skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
horribly wrong about laws that AREN'T "black and white". who defines when its "safe" to go over the prima facia speed limit? well of course that falls to the cops to decide. So whats safe to me might not be safe to a cop. btw I'm 37 and have NEVER had an "at fault accident" so obviously I'm a safe driver. and what makes it not a safe time to go over the prima facia? 1 car in 100 ft of you? 2 cars in 50 ft? me going by a car in another lane thats going the prima facia limit??? So what this does is give the police to make things up as they go and being a law abiding citizen I get screwed. This is a PERFECT example of why law needs to be black and white. On a side note, an officer can just say you were speeding or didnt fully stop at a stop sign and it wont matter what really happened. I had a case in CA just a few weeks ago and the officer flat out lied. What can I do about it? NOTHING but pay the fine.
I'll grant you that Spotlight could be a bit quicker and smarter, but I nevertheless use it all the time. I was never a Quicksilver power user, but I've found Spotlight adequate enough that I've never bothered installing any alternatives (ie. Launchbar).
Hey Guys,

Thanks for the interest! I will love to tell you more about the start-up. I currently live 40 minutes away from downtown Chicago, IL.

I would love to tell you over a phone chat, Skype, or email. Whatever you prefer.

Just drop me an email @ shahedkhan30@gmail.com
Conferência de Segurança Swiss Cyber Storm 3
I'm 90% sure the parent was being ironic. I agree with your points, but I think your response might be out of sync with the tone of the parent.
Unfollowed: How a (Possible) Social Network Spy Came Undone
Please add a [NSFW] tag. And I'm not even sure if this is worthy HN material.
The amazing thing to me is the extent to which companies can't solve elementary coordination problems, and so stay in a Hobbesian state where entities just randomly attack other entities with patent-clubs and there's nothing resembling law or police entities. Step one would be banding together, not just with a centralized defensive patent portfolio, but with a centralized legal defense fund. As for the NPEs, patent the business method of patent trolling (I think somebody already did this, so just keep applying until you get another patent for the same thing), then sue them for violating it. After they're convicted by the central court of patent trolling, of course.

Astounding how the insight of law and centralized police, in just a slightly different domain, is so counterintuitive that companies still farm the lands as individuals, prey to whatever bandits stalk their way.
Unlikely. There are lots of non-Mac iPhone/iPod users who won't use Safari even if available on their platform.
Vertica has EC2 instances available, i am trying to figure out pricing. They are a distributed DB, but not all in RAM.
Swiss Cyber Storm 3 Security Conference
Not much unless OSX achieves higher market share than its competition or people on other platforms start to use Safari instead of their preferred browsers. That won't happen anytime soon.

I'd be more worried about a feature like this coming to Mobile Safari.
It's times like these I wish hacker news had a user follow ability. You are probably one of my favorite authors of all time, and I had no idea you were present here on HN.
I think it is more to do with the engineers/people than money or resources.
A Rough Guide to Social Skills for Awkward Smart People
I'm pretty sure he was fired because the honest and transparent reasons he had were totally inappropriate, and he was condescending and argumentative while positing some rather harsh allegations.

I did not say anything about him being a "retard", I said they should have fired him for stupidity. There is a difference.
You can ask Absolute to remove it:
http://www.ehow.com/how_7683954_disable-computrace-laptop-bi...

So, aside from not being informed about it, this isn't a big deal.
I've published two law-related books, one for business people, the other for lawyers:

1. When You Sign a Business Contract: A Final Pre-Flight Checklist. http://goo.gl/2PbFM This is a $9.99 PDF, downloadable from e-junkie.com. It lists five points that anyone who signs a contract should check to reduce the chance of personal liability, jail time, dangerous provisions, etc. The extensive notes contain numerous real-life stories. The five-point checklist itself and a link to buy the book are posted on my blog.

2. The Law and Business of Computer Software. http://goo.gl/OnqrO This was a treatise for lawyers, first published in 1990 and still in print. I stopped doing the annual updates about 10 years ago; another author's name is on the second edition.
Re: the Starbucks effect, I'm not sure I agree. I think the difference between Starbucks moving in next door and Apple implementing a feature like Reading List is that in the case of Starbucks moving in next door, their marketing drives foot traffic to the vicinity of your location--which you can then take advantage of. I.e., people walking by see your signage and therefore you can capture sales. It is the creation of demand, but it's the creation of demand that your own (much less resourced marketing) can then take advantage of.

In the Reading List case, there's no guarantee that customers that "get educated" about the product will necessarily ever find out about yours. It's still up to you to be in the same "location" as the competitor's product in order to benefit from their marketing.

This may be the case for very well-known products that are always going to be discussed in concert with a feature launched by an Apple in the media, product reviews, etc. But it's certainly not categorically the case.
I don't like the all caps text. Looks a little pixelated to me.

Also, facebook should probably be capitalized.

Good luck.
Some friends and I demo'd our autonomous mobile robot http://maslab.mit.edu/2011/wiki/Team_Two/Final_Paper for this and it was a lot of fun. I nearly lost my voice after only two hours. I wish it was more than just 5 hours though, at the very least because I would've liked to see all the neat things myself. Unfortunately, MIT can't realistically have 20,000-30,000 extra people on campus for long periods of time.
Please, stop spamming HN.
If Apple brings this out, it wont have an API. They may promise one (like facetime) but Instapaper will still be #1 for at least another 12 months.
I'm always a bit nervous with "revolutionary". By now, it's almost a buzzword.
Wow. Even setting aside the question of whether all cops are trustworthy, one does wonder why they are "ex" cops.
HN,

I know all you guys have a short time so I’ll try to be as quick as possible. A friend and I are going to release our startup in about two months that will be a social approach to rating, buying, sharing and collecting coffee.

37signals “getting real” is a book I hold close and dear and they recommend to get out a “buzz” page to collect contacts. So I built a simple one with a few features:

- Linked up to fb instead of asking for emails for social proofing and its a lot easier to “like” something than give up your email address.

- Showed my friends screenshots to get quotes, linked to their twitter accounts to give credibility

- Since its not released it hasn’t been featured in any outlets, I did however submit it to some of the leading “link dumps” and put their logos in there. Even though being seen on digg isnt a big deal, the logos add credibility

- Offered incentives that will be followed up on: early adopter badges and early invites.

What I’d like from you guys:
1. Like it if you like coffee. I’d be smitten.

2. What would you do to make a more efficient and effective buzz page to collect user bases? What pearls of wisdom do you have to market and grow a new web app/startup?

3. If you are a coffee drinker, how do you think technology can be used to make your coffee experience better? What would you really like to see in future iterations of a coffee application? (Some early requests from friends has been to add coffeehouses in the mix)
My startup runs eBookBurn (https://ebookburn.com/), which lets you create valid epub and mobi files w/o having to learn the underlying spec or do any coding.
True, I felt a bit of the same. Switching to "new" may be a good idea.
It's always tempting to build it yourself. Initially we built our own data store too, partly because it was a great geek challenge, and then went back to InnoDB and NoSQL solutions once we figured we can't compete with 1000's of open source devs and battle hardened products.

Our hardware bill for our entire server cluster, which we own, is only slightly more than Druid's monthly cloud bill. [My company is the largest real-time analytics provider on the web]

Few people realize that Redis was created by Salvatore to provide a real-time analytics product - and then it grew into so much more. Also InnoDB's clustered indexes are spectacular when it comes to answering questions like the one's the OP has posed.
That was amazing! It looks like youtube is where the real reality tv is.
Thanks! I know this stuff, but i keep forgetting. :)
I wouldn't make much out of CIA doing something. They have done crazier shit before.
Npm 1.0 is out
Any song listed in my music-bookmarks.txt. I love listening to music when my work has a steady progress. By that I mean the tasks are being done without having to pause and think for too long. Otherwise I find it easier to think in silence.
Game-changing technology, no venture capital
That's a good point. A switch in the font face could be easier to read.
chartbeat?
Ask HN: How do you calculate the # of active users for your web app?
This question came up in a conversation recently and we couldn't agree on a good way to do it.

For example, let's say you launched an app six months ago and have had 5000 sign ups and are growing at a rate of 100 new users/day.

One way to calculate the number of active users would be to count the number of users who have performed a certain action within the last month. The problem is that that also includes everyone who signed up in the last month, many of whom will never use your service once and never come back. It doesn't seem correct to count them towards your active users.

Another way would be to look at all of the users who signed up more than a month ago and who have used your application in the last month, but that seems more complicated than it needs to be.

How do you do it? How do you calculate the number of active users for your web app?
Either Apple have worked on the speed or hardware has just got better but Spotlight is very usable for most people I know. This is especially true of those on a new MacBook Air where it appears instant. Also if you use it a lot it caches the results you hit, so for repetitive app launching it has always worked adequately.
That's what it looks like at face value, but consider these facts and tell me your perception of this story doesn't get swayed a bit:

- This guy was an employee of Transvideo, a company subcontracting for Google.

- He was filming other employees from another company, we'll call it ScanOps, also subcontracting for Google.

- Neither he, nor the ScanOps employees he filmed were employees of Google.

- As per the arrangement between Transvideo and Google, he had access to certain privileges that the ScanOps employees didn't.

- He never disclosed what he eventually learned from the ScanOps employees. His story had nothing on their working conditions, salaries, workload, benefits, health. Nothing. He entirely focused on what was happening to him. He only leaves to the reader to infer from his implications that there's some mistreatment and discrimination going on. For all we know, ScanOps employees might have a better package overall than Transvideo's.

- The steps leading to his termination were all handled by his own superiors at Transvideo. Google's involvement is only implied by third parties. He never directly spoke to someone at Google (other than the security guard). Even his letter was first given to his own managers for approval, before it is implied that it was forwarded to Google. For all we know, the big Kahunas at Transvideo may have decided of their own accord that he was trying to be a smart-ass, potentially causing more trouble than necessary for them, and decided to preemptively terminate him.

End of Facts.

Now for my biased opinions, I think this guy is a manipulator. He carefully chooses words to play in his favor:

- hired jointly by Transvideo Studios and Google: somehow I doubt it. I think he was hired by Transvideo to work on their Google account.

- I found this social arrangement interesting: the implication is that there's some social stratification going on, when in fact we're talking about employees from a different operation working on sensitive enough issues that their badge specifies a number to call if someone asks questions.

- I'll just mention in passing the many hot buttons he pushes to manipulate both the article's readers and the different administrative layers who read his letters. Using the race card, social inequalities and acting as if he's just a simple bystander interested in observing these issues. He'd be my employee and behaving like that towards one of my major clients and he'd be fired, even without my client requesting it.
What do you think of my kickstarter? Would love feedback.
Most of the people I know that used to use Quicksilver now use Alfred: http://bagcheck.com/item/0238-alfred The rest are very happy with Spotlight, like myself.

On the other hand, the Reader button in Safari is awesome and if the new Instapaper-like functionality syncs that content, it will do quite well.
think of the bounties on someone like Kim Jong-Il

Now think of the bounties on average folks like you and me in comparison.

That's right, our lives will instantly be worth pennies and there'll instantly many folks around with incentive to murder.
Node Package Manager 1.0 released
I think he just didn't care and preferred to tell the truth than be intimidated into lying.
اي فون 5
First, as was said already, MIT is actually expanding to teach more students. Second, the OCW initiative at MIT has given thousands of people access to educational material. Finally, it makes sense to me to donate money to an institution that takes "the most privileged technical students in the world" and transforms them from kids that are good at math/science to people that will change the world.
Oh ye of little history. Do none remember Xanadu still? Inspired by Eric Drexler's call for hypertext as a way of making society more intelligent, they tried to invent the Web, a decade too early and with standards much too high (cached local copies which would still receive micropayments, two-way backlinks), and never solved the incredibly difficult programming problems they were tackling before Mosaic and HTML came along.
On their home page CB currently claim 1,977,762 visitors across all sites. We see the following across our network:

397,727,080 visits per month.

1,002,792,862 impressions per month.

209,727,427 absolute uniques per month.

We use a third party to report this data to ensure objectivity when we're doing reports for outsiders. This is from the period March 30 to April 29 2011.
That's a fair summation.

Regarding number 1, there's no divergence, I agree with you 100% on capitalism not dealing with negative externalities. I think that no financial system we will ever come up with will ever be perfect.

Regarding 2, this appears to be a disadvantage one must accept with a capitalist system.

Regarding 3, I would be more positive. I think technology and human ingenuity will overcome pollution eventually, maybe by nanotechnology or clean tech etc. Maybe even human colonies in outer space, like the movie Wall-E or something. In the 1960s there was a theory that the world's population would grow faster than our ability to feed it. The Haber-Bosch process now feeds one-third of the world's population.[1]

Good talking to you. It's good hearing different perpectives on these issues.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
I think that what Dr Bose has done is less about denying MIT the full donation and more about keeping control of his company and making his gift a perpetual one.

First, the fact that they're non-voting shares is because he wants to make a gift without altering the company. If they were voting shares, MIT might vote (in their interest) at some point to sell the company to another audio company or close the company and distribute the money it has to its investors so that they could invest in activities they saw as doing better for their endowment and long-term interests.

Second, by making the shares non-transferable, it means that MIT will be receiving income from Bose for as long as the company exists. While it's true that one can't deduct partial interests, I think there's a bit of leeway there. For example, Harvard's Weidner Library was gifted to the university with the restriction that if they ever knocked so much as a wall down, the library's ownership would transfer to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. This was done in response to Harvard removing an earlier building that the family had donated. Now, I don't know if they deducted the library donation from their taxes and, frankly, the tax code is probably vastly different today. However, gifts are often made with conditions. If I donated a building to a university on the condition that they name the building after me, is that only a partial transfer since they can't dispose of the building however they like?

There's a good reason the law is in place. It prevents someone from donating the rent of a building they are unable to rent at market rates or sell as a scheme to make themselves money rather than being a true donation. However, Dr Bose's donation does seem like a true donation. He could keep the shares and not sell or donate them and then they'd be unrealized gains and untaxed. He's losing the dividend interest on those shares and so he is giving that up and MIT is benefiting from it.

I think this is more about legacy. It ensures that the majority of Bose shares will be held by MIT for all time. As such, the company can never face a hostile takeover. Likewise, it helps MIT which is an institution that he seems to care a good deal about - he received three degrees there and taught there for decades even as his business was successful. I'm not a lawyer and so it might run afoul of the letter of the law, but it doesn't look like a scheme in the way that many other non-full donations do look like schemes. This looks like a professor and founder trying to ensure the future of two institutions he loves.
I guess technically they don't qualify, but surely Microsoft's web properties have to be right up there. Billions later, they have yet to turn a profit.
I'd love to see a demo. Ever since I saw hummingbird's demo of real time traffic analysis I've wanted to write real time analytics.

I'd love to see this one rolling (even a video)

I'll be looking forward to their "part two" where they go on about architecture. They're really managing 1B hits/s ? Or they have a historical data of a billion hits and can parse it in a second ?

(for anyone who hasn't seen hummingbird http://demo.hummingbirdstats.com/ and it's on github https://github.com/mnutt/hummingbird)
Out of curiosity how do you know you're the largest, is there an index somewhere?
An Army of Zombie Minions for RabbitMQ
History of stars and galaxies, Andromeda M31 in all its glory
39. You can always get to the frontpage of HN by wrapping bromides and platitudes in some kind of Top N list.
Actually, it is only 8 decimals: http://www.bitcoin.org/de/node/1#How_divisible_are_Bitcoins

"Technically, a Bitcoin can be divided down to 8 decimals, so 0.00000001 BTC is the smallest possible amount."

So instead of talking about "0.001 BTC", we could say "1 mBTC" or "1000 μBTC". The smallest amount is then 0.01 μBTC. The total amount is 21 trillion μBTC. For a comparison: As of december 2007, there were 829 billion US dollars in circulation.
The First Zombie-Proof House
I think they're just reading 1b rows/second in their db, not writing or receiving. Can't wait for part 2 though.
How Wal-Mart Could Pull Thousands of Its Employees Out of Poverty
You're right.

It's just a comparison of image searches for UIPageControl on Google vs. Bing. The difference is that Bing's image search contains a lot of pictures of naked women.
Immediate up-vote for the flagrant flaunting of Godwin's law.
I wish programming documentation in general were divided into two heavily linked parts, one conversational introductory section and one concise and technical reference section (like a manpage). By heavily linked, I mean the "conversational" section should have plenty of links to the reference section inline with the prose and vice versa. I don't like reading references when I don't even see the big picture. On the other hand, I don't like getting too used to intro material because it's too verbose to refer to later. But if the conversational part has links to the reference section and vice versa, I would get into the habit of following the links and gradually familiarizing myself with the layout of the reference section. Unfortunately, as it is, intros rarely have these links or footnotes to the references, and I have to search for items specifically, losing out on the holistic view.
A related book that examines some of the same themes is Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6596.html

The examples he draws from are nuclear power plant failures (TMI in particular), civil aviation and oil transport. But the basics will be recognizable to anyone who has dealt with large computing installations; interactive complexity, tight coupling and cascading failures.

It is not a reassuring book, you won't be able to look at any complex system without asking yourself what sequence of simple, predictable failures of widely separated parts could tip it into a catastrophic failure mode.
ChartBeat's numbers are concurrent users. No idea how that translates on web but I'd expect it's more than 200m uniques - we do 120ish off 100k - 200k concurrents.
"Mark Shuttleworth, the founder, recently stepped down as CEO to focus full time on leading product design and development."

And this is where the high degree of "programmers design" is coming from.
the M&A world is as much to do with who you know. I wouldn't be surprised if like.com was shopped around to the usual suspects
Blogpost says it actually isn't a "brand new" laptop and Toshiba has since removed the crapware.
Oh yes! I bet you're excited to compare to playtomic
Writen 3 books
Android Application Development for Dummies (wiley)
Android Tablet Application Development for Dummies (wiley)
Landing your dream tech job (self pub)
Two articles in Code Magazine

Not a day job.

Do consulting and bootstrapping work as my main source of income.
Brilliant, a gift with a fishhook in it that makes the survival of Bose's in MIT's interest.
Please, someone send this to Richard Stallman, fast.
Ah, you are correct. But I think that limit was said to be arbitrary and I think it is only set currently due to FP limitations. I am probably wrong though.

In any case, I think the terminology will evolve as you have suggested.

In your example of money in circulation, you have to include the debt money as well though because that is traded as if it exists.
Ted Nelson, not Eric Drexler. And not "inspired by" but founded by him. (K. Eric Drexler is nanotechnology, not hypertext.) Not really an Internet startup, certainly one of the longest but not the biggest tech business failures.
And play with, maybe even use... although I don't know if they're actually releasing the software either.

Definitely a lot of interesting stuff missing from part 1.
I'm working on my first book right now:

http://www.apress.com/microsoft/wpf/9781430237471

It's a lot of work, but it's worth it - I've been working with this technology (Rx) for two years now and I think it's a huge step forward yet very few people understand it. The book will help bring Rx to the masses which is definitely exciting.