skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tie this however with the ads I saw in the NY Subway yesterday, advertising features of Vista and taglined with:

"Microsoft Vista - Now with Service Pack 1!"

Unfortunately, here's how I see it:

- People who are smart enough to know WTF a Service Pack is already are sold one way or another on Vista. Throwing it out there as a selling point is not likely to sway them either way.

- Most people have no idea what it is.

Microsoft has a huge marketing nightmare on their hands - and now they're backed into a corner because they've forcibly killed off the highly successful XP. It makes me wonder if they shouldn't throw a few more patches in and relaunch the product quietly under a new brand. It's a lot more likely to work than the "Now with Service Pack!" crap.
So as long as you use it reasonably it should be fine. As a primary Internet connection would be unreasonable
See, I told you.
Comcast Moves Slowly Over Child Porn | TechJaws
Well the text of the logo isn't very crisp, the alignment of links in the menu bar appears to be overly skewed toward the top of the bar, and the paragraph of text isn't centered?

On the whole though I appreciate it when any site makes a move towards minimalism, thats something we should all get behind.
Last paragraph:

"It also contained Additional RRs pointing WWW.VICTIM.COM to 6.6.6.0. Those records are in-bailiwick: Bob is in fact interested in VICTIM.COM for this query."

Why would it accept a record for www.victim.com for a query against aaaaa.victim.com, when www.victim.com isn't needed for that particular query?

Surely the fix is to further restrict fix 2:
"The RR set poisoning attack is fixed by bailiwick checking, which is a quirky way of saying that resolvers simply remember that if theyâ€™re asking where WWW.VICTIM.COM is, theyâ€™re not interested in caching a new address for WWW.GOOGLE.COM in the same transaction."

Change that to say they are only interested in addresses that help them resolve the current query, and they will only use those intermediate addresses for the current query, and not globally.
Leonardo da Vinci: The Codex Leicester
Real men use IPs only ;)
I think the problem that Vimeo has been having is that users have to wait (sometimes HOURS) for their videos to be encoded. I think that this is a step towards fixing that.
There are two financial "Worlds" you can live in. One is the world of Debt, the other is world of All-Cash. You can prosper in either one of them - but if you get stuck having to go back and forth between them, you will feel pain.
Non-blocking JavaScript Downloads
But knowingly looking the other way makes me uncomfortable - "knowingly looking the other way" is what is really involved here. Legal issues aside, there is an ethical question involved (regardless of your opinion of RIAA). Civil disobedience is one thing, but profit motive and civil disobedience don't mix.

That's one reason I have stayed away from companies with business models like this.
Why Innovation Is Overrated
Patents are unreadable anyway, and in fact reading them is legally dangerous because then you may be knowingly infringing, which triggers triple damages, as I recall.

The latest style is to use a mix of patents and trade secrets anyway, meaning that even if you wasted your time reading patents, you still wouldn't have the full picture.
I agree, there are many legitimate reasons for citing your own work. But that doesn't mean it's wrong to tease people about it. ;)
Its time to go back to the business-model drawing board. Get rid of the ads and start charging for the service? It would be interesting to see how many social networks could justify their existence based on utility alone.
New e-Book on multicore/multithreaded programming
Cilk Arts just published a free e-Book on "surviving the multicore revolution - or at least surviving the hype"
I think that sites like Everyblock are part of the equation. But the real question is how do you build relevancy? There are things neighborhoods talk about and things they don't. How do you bubble up the things they talk about? How do neighbors engage each other in discussion on local topics. That's what we're working on.
PlayCrafter launches. Meta flash games
Raganwald, your writing kicks ass. I wish I've mastered this language well enough to disagree with some of your points [regarding obsolesce of VCs] properly.

Have fun in August!
Here's the deal, if you can come up with a document that has sufficient detail for someone else to implement the idea, then you could potentially implement it yourself.

Modern web development is not a mysterious form of magic, it's most comparable to a genre of theatre that relies on some very literal actors who will stick to the script exactly.

I've seen people with no more than a community college class in web design build profitable businesses online. That's one of the great things about the current state of the art, you don't need to be a graduate of the right school, or have the right background, you just need to be willing to put in a lot of work and skull sweat.
I had a professor in a beginning CS class who was a fortran/pascal programmer (and it showed mightily) but had one very good habit of re-enforcing good cognitive models with english language. Instead of saying a equals b for a = b, he would say a becomes the same as b or if it was a pointer operation a points to what b points to. I still use his method when reading code today.
The Programmers’ Stone » The Original Talks
So Why the Long Face, Professor?
Not only the logo text, the whole logo is grainy. JPEG doesn't handle sharp diagonal lines very well.

There is something interesting going on with the logo - each page refers to a different copy of the logo, so it is re-loaded for each new page the user views. Not strictly related to the branding, but something that is not too hard to fix and would save you a bit of bandwidth.
Agreed. I wish more politicians had the tiniest sliver of a generative model in their muddled thinking.
The three reasons the article gave for dropping gaming videos were that they were outside the main focus of the site, exposed the company to unwanted liability, and were consistently larger and more resource intensive than other videos. Hosting a separate site for game videos would only address the first concern, and doesn't really do much for the others.
What has changed? I just bought a new laptop with Vista on it. The poor puppy was spending about 10 minutes to boot up and cool down: HDD activity upon startup was so insane that it was better to let it sit for 10 minutes before you could actually do anything. After that it could barely breathe on its own 1GB of RAM, without any applications running. I went through the list of running services but couldn't clean up much: there was nothing excessive. Even usual anti-virus junksoft was absent. The damn thing needs 1GB of RAM only to stay barely alive on its own.

How is that usable? These days we're accustomed to running 2-3 copies of virtualized OSes. An operating system in 2008 mustn't assume more than 128MB of RAM available for just sitting and doing nothing, let alone demand 4 times as much.

XP was released when 128MB of RAM was more or less the norm. If you had 512MB, XP was screaming. With Vista, these two numbers (for "barely works" and "screaming") are 1GB and 3GB, i.e. Vista effectively increased its predecessor's hardware requirements by more than 400%

That's just insane.
Of course, making money and using that money for more hardware is a better step towards fixing that.
Why are modern sneakers so ugly?
This dude takes himself way too seriously. I agree with a weaker version of his claim: model-seeking is necessary but not sufficient for problem-solving.
MIT's a bad example now, since tuition is completely free for anyone whose household makes less than $75k/year. Same goes for Stanford (under $100k), Amherst (under about $60k), and a bunch of other top colleges. I paid only about 1/3 of the Amherst sticker price, less than the UMass sticker price for a much better name & connections, with the rest being covered by outright grants.

This trend is new, last few years only, so nobody who went to school 10+ years ago should feel screwed over. (Other than having a bad birthday, of course.)

I'm just worried that a lot of people who could've made it into MIT or Stanford or Amherst say "This is too expensive" and don't try for it. If you can get in and really want to go there, they will find a way for you to be able to attend. Always compare financial aid awards before deciding, and know that you can often get back to the financial aid department with "Well, I really really want to go to Amherst, but I just can't afford it" and odds are good that they'll up your financial aid package. (Assuming you really can't afford it - you should expect to have to sacrifice some lattes and vacations.)

The rest of your post is right-on. It's really the middle-tier colleges and state universities that are inflating rapidly though, because those are the ones whose student bodies rely the most on loans.
Yes, but is anyone watching these videos of kids playing Halo 3 with their buddies? I doubt it...
That's the number for price inflation. Price inflation is monetary inflation minus increases in productivity. Price inflation is useful for determining how standard of living has changed. Monetary inflation ( another word for it is money supply growth or dilution) is the right number to use to determine if interest rates are negative. I was using nominal GDP numbers as the number for money supply growth, although some people use M2, M3 or MZM. Each number has its pros and cons.
Yes, that deserves its own entry in my list of reasons: Articles which refer to very recent predecessors are assumed to be part of a dynamic and fast-moving field and not a backwater. The impact-factor formula explicitly incorporates this assumption.

Now that you point this out, I feel even better about my use of the word "crappy" to describe the submitted article. Everyone involved in scientific publishing keeps one eye on the impact factor numbers at all times. The hypothesis that these impact factor calculations are distorting scientific publishing (similar to the way that the US News rankings are distorting higher education) has been around for years, and you'd think the article might have mentioned it.
goodie, an EEE cloned as a tablet. so? next.
All of my female friends from college love sending these little images back and forth to one another, and while it's a very simple idea, it seems to be extremely popular.

However, in my experience, the Bumper Sticker app is often very slow and clumsy to use. Ironically, I often use it as an example when speaking of Facebook apps that don't do a particularly good job of scaling.
These days we're accustomed to running 2-3 copies of virtualized OSes.

Well, not Vista, right? I thought you had to own Windows Vista Incredible to have permission to run virtualized copies. Or was it Windows Vista Ultimate Smackdown? I can never remember.

Of course, we in the Mac world have a much easier time remembering which versions of the Mac OS can be easily and legally run in virtual machines: None of them.
take your pick:

1. iPod Touch/iPhone is like a Macintosh, only smaller;
2. iPod Touch/iPhone is like an iPod, only more sophisticated;
3. iPod Touch/iPhone has something in common with a Macintosh and an iPod, but it is its own device in its own category, it transcends its parents.

If you go with #3, it deserves its own number.

I had to leave a lot of ranting out, but if you're looking for more material, I actually consider iTunes to be the strongest candidate for another Jobs-led hit. It is dangerous in its own right, and the music industry seems to hate it almost as much as they hated the "rip. mix. burn." ads for iMacs.
Don't forget about RubyForge
And if you have an emergency, who cares if you get nasty phone calls? This is a great budget emergency solution.

iPhone with a rip-off data-plan and budget solution in the same sentence? Steve Jobs' RDF is indeed strong with this crowd.
Many developers prefer verbosity because they are unwilling to learn anything more complex than simple conditionals and loop structures. This is what happens when you turn software development into software engineering.
It could help the third as well if they would either slightly lower the quality to improve transcoding times and/or simply make it OK to have longer transcoding times.

Agreed on the liability end though, if that's the main driver here there's not much they can do.
If the charge was _minimal_, I'd be willing to pay a few bucks a year for Facebook.

If you use it properly (read: non-obsessively), it's a great way to keep connected with people you've known in the past several years. Without Facebook, I would have lost touch with a lot of people, whom I could now communicate with easily when I need to. I gave up the day-to-day "social" aspect of it a while ago, but for keeping connections with past high-school and college friends, there isn't a better way to keep the doors open.

That being said, if I was paying for the service, I'd hope they would open up their data (for export) and give a few more bells and whistles for the money.
I love TextMate for PHP projects because of command-t and snippets, but the syntax highlighting and indentation is a bit off sometimes.
i still think the documentation is still aimed at a relatively high level and/or at a single learning style. i've tried a few times with 0.96 and i'm happy if i can get the darned server running. i'd love to see 'themed' tutorials that help newbies learn python+django to build lots of different things rather than a single 'it can do anything, you just have to start somewhere'. i wouldn't recommend that approach with chemistry - why is it the default for programming?
Laugh all you want. I remember when the terminal connections to mainframes and vaxen were being replaced by websites in the mid-to-late 90s. It was astonishing just how much worse websites could be.
Depends on how specific "successful exit" is. Otherwise:
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/07/nowpublic-buys.html (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=242417)
Part of it is, you can't hear anyone or have a decent conversation, so you might as well drink (there's nothing else to do if no one's dancing)... the correlation makes sense.
The problem is that, while apologizing is the right tactical move in the face of angry customers, it's a tactic, not a strategy.

A person who apologizes is gracious. A person who does nothing but apologize is gracious but impotent: One may accept them as a friend, but one doesn't hire them.

The correct strategic move is to fix the problem, or refund the money, or throw up your hands and declare, believeably, that the problem is unsolveable by anyone.

Microsoft doesn't seem to be able to fix the fact that Vista has no compelling features (they're too busy supporting all the non-compelling features that are in Vista... as someone wise wrote here the other week, once you introduce a feature you're stuck supporting it for life). They certainly don't want to offer refunds. And attempts to pretend that it's impossible to build a better OS than Vista break down as soon as the customer walks past an Apple Store -- or, even worse, as soon as she reboots back into XP.

So, in the absence of a new strategic direction, most of the marketing machine is still coasting along the path of the old one. They're applying lipstick to the pig. Again.
HN worthy? most of us are pretty numerate...
How the Man finally brought e-gold down
Raganwald, your history is backwards. The simple longbow was successfully used by English peasants with decisive, history-changing result against French knighted nobility at Agincourt and Crecy.

http://www.stortford-archers.org.uk/medieval.htm
SICP is a good introduction book. It is fairly deep too. The goal of little lisper is to make you understand recursion. If she gets that then she can get into SICP.
Correction: I mixed up lithography with earlier forms of prints; rather than carving it was oil on stone that was used for the prints and the refinements were made by removing oil (used to repel the ink used in printing).
Of course, we in the Mac world have a much easier time remembering which versions of the Mac OS can be easily and legally run in virtual machines: None of them.

Not true. You can run Leopard server virtualized. I haven't tried it but I know people who offer VPS's with it. And yes, it's completely legal. Both Parallels and VMWare support it.

http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/01/virtual-leopa-1.html
Actually real men use /etc/hosts :)
My suggestion (borrowed from the linked essay) is that figuring out how to put peasants to work killing knights is not dangerous, it's just a way to shuffle which nobles win the battle.

The dangerous thing is when peasants can kill knights all by themselves, without anyone leading them or organizing them or training them. Rather than England vs. France, you are suddenly looking at Monarchy vs. Republic.
The funny thing about housing is it's still over priced in most places. Post bubble it's much cheaper to rent in most areas unless you are in the highest income tax bracket. And with the 30 year ROI which approximates inflation most investments are much better in the long term.

EX: 1.5k per month to rent vs. a 350k condo with 300$/month condo fees looks good until you add in property taxes (.7%), maintenance, and transaction costs.
Gulf states are awash in cash, but I'm not sure that's enough for technology startups.
Browse the web without needing WAP etc support.
Web Ad Firm Learns People Don't Like Spying
How To Communicate Design Decisions To Clients?
RubyForge was one of the reasons I got really interested in ruby/rails development. A central location is a must for new ideas to be easily moved around.
Comparison review: 9 Ruby on Rails IDEs and editors
"No Comment" on Twitter URL Switch and Yes, They Have a Business Plan
uh yeah with the word _Emergency_. RDF? - I don't even own a Mac or an iPhone. I would have made the same comment if "iPhone" was replaced with any other phone.

Obviously, I would highly recommend having a better backup solution in place, but if shit hits the fan and you have to connect to computer A to remote location server B, this seems like an OK option. Do you have any other ideas? Please share - can't have too many backup plans :).
Why is MySpace so ugly? Because your tastes are not those of the majority.
Five technically legal signs for your library
Pi or 2 Pi: That Is the Question
Crimson Editor, runs great with Wine and it's super light weight - been using it for 5 plus years now.
Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks teaches great lessons about managing programmers and programming as a team.

On a less technical note, Growing a Business by Paul Hawken is great book about letting a company grow naturally.
The A-Z of programming languages: D
The bias point is well made. I don't remember the quote exactly, but i think it's something like "...when all you know are hammers, everything looks like a nail...". Though I think his point is that you have to at least be able to form models about the problems you tackle and stick to those models. I feel like you need some commitment or vision to be able to move on. Development tends to have two phases, exploration and exploitation. Balancing the two is a real problem. If you exploit too soon you may miss a much better solution, but if you do too much exploring you may just be wasting time. Balancing the two contributes to writing good code it seems.
There have been scientific proof that the Earth is round for at least 2500 years. The ancient greeks even calculated the circumference of the Earth based on the position of the sun. (http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Distances.htm). We didn't have to circumnavigate the Earth to prove it.

The church also accepted that the Earth was round, despite what many have been told by their teachers. Even sailors knew that the earth was round, since they could see the curvature of Earth from daily observations

I found a more detailed article about this on the net: http://www.bede.org.uk/flatearth.htm

I could go on about how the "dark ages" wasn't so "dark", but that would probably be even more off topic :-)
Most new computers that come stock with Vista have the ram available to run it(mine had 2 gigs). Do you honestly think Dell would install Vista on their PCs if they thought it would make them look bad? If someone's computer is running slow because of Vista, they won't be blaming Vista, they'll be blaming Dell.

As far as old computers are concerned, the person who actually bothers to upgrade the OS on their old PC, will probably have a top of the line PC that actually has the RAM to run it.
Costly Toys, or a New Era for Drivers?  [Tesla Motors]
Microsoft's Turning Point
Make something people want? The hell with that.

Make something DANGEROUS.

You will be missed, Reginald. Great blog.
MIT's a bad example now, since tuition is completely free for anyone whose household makes less than $75k/year.

Yeah, it's easy for us old-timers -- or those of us whose friends and relatives are trying to afford those middle-tier schools that don't have this policy -- to forget this fact.

But good for MIT, Harvard, and the other elite schools for taking this new path. It might have made a big difference in my life had it happened years ago.

If you can get in and really want to go there, they will find a way for you to be able to attend.

Yes, and this was true back in my day as well. They make it possible to attend... by going into debt. The amount of debt that is considered possible is, however, constrained by the supply of credit and by the amount of debt that society considers "reasonable". That's a much larger number today than it used to be.

My point is that societal factors like credit policy, accounting practices, banking regulations, and the popular acceptance of the debtor lifestyle change your environment in ways that are difficult to ignore and resist, even for those of us who are informed enough to try to avoid debt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKZIP#Version_history

Click "deflating". It says the algorithm was used in gzip and PNG. Not exactly a poster child for innovation withering for lack of patents.
this is about bit.ly the url shortening service
Oh, good. I apologized too soon -- I forgot about Leopard server. Now I can revert back to my default sense of smug superiority. ;)
Leopard server can legally only run in a VM on Apple hardware though AFAIK.

I can legally run (some versions of) Windows on any of our Linux machines, loading it over the network, provided we don't exceed the license limit. This is _exceptionally_ useful as it allows access to (office|windows only apps) for the 1% of the time it is useful, without paying for the 99% of the time it isn't.

To do the same for Macs would require us to buy an entire set of Apple hardware. Rather pointless in a shop where most people use Linux out of choice, and most work is done inside a web browser or Eclipse.
Tech Blog is too broad a term. Both his blog, and say Andrew 'bunnie' Huang's (hardware hacker who has done a ton of cool stuff) blog are about technology.

Anyways, the words 'failed you' with respect to Scoble's variant of tech blogging is kind of silly and pretentious - I keep thinking of some guy at his computer, head hung in sorrow, all because Scoble and Matthew Ingram wrote a pro-windows article for their blog.
Wait, are you saying MySpace is not ugly? Number of users/Popularity != Site Not Ugly.
Post bubble it's much cheaper to rent in most areas unless you are in the highest income tax bracket.

Yeah, that sure is funny, isn't it? It's almost as if "post-bubble" is the wrong word, the bubble is still in the process of deflating, and housing prices are likely to continue to fall for the next several years!

[Psst: http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/blog/comments/how-inflated-... ]

Keep on renting.
Once again I see I could have expressed myself far more succinctly. Make something dangerous will be on my new tee shirts :-)
SQL Injection Hack using CAST from 1.verynx.cn