skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Uses it for real fullscreen in Google Maps
Sipping cocktails on tropical beaches?
"... most of them are tricks to improve memorization."

And specifically short-term memorization only.
I'm just catching up to the news on this, but I'm kind of disappointed in the articles that I've read, like this one, which are so quick to backpedal and say, "not that his actions were justified".

This is going to be a terribly unpopular point of view I'm sure, but all specific details of his particular case aside ... what is an individual or small business with limited resources going to do if they end up stuck in an IRS quagmire? Is the IRS really defensible at all here?

What happened is exactly what can be expected to happen when the rules of the social contract are violated. For social contracts to work, there must be a way for parties to peacefully resolve arguments. In the case of the IRS (in particular), you have a complex, constantly changing system, with little recourse for resolving disagreements.

I've been really poor, and it's easy in that situation to adopt an us versus them, self-defeating attitude towards government and bureaucracy. Resolving any disputes requires resources, and when you don't have those resources, you find yourself struggling on the losing end of deals over and over again.

There are, at least, thousands of people that would imagine themselves doing what Stack did, and for much the same reasons. Doesn't that practically require that the tax system get reviewed, and fixed?
Much is made in this "analysis" of Dr. Ivins' throwing out of GEB (a book he apparently loved), then making sure the garbage was picked up, and then looking out in to the parking lot and wooded area across from his home.

According to the report, this is all supposed to be evidence of Ivins' "guilty conscience".

But there could be plenty of alternative explanations for this behavior, foremost among them Ivins' (justified) suspicion that he was under surveillance.

And if Ivins suspected he was under surveillance, why would he throw out something so damningly incriminating (according to the DOJ's view) like GEB? Wouldn't it make more sense to throw out something completely innocuous and then check if it's been tampered with?

Or perhaps Ivins merely threw out GEB by mistake, or regretted throwing it out, and then went out to check to see if the garbage had already been picked up in an attempt to retrieve the book.

The report does not describe how the investigators got their hands on Ivins' garbage. But, if one of their agents actually went to Ivins' house and pulled out the garbage bag out of Ivins' garbage can in plain sight while Ivins witnessed this theft, that would also explain Ivins coming out of his home, checking his garbage can, and then peering in to the parking lot and woods across from his house to see if the garbage thief was there.

The "analysis" also makes much of GEB containing references to DNA (the "Genetic Code"), to the amino acids in DNA, and to codes.

I wonder, considering GEB was a huge bestseller, and considering it dealt with these subjects (DNA, etc..) how many biologists have it on their bookshelf? Is it really so suspicious that he, along with probably a significant fraction of other biologists, had a copy?
I saw a guy wear a derby hat and trenchcoat on the T today. Looked like John Steed, or a douchebag trying to put on a John Steed affectation.

I wonder how many pizza goiters are in his friend list?
This is exactly the same weird response that the first generation of email and usenet spammers gave me when I complained to them (they hadn't learned to forge "From:" addresses at first) directly: shut up or we'll spam you even more.

There must be some psychopathy that you have to have to start spamming, or that you develop after spamming. The responses are illogical in the same way every time.

Spammers need to be tried, found guilty, and punished.
FWIW, our email addresses did not change from "bankofamerica.com" to "baml.com"† until two weeks ago. If I used LinkedIn, this is the event that would prompt me to update my profile, rather than whatever press releases were issued.

(† Why yes, we do use YAML...)
Whether a suit looks good for your height just depends on the proportions of the suit compared to your body. A short guy can wear a suit just as well as a tall guy (or vice versa), if he has the right length jacket. This is because the jacket divides the body into two visual sections, the primary effect of which is to either visually shorten or lengthen the legs. Shorter guys look stubby if their jacket is too long and cuts through their thighs.

Hint: many clothes come in [S]hort, [R]egular, and [T]all length variations. It's good to figure out which one you are and buy the appropriately proportioned one, or err on the side of too long and have a tailor crop it for you.
Games are a big part of the App Store and if tons of Flash games existed it would reduce that market substantially for games in the App Store.
Wow, that's a pretty awesome list.
Also uses it for street view and Google Finance charts.
Google already maintains a large number of copies of YouTube videos, one for each quality level and now they've been adding h.264 and they may have some special ones for different devices I don't know about. Asking for one more in a codec that they own is not much to ask.

And this is not related to open source but rather open web. The internet has been successful because of open technologies, meaning technologies that can be freely implemented and worked with by anyone without asking for permission from someone.

Regardless of what direction Google is moving in giving them some developer feedback doesn't hurt and Flash supporting the codec would be a good thing as well (The more support the better).
Mostly because of inaccessible layers of code, not much to do with Adobe, more to do with apple. If apple would open up some of the lower layers then this stuff could get a lot faster.
I found this linked from an old Hacker News article:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10.1...

In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under either Linux or Mac OS X. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases.
i skimmed to page 14 of the first one. favorite quote:

'Neither is Albert Einstein subject to exclusion by reason of his frequently revised theory of "relativity" which, even if true, is of no more practical importance than the answer to the old academic riddle, "how many angels can stand on the point of a needle if angels do not occupy space."'

lmao. ah mass-energy equivalence, so impractical.
> This is how we evolve the American technology industry, by taking these lessons to heart.

Why only the American one ?
This is one of those very fine lines where on one side you have completely understandable outrage at an unjust and broken system--and on the other you have completely understandable outrage at an unjust and broken system, and killing people who are employed by the system but don't any have direct control over it. I think the former is entirely justified, but the latter is clearly not.
Research Evaluation for Computer Science
I seem to recall that at one point in american history^1, courts could and would strike down laws that were deemed unnecessarily esoteric to the point that they were incomprehensible to the "common man". when you see a system with decades or even centuries of regulations built up via 'regulation, loophole, regulation etc.' you have to wonder if we don't need a clean sheet design.

1. inherited from european common law.
Exactly. A large amount of the stuff in the app store is fluff that is already available for flash, and plenty of the 'apps' are re-writes for the iphone platform of existing .swf files. That's what makes it worth to the users to pay for them, the fact that they're not available for free through an alternative channel. A large part of the app stores market would dry up overnight if flash support were added to the iphone as an out-of-the-box feature.
try to read about "schiziod" personality. It is basically the extreme version of a loner. People that are happy with themselves, don't like contact with other people, and like to keep the human relationships in minimum as possible.

Seems ok in surface (and many schiziod people are happy withe themselves), but in few people it is a precursor of schizophrenia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizoid_personality_disorder
This could be alleviated if the server kept the user's key only on a per-session basis and never actually stored it. I'm curious... how would you feel about that?

Also, there might be a way to make a server transparent so people are more likely to trust it... open-source the server code, of course, and expose the entire file system as read-only could people could run a checksum on the server executable to verify it's the same one? Of course there'd ultimately be no guarantee that there wasn't networking trickery going on...
If the problem with Flash performance on Mac OS was solely due to Apple being uncooperative, why does it work just as poorly on Linux?

I really hope this fight seriously diminishes the popularity of both Flash and the iPhone platform. Apple and Adobe are both working against the interests of users in trying to insure the continued relevance of their platforms.
Uh... what? The author didn't even provide a reason for why we're not ready to use HTML5 <video> tags instead of Flash. He says that "Flash is the acknowledged standard", whatever that means, however <video> actually is a web standard.
Thanks Michael! My friend and I are just starting a website and we decided to do it using RoR even though our knowledge is close to none. We're both PHP developers and thought that if we made a website in RoR we would learn it by trial-and-error. I just heard about railstutorial.org today. I have skimmed through your tutorial book and find it quite useful. I will definitely read it in the next couple of days! (:
The problem is that no one has any direct control over the system.

It is like any other big company. The call centre people are never responsible for the mess the company made to you. However, if you do not want to devote significant resources, you are pretty much screwed up and yell at the call centre people.

The difference is that, in the most cases, you can just forget about the corporation and live your life. There is no opt-out from the IRS, though.
I was expecting this to work with firefox-3.7a2pre and the mentioned options turned on. Unfortunately it doesn't. Even with software renderer turned on, it tries to lookup the mesa library. I tried this using the daily 3.7 build from ubuntu ppa. Has anyone found out how to run it in this setup?
That graph looks wrong: According to it if you have low-middle skill and enter the difficulty level that creates anxiety, a person of less skill would only feel worry.
An easy flow trick is to set a 48-minute timer; commit to single-tasking for the entire duration. 48 minutes is long enough to get something done, and short enough that you can brute force through distractions (not checking email, RSS, HN, etc).

You'll likely continue past the 48 minutes, if you hit a good flow state, or you can take a deliberate 12 minute break and go for an hourly cycle.

Simple Windows timer:
http://www.orzeszek.org/blog/2009/08/21/simple-countdown-tim...

And Mac dashboard widget:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/calculate_convert/m...
Wrong Side of Town 2010
I didn't say Adobe wasn't lazy. mplayer can use the hardware acceleration of my nVidia card, so I don't see why Flash can't. It's just programming.

It's fine with me, though. I would like to see Adobe and Apple both die in a big PR fireball, and that looks to be where this is all leading anyway.
Exactly. Remember how it would be a disaster if we could install non-approved apps because they would take out the cell network? Somehow that has failed to happen despite millions of Android phones capable of running apps from anywhere.
HBase vs BigTable comparison
That being said jquery is amazingly well documented.
Because the other countries only really exist in movies, obviously.
There are bold programmers, but no old programmers
There are two kinds of standards, de-facto and what a piece of paper says. <video> is a piece of paper, Flash is de-facto.

(Not that I would ever use Flash on my site, of course, but I can't dictate policy to the Wider Internet.)
I want. Why can't they sell these on Amazon?
Microsoft offers web browser choice to IE users
Hmm. If the latter is unjustified, what does that say about situations in war where civilians are killed, injured, or have their property destroyed?

I'm not quite equating what happened in Texas with war between sovereign states, but I do think there are some parallels in the mind of the terrorist, as well as in history and human behavior in general.

If you find yourself in a violent conflict with something intangible, like a government or a bureaucracy, how do you not see the people who are working for that government or bureaucracy as being part of the problem?

EDIT: I want to be very clear here. What happened to the employees at the IRS building is tragic, and they didn't have any influence on the IRS' decision-making process, or even on Stack's particular situation. Rather, what I'm trying to say is that as long as there is no way to peacefully resolve disputes in situations like this, to the satisfaction of both parties, then what happened is to be expected and will continue to happen. (Remember Tim McVeigh? He had some of the same complaints...)

So, what happened must prompt a quick response in the form of reforms of the IRS, specifically in dispute management and resolution, and I think that every article that handwaves Stack's terrorism as being the actions of "a wacko", "a nut", or "unjustified", weakens the case for those reforms.
2) complete security.

But its being impossible to monetize would prohibit there being a network at all, wouldn't it?

You can do this already with email and pgp, or encrypted attachments and pgp. You might get closer to the goal by making THAT easy for non-techs, rather than adding the difficulty of creating a whole new social network as such.
It's not 1MHz (in the usual sense), it's 1MS/s. In theory, Nyquist says it should therefore be good to 500kHz in realtime; in practice, consider yourself lucky if that works out. Also consider that if the 'scope has a proper antialiasing filter its rise time will be limited to something in the microsecond region - and if it doesn't have such a filter you've got another problem on your hands. I guess if you've got a repetitive signal and it can do averaging, that would help.
Well, thinking of a BA in the UK as 3/4 of a US BA seems very naive to me, to be honest. It's a completely different system of education. In the US, your first year is spent on studying many things not related to your major, whereas your BA in the UK focuses on your subject right from the beginning. I don't see how research in the UK is less "real" than research in the US, maybe you would care to explain.

Anyway, I think you're right about arranging some research with a professor. Not sure how easy this is, though. I don't know if professors are willing to accept students from outside their own university to conduct research with them.
The real problem is that most airplane seats are inappropriately sized and uncomfortable for adults of average size. I'm not particularly tall, less than 6ft., and I can't recall ever having adequate leg room on any flight except when I happen to be seated in an exit row where there is no seat in front of me. If the seats were appropriately sized for average adults, a large person (whether fat, tall, or both) would be no more uncomfortable than what an average size person is now and would not require any special accommodation from anyone in an adjacent seat.
Crowdsourcing: a response to the "Myth of Crowdsourcing"
Completely agree. Apple is becoming more and more user unfriendly. Why pay for that kind of abuse?
Generally, the employee faces no risks arising from an employer audit. In fact, the employee is often pushing for a reclassification, e.g., when applying for unemployment benefits (available to employees only) after having been terminated as a "contractor."

In practical terms, employees do have input at hearings in which an employer will challenge the results of an audit because it is the employees who are often the key witnesses in such hearings (this usually works to the severe disadvantage of employers though, as a parade of employees is often called in and asked, "did you have to report in for work at a specific time?", "is it true that your duties consisted of making telemarketing cold calls while strapped to a desk?," "are you telling me that making such calls non-stop from 8 to 5 every day signifies that you were 'in your own business' just because your boss made you get a business license?" - this often goes on and on to disastrous effect for the employer and, though I have framed it a bit facetiously here, this is about the spirit in which it occurs).
SCO delenda est.
I think you're right on that, but it worries me that it hasn't happened yet. The iPad is a rather large step towards strengthening their position, and the backlash has been, at best, minimal.
That's a stupid definition of murder.
Wait, what's the difference between "bespoke" and "made-to-measure?" For me they're synonymous.
Flash 10.1 has been in public beta for less than 6 months, and only accelerates decoding on minority hardware. A few percent of their install base has it, tops. Flash on Windows decodes video at unaccelerated libavcodec speeds just fine without it.

They're pushing this angle because it makes them out to be the heroes -- see the passive-aggressive spiel you get when you visit the Flash page on an iPhone -- they'd love to frame everything as "if only Apple would let us". Unfortunately it's not true in the slightest.

Nobody's shipping a full Flash player for Android or WebOS because it doesn't exist. Maemo can use a standard desktop NSAPI plugin, but Nokia+Mozilla won't ship the one Adobe has compiled for them because it's too shitty. All of this has been "6 months away" for years now, going back to the Macromedia days.
I think the "words with friends" model works very well. There's a free version, it's identical except that it shows a small banner add on the main menu, and shows you a full-screen ad after every move. It's not very intrusive but you can't really ignore it either.

It was enough to make me upgrade to the full ($2.99) version after playing for a week. And if users don't upgrade, you still get the ad revenue.

Take a look if you haven't tried it yet.
Labor is blossoming or dancing where/The body is not bruised to pleasure soul...

W.B. Yeats, "Among School Children"
Nice Ari!
I'm nothing more than a layman what comes to things like these, but...

What's there for Google?

- Google, Apple and Microsoft can afford the license and the fee is peanuts to them. Most likely Flash will be history no matter what codec wins.
- If Mozilla decides to stick with it's values and stay free (is anything else even an option?) while the web goes h.264, I'd say a significant part of people will migrate to other browsers. And come on who's going to migrate to IE and Safari isn't that popular on PC, so that's even better for Google and it's Chrome. How could a bigger browser market share be bad? One downside though would be that some smart people who would be really valuable employees and have strong personal values might get pissed off and not join Google.

- "You owe it to the public" "if you care about free software". No matter how much it sucks, the only entities Google owes something is it's creditors and share holders. Sometimes same things benefit both the public and the share holders which is just super, but isn't it a bit naive to ask a publicly listed company not to take advantage of the situation just because it would be nice? Again though there's the possible loss of love, of which effect on the business as a whole I'm not competent to evaluate.

- Mobile hardware support is important and it's going to get even more important in years to come. I might be talking out of my ass here, but isn't the world full of hardware support for h.264? If that hardware support is something really generic like doing ICT really fast and can be applied to VP8 then this might not be that important.
My understanding is this (correct me if I'm wrong...) is this is exactly the business model that has killed Vorbis. Xiph originally created a floating-point free reference implementation, and charged for the integer decoder. You pretty much have to use the integer decoder for any sort of hardware implementation, so the effect was the same.

With few users and a paid barrier to entry, few hardware vendors took the leap. No hardware support means fewer people bothered to encode to Vorbis... and the spiral to the bottom continued.

If you're trying to use the network effect to your advantage, you do exactly what the MPEG-LA has done: the first couple of years are free, then everyone pays. The only want to combat that is to do the same.
And how exactly would keyboard + mouse Flash games would work with accelerometers and multiple intermittent cursors work?

Even if the Flash player was a pinnacle of engineering, the existing content doesn't make any sense for the context.
attr_accessible, messieur
I would love to have something like that for my manual Canon. (A "digital back" that would replace the rear cover might work too, although it would obviously be more tightly tied to a specific camera model.)
You're welcome! Be sure to send me feedback on anything you find confusing or if you find any errors. I should be able to fix them straightaway since my publication process goes something like this:

$ <fix problem>
$ git commit -am "Fixed problem"
$ deploy tutorial

This generates the HTML and builds the PDF from the same source, and then pushes them both up to Heroku. It's very satisfying. :-)
This post, in various guises, pops up about once a month. 'grellas had a solid response last month, and it'll stand us in good stead here too:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1050457

What I read, when I read posts like this between the lines, is that the author doesn't spend much time working with large companies. Small web startups, even if funded, might let an NDA go. Practically no company with in-house counsel --- that is, no company with more than a couple hundred employees --- will show any flexibility on this; they're often legally obligated to have you sign one.
Fleeting Youth, Fading Creativity in Science
You seem to assume, as a foregone conclusion, that CouchDB is a good investment.

Can you explain why?
Michael, thanks! Awesome work.

If I might suggest one improvement: I'd change @title with content_for. A class attribute needlessly messes View and Controller.
And how is it that other third party software mysteriously has access to APIs that Flash allegedly doesn't? For example, MPlayer is able to offload work to the GPU.
Discovering the motives behind piracy can lead to innovation
Apple's Secrecy in China
Not to mention all the BlackBerrys, Windows Mobile phones, and Symbian phones that have been running "unapproved" apps long before the iPhone apps store ever existed. All the apps running on those phones never caused any havoc for the cell phone networks.
"Game designers, particularly video and computer games, benefit from integration of flow principles into gameplay design."

Gamers will get into zones, similar to athletes, where their reaction times become ultra quick and reflexes are super sharp. Game designers sometimes try to bake these directly into the game, and it's arguable whether or not it's beneficial. For example, many people complain about the killstreak rewards in Modern Warfare 2; once you get going, you're pretty much indestructible.