skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't underestimate the power of a small number of geeks. If 100,000 ordinary people are blocked from Flash because Adobe thought dealing with their device was beneath them, then nothing much is going to happen.

If 100,000 geeks can't access a site on their iPhone then you're going to see an alternative or two arise.

I've been using solutions on both Ubuntu and Mac OS X to let me view Youtube content without Flash for about a year. You don't think the existance and ecstatic use of these tools sends a message to those within Google, even if only the fellow geeks?
Probably most of the credit goes to the people involved in the project and their ability to champion their cause and provide these services, straightforward documentation that looks like it's written for humans by humans, etc.

Another part of it might be that BART has been highly automated and computerized since its design and inception so the data they offer has been available in some machine format or another for a long time. I remember there were a couple Macs with atrocious screen burn-in displaying all sorts of real-time info from the inside of the Berkeley Shattuck Ave Station Agent's fish-bowl in the early 90s - if you could hook it up to a Mac then, it seems natural you can offer it over the Web today.
Have you tried http://www.feedbeater.com ?

More specifically: http://www.diffbot.com/api/rss/http://www.kuro5hin.org/secti...

Disclosure: I hung out with the guys who did that site last summer.
Filing For Bankruptcy
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Ah thanks, I mistakingly thought that linked to a next chapter(which actually isn't there; this is the final chapter in the book).
That's clearly my first thought on every idea now: is google likely to implement that themselves at some point ? (it doesn't block me from trying though)
See patio11's comment above - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1077400
Do you mean with real hardware? I have never done any hardware stuff, but I'd like to learn. Where do I start? :)
Also note that it's possible for a single word to have multiple meanings depending on context, this includes even opposite meanings with opposite connotations. In the context of news.yc.com the term "hacker" generally has a different meaning than the term has elsewhere, especially in the context of unauthorized, malicious intrusion into a computer system.

Similarly a term such as "killer" may have an extremely negative connotation in the context of a grisly homicide yet the same word may have a positive connotation and a completely different meaning (dominant, superlative, desirable) in other connotations. Such is the dynamic, flexible, and adaptive nature of language (outside the realm of the pedant).
Twitter Usabilty – A non-technical new user's first experience
Collection of Best, Fresh And Free Web Social Icons Sets
See also: whitehouse.gov (which uses drupal)
But of course. I understand all of those complaints, and I think they all make sense.

Though, look at how spoiled we've become by piracy. Now, we say we'd only buy something if we the exact same experience as we'll have with the final product. A demo is sometimes far from the game experience? yep. Movie trailers are bullshit? Sometimes, yes they are! Movie synopsis then? Even more!

Now, think about all the other things you buy. You can't really go to a car shop and say: "Hi. I'm looking for a car to cross the us. So, in order for it to be really like my final experience, I'll need to borrow it for at least a week.". Or like, "Hi, I want to try a Mac. Of course the factory Mac doesnt' help me much, so I'll borrow it for a day to install emacs/vi, some terminal scripts, quicksilver and see if it suits me well". The list goes on.

Specially with all the other non-pirated items, we have to make a decision about the buying the final product before we've had access to the final product. It's really up to the producer which means he'll provide you, as a sales mechanism, to try his product before you make your buying decision.

Not being able to have the full experience before you buy, specially with some kinds of products (some books, some games, most movies) is critical to selling it. It's not the consumer's right to take by force the final experience from the producer to make a buying decision.
The Hugh Cudlipp lecture: Does journalism exist?
Uniformly distributed random data doesn't follow the law. Data whose logarithm is uniformly distributed does.
Using SVG For Flexible, Scalable, and Fun Backgrounds, Part I
Pure CSS new 3D effect
Even better than the 3D Meninas
Part 2: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/using-svg-for-flexible-sc...
I was going to post that too, a really good read.
Great project, congratulations.

I am still curious about one aspect: why do you realease the source code? (same question for browsershots).. I think for such a service the vast majority is not interested in the backend code and those who are interested might take it and build a competing product, not being required to release the modified code. Am I missing something? What is your take on this ?
Years ago, I read a biography of a prostitute. She got married after becoming a prostitute. Very early in the relationship, she told him bluntly that she can go out to dinner at a nice restaurant and get laid with any of her clients and if he didn't have more to offer her, why should she see him?

According to the book "More work for mother", homemakers today work about 60 hours a week -- the same as homemakers did 300 years ago. The book is the history of technology in the home -- ie of "labor saving devices" like vacuum cleaners. Such inventions apparently saved male labor, not female labor. Vacuum cleaners meant men stopped having to beat the rugs and women took over the task of cleaning rugs. Women who work full time jobs still do 40 hours of housework a week. Men have endeavored to pick up some of the slack. It amounts to them doing, on average, about 10 minutes more a day or an hour and ten minutes a week -- which doesn't begin to make up for the 20 hours of labor she is no longer doing.

With a 50% divorce rate (in the US), I don't think your typical marriage involves Wuv, Twu Wuv (a la Princess Bride). But all the statistics and anecdotes I am familiar with indicate that it does typically involve a great deal of domestic labor on the part of the woman. And, statistically, men with a full-time wife/homemaker climb the corporate ladder faster and make more money on average. I don't think you can replicate that outcome by removing a wife's domestic duties and replacing her with someone who looks good on your arm and is great in bed. This is likely why we have a historical tradition of wealthy men having both a wife and a mistress: The two women play very different roles in his life. And the two women likely want very different things from the relationship. (Perhaps both would ideally like the same thing. But most people are unable to arrange some ideal relationship. When faced with compromising, different people have different priorities.)

In short, I think it is a mistake to think that the same woman in different circumstances would have the same thing to offer. The act of marrying her changes her (or at least changes her relationship to him, for good or for ill). If a man likes what he is getting from an escort service, marrying his favorite escort does not mean he will get more of the same. As for social taboos: People still talk when a wealthy man marries a much younger, very beautiful woman. It is generally assumed to be "an arrangement", not love, and still gets frowned upon.
I heard Mike Arrington actually developed all the IP for the hack. True fake story.
Interesting, but can't this be explained by the distribution of file sizes. There will generally be many small files but fewer and fewer larger files. So there will be more 1k files than 2k files, more 2ks than 3ks, more files between 10 to 19k than 20 to 29k, more files between 100 to 199k than 200 to 299k etc.
CSS Shorthand Clockwise Rule
hey, I absolutely agree about my anedocte not applying to everyone else. What I wanted to illustrate was cases where, piracy not being an option, people just actually buy the games, rather than not buying as some people believe.

As for the income/worth of consumed media for month, I surely don't believe the amount of lost sales or whatever companies claim is exactly the amount of consumed media. That's false as you clearly illustrate. It means people would consume less media, within their means.

All those friends of mine, would the xbox 360 not have pirated games, would also have bought original games. They wouldn't just let it there, sitting. Would they buy every each of their pirated games? of course not.

So my thought process is not like "if there weren't pirated media, people'd pay for all they consumed as pirated items", but rather "weren't there pirated media, people would either consume original media, or do something else, and we can't tell that for sure". And therefore asserting that people who pirate stuff "would have never bought that anyway" is wrong.
Fair enough, but they're all engineers.
Thomson Reuters Delivers Microsecond Access to News in London and Chicago
A Peek Inside the ‘Eleonore’ Browser Exploit Kit
That's at least 1200$ every year. With that money, maybe you could pay a friend to knock together some scripts and not have recurring costs.

Also, do you really spend all day doing A/B tests or do you have 'marginal' time that you could dedicate to other things? I think we (maybe not you; I'm speaking in general) make the mistake of saying that since we bill at X dollars an hour, that our time is worth that. It isn't: you can't fill all your hours with pay work all the time.
Bill Gates has let China down
A perfect darknet would allow criminals to evade detection and law enforcement, but it cannot separate good laws (or criminals) from bad ones. I am pretty sure paedophiles are the bad kind, but there are countries out there that have very different definitions for "criminal" than I am comfortable with.

Also, I am pretty sure there can be no such thing as a perfect darknet, but I really don't want to do the math.
Horizontal and vertical: The evolution of evolution
Http://www.bomb-mp3.com/index.php?search=www+funytimes+com
http://twitter.com/arrington/status/8230803684
The first X-Rays (audio slides)
What HD Moore did is point to a failure and provide a practical way to exploit it. I bet other people with 9+ figure budgets already had this technology.

Pointing out failures can, hopefully, allow to build better law-enforcement-evasion tools in the future. As HD Moore also pointed out, any such tool has a social price built into it.
For example, the histogram in Fig. 34-2b was generated by taking a large number of samples from a computer random number generator. These particular numbers follow a normal distribution with a mean of five and a standard deviation of three

Eh? Shouldn't this be a uniform distribution?
Which browser?

Can you post numbers by any chance (I'm genuinely interested - in my experience chrome and safari were sometimes several times faster than ff with canvas)?
Being technically correct is all I hope for. As an Englishman I always write Eire but say Ireland.
Aurora ("Chinese" checksum) code circulated for years on English sites
Yes. It's amusing how this is a prime example of a person 'seeing' a normal distribution where there is none.
Not sure if this is available, but is there a class near him which has kids about the same age? Thats how I got started in programming. It was great because the teacher knew how to teach kids and having other people around as enthusiastic as myself created a great environment.
>The only area that Flash is even remotely threatened is delivering video

I think this is quite a big deal for flash on the internet. Once you remove video, a very large part of users don't need flash anymore.

Also, the main actor in on-line video , google, has showed clear intent of supporting html5 for video. They are pragmatists, so it will probably take some time before they consider html5 a good enough alternative, but it's still on the horizon.

And when video won't run on flash anymore, i will have much less problems with flash myself. It will be restrained to the things it ought to be used for.

EDIT about :
> The 'slow nature of proprietary software' ... in comparison to web standards????

Well i think it's obvious what he meant is that proprietary platforms are slow to conquer new platforms because the effort sits on one company only (even if it's adobe)
I think he's right. Adobe couldn't even fix an half decent implementation of the Flash VM on linux and OSX. I don't see them supporting a dozen mobile ecosystems tomorrow

>Many mobile devices are getting full-featured flash players soon/now - http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/2009....

Well sorry but you make me think of people saying "You can do the same thing in canvas + JS !!" when confronted with flash media. You kind of miss the point
Y Combinator: What We Do
Branches don't really "disappear" in git, though. You're probably already aware of this, but for everyone not familiar with how git works:

Named branches in git are just moving references to commits. If you delete the pointer, the branch doesn't cease to exist, as it is present in the repository 'tree'. If you know the commit that was the head of the branch, you can easily create a new reference to it. The branch might eventually get garbage-collected if there is no other named ref that depends on it.

For example, if you merge "feature-foo" to "master" and then delete "feature-foo", the name is gone. However, the branch is still there (clearly visible in git-gui), and will not be garbage-collected because "master" depends on it.

The "problem" with hg in my opinion is that it attaches more meaning to the name of the branch than is necessary.

Of course, git also allows you to destroy commits, and destroying ones that you have shared with other repositories may lead to complaints from others developers. But that's a social issue; git will not (and never should) dictate what you do with your commits, it just tracks them.
Йога « Фитнес клуб « Уроки тут
>>EDIT: ...

An old saw is that people from dictatorships believe in conspiracy theories -- after all, they live in one. (Just look at the Middle East and old Eastern Europe.)

But THIS is over the limit for, well, strange... :-)

>>Try writing down anything that undermines your country leaders, or what they won't you to say: in fact we don't know what to say, because if we did we couldn't

So there are thought crimes/memes which we can't think about even in this age of the anonymous Internet? When people have been writing (and even implemented) revolutionary dogma for centuries?!

The main problems with conspiracies is that they have to be secret. Nothing secret is ever efficient and works well.

But certainly, some groups are illegal -- and should be. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and similar groups which murder civilians. The word "terrorism" do have a serious definition.
Benford's Law and the Iranian election: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/06/benfords-law-and-iranian-ele...

And the British MPs' expenses: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/06/its-probably-worth-testing-m...

And BBC executives' expenses: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/06/running-numbers-on-bbc-execu...
Yet there are non-Sun JVMs...
Yukihiro "Matz": Ruby, Functional Programming and Programming Languages Design
Visualizing sorting algorithms with Hilbert curve
Guardian’s Rusbridger Urges Against Industry-Wide Paywalls:UK
A page which politely invites you to enter your Twitter user name & pw. [ I politely declined. ]
IDC: Android to overtake iPhone, BlackBerry by 2013
That's a misleading reply. What you can do in HTML/CSS/JS in a few lines (even with jQuery) or with, say, a day's work does not touch what one can do with the same amount of time using Flash (assuming proficient developers of both technologies). Perhaps the designs might be superficially similar, but they would not be identical.

Perhaps on the web that's irrelevant, because the advantages of the native HTML solution will outweigh the facile glitz and glam of the Flash solution. But on an instantaneous aesthetic reaction gauge, the Flash design will probably win. And given the state of the industry (consumers, graphic designers, and relevant management) that aesthetic reaction is potent enough to cement a great many design decisions.

A lot of that is changing, especially as expertise in building aesthetically pleasing sites in pure HTML has grown and spread, and as sophistication with web technologies has increased across the board (so that even managers and graphic designers start to understand the problems and limitations of Flash-based designs). But it's still there, and Flash is still a very strong player in the web game, and will be for some time to come. Likely until the tooling exists to allow designers to create pure HTML designs that match or exceed the aesthetics of Flash based designs with the same amount of work.
> I really feel like this guy, Craig, who is suing the debt collectors is a hacker for finding the information about possible violations and pursing it legally.

I dont know. The more I read it it sounds like a guy who took a risk and lost big - and now is scrabbling round for "get out of jail free" cards.

With that said; I dont find much sympathy for the individual (his motives dont sync with me) but that's something worth "enduring" if he can actually help to impact the industry. shrug
Would love to have a feed like that and do some machine learning on it. Would be fascinating to see what results are possible, but I guess I'd need a very, very fast trading connection to be able to compete.
No, but it’s my understanding that you can copyright a collection of them if the act of doing so involved considerable work, as pointed out by warp and myself multiple times. So the original website that was scraped holds such a copyright. Please don’t express your opinion as a fact… Of course, IANAL and don’t play one on TV, so both sides could be argued in court. But the original poster doesn’t have any more rights in the data itself than the person who allegedly ripped him off. He has rights in his code, his database schema, etc., but not in the data itself.
Namespaces are a good idea. Having both attributes and child elements is a good idea. The combination of those two allows for easy, partial, versioning of your schema. The ability to impose an ordering is also a nice idea.

http://confusion.tweakblogs.net/blog/816/json-to-xml-convers...
May not be illegal, but is against the T&Cs of the site, so could be a civil matter if the original site decided to argue it in court…
I tried the free developer version of RightScale a year or so ago. RS offers a slightly different service than CK. With RS, you can create scripts which run at startup and configure the instance. RS does automatic master/slave DB server failover, automatic instance creation and load balancing, etc... I'm not sure how their monitoring tools compare to CK. I wouldn't say they are direct competitors, and if they are, RS can do quite a bit more.

That said, I really like the CK interface and will give them a try for basic monitoring.
You're missing an apostrophe. Will HN linkify this correctly? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiglers_law_of_eponymy [EDIT: no, it won't, and I suspect the parent included the apostrophe and HN removed it. So let's try a different way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy ... yup, that works.]

It's pleasing to note that the law applies to itself; Stigler was not its discoverer, and of course he was well aware of this when naming it.
It depends on the RNG you are using. But I agree - it's highly unlikely he picked up one that generates a normal distribution by accident.
I Found the Missing Piece of the Virtualization Puzzle
If you intend to use your 'book without taking it out of the, well, book cooling might be a problem.
Good question, so I wrote a blog post: http://nxdom.posterous.com/why-is-nxdom-open-source
"A novel way to cover MacBook" may just be the best (worst?) play on words ever.
Starting Social vs. Retrofitting Social
It's good business sense to drop providers which don't give them a good return on their time investment. It's probably worth the gamble in the beginning, but it's critical they diversify. We've already seen providers like Amazon come out with their own tools and kill off some startups who based their service solely on AWS.
More expressive loops for Eiffel
not gonna lie... still a creationist.
Aside from the online games segment Flash still seems to be the necessary evil mostly to show video.

Let's see what widespread HTML5 will do to it, codec licensing issues notwithstanding :)
Irish Startup Raises $230,000 Using Only LinkedIn
How an Irish startup raised $230,000 on linekedin
Alas, the Romans took it back.
Pretty pictures of an Apple tablet (mockup)
back up. Looks like they even found the time to add interstital ads on techcrunch.com.. (Direct link: http://www.techcrunch.com/welcome.html)
Paying Zero for Public Services
"HTML5 is the new <applet> which no one will bother install."

As easy as it is to be pessimistic about the browser technology of the average web user, I'm not so sure that HTML5/CSS3 is such a lost cause. Consider that already something like 1/4 to 1/3 of all web users in the US are using a browser that at least partially supports HTML5 or CSS3. Also consider that the more technologically sophisticated the audience of a particular site the more likely they are to use more modern browsers. Given these two simple facts and existing trends in browser marketshare (away from IE, toward FF, Chrome, Safari) I think there is a very real potential for some future major web venture (either de novo or as an evolution of an existing site) to have a strong case for relying on HTML5/CSS3 technologies.

Indeed, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see just such a thing happen multiple times within the next year.

As well there are many ways, as with html5 video, to take advantage of html5 features without abandoning support for "legacy browser" users. Which is the right way to do it just like any major refactoring/redesign effort.

Look, take any major modern web site and open it up in a browser from 1997 and it just plain won't work, because modern sites are built using technology that wasn't supported back then. How did we get here from there? It was a long, slow, hard slog that was painful nearly every step of the way. Nevertheless, here we are, in all our modern CSS2(ish), AJAX, HTML4(ish) glory. Where will we be in 5 or 10 years? Certainly in a different world founded on different technologies and standards. How will we get there? It'll be a long, slow, hard slog just like it always is. But we'll still get there.
Here's a link to interview transcript without all the garbage. http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0ATkBKEXbo6n8ZGdrNzhoM2dfND...
We are moving out of rightscale and are considering http://ylastic.com/ for server management. They seem to be offering the same service for less. Or am I missing something?
(update)
I see that cloudclick spans more cloud offerings. That may justify the increase in price depending on your needs. Since we are only in Ec2 ylastic makes more sense for us.
How long before we have a plug-in to report random page fetches to the toolbarqueries site? A la FF's Track Me Not.

(Edit: "random" meaning unrelated to the user's page fetches, as opposed to "a random sample of actual pages fetched").
Installing Firefox 3.6: One more reason Linux isn't ready for prime time
Intel Jumps Head First into Solar 8 with New Power Plants | Earth and Industry
Google Wonder Wheel
"Big" means that you can hire the people to create your in-house framework or whatever.
Awesome hack. I don't really have any application for this, though.