skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is possible to get high-quality milk and cheese into peoples' stomachs without American notions of "profit" being in the mix at all.

The evidence of this assertion is significantly lacking. I know several Russian immigrants; who came to the US during the Soviet era. The difference in quality and quantity of food available in US supermarkets was a point of amazement for them.

Honestly, I feel like you're trying really hard to play devil's advocate rather than actually believe any of this stuff. It's just too outlandish to believe someone would try to present the USSR as a successful, functioning, state. History has already given its verdict on the USSR. It was an abysmal failure.

In fact, now that the walls preventing communication have come down, and people are able to speak freely about how things really were, we know things were worse in the USSR than we in the US ever realized at the time. People were poorer, corruption was worse, shortages of necessary goods were more widespread, the state itself was in a much more chaotic state most of the time than we ever imagined (the US feared the USSR, because of its perceived strength and unity of focus; but most of those fears turned out to be based on myth).

Is the sewer system in the town where you live profitable?

In some cities in the US (and probably Canada, as well), water/sewer is provided by a private, presumably profitable, company; private co-ops are also common. They operate under strict guidelines and regulations at both the local and federal level (for safety and to insure low-income families have access to clean water and sewer service), but it's not all that uncommon, and I'm unaware of anyone raising a fuss about privately owned utilities (power, garbage service, and communications, utilities are all frequently privately owned in the US and Canada).

What's your point?
You are both referring to style.
I bet if I made a list like this highlighting what a programmer must have when working for a startup there'd be some serious hating going on.

While this may be a good list if you want to read up for a month, this does not cover years of art theory, learning how to choose your battles, developing a refined sense of taste, pure objectivity, and a myriad of other skills that are subtly nuanced into almost every project.

I'm sorry, a good designer's "Must Haves" cannot be encapsulated in a list.
Education's Flash In The Pan?
Personally, I've long missed an old keyboard where the spacebar was split into the space key and a backspace key. I haven't seen that feature on any keyboard since, though I imagine it must be available somehow. Instead, I have a keyboard not unlike the one mentioned in the article. No extra row of function keys, but it's a heavy one with mechanical switches.
Data mining competitions - hospitalization prediction & dark matter mapping
I think it's about time that some government or billionaire throws a few millions at an internet archive project. The Internet Archive is nice but more regular snapshots with a wider coverage would be something I'm certain future historians would love to get their hands on (and they will hate us if we don't do it).
If you drop out of loops, you will reach every article eventually. (Unless you are ending in a cul de sac.)
No, modern rm implementations disallow that by default. You need to override it with a switch.
Don't the feds routinely still bust people in CA?
The real problem is that even facebook seems aol-esque from he onset. It was not technologically revolutionary. Its niche was the cachet conjured from the marketing strategy (harvard -> ivy league schools -> colleges in general -> students in general -> public). Given that facebook has reached critical mass, its hard to imagine a solution that is incrementally better than facebook that could achieve critical mass.

Yes there was myspace / whatever other social networking sites, but the problem there was that none of them reached critical mass.

The only way you could build a better social network is if you really re-thought the problem. Thinking about stuff like privacy controls and apps is taking a facebook-like perspective on the matter, and you won't get anywhere.

You need to think about how a 21st century platform would behave. Define your niche.

And unless you plan on setting up a 501c3, you need to think about how this could be monetized. Ads? Now it would really be slick if you could find a better way of executing ads -- somehow 5 ads per page doesn't really appeal to me
Umm, 3D video isn't any more of a "JS feature" than the many scriptable APIs that dchest listed.

Safari has not shipped WebGL support; it's available only in pre-release builds. (Meanwhile it's been on Chrome's stable channel for three months.)

It's absolutely not true that Chrome avoids introducing new features and APIs before Safari or other browsers. All of the major browsers have pioneered specific new web platform features. For example, Safari with CSS 3D transforms and touch events, Chrome with Web Notifications and the Filesystem API, Mozilla with ES5 Strict Mode and Geolocation, Opera with the hashchange event and datalist and HTML5 form validation, IE with XMLHttpRequest and CSS3 calc()...

Eventually, the features that work well should become standards and be supported by as many browsers as possible. That's exactly what is happening or will hopefully happen with all of these examples, including 3D video.

(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla.)
I have never seen a 3d movie yet. I went to my best local theater, that was built within the last ten years (There actually are only two local movie theaters.) to see How to Train Your Dragon in 3d. The opening credits/intro pieces looked incredible. I was so excited! When the movie started I realized there were only two tiny speakers at the front of the theater by the screen outputting audio. I started complaining to the point that i was getting shushed by some patrons. Mostly asking around who else noticed the audio was broken.

After a few minutes I went to speak with the manager. Basically I was told I was the first person to complain and that was the way it was supposed to be. I couldn't fathom that to be correct so I continued to question the manager. Eventually she somewhat admitted that the audio, for some technical reason she couldn't explain was not properly able to be played on their 3d projection/audio system.

So I left. I got the ticket price refunded but not the cost of my concessions. I couldn't help but feel mass amounts of consumers were being ripped off. I felt the team that produced that fine film would have been heartbroken to have seen the movie there. I know i was not willing to watch a movie, my first 3d movie! with audio the quality of a poorly pirated movie.

I considered finding someone to complain too. I imagined the theater was breaking rules by showing the film with such a key component horribly crippled. But I did not.

I have not been back to see a 3d movie. I would like to see one someday. I will go again, perhaps to a theater in another town, someday. I hope they get their "stuff" together. Articles like this do not inspire confidence.
There are voids. A lot of voids. A good deal of matter (even solid) are actually 'nothing'. If you take materials science, you get the 'atoms made of hard ball' approximation of the world (which usually yields pretty good answers), and even then, the densest you can get anything like 75% matter or something. And that's severely high-balling it (the ball radius approximates the electron cloud as a hard continuous shell, when it's really actually mostly just empty.
Thus confirming that any GUI feature that I don't know where it came from, came from PARC.
I usually look up showtimes on Fandango and they clearly label any digital showings as "DP (Digital Projection) Showtimes". I usually see those for Regal theater listings, it could also be a matter of other chains not reporting the information.
Wield Python's super() like a Jedi
... and we still can't figure their areas beacause of Pi!

facedesk
If you think about all the hype around "local," Street View is a massive and near-impossible to duplicate asset in that battle. With some good image recognition of signs, people, etc. Google could map out specific business locations, exact address locations, which combined with real-time location information from mobile Maps users can make Google Maps basically undefeatable (and it has a solid business model).

Google can afford to play the "long game."
> I can't think of any other reason for agreeing with you (thought XPath is reason enough).

Streaming JSON API/parsers are not wide-spread (and definitely not as widespread as SAX-style streaming XML parsers), which makes JSON unusable for datasets which don't fit in memory.

And generally spreaking, I think most people would be satisfied with a CSS-type query language, I'm always surprised by the dislike my colleagues have for xpath and their lack of knowledge of it, even though xpath is one of the very few things I like in the XML infosphere (the other one being RelaxNG)
>Moved to the USA as a child.

Then you have no idea what you are talking about...
How many sites have Google Analytics or something similar? I would argue that analytics are as essential to the operation of an online business as shopping carts. Allowing a large portion of your website users to opt out of analytics effectively cripples you compared to competitors based out of countries without these restrictions.
Google Unveils NFC Wallet and Offers
MACDefender Trojan Variant Skips Password Requirements
> It's not correctly configured out of the box.

You mean there's a correct configuration? Also, Tomcat, Jetty, PostgreSQL, and Ngnix don't "install correctly" out of the box as described here. Tomcat clusters set themselves up? Postgres? Hell, I think default shared buffers allocation is 32 MB...

> Anything that streams bytes

I'm not sure what the author is trying to do. Doesn't sound like queuing to me...

The documentation is terrible, so I'll give that up. It is unfortunate that there is so much experimentation involved in setting it up. ActiveMQ is immensely versatile and configurable, and it's sort of necessarily complex to get it perfect for your task. It's not a turn-key software; it's a systems architecture component.
CEO and Founder The Milano Group
Skype Outage Impacts Users Around the World
Reading Can Also Make You Dumb
Mac Defender: Mostly Harmless
I don't think they are saying that you and I (application developers) should be writing assembly (they mention C/C++, and refer to C++ libraries elsewhere), unless we want to.

What they do emphasize is that the operating system was written in assembly, and while I don't know the members of the team personally, I'd guess anyone who has completed a project such as this (with this level of polish and utility) is at least potentially capable of being smarter than your average compiler.

I'd also like to state that I do agree, for a vast amount of software development, the convenience of higher-level languages and API's outweigh the associated performance disadvantages but for some programs, the ones that talk directly to hardware and who's library functions are called billions of times a second by application programs (and let's add, that are written far less frequently than application-level code) the assembly approach is justified.

Of course you're welcome to build something similar in a compiled language and prove us all wrong :)
Given that the data for the first few years result from a small number of pages, the graph doesn't allow to reliably distinguish between both interpretations, and his (and your) interpretation is not really justified. If you look just at the complete, reliable years (links from 2000 to 2010), the graph looks convex, just like you'd expect for exponential decay but not for linear decay. So while the first interpratation is probably intended by the author, I'd say he is overstating his case and is most probably wrong.
I remember Windows 1 and it wasn't that great. I used GEM at the time and it was quite superior to both Windows 1 and 2. I am not quite certain why it failed in the marketplace. Apple sued them for look and feel and it brought updates to a halt and that might have been the reason. I was quite suprised to find that GEM is still around as an open source project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGEM if you want to take a look.
Coming soon: make your phone your wallet
clickable links when people choose to post text. It's annoying to have to read a description of a site, where they put the blah.com, and then have to go and copy-paste the link to see the page. It's common for the "Ask HN" pages to have questions pertaining to a startup. Then, the person is forced to make a comment with a clickable link.
Businesses like restaurants and bars use it all the time...

http://www.chalkitupsigns.com/
Strictly speaking, I don't think these things have a 'size' with a border where you can be inside or outside of a lepton 'surface'. Its a basically a point source with a field effect as far as we can determine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_electron_radius

I think the article is saying that the field affect appears to be completely uniform.

Technically, if the electron can affect something at a great distance via gravity or releasing photons you could say the size of an electron is many light years in diameter. Or you could call it infinitesimally tiny.

Neutrons and protons we know to be complicated little parties of quarks and gluons, each of which are, as far as we know, are also elementary particles like leptons.
XSD is used to validate a document conforms to some standard. Say you run a legal document firm and you receive Form Foo from 100 different clients, XSD will handle validating that they are conforming to the standard for you.

XSL is an umbrella for a few things, most interesting is XPath which is a super fast query language for xml documents.

SOAP is just worthless.

WSDL is nice though, it compiles a web service API to source code so you get a nice layer of abstraction around what you're writing to.
Is the real pro-XML argument, then, that it currently has support? As far as I know, there is nothing inherent to JSON to prevent anyone from writing a streaming parser.
That's one amazing judge.

I wonder how Oracle will fight this? I can't imagine that they'll just meekly accept this.
Yes, I agree that it's valuable and will eventually lead to revenue. Perhaps the "mystery" stops right there.

Sometimes it can be difficult to clearly communicate in short forum-style posts. I don't always qualify my posts, but in this case, I didn't want HN readers to think my posts boiled down to ripping on this Google Street View announcement. I should let my posts speak for themselves and work on being more concise. ;)

I feel like there's been an increase in this type of behavior since points were removed from individual posts.
Does anyone have recommendations for resources on messaging/queueing basics? I'm look for something on the basic patterns (pubsub, broadcast... ?) and basic considerations to be aware of.
15 fresh startups with great landing page designs
This is very interesting, and I LOVE that Google is doing it. I use google maps to make sure that a rickshaw/taxi driver isn't ripping me off by going the wrong/long way. It has come in handy for me several times in India.

The real trouble in India is addresses. When I lived in India my official address was
3rd Floor Pran Vijay / Near H K House Lane / Opposite Bata Showroom / Income Tax Colony / Ashram Road / Navrangpura Ahmedabad-380009

How the hell will Gmaps figure that out? Will we just start using lat/long coordinates?
I'd also like to say that while you may not enjoy programming in assembly that doesn't make it a bad thing.

Programming assembly is actually fun (for some of us) and gives you a level of intimacy and insight into the machine that no other language can provide.

OK maybe FORTH
Why You Should Thank Your Gas Giant Planet Every Day
Apologies for posting this up before the transcript was ready. Thought that it explained the concept of agile development to its core...to bring it beyond just technical pivoting.
I came here to post that one of the things I miss from the old internet is single-page articles, without having to search for the print button.
Storm sounds great, but this post probably should have waited until it was actually open-sourced. As it is, it just comes across as naked self-promotion based on a technology that could for all we know be vaporware.
Not in the "pure" scientific method, but in practice, no such thing exists. There is always politics to consider, and Galileo considered wrong.

One might be inclined to believe that Louis XIV was acting as a benefactor when he invited Cassini to France, but in reality he was using it as yet another wedge against the papacy (along with other things such as the Declaration of the Clergy of France) in order to secure more power for himself in France.

Freedom of expression is all about the political climate you find yourself in, and the successful disruptor is he who takes this into account when planning his campaign.
'Near-Perfect' == 'Perfect to within our ability to measure'

That is, the headline might lead you to believe that they are not perfect spheres, but that is not known to be the case.

Also: cool.
Facebook: Pushing millions of lines of code five days a week
Google Offers - Portland, NY, SF
On microscale it's wrong to think about "in between".
There is no in between, there are vacuum, fields (quantized),
field state evolution and amplitudes between initial and final states and so on.
Is an MBA Worth It in 2011?
Precisely. I read the whole post looking for a link to the source on github or something, and then the last sentence was just a huge letdown.
The attack plan is simple: if you build it, they will come.

Let's say I wanted to build a local business service. I could do all of the searching myself, or I could pay some money to google to leverage their platform. There is instant recognition of the google service, and it helps those startups decouple the difficulties of information acquisition from the business model.

In general, google, facebook, apple all do the same thing: maintain a platform upon which others build stuff.
6 Productivity Apps for Small Businesses Integrated with Salesforce.com
In other words, full time job type time consumption (from one of your probably four or five classes) doesn't qualify for call-by-name status. Yowza.

Great post, though I wonder if the call-by-name phenomenon is more about notoriety than actual difficulty. For instance, the only other call-by-name class I can think of is "Orgo" (5.12, Organic Chemistry), which people thought was hard but not comparable to Unified, Junior Lab, or ICE.

There's also the secondary tier of fame, classes whose numbers you can say to nearly anyone without mentioning the course. Notable examples include:

* The "Double-oh's" (6.001, 6.002, 6.003, and 6.004, the four intro Course 6 classes plus 2.007, the Course 2 intro to Design and Manufacturing)

* 170 (6.170 - Software Engineering Lab)

* 100B (18.100B - Analysis, the "more demanding" version "for students with more mathematical maturity")
"We know you don't want to talk to just anyone, which is why you talk to no one. We also know that one face to face meeting can grow your business or career. We want to help make that happen."

If that's the real problem you're trying to solve, it seems sites like LetsLunch.com do a better job of this, partially b/c they don't have to deal with the artificial constraint of having people be in transit somewhere.
This seems terrible. Regardless of what I think of patents, if I ever need the legal system I don't want to only get as much justice as a judge thinks a jury has time for.
yeah, they might arrest you for 90 days and figure out if they are spiked with poison or something. I'd suggest not doing it ;p
Yep, my bad :-\
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It's a super() good overview of super(). Nice to see a post that uses a real example.
I just spent about 20 minutes trying to get anything more than 20.

Wikipedia has the answer, as to not spoil here's a link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy#Cha... I like the last loop on the article not crossed out.
JonoW, I'd like to see a definitive case study for the Enterprise SOA system's use of XML.

It may be my lack of experience in the area, but I have never found big-iron solutions to be a good solution to anything I have dealt with, usually they seem to be more trouble than the actual problem.
Pariser's best point is that we should be aware that what we are seeing is actually being filtered, but I think that he is overstating the cost of personalized filtering and understating its benefit.

There is too much information available to view it unfiltered and it's unclear what that even means. If Google returned the same search results to everyone, that doesn't mean its unfiltered - it determined what to return based on what other people wanted to see. You're just seeing things with the same filter as everyone else. Why is that better? If you think it's better, consider that the reason there is so much trivial crap on TV is because the same people who watch it are the ones generating the aggregate filter.

Old media was already filtered. Just because everyone reads the same NY Times doesn't mean that it doesn't have a ____ slant and that all its subscribers aren't being affected by that confirmation bias. How many people who subscribe to the NYT also subscribe to Reason magazine to get the libertarian viewpoint on current events?

A way this could become better is for the personalizing algorithm to become smarter. Instead of showing you conservative viewpoints because you click on conservative opinions more than liberal ones, a smarter filter would make a higher level assessment of you. So if you click on some liberal ones, maybe it concludes something about you instead of something more trivial about what you look at - maybe it concludes that you like to hear other viewpoints and modifies your filter to better suit that conclusion.
I think JSON's power comes from the fact that it is a subset of a programming language. I organize data in arrays and hash tables (or objects, which can be implemented as hash tables), and that is what JSON provides.

I remember teaching classes in '99 where I needed to explain XML. I could do it in five minutes -- it's like HTML, but you get to make up tags that are case-sensitive. Every start tag needs to have an end tag, and attributes need to be quoted. Put this magic tag at the start, so parsers know it's XML. Here's the special case for a tag that closes itself.

Then what happened? Validation, the gigantic stack of useless WS-* protocols, XSLT, SOAP, horrific parser interfaces, and a whole slew of enterprise-y technologies that cause more problems than they solve. Like COBRA, Ada, and every other "enterprise" technology that was specified first and implemented later, all of the XML add-ons are nice in theory but completely suck to use.

XML has changed from a mildly verbose but eminently human-readable and machine-parsable data representation into a "technology" that has become over-specialized and covered with encrustations to the point that it is approaching regex's on the "now you have two problems" scale. JSON just gets back to a format that both the machine and I can read reliably and with ease.
مشاهدة مباراة الزمالك ومصر المقاصة
Well, if every piece of enterprise software worked right out of the box, consultants would be out of business.

I have to admit that I'm not a big user of ActiveMQ, but I've used a closed-source equivalent from a slightly bigger vendor (IBM) for many years. It also is not configured correctly out of the box for most enterprises. When new features or platforms come out they are often buggy. The documentation though is usually decent until you really want to dig into the internals and understand it.