skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doesn't Amazon have to protect the "cleanliness" of the IP addresses in its pool? I worked a bit in the past on email deliverability issues and recall that mail originating from IPs that have behaved badly in the past was much more likely to get tagged as spam. I'd hate to be the guy whose EC2 instance received one of these IPs. Who knows what sorts of filters would be left around out there.
4B is still nothing to throw out of your bed though, I imagine that the iTunes sales of apps is a much smaller portion of that 4B. I think the lions share would be going to the music and iPod accessories.
re: Hotmail to enterprises

They already have outlook web access (OWA) as a feature of their enterprise outlook product and plenty of independent providers exist which will host your entire outlook stack for you.
More like 27% of the 2008 federal budget.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
Nobody Will Believe You Anyway
26 GigaPixel image http://www.dresden-26-gigapixels.com/dresden26GP
Ho ho. Entirely different sort of parentheses, of course. But yes, the sentence might have been improved by splitting it up so that it didn't need numbering. [EDITED after looking again at what I wrote before, to add:] Or just by removing the numbers.
I have a feeling that graceful disagreement isn't working so well in politics lately. Shouting "Liar!" at the President is just one of many examples.
they can just escape to like-minded havens on the internet rather than fixing the real issues going on around them

For most people, the world just won't stay saved, so they begin to wonder, why keep going to the effort to save it?
Thank goodness. I haven't programmed C in a long time, and thought I was missing something when I saw that code.
This is a really terrible way to convince someone to use your product and when you couple that with google hijacking you really don't have a service I want or will ever want to use (even if all is fixed)
just to clarify: they could obtain a new valid cert by redirecting the MX to their own mail server and requesting a new one via e-mail, right? or is there another way?
That's okay with me. The great thing about the Internet has always been that you can choose the services you want to use and avoid the ones you don't.

We're losing a lot of that control, but that loss of freedom isn't coming from me. I'd like to work to maintain it.
I can vouch that negative reviews can be hidden, my friend wrote one and he sees "23 reviews" including his own, when he is logged in. Everyone else sees "22 reviews" and his is omitted.
> China torpedoes a US aircraft carrier for no particularly good reason

No. The scenario is that China hits a US carrier with a (conventionally armed) ballistic missile, for no particularly good reason
The author works for Google, and his most recent blog post is actually about the Go language:

http://benlynn.blogspot.com/2009/11/it-go-time_6644.html
not a bad way to get your irl account "deleted" too.
The blog title is kinda misleading as it is very little about Microsoft and almost exclusively about Google.
But you're helping break the internet.

When I write software, thanks to people like you now I can't depend on DNS to return accurate results. Another example of this is web browsers, which cache DNS beyond the TTL in order to provide a slightly faster experience. In the process, they break GSLB, which can no longer operate optimally since it can't rely on users re-querying DNS after the TTL of their answer expires.

Most folks are quite happy with your default experience, but that's because they're ignorant of the ramifications.
I actually have personal experience with this. I got a letter from my credit card company saying there was going to be a 20% interest rate hike on my card. It's pretty embarassing to admit I have a credit card with a sizable balance on it, but I'd like to point out that my company gave an easy way out:

I was allowed to "opt-out" of my card to avoid having the interest rate hike affect my existing balance. This means my account is not closed, but I am not allowed to use the card anymore and my balance is still charged the pre-existing interest rate. I have no need to use this card, it is mainly a towering specter of shameful debt to be paid down, so this option was a dream come true.
Indeed. It was a Tom Clancy book with a hawkish pitch. Let me know when the movie adaptation comes out.
Visualizing Data with R and ggplot2 (Video)
Well, I guess the whole world can thank their deity of choice that you're nowhere near being in charge of anything.
If I were the US, I'd simply make it a matter of official policy to make as many official, unofficial, formal, informal, commercial and personal ties to every country in the world as possible, to the maximum extent that any ideology on either side allows.

Yes, certainly we need to maintain defensive and offensive military capabilities, but I think we should be doing much, much more to reduce the need for those capabilities.
This resolution isn’t coming in real time any time soon (i.e. within the next 10 or 15 years), until we have cameras based on a different optical principle than a flat sensor with a set of glass lenses in front of it: Using the sizes of sensors we can currently manufacture for any reasonable kind of price, we can take a picture of this resolution with each exposure having about a maximum of about a 20 degree field of view. And since current sensors are not all that far off of saturating the detail that lenses can resolve, the only way to improve this will be either to make larger sensors, use arrays of cameras (or turn the cameras around very quickly), or use some other kind of optical system. In not too long, I suppose we might be able to capture data continuously, as a video, and then use software (computationally expensive fancy math) to increase the resolution beyond that in any particular frame. But that's still not going to get us close to 18 gigapixel spherical panoramas.
title says "vs" but there is no real comparison btw 2 companies.
Mozilla Firefox Start Page
With the vendor-based technologists and vendor-based evangelists, at least you are certain who is paying them to espouse their opinions; you know how they're going to slant.

Various Industry Analyst firms and Industry Pundits can undergo these same sorts of seismic shifts. And whether the opinion is with technical merit, a paid opinion, a troll for web hits, or a curmudgeon that has made a career out of being quotable, is far less certain.

Well, a few of the curmudgeons are obvious.
It's seems like there are a lot of like minded people posting in here. Not sure who is still checking up on this thread, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

What would be a good way to privately exchange emails? I know some of us used anonymous accounts to post here but I'd be fine with exchanging my real information for IM or emailing with anyone else who is interested. Just not sure about the best way to do that privately...
It was his job to like those things and talk about them. Would you feel the same mire towards a salesperson who, after switching jobs, did not continue to try to sell the products from their old employer?

I don't understand why a professional evangelist, in a paid position, would be expected to behave any differently? He is a salesman.
i wonder if msft allows google to grab yelp too.
I've actually been joking about starting a 'move to the internet' movement.
New computer virus disguised as social security administration download
As a long-time San Francisco resident I found it irksome that Alex was so quick to bemoan the lack of culture to consume without showing any possible interest in creating any.

In my opinion, San Francisco is a beautiful place for creators.
That's all fine but one of the better things in business is to stay level headed when someone doesn't like your product and avoid coming off like a jackssa who could give two shits.
If we're asking questions here... If a group was going into a restaurant, but saw it was dirty would it be "they changed their mind" or "they changed their minds"?
It depends on what you mean. Take this example:

I like video games more than my girlfriend.

A) I like video games more than she does.
== I like video games more than she likes them.

B) I like video games more than her.
== I like video games more than I like her.
I liked the "take care" part at the end.
I really have to disagree on that one, as a designer. I see a lot of mistakes:

- Inconsistent font usage.
- The page isn't centered properly, it's slightly to the left.
- Light blue on white text.
- Improper whitespace usage on the "Faster, Safer, Smarter, Better" section.
- The social network icons, the monitor, and the trophy are all aliased horribly. Someone used the wrong type of anti-aliasing when resizing them.
- Pink.

And it's just plain ugly in my opinion :/
I would imagine that vocabulary would have a greater effect than their spelling or grammar.
I stand corrected. Don't aircraft carriers have pretty good missile defence systems, though?
One of things which annoy me is that he was an evangelist and didn't even try the latest products. Office 2010 preview was out which has threaded discussions he raves about in gmail. He hasn't looked at office online version but says he suspect that it won't be good. I guess he should have as an evangelist asked some questions and pushed few features in the product he would have been selling if he wasn't let go.
Google Convicted in French Copyright Case
Some details in here too:

http://blog.sucuri.net/2009/12/twitter-defacement.html
Some details in here too:

http://blog.sucuri.net/2009/12/twitter-defacement.html

Seems a DNS hijacking for sure.
Is there a reason why the panorama isn't joined cleanly at the closest zoom level? (Northeast direction, facing Vysočany.) I don't know how hard is it to make, though.
That number doesn't include wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Perhaps there are people in the world who don't think this site is utterly tone-deaf. I'm not one of them.

Matters of taste aside, here's a factual prediction: This site will disappear in a flurry of bad press and (perhaps) legal action the first time an actual suicidal person couples the use of the site with an actual suicide attempt.

EDIT: Come to think of it, I'll make another prediction: My first prediction probably won't come to pass, because it would require the site to actually have a statistically significant number of users. And I doubt the effectiveness of the apparent marketing plan. The stench of death doesn't sell very well. Especially when the second step of your viral loop is "encourage your customers to cut off casual contact with any other potential customers". ;)
Article is spot on.

This makes me want to cancel my ACM membership. Which I only got in the first place so that I could get access to their digital library of published papers.
His warning against using #ifdef is also misplaced. I have written assembler (GAS) using the GAS x86 asm preprocessor to write portable x86/x86-64 assembly code in one file. Far simpler and shorter than writing the same code in two files.

Basically, whenever he says "never" do something he means he doesn't like to do it. For example, his answer to not having a multi-level function break is a nested helper function. God no. That's one of the few times when it's correct to use goto.

Edit: Ahh, he also advocated always using mmap instead of the standard file IO functions. Wow that's bad.
Yeah, the numbers change year to year, and the most recent numbers are even greater. From [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_United_States_federal_budg...], I tally ~ $743 billion in defense and veterans affairs. Add a large percentage of the $220 billion in interest payments. The important question percentage-wise is whether you include Social Security.

Anyway, the fraction of the budget is really besides the point. We spend an inordinate amount of money on the military, and there is no viable threats to defend against. China is the best pick because they spend the second most money ($85 billion), but can we legitimately think that we'll go to physical war with such a huge trade partner?

Our military is funded by campfire stories and yellow press.
From the blog post, it looks like this could be done by anybody with a good SLR, lens, robot mount, and lots of time.

Also, let the "wtf am I looking at" hunt begin:

http://i.imgur.com/Ibmo5.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/Tjxfd.jpg
What the US gets for that money tho' is a vast amount of tech that eventually ends up with the general public. I have two GPSs on me at the moment. Which is ridiculous but hey, they're so cheap, why not stick one in every electronic device?! There's a reason that all that comes out of the US.

The EU as a whole spends about half what the US does on defence and ends up with about 10% of the capability. Hmm.
This is what startup hubs are all about.

My criteria for a place to live definitely include "there are fellow HN readers within a ten-mile radius".
Aw, but I love the semicolon; it let's you do CRAZY things!
I actually read the code, and that's not the case.
the -2 is harsh. although smugness isn't required to extol the virtues of scheme.
I just left the following comment on the OSTP blog: (We submitted an NSF proposal yesterday, so this is particularly well-timed.)

As a graduate student and researcher in Computer Science I would welcome the application of NIH’s open publication policy to NSF funded research as well. I just helped submit an NSF proposal and would welcome such guidelines on our research. We already follow them for the most part, and it would help us ensure that conferences and publishers won’t object to the dissemination of the results of our research if it’s not just our own desire, but an obligation from our funding agency.

I would also appreciate if you look into the feasibility of establishing open data and open source requirements for the CISE division of NSF where funded projects would be obligated provide data generated as part of the research (this isn’t always reasonable, so some care will be necessary in formulating this policy) as well as source code used. Right now, especially in computer science, it’s extremely difficult to replicate the results of experiments and often we find that researchers have to invest time in reverse engineering someone’s experiment simply to be able to compare the results one research got with the results of another or their own work. In addition, university technology transfer departments sometimes get in the way of researchers who try and open up their work. Making this a firm requirement from the funding agency provides the researchers with the credibility and leverage they need to ensure technology transfer departments stop interfering with dissemination efforts.

It’s rare someone ever asks for a requirement, but in this case I think extending these types of requirements to NSF programs will give us the power and leverage we need to overcome the obstacles in the way of disseminating our work in the fashion we’d like to be doing anyways.
It still has many improvements over C. Compare:

void func(x) {
if (a == b) {
do(c);
do(d);
}
else{
do(e);
}
}
vs:

def func(x):
if a == b:
do(c)
do(d)
else:
do(e)
It's really annoying that this horseshit comment continues to get moderated up.

thechangelog jumped to an unreasonable, and uninformed conclusion, that implies pretty horrible things about me. He knew literally nothing about the existing circumstances, yet felt free to accuse me of being the sort of person who would destroy my wife's work on a whim.

It's ridiculous that any intelligent person would up-arrow his attack on my character.

Fuck Alex for jumping to the worst possible conclusion, despite having no reason to do so.

And fuck each and every one of you who upvoted his baseless defamations.

Hint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_that_broke_the_camels_bac...
ACM trying to subvert open access
Well, I was a philosophy major once. Fortunately, I balanced it with something marketable--English! The "job lifestyle" that came with the degree was underemployment, and noT much cash, which I gather you are implying. But even that degree gets one past some HR filters.

I did know a fellow from a professional family who (I infer) chose to compete by not competing; got within a few credits of his bachelors at a good school, quit. Was accepted into a good graduate program even so, did most of the work, quit. Not a pretty pattern, and he reached middle age working as a cable guy. I don't say that you're doing this, but be aware of the trap.
Shopify is a company that handles large amounts of customer data.

They've sponsored a very positively spun interview on monetizing such data by spamming people via SMS, "sweepstakes", promoting payday loans and other activities that I consider deeply unethical (even if legal).

I'd think that if Shopify was a reputable firm, they wouldn't want their name within a mile of this scumbag. Particularly when he's being portrayed in a positive light.
i don't grasp the 'problem' with the rating system. a 4.5 star deli offers 4.5 star deli cuisine, and a 4 star restaurant offers 4 star haute cuisine. are they that much more comparable than a 4 star restaurant and a 5 star laundromat?
The point still remains that he arrived to this conclusion by misusing his tools. The problems of inheritance are not a universally recognized truth. There are plenty of OO advocates who believe that inheritance is perfectly fine. Maybe the issue with inheritance in OO languages is people misusing their language.
Keep in mind that US defense contrctors are probably the most expensive in the world. How much does a Lockheed Martin engineer makes versus a Chinese contractor engineer?

The US spending 40-50% of the world's defense budget doesn't say much other than the fact that a lot of people are getting very rich in America. Don't get me wrong, they are still far ahead from everyone else, but I don't think that's a valid metric unless you adjust for purchasing power.
You should give http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone a read. Might offer some new perspective:

He has described the reduction in all the forms of in-person social intercourse upon which Americans used to found, educate, and enrich the fabric of their social lives. He believes this undermines the active civil engagement a strong democracy required from its citizens.
> Salem hypothesis

As a non-western culture person, why is so important to be ranked as one of the five laws of human nature ?

----------------------------------

About the whole article:

I was expecting some universal and fundamental laws, but at last I think this article covers only a minor aspect of predictable human nature in a modern society.
Steve Mann doesn't have anything unremoveable in his body that I know of, just a higher level of integration between his body and hardware.
Surface navies are useless against competent organized opponents. Carrier groups are for power projection to scare the natives, little else. During a $250 million war game in 2002, OPFOR sunk the US fleet in the Persian Gulf. Sorry I can't find the original:
http://bassreport.com/forum/rec.boats.t664050.htm

And another from the War Nerd:
http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carrier...

He repeats this quote from the US Naval Institute about 10 times in that last article: "Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack," and points out that ballistic missiles are 50 year old tech.

The solution to defending a surface navy isn't to throw money at it, but to mothball it.
Check Out New York's Newest Startup Hangout, Dogpatch Labs
Is the combination of Parkinson's Law with Maes-Garreau Law the reason we don't have AI yet?
I suppose the first step, then, would be to give people around you a real living example of what it means to "be the change you want to see in the world".
> I've torn through a SF trilogy in the last week and I read all five Temeraire books (highly recommended!) in about ten days last month

Do you have a job?

Or to put my question differently: What does it mean for you to read a book? How fast do you read? How much attention do you pay to single words an author uses? What kind of books do you read? You mention SciFi novels and non-fiction books.

I personally really cannot understand what's so good about carrying a whole library with you. When I have a good book in my hands it keeps me occupied for several days/weeks/months. Bad books are a waste of time anyway.
Yes, that's how it works.

No other ways, right?
It's dangerous to get to know your neighbours -- if you don't like them, they're hard to avoid. Better to be socially close to those you can physically avoid, and socially distant from those you can't.
Reminds me of this, which also surfaced recently:

http://www.seppukoo.com/

Also strangely well-designed for a simple novelty site.
It would be: they changed their minds.

Why? "they" refers to the group members, because "they" is a plural pronoun.

"It changed its mind" would be how you could write the first phrase. In this phrase, "it", a singular pronoun, would refer to the group.
Good idea.

I have a job and bathe regularly. Yet I walk through the ghetto every day, and find that folks there are still unemployed and smelly. They're just not following my example like they should!
Google's feature creep
Another example of an imitation scroller:

http://booleanmagic.com/cydia/overboard/

(visit on MobileSafari)
This is exactly what the Google Web Toolkit compiler does, but outputs Java bytecode rather than taking it into JS.

The HotSpot compiler does some of this static analysis at runtime (various forms of devirtualization and type-tightening), but it's far more effective if you feed it into a big vat and keep running optimizations on it until you can eke out anything more.
When discussing English, the fact that a word is imported from any language should not matter, as English is a thief language.French however is VERY present in English, since about 1066 anyway. I've been told about half of our words in English have French roots. Further many of the "fancy words" are of French origin, due to the simple fact that the nobles spoke french, and that connotation still exists in the language.

Short version: lots of french words are in English, why does this one example warrant mention.
True story: the ISP I use was acquired by Tiscali and shortly afterwards their cert expired. I called them up to tell them and they told me to turn my anti-virus software off and try again.
IBM was king. I think in the late ’80s and early ’90s, we saw that shift and Microsoft became king of the hill. And in 2009, 2010, going forward, Microsoft is sort of like IBM. It’s a longtime company with a great tradition and still very profitable, but it’s not the leader.

Another sign that a company is at the top, but due to come down:

Awesome R&D, which hasn't a snowball's chance in hell of getting to be a real product. (IBM, Xerox, the old AT&T)

Apple and Google still seem to be actively turning new tech into product. Microsoft: mainly the XBox division seems to still be doing this.
CakePHP In the Enterprise
I was answering solely for myself. I'm not an author.

The only time I really choose my words super-carefully is when I'm working on promotional copy. So that's the angle that I approached it from.
No. They have effectively none.
>>[About General Fusion] Radioactive liquid alkali metal exchangers

The last time I checked the periodic system, lead was NOT an alkali metal. Lithium? Hell, they talk about using sodium in newer nuclear power plants... (and have some going since long.)

[Edit: I googled for you. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi... ]

[Edit: Some discussion about sodium and lead in nuclear reactors. Lithium is hardly worse than sodium. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf32.html ]

(FYI, the main criticism of GF I've seen has been about the mechanical building of the pistons.)