skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think he's polarizing for two reasons:

1. He was so whimsical. Some people just can't cope with whimsy. To them, the world is a serious place for serious business (like programming). Others wanted to dance to his tune, and were glad to join the parade, but wanted someone out else front. _why was a great drum major.

2. When he took down his repos without any warning, the serious people felt as though _why had breached some kind of un-written contract, and the parade folks felt like the children of divorcees: abandoned, and wondering if somehow it was their fault.

When emotions get involved, you get the polarization. Simple as that. Whatever else you say about the guy, he was a great storyteller.
Windows 1.0.
The interface looks remarkably similar and they seem to be taking the same approach to privacy
Radioactive boars on the rise in Germany
Joanna Ciolek | Web Design, SEO, Internet Marketing Resource for Small Business
I would love to hear more about this. I'm currently in the middle of a Django app, and this would be a godsend. I like doing sysadmin stuff, but there's no way I will have time in the next year.

If you guys can pull this off, I will be a very happy customer.
Memory is the root cause but it's more like they didn't implement a paging virtual memory system in the original iPhone os until iOS4 which allows for the persistance.
Seems like a management misunderstanding, or they really believe in a long life of MS. Even their own MeeGo (which is just a bunch or rpms) doesn't require any proprietary security solution, leave alone Android.

Of course, they could create and start to push some artificial, unnecessary security framework, but to whom? Some mobile Windows 7 on Atom I guess.. ^_^ which obviously a born-dead platform, same as this MeeGo.
Historical reasons. Solaris was the definitive platform circa the late nineties. I used Linux back then, but it was definitely not ready for prime time yet. Many enterprises were built around Solaris. Today, Linux is a better alternative today for most use cases, but only marginally better. Until a year ago, it was not worth the cost of a switch.

Why a year ago? Oracle bought Sun. Sun was very good at creating open, useful platforms, but was very bad at making money off of them. Sun was bought by Oracle. Oracle isn't very good at building software, but is extremely good at selling it and maximizing profit from it. Oracle needs to make back the 7+ billion dollars it made on Sun somehow. How? We have part of the answer in the Google suit: by milking Sun's customer base.

Java has 10 million developers. To make 10 billion (there's a fair bit of risk in buying Sun -- if Oracle wants a 3x return, that's 10 billion each for Java, hardware, and Solaris), it needs to make $1000 per developer. How? I don't know how, but I'll run one possible scenario.

Step 1: Cut off competing JVM implementations with patent and copyright suits. This is already starting to happen.

Step 2: Release new versions of Java in two versions. The first is a free Java Express, which is okay for student use, but has no JVM, and omits many of the more enterprise-centric libraries. The second is a full-fledged version, and costs $1000 a pop. Developers would, of course, free to use the old, bit rotting version as well.

Most Java developers cannot switch platforms -- most are working on enterprise systems with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of sunk costs. Java immediately becomes a legacy platform, but even if only 50% of developers buy into it (even if only during the transition period), Oracle makes a cool $5 billion, almost paying for the rest of Sun.

Where does this leave Solaris? I don't know, but I suspect similar things are afoot. Oracle will want to make more money, and Oracle's customers will end up paying more. Oracle is already beginning to move in this direction with the death of OpenSolaris.

Aside from that, Oracle is incapable of attracting good
developers. Former Sun employees are leaving as quickly as they can find new jobs. Will Solaris continue to have a technological advantage in the long term without Sun's brainpower? I seriously doubt it.

I know this is a lot of FUD, but with good reason. I am afraid, uncertain, and doubtful about the future of Java and Solaris. While I'm certain that Oracle will continue to develop Solaris so long as it continues to make them money, I don't know what they'll charge for it, or how well they'll develop it. I really wouldn't want to base my business around it.

(A secondary, technological answer is that Solaris advantages are much better suited to the climate of the nineties than of the teens. In the nineties, we tend to rely more on big computers with many CPUs, massive amount of memory, and many hard drives. In the teens, the trend is much more towards big arrays of cheap, unreliable, redundant boxes. Solaris' advantages are much more pronounced for the former than the latter.)
This is how bad I want a job at Gowalla.
Well what worries me is mostly "what's going to happen to my job now?" I'm not some higher-up so... outlook isn't great. I've seen enough mergers to know how that usually goes.

So! I'm officially bad luck with businesses (was around just as CompUSA got liquidated, now McAfee acquisition), anyone wanna hire an MIS major with a burning desire to learn stuff solely for the sake of learning?

But in all seriousness, I've been speculating over the reasoning behind Intel doing this, and haven't come to many conclusions. As some others here have stated, McAfee actually has quite comprehensive network security (I've obviously seen the network layouts / architectures), etc, and maybe Intel just wants to try and market that?

I have yet to come up with a good reason - they are pretty disparate companies from what I can tell. There are "some" common grounds, but not many.
Limits to Decentralization
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Surprisingly, compilers already do much of these optimization, particularly profile directed feedback (basically a static JIT), and the mixing of high-level and low-level optimizations.

Now while, LLVM may not do this, it's far from the only compiler on the block; especially in the non-open-source world.

The IR argument is a non-argument. Certain optimizations work better with certain IRs than others, that's just the way it is. It's unlikely that there will be one to rule them all. More likely, we'll convert between them to use the optimal one.

Superoptimizers are an interesting case, it's kind of like having a database of optimality. While it may not give much speedup compared to time invested, if you're desperate for that last little bit of performance, it's a great tool. Plus it should make itself faster over time. Could even locate it in the cloud, such that a compiler send its hottest methods over to a remote machine, and it'll use its massive database of optimality to optimize it as best as possible.

Verifiable transformations are great in theory, but it's true, it's extremely hard to implement currently.

The author definitely has a point about AOT/JIT compilers being the future of optimization. Static compilers have been done to death, while dynamic compilers are still (comparatively) new and fresh.
Remember Google Knol?

http://knol.google.com

Their answer to Wikipedia....
"advised by Goldman Sachs"

Who wants to bet Goldman took a large, long McAfee position in the last couple of days? From an unrelated portion of the company, performing usual hedging activities, naturally :-)
Woohoo! But wait, being a startup guy in a third-world country doesn't help. Back to programming...
You can get quite a Lisp fix that week by going to the International Lisp Conference from the 19th to the 21st and the Clojure conference on the 22nd and 23rd. Book your Reno -> RDU flights today!
Thanks, I was about to head into a meeting and didn't have time to do the research. Assuming $175 million in profits per year, that means 44 years to breakeven, ignoring the talent acquisition angle. How much are 20 (or even 50) good programmers worth?
Users of Microsoft Windows have had to put up with weak facilities for managing large numbers of windows for a long time -- I remember having 60-70 windows open on an AIX workstation back in the 90's and never feeling lost, but it's pretty easy to feel lost managing 6-7 windows on a Windows machine.

Multiple issues are involved, for instance, the way that window application processes are responsible for moving themselves, the way focus works, the way cut-and-paste works, etc.

(To be fair, Microsoft has been steadily improving matters, and Win7 is a step forward)

Anyhow, I find things easiest in Windows if I run with windows maximized much of the time, and a multi-monitor rig is a good way to do that and still be able to see more than one thing at a time.

Some Windows apps are very well designed to work w/ multi-monitor rigs too. Visual studio, for instance, makes it very easy to split the VS across monitors 1 and 2 and have the application you're running on or your web browser on monitor 3.
"You do realize that the US has higher unemployment rates than any of those three countries? And, yeah, it's not always easy to find a job and there have been layoffs, but there's a bit of a worldwide recession."

You do realize that many of the states that are failing (California and Michigan) have had some of the highest taxes, largest wages for city workers (Some in California were paid > $200,000/year), and many expensive social programs (Just look at all the money that was pumped into Detroit over the past 20 years).

In Michigan, businesses are taxed on gross income rather than net (A few other states do this too). I don't see how anyone can think this is a good idea. The more difficult you make it for a business, the less likely a business will want to be there (and there will be less jobs).

"And I'm not sure were you got that tax rate. Because it's certainly false. I think you are deluding yourself."

You can't just look at income tax. You need to include VAT, sales, and everything else that you need to pay on a yearly basis.
The purchaser's stock typically goes down because the company just spent a lot of money... whether loaned or not.
you know... I'm quite interested in this idea. Are you ok with me running with it?
It's built-in; it's Javascript. In the spreadsheet, the script stuff is in the "tools" menu, and it opens a new window which has a menu for "triggers". The help is pretty excellent (reference and tutorials), but it doesn't cover Javascript's standard libraries, only google's special spreadsheet classes (BTW: there's some cool stuff in there for webserves, you can download URLs and parse XML.)

function sendEmail() {
var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();
var numRows = sheet.getLastRow() -1;// don't count first row
var selectedRow = Math.floor(Math.random() * numRows);
var dataRange = sheet.getRange(selectedRow+2, 1, 1, 2);// from A2, 1 row, 2 cols
var values = dataRange.getValues();
var date = values[0][0]; // 1st row, 1st col
var prev = values[0][1]; // 1st row, 2nd col

var message = "<HTML><BODY>"
+ '<a href="'+yourFormURLhere+'">goto form</a>'
+ '<BR>'
+ '<b>Oh snap! Remember this from '+date+'</b>'
+ '<BR>'
+ '<textarea rows="20" cols="60" name="prev">'
+ prev
+ '</textarea>'
+ '<font size=1>RemainingDailyQuota: '+ MailApp.getRemainingDailyQuota() +'<font>'
+ "</HTML></BODY>"
;

MailApp.sendEmail( yourAddressHere, "How did your day go?",
"", {htmlBody: message});
}

You get the yourFormURLhere from the form editor. The daily quota is 500 emails.

Protip: It turns out 8pm is not a good time for the trigger to send it, for you to record the day's events, if you keep odd hours like me and get up at 9pm sometimes...

EDIT the http://OhLife.com selection of the previous entry is more useful: they first choose whether it will be "one month ago" or "one week ago" etc, then work out that date, and then get the entry from that date (or I guess the next one if blank). It might turn out that for a particular person that always being reminded of "this time last week" is a very effective context (or some mix of them). Bonus: it's trivial to then describe the entry with that string, which is much more natural than some timedate format.
Good thing most bad-guys aren't super tech savvy...Most people going out to rob someone aren't necessarily using technology to assist in their exploits.

I live in as much of a hood as you can get in Portland, and the people I am worried about being robbed by are any neighbors that may see me packing up to leave for the weekend!

I won't be jumping on this location bandwagon myself, however, my guess is this will NOT fly without some access controls.
In April they issued an update that accidentally targeted legitimate Windows system files, causing the updated boxes to bluescreen. Astounding enterprise-level incompetence.
Why? So he can take the startup gamble without nothing to fall back on? Heck, without a degree not even investors will look at him, unless he makes something in the top 1 percentile.
In addition, the Strange Loop conference from Oct 14-15 (http://strangeloop2010.com) is an unofficial 1st Clojure.
There's a lot of useful advice in that article. Having organised my fair share of meetings, I offer the following related thoughts...

GOALS

There are only two useful goals for most meetings:

1. Make a specific decision.

2. Determine the answer to a specific question.

If a decision is that something will be done, it should also state who will do it, and any relevant extra details such as a timescale or who else needs to be notified when the action is complete.

Before any formal meeting, an agenda should always be circulated, stating the decisions to be made and questions to be answered during the meeting. Agendas should be provided far enough in advance for attendees to organise their contributions, and to identify any agenda points that could be better addressed in a different forum.

After any formal meeting, minutes should always be circulated, stating the decisions and answers. Minutes should be available as soon as possible after the meeting, and placed somewhere they will be easy to find later. Sending the minutes for last month's meeting around the day before this month's meeting is about as useful as sending the agenda around after the meeting has started: better than nothing, but not by much.

Anything on the agenda that does not have one of the two specific goals above is probably a waste of time. In particular, agendas consisting only of vague topic headings are the kiss of death for meetings.

There is little value in holding a meeting to announce answers that are already known or decisions that have already been made. Just send the information to the relevant people to consider in their own time. If you're ever chairing a meeting and feel yourself about to utter the words "Let's go round the table...", you are probably about to make a mistake.

ATTENDEES

The participants in a meeting should be precisely those who are required to make the decisions and determine the answers.

There should also be someone to lead the meeting, and someone to take the minutes. These should preferably be separate people, so neither of them is trying to organise the meeting and participate in the discussion at the same time.

If a decision or question does not require at least the majority of the participants in the meeting, it should probably be dealt with on another occasion.

If a decision or question can be dealt with by a single person on their own authority, see "holding a meeting to announce answers that are already known or decisions that have already been made" above.

BRIEFINGS

Sometimes, it is useful for one person to share some information with a whole group, possibly with some degree of interaction or taking questions afterwards. This is fine, but if there are going to be mostly one-way briefings like this, they should be scheduled, prepared by the briefer, and presented to the group as such.
Attracting investment from VC's, hoping for a big sell-out before the thing falls flat on its face.
Basically it add physicality to the virtual world. Part of the trend of the internet is to help connect people who are not physically present or close. So people can form groups with other people based on interest rather then on location. But there is still lots of value in connecting with people on a more physical level, and these types of services tap into that value.
Will the book be ready for the conference?
Because most of us don't need a branching model this complex, and if we do doing the equivalent thing with "git checkout" is trivial compared to actually managing all those branches.
Founders at Work is a good book of web startup case studies. Are there others?

What I really want is a place where people who run web startups post, "here's something I did to improve my product" and "here's something I did to reach my market" with specifics about their product and market. That's how I could build a mental database of "chunks".

HN is often too high-level (acquisitions, financing) or too low-level (programming techniques) and not right at that chunk level.
100% of the material presented here is also totally relevant for user group organizers. Nothing sucks worse than watching from the sidelines while a couple of kooks turn a developer group meetup about community building into an hour long rant-fest about how Salesforce integration is a rampaging pain in the ass.

I've learned that one of the most important skills a group organizer can have is that uncanny ability to discern when to let the group go off on a tangent and when to reign things back in.
I've read some Peter Drucker.

It seems I am not alone:

quite a lot of results when typing this into google:

site:news.ycombinator.com Peter Drucker
Groupon Teaches You Why Coupons Are Better Than Checkins For Deals
FarmVille is a distraction from work, just like Hacker News is for many people.
It should have been relatively easy to transplant the British literature to America. Do you know how much transfer there was to Germany?
Combine Facebook Photo recognition with camera API's and places = fun
No, I truly meant it. Everything related to the datastore is difficult and tedious. Goodbye to incremental development, goodbye to knocking out a feature in an hour. Every single change you make has to be planned.

Adding a field to an "object"? Where do you use that object? Is there somewhere that you don't use that field which becomes too slow?

How are you going to migrate that new field? There aren't tools to help you migrate. Generally, you have to change to an Explando, add the field, load every single object from the datastore, then save every object back to the datastore.

These are two examples off the top of my head. Every change you want to make in App Engine has similar questions raised. I really did mean it when I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

I think it's a much different learning curve than with any other technology. I'm plenty adept at learning new things, but this was just unnecessary complex, with nothing to redeem it.
Intel Acquires McAfee to Enter The Hardware Based Security Business
Our team uses this with great success. To take this a step further we name our features in conjunction with features in our project management tool. git flow feature start visitor_can_sign_in_812381 This gives us a nice mapping of feature branches to actual features. The one thing to be aware of with git flow is that the author is more on the merge side than on the rebase side. So closing features just involves merging on top of the develop branch. This hasn't raised many problems for our team though.
They don't have to solve a problem; they satisfy needs, such as the need to share, to belong to a community, joy/play etc.

Non-violent communication gathers these - it's pretty useful for a brainstorming, for instance:

- http://www.cnvc.org/en/Training/needs-inventory

Also useful:

- http://www.cnvc.org/en/Training/feelings-inventory
Review my site: CloudSafe.com
We just launched our secure online storage project: http://www.cloudsafe.com

It´s a place to store any critical data you would like to be securely encrypted in the cloud. Just setup a virtual safe and use the web frontend or WebDAV to upload your files. Then you can give selective access to any other user. Or you could use and distribute access codes for the safes.

From a technical perspective: We focused to implement a secure asmyetric cryptographic archtitecture - all content is encrypted via AES-256 and user access administration is done via public/private key encryption. So basically we tried to implement some of the key security elements of GPG/PGP within a cloud service.

The free account comes with three safes and 1GB of free space. Now we would love to get some user feedback: Just use our contact form on the site or drop us a quick note at support@cloudsafe.com.
I do the same thing without git-flow already. What will git-flow give me that I can't easily do or is awkward with using git directly?
In fact, I didn't hear of _why until he disappeared, and @jresig made his testimonial to him. Now retrospectively, I admire his creativity and humor... including an appreciation for his virtual "death", if it was meant to be a part of his overall character.

That said, I appreciate that people have made all of his works available online, and those projects stand on their own merits. I don't find much value in celebrating _why himself, since that's his personal project, not ours.
I don't use any of these products (I don't think I'm the target demographic) but it seems that they can be applied to jwz's classic use case:

"Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?"

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

Where human beings are concerned, there are few problems more fundamental than that.
Top Common Words uttered by Programmers
I think this just gives a nicer interface to git's branching model by removing (excessive) flexibility.
It'll be ready, but in print is another story unfortunately.
Future of the Social Web and How to Stop It
I appreciate the cross-referencing, as you provided four additional sources for more information.

I'm guessing that in this case, however, your phrasing may have come across as dismissive. Its not hard to imagine an overly-critical reader (someone who isn't giving your motives the benefit of the doubt) seeing "This was covered pretty extensively a week ago, although no one commented on it then" and inferring "so why are you posting it again? Here I'll add a bunch of links to prove I'm right."

I could be wrong.
Or buying back shares.
Debugging Tips with Visual Studio 2010
A simplified perpetuity of $175m @ 6% would have a PV of ~= 3b. I'm having trouble seeing how they'd ever break even based on profits alone. I just can't imagine what kind of integration with existing products they think will add another 4.7b.