skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IE already CAN use webkit:

http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/

Just gotta convince the users to install it.

But that's going to be way easier than convincing Microsoft to dump millions in invested development.
JGC criticizes the economist for implying Obama was opposed only to particularly new media (ipads, etc), and not also mentioning TV. I pointed out that they mentioned he also opposes some traditional forms of media (talk radio).

The economist said he joined "a long tradition of grumbling about new technologies and new forms of media", not that he wanted to censor anyone. I pointed out that the quote JGC provides suggests the economist is correct: Obama is criticizing a new information delivery system, the "24/7 media environment". No one besides you mentioned censorship.
Of course federal funding distorts science. How could it not? It's naive to think otherwise. Politics pervades all the other areas of government spending. Are you saying that scientists and their funders are somehow superior to everyone else? That they have a special gene that makes them bias-free?

I see the bias most clearly in the science and studies that are not being funded and the changes that are not being promoted. Why, for example, does Al Gore focus on climate change, which is based on contested predictions of how the climate will be in 50 years, and not on eliminating the farm subsidies which make food so artificially cheap that about a third of Americans, many of them "in poverty," are obese? Could it be that addressing climate change involves increasing government power while eliminating subsidies would reduce government power?

When was the last time government paid for a study that recommended that some department or agency of the government be eliminated?

Sal Khan has videos covering all the math taught in K-12. Why don't government-funded scientists study whether thousands of math teachers can be taken off government payrolls and replaced with Khan's videos?
stop eating fish.
support no fishing zones.
support desert based salt water fish farms.
> You must be joking. It's great that they have finally decided to add SVG support, but bragging about SVG "hardware acceleration" when they won't even commit to supporting the canvas tag is unconscionable.

No, it's not just SVG that will be hardware accelerated. Everything will be rendered in the GPU.

> It's also this kind of thing that makes it clear that either the IE team has its priorities completely out of whack

On what basis do you make this judgement? Why is supporting canvas better than making everything hardware accelerated?
I am a supporter of the Piratebay because the entertainment industry has had far too much control over the way we consume music and movies and I do not want to get back to that.

In the meantime we'll inconvenience the artists while we're slowly converging on a better way to pay them. So be it. As a software producer I'm in the same boat.
At TekPub we raised our monthly subscription from $15 to $19 and we didn't get one complaint. We warned the users ahead of time and told them anyone currently paying $15 would keep paying $15 as long as they kept their subscription going.

It's really not that hard.
It was about time. 37signals release Basecamp localizations.
I think you gain more publicity than competition (especially if it's not something that can be ripped off in a weekend).

Besides, to me it's more important to share data with other developers so it's worth it for me personally, even if financially it's just a wash. Not everything is about money :-)
I think people of our technological knowledge get sick and tired of screaming from the rooftops that we will watch streaming tv with commercials or listen to unlimited music for $10 a month and being shot down with a limit of the 5 newest episodes or limitations to spotify.

Unfortunately, bit torrent is the easiest way and if I am walking to my mother's and the florist only allows five flowers and I want the whole dozen, the neighbor's flower bed is a nice option.
I don't recall if RT from Best Practical has the particular feature, but otherwise it's a well-rounded and battle proven solution. It's ugly as hell though.
I would like the ability to see the homepage from a specific date - a "time machine" feature where you can enter a date and it shows you the home page from that date. TechMeme has this feature and I use it regularly (archives box, right column, bottom).
You've got to be kidding. Porn is destroying society's moral fabric? If porn is capable of this, there wasn't much fabric in the first place.

He's also concerned about the fact that people have become cyborgs, tethered to fancy tools.

Sure, the internet is destroying traditional news organizations, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. The fall of the newspaper isn't signaling the end of society... just maybe society as we know it.

I'm with potatolicious - this is merely flame bait.
Great batch. A couple I hadn't seen yet.
Well it's forkable on github, knock yourself out, Steve :P
Penumbra: Overture and HPL1Engine Code Opened
What an awesome RSS feed icon they have, if you haven't already, try hovering over it a few times (and then a few more.)
I find it seriously irritating when silly limitations like this in a framework corner you into bad data design.

Frameworks by their very definition are not meant to cover 100% of use cases. They cover the 80% of issues that can be solved without composite keys, or those where the overhead in not having the correct design is negligible.

Perhaps in these cases you shouldn't be forcing the framework into a position it can't fit.
Looks nice. But is there a preview or sample available before I buy this?
A previous hotel job I had used a touchscreen Windows-based POS. One day, for whatever reason, I accidentally held down the 'submit transaction' button for half a second too long. The terminal went apeshit and crashed.

Several hours later, after hours of phone calls, hundreds of orders written on paper and totted up by calculator, a confused-looking technician managed to get it working properly again.

What a mess that was.
Ceph looks very interesting. Anyone here using it already?
I don't understand how people who favour browser diversity can be making websites unless they are masochists. MS can use WebKit and still innovate. It's not either-or.

If MS would just implement the <canvas> tag (and according to the standard) then I'd be a little less disgruntled.

I really don't care if they all use WebKit or they all adhered more closely to some standard. I want less work for me to create a website. I guess I could always use Flash. ;-)
Didn't read it all, but I think creating an unambiguous specification is indeed very hard, if not impossible.
He's spent years in the industry building relationships and evaluating companies. You're comparing his entire investment strategy to a kid impulsively buying a toy. That's just not rational. It makes you sound like you have a chip on your shoulder.
I actually first thought the site was about version control, given the name and the CVs references (which I assumed was a typo).
I guess they negotiated most of that 30% facebook credit cut to themselves.
Sounds like Zynga got a discount on Facebook credits in return for staying committed to the FB platform. Of course, I could be horribly wrong
Just a quick tip while we're on subject.

If you use any exotic type for your @font-face, be sure to give it a text-shadow: 0px 0px 1px #fff; to smooth out the edges.

The shadow colour should be the same as the background colour. So technically, it's just a smoother, not a shadow.

The result is the same smooth render you would get with sIFR. Works wonders.
JTrac
Yes, people do it with Talapia right now.
Alcohol and Pregnancy
But this script handles streaming utf-8 encoded strings correctly.
Hire someone and delegate the management of the business to them over time.
If every digital copy is charged the same as the old physical ones, the economic benefit of the internet's innovation is effectively obliterated.

No way! There is still a huge benefit to the internet. There's no plastic to pollute the environment. You don't have to leave home to get the movie. You can stream it from netflix or watch it on Hulu.

Available on the internet, doesn't mean it should be available for free. There are still costs for bandwidth, servers, and all the middlemen who put the pieces together so you can access it that way.
Fragmentation.

It would still be called WebKit, but it would be somewhat compatible with other implementations of WebKit.

Remember Microsoft's Java.
You'll probably get a lot of replies from people saying "just use Django", but that's just because it's what they are using.

First of, going by your requirements, I'd pick SQLAlchemy for handling your database. Although SQLAlchemy includes an ORM, it's not just an ORM. It has an excellent data mapper layer you can use with legacy databases, without having to drop down to raw SQL:

http://www.sqlalchemy.org/docs/sqlexpression.html

If you go with SQLAlchemy the next step is the choice of framework. There are a few around, but I can only provide advice on 3: Django, Pylons and Werkzeug.

Django + SQLAlchemy is frankly not worth the bother. The real benefit to Django is the apps that go with it - for example authentication, the admin site, 3rd party apps such as Pinax and so on. These are great, but if you are building on top of a legacy DB then you won't be able to make much benefit of them, and unfortunately the Django ORM is tightly coupled with these apps.

Django without these apps is not IMHO that compelling, as other components - such as the template engine - are done better elsewhere.

Pylons is the next in popularity - the biggest site I know of running on Pylons is Reddit. It has more flexibility in choice of components, but lacks Django's app ecosystem and documentation is sorely lacking compared to Django. That said, you can use Mako or Jinja2, both excellent template engines, and you can integrate SQLAlchemy very easily. This lack of good, up to date docs is a pain point, as is the auto-generated modules - there is a lot of generated boilerplate code and it takes a while to learn where everything goes (routing, middleware, etc).

Finally Werkzeug - not really a full framework as such, more a toolkit for building WSGI applications. This is my personal favourite, as it's well documented and designed, and lets you structure your application the way you want to. The tutorial explains how to integrate Jinja2 and SQLAlchemy.

That said, you will spend some time laying out a Werkzeug application before you get going, unlike Django and Pylons, and I wouldn't recommend it to Python newbies. There is a new microframework - Flask (http://flask.pocoo.org) built on top of Werkzeug which makes things much easier, but it's a very new development and is probably not production-ready quite yet.
I say it says... "Ass clown so over the RIAA" x^D

@grillonic
We're not quite ready for prime-time, but my startup (Mad Wombat) is developing a helpdesk application called Tracker, which might suit your needs, provided you don't mind us still being early in our beta.

Tracker is a very tightly focused piece of software; it doesn't have public forums, or a wiki, or a knowledgebase. It just tracks problems, which can be submitted via email, via the web interface, or via the REST API.

Now keep in mind, it's still early in our beta. The major features all work, but there are plenty of bugs, which we're fixing as fast as physics allows. Although we do use Tracker as our own customer support and bug-tracking application, so we've got a lot of motivation to make sure that it works.

Shoot me an email if you're interested: don@madwombat.com
I don't see why another company couldn't do the service part, and it could still be the "Google Experience".
Diaspora's opportunity: Model real life instead of SQL tables
With NFC your credit card information is only stored in encrypted form. Implementing a regular app with payment functionality will make it a lot easier to steal this data.
Actually, it is relevant to the basic point. If I could reliably look up well-written and interesting content on the Internet, that would be wonderful. But most of it is lost in a morass of crap. There's probably some level of "Human nature just doesn't incline us toward useful learning," but I think there's also just basic risk aversion: If I read a blog or forum, the information content might be low, but at least I have a good idea what I'm getting. I have no trouble finding an amusing and semi-informative blog, but finding a chemistry text that is useful to me is actually much harder, even though I'm sure there's probably more than one on this giant Web.
What if more than one person activates his QB proxy at the same time?

Is robot-to-robot interaction as good as person-to-robot?
The Bad People Project - Security Awareness for Kids
Thanks. I think it's more bug than a non-feature though.
I'd argue Gmail is a social network. Facebook just makes it a little easier to share images, videos, etc. I don't think it's a difference in kind but of degree. When I send an email to someone, I expect it to only go to that one person. Sure, there are some cases where it might be okay for the receipient to share it, and usually they have an understanding ahead of time of whether it's okay or not. But the sender usually considers it a violation of privacy if it is forwarded to third-parties, especially to the general public. If Google one day unilaterally decided to make all your Gmail email publicly viewable and searchable, there would be a shit storm. Yes, in theory before your emails could have been made public. But in practice, 99% of them do not and it would only have happened if the sender or receiver caused it to happen. But in this case, the trusted intermediary service caused it to happen. That's the violation. So I think the Gmail example is valid and relevant.
I came across this website a few days ago and I like the idea and execution so far :)

In my opinion, you should be able to manually edit project description and add extra information to it.

Also more forges like lauchpad, ohloh? and others are needed.

P.S. At what rate do your spiders crawl GitHub and other websites?

It looks like that many projects with recent updates are missing.
I still prefer the mnemonic "Reboot Even If System Utterly Broken", plus it describes what it does. :)
If MS changed their browser so significantly, many websites would break. A doctor's office I support uses dozens of web sites for insurance, lab results, hospital admissions, etc... I would have installed Firefox or Chrome on all the PCs if the web site worked properly on those browsers. The ugly truth is that many government and corporate systems _only_ test their sites in IE. Its a shame, but thats the state of the industry. If MS changed to WebKit, many of their enterprise customers would feel pain.
Stay-at-home mom uses coupons/rebates to consistently get ~75% off groceries
Trained chimp versus NOAA
Learn to read. I didn't say that torture is good. In fact, I don't have any data on it at all. Just saying that data might still affect one's opinion.

What if you family was abducted and locked into an air sealed room, and the culprit was caught by the police. Your family has 1 hour left before air supply runs out. Would you still be against torture.

Again, I can't stress this enough: please read carefully. I am not advocating torture. This discussion is not about torture at all.
I think you're referring to the following quote :
"As part of that process, the NYSE held on to "buy" orders, in the hopes that it could gather enough of them to meet the selling demand. "Sell" orders that came to the NYSE were rerouted to other exchanges, which were not required to slow trading. Those other exchanges were soon overflowing with sell orders and didn't have enough buy orders to meet them, leading to the rapid decline in prices."

I've spoken to a recently retired HF trader about it to verify that it seems wrong and he says that the way that quote is written it doesn't make sense.
He's not criticizing any particular information delivery system, he's pointing out that in a 24/7 media environment and given a number of actors who are wholeheartedly committed to ignoring the truth in pursuit of preconceived agendas, students and individuals have a responsibility to filter and not believe everything they hear/read.

That's what the quote seemed like it was saying to me.
I really don't mind developing for the latest and greatest versions of the popular browsers. I think there is a surprising amount of congruency among them. Where it gets difficult is developing for older versions of browsers.

This article should have made an argument about retiring old browsers faster and getting people to use the latest versions sooner.

Other than that, I can empathize with his position. Web development is hard. I guess that's why we get paid to do it.
Maybe you should design your sites so that it doesn't need to render pixel-to-pixel the same as on the designers workstation.
If you are of that philosophical mindset, there is no rational argument that will change it. The florist may offer only 5 flowers so she can give more to more people and still charge a reasonable rate. Or maybe she only has 5 left.

If you think it's acceptable to go into someone's yard and pick the flowers they have spent money on for seeds, time designing the flower bed, water, fertilizer, weeding -- and then robbing them of the opportunity to benefit from the hard work they've put into it by seeing their flowers when they come home.

Well... what can I say to someone who thinks that is okay? It's not okay. If someone wants two cars and they can only afford one, is it okay for them to take your car out of your driveway?

Are you serious?

Extrapolate your philosophy to everyone in the world and tell me if you think it's a good one to live in. Do you think that would be a good world to live in? A world where people can just take whatever they want, simply because they want it? Without working for it? Without paying for it? Because that's the easiest way?
Facebook really annihilated any meaning in their mission statement, and all the passive language indicates the leadership doesn't really embrace the new statement or take any ownership over it. Since when is Facebook about open and connected? Facebook connects me with my friends across the globe, in a private forum.

Facebook's mission statement should honestly read "anything for another billion bucks," but instead some marketing stooge wrote this:

Founded in February 2004, Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.
DCoder, I posted the original question on Stack-O.
It's sending a request and getting 200 OK but is not actually removing the tag. Have you gotten it to actually work?
Piracy just tells us that there's a market inefficiency. In other words: Movies, music, software, books a.s.o are too expensive for some market actors. The same with black markets and shadow economies. It just means there's something wrong with the current distribution or pricing system. Piracy isn't nice, but that's because markets aren't nice but true: They reflect both sides, the producer and the consumer.
In my country for long there were no such problems because the government imposed the proihibition of fisherman to go out to get some kinds of species during their mating and growing time. That way fish was allowed to reproduce and grow. Every time the fish you're eating has eggs a few dozens of new fishes could have been spared if the reproduction was allowed to take place. Also sometimes the nets used to catch the fish are too tight not allowing baby fishes to get out.

The problem with the law was that it was in reality imposing a time of starvation every year to the fishermans and their families, while the same species could be bought at the markets imported from other countries. The measure was one of the first to be abandoned when the political regime changed.

I don't really know what is the possibility of fishing companies to cycle between the fishing species during the year to let the other species grow, but that still seems like an alternative to me.

I also think that a fish diet is much more healthy than a meat diet, so a danger like the possible extinction of fishing species shouldn't be taken lightly just because we can get the proteins somewhere else.
The article is very shallow, but th problem is very real. the economist has had some very good coverage on this if you want to cruise their website for it.

The main scourge, the UNEP report says, are government subsidies encouraging ever bigger fishing fleets chasing ever fewer fish, with little attempt made to allow the fish populations to recover. The annual 27 billion dollars in government subsidies to fishing, mostly in rich countries, is "perverse," Mr Sukhdev said, since the entire value of fish caught is only 85 billion dollars.

This is the key issue. Being European, I remember since the 1970s that western European nations, particularly Spain, started ranging further afield because they had fished out most of the waters around their own coasts. The result was 'fishing wars' where trawlers would damage the nets or otherwise interfere with boats from competing nations, which resulted in a few diplomatic incidents. Now Euro fishermen catch way out in the mid-Atlantic, and indeed there have been clashes between Euro and Spanish fishing vessels.

Property rights are offered by some Economists as a solution, and I can see the logic of this; on the other hand I am unsure about the probity of just handing people property title for no value, and I'm uncertain about how these can be properly enforced in international waters anyway, absent solid maritime treaties. So in the meantime we have this idiotic subsidy system, which doesn't benefit anyone except the manufacturers of fishing vessels and equipment.
Innovative Websites That Could Reshape the News
The light just went on for me!

Imagine if your favorite programming language, X, had some sort of facility to expose a function/method's Abstract Syntax Tree and a meta-language for scripting changes to particular patterns of in the AST or activating different functionality. Well, in Lisp, the language is also it's own Abstract Syntax Tree and it's own meta-language.

(I use a Smalltalk meta-language all the time at work for code transformation, but even with such a facility Smalltalk can't quite do everything Lisp macros can do.)
An illegal substance sold legally.
True, good points. In a lot of their foreign reporting you do see 2 sides to the story and it's less connected to any general ideological principles that the economist would be concerned with, so I guess I'm generally more impressed with it than the american/british/euro reporting. European stuff I just assume that they're biased and I don't know enough about the situation to pick up on it so I skim it and try not to draw conclusions.
Sorry, but that is absolutely not true. Notice that every statement you use to back up your premise contains "I". You may not be an effective speed reader or haven't been able to properly train yourself, but your blanket statement that speed reading "doesn't work to really understand anything" is completely absurd.

The goal of speed reading is to increase the rate at which you can _comprehend_ what you read, not just increasing the number of words your read per minute. My dad practiced speed reading while getting his PhD in business management precisely so that he could read the mountains of dense, academic research he needed to in less time. He can read and comprehend fully around 600 wpm. Try telling him that it doesn't work to really understand anything.

It's not something you can master in a week or even a month. It takes a long period of dedicated practice but it can definitely help anyone willing to commit to the training.
Another one:

You know maybe a third to a half of the deals I've done, if you looked on CrunchBase. Gabe disclosed none of the deals he did. But you have enough data to declare which one is better?