skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been watching this device for a while, it truly is one of the most promising non-Apple tablet devices. The android jungle is being filled with creatures, and they are starting to breed :)
Splitting hairs. It's de facto government funding. The license fee is a de facto tax. The government gives the BBC the right to collect the license fee and can take it away again.
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Way of Using an Essay Template
Writing an essay is not something that can be done following strict directions from a template. An essay should not be written down on a formula, since the best possible essays should be personal: add interesting details and be written with passion and commitment. However,
correct.

when I started Silicon alley Reporter I could barely afford to print the first issue (which was about $2k).

any pay barrier sucks
Congratulations.

I've been happily using your service for a year. I look forward to more years of not noticing you. :)
Thanks, if I get back into fiction I'll look out for his work!
Yaler - a simple, open and scalable relay infrastructure for the Web of Things
it won't
Lots of people write great code on Windows. There's no reason why Apple couldn't too, if it cared.
"...the AirLife 100 is ready to operate on the network of any U.S. carrier that chooses to subsidize the device. "

Does it really have to be subsidized by a carrier to run there?
Americans Overpay for Mobile Applications
The license fee is a de facto tax on TVs. The license money goes to the BBC because the government said so. If the government is unhappy with the BBC it can take the license fee away again.
I try to code something, and then write some pointers for later use. To learn some PostScript, I wrote a randomly generated christmas postcard with Koch snowflakes and some other L-system fractals that looked good for Christmas, with Lisp I added a lot to Paul Graham's raytracer in ANSI Common Lisp (beside writing one program for a paper and some other odd code, Lisp is my second language to C, now).

I am trying to write another raytracer, in Forth, but I just can't get to do it, so I will probably ditch it as a project. As for JavaScript (just know a little... I use it mostly as I would use C), I wrote some code I use in my blog. Learnt Java to do some assignments for the University... Lex for a tool to somehow parse C (long story :) and so on.

I always try to write some code that will be "useful", or is in my list of "try to code this!" and well-suited for the language and then comment that code, thus I don't forget everything I used for it.

But it is hard to have a lot of different projects, and sometimes (like in Forth) I stall :/
Really? What's Oracle's involvement?
Speaking as a game dev, the current 3D still isn't good enough for games, IMHO. As you said, it's incremental.

It is the case that game design sacrificed precision control to get the 3D look+feel when it was first introduced: for example, 3D platforming essentially has not progressed beyond Mario 64, and that game is still somewhat uncomfortable to "pick up and play" despite all its refinements; the extra dimension just makes everything far more complex. Adding the glasses helps regain some of the depth cues that make complex movement difficult, but then we're dumping on even more equipment, and gaming is already more complex than it needs to be for most audiences. A full solution would need to be convenient and unobtrusive.
And newer APIs (and even obj-c language features) are only available to 64-bit processes, so sticking with 32-bit so you can use Carbon will be less of an option over time.
He has written some great books about singularity like :

Singularity Sky :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Sky

Accelerando: (free ebook)
http://manybooks.net/titles/strosscother05accelerando-txt.ht...
It takes a lot of balls to put a low-margin product to compete with your cash cows.

I doubt many Intel execs are willing to sacrifice their short-term bonuses for the survival of the company after they left or retired.
This is definitely the last straw. I use Lala daily and it's been a great way to discover new music and bring my collection everywhere I go without having to copy a big library around. I am done as an Apple customer and will do everything I can to make sure all my friends understand the nature of the company before buying any of their products.

This is not the scrappy, innovative underdog Apple we all used to love. This is a nascent suffocating and abusive monopoly that deserves an organized boycott.
Agreed on all your points.

Traditionally the US military, especially the Army, has started out the greenest and learned the fastest. The tragedy of Vietnam is that the learning part was short-circuited.

In the case of a "cyberwar", or more likely it being part of a greater action, say "The Battle of the Taiwan Straits" or whatever, things would be messy but it's silly to say that we're either 100% unprepared or sitting ducks.

As for "skin in the game", one analysis I like is that the intensity of the nation's commitment to a war goes like this, based on the three cultural groups that matter in this area:

The Jacksonians are always ready and willing to fight.

Next are the New England Moralists.

And if the Midwestern Pragmatists decide that fighting the enemy is better than continuing to do business with him, well, it's all over (for the enemy).

You can find at least one good essay out there discussing this.
I think my partner on my current project would have some words... :)
Doesn't seem to be as bad as they're making it look. It only won't work on older systems.
And when I saw it in 3D, I got so caught up in the movie that I completely forgot about the 3D-ness of it. Watching it again later in 2D, it really wasn't a significantly different movie.

The only movie I've ever seen where 3D added something to the experience was an IMAX documentary about fish played in a ten-storey high screen. Combine the three-dimensionality with the peripheral-view-filling nature of the IMAX screen and you really have something. I think it might work better for documentaries than for narratives, though.
I agree they could make the core cross-platform and build platform-specific GUIs, but, apart from making Windows appear to suck less when compared to Macs, what would they gain from it?

I don't particularly like iTunes, but it does two jobs for Apple: it syncs iPods and makes Windows look bad.
So Flash crashing on my Mac is because of the Mac OS X operating system when those same crashes happen under Linux as well, but not under Windows? Methinks it is more a case of shoddy engineering.
His point is that it's pretty trivial for a user to change their browser, these days. Changing their phone is more difficult and expensive. Hence, it would be better for users if developers developed their apps for a specific software platform (e.g. Firefox) as opposed to a specific hardware platform (e.g. iPhone).
The sad part of this story is that I used both Audion and SoundJam back in the day, and Audion was a far superior media player at the time. It's a shame the Panic guys didn't return Apple's call and thus lost the opportunity for Audion to become Apple's new media player centerpiece (iTunes).
This is the very first thing I noticed in Avatar:

>Its image is noticeably darker than standard 2-D.
I get this for utility servers, but can ARM chips address more than 4GB of memory? I currently use a couple of ITX Via boards for some items (e.g. gateway, name server), but I am wondering how far I could go with ARM.
I think the article meant that there are some days when you don't have motivation to do any work - you just don't feel like it. I like arranging music for fun, but I don't always feel like it. When I do try to force myself into it, I don't get much done. The article is saying to avoid doing the work you don't feel like doing because it's going to be half-assed and not valuable anyways.
I'm sorry... electronic signatures are NOT VALID for any kind of overseas contracts (if you live in the US - here in Uruguay they are basically useless too).

Until the law (and custom) catches up, we'll be faxing stuff. And I should know, as I've tried to kill fax at several companies, only to be held back by the legal department.

At my current company (an insurance company), we hold as valid requests for policy renewal faxed in, or on a printed form, but due to the legal requirements we cannot accept any other electronic format, sadly (which would help greatly with automation). Legal dept. wants something that judges will accept as valid on contract disputes.
He's also an occasional contributor to HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross
Somewhat unrelated:

You know, it's actually kind of funny. I've become such a huge fan of Starcraft and Starcraft 2 over the past year, and it always blows my mind that people can talk about sports and chess seriously like this and been seen as reasonable fans and intellectuals, while if you know any of the big names in Starcraft and their past accomplishments, you're still just another videogame nerd.

Hopefully that's a trend that reverses as time goes on - I'd love to be able to speak in polite company about Starcraft as everyone in this thread is speaking about chess.
I agree, normally there is an opt out for this. With the nappy company it's sneakier though. If you don't agree to being contacted about special deals etc.., you won't receive the bag full of goodies, which is the only reason you'd agree to give your data to them in the first place.
Is it considered a "fax" for legal purposes?
I would be wary of self improvement programs that charge money. I'm not sure what exactly you've looked into, but there's a lot of information out there for free or cheap.

I've spent a decent amount of time reading self-improvement books/blogs, and for me the stuff that made the most impact were things that were tailored to the problems I was having at the time.

Here's an overview of what I've read over the years that have helped me to some extent:

I Can Do Anything if I Only Knew What it Was: http://www.amazon.com/Could-Anything-Only-Knew-What/dp/04405...

Paul Graham's Essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

How to Win Friends and Influence People: http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/14...

Four Hour Work Week: http://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Workweek-Escape-Live-Anywhere/d...

Randy Pausch, Time Management: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0

GTD: http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Produc...

Steve Pavlina: http://www.stevepavlina.com/

7 Habits of Highly Effective People (reading this now): http://www.amazon.com/Habits-Highly-Effective-People/dp/0671...

So I would say "it depends" on what you want out of life and where you are now. Self improvement is a life-long task and you will need advice that changes as you progress.
Any hitchcock, chaplin, etc. fans here?

Don't forget that Hitchcock made a 3D movie -- Dial M For Murder was originally done in 3D, and in fact I've never seen it in 2D. There's exactly one moment where the 3D becomes worthwhile, it's where (spoiler alert) the woman getting attacked desperately reaches out onto the desk, towards the audience and picks up the shiny letter opener...
I don't think they see HTML5 as a threat to "Apps" because there's no way now or on even the distant horizon to sell HTML5 apps via a single tap.
> We can watch Rome burn together and laugh and laugh about how uninteresting Google and Facebook are.

Couldnt help laughing on reading this one.
People kept trying to make flying machines without success for a long time too...
In the 1950s, it was novel and driven by audiences, who really wanted to see something in 3D. In 2010 it's mostly being pushed by the theaters, who are desperate to have something they can offer people that they can't get by watching Blu-Rays on 50-inch TVs at home, aside from the experience of eating half a ton of popcorn and listening to some jerk on his phone.
Ubuntu 10.04: First Thoughts
I work for a car insurance company in South America, and we can't accept an application that's not faxed or signed yet, due to our local law lagging.
Only on their "app consoles" (iPhones/iPads/iPod Touches).

The Mac hardware remains as open as Windows.

There's a huge difference, and their behavior with the app consoles is entirely defensible.

The app consoles are not general-purpose computers, and that's a better "experience" for great majority of their users.
To the author:

Sorry, but physics is against you. There isn't enough wireless bandwidth to do what you suggest. It doesn't exist, we're pretty much saturated as it is.

The only hope is micro cells, tons and tons of them, each with high bandwidth, and low range. Or very directional devices (but that's not practical).

But micro cells with the high bandwidth you hope for don't exist now, and probably won't any time soon.

And if such high bandwidth did exist, I really hope the future of computing is not iPhone type devices.
http://www.lala.com/#termsofservice (last updated in 2008, supposedly) states: "la la reserves the right to modify or discontinue any of the Services and material displayed on or offered through the Site, with or without notice to you, and is not obligated to support or update the Site or Services."

That was the contract lala made with their customer.

This exact same scenario - users losing access to music they've paid for due to a service being killed - has happened multiple times[1] due to DRM. I think it's clear that whether the reliance is on a DRM key-server, streaming, or whatever, consumers shouldn't "buy" music that stops being available when servers disappear.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management#Obsol...
I think those missing sets can be very interesting. I didn't realise these figures didn't have tags (I scanned the text twice, but missed them :/)

The problem of lack-of-space in journals justifies these kind of cuts, but you can always submit a longer version to ArXiV without any problems or restrictions
Because <canvas> is used for just the "flashy" part of the site but everything else is still in traditional HTML with all of its advantages. Sure that can be done in Flash too, but, as we've seen, people often end up just doing the vast majority of the site in Flash. There's not the same temptation with <canvas>.
I wonder if this would make bi-pedal movement obsolete, or at least less important to innovate. There would still be need to move up and down steps, but this form factor seems much more compact than current bi-pedal robots.
That doesn't counter the original quote. Remail is still dependent on a third party to push updates to their clients. Now sure they aren't likely to get rejected, but they can't push an update to a client directly they must wait for apple to get around to it, and with the popularity of the app store that might be a while.
I'm curious... what happens to completely nonsensical and spurious patents like these? Does anyone actually treat them seriously? Is it just the case that filing a patent is cheap enough that they might as well file patents for any idea on the planet, just in the off chance they get to sue someone in the future for one of them? It really makes no sense to me.
Agree with the above. I've used Quercus in several projects - porting existing code to the JVM seems like a different use case than re-designing PHP.

http://www.caucho.com/resin-3.0/quercus/
I'm not sure how much of that "focus and shift towards dynamic languages" is real, though, and how much is just an illusion created by lots of animated discussion between us geeks in blogs and on forums like this one.

Of course it's hard to judge the progress of a vast and fast-moving industry like ours, but what data there is always suggests that tried-and-tested static languages like C, Java, C++ and newer derivatives like C# and Objective-C still represent the lion's share of development. A few dynamic languages like Perl, Python and JavaScript have established themselves as mainstream and command significant user bases as well.

However, while we hear a lot about things like Clojure and Groovy because they are new and potentially interesting, I see little evidence that many people are actually using them yet. How much real innovation is coming out of these younger languages and platforms is an open question, and it will probably be a few more years before we know what their real contribution will be.
I think Java should share the future with the Flash - they were already seen their best days.
I'm having a hard time believing this is true. The language in the bill itself is totally indecipherable (to me), but the only people claiming it would be a huge burden have a clear ideological or political bias.
Microsoft Research: Smart Caching for Web Browsers: 60% improvement
No, I'm actually angry at Apple for using it's bank balance to squash a competitor. Should I expect the Lala founders to be saints and walk away from a bit payout? No? Should I expect Apple to compete on quality instead of abusing its position? Apparently not.

Jobs is a dangerous, megalomaniac demagogue.
See also links (http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/links/) which has lots of these things, but hasn't gained any traction probably due to it's academic origin.

But, I agree with your statement. Saying it's similar to PHP, or PHP++, or PHPReboot is just hype.
I'm in your boat as a PHPer (11 years :)), but I like projects like this. I know you can't use your existing projects in it, but if it gains PHP some more respect from the general programming community, I'm all for it.
In GMail, you can log out other sessions if you're logged in. At the very bottom, it says something like "Last account activity: xx minutes ago ..." followed by a Details link. Click it and you'll see the button to log out everyone else but your session.

Otherwise, I don't think so and am watching this thread to learn.
Lower wages, lack of job opportunities means more Americans delaying 'adulthood'
Rob (and Jeremy),

Congratulations is in order. I've been using Fastmail since at least 2001 and have been a paying user for the last eight years. I hope it continues to be the quality service it has been going forward.
There's an implementation of PHP on the JVM Quercus: http://www.caucho.com/resin-3.0/quercus/

Presumably, you could run it now...
> and probably eradicated poverty by ensuring everybody has at least the minimum intelligence level required to make a decent living

So all we have to do to eliminate poverty is to get rid of the stupid people?
In gconf-editor, set /desktop/gnome/peripherals/touchpad/off to true.
NXP (http://ics.nxp.com/products/mcus/cortex-m0/) and Energy Micro (http://energymicro.com/) are actively trying to kill the 8-bit MCU with their ARM Cortex-M(3|0) offerings. Very low power consumption on these chips.

But, still, they require a lot more external circuitry than an MSP430 or (SiLabs)C8051.
I absolutely agree - unfortunately, Gmail doesn't work great for everyone.
IE9 HTML5 Video Will Be H264 Only
No, it's still a 32 bit processor, with no signs of a 64 bit version (the last time I asked about this, someone said he'd found an item from 2001 promising a 64 bit version RSN).

They may have a chicken and egg problem here: with so much money being made in their current markets they might not be able to justify (to themselves, at least) the significant expense of a competitive 64 bit design. Then again, maybe with today's techniques it wouldn't be so hard to simply widen the Cortex A9, which is already up to 4-way SMP and out-of-order superscalar. Achieving those two features wasn't cheap, I'm sure.
Bongs are most assuredly passed. Even sizable ones.
Understanding the spammer (Written by me in 2004)
I have the feeling that ubuntu is trying to hard to look like Windows (for new users) but in the same time doesn't want to copy the UI. I think there is a decision to be made: Copy or not copy. If they really want to get new users from the Windows world, I think they should simply include a Windows theme with the same icons, the same X_[], etc.

Anyway, advanced users doesn't really use ubuntu.. and for some that use it, it's really a modified version.

Last thing, I find also that if their goals is to attract new users, they should stop with the mentality of over-configuring everything, every icons, every possible smallest thing you can think changing and instead, provide a clean and simple interface. Configuration files and script already exist for those special configuration, no need to pollute every window configuration with that.

That's my 0.02$ from someone who's been using Linux for 10 years. (I use arch, btw)
How would you go about making this work with touch?
The Silverlight team is pushing Silverlight. This is a GM for Internet Explorer. Internal strife is pretty common at MS.
If you kill a product you own, you are not squashing the competition, are you?

Again, if Lala hadn't sold, they'd still be open.
Easy Exercises To Reduce Your Waistline
Silverlight 3 began the push into the desktop, and Silverlight 4 takes it even further. WPF is getting phased out, and Silverlight is becoming the way to make desktop apps with an MS stack.
Don't worry, I can't imagine Apple execs saying "mmm, Lala.com, they are going to crush as, lets buy them and shut them down". I think it was more like "mmm we should move itunes to the cloud, Lala works great, lets buy them and use them as foundation for our next itunes iteration."

I have the feeling that if you hold on that credit for few months you might be able to buy back your 75 on a cloud version of iTunes.
There: http://www.dieblinkenlights.com/blog_en/think-evil
I agree, but for totally different reasons.

Consider how 3D works... no, not the cameras and projectors, the brain. It is "well known" that the brain detects how far away something is by measuring how much the eyes have to cross for the two images to converge. What seems to be much less well known, though it is obvious with elementary geometry, is that the breaks down as you get further and further away, as the difference in angles becomes smaller and smaller. And it's only a few tens of feet.

Beyond that, you brain uses numerous context clues to assemble a 3D image of the environment; one big one is occlusion, for instance; a thing that is visibly in front of another thing is clearly closer.

3D technology can only really use the eye-difference thing. Conventional 2D technology is already perfectly good at all the other clues. (Try playing a 3D game sometime and simply trying to see it in 3D; you may find that it's perfectly possible and merely a perspective shift much like seeing the vase or the face in the classical optical illusion.) Consequently, you end up with an effect where everything is either taking place on a very small stage in front of you, or still stuck to the background in totally normal 2D. In the worst case, the background is a visible plane, like a skybox.

There is no way around this limitation. It's fundamental.

A space fight, which sounds like it would be awesome in 3D, is actually fundamentally a 2D thing, when it comes to projection technology. If any bit of the space fight is within you 3D-binocular-vision range, you're probably already dead. It may look awesome, but simultaneously, it is going to look like a toy, intrinsically, because if it is in 3D, it is equally obviously a space fight between two spaceship toys taking place about twenty feet in front of you.

I'm not saying there's no place for 3D, but I'm not exactly holding my breath. Someday, I suspect we'll look back on this series of 3D movies as slightly more sophisticated than the ones from decades past, but only slightly, committing all sorts of "blindingly obvious" scale errors and other such things.
I voted you back up to 1. Keep expressing your preferences. I don't know why you were downvoted.
James Cameron is Working on a 3D Camera for the Next Mars Rover
Sadly, it's extremely hard to see that happening. Write once, run anywhere was a basic attempt at undermining the importance of Microsoft; oddly, it seems to have undermined differences in server OSes. CLR will always be a framework that makes Windows important for basic business reasons.