skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's hard to automate e.g. fixing bugs in an ancient C codebase. And some things, such as various elements in a build tree that need to stay in sync, such that when you modify one bit you have to modify other bits, cannot be easily automated because of the brittleness such automation can introduce. Instead of simply making sure that files are in the right place and following (human) scripts annotated directly in the source code, you end up down in a maze of twisty auto-generating scripts, all not quite alike, trying to figure out what wrote what, where when and why, and route all the right configuration elements from one place to the next, adding complexity and coupling, etc.

So yes, ostensibly everything can be automated, but many things are boring and repetitive yet resist automation, while for others, introducing automation is either too much work to be worth it in the first place, or just introduces more code you need to maintain.
Because when the iPhone was released it provided an experience which did not exist elsewhere. I had tried smart phones up to iPhone and they were a total pain to use. Apple hit the mark with a phone that did the following:

1. Was a decent phone with a good address book

2. Provided a good web surfing experience

3. Provided a good email service

4. Fixed voicemail through visual voicemail

5. Made the carriers provide unlimited data

6. Integrated mapping with GPS

7. Music player

This combination made it a killer device.
Wikipedia is not video centric. Not being capable of viewing a video in Wikipedia rarely is a big deal. This is a big deal on YouTube, however. The effect is way bigger.
I had an app that needed to take snapshots of web pages, and the client was very picky about the image quality. OSX exposes WebKit in such a way that I could get very nice snapshots, and I could never get anything close on Linux so a mac was the tool of choice. It sat there doing absolutely nothing besides running a web service that would occasionally take a pic of a web page and hand it back to the real linux server, and it did that fine for a long time.

I think the main issue I had was with software update. Apple provides an interactive command line interface to their update program so you could write some scripts to do it but in practise I just did it manually every once in a while. A couple of times it didn't reboot cleanly and got stuck on a firmware update or something so a manual power cycle was in order.

I also had a couple of weird problems where the machine would become unresponsive if it hadn't been rebooted for a long time. Never really got to the bottom of that but it would be something to consider if you were going to use them "seriously".
The mother of all demos
What's the story with Flash 10.1 for mobile phones? Did they just drop support for all the VP6 encoded Flash video or are they decoding it in software?
While Clifford Stoll has some useful points, in particular, "What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact." the majority of his essay is already starting to feel dated.

There is a fairly well known maxim (thank you google: http://longnow.org/seminars/02008/jan/11/embracing-uncertain...), that in the short term, we tend to overestimate and in the long term, underestimate.

Saffo, also has another great quote, "Rule: Cherish failure. Preferably other people’s. We fail our way into the future. Silicon Valley is brilliant at this. Since new technologies take 20 years to have an overnight success, for an easy win look for a field that has been failing for 20 years and build on that."

Regarding books - Already eBooks are starting to have an impact, I'm a pretty steady reader, and the groaning bookshelves and boxes (and boxes, and boxes) of books that I used to go through have given away to my Kindle (and iPhone Kindle).

Teaching is starting to undergo a revolution with sites like http://khanacademy.org.

I haven't purchased a physical newspaper in 2+ years - and I'm a newspaper Junkie.

Classifieds? I can't even tell you if my local newspapers have had them for the last I don't know _how_ long - who _doesn't_ use craigslist.

I could go on and on, but the interesting thing is, we're just _starting_ in on the Internet technology curve. The tools and systems we use today are going to look ludicrous twenty to thirty years from now.

I'll let Saffo have the last word:

"Rule: Assume you are wrong. And forecast often."
Considering even the vaunted and once-great New York Times is having trouble just staying afloat due to online competition, I wouldn't say his newspaper point is partially wrong, it's entirely wrong. The internet has mopped the floor so hard with the newspaper industry it really can't be seen as anything but a complete coup.

Also, I disagree that most people will get their news from mainstream sources - personally with the recent Haiti situation I got far more up-to-the-minute news breaks from Facebook, Twitter, and other such sources than I ever got from CNN and the likes. In fact, I would say breaking news is something large news organizations are likely to lose entirely. Nowadays my only mainstream media consumption is almost entirely well-written essays and analyses on things, not raw reporting on a recent event. I predict as the "physical media" generation ages, and the young grow up with the internet being pervasive in their lives, this pattern will only continue to grow.
The death of one form of social contact gives birth to others.

Today via Facebook I was able to set up lunch with a few people I haven't seen for months (one of them, years) - all effortlessly, all without having to track down contact information that in the old world would have been woefully out of date. All instantly.

Next week I'm going to be showing up to a random improv thing along with hundreds of random strangers whom I've never met before. I will likely chat with a lot of them, and maybe make a new friend or two. Try that before the internet.

Heck, on one of my subscribed subreddits someone has taken the liberty of setting up a weekly board-games-and-meetups night for community members to hang out. These people have never met prior to this, and save for a common interest in a website would never have met.
Single Phone Chat Lines
Single Phone Chat lines, are your gateway to FREE intimate chatting on your phone.
I guess it depends on the extent of uncertainty. The issue I see is that at any given time we face a rather large number of uncertain dangers. Doing something about them costs resources and we cannot deal with all of them equally. There are opportunities as well, which also cost resources. So it's all about priorities.

I think it's a very difficult decision problem. Do you try to prevent a very uncertain but potentially grave danger proactively, or do you use your resources where you can be reasonably certain about the effects of your actions? I don't know. It's a balancing act.

I tend to lean on the side of not wasting too many resources on very uncertain future dangers. That said, changing something about how we produce and use energy makes sense for many reasons, not just climate change. So I'm willing to act in spite of the uncertainty, but I'm unwilling to ct radically or accept the kind of moral de-industrialisation and de-globalisation mandate that some global warming advocates are pushing so hard.
Hahaha, thank you for posting this! It's fun going back and reading journalists' predictions.
No it's not. It does not matter.
That's why I'm calling it a bug in Git. Other tools (Mercurial, Darcs) don't trash anything.
This is a place where flash game developers can list games that they have for sale. I'm sure that if you contact many of them you will find they are willing to do custom jobs. http://www.flashgamelicense.com/
The internet allows everyone access competent teachers. There are so many learning resources with videos and how-to articles on a large range of topics. And the resources are extremely up-to-date. When something new is out you don't have to wait for an update to a textbook to be published or a teacher to learn it and include it in a lesson plan.
(sorry, this is way old, but I just saw your response)

you might be interested in the 'db_column' option to Django fields, e.g.

content = models.TextField(db_column='a_different_column_name')

That will allow you to have 'content' on the model, but 'a_different_column_name' in the database. It can be quite helpful for talking to legacy systems.
Although it is usually not done with /usr/*, it is quite common to put a server's /etc under version control. But that's for administrative control, and is usually completely separate from the web application.

However, it is quite common to use rsync for deployment of everything: system, application, etc. from test to production, without any version control needed. This works especially well when using vservers.
He has a handful of good points (eg. the importance of human contact), but most of his examples are laughable because he picked precisely the things that the Internet dominated (eg. daily newspaper).

I wouldn't say the Internet dominated newspapers so much as newspapers imploded, and the web didn't. Stoll's perspective that the Internet won't replace high value content and human interaction any time soon was on the mark. He said that when I was just getting a 14.4kbit modem, and 15 years later I have an always on 15mbit connection that I use to wander the web aimlessly looking for well edited, relevant content. The good old things are gone, but where are the good new things? I think that we're still in the hype.
Internet is already influencing governments to some extent. Rally in Moldova last year (which become a riot) was organized mostly with Twitter and Facebook.
While some of his points are still valid today, it's clear the author has a fundamental misunderstanding of disruptive innovations
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html#complete

direct link
I was pleasantly surprised that the main reason for the FBI investigation wasn't "oh noes child porn!" It would be really sad if child porn was the only way to get the authorities to look at misconduct like this.
WebKit is part of Qt and thus available for any platform.

Or did I miss something?
Kind of reminds me the first time I started freaking out over the "Memory Bug" on my Solaris 2.6 install in 1998. So many people got worried by that data, that they modified several of the system binaries to report "filesystem cache" as "free" in later versions of Solaris.

What's old is always new, again.

Linux makes it (reasonably) clear:

shephard@u804:~$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 515440 39976 475464 0 2684 16452
-/+ buffers/cache: 20840 494600
Swap: 192740 0 192740

shephard@u804:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/475MB bs=1048576 count=475

475+0 records in
475+0 records out
498073600 bytes (498 MB) copied, 73.7244 s, 6.8 MB/s

shephard@u804:~$ free

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 515440 508312 7128 0 1760 475756
-/+ buffers/cache: 30796 484644
Swap: 192740 0 192740
shephard@u804:~$
You work for the IRS, you agree with the IRS or go find another job. None of this "but I have no influence" bullshit.
Top Hot Bollywood Actress in Saree
Saree is the traditional dress for Indian women. Saree is the best of all dresses. The women appears elegent and graceful in saree. In old days of Bollywood, sari was the normal outfit for the actresses. But in modern times, other dresses have repalced saree. After looking at these pictures no one would deny the fact that Indian women look hottest in the saree. We present to you the list of Top 10 Bollywood actresses who looked best in SAREE and Top 10 Hot Bollywood Actress in Saree photos, wallpapers and Pics.
I fail to see what censoring dictionaries has to do with user friendliness. I also doubt that slowing down software updates in order to hunt down infringing icons helps user friendliness or security. Deleting songs from iPods without even a warning when the iPod is connected to the wrong computer is also rather pointless in terms of user friendliness. It's about copyright. So let's be clear about that. Much of what Apple does has to do with control not user friendliness.

But anyway, in some areas you're right. Sometimes less choice makes a device easier to use. At the same time it lowers the threshold at wich I cannot do something that I absolutely must to do. At that point "ease of use" becomes irrelevant.

That's why Apple has become utterly irrelevant to me. Obviously, many people will never hit that threshold, so Apple is going to keep on selling a lot of devices. I just can't understand how anyone calling himself (or herself) a hacker can accept the kind of limitations imposed by Apple, which are hugely more restrictive than anything Microsoft came up with even in their most evil moments.
"Not that I'd do this, but I can at least see the appeal."
I think everybody does. Me too, but still this is sending out the wrong message and could fire back.

If the client is not able to provide me with a certain level of trust, I will not work for her.
In case the situation is fishy... like me having this strange feeling that the client is not as trustworthy as she seems, I invoice early and often.
It is way more easy to bill five times for 2k, then to ask for 10k at once.

Quoting myself from another thread:
When I have a new customer, I tell her that I will send an invoice after a few (10-20) hours of work. She will learn very early what results I can produce in those few hours and whether she likes working with me. I learn very early about her the willingness to pay. I then do my invoicing based on the results of that first test.

Usually I invoice my customers once per month. Some only, if they 'used' 50+ hours. It is all about trust. One customer wants an detailed explanation for every hour in the invoice, so I invoice often. Makes it way more easy for me to get my money. Another customer is very relaxed and just pays what I tell him. I invoice him twice a year.

You are very right about being paranoid that the trigger could misbehave somehow. Code contains bugs. Less code less bugs.
So while we waste our time kissing ass in Washington, who is going to run our businesses?

The simplest solution is often the best and IRS are by definition thugs so he would be justified in doing whatever he wanted to them. Too bad he died.
The problem with computer misuse laws is that they often come down to proving intent. That's why you'll see a lot of computer criminals being hauled up for fraud etc. simply because it is easier to prosecute them for it.

In this case they have a clear intent to spy (especially as it looks like they have been spying). So it looks like the right laws will get applied.

I think it would be extremely difficult to prosecute them with CP laws anyway.
I don't care about user experience
Python Marshal Format
The Qt version (and Chrome's version) uses the platform to do the font rendering, which on everything but OS X and Windows would be freetype.

If the client wanted Apple's particular font rendering, they'd have to use their version of Webkit. The least-shitty way to do that is to write a Webkit app for OS X (there's also the Windows version of Safari, but that would involve a lot of bullshit)
OT: what would you recommend instead of WordPress? I will be migrating away from blogger soon, since they will stop supporting ftp uploading.
Undoubtedly it was I who missed something! It just came down to "well, I have a working script right here for mac, or I can spend the next days/weeks/maybe never trying to get it working and looking nice on linux".

I guess people don't hear "we went with the mac to save money" too often but in this case, that's what it was.

But even so - I generally don't much like linux's font rendering. Doing it on mac meant that the images looked beautiful, basically exactly like Safari, which was to the client's (and my) taste.
...what is an individual or small business with limited
resources going to do if they end up stuck in an IRS
quagmire?

Vote with their feet.
Not in Silicon Valley. Here success starts and ends with attaining investors. Customers and sales are immaterial.
Yep, that's exactly it.

Didn't even have to write an app - I used this excellent tool: http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/
His book Creativity is also excellent, particularly for entrepreneurs.
http://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Flow-Psychology-Discovery-I...
MPEG-LA can't do that because the pool has a rule of non-discriminatory licensing. That's one of the (flimsy) bases for their antitrust exemption.
Example Oriented API Documentation
Many people don't know how kernel caches and buffers work. Even many developers get confused by this and think that a system is almost out of memory. Luckily someone created http://www.linuxatemyram.com/ - that saves me time to explain it over and over to people who panic about the issue.
I think several people nailed this when the story broke, it really was a pretty superficial observation for such an apparently broad analysis.

Slightly off topic, but it just struck me that I'd like to see app icons in the task manager and windowed programs highlighted in some way. The unabridged list of processes is a little too lengthy if you're looking to quickly nip something in the bud. I know there are task manager replacements, but to me they're not as intuitive.

One for the Win8 suggestion box maybe.
This standard basically dictates how to prepare 'tea' so that an expert tea taster can evaluate its quality. At the end of the day the tests are subjective.

It never amazes me how many of these tests and standards have been produced and in many cases stop progress.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if there was a 'Standard for Web Applications' although things came close enough with accessibility laws.
suggestions? Ireland? Singapore? HK?
Q?: Is Theory still improving much? Is it possible to improve it a lot without breaking backward compatibility, or would that require breaking legacy support?

The encoder still has a good bit of room to improve; it still lacks proper pixel-domain RD optimization and could use some psychovisual improvements as well. It is primarily crippled by the ancient VP3 specification though. In theory it may eventually be able to eke ahead of Xvid, as while Xvid was a very good MPEG-4 ASP encoder, it never had any significant psy optimizations, so even though Theora as a video format is probably slightly worse, the encoder should be able to surpass Xvid with psy optimizations in some cases.

The primary problem for adoption (not for quality) is its lack of features. For many many use-cases, one needs fine-grained control over various parameters, such as the buffer size, the maximum bitrate, the latency, and so forth. The encoder is currently very inflexible, and with no alternative encoding libraries, this leaves very little choice for many applications. For practical purposes, it only has one speed mode: "slow as hell", which makes it basically impossible to stream anything above SD.
I always wondered how stereo was achieved. God bless Wikipedia!
Uh, while Mesa often uses hardware to accelerate rendering, it doesn't have to. It also implements OpenGL in software, so it's not totally surprising that Mozilla needs Mesa to do OpenGL-based rendering.
MIT's concept 3D display created by micro-helicopters
Facebook’s HipHop-PHP is now on Github
Some commenters agree that the internet hasn't led to meaningful social connection, but I disagree. Many shy people find it the key to their social life. It's kept me in contact with several college friends, and I now think our kids will know each other. It's a very connective medium.
Being a long time Opera user, I find the regularity with which Opera gets the cold shoulder highly irritating. Also a very odd move considering it'll be on the European Windows 7 alternative browser option list in a couple of weeks.
You think facebook actually deleted your information?
I landed there too after a couple of hours surfing prompted by the Newsweek article.
Ten rules for writing
Hi. Sorry about the self-promotion, but if you want a website or webapp designed and coded (in Flash or any other language), please email me. My email address is mediarosh(at)gmail(dot)com

I hope I can be of some help to you.
"Sorry about the self-promotion,"

Self promotion is fine in small doses. Every comment of yours is a shill for your services. Stop already.
I'm by no means fan of windows, but the article was an obvious troll from the beginning, as it was quite evident that they were mixing up cache with real memory usage.

What really surprised me was that such a pointless 'story' generated so much fuss. Waste of time.
Your best bet would be to ask people around you if they would recommend anyone. You could also try hiring freelancers. This thread should be helpful if you're deciding to go the freelance route: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1028327

Now for some shameless self-promotion: I am a freelance web developer (and I also do software, but that's only for personal projects) based out of Chennai, India, and if you would like to discuss a project, please e-mail me (e-mail in profile).
What I don't agree with is bying a screwdriver with an ergonomic hello-kitty handle that massages your hands and soul (and certain vocal cords) by subsonic vibrations and claim that the experience of using it fully weights up the asteroid-shaped price.

That would be Features, Bob, not User Experience. If you can't tell UX from ... features then I'm not quite sure how the rest of your post is going to stand up.

What I can't understand is the people that like the "user experience" - a horoscope-like vague phrase that can blend into any kind of posh attitude - to describe what they apparently enjoy in a certain tool, brand or lifestyle.

Well, that answers that.
a teacher can tell you in 20 minutes what might take you a month to figure out by yourself.

A teacher who is obstinate in pressing mistaken notions on students can also undo in twenty minutes a month of the students gaining correct understanding by themselves.

What in-person teachers plainly provide better than online teachers is baby-sitting. What they usually do with more regulatory acceptance than online teachers is provide seat-time credentials.

See

http://learninfreedom.org/School_obsolete.html

for some critiques of school from the same era as the submitted article.
Especially given that the author writes that he had "no haskell knowledge at first."
Wet Pussy Videos
Video - How to exploit VUPlayer 2.49 - خدمات العرب
Is there a still need for a watch when we have one in cellphones? I always wonder this. (Except perhaps as a piece of jewelery for men)
George Orwell did it better:

http://www.george-orwell.org/A_Nice_Cup_of_Tea/0.html
Is there a difference? If you have a .NET app that runs under Linux, is it not a Linux app? (same goes for any platform agnostic runtime - java, js, lua, python, ...) There aren't that many languages that are really system-dependant. Conversly, many "Linux apps" written in C/C++ will compile and run just fine under Haiku or Mingw - does that make them BeOS or Windows apps?

It seems that "(Linux|Windows|Mac|BeOS|whatever) app" doesn't have the same meaning today...
Submit travel articles
Its just all about travel industry. Find quality articles and information on travel industry, air travel articles, cruise travel articles, holiday packages info, best travel deals, travel insurance and much more.
Actually, what put me off was that they didn't even at least tell us what material it was striking.
There is always the stuff that goes the other way though like how Seti@Home does FFT's which is computationally expensive and benefits from a distributed system but the file size is quiet small.
No.

It just means that it will be quite difficult to find people who will hire you without going through a headhunting firm that will take half your pay, and that if you do manage to find a small corp that will hire you directly as an independent contractor, and you write off business expenses against that income, there is a chance the IRS will invalidate those writeoffs, which often results in big debit that can't be discharged by bankruptcy.