skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The trick is: who better to run a military contractor than former military men? Who better to run a food company than someone who has worked in the USDA?

These are natural career paths for those individuals that make perfect, natural sense and --in and of themselves-- aren't a real issue.

The real issue is that our government can too easily reward individual companies or industry groups with hand-outs.

If a single general couldn't essentially hand a contract to a supplier on his say-so, that supplier gains nothing by bribing them with a future board position.

What we really need, is for it to be more difficult for individuals to drive contract selection and for the standards for passing a bailout, tariff or corporate welfare program to be much higher.

Perhaps by requiring such legislation to be stand-alone bills, and requiring an oversight office to evaluate contract selection.
Will Rackspace Partnership Save FathomDB? 
Disclaimer: I work for Rackspace and know the FathomDB team well.

This topic is interesting to me in general though and this is a good example to use for a talking point.

First, my opinion on this specific case -- I don't think partnering with us "saved" the company. I do think it certainly helps them to reach an additional audience.

So now to use this as a more broad example case of the real question here, "As a startup how do you pick the proper defensible niche so you can grow enough to compete in broader open markets?"

I believe Fathom has done this by slicing up AWS instances going down to a smaller starting point. Amazon isn't likely to enhance RDS to target the tiny customers but the "tiny DB" market can be enough for a startup to reach the elusive "ramen profitable".
Disclaimer: I work for Rackspace and know the FathomDB team well.

This topic is interesting to me in general though and this is a good example to use for a talking point.

First, my opinion on this specific case -- I don't think partnering with us "saved" the company. I do think it certainly helps them to reach an additional audience.

So now to use this as a more broad example case of the real question here, "As a startup how do you pick the proper defensible niche so you can grow enough to compete in broader open markets?"

I believe Fathom has done this by slicing up AWS instances going down to a smaller starting point. Amazon isn't likely to enhance RDS to target the tiny customers but the "tiny DB" market can be enough for a startup to reach the elusive "ramen profitable".
Some picture noise removal programs allow you to supply a "noise profile picture". This involves leaving your lens cap on and taking a long exposure so that the only thing in your picture is the noise inherent in the camera's sensor. The noise pattern on any given sensor is fairly unique, unique enough that these programs can then use that profile to "subtract" noise from pictures you take.

Perhaps people could register their noise profiles with a service like Flickr and, if their camera is stolen, this noise profile could be detected in pictures found on the web.
Actually, we do run redis in production, and it has been awesome for us. But, for this particular aspect of our application, we see about 20GB of data growth per week. So, an all-in-RAM db isn't really practical.

Either way, durability wasn't the issue for us. Mongodb has no write concurrency. So, when it got so overloaded with data that queries were taking forever, we had no way to purge older data without blocking all read & write operations for hours.
Private firms have historically continued to harvest their privately held resource until gone (e.g., privately held old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest) because they can use the resource (the land the forest once grew on) in some other profitable way.

In such a case, the fact that someone else didn't buy the land with the forests on it suggests that this was the most efficient use of the old-growth forest and the land it was on. That is, just because you or I find the solution unpleasant doesn't mean that it's not the efficient outcome. If it is an inefficient outcome, then there should be a market solution which makes the implementer lots of money.
Because you want security information disseminated. You want nuclear powers to be able to control whether their nukes get used or not. The US has for decades basically given away most of its tech like the PALs to nuclear powers for this very reason, even to nuclear powers we rather wished did not exist (like Pakistan), so the nukes don't get loose. (A sovereign nation knows that everyone else knows the isotopic signatures of its nukes, and that it will be held responsible for any use, so they want the tech as much as we want them to have it.)

The important stuff about nukes is how to make them; nothing about that is revealed by visiting some silos.
> it tests a whole bunch of random features

It clearly can't be random if four other major browser vendors independently score over 90%, and if:

Firefox 2, a browser released in 2006 and predates Acid 3, scores a 52/100 versus the current IE9 score of 32/100.

The only possible explanations are either a) it's an insidious and well organized campaign to unfairly discredit IE, or b) IE, even unreleased IE9, is way behind everybody.

No matter which you believe, random is not an option.
Ok sorry for assuming that the problem was durability / reliability.

If MongoDB has no write concurrency MySQL is simply better from this point of view for your use case as far as I understand, but I'm not very good at MongoDB.

Btw Redis will get Virtual Memory in a few months, I hope you can reconsider it later ;)
Right--the sites I visited are older generations.
This reminds me of Elephant, a CL OODBMS that can use Postgres as a key/value store backend. OODBs, document stores, et al. are useful but using a complete RDBMS as a backend is both overkill and inefficient in my opinion.
That WAS Internet Explorer 9, but the online community made such a ruckus (with good reason) that MS would use the "standards compliant" mode only with a nosuck tag, that they went ahead and made it the default and you'd have to opt-in to the sucky mode.
Right, it wasn't that I thought you had to use GETs for everything, but that, being these are calls that change nothing on the server, GET was appropriate.
What I've Learned About Running a Massive Data Center Operation
Truth. Just thinking that they might be more likely to steal another bike rather than bothering to get the first stolen one fixed.
Possibly a large bore shotgun then - that way you potentially get reuse without the effort of putting together a working guided rocket.
I just subscribe to the Daily Article ML (https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/daily-article-l)!
Wrong Wrong Wrong.

Microsoft is guilty of it because they are the ones who published the code/product as their own. They hired someone to do the work. Yes, that person ripped of Plurk, but Microsoft failed to verify their contractor's work. That makes them culpable.

Plurk was ripped off by Microsoft. Full Stop.

Now, Microsoft has it's own options with respect to that contractor, but their swift response doesn't erase Microsoft's liability.
Another way to think of it: because tables used in encryption algorithms are often very difficult to compress with conventional algorithms, deriving the tables from their pre-compute algorithms is a much more efficient means of compression.
Just found this comment.

I am not exactly sure if they are Turing-complete. The code in (??{code}) can be anything, so I guess, they are.
I'm not sure I agree with #2 unless your competition is really truly despicable. I think that if you use that method against something that's really popular, it will come back to bite you.
This line of thinking turns on the assumption that people are rational. Obviously it would be stupid to destroy something that gives you an infinite stream of income (in most cases; I have seen it demonstrated that this is actually the most profitable option in some cases.) Take away rationality and the whole argument falls on its face. And there is plenty of evidence that humans are myopic, irrational beings. So I would be extremely reluctant to fork over elephants, whales or pretty much anything to a capitalist.

Starting with Kahneman and Tversky, a lot (most?) of interesting work in economics over the last 30 years has been in revising the standard rational actor model to incorporate all of the irrationalities which are reliably exhibited by we homo sapiens.
Makes me smile.

The first Lisp program I wrote was a matrix based encryption program I wrote for a linear algebra class back in college.
If you just added support for some primitives (like some sort of 32BitArray or 64BitArray) then you'd probably be able to get within an order of magnitude of OpenSSL.
Shake Shack: The Accidental Empire of Fast Food
Video: Marc Pincus answers his critics
Of this list only 2 'british' users actually have any influence whatsoever; Stephen Fry and Sarah Brown as they're the only two on there that have managed to consistently draw peoples attention to anything except themselves. (I'm not counting Pete Cashmore here as arguably his twitter account is just a Mashable's feed)

Why 'influence' is being regarded as a synonym for 'popularity' I have no fucking clue, it just shows the continuing degradation of the telegraph that they can't even check a thesaurus any more (not that anyone needs it for two words with distinct meanings that are known to any capable infant).

If we're talking popularity then the most 'influential' thing in the world is the Premier League, watched by billions weekly. How many lives the Premier League has affected in any way besides a form of entertainment is marginal compared to its popularity.
Websites that Break Design Rules
The infringer hasn't exactly saved any costs, now, has he?
I actually quite like this presentation of the patents. Though I agree the background lines are confusing if they are actually meaningful. And it would be great if you could click on the titles and be sent to the actual patent description.

EDIT: re. "Device and Method for Preventing Unwanted Oral Activity" I call prior art on ball gags.
Video street view of Zurich
Somehow it did not help IE with neither rendering capabilities nor speed.

And no, Acid3 does not test for "random features"—it test for stuff that is essential in web apps, mainly DOM manipulation.
Not enough women in computing?
Congrats Justin!
Social proof is a big thing for most buyers, and VCs are no exception. But social proof doesn't render them idiotic. And Andreessen isn't a giddy MBA herd animal, he's a guy who's built and exited with two massive startups.

But to dig into your assumption that $180m is ridiculous... The investment doesn't matter-- the valuation does. So let's guess that they sold a third of their company for that $180m-- that's a $540m valuation. Is that unreasonable? They reportedly have a run rate of $50m. I'll bet it's twice that in a year. What sort of revenue multiple do you think is appropriate for a high growth tech company? What kind of revenue/growth rate would be appropriate for a $540m valuation?

I'm all for poking fun at absurd valuations for companies that don't even have a glimmer of an idea for revenue, but these guys are looking at $50m/yr and growing like a weed. What's not to like?

[edit: another poster said a run rate of $200m - If that's true, wow.]
Predator drones are built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. of San Diego. Some of its communications technology is proprietary, so widely used encryption systems aren't readily compatible, said people familiar with the matter.

If some Russian software could intercept it, it wasn't that proprietary!
Use Godaddy Coupon December 2009 and get a domain in $1 only
Absolutely. PayPal is fine right up until the point when they cut you off, and then you have virtually no recourse. A similar thing happened to me (though I was dealing in physical goods), and I was never able to get it straightened out. They kept asking for more info, I kept faxing it to them; it was never really clear to me what specifically they found suspicious or what I had to do to allay their fears. Having to interact by fax with people who have no authority or incentive to resolve the matter is awful; I think they hope you just give up.
Probably because current procedures have been updated many so times that these procedures wouldn't help anyone trying to launch a current ICBM. The article mentioned a voting system that's used to prevent modern ICBMs from being launched without the agreement of several launch sites. Also, notice the only computer mentioned in the place was the guidance system for the missile. I'm sure a modern ICBM site would have computer based security. An ICBM is useless if you can lockout the guidance system or detonator.

Just think, the guidance system could drop the missile into the ocean or self-destruct the missile on lift off if it is somehow launched without proper codes. (Assuming you could get the rockets to fire in the first place)

The warhead could refuse to detonate if the missile is launched without proper codes.

There are many levels of security a computer can add to prevent an ICBM from being successfully launched. The Titan II launch procedures are based solely on mechanical security.
Improper use of encryption has been a military problem forever. (I seem to recall problems even in Classical warfare.) It just gets bigger with more communication technology.
It was still an issue. It just didn't affect the average person quite so much.

The industry still hated vcrs, xerox machines, libraries, radio, mix tapes, etc. They still sued any time they could.

It was just impossible for them to identify the people copying cassettes, taping concerts, swapping mix tapes, xeroxing a passage from a book, etc. And when they did try to sue libraries to, say, try to block their lending VHS tapes, the average person didn't take much notice.
I was able to get a voice once. It was just sheer luck. She was very nice, but two things happened: they had just transitioned to their new adwords format, she was indicating something about it, and I pointed out that some feature was missing (like "see all ads" or something... I don't quite remember). Within minutes (same phone conversation) that was fixed.

But my problem remains. I sell an educational software product, but I get lumped in with the "essay farms" that sell complete papers to students. So every time I change an ad... even just the price... I have to go through a lengthy review process.

I asked her to institute some sort of trust system-- with occasional spot-checks, of course, to allow my ads to come up in reasonable time. Even my grocery store has a payment trust system!

Still waiting for that system.
Yeah, there is a reason Elephant is nearly an order of magnitude faster when run on Berkeley DB.
Tenure-o-meter
"After 8 years of nothing but messages of bad news and fear, the psychological lift of Obama’s inauguration will lead to a short term rebound effect on the market".

Ahh, I miss the naivety of the ancient days of late 2008. In fact the market dropped from ~9000 at inauguration day to ~6500 by March. Obama's approval rating dropped from around 80 at inauguration to less than 50 now. And bad news and fear, as it turns out, still exist.

"It will be a big year for applications that can play on big screens... video games, movies, etc." -- as a prediction, shrugworthy.

"Similarly, the big news in the mobile world won’t be a slicker, newer cellphone -- it will be smart phone applications" -- this prediction wasn't too bad.

"China’s GDP is likely to plummet in 2009" -- nope, it grew by something like 8%

"This year we’ll see the first computer with no moving parts" -- trueish, though I thought that netbooks sans moving parts were already on the market in 2008.

Wall computing: somebody has already mentioned this. "Carry-along computers will be hot" -- reasonably true. "Led by Europe, LTE (Long Term Evolution) will be the preferred technology for 4G." -- I don't even know what this means.

"Not to be left behind, the less developed world will finally see widespread availability of broadband" -- y'see, as a prediction this one is hard to fault in that it's a long term trend and I'm sure there's some places in the third world that have acquired broadband over the last year. Still, I wouldn't say the last year has seen enormous progress on that front.

"The Internet Assistant will be born" -- hmm, not really. And if a product which could book me a flight, a car, a hotel, and make dinner reservations automatically did exist, I wouldn't use it, since I wouldn't trust it to get me the best prices.

"he was optimistic that having a new, competent, team in Washington, that valued science, technology, and innovation, would improve the country’s overall mood" -- a giggle seems like the appropriate response here.

In conclusion, there's a few accurate predictions here, but they're just identifications of trends which should have been reasonably obvious in 2008. And then there's the impossibly naive political predictions which, the less said about the better.
Firefox gets Multi-Process Plugins from Chrome
Dec. 17, 1903: Bicycle Brothers Make Aeroplane Work Wright
I've been planning to get fish oil for quite some time and today I finally bought some capsules. Thank you frankus for the reminder :)

EDIT: Hm. Maybe I've should've RTFA before I commented. I hope that the product I bought is one of the 75 that do not deplete the menhaden stock. Maybe a certificate for this would be nice?
The open source projects I see on their site aren't under AGPL, they're not even GPL, they're BSD. What's the issue with using it?

Also, unless they're following a different credo than the rest of the open source world, why are they complaining about "stealing" UI? I thought people in Open Source didn't believe in software patents?
pff, you didn't address what I said...

"it's only another $1MM"
They do if you're a big spender.
I read the title, and optimistically hoped that they were talking about server-side javascript. What are the problems for which symmetric crypto in the browser is the correct solution?
For all the doom and gloom around old media. the NYT is doing a great job with the web. Other publications should be looking to them for inspiration.

The NYT hasn't forgotten who they are. They are conveyors of information. It is their job to tell complex stories to the public. The Internet doesn't interfere with that, it enables it. The NYT used to be confined to a static 2d black and white paper to communicate a message. Now they don't have those limits.

And the graphic should be an image map with links to the patents.
This is the historical Google line and a pretty fair one at that. Those of us that are extremely savvy enough to use ad blockers everywhere are also rather cognizant of where ads appear and usually consciously ignore the ads. Most average users won't find the ads so objectionable as to warrant blocking them or dealing with the hassle of installing extensions.

Firefox has over 90M active daily users. The Adblock Plus plugin is by far the biggest and most compelling Ad Blocker - it has 11M active daily users right now. Google seems willing to live with this 12% opt-out in effect. I suspect of those 12% of users, most of those wouldn't click ads anyways, so it's not a big deal in the end.

- http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2009/05/firefox-hits-27...
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/statistics/addon/1865
The writer was talking about the people who produce original content.

He's asking: what if the guy making a youtube video of unboxing his new laptop couldn't use The Final Countdown as his soundtrack?

He still wants to upload his unboxing video. He still wants a soundtrack. What does he do? And what effect will that have?

There's no for-pay alternative unboxing video with a properly licensed The Final Countdown. And there's no for-pay system for him to acquire a license to The Final Countdown. The song isn't even the point at all. If there's any hassle involved in using it, he just won't. Not when he can just grab some JoCo and be done with it.

And if the creators do find and use permissive-license content, doesn't that necessarily erode the value of strictly-licensed content?
Transcribe
Solar cells are promising, but they cannot solve this problem - at the very least, they can't generate power at night - we would have to rely on either an integrated planetary grid or a huge amount of batteries.

Nuclear has only that much fuel to use. Uranium is non-renewable.

And fusion is yet to prove it can provide enough energy. We need better reactors.
I disagree. The name of your competitor is one that draws the eye of people that are interested in the niche that you and your competitor fill, and if you really are better than them (or at least have different flaws), then it's likely some of that traffic will stick.

EDIT: I don't mean to say that "COMPETITOR sucks, use this instead" is a great direction to come at writing ads from, but rather something more like "COMPANY provides SERVICE better than COMPETITOR" might be effective.
Indeed. My bottle (bought from costco) cites those two fishes as ingredients.
This is a lesson from Politics, if you focus all your energy into attacking your opponents it doesn't mean people will choose you, it just means people will choose not to choose.

This tactic does not extend to business. You don't 'win' by having the most users, you win by making the most money, and having a wide open market is stupid and dangerous for a company. This is the major failure with Apples 'PC and Mac' advertisements, it doesn't tell us why we should buy a Mac, just why we shouldn't buy a PC. This tactic presently works for Apple because the people who know the difference between a PC and a Mac are likely aware of the pros for Apple, they just need to be overwhelmed by the cons of a PC.

For a new product, your consumers have no knowledge of your pros, and slandering your opponents does nothing except clue them into their failures. The prime example here is again in politics, slander is a tactic always taken by the right-wing parties, however when your claims are hollow and see through they can fail by record numbers. This happened in the UK when Labour gained the majority with Tony Blair, the conservatives launched a slander campaign that not only alienated voters from the conservative party but had no effect on keeping liberal voters out of the polling booths, they essentially handed parliament to Labour. The conservatives here in Canada keep playing the same tactics and have yet to get a majority through their tactics. Again the same could be seen with tactics used against Obama, but they were baseless claims and liberal voters came out in force, conservative voters staid at relatively the same levels but decreased vastly in percentage.
The gist of this article seems to be that some copyright infringement is fine and should be tolerated. Does this view hold for the GPL?