skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They pursued ECMA4 through a standards body (and lost that fight), but still. They have a decent proprietary flash player for Linux which they didn't have to do, I doubt they did that for any other reason other than for developers. Their Flex SDK is open source.

They only did that to stop Silverlight from appearing to be more open and more friendly to developers. Don't think for a minute the management from Adobe hasn't noticed the multiple languages support in Silverlight, or the Moonlight project.

While working for them they also talked a lot about "taking advantage of the control they have on their formats and protocols". PDF may be a standard, but it's theirs, and they can add things to it at any time to "improve the experience" of Acrobat users.

Flex may be open-source, but it's useless as long as it's tied to Flash. If you're looking for a real open-source alternative, check out OpenLaszlo, a project released before Flex that was almost killed by their clone.

ECMA4 was their attempt to make ActionScript not look like a proprietary language (which it is) ... something like Microsoft did with C#, only the ECMA standard for the CLR is actually usable.

Just last year they killed an open-source project for using the rtmp streaming protocol ... http://linuxcentre.net/rtmpdump-can-be-used-to-download-copy...

They say the SWF format is open. Well, it wasn't just 2 years ago, and the Gnash developers are still not using the Flash-player or the SWF format specifications.

> If you are RMS or a die hard GPL proponent

GPL or RMS have nothing to do with it ... it's in everybody's interest for the web to not be tied to something like Flash.

And you can console yourself with how they've opened pieces of Flash, but the truth of the matter is Moonlight is in a much better shape than any Flash-clone, and that's what I call ironic.
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After the ceremony, your guests adjourn from the Chapel along a trellised colonnade to the Reception. The two spectacular Ballrooms bring a full view of the surrounding private forest with floor-to-ceiling clear story windows and set off by illuminated fountained courtyards.
Morning Read: Curiosities and Tidbits 
Various Links on startups and policy
Ideological Segregation Online and Offline
I've done some work in this area, although more aimed at the school sector than higher ed.

One thing we found was that providing alternate forms of navigation and filtering is important.

For example, from memory the OCW metadata contains subjects. If the query result pages displayed those as facets then it would allow users to refine results by subjects. "School" and "Year" would be other good facets.

Solr does faceting really well, BTW
When I was a kid, the Apple ][ was the system I coveted most to learn how to program. Instead, my computer club could only afford a teletype interface to some remote system (think 1982) and up until recently I've always suffered from at least a partial Mac envy.

No more. This is ridiculous.
LoseThos 64-bit OS version 6.06 released
Digital Dumping Ground
Apple’s iAds bring advertising to iPhone applications
Apple revealed its new advertising forum named as iAd. iAd is built into the upcoming versions 4.0 of the iPhone and iPad. Steve Jobs affirmed, during a recent event at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, CA, that the company wants to change the distribution of advertising.
"ITA uses Allegro Common Lisp"

Unlikely, because then they would have to pay a percentage of their revenue to Allegro in perpetuity. (Allegro has an insane revenue model http://www.franz.com/products/licensing/commercial.lhtml)
Charts for Silverlight 4
That's exactly what I did. Merely complaining about this is a bit dependent, because they've repeately demonstrated that they have no interest in users' privacy.
The counter argument to that is that nowadays on my desktop based on the Linux kernel I use a lot of software that are not GNU projects. Sure they may not be as fundemental as say the coreutils - but they are just as important to having a useable modern operating system.
so you argue that it's okay to FORCE kids through school?

i wouldn't have been ready for the world at age 15, but maybe at age 19-20. now i'm 23 and i'm getting sick and tired of university. they don't even try to relate the stuff they teach to any real-world applications.

i realize that i've been depressed for a while now. it's affecting me physically now. i can't handle expectations these days. i avoid even thinking of studying for exams, which might be the third response of the fight-or-flight response. i can't manage my time. i'm always 20 minutes late to anything, even dates i set myself and that affect nobody else, even if i "account for" that usual delay, unless it's a one-time event and i'm making a real mental effort.

kids want choice, because they're not given any. expectations are the opposite of choice. i can't blame kids for turning out fucked up like they are.
No, that's not what was said. It's about RMS not wanting to replicate his miserable experience for someone else.
> "Hear that, Michael Arrington?"

I completely forgot about the ridiculous iPhone/Gender Dating poll the minute I read that line. Did a TC staff writer just really take a pop shot at Arrington? This can only get good.
Ita uses Allegro Common Lisp or ITA uses SBCL? What's going on here!
There can be workarounds, but using something that's not broken in the first place is better. Every one of those issues comes from other software expecting the spec (RFC) to be followed where it's not.

Another thing I remembered after I posted. There is no universally agreed upon maximum query string length, so passing parameters in GET is web server dependent.
Especially a static image will be publicly available for years (estimated, I don't know how often street view updates).
> Perl's syntax is designed to be more close to natural language.

s/natural/English/. Some languages can be parsed by computer without problems. For example, simple 15kb C program can parse 100% of technical text in Esperanto, 98% of technical text in Ukrainian (my native language), 84% of technical text in Russian, and so on. Not so simple parser can parse more than 100% of text, i.e. it can fix errors in text.

For me, shell is much closer to my native language than perl or SQL.

PS.
AFAIK, there is no natural language in the wild nature. :-/
All human languages are artificial.
Research paper in economics – relevant issues
To scholars of economics and other social sciences, the study that deals with the manufacture, allocation and use of all goods and services are relevant topics for anEconomics research paper.
برنامج الاتصال مجاني الي الجوال و الارضي - شركة الصباحي
Even more interesting than the suicide-site itself is the panic-response from Facebook. A C&D with the most laughable justification ever, Quote:

Facebook demanded that they "cease this activity immediately," citing a violation of users' privacy.

If Facebook is concerned about my privacy then why do they C&D a site that helps me to remove my personal data from the public web?

Major kudos to the suicidemachine makers for provoking Facebook and similar sites to reveal their true face for a moment.
> I think we'd be better served with simply issuing z-scores and normalizing grades completely, so there's some real context.

So should we punish people based on who happened to be in their class with them? That makes sense if you're picking cofounders or sports teammates or something else that probably doesn't really matter, but the entire point of school is to teach. It is not merely preparation for the job market, although some jobs still require a modicum of education. It is not a social club where you network your way into a startup. It is not a way to display your superior intelligence.

Schools are good or bad based on how well they teach material, not on how well they thin the herd or propel their students towards some illusory goal.
So that explains the timing of that xauth announcement from google.
Google can take the approximation of the social graph that they have (in Gmail & Orkut) and improve search results based on that. I doubt they haven't at least tried to estimate how much does this help.
I'm finding myself redirected to http://preview.bloomberg.com when I click this link. I had to use the search box there to find the story. Anybody else having issues?
That would certainly make mint.com pretty interesting...
Affiliate marketing is real, the payouts are real, but they're a lot lower than people usually want to make you believe. If you plan on making a living on affiliate marketing then you should be prepared to work very hard.

Occasionally someone gets rich, but then again, occasionally someone wins the lottery.
training, not learning. did you read the first paragraph? care to give examples of positions that require learning that isn't actual hands-on training?
Texas Divorce
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> the authoritative source of rules

No, it isn't. It is influential, not authoritative.

And, in this instance, it is outdated.
Plus: my reason to hate adobe...

I use DreamWeaver (relax: mostly for file management), and got a chance to upgrade to CS4 inexpensively (ed. discount package) and to check out adobe Contribute. Result: now DW creates a new directory (_notes) in each of my 30+ sites' directories, subdirectories, etc.

Last time I searched for help (goog, etc.), I found no way to disable the Contribute "features". Adobe wouldn't want to make it convenient for me to disengage from any of their products, now, would they? (expletives deleted) [/rant]
so they're growing faster, but they're held back by school with no end in sight, doing inconsequential things?
Doesn't work for me. Still waiting. Firefox, Windows 7.
Doesn't work with firefox 3.0 - seems like you'd be better using two elements, transparency, and z-index. This "old fashioned" way the shadow will work on all browsers it doesn't take much more code than his example.
Local survey results: 100% of males in my IT department said they were less likely to date women who based their dating decisions on men's phone preferences.
So You'd Like to Send Some Email (Through Code)
> Red Hat, Canonical and MindTouch combined have not had as much impact on computing as Apple or Microsoft alone.

Wouldn't that be a question of time and business model? Apple is a hardware company and both were around when the PC (not the IBM one) was invented.

> isn't really making money from the software

It's very hard to directly make money from software sales if you grant your customers the right to share it. Software companies make money out of the scarcity of software ("You want Windows? Ask Microsoft"). Free software is naturally abundant. It's possible, but not easy, to make your users pay directly for it.

And Mozilla can't ask users to pay for it. Not only because it's infinitely abundant (anyone can give you one) but Microsoft's IE comes bundled in the OS most Firefox users run. Opera does that and look at their market share.
Farewell, TomTom - Google SatNav for Android launches in UK
> I think without Wintel, probably we would've had more competition and innovation in the area, and cheaper/faster machines.

Maybe. Or maybe we'd just have locked on to CP/M-86 and Digital Research, which was just as tied to x86.

However, it's impossible to tell if someone like Gates would have risen to the top. Gary Kildall was not Bill Gates and, for that reason among others, Digital Research never became Microsoft. Corporate culture and philosophies matter.
One more vote for trac, we've used taskfreak for about a year but recently made the switch and trac works great. The built in wiki is another big benefit, as well as fairly easy email integration (that did need a plug-in though).
Kellee Santiago's Response To Roger Ebert
That note mentions an interesting application that also gets billing in the home page (http://www.j-paine.org/index.html). Snippet:

write spreadsheets as programs in a language that uses meaningful identifiers rather than A1-style cell names, then compile them into Excel or Google Spreadsheets.

EDIT: includes doing the reverse. (Thanks barrkel. Had a blind spot there ;-)

(I'm also aware of the Resolver One guys, with Python included, at http://www.resolversystems.com/)
I'd disagree with the author. iPhone won't see very many large, high-risk applications developed as a result of Apple's approach. Apple screws over developers and partners too often. You will build a $1 application in a few man-months for iPhone, no questions.

Build a Google Voice? Build a Flash->iPhone compiler? You might get screwed and lose a really big wad of cash.

When business types decide what to build, they multiply out risks. You have technical risk (developers can't build it), market risk (people won't buy it), and a bunch of others. Typically, they're individually low-risk (say, 80% chance of success), but when you multiply them together, you get pretty low numbers.

If you toss in the additional risk of "Apple will cut me off if I'm successful and they want to compete with me" and "Apple will cut me off if they don't like me," it makes it a much less compelling platform.

The costs also go up if you can't share codebase. Requiring iPhone SDK is sort of sane -- you make an iPhone-specific front-end, and it looks better. Requiring Objective C or one of their other languages is kinda wacko -- you can't even share back-end logic. If I just spent millions on something complex (image processing engine, voice recognition system, or whatever), I don't want to spend another big portion of that for an iPhone port.

Worse, the same applies to custom business software, but even more so. If I have an enterprise app employees must use (think UPS guy or bus driver or anything like that), I care a lot about development time, not much about usability, and I can dictate platforms. If I can recompile to Android but rewrite for iPhone, guess what I'm gonna do?
Market economics don't apply here. First, education is compulsory. Second, paying for public education via taxes is compulsory. Thus, everyone has to pay, regardless of how high it is; and if you don't like the quality, you have to pay again to go elsewhere.

Market behavior doesn't apply when the guys with the guns are forcing you to accept their dictates (citation: economics 101).

Now, look at the thing weighing against low cost:

* Teachers' union demanding high pay and benefits, and forming an extremely powerful voting bloc.

* Parents demanding that a 20th sport be added to educational program - they're an organized voting bloc, while the opponents are diffuse and affected less strongly (tragedy of the commons).

* Opaque budget data.

* and so on
Their Flex SDK is open source. There's a whole list here of open source projects they have:
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/site/Home*

Notice that (almost) all their open source project are for Flassh? Basically that's just an investment in their platform, and only their platform.

(I'm not anti-Adobe by anymeans. But they don't get any bonus points for this)
Google maps navigation now available in UK for select Android devices
No, you don't. And there are certainly some pressures not to do so, but, in the end, it's a rights issue - your right to control the tools that everyday grow more and more indispensable to participate in society and to protect your privacy.

But this attitude, of sacrificing "just a little" here and there for more convenience is not healthy either.

And then there is another false idea: Free Software is not about Communism. Communism is about the collective ownership of scarce resources. Free Software is the realization that software (as ideas and knowledge) are infinitely abundant.
Hrmph... this article got my all nostalgic! Now I feel like driving around in remote places this summer, but it's a bit of a stretch from here in Italy to there...
Did RMS say that, or just that he himself had a miserable experience? My point is, if only people with thoroughly happy lives should have kids, then probably only stupid people would have kids.
Did it just become ridiculous with this current rejection, or was it one of the dozens of previous similar ones where it started becoming ridiculous? And is this really news any more?
There is plenty of American politics on HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1281449

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1280561

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1281773

That's just the current homepage.
Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs 2010: The Finalists
No surprise, no news.
No, this is ridiculous:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Anews.ycomb...

This is hacker news, not Apple gossip.
Strange world where family and friends consider you a traitor for giving up your nationality.

Words like that shouldn't be used lightly.
If you're using mod_php, you have to configure a script handler for PUT requests, and then read from stdin in PHP instead of using the superglobals. Is it hard? Not really, but it's not as easy as using $_POST. Here's a tutorial for anybody interested:

http://www.phpbuilder.com/manual/en/features.file-upload.put...
Intriguing result. The conventional wisdom is that the internet makes political groupthink worse, on the theory that while RL requires people to mix with lots of people around them, the internet makes it easy to self-select into echo chambers. The study seems to find the opposite. One guess is that the internet actually mixes people more easily, due to the low barriers in hopping from site to site; whereas IRL, many people tend to live in areas that are generally "conservative" or generally "liberal", and mixing between them is much harder.
"Cultivate an engaged, loyal readership" ... by paying some of them to visit and comment?!

I mean, I can see the pain here (anyone seen the last 74 commentless blog posts on my website? No, didn't think so). (And if I really wanted to "Get the conversation started" I could just wind back my spam filter a little and save the expense.) So I think ProComments is a specious solution to the problem; and I'm willing to be disproved.
Amazing... a few years ago I would have swore this was Flash.
What these authors fails to see is that innovation does not come from the big guys and that is all a heavily regulated platform will attract. In my mind I project that a lot of the authors must be younger, and have not been through one of the typical screw the developers cycles. This has been seen so many times in the tech sector, it is almost like clockwork.

The small developers will pack their bags and take their innovation to another platform, once one is up to par and that is the trick, as of now Apple is ahead of the pack, and so long as they are, developers will put up with them, but as soon as another platform is on par; The trickle will start to happen. Apple knows this and they have placed a huge bet on the fact that, they can remain the leader of the pack. I would assume that they feel that their patents are strong and that will keep them the front runner given their suit against HTC.
> Now, as far as rules of engagement, [Iraqis] are not supposed to pick up the wounded.

It's what any right thinking person would do, care for the wounded, the 'rules of engagement' were probably not set up by the Iraqis if they are not allowed to care for their wounded.
The author has entirely missed the reasons for Apple's successes and failures.

I was a Mac guy in the '90s. The Macs of the day were uninspired beige boxes. They were also expensive and used connectivity technology that made peripherals more expensive[0].

The OS also sucked. The UI was nice, but from a technical standpoint, NT4 was easily and clearly superior[1]. Even Windows 95 had better memory management and multitasking.

Everything Apple made from about 1988 to 1998 would have gotten the Steve Jobs "This is shit!" stamp. Apple lost ground in the '90s because it made average products and sold them at premium prices; it had little to do with third-party developers.

The success of the iPhone also had little to do with third-party developers. It simply has the best user experience, and a "wow-factor" that makes people want to buy one when they play with it. The iPhone would be the most popular smartphone even if it had no third-party apps at all; most people by the iPhone for the iPhone, not the apps.

[0] Not inherently, in many cases, but the result was less competition between peripheral makers than on the PC side.

[1] It pains me to say this. I've always hated Windows.
Unfortunatly, it does not play well with a german keyboard. Z, X, C keys are used as buttons, but on a german keyboard Z und Y are switched.
Adobe, fix you Mac Flash client. The horror, my god, the horror: http://daved.posterous.com/12301965

FYI, ClickToFlash (http://clicktoflash.com/) is a lifesaver/CPU-saver if you use Safari on the Mac.
very nice work!
The people that are most gung-ho about war are usually the ones that have not experienced it or any fall out from one in any way.

Figure the US reaction on 9/11, 3500 civilians killed (unjustly, no mistake) vs the US reaction on tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed. It's just too far away from home, and this video did one service, it rammed home just how ugly that war really is.
How to implement Perl 6 in 2010
20 Font Driven Websites Showcase
Do you like typography? If you do, this post is for you. We’ve collected 20 awesome font driven sites that nicely utilize with typography. Most of them having fonts playing important role from type design to font driven business. They are not only showing their type design but also inspiring you upon usage of balancing within visual and commercial. So take some time to visit these websites and get inspired.
Key point is that it wasn't the guys on the ground but some chopper jockey that caused the bigger part of the carnage.
Minced Meat Patties
I always wonder if people really paranoid about online privacy apply the same fears to their offline lives. That could include always using cash to avoid being tracked by retailers, wearing hats/sunglasses to make yourself harder to identify, making sure no one is looking at you when you go shopping so they can't make a judgement over what you might buy, using fake names whenever possible, wearing gloves to avoid possible finger print traces of your presence, keeping a safe distance from your friends & family in public to avoid any possible observers from noticing you are socially connected. I kind of doubt it. Not sure what to make of that.
That's somewhat contrary to the voice over from the guy flying the chopper.
Hating Adobe can be fun too; just look at some of those hilarious crash reports :)
http://log.maniacalrage.net/tagged/cs4cr
Maybe this is a strange question, but why are you using Dreamweaver for file management?!
You should probably clarify the spritz part, I wouldn't want some kinky Dutchman showing up at your doorstep and expecting something entirely different :)
(unfortunately) I am not a designer either! When I opened the page, it design just felt a bit "old", e.g. not very "web2.0" like, if you know what I mean.

I think, that a bit less of clutter and a better focus on the important parts of the site (the search bar, and a clear message what value the site provides) would definitively help.

Further, something like "example searches" or "last searches" might be beneficial as well, e.g. to showcase the application. Just my 2cts ...

hth, cheers
> They are there at the will of the democratically elected Iraqi government in a deployment sanctioned by the UN Security Council.

Please. The alternative is a total power vacuum, you can't really say that they're there because the locals invited them in.
How did that crap get 4 points on HN ?
So much for the "No worries, Apple is going to enforce its policies selectively, it's really only about Adobe." argument.
Presenting innovation in European software houses
yes really, its set by a 1979 amendment.