skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, but for example I live in Europe and we have to bail out entire countries and industries, which also costs billions. I feel it would make more sense to donate in places where the government can't help, like 3rd world. Is anybody considering donating to the European Union?

I have also heard it can be a problem to donate for specific causes, if the organizations then are not allowed to use the money for other things.

Since apparently these australians live in flooding areas, how many of them have not been insured? Would i encourage them to skip insurance in the future, too, if i would donate now?
The PHP strtod() denial of service bug
Subsidising tele-coms infrastructure.

It doesn't have to be to the tune of millions

Revisit the laws which may put businesses offering free web access at risk of prosecution if users break laws on their networks

Also ease up on the draconian and psychotic levels of policing. Nothing shouts not ready for social advancement more than a angry police man with his knee in your back.

Stop the insane process of thinking every child should have a computer and maybe let them discover these things for themselves in a less structured way.

Finally, promote a change in attitude where discovery is seen as a success

These things could be a start.

I'm excited to see what the UK can do with this idea.
"keep him from doing something that stupid"

I think 50 is going to do what he wants - law firm not withstanding...
This makes me remember when the first iMac came out (apparently in '98) and just broke my brain by not having a floppy drive.

http://www.businessweek.com/1998/36/b3594050.htm
It works because the translator can write template code that is executed by the templating engine at runtime, so the translator can write something like this as the translation:

{switch $d}
{case 1} foo {$d}...
{case 2} {$d} bar..
{default} ba{$d}z
{/switch}

We provided the translators with some basic examples of if/then/switches and so on, they were free to do all sorts of crazy things (especially in polish).
You are confusing having something to hide and keeping your thoughts to yourself. There is a difference.
I was following the tweets in real-time. He did mention that he owned stock in the company. He first explained that he invested in TVG (TV Goods, a subsidiary that markets through channels like QVC and HSN), and then a few tweets later explained that the ticker symbol was HNHI.
I'm confused as to what you mean. Why do you think that it's just nowadays that people are short on integrity or that everything has become short-term?
What I want to know is how can we tell? How can we tell if some topic is totally spun by a larger entity?

Just as an example, most folks who read Linux-related web sites firmly believe that Microsoft and/or Wagg-Ed have paid shills that disrupt Linux conversations. There's the obvious pro-Windows entities, like "Loverock Davidson" in the ZDNet forums, but at least some folks beleive that most or all of the radically pro-Linux ultra-fanboys are planted too, to discredit the more moderate and logical Linux fans.

There's not a single shred of evidence to support this, except maybe Microsoft's history of paying for pro-Microsoft studies, but still people believe.

How am I to tell that a government has set its propaganda agencies on a topic?
My Grandma wants to live in the cloud (More on Chrome OS)
Google Launches Global Online Science Fair
Not equivalent; HTML5 video is still being defined and is not yet in the mainstream.
Is it a mistake that I'm reading Prince before Discourse on Livy? What should I know...
As far as I remember the A and B drives were used for floppy disks. In the olden days home computers didn't have hard drives, and typically either had a single or dual floppy drive. With a dual drive you could do fancy things like make backup copies, without having to repeatedly store data to RAM and swap source and destination floppies. In the 1980s home computers typically didn't have enough memory to store the entire contents of a floppy disk in RAM, which made the process of creating backups irksome if you didn't have a dual drive.

If you've only started using Windows based computers within the last five years then the missing A and B drives may seem mysterious. Floppy drives started disappearing from first laptops and then desktop machines in the early 2000s.
What is the niche blog?
If you're in London, The London School of Economics and Political Science is having a public lecture next week with this author, Evgeny Morozov. I believe it'll be available as a podcast after the fact, for anyone who can't get there.

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2011/20110119t1830...
Brown, Cornell and MIT Grads not considered good enough by recruiters
5 times a day ? Its really is very refreshing to come across so many ideas/opinions et all
How many ad impressions does the $1,700 Android revenue correspond to?

Thank you again for posting these numbers every month.
I find these numbers are not so useful because they are artificially inflated by outsourcing things like building maintenance. If the people actually producing iPhones were Apple employees, their number would be much lower. Profits per employee would say more, but can quickly turn zero or negative in a bad year.
English is free even for commercial use.
The Secret Life of Robots
I grew up with Esperanto, and I don't really see a reason to use it as a pun in this context. It's a nice and useful language and everybody has the option to use it or leave it.

The parallels (to VP8) with the blog post pretty much end there, as you don't actually have to pay your pants off with royalties to some group, just because you are teaching English (h264).

I really like ironic humor, but this one didn't get to me.
I wonder if you couldn't white-label the technology and sell it to those types of businesses. That way they could apply their own branding and incorporate it into their existing sites.
I assume Spanish people are quite polite.
This is a big deal for me, I HATE that carriers can install 5+ crapware apps on my phone that are completely uninstallable without rooting your phone.

I let my nephew play with my phone for about 15 minutes one afternoon and a month later I get a bill for "Need for Speed". Turns out he opened NFS and pressed a single button to play the full version.

Another way to hide the apps it to use Launcher Pro.
I can feel the down votes, but does anyone else think that insider trading (not saying this necessarily is) should be legalized?

My reasons:

- The information current SEC disclosures release is well known to be a (legal) 2nd set of books that has every interest in painting a rosy picture.
- If gaps in information could be narrowed quickly (i.e. from insider knowledge), stock prices would reflect the realities quicker and best.
- Large stock manipulation can't come from people who don't have money to move markets, but info almost always will come from non-traders. This means they traders would be willing to pay insiders for knowledge to trade on the info - doubtlessly using a contract so the knowledge would be legit.
- If a company isn't treating their employees well (pay, moral, etc.), and has many skeletons in the closet: it would be at risk from insiders trying to take advantage of such a scheme.

Back to 50: BBuffone, below asked what the difference between plugging Vitamin water and stock is - I say that the difference is only an artificial one.
Regarding Amazon affiliate earnings, what are the ToS requirements regarding promoting affiliate links directly? Presumably, every affiliate sale makes Amazon money, but if one were doing a lot of sales, would Amazon accuse you of stealing money from them?
Beta testing registration for new, simple, alternative social network
Rackspace and Akamai announce partnership
Leaky abstraction

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...
since this link requires a login to see the content, try http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2096103
I'm 18 and could instantly answer the question.
Not sure how to feel about this.
Which location based image service do you use?
As there are so much of them, which one do you use and why?
Google and H.264 - Far From Hypocritical
There's a command line IM client called Finch, made by the devs of Pidgin
It even loads your pidgin account data automatically :D
The movement from camera film to digital cameras was a largely unnoticed revolution which took place within the last decade.
My younger brother typed format c: instead of format a: once on my Dad’s laptop that he was borrowing to do homework - he was up all night reinstalling Windows 95 from 26 floppys.
bluenile.com does better
Sony asks for restraining order in PS3 hacks
I was working at an Apple reseller when the iMac came out. Part of our sales pitch was to try to convince everyone who bought an iMac that they needed a USB floppy drive to go with it. Everyone was convinced that people needed that floppy drive.

http://www.osnews.com/story/18/The_iMac_and_the_Floppy_Drive...
Few people on superuser.com seem to mention that B:\ was always reserved even on a single floppy system so that it was possible to copy data from one floppy onto another:

1. Insert source disk

2. Type copy a:\. b:\

3. The system will read a chunk of data from a:\ then say:
Please insert disk B: and press any key to continue...

4. You'd swap the disks, press a key, and the system will write the chunk of data and say
Please insert disk A: and press any key to continue...

This would go on and on and on...

Anyone remembers installing Win95 and the number of 1.44MB 3.5" floppies it came on? 26! And once you got to about disk no. 13 it would start asking you to insert seemingly random disk numbers every minute or so... Or how about getting to disk number 17 and being told that the installation is corrupt, start over.... errrr.......
Ask HN: What are the profitable (non-game) iPad/Tablet apps out there?
I've asked this question on Quora but wondered if folks here might have any input.

I'd like to find out about apps that are not games but generate enough income to support one or more individuals working full-time (even at 'ramen-profitable' levels). I'm aware that might mean different things for different people but that's ok.

D'you guys know of such apps or where I can go to find such info?

Thanks,

Quora question: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-profitable-non-game-iPad-Tablet-apps-out-there
Suppose the 4chan hivemind decides to mass-spam your startup with hundreds of thousands of downvotes over the next few weeks. How would you have any recourse in situations like that?
When I looked through the "48 laws" I found a lot of Talmudic references (though maybe that is because the person who recommended it to me mentioned that); I don't recall that being in the translation of "The Prince" that I read..
It's a good illustration of how fast technology moves.
Every company aims to keep costs low, employees count at a minimum, and profits high. I don't see why these companies should be any different.

The companies that 'actually produce' the physical products have their own set of numbers to worry about, too.
What the science of human nature can teach us : The New Yorker
Don't forget the ASSIGN utility which created new device roots from one (or more!) existing folders, or with deferrment i.e. when assigning Fonts: to df0:Fonts, the OS remembers the disk referred to, and will ask you for that specific disk if you remove it and subsequently access Fonts:. It made working with floppies a lot more pleasant.

SUBST on Windows is similar, but with 1/10th of the power and just single drive letters.

I miss the Amiga too, but it simply never kept up the pace.
> Close that car hood citizen, there are secrets in there, don't make me taze you.

Auto makers originally tried to prevent car owners from servicing their own cars or taking them to third parties to be serviced. It took a legal struggle and legislation to enshrine the rights of ownership that car owners take for granted.

Or at least took for granted. A new legal struggle is turning around the right to repair modern cars that make extensive use of processors and proprietary software.

http://blog.fosketts.net/2010/07/29/walled-gardens-gilded-ca...
Maybe when something comes along to replace "save"?

With the steadily increasing amount of software that auto-saves without you noticing, maybe soon we just wont need to "save" anything. It'll just happen.
> "I think it shows how obsolete these things have become that the 'new generation' have no experience of them :-) Makes me feel old – Andy Paton"

Yet we had to put up with this inferior technology for so long. I remember people were still running around with floppy disks at high school in the late 90s/early 00s (it was easily 20 year old technology by that time) and I started using the internet for transferring my files. So much that I have never purchased a USB memory device.
1 really only works if you work in a big market for your native language. For example, you will not sell a lof of your software in English in Japan or France (where translation is mandatory by law, although not applied thoroughly).

What would you say if Japanese were trying to sell Japanese software with Japanese-only indications/manual ? Do you think many American would buy it ?
The argument of below-cost hardware sales comes up frequently, yet I'm not at all sure it's true. Nintendo have certainly gone on record as saying the Wii was _never_ sold for below hardware cost (don't have a reference to hand, sorry); I don't follow the scene enough any more to know the general current position but it's far from a given that hardware sales are subsidised by software.

Frankly I'd much rather see the whole thing opened up and made more reasonable and competitive, into a proper market. Microsoft don't have any say over who releases what for Windows, Apple don't have a say over who releases what for OS X (though are heading down a slippery slope with the App Store following iOS...) - I see no legitimate reason for the games market to be different. If the hardware cost goes up, fine - we're still below the real-terms cost of the earlyish 16 bit era.
Totally not worth it, for you, for the poor processors, for anybody.
Every now and then I regale her (and her sisters) with tales about life in the olden days, when if you wanted to change the channel on the TV, you had to get up and walk across the frickin' room!

Now excuse me, I need to chase some pesky kids off my lawn.
At around 1993 we used cassette tapes to save progress in the game "The Castle"[0] on MSX[1]

Actually I was too young to know what was going on; my dad setup the tape thing.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_%28game%29

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX
Worst part about consulting (for me) was having to be gone from my family so much -- and the lack of permanent friendships at work.

The part about not being able to slow down or you die? I actually like that part. Technology is always changing, and I like the fact that I'm constantly challenged to find real, solid value in what I'm learning or doing. Keeps me on my toes. Although I freely admit it's not for everybody.

I coast by taking as much time as I want between gigs.

I have family members who are "normal" -- they want a 9-5 job, long-term responsibilities and friendships, and they want to forget all about work when they punch out. The don't want things to change, and they want promises they can rely on for the future. They want somebody else to worry about things changing. I respect that. I'm just not that way. I tell folks that consulting has probably ruined me for life as far as ever being a useful company man.
Effective RFPs ignore project details and cost
Bollywood Movie Impatient Vivek Wallpapers, Pictures & Photos Gallery
Impatient Vivek is an imminent Bollywood movie based on Romance and comedy. The movie is directed by Rahat Kazmi and released under the banner Search Film’s Production. The flick is set to release on 7th January, 2011. It is produced by Ashok Chauhan and Malvee S and the music is handled by Shahdaab Bhartiya, Neeraj Shrivastava, Raja Ali, and Aanamik. The movie stars are new comer Vivek Sudarshan and Ex-Miss India Sayali Bhagat. This time, the film is a flashy, youthful and energetic love story and through this movie Vivek is debuting in Bollywood movies. The flick is all about a new age romantic love story, the eagerness of today’s youth, and an uncomplicated story mix-up with comedy.
Well, the U.S. has the 2nd-most internet users after China, and there aren't many Chinese SO users, so I'm not surprised the U.S. ends up as the largest single country.

If we compare some general internet-user stats by continent (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm) to SO's respondents, we get:

of internet % of SO
Asia 42.0% 6.3%
Europe 24.2% 37.8%
US/Canada 13.5% 42.4%
Latin America/Caribbean 10.4% 4.1%
Africa 5.6% 1.5%
Middle East 3.2% 2.6%
Oceania/Australia 1.1% 5.0%

The two biggest differences are: 1) Asians from countries other than India basically don't use SO; and 2) users from English-speaking countries use SO more than everyone else (there's between 3x and 5x more people from each of the US, UK, Australia, and Canada as their proportion of internet users).
Cloud Storage Isn’t Cheap: Price of the Cloud Compared to Traditional Storage
As long as we are talking about legitimate sales originating from real people, the 24-hour duration of the affiliate cookie puts Amazon into a very favorable position. I cannot see why AMZN should accuse you of stealing money.

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/agreement...
Oldest Known Winery Found in Armenia
TwileShare - Share Files on Twitter [Invites]
>"A massive pile of legacy Windows stuff probably assumes C: is the boot volume."

Seeing as Windows has been bootable from removable drives and over networks for a long time, I sincerely doubt it.
Perhaps it's because the first IBM PC did not have an internal hard disk as standard?
.eh_frame
Illinois Passes a 66% Income Tax Increase
Google founder Larry Page buys 193-foot yacht for $45m second-hand
The point is that companies like Accenture or Dell Services by their nature can't outsource their money makers. A comparison between Apple and Accenture on this subject, especially using revenue as opposed to profit, is just not valid.
I did this on an Acorn Archimedes disk and though okay at first, the floppy got corrupted after a few days. Bad idea!
http://abstrusegoose.com/323

The last line: "COBOL is forever" gets me every time. =)
> the courage of Pixar's bosses in saving their employees that recently was on the front page

It can also be a rational decision. If you believe the layoffs being imposed on you will cripple the company, it's better to leave the failure to your successor.
The main point of Grubers' criticism is that Google is being hypocritical by dropping H.264, but still keeping Flash.

If Google would really be visionaries with such great long-term outlooks, then why would they allow Flash, which is owned by a single company which has shown time and again that they can not handle that product responsibly?

Granted, Google is currently making every effort to sandbox the Flash player as tightly as possible. But they are still shipping Chrome with it.
Here it just silently failed. I wanted to write something to a floppy and it just couldn't.
My Mini-ITX blog - http://www.minimotherboard.com
Norvig tackles Beal's Conjecture: $100k to prove or disprove x^m + y^n = z^r
This is an increase from 3 percent to 5 percent. Naturally, that doesn't sound nearly so dramatic as a headline.
"my Spanish skills were not too great yet"

"From my experience English to Spanish translation works pretty well"

I think there's a connection.
GNOME has been using a picture of a hard drive for quite a while now: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gnome-document-save.s...

Though that may also become antiquated with SSDs and cloud storage :-)
Physical limits are a major component of latency. Until we figure out a way to transmit information instantly with infinite bandwidth, local storage will always be a significant factor.

edit: And given trends in solid-state drives, local storage will be cheaper and more energy efficient than a wireless network for a long time.
Making money with open source
I think it was overcome by PCs when they started offering VGA graphics. The Amiga architecture was much more "intimate" with video generation than PCs and, thus, were not so easy upgrade as newer hardware became available.
The difficulty sometimes in comparing is, as this post points out, people don't include all the "other" costs that often dwarf the hardware costs. Power, cooling, bandwidth, etc., all cost money, and when you're not buying a lot of them, they cost a LOT of money. The cost of equipment is usually a fraction of the TCO.
By the time AOL launched in this country, they were giving away CDs which weren't good for anything but drink coasters. It seems they've long since departed as well.
Interesting. After the first few thoughts like "This can't be happening I am only 19" and "this guy is either dumb or 6" my next thought was "What would be the question that would make me feel really old when I am in my 50s"?

The effect this question has on people is because they remember some information which most of the users today don't know as they have never used that technology. So what technology of today will become so obsolete that you would remember your age?
What is the point of this article?

There are some 2,000+ four year colleges in the US, and "recruiters" are only interested in grads from 3 or 4 of them? I'm a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab, no one I know or work with is even interested in job fairs, recruiters, etc.

That said, any company that won't look at me because I'm from MIT and not Princeton isn't the kind of place I would want to work anyway. I'm sure this sort of discrimination makes for great internal culture.
Jeff Atwood tweeted this yesterday with the comment "want to feel old?"
I'm thinking of this - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2049808
I found a set of Windows 3.1 disks at home back in high school once and actually managed to get them installed on my brand new gaming rig that I bought. I was unreasonably proud of that feat.
Compilers can be surprisingly "incorrect" and yet still be usable in production. I've routinely been forced to work with compilers that generated incorrect code in numerous situations, and I've simply cataloged and avoided them.

(Interestingly enough, the compiler in question that generated incorrect code so often that I had a catalog ruleset of "things not to do" was llvm-gcc, when I was first deploying Cydia and Telesphoreo to the jailbroken iPhone community. However, that was a while ago, and LLVM doesn't have those shockingly bad issues anymore.)

(It was just a few weeks ago, though, when chpwn started trying to get Cydia compiling with LLVM and kept getting "internal compiler error" on what seemed like some reasonably simple C++.)
Have you ever tried MyPaint?

IMO a good example of a software which does its tasks very well (I'm no (digital) painter, but I've heard about graphic artists seriously thinking about switching to it... if it only had a Mac version...).
A couple of months ago, my siblings and I were cleaning out our parents' house. In the attic, I came across my original Compaq sewing-machine luggable. I'd given it to my dad when I upgraded to something newer. If memory serves, the Compaq came with two 5.25" floppy drives and 256K RAM. When I was using it myself, I upgraded to 640K RAM, swapped the B: drive for a 10-MB hard disk, and eventually swapped the A: drive for a 3.5" drive. I thought I was pretty cutting-edge (for a non-techie, that is).

I hauled the luggable down from the attic and plugged it in. The only things that worked were the fan and the power indicator light. I guess 25-plus years of San Antonio summers weren't exactly the best thing for the electronics. Off to Goodwill it went.
>apologies to skilled accountants who feel there is an art to their work

Although not an openly advertised role, "Creative Accountants" are abound.