skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article hit the nail on the head when it said good user experience and design is essential to gaining users (then again, when isn't it?).
I remember in my n00b days when I first decided to try Linux I would mainly browse through screenshots to pick a distro to try. For me, it used to be all about the feel and eye-candy of the distro and not the underlying software and I assume that's what draws a large amount non-geeks.

I think desktop Linux, or at least Ubuntu, is at a point now that most geeks use it or know about it so one would assume Canonical will be targeting the other 90-something percent next.
Awesome share, will be using this.
I don't see why not. As long as you don't actually break into Exxon and commit I crime.

The real reason your scenario is unlikely is just that Exxon practically owns the government, so they would change the laws or something to fuck you over.

But I mean what if you discovered a security vulnerability at McDonalds or something, a way to pick their locks. Why are you morally obligated to disclose it without compensation?

On which moral principle are you condemning them?
> Nobody knows Feynman, believe me.

Unfortunately, I do [believe you]. Nonetheless, if Hawking, Feynman, Sagan (and I'm surprised we've forgotten Einstein until now) are the 'prophets' to be held up for physics, they are the examples I would start from to look for a CS prophet. Hofstadter or Turing, as have been mentioned elsewhere, would get my vote. The one is dead, though, and the other has an excellent book or two, but not at all the public image or body of "bite-sized" work that those prophets of physics have.
It gets exploited automatically behind the scenes.
In the UK, most providers charge per-kilobyte. For example, I'm on a contract that gives me 1GB per month. Anything beyond that and I pay extra. It annoys me greatly that tethering isn't included in that (and costs a lot more), whether or not I use the 1GB that I've already paid for.
Noam Chomsky's reaction to Bin Laden's death
The “Wants” and the other personalization bubble
Cosmetic Dentist North Hollywood 
Each patient is the top priority at NOHO Dental Group and receives the most care and attention by the staff and the best treatments by the dentists.To get more information visit our office at 11126 Chandler Blvd., North Hollywood, CA 91601 or go to http://www.BestNorthHollywoodDentist.com or call (818) 824-8228
"experience bij"

Yes... yes, there's room in the lexicon for this. Nice.
Umberto Eco's "Island of the day before" is a funny novel built mostly around all the paradoxes and misunderstandings made possible by the existence of the IDL.

Not a chef d'oeuvre like "Foucault's pendulum" but well worth a read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_the_Day_Before
Data Science & The Role of the Data Scientist
Even worse, Bill Gates is #5... Go figure.
Yeah, that's the part that seemed odd to me as well, though someone knowledgeable in this area of law (at least in the better-settled offline case) could give some better info.

I believe it'd be okay, and probably actually happens, for a private security consultant to do threat assessments for a (non-criminal) client, e.g. prepare a report for DHS on the security of U.S. oil installations. But it seems like they'd be crossing a line if they posted a press release trumpeting a major vulnerability they discovered, mentioning by name which company and approximately where the vulnerability was located, but then refused to disclose it to the company in question.

I'm not sure how much it survives, but I believe there was traditionally even a common-law "duty to warn" if you were aware of significant risks to someone's person or property.
OmniGraffle, Balsamiq, AxureRP and Visio are pretty much the industry standards. Mostly OmniGraffle and Visio. The fact he doesn't even mention Visio just goes to show.
> Every 3 minutes there is a completely different sound playing.

> Each song has a completely different story.

> Each song triggers an entirely different set of emotions.

> Every 6 to 10 minutes I have to stop and start skipping through tracks to find something suitable for the moment.

None of the above issues relate to Chuck Wild's Liquid Mind albums, which is the only music I listen to.

http://www.liquidmindmusic.com/
Of course Earth must have some finite carrying capacity, but that's only terrifying if you assume that "The Crunch" is the only way to bring population growth to a halt.

Population growth is already zero or negative in most developed countries if you remove the effects of immigration. If this becomes a consistent rule for all countries once they become fully developed, the real question is not whether we can sustain infinite population growth, but whether we have the resources to support a developed lifestyle for the entire world. Given current technologies and energy sources, the answer is almost certainly "no", but this is a much more tractable problem.
Possible responses:

a) See! That was a lot of noise about nothing.

b) See! Without that noise they wouldn't have done anything.
Well clearly there are two things going on here, assuming VUPEN is on the level:

1) A remote code execution exploit in Chrome

2) A privilege elevation exploit allowing the hijacked browser process to break out of its mandatory access control jail

Number 1 is of necessity a bug in Chrome itself (or a plugin). Number 2 is probably a vulnerability in the Windows sandbox, but it could instead be that they found a way to successfully attack the small part of Chrome that runs outside low integrity mode. They weren't specific as to the details.

This is, again, at the very least a remote code execution hole in Chrome, and there's no fundamental reason Linux or OS X should be invulnerable to the same hole. That Chrome on Windows is less secure than on Linux or OS X would be the wrong thing to take from this; the point of this demo is that VUPEN accomplished the feat of bypassing all the security mechanisms protecting Chrome on Windows, whereas on the other platforms you have fewer of these mechanisms in the first place (no real ASLR on OS X, no Chrome sandboxing last time I checked on Linux).
500Startups Universe - Every Known 500Startups Company
Start-up vs. Corporate vs. Consulting vs. Combination Platter
If you aren't sure what they are - javascriptcore and webcore have their origins in KHTML, no matter how much of it has been replaced by Apple it's still from that, gcc and gdb are well known GNU parts. CCtools seems to have Darwin origins, they chose to open source it.
Whoops I meant to delete this since it's a double-comment. I actually dont do coke, it was an example in which i used first-person to make it more meaningful
Nature will find far less technical solutions to this problem. War, poverty, disease will provide a ceiling to this growth.
You could try this http://railscasts.com/
> (damned if anyone's gonna spend six months to a year
> crammed into a Dragon)

Yep, they got much more space in Mars-500: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARS-500
Hacker News comments are useful. Consider making the # comments oval a link that opens the HN thread in the right-hand pane.
I wouldn't assume that. I think the big deal here is that they managed to break out of the Windows sandbox; that's what makes the exploit particularly interesting. The same vulnerability could exist on Linux too, but they just didn't invest the time in developing and demoing an exploit there too.

Or maybe not. I'm just saying, we can't assume either way.
Police get paid to generate revenue, and fill out paperwork after a crime has been committed.
Lessons learned from launching a large scale django project
Ask HN: Good source for cartoon graphics?
patio11 recently commented that cutesy cartoon-like graphics work, I like the look as well. Does anyone know of a good source for such graphics?
This is a step forward, but they are still violating the license. Those releases do not have the necessary information to build a new copy, as required by the LGPL: no project IDE (Xcode) files and no makefiles for the iPhone.

And, as saurik mentions here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2523786), they do not even release the full source code! Even if you ignore the point about building your own copy, they are still violating the LGPL: releasing the code to those "WAK" classes is not optional.
"Big government" in the most literal sense :)
The title is a bit misleading since it's only sources of a few tools used in Apple's iOS.
I would argue that it's a subset of the IP holders who are the parasites here, using their wealth to increase their rights beyond what is reasonable and in the interests of those with whom they are supposed to be cooperating. Piracy is the reaction Schneier mentions to the noncooperatives becoming too numerous and too effective. DRM is yet another strategy to limit the rights of those who continue to cooperate.
All ice cream should be coffee flavored.
You also need the previous year's population. With population and life expectancy, you can approximate the per capita death rate, and then it's a straightforward linear equation.
What? That has nothing to do with TV. It has everything to do with your apparent lack of self control. If I spend 45 minutes watching TV or 45 minutes playing with myself, what's the difference? They're both time that I could spend doing other things.

edit: And I never just watch TV anyway, I'm always doing something else, like coding or reading HN or looking at code on GitHub.
Malthus was wrong in principle. He didn't understand human action or economics, and that misunderstanding remains very common. See:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/09/overpopulation.ph...

"Common Malthusianism - the idea that a given resource (such as living space or food) will run out in the future based upon extrapolation of present trends - stems from fundamental misunderstandings about economics, human action and change. We create change in response to our environment; our self-interest leads us to constantly strive at the creation of new resources where old resources are becoming scarce and expensive. This is the path to profit for the individual - and progress for all. One needs a certain amount of willful blindness to avoid seeing the process in action now and in recent history."
The perfect example of this is an old version of the BlackBerry UI that looked like this:

http://i.imgur.com/FypcA.jpg

Fortunately, they wised up and the next version looked like this:

http://i.imgur.com/3o2CF.jpg
I agree that such a state doesn't (a) seem impossible or (b) seem untenable if we have sufficient technological advances (solving fusion ignition, perhaps).

What kind of trajectory takes us from here to there (or to a place dense with similar stable solutions) without going through war and famine? Or, how does a developed nation survive in relative bounty surrounded by nations undergoing severe war and famine?
And some of those are just our globe, rotated. (I'd give an example, but it's hard to come up with one because I don't have an actual globe that I can play around with.)
The Key to the Inbox
New release of IndexTank, now with Public Search API
Google's new movie partnerships are an attempt to avoid spending money to get Hulu on Google TV. Google TV is still a flop even if this works out. Apple TV is about half the price, runs iOS, and supports iPad Air Play.

"Earth Girls Are Easy" still not em bed-able: http://avsquid.com/totally_80s
Why it's still a smart idea to work with Nokia
Well you can bill the govt. but not sure you'll get paid ... ;-)

In general, and most people are surprised by this, you cannot sue the US govt in court. Well you can, but only in certain cases where it allows itself to be sued -- tort cases and some IP laws and even then you almost never get a trial by jury, only a federal judge.

So you'd have to construct this as a tort case and use Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) to your advantage. I suspect if you try that, FBI will invent some reason to arrest you or at least harrass you (interfering with an investigation, obstruction of justice, damage of federal property, etc etc...).
I guess the monetization efforts are bearing fruit.

It will be interesting to see if Google boosts its infrastructure so that folks used to the 'old' performance levels of YouTube will see that kind of performance again.

If not it will be a good pricing exercise in terms of figuring out how ad revenue is affected on the free side by videos pausing a lot.
This probably explains why Apple had stationed Jerome Belegarda and his team of spoken language group focus on distributed speech processing for quite some time.
For me, procrastination often comes from overestimating the pain involved in performing a task (fear). To overcome it, I promise myself I'll just "take a look at the problem", then I convince myself that I'll just do this quick small task (ex: change a label, do a lookup query) and stop, but pretty soon, I see that this isn't scary at all... and I JDI.
http://www.kirkmahoney.com/blog/2008/09/coordinate-vs-co-ord...

Contrary to popular belief, the English language has no official single governing body. Either are considered to be "correct".
eh, I dono. I've heard people complaining, e.g. that they didn't really want to know of the sexual proclivities of their co-workers.

I think it's completely reasonable that this isn't the first thing you find out about your co-workers.
I initially thought that it would be a game that took a thousand years to make :)
The government is generally more worried about keeping foreign governments out of high-tech firms like Google than about their ability to hack high-tech firms like Google.
So? This is an industry with an event called "Pwn2Own."
Noam Chomsky?! This is not Reddit.
Is an App the new Resume?
Wow. Singularity Hub (http://singularityhub.com) moved to a similar design. The result is that I now find it next to impossible to easily figure out what is new, whereas their previous linear design made that trivial, and far more usable.

This is case where a site's RSS or Atom feed ends up being more practical that the home page.
Agile Borat
Older iOS devices outselling newer Android devices
His position may be valid, but that doesn't mean it adds anything meaningful to the discussion.
I guess you've never heard of the Pwn2Own event.
Apple Already Running Nuance Tech in New Data Center, WWDC Announcement?
Modernize Your Git Workflow
"runs iOS" is pretty meaningless when there are no apps.

Apple TV is cool but it's pretty much just NetFlix or buy content from Apple. (Or blacked-out sports if you are into that.)
There are still too many free options that will compete with this 2.99 price tag (e.g. torrents). I think they should lower that price, or move to a small subscription-fee model.
Martin Ford Asks: Will Automation Lead to Economic Collapse? | Singularity Hub
Pay Attention to Fortune: They Might Just Save Print
"First, care"

http://www.43folders.com/2010/02/05/first-care
I'd like to mention something to everyone running around crying about the falling sky because THE GUBBMINT has paid a security company to audit Chrome. Oak Ridge National Labs just recently had to shut down COMPLETELY because an Internet Explorer exploit "pwned" them. Do you maybe see how THE GUBBMINT might be interested in knowing if other browsers, such as Chrome, are as vulnerable?

But by all means, put on your tinfoil hats if that's more fun.
Britain’s Oxygen Accelerator Hopes To Breathe Life Into Startups
LinkedIn claims $3B valuation in IPO pricing
Google to build its own office space
HN with all the TechCrunch bullshit edited out is much better. I've been skipping any TC link for a while now and it's a big improvement.
> Safer software for all, because it's a better thing that VUPEN discover the bug than if it's discovered by some criminals who keep it secret and scam/hack

I suppose it depends on the point of view, but having it exclusively in the hands of governments can easily mean it's limited to criminals who keep it secret and hack.
And maybe once you're done with that, you can read a rebuttal of sorts:

http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Population-Crash-Planets-Surpri...
What I would give for that comments section to be pubic...
How to set up multiple user profiles in Mozilla Firefox 4
What is "WAK"?
I thought that 'humans', as in, you would see one and say, "yeah, that weird looking guy over there," went back about 2.2 - 2.3 million years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution

Populations would have been small, but an extra 2.1 million years is a long time.
Show HN: Evolution of a Startup's Design
I'm tired of doing volunteer work for corporations, personally.
OpenCL looks like a generalization of the OpenGL shader language GLSL. The logistics of passing buffers and controlling execution should be very similar as well.

I think if you learn OpenGL 3.3 (as in this tutorial), you'll get enough of the common stuff down that you can fill in the missing spots from OpenCL reference material directly.
SWFRETools - A collection of tools for reverse engineering Flash files
good summary, also see http://www.quora.com/Educational-Resources/How-do-I-become-a... and
http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/06/what-is-data-science.html
Why have plundering governments plundered? The answer to your question is an implicit assumption of your question.

As to governments replacing gold with paper, that seems to be correlated with economic growth and modernity than anything else. A mercantile approach to gold would be something like that followed by the Spanish with their South American possessions, mining for gold, etc. It didn't serve them very well because they didn't understand that it's not some magical property of the gold that holds value.
The most important thing you can learn while at college is the skill of learning. The ability to quickly absorb disparate information and apply it to the task at hand. The information you learn in college is worthless. You will never use it. However, the skill you pick up as a consequence of learning that information is invaluable and will serve you well for the rest of your life. I work on something new and foreign to me on a daily basis ... that skill allows me to learn quickly and solve the problem at hand.

Granted, you can acquire the same skill by going to the library every day and reading up on a myriad of various subjects, then applying what you learned in self-created projects ... but ... that requires a will of steel and frankly, college just seems more fun.
I wonder how much would it cost to have Pyramid Research publish my study proving the Earth has been visited by extra-terrestrials since the dawn of time.
Tumblr Launches ‘Share On Tumblr’ Button For Publishers
I get ideas right before i fall asleep.
Outdoor Advertising finds a better way of doing business with EatAds.com
Next Generation Education: Teaching Imagination
One API to rule them all
yes, the new yorker always uses tremata/diaereses where most people would use hyphens (if anything).
I did not want to get into this debate but oh well.

>Yes, and society has decided that the proper balance in >that tradeoff is to give creators the choice in deciding >when particular copies of their works are made available to >the public, which means that it is in fact their choice.

Not true. There is a fixed length to which copyright on your work lasts. Its not forever and you don't decide the length.

Why do you think the society puts a limit on it? Because in essence copyright is a restrictive right. It tells you what you CANNOT do. Copyright is not a right but a privilege in the sense that it tells others not to make copies of the work that you created first.

The real reason of having a copyright is not 'for the advancement of science (and culture)'. It is to incentivize the copyright owners to share their creation so in that sense the copyright law is actually created to promote sharing.
I used to be in two minds about this, but now I think I agree with you. Let's solve the problem of building a semi-self-sufficient colony on the rock in our own backyard before we try to solve the same problem on a rock a thousand times further away.

All progress in space exploration has been made with baby steps. We flew men around the backside of the Moon three times before actually attempting a landing. Apollo 10 took a lunar lander within 40,000 feet of the lunar surface without landing. Whatever problems are going to arise with a Mars base I think it'd be better to solve 'em with a Moon base first. Apart from anything else it's easy to get home from the Moon if you need to evacuate, whereas easy transfers from Mars to Earth only crop up every eighteen months or so.

Oh, and if you're not aware there's already a SpaceX flight to the Moon scheduled for 2013; one of the teams for the Lunar X-Prize (Astrobotic Technology) has booked one up.
Thanks for your response, but my question remains.

Why would a entity as big as "the government" would invest in breaking one browser used by a minority (~10%) of users in the web? Wouldn't it be much easier to just compromise their Internet connections?
https://brainbrowser.cbrain.mcgill.ca/surfview.html
Doesn't seem to work in Chrome - eventually get the unresponsive page/kill page dialog.
Only if it's it's statically linked.

If it's dynamically linked, all they need to do is release the source.

EDIT: There are also makefiles provided in the release.
Hackers on a Plane is going to Chaos Communication Camp
I was just disappointed it didn't say much about the algorithm. It read like the intro to a longer piece.
What I find interesting about this is what happens when the mythical iPhone 5 gets released and Verizon has a $50-100 iPhone 4 to sell. Until now (in the U.S.) there's only been a inexpensive iPhone for AT&T.
clarke-hanlon: any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Good infographic. Although:

"The first big data collection project in history was by the U.S. Census, which started in 1790."

Errr....
This makes sense in light of the Siri acquisition. Siri relied heavily on Nuance tech. They were both SSRI alumni.

Apple seems to be "friending" SSRI for AI tech.
The CCC webpage is pretty funny: http://events.ccc.de/camp/2011/
Thanks for the vocab! I've been struggling with needing a word for this for quite a while, ever since I learned the origins of Roman/Greek columns and Chinese Bronzeworks (tree trunks and clayworks). Both retain unnecessary features of previous versions of the work for aesthetic reasons.
WAK is a set of classes in WebCore. They are released in the Mac code releases, for example: http://opensource.apple.com/source/WebCore/WebCore-351.9/wak...

For some reason, Apple does not include them in the iOS releases, in a violation of the LGPL.
I have over the years participated on a number of communities "for smart people", and this is the case in all of them. People have their particular points of view, and when there is some evidence against what the group considers to be good they use all kinds of ad-hominem attacks. I know it is just human nature, but it is sad that people don't see these patterns occurring.
box-shadow is CSS3, not HTML. HTML is markup for text, CSS is formatting that text.

It's not about making it only work in one browser — it's that currently these effects collectively (as Arnorhs points out, this isn't just box-shadow) are only rendered properly by that one browser (actually it's the rendering engine which is most important here — WebKit — which means I can view them fine in Safari 5.1).
Hello Wallet Now Open to Public
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it was just touch screens showing the names.911memorial.org page. What more do you need?
You're right, the general public can be persuaded to get interested in anything that involves pretty pictures.

This is part of the reason I switched from studying semiconductor physics to giant planets. Much prettier pictures on my slides, nowadays.