skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've run into nick a few times lately at a local cafe. From what I've seen, he's been hard at work on the book and he's definitely got my pledge.
I must be the only one, but I cannot for the life of me make sense of any of these stories. Every story I read about these leaked emails is drowned in sarcasm. I don't know up from down.

Can someone explain what exactly is going on in plain English?
> Has there ever been a nuclear reactor built anywhere in the world that didn't rely on government to get it done? Sounds like socialism, doesn't it? Hello France? USSR? USA?

I'm a huge proponent of nuclear power - I think it's one of the cleaner and safer ways to provide energy, and I think nuclear fission combined with fossil fuels is probably enough to last until we develop fusion or hydrogen based power.

Anyway, the reason there's been no nuclear plants built without government action is because it's illegal to build a nuclear plant without government action, since processed uranium can be used to make nuclear weapons. I imagine you'd see more nuclear plants if the restrictions were lessened, and I reckon there'd be plenty of private investors to do it, though I'm not sure it's altogether a good idea in this case.

That said, nuclear power restricted to government-only is the reason it hasn't been built privately, and it's too bad it's forbidden from some areas. Nuclear power would be a godsend to a number of areas on the planet where the local ecosystem is particularly sensitive to pollution and the terrain isn't suitable for wind, solar, or hydroelectric.
Sounds better than hoping that victims did something to deserve it.
The Google HTML5 plugin for IE6 might not alienate your audience.
I've been a Scientific American reader for over a decade now.

(sigh)Each issue gets worse and worse -- the magazine has moved from science to advocacy, and in a huge way.

Sadly, this commentary just continues the trend. Right now the signal-to-noise ratio is about 1-10. If it continues to drop I'll have to go somewhere else for scientific-oriented news.

Come on, guys. You can do better than this!
programmer. offline storage, sql storage, canvas, and web workers are very interesting.
Yes, it does. In a privately held company in the U.S., the shareholders decide what the rules are, so long as they're within the law. They have no obligation beyond that.

Edit: grammar correction
Just read your edit. If "under the hood it runs a Java virtual machine loaded up with its team's player program" still applies, then I don't see a reason not to allow any language which can run on jvm. (java, scala, jruby, jython, groovy, ...)
I like the way it shows that the core site is but a part of the overall strategy. An important part, but just a part.

It's also a good reference to use to answer the question "What does the non-tech founder do?"

Well, see all those other boxes? Figure out how they apply best to you.
So how do you give directions? I know you must have a system, but I'm not sure exactly how it works. "Head down to Block 16, take a left and turn right at block 22"?
The Google Chrome Frame plugin is hardly a panacea for old browsers.
Both; and no it doesn't excite me in the least because of such a slow adoption rate of new browsers.
Where did you confirm that these guys use amazon for their product look up? I've been wondering what they use to look up the products and get images, etc.
Yes, I'd be much more interested in better CSS, solving layout problems, etc., then adding every tag someone can throw into a hat.
OK, so what about what the new elements do for CSS? Won't style sheets be more portable now that we have <aside>, <article>, etc.?
Almost all of the HTML features in HTML5 are boring and barely useful. The rest, basically, <video> and <audio> are crippled.

The useful parts of HTML5 are the new JavaScript APIs (which arguably don't really belong). Unfortunately many important ones are missing, and of the ones which are present many are incomplete or broken.
Because the players need to plug into the game engine in real time.
http://www.netflix.com/ - front page free trial!

Type in your email and a password. While you'll see the monthly price clearly listed, you'll also see Free Trial Offer Details in really tiny text on the left. If you click on it, it tells you how you will be charged unless you cancel. Those sly bastards

This is a similar model to the video professor.
On the video professor page it does tell you, after you click to get the free trial, that you can avoid a full charge by canceling. It also says this on their home page. In fact, it's on the right side of the page on every page of the order process up until the credit card entry (which is where I stopped).

Any decently intelligent individual would know there will be some charge at the end of the trial. It is quite clearly stated as a trial. And because it is a trial, it doesn't matter what the full price is, just as long as you know you can cancel. Which you can, by the way.

So sure, it's very likely that a legitimate business would not be so tricky. So the odds are, maybe they do have bad intentions.

I don't have enough evidence, and Arrington didn't seem to have tried to procure much either.

So there is doubt.
I am scared of nuclear power. I understand, believe and agree that we have today the technical means to use it safely. However, I also believe that its safety is directly dependent on being handled by competent, serious and accountable people. Now, I leave in Brazil (a country already able to enrich Uranium) and I know very well that third world authorities are the last people on earth I would trust my safety and health.

It might be a good idea in civilized countries; not in Brazil, Russia, Iran, India, China, etc.
What's wrong with forking off a process to handle the AI?
I don't mean any offense, but how is there any technology risk?

Unless there's something non-obvious about the way the site works, I believe I could duplicate the product in two weeks with less than $10,000.

That means it's almost all market risk, i.e., the risk is in whether there is demand for it, not whether you can build it.

Something that is 100% technology risk would be, say, a cure for cancer, a new type of filesystem that improves MySQL performance by 100%, or a solar cell that is 1000x more efficient than current solar cells.

There's no question that if you created any of those there'd be demand for them -- the challenge is in the creation.
A few years ago, this company's TV ads said something to the effect of, "You too can learn to RUN a computer." I always thought the word "run" was odd -- kind of like I was going to learn to run a cement mixer or something. Now, I wonder if it was an attempt at selection bias; perhaps there's a correlation between those who respond affirmatively to the notion of "running" a computer are those least likely to read the fine print or return the CDs on time.
Both.

Nope. It just bloats what we already have in xHTML 1.1. Sure, I can throw a header or section tag around a block, but I still have to use divs. It's just another level I need to indent at this point in time.
Bought and resold used textbooks, undercutting the campus bookstore. Bought electronics parts and test gear at hamfests, dead freight sales, and from profs; resold what I didn't need to local surplus dealers (really have to know what stuff will sell). Had a total blast as an experimental subject (economics and biology). Teaching/lab assistant during the school term, research assistant during summer. Repaired, upgraded, modified, and installed home and car audio systems for classmates and profs.

A classmate cut hair (which was almost certainly illegal, in retrospect...). Easy gig, and he had all the business he wanted right there in the dorms.

Heard rumors that someone would buy a car at each break, drive it out to school, and flip for a profit. His angle was that the cars were salvage titled imports that had been rebuilt, and his home state allowed title washing, or something like that. I think the DOT closed the loophole that he was exploiting.
I think this is a pretty naive way to look at it. Of course Harvard realizes their MBAs often end up with a duty to maximize shareholder value at any and all costs. Isn't that kind of the point? "That" being to create tension between the two duties and hopefully get people to examine the system?

This whole short-sighted duty to maximize shareholder value is unarguably a part of the problem with modern capitalism. That was the driving force behind the rush to the dizzying returns promised by the financial black magic that melted the economy.
My gut feeling is that the mobile arena might be where html5 takes off first, with the number of webkit-based browsers out there now (iphone, android).
Because short term thinking mode is the mode you SHOULD be in until you have something people want? That cycle is not long - get out there and see if people are interested. Dying for it? Proceed to next step. Not dying for it? Iterate.

So many years of productive lives are wasted building things nobody wants by bypassing that short term period.
The people who need the pledge the most are also the least likely to follow it when it's really put to the test.

There was an interesting study done by the London School of Hygiene recently that found that people were much more likely to wash their hands if others were present in the bathroom, and if they were shamed into doing it by messages such as "is the person next to you washing with soap?" Of course, there are some people who will never wash their hands when they go to the bathroom. T

I think most people really want to do the right thing, but there are lots of gray areas out there, especially when nobody is looking. Reaching people in that situation is what the vow is made for. Maybe a public promise to be ethical will be a gentle nudge to help them behave ethically. Those with really dirty hands are beyond the reach of any vow, and always will be.
I installed Chrome Frame to make Wave work in IE8, and it ended up breaking Google Reader. Hardly a panacea, indeed.
For your C to be the solution, you'd have to posit that all technological civilizations go this route. Maybe that'll turn out to be the case, but do you have a reason to think that, other than that it seems to be happening here?
What about the customer development methodology urged you to make poor architectural decisions?
A couple of completely unrelated thoughts:

Even in America, there isn't necessarily some standard format for giving directions. If you spend any time around career military folks, they tend to give directions which include north, south, east and west as a critical part of the explanation. Many civilians cannot make heads nor tails of such directions.

I am reminded of an anecdote (probably from Reader's Digest) where an American man working with a Japanese company was frustrated at his inability to get on the same page with these folks. One day when things finally seemed to be getting better, he remarked they were "thinking along parallel lines". The Japanese man agreed. Some time later when they were again at an impasse, he referenced that discussion. The Japanese man then replied "Parallel lines never meet".
While it might not be ready for general-audience web projects, I'm already using HTML5 and CSS3 features (including app cache and database storage) for some upcoming Android- and iPhone-specific mobile sites, and for a product that embeds WebKit in a non-browser application. Many of the features are also useful for building Flex/AIR/Silverlight-style "rich" apps, for which you could distribute Prism or another site-specific browser.
I'll try.

1) Climate science has gotten very emotional -- both for those who think the planet's climate is in danger of spinning out of control and for those who do not.

2) For years the critics/deniers/skeptics have argued that the scientists in the field of climatology have not been working on the up and up. In other words, that there was a conspiracy to prevent the truth from getting out. These people were laughed at.

3) Somebody illegally broke into one place that does climate research and stole a bunch of emails

4) These emails show frustrated scientists who are trying to stack the deck in web forums, trying to prevent people with opposing views from being published, deleting critical data, fudging the numbers, lying to the press, and admitting to each other privately that something is very wrong

5) All hell breaks loose. Those on the side of the "end is coming" take to the web and print media with robust defenses of the scientists in question, pointing out how stressed out they are, how emails can be taken out of context, how the skeptics are mostly morons, how there's much more data than just being produced by this unit, etc. Detractors (so far) are mostly just countering by quoting the scientists themselves and demanding that if the research isn't totally open and reproducible, it's not science. Some have also demanded that the scientists in question step down (I count myself as one of these)

That's as unbiased as I can get. As for my own bias, I have no idea what the earth's climate is doing, but I know a rigged game when I see one, and the nature of the debate on climate science has been in the toliet for a long time. It's good to see a little sunshine getting in. I hope it leads to better standards and higher ethical guidelines. If this is as serious as folks make out, it's even more critical that every little piece of research is beyond reproach. We have a long ways to go before we get there, unfortunately.
That is explained nicely in The Innovator's Dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology. The personal computer wasn't powerful enough to compete against the computers made by large companies and didn't have a big enough (profitable enough) market to interest large companies. Big companies asked their existing customers what they wanted and they all said "bigger, faster computers." None of them wanted smaller, less capable computers.

Woz built the personal computer to scratch his own itch, but it created a new market, a market the big companies didn't have a clue existed (even Woz was surprised).

Big companies are entirely rational in this... they are maximizing their profits and listening to their customers. What they miss is new customers, niche markets that grow into major markets, resegmented markets...
Text interfaces over std{in,out} are a "good thing" - especially for sandboxing and on-demand connecting/disconnecting. They also protect you from people trying to manipulate the game server.
It appears that no one believes that c is impossible to circumvent.
Inglewood Computer Repair Services
How often do you backup your PC? If it were to crash or be stolen, would you lose important data? Geeks Mobile computer repair service recommends installing a rewritable DVD burner or an external hard drive.
I agree with sounddust (I can't just upvote, because my upvotes aren't registering). Although I personally wasn't offended by your attitude (I've gotten used to people having that attitude on HN), your comment was objectively prejudicial: "even the vaguest bit interesting". Not neutral or impartial, which are ideals of the intellectual gratification you seek here...

My personal response is to reply factually, simply ignoring the tone in a comment, as the guidelines imply (with the "2+2=4" example) - and not to downvote unless it's egregious.

But maybe it's fortunate in the bigger scheme of things that you were downvoted - because of this feedback you got. Each little change improves the site as a whole.

BTW: I was thinking that net 2 downvotes, from 1 to -1 (and now 3 downvotes, to -2) is not indicative of the opinion of the community as a whole ... but given that many people vote to adjust a comment score to where they think it should be, maybe it is representative.
The thing is that we would want to run the competition in a controlled environment on a local machine, and somehow enforce computation limits per turn.

If anyone has good ways of doing this across programming languages/across machines, please let me know, but something like 6.370's approach (fixed number of bytecodes per turn) seems like the most reasonable and fair.
Firebug, Web Developer Toolbar, Eventbug, MeasureIt and ColorZilla...
Agreed, I started skipping paragraphs - just skimming the topic sentences - and then started reading it closely when it began interesting again.
Something to think about: sometimes free labor means you're populating your future industry with kids who can afford to not get paid, and this may lead to aristocracy trumping meritocracy.

It was long the practice in medicine that not only did you serve your internship for free, indeed you paid for the privilege. At some point there was a collective realization that this was contributing to, or percieved to contribute to, a good-ole-boy network instead of the meritocracy one wants of doctors. So interns, and other resident physicians, are paid.
Try http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ I couldn't live without it now.
Before we go into a long argument, I would like to state my intentions.

I want to convince people here that if Mr. Arrington, a person who obviously hates scammers, visits a website and prematurely concludes that it's a scam is not necessarily correct.

I hate scammers, and I'm pretty sure most people here have strong feelings about scammers too, because they are the anti-thesis of the hard worker.

But I want people who have decided, to undecided. Because I find it quite surprising how you all can so easily conclude and accuse them of being a scam from the paltry information provided in the article.

They're sly, but what profit-seeking corporation isn't sly. Are they in the gray area? I'm certainly not saying they are not a scam.

It may feel like a scam, but that does not necessarily mean it is one.

Now, to answer your question: I've subscribed to magazine subscription trials. They work like this. It is a fact. They also sell subscriptions, as you have shown.
Emperor has no clothes and this guy is his tailor.
The ACM international programming contest used to require either C/C++ or Java (as of 2004 that is). The thing is, aside from their server doing compiling, I don't see why it couldn't have been any other language. They were incredibly anal about getting output exactly correct for their automated script checkers, and since that worked with stdin/stdout, most programming languages would have been perfectly fine.

If you can avoid limiting which languages are allowed, do so. If you need to provide some sort of library, would XML-RPC work for it? You could easily write a client for a large number of languages.
I'd be suprised if it came from a large company (not counting the founder). It'd be like a large company writing a novel.
Programmer. I'm excited about async scripts and cross document messaging for sure...
It certainly wouldn't be considered socially acceptable here in New Zealand, even ignoring the fact that you'd almost certainly be prosecuted if you tried it.

For some reason it appears to be tolerated in the U.S. despite it apparently being illegal in many cases. Mark Cuban was whining about this recently:
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/09/05/want-an-unpaid-internship...
There is still the mystery of not seeing radio waves or Von Neumann probes.
None.

A combination might be at work as well. Perhaps civilizations stagnate for so long that if they ever do evolve into a true space-faring species that they're so removed from our reality as to effectively have transcended it.

This would explain the lack of contact, the observed trend of mankind, and the odds-on-favorite that something more advanced has to be out there somewhere.
Programmer. I think it's great that we're extending the semantics of what we have now, but we're going in the wrong direction. I agree really strongly with John Allsopp that we shouldn't be extending the number of elements available - we should be creating a framework for extensible semantics (using attributes or the like):

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/semanticsinhtml5

Though I agree that canvas, audio and video tags, and web workers are great additions.
Unless new features are added to CSS, I suspect <aside> and <article> will behave exactly like <div>s do today.
It's actually very unusual for a big company to do anything technically innovative. Most innovation happens in startups; if we are successful big companies may offer to buy us.

Apple and Google are the elephant-sized exceptions here (but still they make a lot of acquisitions).

PS: Steve Wozniak was one of my favourite chapters in Founders at Work.
How to start a career in the startup industry?
Hi guys, I would be really grateful for your suggestions or opinions.

I am looking forward to work in the startup industry and contribute to the os movement. My background is mostly in Java, c/c++. I know that It is a long learning path (python, JavaScript, HTML, css, frameworks like django and pinax), therefore I am willingly to work full time in learning and getting experience.

To start, I have the following ideas:

1) Getting 6 - 12 months sabbatical.

2) Work as apprentice (for free) for a startup. Do you think that any startup is going to be interested in a work setting of Master/Apprentice?

3) Contribute to an open source project like Pinax (Django). could you recommend me another project?

What would be more constructive: working for startup or spending most of the
time making contributions to an open source project?

Thanks!
>My conclusion from observing over the years is that companies with failed business models go offshore to die.

I'm consulting for a Fortune 500 that has used a particular 3rd party system for a significant business function for the past decade. Since the vendor seems incapable of debugging its own system, I ended up reverse engineering parts of it to identify the bug. Then, a call was scheduled between me, the Fortune 500's application support folks, and the vendor's application support folks. The vendor's customer service supervisor and I were the only two people on the call who were not located in India.

An analysis of the application's architecture is a data point in support of your claim. The oldest pieces of the application seem to have some thought behind them although the implementation is significantly outdated. However, the vendor's off-shored web-ification of the application is a cut & paste spaghetti disaster (as easily observed in nearly 4K JSPs, each with one-off authentication code). This company was recently sold to another software vendor that seems to collect has-been cash cows, so it's clearly a couple steps from the graveyard.
I've heard Lua is popular for scripting game AIs, so perhaps that deserves some consideration.
I like to theorize that there is some sort of undiscovered transmission method used by alien civilizations to communicate, one which we can't detect yet. Billions of neutrinos pass through your body every second, and trillions upon trillions through the Earth; a possible transmission medium which may be less susceptible to planetary interference than, say, radio waves.

The speed of light appears to be an unbreakable barrier given our incomplete understanding of the universe. If it does indeed hold up, getting from one galaxy to another may take eons. Perhaps this is keeping the aliens at bay...

It also makes more sense for our society to evolve into robotic intelligent life for space travel. Human bodies are poorly built to leave the Earth. We need to bring oxygen, air, food, etc... Atrophy of the muscles and bones occur during prolonged space flight. We're high maintenance, and not nearly as efficient as, say, a future robotic being specifically built for space travel. It may only needs sunlight for energy, or rely on nuclear fusion.

If we ever meet one, an alien may simply be the evolutionary product of their own technology, looking nothing like the species which initially built it. Do you imagine humans will look like they do today 500 years from now, or completely different?
If you can use VNC, I built this a few years ago: http://akkartik.name/vnc.html
Programmer. OMG, WEBSOCKET!