skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We already tried that. Remember the late 90's? IE4/5/6? Microsoft via Windows/IE are still in the best spot to push the proprietary web. They may have only 50% market share but that's quite an advantage over 15% for WebKit and 25% for Firefox unless they combine forces. As long as Windows remains dominate on the desktop ~90% of people can simply click on IE to access an IE-only website. Before too long they'll forget Chrome or Firefox ever existed. Few sane developers will exclude 50% of the market.
The Coming Collapse of Kleiner Perkins, the Green Economy, and VC as a Whole
this makes the assumption that a bank re-finances it's entire balance sheet at ~0.
It almost serves as an example of how cross-platform targeting can deliver a poor product.
Why does he have a vested interest in making it fail? Could he not change his mind and allow Adobe onto the platform? It's not like he's never changed his mind in the past (the Intel vs PPC 'Megahurtz Myth' comes to mind).
I looked a bit at this (UML tools, etc.) a few years ago, but did not pursue it.

Anything interesting going on, or pointers to an overview of the state of the art ?
You should keep reading for a good laugh - the rest is very amusing.
TI INSIDE Online - Número de assinantes de banda larga fixa cresce 13% em 2009
It's so hard to grasp that the author even uses 'hypercritical' as an adjective to denote an instance of hypocrisy.
IMHO one of the main reasons for the success of OS X and the iPhone/iPad platform is due to web browsers. Imagine a world where web browsers didn't exist but only specific "thick clients" that used the Internet as a web service to access and store data. Almost all these clients would be originally developed for Windows (Flash player was) with Mac and *nix as an after thought. What if you couldn't access Facbook, gmail, Twitter, etc through a web browser? Without the ability to do your day to day activities on a non Window's platform, how many users would make the jump to a Mac or an iPod/Phone/Pad?
I don't think evolution has a whole lot to do with this. Evolution takes place on a much longer time frame, so we're mostly talking about cultural norms here. Furthermore, whatever "trait" leads to accumulating sports cars and mcmansions is not heritable.

There's something called the Matching Hypothesis in sociology that basically says people end up pairing with those on the same "level" (in whichever way that person's culture defines status). i.e. an 8 takes home an 8-ish from the bar, or rich guy gets supermodel. But most everyone ends up matching up with some one else, and flashy-guy isn't improving his gene pool by mating with brain-dead hottie, so I don't think nature is the culprit here.

(However, less educated (for simplicity, let's equate that to less intelligent) people do have a higher birth rate. So the world is getting dumber, but for different reasons! :) )

@euro, we need to work on changing cultural norms (more education, more sustainability, less consumerism) like you suggest in order to better the world.
Ask HN: How did Academia.edu get their .edu domain?
Anyone have insight into the specifics / origins of Academia's .edu domain? Here's what I've dug up so far:

Educause is the registrar for all .edu domains. Their terms state:

Eligibility for a .edu domain name is limited to U.S. postsecondary institutions that are institutionally accredited, i.e., the entire institution and not just particular programs, by agencies on the U.S. Department of Education’s list of Nationally Recognized Accrediting Agencies. These include both "Regional Institutional Accrediting Agencies" and "National Institutional and Specialized Accrediting Bodies" recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.

The Cooperative Agreement between EDUCAUSE and the U.S. Department of Commerce specifies that all .edu names in existence as of October 29, 2001 are "grandfathered", regardless of current or past eligibility requirements.

------

So, it only makes sense if they held it prior to 10/29/01 (or purchased it / leased it from another party).

Any thoughts?
Sort of. They're penned inside Gaza which isn't very big (maybe 10X the size of manhattan), they can't leave or trade, and Israel bans such threatening imports as concrete, which "could be weaponized".

What they have in the way of school are a bunch of brainwashing institutions run by Hamas trying to create perfect islamic soldiers.

This isn't to take sides in the conflict, Hamas and Israel are both contributing to the hopelessness of every day life for average people in Gaza. But let's not minimize it by virtue of a couple of statistics regarding TV ownership.
I'd really rather not start this debate. Suffice it to say that there are effects that 3.3.1 has other than just blocking Flash.
I always thought that the dictatorial(1) attitude towards what can go on an iPhone was temporary: long enough for a healthy development ecosystem to establish itself, basically.

Once competitors become credible, and openness becomes a relevant argument for average customers, there's no harm in also allowing cross-platform software that sucks: good software will hopefully already be there, and customers will have been educated to expect a certain level of quality on Apple platforms.

(1) in the antique Roman sense (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dictator)
I see some of his points, but he is missing the bigger point. (And Steve's letter actually fails here too)

They want to keep flash out of the mobile device space, so arguing about creating crappy desktop apps is a red herring.
Ah yes, the new more powerful standard. Agreed by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, etc, etc, etc, etc.

Standards are for lowest common denominator and almost by design are never, ever simple enough - see e.g. SOAP vs REST, XML vs JSON (Dave Winer be damned).
Really? I leave mine running for weeks on end with no issues. I try to keep it up to date but usually let the updates stew for a month before upgrading. iTunes is indispensable software for me, and I don't own an iPhone, iPad, iPod or any of that. Nor do I use it for purchasing music. Strictly as a music organizer/player, I think it is fantastic and integrates perfectly with the operating system.

That being said, the last time I used iTunes on Windows it was about as enjoybable as waiting for a Java Applet to load up.
Privacy is Expensive.
Look! I did something! It looks good on TV and 98% of the voters are not directly hurt by it.

Looks good, gets votes, it is good.
Nobody pays for the flash player, but maybe adobe makes a few dollars off it's $4500 Flash Media Server licenses?

I'm sure Adobe is cool with killing that income stream since you wrote them this nice letter though.
There are plenty of people that are employed full-time to work on Open Source software. Don't perpetuate the myth that all Open Source software is created by people 'in their free time.'
The author seems to neglect the legitimate practical problems of Adobe gaining market power on the iPhone platform.

If Adobe creates a translation layer from flash to cocoa, and developers use it en masse, then an issue within the translation layer becomes far more problematic: instead of rejecting the developer who wrote the bad code, they have to reject a whole host of apps from innocent developers who used an off-the-shelf third-party framework. As the number of these apps increases, the pressure grows on Apple to work around the problem rather than simply force Adobe to behavior properly. Over time these workarounds corrupt the system they're building and set them down the path of Microsoft.

Not that this is an insurmountable concern, but there are practical matters beyond app quality or lock-in.
I have often gone directly to the video file and played it directly. It seems to work better than iTunes on OS X. I really wish they would just hire a team to do the look and feel on Windows separately. It would improve both platforms.

I do wonder if the trend to use WebKit for a lot more things will continue.
re: extracting wikipedia data

someone's already done this for you. see: dbpedia.org
You're not understanding me.

You say A is better than B, objectively.

I'm telling you that B suffices for my purposes. Given that, the fact that A is objectively better than B doesn't really matter. That fact's importance is subjective. You find it important. I do not.

So you should recognize that what you find as a fault is not necessarily a problem for others, and therefore not necessarily a problem for the project.
If widespread filtering means a founder couldn't get a salaried gig long enough to pay the bills and accumulate some savings, that's a worst-case problem they need to be aware of. I keep hearing it really is rough out there without a degree, but I started out with one so I don't actually know.
"This was a great business pivot."

Yes, indeed. Would love to hear more details about it. Mixergy interview maybe?
Live-Blogging With Adobe CEO
I could refute almost every single point in the first set of arguments.
Design Patterns for Distributed Non-Relational Databases
Hang on, I mention the fact that WSJ is hopelessly biased, and you respond with a link to an even more biased source?

Ok, let's back up and try to engage your brain for a second. So you have a set of 10 year projections there. Those are predictions about the future. With me so far?

Now think about what they were on January 15, 2009 as opposed to January 25, 2009.

Do you think that the act of Obama taking office changed the future and mandated a ton of future government spending? Or do you think these might be fundamentals that we were going to have to deal with regardless?

For bonus points: How much of those future deficits would you guess have to do with the increasing cost of healthcare?

And I'll leave out entirely what they might look like if we hadn't just endured 8 years of studied fingers-in-the-ears idiocy from the Bush administration. Remember that surplus in 2000?

Heritage and WSJ are concerned about deficits. Who did they support in 2000 again?
I've been trying to find stats on how much adobe makes off the flash media server product. Not sure on the long term viability of FMS anyway due to the adoption of HTML5 video.
I know this is heresy. but someone should start working on the next thing. Gopher got replaced.
Article full of emotions, disconnected ideas and "facts", no real arguments :(

Good luck looking at tiny progress bars when upgrading your ABC app, I'll just press refresh.

Oh, and how do you intend to share the ABC news stories with your friends? abc://article ?
In my experience, `do-release-upgrade` works seamlessly and you shouldn't fear upgrading. It's part of the upgrade-manager-core package.
Building a Startup Ecosystem in Japan
So long, Euro? No. Seriously?

Meanwhile, in reality, it was about time for the euro to come down against the dollar. Macroeconomically too, of course, but on a personal level a ~10% effective gross wage increase (or reversal of decrease to be precise) is quite alright with me.
The author openly conceeds the points that consumers will actually care about - performance, security, and proprietary nature. It's hard to claim that it's a "marketing trick to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers" when you agree with large tracts of the author's argument.

Their main point, that he's somehow a hypocrite because Apple haven't used the latest tech for everything, entirely misses the point he's making - Putting a 3rd party layer between your platform and developers can cause a lag in new features being used. He then states he's mostly worried that Adobe would have really amplified this lag, as "Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms". He doesn't say it's bad that they've been this slow, just that they are this slow. If it takes them 10 years to adopt Cocoa, why would anything in iPhone 4.0 turn up in Flash till 2015? His claim is that middleware lag is a bad thing is not weakened by iTunes for Windows being crappy - if anything, it's strengthened.

He makes his position very clear - "we sell more devices because we have the best apps", and feels they get the best apps without middleware. There's nothing inconsistent with this position, whilst still taking advantage of other platforms lack of restrictions. I'm not even going to deal with the authors claim that h.264 is as proprietary as Flash: A standard that was developed by a committee, in the open, with many implementations and a licensing scheme for anyone, versus a commercial closed product developed by a single company and no competitive implementations? Sure, there's no difference at all there.
Pssh, a lot more love went into the ORM than ever went into a sausage.
Actually the schools are mainly run by the UN. Parents can choose a Hamas school if they want though.

And everyday life is most certainly not hopeless for the average person. Why do you think that?

They are penned in though, and I'm certain that they hate that. But from a practical point of view it doesn't prevent much - lots of people never travel far from their home town.

If they wanted change in their worldview, they could. If they ever actually have have their perpetually delayed elections, we'll find out what they really want.
Apple doesn't want to include Flash because Apple can't update Flash. Apple can't fix bugs in Flash, add new features to Flash, and so on. Apple has to rely on Adobe to fix these problems, and historically, on the Mac platform, Adobe has done a piss-poor job of it.

I'm not aware of any situation in which Apple has prevented Adobe from going about their day-to-day business with e.g. Photoshop or Illustrator, or has hindered their ability to fix bugs or add features to those products.
What's really surprising here is such a long post with Job's name on it, in place of the one- or two-word emails we're used to. Is Steve going to start blogging now?
Throw out your templates (Use pure Python instead)
”Child Pornography Is Great,” Anti-Pirates Say
The manifesto is in the module's doc string. I met Tavis at Django Ski and he is a very cool guy!
Except that the M&Ms that were banned are slower, use more power, and crash more often than M&Ms written in Objective-C using the proper APIs.
Exactly. Though I would go even farther than that. Similar to "People don't pay for drills, they pay for holes", "People don't pay for data, they pay for decisions". Data without actionable decisions are worthless.
Neither. It's just pointing out one of many FUD items in Steve's memo.
Stratified JavaScript
keep decrypting keys offsite

Yes, you can do that with Tarsnap. More importantly, Tarsnap also allows you to keep deletion keys offsite.
When we launched posterous in 2008, yes it was missing a bunch of features. But look at us now (or actually, in a month, we have a lot of stuff about to launch). We'll have everything all other blog platforms have, and more.

But SIX YEARS after gmail's launch, they can't say the same.

For Posterous, and any other web app, we'd have to decide the tradeoff. If we focused on one browser, could we add enough value to that experience that it's worth dropping support for Ubuntu Firefox?

Each browser and each developer should be able to decide this, instead of being slowed down by the platform as a whole.
What restrictions are there on labor moving between states in the EU? I'm not aware of any at all - witness the large numbers of Poles who now work in the UK (which I admit I rather like).
I hate PGP. You can't upgrade. Every time you upgrade you pray you'll be able to boot and inevitably stuff breaks. Symantec buying this is the only possible way it could get even worse.
I highly doubt that people who have tried chrome or Firefox will forget it existed. they may not use those browsers at work right now. but corporate apps are changing rapidly towards true open web-standards-based browser solutions. and as that transition accelerates its hard to see how the fastest browser doesn't win. my money's on chrome.
I'd consider it hopeless if I were there. Not many places on earth I'd be less excited about living than there.

As far as whether "they" could change.. awfully hard when you've got Israel on one side and Hamas on the other. Not much room for empowered moderate politics there. Hamas could change, sure.. but until they do, nobody without an army is going to change anything.
I think it's more our current ruling class than the system per se, although that depends on how you define "system".

No system can work if you have fools running it. Our big C Constitutional system has worked better in times past when better people were in office ... and worked worse when worse people were in, e.g. Hoover and FDR making their economic mess worse and prolonging and worsening the agony.

It's just not that bad yet. While e.g. Cash for Clunkers was pure "broken window" bogus economics, do we have anything quite as vile as the Agricultural Department destroying food and preventing its production while at the same time they calculate 1/4 of the nation is malnourished (which the DoD confirmed in the WWII draft)?

Well, maybe this is as perverse, although not hardly as vile. As grellas details in some length, in a period of bad economic times (starting with the dot.com crash) our ruling class as seen fit to steadily destroy the foundations for startups. And it's a general bipartisan thing, e.g. a ruling class problem.

There are, realistically (ignoring the rosy projections of going below a trillion in FY 12, a Presidential election year), trillion dollar annual Federal deficits stretching out as far as the eye can see. Where is this money going to come from? Not from new enterprises and new industries, there will be few if any new Apples, Suns or Googles ... hmmm, Microsoft managed to bootstrap itself, but such opportunities don't come along often and the computers and their components that ran Microsoft Basic and so on were largely/almost entirely not self-funded.

Bleah.
Just because you don't understand the code it doesn't mean it is awful. I am not defending django at all since I use webpy.

Saying the code is awful without proving why is just a way to explain to yourself why you are not understanding the code. It makes you relieved that it is not your fault. However it is your brain deceiving itself.

Blame it on yourself first then on the code.
Yeah, if it's not in their quarterly reports, it's probably secret. I know youtube uses a "pseudostreaming" trick, so they don't have to pay for FMS, and now there is also the Wowza alternative, which is cheaper.

I honestly think that adobe flash video will be pervasive much longer than you might think. Do you know how to send a live video stream in HTML5, in case you wanted to make the HTML5 analog of chatroulette? Neither does anyone else.

You won't see justin.tv switching from flash any time soon.
You sure are. I worked on the HR software previously used by Google, so I know firsthand a little bit about how the application process. I'm guessing you previously worked for a well known IT company and/or went to a top 50 university for a CS degree?
> Not many places on earth I'd be less excited about living than there.

Really? They have among the highest life expectancies in the world, and all the health indexes (maternal death, infant mortality, etc) are very high.

I'd hate living in places like Rawanda much much more - actually pretty much anyplace in Africa, despite not being penned in.

But I could see why you'd hate living in a place controlled by Hamas though.
Game Mechanics - the new black
You've apparently been eating the wrong kinds of sausages.
Google Earth + CRE Data = GAME CHANGER
Actually I think it depends who your customers of that data are. If you're supplying that data to existing customers as "nice-to-know" details, you're right on.

But perhaps you run an advertising-based business and you're looking to increase your CPM. Well then, those details are suddenly quite valuable for advertisers if they can target a very specific audience.
It was actually a really tough decision to make. Having to let go of something you poured blood (literally), sweat and tears over. In the end, the decision was the right one. The business Picwing is in now is profitable, has a much larger market, and scales better. Plus, something about mailing baby photos to grandparents makes me feel good inside.
Setting up Hudson for small Teams
Erlang is the only language where event-driven applications do not need separate callback function for every network request.

Won't any language that can do continuations or coroutines also work?
Turn off the social features in Google Reader
iTunes sucking on Windows doesn't make them hypocrites, it helps prove their point.

I'm sure Apple would rather not have to release a Windows version of iTunes, but it's necessary to sell more iPods.
I think we should have leaderboard for highest up-voted threads. PG?
Wow, as soon as I read the description of the service, I instantly saw a need for this and realized it hasn't been met. I'm not a parent, but I can definitely see the value here.

Guys, I wish you all the best.

P.S., this brings up the market for services that operate with the real world without your direct intervention. I'm sure there can be other uses for this.
Domain record activated: 10-May-1999

from: http://whois.domaintools.com/academia.edu
I sense brlewis and ourdoings will be adding a new feature soon ...
WebSocket, Canvas, Web Workers, HTML5 drag and drop API, WebGL, O3D, Application Cache API, Chrome/FF (and possibly other browsers) allow web apps to open mailto: links, FireBug, Web Developer Toolbar, etc. etc.
On Secure and Agile Collaboration
I'm also waiting for a second source. The only other story I've seen on this bill was also from WSJ, and also written with a heavy spin on it.

This paper's editorial page will argue against anything the current majority party does. Their news reporting is fine, but it's widely known that the editorial page leans strongly to the right.

This same editorial page argued that the healthcare bill contained death panels. Republican politicians, including Palin and Dick Cheney, are regular writers.
Arch Linux developer, KDEmod & Charkra Project Leader, passes away
I think he mostly argues about the fact that Jobs stated Flash not being and open standard as a reason not to support it. I hope we can all agree that Apple has never really been an open standards company and as the author points out, they've mostly stated this for marketing purposes while not fully embracing the idea.
O'Reilly Ebooks: Buy One Get One Free (through tomorrow)