skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The average install/uninstall process is ridiculously easier on Mac OS X. Literally, it's: 1. Drag the single icon (regardless of instruction set or sizeof(int)) into your Applications folder. 2. Double-click the icon.

What icon? Where do I find this icon? Does it magically appear on my desktop? Nope...you've got to go find the website, and then the download page, or you have to go out and buy the CD or DVD that contains the software.

On a Linux system, if I know what it's called or what it does, I can find it and install it easily, using either a GUI or the command line. And, of course, it works well for things beyond simple applications, including packages and systems of packages that include hundreds or thousands of files.

A weakness should not be held up as a strength. There are many strengths to Mac OS X, but package management is not one of them.
Sperm Wars
66200000 / 17420000 * 20 = 76

This article is only true if every cow hide's resultant balls are sent to the exact same place. The superbowl could very well choose 76 different cowhide donors.

76 / 66200000 = 1 / 871 052.6

If that were the case, the odds would be (go figure) about 20x better of being chosen.

I bet the true probability is somewhere in between
Thanks for recommending http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/

It exists to make A/B and Multivariate testing dead-simple for non-technical types :)
I think you're missing the point of the article, which is that this merely looks like abuse to people who don't actually understand what's going on. The author describes why the $400 hammer doesn't really cost $400, but because of the particular way things in government contracts are accounted for, it looks that way to the outside.
I never understood why clamps was in the picture.

Clamps: http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Clamps
Is it just me or did they miscalculate the odds here by trying to tell a story? It seems the only things that matter are:

# of cows slaughtered annually: 66.2M / 1.99 = 33,266,331.7
# of footballs made per cow: 20
# of footballs used in the Super Bowl: 76
# of cows required to make the SB balls: 76 / 20 = 3.8
Odds a randomly slaughtered cow becomes a SB football = 33,266,331.7 / 3.8 = 1 in 8,754,297.82

What am I missing?
Please provide some more background on why the project was created and the ultimate goal. Without that I do not really buy your argument as I have also worked with government contracts (including cost plus) and spent six year in the US Air Force. The problems are these. (1) Did they really need this system in the first place? Example: The F22 Raptor a fifth generation multipurpose fighter. I would argue that we do not really need this system but, sadly the people I worked for (Air Force Generals) the guys who create the ideas and sign the contracts did not even think to ask that question. Building another fighter was a forgone conclusion to them. It was purely about building something and not about defending against a real threat or even a perceived future threat. To the guys who run the Air Force (former fighter pilots primarily) of coarse you need a new plane. (2) Are you building yet another proprietary system on top of other proprietary systems. Example: JSTARS or the E8-C built by Northrop. This system collects a bunch of data about movement on the ground. The problem is Northrop created a proprietary mechanism for getting the data off of the plane. So now the government has to buy the plane and the system to get the data. (3) Was there another way to solve the problem? Example: Microsoft Sharepoint. There are so many sharepoint sites setup in the DOD it is complete waste. Every single unit thinks they need a sharepoint site because other units have sharepoint sites. No one is bothering to ask; hey instead of all setting up our own site why dont we just create a big repository where everyone can drop there (docs, ppts, xls, pdfs, etc...) and tag them with the unit they are from. So I would ask did you need this emails system? Are you perpetuating the problem of continuing to build proprietary systems? Is there another way to accomplish this task outside of an email system? Why did you need t1 lines by the way? Now to the Hammer and the bolt example you give. Instead of building a new bolt for every project and then having to test it and build spares etc... build a bolt that can be used on many projects. I have been in these contract meetings. The private companies intentionally build as many one off solution as possible so we have no choice but, to keep coming back to them. You say build a company and bid on contracts. If you work in contracts you know it is not that simple. I would love to if I had some help navigating the bureaucracy... Again give some more background on that project if you can.
I think what nazgulnarsil is saying is that because this kind of accounting is opaque, it often results in abuse.
I've already voted it up, and don't want to violate social conventions here, but consider this comment another vote for the LtU thread mentioned above. A fantastic and educational argument by people who know what they're talking about. If you're interested in these sorts of details it's good reading, no matter what side of the argument you happen to be on.
Although C# has rules about variable capture and partial-evaluation that do not necessarily apply to fexprs.
I'm sorry I offended you. I should have said that I don't want to get into an argument with an anti-abortionist about abortion.
Since you mentioned Xanadu, I am compelled to once again post the link to the best account of the project and its history that I know of: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html
When I started out in Computers over 25 years ago, I got very interested in TeX and LaTeX and read a lot of the literature. One item that impressed me at the time - and still remember it, was that someone wrote a PhD thesis on hyphenation.

Frank Liang wrote his Stanford Ph.D. thesis on a hyphenation algorithm that is standard in TeX, and has been adapted to numerous languages. The Thesis is available online at http://www.tug.org/docs/liang/

Your application is both useful and well written. It will be very useful though to have the user specify the width of the column in pixels and the font and have a sample that renders the way it should.
Adobe announces Flash Player and AIR for Android
Dude, calm down. Missionary zeal on a topic this contentious makes you look like a conspiracy nut. Be happy that reasoned skepticism is respectable again, and don't try to force other people to change their minds at a pace of your choosing.
We're talking about two different things. The government decides its requirements, not the contractor. Essentially, the government says what it wants, and how you are to deliver it.

For the email example, they said how many servers, how many T1 lines, and how powerful they all had to be. They also wanted usage logs from the T1's for capacity planning. The contractor doesn't have input there.

That's essentially the case with the bolts as well. It's in the specification, the contractor doesn't have the power to say we are going to use these other bolts because they're standard. Items are specified in a specific way for a reason, with bolts, it's because those particular bolts absolutely have to stand up to the rated forces, because they're likely to experience them, with combat and all.
Every time someone checks something, the result is far less than originally claimed.

Statements like this make us look like rabid partisans who are incapable of acknowledging that any actual science is occurring, and will be used to dismiss us when we make claims which are factually well-founded. Let's keep to claims which we can make which are well-supported by the evidence: there is significant scientific uncertainty about the degree to which global warming is anthropogenic, the "consensus" has been oversold, the rigorous system of checks that we have been told existed has repeatedly failed in ways both subtle and obvious, and the costs of measures designed to address global warming are unknown but acknowledged to be very, very high.

Incidentally, I would soft peddle one fact that I know but believe is inadvisable to say too loudly right now: the process of global warming science has been systematically compromised by politically motivated fraud. Twelve months ago, saying that around me would have drawn the same rebuke as above: don't say that, we don't have evidence for it, let's stick to what we can demonstrate. Then the "Climategate" emails came out. I don't care who you are or where you stand on this issue, threatening to destroy evidence to avoid it falling into the hands of researchers immediately pushes us waaaaaaaay into the "fraud" category. However, in terms of marketing, I'd say softpeddle that factually justifiable conclusion until we've shaken the apple tree a little more, and can present it as part of the pattern of behavior it appears to be, rather than "a regrettable incident from a single overworked, much put-upon scientist who might have contributed a few lines to a report which is 99.99% good science."

Sadly, we're not likely to get any help from the U.S. mainstream media in shaking the apple tree, at least until I can think of a good hook for why climate fraud is Dubya's fault. Oh well.
The harmful part is the distortion of the market -- by the government; all other private individuals and organizations ultimately have to bear the result of their choices. The government through force takes money and distorts the market -- no other actor in the equation has that power.
17 USC section 102(a): "Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression . . ."

This section includes a list of eight "works of authorship" (literary works, musical works, dramatic works, pantomimes and choreographic works, pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works, motion picture and other audiovisual works, sound recordings, and architectural works), but that list is not intended to be all-inclusive. In addition, the categories are broadly construed, as for example to sweep computer programs and compilations into the definition of "literary works."

Thus, there is nothing preventing legal language from being copyrightable as long as it constitutes an "original work of authorship." And, if you go to any site that offers legal forms for download, you will find the vendor claiming copyright in the contracts being offered, thus presumably precluding others from taking the same contracts and re-selling them.

That said, the kinds of legal language and contracts you are talking about are almost never made the subject of copyright, I think, simply because they are usually not "original." Most clauses for indemnification, etc. are recycled over and over. Lawyers themselves will often lift them for re-use.

You are right to be concerned about the potential risks in this area but, in practice, I have never heard of any large website complaining of copyright violations from use of legal language similar to theirs and I think the practical risk of borrowing their language is low. For much of the standard stuff involved, I would think it would be nearly impossible for them to prove that the language used is "original" as required for it to be copyrightable.

Moreover, to sue for federal copyright infringement in the U.S., the copyrighted material needs to be formally registered with the copyright office. I would seriously doubt that any large website bothers with this formal requirement over a matter about which they normally could care less (other than making sure it protects their own legal position as used on their site).

I don't know of any definitive place to find a discussion on this but I believe this gives you a pretty good overview of how this area generally works. You can and should check with your attorney about details for your specific situation.
Some have mentioned that the iPhone/iPad (and probably other mobile platforms) are moving consumers away from file based computing (even if the specific OSes underneath are using them). Each application in the iphone doesn't really think about files, but more objects and persistent data or the network resources.
I quit working at a huge defense contractor last year (perhaps the largest in the world?), it's a big one... you know it. Some of the nonsense that they had going on included but was not limited to charging the government $150/hr at a rate of 1.5 lines of code per hour. The code that was being written was not being written by software engineers (it was mechanical engineers, and some other engineering disciplines, but no one that really knew how to write code) and was not being tested (integration tests, but not unit tests or anything).

The biggest piece of bullshit that I saw while working there was this: I was one of the few software engineers on my particular team. My code was more concise (by a factor of 3.5 on average) and contained an order of magnitude less bugs than the team's average bugs per sloc. This was expected because I was one of the few software engineers, it makes sense that my code would be better than a non-software engineer. I was approached by someone in a position of authority and told that the work I was doing was great, but I needed to slow down. I was told "I wasn't earning my value.", which is code speak for "You're working too fast, and if you slow down we can charge the government more because we bill by the hour."

I quite last September and haven't looked back.
I agree with grellas that while Digg or Reddit (really their legal counsel) could technically claim a copyright in the legal written work that you are adapting for your own use, realistically suing you for copyright infringement on their terms of use and privacy policies wouldn't be worth their time, and you could potentially assert a successful defense of fair use. I don't know the specifics of your business so I can't give you specifically tailored indemnity, privacy and use of information clauses for free (yet!) but that type of work is not hard for a lawyer, really shouldn't cost you very much and shouldn't take long (a couple hours). The much bigger issue in my opinion (and why copying Digg, etc long term isn't a good idea) is whether adapting their policies will adequately protect your rights and liabilities and those of your business well, especially those idiosyncratic to your business. If you just need boilerplate for the time being you can avoid this whole issue by using privacy policy and terms of use generators; I found a few here:

http://www.bennadel.com/coldfusion/privacy-policy-generator....

http://terms-of-service-generator.legalriver.com/
I think the way to get a handle on all your stuff is to turn your life inside out (or more accurately, turn it rightside out).

From an engineering standpoint, you have to design your life. You know - architect how you want to live.

From that, it's easy to deal with your stuff -- does it support your design? If it doesn't, it should go.

The computer should have a place. Kitchen stuff should live in the kitchen.

The bedroom closet is for the clothes you do use and maybe seasonal stuff at the top. It isn't for 6 boxes of cat5 and all those extra USB cables you end up with. You should not have a closet or garage full of "misc".

My personal test is the "might" test. Stuff you "might" need is not stuff you do need. It goes.
Let me preface my answer with asking you a question. You see, you seem to have very similar beliefs to those I did a few years ago. My beliefs started changing once I asked myself the question: suppose Satan was all powerful and God/Christ was weak; Satan will reward those who will murder, rape, and torture but sentence those who try to act morally to eternal torture (Hell)... Would you still act morally or would you embrace debauchery? Which would be `right?'

If you are willing to act the way Satan wishes for you to, then the reason you act the way you do now is just selfishness. If you are not, you must be prepared to question the morality of God and to reject immoral actions. I came to the conclusion that the person I was required I reject `Satan' and you can see where things went from there.

>If you really believe that moral absolutes exist, then you must conclude that there exists some infinite being capable of being the foundation for that moral absolutism. Here's why...

It is my opinion that your comment does not proceed to demonstrate this. I will return to this later.

> A perfect morality is knowing all information at once, weighing all that information, and then making the perfect decision.

So an omniscient murder is a good person?

> We as humans are morally relative because we don't know all available information and knowledge. It's why a tribe on some island genuinely believes infanticide is acceptable (they genuinely believe the child is possessed), while you do not (you would know the child has a neurological disorder).

What the tribe does is wrong. The fact that they are doing it out of ignorance makes it understandable but it doesn't make it right.

It's possible that I, like the tribe, am wrong.

But lets reflect on what you've argued. At the beginning you stated:

>If you really believe that moral absolutes exist, then you must conclude that there exists some infinite being capable of being the foundation for that moral absolutism.

You haven't demonstrated this. The only thing you've really made an argument for is that only an omniscient being can know with certainty what is right or wrong. I don't agree, but am willing to grant it temporarily. You still haven't shown that morality can't exist without an omniscient being, or that an omniscient being is necessarily moral.

As Humans we must do the best we can.

Are you willing to argue, then, that infanticide is acceptable? Think about what (supposedly) happened for a minute: God killed thousands, perhaps million, of children. Some wouldn't have been able to speak. Most wouldn't be of an age where they could in anyway be held responsible for their civilisations crimes (slavery) by any sane morality (Yes, I know God likes to go and punish ``even until the third generation.'' I happen to disagree.).

If you are willing to accept this, are you willing to accept Herod's slaughter of the innocents? They're are many similarities between God's actions and Herod's.

Regardless, the question is whether you are willing to justify God's actions. Please answer: is the mass slaughter of children to punish their parents justifiable to you?
I should elaborate a little more about the e-mail contract. The government put together a list of specifications. They wanted all of the equipment guaranteed, and they wanted to pay only a per-email fee. The specification was mainly to make sure the bidders knew exactly what was expected, and what they needed to produce.

The idea was that it costs about $0.35 per piece including design, postage, etc., to send a direct mail advertisement, whereas they could get the entire electronic marketing infrastructure, and pay a fraction of that per-piece. The whole thing was basically a clever pricing structure to get away from direct mail to much cheaper electronic delivery with guaranteed cost savings to the taxpayer because if the system sucked, they just wouldn't use it to send messages. But if it was good, they'd use it instead of the regular marketing materials, saving substantial amounts of money.

Hence why the pricing is higher than it would need to be, because of the risk.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=800693 and associated link.

Summary: To mitigate, either (a) tell your browser not to save any history, or (b) in Firefox, go to about:config and turn off layout.css.visited_links_enabled. (Chrome doesn't seem to have about:config ...)

This should probably be the default ...
What I find far worse is the term "climate denialism". It's simply Orwellian. That sort of attitude just makes me mistrust people's intentions and motivations.
JLinq in MongoDB
The issue has come up a lot in the last couple of months due to the CRU hacking, which is where I guess the HN link is.

The mistake you're making is that you're presuming an equal burden on the so-called "denialists" like they have to prove there isn't global warming. They don't. AGW is an hypothesis. The burden of proof is on it. This is the same mistake creationists make when they take any missing, incomplete, unclear or contradictory part of evolution to mean that God exists and he created Man.

If nothing else the CRU email hacking should give everyone cause for concern at the subversion of the scientific process. Efforts were clearly made to deny access to raw data, generally be obstructionist and the failure of respected journals like Nature not to enforce their policies of, say, the publication of raw data. Or the IPCC admitting their Indian glacier claims weren't based on anything other than a single unfoudned comment in a years old newspaper.
Right so the people creating the contracts are not doing their research. We need to spend more time thinking about how we do things so we dont pay for the same thing over and over. We need a way to make the fact that this bolt has been built public and accessible so if someone needs something similar they can contact the right folks and ask. Why would they say how many t1 lines are need and how many servers? That is silly. What if someone could get the same effect with less power and bandwidth? why wouldn't we use the superior solution. Again to make your point we would need to know what the ultimate goal of the system is and determine if indeed that was the only way to solve the problem. That is the whole point of having competition after all.
but rather scepticism and more specifically scepticism towards individual claims... [although] I'm of the opinion that the AGW hypothesis is correct.

Hats off to you for refusing to poison the debate. I hope you'll read this question in the same spirit.

Have you given any thought to what evidence you'd have to see before changing your position?
Patrick, as you said my tool (VWO) is for non-techies (and I know that) but some of the users have been demanding an API of sorts for A/B and multivariate testing. I have been perplexed on how a language agnostic API for A/B testing can possibly exist. First of all, to make it language agnostic it would probably need to work on HTTP REST but then how would it be different that client side JavaScript based A/B testing.

Any thoughts on language independent API design for A/B testing?
Well, sure. They caused the problem.

The answer for users is "don't trust Google with your information, and get as much of it out of Google's control as you can, even though you don't know how much there is and can't take some of it back."

But we knew that already. The question is "when will Google stop unethically publicizing all the information we don't forcibly remove from their control?"
Why not put out a contract that says. We need to get this information (I) to these people (P) at below this cost (C). If a company designs a system that can do that same thing in a completely new way at 1/100th the cost who cares how they did it.
It's quite interesting in Australia - Home mortgage interest is not deducted but Investment Property interest is considered a business expense and is thus deductible. (Which makes sense to a degree - purchasing an income-generating asset is deductible for any other business, why not in RE).