skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
'This is a living organism that is artificially made, "artificial life" applies to it just as much as the other subject.'

Maybe. But if you end up with a living organism, then that it's not artificial life; it's life (albeit artificially manufactured) . Whereas the software stuff is never anything but artificial.

Long run I'd expect anything that's alive to be called life, regardless of the process that lead to it.
My two cents(I've managed email campaigns to ~100k people):

Sending one email per day to everyone is a lot of mail to be sending your users. You better have a really, really good reason to do so--and those emails better provide significant value to your users, otherwise they will opt out, possibly even report as spam.

I don't know what business you are in, but only certain businesses can really get away with sending that much email--ie Groupon, Gilt, etc.--and that is because those emails provide a lot of value and meet a lot of needs. If you fall in the category of a business who can send that much email awesome!

If possible I think it is best to use a tiered, opt-in subscription model. Some example tiers: "Daily Deals Beat", "Weekly Rundown", "2-Week Summary", and "Monthly Newsletter"(these names suck I know). You can present these options as part of the sign-up process, or better yet, when they click the sign up confirmation email take them to a settings to opt-in to the various tiers. This is also good to have as the landing page for when someone clicks unsubscribe in your email. Take them to this settings page where they can adjust the level of contact, or unsubscribe completely, that is right for them. If you are sending one message a day chances are you will have a lot of people hitting that unsubscribe link, and some might not want to totally discontinue contact so give them options to adjust as well as totally unsubscribe.

Sidenote: Mediapost has an awesome publication called Email Insider, if you plan on sending that much email you might want to be reading this. http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?art_type=32&fa=Ar...
congratulations! Does this mean that Clang project will finally has some spare hands to work on something like OpenMP?
Yep looks like they did pull it. there are a couple of different groups/pages but the one they pulled has 100,000 "likes".
I have two iMacs which already do what you say (Drobo as well). Don't want another device hooked there.
Plug the audio cable into whatever produces sound and you're fine. TV/receiver/pc speakers/whatever. Works for me.

1/8th inch -> standard RCA cable is pretty common I think. I have like 3.
Where is Microsoft in all of this? We're almost at iPhone OS 4.0 and Android 2.2 and in the same time Microsoft have managed to ship one minor upgrade (6.5) and talk a bit about how great 7 will be.
What they don't mention: They got in during the "gold rush" period on both platforms. That is a huge competitive advantage that can't be replicated. I'd be surprised to see someone who released an iPhone app a year ago who could show similar numbers.

Though I do think it's very cool that they're posting these stats. This kind of openness is uncommon.
That is correct. Hence my gripes towards the mini - it wasn't designed to be a digital media player, whereas the AppleTv is (HDMI, optical out). If it supported 1080p and was open, it would be the device. The boxee box could have been the device, but now I am going to wait for the logitech device.
Some people won't be happy unless they make their OWN protons, neutrons and electrons instead of using existing ones in their artificial life.
They don't like doing their own packaging -- head shops aren't exactly apothecaries.
TFA notes that the iPad seems to be cannibalizing iPod sales rather than Macs, though certainly there's no way to know for sure.
It's not a computer, it's a console.

Replay the comparison, but versus Sony and Nintendo.
Apple has stuck with AT&T because they signed a long term contract to give AT&T exclusivity. They had to do that in order to get the phone out. They had approached the other carriers, and no one else was interested in carrying the phone unless the carrier got to control the design of the software. If Apple had not been willing to give exclusivity, its likely AT&T too would have passed on the iPhone.

Without iPhone, there would not be Android. Even if Google had still developed it, they would have had the same problem Apple had--phone companies not willing to let Google be in charge of the software.

It's only because Verizon and Sprint and the rest desperately needed something to compete with iPhone that they were willing to allow Android.
The Term Paper Artist (2008)
Damn right on the last bit.

So how does reacting to bunk threats (threats, not actions) like this fit?

It's fear; pure and simple.

As to the first bit - your just constructing an idiotic scenario that doesn't exist. The attackers in Sweden are not deliberately trying to cause fear - thy are just trying to hurt a guy. However at some point in the background is someone who understands the impact of their actions on a wider scale.

Many men exist within the echelons of terrorists. Many may not communicate together - but they don't really need to. The plan is brutally simple and uncomplicated; cause terror.

I don't think it is possible to claim there isn't a climate of fear in the western world. We see it every week almost.
Well now they'll do the credit check, play fill the cup, and the brain scan.

On the plus side I have a new excuse for trips to Starbucks.
Toyota and Tesla Partnering to Make Electric Cars
Simplest solution: add down-voting to submissions as well as comments. Then people can downvote the super off-topic and repeats.
Few nights ago a drunken Irishman came to the pool table at the pub. I was by then tired of shooting by myself, so I asked him if he wanted to play. He said he was "on a date with Japanese girls" ..

A puzzled moment passed ..

He then took a fat magazine of Japanese porn out of a bag and started flipping through it, inviting me to join the "conversation".

Never has shooting 9-ball alone looked so exciting ..
I don't know if I'm just used to it, but I really like HN's background color.
Google and VMware Wed at the App Engine
Power Outage - a true test for ganeti
> it's your experience. But you can't use that to reason about others'.

I thought using our own experiences to make conclusions and predictions was how our minds work.

(Those conclusions don't have to be right, however.)
What US v. Comstock Means To You
fine - I'll bite.
There's an email address in my profile.. I'll check it out (and report back to HN/This thread if you like..)
I'm just going to leave this here: http://derefr.co.cc/essays/why-television

People don't (only) watch TV because it's a big screen with big speakers attached to it, placed centrally in their houses. There's also a bit of a sociological element going on, which this doesn't replicate.
If I go to Australia before this decision gets reversed, I'm going to be sure to pack a lot of porn.

Also make sure I have some time to kill getting into the country. Really, that's the best solution: everyone needs to carry enough porn coming into the country that the customs officials get so bogged down filtering porn (by hand!) that they have no choice to give up. This is a prime opportunity for civil disobedience.
This has been noted many times and is intentional.

Not that I agree with it, but that's how things are.
Which browser are you on?, might be an issue there, they seem to enlarge in firefox 3.0 in ubuntu.
Why would that be intentional?
This app would be ridiculously easy to build if Wolfram Alpha allowed people to use their API without donating some organs. Essentially, just perform the calculations with the Wolfram Alpha API and keep history on "calcul.at"'s server side.

Problem is that WA would probably never let you use their API like that since it competes with Mathematica.
Interesting. I clicked through to a related article about this guy, and his last run-in with the law was because he refused to provide his DNA to the federal government. Because apparently hacking web pages leaves a lot of DNA evidence, and they want to get him for sure next time, or something. Frightening.
Perhaps ... but it also takes inspiration. Has anyone in the world of software and systems engaged in an analogous act of hacking "necrophilia" or defilement?

Also note that many acts of hacking defilement get their just punishment in due course, when the software doesn't work, the company fails, etc. Feedback of that incisive a nature isn't as prevalent in the musical world.
without iphone there would be no androidd?

August 2005 is when apple bought the android OS form android Inc..way before iphone OS was even coded.
It was more the novel marketplace I think.
PG does not count all the votes, but the upvote button is there even in those cases where your vote will not be counted.

It would be my preference not to have the button in those cases, for consistency and clarity.

If a user interface component is present it should work as expected.

For more information read here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871202
FYI: it's up now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKaJ6jEPXGE#t=3m28s
This is beginning to look suspicious. Does anyone know what on earth is going on with these concerted, ridiculous assaults on freedom in Australia? It almost looks like the work of some ridiculous lobby with an agenda.
Yeah, and also PG on the list is weird. ViaWeb got $10,000 in investment (http://www.paulgraham.com/sfp.html). Not much, but that's still not a bootstrap.
Microsoft is already on board. Apple not so much, but pretty much everyone else is behind it, so Apple may eventually be forced to accept it.
You may not know where to begin with your comments about the Apple and AT&T relationship, but that would mostly be because you Don't Get It. It's not just about control and money; these matter, but less than you think.

By choosing AT&T, Apple chose GSM, which gave the iPhone compatibility with most of the world. They looked at CDMA and realized that it was a dead-end technology; they looked at the expense of having to maintain two different radio chipsets; they looked at a lot of things and made the decision that, at least up until now, they didn't want to deal with it. Apple has relationships with three GSM carriers in Canada (Rogers/Fido, Bell, and Telus) and many more elsewhere in the world. If T-Mobile had used the more common GSM frequencies, Apple might not have gone with an exclusive deal with AT&T. Maybe.

On the other hand, my immediate reaction on seeing the story title was "who is Brad Feld and why should I care that he's switching?"

Seriously. Looking at his CrunchBase profile, I can see that he does VC stuff now and built a fairly large consulting company, but I am still not sure that I should care about his opinions about consumer electronics. So I do think that his opinion has less merit because he got this particular device for free. (Money isn't credibility. To me, he's just some random guy with a platform. A blogger with no relevance to anything that I do.)

IMO, a consumer who has loyalty to a particular device or technology is a fool. If someone really comes up with something that I can unequivocally say is better than my iPhone, I will switch. So far, Android is "close but no cigar".
I have, and it works.
>3) (remember, the goverment is the only one who can violate your free speech rights)

I think this idea is a far greater danger to freedom of speech than a few radical Muslims.
That kind of self-linking would get you banned at MetaFilter ;)

But tell Gerry I said to pop on over here and chime in.
Microsoft will support VP8 in IE9.

Apple's HTML5 implementation uses Quicktime, so supports any format for which you have a Quicktime plug-in. I have no trouble, for instance, watching Ogg Theora video on HTML5 sites in Safari on my Mac.

I'd expect that Perian will add VP8 support for Mac, since they already have a couple other codecs from the VP family. Perian is a third party collection of codecs for Quicktime.
hehe: http://images.regretsy.com/mswood.jpg

That one is quite funny.
It is not a straw man, laws need to be considered just, as far as possible.

Blasphemy used to be illegal all over the Western world, but isn't anymore. Death sentence were metered out in e.g. mid 19th century Sweden -- for much less than Ecce Homo (see previous comment) and Piss Christ.

It is important to lampoon and jeer at ideologies/religions, especially those that insist they have the ultimate Truth and are above criticism.

(Racism/slavery went the other way; it used to be accepted -- but like intolerance to blasphemy, it was put behind us, at least in the West.)
You should re-read your links:

>Update: Microsoft wanted us to clarify that enterprise customers will be able to deploy apps to employees outside the consumer-facing Marketplace -- details on that will be released in the future.

So you'll be able to do whatever you want if you're willing to pay, which is pretty much open in the traditional Microsoft sense.
Sounds like he's pretty sane to me.

I'm considering not renewing my passport because they want my fingerprints too, apparently to stop terrorists from getting passports.

Maybe I've got Aspergers?
People were downloading audio cd's at 33.6k and slower.
Obama Sending Almost Half of All US carriers to Iran by July
Whoops! I don't think it'll let me edit :(
On eBay: Internet controlled vending machine going for $26
http://allievi.sssup.it/techblog/?p=260

Has a little more info
Exactly. Would people a thousand years ago still have bartered if they had a stable currency to use instead? I doubt it. They bartered because a currency the king offered might be gone next week if he died in the latest city siege.
Any word on when VP8 will be added to the Android core media formats?

http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/media-formats.ht...
WikiLeaks founder has his passport confiscated
Yet…people keep forgetting that Apple can enable a lot of this stuff. They currently choose not to, but they can. Given their history, they certainly will when they feel that it's an appropriate time to do so (technology, usability, user experience, and necessary competitive advantage).

Apple is experimenting with its closed model, and there's a lot of people who don't like it, but it's always easier to open a closed model than to close an excessively opened one (see also "Windows viruses").
Powerful Phrases
Patten said if the question was designed to stop child pornography being smuggled into the country then the question should have been asked about "child pornography", without encompassing regular porn.

Yeah, change the question to "Are you carrying any child porn?". That'll stop its import for sure. We should extend this idea further; perhaps we could tick a "Are you planning on robbing this bank?" box before entering a bank. Heck, why not do away with the who judge/jury thing? Next time someone is charged with a crime, just give them a card that says "I committed this crime [Yes] [No]"
When people ask about Apple's support, I think we can assume they're thinking of the other two platforms, which will not run QuickTime plugins.
So is this the new definition of open: less than $100 and no approval process?
The source:

http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

I was at the OOPSLA (+- a few years of 2002) where Gabriel denounced being a programmer and claimed to be a "code poet"... Looking at dreamsongs it looks like he's mostly followed through on that statement.
So it took them 5 years to be profitable? Does that mean they've made back the investment, or just that they make more money than they spend?
Let the lawyers sort that one out - as long as you stay away from copyright violation, and as long as you are well informed as to the potential situations you might end up in, and have an idea how you might deal with them if something comes up, you're golden. Have a secondary look & feel ready to go.....

If you're worried about hurting feelings and "doing the right thing" then you're going to get clobbered by people with more ambition and less scruples.
Steve Jobs on Google's WebM and VP8
I remember they got some good buzz going with the information architects and UX people with their browsing tools early on.
What are your favorite programming-related academic papers?
Yes, within limits. And, you can of course just increase bitrate, which still doesn't really solve anything.
meh, revisionist or ignorant on half of them
I doubt Apple will cooperate with Google. On the other hand, if YouTube drops support for H.264, then Apple really has no choice. I don't know how much money Google makes from YouTube mobile, but if it's not much, they can really screw Apple over if they want to. Who's going to buy an iPhone if it can't use Youtube or any other online video site?
I don't think it is that simple. Apple wanted a lot more control than carries were willing to allow. They approached Verizon, since they were the largest carrier at the time, and they laughed at them. They were not willing to change the way they operated, for some new upstart. Things like visual voicemail would not work with Verizon. You need to understand that carriers are the top dogs, they have great influence over phone manufacturers. Maybe you forget the bad old days, when Verizon would disable bluetooth and computer syncing on your phone, for their own reasons. Those days are mostly gone now, THANKS TO APPLE!

Apple had little clout at the time, and only ATT was willing to working with them. For now, they are still stuck with each other.

While Verizon/Spring may have better coverage in certain areas, they are complete dicks.
Facebook has a track-record of pulling racially / religiously offensive pages. They got rid of some Italian Neo-Nazi's a few years back, and some anti-semetic stuff late last year.

Regardless of the stance on free speech, pictures of Mohammed are offensive to Muslims.

Given their previous policy, I don't think this is any surprise or should get any analysis beyond the attention paid to prior examples . . .
You should try being a foreigner ... I've had my fingerprints taken 5 times now entering the US.
New Panera Bread Location Offers "Pay What You Can Afford" Pricing Model
Gawker (my god, I'm about to favorably cite a Gawker story) pretty convincingly rebutted this:

http://gawker.com/5543141/wikileaks-founder-thinks-everyones...
Not tech business related, but an interesting business model nonetheless.
You are completely wrong. The expense of maintaining two different radios is nothing compared to the extra millions of devices they would have sold. This is so wrong that it is embarrassing that people use this as a point.

How much do you think it costs to buy a standard part, and hire a dozen engineers to get it all working??
I haven't used my mbpro in days. I created and gave an entire talk using keynote. I have terminal, FTP/code editor, rackspace app so I can do technical tasks too. I use highhrise and other g apps for more work relted stuff. Email is a delight. Anything with heavy design is still lacking, though I'd love to give it a go. I can now work uninterrupted for 9 hours with Internet. The world is truly changed.
Is there a way to switch it off? I do not look forward to going back to loads of ads on a page, especially if they are flash.
No, you just realize that terrorists can get valid passports just as easily as ordinary citizens. If anything, things like biometric passports just make people less safe -- since customs agents will just assume that if your passport is valid you aren't a threat, they won't ask tough questions. Then a terrorist will slip by, and they'll have an excuse to require rectal imaging on the next generation of passports.

The irony is that the terrorists have already won.
I agree - I'm not sold on web apps in general, but they do work very well for certain things (email is the classic example).

Despite the hype, I'm not sure how many people are really sold on them. In practice I use native apps 99% of the time. When I'm number crunching Excel, Matlab, Python are all native. When I'm programming (even developing webapps!) Emacs, Mercurial, etc are all native apps.

Web apps still have a long, long way to go before I will be ready to do my day to day work in them.
Is there technology that help Julian Assange out? Would it be as simple as using TOR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_%28anonymity_network%29) and IPRED (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPREDator) to continue operations?
You should read up on stuff yourself.

This is exactly what Apple allows you to do, now, as well. If you want to go enterprise, you pay more (as you will for MS), and you can deploy to 100,000s of devices.

It looks so much like MS just took Apples model for Apps. MS have added nothing.
I was thinking earlier today how useless and tired these topics have become. Mentioning any of the three has too much potential to spark arguments that quickly devolve into gadget he said/she said. I don't know how anyone can read these with interest.

On a related note, can we just accept that some of these big name people will switch devices and we don't need to hear about it? They have the same complaints as everyone else, so does it really matter?

</brief rant and probably karma>
The two projects appear to have implemented different parts of flash. Flash has several separate virtual machines, which have been introduced over the years with new versions of flash.

Lightspark only implements the newer ActionScript3 runtime, from Flash 9 (and newer), while Gnash only (?) implements some of the earlier runtimes.

Currently Lightspark can only run the newer HD youtube player (which is compiled against flash 9), and Gnash can only run the older player (Which I think is still used for VP6 videos)
Yeah, the creative flash tools drew good attention and may have engaged people early on. I think now though, with the overwhelming wealth and variety of items for sale on the site, and with the large number of experienced shoppers, the interest of most people is in efficiently sifting through the items. I've heard more than a few people say they were turned away by seemingly random search results, and that they have grown tired of playing with the color search and whatnot.
Somewhat ironically, the reason for this is that the FSF holds the copyright to the GPL, so only they can change it. Well, you could probably change it, but you couldn't call it the GPL anymore... and it would probably be copyright infringement.

I wonder what would happen if the GPL itself was licensed under the GPL... I suspect it would start raining turtles. :)
Hey no problem, if you have an Ubuntu box running on slicehost etc. you can follow the following to setup postfix: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Postfix

In terms of sending the mail, you'll need some kind of simple app to talk to the smtp server, for example a rails app that uses ActiveMailer. If you're familiar with rails, this will help: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionMailer/Base.html

Though there are probably even simpler services that can talk to SMTP servers even better, as rails is sort of a lot of overhead just for actionmailer.

Hope that helps!
I don't desire flash so much that this matters.
The problem is that very rarely is a platform "unequivocally" better than another. If you're waiting for that expect to wait a long time. We have to make subjective assessments. Loyalty is one of those subjective things. I don't think we are fools for it. In fact it seems like you are pretty loyal to Apple.