skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stakes are high, but that doesn't mean the almost always conservative establishments of countries will treat it that seriously (this is particularly unlikely in Japan as noted).

The space race was a combination of re-purposing military hardware (at least for us, only the Saturn boosters didn't start their life as such, I think the same is essentially true for the Soviets) for short term term political advantage. We were claiming to be the most technologically advanced system, yet the Soviets were the first to orbit a satellite (due to internal US bureaucratic turf fighting) and the first to put a man in orbit. To convince other countries that our system was the best we had to match and exceed the Soviet program.

A good counter example is how other countries only got really serious about atomic weapons after we used two in such a public fashion. Both the general concept (E = mc^2) and the specific method (fission of heavy isotopes) had been around for quite some time; it took the prod of war to actually do it.

You'd hope some grant money would go this way, but remember that the existing chemistry etc. establishments are already entrenched in the system and good at getting grant money. In the US they had no trouble spending 'nanotech' money for their usual pursuits.

Also don't forget that this paradigm shift is a threat to the way they've learned to do things. Never underestimate how far powerful people will go when they are faced with what they view as an existential threat. Look at how willing Nobelist Smalley was to flatly lie about what Drexler was proposing and his first choice of a forum, one notorious for not allowing those attacked to respond, for an example of this.

As for point B, it's not just the Asian nations: I don't know about their current status, but it was Brazil's scientific establishment that Feynman viewed up close and personally during an extended visit that prompted him to formulate the cargo cult science concept. Looking at where Nobelists actually did their work would be one way of taking a stab at the question.
Oracle is a consistently profitable company. They know how to run a business. They know what they're doing. If the old Sun and their culture wanted to survive, they needed to run a better business.
Well, then maybe what they really need is a single server/farm out there that just goes through all the perl/ruby/whatever modules and installs them and runs their unit tests. That way you get the same coverage but you don't waste my time. I, personally, don't want a bunch of unit tests to run when I install stuff--it's slow enough as it is and it's (usually) completely redundant.

It seems the same to me as slackware or one of the other "compile everything yourself" distros--they force you (the installer) to do a bunch of redundant calculations. If someone can compile on my architecture then why should I ever have to compile it? The same with unit tests--if someone can run the unit tests on my exact configuration then why should I ever have to run them?
Angel Profiling (1): A Moveable Feast of Mugs, Maniacs and Masters of the Game
I agree re: your second point, but when I worked at IBM it was explicitly discouraged to use the term 'resources' to refer to people.

Personally I find the people that use this outdated term stop doing so when continually referred to as 'Outlook resources'.
The refreshing effect even from a very short period of sleep (think nodding off at a lecture) can be surprisingly strong. Try going for a nap and setting an alarm clock to go off after 20 minutes, without any expectation to necessarily fall asleep in the time. I often find that 20 minute daytime naps help a lot even if it seems to take more than 10 minutes for me to start nodding off.
Why all the hassle (you must be a Ubuntu development member etc.) just to download and test some fonts ? Surely this is supposed to be open source ?
Fingers crossed on a possible vim-style input plugin/integration
ZeuS Variants Targeting Mobile Banking
Software Aids Language Learners
Every corporation thinks of its employees in a dollars and cents kind of way.

Reminds me of my brother’s old company ( http://www.freud.com/ ). Their website says:

We employ humans, not resources. Job opportunities, contact the HR manager.
The primary use case of this is going to be to upload glitched porn to youtube, so kids these days can suffer through what we had to suffer through before widespread internet availability.
Awww, c'mon. He tried so hard not to preach during all of that - you can't just jump on the one little slip-up, the one word where he just couldn't stop himself from slipping in an advert for the big guy. It's programmed in, he did well only doing it once.
I used to maintain Debian packages. As far as I know (or could find looking through the Policy manual and a few language-specific packaging guidelines), there is no policy against running tests after builds. I spent a few minutes looking through several packages and didn't see any that ran tests, but I have seen bug reports about test failures. If there are tests and they run using a reasonable amount of resources, I can't imagine anyone would argue against running them. The package maintainer has to do it, and I assume that some mess up.
Google is sponsoring a free competitor to one of their proprietary solutions. I wonder why.
Hmm I don't know why. NP
Seems quite simple to me.
Personal Finance Blog
Personal Finance Blog
US military closes in Iron Man technology
That's exactly what I'm saying. You choose where you take risks, and I'd risk penis fracture every day, but think can postpone a phone call a few hours for the sake of 200 people at 10.000 feet.
Agreed. Specifically allowing non-standard locations to remain in packages would cause the FHS would be broken, this would mean:

- config files would be shoved all over the place, without being able to back up /etc as a config location or map frequently read data to var

- You couldn't partition your disks reaosnably beyond a single filesystem as there's no way to predict where apps will shove their junk

- Uninstalling apps would leave junk cron jobs and other files made manually rather than put into include dirs

- Your PATH would be exceedingly long

- You'd end up using 'find' a lot more to know where a particular library is.
"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman
New given/when return, why is that?

Allows DRYer code. So something like this:

say do {
if ($grade eq 'A') { 'Well done!' }
elsif ($grade eq 'B') { 'Try harder!' }
elsif ($grade eq 'C') { 'You need help!!!' }
else { 'You are just making it up!' }
};

Could now be written this way:

say do {
given ($grade) {
'Well done!' when 'A';
'Try harder!' when 'B';
'You need help!!!' when 'C';
default { 'You are just making it up!' }
}
};
Ugh, I can't stand Cringely. He relentlessly bashed Apple around the time I was starting to switch over from Windows and made some of the dumbest predictions and damnations about Apple at the time, all of which were totally off base. His reputation was ruined for me.
So have you seen the same amount of success with your freemiums as mailchimp?
It doesn't look like anything that Mutt + Procmail couldn't do, other than the web interface. Is this something Google should consider setting up for Gmail?
They are back. The Unflushables. Part 2. Another 2.
The Privatization of Culture and the Illusion of Depth
Study: Texting bans don't make driving safer, may actually cause more crashes
Why Airbnb Failed To Gain Traction Twice Before Hitting It Big
It's German.
Productivity Tips
Kindle for the Web
The simplest calculator written in C++ ever
Lessons of the Chewbacca Incident
What always boggles my mind about about startups like this is the fact that their very existence is dependent on a giant company that could roll over and squash the life out of them. Their first product was a pre-paid Mastercard...which implies that they actually had to approach Mastercard with their idea. The idea makes sense and is a bit of a no-brainer...and one can suppose that Mastercard themselves had both the technical capability and resources to do it on their own...so what stopped them? How can a small idea guy feel comfortable exploring ideas like this with large corporate giants?
if I had to take a guess, I'd say that this code is a relic of the old Star Office days. Remember: Open Office has its root in Star Office which was bought out by Sun back in the days.

Star Office was a product by a german company. While it's really bad style to write non-english code, it's understandable that it might happen in debug code like this and if that assertion is never hit, nobody ever sees it to correct it.

"Tab zu gross" is German for "tab too big"
A question / poll: Is the parameter for productivity the number of effective hours / day (or) number of tasks finished ? How do you guys work?
Some quick thoughts:

1. I went to the demo page and even though I read the instructions, it still took me longer than it should have to notice the FB stuff. Without instructions and specifically looking for it, I would have never noticed it was there. I guess placement can vary by store design, but the demo would leave me with that worry.

2. From the merchants perspective, I could see the benefits of having users talk about my products on Facebook, but I don't know if distracting a shopper when they are closer to making a decision is worth the trade off. In other words, is the expected value of the links worth the diminished likelihood of purchase? I can't see this increasing the possibility of a sale to the current user. I could be completely wrong and in that case, any data/statistics you could provide merchants would go a long way to convincing them to use Zuupy.

3. To combine 1 & 2 and suggest a potential pivot: As a guy, I am highly unlikely to ever talk about or seek out advice for a general run of the mill purchase. I may seek out the help of, for example, a photographer friend if I'm going to buy a camera, but that may be the extent of it. Maybe I'm just more introverted than others, but going by my FB feed, I've haven't seen it happen much. Judging by the background graphic on you widget, you seem to agree that the target users are women. From my highly unscientific observations of my wife and her friends, they like to show off purchases they are proud of (say they discovered some new fashion and got it at a huge sale). So, what if instead of allowing users to chat with friends before making a purchase and possibly deterring it from occurring,
users are presented with a big widget right after the purchase to share and discuss with their friends. You still get the free links plus a stronger social endorsement (this person has just made a purchase) and you don't ruin the conversion funnel. If I was a merchant, I could definitely see myself signing up for something like that (bonus points if it just plugged in to existing shopping carts).
What happened to e-gold?
Or directed edge :)

http://directededge.com/signup-developer.html

(don't forget it's free for noncommercial use)
I think it's a fairly shocking hypothesis.

My feeling was that the lesson from this is don't go into a business if you don't have at least a vague idea how you're going to make money out of it.

I love XMarks and I'll absolutely miss it (and would have considered paying for it) but this would seem to be niaivity in the extreme.
FreeOffice wasn't an option?

Open Source Office?

Anything-other-than-LibreOffice?

OpenOffice is something that I can explain to my mother when I install it for her instead of MS Office, Mom, it's just like Office but it is open source. In fact she didn't notice for a long time.

Libre Office? She'll question that for sure, and then what am I going to do, explain the GNU manifesto to her? Come on.

I like the use of the word Libre instead of Free among people who know what we're talking about, but from a marketing/branding standpoint, this is horrible.
IMHO, with my little work in compression, all that dedup stuff was a bit hyped. And BTW it is older than ZFS, at least Plan 9's network storage had the same feature. But alignment kills looking for matching chunks of data. And "generally best left to the application" sounds like a cop-out.
1. Perl isn't nearly as broken on Debian as Ruby is. Don't know about the others.

2. These packaging systems were all designed by and for developers. Debian was designed by and for system administrators. The fact that there are common problems is not surpising.
you're not alone.. I would pay as well
So would filing a bug report.
The alternative option was that Sun just went bankrupt and everyone lost their job, so choose between some leaving and all losing.
I use gmail for POP/SMTP access through MS Outlook only. I like having Outlook and, if I couldn't use it w/ gmail, I would probably look elsewhere for an email address.
I agree that it's a little too similar, especially given that it's a related concept. I'd make tweaking the logo a high priority.
Personally I'd see that as a good thing for people who are likely enough to default that expensive credit is all they can get.
It's only worth spammers time if their search is a successful product that spammers want to be a part of. Even still, with 2m users, I'd imagine that bots wouldn't have a substantial effect on the data, not at least without easily beind detected.

Search is beside the point, though. They said they tried it and it was amazing but only for some things. It's true, just search delicious to get an idea of the type of search possible. It's very good for most things, but worthless for finding any content that people wouldn't tag, like 98% of the content of any URL.

My hypothesis was that their data could be used for other reasons.
Did you explain to her what source code is and explain OSI's definition of open source (you know, DFSG rebranded)?
Google 'getting into the payday loan business' is likely just Google continuing to test its Comparison Ads feature:

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-adwords-comp...

Not surprising that they're there - the industry throws off a boatload of money, but only a portion currently goes to Google, since there's an established lead gen industry acting as intermediaries between Google and the actual payday loan providers.

Same situation as with mortgage leads - and in fact Google's used the same 'bringing transparency to a shady and inefficient industry' rhetoric when they've talked about mortgage lead generation.

Like with mortgage leads, this initiative is probably doomed, since the big advertisers in the space have absolutely no desire to efficiently compete for consumers via directly-comparable financial terms. When an industry's confusing and opaque, it's usually for a reason.
I wouldn't be interested at all. In fact, I'd steer clear of it. If, as an entrepreneur, I have a disruptive/interesting idea, the last thing I want to do is to go talk to a bunch of people I have no personal relationship with. I'd be far better off in 99.999% of cases cultivating local relationships and having local discussions rather than via Skype/email.

I realize that the 20-somethings out there think differently in some cases - and maybe they are right - but it wouldn't be for me.
VCs, Angels and ghetto testing: They are wrong
Gobolinux - the filesystem is the package manager
There's something nicely alliterative about the key things that your service appears to help you do with interesting webpages:
Save, Sync, Search, Share, Simplify
Funding Options for Early-Stage Entrepreneurs
I started experimenting with something similar (although got nowhere) as a helper for getting back to Inbox-0 from an overflowing inbox.

The concept was fairly similar, go through the inbox and sort it into piles of important, replied, unreplied, deletable, twitter statuses etc, and then the user could deal with archiving/deleting/following up more quickly.

This looks like a much better solution however, something running the whole time and stopping me getting into that mess.
Language Construction Kit
Payday Loans: New laws aimed at payday lenders will end up hurting the poor
Have you tried high Quality Video Encoding in the Cloud?
Yes. Another prepaid card company called NetSpend filed to IPO this year too. The original founders of NetSpend, Roy and Bertrand Sosa, are hispanic immigrants and pioneered the prepaid model before GreenDot after recognizing a gap in the industry. As the story goes, they created NetSpend with only $750 in their apartment living room.

They later left NetSpend to found MPOWER Group in 2007. Our company was acquired by one of the MPOWER companies this year, and we couldn't be happier about the leadership and long-term vision here. The Sosa brothers are extremely genuine people. This time they're taking a closer look at banking and underserved markets, and it's a great time for the right kind of innovation in this industry if you ask me.

Last ~2 years have been spent building out product and a multinational infrastructure, I think you'll start hearing more about MPOWER in the near future as they ramp up marketing and social media efforts here in the States.

http://www.mpowerlabs.com
http://www.mangomoney.com
http://www.revworldwide.com
http://www.yapsend.com
Payday Loans: New laws aimed at payday lenders will end up hurting the poor:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1735537
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Ask HN: What's happened to Swivel?
Swivel.com were smart startup positioned themselves as YouTube for embeddable charts. They reported 1mln. charts in the system a few years ago, but last few months traffic to their web-site declined significantly and last 2 weeks the site is down at all. Anybody knows - what's happened to Swivel? My startup is somewhat similar to Swivel so I wonder whether the initial idea was bad or they faced some technical or organizational problems. Thanks.
In 2007 the proprietors of the e-gold service were indicted by the United States Department of Justice on four counts of violating money laundering regulations. In July 2008 the company and its three directors pleaded guilty to charges of "conspiracy to engage in money laundering" and the "operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business" in the U.S. District Court for D.C.[1] The company faces fines of $3.7 million.

As of November 2009 the company's website states "As e-gold Users are aware, by agreement with relevant authorities including the U.S. Department of Justice, e-gold has suspended all e-metal Spend activity subject to meeting certain licensing requirements. As a result, e-gold Users have been unable to engage in any transactions, including exchanges, that would require either receiving or making an e-metal Spend from the accounts they control. We are, however, working diligently to develop a means by which account Owners will be able to access the value in their account".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold
So it's the same thing as historious, basically?
One of the related links is Telephone Phobia.

Something that I also "suffer" from. :)

My phone stopped getting a signal in the last couple weeks and ... I didn't really notice. And I really, really don't mind.
How does Minecraft compare to second life? I suppose the main difference is fixed physics rules? Meaning there is wood that can automatically burn - in SL you could create something that looks like wood, and then make it burn with an extra script.
I guess my wording wasn't the best. My point was that source code which is available, but only under a non-permissive license, would certainly not be considered free.

Some people, first and foremost rms, dismiss the term "open source" completely for missing the point.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSZZraHN0Yg
I can understand the concerns with the dual licensing and copyright assignment, it's the same problem I had with Diaspora's licensing.
so will being a vegetarian... I choose the latter.
Actually, if you type with only two fingers you will be moving your forearm a lot, which is good.
Edit: I want to elaborate on this.
My brother, who's 18 years old, has never learnt how to type properly, but he is, of coures, very fast, using only two fingers. He types with great energy, but less wrist strain. The stronger arm and shoulder muscles can easily take care of the job, it is the wrist muscles that are weak.
> So while not perfect, on this particular item I think they do better than Debian does.

Could well be, but at this point, we're moving pretty far away from Zed's spittle-flecked exhortation to pursue "in-person confrontations meant to embarrass package maintainers, SEO tricks to get people off Debian, promotion of any alternative to Debian, anything to make them pay" and merely talking about what could be made better (and there's always something).
Isn't it easier to explain the concept of libre meaning free[dom] than it is to explain the concept of open source, which may be harder to grasp? If you need to explain, libre is similar to liberty.. and it's a word in several languages.

I fail to see how it's a marketing failure.
He's doing it for the lulz.
How does delicious make money? I love your product and use it almost every day, but it's not immediately obvious to me that there's any advertising.
Giants are not nimble.
First-of-Its-Kind Tool Helps Businesses Make the Case for Cloud Computing
I don't think the advice was to avoid socializing. I think it's just to spend time socializing with people who care about or share values with.

The article didn't say how you're supposed to find those people in the first place though. I guess it assumes you were concentrating on pleasing others until this point, and have been exposed to different groups already.
If you keep your passwords in the browsers, you expose yourself to trojans that once they get access to your computer will harvest all your passwords from the browser and send them to some overseas hacker.
Good article, but horrible formatting. I know some people are advocating for removing paragraph indents, but then you're supposed to have whitespace between each paragraph, right?
I have never used gentoo. Does gentoo patch packages as much as Debian? Or is their build process sophisticated to allow parallel install of multiple versions of say postgresql?
Reminds me of the BBC Radio 4 'Desert Island Discs' interview with Sir Tom Blundell. It was several years ago, and I don't have a transcript, so this is a vaguely remembered paraphrase ...

He was researching protein structure in an X-ray crystallography lab and was working long evenings and nights. Eventually his wife gave him the ultimatum to make a choice between his work and her. He chose work and got a divorce. He said he was incredibly relieved to be free of the guilt he felt neglecting her while he worked at the lab, and threw himself into the research with a new-found energy and determination. Shortly afterwards he he discovered the structure of insulin.

There are billions of mediocre marriages in the world, but structure of insulin is only discovered once.

In retrospect, he sounded like he thought he made the right decision to spend less time with his family.
Lookie, lookie, a QR Code... from space
"Modify the services named based on expected clients. Choose one or more from the following: AOL, BBC, Facebook, Google, IBM, MySpace, Orange, PayPal, VeriSign, LiveJournal, Yandex, Ustream and Yahoo!. "

That's the problem! Most people will look at this and don't know what to do. People hate choice, you generally have to lead them. On the other hand, that you even have to provide such a big list is a flaw in the OpenID spec in my opinion.

Obviously doesn't apply to everyone, but most of the time they don't want to think, they want to use the app.
What are you able to use Plan9 for on a daily basis, out of curiosity?