skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is another way of looking at the "Steve Jobs Risk Premium." (what's the opposite of a premium?) Apple's stock price is not highly valued relative to growth and income, making the company undervalued. The best argument for this undervaluation being rational is that people think that all of the magic comes from Steve Jobs.

I think Jobs is a good leader, but the Magic is more widely distributed than that, and this means that Apple is probably a good buy.

While nobody may be able to raise the cash to do a complete acquisition of the whole company, the same financial metrics that make this appealing (if you could raise the cash) make the stock appealing for those who can raise the cash to buy only $3,000 of the company, or $30,000 of the company, or whatever fraction.

Personally, I'm being irrational. When Apple was $13 a share and had $6 in cash, I thought it was a screaming buy, but didn't invest because of fear. Now that failure then is holding me back, as investing now would be confirmation that failing to do so then was a mistake. I felt Apple was outside my circle of competence... but that was a rationalization.

That Apple is the most valuable tech company in the USA is a rationalization that somehow they must go down in value. I don't think that is wise.
I'm sure they think their screenshots tell the whole story... But I assure you, they don't.

I've even been looking for a good system for deployments, since I think the one at work isn't up to par. (Basically, do it all by hand. Heh.) But without some explanation of the features, I don't see this one doing it for me.
How to Use Ruby to Query a SPARQL Endpoint
Freedom Filter
Guilty as charged :p

Still, I could have gone with donothingfor120seconds.
original paper: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MC.2010....
Does studying for exams count as doing nothing?

It's certainly not accomplishing anything very meaningful :P
Khoi nghiep - Duy tri: Cau hoi cho moi nha doanh nhan
Có rất nhiều doanh nghiệp bỏ qua những yếu tố quan trọng dẫn đến thành công trong kinh doanh như: chiến lược rõ ràng, nguồn nhân lực dồi dào, khả năng tổ chức doanh nghiệp. Và kết quả là doanh nghiệp không phất lên được, mà chủ doanh nghiệp thậm chí vẫn không hiểu gì sao.
World's first solar sail unfurled in orbit
Seems like a white labeling opportunity. Though I am not sure if their TOS allows it.
What the Internet is really doing away with is a giant industry
that used to be useful, but now is merely parasitic.

That can go both ways: the Internet is also breeding a generation of customers that used to value and support music & books, but now is merely parasitic.

we can just give $1.50 to the author directly

I'm all for eliminating middle-men, but free is still a whole lot better than $1.50; and when downloading hundreds of songs from PirateBay, that's several hundreds of dollars versus free.

Musicians who embrace the new reality are doing fine.

Citation needed.

I would also love a functional gift economy, instead of one of scarcity ... but on the Internet a gift economy doesn't really work, because most users are not giving back. How many users of open-source software are giving back contributions and donations?

Even when your software is used by lots of corporations; you either have to beg, or your software has to be broken (in need of a fix).

And I quote from http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=200603210... ...

OpenSSH is in use by millions around the world
however the revenue stream just simply isn't there.

Music, books, software: all of them require effort and lots of it.
Being able to work on such things full-time is wonderful; and if broken technologies/legislation like DRM are the only solution for it, then that will be the future.
this means in Pakistan no one hangs out on HN except me=D
What if it takes off just because it's well-designed and customer focused, like most things Apple?

Are people really gullible, or are you bad at understanding what makes technology take off? I mean, just consider the options here; either millions of people are gullible and will jump on to anything called "iSomething" -- or, you're not that good at understanding what makes technology approachable and useful for most people.

For reference: the lower-case i in the name of the iPad is not what made it take off. It's that for the first time, someone made a well-designed purpose built tablet.
Paypal is preferred, but not necessary, there is an address where you can send a $5.00 check/money order on the website.

Also: If there is a postal outlet in your area, the game exists.
Google summer of code 2011 announced
Surely the correct thing to do would be to lobby to have these tests removed from Acid3 in favour of the separate font tests.

Webkit had to request changes to the tests in in Acid2.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2005_04.html#0...
You don't happen to know of anything similar in Scotland, central belt?
Free Online Tv
The television guide for free tv online, free movies online, news, sports, music and more.
I'd also like to add that arrays are the foundational building block of an extension of Haskell focused on parallelism, called "Data Parallel Haskell"

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Data_Parallel_Haskell
Mahalo 4.0: All about learning
This is great news, I too have been upset by the lack of ugly office suites. I am glad there is another product on the market flying the flag for open source and great user interfaces.
Pass?
congrats to Kevin Rose :)
More efficient than Cmd-w (or Ctrl-w)?
I believe it only shows up once. I've seen it the first time I went to TechCrunch today and now it isn't displaying anymore.

Also, it appears to show only while the page is loading.
The Oatmeal - HTML4 Logo & Zuckerbeast
Memory and Mental Calculation World Records
> The role of piracy. I think we know. And the trends are negative, for both readers and authors.

Except that the role of piracy is anything but clearcut. As Tim O'Reilly famously said in 2002 [1]: "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy."

Again and again over the past several years, we have seen both studies and anecdotal stories from artists finding that file sharing produced a net economic benefit. If "piracy" increases ten times and sales double, that still means doubled sales.

[1] http://tim.oreilly.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html
Appmator
I think they are more for the mom-and-pop business who wants an email list, not web apps that need to send email (which was always a sore spot for EC2 customers). That's why I compared it to Postcard, which is directly marketed as email for web apps. It would certainly be possible to run a Mail Chimp-esque email list with this, but it would take a lot more technical know-how (at minimum you need to create your own views for subscribe/unsubscribe/send). Or at least it will until someone starts selling a wrapper around it for a small mark-up...
I like this. They are priced at 25% of sendgrid, which we use as we send a million emails a month or so. But sendgrid provides a dedicated IP address. Having a dedicated IP over a period of time helps with delivery as the IP 'reputation' increases based on your delivery rates.

A lot of EC2 Ips are blacklisted by ISPs because people just create instances and spam away using exim/sendmail. If amazon and keep its IPs clean and also manage the service well, this is going to be THE email sending service to use.
From Paul Kinlan: http://github.com/paulkinlan

Do you have a Web app? Do you want to get it into the Chrome Web Store? Not sure exactly where to start?

If you can answer "Yes" to any of these questions, then this app is for you.

By entering your app url, Appmator will examine your web app and create a basic manifest that you can upload into the store with in 30 seconds.

It is really as simple as that.

Features:
- One click process
- 30 seconds to get your app in the Chrome Web Store
- Examines your site to get:
- Title of your app
- Description of your app
- Icons to use on your site
- Creates the zip file automatically for you to upload in seconds
- Allows you to configure your app immediately
They are free to try to monetize it using ads. And you are free to use adblock. Just like you are free to be unpolite.

Just don't complain when people don't like you. And don't complain about content behind paywalls.
Seems Amazon wants to fight it out with Google, by matching the new services with Google App Engine's free quota.

$0.10 per thousand in SES -> $0.0001 per email recipient // Same as in GAE.

You can send 2,000 messages for free each day when you call Amazon SES from an Amazon EC2 instance directly or through AWS Elastic Beanstalk. // Same as in GAE.

This, along with the recent AWS Elastic Beanstalk release and Amazon's intent of making Java hosting easy and without restrictions (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119104) all point to the day when I will be able to upload my Python app on GAE directly onto a pre-configured Amazon service (possibly making use of AppScale or TyphoonAE), which internally uses all these new services with free quotas.
Put the fun back into being a Sysadmin with Puppet
AWS' pace of innovation is simply stunning. It shows that the business is not an afterthought for Amazon but rather treated as being of the same importance as their core business.

Compare that to AppEngine and you have to say they leave them behind in the dust. (I know it's not an Apples to Apples comparison.)
Perl/CPAN wins hands down.

And I am both a Perl and a Java programmer.
And also, after you sign up for SES, you can't actually use it to send out emails to your customers until they grant you 'production' access. This process seems to be done manually as they say it can take up to 24 hours after an initial request, and from the sounds of it, someone contacts you personally to confirm your email usage.
I have worked with Constant Contact and it was a Constant Headache. My favorite was when they took the API down for maintenance and maintained HTTP 200 OK status codes for requests but instead of XML returned it was an HTML page saying they were down. I took a screenshot of the page because it was so surprising:

http://www.jongales.com/blog/2009/10/17/constant-contacts-in...
Mac Keyboard Tricks for the Linux-trained Fingers
As I said there are plenty of cases where Arrays suck.

However, 1,000,000 element arrays while not small are generally sorted so fast in memory that N LOG N is fine. I could write a custom hash function that would store the counts in an Array ;0, but it's not something I want to maintain so the fallback option on numbers outside the range would be sorted.

"Sure it is, after you've done your O(nlogn) sort." Creating a binary search tree is also an O(n log n) operation...

Binary search trees wins when you want to constantly updated list that you do searches on, but that's a smaller case than just looking for elements in sets. So for example: if you start with an unordered list and want to look up 50 elements to see which one is in it, you are better off with a linear search though an array, unless you can sort the list while waiting for those 50 elements.

PS: I am bending over backward to support that 95%, but when given all the constants is surprising how often an Array works just as well or better than the "optimal" data structure. Generally speaking you want large data sets in a database somewhere, locally you rarely deal with large data-sets and when you do it's often a temporary thing or a lookup table.
One thing is for sure, every time you do that the rest of the world gets ahead of you by a full day.

Really, instead of doing nothing for 24 hours or even 2 minutes try to really concentrate on what you're doing for a change. People - all people, not just programmers - are wired to do stuff, not to do nothing. And it's surprisingly hard to give something your full attention.

We are far too easily distracted and 'doing nothing' is just as hard as concentrating on one task for the exact same reason: you are easily distracted.

The attempt to concentrate fully on a productive task is a far more useful way to spend that time, and it doesn't have to be some 'set' time either.
Developers Confirm: This Is The Year Of The Tablet
dardan
Converting South African Rand into (5) US dollars and sending it to an American postal account (hoping it doesn't get stolen in the process) is unfortunately not worth the while.
dardan__@live.com
It will be interesting to see how Gmail treats email messages from Amazon SES.
What if it takes off just because it's well-designed and customer focused, like most things Apple?

I've had both an iPod and an iPhone. I'm not scoffing at Apple's ability to deliver.

However a very real thing is some people's attitude towards Apple being some kind of tech-God which cannot do anything wrong. They will praise anything they do (since Apple is now a status-symbol and they want to promote the status of their owned Apple devices) and apologize for any shortcomings or try to hide them under the carpet. That was what my remark was aimed at.

Now back to the point. If you read the article and see what is being envisioned/promoted you will see that it's the same thing all over again: Mobile device set to replace credit/debit-cards.

And ask yourself: If you need to make a payment, regardless of shiny UI and polished product finish, what will be simplest and most practical? A tiny card + PIN code or a freaking iPad with a soft keyboard and an complex, alpha-numerical iTunes-password?

Just trying to picture the iPad-payment scenario in my mind turns into comedy-sketches about the tech-stupidity and hype running wild. Actually I'm seeing this very vividly as a SNL skit.

It will not be elegant, it will not be practical and it will not be better than what we have already. And in the end, it will charge the same credit-card you could have paid with in the first place.

Tell me again, what value can this possibly add?
I would take git over mercurial if only for the wonderful ecosystem that has grown around github.
The short guide to being f**king awesome.
Inspired by 'SPOOKS' from Charlie Stross' 'Halting State'?
Very cool idea. As someone who works out 5-6x/week, I'd love to sign up for a gym that has that model. ;)

4x/week seems a little much for people that are trying to start out. I'll be curious to see how their plans evolve through market feedback.
We used to use SilverPop but then we just bought a PowerMTA license and wrote our own front end. If you are a small company with a large list, SilverPop is too expensive. Amazon is cheap but it doesn't look like it has any mailmerge (email personalization) capabilities.
This is good stuff. But isnt there already way too many wire-framing prototyping apps already?
A "Short" Plays Washington
That's because the article seems to be really old (refers to safari 2 instead of 5, and there's no mention of chrome)
Here's my blog post:

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/introducing-the-amazon-si...

If you like to solve puzzles, be sure to read the PS!
"and when downloading hundreds of songs from PirateBay, that's several hundreds of dollars versus free."

No, it isn't several hundreds of dollars, since many people who are downloading from PirateBay would not buy the songs even if the free option wouldn't be available.
Tony Robbins,Chris Howard or Harv Eker? Who is the Best?
Ebert never mentions Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the short story that the movie is derived from, who wrote the script with Kubrick, and who also wrote a first-class sci-fi novel with the same name and basic plot as the movie.

The Clarke novel is far more literal in spirit than Ebert's interpretation of the film. The most important difference is probably the bedroom. In the novel, it's a place where the aliens try to make Bowman comfortable while they study him. The novel describes how Bowman spits out the water he finds there, because it doesn't taste right: turns out it's too pure. The aliens knew he was supposed to have water, but they didn't understand about all the other trace chemicals we're used to. It's all very concrete.

That being said, there was a book about the making of 2001, and it talked about how there was some conflict between Kubrick and Clarke over the literalness issue. For instance, when the Star Child appears at the end of the movie, Clarke needed there to be concrete explanation of what he was doing there near Earth and why he was doing it, and suggested reasons to Kubrick, who was (in Clarke's description of the scene) "unimpressed." Clarke was also upset when he went to the first screening of the movie and saw that some of the explanatory plot was not there.

My takeaway is that Kubrick was more oriented toward 2001 being a visual poem, intended to convey his vision in a deep, evocative, non-literal way. And in that sense, it seems that Ebert's take on it is consistent with Kubrick's vision, if perhaps not consistent with what Clarke had expected/intended the movie to be.
> Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

Like I said, copy and paste BSD code into your GPL code, and you run into the same problem.

> Provided you properly credit the authors of the code you use, which you should be doing anyway,

Exactly. Even the BSD license has provisions which you must do or you don't have the rights.

I'm not suggesting these rights aren't onerous or difficult to comply with. Rather, you can't just lift BSD code without following the license.
A bit more background: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/LibreOffice-3-3-final...
I think they see the "content mill penalty" writing on the wall and are pivoting to spamming YouTube in advance.
Yes, or the library of the nearest university will be likely to grant you access for a small fee even if you are not a student there, plus you will also get access to their books.
Online Trust Alliance 2011 Data Breach Incident Readiness Guide Released
Ha ha, awesome, but I'm not going to go through the rigamarole of inputting my credit card details (or spend $20, for that matter) to buy it.

I wonder why this app is not on the App Store? I have a hard time believing that this app wouldn't sell 100 to 50,000 times as many copies at $2 on the App Store than it would outside the store (at any price).

Of course, with the capricious nature of Apple app stores, you never know what the actual reason is...
I agree, except for the first bit. It's not helpful to think of life as a race, leave that thinking for business time. It doesn't matter if you reach your 'goals' at 30 or 50 or never, the important thing is to live life along the way.

24 hours was never intended as a serious suggestion, it was supposed to be a hook to get people thinking about the very things you've mentioned.
I'm in. That is, as soon as you get me a .NET client library.
No, however, I'm going to have to read that as it sounds pretty interesting! The idea came out of a "What would be fun, get people exercise, and allow us to interact with others, make use of our hobbies - and add excitement to our lives?"
I'm guessing they can analyze the sentiment of the statement, and opt out when it's negative.
Nokia C3 Qwerty Keypad Mobile Review and Price | TECHGADGETSITE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taking_the_piss
You're denying basic free market economics with an emotional argument. In a competitive market, the cost of a good tends towards its marginal cost of production. We get all excited as the cost of solar cells tends lower and lower, as the marginal cost of their production gets smaller. Do we "value" solar cells less because of this?

"the Internet is also breeding a generation of customers that used to value and support music & books, but now is merely parasitic."

To borrow a phrase, "Citation needed".
No, the terms are specific:

> Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
> Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

Fail to do either of these things, and you run into the same problem you would have by not complying with the GPL.
The popularity of Avatar tells us little about the long term commercial viability of 3D films. Avatar was the subject of a huge amount of marketing and hype (deserved or not) so there are reasons to think it would have done well regardless. Especially when you consider how the directors previous mainstream effort fared. Also, the box office figures for 3D features are falling.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3ea83ed0-1770-11e0-badd-00144feabd...

You're using hand picked data points to argue against the validity of an attempted reasoned argument.
> One thing is for sure, every time you do that the rest of the world gets ahead of you by a full day.

Employers who have people working on their factories 16 hours per day must think the same thing.
If it won't be elegant and simple to use, it will never see the light of day.
That's his point. The choice for a consumer (who knows about BitTorrent) is between paying hundreds of dollars, or paying nothing. Given that, most people will choose to pay nothing.
There's another way to look at it. eBooks sales, whether in Kindle, iBooks, or another marketplace, end up with similar dynamics to the App Store in iOS. People have paid $0.99-$4.99 millions of times over for apps such as Angry Birds that would have sold far fewer copies as a $19.99 boxed PC or game console game. I think eBook readers actually encourage buying books, and for the vast majority of the public, it's so easy to do that they'll do a lot more impulsive buys than before.

Additionally, as DennisP mentioned, if the author is actually getting more money from it, then we're just doing away with a middleman. That's what lot of startups are trying to do right now, after all, and it's a great opportunity. For creative writers, musicians, or designers and coders, there's more chance than before to get your content out there and sell it more seamlessly than before. That can't be all bad!
It's interesting to see where things go, will piracy lower the quality of new books being turned out or will it breed a generation of authors just as talented as those in the past that are willing to get by making a significantly smaller amount than they would have a generation ago.

I can't really say that the declining music sales of the last decade have effected the quality of music being put out in any noticeable way.

I guess the longer term problem is that it's creating a next generation that know no other way but to freely obtain content without contributing anything back.