skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Timex-Sinclair 1000 was like my 3rd or 4th computer. End of contest (hopefully all the real PDP folks are long dead, right?).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000

2K RAM, 3 MHZ CPU (much faster than the .9 MHZ of my TRS-80 Color Computer. Yes, it didn't even have 1 MHZ).
And yes, I did a lot of programming on that keyboard.
Young people are fleeing Portugal in droves. But is this a bad thing?
I'll just leave this here :)
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1992-09-08/
Canada too, with Rogers. Tethering is not allowed on the default data plan (500MB). You have to pay for 1GB (an extra $10 or $15 / month, I think) if you want to tether. I tether all the time and only use about 300MB of my 1GB plan, so I get really pissed when they use their excuse that "you need to have a full 1GB to tether or you'll run out!!11!". Fuck Rogers.
Antimatter isn't free, and current production efficiencies are actually astronomically low (one trillionth efficient or something like that). My point was that matter/anti-matter reactions are nevertheless remarkable and amazing even though anti-matter reactions are common in nature.
OT: You are just the second person I've ever heard say "a scissors" (with an article). Is this a regional thing (like waiting "on line" vs. "in line")?
In other words, "poorly".
In industry, that may be so (I seem to recall one of the Star Wars prequels being the first feature movie done entirely with digital cameras). For end-user video cameras (handicams, or whatnot), we've been storing to magnetic tape for a good bit longer though.
not be deluded or blinded by catchphrases like "life of the mind."
Indeed, this life does exist, but probably only during the ABD portion of a Ph.D. A professor would be extremely lucky to live the life of the mind 15 hours a week, leaving 60 hours of advising, teaching, reviewing, writing grant proposals, traveling, and sitting in meetings.

This immediately made me think of this

The perverse incentives this creates are massive. Universities hire scientists rather than teachers in order to get their hands on half the scientist's grants [1]. Scientists waste their time masquerading as teachers because they can't get grants if they don't work for a university [2]. This is harmful both to science (I'm not doing research in class) and students. Of course, they don't put much effort into teaching because they are judged on their ability to get grants. Actual teachers are squeezed out, since there is no room for them.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=851218

which I originally saw here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2094244
what should they be correcting? Everyone who stayed with him since mid 2008 has lost 65% of their net worth they had in Clarium as of 2008.

However, considering that Clarium assets under management are down from about $8bn to about $2bn, that's only about 25% of investors since the peak (assuming everyone invested equal sums of money at the same point in time - most certainly not true).

people should first learn to read financial journalism correctly before sending "corrections" back :)
Charlie Stross presents an alternate explanation in the novel 'Accelerando'. Advanced civilizations may evolve at an accelerating pace, so anyone moving away from the central star (and source of energy) won't be able to catch up.
Kama Sutra malware threatens to put Windows users in awkward position
http://support.t-mobile.co.uk/help-and-support/index?page=ho...

"There will be no change to the data packages for existing customers for the duration of their contract"

This is for new users only or people upgrading. It doesn't affect existing contracts.
Brilliant, I like how this is a spoof of what Google is doing with h264 .

Of course, facebook's been doing this the whole time and it's been pissing people off, but most of those people were developers who signed on to this ever-changing environment.

Deprecating a format that most people use is a little harsh. On the other hand, it is once again a symptom of intellectual monopoly protected by the government. Apple can charge people for the codec, and google won't have it. Makes sense.

I would like to highlight this fact. A lot of the problems we are encountering are symptoms of intellectual monopolies (as Thomas Jefferson preferred to call it) granted by the government. The activities of the RIAA, Interval Licensing, pharma companies, and Disney may grab headlines, but they are perfectly viable in a system that is set up to grant, and then go to great lengths to enforce, copyright and patent protection.

How can we in the west criticize China's "zi-lu" laws, discount Baidu and Tencent for following their country's laws (see http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Facebook-get-so-much-more-hype...) but at the same time pass laws like this:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/u-k-passes-internet-di...

and this:

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/91378/feds-seize-domain-names-o...

Seems due process goes out the window when copyright is involved. The same western nations that are against censorship of the internet in China, censor the internet as soon as copyright comes up. I am not sure this situation is very stable -- something has to change.
So Who Really Owns Facebook? (Chart)
I'm surprised they are acting like this in the UK. There's a much better choice of carriers in Europe and you don't have any problems with different wireless standards (GSM vs CDMA).

I knew the choice in Ireland was pretty awful but I figured competition in the UK would keep dick moves like this in check.
Having others look at my code has never delivered much value.

Maybe not much value for you, but after enjoying your many insightful comments on this site, I suspect that I would learn a lot by looking at your code. :-)
> the quality of filmmaking, which increases with each film in every quantifiable way.

It's funny, that sounds more like vague generalization than something quantifiable.

I'm impressed by the attention to craft at Pixar, but that doesn't mean that each movie is better than the last. Certainly not in "every quantifiable way".
Not only that, but more users for them means more money to buy hardware and upstream bandwidth and hopefully some profit. That's the reason people are paying them.

Perhaps telecom is different than most markets, but more users generally drives costs down, not up.
No contract has been broken because existing contracts aren't affected: http://support.t-mobile.co.uk/help-and-support/index?page=ho...
Interesting. I'll have to add that to my reading list.
Very similar blog post: http://cam.ly/blog/2010/12/code-fearlessly/
And associated HN chatter: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1964060
Not true. That's just a compiler trick
Huh, whoever downvoted the above comment care to explain why you did that?
Hard coded paths are possible with any operating system, including OSX which was mentioned in the post to which I responded. And when dealing with it, assigning C: to the bootable drive is a feature of a particular implementation, not a legacy of the Operating System. So far as I am aware, no part of recent Windows versions are required to be installed on C:

Even if writing code to require it is trivial.
All told, an alien civilization that saw us would probably be millions of years ahead of us and likely not need our planet for expansion. Habitable space becomes very large if you can colonize bare bits of rock or construct your own habitats.
Does any one seriously believe that US defence/aerospace companies can actually perform feats of technology any more?

Personally, I blame this on the inability of the US to provide for career paths for technical employees, and discouraging any kind of experimentation (chemistry kits, model rockets, electronic tinkering, etc etc) on the part of kids or adults.
Even Canada pretends to use it. Except everybody converts in their head.
Mastering Unix commands: 10 how-to videos to get you started
F#'s type system supports units of measure. It looks really nice: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/andrewkennedy/archive/2008/08/29/uni...
Three valid arguments:

1.My neighbor is a mechanic. He says metric has too many sizes.

2.I was biomed. They have a unit called a Gamma, created just to avoid killing people from confusing millimeter and microliter.

3. Time isn't metric.
But again, H264 is not HTML5 video... H264 is a video codec that just happens to be used with the video tag on Mobile Safari and IE9. It's also how a majority of YouTube's videos are encoded currently, as well as many many other video uplod sites.

It's also the codec used on the Xbox360, the PSP, the PS3, and other pes of consumer electronics. It turns out that to reach the largest audience of consumer electronic devices and computer, H264 happens to be the best choice.

Video production workflows let content producers save as h264 videos.

The adult industry is using h264 videos on their web sites to serve their content to portable "more personal" devices.

I'd say h264 is pretty entrenched now.
"selling what you believe you can do"

People buy from startups knowing that you're a startup, usually. There are always ethical issues when it comes to selling, but I don't think that "ability to execute" is the biggest one, as long as you actually believe it could happen, and try.

"someone doing it with their own money and doing it with someone else's money mean two different things"

I think it's legitimate to point out that there is not a lot of personal money risk for the founders. They probably went without much income for a while, and work a lot. But if the startup fails, and they pick up a job afterward, they probably won't be in the negative.

I agree that "making big decisions" should not be equated with "taking a big risk". They are related but not the same.
Chrome H.264 video decision a vaccination against license trap
Science compels you!
On the flip side, in no other field can someone leave the university and expect a good job regardless of interest or talent in said field.

Do you know what happens to art or English majors that aren't desperately passionate about their trade? They are shift managers working retail.
The majority of iOS devs make little to nothing, documented countless times.

That's not really what he said though. Even if 0.1% of the iPhone developers and 0.1% of the Android developers are making money, the iPhone devs could still be making more.
Yeah, but if you have good feelings about the brand, you'll excuse some not so great offerings. So, they can get away with it for a time.

This is a classic problem: to be really successful you need to create a kind of brand mythology. The problem is once you do that, people stop honestly appraising your work, until it's too late.

Ed Catmull (Pixar CEO) is a huge inspiration to me, and he seems to understand the importance of getting accurate feedback (especially negative feedback). The problem is that once you're Pixar/Disney, the audience isn't really providing you with accurate feedback on the time-scale of a single release.

If your quality is slipping, they'll give you the benefit of the doubt, until it's too late to ignore.
Yeah but your paying for more bandwidth, in the U.S. you pay and get nothing for it.
I'd love to see the diagram scaled by global web share, and perhaps with a fourth colour for those delivered "via Flash". I think you'll get a completely different feel for what the data is trying to tell you. Of course individual web developers should scale it for their own web audience before making any decisions.

(Some other minor notes on the contents of the table: WebM is confirmed for Firefox 4, due in the next month or so, and you do say the chart reflect a few months from now. Desktop Safari supports WebM just as much as IE9 except it already does it and also supports Theora in that same manner, Microsoft have just been more vocal about their potential support of WebM and nothing else. I'd drop IE9 to "with user installed codec" for WebM and raise Safari to the same for WebM and Theora. Finally, IE8 and below aren't going to get WebM unless some very minor plugins, like ChromeFrame or OpenCodecs, get Flash-like penetration levels and if you're allowing that then basically anything is possible. Oh, and does Android support HTML5 video tag H.264 or just Flash video H.264 via the browser?)
Offer HN: ruby programming
Hello all, I'm building a portfolio to try and get some freelance ruby work. I have no commercial development experience however. If you have a small-ish project you need help with (20 hours or so) and you'd be willing to provide a reference please get in touch.

Alternatively, if you have an idea for an open source gem you'd like developed, post it here.
Bypassing Windows 7 x86_64 with SET and Metasploit (video)
But, unlike with your Nexus One, it will cost you $20+ per month to use your personal hotspot.
I'm sure that after they kill and enslave the vast majority of us, the few remaining survivors will be given crummy reservations where we can live our lives in griding poverty while our alien overlords blame us for not accepting the space zombie god Zork as our lord and saviour.
Robert gave Andrew Warner of Mixergy some more details about his interview of pg in a 12/30/09 interview: http://mixergy.com/robert-greene-power-interview/

You can click through to read more, but the highlight for me was: "So, Paul Graham, what I liked about him was he’s always been a complete non-conformist and has gotten away with it, not because his parents had money or he was privileged, but because he didn’t care and he took risks and he just followed what he wanted to do. And that’s sort of the end of this book. That’s like the ultimate thing."
Show HN: Objects - semantic search app for the Wikipedia
Isn't there another possibility that is inline with #1, that Aliens could exist but that the path from them to us can not be traveled by them due to distance and life support constraints, and not knowing where we are located.
I strongly agree (despite accidentally down voting; curse hn's "no take backs!"), but how would you propose competition arise? The existing infrastructure gives existing players a massive (perhaps insurmountable) advantage.
Sony Moves For Temporary Restraining Order Against Alleged PS3 Hackers
"Wakefield met with medical school managers to discuss a joint business even while the first child to be fully investigated in his research was still in the hospital"

So the heads of several medical schools knew or had strong reason to suspect the data was being cooked, and said nothing. But of course this didn't happen because the scientific establishment is corrupt, it's Hollywood's fault.

Science as usual.
Demand Media Clears SEC and Prices IPO
IPv6 really isn't that difficult. It only takes a few minutes to get a free IPv6 address from a tunnel broker and add it to your server. My websites and email were all dual stack less than 24 hours after I started looking into IPv6 for the first time. I wrote a blog post about it last year:

https://secure.grepular.com/Setting_up_IPv6_is_Easier_Than_Y...

If you get a cert error it's because the certificate is signed by cacert.org and several major browser/os combos don't have their root yet.
Students who periodically disappear for long bouts of skiing, soul searching, or contract work tend to be put on the back burner by their advisor, making it much more difficult to get re-engaged later on. An easy litmus test: if acting a certain way would get you fired from a real job, then it's probably a bad idea to try that in a Ph.D. program too.

I tell students the worst thing they can do is lose contact with their advisor. That makes it extremely difficult to come back later.
And in case of installing Windows 3.11, this was even more hilarious because of the fact that installer did not want all the disks in order, but only first five or so and then proceeded to demand disks in essentially random order, and in some cases the numbering on disks themselves did not match installers idea. I vaguely remember that printer drivers that installer expected on disk 7 or 8 (depending on whenever you used "Standard install" or "Expert install") were actually on disk 9.
Rackspace to use Akamai as their CDN provider
Why Bullpen Capital Thinks We Need Another Venture Fund (TCTV)
The second paragraph clarifies that "clients who stuck with him suffered losses of 65 percent from the mid-2008 peak."

I was just making the point that giving Thiel your money wasn't necessarily a bad move. He has failed to properly manage at least one of {volatility, investor's expectations}, but he has still made 12%/year.
Still got mine too. Still worked as of a few years ago when I dragged it out of the attic. Even got all the books, games I had copied from the BBSes, and a few cartridges. I should pull it out to see how well my 300 baud modem works on today's Internet.
What is False Simplicity and How to Avoid It
This is cool, but no one should ever use this. I've used the google translator frequently, and while it's good, it always requires me to use my knowledge of the language I'm translating to in order to create a more correct and meaningful translation. If you really want a site or app that is multilingual, you need a human with good knowledge of the language to do your translations.
Ah yes, saving data onto a cassette tape. My parents purchased an Atari 1200XL in the early 80s and when I was about five years old, I quickly hijacked it to play games and eventually learn how to write code. For the longest time I wondered what the cassette drive was for; why would you play music on your Atari? Then I realized, "Wait a minute! I can store data and turn the computer off?!"

My life was complete.
That's the boring (and most likely) possibility.
Ask HN: S3/Self-hosted/Eucalyptus? Help us optimize bandwidth for big app launch
HNers, here's hoping we can get some advice on what to do with a looming bandwidth bill...

We are about to roll out an app that will have 1 million people using it in a matter of days. We're sure of this because of the nature of the application and the previous experiences of our client.

So, our app must download 7-10MB of data to 'boot'. 10MB x 1MM users = 10TB of data. An equivalent amount of data will need to be downloaded about once/month.

Using S3, we're going to have a pretty big bandwidth bill, around $2500/month.

Hosting our own, we could get to $50/TB using Ripple Web and we could use Eucalyptus to remain S3-compatible - $500 + server = $800?

Anyone else moving away from S3 because they're trying to optimize for bandwidth? Anyone else optimizing for bandwidth costs in creative ways? Are there really cheap CDNs out there that we should consider?
I grew up and went to college in Rapid and still have family and friends there. AT&T already has pretty good coverage in Rapid City, and my friends (working at Golden West Telecom) tell me that full 3G will be available within a few months. Don't know about rural areas.

It sounds like they are pretty serious about expanding their network there (which is good for me as an AT&T customer that regularly travels to Rapid City).
There's also the possibility that signals just merge into the background after a few light years. So they are saying that our radio signals have already travelled a few decades, but they also diffuse under the 1/r^2 law. If there were an identical to Earth, how close would it have to be for SETI to pick up the radio chatter?

It's also possible that aliens use higher-bandwidth optical or above signals in order to communicate. Already as the Earth's networks swell with bandwidth, most of it is coming from optical installations rather than radio links. Even radio is relatively low-powered, so it's unlikely a lot of it is visibly leaking into space.
I'm going to quote from the novel blindsight because I think it sums up the scenarios much better. http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

================

>>Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.

>>Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now?

>>Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean. ==============

I really hope Sagan is right, and I'm a little annoyed that these researchers didn't mention the idea.
Afraid not. Unlocked just means you can use whatever GSM carrier you wish. Carrier-dependent features (MMS, tethering) are controlled by IPCC files (known as 'Carrier Updates') which are downloaded depending on the carrier you are using.

In the old days (3.0 and below) you could get access to features unsupported by AT&T (MMS, tethering..) by modifying a carrier file and applying it to your phone via iTunes, no jailbreak required. As of 3.1 however these files are now signed to prevent tampering.
I went to school during right after the crash and during the height of the outsourcing fears (remember the 2004 election rhetoric?) and I'm pretty sure both of those contributed greatly to the profession's outlook. CS and CompEng enrollments have plummeted while the demand keeps on growing and growing. Definitely a great time to be competent software engineer.
An writing another batchfile as to load MSCDEX only when you actually need to access CDROM as to preserve these precious 50kB of conventional memory :)
Looks like my BS detector fired too soon.

My "straw-man" was not meant to be anything as such. It was an example of a different meditation tradition where tea/coffee is to be avoided.
But even 'constructive' criticism is frequently derided here. That's why I made the point about speculative redesigns. No matter how polite or constructive you try to get, it seems a large chunk of this site will wave it off as being only as useful as reporting your gut feeling on whether something 'works' or 'doesn't'. (As only the designer facing actual decisions knows why they made certain compromises and has to deal with all the real permutations, etc)

You can narrow your argument to just "can't we all just be polite" and have a nice, if naive, point. But I disagree that the core complaints in the article or this thread are restricted to, or even primarily about, the tone.
That's great, and the content seems good, but I still feel like a 2-hour video is sort of a glib response to "there is no good introduction to the framework!" :)
What a troll...I can't believe Northwestern gave her grant money to write about schools better than hers and how they do not get into the top consulting and law firms by looking at...ENGINEERING STUDENTS. News flash - software engineers aren't trying to get into consulting and law firms.
We chose GAE for JobSpice for a number of reasons, but yes, JobSpice is a GAE app.
HipChat adds basic Campfire API compatibility