skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regulating the internet is as stupid as trying to stop the tide. The internet is beautiful because it's non-centralizing, simply put you have virtually no legal jurisdiction to take action against anyone or any website, usually because most are hosted outside of your country. However, every website owner has full legal jurisdiction to sue you if they fuck with your website. Basically put, you might own a few rivers but you don't own the ocean, do what you want with your rivers but you won't get rid of the ocean.

Legislating against content or quality of service online will serve no purpose. Someone phishing card numbers will simply move their operation overseas to a country with no legal interest in the matter (in reality most phishing operations are hosted from countries most people doubt even have the internet). Once you start hitting websites of small businesses who can't meet certain standards (access for the legally blind, etc) or securities or whatever requirements are arbitrarily assigned, they'll simply host themselves in a foreign country.

Introducing regulation into the internet will backfire dramatically, likely forcing major closures of many server hosts in the US. Once even a small percentage of users switch from US servers to foreign servers, then the US server prices will begin to spike, once the prices are uncompetitive then the US servers are closed. You've suddenly lost any ability to regulate anything. I really can't see the introduction of legislation doing anything other than making a country a no web development zone.
For global virtual circle jerking, yes.
The "fiat" comes from dictating the value. Physical commodities intrinsically have some value stability baked-in. A lone government would have a harder time causing inflation of a gold-backed currency than otherwise.
Eclipse Phase is a roleplaying game that is the first (AFAIK) to come under the Creative Commons license.

They seed their own torrent for the PDF.

They still sell well at $50 dollars, when the average cost of a RPG book is 20-40."

Eclipse Phase is a pen and paper RPG. Although they do torrent the PDF, I would think that using a PDF is tedious for most people, which is why they sell the hard copy for $59.99. I'm the same way with computer books. I would rather have a hard copy.

How can you even compare this to an actual game, which would not be able to sell a book?

I also see a comment where you said they are making money. How do you know? The books say "sold out". But this doesn't actually tell us how much money this company made from these books.
It reminds of the 1980's economy when everything was US and now. What would happen after 10 years if the cycle continues.
Is Butler being maintained? Is there a bug tracker? It doesn't look like there's been a release since 2008, but I can't tell because I can't find a dated changelog for the project.
I have to say this tool made me consider getting a mac for a second. Still wont but it has done more good for the argument than any other I've sen before.
Interesting ideas / directions for a undergraduate summer-long research project?
It will take place over the course of one summer. I want to take part because undergraduate (paid!) research sounds very rewarding. However, I don’t really have many ideas. My professor had suggested looking at machine learning algorithms to improve TCP congestion control over wireless networks, but frankly I am much more interested in software architecture / engineering than networking. Does anyone have any advice or suggestions?
Rapid Prototyping with HAML, SASS and Ruby
I'm going to be slightly flippant and say the the bundled tools and little one liners built with them. A few examples from my .profile follow:

Eject a volume:

alias eject='hdiutil eject'

Copy the working dir to the clipboard:

alias cpwd='pwd|xargs echo -n|pbcopy'

Show current airport status:

apinfo='/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport -I'

Use spotlight to search for a file:

spotlightfile() {
mdfind "kMDItemDisplayName == '$@'wc";
}

Use spotlight to search file contents:

spotlightcontent() {
mdfind -interpret "$@";
}

Display a man page in Preview:

pdfman () {
man -t $1 | open -a /Applications/Preview.app -f
}

I've a few others but they're less generic than the above. Also although the above were sitting in my .profile I probably yanked them from random parts of the inter-webs; in other words, I take no credit for them.

EDIT: One more generic one I use fairly regularly:

google() {
python -c "import sys, webbrowser, urllib; webbrowser.open('http://www.google.com/search?' + urllib.urlencode({'q': ' '.join(sys.argv[1:]) }))" $@
}
An example of the value-add a good VC / VC firm will provide to a business, over and above the capital they invest.
This app is amazing! I love how simple it is to use!
I use quicksilver [http://github.com/andreberg/blacktree-alchemy/downloads], more than anything else. (still like it better than launchbar, even with it being not updated in a few years).
Google went down one day and all of these CDNs stopped working at our colo. We got over 50 calls of people complaining their sites were down. Turns out the sites were blocking on waiting for the javascript (timing out after a few minutes).

That is the only time it has happened, but this is what makes me fear being fully dependent on these CDNs. So be advised: add a fallback mechanism.
Not really a command line utility, but rather a programming utility used through the command line:

http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew

I've replaced my MacPorts install with Homebrew and have been pretty happy with it. It's relatively new so not everything is in there yet.
While I'm not as close with my coffee mug as you are, my experience with coffee is such that a caffeine pill replacement would be a susbstantial difference.

By that I mean that a key part of my coffee experience is actually making (or walking to) the cup of joe. It's a brief break in my day where I can focus on something else, clearing my head even momentarily. Similarly, the act of drinking a coffee over ten minutes slows me down, allowing me to refocus on the task/s at hand. Popping pills might provide the same amount of caffeine, but in taking away that experience would detract from my coffee outcomes.
That sounds terrific. I'll send an email later.
I was hoping for that as well. Here's one trick at least for programmers: if you unit test everything right away, getting your pass rate from 0/100 to 100/100 can be like scoring in a game. Personally I've found this strategy feeds into all the habits I developed when I used to play computer games. Gamers have incredible focus; sitting in your chair for 10 hours straight trying to beat a level sound familiar? If you can leverage even a piece of that mindset I'd say you're in good shape in terms of focus.
There may be reasons to mmap a sparse file but I can't think of any.

It sounds like you understand the forces at work here, but I am confused by your statements. Do you think that "pre-allocating" a sparse file is a valid alternative to writing 2GB of zeros to disk in this case?
Patzer claimed on the Mint blog ( http://www.mint.com/blog/updates/why-mint-com-plus-intuit-is... ) that one reason to sell to Intuit was to speed up the adoption of his personal finance ideas in the market place. Seems like a legitimate non-problem reason.

"In addition, by joining Intuit, we can accelerate our ability to add more fantastic new product functionality into both Quicken and Mint.com. This means more people will find it easy and affordable to stay on top of their money issues. Bottom line? I see this as a chance to take a big leap forward toward our ultimate goal of improving the national savings rate."
Andrew,

this is cool but the graphs are all spikey; you should probably use either a histogram or a line graph that connects the actual numbers.

By the way, is there a Japanese translation?
Thought this was a solved problem. Why did they not just buy a portion of Patzer's stock?
"But how do you reconcile the fact that DRM only affects paying customers, such as AC2's need for a constant internet connection or Spore's original maximum installations, where pirates can easily just install the crack and not worry about the DRM?"

Criminals can get guns illegally. Would you say that because it's so difficult for the average, law-abiding citizen to get a gun, that we should remove all the restrictions?

Yes, it affects paying customers, but it's a result of the actions of the pirates. It's a vicious cycle that's not going to stop until:

1) The pirates stop sharing and cracking illegal software
2) The company finds a way to completely protect their software

AC2 is on the right track. They are releasing it as a service/app hybrid. Eventually, all games will be this way.
AM is an amazing piece of artificial intelligence history that too few people know about. In my own dissertation reseearch in AI at UC Santa Cruz I'm trying to make a "discovery system" that works in the context of game design and AM has been a fantastic inspiration. Well, EURISKO is even more amazing, but AM started it all.
>>The thing is the model gerally works good here in the uk

I can agree that some good programming has come out of British public television, but I've been given no reason to think this is necessarily a result of (or in spite of) it being tax-funded.

>>note the tax is optional. Yu can choose not to watch tv

I'll grant that being forced to pay for public television only when watching TV is less bad than being forced to pay for public television regardless of whether or not you can even watch TV would be. On the other hand, even half a spoonful of poop ruins a whole pan of brownies. (Less-bad != Good). Why should I have to pay a tax to watch a private broadcast? Why not tax the internet and create a State-run intranet, on that basis?

>>It might not work elsewhere admittedly. But it's worth a shot.

No. Do not want. This is how problems start. Someone gets (or is given, and runs with) the easy idea: "Let taxes pay for it! If it doesn't work out the way we want, they'll just stop doing it!" But governments don't just stop doing things simply on account of them not working. You're already paying them to do it. Why go through the trouble of admitting mistakes and debating about repealing stuff and, in many cases, taking away peoples' (inefficiently allocated, needlessly created) jobs? Sure sounds like a hassle.

Next thing you know, you've got...what we've all already got. Too much fucking government. Please stop asking for more of it on other peoples' account. Even if you think the BBC airs a few good shows, it's the principle. It's not your money, so quit asking them to spend it. No new taxes. No new programs. No new agencies. We can't get rid of or fix all the crap we _already_ have.

Apologies for the zeal, but this is the appropriate reaction when people start clamoring to take your money and use it for something you will have for all practical purposes absolutely zero say in. This is not an efficient way to use our resources, nor an ethical one.

Edit: typo, linebreak.
hey I'm also working on TotalFinder. in 0.9 I plan to add Terminal+Finder cooperation mode:
when you press hotkey you may slide both Visor Terminal down and Visor Finder Up. You may tab between terminal and finder as it would be one app and their views will stay synced. You get the idea ...
The Raging Septuagenarian
There is no Japanese translation yet... still looking for a translator. I understand that market is a big one too!

As for the graphs... not much I can do. I just did screen grabs from AppViz. The spike down to zero after each day is a bug too :(

I really should regrab these graphs and repost with the latest numbers. They are more interesting now.
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/14831/quicksilver

The "stealth" release of QuickSilver beta 57, from November 2009. It's not perfect, but it crashes far less than other builds in 10.6.2 (for me at least).

I have no idea why it's not on the blacktree site.
Interesting. What sold me on OS X almost 10 years ago now was the simple combination of a first-class UNIX OS w/ support for the major consumer and professional creative apps.
I am a quicksilver user too. Though the index updating seemed to beachball my computer on the regular. After changing the prefs to only update once a day they have gone away.
The Last Four Minutes of Air France Flight 447
Facebook Saved by One Line of Text
I'm just waiting to get a new MBP to setup everything via homebrew. Building myself vs choosing MacPorts has never been an easy choice. Inevitably over the years the choice one way or another has caused me a lot of pain. Homebrew seems to be the best of both worlds, and allows you to confine everything to your home directory which is a nice bonus in my case.

My only fear with homebrew is the lack of robust dependency resolution, but in practice I tend to be installing a limited set of devtools, so it doesn't rise to the same dependency hell that gave rise to the modern crop of unix package managers.
The difference between the standard systematic devaluation of modern governments and serious devaluation is that most governments tend to inflate at a rate of about 2-4% per year. This rate of inflation is considered by most economists to be benign and even helpful to a degree, because people tend to react better to inflation-triggered pay raises than deflation-triggered pay cuts, and businesses often choose to just fire bad workers instead of doing the latter, which can lead to massive spikes in unemployment.

In the 70s, we had about 10-20% inflation per year. This is where we start to see people getting unhappy.

Hyperinflation is defined by economists as being 50% per month, which adds up to something on the order of magnitude of a factor of 64 per year, however, when you have hyperinflation, you usually end up talking about having to add a digit to your prices at least once a month--more generally, hyperinflation is when there's so much inflation your currency is no longer considered to have any permanent value. Look at Zimbabwe and their use of scientific notation.
You're kidding, right? You think they are the only ones drawn as ridiculous cartoons? Every ethnicity in the world has been cartoon-ized, for both positive and negative reasons.
That's not really flippant as those are useful by themselves. All the utility I am advocating does it make the oneliners a bit easier to get to and have context(i.e. changing the working directory to what you are actually working on) readily available. I would say that a programmer without a decent list of aliases saved up is not the best programmer.
If it's public information, how much did you pay per string in one language?
They could have possibly done the same thing by continuing to disrupt, raising a lot more money, and building a billion dollar competitor to Intuit.

Not saying that selling to Intuit was a bad idea, and I completely agree with what Josh is saying, a $100MM+ acquisition is life-changing after all.
I used to be a quicksilver user, I now use this http://www.google.com/quicksearchbox/ basically the same idea.
This could still apply to some business meetings though.
I have been reminded over and over again to be mindful of Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Remember to keep a narrow focus. A summer seems like a long time, but it's not.

Good luck, it sounds like fun. You will enjoy it more if you keep the scope to something you can wrap up by the end of the summer.
I'd appreciate it if you did. I primarily use emacs on Windows, so that aspect is not a problem, and I weeding through all of your cruft might be fun :)
I must say that the biggest selling point on the mac to me was that it had a POSIX shell readily available and I didn't need "putty" to do anything interesting. I have been and still am responsible for many windows boxes but I cannot stand it for my main machine.

I really love the fact that all the power of UNIX is hidden behind a nice GUI(though there are some things that I would like them to fix regarding finder)
Yes, but its really fucked up so its utility is very questionable.
strlen, i'm not really sure you know what you're talking about here.

seed funding + series A in a reasonable case is likely to have sold 35% of the company. another 15-25% for option pool leaves 50% or more for the founding team.

similarly, a reasonable liquidation preference is 1x. i doubt you would see aggressive liquidation preferences on something hot enough to then exit quickly via acquisition anyway.

in this case, it's also possible if the founding team has done reasonably that they still control the board, thus making your explanation of "vcs can block an exit" a bit weak at this juncture, as well.

sure, it CAN go badly like you said, but i don't think that's the average case.
This is the case for me too. I've been using it continually since that story. I also really love the "leveling up" and quest systems, it's such a fun way to explore the site when I'm bored.
At 10 cents a word, the typical 2000-word-a-day professional freelance translator with the standard 250-working-day freelance year is making $50K US. If you're going through an agency charging that little, which he seems to imply, then you're also getting a proofreader to ensure consistency and quality, at about 20% of the take, and a manager, for some unspecified amount of the take, but let's call it 5% management overhead for the sake of argument (it can't be much more than that if the total word price is only 10 cents).

Now your professional translator is taking home $37.5K US, before taxes, before health insurance, and before retirement plans.

Translators are by no means raking in big dough. Well, some of us do OK - I translate a hell of a lot more than 2000 words a day - but your average translator is by no means overpriced, in terms of how much effort actually goes into working with two languages in your head at once and not being a complete nincompoop with whatever subject domain is involved in the job in question. (Of course, I'm speaking as a technical translator, where domain knowledge or the ability to fake it is a significant asset. YMMV for general topics.)

This is a tremendously great hack and food for thought, but there is no way I'd trust a business model to it as it stands.
1. If you have a chance to work with a professor, my suggestion is to choose something in his/her area of expertise, and try to consult every or every other week if possible.

2. Any self-directed research as an undergrad will probably turn into a literature review. Make sure to hit the books hard right at the outset, and try to organize the information so you can use it.

3. Look for interesting work around your school or other schools especially if you have contacts. Anyone who just finished an interesting project will undoubtedly have educated ideas about how it could be improved, or some ideas for similar work.
Obligatory big ups to node:

http://howtonode.org/

http://wiki.github.com/ry/node/modules
How to stop a story from appearing on Reddit
Was AM named after the Ellison story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream"?
By the way, if you want cheap but pretty professional translation, consider the Indian agencies. You won't get anybody working in Europe or the States, of course, but you'll get pretty competent work into Asian languages in the 2 or 3 cent range. (I'm guessing on the customer price based on what the agencies offer freelancers. Obviously, I've never taken any of those jobs; I do have to eat.)
I feel like this is a common argument against homebrew, but have yet to encounter a situation where this was actually an issue.
The first technique is called "back-translation" and is something the pharmaceutical companies use for clinical trial instructions and similar text.
When I first posted the job, I offered $7.00 for what amounted to about 200 words. I later decreased the offer to $5.00 and it seemed to work just as well. I bet even $3-4 would work OK.

I offered people the same amount to edit someone else's translation.
And again, speaking as a translator wondering when his industry is going to go "poof" (not this year yet), this is a damn fine hack.
How To Study: 4th Grade & Social Studies
Funny thing about Nethack... a newbie looks at it and says "what is this, a computer hacking game?" An intermediate player says "oh, I see, it's just an RPG." An advanced player says "oh, wait, it is a hacking game!"
Actually outright is also a single-entry system since they don't track receivables or payments, only income and expenses.

Any comment on why you want double-entry book-keeping as opposed to simply tracking income & expenses?

Any other requirements you might have?
My ex-partner used to say nobody died making a profit. Selling at $100++ is certainly not small change.
Simulated, apparently. The graph at the bottom references "MOST"; see the links in the comment by blogimus for more info.
Sounds reasonable. Thanks for the information.
cache: http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:http://gapingvoid.com/20...
Actually, the main developer of QSB is also the creator of Quicksilver, whom made it an open source project once Google hired him.

That's why Quicksilver has no official site, by the way.
Well said Brendan!
After watching last week's Tosh.0, your description may be more spot on than you realize.
I've been trying for months to find fellow startups or entrepreneurs in my city. I've come to the conclusion there aren't any (or they're very good at hiding). Silly, considering Wachovia, Hanes/Sara Lee, RJ Reynolds, Wrangler, Krispy Kreme, and about a million other big companies are based here in Winston-Salem or very close by... Redhat is based about 30 minutes away, as well as a bunch of large tech companies (in Raleigh).

There's even this silly group that tries to connect business and creative people, but their events are so terrible I can't bring myself to go... think "The development of Disney as a cultural phenomena"... and I know others feel the same. I've offered to help them, offered event ideas, but these folks think they know it all. Too bad the time I did go, there were only maybe a dozen or so people there, all mostly employees of this partnership group.

So if there are any startups in North Carolina (especially the Triad) raise your hands, lets buy each other a beer soon.
PyCon 2010: Optimizations And Micro-Optimizations In CPython
Usually when somebody coins a new word, they pick a word that's not a word yet.

Patzer is a fairly well-used term in the chess world. It makes for some confusing headlines here on HN when you try to parse them using the meaning of the existing word.
This is a delightful talk. I don't usually delve into learning what is under the hood in Python, so the clarity here was appreciated.
I'd bet they use Red5 or Flash Media Server for the video streaming features, last time I checked they were the only game in town.
NYC Needs a Startup Blog w/out a mesh of financial conflicts
You'd be surprised. The first thing that comes to mind is modern macro-economic forecasting, which is built on a host of controversial axioms. These forecasts are little better than Roman augury, and one could argue they are actually a net negative because they give us the false pretense of knowledge.

Using game theory to make predictions, expected utility theory, etc the list goes on and on (sorry to pick on economics, I'm sure there are plenty of other fields that suffer the same problems).

Just look at some of the assumptions made by the financial engineers who caused the recent financial crisis if want your head to explode: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black–Scholes#Model_assumptions
The Future Of Apple
World of Warcraft - Man in the middle attack in the wild