skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The distributed programmer in me wants to point out that having applications automatically use the latest version of a library is a scary proposition.

During a distributed operation, participants can arrive at many different points in time. This means that applications using the newly-patched library will likely be interacting with applications using the unpatched library. Whenever multiple versions of anything are interacting with themselves things can get complicated.

In light of this, we opted to keep things simple and predictable for ourselves (and others). Since applications always run against exactly what you say they should, you're free to keep running forward, without having to worry about tripping over past decisions.
These prices coming down have pretty much guaranteed an ebook reader is the next thing I'm buying. When they were $300 reading on my computer screen didn't seem too bad, but for (soon) under $100 I'm sold.

Anyone have any particular recommendations that aren't the Kindle? I avoid devices that are as locked down as it is. I don't really care about wireless, I want an e-ink (or comparably easy-on-the-eyes screen), and decent PDF support would be nice. The Sony Reader Touch and the Nook both interesting, although there seem to be a ton of other ones out there made by companies I've never heard of. Any suggestions?
I say this as a former developer who created some of the first video chat rooms ever (CUworld in 2000). Talking to random people online eventually devolves into porn. You can't help it. Chatroulette got around that stigma by eliminating all approach anxiety to a conversation (Parker's words)--sort of like the exact opposite effect of perusing profiles of people on a dating site and messaging someone very attractive (who probably gets inundated with requests).

I think the notion of turning chatroulette into a performance platform is very interesting. Some of the Ben Folds chatroulette performances were pretty fascinating and managed to get at the one-to-many-ness necessary to drive large amounts of traffic on a consumer site (you don't need that to make an interesting product--but Skype seems to have nailed 1 to 1 video pretty well). Being able to have different bands 'battle' on chatroulette or have comics or musicians present new material could be great.
MySQL: I bet that part is coming.
Taking flight with engineered paper planes (photos)
Thanks for the info man :)
Russell Jurney, You Magnificent Bastard, I Read Your Posts
Congrats guys, win that market!
Certainly not the biggest authority on this but couldn't find much other than AppEngine about 6 months ago. Here's what I did find:

Media Temple has Django Grid Containers:
http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/gs/features/containers.php...

There is a gentleman named Solomon Hykes (@solomonstre) who was working on something Heroku-like for wsgi apps. Last I heard, they were trying to remove a lot of dependencies from their stack. Doing a quick search, it looks like they've made some progress: http://bitbucket.org/dotcloud
su
cat /dev/urandom > /dev/msm_pcm_out

on Android :)
You need root first, be aware, its quite loud >_<
I was reviewing some of Ellison's pre-acquisition talk about Java and found this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Dtqe1e0tXg#t=7m10s

Interesting and relevant.
What I'd like to see is the ability to give a read-only login to third parties like Mint.
No offense, but you're not making any sense. The current generation has not lasted longer than previous generations, and pretty much anyone in pre-algebra could plot you a graph that would show "we can expect the PS4 and XBox 720 by 2013 at the latest."

PS1 - 1994
PS2 - 2000
PS3 - 2006

The average works out roughly the same for Nintendo, and since Microsoft only has two data points it's not really worth including them.
Unsuck It - translate business jargon
Skip the "patent and promise" dance and just release the damn thing BSD and forget about patents. (Implied, should have specified)
"Making GitHub More Open: Git-backed Wikis" wouldn't have made sense even 15 years ago.

"Twitter Polling in the Cloud in 30s using PiCloud" wouldn't have made sense only 5 years ago.
As a developer, I'm getting scared off the Java platform here. I know it's the JVM that's at issue, but I hate the kind of lock in that this implies - I think they'll do serious long term harm here.
Ask HN: NAT vs routing vs bridging, for dummies
Can someone point me to a reference (site or book) that explains the differences, advantages and drawbacks of each? Specifically, when used with Linux KVM virtualization.
Interrupting the Loop with break and continue
I assume the JS Touch APIs are for apple hardware only, or 4% of Firefox users.
"and then?"
Great! I'll be looking forward to it. I kind of have a thing for small languages.
Who will be using the application?
my experience with paypal has also been largely positive. I process between USD$10K and USD$20K a month in paypal payments.

As far as I can tell, they aren't much worse than most other payment processors. Most payment processors, if someone with bad credit comes along, or someone gets lots of chargebacks, or if someone is in a funny business sector, they keep some percentage of your money in escrow for a certain number of months.

Now, personally, I have a very liberal refund policy (and really, I think anyone who accepts paypal or credit cards should do the same... because anyone who wants to, with either of those methods, can get their money back, if they really want to.) so I generally don't get chargebacks on my papal account. My last 'dispute' in fact, was an accident... the guy says he meant to dispute the next transaction, with a different company.

and hell, if you tangle with the IRS, your regular bank account will get frozen.

Now, I have heard many, many paypal horror stories from non-profits.

I wonder if paypal is going overboard in cooperating with the US government (in this case, the government harassing not-for-profits who haven't lawyered up enough) to avoid the fate of e-gold?

The e-gold guys, as far as I can tell, were told 'freeze your business or we will throw your asses in jail.' I've still got around a hundred bucks in e-gold I can't access because of that.

E-gold was set up a the way a privacy nerd would set up a banking system, and they built a fairly secure system, but they ignored fraud, saying they were trying to be 'like cash' and first accumulated a reputation for serving the shady and outright fraudulent market, before being shut down by the government.
I'm puzzled that you think the Kindle is locked down - it supports almost all of the major ebook formats. Only buying Kindle books on Amazon will entail DRM, supplying your own files is as good as it is on any other e-reader.
Debt settlement texas
Gitit has been around since 2008, but I guess that's a little while.

Actually, the more I read, the more this sounds like Gitit-in-Ruby-rather-than-Haskell.

Defaults to Markdown while support a bunch of other input formats? Check.

Drag and drop diffs? Check.

Git-backed wikis? Check.

Gitit still has more features (apparently there's no search for Github's wiki), but then, it's much much less popular.
HP board sued over the Hurd-Fisher affair
I agree that counter suing is one tactic.

Another one is that after all the denunciations and sabre-rattling, Google hand over a wad of cash to licence the technology and Oracle score a slice of Android sales.

Merely the threat of future lawsuits... justified or not, could harm Android adoption, so Google may settle (after posturing and sabre-rattling of course) on that basis alone
Hmm from my Cogent colo in New Jersey to my Primus Colo in Adelaide, I consistently get 4-5 mbits both ways and those are by no means high dollar, special privilege connections.

Its not 100, but its faster than the 2 the author claims.
I think I'm thinking of something else, that guy posted it just earlier this week
3 Unknown Features of the iPhone 4
This sucks. Android is one the best thing happened to Java in recent times. And this actually means the Apache Harmony people wont get the TCK now. Sucks even more.
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A good project manager knows to bring both the client and the designer together in one room, and not be the gateway of information. This article is just a rant about the issues someone is having with a particular project manager.
Amazon does support open formats, just not ePub. http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...
I have thought about a problem that is somewhat related: You want to communicate with an entity that you do not personally know or have on your contacts list, but you share some semantic aspect with this person - e.g. same commute to work, or same day care center for your kids and theirs. The solutions I'd thought of for this problem was to employ an entity that exists at a higher hierarchical level - say the mobile phone company, that can 'see' the common aspect and can allow you to contact this person on a need-to-contact basis. I call this 'semantic social links' for lack of a better term. The idea is slippery though because it must be balanced with privacy properly.

The problem you have described is different because an actual meeting has occurred between the two parties, and yet perhaps it has a simple (orthodox?) solution -- giving/taking business cards. You are asking for some way of digitally bookmarking this business card.

-Suhas
That is just the most obvious path, too. Not only is Google their traffic lifeline, they are also their largest advertising customer. Merely "Smart Pricing" eHow or turning off Youtube rev share for ExpertVillage would likely also be fatal, or close to it. More broadly, any substantial opening into Google search keyword data would put DM within striking range of any YC startup sized company that wanted them -- search prediction is the only hard part of the puzzle.

Luckily for DM, Google would switch all employees to Windows ME, code only in BASIC, and sell out a million dissidents prior to allowing the world to organize their data.
I agree with your analysis... another factor I guess is that Google will want to ensure that Oracle cannot repeat this trick whenever Oracle wants in the future (breach of license, not re-infringement).

My work has had bad experiences with Oracle license chenanigans. Of course Google probably has better lawyers than my work does!
Dean Kamen....? Really?
What a Shame That Guilt Got a Bad Name
"Cyber defense is often the opposite of a creative activity."

Security can also be about identifying and mitigating risks to make a formerly unprofitable certain loss into a viable business opportunity. Big picture example: how many US banks would have offices in China or Russia right now without the help of security professionals? It's not all about bopping people on the head.
Well, Sun own MySQL. But the drop-in replacement MySQL engine makers (infobright, percona, etc) might be a little worried.
maybe they should have gone with mono/.net instead
Plus, there are a lot of restrictions that will annoy you (like not being able to ride to work, leaving you phone at home, possibly no internet access), and you may be forced to use Microsoft for everything, not the best tool for the job.

There is not much worse in my book, at a Microsoft shop where they refuse to consider anything else.
EPUB isn't exactly a minor omission.

Amazon wants to control the whole experience from content down to the physical device. They want to do the same thing Apple's done with iOS. They're not Apple, so they may not succeed, but I'm not going to support them until I'm reasonably confident that's not the way they're heading. I don't own an iP{hone,od,ad} either for the same reason.
nice stuff, and i hadn't heard of this site before but i like that this is happening in the south. they could stand to proofread a little better but hey, couldn't we all?
Unboxing Windows Phone 7 & Walkthrough
Cyrus Field and the epic struggle to lay the first transatlantic cable
" The million dollar question is why would anybody in their right mind do this?"

A slice of Android sales revenue... Perhaps as high as US$1 per handset would be nice.
Oh, that made my day. I'm still going to laugh every time I think about this days from now.
Do you have a link that explains more? The GAE docs say they use "the Java 6 virtual machine (JVM)."

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/overview.html
Given that Eric Schmidt is the former head of Java at Sun, it seems unlikely they'd have written their own JVM if they didn't have a good reason to do so. Also, JavaME is awful.
I'll try to address that over the weekend. YABT was my original foray into Python, so it's pretty week right now and never really developed into much more than a proof of concept.
Yes, and people running third party OS extensions can only get 1080p to play with the aid of that broadcom card.

It seems odd that AppleTV was ever advertised as 1080p...
Righthaven files proliferation of copyright lawsuits
So they are making at least a few million dollars per year in just interest on their assets, yet still dodging taxes that sustain the country that helped make them so wealthy.

I think it must all just be a big game to them at that level.
Clojure will be fine, at least. I think I remember Rich saying it was explicitly designed as a multi-VM language in an interview somewhere. Anyway, he already has an official, apparently actively maintained port of Clojure to the .NET CLR:

http://github.com/richhickey/clojure-clr/

Now porting your Clojure applications between VMs may or may not be a reasonable proposition depending on what kind of non-Clojure pure Java libraries you depend upon, but the fate of the Clojure language is thankfully not tied to the fate of the Java runtime.

I think Scala has a .NET port too, but I don't know if it's active.
Root it. Or just manually upgrade?
What's happening at Yahoo
OkCupid.
Calvin & Hobbes "Search Engine"
Carmack's team is still large enough to develop a top-notch engine that can be used in AAA titles put together by some other shop. The idTech engines have not been slacking in innovation, and the biggest thing limiting their use outside of id recently (lack of scalability down to low-end hardware) is clearly not a problem anymore.
India joins the bandwagon to ban RIM
Is that Larry Ellison? He looks different than this: http://www.google.com/images?q=larry+ellison
Pak floods a chance for Taliban to regroup
YABT popped up shortly after ticgit -- same type of thing. Scratched and itch to try something, then let it fall off. I'm going to revisit it and see where it stands though. I'd love to get it to where it serves as the backend for GitHub Issues.

One of the reasons I wrote it instead of extending ticgit was that I wanted something entirely independent of any VCS. All stuff I need to get in a readme, though. :-)
Let me let you in on a little secret: karma doesn't matter. Most people won't look at the number next to your post. In fact, some might read your post solely because it has a low rating. It's hardly tyranny of the majority when your opinion can be seen just like anyone else's.
Why didn't they do it ? Is it because of lack of ARM support ?
There's even an email button so you can send your boss a message saying "Hey douchebag! Stop torturing the English language!"
It takes a while to get to the interview part. The intro is by someone but I don't know then he start talking with Larry.
This letter increased my admiration of the man greatly.
I think they are just making the point that the absence of wireless regulation in this proposal does not preclude such regulation in the future. You could accuse them of capitulating on that, but not reversing.
The Sun JVM is a lot of things and got a lot better and a lot faster over time, but it is an astounding memory hog. Only thing I've ever seen that will (seriously) reserve 64 bits for a Boolean field on a 64-bit VM.
Dunno, Zed has been extremely nice and patient with me in our limited online interactions. I've read his "angry" blogs, but these seemed like a jokey persona. He's really rather pleasant.
That said, the article was clearly framed in the context of Maryland, so I think it's a pretty fair assessment.
The most worrisome factor in this lawsuit is how this will impact java as a language and a platform. If Google loses this lawsuit, java as a language and platform could easily die. Many companies would refuse to use it, just to be on the safe side and avoid litigation from Oracle.

Oracle probably doesn't realize the massive damage it has done to the java platform just by going forward with this suit. Due to the looming threat of Oracle closing the java platform, startups and companies may begin avoiding the java platform in the same way they avoid the Microsoft stack. In fact, I can't see any reason why I WOULDN'T choose the .NET framework over java if both are so closed. At least C# has lambdas...
"Diversify
Unsucked:

Change."

... no.
Careful. Hotspot compiling was introduced with the JVM.
If they would have been profitable without these assets as either a liability or cash flow item on balance sheet - I think that counts as profitable.

Eg - If you're in the printing business and profit 500k but buy a 750k printer that you don't need to be operationally profitable but will help you be MORE profitable in future years - you lost money but you're still soundly profitable
Maybe I'm betraying my corporate institutionalization here but I was reading through the list and going "Hey, that isn't so bad, is it?".

Are terms like boilerplate, 'at the end of the day' so bad? :)
Sun bought several of these, especially the developers of Strongtalk, a compiled, statically typed dialect of Smalltalk. So if there is any prior art on this, chances are that all the related patents are now in Oracle's portfolio.
Me And A Hobo Announce A Recommendation For Google
what does ' before a symbol do?
Swarm dynamics - can ant behavior models solve AI problems?
Nitpick: As the name implies, megatexturing solves the problem of texture memory management and rendering, allowing essentially unlimited texture detail on any object. The problem of unlimited geometry detail is still unsolved. Carmack has hinted that id Tech 6 may tackle the geometry problem using voxels instead of polygons, and id actually demoed a voxel rendering system at SIGGRAPH 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpEpAFGplnI
I was reminded of that bubble-era wired article as well. It's interesting to reread - I remember even at the time thinking it sounded a bit too breathless.
Is it possible that Google's hasty deal with Verizon is intended explicitly to prevent Apple from making a non-neutrality deal with Verizon?

Imagine it: Apple negotiates preferred status for Facetime and for Bing Search and Bing Videos (via a profit sharing deal with MS) or even Apple Video search bundled with the new cloud iTunes, all via iPhone and iPad on Verizon.

My take is that Google felt it was worth all the negative PR of the net neutrality reversal to prevent Apple from being able to have a non-neutrality upper hand in with the premier US mobile carrier. Think about it, only with a device like an iPhone 4G or iPad and a network like Verizon does non-neutrality offer significant advantages in the mobile space.
I wonder what would have happened, though. Would the market decide that being platform-agnostic is more important than using MS dev tools? Would developers just have to work (around) with an incompatible platform, as they do with IE.

I wonder if the MS rift caused more harm to Java than letting Microsoft change its implementation.
does this include application data?

When my wife upgraded her iPhone a year ago, iTunes did a "restore from backup" and her new phone was then (an hour or two later) set up exactly like her previous one, including all applications and their data, saved games, in progress games, options, settings, the lot.
As a side note, there is something cooking. In the last weeks, Oracle has been replacing Sun's copyright messages with their own all over in Java. This even effected Eclipses startup code.
Isn't Android free ? The problem is more for mobile phone companies that may now have to pay a license for using it. This will hurt a lot.
ah, but reputation matters here... you don't want to have a reputation for being easy money for patent trolls. Additionally, as google doesn't seem to be a patent troll, it's probably also in their interest to set legal precedents that weaken software patents.

I mean, obviously, this doesn't mean 'always fight' but it's another value you need to punch in to your equation, one weighing in on the 'fight' side.

In my business, a similar example would be the money I spend on running an aggressive abuse desk. Running a less-aggressive abuse desk would be cheaper, both in the work it takes and in customers I've lost, at least in the short term.

But in the long term, /because/ I have succeeded in making my service a hostile place for spammers, my abuse complaint rate is much lower than it would be otherwise. for a while, another VPS company rented a few servers from me... and in spite of being something like 1/60th of my size, they produced more abuse desk work than the rest of my customers combined. I believe, because I have an aggressive abuse desk.

(I mean, there are other costs... I've lost at least one legitimate customer I know of, because he was compromised and his box was spewing ssh attacks over the network. I shut him down with an email notice, the email went to the shut down box, so he never got it. )

my point is that there are real business reasons to fight that sometimes go beyond the immediate results of that fight.
And where exactly will this money come from without making it even worse for the next generation?
They're clearly making more of an effort with Rage than they did with previous engines. They were spoiled to a degree by how eagerly 3rd-parties licensed the Doom, Quake, and Quake II engines. Id developed a nasty reputation for dumping code on licensees with little support. In fact, one of the main ways Epic stole the licensed engine market from them was by providing much more aggressive marketing and support. Id's attitude was always "if we build it, they will come".
Why the perception of Google makes Google Aps fail
That joke has also been successfully applied to lawyers.
You're assuming they a) care about Java, and b) care about what's good for the smartphone market. If you flip those assumptions, it's not boneheaded at all. Just very, very slimy...
MathJax | Beautiful math in all browsers
Ooshirts t-shirt printing
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Working With Open Source Project Teams To Fix Software Problems
Dalvik is a register based VM, as opposed the the stack based JVM.

Also Sun removed the classpath exception when they put JavaME under the GPL. That means if you used the GPL'ed version of Java on a mobile device then it becomes viral - including to any application code. (That's why most GPL'ed Java programs use the classpath exception).

From Sun's point of view, this was a good idea because it allowed them to protect JavaME licence revenue. Google saw JavaME as outdated, though, so instead of licencing it they took the Apache licensed Harmony project (ie, a clean room, Apache licensed version of the Java class libraries) and build Android around it.
We do offer cloud.files (http://docs.picloud.com/moduledoc.html#module-cloud.files), which allows you to store data. It is an S3 wrapper rather than a full-blown relational db, but you may find that it fits your needs.

You can also connect to any service with us. Amazon SQS works well if you need a highly scalable queueing system.