skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Strongly disagree. It might be unattractive to SOME, but it's probably attractive to the people they are filtering for, who (among other things):

- Are proven to be able to build a business
- Probably have the cash to actually work for equity INDEFINITELY. Most people have a very finite amount of time they can work for equity before they start getting hungry and have to pick up a day job or some consulting work.
- Probably don't need startup education... i.e. they know about the highs, the lows, the shifting landscapes, etc.
- Aren't currently deeply engaged with another project.

Personally, I'm still iffy on the "founder personal ad", whatever the filter. It's like advertising for a wife... I think it'd be better to advertise that you're interested in "dating" and seeing where it leads. But if you're going to go this route, veteran founders with a track record seems like an obvious filter.
Good job Microsoft. I worked for vendors in China before and I'm well aware of their practices...

So now Microsoft have no "plurk" service, why not buy the startup and integrate them into their offering? Wins all around.
by narrow do you mean you want to see more features, a broader thematic focus, results for more cities?
Speaking of which; when advising to use multiple domains should really mention not to go overboard on the number you use.

Too many alternative domains and you will get a new warning from yslow. Every time you pull from a new domain, this will incur a dns lookup, might even end up with the page going slower because them.
What?

The Chinese government has issues with sites containing user-generated content. Neither Microsoft nor anyone else can resolve these issues just by throwing money at the problem. Getting Plurk back into China would likely involve making substantial changes to how the site is run: for example, demonstrating that they can and will take down or block posts at the request of the Chinese government within a specific amount of time after the request is made.
Not really, but the hipsters and scene kids like to think that culture ends once you can no longer smell the bum urine. SV covers a lot of territory, so getting an idea of your approximate location might help. If you are going to be in the Palo Alto/MV area then you should check out the Computer History Museum, the Tech Museum is currently running a nice Star Trek exhibit and the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum is worth the effort if you have the time. Depending on whether or not you will have a car during your visit, the Monterrey Bay Aquarium is an hour or so away.

There is quite a lot to do in the south bay and peninsula without needing to fight traffic to visit that small town to our north. Everyone should visit SF for a day or so to see the tourist traps and savor the odor, but with a little bit of searching you can find a lot of interesting things that might be a bit closer to wherever you are sleeping...
Ask HN: memorization of syntax
A professor at my college that has helped me out with projects before has said that he thinks memorization of syntax is important for first year programming students to learn. This was sort of a WTF moment for me. Is this a common position? It's not how I learned and it sounds harmful. If HN agrees, what should I say to convince him otherwise?
Slightly off-topic, but the article pokes fun of older versions of IE because they only run two concurrent HTTP requests to a host at a time. That is actually the only instance where IE follows standards correctly: http://awurl.com/eWXb3NvtK
Yes, both are very tedious, but both possible and done by other frameworks.
I'm hoping to construct one of these for Atlanta's clusters in finance and network hardware/software as well. In practice, they overlap a great deal.

And I agree - I think that not only can you rate startup friendliness this way, but you can directly measure 'startup wealth' and detect cluster emergence.
Not a bad site, all that's missing is how to get a couple million dollars required for the initial funding.
Blue Security did exactly that with it's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog program.

It was very very effective. So effective that spammers got together and DOS'd them, to the point that they were forced to shut down.

No one (currently) is willing to try it again. A P2P version designed to handle a DOS was attempted, but never went anywhere.
Deadline today to apply for a local news grant. $5 million for 2010
s/library/museum
Not definitively. There are exceptions. For example, at...

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/less-versus-fewer.aspx

...GrammarGirl notes that "it is customary to use the word less to describe time, money, and distance". A limited character budget is a little like linear distance (display length of a message; "140 characters long") and a little like money (spending your allocated character count).

And, the masses have spoken:

["140 characters or less"] -> about 14,300,000 results

["140 characters or fewer"] -> about 448,000 results
No, but given Square's (inevitable) high fees I suspect it won't be used in high-volume retail anyway.
Transform your Jekyll pages into a Rack app
You do realize, of course, that just 20 years ago, this computer would have been considered "Outrageously over-powered, no individual could conceivably need so much performance/memory"

I sometimes wonder why it is that, as individuals, we look at the systems that were shockingly powerful and capable, and now consider them to be "crap."
I have been planning on doing the same thing. My original statement was to grow my hair until ridewithgps earned $1000, but, given the length of time I have been saying that, I am only 3 or so months away from the required 10 inches. Nice to see other people willing to do the same thing!

Plus, with all the positive karma we will receive from donating to cancer children, we can cut people off in traffic and still feel good :P
The Microsoft Response To The Plurk Debacle – Sorry
Cool that they acted on it so quickly, but it makes me wonder what sort of controls are in place in China, and who is overseeing these sorts of projects. It's hard to believe someone who was familiar with the competition would green-light an obvious rip-off ... unless they weren't aware of Plurk or didn't care.
This episode, I guess is the best thing that could have happened to plurk. For all the publicity I mean.
Yep. If you just use the default asset host configuration, we limit it to four hosts, as per YSlow.
It's not just about talent.

It's about (among other things, I assume):

- Wealth (exit = cash = ability to work for equity for an indeterminate period)
- Availability (recent exit = not currently engaged with another project)

The first is the biggie. I'd say 99.9% of people on HN can't say "I will eschew all paying work for up to 2 years and can toss a few hundred grand of my own money in if we need a cash infusion".

Of course, the recent exit thing is a problem, too. Most buyers lock in the founders for 1-2 years, so recent exiteers will have golden handcuffs.
Beyond latency, it's also about the conversation interface, and the engagement model with the participants.
Stackoverflow Careers is based on the premise that it's worth $5,000/yr to me, plus $99/yr/candidate for the candidate, to share that information.

Do you really see that much value, versus simply asking all candidates 'Are there any publicly accessible technical forums or mailing lists that you participate on a regular basis? If so, are you willing to share your username?'

I prefer the latter, because it's a question I can ask all candidates, and it doesn't cost me $5,000 to ask. Nor does it cost you $99 to answer.
It does not make conversation any more natural. Not to mention, that I don't remember when did I have a phone unable to accept a long text and send in whatever number of SMSes needed.
> hairy problems with numerous, poor implementations. I.e. a page on implementing a library for handling times and dates

You could start with http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html
So does Plurk actually get anything out of this? (Besides the free publicity)
Are you saying the Sonic Cruiser was incompetently designed? I'm pretty sure it was the same team that later did the 787...
They get to stop Microsoft from copying their stuff.
How do you dust all that stuff???
The lack of tediousness is the feature. When using Rails, you aren't required to know much about what's going on in order to get the benefits. And that results in an almost universal level of usage.
For the sake of the kids, Rubbish!!! I feel my kids are safer in the USA than in Australia after the recent developments.

and you know, where they burn books...
If it hadn't been from 43folders,which I know is Merlin Manns site I wouldn't have clicked through. He has some good stuff on there, especially inboxzero.
We had a six month earn out. It ended on July 15, 2009. We took slightly less money to get out sooner.
I doubt anyone'll be discussing financial settlements in public, but...
I'm curious: are you implying that that's what this apology does, or that the apology is lacking?
Personally I think you are too early.

Solar power has such a poor ROI that you would only do it if you don't do the math. It's not even good for the environment, since it takes so much energy to make a solar panel.

Basically you have almost no market.

If I could suggest something else, add ground source heat pumps. Those have a great ROI, but are not very common, and it's hard to find installers.
Portrait of a Multitasking Mind
How did you learn syntax?
The problem with the title "Your Pages Will Load Faster With Rails" is that it implies that Rails alone will make your pages load faster, and/or that Rails alone will make your pages load faster than they already are.

All of the speedup suggestions outlined in your article can also be handled easily - easier than Rails or not, I don't know - in other languages and frameworks as well. There is nothing about any of these items that only Rails can handle - heck half of them don't even have anything to do with your choice of server-side frameworks.

The main point of your article is "How Rails can make it easy to make your pages load faster".
You've gotta know the syntax or you'll spend so much time looking things up that you'll never get anything done.
Concurrent nav is a big feature for power users, but for the rest of the world, probably not.

Edit: I'm surprised that this is such an unpopular point of view.
No Pick-Up In Twitter’s U.S. Traffic In November
Microsoft Gives Final Answer On Plurk Disaster: It Wasn’t Us
Really, there is not a single other standard that IE follows correctly?
Russell, this is an awesome and very thorough visualization and analysis of Atlanta's cluster of security-focused companies. Luckily for Atlanta, the emerging convergence of TV-mobile-computer to a single device presents a tremendous need for more and more security products. Too, the threat of Internet terrorism does the same. Great job. Fascinating visualization.
RockYou Hacked: Over 30 million accounts at risk. Passwords in cleartext
I don't get it. It's a parser that does the output in a particular pretty printed format? If you knew that you wanted to do that from the start, wouldn't you write your compiler parser to be a separate piece of code?

Also, banner indenting style is superior!
I guess it's a perspective thing. To me it seems more like you're paying $5000 to get access to CVs by programmers who are dedicated enough to the whole job hunting process and secure enough in their ability that they're willing to pay $100 just to list their CVs. The stack overflow score seems fairly incidental to the whole process.
Google Hypocritical on the Importance of Privacy
Is the physics within the Solar system really understood?
Morgan Stanley's Mobile Innternet Report (Long Read)
Technology of Liberation? Activists Get their Own Smartphone
The only pictures I can find are small and generic on their website. If no one's held it and written a review and taken pictures of it, it doesn't exist.
Android Market past 20k apps (raw stats)
I've never used RockYou's apps but I'm totally in shock.

Not so much about the attack, or that it was an SQL injection. Nah, what shocked me is the fact that passwords were stored in cleartext!

Can someone explain what possible use case permits passwords to be stored in cleartext?
Flash Games to iPhone - First press on my startup - One App At A Time
Go to their site, click the Open Store link, then click Buy Now. phpMyAdmin entry page.
You can see a clear spike in submissions right around US Thanksgiving.
Three pages, no pictures.
I love Google. I use Google. And I would have said the exact same thing two years ago. At least Schmidt came out and eventually said what pretty much every company that has shareholders stands for. Ergo, this is not a tired reference to anything, really.

It just so happens that Google by their very nature already knows a lot more about me than my current provider (vzw) will ever know. And using a phone on their service will increase Google's knowledge that much more.

I'm honestly not much a smart-phone person. I was an early adopter (Windows CE phones) and ever since then, it's given me a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. Smart-phones have not changed much, really. At their core, most are not as good at being a phone as some of their less-snazzy counterparts. That was my original gripe.

What has changed: ubiquity of mobile-friendly content and increased bandwidth to handsets. Now it doesn't matter much. Smart-phone users are more likely to use their devices for everything BUT talking on the phone.

At any rate, I think the fact that android ties to a google account is a bit of a privacy fail, but IIRC Sidekick does the same thing, roughly (though not to Google). Then the fact that by default the calls will go through GVoice means that Google absolutely knows everyone you call, everyone that calls you, every SMS/MMS. The privacy implications of that are similar to Google setting up its own high-performance DNS (that's been hashed over in a few threads here on YC as well, poke around).

Still, with all that... I'm kinda lusting for this gadget.
When you come to a city that isn't found it still tries to display all the metadata in the sidebar, but it's all blank.

I searched for Kamloops.BC and the averages were there with no numbers.

All in all it seems like a pretty cool service. You just need to work on the search and get more data.
Ask HN: I need some motivation. Have anything for that? ;)
It seems like a very cool idea!
The Problem with Software Development is...
Holy crap. This is a little tongue-and-cheek, but if it inspires even one person to start an airline Boeing will make their money back in no time!
It was significantly easier for them because the transgression was done by an external contractor.

I doubt they would have been this quick or this forthright had it been an internal job.
I agree, but perhaps I'm missing something - are they actually saying anywhere in that statement that they are cutting ties with the vendor that copied the code?

It seems as if they are only saying they will be suspending the beta of this application and re-evaluating their practices towards application code supplied by third-party vendors.
It creates long (512-bit) digests, and:

Even a small change in the message will (with an extremely high probability of 1-10^(-154)) result in a different hash, which will usually look completely different just like two unrelated random numbers do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlpool_(cryptography)

I used it for a while, then learned that using a fast hash, even looped plenty of times, is a bad idea for password storage when you have easy access to B/scrypt.
7 Things that'll get you the body YOU want.
Here's a list of seven things that'll get you the body you've always wanted. Some of them are mental and others are actual physical steps you can take when you're in the gym to get the body you've always dreamed of. Good Luck!
While the remark wasn't meant to be taken literally, it's pretty close to true: http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-summary

Part of it is a product of how difficult it is to be standards compliant with web technology, and perhaps I made an overbearing comment, but I'm still bitter with how IE held the web back for so many years out of apathy.
Software guy: "Here's your new efficient CRM server!"

Pointy-haired guy: "Where's teh xml? Where's teh 3D? Your software is lame and from the 1960s."

Really?
I doubt he meant that you should memorize the syntax through, say, flashcards. Rather, he probably meant that you need to program enough in something so that you memorize the syntax as an incidental benefit. Once you've memorized - internalized - the syntax, there will be significantly less friction when you program.
If you have a wordpress blog, wordpress.com will convert your latex to images using this plugin:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-latex/
"Names do not matter, only thoughts are important."

There's a fine line between an appeal to authority and wanting some credibility. Just because I'm an expert on xyz doesn't mean my thoughts are more important, but in a discussion about different thoughts credibility and experience (via a name) do matter.

As for rotating usernames, I disagree, though I would support a feature that allowed that by choice. I choose to use my full name for the very reason that, where relevant, people can review my credibility. Consistent usernames also encourage discussion and help thwart trolling.

Jumping into a class action run by someone wanting to remain anonymous runs a red flag for me.
Tab is crashing on Google Chrome 4.0.266.0 on Ubuntu.
Great idea, lets see those flash games in the iphone, good luck oneapp!!
On odd-numbered days people accuse companies the size of Microsoft of being stodgy, plodding, and bureaucratic, unable to ship anything in less than five years because of all the meetings and safeguards and red tape.

On even-numbered days people accuse companies like Microsoft of not having enough meetings and safeguards. How could they green-light some contractor's code without triple-checking it against all the potential competitors on the web? Maybe consulting an IP lawyer. Maybe hold up the release of the code for three or four months, just to be sure. Get the CEO to sign off on it.

The moral is: Microsoft is sometimes good, and Microsoft is sometimes bad, but Microsoft will always be criticized.

In this case it looks to me like they did the right thing. They hired a contractor. They gave the contractor the power to get things done without constant handholding. In return, they made the contractor pledge in writing to uphold certain standards. Now the contract has been violated, and Microsoft took immediate action, and this press release is part of the result. It looks so innocent, but what it says is this:

These contractors have failed us for the last time. Now witness the awesome destructive power of our legal team.

You can't go through life constantly triple-checking everything. That's what contracts and insurance are for.
Downloaded it- it's actually surprisingly useful.
Also, "fmt" is an old Unix formatting command, which name "gofmt" builds on. There's history there.
And here it is. I have a specific account for only my GVoice. It would, rest assured, be tied to that one. Not much else happens on that account.
Interesting post, I never knew about the Capacitor Plague! Will be sure to remember it.
All hermit crabs use shells, all trapdoor spiders lay traps. I'm assuming that's the main difference between them and this octopus.
Heysoos, the day they cure cancer someone will find a way to criticize them for it.
Looks like you're already getting some great practice in preparation to review-spam the app store!
"you could have typed "else if" when you meant to type "elseif" and vice-versa and the mistake could easily be overlooked as your code would be syntactically correct, parsing and running and doing the wrong thing."

can you give an example where this would make a difference?
I'm a big Wikipedia fan, but I think its corporeal form would be more likely to resemble the U.S. Government Housing and Urban Development building rather than this.
Wouldn't things get kicked out for lacking notability?
Talk about getting your money's worth!
Perhaps they should sue Microsoft for irreparable financial damages... like the RIAA does to file sharers? After all, no one was deprived of any physical property as far as I can tell.
:)

Who said social marketing wasn't fair play? I'm a real hacker news reader, not a spammer... been here a long time.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=rabble
It's an extra bit of information that you wont get from interviewing someone. A lot of people interview well and are good at talking, but can't program worth a damn and they will waste lots of your time and money. I've seen this happen a lot.

The fact that someone spends time on the website answering questions shows they are passionate about programming and might be helpful people. Generally these are considered good traits.

It would be worthwhile to spend some time figuring this stuff out because it help you make a better choice. Good luck!
Steve Krug's new #ux book is out
I think we'll transition to more socialistic system when people begin to get desperate. It's that, or mayhem, and the people who aren't desperate are the very people who can buy reprieve from mayhem in the form of socialism. It'll be worth the cost.
That's not necessarily fair. When I was there, it was a hell of a lot easier to get some cash to hire an external vendor than to get more headcount. Perhaps a penny-wise but pound-foolish situation, but it is what it is.

Also, there are times when a group without development resources (e.g. a content group or an evangelism group) wants to build a tool or a website. They don't really have an option but to outsource its creation.
Ask HN: 6 Startup Founders, What To Do About Equity
I am part of a new startup that was built out of Start Up Weekend. Startup Weekend is pretty much a weekend sprint of software development. The group of 6 is continuing with the company. This has brought up the question: How should we divide equity. My question to HN is what are the consequences of equity division (Further investment, Member moral, etc.); from having 6 equal owners to one with 51% and the others with less.
These machines are considered "crap" in comparison to current machines and what software is currently expected to run on machines. I reckon it'd be pretty awesome as an OS/2 Warp machine.
Impressive. Have you read all of them (that would be even more impressive)? I know a lot of people with incredible libraries in their homes but they don't read any of the books the have...
That's the killer for me. I wish projects that release version 0.17.2 would just get on with it and give us a 1.0.

Actually, I guess I'd be happy if the constraint was simply "don't break shit in a patch release, even if you're 0.x".
I don't think flipping businesses is a model to admire.

They aren't creating any more value than some guy selling a get rich quick scheme.

And given the amount of attention DHH receives for taking the counterpoint to your argument here, I'd disagree that "most people on HN" would not be interested in this.
I don't doubt your a real reader, but your 3 friends with no karma seem a tad suspicious

Maybe its a coincidence...
Well, yes! But it would have been harder for an employee to do this since he would have been violating MS policies, hence risking his job.

Also, The whole thing would have gone through a whole design process involving a PM and a Test, I doubt the 3 would have come to the same design decision (visual + architectural) as Plurk. Also, if the three decided to steal the code than it would have been three people risking their jobs instead of a vendor who was hoping "nobody would notice" esp since Plurk wasn't available from China.
Zero-energy house in Maine
This is very cool, it would be more cool if he made it a public museum. It would obviously cost money to move the stuff into a proper building with security and staffing but would be great for so many people...
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