skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since the word "sabotage" is getting thrown around, here's some guidelines from an actual WWII sabotage manual.

http://boingboing.net/2008/06/11/sabotage-manual-from.html

(1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of per­ sonal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

Slightly uncanny resemblance.
anyone have yaws versus nginx data?
It's probably worth reading the quote in full, and recalling that Shelley's been party to a number of high-profile feuds involving the person she's going after in the quote. So I wouldn't exactly rate it as a neutral quote, and for this post to present it as such is a bit disingenuous.

Personally, I think the whole thing reeks of stupid standards-committee politics from all sides. Adobe, judging from what they've posted publicly, decided to play up technicalities and procedural issues to try to kill or hold up a competitor to Flash, and the WG chairs responded by publicly alluding to private discussions and painting it to look as bad as possible.
While this is outrageous, it is a state matter. Each state has the right to be idiotic in it's own fashion. I say this as a native Floridian.
From http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/15/live-from-microsofts-wind...

"Here's a look at the browser. This is a much more advanced browser then we've ever shipped. It's based on the desktop version of IE, so it's highly compatible with lots of webpages."

And there's a few pictures.
And that's what I really want to hear from John - not arguing over who did what, but a simple statement along the lines of:

'Adobe will modify existing tools, or create new tools that allow content creators to do 2D and 3D drawing, and/or video, using Canvas and HTML Video, with the output not relying on Adobe Flash technologies '

or:

'Adobe will not modify existing tools, or create new tools that output to Canvas and HTML Video'

Either answer shows whether they're committed to a rich web with these features built in as standard.
You can't blame the IPCC for the behavior of the CRU group, though.
Nice project. Should also check the Vary header.
Wow. How could the forget about Mighty Mouse?
J2ME sucks because the API is not always implemented correctly on all the devices. It seems up to the handset maker to ensure compatibility. It is certainly not write once, run anywhere...and the API is limited. The GUI library really sucks, you have to hand roll everything if you want anything interesting.
Their thoughts exactly: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/10/sneak_peek_ai_fl_dw_can...
Will any out of state University seriously consider a college application without 12 grades of experience?

If an entire state does this, I doubt very many universities would categorically reject applicants from that state.

Perhaps the real problem is universities (and others) counting years in school rather than education delivered. The output is hard to measure (and besides, everyone complains about tests), so lets focus exclusively on the input?
Certainly here in Sweden there are several high school run by private for profit companies. On the whole they seem to be doing OK, some are top of the league, some are so bad the government has to threaten to close them down, but most are perfectly average. Pretty much just like the state run schools. At the end of the day choice is good. If a high school student has 8 different schools he can go to then those school will work hard to up their game and try to attract that student (since students=money)
Europe start thinking (and producing) big things
I surf the web lot and I investigate startup companies a lot as well. Like most people I believe on HN.

I am wondering why the startups in Europe focus on small and relative easy issues, rather than mind-boggling big and extreme world changing.

Does it came with our loooong history and small territory? I'm curious to hear how HackerNews thinks about this.
John,

I have a bit of cognitive dissonance going on here. I scanned this and have no idea what you're trying to do.

Is it to take one picture used by some skeptics and try to base an entire case of what climate science is like?

If so, that's clearly using a straw man argument.

Of course, in lots of dimensions climate change is a political/religious discussion, and you've every right to use all sorts of rhetorical tools to persuade us. But since your point is about science, logic, and reasoning, why the heavy-handed format? You're actually making the case that you're not so good at the science end of things, and that certainly can't be what you wanted, right?
I can provide additional such opportunities, and will double that offer.
> How else do you use Flash, anyway?

To play back standalone SWF files and WORA applications. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Lite

But you're right, I just noticed there is indeed a web plugin: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer_pocketpc/ - I stand corrected. It's based on Flash 7, which I think explains why it didn't work for most users (including myself, owning a WM 2005 and WM6 device).
Windows Phone 7 Series: Everything Is Different Now
The Internet: How The Series of Tubes Connect
One in a million happens a lot when your site is big
The proposal is essentially worthless, though. The entirety of high school (not just 12th grade) is already optional: just take the GED. And it's not very hard if you're determined enough to graduate in 11th grade with a full diploma. (I would have done that if AP classes hadn't interested me.)
Crime in America keeps going down, yet the American public refuses to believe it
Hmmm, maybe you shouldn't try to couple the two?

I.e. accept "benefits" cuts in times of "receding tax revenues" (never let a crisis got to waste :-) and on a separate tack work on the much harder problem you and everyone else who's sane is worried about.

Although ... my narrowly divided purple state of Missouri is not having serious problems with public sector employees, and how much do you want to bet that Utah is having even less?
aiming to become the Kiva

Does this mean that Grow VC will pretend that you are loaning to one specific individual, while actually just backfilling loans that have already been made by other organizations?
The most interesting results for me are Charlie Watts'. Of the Rolling Stones' explicitly dance-oriented tracks from the 70s, "Hot Stuff" and "Miss You" are 87%, and "Shattered" is 85%. I read this as being way too loose to have had machine help, but way steadier than just about any human drummer.
Interesting! I wasn't aware of your previous post. Thanks for clarifying.
Ask HN: Is there an anti-Flash bias on Hacker News?
Disclaimer: yes I'm a Flash guy.

I feel we have an unusually high level of anti-Flash sentiment lately on Hacker News. It started cooking during the HTML5 video discussion, bubbled up during the iPad release, and boiled over with the recent "Adobe blocking latest HTML5 draft" debate.

I don't mind debating HTML5 et al vs Flash, but I personally seem to be taking karma hits for simply being on the side of Flash. Here's one example (from the "Adobe blocking HTML5" debate):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1120689

In this exchange I received multiple negative karma hits and Hickson himself (who wrote the original blog entry) only received a couple of positive karma points. In contrast, the people scoring the most karma seemed to be those who accepted the anti-Adobe premise at face value or added more anti-Adobe sensationalism.

I'm not saying that Hacker News is entirely anti-Flash; it seems to be a small faction. Nevertheless, a fair amount of the rhetoric seems to be little more than spite, thus reducing the quality and authority of Hacker News.
> Each state has the right to be idiotic in it's own fashion.

Actually, no, they don't. We have these things called habeas corpus and due process and civil rights that are supposed to protect us from governments being idiotic - on any level.

Edit: Emphasis mine "[N]o Person ought to be taken imprisoned or disseised of his freehold, or be exiled or deprived of his Privileges, Franchises, Life, Liberty or Property but by due process of Law."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_process#In_the_U.S. - 1788 as a condition for New York State to ratify the Constitution
I read the public mailing list thread - starts here: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Feb/0349... - and continues for quite some time.

I came to the conclusion that Larry Masinter from Adobe did issue a formal objection to the public list - this is quite obvious from this post: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2010Feb/0002...

However, there was then further communication that took place in a private, members-only list, where apparently this objection was handled.

What seems to be happening is either Adobe is innocently handling the process of raising objections incorrectly, by posting them in a public list, then withdrawing them privately later on, or Adobe is maliciously attempting to subvert the process through delaying tactics.

I encourage you to read the thread and decide for yourself if Adobe is really innocent or is deliberately delaying. In considering such things, I usually like to look at what the parties have to gain/lose, as well as their actions.
Nokia Symbian^3 demo video
Are you from America? If so, it would make sense that you would find people from the culture with which you are more familiar would also be the most boring. I imagine an Indian would be similarly bored to discover that many Indians search for information about cricket.
I hope this is just a troll. Anyway this is the direct link: http://edinburgh.gumtree.com/edinburgh/97/53993597.html
Replace "Flash"/"Adobe" with "Buzz"/"Google" and you've got pretty much the same thing.

Geeks love to hate.
This is really old.

They're essentially comparing apples to oranges:

Apache's worker MPM uses system threads, whereas Erlang uses its own internal scheduler, so that at the system level, there is only one process.
Apache hasn't changed that such since 2.0 when it comes to basic connection handling. When it comes to handling tons and tons of connection, its I/O architecture is the problem, irregardless of prefork or worker.

That said, the comparison is pretty yawning. It's been known for years that Apache with its non-evented architecture is not good at handling massive amounts of connections; there's really no point at comparing with Apache anymore. I'm more interested in how this stacks up against Lighttpd or Nginx.
Yeah ... but federal and generally state money is tied to attendance, so perhaps the state needs to step in like this and make it formal?

And in my state of Missouri in 1979 to get my diploma I had to take 12th grade (which due to bad or mediocre teachers was almost entirely a waste of time: it's a bad sign when you're taking English Lit, Physics, Trig and Calculus, etc. and your 2nd year of JROTC is by far the best, most interesting and most useful class).
nginx would do very well too. But what's interesting about yaws or mochiweb or other Erlang systems is that they could also handle long-running calculations just about as well as they handle a static file. Well, perhaps there would be some loss of performance, but not nearly so much as if you have to spawn external threads or processes to handle said long running calculations.
I was doing some work for the Office of the Speaker of the House in California, which is huge and employees hundreds of people. They are paid by the state. A guy there told me that when the is a gov. shutdown, they get IOUs for months. Plus they do get laid off also.
indirect link, obvious scam (or at least fail in the long run).
Well, after the passage of the 14th Amendment they were supposed to protect us from lower level governments, but that was quickly eviscerated by the Supremes (e.g. Slaughterhouse) and only bit by bit is being fixed.
Maybe they can migrate to Resolver One.
8% of weather stations are rated as "poor" (>= 2C error) and 61% of stations are rated as "worst" (>= 5C error). It's not just "one bad thermometer". It's the vast majority of thermometers that are bad.
http://www.surfacestations.org/
They're competing for the most lucrative advertising market (by far). Why is that surprising or even bad business?
This is why it's so easy for companies like Apple and Adobe to fight over competing standards. You have both companies with developers that have years of training and work experience within their individual content creation pipelines. We call them "fanboys", but in reality they are just working people like you or I that have a particularly well developed skill set and don't want to have to re-train on a whole new platform.

I'm reminded of the great quote by Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."
It is invite only. You have to be invited, and then you have to be willing to pay $6000 to attend.
We like good technology, open technology, interoperable technology, accessible technology, technology based on standards, efficient technology, technology that pushes the state of the art, technology that expands what we can do.

We don't like being corralled into one vendor's world, having technology that only works well on one out of our three main platforms, technology that boils our CPU and wastes our battery, and technology whose owners are now actively trying to hold back standards progress in order to protect it.

You're surprised there's an anti-Flash feeling here?
I hope I am not one of the few who didn't like the interface. It looked too much like "flash interface" you see on some websites. Not a big fan of sideways sliding.

I applaud having more choices in interface, but I am more interested in better choices as opposed to having just another choice. Hard to draw any solid conclusion just by watching that video, but not very impressed so far. IMO YMMV
A gene for Alzheimer's makes you smarter
What a horrible post. Google hasn't done anything for us, they've done things for their business. It happens that for the moment their business model (largely) requires them to do things that we find convenient or good. This is extremely unlikely to remain the case forever.

Have loyalty to your friends/family. Not to some public company that doesn't know or care about you.
I'll triple your offer. You can put it on your résumé 6 times.
There's nothing civil about asset forfeiture.
> The IPCC is not, as many people seem to think, a large organization. In fact, it has only 10 full-time staff in its secretariat at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva

> The actual work of the IPCC is done by unpaid volunteers – thousands of scientists at universities and research institutes around the world who contribute as authors or reviewers to the completion of the IPCC reports.

There's your consensus - 10 full time staff and many volunteers. Doesn't it seem like you'd have obvious selection bias with who would volunteer for the IPCC? We're talking about the most passionately pro-environmentalism people in the world. People that would make the argument, "Even if global warming doesn't exist, we still need to do something."

Yet when an untrained amateur tries his hand at it and finds the numbers don't work, he's a "denier". I've seen enough decent analysis that goes against the general IPCC position by engineers, programmers, and other people with general science backgrounds who aren't specifically climate scientists. The most damning was that the algorithms that produced the hockey stick curve created the same scary graph with red noise in over 90% of simulations. So, random temperature data showed in 90% of cases that imminent global warming catastrophe was coming.

Despite presenting things sensibly and respectfully, these amateurs often get compared to Fox News or other such ad hominem. Sure, there's knuckleheads on both sides, but you've got severe selection bias in favor of who is working at the IPCC, and intelligent amateurs who respectfully produce data or show that the numbers don't work are shouted down, compared to Fox, or compared to fundamentalist religious people.
Probably not one of my best blog posts, I was just mad about the way in which two newspapers in the UK have reported the Rome airport situation as part of larger stories about how climate change apparently isn't happening.
Steve Balmer from the press conference:

"...the innovation of developers is important. We build a new foundation with a rich set of development tools which we'll discuss at MIX next month. [...] we want to take a very big step forward on [development tools]."

I wonder if this is just WPF/Sliverlight.

This seems a lot like the Palm WebOS announcement; similar reboot/new platform and breaking of backwards compatibility (unconfirmed).
Job: Social Networks Manager
I agree, having a choice of private schools is nice, however, what about when their is no public school option? That, I think, would be bad, because it would leave corporate sponsorship to provide school for the "least common denominator." Can you imagine if a school was sponsored by Archer Daniels Midland or Monsanto, for free, with the understanding that students would be experimented on with new GMO products served in their lunches? I expect some corporations would also like to have the option to impress upon young students at an early age the importance of using their products through advertising. Should we allow our schools to become giant Adsense experiments?
Passing an URL through a phone/piece of paper.
It's the same thing here. We have a large number of private schools. Some are based in religion, others are quite secular. These secular private schools tend to offer a more rigorous education (although that does not seem to necessarily reflect actual achievement).
Alexandria Project, Chap. 5: So how do ya like them iBalls?
How Google eclipses Microsoft as tech giant stealing the headlines
Same in the UK
I agree that those are the claims made by Surface Stations. Do you know if their raw data is available for download? I see their report on what they are doing, but I would be great to see the raw, uninterpreted data about their findings.
Broadband, Yes. Toilet, No.
Oh wow, this is even worse:

> The IPCC does not carry out primary research, and hence any mistakes in the IPCC reports do not imply that any climate research itself is wrong. A reference to a poor report or an editorial lapse by IPCC authors obviously does not undermine climate science.

Any mistakes in the IPCC reports does not imply that any climate research itself is wrong? Doesn't that mean that anything presented in IPCC reports does not imply that any climate research is right either? You can't have it both ways...
The phone does not seem simple. My mom was able to figure the iphone out. I doubt about this one.
Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap.
S/S 2010: L.A.M.B. Shoe Collection
Would it have been more successful if they had fragmented their efforts further?
I know this perception is certainly true in my family. At any major family gathering it always seems to come up that everything is "so much worse" and "more dangerous than it used to be." "We used to just leave the doors unlocked and no one cared - now you can't leave anything unattended or it'll walk off!" And yet this is based on no evidence at all. If I ask if they've had anything stolen, the answer is always no; then they justify that result because they always lock things up! Sigh.
"TED has never paid speakers to attend, but we're committed to creating an experience that's tremendously fulfilling and beneficial on all sides. We do, of course, cover travel costs to Long Beach or Palm Springs, and provide excellent hotel accommodation." Source: http://www.ted.com/pages/view/id/73
Microsoft announces Windows Mobile 7, now officially dubbed “Windows Phone”
Macmillan v. Amazon comes down to price discrimination v. demand elasticity
While I agree with you, The Supreme Court doesn't, and we don't get to decide; they do. Until the Civil War amendments, those Constitutional protections didn't apply to the States. Since the Fourteenth Amendment and its Due Process clause, they clearly do. But the Supremes don't seem to recognize this. Until they do, the States have the right to be just this stupid.
I spent a very fun fifteen minutes on Chatroulette the other day. Every time a new chat started, I'd type "Hey! Haven't I seen on you To Catch a Predator?"
I can't see that happening often enough for there to be so many different shorteners available, especially with Google and Facebook running their own.
I see. So I can lump it in with all of the other useless stuff.
As long as BYU is on board, Utah can probably just go ahead and pass the bill.
We Don’t Want Privacy: A Protester On The Other Side. Part One
With how much they've been talking about taking Silverlight mobile since last year's MIX (at PDC most notably) I would almost guarantee that it will be Silverlight.
Of course I don't think they'll do that, but if they've already messed up PR for some reason, due to being evil, at least they can brush it off (at least a little) on having never claimed that they weren't going to be evil. If it comes to that, they're probably already screwed, but at least they have a counter argument against the you promised you wouldn't be evil crowd.
That browser better has to support the exact same features as webkit for android and Iphone else I don't think this phone can match up against the iphone and android phones due to the lack of developer interest in developing for this browser.

Developers are fed up for years with Microsoft's browsers and here they can safely ignore it because it doesn't have a huge market share.
I get the impression they don't want it to be app centric - presumably "apps" now add functionality to the "hubs" - of course that assumes everything can be neatly categorised
When someone you know is murdered for no apparent reason, the actual crime rate really doesn't matter.
http://www.windowsphone7series.com/ Click on the phone for the video demo and watch the first segment. You can swipe to get your full list of apps.
The interesting part of this to me is an athlete's foot cure.

Lots of places you can put this for cheap foot treatment to whole teams of athletes.
Very simple explanation: the media.

Fewer crimes happen these days yes, but that just means that the media can cover more of them that do happen, so we are more informed of crime than we ever have been in the past.

Thus, the news sources end up propagating this false idea that crime is actually on the rise because they work hard at keeping this news always at the forefront of people's minds.
Engadget Puts the World of Technology in Your Pocket
Being a tech enthusiast myself and writing about both technology and mobile applications for a living, Engadget is one of the main sources, among others, I tend to frequent if I’m looking for breaking technology news. So, does the app put the website we all know and love into our hands?