skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That might just be me. I am usually a "statistical outlier" on ....just about any topic.

However, at the age of 17, I noted that I was surrounded by very intelligent people who were quite miserable in most cases. I concluded that I would rather by wise instead of smart and set about trying to figure out how to get out of my own damn way. Some studies indicate that very talented, intelligent, educated people who can't make their career (or lives) work are failing because they are basically in their own way and just won't quit being in their own way. (They are obnoxious, rude, arrogant....etc...and sooner or later employers (and others) conclude that the downside is just not worth whatever they have to offer.)

Or, to quote a conversation I had with my sister some years ago:

Me: "Some people with high IQ's just seem to go around shooting themselves in the foot."

Sis: "...and using their high IQ's to improve their aim."

I tend to assume that people like Sam Walton or Madonna or Bill Gates were fortunate in that they were born and/or raised without the tendency to stay in their own way all the damn time. I don't seem to have started life with such good fortune. I've had to work at it. Given the high failure rate of startups, I tend to assume I am not the only person who could stand to work at it.

Peace and good luck.
This is really awful. Only proves that money drives oracle and not ethics and community. Wonder what's in store for mysql.
Would you really notice one addtional href in the footer?
The mystery of Steve Jobs's license-plate-less Mercedes Benz
I think this type of behavior was what everyone feared would happen, but I never really believed they would stoop this low.

This may mean that JCP is dead, harmony is doomed and it must be pretty scary for companies heavily invested in Java.
"Paypal for Groups" Startup WePay (YC S09) Raises $7.5M Series B
I guess it all comes down to "what do you want to do?" Do you want to be able to do "stuff" with your phone -- anything?

Or do you want to look/feel good while doing some smaller subset of "stuff"?

A device that can do one thing, awesomely, is simply not as attractive as a device that can do 100 things at the 90% "good enough" level.

Are you comparing it to the iPhone here? Yes, the iPhone has some limitations but it's nowhere near your 100:1 ratio. Actually, there isn't that many limitations honestly. No you don't have turn-by-turn navigation out of the box, but it's available. MobileMe is supposed to offer some of the integration with a Google account.

Sure, you have things like plugging to iTunes, and limitations due to the App Store, but your comment sounds like "an iPhone is pretty and works very well but is very limited, while an Android phone is not as polished but the sky is the limit in terms of what can be done with it". It's simply not true.

Also, regarding "look/feel good", it sounds like you feel that the iPhone is still a status symbol. I think the iPhone is past being a fashion accessory that make people turn around.

edit: one can argue that you're trading some freedom for some polish. Basing your argument on what the various phones can do and can not do doesn't work for me.
Whoa, congrats guys!
“Paypal for Groups” Startup WePay Raises $7.5M Series B
"Java is the single most important software we've ever acquired," Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison said during a conference call [...]

... "and if you don't do everything I say, I'll blow up the moon! Ah-hahahahah!"

How do you not love this guy? Somebody get him a black cape.
Could the timing they chose have anything to do with the whole deal between Google and Verizon?
Well that's all well and good, but my understanding was that Australia's internet access sucks because its connectivity to the rest of the world is garbage. High latency, expensive bandwidth, none of which is going to be solved by a faster internal infrastructure.

Of course, if Australians get most of their content internally (news sites, etc.) it's not so bad, but with Facebook and YouTube out there, I'm betting that's not the case.
Two word: GOOGLE CALENDAR
"You're backing it up with your own personal anecdote?"

No. I provided a counterexample that falsifies an implicit assumption of the 6-year cutoff model of the college dropout rate. If you measure your dropout rate as the percentage of students who have not graduated within 6 years of enrollment, it is provably true that your measurement is an overestimate of the true value.

"Maybe the reason why the 6 year cutoff is so often used is because someone already crunched the numbers and found it was good enough?"

If someone had already crunched the numbers, the appropriate correction factor to apply to the 6-year measurement would be well-known and, instead of reporting the 6-year cutoff value, a distribution-corrected 6-year cutoff value would have been reported instead. If nobody crunched the numbers to find out what the characteristics of the distribution's tail are, then the methodology is sloppy. If a correction factor was applied but not explicitly mentioned where the value is reported, then the reporting is sloppy. Either way, a reasonable person is justified in regarding the reported value as merely an upper bound on the dropout rate and rejecting the assertion that it is an accurate measurement of the true value.
ID games have always been technically astounding, but let down by art direction and inconsistent gameplay. From everything I have seen of Rage so far, it looks like they've been working on these shortcomings - I'm quite excited about playing it.
Long Weekends Rule
Unless he created it in LaTeX, realized it looked terrible, and decided to opt for Word/Pages instead.
I much prefer this treatment: http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/06/26/stating-pnp-without...

However, it is more of a "p vs. np for non CS theory people".
If I'm getting it for someone as a holiday gift, I'd wait.

If I'm buying it for myself, I'd buy it now. $40 price premium to have it 3 months sooner? Seems worth it to me, $40 isn't much of a big deal and you can do a lot of reading in that time.
I feel a little naive for not expecting something like this. I thought all the Sun/Oracle nonsense would be around MySQL.
Not very new but still interesting. Read also about the origin of it here:

* http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/

* http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/15/
Java's Inner Classes: The Keys to the Kingdom
At Apple, Steve Job's 20% project takes up 100% of your time.
This would be like Microsoft suing the Mono team for its C# and CLI implementations, which it has irrevocably promised not to do:

http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx

I was worried when Oracle acquired Sun, but I never thought I'd see them clamp down on Java to the extent that .NET is a significantly more open platform. But there it is.
My life in the start up arc
He is just trying to save /more/ children in Africa. http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748704...

Larry Ellison is a saint! ... and an asshole.
Correct. As our sign up page indicates, we're only in the U.S. right now.
Nice analysis. While Google's forbearance is their imminent and everpresent risk factor, other trends in search and content-creation could also put them at risk, in the 3-10 year timeframe. I'm thinking better peer production, better search, and ad models that evolve away from the kinds of placements that drench their portfolio sites.
Constant Variables
This article is a bit light on detail - can anyone explain how the development of Android infringes on Oracle's IP?
Agreed. Only someone who hasn't been in the tech industry since the early days of 3D games wouldn't recognize Carmack's name.

He is a demi-god to me, a person who has passionately stuck with 3D programming for most of his career and even pressed outside his comfort zone into the emerging commercial space race. If anyone deserves to have ego, he does. Frankly, considering what he's accomplished, I think he's quite humble on stage.
Excuse the really really obvious question, but how can you sue somebody for intellectual property infringement on open-source software? Didn't you already give anybody the license to do what they wanted with it? If they've violated the license terms in some way, isn't that different from IP infringement?
The biggest issue I see with Oracle's lawsuit is not with Android itself, but the future of Java as an open platform.

The claims are pretty serious, and Oracle is going straight for the jugular. It'll be interesting to see how it shakes out, but I've got to hope that Google will come out of this in good shape for the sake of Java. It's unfortunate that Oracle is interpreting Google's implementation of Dalvik and a Java-based system as a direct infringement upon their patents.

Android aside, it raises some fairly serious questions around Java's future development as a platform vis a vis the uncertainty recently resolved between Microsoft and the Mono project. While Microsoft extended their "Community Promise" to Mono implementors and users, Oracle seems to be taking the opposite approach to companies developing alternate JVMs and Java-based devices. It'll be interesting to see Oracle's stance toward other alternate JVMs such as IBM's.

If you're curious, the original complaint is here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/35811761/Oracle-s-complaint-agains...

The patents upon which Oracle claims infringement are:

- Protection domains to provide security in a computer system (6,125,447)

- Controlling Access to a Resource (6,192,476)

- Method and apparatus for pre-processing and packaging class files (5,966,702)

- System and method for dynamic preloading of classes through memory space cloning of a master runtime system process (7,426,720)

- Interpreting functions utilizing a hybrid of virtual and native machine instructions (6,910,205)

- Method and system for performing static initialization (6,061,520)
Would you mind explaining the difference between them, other than that one is capitalized while the other is not, then? Focus on how I would be inaccurate if I replaced every instance of "internet" with "Internet" in my previous post.
Web API Lifecycles and Hypecycles
My guess is that you got lucky, flew under the radar and now the amount you're processing is substantial enough that they won't try to pull anything.

Either that or your time just hasn't come yet :)
House Plants can benefit your health & Help Improve The Air Quality Inside Homes
I dare say this is what the sperm whale in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was referring to when it thought "Oh no, not again."
We don't build any in, but the same strategies (ie, requiring a license key, etc) that work for regular applications like Microsoft Word also work for fluid applications. The bits can be copied easily, but the same is true for traditional software.

Crazy strategies, like CDs that physically can't be copied and must be in the drive or kernel extensions obviously won't work, but that's probably a good thing. =)
Minesweeper Online
This has nothing to do with the JCP or Harmony. Sun's long-standing policy has been to grant Java licenses to compatible implementations, which Dalvik certainly is not. Also, Sun was only willing to grant free licenses to open-source non-mobile VMs, which again Dalvik is not eligible for.
I'm struggling to understand this as well - I would have thought OSS licensing and software patents would be incompatible.
Oh joy. I would like some details before I wave goodbye to java and the jvm.
Google is treating this as something that should exist now rather than "someday".

You can go to the store today and buy a new Android phone and when you put in your Google Voice credentials, it will have all of your text messages with their read status. There is no reason a USB cable and laptop need to be involved in that process.
Google should switch to C# and Mono. Besides giving them a better language and VM, it would cause the most amusing set of rants from the anti-Mono crowd. Win/win.
Link to complaint: http://www.scribd.com/doc/35811761/Oracle-s-complaint-agains...
Of course you can. There'd be no such thing as an enforceable software patent if any company could just sponsor an open source project to implement each part of its product that infringed a patent. Presumably --- hopefully 'grellas will clear this up --- Oracle can measure damages incurred by Google supplanting Sun/Oracle Java with their own Java in terms of percentage points of global smartphone revenue.

Here's some more context:

http://blogs.gartner.com/brian_prentice/2009/08/06/google-op...
Surely it would take at least 10 mouse clicks ;)
If you can successfully do two things you may have a good shot:

1) Convince Google and the web generally you are value-add somehow (say, by having detailed reviews).

2) My partner recently entered my phone number for a moving quote from one of these sites. Huge mistake - we got dozens of calls from different companies. Obviously this is what will kill the industry - there are a lot of suckers but eventually people will learn. If you could make this process more transparent and protect the end user, perhaps users would come back and you wouldn't be so tied to acquisition channels. (Sorta like an Angie's List but where the company pays instead of the user.)

Shoot me an email at juliuss@gmail.com if you want their actual website to check out. I wouldn't want to post their name publicly unless he said it was ok. (I get a feeling nobody in this space wants anyone else to know what they're up to.)
I've played with one of these and they are pretty neat. As others have mentioned, most of the functionality relies on using special paper which is printed with patterns of dots. The paper doesn't look special though -- the dots are almost unnoticeable, and it's ordinary paper in texture and thickness etc.

The piano-playing functionality mentioned in the article really does work like magic -- draw keys, play keys, done.

In general though, I struggle to think of a reason I'd use it: I type much faster and more accurately than I write, and I seldom have any reason to be matching audio with text transcriptions.
Aren't Larry Ellison and Steven Jobs best friends?
It just goes to show that whatever company-de-jour promises about enforcing the patents that they are granted today, all bets are off when they fall on hard times and are acquired tomorrow.

Serious about openness? Skip the "patent and promise" dance and just release the damn thing BSD.
What implications, if any, does this have for the future of JVM languages like Scala, Clojure, etc.?
No. You're charged for the connection your server has to the wider internet. The end-user is charged for their connection to the wider internet.

Note that I'm talking about the total bandwidth available, not the speed of the connection to an end-user. The distinction is important: having more bandwidth means that you can send data to more users without sacrificing individual speed.

Peering arrangements between providers are the closest it should be possible to get to paying for a larger chunk of the last mile: because the server they are trying to talk to is fewer hops away, they will have lower pings, and possibly more responsive page-loading. In a situation where the connection of a network to the backbone is saturated, this appears to be the same as giving the peered provider's packets priority, since that connection is not saturated. This situation is somewhat distinct, however, being an issue of incompetence or third-party malice (the connection is either too small for normal usage or being attacked) instead of hardware designed to prioritize packets by source (which would be malice or greed on the part of the provider). This assumes a simple network topography, with a single connection to non-peered network, but it may be expanded to explain situations involving larger networks.
I bet the mono people are laughing their asses off now...

I think Sun suing Microsoft was a mistake too for the Java platform... the write once, run everywhere ideology made Java the native platform of the server... write once, run everywhere should be the default, but it should be easier and encouraged to escape...
> ''Steve made some very interesting observations very
early on about how this was about navigating content,
'' Ive told The New York Times. ''It was about being
very focused and not trying to do too much with the
device -- which would have been its complication and,
therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren't
obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid
of stuff.''

I remember back in 2002 or so I had bought an ARCHOS because it had a camera, video camera and played movies. I then saw non technical friends starting to talk about the iPod. I honestly felt it was like hearing non technical people discussing recursion. I knew the iPod must be different. Sure I had plenty of friends that new what MP3's were and downloaded them, but they were my technological friends. So to hear these non techies talk about the iPod, I was like "Whoa".

I took a step back to compare the ARCHOS that I bought with the iPod. And I realized wow Steve Job's is very smart [1] and at that moment I realized Apple is going to be bigger than Microsoft. As Jon Ive says in the quote above:
"It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device -- which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise." I had already realized this works very well for In-N-Out Burger. So well that when Chipotle came out I knew it would be a success.

It has really surprised me how Steve Jobs laid out the winning model for making a product 9 years ago and few companies have followed. It is actually rather frustrating. Every time Apple comes out with a new product (for the most part), a few people are like "Yes, this is amazing" and everyone else complains "It doesn't have enough features. It sucks."

[1] The ARCHOS had a bunch of features such as a camera, camcorder and it could play videos. But I never used the thing. The interface sucked and the battery life sucked. When I bought an iPod I used it constantly. I still use it. It is much better to have a product that does one thing extremely well than a product that does a bunch of things mediocre or not well at all.
corrections:
...on customer support later, so this is viewed as mission critical for reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction. This is not a web app where you can do continuous deployment.

many OEMs have unique product managers for each carriers...
If they were talking about Oracle's patents, it would make sense. It's the talk of it being copyright infringement that has me confused.

Android is basically, as far as I've read, a Linux kernel, with Google's own user space on top of that--their own equivalent of libc and their own windowing system. On top of that, they run their own JVM, which they wrote themselves and which is NOT even compatible with Oracle's at the byte-code level. Android apps are written in Java and compiled/JITed for Google's VM.

So, unless the Java compiler itself takes code from Oracle's compiler, it is hard to see what in their would contain copies of Oracle code.
I think that rather than focusing on coming up with new chemicals to kill bacteria, pharmaceutical companies should work on entirely new ways of fighting bacteria, like genetically modifying bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria) to go after certain strains.
Why you might not want that high-paying cybersecurity job
Come on.

Everybody starts somewhere.
By better language, do you mean better than Java? The JVM supports many other great languages like Ruby, Clojure and Scala.

I'd love to see Google provide GWT support for Scala, but that's another issue :)
LOL - obviously the timing (and title) are a little awkward given the whole "WePay saves Burning Man from the cold, heartless claws of PayPal" press a few hours ago :(
Bootstrapping Your Business on a Budget
Patents cited in the complaint(http://www.scribd.com/doc/35810897/Oracle-Google-Complaint):

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=dyQGAAAAEBAJ, http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=G1YGAAAAEBAJ&dq=6... - Does Dalvik even use the Java security model?

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=5GMZAAAAEBAJ - related to the dex file format

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=U-4UAAAAEBAJ

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=mEwEAAAAEBAJ
A lot of them can't, and we'll see the fallout from that over the next several years!
I've used hostmonster and that has been pretty reliable.

It is kinda' like newegg versus CDW.

There are some weird restrictions, you must have a fixed ip to use the maximum execution time for cronjobs, daemons, and things running in ssh.

Cronjobs are limited to 30 minutes. Daemons are unlimited (but you can get in trouble for saturating the CPU/network), web-based PHP/MySQL, FTP, etc is limited to 12 hours.

I have a site that takes a 2GB csv file once every 3 months and imports it into a denormalized MySQL db, and another site that downloads several hundred images daily and resizes them into thumbnails and a second size.

Each of these required creative solutions. That is what you get for ~$100/yr 'unmetered' hosting.

I looked at the hosting provider you mentioned, and it seems the server is located in Germany w/ upto 4GB of RAM and 250GB of storage for ~$75/month. Says 'guaranteed resources', but who knows how quickly you can saturate the CPU?

Rackspace cloud has a calculator to determine costs and you only have so much throughput, so you can calculate worse-case bandwidth scenario, or have another way to mitigate bandwidth "overages".

http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers...
Oracle's complaint against Google for Java patent infringement
Twitter Polling in the Cloud in 30s using PiCloud
As background, from WikiPedia:

"On November 13, 2006, Sun released much of Java as open source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). On May 8, 2007, Sun finished the process, making all of Java's core code available under free software/open-source distribution terms, aside from a small portion of code to which Sun did not hold the copyright."

If Sun willingly made the code GPL licensed, and Google isn't using anything outside the GPL code, even if some of the technologies were covered by patents I don't see Oracle having a case. Right now, this sounds very much like the SCO - Linux suit that dragged on forever and went nowhere.
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Are approved revisions really a branch or just a tag somewhere in a linear version history? With branches you can have n parallel branches, whereas with Wikipedia it seems--though I may be wrong--that you just have one version history, with one or more revisions within that history flagged as "approved". (Having n branches of a Wikipedia article would be frowned upon, since the community decided in the early days that you can't fork an article--that only gets in the way of building an authoritative and neutral version--though it has been argued in the past that having multiple forks on controversial topics, each written from a particular point of view, would be more informative.)

Also, Git-style branches only make sense as alternative branches of the entire repository, which doesn't exist in Wikipedia terms because you can't atomically commit changes to multiple articles together. It's more than possible to have a wiki with branching and cross-page atomic commits--it's even a good idea. But it wouldn't fit Wikipedia. And to get around the atomic commit problem (given the massively concurrent editing that happens on Wikipedia) you'd have to essentially have one Git repository per article, at which point you're probably better off with a different type of backend.
Hamlet - type-safe HTML template language for Haskell
You are right - my initial gut reaction bested my brain :)
I'm sure there would be speed issues, but Google is really supportive of Python right? Wink wink, nudge nudge.

(I've heard about the Android Scripting Environment, but it sounds like that is not as fully supported as might be ideal).