skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many VoIP companies these days allow you to set a daily / monthly spending limit that will stop your calls in case you get hacked, for example. I'd really like to see that kind of service becoming a mainstream feature on mobile networks (would also help with stolen handsets to some extent).
I actually don't have words for how sad this is..
Hotels on the Beachfront
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I guess he's adding to his personal experience rather than substituting.
What exactly is noble about them? They were probably savage and barbaric; the complete opposite of noble.
may I add that software patents are non-existent here in Europe. So a codec made here in Europe should not have to worry about infringing anything..
Data visualization - 9 Years of Sleep
A significant number of people have modern browsers but browse with JS disabled (eg NoScript). If your layout relies on JS, you may be making your site inaccessible to them.
Really? Downvoted for providing a summary of the (very long) post? I don't see the logic here.
Or they could have made an announcement. I have seen a lot of reviews and articles clearly mentioning that the link they are posting is an affiliate link and I don't find anything wrong with that. Because they are explicitly saying that it is an affiliate link and it is the choice of a visitor then.

There is nothing wrong with affiliate links, _as long as_ the visitor is aware of it.
I don't think what they are doing is illegal (IANAL, though). But nobody reads TOS, and even if I read something like the above, I would maybe assume they just need that to be able to publish the blog posts at all. It's difficult to get such formulations right - what does "in connection with Posterous and Posterous's business" mean, for example? Does it mean they may do whatever they want to do, as long as they earn money with it? Ie wrap your blog posts into a book and sell it? Print T-Shirts with the drawings you posted?

There is always a certain amount of goodwill in interpreting contracts and TOS. If it turns out that a company is bending the wording to their advantage, it is a natural reaction to leave and avoid the company in the future.
I don't understand this trend of making images in CSS3. Isn't that what SVG is for?
A very important essay:

Vague patent threats are made because "specific statements would allow the victims of this FUD to petition a court for a declaratory judgment of non-infringement."

The MPEG formats are deliberate patent minefields" because the process officially does not take patents into consideration (all parties agree to RAND licensing ahead of time) and every party is determined to make sure the standard includes one or more of theirs even if it's unneeded or detrimental to the standard, so that they'll have cross license status and won't have to pay anything to use it.

(And that's what happens when all parties are playing by the rules. That doesn't always happen (e.g. see Rambus, the RDRAM company) and in general patents are making a hash of the standards process: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1134000)

Most of these patents are "exceptionally narrow, as it's much cheaper and easier to obtain a very narrow patent."

Read the whole thing for the conclusion, which asserts that avoiding this MPEG type mess is the best approach and implies that patent free formats are possible, although of course there's no escaping the possibility of ending up in court going either way (in fact it might be more likely in the patent centric approach).
There have been a few discussions about this topic in the past, and in the end it boils down to the developer being smart about the way he does requests.

I'm quite sure (wish I could remember where I read it) the crawler only actually performs GETs (which makes total sense because GET was always meant for retrieving and listing data), so a smart developer would use other HTTP methods (PUT, POST, DELETE) for actions that have modify existing application data.
I am also not medically trained, but I was present during my wife's two childbirths. I am strongly opposed to described method and would not advice anyone, let alone my wife, to undergo such treatment. Why ? Because delivering a child is a process, during which many things may go wrong and there's a number of possible complications. Baby is stressed, mother is stressed, no one knows in advance, what can go wrong. The staff needs time to react and help the baby (and possibly mother) if needed. I can't see them helping anyone with a machine spinning so fast that centrifugal force ejects a baby. Actually, I can't even imagine the force needed for that, would probably kill the baby and mother.
How about this? http://www.haskell.org/all_about_monads/html/contmonad.html
It's Time to Treat IT Like We Know What We're Doing
The Flash-compiled apps would not be nearly so big if Apple allowed shared libraries to be installed once and loaded dynamically, instead of forcing them to be statically linked into each and every app that uses them, thus bloating app size with redundant code.

But that's crazy talk -- it's not like iPhone OS is an Unix with several[1][2][3] well-defined and proven extension mechanisms, or anything...

[1] http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Develop...

[2] http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/CoreFou...

[3] http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/MacOSX/...
You'll have a patent war on your hands with the Magratheans.
Evidence based smear campaigns
For people working in high tech, LSD usage increased creativity the following day.
You can do the overflowing labels by given the label box a negative left and right margin. Or a negative right margin and a corresponding relative position.

Of course, this gives you no guarantee that there wouldn't be two overlapping labels in adjacent products. To test for and prevent that, you would still be on the hook for some JS, but it would be much simpler than the JS that's already in place. Basically just some jQuery to step through the pairs of adjacent objects and check the overlap of the internal spans containing the text.
Putting these small images together into one file is a good way to speed up the load times of the page.

However, I think the the CSS file would have been smaller with the icons as PNGs in a data URI or by using a single CSS-Sprite. You wouldn't be able to scale the icons, though.
Software startups thrive in SoMa
Palin, October 2, 2008, vice-presidential debate: "The chant is 'drill, baby, drill.' And that's what we hear all across this country in our rallies because people are so hungry for those domestic sources of energy to be tapped into."
The 'Noble Savage' myth is the last vestige of racism still taken seriously by educated Westerners. It seems harmless enough, because the stereotype is positive, but it's still an assumption about moral character based on race.
Here are a few that I'd suggest:

* The purple cow

* Positioning

* 22 immutable laws of marketing
Where do you live, where contracts don't have to involve consideration in both directions?

That consideration doesn't have to be financial, but there has to be something of value in the deal for both sides. Maybe in Posterous's case, a user could argue that providing the rights to use their content was consideration enough, and maybe a court would agree. This is where you start needing a real lawyer.
In the end, this only means the following:

- The C spec permits this behaviour, the Java Spec doesn't
- as a programmer, know the language and the spec that you use

The destroying_world() example only shows that the programmer needs to know the language he is using.
The optimization is in my opinion practical and reasonable in most cases.

Every programmer that depends his program workflow and important decisions on the termination of an infinite loop should be bitch slapped to hell. Do you have another more reasonable example?
The only example for the infinite loop i can think of is the eventloop of some network code. But i fail to see where any code over a few lines doesn't have any side effects.
Palin 2010: [Now that the oil is about to line your shores], I'll pray for you.

http://twitter.com/SarahPalinUSA/status/13132651183
Those shifting, spiral-like patterns that are intermittent throughout the graph, I think those are his holidays (most occur at august), where he, as so many others "like us", turn his night and day around :)
To some extent, I would be more worried about the effect this would have on blogs hosted by Posterous. If I'm reading a blog and I find it doing something sneaky to track my behaviour, I'm not going to care whether it is the blogger or the host service, I'm just going to stick all related domains/IPs in the appropriate kill file under "don't spy on me".
no, you're wrong. the spiral-like patterns are the sleep cycles that gets disrupted by staying up late and waking up late in the day. The holiday are the periods that's all gray -> days with no connect in august
CSS-Sprite is one way to speed up the load time but even though this css file is still much smaller than the size of images used in CSS-Sprite.
And on the other hand the programmer could change icon property(like gradient , radius etc) very easily.
I thought this would be a riff on the 'machine that goes "ping"', but no, it's completely insane.

Wheel of morality, turn turn turn, tell us the lesson that we should learn.
He kinda did say that. And yes, those all gray areas are vacations.
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I'm sorry, but how was my post incorrect?

(a) Terms and conditions aren't worth anything unless they are legally enforceable.

(b) The terms and conditions for just about every blogging or social networking site claim a far-reaching right to use and modify any submitted material, and I've just confirmed that this includes the terms for Posterous.

(c) Whether it is bad PR for them to pull something like this is a different question.
"Preys" not "Prays"
I don't profess to understand the challenges of developing an oil well 5000 ft beneath sea level, but does anyone know why there isn't a valve installed that could be shut off by a submersible?

What I do know is BP initially said it was roughly 1000 barrels/day when they knew it was probably more. So the rate is now at 25 times the original estimate. That's either incompetence or PR disaster control at it's worst.
Aug 2009 - Mar 2010 looks like for all 7 months!
To paraphrase one of the people in the video LSD is like a catalyst: it depends on who you are and where you are.

Against all the benefits that these drugs offer they can also create mental illness. These drugs definitely need some control as they have just enough power to ruin as to enlighten. It would be good to advocate personal choice but widespread use can cause problems with society.
I wonder if I could link LSD to the jerky movement of a very clever professor I know...
Who are you texting 50 times a day?
A friend of mine sees a flying stomach wherever he goes, thanks to LSD.

He dropped out of college, during his senior year. Sad.
I guess some do consider; don't know how many. But if you say that 40% don't save for retirement I just have no idea if it is supposed to be unusual or perfectly normal. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised with any number up to 80%; I suspect most people are reckless and not forward-thinking (judging by myself maybe - I am reckless young man) And - is it supposed to be some special kind of saving scheme that you use for retirement?

The same goes for mutual funds, stock, bonds and. Are all people supposed to have them? Or bank accounts, even. Sure, most people have them now, but some don't. 7% or 16% looks ok to me.

I wanted to communicate that I (and probably many other people) have no frame of reference to relate the information in this infographic to, while the it implies that anyone does. Well, maybe this is not a good infographic after all.
India Bans Chinese Telecom Equipment
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setting a 'don't worry about it' limit in transfer, then charging a /whole lot/ per gigabyte above that is an established (though nearly universally hated) business model for ISPs.

The logic behind the model makes sense; 95% of your customers use so little bandwidth that it doesn't make sense to charge them differently. the cost of having them deal with a variable bill is greater than the cost of the bandwidth. The problem is that you need some way to restrain that 5% who eat enough bandwidth to hurt you.

Many ISPs (myself included) default to rate-limiting or disconnecting users when they go over the 'don't worry about it' quota, and then require users to take some additional action if they wish to pay more for more bandwidth. This is the solution that nearly all low end customers want.

The disadvantage (for the ISP) of rate limiting or disconnecting users when they go over rather than charging a lot is that users are more comfortable approaching the limit if they know the consequence is that their service will stop working until the next billing cycle than if the consequence is a truly massive bill.
Apple shutting Lala - Clould Music via iTunes?
It's not money left on the table. It's an automated way to take a slice of money that was set aside for a non-automated sales process.

I only recently found out about these services, and my first thought was "cool!" But now, it occurs to me that they're built on very shakey ground. They only work if they're not popular. If they start becoming widespread, then the affiliate programs will have to lower (perhaps drastically) the commissions offered to compensate for the fact that suddenly every link is an affiliate link.
Unrelated question. How did you make syntax highlighting for bash prompt? I mean, yellow strings ('user exists' on 5:40) and orange wrong commands (enclosed string "'use").

I've found no clue in http://github.com/benhoskings/dot-files
Probably either northern Alaska, or maybe somewhere in Australia.

This is pretty epic looking, isn't it:

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=45.396641,11.829498&#...
There's also peyote use in the Native American Church.
Replying to both posts above. Thx.

I am not interested in webapps. I usually do command line stuff, or libraries, and i've done some libraries in ncurses. Basically a terminal freak. Currently ruby, but 5-6 years of Java before that. No functional language exp.

Are there not several versions of Scheme, too. Any suggestions for what to start with.

Is scheme/lisp/clojure the correct language to use for terminal/command-line apps or ncurses stuff ?

Does anyone offhand know if there is ncurses support for these languages ?
Will one's learning carry over easily from one lisp to another (one CL to another), and onto Clojure ?
Inside the mind of Boy Genius, whose blog sold for millions
There is. It's a 450 ton device called a blowout preventer
It didn't activate and they have been trying to do it manually for several days.

I work in the oil and gas industry and live along the gulf coast. It's a heart wrenching situation.
Good. Tell em! Even better that you're taking a real stand by putting your money where your feet are and moving on. Oh, shit, Posterous is free. Maybe send them a check for the valuable service they did provide you before moving on.

And really, what better blog alternative are you even going to go to?
A Little Intro to Time Series
(e^(i * pi)) + 1 = 0
Which scheme. I am on OS X. Thanks.
I realize that most of you probably knew this already but I didn't and it is staggering...

Also cool is that Google 'knows':

http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&q=(e^(i+*+pi))+%2B+1&#...
> So whenever I use a free service, they are basically entitled to do whatever they want? What kind of logic is that?

Pretty fucking much!

You've got it the wrong way around asshole. If you can't handle it, you shouldn't be USING a free service!
Articles like this are part of the problem. Here we have someone quite sincerely claiming that the Web doesn't suck as a platform compared to using native applications, because the Web can do things like drag and drop. Just stop and think about that for a minute. The author is arguing that the Web platform doesn't suck because at some as-yet undetermined point in the future, some browsers will be able to do some things that desktop applications on every major platform have taken for granted for well over a decade?

I'm sorry to be negative here, but I think a huge contributory factor in the glacial pace of the Web's development is the staggering lack of perspective repeatedly demonstrated by those who are leading that process and/or evangelising the Web as a general purpose software platform. At a time when the leading edge is considering controlled side effects and transactional memory, the Web is learning about having multiple threads and doing message passing. At a time when the leading edge is using GPUs to accelerate not just graphics but intensive computations generally, the Web just learned how to do a basic 3D rotation matrix.

In a full game of Go, there is a 19x19 grid of positions on the board. When a weaker player has a game with a stronger one, it is traditional to let the weaker player start with between 1 and 9 extra stones on the board as a handicap. More than 9 stones, on a board with 361 positions, is considered unnecessary because at that point it's not a competition at all, it's just a tutorial by the more advanced player for the benefit of the beginner. Just a thought.
Dave Winer is wrong and right about Twitter
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What's depressing about this isn't the populist outrage about our lack of drilling: it's the fact that Americans are so ignorant of their own energy consumption they believe we can somehow drill out way out of high gas prices (which are already very low compared to other places).
You can find out for yourself really easily -- just go along to an SF convention for a couple of days. On day 1, experience it; on day 2, volunteer as a gopher, then stick around for teardown and the dead dog party afterwards. At the DD, you can talk to the committee members (once they're no longer running around like blue-arsed flies), which should finish your whistle-stop education.

(I've been going to SF conventions for 25 years, and esr is bang on the money, IMO.)
This is not a lawsuit, and to pretend it is is not really correct. It's simply one side not informing the other fully of the status quo, which is not 'actionable' in any other way than by simply quitting the service, which probably quite a few people will do.

A business operates on trust, this breaks that trust.

It's not just PR, it's a fundamental breach of the silent agreement between users and a service.

What your terms and conditions write in legalese and what you intend to do in plain English can be two different things but that isn't a long term strategy.

Nobody is going to sue posterous over this, mostly because there isn't any real damage to the end users, and yet they should have known much better than to even try and get away with this.
Ok, but Pinnacle describes a local maximum, which seems to describe us perfectly.
I don't think the visitors are the people that matter, but the creators of the content, other than that I agree, if they mentioned it explicitly and not clouded in legalese ('we can modify your content', which most people would interpret to mean we can edit your content in case it is offensive or in case it violates the tos).
All these innovations are great but can we use them yet? The answer is no:

http://caniuse.com/

And the reason why that answer is no is mostly because of older versions of IE.
I don't get it. That would assume that developers are too stupid to select the right tool for the job by themselves. On the other hand, it is supposed to improve the quality of apps. So you help stupid developers, which leads to a higher proportion of stupid developers on the app store - how does that help quality?

Smart developers should be able to evaluate a framework for themselves, and even use native interfaces to extend existing frameworks if some required functionality is missing. Some of the middleware might even be open source.

It's not even worth arguing about. I don't need anybody to tell me what is the best tool for my job. If they want, educate me, advertise why their tool is the best, etc. But don't force me to do something because they assume they know better than I do what is good for myself (and my app).

I can't imagine why any argument could convince me that it is for my own good to enforce a certain tool. All that is being said, features not being available etc., might weigh in for my decision for a specific tool. But it can never be a reason for such an enforcement.
I proposed some days ago a Twitter-like follow button. Everyone could make his favorite user list. This don't have to affect to the current site if the follow button is only in the profile page of each user and your tracked user page link is in your own profile.

The complexity of the new tracked users page may be similar to the current threads page. If it's a private page is posible that don't waste too much server CPU.
Ask HN: Alternative to Snipplr.com?
http://snipplr.com/ is a little webapp that let's you save and share snippets of code, it has an open API and plugins for many IDEs and code editors.

It was originally created by Tyler Hall (http://clickontyler.com/) on 2006, who sold it (I suppose) to the guys behind http://raven-seo-tools.com/ in early 2008.

Since then, the site has only been updated in order to add more and more ads and on top of that, it has been completely taken over by spammers.

In its most recent update -and despite the huge spam problem- they have just added even more ads, so I have finally decided to take my snippets out of there.

I'm currently considering http://pastie.org/ and http://gist.github.com/ as alternatives, but none of them offers the core functionalities that I'm looking for.

I would like it to have:

- Public/Private snippets.
- Advanced search and browse by language
- TextMate integration.
- Comments and/or Versioning

Any recommendations?
Oh, I understand it at that level. I did a compilers course in Scheme with Kent Dybvig; I know how continuations are implemented (the whole "there is no single stack" thing) but my programming mind, the not-really-verbal part that actually does the coding, just doesn't grok them.

Just like closures; I knew more or less what they were - but this January I ran into my first situation where I really, truly saw how they made a particular situation easier - like, easier in a way that nothing else did - and since then I can't live without closures. That insight suddenly reorganized everything I thought I knew about programming.

I'm still waiting for that to happen with continuations.
Filling Water Glasses, Shots of Liquor
Pakistan Drone Pilots Could be Tried for War Crimes
The pilots of the drones that recently bombed Pakistan could be tried for war crimes, Harold Koh, a law professor at Yale.
Not exactly. It would require them to release the terms of every deal. The methodology to evaluate these would not be required. In many sectors of the markets such services are alrady provided to the banks by vendors so the bank would merely have disclose the name of the security and just a few other bits.

And yes, this would have a profound effect on proprietary trading. That's the whole point. It would disperse prop trading to smaller entities not subject to disclosure.