skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fact that it takes seconds to probe and initialize the hardware is totally unnecessary, because any modern OS worth its salt ('BSD, Linux, Mac OS, Windows) will probably do it itself. It is still so because PC hardware manufacturers prefer to retain status quo and not fix what is not broken. This is so with many other things in PC architecture, as well. I.e. take the ATX power connections: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATX. We could be using just one voltage (+12V or other) going to the motherboard long ago. It would simplify electrical design, thereby improving efficiency, thereby simplifying cooling and lowering noise; and lowering costs in the process. But the manufacturers are content with the status quo. If nothing else, the hint that it is the right thing to do is that Google does it: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html, search for "Gigabyte".
I mean cost beyond just web development. As mentioned in the article, there is a massive range of consumer and non-consumer products which have adopted jpeg as a universal format.
HYPOTHETICALLY SPEAKING...
HIPAA Violations Not Always Due to Data Breaches
Careful. The author of this article believes he's made an observation about which open source model is more effective, but he hasn't. Rather, he's observing that there are price-insensitive markets where it doesn't make sense to hold back components, because you'll get paid either way.

A (niche) counterexample to this is Nessus, the most popular open source security scanner. Until a few years ago, Nessus was entirely GPL with a commercially-licensed counterpart product. But a huge chunk of Nessus' market isn't F-500 companies with big IT budgets, but consultants, who are very price sensitive. Tenable had to retreat from GPL altogether in later versions because the market was free-riding.

It is not always the case that "the most open" product wins.

When you're selling mostly to big companies, IT managers will pay almost no matter what; it's actually easier for them to sign a PO than it is to drive adoption of a free offering, because IT organizations are organized around purchasing-centric projects. So it makes sense that Red Hat would keep everything maximally free, to capitalize on the marketing benefit of a thriving community.
My understanding is that many algorithms float "test trades" to probe the other market participants (human and machine). It would be very costly for the algorithms to risk too much money on probing at an inaccurate price, so chances are the "hot potato" was not very deep at all.

Nonetheless, your point stands that it could be an artifact of the traders expecting human-like decisions to underly the phenomena they saw.

(it does seem implausible to me, but oh well)
yes, people explicitly searching can increase your bounce rate... you run a banner ad, it teases people about your product, they dont click. later, after seeing it a few times, they eventually search on your product, end up at your site, see what it is all about and move on.

an e-commerce company i did work for saw that happen on numerous occasions.
Browse the Web, earn points and prizes
The point you have is a valid one, but I feel like it shouldn't be.

For example, the fact that you say there'd be plugin-hell with 30 plugins is crazy. A good management system should be able to efficiently handle hundreds or even millions of components.

And what if we standardized support for the scripting languages? So, for example, the DOM calls looked like RESTFUL services returning JSON. And maybe there was a low-level, but efficient virtual machine that everyone could target (someone mentioned LLVM -- although I really don't care what it is all that much).

It just feels like the web is in this weird cycle where we continue to make suboptimal choices... largely because that's how it was done the first time.
Can zombies catch you in a limousine?
Introducing the FBI’s Zeus Trojan crime ring most wanted poster
>Copyright infringement has nothing to do with counterfeiting.

That's not really true. Counterfeit goods often involve copyright violations.

The bit that raises the conspiracy hackles is that, if you say "counterfeiting", you're conflating counterfeit goods and counterfeit money.
Thanks for the downvote, I misplaced this comment. I meant to post it on the thread about the supermarket that returned some lost keys to a customer.

Edit: found the artile: http://consumerist.com/2010/09/ap-mails-you-back-keys-you-dr...
1. Albert Einstein wasn't an H1B. He would be of either an asylum or "national interest" category. There is big difference - H1B contribute significantly as professionals in technical area, yet not in science or business development.

2. "Time now for Americans to migrate and contribute to rest of the world."

If you haven't noticed, Americans have been doing it for many, at least, decades if not centuries. International business development, trade, military participation and help, at least during WWII, technology dissemination, human rights, ... i'm not naive and i'm critical enough about American "empire", yet credit due where credit due.
Web Site Cyber Attacks on the rise
The odd thing, it seems to me, is that Joel and Jeff are sticking with the model of "lots of focused sites." I think that the existing tag system is sufficient to help people find the questions (and answers) relevant to them, and I don't see the downside to having "one big site" (like Quora).

Somebody ought to mock up a "Stack Universe" site, that integrates all of the data from the other sites, just to show what that would look like.
I must have misunderstood you, and now I'm intrigued: what connector does an iDevice have other than the dock connector and the headphone connector?
Thanks! Just added Facebook, and am setting up the Share This widget.
Yeah, there's a few hundred achievements (!) which exist for a combination of fun and to unlock the alternate weapons. (If you don't get the achievements, you'll gradually get the weapons anyway via random "drops" when you die and/or crafting, trading, or (now) RMT.)
Well... yeah. It's a beta. At 0.1% use across the internet, that's not too bad of a market presence for a beta, really, but betas just plain don't count noticeably.

I quite like Ars' list of browsers. IE combined comes out at ~17%, as opposed to just below 60% universally.
The most interesting part of these figures is that despite the growth of iOS devices and Mac market share, Safari is virtually flat and now only the second most popular Webkit based browser.
Ohm kind of bugs me. Redis is very different from other databases. I don't think it's a good idea to hide the raw Redis API from your application, for a couple reasons:

* It's important to understand the keys your application is using (and my experience with Ohm was that, in particular with indexing, we wound up with an explosion of keys).

* The raw Redis API offers lots of opportunities to restructure your application; two good examples are set operations and blocking operations.

Redis is quirky in the best possible way. You should get very familiar with it before you opt to abstract it away.
FWIW:

MediaTemple is a reasonable choice. They give you quite a lot of cpu time on VE servers. I say you spend 30 bucks and try the cheapest option. Never tried linode/heroku though.

I found performance of thin in multithreading mode (with appropriate rails settings) quite promising and having low memory footprint. No need to load balance on a single instance since it handles everything cluster would (NB: 1.9+ ruby only). As far as I understand, the best way to load-balance is to give one task per server at a time and keep other tasks in waiting queue.

Linux distribution are a matter of taste imho. I always go with ubuntu since it's easier to set up.
We tried a while ago. My suggestion: only use it if you're specifically selling to Amazon users (e.g. a EC2 image for Solr). If you're just selling a general SaaS or server product, it's hard enough to get someone to sign up for your service; don't make them sign up for another service too.
RBN
I've been in a hiring position for a lot of my career and always looked down on certificates. I always wanted candidates who could demonstrate their expertise, a certificate from a program I knew nothing about was meaningless. If you are doing to program to learn more. Do it. If you are doing it to get a job, be aware that for some jobs, it won't help ( but for a bullet point satifying hire, it would probably be a nice feather ).
If the most important thing is getting people to start using a site, a weird name (sorry) is a definite barrier.

Imagine a website is behind a locked door, like a 1920s speakeasy. You have to hear, remember, then say (maybe even spell) a secret codeword to a grumpy doorman to enter. This is pretty much the user reality.

A startup could easily test domain name memorability using Mechanical Turk, I think, which would make this a far more objective exercise. Briefly show panel members a short list of websites and descriptions, then quiz them.

If you get your numbers from 30% to 60%, maybe paying a few thousand dollars for a domain name isn't so bad. I know many (myself included) still have a 1990s level of spite about paying for resold domains, but maybe we can get over that if it's quantified.

Finally, I'm not saying mint.com is necessarily worth two million dollars, but I quickly add that if it's worth two million dollars to anyone, it's to a financial-services startup.
Give it 15 years. If it's free and better, then at some point, all browsers and tools will have it as an option. If CPU keeps improving faster than bandwidth, and free codebases keep growing, then an option to create webP on the fly (or downconvert to jpg for older clients) will become effortless.

In the meantime, if early adopters get a slightly better web experience -- that's a win for Google. They want more marginal pressure to upgrade.
While Mint is a great name, I totally agree that the difference was execution. Several years ago I tried Wesabe, Mint, Quicken, MS Money (which, IIRC, used yodlee), as well as Yodlee's site itself. I went with Mint because it just worked. It had access to all of the Yodlee banks, with a far more intuitive interface than yodlee. Frankly, at the time, there were no alternatives. I've not bothered to look since.
Fugue: Unicorn for Node.js
Way to not get it.

I used to write games for fun. The problem was that there's a lot of boring stuff to writing a game: tracking key presses fluidly, polishing the interface, making sure it runs well on others' machines, etc. Also, the games weren't really that much fun. (Pretty much on par with 80% of the Flash games out there. "Oh look, yet another top-down shooter.")

Then I realized that I don't write games because I want to play them; I write games because I want to make them. Making a game is a game in itself. Why should I spend the time making my unfun game shiny when I could be having fun?

So now, I make "aquariums"- stuff happens on the screen, but there's no real interaction. The fun stuff happens in the code. Maybe some of it will eventually be useful in a real game, but that's not the primary goal.
Impressed.
100% agree with you.
I'd argue that it teaches you how to express the algorithms in an imperative manner, which most of the world will use. That way, you'll be able to more easily read the code the rest of the world writes.

Or perhaps it's to teach you how poorly some languages express algorithms.
Network Independent Value: Why social networks fail
Antarctica on Google Streetview
It depends a lot on what you want to do. Some business problems are not all that technical, some are highly technical.

Some startups are easy to bootstrap, others aren't.

The main advice I'd give you is this: Figure out what you really, really want to do... the thing that makes you most excited and passionate. And demand of yourself that you do it.

There's nothing worse than working very hard at something and realizing that you've put blood, sweat and tears into something you don't really give a damn about.
Learning C is also a very important step to understanding operating systems.
I'm excited for the possibility that wifi will be able to serve a much larger area, perhaps 100-1000 times the area of current wifi points. I've been trying to figure out how to make micro-ISP businesses super convenient (just buy a router, set it up, and get paid) -- this might just be what that idea needs to get started. Maybe we can simultaneously disrupt the major cellphone providers and the major ISPs... wifi everywhere!
How do you deal with plain old paper mail / documents?
I'd be interested in hearing how you guys deal with daily plain old paper mail? Bills, insurance documents, etc. ... I'm not a big fan of folder on a shelf, etc... I'd rather scan all that stuff and archive and organize it digitally. Two requirements I have: 1) More ore less future proof solution, i.e. some software solution with a possibly open database format, API, lots of support for and by third party tools, etc. 2) Not in the cloud. I don't really want to have this documents on some remote sever but rather within my own four walls.

Any suggestions? Any experiences to share? Anything?
You get THREE DOLLARS PER BOOK?

Who's your publisher? Perl web frameworks are that popular?!
Microsoft sues Motorola over patents, citing Android phones
The Rise of VC in Massachusetts and the Emergence of New Leadership
Carrier Billing Behind Android Paid Apps Market Jump?
Does anyone know when this went live? I'm assuming it is live already.

I see it was proposed in Oct 2009: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/proposal-...
Without knowing the target audience of the product, or the actual product itsself, it is difficult to say whether people would use these features and whether your site would benefit from having them or be at a disadvantage by not having them.

I think there are plenty of cases where social networking sites are unnecessary, even in a community... for example there isn't a 'post to twitter or fb' on stackoverflow every time you answer a question, the value is in the site its self. However there are many other sites that gain a little something extra by either having the option to authorize a login or share activity through social media (i.e. i think it's cool that pandora tells me that a friend likes an aritst when i'm listening).

Can you tell us a little more about the target market and maybe a little more about what the web app does... saying that it's "web 2.0" is pretty cliche and says absolutely nothing about the actual product.
The Global Glut in I.P.O.'s
Facebook is splitting shares 5-for-1
Wow, very nicely designed, and I love how fast it is.

Some clarification on a few of the entries would be nice if you have time. For instance, what does "Healthcare" mean once Medicare and Medicaid are excluded? And what's the difference between "compulsory" and "discretionary" spending (when surely the government could eradicate the compulsory stuff if it wanted to). Perhaps you could have explanations of each term if you click on 'em?

Also having "miscellaneous" as the third highest number is a little unsatisfying, can you break that down a bit more?

But these are nitpicks, nice work!
Where Do Good Ideas Come From: A Q&A With Steven Johnson
You can also append .info to get detailed stats.
Superiortattoos
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What's the difference between DevPay and Paid AMIs?
Wanting to be your own boss is 100% enough to start a business. But not to start a Successful Business.

If you don't know what you are going to do and you just start because you want to start. Chances are more that you will fail.

Some people give an excuse, failure is necessary for success. Total BS. Crap.

Those people misinterpret the saying.

If you want to start a business of Restaurant, you should know what is the job of a Dish Washer.
Don't let sensationalism and fear guide your judgment.
compare his horrendous 33kb jpg: http://i.imgur.com/djmBv.png
to the 33kb jpg i made in photoshop: http://i.imgur.com/02E6e.jpg
A Day in the Life of Facebook Operations
Another generic, thin-on-facts hype article about the "whitespace". I'm disappointed in Slate. With all the vacuous pieces around, it's difficult to even find out which frequencies are being made available.

Here's an article from 2007 with some facts:

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/04/white-space.ars

Basically new mobile devices will be allowed if they can actively dodge TV channels, in the 50-700 MHz range, and use the spaces in between.

Truly the only advantage of these lower-than-wifi frequencies, as far as I can tell, is less signal attenuation (over distances and through walls). That means more potential for crowding, too. Plus I assume you need a longer antenna for the longer wavelength. I haven't been able to find any good info about potential data rates.

In North America, 900-930 MHz is already unlicensed and used for some cordless phones and wireless transmitters. Remember that big antenna sticking out of your first cordless phone? (Before the fancier 2.4 GHz ones that interfered with your home wifi.)

Anyway, new unlicensed bands is exciting, even if no single frequency is unused everywhere in the country, but I just don't get the "super wifi" / "wifi on drugs/steroids" angle without more facts.
Thank you! I'll add in some tooltips for the items, because you're right, it's hard to know exactly what they entail.

EDIT: Just added tooltips, I'm taking descriptions straight from Wikipedia (usually the first paragraph).
I'm not seeing the scenario where IPv4 costs my mom $20/mo for commodity web access.

And even my mom has IPv6 software. Mysteriously enough, none of my clients --- large F-500's with network groups mature enough to have security teams sponsoring security reviews of applications --- none of them use IPv6 in production. Pretend I'm one of them and sell me an IPv6 deployment project.
The thing is you scale to meet demand. But unless you have a truly amazing product then you don't have to worry about that right away. Sure, you may scale up to 4 dynos to handle a techcrunch mention (or something like that), at $0.20 an hour. But you don't have to keep using that many dynos after the initial traffic spike. So you just scale them back after 2-6 hours and you pay an extra $1-2 a month for those spikes.

Now, if you make it big and have to employ 25 dynos 24/7 then you are getting into the territory of needing your own infrastructure. But that is probably a long ways off and you'll be hiring people who know that stuff by then.

Google around for some performance comparisons of heroku, but I think that I saw a something where you could handle 5000 or so concurrent users with acceptable response times (i.e. not hitting the backlog too deep errors from heroku), with just 2 dynos. Don't quote me on that, but it's what I remember.

If you go to heroku's pricing page you can play with the number of dynos and workers all you want to see possible costs.

One other thing to remember is that if you have periods with no traffic (say overnight at launch), then you can scale down to 1 dyno and your app will still be available but it won't cost you a thing. So really that $87 is the highest possible for a 2 dyno/1 worker deploy. You could save a lot of money by scaling back to the free 1 dyno during periods of inactivity.
* Feliz Aniversário * - Mensagens Rox - Mensagens para todas Ocasiões
Very interesting. Motorola is one of the big handset OEMs that Microsoft lost in favor of Android. A Microsoft executive was just talking about how the cost of a Windows Phone 7 license indemnifies handset makers from IP & legal claims that Android makes leaves them vulnerable too. Well this sure hammers home that point!
http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/
Among the reasons (first list): #s 2 and 3 are ways in which the AMA restricts supply in the US. The AMA may claim 'quality' (and who can gainsay claims of quality in health care) but one suspects that restricting supply and keeping salaries high is an at least equally valid (note the round about elocution) reason.

Claims that something is 'complicated' can be used to obscure and it seems to me to that one very clear source of problems in health care is the AMA. On the other hand, the AMA represents pretty much all doctors in the US and if they're earning above market salaries you can bet that most of them would strongly defend that. "They spent so many years in med school"; "they have so much student debt"; and "health care is unimpeachably a matter of quality" - right?

Financial markets are 'complicated' and that's why we can't do anything about those either.
I have an FSA. If it looks like I might have money at the end of the year I stock up on over the counter stuff, cold medicine for us and the kids, ibuprofen, hearing aid batteries (for my 9 year old son), maybe an extra pair of glasses for one of us (in fact if I have enough this year I'm getting prescription sunglasses). Heck even band-aids are an eligible expense. It's pretty easy to come up with something to spend that excess on that you will use. One of my son's hearing aids is getting close to it's expected end of life so I will be budgeting to buy a new one next year. So far I have never had a year where I couldn't use the money by the end of the year.

One thing to note, after this year over the counter meds (like ibuprofen) won't be eligible without a prescription, but band-aids still will be so thanks government for making the program less useful.
A pretty dim view of users, but does that mean that Chrome is not for technical people? It's for an audience that is too dumb to be capable of understanding auto-update? (This audience, incidentally, does not exist: users aren't that dumb.)

In either case, the Right Thing was discovered long, long ago: sensible defaults. Users who don't understand the software needn't worry, and those that know what they're doing can make the appropriate decision.

It bugs me to no end when developers take this parental tack with users, as if we were not only responsible for producing the software, but also for ensuring the user doesn't do anything to harm themselves. Put an are-you-sure dialog box in the way, but don't try to force anything on your users. Even if you know better, you're over-stepping and your second-guessing of the user is misguided.
Just bought you a copy and emailed it to you. Enjoy!
NPD Survey: What people are doing with their iPad's
Find a good designer to work with. A developer with a good designer makes a good combo since they can produce stuff that looks good.
A small city in central Japan you may not be familiar with.

$450 rent, $300 utilities (power, gas, water, sewage, data data data), $100 gym, $500 health + pension, $250 food + sundries if I live the cheapest I have ever achieved living. $750 on food and sundries if I live how I actually live (e.g. eating out, entertaining, going out with friends, what have you).
Linux Mint Debian Edition - Is It All It's Cracked Up to Be?
JPEG2000 was wavelet based and that was interesting development, compression-wise and feature-wise like you mentioned.
Microsoft sues Motorola over Android patent infringements
Back when I did TA tech teaching there were many, many student movie projects saved due to target disk mode. Too bad that FireWire is depreciated in favor of USB.
While I agree that Redis (and other nosql databases) are very different than relational ones, I think that the classic model oriented approach makes getting the simple stuff out of the way very easy.

"Makes easy things easy, and hard things possible". Redis makes the hard things possible, Ohm focuses on the easy things made easy part. I do agree of course that understanding your tools is of vital importance.