skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, but the thing is it really is going to have to be good software.

In example it would take a very good software package to move ubuntu users from openoffice to another alternative.

But there are some places where ubuntu is somewhat lacking that might not need amazing software: something like itunes with a store and device support etcetera but I can't really think of more examples.
Whoops, you're right.

Doesn't really change the fact that this is in no way novel, and likely has published prior art going back to at least the 70s.

I just don't see how anyone with any significant knowledge of computer science could think this was a new idea.
"... How the air security organizations got into buying these machines without thinking through the implications is what I find ridiculous. ..."

There is a heavy PR campaign going on for scanners. I found this via Jane News Briefs.

"... Body Scanners, Security and Airport Efficiency
A Message from BOZO Systems... Can airports lower costs, improve operations and increase passenger satisfaction - while enhancing aviation security? ... As the world's leading personnel screening technology, a NERK 500 system can be a key part of an integrated aviation security solution. Learn how a NERK 500 can lower airport operating costs and improve checkpoint throughput and passenger satisfaction. Our consultants can demonstrate how a NERK 500 can optimize checkpoint operations.... With the NERK 500, passengers get through the checkpoint faster: total scanning time far faster than competing millimetre wave body scanners. ..."

This is the message being sold to airline owners.
Go World?
Interesting! I found a good explanation at http://locklessinc.com/articles/flexible_lists_in_cpp/

I do wonder how they could have missed the obviousness of it. Or maybe it's just the shotgun approach to patent trolling.
Why are there no OEMs making strictly ubuntu machines? There's System76, but they're too complicated (20 different choices). Go look at hardware partners and there are no north american system builders! That's what Ubuntu is missing. Guys like us will install it, but if they want to be adopted by normal people it has to come with the system. You'll never get a strong commitment from big guys like DELL. They're too worried about pissing off MSFT.

I'll tell ya, Ubuntu Netbook Edition is the best interface for "simple computing" out there. It's like an iPhone for your desktop computer. I almost want to do a live test where I sit people down with windows 7 and Ubuntu Netbook Edition. I bet you Ubuntu Netbook Edition will win almost every time.
Short URLs Not Necessarily Better
Google's employees are way more efficient than Yahoo's
Google squeezed out $336,467 per employee last quarter while Yahoo only got $124,000.
I hope this ends up being a sort of "build it and they will come" scenario, and it ends up boosting OS X game development across the board.

With Valve developing for OS X and Blizzard being a long time OS X supporter, I'm pretty close to not needing a PC for anything at all. Maybe in a few years the platforms will be equally competitive.
I am aware of VPS/Dedicated server options, and addressed that in my comments. They're a good fit for me personally, but not for my company, whose clients want to see long lists of well-known clients for their hosts. Rackspace has that, but their only managed solution other than a dedicated managed server is the cloud. Media Temple also has an impressive client list, but it's the same boat.

I'm just frustrated that I have to considering moving 100 sites again when I just went through this a year ago, specifically because the one thing the cloud keeps promising is performance and scalabilty and that's the one thing is sucks the most at. Its amazing to me that more people haven't called bullshit on it.

Fabulously, we only have a few sites on the box at work, so moving them will be easy enough. We're on a managed dedicated box at The Planet, which has been okay but not ideal. My own personal server, for which an impressive client liist is less important, has a huge pile of sites that will take forever to move. Again.

Also, s/his/her/.
I thought that it might get a decent software patents discussion going again, or that maybe there was something that I'd missed about this particularly implementation that someone could provide some insight on.

I know it's nothing particularly new for HN if you've been around a while, but new people join all the time, and recently at least one IP lawyer has seems to have joined, so I thought I'd submit it and see if there was any interest.

No cheap karma intended, I don't care about whuffie.
Bezos (lowering costs for consumers) vs Jobs (fleecing consumers) - I know who i'm rooting for
That's a solid 93/100 on the etymology awesome scale.
Better than the brown.
write us back when TSA & equivalent go through the same selection process as MDs.
You can't do that in ogg either, you need the header packets.
This is a gigantic step... sideways.

Big clunky fonts and an excessive amount of blank space. It's like the American car of UIs.
Apparently [1] you can also add profiles for enabled apps in case the heuristic fails for some reason, or you want to force using the low-power CPU.

[1] c't Magazin 6/2010
Am I the only one who thinks that at the GUI level Ubuntu is better than OS X? (I use Snow Leopard and Ubuntu 8.04 extensively)
Google Patents Location-based Advertising
I've just spent a couple of weeks putting together a simple iPhone app. While I have the benefit of having written some Cocoa apps in the past, I really didn't find it the nightmare that you described.

Of course, the DRM and signing up for the developer program is a complete pain, but waiting and following instructions means it's only a minor hindrance. Even if it's a big philosophical discomfort with the platform.

Maybe I need to work longer at it to discover all the pitfalls?
Thanks for the pointers. I have written a few patents. Well, I wrote the invention part and paid supposedly good patent attorneys to clean it up and write the claims and educate me on the process.

I "thought" my lawyers told me the first few claims (1-3?) have to stand on their own and the rest can build on the invention. Meaning, if the first few are not unique inventions, the whole thing fell apart. More info would be useful.
Startup Idea Generator
Yep. I think so. When you get big enough not to care, you inevitably stop caring. At some point, you become evil, and the smartest guys usually don't want to work for the evil company.

That being said, I this is a good thing - other companies may be forced to out-innovate Apple and pay as much attention to detail as they do, and maybe these companies will attract all the talent they need to make it happen.
This interview seems really useful for small sites battling to get traction, especially the part about doing better customer service than big sites can do.
Simultaneously, the advertisement is for the position in charge of their website and online presence (which is to say a decent portion of their operations), and is thus a fairly senior position.

Stuff just gets more complicated when money's involved. It's one thing to ask for a hand with something you're not making money off of, and another thing to ask for free help on a project that's paying you.
I am not entirely sure. Is the difference between: (1) a number of reusable modules/components (I am thinking of, say, maven artifacts in a private repository, something along a private CPAN) and (2) the evil Uber-Application that:

in (1) you take several modules out of the sea of modules you have and integrate them into the software you create for the customers needs (potentially adapting or refining the modules)

while in (2) you rather try to bend a single application and the customers will in a way such that they eventually meet somewhere, forming some sort of application which sort of meets the customers requirements?

If this is the case, then I think I agree.
Ok, so only add pages to the mirror that are older than N days or have more than M (non-reverted) edits. Probably you'd also need to have tracking for when page names change. It's not a deal-breaker.
Facebook & Twitter Access via Mobile Grows by Triple-Digits in the Past Year
Could you relate that claim to the submission at hand?
Does the 13th of March still stand for all those who made the deadline?
Google launches the latest star
The only proof that a link was 'paid' is the invoice, reports, anonymous or not are going to be very hard to verify.
Support cost is the only thing I can think of. And pressure from MS. I looked just today for an Ubuntu laptop and ran into the exact issue you describe. Dell has Ubuntu on two netbooks, but that's it. Not that I can't install on my own, but I don't want to pay for Windows if I'm not going to use it (and knowing all the hardware is supported is a nice plus).
They need to seriously reconsider this GTK theme. I feel like maybe they're trying too hard to look different. Does anyone actually like it? Besides bad color selection it's inconsistent. The menubar doesn't even match the rest of the UI which seems like the most obvious bit of consistency you'd expect. Even between the two variants it's lacking consistently. The dark version has menus that match the menubar color, the light variant does not. At least the old Taco Bell bathroom theme was consistent. I may not have liked the colors but you could ignore that easily enough. This theme just screams at my eyes and not in a good way.
Which makes you wonder what exactly are the requirements to qualify as the dude watching the monitor. First come first serve basis?

It's hard being a specialist but almost anyone can apply for security.

Well in my case if I had to I'd ask for female security officer (or gynecologist for that matter).
Indie Coder Proves Android Apps Can Make Money, Too
Google PowerMeter gets API
No, he didn't. For one, he quit blogging, whereas I'm just taking a break. For another, I don't read Joel.
Sure - the editor in chief, or whoever on staff wrote that description, doesn't really know ASP from LAMP. But they do know the current programmers use ASP.net and MT, and will need to continue using ASP.net and MT for the time being.

In the past three years, the collegian website has added a lot of great features, and the design has improved considerably. It looks like they're still stuck on an old ASP backend, but the students responsible for the front page have been moving in the right direction. Unfortunately, its a pretty huge undertaking for unpaid (or close) full time students to replace a decent working site with a decade of archives with with a Rails app.

In many ways, the Collegian is a representative good college daily - there are many in much deeper trouble for failing to grasp the basics of good journalism, not the basics of web 2.0. (Disclosure: Former Collegian photo staff)
Being a monopoly in music distribution

What definition of monopoly leads you to that conclusion?
Buy a Jeep, Fund a Startup
The problem is that a company run by content creators (and news/opinion articles are content just like film/music is) is going to tend to see the distribution of that content as ancillary to its creation. They then see the IT/web department as being on the same plane as the delivery-boys in terms of importance.
It's been a while since I looked at the metadata standards, but it's my memory that there are two: one that is "deprecated", supports only a few tags, and is supported by libraries,, and the "new" format you linked to, which is the "way forward" but so far completely unsupported by anything.

The specific problems I remember are that the ReplayGain tag contents are unspecified (decimal, like Vorbis/FLAC? IEEE754 half, single, double in some endianness?), there's no support for cover art, and the "examples" are all broken links. In my opinion, FLAC has the best metadata support -- Vorbis is close, but its cover art support is a catastrophe.
I don't think ambition is something you have to earn, more power to him.

However considering the cat-herding involved in creating great user experiences from the top down, and considering how much Apple pays its engineers and designers, if he pulls this off he's 100 times the leader Steve Jobs is.
pressure from MS is the biggest part.
Nonsense! I'm sure the editor-in-chief's major in print journalism and women's studies, as well as extensive experience as an "investigative team leader", is more than enough qualification to manage internet things. ;)

More seriously, it's probably hard to find good staff for that on a student newspaper. I think it would help their case if they wrote it in a more friendly tone than "Please submit a cover letter, resume and work samples to editorinchief@psucollegian.com. Submit applications by 5 p.m. March 1". Sounds very pretentious considering they're begging for a volunteer.
That's pretty much it. I have people who read my blog regularly, and if I didn't explain why I was taking a break, they'd want to know.

I didn't intend the post to be on HN. I didn't submit the post to HN. I didn't upvote the post on HN.
Dean Wampler on Programming Languages (Scala, Clojure, Java and Ruby)
The venture capital industry is such a vital part of modern society, it's where robots and cancer cures will probably come from, yet it operates on the level of alchemy. There needs to be a real shake up, on the level of a 100 more right side capital's. And God knows investors would welcome it, they're literally throwing their money at gambling (derivatives) these days.
It looks more like a pointy-haired boss powerpoint presentation generator.
I remember back in ~2000~2001 there was some popular cart application floating around. Everyone used it! A google search of "/uri/somecart.cgi?something" brought up tons of pages... and of course, a vulnerability in the wild put everyone's information out on a silver plate for these card scavengers.

Well, luckily I was poor and 16 when they bounced and locked my card up right away(never buying from that tshirt store again).

Years down the line though, I still can find my name, old cc, and address on these lists. They're all over IRC...

On the topic of scamming, most of them use a reputation based system (ie. traderx has 60 successful transactions, while traderb has -3 successful transactions; who would you go with?)

You can also hire moderators to check out some things, iirc. Such as, placing a $0.03 charge through a merchant and verifying or checking the accounts.

I did a pretty large study of this back in 2003 or so, but really lost interest once I pissed off the wrong people and they got personal.
In this case its actually http://fetchback.com/.
You're joking, but honestly, I really do think there's going to be a wave of private/closed-community products that counterbalance the boom in highly social technology over the past few years.
That seems anti-competitive... Have you heard if they play hardball on OEM contracts if Linux is also an option? If a company has to pay more for each of its millions of Windows licenses because Ubuntu is an option I could definitely understand why we're not seeing any options.
If you are large enough to determine the entire music industry you are a monopoly.

Microsoft gets all sorts of crap for windows being a monopoly yet there is still mac and linux that anyone can change to. Yet they are still considered a monopoly.

By that definition apple is a monopoly.
SXSW 2010 for Hackers
It is for usability. Ubuntu's only weakness is that at the pixel level it's a bit uglier than OSX in some areas... and that by default it doesn't come with quite the same level of fonts...
From the article: "[T]hey were selected at random to go through the new scanning machine." Two Muslim women? traveling together? picked at random?? Really now.

In The Netherlands we have similar "random" increased security checks for people whom fit a specific profile, but the government refuses to tell what that profile is. Now, I'm a a skinny white guy so will probably never fit any profile, but the whole "do what we tell you to do and we wont tell you why" coming from a governing body really gets under my skin.
Verisign Registry to Increase COM & NET fees in July 2010
Do an A/B test... and definitely let me/us know what the results are, if you decide to do that. Hard data on this issue would be good for the whole community to have!
That's a good point. I'll have to think about this.
"Guilty until proven innocent. I am disgusted at how quickly people give in to this.

Go through the scanner/rectal screen to prove your innocence."

Do you have a better answer?

We are searching people before they go onto a plane. We can either have less security and potentially allow someone to get through and kill innocent people (which has already happened and almost happened on multiple occasions) or have body-scans and other measures to prevent these situations.

I have flown many times in the last year and I don't mind the extra levels of security that are in place. I think the real problem is that the security measures are working too well and people are getting complacent.

It reminds me of Y2K. After it happened, there were many people that said "see, nothing happened!". When in reality, thousands of people worked for a long time to fix all of the issues that would have been a problem.
A) Data-mining loving businesses could still make customers create an account to checkout and get their emails. Even if they don't store their credit card information, they still know what the customer is buying and can email them recommendations.

B)I think that if given the choice, most buyers would choose the more secure option for payment if it was free.

C) This is great for banks and customers that bear the burden of identity theft. As the number of sites you give your information to increases, the probability that a site with your data will be comprised approaches 1.
I think you and others are looking at it from a normal business transactions perspective. College papers aren't a business. I would be surprised if their advertisement revenue even covered operation costs. Students work on college papers for the same reason they attend class: to learn.

Also, I think you're using "senior" in a different manner than I. I'm using it to mean seniority, or length of time spent working on the paper. You're using it to denote importance.
The Collegian web site was cutting edge a few years ago. My predecessors really did a hell of a job cooking up a brand new system (built on MT). The previous system, from what I read, was archaic.

Sadly not much has changed over the last couple years and without proper staff, nothing really will change.
In some respects - I switched from GNOME to OS X and I found that Nautilus respected the tree a lot more than OS X did, NetworkManager also showed signal strength before OS X's top bar network thingy did.

Only reason I quit is that after speccing hardware that had OSS drivers (and was fairly underpowered to boot), drivers in Ubuntu still didn't work 100% (eg, connecting to external displays broke X render support) and this got worse over time (Intel drivers being replaced with much more unstable replacements).

I still develop for Ubuntu, but inside a VM.
Active.com now Served through Akamai - Huge Performance Boost
Having developed multiple multi-threaded, sensor-, service-, and multimedia-based Android applications, I think he is mostly right when he writes, "I don't think you'll ever see the groundswell the way you have with the iPhone SDK where people from all walks of life with no programming experience developed a desire to learn to write software, but I do think that there will eventually be a good market for Android apps and, therefore, for Android developers."

I would be very hesitant to use a mobile platform that allowed neither background services nor mounting as a drive (w/o risk of bricking the device). Not to mention one that is closed source. But then my apps are targeted at R&D, not mass market. For mass market apps, the iPhone probably has the advantage.
I love it.. change with the times, dare to be modern and move along. All companies could learn from this.
E.g. Dreamweaver, Photoshop, games. The same thing that Windows people pay for, really.
>> Point is, when you have good partnerships that are not just fluff, you also need solid communication.

You really, really do.

While I don't think the various tech blogs that "reported" on my tweet did anyone a service by blowing it out of proportion, the onus for communicating poorly and freaking out our developers over nothing is ultimately on me.
Getting feedback on posts before I publish has been valuable. If and when I get back to blogging, I'll be soliciting that peer feedback for each and every post. Great advice. Thanks!
"Most of us recognize we're more likely to get hit by lightning while winning the lottery than be saved by one of these machines, and as such oppose their use."

Do you actually know how many attacks these machines will prevent? You don't seem to have any facts to back up your statements.

In addition to this, the fact that people know that these machines are in place will prevent some future attempts.
I wouldn't call it the standard script. Most tech companies actually do show restraint and use patents for defensive purposes only. In fact I heard a heart-warming story at lunch today about how one of the top guys at a large well-known software company recently shut down an internal proposal to start using its IP more offensively. This is, however, the standard script for Apple, originator of the long, infamous, ultimately unsuccessful attempt to sue Microsoft for "look and feel" infringements. For a company that stole so much of its own core technology in the early days from Xerox, Apple has never been shy about making overly broad IP ownership claims. Their legal department has historically been one of the most aggressive and overreaching in the industry. I agree with you that it is surprising that so many people are only now seeing Apple in this light.
"Pornography or porn is the portrayal of explicit sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual excitement." [1]

Doctors don't take photos (or other media) of naked children, so there is no pornography involved. Obviously if they do take photos, there is a crime. Likewise if they touch a child inappropriately, there is a (different) crime.

In the case of the body scanners, images are taken, thus it is pornography, and a crime.

And of course, MDs are actually screened and have thorough background checks where-as there have been multiple instances [2] of TSA employees not being thoroughly screened.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography

2. http://boardingarea.com/blogs/flyingwithfish/2010/02/05/tsa-...
Yeah, but tweets aren't limited to the GSM 7-bit character set, so if you tweet in say, Russian, 140 characters is too much, because the whole message needs to be encoded using 2-byte characters.

Twitter's limitation is based on thinking around SMS, but it doesn't actually match up to real world SMS, because they didn't think through all the international language considerations. It's pretty botched up.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=660986
I grew up on the East Coast. I can deal with harsh winters. Plus, I'm only happy when it rains.
Sadly you get a discount from windows on most machines... same specs but the windows equivalent is usually cheaper.
I'm surprised they didn't want a minimum 10 years experience in iphone app dev experience.
I might be there with GeekStack at one of the side tables (not ready to be one of the main presenters yet).
Chile earthquake: may have shifted the Earth's axis and created shorter days
Ah, got it. Thank you, that was helpful.
I think its because Apple's main sources of revenue (handheld devices like iPod, iPhone...) are no longer conflicting with Microsoft's. Windows and Office are still huge revenue generator for MS and dominate their market.
Scribd Turns Three, Gets A New Look And Logo
what's wrong with commenting on news stories? Isn't that what we do here?