skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say all data has its value. If I were to compare their data to, say, Last.fm, I believe Last.fm's data is far more important/valuable for music trends.

From Songkick, I think it would be interesting to understand if people buy tickets online or not. I believe it's too expensive but as soon as tickets start to be digital only that will be a non issue.
Nokia also owns trolltech which has QtWebKit, so they can have both a webkit and gecko based browser.
It's a very short book. But if you liked "Cobol the good parts", than it's absolutely recommended.
As you said: the Knuth/Plass algorithmn does not reduce or even detect rivers. Detecting rivers can be done in linear time, but reducing is very likely to put the algorithm in a higher time complexity class (which is almost linear with input length for the normal algorithm!).
Yeah, I saw that. My point is that the registry wasn't designed for that.

I'll be the same as complaining that the format of the /etc files is not well document, is not standard across different flavors of UNIX and everyone sticks whatever they want there.
It does expose (by full name) any contact who comments on one of your Buzzes. It's far from being obvious when you are using Buzz for the first time that your comments will be seen not just by the Buzz author; it's also far from obvious initially for the Buzz author that his contacts will see each other if they comment. Finally, it's not clear at all who is seeing what. This all feels fuzzy and insecure as compared to good old email.
I'm just saying that the publishers balance potential lost sales due to DRM against potential gained sales because of DRM and see a net sales gain. It's a publicly traded company - they have an obligation to shareholders to address this.

Say that 5m copies have been downloaded illegally (I think that's pretty conservative in the case of AC2). Assume that a small percentage, maybe as low as 1%, of those that pirate it would actually buy it if they couldn't pirate it. That's 50000 copies. Realistically, how many people are put off from buying by this DRM. If that figure is less than 50000 and covers the development cost of the DRM then you have your net profit and DRM "works".

Adjust the figures to whatever you think is realistic, but
publishers have a lot of research data that they don't make public so they're probably in a good position to make predictions.

It doesn't mean that their numbers are correct though.
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And just because they didn't read the EULA on their software / contract at their job does not mean they are not bound by it.

I agree with the initial design errors, but there's never been a privacy leak in Buzz that people didn't tell to exist.
It helps to realize when and why it was created. The internal lore, as best I recall it is below...

At the time, application developers stored settings in INI files in the \Windows directory. Reading this name=value file was very slow. The registry was an attempt to centralize storage of that data, speed up application startup by reducing the time required to settings data from it, and to respond robustly to disk corruption.

Of course, after it was created, everybody and their grandpappy (COM, MSI/Darwin, etc.) decided to abuse it as a general-purpose store. Now that XML file load is considered zippy enough to be done at application start, developers are encouraged to have a private configuration file in their own application directory and per-user ones in the per-user directories.
The right solution to that is to overwrite his "hotshot prod changes" from version control until he learns that he has to do it in version control first.

If you don't have enough political pull to make that stick, then you have a second problem...
Is the sound created by the change in the depth or the shape of the groove?
You do realize that Valve does delayed bans. If they detect you using some sort of cheat, they will not ban you right away, but generally within a couple weeks. This prevents cheaters from knowing what exactly caused the ban (especially if they are using multiple hacks). You may have gotten lucky and used a new hack before Valve new about it/added it to VAC. The only way to hack and ensure that you do not get caught is to create your own hack and share it with nobody so that way VAC has nothing to match it against.
That is a plus. You can go very far within the free quota limits.

Another thing I forgot to mention is that if you want to use an external domain (clojuresombrero.com instead of closuresombrero.appspot.com), and you want users in China to be able to access it, then you need to run everything through a reverse proxy or they'll hit the Great Firewall block.
This is great news. However, having a Knuth & Plass line breaking algorithm without hyphenation is like sex without a partner. Pretty much useless. The good points you get from using a total fit algorithm is much less then you lose from lack of hyphenation. If hyphenation is implemented, this will be very great!
Great info, but I thought that I'd supplement that, noting that they also have the Chumby One, which is a hard shell version without included battery. Mine is placed mainly to stare at as I dumbly eat cereal first thing in the morning
http://www.chumby.com/pages/compare

And of course the main website is
http://www.chumby.com/
almost exactly the opposite. its much easier to just get all my data related to some 'entity' in some place then to have to gather it over a half a dozen columns with a weird syntax (I know SQL very well, I just hate it with a passion :)
developers, developers, developers,
developers, developers, developers...
How is anything here "above the law"? It's an entirely opt-in service for exposing your info, and it told you, from day 1, what was being made public.

(The original notification: http://img694.imageshack.us/i/buzzflaw.jpg/ ) Note that it says "name, photo, people you follow, and people who follow you". Poor design != breaking the law.

edit: bah, static link fail. Updated link. Original source: http://is.gd/8Fduj
This is pretty standard practice.

In the US. Certainly not in Europe.
What's bad about giving programmers a standard API to store config settings so they are in a central place and can be tweaked by administrators and users using gui tools (for other people you can still grep ~\.gconf or use they command line tools).

I don't think the Windows Registry is a bad idea by itself, it's just a poor implementation and very badly organized.
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I'm sure every credit and debit card company---who get to charge several percent of each transaction in fees---agrees with you.
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TED: Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero
The 2010 TED Talks are already being posted.
I think it is an interesting idea of bringing people from across the globe together in one topic. Variety of experiences and openness create a hook. :)
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Doubtful, the sign in link goes to twitter.com
Right now as the article explains it's cheaper to use humna labour to do many manufacturing tasks, especially for low volume orders. What I find interesting to think about is the cross over point where it does actually become cheaper to use machines for most or all manufacturing. I think this is all but inevitable. What happens to a country like China when this occurs?
There is this 2001 case, Kyllo v. United States, that held it illegal for the police to use a thermal scanner to detect heat lamps

I don't think that's precisely correct. It's not illegal -- the cops aren't going to be sent to jail. It just makes the evidence inadmissible.

And that subtlety makes all the difference in this application.
That's been every job I've ever been at. I think employers are just too nice sometimes. It works in your favor when something comes up and you need them to be understanding but it's hard to stay motivated sometimes when you either need to clean up after someone's mess or know that someone just isn't doing anything. With some people I'd rather them stay out of the way than have to fix the build every day or redo pages they did because they did something crazy.
Web Laureate Insight, "Buzz: Control-Release"
For the record, the study was domestic, and "struggling societies" has a specific demographic connotation:

http://www.appliedgeographic.com/mosaic_group_j.html

The rest of the groups listed in the diagram are also listed:

http://www.appliedgeographic.com/mosaic.html

And as a postscript, describing "developing countries" as "struggling societies" is a little insulting :-)
> As long as there is no indication that there were sexual motives, than no accusations of sexual motives should be made.

That's not how child porn laws work.

Laws should always be enforced most harshly against govt agents and folks who actually advocate the laws in question.

Govt employment is not a right and if someone is unwilling to accept heightened scrutiny, they can work for someone who is willing to accomodate that preference.
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I love that there was a guy whose whole job was to show up at the hotel, pay for the room across the hall from the target, hand off the key, and then immediately leave the country.
I'm sure there are a few good courses. It's just wading through the crap that makes it unbearable.

Hilariously awful example: the "teacher" of the class wanted to explain what a pointer was, so he gave us a link to a Wikipedia article on pointers.
Many years ago I ran a record label, and as part of the process of manufacturing I took the source DAT tapes to a cutting studio, where an engineer cut the "lacquer", which is a one-off, soft wax version of what will later be pressed into hundreds of records.

After he had finished mixing the record and used a lathe to cut the lacquer, he showed me the grooves which has been cut using a microscope attached to the lathe. Not quite as much detail as the photos above, but more than enough to see clearly how the shape of the grooves creates the resultant waveform.

Really, really incredible feeling.

Vinyl records are, without a doubt, one of my favourite pieces of music technology.
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Because of this article I installed the BetterPrivacy Firefox extension. Looks like a good no effort solution; I have it set to silently clear Flash cookies and super cookies when the browser closes.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623
Once you have a sizeable customer base, transitioning to being a direct seller and getting a bigger cut seems the obvious route to take.
Do people read headlines on HN before posting anymore? Can Arc check for duplicate URLs?
Speaking of school's control and observation of kids not on their premises, wasn't there a case a while back where a kid skipped school and later appeared on TV holding a "Bush sucks!" protest sign? My memory is fuzzy on this, but it seems like the courts upheld the right of the school to punish the kid? Anybody got a link for that case?

Extrapolating from what I don't know into things I can't even speculate on (I love the internet), what if these administrators saw the same kids engaging in obscene political action, like defiling election signs or something? Or witnessed a murder? If I remember correctly, even police who are authorized to eavesdrop are bound by all kinds of rules about what they can observe and what they're forced to take action on.
A few security researchers, myself included, are getting together with one or two Mozilla devs tomorrow at Mountain view to talk about this and other related issues.
Good job, this is really nice.

Like you mentioned in your announcement, this tool seems like it's primarily useful for (important) business. Is there anything you can do that would make me feel assured that the conversion is accurate? I'm 90% sure that everything is perfect, but that's not really good enough. I'd be much more inclined to use the tool if I knew I could trust it.
I guess this means be prepared for a ton of applications that are buggy, memory and CPU hogs. I'm a C# developer and developing for the iPhone has made me a much better developer in general. Things you don't have to worry about in .NET, like memory and thread management, are all in vogue now because Apple forces you to pay attention to them. And the compiler does a great job of letting you know that your application is as leaky as 100 year old plumbing.

Now the only question I have is will they take a cue from Apple and include free WM7 development tools in VS Express, or do you have to pony up $800 for the privilege?
Nothing's wrong with it. Make it a simple text file and place it in /etc where it's supposed to be anyway. Don't make users chase different config locations for different programs.

UNIX already has a standard for storing configuration. It is simple, text-based, scriptable and standardized.

And there is no need for "standard API" here. Its too late. GConf doesn't cover 99% of whats on a typical Ubuntu system, so why did they invent this "standard" for 1% of all system settings? Why fragment the system?
As I stated, "This was the case on accounts I set up the first day..." My subsequent testing summarized in that comment simply confirmed it.
Nice article, and I think it does a decent job explaining the point and the problems. I, personally, side with the education-solution, as excessive computer ignorance is a very real danger and much more applicable to most people than most things school attempts to teach.

In all seriousness, this seems like the perfect place to use the StupidFilter (http://stupidfilter.org). Separate bugs and complaints as they did (bug-tracking system instead of emails), and run all complaints through the filter. I'd even recommend informing people that it'll be run through the filter; anyone who can read before they scream at you can test for themselves to make sure it passes. If they can't be understandable and can't read before yelling, they're not worth the time, because nothing you do will make all of them happy. As the article suggests, pick your battles.
I agree, but I don't think that was the focus of this article. No amount of usability testing would have helped here. RWW and Facebook already look completely different - not the URL, the entire page!

The same goes for any other application. The user doesn't have an appropriate "mental model" of how the computer works. What is an app developer to do at that point?
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Meh. Maybe I meant iPods. Too eager to get my flippant comment posted, I guess.
Now that Firefox 2.0 is history, you can reliably use soft hyphens to hyphenate HTML text, and there are JavaScript libraries to do the hyphenation on the client:

http://www.mnn.ch/hyph/hyphenation1.html
BetterPrivacy is good; it blocks Flash cookies, but I don't think it does anything against browser fingerprinting, which is also a type of supercookie (at least the way I use the term in the article.)
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/27/panopticlick-effs-to.ht...
And where was the IT leader for the school in all of this? This is where professional responsibility has to come into play. He or she has a responsibility to be aware of what's right and wrong, and installing and activating remote spycam software is so very definitely wrong; I don't even have the words.
I've got a friend that works as an audio producer at a recording studio here, and I've sent the link off to him. I'm not sure, but I think they have an on-site system they use, but it may be something like MS Exchange, I really hadn't thought of it as much of an issue because they have staff who are responsible for the billing aspects of studio time, including studio use and then any engineers/producers associated with the use. Since it's a billed product, I imagine actual use tracking rather than just scheduling would play a key part.

I think your biggest hurdle will be that you need the head/ownder of the studio/facility to decide to use and roll out the product. I'd either find out where all the engineers hang out online and market directly there (ie, drive the bottom up recommendations for change) or go the bold route. You want to make studio's lives' easier. So do a search for the studios in your area, pick up the phone and keep working away until you get to someone with purchase authority. Then arrange a demo/sales pitch. I think your price ranges fit well for the small-medium sized studios, and if they're tracking the scheduling of 8 rooms, it's probably done in Excel and they aren't even thinking of looking.
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I don't think it would be hard. Just create a Windows application that hosts an IE ActiveX control and hides its main window.
Or even better: When the user's screen saver is running, start a full-blown IE window and control it through Window messages. The traces would be identical to the case in which the user used IE himself.
Yeah--Why does it matter that the registry is endian-specific? Doesn't Windows only run on little-endian processors (x86, x86-64) or am I mistaken?

Is there any reason why a new version of Windows couldn't do away with the registry and create a layer of abstraction to allow programs in a "compatibility mode" to run normally but have its registry interactions translated to the new system? Wouldn't that be a similar principle to what Wine does?
Cash is already close to optional so the "useless inventory management exercise" is a choice that you've made.

Given that cash already optional, wanting to ban cash means that you're objecting to someone else using cash. Why do you care?
The claimed reasons are (a) it would take work to implement, and (b) it would be slower than the current method.

Both seem like pretty weak excuses to me.

The main real reason is likely that most users don’t care, and so they can get away with it.
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No, laws should be applied equally to everyone.

You should not be punished more harshly because you are a "government agent." What does your postal clerk have to do with some idiot congressman who passed too strict a law on child porn?
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I prefer to read up on people whose work is timeless: Claude Shannon, John Tukey, Jon Klienberg, the bioinformaticians whose work will one day discover a cure for cancer, etc.
To summarize: the article is a summary of recent stories about high frequency trading. I found it interesting.
Or you check in the production changes....

If you can't do this from your source control system, try something more powerful.
Well, hyphenation isn’t too hard, since there are reasonable solutions that can be used directly or easily ported. (There are existing javascript hyphenation libraries floating around.)

The real problem with all of this is that everything is being done in a canvas element, which means no text selection, no searching, etc. etc.
Found it -- it was the kid who displayed the sign "Bong hits for Jesus" and the school administrators were supported in suppressing free speech at a school-sponsored event. I love that kid!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_v._Frederick

Also for those interested in learning more about the control schools have over free speech, here's a great PDF http://breitlinks.com/freespeechpdf/speech.pdf

I guess the point I was getting to was this: if a kid is at home on a school laptop, supposedly only doing schoolwork, is that a school-sponsored event? Would any activity constitute a school-sponsored event? Do school administrators have an obligation to report any crimes they may see when using this? If not, could they be considered accomplices? I would think not, but I'm not sure.

Not only is this an awful invasion of privacy, it muddles up the public sector deep in the heart of all sorts of other individual rights. So if the courts were to rule this legal (which I find highly unlikely) it would make a mess out of all sorts of other laws. In my opinion.
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All Macs that have cameras do. And it shows to the OS as a USB sensor. Obviously there must be ways to turn it on without lighting the light,
That was already true for what they're now calling "Windows Phone Classic."
I'm a big fan of Songkick, myself.

I used to subscribe to a number of newsletters to try and find the gigs I wanted to go to. Now I get an e-mail from Songkick whenever an artist that I listen to is in town, and I certainly do use their links to go and buy tickets. It's been really useful for me.

I don't think the value is just in the listing of the gigs, but how they've combined it with tools to learn who you listen to (aka track), and the social media connections (capturing tweets while you're at gigs, etc.). So while Last.fm has a more valuable dataset, Songkick as a whole has just as compelling a value to me as a concert-goer.
Because Registry / gconf et. al. provide cheap notifications of when a specific key changes. This is the reason that a registry-type solution is useful, as well as helps performance.

Your solution means that every app interested in a setting has to put a file change notification on the conf file, then reparse the entire thing and diff it to see what changed.
Because a) first fit, best fit or something else is trivial to implement, having a good total fit implementation that works in a lot of circumstances is not trivial (I have re-implemented a simpler version of the algorithm in Ruby including using a hyphenation library). b) you can ask the same question: why does almost no word processor implement this algorithm? And with word processors it is much more important! The answer is simple: Most word processors are doing many things badly so having a total-fit h&j (hyphenation and justification) algorithm would only make the output slightly better but still much inferior to good book typography.
I find the idea of Matt Taibbi writing articles made of poo to be metaphorically appropriate.

It depresses me that these screeds find a place on this website. It should be obvious, by the tone, polemical nature, and carefully arranged blindness of the above article, that no valuable or contextually useful information could be got out of it.

It further puzzles me that it has become trendy to attack the financial market's most successful and profitable large institution. This proto-Marxist sentiment has no place in a free society. The only people forced to trade with Goldman were taxpayers financing the bailouts, and you know what happened to them? They got all their money back plus twenty-three percent interest.
...there was no indication that if you tried out the feature, a list of people that you e-mailed frequently would be published to the public.

Yes, there was. After your first attempt to post, this popped up (this is the original, not the newer one(s)): http://img694.imageshack.us/i/buzzflaw.jpg/

Note that it says "name, photo, people you follow, and people who follow you", while using the word "public" several times. Clicking "edit" let you uncheck the "people you follow / follow you" box that's since been made more prominent and on that popup.

edit: bah, static-link fail. Updated link. Original source: http://is.gd/8Fduj
I'd say you should start using Git or Hg or any distributed system immediately. No need to worry about getting complete adoption for those to be exceedingly effective. Svn (or any "centralized only" SCM) is less capable in an environment such as this as it requires everyone to adopt at once.

After you have a week or two worth of changes in your repor then you can convert people one by one, and you don't even have to tell people about the repositories you're using until it's time to try to convert them.
Not to mention - the registry hive file is an internal data file for Windows; why would the author have the expectation that it would always have the same format.