skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A short video history of negative tech ads
True, but Buffet (I believe) considers companies with Hero-CEO's as dangerous investments, as they have a single point of failure.
I hate to say it but, this thing keeps getting bigger so they can bill for more stuff. Yes, I know the FAQ calls this bs ( http://www.dsm5.org/about/Pages/faq.aspx ), but look at the rest of the answer.
This site puts a face to all the commenters on Digg and YouTube. Which is a portrait to the carnal side of humanity; not our best side!
You have some very interesting points.

But remember that there is also progress in at least the technically oriented arts. Even the best games of the past look positively dated compared to modern fare. I played Planescape Torment very recently. It is probably one of the best video games ever in my opinion, but it was painfully dated when compared to even budget games on my PS3. In music the entire Techno and Metal Genre's are relatively recent (I am a huge fan of Savatage for instance) and could not exist as they are today without technology that is relatively modern. Avatar is an example of a movie that could not have been made ten years ago....

Even in books, recently written books are often more timely than the classics. I love many of the classics in literature, but you will find few of them dealing with the issues raised by Artificial Intelligence (not none, Frankenstein and The Island Of Dr. Moreau are at least close, but very few).

So, I agree with you, but I think you are glossing over the very important factors of improved technology and timeliness of subject matter.
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard
>"I desperately hope you're not implying that we should give credence to the din of crackpot circus clowns who think dramatic climate change isn't really happening and that Al Gore is personally placing space heaters on the glaciers and polar icecaps."

No, I think we should give credence to the work of amateurs like Steve McIntyre whose high quality criticisms of specific pieces of work have been accepted into the scientific literature and who has been an important force in helping us see more clearly what is happening with the global climate.

But since you seem to have your mind made up, I guess we should just call each other names.
When I only read status updates, I didn't see all the annoying notifications of friends' other activities that I don't want to see. It's barely possible, by using left navigation "Friends | Status Updates" to get the view of the feed I used to like, except that seems to be buggy just now.

Also, my own homepage is junked up with back notifications of where I have commented or who I have friended, and I don't have a default to turn off those notifications, which I have to delete one by one. Facebook is often annoying like that--it refuses to stay clean and simple. It doesn't allow global settings that give me what I want.
The sad thing is that hollywood execs are scared by news like this when they should be looking at it as an opportunity.

The ability to download a full HD movie in <5 minutes opens up a treasure trove of revenue possibilities. It makes content delivery much more convenient and thus much more compelling for customers.
I'm almost certain there is. It's apparent in most of British culture. I even read an article recently about different approaches to sports throughout history that said basically the same thing. The greek/roman tradition was very hero focused, traditional british sports are very team focused, and american sports have merged the two, where we have team sports but also have standout hero's within those teams.
This was an interesting article if only for the nice summary as I wasn't completely aware of the situation.

The tidbit in the end surprised me though- Toyota is trying to hard to spin that they stopped selling cars as a safety precaution. Turns out the NHTSA forced them to stop selling.
Point of clarification: I believe Django Advent is the site that is hosting articles about the forthcoming Django 1.2 features (like messaging in this particular post), and is not the name of a feature within Django. (Even though the title of the post and its context on HN might make it look as though it is).
SpyEye Bot versus Zeus Bot
Cool idea, but was anyone else reminded of the Internet2 hype when they read this?
"But's that reference is only 'a mile wide and an inch deep'"

So maybe that's an overview/jumping off point?

I've run FreeBSD at home years ago. I'm on slicehost for now, the and linode offer mainstream-ish linux.

My concern with *BSD, or a less mainstream Linux, is the difficulty it may introduce in developing and running apps based on the many ready-made tools and frameworks available. Good security vs easy development. "Gaaa!"
Might not be "troll" - here's their "JumpCode" system: http://www.jumpcodesystem.com/
A bigger issue issue for who? Telecommunications companies have decided that it's not worth investing much in connections to low density areas. If there are enough people clicking on ads in those places to make it worthwhile, maybe Google will provide connections in those areas. If that doesn't happen, I don't see any justification for subsidizing people's connections above a level that is necessary for basic access of information to aid in making informed voting decisions since we share a government.
Most of the flaws that Steve found are in studies that claim to show that current climate warming is unprecedented in human history. These studies are important for drumming up the panic that you so ably display. It ought to be of interest to any person that we get these studies right before we squander trillions of dollars on useless environmental projects in a world where half of humanity is still desperately poor.

But it seems that many people are more interested in having their own pet ecopocalypse to feel self-righteous about than actually getting the science correct.
"if you are talking about TV shows I wouldn't consider them art at all."

Ernie Kovacs.

Also Playhouse 90.
The author of Darcs is writing a git porcelain that uses the Darcs command-line interface and patch semantics:

http://github.com/droundy/iolaus
I'd actually recommend against this. I think he should focus on being the best at what he does, otherwise he might risk catching featuritis and sucking at everything instead of being awesome at one thing.
Dusting for Hackers
HTC Scorpion Leaked. 1.5Ghz Processor. Android 2.2. Is it real?
Would you buy a Toyota today? I would. Do you really think that the NHTSA might not be doing this partly as a handout to the government's own auto companies (Chrysler and GM)?
Adobe: 7 million people attempt to download Flash each month
Google needs to sell access to entrepreneurs/large entities who want to get into the ISP business. Doing this will create a market over the monopoly/oligopoly we have here in the US.
You know, I just realized that there has got to be a sample bias here. Almost by definition, ex-employees are more likely to have negative things to say about the company than those who have chosen to stay. Microsoft has been big enough, and for long enough, that no matter how great a place they are to work, many people would have had bad experiences - by bad luck and honest miscommunication, if nothing else - that caused them to leave.

I'm not saying the article's points are not valid and true; as far as I know, they are. Just pointing out that if we're looking at what EX-employees are saying, we're looking at reality through a certain filter.
How would you promote a SW product to... you?
I am an concept and UI-designer. I design features and UI for a SW product that is primarily targeted to you (Developers, Programmers, designers - people with skill and urge to create new).

Now the product starts to be ready. And it will be really good - it has excellent features, and with it you can do in hours what would take days or weeks without the product. Really, seen that.

But... this is not the first piece of SW that comes with similar claims.

So, my question: What makes You interested in investing time and effort to take look into a new SW product?
- down-to-earth-list of features?
- how-to-do-it -videos?
- general, concept presentations?
- Big Brand?
- or..?
The patent is hilarious http://priorsmart.com/6049835

"A system for quickly and easily accessing preselected desired addresses or URLs on the Internet is disclosed in which a published list of Internet or World Wide Web sites together with their unique jump codes is utilized in connection with a corresponding specialized Web site which is accessed by a user using either a personal computer or a TV Internet Terminal and remote control, after which access a jump code corresponding to the preselected desired URL is entered by the user and software contained in the specialized Web site immediately and automatically accesses the desired Web site."

Bitly?
I noticed a lot of distain for the two-party system and went about investigating alternatives. Modern Ballots is an attempt to make Schulze STV, a proportional representation algorithm, easy to use for anyone that wants to hold a vote.

Thing is, I'm not really all that savvy when it comes to UI design, marketing and all that stuff. Any suggestions on how to make this kind of thing more appealing? Electoral reform isn't exactly the sexiest of subjects, although it does entertain sporadic conversation.
On the contrary it is the continuing existence of dinosaurs like Warner Music that is "clearly not positive for the industry". Artists are doing quite well out of the new reality of the internet -- it's only the record companies that are losing out: http://labs.timesonline.co.uk/blog/2009/11/12/do-music-artis...
No offense, but there are some comments posted here that may take a second or two of interpretation to understand, perhaps making them that much more witty?
The current hit single "TiK ToK" from "Kes$a"

When I read that I realize two things:

* I'm getting old

* It's not surprising that the music industry is in trouble

Maybe it's a great song, but the title and artist's name definitely don't make me want to find out. But maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy.
My Experience at the Best Acupuncturist in Cape Town
The Golden Grid(CSS Framework) .PSD Template
AllRGB: images with one pixel for every RGB-color
So if someone with multiple doctorates resigns his tenured position and works at McDonald's flipping burgers during the day, he is back to amateur status?
I've been wondering lately what would happen if someone like Google decided to build their own cellular network. Is there a way that someone could disrupt that industry?
Why is it so difficult finding good C++ programmers?

I imagine its because C++ is a hard language. I mean, its easy to program in C++ - but its difficult to program well. Its a large and complicated language, which, alongside its own problems, also inherits C's problems. This makes it a tough language to master and I guess most of the truly great C++ programmers have already been hired.

(PS: I won't claim to be a good programmer (C++ or otherwise), but I will be available for contract work soon, in case your needs for those projects happen to overlap with my skillset. Details in my profile, if interested)
This is sadly not unique to the Obama administration. Every president since at least Kennedy has altered the statistical measures of key economic indicators in order to hide weakness in the economy. Here's a fantastic article on the subject of bipartisan economic perfidy: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/05/0082023
ArsTechnica tends to have very good reviews and I get the vast majority of my gaming news from them (the rest is from friends I know in person.) But that works for me because I am a long time reader and know that their tastes in game are similar to mine. If your tastes skew far differently they may not be a good source. Also, it helps that I read their technical content anyway so I see the gaming news in the course of what I am doing anyway.

In general, the best place to possibly get good reviews is to have friends with similar tastes as you and ask them what they like. Not only will you get recommendations you know are good, you will have someone to talk about the games with/play multiplayer with.

And despite the fact they will be dated, don't forget some of the classics. Planescape Torment and Quest for Glory V were fantastic. Even with dated graphics they stand up well to many modern games, at least to someone with my taste in RPG games.
Thanks a bunch for this. Now I have to e-mail it to so many people who are vulnerable to the "shiny and made by Apple" paradigm. "Slim" is unfortunately more important than "better performing."
How tablets will change magazines, books, and newspapers
Thanks for the resources!
I hope that this is not the beginning of the end for Spotify, etc.
Rumor Mill: Google Acquiring Sprint
http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/google/rumor-mill-g...
If I was starting fresh, that would be my jumping off point. It will orient you, it develops a good philosophy and it will allow you to build your own priority ordered lists (which you probably won't be able to find as such, since things are so unstandardized (and therefore exciting!) right now), and then you'll know what to drill down to with Google et. al.

And, yep, you've outlined one fundamental tradeoff, but in server space this should be less of a problem. But I wouldn't be personally adverse to starting out with a distribution with a serious SELinux implementation (e.g. Fedora, but that has an upgrade problem). Of course SELinux just by itself is somewhat complicated, but it's the only defense in depth solution I know of. And I want one of those in addition to making the "crusts" as hardened as possible.

One thing I'd think strongly about is getting one foundation in place ASAP: disaster and intrusion recovery.

Just like the second thing I do after "Hello, world!" in a new programming project is to set up a good logging system, being able to recover from "man caused" and other disasters will help you a lot until you're a Uber Security Guru.

Ask me if you're responsible for keeping customer information secure ... that's its own can of worms and one that's I've worked on myself.
Rise in solar activity all but certain to mess with GPS
Apparently, 63% of US adults live in households with broadband. Considering the number people who avoid or can't use the internet (i.e. older folks) this seems like remarkable penetration to me.

PDF: http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media/Files/Reports/2009/Home-B...
Paul Krugman replies to Obama's bonus comments:  "we're doomed"
Actually, we (Django) are moving to a release schedule based around the church calendar. I'm looking forward to the three-day release cycle for Django Easter, and all the i18n work we'll get to do for Django Pentecost.
If he had a TV he'd have to pay the license fee.
Partner to show/teach/mentor Amazon Cloud
Hi.

Got a project that has a distributed crawler/parser, with a master/server model. There's a backend/serverside database where the data is eventually stored...

Interested in seeing if this kind of thing can work in the "cloud"! So I'm trying to find someone that I can work with to see how this would work on the cloud.

Pointers on how I can find this resource are welcome!!

thanks

tom
Google to Offer Super-Fast Net Service
Sadly, yes. I run into them a lot, but always offline. The reason you don't hear about them is because the same people who don't know about DVCSes tend not to frequent forums like Hacker News and proggit. A lot of programmers--and I mean a lot--are just programming to make a buck. Some are good, some are bad, but at any rate, they're not in it for the craft of coding. They're in it because it's a job. Those people don't read the modern equivalent of trade mags because there's nothing in it for them. The only tools that matter are the ones they're actually using, right now. It's these people we really need to reach.
Briefly:

1. Ruby on Rails/Heroku/jQuery

2. 3 months. See http://preceden.com/timelines/5-preceden

3. Nights and weekends

4. I'm using AdWords at the moment, not necessarily because I'm hoping it will bring in a lot of users, mostly because I want to learn about AdWords.

5. Too early to tell; just started and haven't received enough traffic for the results to be meaningful.

I have a blog (see profile) and I'll write extensively about these things over the coming weeks.
A JSON event-based convention for WebSockets
HTML5 WebSockets give you a persistent connection between server and browser which you can use to send text data back and forth. Here we explore an event-centric message format on top of WebSockets to ease the development of Javascript Real Time Applications.
I can never read articles such as these and shake the author's holier than thou attitude toward tv and tv watchers.

To say you don't watch TV now is not the same as saying it twenty years ago. I mean, how different really is it to watch an episode of so you think you can dance and read half the crap that makes it to the front of reddit nowadays? how different is it to watch people trying to dance than it is to watch a cat do something "funny" or some stupid fffuuu cartoon?

In the past, when people said they didn't watch TV it meant they were living a certain lifestyle. With the advent of the internet, that just doesn't apply anymore.

Perhaps it is a personal failure, but these articles always reek of, look at me, yet another thing I use to make myself feel better than other people.

And no, this isn't me lashing out because I watch hours and hours of TV.
Dear The Onion,

Thank you.
The idea that a software/firmware bug in the electronics that controls the gas pedal could kill me is deeply, deeply unsettling. If you put electronics into basic systems of a car like this, I want it to be like plane electronics: three of everything, with a majority rule.
Precisely right. They are not a 'troll', because they actually sell what they have patented. But it seems that what they have patented is little more than a software idea; scarcely more clever (though infinitely more monetizable) than, say, some CSS hacks I've seen.

I'm not sure how this particular patent promotes the Progress of Science and the useful Arts; it seems merely to retard them.
Automobiles are incredibly complex and I don't think anyone really faults a company for having to issue a recall to fix a problem.
What's unsettling about Toyota, though, is the coverup. They attributed the problem to floor mats and even blamed drivers for adding extra floor mats. This wouldn't be an issue if Toyota had just been upfront from the start and not tried to sweep their problems under the rug.
Google to unveil 1 GB per second fiber optic broadband network
The biggest surprise for me is that Paul claims he personally has to look the Y-combinator pattern up on Wikipedia. Though I suspect some false modesty here because he didn't want to side track the interview.

As for the rest, lots of interesting details in the general theme that I've come to expect from him. The phrase I like that sums it up is Ready! Fire! Aim! (Add appropriate discussion of tracer bullets.)
> if someone gets in jail for being part of anonymous ....

one is all it takes apparently
Certainly, but few of them are that vague. Something being witty implies hidden content that further thought will reveal. That one, while perhaps inspiring thought along those lines, contains nothing in and of itself.

Besides. Given the yc crowd and their response to monopolistic habits, I'd be willing to bet that something like 90% or more had the same thought. So you can argue that it's not even inspiring.

"It's a trap!" ~Admiral Ackbar
the knack ( http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/knack ) , not the nag ( http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/nag ).

They mean very different things.
I noticed a theme while reading reviews of tech companies on Glassdoor: people either complained that a company had too much bureaucracy and layers of management, or they complained there was no room for advancement.
The failure is not the recall -- that happens. The failure is that they knew about the problem and lied about it.
Hey - just wanted to say thanks for the comment. I just had breakfast with the sprouted wheat bread you recommended along with my eggs & garden veggies. Good stuff! I also picked up pure balsamic vinaigrette made from just EVOO and balsamic. Less calories indeed. I still have yet to solve the problem of how to keep salad greens from going bad after just a few days in my fridge.
Seems like a stretch to me. I read the patent and in particular the claims they are saying the Chicago Tribune infringed on. I then looked at the Tribune's website and don't see where they would be infringing based on the claims and description in the patent. Looking at the Jump Code website, it gives an example of newspaper classified ads, but in looking at the Tribune website I don't any "codes" in their classifieds. In fact most of their classifieds are run by third-party systems (CareerBuilder, Pets.com, etc...). I wonder if the print version of the Tribune includes some reference to these numbers in their classifieds or even articles in the paper relating the print article to the online version.

I don't think this is a unique idea though and I would think it would be easy to find some form of prior art in the case. The system basically sounds like using a "keyword", or in this case a JumpCode, to link to a website. But the patent was filed in 2000. Companies like AOL and even CompuServe have used keywords for years on their site to link to webpages. I know newspapers have used keywords in print classifieds to link to online resources for a while (not sure if it would be before 2000 though) as well.

I don't believe these people are trolling necessarily, but I do think they have some aggressive legal advice here and may be looking to get some attention or prevent their business from failing.
Interview with Media Entrepreneur Carlos Leon, Founder of CML Media Group
First, Ford didn't take any government money and actually reported a profit for the past year.

Second, there's a difference between a subsidy and loans. GM and Chrysler got loans. Now, they were loans they couldn't have gotten on the open market because they looked too toxic. However, GM is now saying they'll be able to repay the loan pretty quickly. That indicates that investors misjudged the risk. Granted, it could have turned out otherwise (and I was one of the people that thought that it would have).

And I think that people feel betrayed if a company has a potentially fatal flaw in their devices. This isn't an issue of mere reliability. If my car is unreliable, it's annoying and I have higher repair bills. If my car speeds up to 100MPH and I can't stop it, I can die. Those two things sit differently with consumers. And it looks like Toyota tried to write it off as nothing when it was something and tried to protect their image rather than their customers lives.

It's one of those things: if a company has produced a wonderful, superior, reliable vehicle that kills 1 in 100,000, are they better? Most would say no, but it's easier to hide and it looks like Toyota was trying to hide their problems.

Toyota isn't failed, but this will be a huge setback for them (and it should be). If you hide problems that are fatal to people, you deserve to have your sales drop. There's an outrage over that.

Toyota screwed up big time for many years. The US auto makers also screwed up for many years. The US auto makers troubles came to light slowly in a way that was mostly about finances, wages, etc. Toyota's screw up is about human fatalities and came to light very quickly. That's a lot of the difference in the way it's being treated by the media.