skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation," he said.

> What we take him to mean by this that instead of innovating Microsoft sought to make itself into the guardian of digital media - a sort of Internet copyright cop - by stitching up a DRM-infested monster.

That's a non-sequitur, and borderlines on putting words into Ballmer's mouth. I don't see any way to construe Balmer's quote as being about DRM.
From what I can remember of being an academic researcher (it was a while ago) the term "trivial" was indeed used to indicate something that wasn't of any real research interest.

This does indeed annoy people who put a lot of work into building complex systems that actually do useful stuff.
Facebook is the new Microsoft
You're reading too much into the aside.

Perhaps the greater context is "Luckily we retained the essential founders and despite what the new CEO did we went public and everyone succeeded in the short term".
I think they call it code reuse or Don't Repeat Yourself or something unwise like that.

Dumbzucks!
So that's what cut is for!
Dumping the JSON objects into CouchDB for static analysis should be a fun project.
Seven Reasons to Upgrade to Fedora 13
Has HTC completely abandoned the Hero?
No trace of it on the website.
Actually, the board of directors hires the CEO, the CEO reports to the board, and the employees report to the CEO.

The CEO can only be said to 'work for the founders' if the founders control the board. If the founders lose control of the board, then founder status itself means nothing.
I wrote about this a while ago,

Apple currently does not offer any in itunes analytics, for instance, how many people view your app page, how long they spend, do they click the images, do they click buy, if they click buy, do they complete the purchase etc. I'm sure they are working on it...aren't they?
If iterating over a list, try iterating backwards. That way you can delete items from the list without effect on iterator position. This doesn't work on dicts, of course, but this way you can delete in-place without creating a copy data structure.
They really were quite menacing in a professional kind of way - even more so than corporate lawyers.
I like the design and I give you kudos for trying out an unusual page layout (navigation bar being on the bottom rather than top). I think it works! Although I will say that it feels more like a designer's website than a programmer's; while design aesthetics are important to me as a programmer, it is generally the content or clever personal projects that give it the icing...

I'm one to speak though, my own website is rather boring! Good job on your site.
You're probably right. Maybe it would be nice that there was a bank where the customers were us salarymen.

OTOH they probably already exist - there are lots of pseudo-bank financial institutions over here (basically lending co-ops) with very flexible working hours, and awfully big interest rates, but they only provide some of the bank's services (short-term lending at those abusive rates mostly), you don't get stuff like mortgages, car buying credits, savings accounts, or investment opportunities (even though they might make a great place to get good interest since they're lending money at such a big interest rate).
But what's the point of an https search if it's not really secure? The only thing the user is trying to hide is the query, and it's not being entirely hidden.

For users who are annoyed, you could explain to them somewhere on the site that you don't put it in the URL because it exposes their query. If they really want a secure search, I imagine they'll understand the tradeoff.
I'm afraid you have me at a loss there... I'm missing some context.
Evolution of PC Audio - As Told by Secret of Monkey Island
I'm responding to the part of the article where Fred opines that a balance is needed, and quiet confidence is probably best. That's helpful to someone whose imbalance is not being quiet enough. But you can be too quiet as well. I think more information is needed to truly find balance.
Traditionally the conventional wisdom, as told by people who I'll note had a stake in this type of outcome, was that the founders by definition didn't have what it takes to grow the company.

Sometimes this certainly true. Maybe even most of the time. But then there's the question, can the founders learn what they need to learn about growing the company more easily than Mr. New CEO learn what's essential to its success that he doesn't understand and probably has no background, no intuitive feeling about.

The CEO in theory has the character necessary to do the big(er) company things and this is no small matter, a lot of people just don't have that (management and leadership are HARD). Whereas the character of the founders in this role is generally untested or often in the process of being tested and found wanting.

I've seen both sides, there's no hard and fast rule here.
VoltDB - in memory, ACID compliant, partitioned, SQL database
IPad has 91% consumer satisfaction, demand greater than pre-launch
Because I'm tagged. Once you tag somebody, the link is created.

If you don't tag me, no harm no foul. But once you do tag me, then I should at least be able to speak my mind in a public open forum about how I would like that data to be used.
Umbraco 404 Edition Released
Nicely picked up.

Microsoft overreached with Vista, but I believe they've overreached with many other things.

Joel Spolsky wrote a great essay on Microsoft's 'Fire and Motion' where they simply keep building new and deprecating old apis. How do you ship and support software against such a fast-moving target?

The only way to win is to walk away.
I noticed that proficiency in Java is required. Is there a technical reason or unique feature that makes Java the best choice for 80legs, as opposed to some other language?
First Look: Flash Arrives on New Android OS
Excerpt:

"We tested different websites with the Flash 10.1 Player on a Nexus One running Android 2.2 and here’s our first take: With Flash on your phone, no website is really out of bounds. Flash does not appear to be a battery hog, nor does it chew away at your phone’s resources.

But it’s not a flawless experience either."
Sure, and Adele Goldberg (Smalltalk) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adele_Goldberg_%28computer_scie... helped OOP really evolve.

Women have had serious influence on computer science since the very beginning.
An introduction to existential risks
1. Archive.org -- kind of kills the whole "delete my past" idea.

2. Even if it were possible, what about personal responsibility? Why is it a good thing that your past can simply be erased? If you're running for office and it turns out that when you were in college you had lots of crazy coke parties and posted them online, I want to know that and hear you explain it.

I just don't see a strong argument here for why we need to be able to hide what we once thought should be public.
The short side of a banana sale is a guy with a comparative advantage in the production of bananas. The short side of a bet is a guy who thinks you are going to lose. A synthetic CDO is a package of bets, not a package of bananas.

If you bet that the Yankees would win, you can be sure that someone else believed the Yankees would lose. Similarly, if you received a synthetic sports bet, with a payoff of 100 x Yankee win + 100 x Red Sox win + 100 x Blue Jays win, you can be sure that someone else thinks that at least 2 of the 3 teams will lose. If you lose this bet, you've got no cause for complaint since you were trying to do the same thing to the other guy.

Paulson picked (in their opinion) the worst securities out there. ACA picked (in their opinion) the best of the worst. Everyone on the long side of this bet (which includes Goldman) believed Paulson was wrong and were fully prepared to take their money.
You're missing a few details, especially around "primitive" data types. There's not really any such thing in Ruby - everything is an object, but some objects - numbers, booleans, nil - are immutable.

When you copy an object, all you do is copy its set of instance variables, which are just references to other objects. For an array, the instance variables are its set of indexes, which again are just references. Copying an array just means making a new list of references, but the objects they point to remain unmodified and uncopied.

Consider:

<pre>
array = ["foo"]
copy = array.dup
</pre>

array and copy are independently mutable - modifying the index in one does not affect the indexes in the other - but they still both contain references to the single string "foo". Thus:

<pre>
copy.first.gsub! /foo/, "bar"
</pre>

modifies the string referenced by copy, which is the same string referenced by array. So array becomes ["bar"].

If you want a true deep copy, do something like this:

<pre>
def deep_copy(object)
case object
when Array
object.map { |item| deep_copy(item) }
when Hash
object.inject({}) do |hash, (key,value)|
hash[deep_copy(key)] = deep_copy(value)
hash
end
# handle other data structures if need be
else
object.respond_to?(:dup) ? object.dup : object
end
end
</pre>
In fact, Buffett thrives with investments in companies that have "fallen from grace." I don't think he is afraid of that stigma.
What is "remote intern / contract work" ? Anything you hire a contractor to do is typically going to be inappropriate work for an intern.

This smells like one of those gigs where they hope to pay slave wages for work in their primary line-of-business, and call it an "internship" to excuse their behaviour.
The article read to me like thinly veiled mudslinging and innuendo.
I still don't follow 100%. If there are two people in a photo, how does your input supercede theirs, on how it is used or not used?
Apologies for the formatting screw-up. The deep_copy function is here:

http://gist.github.com/407741
The OpenBSD packaging system's update infrastructure has really improved within the last year. It might be worth another look. I do porting, and very frequently update to a recent snapshot, then update all ports. I haven't had problems with it for a while.

And yeah, best router/firewall OS ever.
The SIGGRAPH paper describing how the glove works in more detail is available as a 5.7 MB PDF here: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rywang/handtracking/s09-hand-tra...

I thought it was fairly readable, you can at least get the gist of how they use the database of gestures to estimate the pose of the hand on a per-frame basis.
30% of DNS traffic? isn't this a lot?
I ran into the exact same problem when trying to solve some (not very complicated in retrospect) errors in a body of text. Shallow copying a string that I was applying permutations to and storing in an array meant that every single string in the array was the same, so I could never have more than one permutation without pulling some hacks like this.

I would be very interested in a cleaner variant on the marshal load hack for non-primitives, or even some interesting doc/writeup on how this works.
What's New in Android 2.2
"We tested different websites with the Flash 10.1 Player on a Nexus One running Android 2.2 and here’s our first take: With Flash on your phone, no website is really out of bounds. Flash does not appear to be a battery hog, nor does it chew away at your phone’s resources."

Weird. It's like Steve Jobs wasn't telling the entire truth, or something.
So little meaning? How about:

"Attracting talented employees; making balanced investments; innovating in the right areas, maintaining a positive product flow and making the right future bets."

Sorry for the meretricious linking, but some time ago I wrote about The Not-So-Big Software Design:

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/05/not-so-big-software-appl...

My thesis was that a good design was about the specifics of the problem and the client, not about generics that could be applied to any project. I feel the same way about business plans.

What's specific to Microsoft about this list? In what way are these the right objectives for Microsoft but not for Apple, General Motors, or Heroku?

Ballmer doesn't call me up telling me how to blather on the Internet, so I won't tell him how to blather to reporters.

But I will warn him: Steve, if I'm ever interviewing you and you give me this list, I won't meekly transcribe your Motherhood and Apple Pie platitudes, I'll follow-up by asking you what's specific to Microsoft about these items that couldn't apply to anyone. I'll ask you what's special about your leadership that you could identify these priorities, and how you differ from some B.Comm. intern that would mouth much the same list if I asked them what Microsoft needs to do to succeed.
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
>spend time learning other things on your own

Hear Hear! And all learning is done on one's own, really.

IQ is, not to put too fine a point on it, bunk.

Grades are also bunk. They can never measure depth of knowledge, which is the thing that matters, intellectually speaking. Depth depends on connections formed with other areas of knowledge, which are unique to each student.
Lacks depth: in order to be innovative we need focus, in order to have focus we need to be specialized, in order to be specialized we need to not focus on growing food when we program (or do brain surgery or rocket science). These support structures are necessary for competitive innovation (though I completely feel your pain).

So if you want to make this argument, you need to figure out a way that it doesn't matter if the US competes globally anymore. That's the only way this works. Otherwise you just make us non competitive in the global market. When everyone else stops growing we can too, but unfortunately until then it's going to be pretty hard to convince people to stop consuming.
Thanks, that was a cool link. And it did come to about twice what I get paid hourly as an employee, so I guess that's a good heuristic.
In reviews like this, there's always one common complaint I see over and over:

It's too hard to support every possible combination of distro / WM / driver / library

My answer is: well then don't. Much like in Windows, 99% of your users will have a fairly sane and normal setup. I guarantee he doesn't lose sleep worrying about whether users can run his games in Windows 95, so why expend even a half-hour's effort getting it to work in somebody's mangled LFS installation?

There's only three WMs to worry about: Metacity, KWin, and Xfwm. They are all quite standards-compliant, and if your game will work in one, it'll work fine in another. "But what if a user's running ratpoison!?" Tell that user they're not using a supported configuration. Problem solved.

Ditto for sound. If your game uses OpenAL or GStreamer and doesn't work on their system, then the problem is their system. You're not obligated to support every half-wit Gentoo user who uninstalls ALSA to optimize his kernel.

If your game needs libfoo-1.1, released last year, and a user only has libfoo-0.83-rc2 installed, don't worry about it. It's OK if your game spits out an error and crashes. Just include what libraries you built against in the README, and try to make sure it'll work on the most recent versions of Ubuntu and Fedora. Anybody who installs some weird library version will have the knowhow to ldd the binary and install missing software themselves.
Our experience with third party login services
Just a wild guess. Microsoft has always trying to dumb down its offering for regular people (i.e.: non-developers). Nothing bad with that, just like Cloud offerings trying to eliminate Sys/Net-Admin. Examples of such (MS) technologies were: Access, ASP.NET, VB. The dream of Microsoft was to cut developers out so that the Biz-guy can whip up a small utility software quickly or to generate various reports quickly.

At some point, MS probably realized that either these tools are not enough or their customers are asking for more because businesses are getting more complex and agility is required.

MS, known as the company that is great in terms of partnering and pleasing everybody except developers, decided to re-brand its offering to be more developer friendly. But at the same time, still serving the non-developers community as well (which seems to be dying slowly because well... if you don't like computers, you will not like it at all, period. You will hire someone to do the "dirty" job for you).

It'll take a while to transform the old MS to the new MS. If they ever made it.

Meanwhile, (some) OSS projects didn't have ambitious goals. They solve the authors's problems. During the inception of the project, they didn't care about the non-developer audiences. They care about themselves: developers.
Will their mobile browser strategy be another Vista, giving an enormous head start to Webkit's version of HTML5 while not producing much value intrinsically?
Calacanis, after ranting about Facebook privacy, breaches his user’s privacy.
I'm on Jason Calacanis' email newsletter list.

After his email yesterday stating that he's quitting Facebook for privacy breaches I was amused this morning to see that he had inadvertently left his newsletter mailbot settings open so that users could reply to eachother.

Most people are respectful, but there are of course a half-dozen bad eggs self-promoting, sending ads, etc. Anybody else on the list?
My dad was involved in the network architecture of ATMs/cashpoints for UK banks in the 80s.. not sure if this ever happened, but there was an urban myth of some early installations where one ATM was distributing 200 pounds no matter what was punched in on the keypad.
No-one informed the local bank, but the next day there was just this huge queue of people checking out this new cashpoint thingy...
Sometimes moving on is the best decision - Short Brad Feld Clip
A programmable nanoscale assembly line
Incredible. The problem is, they look like bowling shoes for your hands.

I'm betting you can fix this by putting some paint on there that reflects infrared or ultraviolet light at different frequencies. Might need to upgrade that webcam though.
Keep reading. Not sure about you, but I consider using 40% of charge for two hours of Flash a lot.
Google Mobile Ads
Most of the app's they allow you to run on the scraped content are built on java
I just don't get why everyone is sold on web apps. They are an absolute pain to develop compared to writing native apps.

I know people talk about deployment and so on, but really, that is easily solved with auto-updating clients.

I for one wish web apps would go away and we could go back to native clients.

(For LOB anyway which is what I spend a lot of my time on)
I didn't say delete. I specifically say I would like to annotate any personal data of me on the web with my preference for public release. My preferences may change over time.

I'm not asking to change the way the internet works or to pass any kind of law or anything. I'm simply purposing a standard way to, in one location, provide some feedback about all my data.

I would imagine that if we did this, at a later stage web applications would either certify that they followed this standard -- or not. No skin off my back in either case.

So for the case of the guy running for office, he'd just have one place to go to in order to say no, I really don't want to share that any more. And perhaps provide an explanation of what happened and why he feels the way he does. People would still be free to distribute whatever data they wanted, but a mechanism is provided to centralize new information related to me. Not the data, but a control block -- which apps can choose to use, ignore, display as an annotation, etc.
I believe you are thinking in terms of how some specific application may choose to implement this proposed standard.

I really don't go there. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1364381
Some innovative new crap The New York Times surely has a throbbing hard-on for
A starvation budget is different for different people. If you have a mortgage, for instance, or Silicon Valley rent, it makes a huge difference in how much you have to make before you can even afford ramen :-)
RSS feed of Twitter lists
Google Reader already has all of his blog posts archived. But it's nice to have it organized too.
First synthetic cell created
To be fair, they'll say the same thing in most parts of the US but they will be more supportive. :)
Efficient Algorithms and Data Structures for Massive Data Sets
I still believe that a best-of-both-worlds is possible, and probably coming. But I sort of agree with you in the sense that I would much, much rather have only Internet-connected native clients, than only web apps. Fortunately it doesn't have to be one or the other.
Why does society value growth above all else?
I'm surprised that none of the students tried to skew the results as the author expected. If could have been done fairly easily by writing a quick HTML page that uses JavaScript to make a couple iframes continuously load a variety of different sites.
Actually, Shatner is the consummate master at making one groan, in the way that one's parents often do.
How to Build a Loyal Blog Following
That's what's so good about it!
Okay. I misread it. My bad.

If its directed at developers its a great design then. Its cool. And we like cool stuff.
Sufficient Design
FNB in South Africa has a learning quick select feature for withdrawals like the one you describe. After I withdrew the same amount a couple of times it appeared on the main screen as a quick select option.

Same with language. I'm sure I was asked at some point what my language preference was, but since then I've never had to tell an FNB ATM my language choice. I still do for other banks, but that's probably because language preference isn't amongst the pieces of data which banks share between each other.

So it can be done. You don't need local storage on the ATM itself, just a few additional attributes requested and sent down when the ATM retrieves the customer account data from whichever central servers it's using.
The article also pointed out that pages that would otherwise work fine on a PC were borked or had slow performance. This is not the 1-to-1 flash support I think users are expecting.
I was a student there 1986-1990, then worked full-time on Athena until February, 1998. What you say has been true a long time. There are no-trespassing signs at all MIT entrances only so that the MIT police can legally eject people who cause trouble. Casual visiting is normal.

In 1994 I pushed hard to get kerberos-authenticated telnet into the Athena release. The general sentiment from others was that, sure, sniffing passwords was possible, but distributed computing was advancing to the point where people would be able to do everything from their desks, and wouldn't need remote logins. So kerberizing other services was a higher priority.
oblig: http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html
I guess in memory means that it never writes data to the disks. So what happens when the machine reboots?
Key Elements of a Massively Scalable Startup
More like Adobe has finally poured some engineering investment into making Flash work decently on a mobile platform. By all indications 10.1 is a massive improvement over 10. It's still not quite as good as Adobe are saying, but it seems to be a lot better.

For what it's worth, this is exactly what Adobe should have done from the start instead of wasting their time trying to convince Apple to allow Flash on the iPhone. Getting Flash to run flawlessly on competing smartphones would have made it far harder to Jobs to claim that Flash wasn't technically up to it.
Sys Admin truths that will never change
First he said you didn't need a native SDK, you could make-do with web apps, then they released the SDK.

Then he said Apple had to approve apps because otherwise very bad things would happen, but with 50000 apps and millions of users, Android showed that's not the case.

Now he says Flash is bad for mobile and Android is once again showing that's not the case.

The best part is, you don't have to care what Jobs says as much anymore. I switched from an iPhone to a Nexus One a few months ago and after watching the Froyo keynote, I have a hard time imagining going back.