skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it hard to imagine that there is any web framework still around that could be more screwed up than Struts. After having had some major exposure to the various members of the Struts family and Rails, I would say that the experience of using Struts 2 is slightly worse than using Rails while being flogged by an expert torturer. :-)

If you want to test the world beyond MS I would recommend (apart from Rails or Django) looking into the Scala/Lift (my preferred toolset), Clojure/Compojure or JavaScript/Node.js combos (depending upon you language preferences).

I would be careful with Rails, when you plan to do some heavy data processing and/or if you need your application processes to run for a long time without being restarted.

For small, straightforward applications or prototyping the Ruby/Sinatra/MongoDB combo is also really really nice.
The campaign owner has not "accepted" any of the pledges, so Pledgie is not getting an IPN from PayPal.
Using bundled packages for offline support is entirely the wrong strategy. The coupling is too tight even before you start trying to use the same format for multiple browsers.

You should just copy Apple and just make it easy to save web pages as local apps, though you might want to explicitly offer with an infobar when there's a manifest available. What they already look for is all you need:

<html manifest="..."> and window.applicationCache
<meta name="application-name"> and <meta name="application-url">
<link rel="icon" sizes="..."> or <link rel="apple-touch-icon">
That and making it easier for developers to make better websites encourages more usage of the internet .

TypeKit helped build part of this (http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/webfont_loader.htm...), so read what you can there.
A non-fun thing about that license: it seems to me that it's not compatible with the GPLv2, which doesn't allow adding extra restrictions on the end user. I can't remember if it's compatible with LGPL or not, though GPLv3 seems safe.

This has been raised on ffmpeg-devel, so hopefully Google has some opinion about it.
It would have the awesome intended consequence of exposing how patents actually hinder innovation, not improve it.
[Tell HN] Google's the first word in 9 of the 30 links on the HN homepage
This must be a record.
Same here; I use it as basically a free web interface to Mathematica. I don't do any normal search on it.
> Like if an Intel manager comes up with an idea and asks an engineer to work up a prototype, surely it'd be illegal for the engineer to quit and work up that same prototype for a new chip-design startup instead?

Yet this is how many Silicon Valley (back when the valley was actually about Silicon) start-ups began. Generally, however, the pattern was engineer and manager would identify a business need that real customers have. They would attempt to build it as a "pet project", be stiffed by conservative and hunch-driven product organization and would then both quit and take a large chunk of the engineers along with them.

The reason this succeeded is that NDAs and non-competes are unenforceable in California. Law suits would still come (due to alleged theft of IP, which generally never happened) and be settled out of court for only a small proportion of the the equity the "idea" produced.

Personally, I will stand by my words. If you can't build your idea it's worthless (you can't estimate whether others can either). If everyone else can (welcome to web 2.0), it's worthless as well. Sure you may be able to sue somebody over your idea (but you generally have to have something more, like a claim of IP theft), but your lawsuit proceeds will be a fraction of what the person who "stole" your idea has made out of it. That $65mm doesn't change Zuckerberg's life _a single bit_ (not having another $65mm
might only make life easier for him, as that's one less bodyguard to hire to protect it).

On the other hand, if you have a genuinely new idea i.e., you have a new CPU architecture you invented but don't have the ability to build the prototype chip _all by yourself_ then one engineer quitting and competing with you won't succeed unless he _actually_ steals your design (this is real IP theft) and even then you'll likely outdo him (as he'll have a bug for bug copy of your design, whereas you actually understand the design choices).

If management wants to be rich, they have to treat engineers with utmost respect. There's difference between engineers mere _coders_ who turn business requirements into code (usually by gluing software others have written together) and engineers. Spot the engineers early on, challenge them, give them autonomy and responsibility. Let them work on pet projects (Google calls it "20% time", but it's merely a codification of something successful companies had been doing before), tune your product vision with their data.
What if, in Windows or OS X or linux, whenever you wanted to go to a folder or open a new app, you had to write the name of the folder/app and it's path in the terminal. What a waste of time, right?

Actually, it's the opposite. I have been a fan of Launchy for years and I can't even imagine how I would manage so many applications with icons, or how I could open a program so quickly.
I mean 10. It's on 10. http://www.flickr.com/photos/joemurphy/4622538325/sizes/o/
Apps are represented in the tab bar as "pinned tabs" (which it looks like they updated the styling of), the user probably has HN set as one.
The survey gains general statistics about loss and then is geared to help us fine tune our marketing. I am hoping that seeing some real world process of a company trying to fine tune their marketing will help other HNers fine tune their marketing as well
The simplest explanation is that Katz was picked because he has a high aptitude for physics problem-solving. Why was he picked over someone else with a better resume? I don't know.

If you could prove otherwise, then we could steer this discussion in another direction.
The MIDI samples were a really poor choice to introduce the program's compositions, but those snippets do sound a lot like Bach chorales stylistically, perhaps at the level a competent (if uninspiring) student of harmony.

The chorales exist online in machine-readable formats at http://www.jsbchorales.net/ (a great resource for doing comprehensive analysis on chorale harmony -- wouldn't doubt if the same data served as input for the Emmy program).
> On the other hand, I find the Winklevoss brothers revolting: "Oh hey, here's this nerd who can our build vision for us and make us rich! Let's hire and pay him pittance! Oh no, he executed on our unique idea himself?!".

>Zuckerberg did a much smarter: took their (simple and intrinsically worthless) idea and built a product and a business on it himself.

What's more revolting is that Zuckerberg agrees to do the work for them and then stalls them so he can steal their idea. You call it smart, I call it being a shady douche bag.
Absolutely you can start using it. I evolve it every single day. I use Protopub exclusively as my feed reader, and have been for about a month.

Right now, Protopub is an experiment, but it also serves as a beacon to other likeminded hackers in NYC, where I live, that I am interested in meeting others who want to create unique and technically savvy projects. It has done a good job of doing exactly that so far.
I'm getting so sick of seeing "tl;dr". Especially when you gloss over important facts in the article. Stop being lazy and stop enabling laziness.

Edit: Plus, the article in question here has 5 little baby paragraphs. Is that really too long to read? Do you click-in expecting to read a tweet?
ConnectU, Leave Zuckerberg Alone
That is the nature of a MIDI rendering. The output of this program is a composition, not composition-plus-interpretation.
Based on the video (not published on their site):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRTzRAtDujU

It looks like they want to distribute via a virtual machine image, and that you need a dedicated web-server in order to be discoverable.
Furthermore, the setting cookies are simple transparent cookies (f=-1 to turn off favicons), they are not tracking cookies. They are only used when you set the preference and then only contain your preference itself.
> Wow. I'm into screencasts, but I'd never heard of you!

We launched a month ago. :)

> I'm curious about the pre-order screencasts. How much planning did you do beforehand?

There is quite a bit of planning behind it:

* Only authors that we're familiar with and trust can do courses (as opposed to authoring a single screencast).

* Each author needs to be specific about what material they're going to cover in each lesson.

* Half of the royalties from preorders are withheld until the course is completed. This motivates authors to finish what they started, as well as giving us funds to handle emergency situations.

* We only release a course after work on the second lesson has been started. This helps us evaluate how long the first lesson took a given author. If it took too long, we won't start a course, but simply convert that lesson into a single screencast.

* We aim for a release of at least one lesson per month, give or take.

* When it comes to TDD and Python, these courses have been adopted/translated from our Italian catalog, where the fourth and fifth lessons, respectively, are being created at the moment. The Italian version of the Python course should be finished by the end of June, then it will be a matter of translation.

> Are you set up to do bulk refunds if you don't finish a series in a reasonable amount of time?

Creating a whole course takes a lot of time and work. It's akin to writing a large technical book. For this reason, we may disagree on the definition of "reasonable amount of time". What's sure is that if after a year, a course has yet to be completed, and a customer complains, we'll issue a partial refund or some form of "store credit".

Ultimately, we sincerely care about providing really good customer care, and strive to ensure that all of our courses end up being completed.
India's 3G spectrum auction raises $11 BILLION
Surprising to hear that Azure is cheaper for you, I would be interested in hearing if that holds true once you actually get up and running on it.

I actually used a powershell script to automate deployments on Azure, it was the delay from when you do that which is so frustrating. Waiting 5-10 minutes was fairly normal.
I keep my Finder windows in Column view, and usually navigate around by typing (the first few letters of) its name, not dissimilar to how I use the Awesome bar.
It's funny. He bitches that MS Word has not improved since 1997. The 1997, hell, the 1990 version, had all the features he is asking for. The features were not hard to learn, and the thing has always come with a manual that is not hard to follow. All they've done lately is mess with the interface and make it so it doesn't freak out on large documents.

creating documents with several sections that can easily be moved around

Outline. Learn styles.

just wants to type most stuff with single or double spacing and a comfortable serif font

Default template. Again, styles.

Does Word, say, have a scratchpad where you can save sections of writing to use later?

How about a second document?

mark where certain thoughts or paragraphs come from that will not turn your text into an unreadable jumble of pink “comments”?

Toggle View Markup to hide the comments.

What bothers most people is the behavior Word exhibits when you use it as a WYSIWYG word processor. It is based on a stylesheet and if you learn to use it that way it will not surprise you.

http://achewood.com/index.php?date=05182004

"Thank you Microsoft Word for continuing to be a good program."
I'm sure that it's just your friend that sits around manually configuring servers, taking EC2 at face value as just virtual hardware -- what some are calling the "Meat Cloud".

Source Code > Documentation > Artifacts
Ah, that makes sense. Did you listen to the album, too?
I don't know a single recent Apple product that's truly innovative, including NeXT. Please fill me on this:

* Apple II had tons of competitors on the market

* Lisa/Macintosh? Xerox PARC roots

* iPod? Tons of poorly constructed devices before it

* NeXT and OS X? Obj C is not the first "C with objects" language, Mach kernel is from CMU

* iPad/Newton? Tons of prior art (the idea itself belongs to Alan Kay)

I have major problems with Apple (they aren't friendly to hackers who don't work at Apple), but the fact that people forgot the predecessors of Apple's devices is only an example of importance of execution.
I created Charlie Rose's Guest List + CrunchBase = CharlieCrunch
It's disappointing at a time like this that when all Americans need to come together and focus on relief efforts and recovery efforts in the Gulf, someone in power decides a person's divisive position on an issue affects his ability to focus on a problem.
Woman hide inside the coffin to escape arrest
Zoo X Mania - free animal porn videos
I don't know what kind of books you're writing, but 100,000 pages is too many pages. Did you mean 100,000 words?

I've only ever written 50,000 word NaNoWriMo stuff, but I've had a lot of success with text files, simply marked-up, in emacs. One text file per chapter. A short Python script converts them into LaTeX and a makefile builds a PDF. All the notes are handled with org-mode. It's a really sweet setup.
These posts are always interesting, but usually not all that informative. For every one of these posts there are probably 100 writers who are fine with Word.

There are some minor things I'd like out of Word, but the main thing is probably to start up faster. Takes about 3s on my computer. I'd love to see sub 1s startup.

With that said, OneNote is always running so I use that for a lot of the type of writing that this author refers to.
Neither of your points are really true:

ChromeOS uses X Windows, just without a reparenting window manager.

ChromeOS is not Unix 'hidden' under a pretty UI -- neither the filesystem nor the userland are exposed to the user or to application developers. There's no Finder as the main UI with a Terminal in the Utilities folder: both metaphors are simply gone.
The "page" may be less fashionable than the "store" these days but It ain't dying. No one is required to buy what "bundle sellers" are selling.
I expected the downmod. That's why I said I shouldn't tell this[1]. People here appear to be so worried about ethics, that forgot everything else. Will you please explain to me, the invalidity of the case? I mean they made patent infringement, and if the infringement is judged as valid, than what are we discussing?

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1361888
I love watching Charlie Rose interviews with tech/startup people. It's hard to find them on his site (his Technology section isn't very good). So I whipped up a script to grab his guest list and check if the guest has a CrunchBase profile. Mostly for myself, but I figured other people might in find it useful too. Enjoy.
Baby Steps for the LHC
Then nothing. You should expect this. If the court sets a fine, you should pay it.

EDIT: I'm not trolling, nor I would ever want to do so. It's just that people here are forgetting how the system works (you're a hacker, find your way out). See last paragraph http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1363080
Ray Guns Near Crossroads to the Battlefield
Of course. I suppose my question is how important these things are in day-to-day operation. Maybe it's a trivial question, but I think there's something there, given that some people run their company from an island in Costa Rica while managing a virtual team, and others insist on having an office in the Valley.
Exactly.

Salesforce can defend two ways: 1) challenge the validity of the patent, or 2) prove that they don't infringe the patent.

Option 1 is harder. Patents are presumed valid. Defendant (Salesforce) has the burden of proof that the patent should be overturned. Salesforce will have to do that for each alleged infringing claim.

Option 2 is easier. Plaintiff (Microsoft) has the burden of proving infringement. Salesforce just needs to show that they aren't infringing claim 1 and then they also aren't infringing claims 2-9.
Android uses a heavily hacked kernel and essentially ignores the standard interfaces for everything it's userland stuff touches. It's also less of a distro than Slackware was -- every update has to be ported to the existing hardware platforms! Google finally wised up and will soon start shipping all the user-facing stuff through the Marketplace instead of tied to a kernel release.

ChromeOS is better, it's just a spin of Ubuntu.
That sounds really interesting! If anyone does the analysis it would be cool to see the results.
That's why I advocate the Dock on the left and auto-hide: to recover those previous few pixel rows. I have it shrunk down to the minimum size. It might as well be completely disabled.
I got exactly what I hoped for when clicking through. Turnkey-style VMs are great!
A history of in-flight food (with 1958 video)
"VP8 copies way too much from H.264 [to be] patent-free."
If you're looking for a balanced outside view, and find that outside view less balanced than initially claimed...
they now have a classifier that lets you input random text and tells you the language it was probably written in.

Incidentally, Google Translate does this and starts guessing the source language as you start typing. I found it interesting that when you type a single character, w is guessed as Polish, i is Norwegian, s is Czech, e is Portuguese...
HTML5 is now officially ready for prime-time. Anything is possible with HTML5.
> It is possible he had an older revision of their code.

Unless he had a very ancient version of this codebase it is unlikely that it is different in structure from the current mainline.

Adding comments or sanitizing local variable names are only very superficial changes.
I'm not an Apple fan, I run Ubuntu on my macbook pro but as far as smartphones go the iPhone was truly innovative. Its closed nature is hurting it now, but it was innovative.
I have no idea nor any opinion about the merits of their case. I am pointing out the otherwise useful idea of "just shrug it off and build something else" is good advice only in a certain domain, and this is not in that domain. It is dangerous to take advice out of the domain it is appropriate for (a broadly applicable statement), and useful to point out when it is occurring.

Frankly, I don't care how any lawsuit goes. My personal recommendation would be to take the settlement and cash out while Facebook stock is still worth something. I'm not terribly sanguine about the 1-2 year prospect of the stock. (Not because Facebook will be gone by then, but because the current value of the stock includes a promise of growth that I think will be obviously not going to happen by then.)
Webmachine in the Data Center
I suppose I didn't mean "patent troll", but instead spoke with a growing distaste for the way patent law is practiced. When I read that article I found difficulty locating where I stood between calling something a compression technique and just... math.
If you're an ASP.NET MVC programmer looking to learn Ruby on Rails, check out my book Ruby on Rails Tutorial at

http://www.railstutorial.org/

I don't know ASP.NET MVC at all, so I haven't tailored the presentation to Microsoft developers, and I'd be curious to hear if you find my approach accessible. You can leave me feedback at http://www.railstutorial.org/feedback.

N.B. Although NoSQL is outside the scope of an introductory tutorial, I'm hoping to do some follow-on articles on such specialized topics once the core tutorial is finished. (I'm currently writing the final chapter.)
Will the oil spill force Obama to begin Environmental 'New Deal'?
99designs Beats DropBox & Tumblr, Creates Video
You really don't HAVE to use SQL Server just because you're using .net you know...
Plus they don't qualify what audiences!
> But when Bach wrote his first fugue it was a breakthrough, and even if after that each and every other fugue was linked back to that first one [...]

What makes you say that? Bach did not invent fugues, so why should his first fugue be a breakthrough--compared to other fugues--and why should every fugue henceforth go back to Bach's first fugue? (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugue#History)
The nice thing about a post-singularity AI is that it also handles all of those other threats.
if i could receive and send email from it, i could switch to it as my primary platform. then i could make use of the additional features when others are on wave. as it works now its just not doable.

why?
The Future Is Now.
The DISCLOSE Act regulates blogs' political speech
I don't think Google has some magic "make this algorithm scale to huge datasets" box that they can run things through. The reason why Google can run predictions on huge datasets is because they designed an algorithm that has lower accuracy but greater scalability; this service seems to be just them giving you an API to that algorithm. I think your comment sounds like "I like your algorithm, but I'd rather use my algorithm, so please run my algorithm but make it have the features of your algorithm"...
What I thought the article would be about, though you did touch on it, is how the prevalence of APIs and data-driven, single-purpose apps have begun to put a dent in web access of major sites (social media, shopping, news). It's an interesting phenomenon, definitely something deserving some further examination.
Using past data to give you better service for future data -- isn't this exactly what you want a prediction algorithm to do?
That would be interesting. Does anyone have a dataset? Ideally to do this type analysis you would also need to know the upvote (or downvote) history of the users so you can pinpoint any bias, or predict which comments you as a user are most fond of reading.
> The reason this succeeded is that NDAs and non-competes are unenforceable in California.

True for employee noncompetes with no other relevant factors; not true for NDAs.
Does google use the data you upload for other purposes besides just driving your (private) results via the prediction api?
And then you have the added complexity of two OS platforms to support.....

I think they made the point in the article that they could have overcome the obstacles of the ASP MVC platform, but why? They said they're more productive on Rails, they like working on it better, and it's cheaper.

What positive would there be (for them) of staying on the MS platform?
We all have this idea in the past, the difference is that Google has many top Ph.Ds pushing Machine Learning advancement, and this is something we can't do with an idea.
Does it mean that IE8 would be unable to play a given video even with the proper codec installed?!

This is absolutely insane.
Yes, anything is possible with HTML5, but only on html5Zombo.com.
Another interesting project is crm114: http://crm114.sourceforge.net/

It's ridiculously easy to use. I used it for identification of spam/scam messages and setting it up was just 5 lines of code.

I wrote a blog post about using it here: http://smokinn.com/blog/post/253
> Which is probably a sensible security precaution.

Why not sandbox the video codec? It's not like it needs to even read more than a single given file. Heck. It's not like it even needs to read a file - it only needs a data-stream from where to read compressed frames and a callback pointer so that it can give them to whatever displays them.
We ended up using OpenSolaris for a project specifically for ZFS, plus some related hardware support. I typically use OpenBSD or Debian for most projects requiring a BSD or Linux, so I found myself comparing it to those two systems.

We've definitely had some trouble with getting packages to work correctly, especially when using newer versions of software that were available as packages in the distribution. Most maddeningly though, it's slow. We set it up on a pretty beefy abmx machine, and at its worst it took over 15 minutes to boot.