skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google moves to mainstream RSS with a simple name
Gives me a bad invite code error message...
I agree. It might be motivational for some people, but this isn't based on any scientific research to define the "hyperbrain".
Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM)
They don't control the apps, but they control their networks. Your theory only works if money can be made even when these fancy applications are being used. If a carrier loses money when people start using these apps (for example, maybe a VIOP app) on their smartphones, there is no incentive to be competitive. They'll just get rid of you as a customer, and no other carrier will want you or your smartphone on their network. So getting rid of you would actually be an advantage.

Now, common public perception is that carriers actually make a ton of money and that they could allow these apps and still make money (I think this is true, actually). But that doesn't mean that carrier concerns won't play into the equation. In all seriousness, Steve Jobs didn't make up those categories Apple wouldn't allow in the App Store out of thin air, they are all carrier concerns.

So why would a carrier want to allow massive amounts of Android phones using massive amounts of data, not paying for big voice plans and slowing down their network? I think a better reality is that either the carriers will block your fancy app on their network, or they'll charge you extra for all the data and whatnot those fancy apps will use. So yes, you can develop a more open app, but using it is another matter.
Someone is always pissing in my cereal!

More of an attempt to sorta justify it all, if even just to myself. There are far more interesting things to brag about.
Justin's a really cool guy. He runs the http://ebikes.ca/ site and has built a bunch of other cool vehicles, like a segway-style self-balancing skateboard (the "e-manual") and self-balancing unicycle.

I worked on a weight-controlled electric skateboard with him that we took down to the 2007 Maker Faire.
Android Market: a user-driven content distribution system
Play Learn Guitar
Will IE8 be the new IE6 ?
Well, that's partially false. #to_proc is in 1.9.

I also completely and totally disagree that they're not clever. There is nothing _not_ clever about #returning. It is second only to using inject because you're too lazy to assign to a variable first. Nevermind that every railz0r that does that ignores the fact that they've now assigned N times instead of once.

Clever code, in my mind, is a form of hidden cost. It seems to be what I get paid to deal with (read: remove) the most.
A much better idea would be to be able to define an html to surround user code (allthough one has to make sure that the usercode will never contain that special tag) and disallow all javascript or other malicious actions in it.
I smell envy.

Everyone responds well to ego-stroking articles. The real question is, can you inject some useful stuff along with the ego-stroking?
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/sherstov/pdmc/
Web 2.0 Trends [PIC]
Google gives irked Apps admins one free spin vs. outage whammies
Google points to empty shelves where Android apps may some day be sold
Textured graphics can be captured in a flash (w/video)
There are some good things in this post, but did anyone else get the impression that the author ran parts of it through a Markov Chain text generator to bulk it up?
Also, Ubiquity is open source.
It's a contract.

Things change rapidly and these people understand how well some business problems can be addressed with technology. They also have a pretty good feel for what it will take. Their biggest problem is that they want everything now.

I have a habit of almost always saying "yes". But sometimes you just gotta say no. Not easy for anyone.

Hopefully, once I get this thing into production, I can go back to normal chaos mode :-)
The Web's the place (don't be a sharecropper)
How about a massive catapult to replace the space shuttle
Don't have meetings

http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch07_Meetings_Are_Toxic.php
Introduction to SQL
Decades ago to crack into a computer you needed to be a hacker, since computers were all different. Today we have "script kiddies" who most definitely aren't hackers, but are crackers.

I don't think there's a script-kiddie equivalent for phone systems.
Joel Spolsky has an excellent write-up called "Martian Headsets" that explains why MS is damned either way on standards issues.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html

It should be mandatory reading for everyone who supports web standards.
Comcast Sets Threshold for `Excessive' Internet Use
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html
Aside from the problem discussed in the article of squishing people by accelerating them at hundreds of g, there's a more fundamental problem with a "launch X into orbit by shooting it very fast" approach: Trajectory. An object in freefall (which your ballistics are once they leave your gun / catapult / linear accelerator / etc) with a bounded trajectory (i.e., doesn't escape Earth's gravity entirely) travels in an elliptical path. If one point on that path is on the earth's surface... well, there's 3 more points on the earth's surface, too.

In order to reach orbit, you MUST add angular momentum. And until we have a space elevator, that means rockets.
If you get quicker, doesn't that give you time for more projects?
Cloudbursting
it's not at all clear what Greenspun really wanted VC money for in his cash-generative services company

Read his new, improved, more nuanced explanation in Founders at Work.

If I were to summarize his answer: It requires intestinal fortitude to embrace slow, organic growth at the cost of turning down lots and lots of business from a market that is begging for your services. But it is also hard to recruit people to grow your company -- especially businesspeople -- in a bubble economy where every company with a domain name is going public with billion-dollar valuations. So ArsDigita tried to come up with a plan to go public, and that inevitably involved VCs, because back then investment banks didn't bother talking to privately funded companies, because the fix was in: Why bother working with actual, profitable companies when you can make more money by scratching a VC's back? It's not like the market was paying attention to fundamentals at the time.

The moral of this story is that bubbles suck. They're completely disorienting: The market value of everything is screwed up, and you're surrounded by irrational people. I do not miss those days at all.
I thought the original hackers were almost exclusively using AT&T's system.
We'll be opening Wundrbar up soon. Not quite true open source, but close. Enough to allow a ton of scripting / hacking / mashing up. More news on that real soon...
Good article on a fascinating topic.

I find the most depressing aspect of QC, though, to be the no-cloning theorem. Computation is a bit trickier when you can't copy data.
Take a look at page 16, line 28 in the decision :) Also page 6 line 26.

I don't know if judges should really be using wikipedia that way - what if it was vandalized on the day they checked it?
NeverBlock, MySQL and MySQLPlus
San Francisco is heating up, economy slowing down
Wind Power Running Into Problems
Optimizing Yahoo Search for the iPhone (interface)
Only math dorks go by expected returns. ;-) (Which includes myself, since initially I got into entrepreneurship because I figured "10% chance of $40M, 90% chance of 0 - hey, a $4M expected return for a couple years of work beats most other professions." Silly me.)

Utility functions aren't linear, and often aren't continuous. For most people, the increase in utility from $75k to $100k is negligible - it just means you can buy a fancier car, get a bigger TV, and have a few more lattes. The increase in utility from $100K to $15M is enormous, because it means you never have to work again. The increase in utility from $15M to $20M is, again, negligible.
You don't need quantum mechanics to produce this kind of a result. One-time-pad encryption does essentially the same thing. Both the "key" and the "ciphertext" (I put them in scare quotes because they are mathematically indistinguishable) by themselves are just random bit strings containing zero information. But together they contain all the information of the original cleartext.
This is the best article ever for explaining the two possible startup models, bootstrapping and venture-funding. I have done both, one that was funded by VC's and failed and one that was bootstrapped and succeeded. I would be the first one to admit that I have limited data points. Thanks for sharing.
The theme behind this article is a bit dated. I'm reminded of the (probably fictional) story 15 years back about the sysadmin who only worked fully nude from 11pm until 6 am because he was that important and one of the only dudes in the universe who knew unix.

These days there are plenty of Ivy-League-Type-A-personality people who are both easy to work with and good at programming. In most situations nobody is required to deal with an extreme weirdo.

For these articles to be useful, they should be about how said weirdos can alter their behavior to be productive. I know people and even have family members that exhibit some of the traits described, and they are un or underemployed because nobody is interested in putting up with their personality quirks. Nor does anyone need to put up with them. It is still hard to find good programmers, but not nearly as hard as it used to be.

Writing it from the perspective of how to manage these people is pointless, because it is rare that anyone would be required to work with the person described. They can simply find someone better and less socially bizarre.
Why it's so hard to swat a fly
Umm, isn't this what Bell Labs found under Gell-Mann in like 40 years ago? You overcome transmission problems with redundancy. Or am I missing something?
Comcast to dam and damn the Internet with usage caps
This is interesting, but thin. Those truly interested in the implementation details of ELF shared libraries on linux should read Ulrich Drepper's whitepaper:

http://people.redhat.com/drepper/dsohowto.pdf
I don't think carriers will be able to do much about it. They'll be in much the same position ISPs are in now. They might limit the amount of data you can use for a given service plan per month. It will be very hard for them to discriminate between a VOIP app and any other though. We've already seen the cat and mouse shenanigans that go on with ISPs and now even American Airlines.

The ISPs aren't winning. You cannot stop a bunch of smart, determined people from doing what they want with an open platform. Developers like the ones who read this site are just too much.

Regardless, carriers clearly realize that data is the future of their industry. There is no growth left in voice services. They're moving in that direction full-force. They want this.
See how our experiences differ? Just the other day I was fixing a bug caused by someone writing:

def squidget(options = {})
squid = { :foo => :bar, ... }.merge(options)
...
squid[:bash] = :blitz
end

The method was returning :blitz instead of the hash that the method was constructing. I changed it to a returning statement and to my eye it looks much more clear what is going on.

Of course, you could add a "return squid" at the end, or just plain "squid," but somehow that seems less clear, since when you start manufacturing the squid, it isn't obvious what you are doing until you reach the end of the method. Witha returning statement, you know right away.

All in all, I feel good about all constructions in Ruby that use blocks to wrap around the stuff they are doing, like

Foo.transaction do
...
end

But you're younger than I am, so your brain is probably sharper. Maybe you find it easier to just work directly with imperitive-style code. Many people I know prefer it that way. I know I like to simulate Scheme as much as possible, and use expressions instead of assigning local variables as much as possible. It could be laziness on my part.
MerbCamp Announced
| Alternately, the effort of getting back in gear so many times in a week or two will gradually wear him down until he’s exhausted, depressed, or worse.

Yep. This is something I've kinda known for a while, but it's right up in my face now. I am currently a (cheap) consultant doing on-site technical support (for, literally, everything), network administration, business processes and systems, and on and on and on. And, when I'm not doing that, I'm trying to get back in to gear for web design and software development.

I'm utterly exhausted. I now have to take a moment when a client hits me with a new problem, and close my eyes, and consciously remember everything related to their particular system.
When To Use Magazine-Style Themes For Blogs?
I'm working on a web app clone of Axis & Allies. It's using Google Maps (with the game board overlaid) as the UI.
Where did all the good tech discussions go?
Exciting stuff. Who all is going to make it there?
Quality Content or Bullshit? | SlashBe
Android Developer Contest Results
Observe the winners
You can find more information on GoCart at http://www.biggu.com/
Thank you for the link! Two days ago my Intelligent Systems professor said he used to teach the class with an emphasis on Bayesian Networks, but this semester he is teaching about probability, statistics, rule based expert systems, and genetic algorithms. I was interested in the Bayesian networks because of PG's paper on spam filtering and somewhat disappointed that Bayesian networks wouldn't be formally covered. This is the perfect time for this to be posted! Thanks again!
Every Nokia phone I've ever had shipped with an application like the App Store called Nokia Catalog. They just didn't market it well.
By that logic, ANY entities site could be used for ANY information on Wikipedia. The point is that it's valuable and useful information that isn't readily available (most VCs keep incomplete lists, probably to marginalize the failures). The lists would enhance the knowledge of the reader, which SHOULD be the goal of Wikipedia.
> ``The monthly data usage threshold will have absolutely no impact on 99 percent of our customers because their usage is well below'' 250 gigabytes, Khoury said.

What about the 143,000 whose usage is above that? When you have 14.3 million customers, 1% becomes a sizable number of users.
It's because they can detect the tiny air pressure changes from nearby moving objects. The trick to swatting a fly is simply to swing hard and fast. If you half-ass it they sense the incoming palm/magazine/swatter while they have plenty of time to react.
Ah, I just moved back to San Jose from SD/La Jolla, I used to go to UCSD.

It's a great campus. You'll definitely know if you're near the conference room because there's a GIANT bear made out of rocks in the courtyard. Every few months they have "Bear gardens" which is free pizza and beer for students/faculty.

Also be sure to check out SDRuby while you're there, I'm pretty sure they'll throw something special for MerbCamp.

Let me know if you guys have any questions about the school or area.
Wall Street Applied to Technology Entrepreneurship
Seeing the Sky with Different Eyes
Mixing Open Source & Business
Thank you for your interesting comment.
Basically, they want to turn Blogger into a Twitter-like social network that isn't limited to 140 characters.
The author of the article is the creator of the great Ogre 3d engine. His advice is worth reading, as he's very experienced both in creating successful open software and in doing contract work related to it (he explains the results in the article).
I'm gonna throw a book recommendation out there: "The Millionaire Next Door".
it's impossible to be happy if you're always comparing yourself to others. there will always be someone smarter, better looking, richer, and with a bigger ____ than you :p
True happiness is contentment, contentment comes from financial security. I laugh at those millionaires who, as the article said, are squeaking by on 400k a year. The biggest key to financial security isn't making more money. It's reducing your living expenses. If you're making 90k a year but socking away half of that, you're buying a year of retirement for every year you work. (assuming your investments only keep you even with inflation and dont make you any additional money).

also: one of the best pieces of advice in the article is always have a mortgage. as soon as you finish paying off your first house it's time to make a down payment on a new one and rent it out to pay for the mortgage. assets>cash, plus it's tax advantaged.
foo = returning(Object.new) do |f|
def f.bar
...
end
def f.bash
...
end
end

# vs

foo = Object.new
def foo.bar
...
end
def foo.bash
...
end

1 line shorter, less indentation, more clear. What does returning get you besides another message send and block activation? I have yet to see a good use for it. (yes, I'm biased. calibrate accordingly)
Considering that Ma Bell was a monopoly until 1984, I'd agree.

To paraphrase John Draper (aka Captain Crunch), "A system is a system, whether a phone network or a computer."
The lines in question:

"Neither side explained precisely what a Flash file is, but this court understands it to be the name of a file format used to transmit videos over the Internet. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_format."

"The court takes judicial notice of the Wikipedia definition of “IP address” as to the fact that an IP address may be shared by multiple users. This is not a matter that is subject to reasonable dispute."
Apple details next-gen multi-touch techniques for tablet Macs
Comcast Flexing Muscle Again | TechJaws
Community Linux distros on the rise in the enterprise
What can nerds do for the election?
Developers rest easier with JavaScript reversal
MicroID (Hashing Email Addresses For Web) considered harmful (to privacy)
You may think I'm rich, but I don't.

How very very true that is. I have friends that make less than half what I do. Once upon a time, I would have thought that my current income would mean I'd "made it". But somehow, here I am, still occasionally concerned about being overdrawn, still trying to be frugal, still feeling like I don't make enough to do all the things I want to do. By world standards, I was fantastically wealthy when I was peddling vacuums.

Some things are more a function of the human condition than anything else. People in San Diego complain about the weather.
assignment evaluation to RHS catches everyone once in a while. I'd have gone with the plain `squid` at the end. Maybe even with a `return` if I was feeling chatty. (It took me a long while to get over my anti-return-for-speed-reasons bias... I'm still working on it sometimes.)

Besides, I'm not that much younger than you. :P

I think it is mostly that you went the lispy route while I took the smalltalk route.

ETA:

actually... I'll go one step further...

`returning` violates "Do the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work" flat out without giving you anything in return.
This is really about how to get upper-middle class wealth. The psychology of these millionaires is very different from the mentality of big startup founders -- sure, half run businesses, but these are lifestyle-type companies with no ability to scale.
So far I tested iShowU - it's ok.

BTW - Stomp really compresses quicktime well.
both of these points make me sad.
Computer worm infects International Space Station
The sector is already dominated by professionals. The dynamics of satellite TV were similar, and though it was a painful process to revoke not only malicious players but the entire population of defective players that broke the protected path from DTV to the S-Video port, they eventually succeeded.

My point is, "useless" is too strong a word. It isn't silver-bullet simple, but it is a tool that can be made to work. Content providers are already costing Slysoft money; now they just have to figure out how to increase that cost fast enough to push them out of business.
When people start affording more with larger incomes, their assets turn into overhead that must be managed. It's a cliche, but the TCO of most things is more than their face value. On the other hand of that, there is an amount of dollars one can earn to build a framework and make their money be self-supporting. I.e. the returns on investment covers taxes and expenses and actually has non-negative growth.

While I agree that contentment is /a/ key to happiness, it won't exactly motivate you to strive for things completely out of reach. Just the chase of your goals can result in happiness.
Is "Site complies with law, wins law suit" less of a story than "Judge cites Wikipedia definitions in ruling"?

In this city a high school student who cites Wikipedia without a secondary source gets a (provisional) F.

If Wikipedia is an authority sufficient for the judiciary the world really has transitioned from the Britannica era.
Object Oriented Programming in JavaScript
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_middle_class#Income

10 Million households have $1 million+. There are an estimated 111,162,259 households in the US...

This is upper class wealth...just not completely elite levels of wealth. I think the point of the article is that people with upper class levels of wealth tend to have upper-middle class lifestyles.
Compound eyes help a lot too.
Zeep Mobile - A free mobile messaging API for developers
Tumblr already uses this lingo, too, and I think it should make more sense to people. I thought that the "RSS is like email" metaphor would work, but I think this is going to help adoption quite a bit.
MS is in a lot of situations where they're screwed either way, but people tend not to feel sorry for companies with market caps over the quarter trillion mark.
I don't think that's particularly important. What an IP address is and what a Flash video are weren't really important to the case. It sounds more like the judge was curious.

If Wikipedia was vandalized and the judge based his ruling on incorrect information, that would be grounds for an appeal, I'm sure.

Wikipedia may not be 100% correct, but I think we all use it as a starting point. A lot of times it is correct, and it gives us the background information we need to understand other sources. Not something I'm going to complain about. (Cue the inevitable responeses -- "I hate the Wikipedia admins", or "I'm so smart I never need to look anything up." Yeah, yeah. Tell someone who cares.)
How Steve Jobs' obit got published
Not to mention that a judge will usually throw out a case that looks exactly like another one. If you are a small site like Veoh and you get sued, this case will decrease the likelyhood that your case ever goes to trial. (And that's where the expense is.)
Is Io going to appeal? Personally, I don't get excited until the Supreme Court rules. This "victory for user-generated content sites" could easily be overturned.
Little things that matter
Social Networking for Books: One Ring, or Loosely Joined?
Just because a business isn't suited for investment by VCs doesn't mean it's not a great investment for its owners nor that they necessarily possess lesser business ability or some kind of inferior mentality.
EA: Second-hand sales are a “critical situation”
Microsoft's Live Search Cashback Scheme Fails To Move The Market Share Needle
The Google Alphabet, 2008 edition
The Asus works
Free College Football Picks
"... Seriously, how is 20 yr (30?) old client-side technology implemented in a browser considered news? ..."

Because you can do interesting things with open technology on a large range of platforms without some vendor getting in the way. I know one application straight away (comics) that could use this technique to create more compelling interactive stories.

It's not what you think of the technology, but what you can do with it.