skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was a technician at Futureshop before (now owned by Best Buy).

Software isn't covered by the extended warranty at both places so that means regardless if you have Windows or Linux issues the tech's will not fix it under the extended warranty.

The warranty only covers hardware issues not caused by the user (i.e. spills or drops).

I've had linux laptops come in and we usually didn't bat an eye (the average tech seems to know of it and the occasional one actually uses it). We generally don't care because we run software off of a bootable disc to do diagnostics assuming the issue is a hardware one and not software.

I think one plausible reason that the netbook was rejected in this case is most netbooks do not have dvd drives and they may have had difficulty running the diagnostics.

Of course the source story paints a very hostile picture from one side. Without knowing the other side we can't know what the real issue was. It could have been that the technician legitimately believed software damaged the netbook. Or the customer could have been rude in which case the techs and manager became hostile. Who knows?

In either case he should either bring it to another store or send a letter/email to someone at head office who will almost always take care of the customer.

Of course the whole linux and damaging hardware issue is still open. I remember a while ago that there was a 'minor' bug in Ubuntu that caused the continuous strain to the hard drive that could theoretically cause damage.
In London a sizeable quantity of bike thefts appear to be pre-meditated and part of organised crime. The bikes we've recovered (I run http://www.londonfgss.com/ ) have turned up as far afield as the coast and as close as Brick Lane.

Down Brick Lane market on a Sunday morning there is literally a fence... a chicken wire one from which stolen bikes are sold. Lord knows what the buyers are thinking, and the police are well aware of what is happening too (but are doing very little about it).

We are now tracking (within the community) where bikes are stolen from, the measures used to protect them and evidence of how they were circumvented as well as where and when the bikes are turning up. With a large enough community (over 12,000 users in the same city) we're able to recover a fair amount of our own property after the event... not to say we're lax about protecting it but that by taking as many precautions and steps that you can you stand some chance of being re-united should the worst happen.

Opportunist crime wherein someone just steals something because it's easy to and then they keep the item now seems rare.

Oh, and if you're interested in bike security these guides on my site are good places to start:

Guide to which locks to use (which are primary security, which should be considered secondary):
http://www.londonfgss.com/thread17938.html

Review of a motion alarm:
http://www.londonfgss.com/thread24813.html

We also have private areas of the site for tracking stolen bikes, and have worked with companies like Kryptonite to help make their locks better, local police to try and get them to do stuff about the 'fence' and the local cycling associations to try and raise awareness. We're collectively writing guides on bike security too which we hope will be released under creative commons on a wiki and then from there we can encourage bike shops to distribute copies with every new bike sold.

Anyhow... I am more than wandering off the point, which is that most stolen bikes in London are stolen to be sold and that the buyers tend to be regular people who do take them into bike shops after a while, from where some bikes have been recovered. More successfully though, we've recovered bikes from Gumtree and eBay classifieds.
Come on now - lets focus on what is important here - US national security or the profits of Disney Co?
On my phone so I can't search thoroughly yet. Does this mean netflix silverlifht drm is dealt with?
TEDTalk - Alexis Ohanian (Reddit): How to make a splash in social media
here is the question about the long tail words, do you need decent page rank for just your main site's homepage, or do you need page rank for all those other pages too?
What if i play in the options market?
No amount of testing the former will lead you to realize the latter. Sure, you might happen to come to the realization while writing the test, but you might do so over breakfast too.

You're a bit more likely to do it during a time you've set aside to fully consider potential failure scenarios.
IE9 hasn't been released yet; or did you mean, a super early preliminary build in the early stages of IE9 development which probably has little to do with how the final product will look like? We haven't even shipped a developer preview release yet ...

(disclosure: I work on the IE team)
Finally a halfway-intelligent article on the subject.
That's how I am, it limits the damage I can do by over-designing. :)
Tabs Open Relative: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1956 might be what you're looking for.
I agree with Google that advertisers will eventually sort themselves out. I have no objections at all to discreet banner ads, but irritating/puerile animations or anything which obscures the text I'm trying to read or forces me to click on a close button I find unacceptable. For the foreseeable future I'll continue to use Adblock/Ad-Art, but if advertising becomes more sensible and restrained I may have no need to use those.
Indeed. I never owned a checkbook until I moved to the US. Why does everybody love them here?
This is a difficult dynamic to manage and depends really heavily on the designer and programmer involved, how good they actually are and how much they credit the others expertise.

I've worked on projects at one job with a designer that was top notch. He knew and understood the medium despite having started as a print designer. As he did with print, where he learned about the pre-press process, he made sure he learned about the web, usability and understood HTML and CSS. What a joy it was to work with him. His designs were beautiful and understood usability without sacrificing appearance. He's gone on to do independant work and now makes double what I do. Good on him.

Then there's the other side. I've worked with another designer who thinks design exists in a silo, refuses to learn anything about the medium and has very firm (and misguided) ideas about usability. They see no point in involving a programmer in the design phase because the programmer is just supposed to make things work and doesn't understand design. They have learned nothing about the web and feel learning HTML or CSS dilutes their focus; any designer that does know these things is looked down upon because they're spreading the attention to far and will make a poor designer.

Programmers can make it hard on a designer, even good ones, and we shouldn't. This is the most valuable working relationship you can form in my opinion.

If you find one of the former, hold on to them like they are the only life preserver in the ocean. If one of the latter, run like hell. There are, of course, many skill/knowledge levels in between but it really makes me appreciate it when I have a good one to work with.
Because local network admins in various big companies refuse to upgrade from IE6 since they depend on internal applications coded against IE6 specifically, and Microsoft does not control every single corporate LAN to be able to force upgrades down their throats when they don't want them ...
Iraq insurgents 'hack into video feeds from US drones'
I have a very hard time believing this. I can certainly believe the bit about finding the failure mode, but not the bit about deliberately sabotaging a public demo. That would be beyond stupid.
I did, which is why I said "usually". This happened to me twice, and I've never had to go through so much trouble. Furthermore, as to letting PayPal know about a sale, it _is_ possible.

The first time I had an incident was because of a sale I ran, and PayPal limited the account I got it fixed in a week, just in time for a sale of another product. This time, I emailes PayPal telling them about the previous story and asking if there would be a problem. There was, and my account got limited for a second time.

What I did then was, instead of submitting documents, I uploaded a screenshot of my email correspondence with PayPal, and their response. One or two days later, my account was free.
Revenue breakdown for crazyegg.com
No, I don't think so.

The reason why there's no system to license 'The Final Countdown' is probably that it wouldn't pay. I mean, come on! How many people would really watch a guys video unboxing his laptop? This is a nice for his handful of friends but the majority doesn't care, at all.

Even if you combine all the long-tail stuff, it's probably not worth the effort. IIRC Youtube is even unable to find advertisers for all this low-value long-tail stuff.

So, what will happen if this laptop guy uses some CC music? Nothing, I'd say. His friends will have forgotten it in a minute unless the track is really exceptional. And even if it's exceptional, that's one track in a few thousand.

Thus, the impact on stricly-licensed content will be very close to zero.
Irony: http://imgur.com/4QOPv.png. Note that the only ads so blocked are flash ads.
The following link was submitted before this thread,

http://www.funadvice.com/q/why_is_africa_called_the_motherla...

so there is evidence that people have been calling Africa the motherland before the issue came up here.
NoSQL East 2009 Videos
How to protect Hyper-V with DPM 2010?
You're allowed to have your opinion. Of course you are. I simply fail to see how your stating it here was contributing a whit to the conversation. I was trying to state an opinion re: the record labels, and your opinion that music is worthless wasn't a counterpoint. All it was was snide.

But it's fairly obvious how little you know about the things you've chosen to discuss. The way that you label art as "with a price tag" and "free" proves you know such a little amount that you'd assume it's simplistic enough to categorize on who's charging and who's not. That's a child's argument. That's how I talked about art when I was fourteen years old.

I'm not arguing with you because I want to debate you about music or about art. I have stated clearly that I think discussing art on this forum isn't worth the payoff, not when there are knowledgeable people willing to have actual conversations elsewhere. Rather, I am arguing that your position is uneducated and nonsensical, and that by attempting to state it like it's a valid point you're degrading yourself and this thread. Admit that perhaps there's more between heaven and earth than you've dreamt, and we will shake hands and part ways.

But you seem to think that my telling you you're uneducated is "raving like a lunatic", so perhaps this conversation's over already.
Interesting (and depressing) story. On one of your posts you say:

"Sometimes because of the nature of my work I get to hear stories from a greybeard with a past that is, well, "interesting." And again, because of the nature of my work, or more accurately, because of the nature of their work, the stories can't be verified."

What's the nature of your work?
PHP port too.
Did you try having multiple collections and then just dropping them?
http://www.perqworks.com
well, from a publisher perspective would you rather get 50% of $10 or 80% of $1? Adroll doesn't contain the same premium level of sites as a vertical niche network because those publishers know that they can make much more with the niche network then something like adroll.
Looks interesting. I'll bookmark it to read later.

I can relate, especially to the bit where he says "I can only seem to accomplish anything when I have far too much to do, for the simple reason that I have no shortage of projects to work on as a way of not working on the most important ones."
I think a lot of college students have this mentality, which may be why people think we come across as "lazy." I've found that the sure-fire way to get me working on some relatively unimportant task is to put a more urgent one in the pipe.
First Free 1080p Electric Sheep Animation
I'd be happy to make them available if I still had them. But I no longer have them. Nor am I in academia, so I'll be unlikely to teach that subject again.

Sorry.
Or if you want to only keep x amount of data around - thats what capped collections were designed for.
I imagine the problem is they are military/corporate stories :)
It sounds like one of these stories with educational/entertainment purposes rather than a description of an actual problem or event. I did find one reference -

"D. E. Stevenson attributes this story to Nancy Leveson, Software System Safety, STAR '93, Ontario at Darlington, Ontario. 1993.

A torpedo was designed to self-destruct if it turned 180 degrees. Unfortunately for the test ship the torpedo stuck in the tube and the captain turned the ship around for port "

It sounds mildly more plausible since it doesn't begin with the rather improbable torpedo design problem of 'submarines shooting themselves with their own torpedo'.

Still, if tasked with designing a reasonably safe torpedo, one of the very first things you're likely to come up with are 'armed' and 'safe' modes with the torpedo staying in 'safe' mode until it is about to be launched. The next obvious safety feature would be to make the torpedo return to 'safe' mode the moment significantly abnormal conditions are encountered - say, stuck in tube, wildly off-course, etc.

Adding a self destruct mechanism seems highly unsafe - there's the problem of the self-destruct mechanism malfunctioning and activating at an inopportune time. Additionally, if the torpedo has no idea where it is, the last thing you probably want is having it blow up - possibly near you or a friendly.

The actual stories of the difficulties developing WWII torpedoes are quite interesting and offer plenty of lessons in complex systems design, testing and deployment - see:

http://www.ww2pacific.com/torpedo.html

A design flaw that must have been particularly galling: "The conventional contact exploder was designed for the earlier, slower, 33 knot, Mk 13 torpedo. The newer, faster, 46 knot, Mk 14 torpedo had higher inertial impacts that would cause the firing pin to miss the exploder cap. " In other words, the more squarely you hit your target, the more likely the torpedo would fail.
This was a great story with all kinds of lessons about the things we do every day and understandable by almost anyone, including people new to our industry.

This will be the last of these stories for a while.

RiderOfGiraffes, I urge you to reconsider...

The previous two stories pretty much sank without trace

Which probably means nothing. There are many reasons stories do or do not get votes, with quality and interest only two of them. You must also consider time of day, day of week, competition from other stories, competition from other sites, competition from non-internet activities, competition from work, mix of people on-line at that time, mix of lurkers, mix of people who don't vote yet, etc., etc., etc.

Over the years I have made the exact same comment multiple times just to see if the reaction would vary, and it always did. One comment got over 60 up-votes and 6 months later got none.

What does this mean? Nothing. Just keep on posting.

...then stop writing them up and re-think the effort

It's perfectly normal to re-think the effort, but don't stop writing while you're rethinking.

This is a place for builders and entrepreneurs. We may eventually quit, but usually long after others would.

I have 2 signs over my desk, "It Doesn't Matter" and "Jabez Wolffe". When things get tough, the former keeps me from having a stroke and the latter keeps me from quitting. Jabez Wolffe attempted the English Channel 22 times without success. Once, when he didn't know where he was and conditions were dangerous, he quit 100 yards from shore.

Don't be Jabez Wolffe. Your next story may make a big difference in someone's life. If I'm on-line at the time, I'll vote it up. Keep 'em coming.
Totally agree. However, I do find it very dangerous. I frequently try to do stupid things that sound like fun, then fall, when I'm cycling drunk.
I don't believe the market will balance itself at all. Online publishers are reliant on advertiser revenue, and there's far too much ad space to fill solely with useful ads for useful products. At the same time, the vast majority of AdBlock users block almost everything - including the 'useful ads for useful products' and the high-value branded advertisements that pay by the impression and really don't care whether you click on them or not, just as long as you see them.

Right now, online publishers view ad blocking as an annoying evil not worth combatting - under the assumption that <5% of all users block advertisements, that the users that do often aren't advertisers' most desirable demographic, and that playing cat-and-mouse with ad blockers is more annoying than it's worth. But as the percentage of users using ad blockers rises, more online publishers will be open to technical solutions to this problem. I know of multiple projects that incorporate server-to-server ad calls (so the ads are served from the same domain as the content) and slicing of ads into multiple smaller images (so the ads aren't standard IAB image sizes, but chunks of the key content are.) Other projects I've seen tie the presence of advertising to key site functionality, making it impossible to use the site effectively without referencing a visible advertisement. As ad blocking increases to the point where it's material to publishers, blocking ad blocking will spawn a lot of startups.

There's already a good example of this: the increasing use of Local Shared Objects (also known as 'Flash cookies') to store data formerly stored in cookies and even to respawn data in deleted cookies. Use of Local Shared Objects for advertising purposes was extremely rare several years ago. As the proportion of users regularly deleting the cookies that contained unique IDs for ad targeting and frequency capping crept up, the market didn't 'balance' by forgoing unique identifiers in cookies - it found a technical workaround by repurposing rarely-deleted LSOs.

I never really understand it when ad-blocking advocates evangelize to the general public - the more there are, the more likely it is that their blocking will in turn be blocked.
If you even have to think about what your session token is, you've done things dramatically wrong.
I don't want to be picky, but:

1. It seems to be a single adSense account. Not "AdSense accountS".

2. "yesterday AndAppStore received a payment for the first two months of the nearly three months that had not bee paid." (From the thread)

I agree though, Google really needs to buy a company that knows about customer service.

FWIW, Here's my method:

1. Get an AdWords account. Spend money.
2. If you ever have any issues with Google, you now have a phone number with a real google employee at the end, and you're paying them money which makes them more interested.
Most knowledgeable cyclists ride on the road all the time. Riding on sidewalks is dangerous, mainly because cars frequently pull out of driveways and stop at the edge of the road, not the edge of the sidewalk. A cyclist on the sidewalk is usually moving faster than the pedestrians that cars are used to, so they don't think to stop at the sidewalk and watch for cyclists.
Damn shame because 2011 is going to be the year of linux on the desktop for sure.
В Контакте | Серёга ♥♫kis♀ Зовтун
How to read (and re-read) a book
Sort of the uncanny valley for intelligence. It astounds me how many people don't trust programs/automations when it is almost provably better at performing a given task. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
The Law of Unintended Consequences
Seems implausible to me. Rather than a self-destruct, it would be more plausible to just disable the explosive trigger altogether. If a torpedo fails to hit target for whatever reason (including, but not limited to the original problem) you don't necessarily want it to explode in some random place. Nor is it clear how, if this failure did occur with loss of all hands, we would ever have known about it.

Despite this, I take the point of the story to be that self-corrective failure detection mechanisms should not be capable of causing greater harm than the maximum plausible damage of the problem they were intended to correct.
mplayer is great and I use it as my primary video player, but I can understand why one would prefer VLC -- it's much more friendly, even if you use the GUI for both.

Also, mplayer and VLC are helpmeets in my system; sometimes VLC can play something that mplayer will choke on, and vice versa. VLC is a valuable resource indeed.
Transliteration goes global
Yeah I think we have a long way to go before js performance is affected by CPU caches.
1. There are still a lot of people running on older computers (i.e. Windows 98/ME) and see no reason to upgrade (and probably have never installed a system update/hotfix at all).

2. There are just a lot of people that don't install any system updates.

3. There are people with pirated Windows versions that don't know how (or just don't care about them at all) to hack around the 'Genuine Windows' checks. So they don't install system updates.
I'm pretty sure Shuttleworth has clearly stated he never sees a profitable business model around Desktop linux.
Maybe in America, I don't know. Over here, it's as I quoted above.
Thanks for that link, that was a very interesting read.
When the CEO can't access ESPN.com from his work PC, then you'll see a big push for something to be fixed.
Long time lurker. Signed up to say keep the greybeard stories coming!
This could be a good thing for both Ubuntu and Canonical. From what I've seen/read/heard Shuttleworth never showed much interest in Canonical the company and spent all his time evangelizing Ubuntu the distribution. By getting someone with more interest in the business side of things running the business side things hopefully Canonical can grow into whatever it was hoping to grow into.

This will also leave Mark with more free time to focus on what he seems to be passionate about. All in all this could turn out to be exactly what Canonical and Ubuntu needs.
ConceptRobots – Seriously Awesome Images Of Robots
Ask HN: where are we, in Maslow's hierarchy of needs?
Bah, I completely didn't see (2) first time around. Google groups really needs a better interface. Even doing "Newer" didn't reveal that post until I searched for it manually.

Has that tactic of getting an AdWords account worked for you? With which product?

I'm evaluating Google Checkout for a project of mine and between this and the Paypal thread, i'm starting to consider alternatives.
Also see http://blog.canonical.com/?p=307
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap2.html#204

"A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner's duly authorized agent."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Linux#Year_of_Desktop_L...
Insurance only makes sense if you can't afford the low-probability, high-impact fluctuation. On average, you will lose money -- after all, that's how the insurance companies make money.

That's why it really only makes sense on cars, houses, airplanes, etc. And maybe, in the US, for liability.
Too bad, his vision has really dramatically changed the desktop linux landscape. For many users, Desktop Linux is Ubuntu.
The CEO (and all the other big shot managers) have all received the magic blessings needed to plug their personal laptops into the company network and never even sees the desktop working environment foisted upon their menial workers (or at least that is my experience).
There's not enough information to explore potential causality here. All we have is the word of an aggrieved site owner who swears up and down that he was engaged in perfectly unimpeachable conduct. There's no evidence, just whining.