skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why Apple chose the iPad's screen format
That blog post doesn't make it clear that Weave is also good for syncing between computers. I've been using it for months to sync between my desktop and my two laptops, where each laptop is running two operating systems. For me, the coolest thing about it is that the history syncing means that the suggestions as I'm typing in a URL are the same on all the machines, so that when I type 's', slashdot and stackoverflow are the first two.

Bookmark syncing is also nice because NoScript can store it's rules in a bookmark, so I will only have to whitelist any site once.
It's so much simpler than that. Read the first amendment closely one more time. "Congress shall make no law..."

Where does it stipulate that this does not apply to groups with a shared financial interest? Why would anyone lean towards less free speech rather than more?
going to the moon was the first step in a potential Mars mission...this pushes back Mars by a decade at least
I love the "unpack" dripping off his arms.
Study: Overweight adults over 70 may live longer than their thinner peers
I would like to note though, that psyco development has been stopped for a couple years, and probably won't continue (unless a new developer thinks there's a future and takes it over). Further development is going into pypy.

Also, it can't run on 64-bit machines. If you want to run it on OS/X 10.6, you need to build your own 32 bit python.
Obama deserves kudos for this. Lowering the cost of access to space by introducing commercial rocketry is a step in the right direction, which will facilitate many other things in future. Going back to the moon in a craft almost identical to Apollo would have represented neither a science nor an engineering advance.

This could be the beginning of the end of grandstanding "national prestige" space projects, and the start of an expansion in human activities in space.
Good interview, Alexis seems like a nice guy
Silicon Valley, NYC Gain New Seed Funds
If I were a an author, I would be mad at the publisher, not at Amazon.
I too think your statement is silly.
Also, it's the size of two iPhone screens, making it nice and easy to scale up an iPhone app without black borders.
Quite a few people suggested gpg/hash or public key. If you do that (I wouldn't), be sure to include fluff before and after the number inside your signed message; A credit card has ~30 bit of randomness, and if you know the hashed/encrypted (even if salted) version of the hash, a hacker can just enumerate the credit card number to see if it comes out the same.

It's not just the credit card numbers that are valuable -- it's the combination of credit card number + billing address that are generally required to make a purchase. 30 bit enumeration can require just a few minutes (or even seconds) on modern CPUs and GPUs. So, if you do store them this way, fluff them front and back with random data that you ignore when decoding.

What would I do? Make sure the user has a password (Use HMAC/bcrypt to verify password; DO NOT STORE PASSWORD!); When the user logs in, derive key from password using a different HMAC with different salt, and store in memory/session vars only for as long as needed. Use that key to encrypt the credit card number with a symmetric cipher, e.g. AES; make sure to purge these keys from memory/session directory early and often.

Advantage: You don't have access to the credit card on record even if you (or a rogue employee) wants to. Active participation from user _required_ to get access to data. If your server is hacked, only credit cards used while a hacker has complete view of traffic are compromised, and not all data stored.

Even better: offload to payment processor and make it their problem.

Really.
Maybe this is just me, but I was never terribly keen on another Moon landing. In general, I'm not interested in further manned space exploration unless it contributes to establishing an industrial presence in space.

Probes and robots are doing a pretty damned good job at exploratory science.
The definition of "blatantly insecure" is highly subjective. I don't think most app developers want to be held to my standard of "highly secure", and I'm a second-tier vulnerability researcher.
I don't think this blog post is correct. I do not think that "indecision", or "thinking about something as you work on it" was critical to the failure.

The problem did not lie in the indecision or the discussion, the problem lay in a combination of many factors, and the indecision just meant that the problem was discovered later.

Even if the decision had been made in a single day and the product created as fast as possible - all the other issues would have continued to exist, and who is to know what would have happened after launch.

Being slow in making decisions is not a bad idea, particular when your target market is not changing much. In fact, the longer you wait, the more chance you have to research and understand your market properly.

Deciding quickly all the time and chasing new things is not a recipe for success - and it will surely lead to chaos.

The core problem with their business lay in what I call 'concept', and no speed of decision or different approach would have fixed this for them.
I think Dave's unique formatting is an essential part of the experience of reading his posts. Filtering it through the Readability tool is similar to listening to MIDI file versions of your favourite songs.
"Instead, as we have seen from all sorts of phenomena, from the Anonymous protests against Scientology to Al Qaeda terrorism, distributed movements with no central control are as powerful (and, in many cases, more powerful) than centralized armies."

Are you sure the Anonymous have done any long term damage to Scientology? Or that Al-Qaeda actually achieved anything meaningful against the occident? If you look at history, those who are more centralized are always the ones how are the more powerful. Up until the point they become too big and things start to break down. After that, it's back to normal and the more centralized win. Short-term imperialism and attempts at unification throughout history gives us good examples of how things unfold.

There's certainly a lot of nationalistic Chinese hackers, but I don't think they could pose any significant threats. The best they could do is adding noise so that the "real" government hackers go undetected. They would also become dangerous if coordinated by the government, but at that point they're no longer decentralized.

I think decentralization have its advantages when considered in the right context. But politics and religion are all about centralization and always have been.
Gigabit wireless devices expected later this year
My friend at Intel Labs in Seattle did a similar demo with a small board they designed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-65Q3BpwH4
Hey there, you're stealing my idea :P

Actually, that one is a good one.

I'll add my own problem: paperwork. The organization I work for has lots of seemingly useless paperwork, but it cannot be automated because of the legal requirements - we NEED to have paper signatures of customers' contracts.

That said, we're looking into minimizing it as much as possible - if only there was a widely recognized and legally accepted electronic equivalent to the signature, we could automate most of the process :(
While I enjoyed the article, and I appreciate you posting it, one quibble: it's off-putting whenever anyone mentions a number they got on a test as evidence for intelligence. If you write intelligently, I'll happily consider you intelligent.
Name one who does.
It's all a facade. Dude eats babies.
IE8 overtakes IE6 as the most popular browser
Rolling Stone meets Steve Jobs: "I don't want to talk about Apple" (1994)
If you require more than a day to recover you should either be doing less strenuous exercise or you should be lowering your number of workouts per week.

I used to sit next to a 100+ mile/wk runner and he ate nothing out of the ordinary, just more of it (100miles of running is a 10-14k net calorie increase, depending on who you believe).
What will kill the cloud?
Simply don't store user-created content (images) in a folder in your main site, that doesn't scale anyway. Put pictures in pic.mysite.com or something like that (you can map an S3 bucket to that if you like).
No, I distrust everyone, but I distrust someone with an incentive to lie more.

Phil Jones is famous and was reasonably comfortable tenured professor with a guaranteed steady income, and wielding power over most of the western world with prophecies of doom and gloom. It's unlikely he'll say "I've been wrong for the last 20 years" regardless of what science shows.

There are numerous examples: Read Michael Pollen's NYTimes "Unhappy meals", "Is it all one big fat lie" or Gary Taubes "Good Calories, Bad Calories" on how nutrition science is perverted for profit.

Read about the recent raw milk legislation about how medical science is perverted for profit.

edit: Wanted to say I'm not stating anything about climate research, as I don't know enough about it; just that I don't share the "good science outnumbers bad science" view.
All millionaires have different quirks. I forgive him
The U.S. Currency Problem and the Return of the Wooden Nickel
Or you could just not bother. I just skipped to the summary:

"This has been a complete ramble and i don't have time to edit this shit, so i'm leaving it as it is."
Thanks GFischer.

Ya, I'm glad I ran my first draft by people first because they had no idea what I was talking with simulated annealing. I hope this final version does an OK job of explaining it.
ExoPC - Slate
Also an article with a slightly different take here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1087644

A couple of comments there ...
It's about time PG just put an Amazon affiliate ad for that book on the front page. It really has become mandatory reading in all the entrepreneur circles I seem to travel in. Or maybe I need to get out more -- that's probably it.

I would be interested to see a Hacker News reading list sorted based on votes. Hey wait, I know a site that could do that...
Since, presumably, the 140 character limit derives from SMS message limits, it might be interesting to look at what the message lengths are for these (note that this is GSM specific and I don't know the CDMA equivalents):

SMS payload is 140 octets. That means that you can store 140 8bit characters, eg Latin1 encoding, in a text message.

However, the GSM default encoding is 7bit packed. Each character is 7bit and they are packed together into the 140 octets, this leaves a maximum size of 160 characters per message.

For international characters, GSM uses USC2, which is a 16bit encoding, limiting messages to 70 characters.

You can also send concatenated messages, where multiple SMS messages make up the actual message text. In this case, you must subtract (from memory, so may be off) 4 octets from the limits, for the user data header. The user data header consists of a length and one or more information elements. An information element consists of 3 octets: an information element identifier (in this case, 0, for concatenated message) and some parameters (I'm not sure if this is specific to the IEI? I could look it up, but I'm too lazy.. for concatenated messages, the next octet is number of messages and the final one is the current message index).

Hopefully someone found this information interesting ;-)
$3 billion a week to occupy Iraq - no problem!

$8 billion over four years to go to the frickin' moon - too expensive!

Go figure.
Almost all of these things are not Amazon's fault. The fault should be placed on the stupidly idiotic actions of the publisher.
Stross, at least, seems to see this as an attack on both his publisher and him (if nothing else, he ends up as collateral damage). Amazon demands more publication rights and a larger cut of the sale price, which means he gets less for his writing.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/amazon-m...
Good sales people should be richly rewarded, absolutely... but it all comes down to the product.

I've seen salespeople that do only the "easy" sales (the ones where the customer is the one that drives the sale, and not the ones where the salesman hooks the buyer)... I'm not sure if the salesman should be rewarded for those.

OTOH, when the salesman takes the time to see where the product can fit and help the company, and is actively involved in demoing and smoothing out the sale.. those are worth every penny.

Also, those that find the way into companies, to look for the decision takers with a problem... that should also be a factor.
'Zune phone' expected at Mobile World Conference in Barcelona (Feb)
E-Book Pricing Put Into Turmoil
Spray-on glass could change the world
I wasn't implying plagiarism, just that such a novel would be copying JK Rowling's premise.

Though as a matter of fact, many of them do copy chunks of our site.
Roll-to-Roll Printed Plastic Displays
We also have a pretty active python user group that meet once a month. http://www.meetup.com/python-meetup-dc/
Perhaps the unspoken point is, we want to be able to deliberately break the law, should such a need arise. Yes, the citizens are potentially at odds with the government. Privacy from government isn't just finding the most effective and just policy for both parties, it's also a give and take negotiation.
Let's actually take a look at the two scenarios.

In the case of corporation-owned property, the shareholders indirectly own the property itself. If the government takes away the property, the shareholders lose the property, and the government violates the takings clause insofar as individual humans have lost money.

In the case of corporate speech, the shareholders are not speaking at all. Instead, executives are speaking, protected from the consequences of their speech by the corporate shield. In comparison with the above case, nothing stops the individual executives or the individual shareholders from speaking, either by themselves or in concert with others.

What I'm suggesting is that the form of the corporation, which the government created to shield actors from the consequences of their actions, is not itself afforded the right to speech.
Bookmark, history, and tab syncing appeals to me. Passwords, not so much. Does this extension allow me to exclude passwords and sync the rest?
We need privacy because we may have to break the law...
That certainly does simplify things in my mind. Thank you. I will leave C for such a time that I need it. I will continue on my path with python because I have come a long way.
Thanks.
Well, I'll bite.

Adobe: Is there a definitive reference for both the video tag and the JS API used to communicate with it?

The HTML5 draft is extremely well defined (that's the point) albeit constantly evolving (hence draft).

Adobe: My assumption is that each browser provides a default set of controls. Can these be modified or do you need to start from scratch?

You can't modify the browser's implementation but you make your own with HTML5, or use one of many open source starting points.

Adobe: How do you do true streaming with the video tag (i.e. not progressive download)?

I don't think this is possible.

Adobe: Is it possible to provide some form of DRM protection for video in HTML 5?

No.

Adobe: Is there a tool that is optimal for encoding Ogg videos for Firefox?

Not sure.

Adobe: I remember reading that you can seek to any part of a video even if it hasn’t been downloaded yet. Is that true and if so, how is that achieved?

Not sure.

Adobe: Is there no hope for IE ever supporting the video tag?

There is hope.
Was not aware of this, thanks for the heads up.
Not just you, give me more Spirit/Opportunity and Cassini-Huygens please.
Amazon not communicating its situation effectively is the publisher's fault?
I guess he forgot to add this corollary:

If you can't make your product a frequent-use product, use somebody else's sign-on system (Google, Facebook Connect...).
We shouldn't be wasting $3 billion a week in Iraq. But, we shouldn't be wasting $2 billion a year to go to the moon either. AFAICT, there's no significant scientific justification for people to go to the moon or to Mars at this time. Robots can go instead. Previous robot-based Mars missions have been very successful--except for the ones that would have killed everybody on board if they were manned.
Not the actual golden mean. That is 1.618ish. A 1024x633 display would nearly have that ratio.

It has long been shunned in hardware because it requires one row or column of irregular size to implement, which was never a rational decision.
This seems like a false dilemma - either corporations are legally protected as individuals by the Bill of Rights, or they are totally unprotected. Wouldn't it make sense to treat them as something other than people, since they are not, in fact, people, and give them a separate set of protections?

To expand, corporations came into existence so that an entity other than an entity other than individuals could own property, and so that the individuals could take on risks without bankrupting themselves, right? Couldn't that be honored without treating corporations like individuals?
Heaven forfend one should use an attractive font on a Google product.

Seeing the incredible engineering innovations going on at Google, and the incredible UI innovations going on elsewhere, makes me a little sad - never the twain shall meet, and instead they're redeemed to making shallow copies of each other and never quite hitting the spot. Over-designed and under-engineered, or vice versa.

Adding design-led products or hiring more designers, however, would kind of change what Google is about IMO. Can engineers be taught design? ;)
If you know Python and Teradata, please send me your resume anyway to contract-mco@actifact.com and I will keep it on file for any future position. It's very hard to find people with both Python and Teradata skills.

The contract starts out at 2 months because that is all my client will commit to at the moment, but I consider it likely to get extended if you are any good.

I don't mind missing out on applicants that are searching for the usual "ETL developer with Informatica or DataStage experience". I am looking for people with strong SQL, not a particular ETL tool. Thanks for the suggestion.
I'm curious if the password problem is really as big as he says or if he's just biased because of his experience at PayPal. I don't always remember my password, but I've never encountered a site that didn't offer one of the following:

1) Password retrieval/reset by email
2) Password retrieval/reset by secret questions

Also, don't most browsers these days ask you if you want it to save your password? Then there is password plugins. I thought most people use the same or an easy password anyway.
Schools can be really bad on this. One college I went to charged people with "condoning" if they were aware that someone else was breaking the rules and didn't report it. I think this is actually pretty common among private colleges in the US.

Imagine how badly that would be abused if it were a law.
Also, as the liberal justices have clearly explained in several dissents to Kennedy-written opinions about campaign finance over the last few years, money cannot be equated with speech, and restricting campaign finance can be seen in many ways to increase people’s ability to participate in the political process, as guaranteed by the constitution.
from the comment:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/01/the-secrets-of-octop.ht...

"Turns out, on a scale of one to chimpanzee, octopuses are
probably somewhere close to matching wits with a dog"
Interesting numbering system -- is one the only digit?
Well, this is (to varying degrees) a problem for any country that uses copper coins - not just the US, but also the EU, China (nickel-clad steel 1 yuan coin0 and so on. edit (s/copper/nickel)
I'm much more interested in the ORM discussion... anyone has some good resources on that? (mabye referenced over here in HN?)

I'm pretty excited about Microsoft's Entity Framework v4 right now (because I haven't actually tried it :P - the first version didn't fulfill my needs)
The recurring theme here is that Amazon didn't properly communicate anything to most of the people who were affected. The publisher is behaving very strategically at this point in attempting to promote its newly formed partnership with Apple and Amazon basically played into their hands by not presenting their side of the story soon enough.
So far the web outcry seems to be about 50/50 for/against Amazon on this one. I personally can see both side's view.

My biggest issue is with their public airing of their dirty laundry. Seems a calculated move that has backfired.
NYC might not have had any 'runaway' successes recently, but it's had some rather respectable advertising-related successes in the last few years - for example, Right Media, TACODA, and Quigo. The employees at these companies have largely gone on to take more-responsible positions at a variety of other advertising-related startups, many of which are doing rather well. When it comes to online advertising, at least, the talent pool over here is getting pretty deep.
From the paper: "In any case, security economics teaches that you’re unlikely to get a secure system if Alice guards it while Bob pays the cost of failure."

This problem is nothing new. All that changes with 3DS is that Carol pays instead of Bob.
If you know someone that works there, tell them you might be interested and ask them to take you to lunch. They'll be happy to as we're trying to find more people. The Irvine office just had an open house. It was the first time we've done one and I don't know of any more scheduled, but if anyone's in the area I'd be happy to let you know if we have another in the future. If those aren't options, then just apply anyway. We always take candidates to lunch when they interview. Worst case is you decide it's not for you and you have to turn down an offer, but I've been very happy there.
Shouldn't an Adobe evangelist be up on the details of his biggest competitor? Makes it seem like concern trolling.
If they accept a 10% or so cancer risk per crewmember, they can launch a chemical rocket mission as 4 pieces using a variation on Mars Direct. But to do this, they would need in-situ fuel production in place a year earlier.
It seems extremely unlikely to me that this action was taken without careful consideration by a number of people at the very top of Amazon's organization.

This was not some off the cuff reaction, it had to be carefully planned. Any analysis that assumes it was a silly mistake therefore seems likely to be wildly off base.
Absolutely. This was dumb, and quite frankly a cynical bread-and-circus idea in the first place. There was never any meaningful scientific justification for the project (nor the Mars one that was announced simultaneously).

Although the grandparent post is right: relative to other wastes in our government (the Iraq war being by far the biggest discretionary one), this is small potatoes. But $8B is $8B, and it means it doesn't have to be cut elsewhere.
So we've advanced to mere disdain. Better than undisguised contempt, I guess. But beware talking down to your potential userbase; that's one of the systemic problems of educational and enterprise software.
LuckyBackup 0.3.5 su LinuX
Some programmers prefer writing code in Python, because they find it more enjoyable than, e.g., Java or C++. These programmers look around for jobs mentioning Python, for obvious reasons.

Python is straightforward and intuitive, but I don’t think anyone can master it in a week. For example, programmers used to writing Java code tend to write long, unnecessarily over-structured, un-idiomatic Python code. This is not because they’re bad programmers, but because they aren’t used to writing Python, and haven’t read lots of good Python code.
It's a bad sign when you have to debase your currency twice in a quarter century period: in the early '80s the copper alloy penny was replaced with zinc with a copper wash.

Inflation has been "under control" during that period (compared to the Carter peak of nearly 15%), but it adds up.