skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If we can set aside the "Comcast is inherently evil" mindset for a moment, this to me reads simply that Comcast notified Level 3 that they were terminating a previously agreed upon settlement-free peering [1] agreement where Comcast and L3 find exchanging traffic without charging each other mutually beneficial.

This kind of thing is not an unusual event in the history of the Internet and can happen for any number of reasons -- including arguably justified criteria such as unbalanced traffic ratios, as well as business strategy (or greed, depending on which side you are on).

Level 3 has elected to frame this as a net neutrality issue and take the dispute to the press and the court of public opinion, but it's probably about a different question: who will pay, and how much will each party pay, for the infrastructure required to deliver content from L3's customers to Comcast's customers?

If viewed in this light, this peering agreement renegotiation is Comcast pushing back some of the costs on L3 and/or it's customers (i.e. streaming video providers). The other alternative would be to raise it's own customer rates.

It's possible that Comcast is being greedy and leveraging their position to rent-seek, but it's also possible that the traffic mix that resulted in the previous peering agreement is now significantly out of whack, justifying this renegotiation. It's definitely not black and white, and this is only one side of the story.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering
I would say that "FaceTime" is the most convenient way to describe it given the hype factor even if it is pretty nondescriptive.

The easiest way would be "{Etherpad,SubEthaEdit} for drawings" but I suppose you kids these days do not remember those…Nice project at any rate.
> I agree. The rub is that it's not usually the taxpayers making that decision, but their elected representatives.

Sorry - you don't get to hide behind representatives.

> I believe there's already a commonly applied differentiation between appointed and civil service[1] positions.

While there is a difference, the "you can't do things that piss off the voters" rule applies to both.
http://venturesocially.tumblr.com/post/1730363970/hobbystrap...
Poor guy, once two other people come over and use the same post. How do you get it down, past two other bicycles!?
Well, yes - programmers are human.

The terrible thing to me is that this discussion is better than I'd see in non-programmer circles.
Is it really a pie fallacy?

Here's what I really mean by subsidizing, in context, and you can decide if it fits, or if I am suggesting something else...

If you buy into the idea that a developer, for example, can be 10x more productive than another, which I do (and I'm not one of the 10x guys at all), then you tend to think that those people should be paid a heap more than the average IT guy... but in fact, they are bound by the same corporate salary ranges as everyone else on the team... so you end up with the delta between the bottom guy and the most productive guy is at most 70K.

Therefore, thanks primarily to the top performers, our overall team performs well and everyone benefits similarly... but they really shouldn't benefit similarly since the amount of value creation is wildly different from developer to developer.
every single time
I also purchased the App Sumo deal, and had the same experience with their customer support. I chatted with Suhail. His responses didn't contain any of the corporate, canned, or scripted responses that you sometimes hear. It felt as though I was IMing a friend.

I asked him how much of an increase MixPanel had seen in support requests due to the App Sumo deal and he responded "A ton :)"
The key people behind Rust are also on Mozilla's JavaScript team (one of them is Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript), and they are active in the ECMA process that's defining ES5 and ES Harmony, which are "fixed up" versions of JavaScript. Firefox 4 contains one of the first implementations of many of the improvements in ES5.

But high-performance JavaScript VMs and rendering engines are not written in JavaScript; today they are mostly written in C++. Rust is designed by and targeted at the people implementing the VMs. It's the language they hope to use to implement future JavaScript compilers.
Mathematical Doodling
Yes. Asa is on Windows.
Which suggests Comcast's real aim may be to force Level 3 to peer.
"..the coming age of involuntary transparency..."

My, what a nice turn of a phrase.

Assange dumps all your trade secrets on the net? It's not a crime, nope, you're just being "involuntarily transparent".

Orwell would have been proud.
Disclaimer: Let me point out that I've entered what my wife calls "grad student mode". I'm continuing to argue this point out of proportion to how much it concerns me because I see what I believe is a flaw in your argument that you are failing to acknowledge or apparently unaware of. I want to debug your argument.

Okay, the crux here is this term "innocent phrase". By describing it as such, you're presupposing that which you're trying to prove.

A deeper analysis would be to ask "what evidence could convince me that this thing I consider innocent is actually not innocent, but a symptom of a systematic problem?"

Following from that -- if there is this thing that is hidden from me -- because I think it's nothing, what practices would tend to reveal these kinds of things, and what practices would tend to keep them hidden? Am I doing things that would tend to keep it hidden?

The broader issue is that irrational discrimination does not require ill intent, only a lack of understanding. People generally don't try to be assholes -- and yet they still will be unless they question the status quo.
Ask HN: Any bluetooth hackers out there can help me
I im using DarwiinRemote (Wii remote driver for OS X) in a project

http://sourceforge.net/projects/darwiin-remote/

It works great on OS X 10.6 Intel. Not so good on PowerPC..you have to unregister all Ninendo Wii devices and then run the app. The problem is with WiiRemote.framework, which can be downloaded from the trunk on sourceforge.

I posted this on the DarwiinRemote mailing list, but I thought Id try here to:
I want it so that it works as well on 10.5 PowerPC as is does 10.6 Intel, but I am not knowledgeable enough yet of Bluetooth on Mac to do this myself, so Im willing to pay to get it fixed. Ofcourse the fix will be donated back to the darwiin remote project.

Please let me know if you have the ability and we can work something out.
Rhetoric on both sides. Informational IEDs?
A Conversation with Ed Catmull, Pixar cofounder
i couldn't get this to work. i put "test" in for the last.fm name like was suggested here. a song and tab appeared, and nothing else. am i missing audio or something?

when i browse tab sites, i know which ones have the quality tabs. i choose ultimate-guitar and bassmasta as frequently as possible because i know i hate 911tabs, etc. i'm not going to switch to anyone's new web app unless i know they have the best tabs from these other sources.
Oh really?

The Comcast alternatives in Seattle are Qwest's elderly DSL, and Clearwire Wimax which can struggle to get over 1mbps. Compared to a lot of US cities, even those options look good. High-speed internet service in the US does not resemble a functioning market.
Yes, under Windows:

Google Earth Plugin
File: npgeplugin.dll
Version: 1.0.0.1
GEPlugin

I'm sure I didn't ask for it.

And while you are at it, please stop putting Google Earth icon on my desktop after every update. I deleted it for a reason (no icons except Recycle Bin on the desktop). Same about start menu entry (I moved it into another folder. Stop recreating the original location).
IANAE (I am not an economist), but here's an observation from a born-and-bred Californian: whenever the economy is bad, the state budget takes it on the chin. California is big -- bigger than a lot of people realize. I mean this in terms of geography and population. So it seems to me that national problems are magnified here in our microcosm.

Once the economy picks up, the state problems ease.

Tangential anecdote: I was at a JBoss conference a few years ago, talking with a guy from the company who'd never been to California before. I mentioned that I had just driven back here -- I'd been snowboarding over the weekend. He gives me a dubious look, and says, "You don't have snow in California."
Now that's the twenty-first century I signed up for.
Or "Badasses wanted" or whatever. People who would have recognized the quote would still have recognized it.

I wouldn't immediately think this is a huge issue, but 1) I'm a guy, so I don't have to wait until a tiny footnote at the end to know that they're not trying to exclude me and 2) I can't help noticing all the frantic huffing and puffing by people with no stake in this company to defend the use of "men".
Advanced analysis of the 2010-11-24 local Windows kernel exploit
Dstat: Versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat, netstat and ifstat
So just another missing line of essential commentary?
Here here. There's nothing as hard as achieving success in all aspects of your life.
If you found this such a great opportunity, wouldn't you be happy you had less competition for it?
Sorry, my 27" is 16x9 and the 19" on the side are 4:3. Didn't make that clear in the post. Just saying it's a good way to go :)
Picky eating becomes recognized as a disorder
Whats stunning is how little the author knew/knows about the genre he jumped into.

"We had been playing this interesting indie game "POWDER" ... but at the time, I had no idea that POWDER was just the tip of a massive, 30 year old iceberg - the Roguelike genre (here's the wikipedia page on Roguelikes, if you aren't familiar)."

Which is surprising, but understandable.

However, this:

"Along the way, I also got very into "Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup", which while it is a fantastic game, the original author, Linley, was not very disciplined about throwing things into his game"

That is pretty much the exact opposite of why Dungeon Crawl was created.
So what you have is already "great," "awe-inspiring," and "amazing" yet if you ship it now instead of a few days from now it will somehow be "crap?"

I doubt that what you have is crap. I also doubt that what you have inspires awe. You're putting too much pressure on this "launch." It's just the first of hopefully many public or semi-public iterations. No one is going to care anywhere near as much as you do about this. Just get it out there, consider it a success if you pick up a few early adopters, and iterate.
I take it that by "everything" you, like a lot of Windows-using prognosticators, mean "Windows".
And guess what - we need those lesser mortals so we can keep doing the fun stuff.
...or they didn't. :-)

Though I am curious: why are they announcing this via a press conference? It seems as though they would publish a paper to be peer-reviewed or something first.
You know, I hated to add the last part to my comment, but it just didn't look right being a one-liner.

It wasn't meant to be a snarky point, but a serious one: it's a very nice turn of a phrase. It's neat how we invent new phrases to couch certain concepts either pro or con.

I love language and the study of how we communicate. Watching little phrases like this appear and then either grow or die (to me) is extremely fascinating.

EDIT: A terrific example of this is the oldie "mistakes were made" Note how the sentence actually has no subject -- "mistakes" seem to have made themselves. Cool stuff.
Most criticisms of California target public sector backwardness, so it's not a refutation of that to point to the strength of the state's private sector. And "CA's private sector is strong, ergo it hasn't been harmed by the government" is a circular argument.

This is an argument over the precise extent to which bad policies are bad. Seems more useful to discuss what genuinely good policy looks like.
Luis von Ahn on Human Computation [video]
At my school the "honors program" was very liberal arts focused. But, with the grading I described above, the good students got straight A's, so the valedictorian was the person (or usually people) who managed to take the most AP classes. Only the easier, not calculus based, version of AP Physics was offered, so it wasn't that hard and a lot of the top students took it.

The councilor told me the average AP Physics test score was slightly above a 2. Calculus (AB - the differential/integral only version) test scores were in that range as well, despite most students getting As in both classes.
If You're Not Paying for It; You're the Product
So, can this discovery help the still-living?

Meaning, can this be adapted to reverse the aging of, for example, my parents?
That's backwards. Teachers do not force students to be compliant. On the contrary, parents and school administrations force teachers to be compliant when their students ask to be allowed not to work as hard.

If schools were teaching deference and compliance, you wouldn't have such a student who is truant yet aced every test.

The truth is our schools aren't teaching much of anything, and it's partially because of the attitude you outline in your post - everyone believes that their child is that exceptional student who despite being an arrogant prick and never showing up to class, is still brilliant. Consequently they raise hell until teachers relent and give their children good grades. Now, of course this is less likely to happen with the aforementioned truant child, because the teacher has something concrete to point to as to why the child is undeserving. In the case of the child who shows up every day and does work yet is not learning, the teacher has nothing to tell the parents other than the truth - and the truth will cause the teacher a world of grief.

Of course, really, parents don't have to actually cause trouble. The assumption that every child is deserving of good grades has been institutionalized, so teachers have to have wills of iron to go in year after year and risk parental attacks.
> Where is it save to have one's opinions published without being bothered - ever?

Why does it have to be one site? In other words, why not engage in publication arbitrage?

> This is not about sharing illegal files

"Illegal files" are a form of restricted speech.
I hear you. I find a lot of activist arguments annoying, because I'm a wealthy focused guy with a 150 IQ, who's happy to sit in the basement working on the next big thing. :)

It doesn't mean they're wrong, though. I've seen many examples of just gross sexism from techies who were convinced those other people with the shirt-bumps were just whiners.
Fair enough, but do they collect their own aerial data? I was under the impression it's all collected through by third parties. Also, do they use anything other than satellite imagery right now? Is LIDAR effective at that range?
The one way that people break out of the chicken and egg situation is by using the "Bowling pin strategy" (more info here http://edgehopper.com/). So you start with one niche and then scale out intelligently from there. Again, this is what Groupon did by starting in SF and then growing from there.

Sorry I was unclear - all 5 of the ideas were meant to be implemented in specific locales then expanding.

Is there a city in the world that has a lot of people taking cabs from the airport?

Every airport that I frequent regularly has this problem: Boston, NYC (x3), SF and Toronto. I think this would not be useful in some of the developing countries. I'd be willing to bet this would be useful for any airport where 1) there is a significant metropolitan core in a small constrained geographic area and 2) Where labor costs are high enough that the majority of the cost of the cab comes from driver wages/compensation.

Actually, now that I think about it. Any "route" where a sufficiently large number of people would regularly be paying a substantial cab fare would almost certainly have an alternative means of transportation. Whether this be public transportation, shuttle services, etc. More often than not I think you'd find that society at large has already implemented your taxi sharing.

Agreed but every mode of transport has a cost/convenience tradeoff. Public transit is generally cheap but takes some time. Single occupancy cabs are at the other end of the spectrum. And if you plotted every mode I don't believe the curve would be linear. Take for example shuttle services that are common in the US, specifically one from Boston airport to MIT. They typically serve ~8 passengers and cost roughly $20/person in my experience. This is fairly expensive relative to a cab that shares a ~$35 cab ride even among just two people. At $17.5/person it is much much faster to get to your destination in this method. There seems to be a sweet spot served by shared taxis specifically.

The above is just for airports - another environment where this may work is in dense urban environments for short trips. I'm picturing going crosstown in Manhattan. For it to be useful, there would need to be sufficiently large number of users such that matching friction would be low enough that it didn't impact already low travel distances.

Though your idea has given me another idea. An app that lets taxi drivers schedule with individuals directly. How many times do you take a taxi where the driver will give you their card and say "Give me a call if you want a ride?" Well, if you have an app that connects drivers with riders in an easy fashion, then you can get into a situation where everybody's incentives are aligned. You can get the driver to give the rider a discount, the driver does this for guaranteed income, the rider does it for the discount, and you do it because you get a small cut. You can then expand into a "group ride" policy because your already having a person plan out their route.

UberCab? Rather Uber
It would have to depend on the investor. Honestly you have a founders bias, which is natural. This could be the case with an angel investor but definitely not acceptablefor vcs. Honestly, I'd think that angels wouldn't want the deal either.

When people invest in a company, they generally want a significant amount of equity in the company. It's a long process to find suitable investments and if they don't make a significant investment then it wouldn't be worth their time.

If I was the investor then I wouldn't accept your deal because what's the point if buying such a small percentage since I wouldn't have a board seat or any significant control or say in the company. Having a say is important to me because it allows me to protect my investment as well. Thus, for these reasons I believe that your deal is unrealistic for most general angels and vcs.
http://prq.se/?intl=1

PRQ.SE used to run Pirate Bay servers.

Also http://baywords.com/ which is a free and uncensored blogging platform runs on their servers apparently.

Totally anonymous.

Downside is that they are really costly!
You can also choose to run an application each time and paste in a result, if I remember right.
Leadership abilities can't really be taught, and are always in short supply. It's hard to make the people around you more effective at their jobs.
As a Comcast subscriber, I'd more than happy to switch to a different ISP if Comcast starts to limit access to Netflix or any other content provider.

How many broadband ISPs are there in your area? In many areas, there are no more than two. If they both adopt this policy, without net neutrality you're out of luck.
<grammarNazi>If You're Not Paying for It: You're the Product</grammarNazi>

Grammatical error! Your argument is invalid!
Show HN: stk8.co, a multiple URL shortener.
A minute ago you were saying that a vulnerability requiring physical access wasn't a security hole. Now you're saying I should consider my phone compromised because other people have physical access to it. I don't see how you can hold both positions.
http://stk8.co is a tool that allows you to shorten a stack of links. The links are embedded and properly formatted for easy viewing. Here's a couple of stacks to share with you:

http://stk8.co/sample

http://stk8.co/gkbbbc

You can also use the bookmarklet for easier stacking.
Is Facebook a Threat to the Web?
arbitrage? what's that?
> I worry that once Americans become cynical and scared enough to stop aspiring to that line, it will then be a short trip to a fascist or pseudo-fascist state.

Ah yes, "fascism is falling on America"

> Naive? Perhaps, but if you don't have high and lofty ideals, then what is to be the counter weight to doing everything and anything in the name of safety?

but it always seems to land somewhere else (typically Europe).

Fascism lands where it is like what has been before and the US hasn't been govt-authoritarian (yet).
Next Wikileaks Release Targets Major US Bank
News Corp. Open To Sale of MySpace, Reuters Says.
So is there anything both original and clever in this?
Interesting article.

One statement struck me as odd:

> Most of the states that have grown faster than California during that time are farm states, riding an incredible boom in agriculture prices.

I suppose there is nothing wrong with this statement, strictly speaking. However, it suggests that CA is not a "farm state". But it certainly is. CA is the number-one agricultural producer of all the 50 states. It's a clear number one in crops, and number two (after TX) in livestock.
Here's what strikes me as funny: California's budget crunch is $25 billion. Texas (a paragon of small government) is facing a deficit of... $25 billion. The fact that both states have similar deficits would seem to back your argument that this has more to do with the economy than budgetary policy.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/politics/st...

http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-11-11/news/24826042_1_budget...
Don't ship something that's not ready. If you have a subset of the product that makes sense to release, release it, but most likely releasing a subset that's not designed to be used standalone will leave you with a product that has some glaring holes and inconsistencies.

If it's going to have bugs, frustrate customers, or worse yet, lose their data, sit tight and polish it until it's ready. If people are waiting for it, send them a clear update saying that you know that they are waiting, that you are working on the final updates, and that you expect it to be ready at such and such date. Your customers will appreciate the transparency, and won't mind waiting a bit longer if it means they get a product that's a joy to use.

This doesn't apply if the customers are waiting for a beta release - in that case, go ahead and release, just make sure to remind them that the product is in beta, and therefore bugs are to be expected.
1) Who cares if he's spending that much time doing it? If he loves it, that's all that matters. If everyone dedicated themselves like that to something that ignited their passion, the world would be better off in general.

2) I would assume that while he does probably work his ass off, there is a bit of exaggeration there. It's for the investors. They want to know they're investing their money in someone who is dedicated to the product and not afraid to bust ass and work long hours. I'm sure he does, but the glorifying of it is probably to retain investor confidence.

3) Someone buy the kid a copy of Rework
How can you not like humans? How can you not empathise with humanity? Seems like an epic failure of big-picture imagination.

I love people and I love humans.
I need to instantiate an array with 251 members. Guess I'm out of luck
A "Game Designer" that has never heard of roguelike? But the game turned out to look good.

And please, change the title to include "iPhone game" or similar, currently it looks like a philosophy article in lesswrong style.
Entirely valid point, but there are ways to handle that as well (tor networks come to mind), but it does devolve into an arm's race. Where each side is spending more time/energy protecting or cracking a packet to charge it at a specific rate.
More importantly - Can it reanimate the no-longer living?
Agricultural products are also a big export for the US.