skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a good story (it contains some details that I don't think were publicly revealed back in 1996) but the title is misleading since NT plays a very minor part.

Edit: I'm not sure which embarrasses me more; the fact that this old story got 30 points or that my trivial comment got 16 points.
Can you even imagine how much money J K Rowling could make if she hired a few people to run a self publishing outfit and then sold her latest scrawl on the App Store and iBookstore at $9.99 a pop?

Not that she needs any more money at this point, of course..
Clojure can use (with very little mismatch) any available Java/JVM libraries.

F# can use anything available for the CLR/.NET.

Libraries are not really an issue.
Is the International Role of the Dollar Changing?
Us Dept. of Justice has reservations about Google book settlement
A recent book on this and various other topics related to recent human evolution is "The 10,000 Year Explosion" by Cochran and Harpending.
Your "94%" figure does not account for users on Windows XP, which does have Silverlight pre-installed. Mozilla has said that 60% of their users are running Windows XP, so one imagines the share for Internet Explorer is likewise significant.
It's probably not feasible for the editors and producers at five or ten percent; it might start to make sense at 20%.
I've considered selling editorial services. I haven't figured out how to market them, though -- nor a cost strategy.
It's a matter of battery life, not performance. Every modern mobile device has a sufficiently powerful CPU to decode Theora in real time, but decoding with dedicated hardware (regardless of codec) uses less power.
In addition, most proprietary source code is also secret, so it's hard to infringe something that you can't even see.
Call me old fashioned, but when it was just mechanical, there'd be less that could go wrong.

Yes, I realize, less that could go right too (in terms of stability features in braking). But still...
NASA - The Sun is a Variable Star
The Inherent Instability of Corporate Monopolies
Heya :-)
IFreeTablet - the open source iPad competitor from Spain
Actually that very much scares me. What's to prevent any company from copyrighting a small passage of code and then rigorously suing everyone and their brother for it? At least with patents you can claim prior art.
CollegeHumor is hiring a PHP developers. We are in New York City. Come work for us!

http://www.collegehumor.com/jobs#job_18
My 3G is unresponsive regardless of what app is running or whether an app is using the CPU. Even the springboard locks up at times. It's the OS itself (or the 3G hardware, more likely) that's the problem.

Not saying that multitasking wouldn't make things worse, but don't give any props to iPhone OS for avoiding delays. OS 3.0 is embarrassingly laggy on the 3G.
I've been flirting with the idea of getting one since it came out. I am OK with the price and all the other stuff.

The problem? I can't handle the phone before buying it. I've looked in 3 stores that sell T-Mobile but none o them have a Nexus one that I can hold in my hand and examine before buying, and I'm reluctant to spend >$500 based only on a picture on the website. They don't even have it at the flagship T-Mobile store in San Francisco and nobody I know owns one.

So I've renewed my existing service for my current craptastic phone for another month.
Google does massively distributed computing, whereas Facebook doesn't have the same priorities.

But I agree, the analogy is not the best
I wouldn't hold my breath that the forthcoming Bilski decision will put an end to frivolous patents.

While it is true that the justices appeared to be highly skeptical at oral argument of the patent claims being asserted in this case, one must remember context here: in essence, Bilski was the decision by which the Federal Circuit sought to rein in process patents in the first place, and it did so with a rationale that, while clearly limiting such patents, relied on a somewhat arbitrary test that finds no direct support in either the constitution or the patent statutes (industry participants clearly see the case as potentially major and have filed over 50 amicus, or "friend-of-the-court" briefs with the Court). One might think of it as a pragmatic test by which the Federal Circuit sought almost out of desperation to bring some measure of sanity to this area.

It is never good news for your case, though, when the Supreme Court agrees to hear a case that first adopted a novel test that the lower court basically invented. This typically means that at least a good number of the justices are prepared potentially to reverse that decision and, if that should occur here, this will mean that there may be broader scope than exists today for the granting of process patents.

Again, the justices did not seem impressed at argument with the claims for broad patentability as asserted by the claimant in this case and they may easily rule against him, as did the Federal Circuit court. But they may choose to rule on narrow grounds that perhaps strike down the Federal Circuit test without attempting to define the rules definitively going forward (the Court often does this on the theory that an issue will continue to develop over time as it considers how best to finally deal with it).

It is a mistake to have raised expectations about the impact of this case in striking down process and software patents. It may happen but, if it does, that will be a surprise and not an expected outcome. In this sense, this piece is a bit over-optimistic, in my view.
ExtraHop Networks in Seattle, especially if you're into systems-level programming or networking. Email me: ben@
Ask HN: Anybody Interested in a HackerNews F# FaceBook Group?
If so, post here. I'll set it up.
Applied with http://thecadmus.com. Thanks for setting it up!
I am the REBOL user. I find this interesting as a unburdened review from someone who is not a REBOL user/fan.
"'Roads?' Where we're going we don't need 'roads'."
Honesty. I think she'd make less money than going the traditional way. JK Rowling is big enough to basically make up her own terms and browbeat her publisher into accepting it.
I'm not sure how you reached this conclusion.

The author writes, "Guido's talk describes many elements of what makes it scale...The second piece is an enforced policy of having every single patch go through a code review process before you check anything in...And beyond that you have people paying attention to best practices such as consistent style, good unit testing, so on and so forth. (All of which are reinforced in the code review process.)"

I think he makes it clear that the reason developing from HEAD has worked at Google is because they have lots of processes to ensure success.
And C++ was a derivative of C and Simula. Apparently pragmatism is (and has been for a while) the new originality.
I wish amazon would bundle the ebook with the physical book for an extra dollar or something. I've often gone to buy a book, and thought maybe I'd buy the ebook so I could start reading it immediately on my iphone. But then it's not substantially cheaper than the physical book, and I decide I'd prefer the physical book.
Clojure with Emacs and Slime/Swank on Ubuntu
good point.

I think it has more to do with the company's core values than the company's expertise.

Most data centers have expertise in data centers operations, but they don't know where to focus. Google is a master in optimization, so they took it to the next level, even in data centers. Apple values design and user experience that it sets the focus on future product development etc.
Not everything Google does is about massively distributed computing. But the work on massively distributed computing payed off in serving images, videos, and doing caching content.

I see the point you are trying to make and even agree with. But it is still a little odd that no one saw the success that is possible with what google did and worked to replicate it.
Good point. I'll have to make the distinction clearer or rethink model. Thanks!
Experts on Mac vs. PC security
I don't think it really has much to do with the total size of your RAM, and more to do with how it ends up getting used. Sure, we can get more RAM so everything we have fits in it, but then everything in the next generation will just use more.

It's about guarantees. We want to guarantee that one application bug doesn't bring the whole system to its knees. If that app you downloaded gets into some crazy polling loop and starts hogging all the CPU, making your iPhone run hot and run out of battery in 1 hour, you won't be happy and you won't have a good way to figure out what's going on and fix it.
Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter is one of the better books I've ever read (3-4 times). My former colleagues at AboutUs.org even had a weekly book club for it.
If people want to score karma points, they are welcome to do so, I couldn't care less. That doesn't give them much more privileges anyway…

I would add that I don't think that an automated post is a good solution. Companies and recruiters would figure that out pretty fast and spam the regular posts. I'd think there's more chances that it stays pretty organic the way it is right now.
Simply having fast app startup times doesn't not solve the problem.

For example, very often I will want to quickly check my email or chat session while a page is loading, but if it stops loading that page when I switch applications I don't gain that benefit. I also like to have chat sessions open and get small notifications (usually a sound or on-screen indicator) when I have new messages even if I'm in the middle of reading a large article in my browser.

Without background applications, neither of these usage scenarios is viable. It is this sort of usage that sets it apart from a general-purpose computing device and makes it into an appliance for me.
That is correct - for instance, the version of SBCL in Lispbox is 0.9.7, and the most recent released version is 1.0.35.
Yeah, I would really like it if they'd let third party alarm clock apps relaunch themselves at the right time. Or if they'd just add playing music as an option to the built in alarm clock. It seems crazy that there's no way to do this but leave the phone in the alarm clock app, plugged in all night.
I think the law is fine as is. If you have $100,000, then you don't have any business making strategic investments in early stage start-ups. And if you really want to, you can, though not through certain forums.

To some extent, the government absolutely must protect people from their own ignorance. Being a so-called accredited investor is a very low bar, and there are ways around it anyways. Credit cards laws are an excellent example of laws that protect people from themselves, and that should be stricter still.
The music industry felt a little burned by the whole 99 cent experience, and I suspect the movie and book people learned from that. Also, Amazon already tried the "bully the publishers" play so Apple is doing something different.
Why I hate (programming language) advocacy [2000]
The Entrepreneurial mindset
Board meetings that suck
Not really, since they're totally different communities, and as far as I know, the fundie-Mormons don't actually claim to be polyamorous. At the risk of coining another poor metaphor, it's more like the difference between kosher and halal--sure, in both cases you're not allowed to eat pork, but Muslims wouldn't care to say they keep kosher, Jews don't particularly care if their food is halal, and they're completely separate groups of people. And there's a lot of differences, too.
EventVue post-mortem
How to upgrade plugins to Rails 3.0
Friends and family is one of the exceptions to the SEC rules.
He's writing yacc for crypto protocols. You write an algorithm in his Stupid language, you and others verify it Stupidly, and then compile it to your real language.
I'm not sure I understand this; is this simply a method for detecting whether (for example) a gcc4.0 binary on your system is compromised, done by checking whether it matches the binary as compiled by a gcc4.0 compiled from source on another system?

I guess I don't see why this is worth a PhD; has nobody ever bothered to verify whether checking the binary against the results of a trusted compiler works? Did this guy contribute some measure of rigor that was previously missing?
I love the idea of the little guy doing it without a big publisher. The problem with that idea is the same problem that any indie artist has had: exposure.

Publishers spend between 1 and 3 million dollars on a new book just for production (editors, graphic designers, typesetters, etc.) and marketing. JK Rowling very much benefited from those dollars. Editors helped her shape her work into books millions of people would love and marketers made sure that the world heard about it. She would not be the woman she is today (financially speaking) without those up-front costs.

At this point in her career, you're probably right, she could self publish and do pretty well. But if the later Harry Potter books (where she had more editorial control) are any indication, she's much better off under the guide of a strict editor.
You do realize that that's not their core competance, right? An author wants to write good books, so there's a great market opportunity for someone to outsource to...like an existing publisher, who has the reputation of choosing high-quality authors, which they want to bask in.
any plans for android?
What's to stop:

1) People avoiding unbig.me links because they don't like advertising

2) People taking one unbig.me link and then retweeting another to steal the advertising money?

You might not consider either of these a problem, of course :-)
IANAL, but copyrights also differ from patents in that you have to show intentional imitation, not just similarity. Since prior art would reasonably prove that couldn't have copied something, this would imply that this avenue of defense is strictly stronger than the prior art defense against patent litigation. Some quotes from Wikipedia (with the usual caveats):

> "... two authors may own copyright on two substantially identical works, if it is determined that the duplication was coincidental, and neither was copied from the other."

> "Infringement requires... that the defendant copied the protected work... if two individuals both create a story that by pure coincidence is nearly identical, but each without knowledge of the other, there is no infringement since there is no copying."
I read grellas' comment as pointing out that although there are limited circumstances in which non-accredited investors can invest, it's not a good idea to do so because of the impact it has on financing down the road.
Makes me wonder what it would take to get clozure supported on Windows.
Microsoft pays, literally, for Bing's bigger market share
Best Buy has display models, but at least at my local Best Buy, none of them actually work. Last I was in there they had 3 Droids on display, and all of them had static images (stickers) on the screen. I'm not even sure if they were actual Droid phones.

I'm guessing they're saving on power costs, but it seems mind numbingly obvious that a working display model will lead to more sales... granted, unless the phones are crap to use (which is not a comment on the Droid specifically, just the typical phone sold at Best Buy over the past decade).
If you want to work for an awesome financial services startup in London, look no further than youDevise!

http://www.youdevise.com/about/careers.php

(I use to work there before I needed to move back to the states - I miss it a lot!)
I'm not sure this law is in place because of the risks of startup investing. It seems rather more likely that it's there to protect the public from outright fraud, "Cash4Gold"-and-"Gold4Cash"-style.
Why and how Apple killed the 9.99 ebook
Ask HN: What monitoring/management tools do you use?
I am a system administrator who has been working at my first and only job for the past 3 years. I manage 9 live servers and 25-30 internally. We use LAMP for live/staging and CentOS or Redhat everywhere.

This being my one and only job I've had to rely on a lot of reading around the internet to find the best management and monitoring tools. I like mmonit/monit for health checking running services which alert me via sms, email and xmpp when there are failures. I use chef for automated deployment of new software, Anthill for code releases and a whole lot of bash scripting for backups.

I was wondering what management/monitoring tools you guys use to manage large clusters of servers? And if you knew of what the big players like google, twitter, amazon and ebay use. It would be interesting to see the difference between tools used to manage 10 servers vs 1000.

Thanks HN
GM was required to disclose huge amounts of information to the public on a regular basis about its operations and cash flow. The SEC doesn't exist to reduce the risk of bona fide investing. It's there to reduce the instance of out-and-out fraud.
What th..? They left off "trolling"!!!
Cisco CEO John Chambers Explains How it Blew Past Expectations
I program residential automation systems and this is a real concern of ours. On some projects we must show proof of proper insurance coverage.

I am surprised that most programming projects don't require a similar assurance.
You can make something beautiful and well-designed without color at all. Black and white can be beautiful. The same cannot be said of typography.

And Georgia is actually very readable at small font sizes. It was specifically designed for use as a text font on a computer screen. It's a fine choice for body text.
America's Two Economies: A Data Driven Look
Advertisements requiring the granularity provided by Core Location are a tiny sliver of an already small mobile advertising market. The vast majority of mobile advertising campaigns are targeted at the country level, and the user's IP address is all that's needed. A small number are targeted to the state or designated marketing area (essentially a metropolitan region). Mobile IP isn't perfect for those, but it's better than nothing. In other words, this barely impacts the mobile advertising industry at all.

I suspect Apple will release an Advertising SDK that relies on Quattro, take 30% of the profits - less than most advertising networks take - and cut developers a single check, which will be mighty convenient. However, Apple's not likely to enforce that developers use only their advertising SDK. Many iPhone application developers that use advertising know that using multiple ad sources and doing some simple yield optimization performs better than a single ad source - even the most privileged ad network doesn't perform as well as multiple ad networks used in conjunction. Banning an AdMob or a Millenial or a Google AdSense would result in significant backlash.

I believe zefhous is completely right - this is about protecting the user experience, nothing more.
Microsoft Joins SVG Working Group
Thanks for the link -- it looks like I was drastically overestimating Silverlight's market penetration.

However, the graphs on that site appear unreliable -- for example, they show Silverlight's market share dropping by 14% between January 22 and 26. Do you know if the raw data is available?
Explain my brain: Neuroaesthetics
Far fewer features than H.264 and supposedly not easily implemented in hardware.
Schedule Time for Play
Franz will be releasing a new one next week based on the just-about-to-be-released Allegro CL 8.2.
You might try checking the existing services selling on, say, Lulu.com -- there are a number of price points with various expectations of service, from the merely editorial to editorial/design/typography, and covering the gamut from the family Christmas album to multi-volume academic tomes. There's got to be a niche or two that isn't being hit or that could use a competitive bump or two. If you can offer Kindle-formatted and Mobipocket in addition to the standard PDF (and make 'em all work right and look good), there's a bit of value-added right there. (And if you can build a tool set to do the majority of the grunt work, you can do it either more cheaply or in higher volumes than the competition.)

I'd do it myself, but I'm the type who can "correct" a Douglas Adams until it reads like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and I'd have to pay people for the privilege (negative pricing).
We're hiring in Sofia, Bulgaria:

http://blue-edge.bg/jobs
I agree with this, and I'd add that it's fine to include links, just not as part of a signature. Moreover, by prepending the http part you can make them clickable, e.g., http://twitter.com/openangelforum.
The Bootstrapper Breakfasts are now meeting the 4th Tuesday in San Diego at Richard Walker's Pancake House see http://www.meetup.com/Bootstrappers-Breakfast-San-Diego and see http://www.bootstrapperbreakfast.com/ for info on events in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Minneapolis.
I think one of the reason behind success of iPhone is the bundled iPod and integration with iTunes infrastructure. Android phone makers need to understand the fact that just putting 3.5mm jack is not going to make it a music phone. Android's media player still sucks, not sure about the audio quality. For iPhone there are plenty of docks and portable speaker systems available. Android might catch up on app store, but they still have lot to do. Not to mention different version of Android OS on all the Android phones.
Thanks for the input. I've thought of both of them. #1 is would be problem. #2 each link made by our registered users is unique and assigned to the user that made it - even if its the same link someone already used... and I think retweeting a link would be a welcome site to the original link owner :)
Huh, that looks fairly reasonable. I'm afraid I don't have any other suggestions at the moment -- I'm too unfamiliar with the workings of the Chinese firewall.
The question is not "Can they afford a tax hike?" The question is, "Will they continue to gross $250,000 and take home less of it, or will they find a lower-stressed job and make less?"

The answer is probably the latter, for a lot of folks.
So with this system, one bug and your brakes doesn't work anymore? How did that ever pass approval?
great movie idea!
Money isn't everything. It would be nice to have a section that lists the angels experiences.

One can easily bootstrap, having little money but its much more difficult to bootstrap having no experience. I would give up a portion of my venture just for the right experience capital. Money is just a plus.
Way to be overly literal and pedantic, captain bring down.

The use of the term "fractal" here is in reference to "quality" not, say, appearance. And that use of the term (specifically meaning: self-similar at many different levels of scale) is meaningful, accurate, and helps clarify the point being made, which is the highest purpose of language.
I'm right there on that line. Honestly I pay a TON of taxes already. Very high rate, lots of taxable income. Cutting back to be under 250k would probably make more sense than making 255k and paying a lot more in taxes.

I don't mind taxes and social programs. I do mind paying for unending wars in the Middle East (not making a political statement, just a budgetary one). Cut some of the crazy expenses, and I'll be happier paying my taxes, and you probably won't even have to jack them up.
For our java infrastructure we use Introscope. I dont know if they have version for LAMP architecture. http://www.ca.com/us/application-management.aspx
Uh. No. The answer is the former, for the absolutely overwhelming and unspeakably vast majority of them. And for the rest, there are a dozen equally qualified people ready to do that job for them.
Reddit clone in 60 minutes and 4 lines of C
Really? That doesn't make any sense to me. "Oh my, I'm making marginally less take-home money. I should completely change my career and get even less money!"

Remember it's a marginal tax system. They would only get taxed more on the amount they are making over 250k.

No matter what the tax rate goes to, you'll still be bringing home more money by having a higher paying job.