up. Not so with Engine Yard.

It's like buying a Porsche, realizing you need more seats, and then switching to a nice, reliable, high-end Civic.
It looks like they're made in Poland, which probably keeps the cost down a lot.
This hits home right now. I'm traveling more and reading less, because I hate carrying books in my bags. I love the idea, but I can't get over the cost for a limited use device. Especially when you can get a netbook for the same price. Is the netbook as convenient for reading - no, but it can do the job.

At $300, I can't convince myself to take the plunge. $200 I could probably convince myself, and at <$150 I'd have the Kindle already.
@yan I had a number of conversations with him, in all of which which he seemed like a really nice guy and perfectly reasonable. Each time he assured me that he had every intention of finishing the work, and there was only a few hours left.

He knew very well that the work was meant to have been completed in seven days. He explained to me that the project had overrun because my friend supplied the artwork late. Which was a perfectly valid explanation for 1 week of overrun. The other 6 weeks, however, are not so clear...
Exactly, thanks for posting this (you beat me to it).

It's not that we need to constantly respond to every Tornado post with a Twisted rebuttal - but it is appropriate to respond to articles the contain FUD and demonstrate far less elegant, far more verbose, non cross-platform solutions.
'Chip-Tune' Music - Now on display in Philly
Interesting. Thanks for the link.

Although I'm not convinced from the results of one study, now I understand what the genesis of the original comment was.

Evolution is a fascinating subject. I think it would be neat if all our schools taught 12 years of Reading, Writing, Arithmetic and Evolution.
When you're trying to communicate a handful of pixels of information why send the entire (complex) vector file?
"I usually sit back and just watch the show."

Were that always an option. :)
infoworld.com is on the banned domains list for exactly this reason
so....what's excellent about it.... or do you mean you find it useful to use?

i'm personally very cautious about introducing "magic" and "voodoo" into my repositories. i many times have to tweak libraries (add features, fix bugs), so it's worth them making sense without me having to refactor them first (i did this with qunit, tho...it's hard to generalize, eh?).

more importantly, it's important to me that new developers ramp up fast. there's something about collaboration that many lone programmers don't grok. similarly, the code must make sense to me next month. extensibility and maintainability are almost inversely related to voodoo and magic.

good abstraction, handling complexity through elegance, now these are worth having.

it can be quite hard separating good programming from bad. it is even harder when the work itself is complex in nature, although that is when good programming really shines.
"We’ve attracted over 1.5 million users, found over $300 million in savings, managed $50 billion in assets, and helped people track nearly $200 billion in purchases."

I'm not sure I would sell - $170m seems rather low. Furthermore, they have so much room for expansion, which only will be crippled by working under a tax software company. They might be trying to automagically do your taxes for you, but they don't have enough relevant information without having it to be the same hassle as using the software.
I do something similar. I use LeechBlock, an add-on for Firefox. I have it set to let me view sites, such as HN, before 7:30 (a reward for getting in early), during lunch (hopefully, that means between 11:30-Noon:30), and after 4:30 (brain is probably mush at this point anyways). LeechBlock even lets you redirect to a different site instead of a blacklisted one. I picked my companies web site. I must say, I have conditioned myself doing this. The urge to check time-sinks have dropped significantly since I have been doing this.

After reading this, I feel editing /etc/hosts is a better option.
I love that Datamapper will build a working database from nothing just given the class definitions; no migrations, no schema definitions, just a URL to the database instance. Database access with Datamapper is completely frictionless, unlike with AR.
One Year Ago Today - Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Filed for Bankruptcy
I just realized it had been a year to the day, and posted this for the purpose of reflection.
Thoughts?
Right on. The YC experience is worth so much more than just $15k-25k. It's like giving some stock to part time consultants. Except the consultants are none other than PG, Jessica and Trevor, and they pay you $15-25k! Then you also get the seal of approval and doors instantly open. And you get to learn from others' mistakes and triumphs as you see first hand 20+ other startups thrive and die. Plus you get access to the YC alum network.

PLUS, there are virtually no costs of the YC process. You fill out an application: 1-2 hours. You interview: 10 minutes + travel time. You fill out some paperwork: 3-4 hours. Boom, you get a check and have a Delaware corporation. Maybe you don't get in and you're out a few hours of work.

Compare that to the fundraising process with anyone else. Of course, I'm preaching to the choir here. But I just wanted to add another data point.
Adobe to buy Omniture for $1.8 billion
They're dying due to selection bias.
No, I'm sorry, but none of what you wrote is correct.

The color fringing is due to an effect similar to a diffraction grating. It's caused by light bending as it travels near an edge (like a prism makes a rainbow by bending light). Chromatic aberration exists, but has nothing to do with the color fringing.

The color fringes on the icon are clearer because an LCD monitor actually has 3 times as many pixels as the typical count. It has 3 pixels for each normal pixel: one for Red, Green, and Blue.

These images make use of that, to basically have 3 times the resolution of an ordinary image. So smaller details are now visible.

It doesn't work on CRT's (it actually looks worse). And it only works on LCD's if the order of the sub-pixels is the same as what the author expects.
I would love to understand what the 300 million number actually means. Does that mean they've signed up 300 million users but only half are active or some other percentage or do they actually have 300 million active users..?

Active = logs in once a week?
Tcl is an incredibly underestimated language. The Ruby guys go crazy for Shoes; Tcl/Tk had Starkits years ago which do way more. Concurrency is all the rage - see how efficiently the Tcl VM can run as many interpreters as you want (tho' you can have threads if you want them too), forget Python's GIL. The Lisp crowd talk about macros as their killer advantage - Tcl makes adding new constructs trivial (everyone implements their own do...while in a few lines of code). Distributed computing - Tcl securely exchanges Tcl scripts as easily as data, send some processing off and get it back, or build a rich GUI control on the fly and send it to someone's screen, it'll run there and send only the data back to you.

I never understood why Tcl wasn't wildly popular. Even now it suffers from a reputation as an "old" language, when its VM is up there with the best of them.
Stock Prices: LEH -
Sept 15th 2008: $49.37/share --> Sept 15th 2009: $00.13/share
I believe it's the number of users who have logged in in the last month.
There is also a problem with it, see the wikipedia entry on "outbreeding depression".
And they just launched. Well spotted!
That's very cool, but it feels like he cheated by not having the train running on actual tracks.

I know, I'm nit-picking, but the level of craftsmanship I regularly see via the web has caused me to become jaded.
Children are have lighter eyes (and everything else) than adults. It's a sign of youth.
The author doesn't seem to distinguish between qualitative and quantitative difference in computation. His criticism doesn't really address the argument he quoted. The reference to IQ test distribution is not a particularly good analogy, as his opponent was speaking about limits of intelligence.

It is also worth mentioning that the notion of superintelligence is at odds with Church thesis. Which, while can't be proven, is widely accepted and is a cornerstone of computer science as we know it. Personally I think there's a better chance of breaking light speed barrier than of intelligence capable of what human (or hypothetical "ordinary AI") inherently can't.
This data can be misleading. Girls probably get way more messasges and guys send more messages. The reply rate for messages sent by a man is probably much lower than for messages sent by a woman.

A man in more likely to call a woman "pretty" than the other way around. Thus the reply rate for "You're pretty" is low (30%, the average rate is 32%). But the reply rate for man-to-woman messages is 27%. So saying "you're pretty" probably helps.
Cash flow + means now web 2.0 ambitions are defensible.
Clearwire flips the switch on WiMax network in Silicon Valley
Realtime discovery of coupons and freebies
Freezly.com provides a real-time tracker of giveaways, sweepstakes, deals and coupons on the Internet. Rather than searching thousands of web sites, Freezly.com takes advantage of the information shared by the rapidly growing Twitter community to discover free and discounted stuff.
amazing, 300 million people can see something I can't. Am I the only person working in the tech field not to have facebook?

Congratulations indeed, what an amazing scaling success story. Every statistic I read about them is staggering.
There's was a great article I red once, maybe on Less Wrong (their site search sucks, I can't find anything) about a rare brain disorder.

I think it was genetic and only hit the more primitive parts of the brain, while the most recently evolved and most rational part were unaffected.

Would this make you extra smart? It turns out no, but it does seem to make you pathologically friendly what ever that means.

So the human brain is in fact a carefully balanced combination of reason and instinct. Remove the primitive animal instincts and emotions and the result is not super smart, but surprisingly dumb.

And this means a super intellect can not simply be pure reason or just a lot of reason. It will not at all be easy to come up with smarter then Human AI.

And what if when we do have super smart AI, it takes a zen attitude towards existence, and just doesn't care much for existence itself? I don't mean our existence, but it's own. After all there is a sad correlation between higher then average human intellect and depression and suicide.
Interesting.

So far I see nothing that makes Sinatra more appealing or useful than Ramaze, and some thing that make it less so.

The curious thing is that on the one hand Sinatra gets described as a "framework", and on other other hand there's a great deal of BYOC (bring your own code).

That's fine, and something I tedn to prefer, but if I really want lightweight microstuff I'd start with a plain Rack app, and if I need more I'd convert it into a Ramaze app.

I do like how Sinatra auto-maps the REST verbs, but basically it comes off more as Rack middleware with a cheering section than an actual Web framework, micro or otherwise.

(also, Hey Chris!)
How do we know that nobody 10,000 years ago had blue eyes? Er, well, of course it's impossible to _know_, but what leads us to conclude that nobody 10,000 years ago had blue eyes? Anyone know?

Edit: posted this before I saw the other thread and the excellent answer here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=824543
My mistake.
Actually, I was really disappointed. The engine bay shot killed it for me, those K&N filters on top of the rocker covers, silly anodised aluminium pressure fittings and the crazy angled radiator support just lack symmetry and grace.

The whole thing says to me that it was a whole lot of work, for not a whole lot of excellence.

Still though, I bet it goes faster than my car.
Facebook stopped measuring inactive users a long time ago. Anything you hear out of them refers to active users.
As the YC FAQ states: "Half (maybe more) of the startups we fund don't need the money. ..."

I'd really like to be a part of YC someday soon–and I definitely wouldn't need the money. My problem is finding time to be away from my current company long enough to focus on and launch a new idea.

When I read that Sarah Lacy comment last night, I thought it was one of the more short-sighted comments I'd read on TC. Is that par for the course for her?
the majority of websites quote user numbers as the total number of users who have signed up (ourselves and myspace included, if i remember correctly) -- it's pretty standard. facebook goes out of their way to understate their numbers (compared to everyone else) and only talk about the total number of active users.
"Earlier this year, we said we expected to be cash flow positive sometime in 2010, and I'm pleased to share that we achieved this milestone last quarter"

Interesting.
CitySourced Lets You Report Pot Holes And Graffiti On The Go
It's called Sub-pixel rendering.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-pixel_rendering

And google it also, there are many sites that explain it, so I won't repeat them.

It only works on LCD's, and the order of the sub-pixels on your LCD has to match the authors.

There is an option you can set to tell your OS to use sub-pixels when anti-aliasing fonts.

Basically for each pixel, there are actually 3, one for each of red, green, blue. By using this, you can increase the horizontal resolution by a factor of three (more or less).

Horizontal resolution, because most LCD's have the three sub-pixels in a horizontal row.
it's only unexpected if you've been solely listening to the "facebook sucks" and "facebook is a bubble" bandwagon that seems to be particularly prominent here on HN. there's been tons of news about their high revenue numbers lately and they've been approaching cash-flow positive for a long time now.
If the article is accurate, then the device itself claimed that it supported on-device encryption when it communicated with Exchange.

I don't know about the marketing materials, but for the past year, the software itself has made the claim.
So approx. the equivalent of the entire US population is active on Facebook?
You seem to be saying that circles are not subtypes of ellipses. That circleness is just a property of ellipses. If we accept that then the whole issue is moot, and substitutability is true by tautology.

A circle is a triple: (x,y,radius). An ellipse is a 5-tuple: (x,y,major,minor,angle).

Maybe we should be talking about angle instead? It can't be derived from a circle. What happens when you feed a circle to selectEllipsesByAngle()?
It may not be a question of 'can't' or 'can', it may be a question of how fast.

Someone that can solve complicated puzzles quickly is perceived as smarter than someone who can solve those very same puzzles but slower.

Even though to all practical intents and purposes they would be equally intelligent.

All the tests by which we measure ourselves have a time limit associated with them. Society is quite biased against 'slow' people, even though they may be just as smart as the rest.

I'm skeptical about claims that we will be able to engineer an intelligence that is 'smarter' than we are, but I'm open to the possibility that we can engineer one that is as intelligent as we are but simply much faster.

I don't expect that to happen any time soon though (soon as in the next 50 to 200 years or so), and maybe we won't be able to do this at all.

But one small fact about our ability to make tools to make things that we can not make is visible in the semiconductor industry, where we have made computers that make the next generation chips, and so on. If you wanted to re-start today from 1970's technology with all the knowledge that we have about making chips it would still take quite a bit of time to get us back to the present state of the art.

Maybe something similar holds for 'intelligence', that once you achieve a certain base level of intelligence that runs faster than our own and so can try many more avenues than we are capable of that might yield results faster and lead to incremental improvements in the functioning of this intelligence over time.

One big factor here could be that an AI could draw on a 'perfect memory', once something is stored it would accessible for ever at very high speeds. That alone would give it a tremendous edge.
"You could say that giving up 6% for $25k is a bad deal, that it values the business at less than $500k"

I'll take it further. This is a good deal without the mentoring, although I can't imagine anyone finding your startup valuable without you taking good mentoring. Who is the kook that thinks a startup with no finished product, no users, certainly no "customers", so clearly no proven biz model, is even worth $500k?

Does Sarah Lacy have any first hand experience at the helm of a start-up? Based on her opinion I can't imagine so. As a person that has been doing startups for 20+ years, I can say its a no-brainer to give up 6% for a little cash and proven leadership.
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