skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Epic post but very well done (as usual!) and informative. I'm going to have to work on setting up my own Jekyll.
There are many companies (and government agencies like NASA) that do a lot of high-end 3D visualization and processing on linux. Having one of these desktops would be nice in one of those environments.
The problem at the moment is that the publishers are marketing eBooks as a new luxury product to a niche of rich techies who but iPads on a whim.

SO an eBook costs the same as the hardback - screwing you. But the contract with the author has the same clauses charging them a percentage of buy-backs and printing faults or damaged copies as the paper version - screwing them.

The publishers need to realize the game has changed - and quickly unless they want to end up like the record business
Bookshop swaps Kindles for real books
For how long? I paid $500 or so for my Radeon HD 4870x2 around 2 years ago, and it's done everything you described since then. In my experience, getting high end video cards is a better choice in the long run.
I thought this was normal? They'd have two separate mailings sent from two locations such that they would only meet at the destination's mailbox on separate days. Then, after receiving the card, it'd have to be activated by calling an 800 number and giving some information, at which point they might also force a PIN change.

Also, he worries about the PIN being stored somewhere in plain text. If one-way hashes were used, anyone obtaining the hash would only need to test it against 10k possible values to get the original.
I am reading the homepage but don't understand why I would use this.

Sentences like this don't help: "SnapBill is an online invoicing and billing system with service provisioning capabilities." Compare with the writing here: http://aws.amazon.com/fps/

Your explanation here ("Our main focus is on creating Services, and selling them.") isn't really clear either. Find a good way to explain that main focus in 2 sentences, and put that on top of the page.
Feynman is saying that explanations do not detract from enjoyment, not that they are necessary to it.
Refactoring only goes so far in this case, since we can only realistically refactor one application. Unit tests help the refactored application but they don't guarantee that all of the other pieces (DB stored procs, MS Access, classic ASP, assorted other bits) still work.
Nope, my mom uses it for her coursework as she's working toward her master's degree. She really does like it, she says it's more readable. We've all tried to convince her otherwise, but as long as her advisor doesn't mind, she'll keep using it.
We've got a lot in the pipeline :D
Munich is hiring, have a look at the cool possibilities: http://www.google.de/intl/en/jobs/germanylocations/munich/sw...
No, but many systems will be that much more likely to be replaced by something that could possibly run in the cloud. It'll become something actually on the horizon in ten years, as opposed to something unreasonably far off.
Your summary is much more emphatic (“people”; “substantially easier”) than any of the research I’ve seen.

As for color schemes: any scheme which makes a website unreadable by the color blind will make it mostly unreadable by everyone else, too: human vision distinguishes shapes and details mainly via lightness contrast.
If you can't trust Google, who can you trust?
And it's not even necessarily complex. Almost any MS Word doc that I get will be rendered incorrectly in OO if the document contains imbedded graphics (e.g. a logo). And vice-versa.
The article seems confused, or stuck in obsolete ways of thinking.

The real purpose is not to pay for 'books'. It is not to 'protect' author's 'rights. It is not to have 'ownership. The purpose here is to pay for production of books. Production does not essentially depend on 'ownership' or 'rights' at all.

Books are data. You do not 'own' data in the normal sense. It is an abundance, it is infinitely copyable. Gluing together the ideas of books and ownership no longer makes much sense. And similarly for 'rights': they were a practical means of funding production in a material world, but now they are not.

It is somewhat reasonable to observe the apparent lack of confirmed business model for funding book production in an internet world. But the undertone that we are slipping into doom and dread is funny when you think about it. Are we losing something? Has the internet taken something away? No, it has given us something. We do not have less now, we have more. So, we need new ways to organise ourselves and production. Why is that such an impossible thing to imagine? We can build the internet, but we cannot re-arrange what we do a little? We should have at least an iota of confidence in human capability.

You hardly even need optimism: simply look around. We have had at least a decade of 'piracy' of music. Oh no! Surely the world must have collapsed! Ask yourself: do you have less music to enjoy now than before? I very much doubt it. There is more music now than ever.

This whole 'end of the world' fantasy is largely just industry FUD. Stop perpetuating it, and instead celebrate the internet and think of ways to use it to do more than before.
Awethu!
Will there be a Data Center Hiring Boom for 2011?
You're having a conversation with two different people. I dedicated half of my first paragraph to the issue. skore is who you're responding to in this comment, who has different opinions (valid ones, but they differ from mine).

I do not think that the author's right to choose their own license is a minor point. It think it's absolutely core to everything about the GPL and licensing and copyright in general. The author's right to determine how their work is used is pretty much the most important point.

And, honestly, in my opinion, and the opinion of the law, it makes all other arguments moot. The law is on the side of the creator of the work, and I believe ethics is on the side of the creator of the work, as well. If the creator of the work wants it to be licensed under the GPL, and you disagree, as far as I'm concerned your only ethical response is to not use the code, or write your own and license it however you see fit, or negotiate with the author of the work you want under a different license. As I've mentioned in other threads, I've sold BSD and commercial licenses of my code in the past, and I currently use a dual-licensed model for my products, and many others have done the same over the years.

One other point I've made elsewhere in this conversation, but I'll make again here: Damned near every flame war about the GPL, which this has obviously devolved into, tends to be not about the clarity of the license or whether it can force people to license their code in ways they didn't want (which is what the original post was about, in case anyone has forgotten). It's simply that some people do not like the GPL and disagree with the FSF and its motives. That's fine. But don't pretend you don't understand the license, don't obfuscate the meaning or capabilities of the license to claim that it can "infect" code or that it is "viral" or that a BSD project can accidentally become GPL. That's just more FUD. You aren't "infected" if you use GPL code without abiding by the terms of the license. You are simply in violation of the license, and you have many means to remedy that situation, and no one is going to force you to release all of your code under the GPL, and no one has any legal method to cause you to do so. Code does not magically become GPL just because you accidentally included some GPL code.

That was the point of the original linked article (which is what we're discussing here, let's not forget), and a point I've tried to make clear all along, in various ways.
While I don't think he'll get very many takers - except maybe people who were given a Kindle for Christmas - this strikes me as a great way of marketing to people who are in the market to buy paper books, but might have bought them from a larger retailer (or Amazon!) instead.
The Power of "First Touch" Attribution
I have no doubt that some people truly like it. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m wrong.
Just put a soft glottal stop between the schwa and the o, or just pronounce them as two words.
I don't know about that... In preparing to launch a high volume email startup, I have a few problems:

* How reputable are Amazon's IP's? Will my emails get flagged as spam due to reuse and general abuse?

* Another cranky API to use. Why not STMP?

* Sendgrid (and several others) have wonderful built in statistics and other quick n' easy apps.

* Also, those services' core business is deliverability, not volume. I feel AWS's offering may be the other way around...
"and I don't know if its intentional"

Surely you jest :) If there's one thing 37signals do extremely well it's getting people to talk/write about them.
Most of this post was over my head since I'm not a programmer, but I really enjoyed the part where Stammy explained what caused his site's revenue to fall. I'll be interested to see how this change affects his search rankings.
But the value of OpenID is that it isn't a single system. Anybody can be an OpenID provider, including me with the box sitting in my basement.
Installing Linux in favor of Windows won't make computers cheaper. Microsoft sells OEM distributors their Windows 7 Home license for around $50. Then, the reason off the shelf computers come bundled with so much bloatware from the likes of McAffee, Symantec, and 100 free hours of AOL is because those companies pay for it. In many cases, pc manufacturers actually return a net positive on installed software.
How to remove software cracks and keygens from file hosting sites
How Steve Jobs gets things done
Yet another (scary) example of the U.S. trying to act more like China (with regards to the internet): http://www.futuregov.asia/articles/2010/oct/22/chinas-real-n...

The previous example being the DHS censoring web sites such as The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks.
Baltimore, MD -- thanks for the input!
If you don't need CUDA or PhysX, is there any reason to use nvidia and not ATI?
Yea thats definitely it, just something I've noticed over time. Its a great strategy for getting people on your side, I think I see gruber doing the same thing from time to time, with less transparency though.
Most likely you have what's known as "fake" RAID. Really it's just software RAID, with a few things in BIOS to make it easier to implement.
Prompted by security holes in Wordpress that resulted in spam links embedded in my blog, I switched to Jekyll about a year ago. The switch was painful, but the results were good.

A few months later, I switched from Jekyll, which is written in Ruby, to http://blogofile.com, which is very similar to Jekyll, but written in Python. The second switch was prompted by one of the parsers in Jekyll repeatedly choking on bad markup left over from Wordpress, but failing to reveal the location of the parse errors.

I've subsequently used Blogofile for a larger site that includes both static pages and a blog. It's worked extremely well.
I never quite get the idea of OpenID. It's like outsourcing the front door of your Italian restaurant business.

Furthermore, when using OpenID, users have to remember yet another type of token. As opposed to the ubiquitous email+password.
Indeed. I don't know how their features compare, but hey, Hyde is built on Python. :-)
I love alienware products very much. Their sheer no-compromise attitude to build the best gaming pc's is known through the world. I personally feel that they should enter linux market by manufacturing specific products, for ex something on the lines of google cr-48 chrome notebook. There is lot of scope in this area and personally as a hacker/programmer I know what kind of hunger we are in. Also a lot of customizations can be done on linux desktops & laptops which the traditional companies like sony,lenovo,ibm,apple don't offer.
//(There is lot to talk, but i think i made all my important points)\\

So I hearty welcome their interest in knowing our interest, but will be seriously disappointed if they didn't enter this market. :)
Startup Quote: Edwin Land, creator, Polaroid
Ideologically it's good, aesthetically and phonetically not so much.
@Gabriel: How long do you think this will be a sustainable approach to powering Web search? What I mean is, after a certain amount of traffic will you be able to continue using all these external APIs or do you expect that in the future you will have to augment some or all of this data with something in-house like moving to full-scale Web crawls?
The Accidental Semantic Web
Can today's chaotic linked data help systems get smarter?
I think this works better, I don't think a traditional landing page would work here.
If it was reasonably priced and decent, I would actually love support for Linux on my pc. My next one will probably be an Alienware (the mx11 netbook), and if they can make things less of a headache, I'm all for it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a geek, I'm a power user, I can fix my own computer. I just don't want to. I just installed the latest version of Ubuntu on my current netbook, and surprise surprise, I need to hack some drivers and recompile the kernel. It's a chore that I just don't want to deal with any more.

More economically, if the price of support works out less than the opportunity cost of doing it myself, then it obviously makes sense to use the support.
It's not as annoying as trying to download an update from MEGA compoter corp and having to click through dozens of pages about not downloading to N Korea and having to read and agree to some prose that MEGA corp is a wholly owned subsidiary of MEGA corp global except the download is being provided by MEGA corp services which is the luxembourg tax haven of MEGA corp .......

Just to check that I'm clikigng on the windows 32bit version
Sadly, DisplayPort monitors are still vastly overpriced. We need mainstream LCDs to start supporting the standard.
I'd like to check this out, but the code examples aren't nearly dark enough (on FF4.0b9 at least) which makes them painful to read.
An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.

- Edwin Land

http://startupquote.com/post/2926218077
Some constructive critism: you make some good points, but it's hard to digest them in such a long format. I'd suggest you try editing your thoughts down more aggressively so that readers can digest them quickly. If you find yourself having to write a conclusion paragraph to a comment, odds are you're not editing your key points down enough to get them across.

This isn't meant to be offensive, it's just one of those things that until someone tells you about it you'll continue to go on unknowingly making the same mistake. I had someone do this with me recently in regards to my presentation 'skills', or lack thereof, and it was very helpful.
homo-economicus is an absurd simplification.
Killer post, wish I had this 6 months ago. I also use Jekyll on ginzametrics.com and it has been a dream. Your site is much bigger than mine so I haven't encountered the rebuild time issues, but it's good to know about.

Static files are definitely the way to go.
Model Selection and the Difficulty of Falsifying Probability Models: Part II
choking on bad markup left over from Wordpress,
but failing to reveal the location of the parse errors.

I have this one nagging issue where it says I have an unclosed liquid highlight tag but I have no idea what post it's in.
...And?

What does that sort of entitled whining have to do with the storage methodology?

Also, neither Dropbox nor Gmail have ever charged me a cent.
9,000 interviews, at €30.00 an hour, times two interviewers, is €270,000 x 2 = €540,000.

If through recruitment agencies, assuming a 10%-of-first-year's-salary fee and average salary of €40,000,
€40,000 x 10% x 1000 = €4,000,000

I hear that you should multiply x two the gross salary to get the annual cost of an employee.
€40,000 x 2 x 1000 = €80 million.

Assuming they are permanent staff, and the risk free rate is 3%, then an additional liability of €80,000,000/.03 = €2.7 Billion Euro is created for Google. This figure makes the previous two immaterial so I am going to forget about them.

Current market capital of Google is 144.079573 billion Euro. (and somebody should tell Google's search calculator folks that it's Euro, not Euros, as 's' does not pluralise in all languages)

2.7 divided by 144 = 1.8% of market capital (or overall current share value based on most recent market price) that this should cost them. Says nothing about what this could or could not earn them.

Just thinking out loud. I probably made a mistake somewhere.
My approach is to do everything in CSS animations for browsers that support it, and then fall back to jQuery animations for those that don't.

CSS animations can take advantage of hardware graphics acceleration and they render very nicely on mobile browsers.

So, my answer is: both.
> Their sheer no-compromise attitude to build the best gaming pc's is known through the world

Sorry, but this is fluff. There are many companies that make specialist gaming PCs, and Alienware aren't number one. Don't get me wrong, they're good (and the vast majority of pre-made "gaming" PCs I've seen were absolutely terrible), but they're no Scan for example.
That wasn't a review.
I don't know. It's basically software with a sneakernet last hop and mtr would take forever! If by "real life" security, you mean "physical" security, I don't see any physical security issue. Even in the military, this sort of stuff would be handled by crypto guys, not masters-at-arms. As far as physical security of the mail, FWIW, you can ship Top Secret through the US Mail. Just double-envelope it and send it registered.
Intel signs Will.i.am as Director of Creative Innovation
Damn: Pixelmator grabs $1 Million on the Mac App Store
Looks like people can make a load of cash on the Mac App Store. $1 Million in 20 days is pretty crazy.
I would also look into doing an automatic video about your product and do a quick demo reel. (no sound)
Haha, this is extremely funny, since that email was written by Derek Sivers; then owner of CD Baby, and an incredibly popular contributer around here.
I don't know how to link to a piece of a TED talk, so http://www.ted.com/talks/paula_scher_gets_serious.html

The whole talk is good, but around 4:45 she starts talking about her cover design for books and music, and eventaully expands into covering buildings with words. The first thing she mentions is how much she hates Helvetica :-)
I'm also a native English speaker, and I also presumed that a word had been omitted in the title. It was easy enough to figure out from context once in the article, but from the title alone I didn't even try to guess.
> IIRC Microsoft had a completely separate team working on Win NT initially, lead by David Cutler.

If you're interested in this, I highly suggest you read "Show Stopper!". It provides some interesting insights into Microsoft's early days with NT.

http://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Micr...
I have no experience with Jekyll, but is there some way to do a "limited rebuild" to overcome the rebuild time issues?

For a blog, all that really needs to be updated (aside from generating the new post) are index / archive / tag pages, right? Can't you just rebuild them, while leaving old posts alone?
Yeah, that was exactly the problem I had-- Liquid error, but no idea what post contained the problem. I ended up doing a binary search by removing half of the posts, re-running Jekyll to see if the error persisted, and so forth.

Fortunately, the switch to another blog compiler is easy once you've got everything as flat files.
PhD Dissertations Writing Tips
The most important factor when writing a PhD dissertation is the fact that information gained through thorough research on the particular topic studied should be written in the most comprehensive manner possible. This will make for a successful dissertation.
It's a shame that CAS for multitenant apps never really took off. We have an integrated CAS and OpenID server to handle single-sign on for all our apps, and losing OpenID will mean an additional username/password for our people to remember for Highrise. We are probably going to write our own CRM at this point.
Note that pyjs has several compilation options, one of which wraps numbers to distinguish between float and int. However, stuff like correct delegation with multiple inheritance might never work because js can only have one delegate. Currently one of the big problems in practice is that attribute access doesn't behave like getattr, which makes working with @property inconsistent. Also, __call__ doesn't work. Lots of minor details. At least they are checked in the unit tests, in case someone wants to help.
Introducing a new way to find out what people are buzzing on the web now.
The readability bookmarklet works on code examples too:

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
I write this in the hope it will be taken constructively: I think you desperately need a good information architect and copywriter to redo your home page, tour, etc.

I have spent much of the past two days looking at various options for recurring billing and related automation for a start-up. It sounds like your service ought to be of interest to me, right now.

Unfortunately, I have absolutely no idea after scanning your home page and tour page what your target market is. Are you aimed at invoicing for freelancers/agencies with a few repeat clients? Monthly billing for end users of subscription web services?

You have written a lot (probably far too much) on your home page and tour page, but without enough detail about what your service actually does to decide whether it's worth investigating further. For example, you mention tax, but not whether you automatically handle VAT based on location (without which you aren't going to get very far here in Europe). You mention payment collection and credit cards, but without a clear statement of your level of PCI DSS compliance and whether clients need to handle any card data on their own systems to use your service (without which you probably aren't going to get very far at all).

You aren't short of buzzwords and transparent marketing drivel, though, and there are a few silly spelling errors and the like as well. That all paints a very unprofessional picture given that you're asking clients to trust you with vital financial matters.

For what it's worth, I did spend about 15 minutes looking over your site before writing this post, partly to try to be honest but constructive in the criticism, and partly out of genuine interest. In roughly the same amount of time looking at the web site of another business this morning, I had confirmed that they offered broadly the service the start-up was looking for, identified most of the details about how the start-up's pricing plans could be implemented using their system, identified a few specific details to ask about and an e-mail address where the questions could be sent if and when the start-up was ready to explore more deeply, worked out approximately what the monthly costs would be for adopting the service, and begun exploring the customisations and APIs to see whether they could address any of those questions I mentioned before.

On a more constructive note, your site does look attractive, and I expect most of the bad impression it made on me really could be overcome quite quickly with a bit of professional help to structure the content, so that the important details come across and the general feel is more professional service and less budget store TV ad.
"Billions of dollars are lost every year from illegal downloads of music, movies and software"

The industry has yet to present proof to this statement other than: estimate the number of downloads and do a dumb multiplication with retail prices.
Software Engineering and C++