skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed, one reason behind the phenomenal success of the band is some of its early videos were viral sensations in the mid-2000s. Killing embedding seriously weakens the ability of OK Go to attract new followers, as their music doesn't get a lot of radio airplay and new fans who are unaware of the band are probably not browsing YouTube to find new music -- they're looking on friends' facebook pages, music blogs, etc.
I'm sorry, but it is not 10 years old. The original release of Windows XP was late 2001 (9 years ago). Most people are running Service Pack 2 (6 years ago) or Service Pack 3 (2 years ago).

I currently have no reason to switch to Windows 7, but if I do I really really hope I can change the shell to something approximating Windows 2000 and lacking the transparency and pseudo-Dock that they have going.
Motorola chooses Microsoft Bing for Android devices in China
Was Kodesh new to Microsoft at the time? The culture there is a "prove it works first, ask for approval once you've worked everything through in detail and need a Big Change" one. I would have expected any reasonable manager to just spin up a small team to fully mock up a few devices in concert with a couple of clients and present those up the chain.

I personally would have nixed him on this as well. It's quite easy to say, "we should scrap this and build something else" and another entirely to provide sufficient evidence that you're capable of doing so. If, for example, this guy wasn't able to deliver but was given a charter based on his random memo, Microsoft wouldn't be in third right now. They would be completely out of the game.

Even readers of this site who hate Microsoft have probably experienced it: most bad managers step into a new position and immediately talk about how the old thing needs to be thrown out and a new one built, naturally at great time and expense (and hiring a few of his old "Architect" buddies) but with amazing benefits down the line. How does that story usually end when you say "ok"?
The social stigma applied to porn actresses is enormous. Working a factory job will not exclude you from other lines of work later in your life, nor is it necessary to hide former factory work from your parents or acquaintances. Even a brief stint in porn can cause long lasting deleterious effects in a woman's life.
Ah, yeah, they're cutting their own costs in half. Big deal.
Synchronicity
If I remember right, the royalties from youtube were only a couple thousand dollars, so yes they were stupid, very stupid.
Very telling:

> Gates rejected the suggestions. “It’s very disappointing you feel that way,” he told Kodesh. “We don’t have time to start from scratch.”

1. "I'm disappointed you feel this way:" This is a direct criticism of Kodesh's personal feelings and an attack on his loyalty of the party line. This would have been so much better had Gates written "I can understand your enthusiasm for starting over, however..."

2. The old, old story: "If you don't have time to do it right, where will you find the time to do it over?" And indeed they did end up doing it over with Zune, having frittered years away with CE.
> Libertarians, on the other hand, don't know or understand the philosophy from which many of their political conclusions were copied

What is the basis for this assertion?

> and are thus susceptible to reverting to political conclusions that appear momentarily practical, or consistent with altruism

I don't understand why you are using the word reverting. Are you implying there is something wrong with political conclusions that appear practical or altruistic?

> On top of that, "libertarian" has come to means so many things that it means nothing

That people exist who pervert a term does not render the term meaningless.

> there are libertarians in favor of and against abortion, in favor of and against anarchy, in favor of and against anti-trust regulation

I agree there is no clear-cut libertarian stance on abortion, because there are several confounding factors upon which libertarianism does not opine -- e.g. when does life begin? The libertarian umbrella does indeed ostensibly cover anarchy, and it should not be a surprise that there is a spectrum of belief. If you desire a concrete libertarian platform, you can look to the Libertarian Party.

> libertarianism is a political dead end (because it's not consistent with the terrible mixed bag of present-day American values

Can you elaborate on this? By calling it a dead end, you are saying it has no future, but you are basing this on present-day values, as though these values can never change in the future. I am still unsure as to which values you refer.

> or with itself.)

Libertarianism does indeed cover a spectrum of beliefs. I don't see how that implies that it is a political dead end. Other viable political philosophies cover spectrums of belief (e.g. republicanism, conservatism, populism, liberalism, etc.)
If you're looking for a good introductory book to some of the buddhist/taoist/zen concepts touched upon in this article, I highly recommend Alan Watts' books.

Here's one that I've particularly enjoyed:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eastern-Wisdom-Modern-Life-Collected...

It's a collection of lectures that he gave over a decade or so, in the 60s. It introduces most of the really important concepts of eastern philosophy.

This book provides a nice follow-up to the previous one, with a much more complete, detailed, academic view of the topics, which helps gain a better understanding of it all:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Way-Zen-Vintage-Spiritual-Classics/d...
France is a poor general comparison for the reasons specified later. The UK system is something of a compromise of the two and worth consideration.

Actually I thought about this a little today:

The US system is biased towards the extremely ill - it is essentially a bet against you getting an uncommon illness.

The UK system is biased towards the mildly ill - if you have an uncommon illness it doesn't work as well. So it is a bet against not getting an uncommon illness.
A static memory quota might be better than what we have now. Sometimes my app gets punted at 2 MB, sometimes it can use 20. Users with jailbroken phones seem to have particular problems with memory, especially when they try to take photos.
> I wish we would adopt QR codes more here in the US of A... Japan uses them all over the place.

Agreed.
When you compress air, it heats up and expands -- thus making the pressure go up faster than one might expect. So, when storing it you lose a lot of energy as heat.

When you let it uncompress, it cools -- losing a lot of energy again.

Point is, you lose quite a bit of energy going both ways.

A good solution might be to combine wind and pumped hydro: have the wind turbine pump water to a higher elevation when extra wind is available.
I don't think Rand said that. If she did I'd like to read it. Cite please where she says she doesn't want minimal govt. (She did say she didn't want zero govt.)
The reason many apps start as crap is due to the arbitrary nature of the "standards" set by apple. They literally reject your app for any reason (or no reason), even after "suggesting" several changes that cost quite a bit of money. It is professional malpractice to council your clients to build anything other than the bare minimum before publishing (if you're a third party app developer as I am).

So basically, Apple gets crap apps because good apps are too risky to build as Apple can reject it ex post facto. There isn't a way to even say, pay them 20k dollars to do a preapproval study. So no one is willing to drop the big bucks required to put out complex full featured apps until the app has been in the store and selling for awhile.

Apple's approval process makes only iterative development worthwhile, and biases what people SHOULD be doing towards low cost work.
You attack Libertarianism on the grounds that it has adherents that disagree widely on several topics. So does that mean that if I found some Objectivists that disagreed on points of policy, that Objectivism would "mean so many things that it means nothing?" Your argument certainly seems to imply as much.
As far as I can make out, their latest video was made after the split with EMI. They don't own the rights to the first big hit video they had (the one with the treadmills), so presumably that will never become embeddable.
I don't really see the point either - the reason why there are professional qualifications (apart from the monopolistic reasons) is to ensure that people who have responsible jobs meet some minimum level of competence.

If an academic screws up, nobody really gets harmed that badly. Contrast that with a medic, lawyers, PE etc.
it also does currency conversion ... try " 300 USD * 1.19 in EUR "
I flew back and forth from UK->US between 2004 and 2008. Probably 40 or so times. Never had an issue with immigration :/

I think they're fairly fine with it as long as you look confident and know what they want to hear.
This is one of the funnier (funny as in sad) aspects of the US Healthcare debate - while half the populace is railing on and on against some imaginary gargantuan bureaucracy, from an end-user perspective healthcare systems like Canada's are great. You have a simple periodic billing system (every paycheque) and access to everything is a simple card-swipe away.
IPhone can be addicting, says Stanford University survey » Unwired View
You misunderstand Rand. The important thing about her philosophy is her ethics, her epistemology and her metaphysics. My opinion is that once this is understood, the contradictions you see cease to exist. (Specifically, non-aggression is a conclusion, and is not axiomatic.)

The political stuff is just a downstream consequence of a much deeper set of ideas. It's important, but politics is at the periphery of Objectivism (in that Objectivism has political implications, just like any other philosophy), far from the core.
I have issues relating to other's health care problems. I suppose here in Australia we're spoiled.

For example. I have the best private health coverage I could find and I pay less than $130 a month AUD; but it doesn't stop there. We still have a free health care system if you're ok with waiting for major ops.

In terms of what it would cost me for a GP visit. My current GP costs about $20 a visit but often I can claim the majority back with our Medicare Bulk Billing system (not to be confused with the US Medicare.)

Our system seems to work extraordinarily well. Those who want to pay for health care can (like I do, it's not that expensive) ... those who can't afford too are still covered by our free system.
conversely, there are many people who look down their nose at you if you do a factory job, and many people who admire or desire women who worked in porn/stripping.
If it violated the licence, the author has legal recourse. If not: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point
Most relevant line from the article: "Unfortunately, the coining of new jargon is likely to proceed even faster than the evolution of computing markets."
The only thing I think anyone can tell you about porn for certain is that it is, literally, everywhere (I'd say around 95% of the computers I poke around inside of contain porn).
Are the Europeans who implemented that momentarily practical solution quite a few years ago currently not free? Won’t they be free in the future?
I think you are right for particular cases, but CSS, HTML, and Javascript are all feasible to create test suites for. Either in the form of unit tests, or in the form of written test cases. From this input the expected output looks like this. And, unlike the spec itself, these example cases can grow over time to be more complete. A partial test suite is still better than no test suite. I am all for pragmatism and if a particular domain being spec'd doesn't lend itself to a particular method of validation, then don't do it, be there are plenty of specs that could benefit that don't have them.
The Blurring Line Between Commerce And Ad Models
This reminded me of a great suggestion by Jack Stack in "The Great Game of Business" (top of page 72 see http://www.amazon.com/Great-Game-Business-Jack-Stack/dp/0385... )

"A business should be run like an aquarium, where *everybody*
can see what's going on--what's going in, what's moving around,
what's coming out. That's the only way to make sure people
understand what you're doing, and why, and have some input into
deciding where you are going. Then, when the unexpected happens,
they know how to react and react quickly."
> As an interface designer I am often asked to design a “better” interface to some product. Usually one can be designed such that, in terms of learning time, eventual speed of operation (productivity), decreased error rates, and ease of implementation it is superior to competing or the client’s own products. Even where my proposals are seen as significant improvements, they are often rejected nonetheless on the grounds that they are not intuitive.

> It is a classic “catch 22.” The client wants something that is significantly superior to the competition. But if superior, it cannot be the same, so it must be different (typically the greater the improvement, the greater the difference). Therefore it cannot be intuitive, that is, familiar. What the client usually wants is an interface with at most marginal differences that, somehow, makes a major improvement. This can be achieved only on the rare occasions where the original interface has some major flaw that is remedied by a minor fix.

--Jef Raskin
Ask HN: How do you sell software to academics?
Me and two fellow grad students are launching a startup that's applying to Y Combinator this cycle. We're making statistical software aimed at students and researchers, with an emphasis on ease of use and smooth collaboration. The trouble is, none of us has experience selling to this market. We know that it's on a long sales cycle, and we're going to have to start beating doors early if we want to start selling to academic institutions in 2011. What we want to know is how.

We'd also appreciate introductions to other startups that are selling to academic institutions, broadly defined. We've already spoken with Chris Varenhorst of Lingt (YC S09), which is selling their classroom product to high schools. Any others come to mind?
Suggestions for generating charts on LAMP
I'm deploying a website on a LAMP stack and I need to generate a reasonable amount of graphs and pie charts etc with labels et all. What would you suggest I use?
Ask HN: How do you limit liablity in a company as a minority stake holder?
Ok, so I have a life long friend who is starting his own business and needs some help (website, biz setup, basic accounting, etc) and wants to give me a small percentage of the company in exchange.

Really, I would do it for free, so I'm not worried about getting anything from him financially for my time... if things work out and I see a return so be it.

My concern is, as lets say a 10% owner/share holder, with two other partners what liabilities do I have? I will not be involved in day-to-day operations and at 10% have very little legal input as to what they do as a company. (Although I would server in an advisory roll)

If things were to go south how do I protect myself? I own my own business (which is my livelihood) and don't want any thing that they do affecting what I am able to do with my business. Really I am looking to protect myself from a worst-case scenario.

Any help would be appreciated.
This is a great example of someone comparing the principles of one (political) philosophy to some practitioners of another political philosophy. i.e. apples to oranges.
The idea that pornography only objectifies women is inherently sexist. There are men in porn too. I think people take this point of view out of some antiquated notion of chivaly: women need to be protected because they obviously can't do it for themselves.
How Much Has Scala Influenced Erlang?
I disagree. People start companies here all the time. No one thinks 'wow+brave' / 'crazy'. After all, it costs £20 to set up a Ltd company and get trading.

We're probably slightly more grounded and have a slightly lower stomach for high risk stuff, but I don't see that as necessarily a bad thing at all.

I guess one of the questions is 'can you succeed if you don't buy into the "scene" schmooze contacts culture etc'. I think you can, depending on your business model of course, but there are some fairly big success stories out there.

Also really, these days you can get a ton of contacts online. You don't have to be in any particular place.
Yeah, but in Python you have other niceties, like dates.

Just the other day my pregnant wife asked me to calculate the aprox date she'll give birth (considering she has 17 weeks) ...

from datetime import datetime, timedelta

print str( datetime.now() + timedelta(weeks=40 - 17) )
Why has Microsoft found itself in third place, behind Apple and now Google, in the mobile segment of computing?

Because it's not an area they've ever been interested in.

Just because Mobile is the latest and greatest area of tech development doesn't mean everyone will stop using PC's tomorrow (and more importantly - that corporates will stop using PC's tomorrow)

So Microsoft got serious about "mobile" later than Apple - but it's always been a half hearted attempt. It seems as lot like MS wanting a finger in all the markets - "just in case".
The arguments for ECC are (a) it is much more efficient than RSA so you can use stronger keys at less cost, (b) ECDHE is so much faster than DHE (over the integers mod Z) that ECDHE becomes practical in situations where DHE wasn't, (c) it is in NSA Suite B, (d) the major crypto libraries already implement it.

The arguments for AES-GCM: (a) AES-GCM and AES-CCM are the only standardized CTR modes in TLS, (b) you can implement AES-GCM efficiently in constant time (see http://www.cryptojedi.org/papers/aesbs-20090616.pdf), (c) it is the NSA suite B cipher mode, (d) the alternate mode for AES in TLS (AES-CBC-SHA) requires a new initialization vector for every TLS record, which means that you need to get 128 bits of from your PRNG for every 16KB of data transfered, whereas AES-GCM mode only requires 128 bits total per connection. A strong argument against GCM mode is that OpenSSL, NSS, and the Windows CryptoAPI (prior to Windows 7/2008R2) do not implement it yet.

Do you have a link to something that shows that AES-CTR-HMAC-SHA-256 is really faster than AES-GCM? That is something I've always wondered about.

Since you'll be at a BSD conference, I bet you won't get too many people questioning your suggestion to use OpenSSL. But, in the Linux world it seems there's a big push by Red Hat, SuSe, and other enterprise Linux vendors to replace OpenSSL with NSS in every application they support, because of NSS's huge advantages over OpenSSL w.r.t. FIPS-140 validation.
The OP presents a conceptual, ontological claim ("...that all things lack absolute identity and are interdependent."), whereas in Buddhist practice, it refers to the experience of looking for some inherent existence, and seeing nothing. It's not an ontological issue in that context: There could actually be an absolute identity, but it would have no bearing on the practice.

Alan Watts only ever confused me. These two guys made it a whole lot clearer for me. (Particularly Ken. I consider him my teacher.)

http://unfetteredmind.org/audio/podclass.php?code=AP#here
This subthread is a great example of why progress in American politics seems so hard to come by: Every potential policy change seems to devolve into a discussion about what team people are on, and the similarities and differences between all the different teams (to me it's often very reminiscent of Monty Python's Life Of Brian - Peoples' Front of Judea vs Judean People's Front, etc).
That argument doesn't hold. No one ever lost custody or a subsequent job because they were formerly a factory worker. A former porn actress is treated by the bulk of society much the same way a sex offender is treated.
I didn't see how this related to the drug habit for a second; you're saying that women turn to pornography in order to support their drug habit, not paying attention to the negative consequences, right? I want to make sure I'm understanding correctly before I reply and sounds like an idiot.
Also, why do those metrics matter? We could dramatically decrease the murder rate by removing everybody's limbs.
The Parabolic Jerusalem
The Jerusalem roof is the new spiritual catacomb.
The drawing cables between ports part is what works, even if the animated dangling is a little silly when they could be neatly routed.

What's terrible about those Pro Audio UIs is the arrays of fiddly little knobs arranged in the same cramped pattern they are on the hardware. They have improved the usability over the years by making the dials effectively sliders -- scrubbing on an arc is just a degenerate case of scrubbing on one axis.

The worst are plugins that have these cramped UIs but aren't representative of physical hardware -- some are worse than the worst Kay's Power Tools UIs.
Could you elaborate on why the UK's and Canada's health care systems suck?
"As the use of porn increases, the rate of sex crimes goes down"

This is a perfect application of "Correlation does not imply causation". It's very likely that over time (during which internet porn has skyrocketed and made consumption frictionless) the awareness for supporting victims of sexual assault as also gone up.. from completely unrelated trends like rises in feminism and an overall decrease in crime over the last 15 years.

Source
1995: http://www.fbi.gov/filelink.html?file=/ucr/Cius_97/95CRIME/9...
2008: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/data/table_25.html
The vast majority of porn is created for men, and the men in these films are not objectified in the same way women are. This has nothing to do with chivalry.
This is a much bigger issue on mobile devices though. It wouldn't be so bad if any of the apps for HN supported up and down voting.
He wasn't talking about people claiming that AES was military grade.

Well, no. But only because AES didn't exist yet. Saying "this is secure because it uses 256-bit AES" is just as bogus as saying "this car will be fast because it has a powerful engine" -- and the CNSS knows it, which is why NSA-approved cryptography consists of "an approved algorithm; an implementation that has been approved for the protection of classified information in a particular environment; and a supporting key management infrastructure"... not just the algorithm itself.

I'm having trouble understanding how someone who wrote "if you're typing the letters A-E-S into your code, you're doing it wrong" fails to grasp the bogosity inherent in "using AES makes this military grade". I thought you'd be cheering me on at this point.
ChatRoulette Map Exposes EVERYONE
Your point really isn't valid. The questions in this debate are quality of care and and cost. People against systems like the one in Canada claim they will cost too much and be of a poorer quality than what the U.S. has now. So ease of use doesn't invalidate anyone's point

The argument you make is like someone claiming McDonalds is better than a Fine Restaurant for the diner. Because you can swipe your card at the counter in Mcdonalds where you have to get a pen and fill out the receipt at a Restaurant.
I suspect they'd find it has some serious downsides.

Gaaah, this comment was so good until you whiffed at the end! You point out that their methodology was sloppy, that the title is not apropos, and then assert your own unfounded opinion right at the end.
We should just decriminalize everything, which would completely eliminate every legal problem on the books.