skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually the founding fathers were much less religious than current Americas, but still viewed the state and society in classical Christian terms. In other words, they viewed society as secular because the Christians (mostly) who inhabited the country at the time had no stomach for the problems associated with having the state fight religious wars. Everybody just wanted to have their own version of protestantism and leave each other alone (except for friendly persuasion, of course)

So the Congress opened with a prayer. Most of the founding fathers attended church. Political speeches were, for a very long time, characterized by religious imagery and overtones. Catholics were feared when they started arriving. etc.

The country was about as Christian as it could get -- save for the establishment of a national religion, which everybody knew was a bad idea. But even that was only at a national level. Massachusetts had an established state church for some time after the constitution was signed.

Somehow the idea that the government shouldn't endorse a church has evolved into the idea that the government and church shouldn't have anything at all to do with each other -- probably a good idea but not at all what was intended by the founders.

It's an interesting study on how the same language can be construed in various ways by various generations.
Google's customers aren't the users. Google's customers are the advertisers. The users are the product being sold.
Your analogy is off base. The opposite of "fail fast" is not "living in dreams for years." The arguments is: spend time planning before your launch (measure twice, cut once) and don't give up easily if the first iteration doesn't work.
It's great as far as it goes.

Would be better if the sum were greater than the parts, i.e. more than a static list of interesting site/blogs. There's the obvious "if you liked that, here's something else you might like." Set the WayCool to 11 and see what you come up with.

But it's a good start, done well.
As pohl said in this thread, he's praising the movie adaptation, not his own work. Tokyo and Times Square already look like certain parts of the movie. Syd Mead really is a visionary.
they finally updated the apple.com header and added a new section, 'iPad'.
Why can't someone answer with "our team" or "they way we execute"? If your competitor is always a step behind you copying features you wrote last month, doesn't that guarantee that you'll always be ahead of them?
As you said, (bad) tools for this do exist. What problems do the current crop of tools have that prevent you from working?
10 things you need to stop tweeting about
Just to clarify my original point, I don't suggest the consumer is forced to return these products - merely that if I want to throw away my first generation iPod then Apple should be the one that can take it back and reuse or recycle it; after all they know exactly how it was made. I feel it's a real waste to throw such a highly engineered piece of technology into landfill.
My first "rub" is that people launch products too quickly without thinking / planning first. Measure twice, cut once. I'm all for MVP and learn but not without planning first. My second "rub" is the one you identify. People use the "fail fast" mantra as an excuse to give up early if it doesn't work.
It reminds us the hard way that school is an ambiguous beast: it has an educational side, but it has also a disciplinary side, as people like Foucault where pointing. It is made to prepare children to obey to their superiors, to follow strict schedules imposed from outside, and soon, it prepares them to always be watched. Our future ?
Easy incorporated suite to debug and test (with interaction) all popular browser/OS combinations.
I noticed this in the Middle East too. The horn is used just to announce your presence so they know to look out for you. It's an interesting cultural quirk. It was also common to flash your lights when you're changing lanes on the highway to pass someone, which is considered rude in the US as well.
I am down to two, but some are replaced with bulkier plastic fobs.
>he is about 17 kilos and if he ever lost it - he would not do much more than draw blood and give a nasty cut or two.

Your dog could easily kill a smaller mammal, such as a human child. Indeed a "nasty cut or two" could kill an adult but is highly unlikely. Thing is if your dog threatens to harm me or my child and I crush its skull under my boot then I'll be arrested.

>Over the past 9 years in the 3 local dogruns, my dog and I have come into contact with numerous other dogs and have seen less than ten fights in that time frame

I find that interesting as nearly every time I'm out walking at a place where dog-walking is popular I witness dogs fighting. Probably a dozen times a year, I do try and avoid such places as I don't like walking in faeces or hearing "oh he's harmless" as my toddler is knocked over by an out of control dog.
Although they are "experiencing technical difficulties".
I don't fancy facing auditors or the taxman with a picture of a bit of paper.
How Chatroulette Breaks the Web’s Fifth Wall of Content Production
Flashing headlights is a common indicator where I live for alerting someone to any of these problems.
I know I'm greatly generalizing here, but when it comes to privacy there are two types of people: good people with legitimate things to hide and bad people with bad things to hide. Knowledge is everything. If I know the government is logging my chats and I'm in the "good people" category, I'll try not to say anything I don't want public and at the same time hope they are catching the "bad people" by logging their chats too.

But does that mean we only care about the privacy of good people? Or do we justify breaching the privacy of good people in order to "protect" them from the information bad people might have?

For me, I'll give up a lot of my privacy if it means less savory characters are stopped from doing bad things. But it's a fine line, and it can be crossed when so much of my privacy is given up that it becomes dangerous to me because of the usefulness or sensitivity of the information divulged.

----------

The death of privacy is quickly being carried out by the age of false privacy. It's the age of not knowing who is hearing what or even know how much you are sharing; but more so, it's the age of cover-up, where you buy privacy by putting forth a salted self. Those immersed in social media are getting increasingly apt at concealing the bad and accentuating the good. Personal blogging is usually nothing more than an exercise in deception. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't want to know your dirty secrets.
Do you realise the amount of natural resources Africa has? I doubt it would be empty.
Recycling is bullshit even if you do try to reduce waste as much as possible. (In fact, there's a TV show called Bullshit that did an episode on recycling.)

Not all of it, but enough of it to be pretty heartbreaking. Recycling metals makes a lot of sense, because mining is energetically costly. Recycling glass does too, because there's a lot of refining that goes into getting glass into a usable form. And both of these are easily separated from the junk they come in with.

Plastics, on the other hand, are a total nightmare. There are so many different types of plastics, some of them are completely unrecyclable, and people are usually too lazy or ignorant to sort correctly. What it means is that a ton of energy and pollutants are devoted to separating them from each other. Some calculations say that more energy is involved in recycling plastics (incl. transport, etc.) than to make them from scratch from crude oil.

Paper I'm still up in the air on. The end product isn't great, which reduces its viability. Plus, the vast majority of trees used in paper production are from tree farms. I don't know much about the rest of it.
I wish, wish, WISH there would be a $5 price floor for "designed for iPad" apps! That would lead to a much more sustainable software ecosystem, and if someone wants to do a simple app they can design for iPhone, and there can be free "designed for iPad" for software that monetizes another way.

Too many developers are like NBA general managers and need someone to save them from themselves.
Yeah, I'm not sure why she moved there. The "hip" reputation maybe. Certainly not the weather. ;)
I can't even use it as a raw media consumption device since no flash = no youtube or hulu...and I'm sure as the sun is hot I can't play Blue Rays, divx, xvid files on it. Basically the only thing I could do with it is game and read books...and there are far better options for both.
Self-Segregation or Deliberation in Blog Readership?
I visited that link for the first time. Had to go through the intro page with the two big green buttons. Chose the "search history" button (not the All Web, with toolbar). My history page was completely empty.

Then I tested one search (in another window). Refresh history page, there it is. So it was off before, clicking the button had turned it on.

I deleted that history item, then clicked the "pause" link on the side-list. Was informed that no history would be collected until I clicked "resume".

TL;DR: if going in for the first time, hitting a button on that page will start collecting search history. Apparently.
How To Display Real Time Search Twits  On Your Blog
You're right, combining with a hunger inhibitor would be a great start.
The article seems to take a rough tone to argue for this:

Fail faster.
Also:

> "Instead, to the joy or relief, as the case may be, of the two members of the majority, this court's willingness to abandon its constitutional responsibilities will be praised as patriotic," Reinhardt wrote, "and may even burnish the court's reputation among those who believe that it adheres too strictly to the dictates of the Constitution or that it values excessively the mandate of the Bill of Rights."

I had to re-read that once to get it, but wow - zing. What a fantastic way of putting it. "may even burnish the court's reputation among those who believe that it adheres too strictly to the dictates of the Constitution or that it values excessively the mandate of the Bill of Rights" - what a subtle, wonderful criticism.
Does that I've made it? http://www.mahalo.com/cornify
>people don't understand frequency and how it applies to them

Or perhaps they do. Frequency works when assessing statistical risk for a population. Statistics work for populations not for individual instances. The fact that my chances of being attacked by a dog are statistically low are little solace when faced with a frothing mad pitbull.

Ultimately individuals want to preserve themselves (and family/friends) not simply preserve a high proportion of the population.
I always thought that fail fast meant the following:

# From there build the MVP (minimum viable product). I believe in launching with a small set of features and learning from the market before you spend too much money building out a feature rich product or before you put serious capital to work.

# If you validate that there’s a market then go for it! If you don’t believe that your product is resonating then pivot and find one!

(taken from his bullets on "What is the right way to build a startup?")

I really haven't seen any definitions of fail fast where it meant that you waste money, don't respond to the market, and wrap things up.
the dinosaur in the linked theme is copied from the t-shirt sold by dinosaur comics. It's pretty straightforward.
Betaworks' John Borthwick: Why We We're Betting on Twitter/Realtime startups
I'm waiting to see if Google will do anything with the report.
They must have tied their store to Ubisoft's DRM servers.
Ideally the same metrics any small business uses:

-Revenue
-Conversion Rate
-Ad CTR
-Time on site
-Clickthroughs to order page
-CPC/CPA
-CLV
I had posted this article not so much to highlight the faith/atheism issue as to highlight the way judging often works in reality.

This case had caused a huge uproar in 2002 when Judge Reinhardt had led a panel in striking down the Pledge as unconstitutional. While no politician would defend the decision, the case went up on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which punted on it by holding that the plaintiff, a gadfly lawyer named Newton Minnow, lacked "standing" to bring it - this meant the Court invalidated the decision while avoiding the jurisprudential pit into which it might lead under the Establishment Clause line of cases.

The striking thing that happened here is Mr. Minnow found a qualified plaintiff to renew his attack and saw it head to a friendly panel of the Ninth Circuit that seemed highly likely to invalidate the 'under God' language, with Judge Reinhardt and another leading liberal judge - one who had a track record of striking down laws promoting religion in such contexts and who was a 30-year friend of Judge Reinhardt's - constituting two of the three panelists.

Yet the decision did not go as expected, and it appears that this resulted as much as anything from a pragmatic decision by the second liberal judge on the panel not to want to go against the political headwinds that the case inevitably presented.

I had clerked for a federal court and often saw this sort of thing. Judging may appear "objective" or "disinterested" but, in reality, where a case is politically charged, the politics often affects the outcome - and that appears to be what happened here. Actually, this is somewhat surprising from the Ninth Circuit appeals court, which has a long history of following its own path on such issues (and hence has a historically high reversal rate in the Supreme Court).

Hope this isn't too much "inside baseball" stuff. I think it depicts an interesting reality within our courts that many do not appreciate in taking a mere headline view of such decisions. This piece does a fine job of bringing out the human issues that can so affect the judging process.
In my experience, local news sources always list the ages, and often even list the home addresses of the people involved in a car accident.
Here in the US, if not specifically set up otherwise, my wife would automatically get my shares

Your heirs (or anybody else you wanted to designate in your will) would get them even if you weren't married.
The Power of Your Little Black Book
No doubt that list is different for everyone, but here's mine:

1) Replace employer-sponsored and lottery green cards with a points-based self-petitioning system that can be tuned annually according to the nation's needs. Such a system would award points for basic criteria for age, language, education and experience, with bonus points for experience in occupations for which there are shortages.

2) Eliminate H1B and its byzantine rules, replacing it with a simpler short-term work visa that has a 2 year limit and no renewal. Anything longer in not temporary, and falls in the category above (and if the person does not qualify for 1) then why is it necessary to hire this person and not an American?)

3) Crack down on USCIS backlogs. There is no excuse for it taking years to process visas. Quite apart from the fact that people people's live on hold for that wrong is unjust, it costs American businesses real money. If they need an expert in a certain field, they need it now, not at some indeterminate time.
If those charts are accurate, then bottled beer does not count as "refillable", or at least I don't see how it could.
As long as you're both quiet you'll be fine.
Road to the Nut House
Hey Shafqat, I'm writing an academic paper on the future of news. Would love to interview you for it and get your opinion and outlook. We've already interviewed people from Reuters/Dowjones, iReport, etc. Contact me if you're interested david.haddad at gmail
>it's always the rich, white, Protestant males

I'll give you rich and male. He's definitely a pinky colour but I can let "white" slide. I'm pretty sure he's not a Christian.

Do you consider "rich, white, Protestant males" should not be allowed to air their opinions?
Rg3,
I went back and had another look.

I take my words back (if that's ever possible :) ).

I assumed the purpose of writing that article as saying I pick this, if pushed to the corner (as is the case in our startups).

I will have to say it's a fairly good introduction.
I like the amount of details provided.
This sounded really creepy and supernatural until I read that there are 90MPH wind gusts and ice involved. That's a very strong wind force against a large, flat rock face.
On a slightly related topic: I'm always wondering if I should report another page that way... swik.net seems to at least try to be legit, but all they do is capture common opensource searches (for example googling "sip yate" gives swik.net/yate+sip) and then display loads of links to other services, without any added value.

Does anyone know if they provide any real services?
The two major ones that matter are:

Cost Per Acquisition and Average Revenue Per User.
Investors Uses Green to Make More Green
I've done a little work on Blog mining for a large conglomerate. One thing that blog posts have in spades is a remarkably high affect compared to news reporting. This enables high quality sentiment scoring to be useful.

In one case we found an increase in reporting on a certain topic in the blogosphere coincided with a vast increase in negative sentiment about that subject. Basically the more people were talking about that subject, the more they hated it.

Then suddenly a drop-off of activity and the sentiment abruptly changed to positive.

Turns out there was a flood of discussion about some upcoming legislation on the topic and the feeling was generally that it was a stupid law that would cost millions of dollars and not benefit anyone.

The law failed and discussion was quickly replaced with people back promoting the failed idea...hence the slowdown in activity and the newly positive sentiment.

We used a similar technique on a large number of topic areas an fairly comprehensively mined consumer thinking for a fairly major branding campaign.

The morale is that the corporate world is listening to what the bloggers say, just in aggregate and not in too much detail.
One idea that I've thrown around, and seen out there, is the ability to send in a polygonal area that I want to search in and have the API return the houses for sale/rent in that area. Letting the user pick the neighborhood or even the side of the street they want to live on is really powerful.

The funny thing is, I've called one of the major geolocation providers and asked for something along these lines and they couldn't provide it. Built it myself in under 24 hours using open source geo-encoding tools and Google Maps.
In the US, you can buy a $20 kit that includes a cheap GPS enabled phone and some software that would give you this functionality. Hide the phone deep in your car. When it's stolen, the software will locate it on a map.

http://www.accutracking.com/kit.html
I agree. Pledging allegiance is a sham. The only reason folks are so enamored with the our republic is because it was wrought out of the last frontier, by a bunch of non-conformist misfits, who, guided by Jefferson and other folks, like Lafayette implemented a radical form of government which attempted to really treat folks as free (slaves are another issue). That lasted for about 140 years. Now our content with the government should be commensurate with the degree in which it steps out of the way, and does not simply exist to support the status quo. That was what was so special about America to begin with: there was no status quo!
Of course a VC doesn't want you to monetize too quickly, they want the company to be huge, but only after the founders holdings are fully diluted. The average technical founder is taken advantage of in a major way by the average venture capitalist under the guise of the status quo.
The former president of my country (Uruguay) maintained his "day job" (he was an oncologist, and visited his patients for all 5 years of government).

It's not the same scale as an US senator, but you could compare it to a State governor from the smaller US states.

We used to joke about the chairman of the hospital, who was "the president's boss".
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Structured_Query_Language

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MySQL
A case when this will still break bookmarking:

- user with JS enabled opens the website and navigates to some inner page

- user with JS copies the url for the inner page (e.g. http://example.org/#foo/bar)

- user with JS sends this url to a friend

- a friend with JS disabled opens the url and does not get the inner page.

Also -- what if a search engine "bookmarks" the page and a user with JS opens it? Do you:

a) redirect him from example.org/foo/bar to exmple.org/#foo/bar or...

b) do you leave the url untouched and wait until the user bookmarks another page as example.org/foo/bar#foo/baz ?

a) -- you waste processing power on visitors from search engines.

b) -- you waste processing power on the next opening of the bookmark. Also this looks like a bug waiting to happen.

Disclosure: I browse with JS turned off (Firefox NoScript extension) and websites that rely on JavaScript when a static page would do annoy me.
Monetize is the dumbest word. Just write profit.
Fate of a Social Games Company: The story of what happened to PMOG
Some people don't use javascript. Especially on mobile devices, I sometimes leave it off. Aside from specific application style pages, most should consider javascript an optional enhancement, not a requirement.
rebuttal: "premature optimization is the root of all evil" -- Knuth

Why bother making something scale before you know whether there is demand or profit?
that's very interesting. I had learned that no one bothers to pan bass frequencies because IRL they are difficult to localize. For example, no one at a live show could tell you if the bass rig is on stage right or left. So, a recording with hard panned bass would just sound wrong.
Geoffrey Moore's talk at Business of Software 2009 (video)
Couldn't agree more, +1.
According to Alexa, MySpace is still at the #18 position among the most trafficked sites on the internet:

http://www.alexa.com/topsites

I'm not sure which I trust more: the Nielson report, or Alexa. Unless Nielson actually installed tracking code on each of those websites or got traffic information from the respective companies, I don't see how they generated their rankings. The same goes for Alexa. I doubt that either ranking is particularly accurate.
"Monetize" != "create profit"

"Monetize" == "create revenue".

You can monetize a free service by charging $1 for it, suddenly start bringing in $1 mill/year ... and still be profit negative because you're spending $2 mill/year on engineering.
Could GPS create a world without signs?
JPL Program Cleans Mars Mission Code
Jet Propulsion Laboratory uses formal verification at every step of software development, and is applying some of those techniques to the flight code for next year's Mars Science Laboratory robotic exploration mission.
You are right, I should have paid better attention (the provider is, apparently, not themselves advertising this "feature").

Regardless I still don't see the point of highlighting a loophole that is obviously going away in the short term.

Au contraire the existence of this flaw should a be strong indicator against using said ISP. Do you really want to trust your stuff to them if they can't even get their own billing straight?
Care and feeding of Happy Spammers (running a Zero-Spam blog service in 2010)
I went in the same way. Near the end my jaw just dropped, and all I could think was "Wow." (which is also a very short summary of what Philip K. Dick wrote).
'Android isn't monetising well' claims Glu
That's what I thought when someone started scraping my feed. It didn't make me feel any better in the long run though. And the bigger problem is that even if you send them a DMCA notice they just take it down and then set it up again on a different domain. They are in it for the quick profit, not the long haul.