skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't mean to sound condescending. I can't help the timing of the decision, either. I'm also guessing he's read HN enough to have more than my comments to weigh for various perceptions of a startup. To my knowledge the failure rate of startups is around 90% (not my doing). In light of that, I felt the best thing I could do if I wanted to truly help, which I do, is try and foster a tough, ready for battle mental mindset. His announcement seemed a bit cheery and optimistic, and I wanted to suggest that, realistically, the road to startup success is not usually a cakewalk. HN is largely a startup community, so I figured others might find value in my comments as well, and if such comments harm his enthusiasm, and are more destructive than constructive then, IMO, he's quite likely to end up in the 90%.
Missing the point of WikiLeaks
Even hiring more staff just before launch doesn't really solve this problem.

If you've got good code and tested the product well the quantity of emergencies at launch should be quite low as unless you are launching a new product to a lot of existing users you're unlikely to get a large amount of usage at launch.

As you scale up your customer base and your business, be sure to think of your lone developer first and provide him with extra resources (and you with less risk) by increasing your development team.

Good luck!
You don't need to download a unique .wwf file "viewer" according to the website:

"WWF documents can be opened with most programs that can open PDFs."

http://www.saveaswwf.com/en/faqs.html
Google App Inventor, of course...
They have iOS development for iOS now? Awesome. What will Apple think of next?
Sorry about that, and thanks for pointing it out. Fixed.
Sadly, if piracy ever did go away, then all those great achievements would disappear with it. The only reason they exist is because piracy is providing competition to a market that has none.
I fancy the term "communicator," personally.
>The reason: We won. And all you audiophiles and copyfighters, you know who fixed our problems? The record labels and online stores we loved to hate.

I'm not sure I follow the logic here. I would argue that the rejection of DRM systems wasn't fixed by labels. They had to be brought kicking and screaming to that particular table.

In this whole thing, what's funny to me is that the solution to the whole issue was known as soon as Napster got big - make all the songs available, and make them cheap, and most people will stop bothering with pirated music. I know I got bored with pirated music about a week after starting it.

Personally, in the fullness of time, the record companies will come to love digital music. There's one less middleman taking a cut, no inventory to worry about, and new ideas, cross promotions and artists can be brought to market and tested faster than ever. The biggest losers appear to be the people who did album art, but maybe with the high quality screens of digital devices, they'll find new ways to show their talent.

But digital music will always have it's roots in piracy, something that will end up as a trivia nugget in years to come, kind of like how people talk about how NASCAR got going because of bootleggers running moonshine. 'For 20 points, how did digital music become popular and displace the CD?'
That 14 year old Kuwaiti boy who developed Doodle Destroy over 3 days with 900K downloads and being featured on CNN would strongly disagree.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/10/05/kuwait.iphone.teen...
Sure, it's an anecdote, note a statistic. But people purchase favored brands in everything else, I hardly see a reason airlines should be different; particularly given a carrier like United makes most of their money on business class seats, and they do treat those passengers well.
I work for Canada's largest bank and they're turfing contractors at a pretty rapid rate. Shoveling lots of work offshore.

Edit: FTE's seem safe for the moment.
computer

minicomputer

microcomputer

...nanocomputer?
IANAP sadly but this sounds really interesting. What effect would this have on the total amount of matter in the universe? Could this affect the estimates of dark matter?
In Spanish the word "tabletas" is already used for this.
Are tech startups more like Hollywood than we imagine?
> It’s certainly better than most of the stuff out on BitTorrent.

Firstly, "out on BitTorrent" doesn't make much sense. Secondly, it would seem the author is unaware of great enthusiast trackers like what and waffles.
Government DOSing of Amazon would get a lot of attention... An organized attack bringing down ec2 / s3 would risk the attention of some pretty clever individuals who's businesses and hobbies were affected and produce some interesting fallout.
This is the exact same plan for 3 major Canadian oil-n-gas I know. Details are unfolding, but many will be affected.
Basically, individual contractors are to be replaced by fewer BigName companies with work done overseas.

Edit: details
The biggest problem will be the lack of knowledge of Apple products and software from the perspective of he IT department. They can't manage and secure something they don't know how to use.

If you're the only person in the company with a Mac and you have a complex network of interrelated systems then supporting just one Mac on the network just may not be worth it and may increase the tech support issues for everyone, not just you.

In the simplest case, if you are sending a MS Word document to a collegue, the document may not render in the same way on the Mac and Windows versions of the platform. The IT department is likely to have to service request calls for an issue that wouldn't exist in a controlled and consistent environment.

Of course, if your IT systems are fairly open and have very few restrictions in place regarding installation of apps and personal settings, then there is very little added risk or overhead in including a Mac in the network. Just don't expect your IT department to support it.
With services like Rdio, Netflix, and Steam it's actually easier for me to get what I want legally now. Lots of people don't pirate because of the cost, it just used to be the easiest/fastest way to get music/movies/games.
If you highlight the following code with python.el:

a = 1
b = 2

a and b will be highlighted in orange. However, in this code they will not:

a, b = 1, 2

I tried to modify python.el so that variables defined by parallel assignment would get highlighted.
I made the following imperfect change to python.el:

< ;; If parallel assignment is used, up to four variable names are highlighted.
< (,(rx line-start
< (zero-or-one (group (1+ (or word ?_))) (0+ space) "," (0+ space))
< (zero-or-one (group (1+ (or word ?_))) (0+ space) "," (0+ space))
< (zero-or-one (group (1+ (or word ?_))) (0+ space) "," (0+ space))
< (group (1+ (or word ?_))) (0+ space) "=")
< (1 font-lock-variable-name-face) (2 font-lock-variable-name-face)
< (3 font-lock-variable-name-face) (4 font-lock-variable-name-face))
---
> (,(rx line-start (group (1+ (or word ?_))) (0+ space) "=")
> (1 font-lock-variable-name-face))

The change is imperfect because it only highlights up to 4 variables created by parallel assignment. It does not work for this code:

a, b, c, d, e = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

If anybody is good enough with Emacs Lisp to handle the general case I would be interested to see it.
please resist the urge to tell me what I ought to <verb>. Oh, wait . . .
And can it recognize a double negative, as in, "all of these Apple sucks sites suck"?

If you can do decent sentiment analysis though, you could lower the page rank granted by a link by sentiment of text in its proximity, while not lowering the rank of the page that contains the negative sentiment.
Despite your clear emotional involvement in this issue, you've written quite a lot to say very little, Mr/s. Schultz.

My response will be relatively short, and I feel compelled to explain why.

You wrote thirteen paragraphs. The first two are rhetorical metadiscourse. The next three are implied arguments against a straw man. In the sixth paragraph you actually attempted to make an argument, it appears, but you only violently agreed with my point ("everyone agrees too many things are classified"). The next six paragraphs consist of irrelevant information probably copied and pasted. In the last paragraph alone do you make a claim which actually merits my response.

Your claim that the state department "spent the last week clean[ing] up...diplomatic brush fires" is completely unsubstantiated. I've seen little evidence that "cablegate" has caused anything more than mild embarrassment of government officials and a media bonanza.

Your only real contention worth a response is "[Documents are] not wrongfully classified when the definition of restricted is that it impedes your ability to do the job". Part of the government's job is explaining itself and its actions to its citizens: it reports to us, because it exists by our consent. Classification and secrecy exists not so the government won't be required to account for its actions, but in order to protect the lives of the citizens who consent to its existence. According to your interpretation of "restricted" the government should classify all potentially embarrassing information which might be construed negatively by the citizenry, and frankly, I don't think I need an argument to demonstrate the bankruptcy of that claim: given the usual incompetency of the government your principle, taken to its logical conclusion, would have the government classifying nearly everything.
San Francisco / SF Bay Area

TaskRabbit

Rails engineers helping people get stuff done.

http://taskrabbit.com/main/careers
Lisp developer walks away with Google AI contest
Why do they have the video set to 720p when they explicitly make the container 340px tall?

<object width="560" height="340">...</object>

That's just annoying. And makes me drop it down so my internet connection can stream it. And beyond worthless, becoming wasteful, because even 480p is more than it can display but you're draining my battery more with increased CPU use.
Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Brian Garrett, Co-Founder And... - Topix
If you mean designers and illustrators who refuse to upgrade their skills for digital production, then yes, they will fade away into bitterness and obscurity.
Startuply: Startup companies. Startup jobs.
As far as I know the security concerns wouldn't be any different to connecting from a Windows box. This should help you http://weblog.bignerdranch.com/?p=6&page=3.
My mother worked for a subsidiary of a certain $87 billion a year health insurer. They are closing the office she worked at this month and firing [edit: "laying off"] all the employees.
If Wikileaks got hold of the entire cable database, who else did?
Be careful with contract work though, it's very easy to fall into the trap of taking on too much and pushing back your own project...

Contract work can be worse golden handcuffs than a job in corporate
Honest question: Based on the general sentiment here, is there anything that a government should be legitimately allowed to keep secret?
My impression is that the iPhone App Store does a much better job of letting small developers make money than the iTunes music store does of letting small bands make money. I wonder what the core difference is?
For CVS and svn: you can hide it until someone actually looks at the relevant code. For git: not really

I don't think DVCSes help much here.

Those statements sound contradictory.
Let me try to understand - the distributed aspects of DVCSes would not have helped here. But the incidental fact of checksums in DVCSes (maybe necessitated by the nature of "distributed") does help. Right ?
While I agree with your logic completly there are other factors that play into a home buyer that are not in play with an investor the bigest one being emotion and sociatal norms. I could not begin to fathom how many times in my life I heard growing up, boy when you become a man buy a house, it's the American dream, they are not making any more land. Real estate always goes up. The advice like hey you could get trapped in a life sucking death trap was not dispensed until late in the bubble and now freely flows in the crash. So you have people that have no sophistication in investment purchasing homes because the common mantra was what could possibly go wrong. You have skyrocketing home prices and people panicking that they are going to be forever left out of the greatness of home-ownership that they have heard about their entire life which all culminates in disaster for the home owner.

I find it hard not to blame the bankers, when you have a party that clearly lacks the knowledge to understand the realities of the market and a party that clearly knows that they are inflating the market then you have to place blame on the party that willfully acted while possessing full knowledge. Where the homeowners greedy sure, and I would venture to guess that the number of homeowners that did so out of greed where high but they where also making decisions on information that was reinforced over years of indoctrination information that the bankers willfully exploited with full knowledge that the realities of the market where in sharp contrast to the homeowner perceived reality of what homeownership meant.

So while you logic is correct it omits some very important facts the biggest one being that the product was not sold to an investor but the average person.
My response was not supposed to be funny; it's a critique of an uninformed article.

None of your title suggestions match mine, because yours are true. Scheme is simple and no-frills; elisp is outdated and utilitarian. Common Lisp is...well, it's not Japanese, so he's lost me there.

But implying that Haskell is unsuited or unused for industrial purposes is absurd; most major Haskell libraries are written for companies, the main compilers are developed by companies, most papers are about solving some particular industrial problem, etc. Yegge's article might as well be about how nobody uses Erlang or Forth, it would make equally little sense.

Hell, the industry Yegge specifically calls out (finance) is known to use Haskell more than usual; Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, and Credit Suisse especially. Barclays even released a paper detailing their experiences!
The only real security concern that I can see is that if you become infected with some sort of malware (or you get hacked), there may be no other noticeable activity on the network. So, you might say "my computer seems a little slow today," but since the malware wouldn't be infecting the Windows computers, there'd be no alerts on their IDS.

The preceding scenario is a ridiculously contrived and unlikely event.

The truth is that the BSD kernel underneath OS X has a lot more security credibility than does Windows. Furthermore, since OS X has a lower market share than Windows, it is less likely that malware creators will target it. This does not make you immune from hacking, but since you are directly comparing your situation with Windows alternatives, I think it's fair.

Additionally, OS X these days is very inter-operable, so I wouldn't really worry about IT compatibility too much.

The biggest concern I'd have is convincing them that it's worth triple the cost of its Dell counterpart. That one's a little more tricky.
"Online stores have cranked up the audio quality to a fat 256 Kbps. [...] It’s certainly better than most of the stuff out on BitTorrent."

Oh really?

Even wide open trackers have a lot of stuff encoded in 320/FLAC. And I guess no one bothers with anything less than that on sites that specialize in music.

It's the age of movie piracy now, but music piracy is not dead.
I doubt that's the only reason. The picketing nerds in hazmat suits were probably folks from the FSF, and they are opposed to DRM on principle, and I believe that would have been shouting the same principles whether if pirated music was available and DRM-free or not.
China Touts Drive to Target Hackers
256 is pretty standard for torrenting music, sure you might not be able to really tell the difference but I think a lossless format like flac would go a long way to converting some people.
I think comfort zone plays a part in IT developers seeming uninterested in "new" ideas. Closer to the heart of the problem IMO is that most business applications are just not very interesting. You can reduce them to: take input values from screen, run SQL query, and post query results back to the screen. Writing good SQL is the most challenging part.

In order for apps to be more interesting - making new ideas in IT appealing - businesses must be willing to re-examine their processes and change them with an eye towards better automation and some business intelligence. However, getting a single department in a business to change its processes is as monumental as changing global warming.

Of course, another issue altogether is COTS reducing the applications actually written in-house. Making intellectual investments in powerful programming languages is just not sound when a developer is simply writing "glue" code between vendor systems.

People do generally get jazzed up in IT departments when new technologies come around. Sure, there are technological curmudgeons, but very few. Enthusiasm gets dampened when it is clear that a good business case cannot be made for the new technology.

(I used "new" relative to an IT department's current environment and not in reference to age of the technology.)
Apple wins patent on 3D projector that needs no glasses
HP Printer Installation Software
The HP printer driver is software which helps to connect the computer to your printer. You will get the HP printer software while buying the product itself.
Even wide open trackers have a lot of stuff encoded in 320/FLAC.

And for the most part, the people encoding these rips in FLAC admit that they can't tell the difference between 320kbps and V0, let alone FLAC and V0.

In other words: 256kbps is good enough for the very large majority of the people out there. And a file encoded at 256kbps with AAC is higher quality than that encoded at 256kbps with MP3.
Direct link to the patent - http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...
Run your life like a startup
Dolly reborn Four clones created of sheep that changed science
Well for the elliptical galaxies in question it is likely the amount of dark matter will need to be revised down. Though really if this discovery is borne out then one could say that the dwarf stars were dark matter until they were discovered.

It still does not account for the 10x dark matter mass in our own galaxy.
The site is actually quite clean with ad-block installed. I had to go back and double check to see what you were talking about! http://imgur.com/jDtjS.png
I don't think that Apple should have pulled this. Certainly there are pro-gay apps on the store that some people find just as offensive as the gay community might find this app. However, Apple doesn't have to feature either of these apps on the front page or any other page and they can easily be made available only by looking explicitly for them. Wouldn't those measures debunk the idea of the app store being a "political soapbox"?
Well, it's only good if it's making you money...
"Lets take anything to do with behavioural conditioning and fundamental incentive structures and call them game mechanics, just so we have an excuse to make up something new and forget that everything we're doing has been going under constant research and development since the dawn of the industrial revolution..."
I look forward to hearing how that turned out for them.
"If we take the inevitability of future large leaks for granted, then I think the debate must eventually centre on the things that will determine the supply of leakers and leaks. Some of us wish to encourage in individuals the sense of justice which would embolden them to challenge the institutions that control our fate by bringing their secrets to light. Some of us wish to encourage in individuals ever greater fealty and submission to corporations and the state in order to protect the privileges and prerogatives of the powerful."
Yahoo. Right before the holidays, too. Guess they want to avoid paying bonuses to soon-to-be goners.

http://kara.allthingsd.com/20101130/yahoo-layoffs-coming-dec...
My mom first had the idea for rollerblades in 1968 — that doesn't mean she's a cofounder of Nordica. Thinking of an idea for a business is so many light years away from actually acting on that idea.
There was major uproar from apple about quality issues if they were to allow flash games as standalone apps(not browser). Meaning a major influx of low quality games or apps. I'm surprised a framework like this doesnt bring up the same concerns from apple.
Lots of people don't pirate because of the cost, it just used to be the easiest/fastest way to get music/movies/games.

Rhapsody opened in 2001. If it took 9 years for music piracy to be "over", then I think there's something more at work than the "it's easier to pirate" defense.
I feel like it's important to note that this is actually obliterating the entire user profile. Bookmarks, saved passwords, and extensions included. Unless I'm mistaken, which is certainly possible.
It seems to me that this still falls under the current rule of capitalizing proper nouns, though in this instance the nouns are made proper for exactly the reason you stated.
How to save the world
I think the best point this piece makes is that things have changed. This is not something you can wish or threaten away. Nothing ever goes back to the way it was after something as profound as all of this.
A better title: "3 Time Winner of Computer Games Olympiad Wins Yet Another Contest".
I actually thought he was parodying the standard way to make fun of Haskell.
Maybe you mean layoffs...

Every company should be ready to do a firing if it's required that the employee and the company part ways.
Is there a summary of the algorithms he used anywhere? I don't see how it was the language that won the competition, rather than the code he wrote in it.
Presumably this is RBC? Do you think it has to do with meeting some sort of quarterly budget targets?
The real benefit to lossless encodings is that you don't experience a second generation of loss when you want to transcode. Going from, say, MP3 to AAC is pointless and causes considerably more loss than FLAC to AAC. But for most people, an MP3 or DRM-free AAC file is Good Enough (TM).
You are no longer free to move around the country
For kids (likely the target audience of this), the $99 developer program fee would be quite high (let alone the fact they have to register under a parent's name) -- I don't think this will really make an impact on the App Store.
I find it strange that Wired gives Grooveshark a shout out for allowing people to "sample any song you want before you buy," since the "before you buy" is totally assumed. I love Grooveshark, but it's so good at giving you what you want for free that it seems a bit like piracy in the cloud. I think the reality is that piracy and legal obtainment coexist and are a bit more ambiguous now, rather than fighting for the total extermination of the other.