skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps unfortunate, but not entirely unmotivated. SELinux has caused nothing but trouble for me. Things strangely don't work, until you remember to look for audit messages, and the documentation I've seen doesn't make it much less opaque...
We compared the numbers we got from our newsletter survey and those we got from Stack Overflow and they were actually much closer than even we expected. Mercurial gets a slight bump in our newsletter responses, but SVN still dominates across the board.
Hmm... maybe JRuby? It's reasonably performant nowadays, and has great interop with Java (which the OP knows already). You could write parts of it in Java if it needed to be faster, or even in C via JNA (or --ugh-- JNI).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110
Hackers spear-phish, infiltrate French Ministry of Finances
The first chart is all phones, not just smartphones and HTC only sell smartphones. You either have to sell lots of dumbphones too (like Samsung and LG) or sell a whole bunch of smartphones (RIM and Apple).

I'm not sure whether Motorola is there mostly on the strengths of smartphone sales alone or combined with dumbphones.
Tethering to a PC/Mac is an obvious hack, but nevertheless today's tablets (whether iOS, Android, or whatever) are clearly post-PC devices. Why?

The filesystem has gone away.

Everything about the previous generation of computers revolved around files. To a user, everything on a PC is a file. Nothing on my iPad looks like a file. There are icons for applications. Are they files? Or is this HTML presented in a browser? Does a user know or care?

This simple difference changes everything. No files means that DVDs, floppy discs, thumb drives, and all other forms of storage are suddenly repositioned. iTunes sucks in so many ways, but one way it doesn't suck is that I don't care where my songs are, just that there's a database of songs with an interface that is song-specific. Music playing applications are post-PC ways to manipulate music.

Obviously iTunes exists on a Mac/PC as well as on an iOS device. On a Mac or a PC, it provides an interface for dealing with music files, but I can still hunt for the files if I want to. If I move a file, I break the carefully crafted illusion of there just being music.

On a Mac, I install software by downloading it and dragging it into my Applications folder. I'm manipulating files. Sure, there are fronts put up so I can avoid the files, like installer packages and the new Mac App Store. But the application files are still there to be manipulated and I can still fool around with the Library and stumble over the filesystem's spoor when I go trekking through the Finder.

On an iOS device, there are no files, there is no Finder. Software is installed by some magic process that never exposes me to the implementation. The illusion is complete. This is what makes an iOS device a post-PC device. I imagine that there are or will be tablets and phones where I can break into the device and discover that hidden from the user is a world of files. Such devices won't be post-PC devices, they'll be PCs in a tablet form factor.

To summarize, my contention is that "Post-PC Device" doesn't mean tablet or phone, it means "No filesystem."
Wait. What blew up that it took someone 20 hours to realize? The first thing you take from that is, don't do anything without double-checking your change to make sure it worked.

In terms of rollback, just don't do anything which isn't reversible. Taking chances with your changes is taking chances with your business. If you don't know how to rollback whatever you're doing, ask someone who does (there is always a way to roll back or add redundancy).
See also ShaderToy: http://www.iquilezles.org/apps/shadertoy/
Full Text Searching with Solr and Sunspot
Adobe Releases Flash-To-HTML5 Conversion Tool
The physics puzzle is what attracts most people to the game. But I've noticed with my son the "story" elements, sounds, and characters are also a big draw. He actually wanted an angry birds stuffed animal for Xmas, after seeing the ads on the mobile game.

In addition, for my son I've found that the physics element in Angry Birds has helped build interest in other physics puzzles, including those that don't have as much flavor, such as Ragdoll Blaster.
The Wally Interface Awards
> I would say you can get more powerful laptops/netbooks and desktops with more storage for less than $500.

Come on, don't compare crappy netbooks running windows 7 on a tiny screen to the iPad. The iPad is a completely different kind of device. While its specs might be (hypothetically speaking (for the sake of the argument)) crappier than some netbook out there, that's not the point.

You ignored the whole sentence and picked on "cheaply". You forgot "non-expert users" and "simply".

Also, coming back to the price. Think of the value the iPad is offering; not just the specs. Easy to hold, looks gorgeous, plenty of apps, fun to use, fluid experience .. etc.
How I concentrate in a noisy office
Hi, I'd like to know more about the projects you're involved. I checked your user info but I don't see your e-mail.
I don't write much C, mostly C++. But one of the things I swear about most when using C is the totally primitive and error-prone string handling. (I realize that C is supposed to be "primitive", but this really is a domain where the pain goes up drastically.)
A new browser idea
I live in Ireland and am an Irish citizen (US citizen too, hoping to move to the US). There are several reasons I would think the US is better for entrepreneurs and startups than Ireland.

* The truly brilliant people tend to leave after high school, since there're no world class universities here (particularly for sciences).

* People seem, in my opinion, to get quite tunneled vision in terms of what they can achieve: they see Ireland as the boundary of their successes. People here tend to be unambitious.

* Labour laws in Ireland are very strict: once you hire someone, it's practically impossible to fire them.

* We are currently in a terrible economic situation, the country is bankrupt. 20 year old Irish companies have trouble getting credit, let alone startups.

* It's probably worth noting that Enterprise Ireland is generally considered quite incompetent in terms of deciding who to invest in and in general operation of their programs. Getting this grant would require, most likely, an absurd amount of hoop jumping.

* Dublin is also still a very expensive place to live.

That said, there're a lot of great things about Ireland (more specifically Dublin):

* It's a very small (and very social!) place, building a network is not hard, everyone knows everyone.

* Dublin is a great place to live.

* Very low corporation tax (12.5%)

EDIT: Formatting
Way to steal my karma.... :)

As the original author of this, I was going to put it into a much more presentable state before showing it off here.

For those confused, here's a proper explanation. No real-world thing can actually be Turing complete (able to express basically any computation that we might want to perform of any size). That's because there are finitely many atoms in the universe, so we can only construct machines of finite size.

It's well known that Rule 110 (Google it) is Turing Compete.

What I've done is made an implementation of Rule 110 in HTML and CSS. Since CSS can't actually really manipulate state, some user interaction is required to "drive" it. In the one that bgruber linked to, it's clicking.

Here's a bigger version that doesn't require the user to know where to put his mouse. The tab-space combo is just as legitimate as requiring that you plug a computer into a wall to power it in order to run a Java program. http://elilies.com/rule110-full.html

Also, I haven't tested it on anything besides the latest Chrome on Mac.
Without knowing too much about these other sites, what sets DecideOnADate apart is that we focus on driving a group towards a date that works for as many as possible and doing so with the least amount of effort as possible on part of the organizer. Our goal is for the organizer to create the event, and then not have to do a thing. We will notify them when a date is decided on.
Personally I use github for projects I want to link to on my resume and bitbucket for websites and stuff I don't want to share with the world (yet). Maybe it's because I'm a novice user who only does the basic commands, but I see no real difference between git and mercurial.

I use TFS in my professional job and am pretty surprised that so many people like it. Everyone I work with either hates it or lives with it. Doing stuff like moving changes from one branch to another is unreasonably hard.
As far as I remember is LaTeX (or TeX itself) touring complete, too. In the end, if you can simulate a turing machine (or another "equivalent" calculating "device") the language is itself turing complete. While not being a html/css wizard, by the amount of complex examples i saw you could do with only HTML/CSS3, I am not surprised that you can write a cellular automaton in it.

edit: typo (personal hangup with touring/turing)
The infographic makes it look like half of VSS users love it. But later on, the article states that zero VSS users said they loved it.
My guess is that a lot of that 70% represents the OS these people use professionally at work. I'd be more interested in seeing the split between OS used professionally and OS used personally.
I usually don't like to cite any popular tech books, but there is a great chapter in "Free" by Chris Anderson on examples where piracy is being monetized in China, Brazel, etc.

It's probably one of the best parts of the book.
Getting the most out of PyCon
I'm not sure I understand the need to organize new innovations into "generations". I see the current tablet offerings as a solution to a different problem than the one PCs currently solve.

The idea that tablets are "post-pc" seems far too limiting, and I think it reflects the current trend in consumer electronics to race for some lowest-common-denominator-does-it-all-general-purpose device, rather than understanding that different needs can sometimes be better solved with different devices.
If you skip the rest of the article, at least check out the slides.

http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/engr245-session-01-course-o...
That would be the corporate world. Not only web startups need programmers ;)
The article mentions Kiln (http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/) as a code review tool. What other code review/collaboration tools are people using with Git and/or Mercurial?
given that 'others' does not seem to be 0.5% of the chart: what else is in there?
What happens when you decide that some friends get to see the "inner child" and some don't?

In Appleseed, you create an "inner child" friends circle, and post it only to them. Nobody else would know that friends circle even exists.

It's a challenge, from a UI/UX perspective, but if I could fix it in a way that is generally intuitive, with barely any funds, working in my spare time, then surely Facebook, with all it's engineers and funding can do the same.
meh... If someone has physical access to a GNU/Linux machine you'll most likely get pwned regardless.
Hamming said the same thing:

Most great scientists know many important problems. They
have something between 10 and 20 important problems for
which they are looking for an attack. And when they see a
new idea come up, one hears them say "Well that bears on
this problem." They drop all the other things and get after
it. Now I can tell you a horror story that was told to me
but I can't vouch for the truth of it. I was sitting in an
airport talking to a friend of mine from Los Alamos about
how it was lucky that the fission experiment occurred over
in Europe when it did because that got us working on the
atomic bomb here in the US. He said "No; at Berkeley we had
gathered a bunch of data; we didn't get around to reducing
it because we were building some more equipment, but if we
had reduced that data we would have found fission." They
had it in their hands and they didn't pursue it. They came
in second!

The great scientists, when an opportunity opens up, get
after it and they pursue it. They drop all other things.
They get rid of other things and they get after an idea
because they had already thought the thing through. Their
minds are prepared; they see the opportunity and they go
after it. Now of course lots of times it doesn't work out,
but you don't have to hit many of them to do some great
science. It's kind of easy. One of the chief tricks is to
live a long time!

"You and Your Research"

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
Is my MacBook Pro any more Turing complete? All of the memory came with it. There's no way to expand the memory as it's running.
Never underestimate a company's reluctance to change. Usually, the bigger they are (or the more clueless the decision-makers are), the greater the reluctance.
Not for logging in, though. And in the future more and more sites could turn to Facebook as their single login solution, because they solve the tracking consent problem.
Resorting to a shell? I prefer the shell. I'd like to see users of other operating systems turn off their computers from bed without resorting to VNC.
Canvas vs SVG performance on iPad
Baltimore's a good target. You generally would expect something like this to happen in the (nearby) DC area, but between Fort Meade and other Maryland-area institutions, there is some AMAZING talent in or around Baltimore, and it's much more pleasant getting into and out of.

Mike, if you need any help with anything technical, please feel free to let me know -- contact info is in my profile.
I tried to do a little bit better of a job explaining it above. I was caught off guard... I intended to post this in a few days with a proper explanation.
But the HTML is not the program; it's the machine that runs the program. In that view, the tape being finite is just like the tape (RAM, disk, mercury delay lines) of a physical machine being finite.
Aren't payment processors a pain?

From my experiences, they make you create terms of service for every web app no matter how tiny. Are there ways around this and what do you suggest?
Slicehost or Linode. You get a basic, empty box, and Slicehost has some of the best documentation out there. Everything you do will be the "normal" way - so you don't need to deal with any heroku-style weirdness. Great way to learn.
I knew there are bitcoin app engine projects. It just would be nice to host everything including the wallet on AppEngine. Since money is involved, would be nice to not have too much administrator responsibility.
Eva Longoria: firme y fuerte con el hermano de Penélope Cruz
I don't understand our obsession with version control systems. I still find that SVN meets my needs 95% of the time. I've used git for my projects that are hosted on heroku, but I've never been so impressed with it that I want to completely move to git.
I wonder how much further along git would be on Windows if it had run better on that platform historically, and had a better GUI.

The Mac numbers don't surprise me at all, as the large influx of unix people to the platform are more used to using CLI tools.

(yes, I'm saying that on the whole, Mac users are less afraid of the CLI than Windows users. Shocker!)
SELinux relies on the kernel being intact. If you do a buffer overrun in the kernel, then SELinux isn't going to help at all.
http://jsbin.com/owehi4/
Maybe in the future we can all be IMVU:

Back to the deploy process, nine minutes have elapsed and a commit has been greenlit for the website. The programmer runs the imvu_push script. The code is rsync’d out to the hundreds of machines in our cluster. Load average, cpu usage, php errors and dies and more are sampled by the push script, as a basis line. A symlink is switched on a small subset of the machines throwing the code live to its first few customers. A minute later the push script again samples data across the cluster and if there has been a statistically significant regression then the revision is automatically rolled back. If not, then it gets pushed to 100% of the cluster and monitored in the same way for another five minutes. The code is now live and fully pushed. This whole process is simple enough that it’s implemented by a handfull of shell scripts.

http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deplo...
Thanks so much for sharing this.
thank you, I definitely will reach out. The main thing we're gonna need is people to help advise these companies (not too time-consuming, just answer some questions here and there). I agree with your assessment. There are a lot of under-the-radar companies and people hanging out in this area.
At ~$20k for ~6% equity, YC would seem to be an even smaller valuation than $500k, right?
Why is it stretching things a little far? Non-infinite tape is, as you noted, a limit on everything we consider turing complete: this is just running at a much higher level of abstraction than your computer. You could (if you were so inclined) create a physical machine with a grid of memory that behaved according to rules defined by CSS selectors. Just because this doesn't do direct memory access and behave like the computer or a traditional TM doesn't make it not a TM. (Or, at least, any less of a TM than the computer you're using.)
International Women’s day celebrates female entrepreneurs
Adobe releases Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool to support Apple's iOS
Sources? Biologically, the default state for human embryos is female after all, look up Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome.
> Clock starts once it's reviewed and accepted, but protection starts once it's filed.

If so, that's a change (back).

A "long time ago", the clock started at issue, so some folks filed and kept an application alive for (in some cases) decades until the patent was worth something. They then let it issue and ... profit. That's what was known as "submarine patents".

A while back (20+ years IIRC), the rules were changed so the clock started on filing. (Despite that, some folks still rant about submarine patents.)

Have those rules really changed back? When?
Apache hacker here. AMA.
Your point is entirely orthogonal to my point, so I am quite comfortable that following your digression does not undermine my comment in any way.

What I will say about Android handset makers racing each other to the bottom is that what is good for you as a consumer is when entire products compete against each other. The trouble with looking at handsets is that they aren't really whole and complete products. They need an OS/Ecosystem/Theme Park and they need a carrier's service to complete them.

What is best for consumers is when there is competition for all the elements of the stack from top to bottom, either in packages (iOS on iPhone on AT&T vs. Android on Nokia on Sprint) or individually. I don't know how things will play out in the Android "space," but from what I've seen so far, the big nut to crack for consumers is the carriers, not the hardware and not the OS.

When text messages are less than a penny each, I will know that the entire stack is competing in a way that is good for consumers.
People still using IE6 might not be gamers.

For example I have no idea what a PS1 was like (or PS2 for that matter?)
Turing. Not 'touring'. Please, it was right up there in the headline.
I grew up in Bethesda, MD and for personal reasons would like to get back there. Some of our early adopters are likely to be DC based lawyers and we were considering setting up shop near DC but we also want a supportive entrepreneurial environment. You may have solved that for us.

Baltimore is a great city for this. Close to DC, access to NYC and Boston, lower cost of living, enjoyable place to live, some great schools near by.
Productivity paradox: Why hasn't the Internet helped the economy grow more?
yes, it is slow when you start it up first time 'cause it has to load all the dependencies and stuff but it's not so bad once it starts up and when you test something. having more memory helps a lot. try it.
Isn't that a Monday launch? :)
CSS Floats 101
The article says July 1 to Aug 30 but later mentions 12 weeks and your doc says Sept 30 -- which is right?

If you allow students who would have to go back to school in Sept. you might get a bigger response.
Webdis, an HTTP interface for Redis with JSON output
Work Like It's 1999: High-Tech Incubators
Sure, let me also suggest a "save" or "update" button. It was unclear if I needed to do anything else once I added the widget.
TeX is very Turing complete. As is Java sans semicolons, C macros, and many other things that probably shouldn't be. Right now, I'm trying to figure out what the minimum number of characters you need in Ruby is to make it Turing complete. I'm pretty sure that if you restrict yourself to under 12 characters, it's still possible.
Could you drop me a line, contact information in my profile? I'm in need of advice and support in some areas, may be able to offer it in others.
Yes, GIT is way more hassle than it should be. I hate that it depends on cygwin and msysgit is a great start but still a little alien feeling.

I disagree with the blanket statement about Mac users. Developers using Mac are not Mac users by a long shot. For most of us I know it is a case of the Mac being a better *nix dev box than the alternatives.
How many people are working on your projects? Remember that Linus created git to scratch his own itch in managing patch submissions to the Linux kernel. If you've got squillions of people you don't know working 24/7 around the globe to come up with patches to your C-based system, then git was designed for you. If you're a one- or two-man team who svn merges twice a day, you might not care.

Spolsky did a decent job outlining the headaches that DVCS is designed to solve: http://hginit.com/
It is an option if you're willing to lower the bar on your standard of living, and if you have a family, your family's standard of living. Eventually, you weigh everything and decide whether or not the effort and experience is worth the pay or life itself.

Sad to say, but isn't that why some people end up committing suicide? Because they don't see how anything's of value?

Of course, such quitting-income decisions are easier to make if you're single and young. Looking at yardie's experience, that's a great example of just going and doing whatever, without requiring the huge cash one would need to do what OP did. OP was obviously in a very fortunate position.
Is this a full-time gig or just side cash? It sounds like it is side cash, so that rules out a lot of other longer term revenues.

I think apps and web apps are good options and digital content is hard to sell unless you have a big audience to begin with. If you don't people will wonder why they should buy it from you.

I also agree with ohashi to try as many small ideas as possible. Just get the content out there.
You say that like it is a property of GNU/Linux, rather than a property of physical access.
It works fine on Firefox 4.0b12 on Linux too. :-)

That version works much better than the one I tried on github! It's also much cooler.
US Mars mission takes pole position
A feature is what ever you make it out to be by definition. You could call a text field or a button a feature if you wanted to.

I just think that closing your account is something more fundamental that being what we traditional think of as a 'feature'.
It's always easier to join the 'evil empire' than it is to be a 'rebel fighter.' You seem to advocate giving up on your principles just because it's too hard to stick too them. 'Fight the power' indeed...
I prefered Women's day as Mothers' presumes that unless a woman is a mother, she doesn't deserve to be celebrated.

If a woman works she is celebrated via labor day. If she fights she is celebrated via veterans day. If a woman neither works nor fights nor is a mother, why exactly does she deserve to be celebrated? (the same applies to men too).
IIRC, if you get caught you're banned from entering the country for 10 years. Not worth it.
Does anyone else find it surprising that SlashDot is the highest ranked favorite tech website amongst respondents?