skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a very interesting observation. I think it hinges on the fact that filesharing 'damages' can be directly related to a product that would have otherwise been sold (or at least, so they allege). In the case of Oracle vs Google though, Google receives no payment for their product, but as far as I know neither does Oracle.

The java runtime is available to anybody free of charge for the 'price' of a download, so what - if any - damages Oracle intends to show is a mystery to me.
Wasn't sure how to title this. I was floored by this footage when I saw it. I originally came across it on Real News, and had a surprisingly hard time finding the actual footage.

The footage is seriously amazing. Literally over the shoulder of the Taliban as they are firing at US soldiers. You see the soldiers get more and more comfortable with the (white, western) film maker.

For anyone with any curiosity in foreign affairs, I can't recommend this enough.
Ask HN: Do you think bit.ly should be worried? Do you think they could feasibly switch to a backup url (like j.mp) without totally killing their service?
Or anything using JITed virtual machines, for that matter...
This is very bad.

People won't have to visit the page they found - meaning no visit, no ads shown, no money. Every real content producer is going to lose BIG with this.

Also this looks like World-Wide Copyright Infringement to me. Possibly, a good reason for class action suit from everyone who created any kind of site. Google now creates and distributes large portions of your web page without any kind permission. (I don't think this (near full-size screenshots with readable text) could pass as "fair use" in any kind of sane trial)

Sadly, this is exactly what I predicted 2 years ago: "What worries me is the amount of text they [Cuil] show on the search page. It's becoming much and much more of a nuisance that search companies think it's okay to massively copy parts of your site and display them. "
The problem is that without the scalability infrastructure, it doesn't work. Although to be fair, the Twitter people probably didn't know that in the beginning, either.

So you could have built a crappy prototype, true. However, while Twitter is an exciting startup, a Twitter clone is not (anymore).

Granted, you might be able to build the occasional CRUD prototype for something that could become an interesting startup. I doubt it is true for all kinds of startups, though.
Fun facts: Gene Simmons was born as Chaim Witz in Haifa, Israel, and at one point planned on being a rabbi.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppal

Hypocrisy isn't a crime, but it can invalidate a claim if you publicly state one interpretation of law and later state another.
Me either. This is the single best improvement I've made in the last 4 to 5 years. My MBP is awesome with this X25-M. I have adapted myself to use this little 160gb space very confortably using some external storage at home. This is great! I sure do recommend this to anyone!
I'm not 100% sure how WebSockets work, but I assume it's going through your server and then sent to everyone else? Could you not do a rate limit of 5 per 30 seconds, or require at least one comment in between yours? Not sure what the best approach would be best.
I think what really happened here is that someone at the Libyan domain authority decided they wanted the name and made up a story in order to seize it. I've heard of other cases of .ly names being confiscated, and for this reason we advise YC startups not to depend on them.
> "It just doesn't do what I need it to do"

Yet you're trying to use your personal needs to counter claims about whether the bulk of average, non-technical people, are going to run into roadblocks.

> "Simply doing things isn't really the same as "doing things""

Clearly, you need to try one out. The iPad is orders of magnitude more useful and effective than Windows slates.

e.g. both can do photo editing and no-one's going to ask either to run photoshop, but regular people will get far more done, far more easily, with an iPad.

It not only does these things, it does them usably well.

As to your list:
1. Printing (unfortunately) will happen shortly.

2. USB keys are a notable bummer, but like with Flash, USB is a means to an end. It's horribly popular, so it is a pain point, but how often are regular people swapping USB sticks?
In my experience, when you get an iOS device, you get a dropbox account shortly after. (Yes, even my mother. She loves Dropbox.)

3. People don't connect to domains.

4. Yeah, it connects to cameras.

5. Do people ask every device to host all of their media content? Most iPods aren't holding all of their owner's media. Most netbooks aren't holding all of their owner's media. That's never been much of a barrier. As long as a considerable swath can be held locally and the rest is accessible, regular people apparently couldn't care less.
Nice links! Hadn't seen wikibooks before..
Enthusiasm High, Numbers Still Murky for Socially Concious VC
We ended up with the JBOD solutions on a standard ahci controller with soft raid. We've tried a few different controllers and so far the performance with them has been been kinda sad, they just aren't made for the amount of iops the ssds provide.

I saved the results from tiobench from some of my initial testing with 6 intel x-25m here: http://gist.github.com/348417

Not bad for $2400 worth of ssds.
Can VCs Be Value Investors?
We have 2 Intel X25-M 80G in RAID 1
PragPub Magazine October 2010: HTML5, Agile, Good Code, Halloween and more
Er, I apparently cannot be bothered to read my own posts.

s/Monolithic kernels have pretty much everything in memory/Monolithic kernels have pretty much everything in kernel space/
I've been thinking about Oracle's stewardship of Java, as an intellectual exercise. I'm going to argue for Oracle (because that's the opposite of how I feel.)

(1)
Oracle is not a technology company. They don't have an engineering culture; they don't want an engineering culture. So James Gosling left and many others (though oddly, Guy Steele remains: http://labs.oracle.com/people/mybio.php?uid=25706). But maybe this doesn't matter for Java today...

Java has matured (some would say "stagnated") and that doesn't hurt its prospects for business use, but enhances them. And, quite amazingly, Java still has great qualities for today's two largest emerging markets: the Cloud (hey! the network is the computer!) and small embedded systems (like Android.) None too shabby, as-is.

(2)
Oracle is a sales company. Sun was terrible at making money from Java. Maybe Java... needs Oracle?

Microsoft has pushed business cases and business applications, and C# and .Net have gained great acceptance, even though they are confined to MS's stack. Even Apple is succeeding with its closed iPhone/iPad "stack". Why can't Oracle do the same in an Enterprise stack? Yes, many Java developers will really hate it. Yet, that confinement hasn't stopped .net developers.

(3)
The problem with Oracle is not sales vs. tech, but that they don't seem to be 100% on the ball - which is why Google is able to rip them apart so confidently.
While I think the sales-based stewardship I outline above is plausible, it still needs to be well executed.
What host are you using and how much does this cost you?
Bruce Schneier points out:

This is being sold using fear:

...company spokespeople emphasize liability. What happens if one of your employees freaks out, comes to work and starts threatening coworkers with a samurai sword? You'll be held responsible because all of the signs of such behavior were clear for all to see on public Facebook pages. That's why you should scan every prospective hire and run continued scans on every existing employee.

In other words, they make the case that now that people use social networks, companies will be expected (by shareholders, etc.) to monitor those services and protect the company from lawsuits, damage to reputation, and other harm.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/10/monitoring_emp...
That article was an extremely roundabout way of explaining Metcalfe's Law.
The complaint says: "COMPLAINT FOR PATENT AND COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT" or at least this copy does: http://regmedia.co.uk/2010/08/13/oracle_complaint_against_go...
I'll try and get a copy of that locally and add it to my list in any case.

I have read a number of books trying to tie the link between ancient mysticicsm and modern physics. I am not a physicist and have only the most basic understanding of the maths involved in quantum systems.

However, without fail, these ideas seem pretty much universally dismissed by the graduate level math and physics students I have had the opportunity to talk with these things about.

No one wants to let go of determinism it seems.
Not to mention .tv.

I think many people consider .tv a creation for television and video on the Internet, but it was originally reserved for the island of Tuvalu.

For a time, GoDaddy had a popup when you went to register a .tv domain stating that the island of Tuvalu was sinking and may not exist in the future.

http://boingboing.net/2009/04/30/godaddy-dont-buy-dot.html

If you believe Wikipedia, however, a move in March of this year by Sedo made .tv a safe investment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tv
I originally thought this was all about the 'Tibetan Book of the Dead'
Yes you can - you're just gambling that there won't be a run on the bank. That the fact that someone knows they could convert your note into gold meaning they never actually do it.
Been using an SSD in my Macbook Pro for the last year ... easily the best computer upgrade I've made in my lifetime (no kidding) ... Photoshop and Netbeans open up in 5-9 seconds, booting into OS X takes less than 30-40 seconds and applications generally fire up in the blink of an eye.

One word of caution though, when the SSD runs out of free blocks and has to re-use blocks marked as deleted, the performance hit can be pretty painful ... sudden application freezes that take many seconds to resolve are not uncommon (This is from Windows XP ... I spend a lot of time in it on my Apple machine)

There is a TRIM command that is supposed to help with this problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM, but only Windows 7 and Linux support it at present.
There is definitely some risk, so mitigate it and buy the ly.com variant of a .ly domain to protect against this - much like ad.ly owns adly.com, embed.ly owns embedly.com.

Watch what bit.ly does - likely nothing right now. If they get warning like vb.ly says they did, we will hear about it, and then every .ly owner has a problem.
Debian rolling distribution
Citing relevance, Mozilla to include Bing in Firefox 4 search box
Shouldn't the business people in the organization also learn to understand the consequences to the company of poorly managed development processes and technical debt ?

It works both ways.
Nub Nub: PubSubHubbub protocol implementation
Google Voice having issues with text messages?
JavaScript doesn't have blocks. {} is shorthand notation for an object, so you would want something like

function asdf(){
return {x:1};
}

It's a less verbose way of doing this:

function asdf2(){
var myObj = new Object();
myObj.x = 1;
return myObj;
}

Outside of a object written in shorthand notation, x:1 is treated as a label (x:) followed by a value (1). In general labels are not used in JS, and it's probably a good idea to avoid them.

Relatedly, to "fake" a block in JS, wrap it in a function:

(function(){
var a = 1;
// do something with a
}());

// out side of the "block" a is undefined (or whatever value it was before the "block")

[Edited for accuracy and clarity]
We own the internet in the sense that we create the content and value for those domains, that otherwise would be just a collection of useless characters. How many successful startups do you know that were created by Libyans? And as far as Sharia law goes – I don't care what they do in their own countries, as long as it doesn't touch me in any way. That also means that if touching their domains means risking to loose your business - I would stay away, and every rational Internet entrepreneur would do the same. That's how WE own the Internet in my understanding.

Thanks for the .it article, I guess I rushed with assumptions. Governments are governments after all.
It's a little more than that when this article is stating that there's a severe privacy risk for people who don't even own an iPhone or have never installed the Facebook application. Perhaps it's not a big deal for you to have your phone number out there for public consumption, but it is for many people including myself.
I just tried deleting and re-installing the Facebook app, and was offered no option regarding sync. When/how does this choice become available?
ISPs begin fighting IP lookup requests in wake of data leak
Putting Square Enix out of business.
.Net may be confined to the Microsoft stack but C# is not, thanks to Mono.
'Net neutrality' as fighting words
Toshiba to Launch Tablets World-wide in 2011
Good Code Tells the Truth
Now that's the real spirit of rock and roll!
>but we have killed people - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

Are you working on a radiation dosing machine? If you are (or you work on aircraft control systems or nuclear power plant safety systems, etc), then a completely different set of requirements and processes apply. If not, however, it's corrupting to bring such examples up in the context of someone making some trivial tool.

>Qualified doctors and lawyers don't talk about professionalism much because it has been drilled into them during training and has become implicit in everything they do

Doctors often essentially wing it: They have to think on their feet and act quickly, and often apply essentially "hacks" where the inputs are not all known (many uses of drugs were essentially discovered by doctors who prescribed it for unrelated conditions, eventually leading it to be tested and actually certified for that purpose). Architects regularly have to adapt plan to new conditions, quickly.

Though of course what an architect does is far more structurally fixed than software -- again the analogy falls apart.
My biggest reason for installing an SSD in my MBP is to remove the risk of drive failure from an accidental drop. Knowing there are no spinning platters inside give some peace of mind.
I liked it, and prompted me to finally get around to registering, so the win is clear for HN as well.
I think the title is fine as it is now ... makes it clear that this isn't just another JavaScript guide/tutorial.
A genuine 'elixir of life' - at least for mice
Here's one example when I was a consultant doing work on embedded devices, I saw often very flagrant violations of GPL. When I asked what their policy on GPL was it was that GPL was only allowed in these specific modules, but not these other ones. And they had a review process for it.

When I went and reviewed the logs I saw that the review process did happen, but tailed off and then about two years before I began it had completely stopped. Yet I could find new code checked in that GPL'ed.

This particular place was really receptive to my suggestions and actually refactored the code and rewrote some of the code (although I wouldn't call it clean room). But had I not randomly ran across it, they stopped looking at it. Legal and management cared a great deal about this, but the devs on the floor didn't seem to care quite as much. And I'd heard about some that complained that I had apparently come to slow them down by adding extra process.

In any case, this isn't the only example. I think you'd be surprised how much BSD code gets shipped w/o attribution. And I think you'd also be surprised at how much reverse engineering takes place (which is a slightly different issue, but I think related in liberties devs will often take w/o consulting legal).
I wouldn't panic yet as a .ly domain owner:

"While letters ‘vb’ are quite generic and bear no offensive meaning in themselves, they’re being used as a domain name for an openly admitted ‘adult friendly URL shortener’. Now, had your domain merely been a URL shortener for general uses similar to bit.ly (as you claim) there would have been no problem with it. It is when you promote your site being solely for adult uses, or even state that you are ‘adult friendly’ to promote it that we as a Libyan Registry have an issue."

There is definitely some risk, so mitigate it and buy the ly.com variant of a .ly domain to protect against this - much like ad.ly owns adly.com, embed.ly owns embedly.com.

Watch what bit.ly does - likely nothing right now. If they get warning like vb.ly says they did, we will hear about it, and then every .ly owner has a problem.
Yes, and that's what Tyrannosaurs is saying. The article is what's one-sided - it doesn't seem to understand that (unless you work for e.g. 37 Signals) software is in service of the business, and at the end of the day everyone's there to make money for the business.
Living and enjoying life?
Finally, Google gets a chance to appear non-evil!

But note: nothing substantive about the patents which are the tricky bit.
It's always nice when someone starts a contest you've already won.
var a = x:1

This is invalid. Stop guessing. Read the language spec. Best by far is "Definitive Javascript O'Reilly"

{} is a block of statements. For example,

{doSomething();doAnotherThing()}

{} when used as an expression, is object literal notation. For example,

var a = {foo:23,bar:99};

If you want to be explicit that something is an expression, enclose it in parenthesis...

Console>{foo:1}
1 // "{}" = code block, "foo:" = label.

Console>({foo:1})
{foo:1}

Return an object:

function foo() {
return {bar:23, baz: function() {return 89}};
}
I tend to agree with you, but you asked why we didn't just buy the Brazilian system. And my guess is that's part of it.
Or, they leave Bitly alone because they're the best-known .ly domain, but fuck with everyone else. Because: they can.
Cell phones more sophisticated than guidance systems on some nukes
Would like to use them in servers, but Linux currently is not supporting TRIM through RAID.

Also VPSes with SSDs would be nice for database servers.
>It seems like being a professional IS about understanding costs and making tradeoffs.

This is the core essence of it. Professionalism is communicating and offering transparency, while adapting to, essentially, the real world.

When I hear the "give me an unmoving specification and I yield to no change" crowd, I envision them essentially as technicians.
I've been dealing with this problem in a limited fashion for over a week, originally it was just texts from people in my own area code on Verizon Wireless. In the last few days it has proven to be a problem for all phones, which is a big problem considering I'm getting married this weekend and have so far discovered both my friend who's coordinating the day of, and the guy who I am getting sound equipment from, have both been trying to text me and thought I was ignoring them.
2x Kingston E-series, 1x Intel X-25E.

The difference is similar to dialup --> cable.

Intel's self-serve support's organized better than Kingston's, but neither offers a subscription to notify of firmware updates like Dell does.
In my opinion (its not in my purview), it'll take government help. Take that for what you will.
No, you're thinking small. First, the full page shows including ads. If anything potentially more sites and ads will receive a view as users mouse over results. The difference is a user doesn't have to go to a page and be annoyed with pop-up messages before hitting the back button. When a site with the desired content is found the user will then click through to it.

This appears to me to offer end users a better search/browse experience, and that's always a win for everybody.
Besides just discipline and energy, I also noticed one more thing working out helped me out with.
It provides a way to push your limits without being afraid of failure - because there is no pressure to perform. You can't lift the weight, no worries, just drop down a plate this week and give it a go the following week! This attitude propagates to work - you tend to take away failure as an excuse not to get something done!
Absolutely it works both ways.

The reason I posted from the position I did is that too often in these discussions there is the assumption that the programmer understand the business well enough to make the call which in my experience is false.

The reality is that in these situations you have two people each of whom understand part of the problem. Simple black and white declarations of right or wrong by either party are unlikely to result in an optimal solution to the whole problem.
If you have Gmail push, configure Voice to forward a copy to Gmail.
Aha, embedded: that's definitely an area where companies get busted for GPL violations.

Apache Harmony is the other side of the coin from this though: it's an open source project with very strict requirements in terms of contributors: http://harmony.apache.org/contribution_policy.html

And I think Google is likely a lot more careful/knowledgeable than some random hardware company trying to ship a product as fast as it possibly can. Also, my guess is that something like Dalvik is not just something you find laying around on the internet...
After this past week, I know exactly what you mean...
You can't tell your advertiser: "Hey, your ads, probably, were shown about a hundred thousand times on Google. Well, I can't prove it, users can't click on it and also they see a random frame from your ads (if they see it at all), but still now you can pay me".

Why would I (as a visitor) need to click the site if I see what I searched for right there, on Google screenshot?
That sounds like a big corporations goal, not a startups.
I know RMS is a special case but it annoys me when people say/act as if they're too busy to properly respond.

One of my favorite people in Microsoft is Ray Ozzie. Every single time I've mailed him, I've gotten a long, thoughtful reply. He is probably the best email handler I've seen.

BillG is pretty good at email and sending you prompt replies.
This may be a huge motivation for people doing their own start-ups and side-projects. The continual compromises, crappy legacy code, spurious feature requests and unsavoury hack jobs of day-to-day business development spur developers to go off and do something on their own - even if it's just a weekend project on GitHub - so they can remind themselves that software development is a fun and challenging activity.
"My method for trolling through Craigslist is to grab RSS feeds for all the major cities where I’m interested and setup in Google Reader"

I built a quick app a few years ago that helped out with this tremendously. I would feed the app a list of craigslist cities I wanted to watch, and it would grab the RSS of the web/info design section for that city. It would parse the feed and dump the jobs into a database. It would load new jobs with a cron that ran a few times a day.

The dashboard page showed a list of jobs that hadn't been acted on yet. You could easily eliminate a job with an [X] button, or move them into a "save for later" area. You'd have to act on every job, but it was quick to do so. Then the app had a built-in responder that allowed me to initiate the conversation from within in the app.

After putting this thing together, I got a total of 2 good jobs off of CL. I quit looking for freelance jobs shortly after but may start up again once I'm done with my masters.