skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think flash is "evil", but as I often am browsing around on my iphone, a nicely degrading site is a godsend. This seems like the type of site someone might add to their home screen and check periodically.
They really must have an ace up their sleeve. This seems both illogical and suicidal. They had a product people were willing to pay for, and in the name of some higher ideal they are abandoning a model that was shown to work.

If they really wanted to open up their tools to more people, they could very well have adjusted the pricing model within their current, working business model. Not throw the whole thing out in the name of persuing an un-proven model.

I have a hard time believing the VC's were all on board with this move. It's not simply risky, it's unnecessarily risky, which is the worst type of risk for a startup to incur. (They already have enough risk as it is.)

Edit: Note, I'm not trying to say that what they are doing is the wrong move -- only that since it is so apparently unnecessarily risky from the outside they must really have something big planned that has a much bigger upside for them in the long run.
Science may not know the underlying cause, but I would be willing to take a bet at unfavorable odds that methylphenidate or amphetamine would improve the OP's ability to get things done. Good therapy for the OP's likely condition, ADHD, is a lot more like having your own personal anti-akrasia trainer than sitting on a couch and telling someone about your problems.

The current "in" schools of psychology are not Freudian or Jungian; they try to treat symptons rather than the underlying cause.
Build it and see if anyone pays you for it.
In that context, you're right doesn't sound as menacing.

That said "that somehow we were publishing their email addresses and private information, which was not true." seems like sort actually untrue, indeed.

Maybe they weren't displaying emails. But they certainly showed the names of my contacts and pictures. I looked at a contacts computer who had the defaul settings, and could see some of my profile.

I guess my point is they should have gone of the side of privacy and caution, but they needed to err on the side of huge social networks (and displaying info helps those build) to sell this product to the public. I just think they made a selfish corporate decision.

At least they are trying to remedy it.
Also, Flash often, rather surprisingly, uses more CPU cycles when a video is paused than e.g. VLC does actually playing the darned thing (on OS X).

I guess this must be because Apple doesn't allow Adobe access to its proprietary, hardware based empty loop optimizations...
Documentation is never accurate. No source code, no knowing-for-sure.
Believe me, you'll be breaking production a lot of times again in the future. Become comfortable with the thought of it - you need to be able to perform at peak competence when production is broken, because that's when your skills and clarity of thought are most needed.
They [congress] are patriotic, hard-working and devoted to the public good as they see it, but the institutional and cultural impediments to change frustrate the intentions of these well-meaning people as rarely before. It was not always thus.

Yes, as we all know, the US was designed to be run top down by a rapidly moving federal government. We didn't create checks and balances and a government limited by a constitution, because we wanted to make sure that our well meaning overlords could change things on a dime!

Currently, the decision to begin debate on a bill can be filibustered, followed by another filibuster on each amendment, followed by yet another filibuster before a final vote. This leads to multiple legislative delays and effectively grinds the Senate to a halt.

Sure, one filibuster per law, provided the Senate stops completely rewriting laws during the debate process.

True story: there was once a law called To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide earnings assistance and tax relief to members of the uniformed services, volunteer firefighters, and Peace Corps volunteers, and for other purposes. Somewhere along the line, the Senate decided to completely replace the text of that bill with a $700 billion giveaway to the financial services industry.

Under Baye's proposed rule, this nonsense couldn't even be filibustered. Great plan.
The senate was different, more united, in the past, but so too was the country.
"What's the difference between having an illusion of consciousness and having the real thing?"

Primarily, the word "illusion".

At this point, having read up on these issues for a while, anytime I see the word "illusion" now I tend to just shut the book/leave the webpage/whatever. Have you ever, once, seen someone sit down and say what they mean by "illusion", or give a way of telling you how to distinguish between "illusion" or "reality"? Maybe you have (no sarcasm intended), but I've never seen it, and without that the word basically just marks someone who is trying to sound insightful without doing the hard work of actually being insightful and saying something without leaving an enormous linguistic void right in the center of the argument.
God, no! How on earth is Congress supposed to re-read tens of thousands of statutes? It's a nice sentiment and certainly a principle that should get adopted for "temporary legislation/measures" but, generally speaking, it's hugely impractical.

How are you suppoed to enter into contracts if you don't know what the law of the land is going to be in four years time? Transaction costs would increase enormously.
At least there's a nice disclaimer that cues one (one who's looking for objectivity, that is) to stop reading at paragraph #1:

"That is to say, if I wasn’t addicted to using every Google app out there (calendar, mail, docs, maps, etc.), the phone may not have wowed me so much, but I AM a Google girl, so it fits beautifully into my lifestyle."
> Flash is not "slower" on Mac . It uses up too much resources compared to its Windows edition. I switch between Windows(work) and Mac (personal) all the time and i have never seen anything Flash playing "slower" on mac.

I think you'll find that, with regards to computer software "slower" and "uses more resources" are generally interchangable; it's a trade-off. And "slower" can be quite obviously observed when a "uses more resources" app hits a resource limit. For instance, there are flash games (not videos -- _games_) which are so choppy as to be unplayable on my dual core 2.5GHz MBP -- because it uses too much of "more resources," and runs out of cpu cycles.
I sometimes use willow bark if I have a headache.

(Does it still count as "traditional" if I prefer to use it in pill form where the dosage is accurately controlled?)
In my experience flash under Linux was much worse than OS X. One of the main reasons I switched to OS X was to make flex development less painful.
It looks like they're using the following data sources:

U.S. Customs Import Data

Hong Kong Trade Development Council Data

DP Information Group Reports

EDDI Red Flag Database

China Export & Credit Insurance Corporation (SINOSURE) Reports

Social Accountability International Compliance Data

TriVista Sourcing Data

Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production (WRAP)
Compliance Data

CUSTOMS Info Reports
Node.js guys discussing async programming style
Kind of a misleading title; quote taken out of context; not (at all) what the article is actually about.
It is odd that the sender was smart enough to make the return address "4th grade" at some school, but was not smart enough to spell penicillin correctly.
this is my main problem with android as well (current nexus one owner, former iphone owner): that unfortunately a lot of the core applications can't be separated from google services. the early releases of android on the g1 and mytouch 3g couldn't even be used past the welcome screen without forcing you to sign up for a google account.

currently there is no way to create and store local calendars or contacts. everything must be tied to an account, which currently limits you to a google account or an activesync/exchange account. i setup z-push (http://z-push.sourceforge.net/) on my server to act as an activesync server so i could at least sync my contacts to my own machine, but it doesn't yet support calendars. of course the built-in calendar app has no support for ical or anything standard, and expects you to do that all from google calendar's web interface and then sync that to your phone.

i just updated the "listen" application on my nexus one, which is a google-built application for downloading and listening to podcasts. with the new version released yesterday, it now forces you to store your subscriptions in google reader instead of just on the phone itself.

i'm sure there are many that have no problem trusting google with all of their data, relying completely on them for email, chatting, searching, reading rss feeds, and making phone calls through google voice, and so all of this automatic syncing with google is neat and useful. but there are those of us that would like to use alternatives or just prefer to keep everything on the phone itself.

as bad as apple is with their strict control over the iphone and its applications, at least they don't force users to use their .mac service. calendars, contacts, and every other application can be used without giving apple control over all of your data.
I did something similar for a friend of mine. Slight difference was that I had the best success by pre-populating the hidden field with some static value and checking to make sure it was set right.

Some bots don't fill out the hidden forms, and some do, you could probably use a couple hidden fields to try to catch all types of bots. Also, if you keep some session data, you could place a random value in the hidden field, and expire it on the first hit (for bots that scrape once, and POST many times).

The site I put this on is pretty small, so I'd be interested in hearing if any moderately trafficked sites still find this effective.
" It's trivial to show that a Chinese Room that could converse for more than 15 minutes would have to contain more elementary particles than the entire planet."

I don't believe it, can you show it?
I recently opted to swap jqplot for google vis for some reporting functionality. Losing the annotated timeline was painful, but I think, in the end, workable (jqplot can link the zoom together on two charts so that one of them is the thumbnail).

Flash was part of the reason I switched; I was not wholly comfortable with [what I perceive as] the fragile and convoluted page load dependency between google vis and jquery (perhaps you have a better way).
"How on earth is Congress supposed to re-read tens of thousands of statutes? It's a nice sentiment and certainly a principle that should get adopted for "temporary legislation/measures" but, generally speaking, it's hugely impractical.

How are you supposed to enter into contracts if you don't know what the law of the land is going to be in four years time? Transaction costs would increase enormously."

Contracts are mostly based on Sate law. Also,some states have Sunset provisions and have a standard package of laws they pass at the beginning of each year.

As for the impracticality of so many thousands of statutes, that's rather the point.
Why not directly reply to them? It's less likely they'll read this here.
An Adobe Flash developer on why the iPad can’t use Flash
Take a look at "Society of mind" by Marvin Minsky. We already understand pretty well that the mind is a colony of mostly independent system, working in various configurations. Here's the first chapter: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/minsky07/minsky07_index.html

As far as I'm concerned, qualia is just a fancy synonym for "soul". I don't miss it one bit. Consciousness on the other hand, that we have. Only it turns out to be a more elusive concept then we once thought.
I was really turned by this statement as well. There are plenty of plugins that do ALREADY including Unity 3d, Director (Adobe product that died in the Macromedia-Adobe transition via lack of investment by Adobe (it did lead browser 3d gaming for a while)), Java and more.

There is NO excuse that a plugin shouldn't be able to access the hardware that is pretty standard today. The worst set of cards can even handle better than software many times over. The worst cards are the intel 945s and more but those are also in netbooks. There hasn't been a better time FOR graphics hardware acceleration. This is also the sole reason flash seems slow on OSX and why native apps on the iPhone are the only way for immersive experiences.

Here is Unity 3D's hardware of the casual gamer breakdown: http://unity3d.com/webplayer/hwstats/pages/web-2009Q3.html
I agree with you, except that I quibble that perhaps the Congress shouldn't have enacted "tens of thousands of statutes" in the first place.

Maybe just make them read all of them before getting on with business? I.e. something to motivate them to reduce the word count (without of course allowing unelected bureaucrats to take up the slack with regulations that have the force of law unless struck down in the courts).
On the Fundamental Nature of the  Universe
Really?!?!!??? That doesn't agree with my knowledge of US political history at all. Perhaps you could be more specific with dates?
The bible verses were introduced in the mid-1980s when the then-president of the company went "born again" (as it was still a family-owned/family-run business at the time, this was easy to implement by fiat). I suspect their continuing presence has more to do with inertia than any evangelical bent at the corporate level; removing them would stir up negative PR with no real purpose.
It's not the focus of the talk that I take issue with, but that the choice of tools (fun, new, poorly tested) seems to have been made without regard to the needs of the product.

Personally, I think it's better to innovate at the product layer and use the most boring technologies you can get away with below that.

Sometimes there are sound reasons to go with a new technical approach, but by your own admission this was not the case here.

And so the classic symptoms appear - full rewrite, unexpected delays, interoperability problems in the new layer requiring a change in an unrelated part of the app (mysql to postgres migration in this case), hacking on an ORM, the joys of being the first people to discover a new class of bugs at scale.

All of this effort could have been more productively channeled into making the product unique and awesome, however boring the backend.
I think that's his point. We already can't know what the law of the land is.
How many years of study does it take to know the law of the land now? Transaction costs are already enormous.

It's only hugely impractical because it should have been in place from the beginning.
No, it was just plain dumb.
Richard Gabriel has a nice write-up on this, well worth reading especially if you're in the sputtering 'zomg this is SO dumb' camp. It's also a much quicker read than the entirety of the Stanford page.

http://www.dreamsongs.com/Searle.html

"Searle's argument is subtle in a way that seems to confuse intelligent readers. "
One important thing to note is that semweb is about the semantics of the SCHEMA, not the semantics of the DATA. Everyone appears to have forgotten this.
I'd love to see someone come up with actual facts around this Flash on Mac issue. There seems to be somewhat of a shortage of facts. Gruber has mostly hearsay (although he is very convincing with that).

We'd need to do real benchmarking for various sorts of flash content. What about poorly written ActionScript in the SWF? Does it matter when you are running multiple instances of the player, etc.

These ongoing political speculations are entertaining, but they are getting us nowhere.
I don't believe I made that argument.

Here's my point as a startup conjecture:

"Sacrifice the network effects of established languages/frameworks only when it gives your startup an unfair (10x) advantage."
I am much happier with a Droid than my wife was with a Nexus One. But I rarely use the keyboard, to be honest.

NB: I have all kinds of conflict here.
Reading on a LCD is definitely different (even harder) than reading text on paper. You need to get used to it.

But I would argue that more and more people are. And more and more might just be enough. A big minority in any richer country might just do the job.

I’m not sure whether LCDs will be inside the devices which finally bring digital books to the masses but I do think it’s a distinct possibility. I do think they are good enough.
You've got it backwards, Gears was the zeroth version of the LocalStorage, Web Workers, and Geolocation APIs: HTML5 is based on it

It was always an experiment, a way to test this stuff out without putting it in Webkit or Gecko where people could depend on it. All of the APIs changed form when they were standardized, with some being abandoned (LocalServer and Desktop).
Makes me think of the impact that new media has had on the country. Used to be that you saw news either because (a) a national newspaper published it or (b) your local newspaper published it. News was basically bland and was created by central organizations that had the resources to have their own printing-houses.

With digital publishing and therefore 0 barriers to publishing content, long tail news is now here, so you read/watch what you're interested in, and you find a community in your shared interests with others. I think this has had a major impact on the country -- it's perhaps in the little things that no longer unite us, like the small-talk about the day's news.

Maybe not though. Maybe according to this train of thought we should be more united because we all see the exact same headlines on Google News, CNN.com, NYTimes.com, all at the same time.

Maybe the lack of unity is due to other things, more non-Caucasians in the country for example. White Americans make up 75% of our population, vs a historical trend of 80-90%. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_American, under Sub-Heading "Demographic information". It's human nature to fear or stay away from people who aren't like you or who don't look like you.

Now that I think of it I'm sure it's a combination of factors. Usually is.
Not being able to program a computer is like ...
We read it here, and I really appreciate that @harryh is engaging in the dialogue.
But the idea is to envision what the future will be like. In the article he couldn't imagine the world as it is now. A simple idea like the newspaper being outdated was beyond him.
I have a grudge against written philosophy. The meaning of words is subjective. It is defined by what relations you draw in your brains when you read or hear that word. This not only makes words quite unimportant, they turn your mind into a philosophical mine field. It is constantly under the assumption that words have some universal meaning. People seeking for the "intelligence" or "truth" that they have in their head, but they're constantly redefining it based on new insights obtained in their search. As a result, all these concepts seem unattainable.

If you take the focus off the word, much of your prejudice disappears. You see the relationships, the structure, the observations, the logic, the nuance. You can see you used two distinct meanings of the word "intelligence". One is a set of expected reactions, the other is your consciousness. Now this gives rise to a logical question: Are these two things the same? The Chinese room shows that's not necessarily the case. However, might that feeling you call consciousness be a side-effect of a the particular type of Chinese room that's going on in your head? That's how you get interesting philosophy.
My own experience:

I have more than 100 open projects in my hard drive right now. Had thousands more in older pcs and floppies that I abandoned when new technology arrived, from basic to pascal, C, java, python, ruby, etc. Right now, only in node.js I have like ten projects open.

So, am I worried about never finishing them? not at all.

I see them as learning projects, they filled an empty slot in my brain which expanded my knowledge and experience.

They call it 'the next shiny thing', I call it learning.

Look! Flusspferd!

- me opens another project -
As for passing a standard package of laws at the beginning of each year: Then why use sunset clauses at all, if legislators don't even think about it but just pass it along in one sweep every year?

I wholeheartedly agree that nearly every developed country is over-regulated, especially the US, having a different approach to regulating (narrowly worded, long statutes vs short, general principles) than some European legal traditions. Alas, the majority of people don't want to get strangled by regulations but at the same time want to have lots of industries regulated. I think the best shot is to inform them about the consequences of over-regulation.
Are you sure this is an NBC thing and not an olympic thing in general?

Because here in Canada we get sent to http://www.ctvolympics.ca and they're using Silverlight as well.
The argument that limitations to campaign finance are a free speech issue makes sense. What doesn't make sense is treating corporate and other organizations as persons with all or even most of the rights of air-breathing U.S. citizens. Corporations and unions and other such groups are legal entities which exist only for the public good. The state created them, and the state can regulate them in any way which benefits the public good.

Edit - And regarding enforcement, I would just encourage stiff penalties. An organization found guilty of multiple instances of finance fraud could be charged with RICO and it's leaders thrown in jail. So much for enforcement.
Any operating system developer who knows anything about paging would know exactly what was going on. Especially since you can immediately tell using the Windows task manager that it was doing caching.
tl;dr:

"We got funded. We were really tired of making money by selling things to people."
Fibonacci Flim-Flam
Before Chrome, I was a heavy Safari user. I'm rather happy that they are shifting resources away from Gears towards standard compliance. Then maybe those who need the power of Gears can stop running Safari in 32-bit mode. I'm also excited about what this means for offline GMail and Mailplane.

Gears Team Blog post on the matter: http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/hello-html5.html
Since you could fit someone who speaks Chinese in the room... assuming people are made of elementary particles.
I only get a couple of spam comments a day at the moment but all of them have so far filled in the hidden field. I've been running it for about a week and a half. I've not seen a bot try and post more than once yet.
“I encourage you to send me your comments regarding Daring Fireball. Unfortunately, I am at times a lousy correspondent — where by “at times” I mean “most of the time”. If I don’t respond to your email, or do so only after an inordinate amount of time has passed, please don’t take it personally.

Please address correspondence to:

comments@daringfireball.net”

Daring Fireball – Contact
It also doesn't rule out coincidence. People often just get better for no other reason than their body's natural healing process. Maybe the acupuncture had a placebo effect here. Maybe it had a "real" effect. Maybe, coincidentally, his body just happen to heal at the same moment the treatment was administered.
I think you're looking for something like OpenX Community Hosted. http://www.openx.org/ad-server