skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bank of America ATMs do this. After entering your PIN, you just press the Fast Cash button rather than the normal OK button, and it'll give you your standard amount and then return your card.
Facebook Privacy idea - Chinese wall?
So like many other users, I've been weighing the benefits of removing myself from facebook with the loss of social connections - invited events, messages, photo postings, etc. While I'd like to keep the latter, I don't much care for any other interaction with Facebook.

This brings up the idea of a 3rd party agent - a sort of Chinese Wall - that would relay certain events - invites, messages, etc. - to me, while limiting other interactions and generally keeping me and my browsing habits clear of the site.

What do you guys think? Anyone interested in thinking about this in some more detail?
So Adobe could have fixed Flash at any time, they just didn't feel like it?
It's an excellent idea. Such a device could also be used to self-monitor one's Internet use. It's also quite a dangerous device. I could imagine applying the interface ideas of Time Machine to such a device.

Perhaps a proxy is the wrong way to package this. How about a browser that does this?
I'd say no question, but still entertaining.

And I think highlights why privacy IS so important - Jason's list is super targeted and unscrupulous advertisers who are also subscribers immediately began abusing the information.

If they had more info - phone / address / etc - those would be put right to use too.
Misterorange (Evan Erwin) has other side of him:

he's an avid Magic:the Gathering card game player, and he has some very good youtube webcasts called "The Magic Show", sponsored by a card game website for those of you interested in that: http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/archive.php?Article=Ev....

(I know of this because I'm an avid M:TG player myself)
everyone requires a single, authoratative identity on the web

I don't think so...why couldn't you just use OpenID or some equivalent. If I'm posting a comment or tagging a photo, I get to choose which identity service represents me.

Any service that gives people sweeping power to delete content is at a disadvantage to those who don't.

Not necessarily. Right now, services have to spend time and money dealing with removal requests. If they ignore those requests, they get law suits, which are expensive. Staff time, especially attorney staff time, is expensive. Automating the removal process might save money.

And third, there are plenty of good reasons why you can't lay claim to everything on the web that involves you

This is a choice that reflects our values though. European privacy law represents a different choice based on different values. Under those legal principles, my image is part of me. I have a material right to control how it is used, just like I have a right to control who can publish the copyrighted novel I wrote.

what if I'm a photojournalist?

Then you can't publish it without my consent. People who are not public figures have privacy rights under the law right now.
I'm poor so I don't buy a lot of things, books from charity shops, refurbished computers, so I feel like big corporations are after me because I'm a bad consumer.
Am I a bad person?
Announcing Google TV: TV meets web. Web meets TV.
I don't understand how they could avoid locks. They say that each replica runs independently and hence that avoids locking; what about write updates to the same object from different clients? That would need locking of some form at some level.

They should also explicitly discuss the failure models for which they're guaranteeing Durability. If you're scaling to "web-scale", and running this db in a data-centre, then, a single failure would wipe out a rack of machines. Coordinated failures are not uncommon in data-centres. What about those?
A local intern would be full time.

Remote work would depend on the ability of the programmer. We have a few dozen 80apps that need to be produced for various crawl packages right now (more coming). I expect each one would take 1-3 days of programming.
Booting should become a thing of the past eventually. But some form of reset from a known state will still happen.
CSS Best Practices for Team-Based Development
Implicit? I think having to explicitly press the "Quick cash" button is much better than not being able to do a different transaction at all. Like, for example, change the setting.
Given that realisation, I'd have thought not admitting in public to having comitted a federal crime would jump higher up your priorities!
Lots of current webcams already pick up invisible infrared frequencies quite nicely.
It's not that hard to get excited after you watch something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPDT21oEhW0

At that time, it looked like they had something that would humiliate the competition.

I had not completed my transition over to Linux at that time and considered, seriously, sticking to Windows.
What the US Government Really Owns (We think)
Now they just need to release FroYo for phones other than the Nexus One, Droid, and at some point EVO.

I want it for my MyTouch, so I can finally have all the new goodies :(
Early adopter signup gives access to the source, which is licensed under GPLv3. However, there is a binding Beta agreement which states that I may not redistribute the code/application.

The VoltDB software is being published as open source software under the Gnu Public License V3. In other words, as Early Release program members, you now have access to the source files for VoltDB and the development tools for browsing the source code and the current issues lists.

Please note, however, that the Beta agreement is still in effect until VoltDB is officially available. So we ask that you not redistribute the source or binaries beyond your own use at this time.

Is this legally enforceable?
It seems incredibly irresponsible to think something is vitally important and not be working on it. Causation should have much to do with it.

It may be reasonable to think some other task is more important than this one, or for there is no task which you can identify as the most important, but it is in no way arrogant from someone to conclude that there is a most important task, or that some particular task is it, even by a large margin.

I mean, is the counterargument that there is no most important task? or that we can't know it? Or that it's arrogant to think we have it right?
James H Kunstler [TED] dissects suburbia
Yes.

Many of the commenters are asking me to solve the total problem presented. I do not have the solution. But I know the first step is to define and measure the problem.

Right now I have no idea even how big a problem this is, much less what to do about it. As a problem-solver, I would like to start getting an idea of how much and what kinds of data we are talking about. This is a crucial question for future discussions about public policy.

It used to be there were only a few companies with enough data storage to hold all the data that people generated. As storage prices continue to drop, the number of companies will grow at an exponential rate. If I've got a million little copies of me in that chicken suit at the office party, there is no way I can chase them all down and annotate them. But I can provide a central repository where folks can come and see my wishes, desires, or feedback.
"I write my styles on one line ... Personally, I feel this is more readable. And my team members agree. When dealing with so many lines of CSS, the multi-line approach becomes cumbersome to scan through. Keeping everything on one line seems to make it easier."
you dont know me and you dont know my style
I wonder if rejecting flash is Apple's 21st century version of not licensing their operating system. In the 80's, nobody knew such a move was a death magnet. Perhaps missing the mobile flash train could be something similar today.

Interestingly, running flash on phones could pose a threat to Apple's current business model. On the iPhone, music/movies/games all come via the app store. However, flash can deliver all of those directly to the browser - whether for free (youtube), or for a fee (netflicks).
As a side note this one of those fundamental language problems that Clojure solves without sacrificing performance.
Seems to me that when SAP embraces Software as a Service, it shows how inevitable SaaS is.
I do systems research. We only use "trivial" if something is so easy as to be an afterthought. If you're talking theory, then, fine, solved problems are "trivial." But we're not talking theory.
Google Buys Simplify Media To Power Music Syncing For New iTunes Competitor
Nope. To do that, you'd have to talk about performance strictly under 3G, or you'd have to talk about use under conditions like onboard a plane.

There should be different expectations for mobile use. 3G use is already a drain, and you're asking to add another drain on top of that.

The question to ask, is how would Flash over 3G do? If we're down to just a few hours of battery life, it doesn't sound attractive anymore.
Variable declaration hoisting in JavaScript
How is this not an argument about economics? The author makes specific arguments for growing one's own food, and returning to a barter economy. He makes a slight jab at the notion of not merely being consumers, but also creators, but it seems like the crux of his argument is that we should be disconnecting ourselves from corporations in their current form.

Note: I think this idea overall is pretty dumb. A rejection of corporations in favor of cottage industries and barter economies? I'm pretty sure there is free love and tie-dye shirts in his future.
XenClient: Baremetal Desktop Virtualization
Is it just me, or does this seem a lot like what boxee does? Perhaps Google, with it's brand name will be finally able to push the web+tv concept into the mainstream.
First Self-Replicating Synthetic Bacterial Cell
Australia: Travellers To Be Searched For Porn
Section 7:

All other non-permissive additional terms are considered “further restrictions” within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term. If a license document contains a further restriction but permits relicensing or conveying under this License, you may add to a covered work material governed by the terms of that license document, provided that the further restriction does not survive such relicensing or conveying.

I don't think it's enforceable, but IANAL.
Just think. Without this man's contribution, professors would have no way of demonstrating threading/concurrency problems.
Are you kidding me? The "solution" is to serialize and deserialize? That's a incredible waste.

edit: I thought it was not uncommon for higher level languages to pass arrays and objects by reference, so this post wasn't particularly new or interesting. Unless you're coming from PHP, which is, IMO, a nightmare because everything is passed by value (by default) except objects.
The thing is that neither of those actually solve the problem. They were the first thing that I tried...
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowNDA
So, how fast does it run ALTER ?
'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists
The analytics they gather will be invaluable. Like nielsen ratings for web video (correlated by household instead of user or computer).
It's not a bug ... the references are copied by value (don't know what the big deal is ... it's the same thing happening in Java), the cloning done on the basic collections is shallow (again, same thing happening in many other languages) and the basic types like Fixnum are immutable.

When learning a new language, after playing around with code-snippets I then usually read the language's reference.
It ended up being longer than I had planned.. The main reason being that I wanted to demonstrate the fact that Object.clone doesn't work as I would have anticipated, and that I wanted to demonstrate a possible solution.

Greg Brown was kind enough to steer me onto the right track though, this is mainly a design problem. I should be avoiding copying wherever possible.
Top PDF Manuals Search Engine Features
Just to reinforce the other comments - this is pretty much expected behaviour in high level languages.

Always read the docs.
Your analogy falls apart because a CDO is, by definition, a collection of rotten bananas. They all were, and anyone who was betting on them should have known that.

It's the worst-performing (in hindsight too) tranches of bonds backed by mortgages that get into a CDO. Nobody needed to repackage the higher tranches because they were assumed to be risk-free and given the same rating as US Treasuries so they were just sold as bonds.

Synthetic CDOs were all built to effectively wager against credit default swaps, which were all hand-selected by investors (mostly hedge fund managers). If you purchased synthetic CDOs then of course they were hand-selected rotten bananas, but you were wagering (incorrectly) that the rating models used by S&P and Moodys were correct in assuming that if you got enough rotten bananas together, you were left with 80% good bananas and 20% really rotten ones.
Right, but I don't really want to do that 100+ times. I realize its possible... but I just don't have the patience for it. Why can't I do it in bulk?
Or I can hook a pc to my tv like I did last month. Ta-da.

Seriously, this is a good idea, if executed correctly. I like the pc b/c i can play Bluray, DVD, Youtube and Netflix streaming on the same device. And there's only one device.

If you combined those into once device, that would be cool. Some Bluray players are getting there. However, I like the ability to hack and play. I can install my own codes, etc.
I don't think protecting the app store is a reason why Apple is disallowing Flash on the iPhone/iPad. Apple has indicated that it runs the app store near break-even, and doesn't view it as a profit generator: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/26/app_store_wild.... The app store is there to sell devices -- like the iTunes store for the iPod.
They already get a lot of this data. Set-top box analytics are far more accurate than Nielsen: http://www.google.com/adwords/tvads/
If you want to play in Microsoft's ecosystem, you have to correctly pick which APIs and products you will support (and code against) and which ones you think will be dropped before you recoup your investment.

While working at a MS "solution provider" I had the task of building a large NGO hosting service on top of IIS, Site Server, Exchange and SQL Server. I was not allowed to use Apache or any other non-Microsoft alternative.

I can only imagine the nightmare it would be (for our client) to port it to newer versions of whatever came after Site Server 3.

That same solution provider whole heartedly embraced WebClasses when they were announced, but that happened after I left.
Well in fairness, I did mention that the realization made me feel stupid :-p

It's not necessarily obvious if you're coming from other languages that don't behave this way. That being said I'm surprised that I had never run into this problem before. I think that most of the time I had the right idea with not copying objects, but in this case I had memoized a method call and the Hash 'cache' was getting corrupted which was what brought it to my attention... A slightly more unusual situation.
It would be awesome to pair this with haptic feedback and actually be able to 'touch' the blocks as you're stacking them, etc.
Humorously even Paulson and most of the other people who made a fortune had no idea just how right they were. They were all buying the mezzanine tranches (confusing lingo for next to worst) of the CDOs, when in reality even the best tranches (called senior) hit 0. They could have made many times more money (and a few people did, though not more than you could count on your fingers) since the credit default swaps were much cheaper on the highly-rated tranches but the risk was effectively the same since the correlation between subprime defaults considered to be about .3 was actually 1.

Hindsight is 20/20 though.
Our company is in a similar situation. We're currently looking into http://www.port25.com/ (a software solution for $x,xxx) and http://www.strongmail.com/ (a hardware/software solution for $xx,xxx).
I have actually come to Ruby from PHP, maybe that's where I got my incorrect assumptions from, it definitely wouldn't be the first bad habit PHP has left me with.
Wow, that sounds like a serious undertaking. How much PL/SQL are we talking about here? How long did writing the Perl -> Prolog solution take?
From their whitepaper:

"Conventional databases experience disk and user stalls within transactions. Rather than let the CPU be idle during the stalls, those DBMSs interleave SQL execution from multiple transactions during the waits so the CPU is always busy. This is what requires much of the complex latching and locking overhead.

VoltDB doesn’t experience user stalls (since transactions happen within stored procedures) or disk stalls (because VoltDB processes data in main memory). Therefore, it is able to eliminate the overhead associated with multi-threading (latching) and locking. Each VoltDB execution engine is single-threaded and contains a queue of transaction requests, which it executes sequentially—and exclusively—against its data. Elimination of stalls and the need for locking and latching overhead and allows typical VoltDB SQL operations to complete in microseconds.

For single-partition transactions, each VoltDB engine operates autonomously. For multi-partition transactions, one engine distributes and coordinates work plans for the other engines. VoltDB assumes that an application designer can construct a partitioning/cloning scheme and a transaction design that makes a large majority of the transactions local to a single virtual node. Many common applications such as order-fulfillment, software as a service (SaaS), Web 2.0 and trading systems have this property."

http://www.voltdb.com/_pdf/VoltDBTechnicalOverviewWhitePaper...
Any word on when Flash 10.1 is coming to OS X? Flash is such a resource hog even on my Mac Pro, I'm hoping this will mitigate the problem.
Clicker.com Introduces new UI
It seems that it's single-threaded, so all writes will be serialized, hence no locking.
Speaking of hardware, I'm using it on an alix 2d3 (http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm) with openbsd.
I was impressed because it's more powerful but much cheaper than a soekris.
Dehydra is a thin wrapper over GCC AST that allows you to access it from JS. This means you (or someone else) has to write the actual JS code that does the static analysis.

If you want some more information on how this works, take a look at this intro to parsing C++ with a GCC plugin:

http://www.codesynthesis.com/~boris/blog/2010/05/03/parsing-...
are you allowed to have your phone switched on on the plane?
TCP probably uses larger packets so results are bit skewed imho
I'm watching the live stream in bits and pieces. What is the "input device", exactly? A wireless mouse? That's gonna be a real pain to use.
Tweet You and The Horse You Rode In On
Things I Wish I Had Known When Starting Out in Life
And we have Steve Jobs to thank for that. I believe that what would solve many of today's economy problems, is just a bit more balls from companies. Apple rocked the boat and we got better service. More rocking from all sides please!.
Sorry. We Messed Up. (Zendesk responds to pricing criticism)
That's not what Engadget says.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/20/android-2-2-froyo-beta-ha...

Money quote: "our beloved handset got piping hot after about 30 minutes of heavy video watching, and the battery indicator in the upper right had a sizable dent."
To me the color scheme seems a bit ugly, but others seem to like the site so it might just be me. What I find ugly is the green on gray. Changing either the green or the gray would make the site look better in my opinion.
I wonder if Apple will react by updating AppleTV and turning into what everybody was hoping it would be from the beginning..
"Adobe says it has made tweaks that will shut down the Flash Player 10.1 when the system runs out of memory."

I'm not sure that I would call that fixed.
For me it was quite the opposite. I didn't begin to show any particular interest in mathematics until proof based courses came into the picture. I would certainly not have earned a degree in mathematics were it not for my interests being piqued by a capricious used bookstore purchase of E. Kampke's Set Theory when just out of high school. It was the axiomatic proof based method that appealed to me. Calculation, on the other hand, seemed to my naive 17-year-old self to be terribly banal.

To put things in perspective, and to possibly invalidate the general application of my insight on the matter, Calculus was in fact the only course I passed my final semester of high school. I received a D shortly before I dropped out altogether. The D score was earned only after being the only student to ace the final, a task which was itself only possible after I proved the first fundamental theorem to myself (thanks to an especially verbose description of it in one of the exam questions) during the course of the test.

To this day I find that the actual solving of equations to be tedious and can only be interested in problems tenable to axiomatic and algorithmic approaches. Thats where all the fun is imho. Who cares about actually determining a number (or equation)? [the answer: all the smartest people do.]
You avoid locks by serializing transactions at any site. Since you're not waiting on disk (in memory DB) and each partition runs on its own block of memory and has its own cpu/thread, you simply don't let two transactions on the same partition run concurrently.

See http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/hstore-cc.pdf for cases where you want to run two transactions in the same location concurrently in h-store (the academic precursor to VoltDB).
No worries, thanks for taking the time to write it out. I'm glad that I wrote the post (and that I'm getting hammered a little for my assumptions) because making mistakes is probably the only way I'm going to get a deeper understanding of the language...

One thing that confused the issue a little for me is the fact that some objects in Ruby are actually only really 'pretend objects'. ie:

>> test = 4
=> 4
>> test2 = 4
=> 4
>> test.object_id
=> 9
>> test2.object_id
=> 9

I don't know enough about the deeper parts of the language to know what else there is that's like this though...
What's the difference between taking a picture in a public place (a.k.a. measuring the photons of the wavelength of visible light) and sniffing Wi-Fi signals (a.k.a. measuring the photons of the wavelength of radio)? Public photons are public photons, it seems arbitrary to distinguish them based on wavelength. How can it be a crime to measure the photons passing all around us, sometimes literally through us? The originators of these photons are knowingly sending them into the public, so they should have no expectation of privacy, just as we have no expectation of privacy for the photons that reflect off us into someone's camera on the street.
Reasonably well-handled. I didn't go through the effort of switching our business away from this because I thought something might happen.

I do have the sneaking suspicion that if we grow a bit the business case for either switching or rolling an in-house solution ourselves will become much more compelling though, especially if I'm forced to upgrade from my current plan to a new one.
capitalize, chomp are non-destructive contrary to their "bang" counterparts: capitalize!, chomp!

Lots of methods are non-destructive and it's cleaner to use them instead of artificially calling dup().
It sounds good, but what are the chances that this will come to Canada? We still don't get Hulu or Google Voice...
Eclipse finally gets block selection