skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
50% is quite standard for team acquisitions to my knowledge. However, for TechCrunch earn-out sounds quite high.

I'm also surprised of the price, it seems low compared to many tech acquisitions. TechCrunch has a lot of eyeballs, even if it doesn't have main stream audience.

Midsize Finnish regional newspaper companies have market caps around €180M. TechCrunch, a major international tech publication with millions of readers, is worth of only 10-25% of a local newspaper with audience of 300000 people? WTF? Either newspaper valuations are absurd, or internet advertising and tech events are a failure as a business model.
Andrew Moore's lecture slides are also very useful:
http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/index.html
Problems here on Ubuntu/Firefox. No problem with the account set-up. No problem with the Firefox plug-in install.

When I try to add this page, I get the "Adding this page..." but after a few seconds I get another window that has "Zukmo" at the top in large text, but the window is not large enough to contain further text. This latter window disappears after a second or less.

I think the window is asking me to log-in. But I am logged in to Zukmo.

One further thing. Forcing an icon into the status bar without the option to switch it off is a show-stopper for me. It's a decision that doesn't scale. If every plug-in did this, then the status bar would be a mess and its usefulness reduced.
> It is impossible to prove that the classified information hasn't led to higher danger for our troops

But we are talking about informants and not troops -- those are the names that would have been redacted.

> How the hell can you know that?

Well that was the case the last time I read an article about this. Although I can't remember where it was... It definitely mentioned that there have been no casualties as of yet. Admittedly I've made an assumption that if there was the US would kick up a huge fuss if an informant was killed due to Wikileaks. That sounds realistic to me.
I beg to differ.

If the US ever got anywhere near the top of, say, the PISA study, you can be sure it would make the front page of the New York Times.

It's not all schadenfreude, really.
Yeah, where are the stickers that advertise the processor? Or an AT&T logo you can't remove. By god, Apple is at a disadvantage aren't they? Do 37signals really think people can't tell Apple products are good when they're made of glass and aluminum? Apple products just feel more solid and reliable because of those things.

But maybe people prefer the silver paint rubbing off under their palms because their laptop is really made of cheap black plastic.
With TechCrunch, AOL values distribution over creation
Well, when it's an interview made in America, it may not be a waste of time. That's kind of like saying that 95 % of people in the world aren't from the US, so any survey made using them is a complete waste of time.
Yes, it does. There have been some studies on the black community where the women would rather remain single mothers than to marry. The logic being that men become an expense.There are also studies that show that divorce is much likelier in cases where there are no male children or the woman makes more than the man.
A service like wikileaks is valuable to society precisely because (in theory, though apparently not in implementation) it doesn't make the value judgement whether something is of interest or not. Instead, it gives us all the information, and lets people make the decision for themselves.

When I make that value judgement, Assange's private life is absolutely relevant to the public interest. What he says and does in public gives us what little insight we can get into the mind of the person who controls what goes on the servers of wikileaks. He could be a tool of the US government, for all we know, leaking information that is damning but not nearly as damning as the information that won't be dug for nearly as hard now that what we have is public. Or, he could be selectively publishing things in a wildly unbalanced way, trying to stick it to the US government for his own purposes (a popular view, it would seem). Though we can't know for sure, every bit of his private life we can analyze allows us to be more confident in our decision to trust him or not.
One can make a lot of money of the app store, but there are more android devices in the world than there are IOS devices.

Apple has the most succesful store, but the android has the better platform - because developers aren't restricted.
This American Life did an episode that featured his story. Check it out.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/412/m...
Hopefully they can take key parts of the atv ios build and port it to an app for jailbroken ipod touches/iphones. Have it run like front row for OS X. That way you would only need one device and you could play back local media.
2010 Technology M&A Trends and Rankings – How Active Have the Tech Giants Been?
I don't get why people are against the name. Yeah, it's not "mom-friendly", but neither is any software. Everyone uses Word at home because it's what they use at work. They don't think of software packages as being discrete elements, they think of "a computer" and "that place where I type memos". Microsoft wins by default.

OO.org and LibreOffice should target two demographics: industries where everyone needs to be trained anyway, and for enthusiasts. If you work for megacorp-with-Word and you got Word for free with your computer, and you don't enjoy using computers, then LibreOffice's advantages are minimal. No need to cater to that demographic, because they simply don't care.

(Incidentally, I wrote a book in OO.org a few years ago. HORRIBLE. NEVER AGAIN. But I wouldn't use Word, either.)
The idea of having packages installed in different directories is very convenient for development, you often need to install several versions of the same package and don't want to clutter /usr/local (or don't have root permissions)

Some months ago I have written a small tool that automates installing apps in separate directories and then symlink them to a directory in the path. It also supports disabling/reenabling/removing single packages (by removing the symlinks) and has a PIP fork to simplify installation of Python packages (also an "autobuild" for standard configure/make build systems)

It was written for development but actually it became my preferred system to install packages in Mac OSX, packaging systems (fink, macports...) are terrible there.

It's on pypi and doesn't require any installation, if you want to give it a try:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/bpt/
Like, umm, a commercial software company?

Look, this is about power. In the commercial world, the power ultimately, albeit indirectly, lies in the hands of the end user who decide what he or she will and will not pay for. In the "free software" world the power is in the hands of the high priests who are beholden to no-one, and users are expected to be grateful for whatever they're given.

Do you think the average user wouldn't want something for free? But the cost can't be avoided in software - it only depends what currency you want to pay in.
I'm not a fan of this approach. XSS attacks tend to involve attackers coercing servers into generating JS that act against the server's interests; since the server is signing the JS, the fundamental weakness remains. Moreover, by disabling inline scripts, this tool forces dynamic JS behavior to be factored into bona fide dynamic Javascript files, and actual JS is an even harder quoting domain to deal with than the HTML DOM.

We are already moving towards a world where XSS is largely a solved problem: where servers can do content-aware neutralization of all content by default. Rails 3 is already getting close. Over the long term, this is how we're probably going to deal with the XSS problem.
This is true - my boss has been pressuring me to do the legwork required to get at least a masters in stats or CS so I can carry a higher title in our institutional research department.

Just for those outside of academia - state schools really drink their own Kool-aid. Associate/assistant directors require a masters degree in anything while directors require PhD credentials.
Incompatibility is certainly a headache, but having worked on a 10k-line, Firefox-only Javascript project, I can say with confidence that there are a number of pain-points in the language itself.

Scoping weirdness, the erratic semantics of the 'this' keyword, etc.

If you had multiple languages atop a VM, it would be simpler, in fact. The browser only needs to worry about bytecode, except in the case of Javascript, where the inclusion of Rhino (or its equivalent) would be needed for pragmatic reasons. Any hooks into the DOM would be exposed through the VM, and a sensible way to talk to the VM would be the language implementor's problem.
It's not necessarily good news for women. They've talked a lot about the benefits to higher education levels amongst young women, but how much of it is down to a simple selection effect: women that are intelligent, ambitious and career-minded are more likely [quite possibly through choice] to be single and childless in their twenties? Men that are intelligent, ambitious and career-minded don't necessarily need to make the same sacrifices, hence a male cohort of single, childless twentysomethings being quite possibly less valuable to employers than the male one. It's even conceivable that young, single childless women might be both earning more than their male counterparts and still being underpaid relative to their capabilities.
I thought so too.
To draw a non-religious analogy, a computer programmer doesn't need to know who wrote a language to be able to code in it.

I'm not sure the analogy fits. I'd argue it's more like a group of .NET programmers who had never heard of Bill Gates. Luther is such a towering figure in the history of the religion, it's hard to believe that any Christian, Protestant or otherwise, would not be aware of his role. That a decent percentage said Protestants are Lutherans is just too painful to even think about.
No, it doesn't do bidirectional sync, at least not yet.
Xmarks should work with a private server over WebDAV. You can register for a box.net account and get WebDAV access at box.net/dav. Of course, it is a short term solution. If nice folks at Xmarks decide to open source the code, this could work out be a long term solution.
A rare moment of clarity, maybe? Let's stick to things we can do for a profit?
Operating a Successful Restaurant Business is no Accident
A couple more items. There's no option to disable Twitter once enabled. There's no option to delete your account.
It should be something passive. Something that tracks your time the whole month/week/day and u just open up a panel and drag your time accordingly (ie, 4 hours using ECLIPSE IDE). Something that just requires the user to categorize or organize his time. Not track/enter it
UK University gives medical students text books on iPhones
Correct, that is my opinion: that is the ethical decision I would make. :)

It is better to put a small number of people at minor risk in a game of anti-war political arm-twisting than it is to let a war that will put a lot more people at much greater risk be prolonged.
The Plans For Steve Jobs’s New House
~ curl -v 'http://userstream.twitter.com/2/user.json
* About to connect() to userstream.twitter.com port 80 (#0)
* Trying 128.242.245.39...

timeout
More on banking software: works from backoffice intranets / middleware (J2EE) to low latency trading (core J2SE).

The plus I see, is not having to worry too much about errors (wrt C++). Makes working with large codebases / multiple collaborators easier. Great IDEs too.

Still, coding in Java is quite boring (overdeclaration, lack of pointers/unchecked sections, ...).
But by the same token, if gray is easier on some people's monitors, using high-contrast text is also an example of "everybody has what I have."
> The Droid isn't less expensive than the iPhone was. Neither was even the miserable G1. The Galaxy S isn't a cheap phone.

Nonsense.

> My Nexus One cost me $550. How much did your iPhone cost you?

The iPhone is $599 or $699, depending on model.

In the UK it is £499 to £599, equates to $780 or $950.

In the UK the Nexus One was just under $550, though VAT could take another bite out of the wallet.

Right now in Europe the Galaxy S is €500 ($615), less than either iPhone.
I have been quite happy with Delicious and have used it for many years. Depending on how you use bookmarks, I would certainly suggest checking it out. I manage a large set of bookmarks between Delicious, StumbleUpon, Firefox's bookmarks, and Xmarks, and I am very pleased with the workflow of importing and tagging links in Delicious.

It's often overlooked, but remember that than even though Delicious is "social" bookmarking, you can set all your links to private. I use a combination of both public and private, but I also really value Delicious for discovering new content.
Five-year plan: 8 problems IT must solve
http://www.eikasoft.com/redditvotepro/buy_form.php

50 votes for 20 bucks.
The effectiveness of Boehm's GC
Invoice yourself – What are you (really) worth?
Old Trees May Soon Meet Their Match
Lessons learned from HLVM
These people have a deal with the US government, and the US government has a strong responsibility in keeping their identities a secret. If the US government can not guarantee the secrecy of those identities you should not be blaming the messenger or even the telephone wire for that but the organization that was tasked with keeping that information secure.
"This also does not surprise me, because this is more of a history question than religion. To draw a non-religious analogy, a computer programmer doesn't need to know who wrote a language to be able to code in it."

Are there programmers who work in languages whose origins they don't know? People (at least people I know) who care about stuff tend to try to learn more about it.
Three Lessons Apple's Competitors Have Yet To Learn
Though the technology world is admittedly a bit obsessed with Apple, it’s hard to blame them.

After all, the Cupertino-based company wouldn’t inspire so much chatter if their products and services were merely ordinary or everyday. Apple seem to have a knack for creating things – both technology and services – that provoke discussion.
IControlPad to use Bluetooth instead of dock connector
This completely depends on the audience of the site. If I was building a social site built upon the engagement of teenage girls, I would absolutely force Facebook login, and the vast majority of them would not care/ be happy for it.
I don't think you're work requires no creativity. But I think you have to explain why visual design that's experimentally shown to impair creative cognition is tolerated and even embraced by people in "left-brained" professions. My explanation is that people just have different needs. Not everyone needs high octane gas, and designers shouldn't assume that they do.

"Design for design sake" is just another way of saying you don't share the designer goals of engaging an audience and enhancing creative cognition. There's nothing wrong with that, people have different needs, so "good" means something different to a designer than it does to you.
yeah, but the less rich of the intelligent have better, safer and more widely respected jobs (I have met door to door salesmen that make more than members of parliament). They had opportunities to chose other more lucrative careers, but they didn't.
Half the population will be paid above average, half below, obviously.

But feminists think the top half is men-only, and they want it to be women-only.
I hate to be picky but it seems to be getting out of control.

Graph API - The Facebook API for querying the Facebook graph

Open Graph Protocol - The "standard" for be able to query meta and classify a particular website.
That's a straw man argument. I don't believe the US is blameless; in fact, I think their obviously horrible opsec makes them primarily to blame for this debacle. What on earth does that have to do with the ethics of Wikileaks?
The major question is then: should the text be adjusted for the people who read or for the people who don't. I believe that super-high contrast and too bright screens are more common among the people who watch videos and photos or play games more than read the texts on the screen.
7 tricks to making using a computer look exciting on TV
I'm not sure how I feel about the lower-case f, but I love how the l, i, and j are all easily distinguished from one another, and the font looks generally pretty darn pleasant.
I bet it's the real transcript.
I like the idea that random people sitting in chairs in conference rooms in Western Europe and the US should be able to decide what their citizens should and shouldn't know as long as they think it furthers their agenda. That is, after all, the logic that our governments keep using to get us into conflicts.
I learned a lot about Farmville from this article, having had minimal prior knowledge. It was informative for me.
Interesting premise, I don't think people put enough stock in their self-worth. I was having this discussion with someone this morning. We talked about how mothers, after 20 years of raising children, have very low self worth because they have not "done" anything. This is a cause of media and society in general, with the importance of Ivy's and pretigious careers.
I just want to be clear: you're not arguing about the merits, just that you shouldn't care? Is that an efficient use of time?
That's all true, and no, you can't quantify that, or at least it's very hard to quantify. Here's what I can quantify:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/141716/new-high-call-afghanistan-...

I personally believe that the expected value of -5% public approval for the Afghan war is very, very positive; on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars and many lives. I also assign a high, but hard-to-quantify value to generally decreasing the public's trust in government, which leaks like this tend to do.

I just don't believe that scenarios similar to the one you describe can be having a similar degree of impact. I think your description is plausible, but to imagine that it's happening frequently sounds like an overestimation of the technical capacity and manpower of the Taliban and insurgent groups.

I am very ready to condemn avoidable harm caused by bad practices surrounding leaked information, things that Wikileaks can clearly control, like redacting names. However, the sorts of situations you describe are inevitable with any leak of meaningful classified information, and since I think that these type of leaks are a big net positive (after taking your scenario into account) I'm not inclined to consider them damning in any way.

(I understand that you might disagree strongly with me about the utility of the war in general, so I don't expect to convince you if that's the case.)
AOL acquires Thing Labs (Brizzly)
Why not do some QA, documentation, etc. for the developers?
Wow. What a great post of nothing but idle speculation. Everything is going 'all glass' until it goes the other direction, and whatever that direction is I'm sure Apple will be leading it.
Never looked at it this way... Great new way of thinking!
Say what you will about Tucker Max and his work, this was a quality blog post with a lot of great references and a valuable message. And it's the same message that we seem to keep coming back to: make something people want.
Am mentally replacing Assange with Zuckk and Wikileaks with Fbook as I read this. Interesting parallel.
I certainly hope that jython is also included in their efforts towards opening the jvm to non-java languages.
Egads! Tucker Max and Tim Ferris at the same time!? My Huckster Detector 5000 readings are off the charts!
Some products are about features and some are about experience.

Experience seems like it wins if your audience is a large number of casual users. Having the right Features seem more important if you're after a smaller number of professionals who have specific things that they need to do (why Adobe prevails in certain field despite their horrific UIs).
I thought they were going to offer wordpress-powered blogs on their own domain(s). Was I wrong?
People waste so much time everyday. Maybe if we looked at time differently we'd all be better off
Put Your Investors To Work For You
The motives and integrity of those who propagate information are always of interest to the people receiving that information.
AOL’s Wild Acquisition Day Concludes With Thing Labs, Maker Of Brizzly
>Nonsense

Obnoxious.

>The iPhone is $599 or $699, depending on model.

Ignoring the laughable notion that $549 compared to $599 makes one "cheap" relative to the other, my delivery price of the Nexus One was greater than walking into the telco and buying an iPhone 3GS (the option at the time) for full retail.

Regardless, the number of iPhone owners who paid full retail approaches zero. It wasn't even possible until very recently, and is under very little demand. Instead most consumers can only stomach the illusion of spending $49 to $199 on a phone, even the faux-rich iPhone illuminati.

Which is a price point that is shared by virtually all smartphones.

Add in that with any smartphone you're looking at a comparable monthly servicing fee.
So your argument is that we all have a right to know which Afghanis and Pakistanis are informing on militant groups?
This is like saying people buy water pipes for tobacco

They might be entertained by the fantasy of winning money, but the real intent is for winning money.
Asteroids JavaScript Bookmarklet to blow up any web site
If there are any loopholes (so to speak), it's the role of the citizens to "exploit" them and the role of law makers to close them if necessary.

That's a pretty bad attitude to have, that citizens should be trying to exploit as many loopholes as possible. That sets up citizenry vs. govt. as a competitive game, which is a great recipe for making something that's supposed to be cooperative become dysfunctional and complex.

It's an impossibly complex task to make a perfect airtight literal codex of laws in a system, and it's not reasonable to assume that humans can create such without introducing a huge number of contradictions, etc. We need to keep in mind the spirit of the law in order to keep our system from devolving into a morass.
Poor People Are Much Poorer Than You Think
I'm curious what the general consensus is for using something like OAuth for authentication for sites with a non-technical focus. Personally, the login form implementation of StackOverflow is perfect. But I wonder whether asking people to log in using the credentials from another site is still a confusing concept if a portion of your userbase is non-technical.
Apparently they're still polishing up the font, so the Ubuntu guys offer it as a package for easy upgrading. That's my guess at their reasoning, anyway.
And don't forget that no-longer-OpenSolaris is still freely available ... and might even become something now that it's free of the dead hand of Sun (at least for it being a truly "open" project).

I for one am not happy with Linux and would love to run Open/whateverSolaris ... if it has serious driver support. That's been the Achilles heal of x86 Solaris for more than a decade (e.g. something I directly experienced in 1999) and fixing that will likely be a determining factor in its future success.

Unfortunately that's very painful hard work and lots of it, I wouldn't predict success on general principles. But one can hope.