skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a good point and reminds of a professor I had in grad school. I remember having this discussion with him over beers once and while he could explain how any algorithm worked (or figure out how to explain), he didn't really care. What got him excited was taking all these low level pieces and using them to build things that never existed before and solving higher order problems.
It becomes experimental science, you adjust various parameters and measure the result. Certainly to get performance but sometimes just to get APIs to work together.

This confuses the issue. The relevant question is --- as a programmer, would you consider yourself a "scientist" or an "engineer"?

In that context, we would not want to conflate the two, for example by trying to define why engineering ("adjust various parameters ... to get APIs to work together") is in fact science ("it becomes experimental science").

During the process of engineering, we of course employ the scientific method to accomplish our goals. But we would not want to consider engineering a purely scientific endeavor, in the way that, say, theoretical physics is a purely scientific endeavor.
Cool scheme. For that amount of travel I feel like he should have collected more miles and gone for the first class award (280,000 airline miles required for the same distance flown).

Sure, it requires twice as many miles, but if you're going to be flying multiple transcontinental flights, first class is nothing to scoff at. The total cash value of that many first class flights is going to be far north of $100k, so in some sense you're also getting more value out of it.
A Letter from Anonymous - Our Message, Intentions, and Potential Targets
s/sensible/sensitive/;
Some universities call their program "computer and information sciences," which I think captures the notion that there's a distinction between the technical and theoretical training. What I've done since leaving school hardly qualifies me as a scientist, but I certainly draw on the principles.
I think this is the first time I've actually updated a gist I cloned. It all makes sense now.

However, I can't figure out how to run this. I have your toyserver.js (and redis) running, and I have client.html making requests to the server, but the server always returns an empty response. My redis db is empty, is there something I need to do to populate it?
"...but it means that files can't be securely encrypted"

I'm sorry, but I don't follow.

For all bit-identical copies of a file, the secure hash will be the same. For all copies of that file encrypted with the same symmetric encryption key, the same property holds. Encrypt it with AES-256 using a shared key, and all users can still take advantage of the LAN copies and de-duping that Dropbox supports for unencrypted files.

Now, if you want full asymmetric (RSA, PGP, whatever) encryption of files with per-user keys and fast LAN copies/de-dupling of the plaintext version, you're of course out of luck. That's not a failing of Dropbox, though; the same would be true of any NAS solution, locally-hosted or not.
Seems too early to consider it a failure. Maybe customers will be just as vapid about their security apps as the creators?
Good for you giving away a significant portion of income.

Firstly,

"I know I'd prefer to see money allocated by smart people like Gates, Buffet, Zuckerberg than by politicians who need to keep constituents happy and win votes."

I feel like you are treating these conditions as being mutually exclusive, and they do not need to be. I want money allocated by intelligent people who need to keep constituents happy. And I want them to have smart constituents, so that they are actually held accountable making bad allocations. This is because I want a large number of problems to be taken care of expediently.

Secondly,

Rich != Smart.

I don't see how it is that being rich makes Gates, Buffet, Zuckerberg better at allocating resources. Sure, they have some business savvy, but there is a certain amount of luck involved as well (as with any statistical out-lier). This doesn't account for others who made their money through inheritance, and are dumb (really dumb).

The point is not that 'the evil rich are against us,' the point is that they benefit exponentially from government protections compared to a normal person and should provide funds accordingly. I don't see how any of these people would be able to hold onto (or even establish) their wealth without the protections (and utilities, and services) afforded by the government (and if they were, it would simply be some sort of Monarchy).

(ex. The rich don't just benefit from their own use of public roads, they benefit from their employees and customers use as well. How do the rich obtain intelligent, educated labor without required public education? How do they plan to hold onto wealth as they accumulate it without the enforcement of various property laws?)

Charity is good, don't give me wrong. But the rich are hardly victims of the government.
Maybe a Groupon style "You get this price is X people commit" rather than an AppSumo-style deal that anyone can buy.
It's a mirror for http://letterfromanonymous.webs.com, which was frozen due to bandwidth issues.

Edit: Spelling.
It may be illegal in Japan. I'm not familiar with their laws. It's not in most U.S. states (laws vary location to location, yadda yadda.)

> you're trespassing.

Only if they come back after being told not to.

> It is also probably public nuisance and disturbance of the peace

These can somewhat statutorily vague, but the conduct here does not seem to match either of those (from Wikipedia):

> In English criminal law, public nuisance is a class of common law offence in which the injury, loss or damage is suffered by the local community as a whole rather than by individual victims.

The primary loss is WalMart's, and it is of hypothetical sales, of which there is no property right.

> Disturbing the peace is a crime generally defined as the unsettling of proper order in a public space through one's actions. This can include creating loud noise by fighting or challenging to fight, disturbing others by loud and unreasonable noise (including loud music), or using offensive words or insults likely to incite violence.

Er, no.

> larceny

Seriously? No good made it past the checkout counter.

> harassment

maybe. This only comes into play after repeated unwanted communication, (with some extension based on treatment of protected classes). If (as indeed suggested) people did this multiple times, this might be plausible.

> conspiracy

Only comes into play if there is an underlying illegality.

> Under RICO, a person who is a member of an enterprise that has committed any two of 35 crimes—27 federal crimes and 8 state crimes—within a 10-year period can be charged with racketeering

Uh, no.

> seem to think that the law is a finite state machine,

It's obviously not, and I agree this is a problem. A series of legal actions can completely be a crime in the right context, and the courts and officers of the law consider such things. But here you've really given little to hang a criminal charge on.
Infrared add-on could let standard cameras see cancer
Were atoms real? (Interesting discussion of scientific philosophy.)
Yeah, and it's been so unprofitable they've stopped installing it in new towns.
Sounds like the code I wrote in University.
Sure, it's obviousness that I did not frame the post correctly, to gain such a response (it is what it is now though). I still take issue with being called a liar though. If that fact was remotely in doubt I would have refrain from using that word. Further even if they had admitted to lying I would let their words stand as testimony to their deceit. It is a word that detracts from one position and adds to the others without truly rebutting the position. It is therefore disingenuous to use, if the fact is in question.

That being said, I can see where the post could be construed that it was not the true reason for the initial contact. I still think there is enough ambiguity that I should have been given the benefit of the doubt.
Best one I ever saw was at Carnegie Mellon. They integrated this onto a CAN bus and were in talks with Bosch.

http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ece549/spring10/team7/index.html
I understand your goal is to get the best deal for your client but I think the way you test potential vendors may be a little removed to give you adequate information. Consider this company has a lot more information on the recommended path to properly learning their product. Through experience with other customers they may know ahead of time that the basic version is all that is really needed for a non-commercial user.
If the flake is 10m long it weighs many tons, adding 75kg of climber in the same gravity direction is negligible.
Putting a torque on the rock along the breaking line is a different story.

(probably more like 50kg for skinny zero % body fat climber types)
If I'm ever popular enough to have that issue, I'll try it. I've held on tightly to all two of my Direct Messages for nearly a year!
The day I bought $15,000
Thanks for the notice. I fixed it.
Not to stick my nose in where it doesn't belong, but...

Might your students be better served by learning to use a more traditional version control system than Dropbox as a repository for their class projects? Mercurial and Git both have "large file" extensions/forks available that make asset management less painful, and the lessons learned w.r.t. workflow would carry forward into many other, non-game-related programming projects the students undertake in the future.
That feels like the promotion article that tells us the story of the promotion website that failed (or not) to promote the app.
If you get the chance, I'd like to see the adding of keyboard shortcuts for expanding/shrinking the different views.
Perhaps there is a partially-reflective film on the back of the LCD, but in front of the backlight diffusor, that lets the backlight through (with some attentuation).
I preferred to ask instead of assuming - but yes, the poll agrees with you :)
Likewise, Los Angeles. Will report back.
It's the app store equivalent of the "big box" VHS craze in the mid-late 80s. Video stores had precious shelf space and wanted to cram as many titles face forward so customers can marvel in the variety. To make themselves unique, dubious movie houses made their box art more elaborate: Larger (often twice the size of the tape it held) and more "artistic" (textures, reflective surfaces, holograms, blatantly explicit or exploitative covers, eye-popping colors etc.).

I have a theory that computer book companies do their toned-down version of that as well: Horrifically large and heavy books with large font sizes and images inserted apropos of nothing. Sometimes I look that the O'Reilly Head First or Wiley Dummies books and have trouble keeping track of the actual content with all of the little margin drawings and asides and endless admonitions festooned throughout (not to mention the little one-panel cartoons that often don't make any damn sense at all). They are either large in size or so thick that if displayed spine-first, they still take up a honking amount of shelf space.

The Ben Bodyguard site is the big box/book phase of the app store: Visibility at all costs = Sales (no matter how fleeting).
Surprised they didn't use sub-second precision ;)

"This application will be open until 11:59:59 PM PST on December 21, 2010."
More efficiently than the example or in "Minority Report"? Sure, even if a less-sophisticated computer user (such as a cop) might not.

You cannot, however, use a mouse + keyboard faster than performing very small gestures mainly with fingers (as in, raise your hands from the keyboard and perform similar gestures).
I used it in the past but didn't feel comfortable with it.

As well, these days you have solutions like omniauth provide much of it without any dependency.

(but thanks for taking the time to suggest it anyway)
.net is now signed with DNSSEC
Im less concerned about metered BW than I am every single farking packet I create passing through the hands of a deeply technically capable company that is google.

Will digital freedom exist in the future? in 20 years, will the thought police/BB be monitoring every action, input and response? [Edit: More-so than now, with Eschelon?]

Sure, the google "Free Candy" van looks really enticing now - but what about once I get in and am too far into the trip to say no?
Inconsolata.

sudo apt-get install ttf-inconsolata
Is it 'blantantly' ignoring it...

EDIT - Damn Chrome - it just auto-saves half a comment then breaks.

Is it blantantly ignoring the content when the content was partially about how he piled up rewards cards points to get 'free' airline miles?
> I just got mine too. Sadly, as expected, flash brings it to its knees and fonts look like Linux :(

Fonts look better on my Ubuntu than on OS X. Don't generalize.
This is now the largest zone on the internet that is signed (until .com goes live in March 2011).
Wow, Google moves very fast for such a large company.
Yeah, rereading the http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1987258, it still feels like you told a "I outsmarted him" story. I get that's not your point, just might want to watch your storytelling's theme a bit more explicitly :D

I believe you that you did not intend to, but looking at the writing, that's what it is.
Oops, we still have to link it. Thanks.
I think, but this is a wild guess, that they want to keep a good reputation because of the effect it has on (private) inventors: would you rather sell to Bell Labs or Trolls Inc.?
I know, but still, it sounds a bit patronising. Sometimes you just fail and it amounts to nothing, just ignore it and go on to the next thing. I know it's hard to admit we've wasted time on something, but sometimes it just happens. Sure, you gain experience, but that doesn't mean it's better than if it had actually succeeded.
Yeah, I think it tends to be a difference between introverted / extroverted personalities.

I also have somewhat severe ADD; open office layouts are fairly negatively impacting to my productivity.
I had to do a bit of searching to figure this out, but that twitter quote is from the President of the ASF - interesting.
Can you elaborate a bit? Are you looking for something a bit more 'in between', like a 200GB package? (Price per GB hasn't changed much from the 100GB package to the 350GB package, so I guess that ain't the problem.)
The Next Big Layer in the Cloud: Data as a Service
Ron Conway and MC Hammer offer a meeting for charity
One definition of engineering I read a while back (and haven't been able to find again) was something to the effect of "engineering is the application of science to produce devices to perform useful work" so by that definition, I'd agree with you.
I'm confused - what does a PDF showing their sales pitch have to do with the Google project?
Concert pianists are foolish about hamster care. They will chew right the hell through a cardboard toilet paper tube! what are you thinking, stupid pianist!

Audio engineers are foolish about contract law. It's called an implied-in-fact contract! IMPLIED IN FACT! It doesn't need to be spelled out in ink! Why do you always make this mistake, audio engineers?

Sanitation workers are foolish about bespoke tailoring. Functioning sleeve buttons don't work on off-the-rack clothes! You can't position the buttonholes until you've altered the jacket! Stop putting functioning sleeve buttons on those jacket and get back to collecting trash!

See, there, I can name three. What is your point? He didn't say tech people are simply foolish; he said they're foolish about a lot of things, and he's right, and you literally agreed with him the very sentence after you told him to stop.

Tech people sure are thin skinned. Way, way more thin skinned than audio engineers and san workers.
Farmville is a networking marketing scam, not a social game
For people who are unfamiliar with all the acronyms:

ASF : Apache Software Foundation

EC : Executive Committee

EE : Enterprise Edition

JCP : Java Community Process

JSR : Java Specification Request

JSPA : Java Specification Participation Agreement

SE : Standard Edition

TCK : Test Compatibility Kit
I have been in Austin for 13 months now. The market for all dev languages appears really good, if you take into account the amount of people hiring at local user groups and all the recruiter emails that I get. There are also one or more tech events on most nights of the week, so networking is super easy and the events are fun.

You mentioned being a Southern boy; I am from Chicago and I would say that it does not feel like a "southern" town here, so keep that in mind. It is urban, don't be fooled by the "Texas" thing.

Anyway, people are real friendly, tech jobs appear plentiful, and there is a very good nightlife. The housing is expensive for Texas, but probably not compared to other states. The "no income tax" thing helps, as well.
re:IST --
.

.

I think some of it is the Indian-ness of the product. They're not trying to blend in, they're trying to be themselves. If that makes it different, and if it costs them customers, that's ok too! It's the price of a personality. Unlike companies that try to hide their non-US image by using stock pictures and VOIP contact numbers, NotionInk's message (to me, at least) seems quite clear: "We're a small but ambitious company in India. This is what we're building!"

.

And I like that.
Righthaven (copyright troll) sues Drudge Report
getting closer, but not there yet.
I'm located outside of US, though would be happy to try your piece of hardware in my environment. Email sent.
Sometimes I look that the O'Reilly Head First or Wiley Dummies books and have trouble keeping track of the actual content with all of the little margin drawings and asides and endless admonitions festooned throughout (not to mention the little one-panel cartoons that often don't make any damn sense at all).

Undergraduate textbooks, too. There's no reason why a first-year physics textbook should be a thousand pages long; the same information presented sensibly could fit in two hundred, maybe one hundred. But it sure does look impressive to the committee in charge of choosing the textbook (and they never have to carry it around or see the pricetag).

On my "to do" list is to write the 150-page freshman physics textbook. (But of course if it existed we could only charge twenty bucks for it, whereas if I threw in five hundred pages of unnecessary pictures and repetition I could quintuple my commission...)
People work at google and Facebook or xyz startup because of what they believe. You need to tell us what you believe. We can build web forms and plug them into a database anywhere. Simon Sinek would call this the "Why."

Then tell us how you're going to do it? This will probably stream from the idea of why. How you do it must be inline with why you're doing.

Finally, tell us what you have to offer. Namely, a job.
Lisp has average performance in Google AI Competition
DivX HiQ Boosts Video Playback Performance by Replacing Flash
Hollywood Desperation - Start Blocking Special Features On Rental DVDs
Especially with Notational Velocity which is a joy to use and OSS.

http://notational.net/
hey all- thanks for taking an interest in the post, I've really enjoyed reading your feedback.

the impetus for this one was a series of conversations with entrepreneurs who said they were glad we hadn't funded them when they initially approached us. In retrospect, they felt that funding the wrong direction for them would have validated their bad idea and reenforced their belief that it was worth pursing. The push back ended up forcing them to really think about where to spend their time and limited resources.

The other conversations have been with entrepreneurs and founders expressing concern that its too easy to raise seed funding right now. That there's a growing sense of entitlement and arrogance particularly in the bay area. That half baked ideas aren't getting push back; rather, they're getting validated and compounding the entitlement problem.

No one knows how all of this is going to play out over the long aul. Just trying to lend a little perspective to those going through their own fundraising process.
You mean like forming a picket line?

Like what oppressed workers did in the throws of the industrial revolution?

Its peaceful protest...
Even with a local server, you still want offsite backups. Guess what? If you stay under 1TB, this is probably the cheapest offsite backup solution for servers.
The Bank of Groupon: Why Google Offered $6 Billion to a Coupon Company
On issues of product direction and a whole host of other decisions which aren't practically decidable by "let's vote everyday," it seems reasonable that the collective would elect from within a chairman who would hold office for some previously agreed upon period of time before the next election, say two years. Etc.

The logistics problems aren't the big difficulty to me. To me the activation energy, so to speak, is where it gets tough. Who starts the thing? How does it get rolling and profitable such that you could get people to do such a thing.
Nice article. I agree 95% (I always give myself 5% in case I change my mind later about a few things ;)

I once got hired in a company where I found that a developer had convinced the management of letting him build a framework. Since our boss swore by this guy, we had no choice but to keep using his pile of garbage. I've subsequently used various frameworks and have had various frustrations that with time I think I can pin point. Here's my list of recommendations for people undertaking the next life changing framework out there:

- Always start by asking yourself "Am I nearly as good as I think I am?"

- don't try to fix the world with your framework. Stick to the 80/20 rule. Simple tools that solve 80% of problems efficiently and unambiguously. Leave it at that. Please, pleeeaaase don't venture in the other 20

- provide damn good APIs and hooks to extend your base libraries.

- make it equally easy to avoid using your libraries. If your library is meant to be used by somewhat smart and responsible people, do your very best to keep them in charge. You may recommend against certain practices, but don't you put safeguards that prevent me from implementing the occasional hack.

- document both, how to do it your way and how to go around.

- document your framework's capability as well as limitations. I have no clue why most library authors avoid talking about limitations. They know what they are and they know people will ask about them, yet they don't document them. If your ORM lib doesn't offer a certain facility, please just tell me. Spare me the countless fruitless hours of searching google and irc. Let me know I need to go down to sql, I won't mind. Don't just hope that I will never need to use it in my life and leave me hanging. Tell me. TELL ME.
Alternatively there is also Oliver Steele's functional javascript which is neat: http://osteele.com/sources/javascript/functional/
Lego Antikythera Mechanism (oldest known scientific computer)