skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I imagine Apple and AT&T don't want their consumer device to become part of the infrastructure of a major and potentially critical business. Same with the EMS thing. Just too many potential legal risks.
That's a nonsense question, because the Constitution doesn't give you the right to use Rackspace's computers in the first place. Rackspace owns them, and has the understandable perception that it's their choice how they get used, not 'rbanffy's.
The problem with burning bibles is that it would get you marked as a supporter of Islam.

What do you burn when you hate both Islam and Christianity?
I've decided that for my 9/11 barbecue, I'm going to make it stritctly BYOBTB (bring your own book to burn) so we can try to offend everyone.

Me? I'm burning my copy of Team Foundation Server 2005 Hands-on-Guide, of course.
Keep in mind that this likely isn't just a political move, but a strategic move to prevent impact to other customers. This sort of site will commonly draw attacks that have a major negative impact on the hosting provider, while generating minimal revenue for the hosting provider. This sort of customer is likely to cost a hosting company money rather than make them money.
> Do you realize how weaselly that is? What does that mean?

There's a distinct difference between saying that you know someone is incompetent, and saying that you don't know that someone is competent. It's the same as the difference between agnosticism and atheism.

What I am also saying, and what you're probably really arguing with, is that the linked article constitutes evidence against 37s' competence. That's still very different than saying that it shows that they're incompetent, which is how you've been mischaracterizing my posts.
Airbags are of no real use if you are wearing a seatbelt.

Cars have got bigger because everybody wants one of those nice safe SUVs with the special rollover feature.

My 1989 Citroen AX 1.3L diesel used to do >60mpg commuting and a factory tuned one did 90mpg on a run across europe - it weighted 650kg. A VW polo of the same era does about the same.

Of course they didn't have 27 cupholders or 7 speaker DVD surround - they are just cars, limited to transporting 4people at the highway speed limit. They can't climb mountains or make you irresistible to women.
The processors are similar, true. Although even that is not completely right. I believe Apple managed to get Intel to produce a couple of CPUs spec they way they wanted... but a few months later Intel was free to sell it to others too. (I am thinking the original Macbook air, for example).

They also use pretty standard graphics cards, CD/DVD drivers (although not always), hard disks and so on.

But there are still a few differences.

First: they case is most definitely something that sets them apart, and they are not "off the shelf".

Second: they pick good combinations, which in a way it's easier for them since they are selling the computer as a whole and not for its specs. Hence if they think it's better value for money they may go with a camera that has lower megapixels despite having better images (e.g. more sensitive sensors). Or decide if it's better to invest in more RAM, faster GPU or faster CPU. And so on.

Many (though not all) PC manufacturer are in a much more cut-throat market, and in such hyper-competitive environment it's not surprising that easily quantifiable numbers (e.g. MHz, megapixels, contrast, resolution, etc...) becomes the key point.

Third: Apple has often thinks outside of the box, so to speak, and backs up new technologies much before others. Wifi was an example, floppy drive, USB, Firewire, multi-track, etc... They can do that because they control the whole stack, but it's still a hardware advantage in the end.

Forth and last: they innovate some small details such as the mag-safe power supply, or the way it closes, or some other small touches...
Me too, and I'm not exactly certain how I feel about that. I guess as time moves on I've realized the only one that can get this train going is me.
Liability is a bitch!

I do notice that they left out the standard clause about operating Nuclear facilities, but that's probably present in the clickwrap for just using the device at all.
Not quite the issue here.

You absolutely have the right to free speech in the US. But any owner of private property can pretty much ban you from that property, for example (there are certainly some protected exceptions, but in general 'the law' is on their side).

Similarly, Rackspace has the right to stop servicing their customer if they feel the customer has violated the contract. Now, whether or not a court has to step in to determine the validity of the contract, etc, is a completely separate issue.

But this most certainly all has absolutely nothing to do with constitutionally protected speech.
14K for a design and 5K for the initial legal work seems pretty steep to me for a completely new, unproven web. Surely it could have been done an order of magnitude cheaper for similar quality, no?

Anyway I'm glad he shared the data.
Again, just like Windows Mobile. This is why I think the "openness" hype is undeserving. Yes, in comparison to the iPhone this all significant, but the iPhone wasn't even the original smartphone OS.
This does nothing except give more free publicity to the Koran burners. They'll just find another company to host their site, which will have even more traffic now.

I know we probably can't, but could we just ignore them, hope they get bored when no one pays attention to them and go away?
US soldiers killed Afghan civilians for sport and collected fingers as trophies
I'd suggest not burning anything.
It's not Rackspace's job to preserve the freedom of speech – that role belongs to congress.

The business relationship is a two way street. Fortunately for Rackspace, they're in a position where they can pick their customers.

Regardless of how you feel about burning Qurans, Rackspace has the right to recognize that one of their hosting customers is doing stupid things as a result of religion – and to decide they want no part of it. For simple liability reasons alone this may be a good idea – who knows what violence this idiocy will inspire.

If I were running a hosting company, I'd be wary of permitting religious content of any sort, much less the "my religion is better than your religion and you should get out of my country/planet" sort.
Put something interesting on the rope, like a politician or Justin Bieber and people would be all over this. :-)
I uploaded a screenshot here: http://twitpic.com/2mshks
Book burning has a very dark history, often long and traumatically remembered.

Heinrich Heine famously wrote "Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings." a century later his writings ware torched at the Opernplatz in Berlin, among many other books.

Curiously, that famous (and prescient) quote was from a play referring to the burning of the Quran.

That it is within the legal rights of people to do so, is a testament to a great legal system we have, that people are actually doing this abhorrent act, is very disturbing.
The Torah?
Well - they started it!

Edit: Apparently the good reverend was also promising to burn copies of the Talmud (presumably burning the Torah would remove all those useful passages about gays)
Scientific proof: Nobody hates hipsters more than hipsters
It's not unusable, and overall I actually prefer it to, say, C or Java. But compared to modern languages it has some glaring weaknesses.

Also, you have to be careful to distinguish between the framework and the language. Cocoa is an excellent framework that does a great job playing to Objective-C's strengths. It's the language that I'm criticizing here.
So now instead of developing for a platform run by a megalomaniac dictator who never listens, you can develop for a platform run by a megalomaniac dictator who rarely listens to the demands of developers. Sign me up!
3D video cards are a commodity, too, these days. Even they could offer open-source reference drivers that allow for full basic utilization of the hardware, albeit at suboptimal performance. The heavily-optimized trade secret like cool codepaths could be offered in binary drivers for those who want the last drop of perf.
Exactly, they agreed to Rackspace's conditions when they purchased hosting from them. First amendments have nothing do do with this considering it's not the government which is censoring here but the company providing the service. The only thing the church can argue is that it's a breach of contract.

First amendment free speech rights applies to government censorship not to corporation's censoring things done with their services.
Everyone in the office is queued up to hit it now. I already went once!
So free speech means nothing to you apparently. It is in hard issues like this that free speech must remain free or it is an illusion. I do not agree with what the church is doing either but refusing them free speech is a dangerous precedence to be saying "good" to.
I'm confused - first you wanted education to subsidize research. Wouldn't that have been taking money away from education, back when you believed that was the status quo? It seems as if your fundamental assumption is that the status quo must be correct.

In any case, yes, I agree with you that most researchers will need to have some sort of undergrad education. I don't see any reason why that education should be provided by researchers - cheap adjunct professors seem to do a reasonably good job at it.

(I do agree that a PhD program will need to be taught by researchers, since it is basically just an apprenticeship.)

As for teaching, my experience was worth considerably less to my students than a better ability to explain simple concepts would have been. The fact that I developed a nice outgoing wave filter for the Schrodinger equation did not help my fashion business student who barely knew algebra. It didn't even help the top 2-3 students who were breezing through my class, who might (possibly) have understood the concept of a PDE, or at least nodded along as if they did.

What might have helped them was someone who (like them) struggled with calculus, mastered it, and knew where the difficult points were. It also might have helped to have someone who could get to know students, understand how they learn best, and then tailor the lessons to suit them. Or someone who can look at a sea of blank faces and determine when they are confused. Unfortunately, that person wasn't me. I know a number of people who are that person, but only a small fraction of them have published anything beyond their PhD thesis.
Ask HN: Selling disruptive technology
I'm posting on behalf of an acquaintance, who approached me recently with several major ideas in the field of ceramics. He has publications and patents to back his claims, but he has trouble with investors. His website with more explanations is http://rokhv.com. Quick summary: he invented several new types of ceramics, and knows how to manufacture them. Uses: containers for nuclear waste disposal (cheaper and safer than Yucca Mountain); cheap and thin superconducting wire; incinerators which produce clean electricity.

Investors get excited, refer him to experts in the ceramics, who reply "no way." Except some of these experts work on competing ideas, or have other vested interests. This is the disruptive technology problem which PG wrote about: people either outright don't understand what you're doing, or they don't want to understand it.

I personally have no stake in this, but I'm always interested in pushing for clean energy sources. I wonder if crowd here has any suggestions.
When your obvious hate speech has been denounced by both the Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan and the President of the United States as dangerous to troops and civilians overseas, I sympathize that someone might say "I want no part of this. I'm out."

I think saying this offends their "personal sensibilities" is understating the circumstance. It's now an international issue. They have a right to say it and a right to do it, and other people have an equal right to disassociate themselves from it.
I know that these round-up programs are quite popular -- but it reflects a sloppy-with-money mindset I just don't have.

Let's say you're a super-heavy card user -- 5 times a day. And charges are random in the cents value -- so on average a charge yields a $0.50 allocation.

Why not just donate (30 days * 5 transactions/day * $0.50/transaction =) $75/month to your chosen purposes (be they personal savings as with BoFA or a charity as here)?

Sure, you cold use transaction volume as an initial indicator of ability-to-pay or a socially-normed anchor-value. But, there really ought to be more consideration of personal circumstances than that. (What's your overall savings/debt? What are your other obligations?) And, this only requires an occasional look-back at prior volume to set a benchmark level -- not a constant function of every transaction.

Sure, putting allocations on autopilot improves compliance to a stated plan... but that can be done without the 'round-up' transaction gimmick. (Lots of systems for auto-charging donations or savings on weekly/monthly/paycheckly/etc. schedules already exist.)

And why $0.50 per transaction? If trying to achieve an optimal savings rate, it's unlikely that's the right ratio for anyone.
My thoughts exactly.

Can't we simply ignore a bunch of nuts in a small town in Florida who want to start a fire in their backyard?

It's the same way I feel about terrorism. Can't we just accept the unfortunate loss of life that occurs when some nutter/group of nutters decide to murder people, instead of, you know, being terrorized?
What is your definition of violence?

My dictionary (Dictionary.app) says "behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something." Specifically, how is Rackspace using physical force against anyone?
I don't know if the laws have changed since 1995, but back then when I worked for AT&T, you could have your telephone service turned off for using profanity across state lines.

I was actually a part of making this happen for someone who called in -- I had a high voice at the time, got called "ma'am" a lot. A male customer was coming on to me, wanted to send me flowers. As I was trying to assist them, I noticed the call records - some employee codes I recognized as males had notes like "lost call" and "customer hung up"; females had notes like "customer made inappropriate comments". Long story short, a supervisor listened in, and after they made sexual advances and used profanity, got their telephone service cut off (and I don't just mean long distance, I mean local service - the LECs in those days still had a good relationship with AT&T)...

So where's the right of free speech there?

Still not quite the same issue, because that involved federal law, whereas this is regarding Rackspace contracts... But it's an example of something trumping free speech.

The shorter and more classic example is the [lack of] right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre [when there is no fire].
Actually, the GPL is not exercised in that example. As the author of Doom, id Software can do whatever they want with it; they are not going to sue themselves for violating the GPL.

The GPL's terms only become relevant when a third party wants to use it to distribute the work. And it seems the GPL (v3, at least) would not allow a third party to publish Doom on the App Store.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/762498/iphone-and-gpl
You have a good point that a private monopoly can ultimately limit public rights like free speech. If there's no alternative provider that is willing to host hate speech, you can't broadcast it in that form.

I can think of three ways to provide for that:

1. Public servers, possibly sponsored by the govt

2. Regulation of Internet access run by private companies

3. Waiting for private competition to create such a space

The first one worked well in the early days of the Internet. There were lots of rules against commercial use of publicly-funded computers but little content regulation. Despite what some may think about the govt, it has lost most times it has attempted to limit free speech.

Regulation sort of works for railroads and telecom lines. Bell gets a monopoly on wiring but they have to provide access to disabled people, can't do discriminatory pricing, etc.

The last one is least likely to succeed. I don't know of any private US company that advertises themselves as "no takedown unless required by court order". It seems there is little profit advantage in marginalized speech compared to the cost of defending against attacks on it.

While it's good to see Ipredator and BayImg providing services with this kind of guarantee, the fact that such an effort only seems possible in Sweden should give us pause.
If you are down all day every Monday, that's still 85% uptime. Hyperbole is awesome!
As I understand it, ATI is almost doing that by providing information to authors of open-source drivers.
Punishing your clients is not a good way for they to lose weight. I propose another solution, when they stick to their goals they should receive a reward that's a better solution, try it and tell us about it. Don't downmod yourself.
What if media had ignored Terry Jones?

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/os-mike-thomas-q...
Detecting Trojans and Worms with Network Analyzer
I don't think any other large provider would do any better in this case. You agree to their terms of service and hate speech is forbidden by those terms. If you aren't hosting things which is hate speech (my opinion is that the church's website did include things which in my view fall under hate speech) then this news shouldn't bother you at all.

I know it's all subjective and Rackspace basically can choose to label anything hate speech. My point is that all providers have this liberty, not just Rackspace.
I used to like them, but I like being able to run cron jobs even more.
1) You weigh in by taking a picture of your feet on the scale. Sure, you can photoshop it or lean on a table (it's actually kind of hard to do that), but in the end, if you cheat, all you do is get your money back, you don't make money.

2) Pretty much everything out there is positive reinforcement. We try our best to help you succeed, we would rather get a tip than keep your money because you failed to make your goals. For years I would try to lose weight for a couple of weeks and then my life would go back to normal. I wanted something where my life would be WORSE if I failed so I made LIOLI.
Rhinoplasty Orange County
What else do we keep in a protective case 24/7, even when we're using it? The case is basically a part of the phone. It's there all the time and is a big part of the user experience. I think it's noteworthy that contrary to everyone's perception, Apple punted a big part of the iPhone user experience to third-party companies. They slipped this by everyone because we judge the iPhone based on its aesthetics without a case, even though the majority of iPhone users can't or don't want to use it that way.

I'm not hating; I'm just pointing out the logical problem behind praising the robustness and external appearance of a device whose external appearance you rarely see in the wild because it isn't robust enough to use without a case.

Think about it. As beautiful and sleek as the iPhone is without a case, most iPhone owners prefer to put a case on it. Every time you see a person with an iPhone in a case, Apple failed in the eyes of that person to create a better product than iPhone-in-a-case. The beauty was not enough to make up for the fragility, so the user gave up all the external beauty to get back the robustness that Apple traded away to make it beautiful. If you get used to thinking of the naked iPhone as inferior to iPhone-in-a-case -- and if you respect the judgment of the users, you have to -- then it doesn't make sense to admire its design so much.
No, removing hosting of a website is though.

Imagine a comparable scenario: an independent newspaper is renting a printing press, they aren't behind on rent but the provider decides they don't like what the paper is printing so they repossess the printing press. That's definitely a form of violence, even if it isn't physical violence (in the same manner that publicly burning another religion's holy text is a form of violence).
I suspect Rackspace is constantly pulling down sites for violations of their acceptable use policy.
For those who haven't seen Amanda's interview on This Week in Social Media, you might want to check it out on thisweekin.com (show link: http://bit.ly/9GiyPy).
Please remember that what you find enjoyable could possibly be different than what 40-year-old moms in flyover country find enjoyable. Also realize the latter group is what made Oprah, the Wii, and Zynga billion dollar businesses.
Sorry, but I can't be a female because I'm a male today.
To the contrary - in Islam the Bible is also a Holy Book, and Jesus is also upheld and respected as a prophet, and given the same due respect as Prophet Muhammad.
Rhinoplasty can reduce or increase the size of your nose, change the shape of the tip or the bridge, narrow the span of the nostrils, or change the angle between your nose and your upper lip
lame it skipped my turn.
It could have been done for cheaper, especially legal. However, I don't think the design would have been as good for cheaper. Keep in mind those were "retail", I had some "friend discounts" I didn't want to make public.

Legal is tough, the weight loss industry can be kind of scary because people can get hurt. It is especially scary if you are doing something "weird". Most new websites or businesses will not need a custom TOS, PP, etc. They can tweak one that already exists.
> can pretty much ban you from that property

In effect, you have your free speech curtailed because you have to express it using someone else's property. Companies like Rackspace may prevent your free speech from reaching anyone for any reason that fits the contract you signed.
The idea sounds like it might be interesting, but I can't imagine how this works and neither your website nor the facebook page linked at the bottom tell me anything about it.

I might suspect that if I signed up with Facebook Connect that there might be more information, but it's not clear whether that's the case - and I wouldn't try it on the off chance.

I would suggest that there needs to be more up-front information to explain what happens if I use Facebook Connect to login. How does giving you my credit card work? On the face of it, that sounds like a scam. Is this service for everyone, or only people in the USA? After signing up, how easily can I opt out? etc etc.

But I'm curious to know more.
indeed a nice idea ,,, consider changing the swipegood logo and by making it more apparent... how will that work, i dont know, but its a nice thing that people will surely appreciate....
I've gone twice, and it's working perfectly for my coworkers. You need to click the 'Start busting pinata' button when it shows up for you.
Yeah but we're not talking about less restrictive licenses, we're talking about linux and the gpl and the fact that zero of the changes from android have made it back upstream into the kernel.

Dirk Hohndel from MeeGo made a good point at OSCON this year that open source is not just about releasing patches to code you changed, but oepn source is about engaging with the upstream projects that you're using, and that is something that android has not done well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfQTaIGPxP8

Don't get me wrong, I still think android is great, I've been using android phones since just after the G1 was released, and its a great platform, but there are definitely a lot of open issues with it that could be handled better.
I feel like it's important to compare this to things in the "real world".

You have the right to free speech, but you're probably going to be quickly ordered to leave a church if you begin swearing loudly.

You have the right to bear arms, but buildings are free to forbid you bring in weapons of any sort.