skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"For me, with Ruby, it's that I only know Ruby. I don't know the underlying C."

Most of the standard library is written in Ruby, and my guess is that there are things in there that could use some love.
define immature
Seems like link bait...someone just wanting an argument.
I don't have a congressman. It's all too easy to think that this is an American thing, but Youtube is a worldwide site, and hundreds of millions of people are not in a position to do anything about this.

edit: parodies are legally protected and if youtube is willing to profit of these things they should be willing to defend them.

If the removal was automated (which is definitely a possibility) then youtube should do a better job because clearly going by sound track or a significant part of the image alone is going to remove all kinds of stuff that have a legal status that is different than an actual copy.
Ask HN:  Do I charge for beta?
I'm working on a app that I want to use freemium on release. Do I charge for beta? Will it seem like I'm taking away features when I release?
Yes, and Brett and I have discussed grossly improving the dev.python.org site. It's on the plan, but somewhat orthogonal to what I'm asking for from the community. Personally, I'm quite aware of how to contribute :)
Wouldn't it be great to have a classical church pulpit to rest your laptop on, then have your Holy Code propagate to the masses?

Maybe at 0800-RENT-A-CHURCH ;-)
You might want to check out MXHR, Mixed xml http requests for your next article and benchmarking.
Still, if this innovation makes lethality accidents 90% less likely per use, but that newfound confidence makes usage 20X more frequent, net fatalities could go up.

It may be good to have new options, but there's still danger during the adjustment period.
> There's certainly a case to be made, but why should youtube foot the bill for making it?

Because they made good money of it?
you sir, have balls of steel.

could you comment on how things have changed for you over the years?
I matched your dream job with patio11's comment :
"I think I've got my dream job, but three years ago I said the same thing about the last job, and three years prior I said the same thing about the job before that, so your guess is as good as mine what my dream job will be three years from now."
Forget about Google... Facebook is gunning for Claritas and other profiling companies that have been doing this for years, though behind the scenes and not in real time (see http://epic.org/privacy/profiling/ for more about profiling).

Google may have (deservedly) gotten a black eye for the Buzz debacle, but they have a lot of cultural DNA that values privacy (their CEO aside) and at least some systems in place to allow management of personal data (as well as data exodus).

Facebook on the other hand is clearly all business and will bend privacy concepts till their either break or users are conditioned to accept lack-thereof as the new standard (all in the name of "sharing").
This is absolutely true; especially, I find, here on HN where my concise, clear comments tend to go down better.

(and, yes, this is deliberately concise :))
Which Linux tablet do you have? I was tempted by the iPad, but if there is a good Linux one, you got me. Also, does it sync with, what I assume is, your Android?
Bruise me Elmo?
Man, talk about banner blindness! It took me 10 seconds to find the Facebook bar in that picture, and I knew (approximately) where to look!
Here is Hitlers reaction :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBO5dh9qrIQ
One thing I'd suggest is finding people to mentor new contributors and sort of take a bit of joint ownership of the patch until it's at the point where it's very likely to be merged.

After one experience like this most people would be ready to submit patches on their own...

I think it would be cool to have the community provide this sort of "training wheels" to help people get past all of the roadblocks and not feel relegated to dealing with bug report paperwork (as valuable as that is)...

The conundrum with projects like Python is that the people talented enough to submit useful patches are usually not the ones who have the time to do so.
This would not be the number one story on any other site like this on the internet.
The threadmill could be used to generate the electricity for your PC. Choose a model like hamsters have, a human-size one: http://www.impactlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/hamster-...
Any plans for an Un-Like-O-Matic?
From his about section:

"After 21 years in 8 high technology companies, I retired in 1999. I started my last company, E.piphany, in my living room in 1996. My other startups include two semiconductor companies, Zilog and MIPS Computers, a workstation company Convergent Technologies, a consulting stint for a graphics hardware/software spinout Pixar, a supercomputer firm, Ardent, a computer peripheral supplier, SuperMac, a military intelligence systems supplier, ESL and a video game company, Rocket Science Games.

Total score: two large craters (Rocket Science and Ardent), one dot.com bubble home run (E.piphany) and several base hits."

Epiphany, Inc. (previous NASDAQ symbol: EPNY), previously known as E.piphany and Epiphany Marketing Software, was a company developing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. On September 29, 2005, Epiphany was acquired by SSA Global Technologies.[1] Epiphany CRM software is now produced by Infor, which acquired SSA Global in 2006.
SimCity Player Spends 3 years on optimal city design
JavaScript Justifies Everything (well, text anyway)
That'd be quite interesting. Maybe if I have some time this weekend.
I understand what you offer, but have no idea how you actually implement it. Screenshots of your app and maybe a chart of the steps you take to get my info to all those places would be useful.

I just don't see how you can automatically get my info to reporters, etc... or at least in a way that doesn't spam them and get the right info to the right reporter (they each focus on an area).
The question is how can u get people to re-read the comments page for new comments? Maybe something like a "(5 new comments)" next to the comments link might work??
The nice thing about Ubuntu/Gnome is how easy it is to customize. As long as Emerald Theme Manager still works on 10.04, this release should be great.

I also prefer the window buttons on the right and it's good to know that we have a choice. On my MacBook I just have to accept it as is.

One thing I would love to see from Ubuntu is clean fonts working out of the box like Windows and Mac. I think that would be game changer for desktop Linux.
Ah certainly. They are all tools - you use the correct tool for the situation. For entertainment purposes I would want to make sure Flash was in my tool belt.
My point was to get something more solid.
A certain political blogger, in another context (http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/04/the-fifte...), remarked:

[T]here are really two ways to break news. A Type 1 scoop is a story that if you don’t break, just won’t be broken. A Type 2 scoop is a pure race for priority... [such scoops] are structurally similar to “breaking news” but they don’t have any real value.

Revealing what’s in the next iPhone is a Type 2 scoop: everyone was going to find out this information as soon as the product was actually released, so Gizmodo didn’t provide much of a public service by publishing it ahead of schedule.

If journalists didn’t get so much attention paid to their Type 2 scoops then maybe they’d devote more resources to breaking Type 1 scoops.

(Disclaimer of interest: My startup was recently bought by Nokia, which, duh, competes with Apple in the smartphone market.)
Cornell Won't Ban the iPad
Other freemium apps have given the beta away for free with the promise of a lifetime discount for users of the beta. That seems like a nice compromise to me.
I dig the Ikea furniture in the control room. Eat your own dogfood...
Well, now that 100+ million people heard of it, it's a good time to pull the sample and tell them to go buy it (yeah, I know, but consider a conversion rate of 0.01% ...)

P.S. I don't really care. Just pointing out that this one probably ran its course, and empty links may make them more money than handing out lollipops. Or not. Not MBA'ing this.
I know the Fog Creek office has them. http://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#
And, if giving direction to a newcomer - I'd pass her the slimmer volume 9 times out of 9.
The source the article cites [1] contains this sentence:

These videos were blocked by YouTube’s Content ID system, not taken down via DMCA notices

This probably means that neither YouTube nor Constantin Films took any active steps to take down the video. It was probably all automatic through content fingerprints.

It works like this: Content providers, e.g. Constantin Films, create fingerprints for their catalogue with a fingerprinting service, e.g. Audible Magic. Sites with user generated content e.g. YouTube check any uploaded content
for a matching fingerprint. If anything gets identified as copyrighted content it gets blocked. I work at a video platform, and this is how we deal with copyrighted content.

Usually, this happens during upload, my guess is that YouTube started to use such a service at some point and now cleans their content, which takes some time.

I think the parodies are only collateral damage. One more reason to reform copyright.

http://openvideoalliance.org/2010/04/hitler-downfall-meme-ge...
thanks, that sounds like a good idea. I'm afraid I wasn't clear in the title, I obviously do not mean to charge for the regular part of the site!
Anyone have any comparison between this and flot or jqPlot? I'm going to be implementing client-side graphs on my site, preferably using JSON as my data format, and I'm trying to make sure I'm on the "right side of history."
The fact that the _Downfall_ producers didn't buy Youtube ads to pop up when the parodies were played just shows how stupid they are. I mean really! How else is a movie about Hitler, in German (!), going to get worldwide mindshare? Just goes to show all the luddite media knuckleheads aren't in Hollywood...
I don't know if I'm the only one, but there are 3 things I do as soon as I install Ubuntu:

1.) Configure the video card

2.) Install cairo-dock

3.) Mess with theme packages and desktop backgrounds

I think that the biggest advantage Linux distros tend to have is customization.

It doesn't really matter too much what the default skins for various GUI components are, as I will be changing them anyway.

I know that this doesn't speak to the casual computer user that much, but really, why should I suffer through OS X, which is about 80% of what I want (and doesn't run on 'regular' hardware without license-breaking), when I can install ubuntu or debian or gentoo, customize it, and get 100% of what I want.
Maybe there could be an 'introduction to submitting patches to Python' tutorial with a VM that includes:

- A Python implementation with some obvious and easy to find bugs (plus hints).

- A checklist of the patch notes/emails that would be expected.

- The e-mail address of someone who will read and respond to the submitted patch and offer feedback. (Should be low traffic, and it'd be worth answering the email to get a new patch submitter.)
I think you're missing the point here, that's not just a 'sample' but a reworking of the original, either with subtitles (most of them) or with a voice over (a very few, but some really good ones).

So watching the movie is not going to give back the parodies.
If you're used to latex, there's no comparison :-)
Long but fascinating presentation made by Steve Blank at Google Tech Talks in December, 2007. I was a history major as an undergraduate and wanted to be a professor of history. This presentation reminds me why - history can be presented in methodical and detailed fashion but it need not be boring if the person presenting it has a lively sense of the human drama associated with any given era, as Mr. Blank very evidently does.

His particular topic here: the military history of Silicon Valley, by which he opens up a hugely important era in the Valley's history that we scarcely consider today, to wit, the technology developed in and around WWII.

Well worth listening to, even in snippet for those who lack the time to sit through the whole 56 minutes.
There's a flaw in assuming that an undergraduate liberal arts education is terminal. For instance, "between 1986 and 1995, more people earning PhD degrees in the earth sciences graduated from Carleton (50) than any other four-year college."

And that's from a tiny liberal arts school with a total population of ~2,000 students.
PerfectSight: Self Evaluation of Visual Accommodation with a cell phone.
An optometry solution combines inexpensive optical elements and interactive software components to create a new optometry device suitable for developing countries.
IBM highlights the Java 7 up and coming features
HN RFC: critique/break v1 of my app, Supermailer (a simple mailing list service)
Headless Web Workers: Does the web need background apps?
Why do you write Ikea product names in all-caps?
TED Blog: Build a tower, build a team: Tom Wujec on TED.com
I doubt it. That flare reaches out probably several times the diameter of the earth.
Hear, hear.

Main reason I don't like using Firefox: It runs an update every friggen time I start it.
The adjustment period is definitely going to dangerous but not nearly on par with tasers. I'm arguing this is a known, predictable issue unlike tasers which should prevent some of the stupidity that's been happening with tasers.

Additionally this type of weapon is less effective at stopping a person at short range than a taser is. (It's also much larger, more like a rifle than a pistol) This is more of a type of weapon that a SWAT team would use than your regular police officers. I hope this would reduce the chances for abuse.
Nice. Sounds cheap.
Mandatory silent updates are great for security and stability fixes; the complaints people have about it are when the web browser changes the UI or breaks compatibility with extensions. Maybe a hybrid approach would be best.
We know how at least one of the other booted founders feels, and he suggests he understood there was always a risk the money wouldn't come through:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/15/the-curious-case-of-vancouv...

The 'deal' was reversed in that no equity was requested even though some material assistance was provided. If hypothetically a startup was willing and able to continue in Vancouver even without the foreseen investment, the whole episode could have still been net-positive. If the startup was derailed by the detour to Vancouver (as appears to be the Status.ly situation), the whole episode appears net-negative.

If there's not enough cash to make the full investment, and already ~$10K or more has been spent on the companies released from the program, what's the additional 'compensation' amount that would be fair? Airfare back home? Some hypothetical opportunity cost that was forgone based on their hopes in Vancouver?

Jamie might have a legal case but if there's one email where BL reports, and Jamie acknowledges, that the funding is still pending and conditional on other uncertain factors, that case could be shot.
u r rite abt that lol

Or to be more precise, please use proper English. If English is your second language, we are forgiving -- unless your first language is AOLspeak.
That's true for the social plugins, but if you've authenticated with the site (e.g., click the "log in" button at the top of any CNN page and log in with FB), any 3rd party running javascript on the page will have access to all of the data you've allowed the parent site to access.

Facebook uses their parent-child-parent iframe tricks to assign a first-party cookie for the host domain. This cookie contains the Facebook user id and the OAuth access token used to make requests to the Graph API.

Any javascript running on the page can snatch that cookie and send the data back up to its mothership, which can then impersonate the host domain to make API requests on behalf of the user. Fun stuff.
Metafilter does that, and I think that helps people continue a discussion that they are interested in, regardless of its effect on "reputation". HN does a similar thing with the "threads" link, but it only helps for conversations the user is active in (to encourage involvement?).

My thinking on late (and hence low-exposure) contributions is more along the lines of weighting. If 10 people read a comment and 5 upvote it, it should be rewarded similarly to a comment with 100 reads and 50 upvotes.
This is cool, but I'm a bit underwhelmed that NASA labels its OWN immages as "stunning".

Seriously "NASA's New Eye on the Sun Delivers Stunning First Images" is the kind of press flack hucksterism we'd decry if any other firm promoted itself that transparently.
Craiglist's amazing per-employee revenue figures
We[1] have more text, a bigger video and other pictures here, too:

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/21...

[1] Speaking as one of the site developers, not to take credit from the scientists
Does Adobe Flash support exporting to SVG? Adobe should capitalize on all this SVG hype and make an advanced animated SVG / javascript editor, because there aren't any right now AFAIK.
Is there something different about Putty on Vista? We use it on XP for tunneling all the time.
That is some really scary stuff in the link you gave!!! People need to realize that it's not worth the $0.25 off a can of green beans you get by using a loyalty card, if a sleazy merchant is going to swoop in at some vulnerable time in your life and help separate you from hundreds or thousands of your dollars.
Vasco Rossi sul palco per il primo concerto su iPhone
Python has always worked quite well for me. If I've found bugs, they've generally been fixed in the next version. This is in comparison to PHP and its associated libraries, where I feel like I'm constantly patching to keep the house of cards standing.
Did anybody notice that Firefox 3.6 and later forgets address bar history?
Great link! I have looked into using SVG for mapping applications. It would simplify development of mapping apps. However, size of a country map with some detail can be pretty big, around 2Mb so it wouldn't play well on e.g. mobile apps where the vectors could come to use. Anyway, there are many free maps here to play with http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SVG_maps
> Why not? It's your hardware and you can do what you want with it.

good luck buying a copy of OSX and running it on a VM. Welcome to the QA department hell.

Maybe google will leave the US now too because of the DMCA.
You need to explain on the front page why I'd want to signup. List some features, give some info. What does it do? What makes it great? Why should I bother?
Still using those ugly orange folders, though. Hrm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
I hear there are some tools for converting, but never used one. Try a search after swf2svg
Love it. I would sign up if I had the money.

1. Clear yes
2. Very - the metric thing is very important.
This would be the same Journal of Climate that Mann was once an editor of (http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=201)?

The invocation of "peer review" doesn't mean anything (good) nowadays in this field, as previously discussed (see also what the CRU emails revealed about ... management of "acceptable" journals and editors), and a single peer reviewed paper by the CRU circle including Mann is less than convincing, let alone definitive. This email from McIntyre and McKitrick http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=458 should raise some serious questions about it.
What's true about it? That, within certain contrived scenarios involving existential threats to humankind, humanities knowledge becomes useless?

Science and technology are important, and deserve more respect and funding than they get in this society, but not to the detriment of all else.
It could go either way. We're already well into Poe's Law territory.
I think the blog posting (the mea culpa) was carefully crafted to avoid taking a stance that could cost them money, but I think it is crystal clear that if the situation had been outlined beforehand (that the money was not on hand) that they would have never made the move.

That's called pre-contractual information, which is supposed to be given freely so the other party realizes the risk. They did nothing to warn them the money was not available at all, and might never become available.

In a court case that would probably have 'legs', even if getting to a judgment would probably cost more than it's worth, and they seem to bank on that not happening. But there are more ways to skin a cat and the internet is a great place to put such things to right.

The way out is to compensate them for the expenses they made that they would not have made if they would have been properly informed beforehand, so that includes the funds to re-locate back to where ever they came from and a sum of several thousand dollars to get started again.

Figure another 5 to 10 grand per founder and you should call it quits and consider the matter settled as good as possible given the circumstances.

If they don't have the cash they could do an iou redeemable a year from now, or when they take on their next round of funding.

You break it, you own it, and a real 'sorry' includes compensation.

We agree about the one email, if that exists it's a different story, but then I think that mea culpa would never have been written, clearly there is a party at fault here, by their own admission.
> And lots of people have Bluetooth turned off to save battery

As opposed to GPS?
How RDF Databases Differ from Other NoSQL Solutions
Braess's paradox
Man, you guys are smart and fast. Solving problems overnight... Awesome.
A moving square, from a couple lines of code, distributed to millions of computers, smart phones, other devices running various operating systems and zillions of different hardware configurations.

The last part is stunning and does not exist outside of browsers.
DMCA does not apply to anything you own.

Was it ever used against consumers that don't try to make a shop out of modified equipment?
I used to have an obsession about reserving a great name or two whenever a new service came out. I worked on my own shareware application, and I never knew where I would branch out for my next app.

I registered apps.facebook.com/docs when Facebook Apps first came out. Facebook took that name (the Canvas URL) away from me within days, however.

I still have my three letter twitter account name, as well as usernames like "Call" and "Cards" on one of the biggest and most-advertised poker sites, from when they were in beta. I've found it interesting to see which companies would take back their names after realizing they let a good one go, and which would not.
This comment did not deserve 43 points :)
The big question for me is: if I upgrade to 10.04, will it by default overwrite my colour scheme and other things I've set up on my desktop?

Because it took me time to set up the colours / fonts / effects / etc the way I like them, and I'm buggered if I'm going to let some arrogant bastard tell me I have to either (i) have my desktop they way he wants it not the way I want it, or (ii) re-do all that work.
you'll see a slew of 'copycat' companies getting investment if a company in a certain league grows big

This is why I'm a cynic -- you don't even need a company to get big, you just need the field to be "hot". Back in 2000 I was cold-called by two VCs wanting to invest in my work on distributed computing (I had recently announced the computation of the quadrillionth bit of Pi).

They were interested for no reason beyond the fact that everybody else was interested in the field. I told them that there was no workable business model and that I wouldn't take their money under such conditions -- so they went and gave their money to someone who was willing to ignore reality in order to justify taking the money.

About $100M went into that field in 2000, and none of it came back out. Such a horrible waste.