skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally I think cases like this are a great example of when capital punishment is acceptable.

When a person shows that much contempt for the life and well-being of another human being, they really don't deserve to continue living...
France plans 'Google tax' on Internet searches
> ... Douglas Adams' editorial expenses joke.

Haven't heard that one. And, alas, Google is no help. Could you offer any pointers (or just state the joke)?
I'm not a security person, but my understanding is that all security systems are known to fail and thus come with a lifetime. Real safes aren't uncrackable, but uncrackable under 15 minutes of duress.

Crypto seems a little different since exponential complexity pushes those lifetimes out to what people often assume is infnite. A demonstration of a 4 year lifetime of a 768-bit under moderately powerful attack makes it clear that it isn't different and that its lifetime is now scarily short.

It's a lot like what I assume the introduction of power tools might have done to safe cracking. What previously was a 30 minute safe becomes a 30 second safe once the people you want to keep out can drill.
I'm not really sure how this has existed for 16 years and I haven't read it.

This is the best argument I've ever heard against software patents.
For all we know, Core Text-backed CJK text rendering works fine in TM2 and the wait is for Allan to finish working on other parts of the editor instead.

And FWIW, my comment about deprecated methods was made with new code for TM2 in mind, not TM1.x code being used on TM2.
we should avoid abstractions which permanately hide details, and instead, seek out those which allow us to ignore the details when convenience allows, but promptly think through the abstraction when necessary.

Why do you suppose such abstractions exist and that the same abstraction is of as much value to someone else? Given the sheer amount of details on different levels, is it even feasible for someone to be aware of all relevant details? If not, no abstractions that allow you to 'see through them' can possibly exist, because there is no underlying detail for you too see.
Isn't that the same thing?

(n^1/3)^c = n^(c/3)

Still an exponential relationship, just a smaller constant.
I think you're right. Even when Adobe finally ships a modern Flash plugin for mobiles there are going to be some major usability issues. How do you deal with something like hovering on a touchscreen? or account for rendering properly on different size/resolution screens? It seems like we're going to reach the point quickly where trying to adapt Flash to work on a wide range of mobile devices isn't worth it.
whoops, this is missing a not. "we should not dismiss ..."
sorry about that!
Gemcutter Webhooks on Google Wave (and Google App Engine) part 1
Agreed.

On the lighter side, there is a chance that Apple might release some other gadget and people will go after it if you are going to take months to release an app for iphone ;)
> When you're dealing with financial transactions or stock trading or with medical records, you're either able to deal with the fire hose of data, or with the uptime requirements, or the scale of the data. Or not.

But you might find that there is one stock market with a smaller trade volume than the others. Or one of the 50 hospitals in your district is smaller.

If you can peel off a bunch of "early adopters" and make them guinea pigs, you can get some of the benefits of rapid development. You either need the buy in of the early adopters or be able to push them around.

This happens all the time. The UK used to test their laws on the Scots before rolling them out to the rest of the country.
Burn the fuckin witch!

Capital punishment is not enough for her...
"She said Willa Blanc just showed up and said she had a large dog in the trash can, and paid her dad $1,000 to help them burn it," prosecutor Smith said. "They took all night to do it. This was even weirder than we were imagining."

Seriously...why would anyone believe a lie like that? This story makes me angry.
Dancing Graffiti [photo set]
In a fast growth company engineers spend a lot of their time on hiring (phone screens, multiple in person interviews, "selling" after the interview). Candidate "screening the company" after a phone screen, but before an interview actually saves engineering hours that would be wasted interviewing a person who won't take an offer.
Indeed! I made one iPhone app last year, gave it away for free, got a lot of exposure, and have been doing enough consulting to (finally) leave my day job @ Y! and focus on my own big (iPhone related) project.
Mobile phone use may stave off, reverse Alzheimer's: study
Google's book scanning technology apparently revealed by Japanese researchers.
I look at it from a financial standpoint.

When someone does something this vile, we (the people, by the courts) determine that they shall no longer have a right to their life. Whether that be by ending it via capital punishment or by keeping them incarcerated forever, they essentially no longer have a right to their life.

It costs ~$48,000 per year to keep someone incarcerated (at least in MA where I am: http://www.massbar.org/legislative-activities/mba-memo-on-se...)

If a court determines that someone will no longer have a right to their life and their remaining lifespan is, for example, 40 years, we will spend somewhere on the order of $2,000,000 to keep them incarcerated for their lifetime.

Of course, that assumes the value of the dollar is constant (it isn't) and that the price of keeping this murderer in a maximum security prison is the same as the average cost of keeping someone incarcerated. (it isn't)

When we are locking the door and throwing away the key, why not save the $2,000,000 keeping someone alive who we've deemed has no right to life anyway?
"Memcachedb also has another feature that blocks all reads while it writes to the disk."

Seriously?

Wow.
Yes, that's from the Sculley era and Jobs would rather set himself on fire than use anything from that era of Apple's history.
Seems like the Indiana bill had a few more options than pi = 3. :)

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/805/did-a-state-leg...
You read it wrong (or I was unclear in what I meant, more likely).

YC and PG (and thus news.yc) has a STRONG valley bias. I personally think the Valley's importance is overblown (and that the domination of the Valley is fading). So the remark was more of a jab at valley purists than a statement that "secondary" cities like Boulder (and Seattle, where I am) are less solid. That said, of course, statistically more startups get funded and sold in the valley than anywhere else (by raw # and percentage, near as I can tell). So yeah, I guess these numbers would be remarkable in the valley and are slightly more remarkable in a non-valley town.

I have a few posts (with some data) talking about how I think the Valley is losing dominance-- and I'd think TechStars' success is yet another data point here.

(search for "valley" and see 1st, 2nd, and 5th post on my blog if you'd like to see some interest data: http://www.tonywright.com/ )
Exactly. Low level knowledge is nice to have in some situations, but is for the most part not required to accomplish a lot because high level knowledge and tools are often sufficient.
You are consistently available for insights.
Obsolete Skill Set: The 3 Rs — Literacy and Letteracy in the Media Ages
A lot of engineers have similar mental health issues, so I'm sure we all know someone like this. It's hard to strike the right balance between respecting their privacy and looking out for them.
Plumb, a web layout composition tool for use with the Blueprint framework.
Browser based WYSIWYG app that allows the users to construct BlueprintCSS based layouts.
Sounds like it's time to look at Redis...
A note to the author/submitter: It's Gantt, with two 't's, and it's not an acronym.

Pedantry aside, it's important because assuming that it is an acronym obscures its Taylorist origins.
I mailed Russ and he says no eta, they are probably in a cupboard in MIT
I hate to be a downer, but this just sounds crazy to me. Yes, I understand that they use a ton of power and can probably get it cheaper this way, but this is an advertising and software company, not a power company.

Am I being a total neophobe or do others think they're drifting dangerously far away from their core competencies?
FYI if you are into the bleeding edge, redis has a virtual memory implementation as of about 12 hours ago.
She called the girl "dude"
It should also say the US Patent [and Trademark] Office (USPTO). There is at least one Patent Office in the majority of countries.
My exact thoughts. I think I am going to print it out and study it for a while. I am sure there are tons of productivity things I can learn..and things I should probably already know.
Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?
I am curious how Managers think that adding Flash makes them better then Apple.
Natal Recognizes 31 Body Parts, Uses Tenth Of Xbox 360 "Computing Resources"
We don't often learn something by killing, and it is barbaric. An ironic reflection of our own lust for blood. But, okay. Sure, it is satisfying since the "bitch has it coming."

Capital punishment is the easy way out for the criminal and the society that reared the criminal. If the criminal is truly guilty, they always get the last laugh. At least in my mind.

We, the taxpayers, front the money to satisfy our blood-lust. And we learn nothing in the end except, for a moment, we can feel the thrill of hooting and hollering over the carcass of an enemy.
Silicon Valley 'Bloodbath' Leaves Buildings Empty
I'm sure there's just as many failed startups that bone-headedly try to keep going.

I think the important thing is to keep evaluating based on user reactions and market size. You might find that there's a segment of users that want to do something slightly different. Even if you're the first mover, there will always be competition.

That said, I think Amazon knew that eCommerce was going to be a pretty big market, and the Google knew lots of people searched. Even if they didn't get most of the pie, some of the pie was still big enough. If he made an iPhone app to find recipes for star wars fans with allergies (or something with a niche market) without potential for enlarging of the market, it may be time to consider something else.
sounds like a redefinition of 'in any way' to me...

So why am I singing the praises of Amazon and EC2? Mainly to dispel the opinion that the site getting slower since the move is in any way related to Amazon...(snipped)...Unfortunately, the single EBS volumes they were on could not handle these bursting writes.
I'm not sure the website is that well made in the first place. The results of Ctrl+A amused me.
I don't know about Chris, but I know Guido van Rossum wasn't allowed to sign-off on code reviews involving python until he passed Google's style test.

To put this into context, Google (at least as of 2007 when I was there) takes the style of their code quite serious. In order to check code in, it needs to be reviewed and signed off by at least two team members. The two people who sign it off also have to be certified in that language though, according to Google's internal style guidelines and usage policies.

When you start, you can't sign-off on code for any language, even if you created the language (in all fairness, Google's internal style does vary from PEP-8 slightly). The upside of this is that the entire code base is consistent and more or less looks like it was all written by the same person.

In short, Google has a lot of famous people working for them. When I was there I never saw that impact how they were treated.
Or Tokyo Cabinet / Tyrant, which is still a high performance key/value store but doesn't need to fit everything in RAM. Depends on how much they're storing.
I'm bothered by the need to run SW RAID on top of HW RAID. One would think that Amazon would sell faster EBS "disks" for a premium.

And slower disks for a discount? But, I guess that's what S3 is for.
i wish someone showed me that when i was 5
Regulators are absolutely our biggest headache, but while hard I don't think it's impossible. It is one of the biggest areas of discussion on the mailing list.

If you're interested you should join the Agile Banking group:

http://groups.google.com/group/agile-banking?hl=en

Regulation is definitely one of the biggest issues, but I theorize if you build small low value services via the grass roots I am convinced we can then work with regulators.
Wow, a pretty old LtU thread!

I think too many PL geeks working on one language is a sure fire way to either get nothing done, or get some really weird hodgepodge that would satisfy nobody - the ultimate design by committee!
Recognizing Five Small Business Security Threats
Heh... It was pretty obvious what would happen, well before 1994. From a 1991 Bill Gates memo:

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. I feel certain that some large company will patent some obvious thing related to interface, object orientation, algorithm, application extension or other crucial technique. If we assume this company has no need of any of our patents then they have a 17-year right to take as much of our profits as they want. The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can.

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2007/03/analysis-micros...
Without the risk of an insecure cellular network, greed would be the only motivating factor in keeping this a closed device.

What about the rumors that the Tablet will include nationwide 3G access, similar to the Kindle? I believe this is a necessary addition -- think about how useful the iPhone would be without Edge/3G access: not at all.
Read the FAQ.
No, but I do think it is akin to saying a rape is the victim's fault because they went to a bar instead of using eHarmony from the comfort of home. So, i'd say it is even more ridiculous that your analogy.
My point is that I don't think that it is a good thing. Classes start to focus exclusively on underperforming students - which is good - but not to the exclusion of well performing students who need to be challenged as well.

Of course, Texas is the state who (at one time at least) had the educational program that focused on "The Three Rs" (Reading, Riting, and Rithmetic). Ugh. And they wonder why the US is behind.
When you include the cost of appeals etc we spend more than that (on average) actually killing someone. In the old days of trial > hanging your argument was more reasonable, but we also killed more innocent people back then.
Dunno. I have to deal with poorly-documented vendorware (and Windows, from time to time) and I have had to make websites that work in IE6. I would not count either as "hell on earth". It's just stuff that needs to be done, and people will pay a lot of money to have it done.
I think it works like this:

Even if Amazon uses 'k' hdds for one EBS "disk", since you're sharing the real hdds with other users, you don't get 'k' hdds' performance, you only get a fraction.

By RAIDing over 'n' EBS "disks", you are effectively compensating for the reduced performance due to sharing.
Microsoft's history with the Tablet PC
It isn't. It's more akin to saying: "If no one ever went out dressed like they were clubbing and stayed home playing Second Life instead, no one would ever get raped walking back from clubs."

But then who knows? In that case one might see an increase of rapists knocking on people's front doors.

Some scientists would say of such statements: "It's so bad, it's not even wrong!"
But would they realize that? Tightass companies are tightass.
TweetPhoto expands offering to Foursquare platform
Link to said vlog: http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/05/10/thoughts-on-mozilla/
That's good point; thanks!
Google's stated mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

I.e. ALL the information on earth (they may need reword from "world" to galaxy or whatever in the future).

Whenever they need a resource or perform an activity at scale and the existing solutions suck they like to invent better ways (e.g. dutch auction instead of investment bank cabal when listing on a stock exchange).

PS: I'm not a big fan of the corporatist phrase, "core competency". I dislike it almost as much as I dislike the phrase "best practice", for the similar reasons.
This is a summary of cryptographic hashes being broken via cryptanalysis (breaking the algorithm), not RSA keys (big primes) being factored. I'd love to see the same chart but for prime factorization.
I actually agree with you far more that my original statement shows. That being said I just can't see how keeping someone locked in a cage for the rest of their life is in any way preferable to just killing them.

They are unable to contribute to society while incarcerated, incarceration is not shown to actually help rehabilitate them, and incarceration costs everyone else a lot of money...

On the other hand: if capital punishment is used then it's pretty clear they'll never get the chance to re-offend. And in cases like this where the criminal has done something truly heinous I think that is the biggest plus possible.
For example: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/%7Enevins/npr09.pdf.
I haven't used it for a production app, but I will say that it kicks AIR's ass with regards to CPU and memory usage. Titanium has way lower resource utilization for the same app as compared to Adobe AIR.
I get what the stack looks like, but it seems really broken and likely quite inefficient. Thus far, Amazon has gone after greenfield applications which can be written within the constraints of their cloud platform. However, there are a ton of people hosting their own SQL database-based apps where a single DB is the bottleneck. Without significant refactoring, these apps can only scale vertically with the DB. So, while Amazon provides nice, big boxes to run SQLServer/MySQL/etc., disk performance is that of a desktop machine -- hardly a balanced system. How many more customers could they capture if they offered premium, high-performance storage options?
Are there any hard stats available on this sort of thing?
They discovered that the scientist had converted his living room into a monitoring station for extra-terrestrial life: Six powerful computers were running a program that analyzed radio signals from outer space.

If that's SETI @ Home (as I believe) then in addition to being a "monitoring station for extra-terrestrial life", my living room is also a cryptography lab (PrimeGrid) and a quantum computing and AI laboratory (AQUA@home).

Who knew!
Kurzweil Demos Blio E-reader Platform at CES (Video)
"It's magical thinking: If we defend against what the terrorists did last time, we'll somehow defend against what they do one time. Of course this doesn't work. We take away guns and bombs, so the terrorists use box cutters. We take away box cutters and corkscrews, and the terrorists hide explosives in their shoes. We screen shoes, they use liquids. We limit liquids, they sew PETN into their underwear. We implement full-body scanners, and they're going to do something else. This is a stupid game; we should stop playing it."

And do away with the restrictions? As much as I dislike dealing with the TSA, some of these rules have made it far more difficult for terrorists to bring down or hijack an airplane. I'm sure I am not the only one who remembers the bad old days when criminals, mentally ill people, non-suicidal terrorists, and political extremists would regularly hijack flights here and abroad. I can't remember the last time it's happened, because now it's nearly impossible for anyone to bring on weapons or get into the cockpit.

I also disagree with his conclusion that people reacted with "fear" to the Christmas day attempt. Most of the reaction I saw was relief and anger.
Warner Bros. new releases to stay off Netflix for 28 days
Isn't a 30% transaction fee too high for this? Unlike iPhone/Android, you still get the distribution channel regardless of whether you use Facebook's credit system.
This is pure gold. Thanks.
This is probably biased, but it lists several study's.

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty
The mere title (but the article as well) begs the question, to what extent is management a science at all? While there's a lot of pseudo-science in pop business nonfiction, there's very little rigor - see a summary of this critique here: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/04/12/...

In particular, "In a paper currently under review, the three argue that not only are business gurus bad at identifying the causes of success, they have no way of telling true greatness from mere luck - if enough people are flipping coins, someone is likely to string together an impressive run of heads. According to their analysis of 13 of the most influential business success books, three quarters of the purportedly great companies had track records that could just as easily have been explained by the vicissitudes of random chance - performances that looked impressive on first glance were simply akin to being the lucky person in a stadium full of coin-flippers."

Maybe HBR is more rigorous than the pop business press as a whole, but this article doesn't seem to be.
I'm saying that using $ to name a function, isn't a good idea.

It looks cheap to use, but it's not. That's my point.

Same reason I hate those things in C# is it? where you can get some code to run each time a variable is read/written to.
In cases like this you can pretty much count on a 'life without parole' sentence though.

I'd say 60 pitiful years in a federal penitentiary is far more cruel than a death sentence.
meh. If you like it use it. Personally I find that code ugly, inefficient and error prone.
Sylvester Stallone: Nach Unfall Metallplatte im Nacken
Gamer: Gerard Butler zeigt mal wieder "Titten"
There was me thinking it was sarcasm - works both ways :)
This is the natural state of the economy though and quite expected.

Every business wants to reduce expenses, and if that means importing H1-Bs, then it is going to happen bar government intervention. Satisfaction obviously goes down because that's what it takes to compete with workers who are used to non-first-world living conditions.
Interesting story, disappointingly unreflective and myopic discussion here.

Buying a computer from Amazon is only cheaper because of US law unfairly privileging internet retailers over bricks-and-mortar. The sales tax pays for things in your community. You know, the physical location where you eat and sleep?

Why exactly should someone well-off enough to afford a brand-new $2,000 MacBook Pro be able to escape paying sales tax just because they bought it on the internet (and they even have the money to afford an existing computer and internet connection in the first place), but the food that a struggling single parent working near minimum wage needs to survive should be subject to sales tax?

Further, the Apple Store isn't just a retail outlet, it's also a service center. Do you think everyone who got robbed was buying a brand-new one? Maybe they were picking up their repair.
At some point one of these new, non-core, ventures will be identified by historians as the point at which Google made the same mistake as Microsoft and started out on the slow path to insignificance.
The core problem with this scheme is one that's endemic to this sort of legislation. It's a basic assumption that economic interactions are all ultimately zero-sum, which is simply untrue. The idea that Google (or anyone else) must necessarily derive its success from somehow, somewhere screwing people denies the fact that the healthiest economies are packed with non-zero-sum interactions.
We've got no products and we're open to anything.

They might not be stealth, but that's like not wearing camouflage when you're not a soldier and not in war-zone.