skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well that's the point, isn't it? XML unifies various independent ecosystems. At the very least, if defines such essential things like data and time representation formats, whereas JSON doesn't even attempt to do that.

But then XML goes further and provides you with a contract. Now anyone can write their independent implementation and test it (validate it) to that contract. This is what Web was about in the first place. You can use any technology imaginable, any language imaginable, but in the end you are delivering to common format, HTML+JS.

Now that this is insufficient, the natural evolution would be XML and REST. JSON, however, is a liability. I believe it is, in fact, the next IE6!
Simple and fast document scanning and OCR for Mac OS
"How we use Twitter to grow our business network."
Typically the team either tracks clicking the trial or actually starting the trial. We track stuff all the way through. Over the last couple of months of A/B testing, they've noted that the conversion rate of the trial page is not extraordinarily sensitive to A/B tests in progress before that page, so often we use "opened the page" as a proxy for "started a trial" because it gets results weeks faster. (BCC uses trials and not sales as the conversion of interest for much the same reason.)
Ask HN: Received an incubator term sheet, should I get a lawyer?
I was accepted into an inaugural startup incubator that offers $20,000, mentorship, and office space (the usual benefits) in exchange for a percentage of the company. I am happy with the terms at a high level, but I honestly don't understand everything on the term sheet.

Is it worth it to hire a lawyer to look for anything that may inhibit future funding? Has anyone gone through this process? Specifically, I'd love to know what most startups do in this situation. I think most startups just trust the program, but since this is a brand new incubator, I think we are all learning together.
CappCon speakers announced (Wolf Rentzsch, Google, Sofa, Mockingbird, more)
That's a nice, subtle assessment of Altly. (Intentional or not.)
The bootloader for the kernel (called Pure64) requires this. They chose FAT16 because it's compatible with most operating systems and also not unimportant; it's relatively easy to implement.
So what's the startup idea for this?
Ah, judging by that report, the law really seems quite reasonable.

Basically, if the user explicitly requests some functionality, like creating an account or saving a preference, and you need a cookie to do that, you don't have to ask permission to set it.

If you want to do anything else with the cookie, you have to get informed consent and the practical way to do that is by making it part of the request e.g. adding an explanation and checkbox to the signup or preferences page. Naturally, the more you want to do with the cookie, the more you have to explain to the user.

So effectively, you get to track users in exchange for their engagement with your site, and you have to (gasp) tell them exactly how you are tracking them.
The video file can be downloaded at http://ustream.vo.llnwd.net/pd14/0/1/14/14951/14951420/1_819...
eBooks?
What caching plugin do you use?
Ask HN:  Career Reboot - Advice?
I am working for a large consulting company, as Project Manager for many large ERP projects. In recent years, the job demands have increased to the point that the hours are 60 to 80 per week plus travel, with no bump in compensation, and ever rising workload expectations. Furthermore, the industry looks to be shedding jobs as they offshore more work. I am seriously contemplating going independent and getting back into programming or package based consulting (I've done both), where I think there is more consistent/robust demand (vs Project Management - also, I observed that compensation is not substantially higher, if at all, for the additional responsibilities) for independents. The average independent that I have hired has come close to, and quite frequently exceeded the compensation I was making before tax.

My problem is that it has been more than 10 years since I've done that sort of work. I have saved enough funds and am very willing to quit and spend the next year or two retooling, working for low pay to gain experience. I am not a complete noob in the IT market, but would like advice or insight on market trends and related skills (e.g. - and I am making these up to illustrate - web design and programming are on a long term increase, and JAVA would be the right skill to pick up; business analytics is up and coming, and SAS is the way to go)? For context...I've spend several years mainframe programming, a few years ERP package solution consulting, and the rest as PM (certified PMP).

Also, I am thinking of moving from east coast to low cost city with high demand and lower cost of living (e.g. in Texas), with the intention of not traveling for work. Would like input on this too.
Right. A community exists for people who make their own book scanners: http://www.diybookscanner.org/ , but book scanning is really quite tedious and hardly worth it unless you really need one book a lot. There were previous discussions about this on HN in which the consensus was that book scanning wasn't really feasible for more than a book or two due to time.
Should be critical, yes. But if you know the market, you know that things like usability or ux are used 90% of times as buzzwords from sellers. I'm afraid I can't disclose some of my experiences with top design agencies in both the US and Italy, but trust me, I've got a truckload of horror stories :)
Is there a "first to declare a bubble" bubble?

Bubbles aren't just "lots of people are trying the same thing" or "lots of people are trying to copy a new idea" or "people discover a new market", you know. The value of the term "bubble" has been frittered away to nearly nothing by people rushing to slap the label on everything showing the slightest bit of growth. Sure, a lot of these guys will end up failing or acquiring each other, but that's not a bubble, that's just how the rush into a new market always works.
Related: http://TheWikiGame.com
(I built this app, it's made with using django, xmpp, and almost every datatype that Redis provides)
This is perfect point which I agree with completely.

What I don't agree with is OP's blanket statements like 'privatization is theft'. So far the only argument to support his views were his childhood memories.
I meant on my existing books. Most not available as e-books (proprietary study materials, certificate course materials, books in other languages, ...).
Correct. As mcav mentioned scanning books is very complicated -- way more effort than I'm willing to spend.

And even if I could, I don't think I would. I like the feel of books in my hands.
If you already have a scanner, you can get a nice scan software with OCR functionality for $15 on the Mac App store: http://www.pdfscannerapp.com
Disclaimer: The app is a hobby project of mine which I created after desperately searching for a software to automatically straighten the awfully crooked scans my all in one printer produces.
Put two spaces at the beginning of a line for that line to be displayed monospaced.

Example
Does anyone now of a good resource for theater reviews? Some quick Googling didn't pull anything up for me. It would be interesting to see a listing of which theaters use which projectors as well as sound system quality.
"if an electron was the size of the solar system, it would be out from being perfectly round by less than the width of a human hair"

This doesn't seem right:

Radius of an electron: 2.8e-15 m
Off by: 1e-29 m

Thus it's off by 0.0000000000004%

Average distance of pluto from the sun: 5.9e12 m
Thus "size" of the solar system: 1.18e13 m

1.18e13 * 0.0000000000004% = 4.2e-2 = 4.2cm

It's not off by that much , but 4.2cm is way more than the width of a human hair (17-180um, a factor of ~1000-2000-fold)
Try this example.

It is 2015, the US Federal Government is approaching true bankruptcy. The decision is made to denationalize the Yellowstone National Park. It is sold to Exxon Corp. for $300 million. They will prospect for oil there. You, one of 300 million eligible shareholders, are sent a stock certificate worth $1. You sell it for $0.50 to buy a stale loaf of bread from a local gang (your family has nothing else to eat.)

Did this story feature a theft?

Which traditional political ideology does it support?
I worked with Dmitry while he was at Myspace, he definitely is very passionate about competing with Facebook -- he was many times at odds with Myspace leadership on the issue of whether to compete with them or carve our own niche and embrace their platform (you can see who won that debate). I'm glad he's finally fulfilling his vision.
so much to learn from all industries about sales....
> The definition of "cookies used by the core service" here is so far off its insane. Analytics packages like Google Analytics are not part of my "core service"?

If Google Analytics is a core service your site offers to visitors, then I suggest you have bigger problems that just this tiny change to UK Law.

On the other hand, if what you say is indeed true, surely you can come up with a compelling explanation to your visitors over why it is in the visitor's best interests to opt into to having a Google Analytics cookie added.

>It increases the burden on site owners collecting data about thing that are happening on their own site

That's only if you decide not to give the user a choice of whether to opt in to tracking or profile-building cookies. I don't think you should write that option off so quickly

Sites should always take the privacy issues of their visitors seriously. Now is a good time to sit down and consider it. No longer can you turn a blind eye and let third parties use your site to build profiles about visitors. Now you have to get their informed consent first.

> If I can't A/B test my site how the hell am I supposed to improve it?

You can A/B test your site. If you want to use a method that requires cookies, then get the visitor's consent first.

> Additionally, for ad supported sites, don't be shocked to see revenue drop like a rock when sites can't fill any inventory with retargeted ads or other forms of more targeted advertising that pay a higher CPM. Less money = less resources = worse experiences.

This is not surprising. The value of ads is based on the profiles they build up about each visitor to your site. You've been making money by quietly leaking their browsing history to these third party ad-networks. Now you are being asked to be more responsible.
Protect the Open Internet: Civil Society during the G8
Yeah, the S1300 is another option if you're willing to spend a bit more.
I saw that same graph on Khan's FAQ today. He was explaining that if there's a lull in the video, then he works to make it more interesting at that point, until the lull goes away.

How do you get that data?
Great app. I agree with maushu, it would be neat to have it auto-refresh. Was this a weekend project?
I'm predicting a bubble in fisherman analogies.
I'm building an alternative to Facebook called Kwolla. You can install it on your own machine or use our API. I'm bootstrapping the entire thing. You can download my 1.x version of software for free or pay for a 2.0 pre-sale.

I wish I could get coverage like this. :)
You described a hard real-time system. That exists for things like the controllers on a jet. What's becoming much more prevalent are soft real-time systems that perform analytics. There won't be any catastrophic failure if deadlines aren't meant - and there may not even be any expressed deadline - it's just understood that the data must be processed and analyzed as fast as possible to be useful.
This or the other one, with a catchier title (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2577459)

I thought this would be hugely popular...especially considering those "getting started with open source" discussions that have been around lately.
ic, thanks. I hope the day when every book can be purchased in electronic form comes soon!
Thanks to Jason for putting this up on the archive.org site:
http://www.archive.org/details/2011-05-calufa-twitter-sql
Venture Capital 2.0’s secret sauce ~ Innovation Investment Journal
Is there an analogue here to long-form advertising copy? Perhaps enterprise buyers are as vulnerable to infomercials as insomniac housewives.
The cause was... wait for it... Apache KeepAlive. For more details, searchyc.com for [patio11 keepalive]. It kills more blogs than cancer.

I should start a How To Make Sure Your Blog Does Not Die Horribly consulting business. And it will consist of disabling Apache KeepAlive, and then chanting arcane incantations in Latin about caching for the next hour to make people feel like they were really getting their money's worth.
Amazon's New Mac Download Store Takes On Apple's Mac App Store
You seem to be harboring a lot of anger. What is really going on here?
Yeah, there's NFC access for vending machines/convenience stores, but as already noted Japan is still very cash centric (which I find I prefer, but YMMV).

tl;dr it's here in Japan, yes, but not as "use anywhere" as you'd be led to believe. Doesn't mean it doesn't fucking rock, though.
I think its WP Super Cache
Actually we are working right now on exactly the above described use case. Let us know if you want a private beta code to help test it (it's in currently in alpha). Email my username @ company name.
How's it an antipattern?
Surely it would be a lot easier if you were willing to destroy the book in the process? You'd just need a scanner that will feed pages through like a printer, and to merge the page numbers if it's a one sided scanner.

The scanners on that page are ridiculously cool.
I like that " Nobody appreciates you more than YOU."! Great point.

I have pretty much made a decision to strike on my own again. I won't be building a product, but will keep growing a consulting business.
Multiple corporations and multiple local businesses and non-profits owning the means of dissent does not cause me nearly the distress that one single entity with direct motivation to stifle speech owning those means would. Nothing is perfect, because humans are flawed. But, competition helps keep the conflicting interests of large groups of people in check.

I find the notion of one point of control to be frightening, especially if that one point of control is in the hands of the people that the citizens would most need to be able to speak out against. As bad as AT&T may treat its customers, they don't have the power to imprison them or execute them; governments have that power. And, if things are bad enough from AT&T, I have options; none of those options may be great, but I do pretty much always have options, and those options are getting better as providers compete for more of the pie. FiOS and 3G/4G/WiMax have become viable broadband options in many places in the US, just in the past couple of years (I use 3G/4G Internet because I travel full-time).

There is nothing perfect in this world. But, a competitive landscape is safer for little guys like me, than one in which I have no choices.
Telecommunication takes 7 steps as of now. The telecommunication page has been edited a lot over the past day. Some pages have been edited to break the chain to philosophy xkcd mentions, e.g. mathematics (and then reverted by irate Wikipedians).
Is there something that is exclusive to Google? Could this be implemented on any phone with NFC right now?
I could cite a wealth of literature describing what Soviet life was actually like for people other than dissident whiners.

But it would be a waste of time, because 1) it would persuade no one - everyone here appears to have read-only minds on the subject and 2) most of it has never and will never be translated to English.
"I think what's being said here is that it's easy to pick up the ideas of visual design, not the actual skill (I hope). "

No, that's exactly what I'm saying. I'm a bit more seasoned as a designer (my public folio is super outdated so you'll have to trust me) but I leveled up in visual design by zooming in to a design I liked and recreating it pixel by pixel in Fireworks. Eventually you'll find that certain things become second nature (using gradients, textures and shadows to distinguish content areas) and the types of things you're trying to recreate get harder and more complex. That's cool, it's called progress.

Zooming in and recreating as a way to learn is the single most helpful tip I got from a creative director about halfway through my career, right in the middle of a shift from developer to designer, and it served me well.

And if you're interested in how to do it without being a ripoff artist and completely copying someone else's layout (which is not what I'm advocating), the trick is to only copy elements of a several different designs and layer them into a seamless whole, as first advocated back in 2004 by Cameron Moll:

http://cameronmoll.com/archives/000016.html
Have you looked into W3 Total Cache? I've heard it's quite a bit better at handling heavy traffic. I've never gotten enough hits to see, but it's worth testing.
When Oracle filed their claims they put themselves at the mercy of the same legal system that allows them to file said claims. The judge in this case is simply exercising his authority. You can't have your cake and eat it. And more importantly, this might set a positive precedent for other patent cases.
But until it's essentially universal, that still shifts burden to the user: they have to look around and try to figure out whether this alternative payment method is accepted at this merchant. Why wouldn't they just whip out their credit card that they know is going to be accepted?

EDIT: What I mean to say is: if credit-card-swiping were particularly onerous, I could see this easily taking off. But since it's not (at all!) and people are trying to replace it with something that seems equally-if-not-more burdensome, it's hard for me to see why this would catch on outside tech folks that mostly do it for the geekfactor.
Oh, cool, thanks for clarifying.
Facebook finally plateaus in 2011
Just as there are A-grade startups and the B-startups, there are now A-grade incubators and a growing list of B-ones. Founders thinking that he value of participation in New Incubator X will be similar to participating in YCombinator are in for an unpleasant surprise.

Long term, I don't think that this will look like the college market since it will be much easier to measure the quality of an incubator's outputs than of a college's outputs and we'll see the lower quality ones fade away.
That sounds like complete BS. I grew up in Russia and no way that statistic could be remotely true.
I can't help but think that anytime you think you might need a lawyer, you probably do. Personally, I'd get a lawyer to review the contract just so I understood exactly what I'm getting myself into, even if the incubator had been around for ages.

I'll also toss out a personal recommendation for Gabe Levine, who has a blog online about lawyering for makers: http://mylawyergabe.com/
You can, and we do, embed an ActiveMQ broker in an application.

They pass messages. They're fairly related.
Yeah, it is. See my response to rglover below and feel free to ping me offline if you need more tips.
FDA Sued over Farm Antiobiotic Use
Nice article, but one thing struck me when reading the code examples posted in the article: What's the use of using kwds in __init__?

class Shape(Root):
def __init__(self, **kwds):
self.shapename = kwds.pop('shapename')
super().__init__(**kwds)

class ColoredShape(Shape):
def __init__(self, **kwds):
self.color = kwds.pop('color')
super().__init__(**kwds)

I would personally just have written this somewhat similar to this:

class Shape(Root):
def __init__(self, shapename):
self.shapename = shapename
super().__init__()

class ColoredShape(Shape):
def __init__(self, shapename, color):
self.shapename = shapename
self.color = color
super().__init__(shapename)

But then again I'm by no means what anyone could call a Python 'Jedi'. Can anyone explain to me why using kwds in this way would be better? Would it not lead to having to look up the declaration of the class for the exact names of arguments to pop() every time?
> What is your evidence in support of the idea that assembly cannot be faster?

I made no such claim.

My gripe was using it as a feature, claiming that since it's in assembly, it's certainly faster, which is just simply not true. In most cases, it's the algorithm that determines performance as opposed to the details of its implementation. Assembly certainly has its place, but arguing a kernel completely implemented in assembly is faster simply due to the abstraction level they're working on does not carry much weight. Of course you'll be able to find hand-tuned algorithms that are much faster in assembly than a higher-level language, but that does not follow that "Complex software written in X is generally slower than complex software written in assembly"

Also, Lua is a poor example. It's performance was much more heavily influenced by portability and embedability.
That depends. If he's going to have the same "Don't F&*% with Windows" attitude like he used to have in the past, when people came to him with such projects, then I doubt he'll do much better than Ballmer.

Microsoft needs to let innovation get out of their labs regardless if it has to potential to kill Windows or not. The priority should be to make great products with no restrictions. Did Steve Jobs get his employees to f$%^ off when they came with the idea to make iOS that would potentially affect Mac sales in the future? I don't think so.

The iPhone disrupts the iPod business, and the iPad disrupts the Macbook business (though it's still too early to see the effects). Microsoft wouldn't build anything that has the potential to disrupt Windows right now. That's why they'd rather wait over 2 years since the iPad launched to use the real Windows for tablets, instead of making a WP7 tablet version right away (which would have to be about as cheap as WP7 for phones).
Yeah, and?
I also like the feel of books and the easy way to mark stuff with a pencil. What I hate, though, is the weight of the books and the hassle to store them, to transport them on a daily basis (student), move them from city to city with airline luggage limits. Erases all the love I had for the convenience when reading.
To be clear, he qualifies this with the statement

Final words: A modern compiler contains a huge set of heuristics that interact with each other in strange ways. They have been tuned for 'average' code. But an interpreter is a very different beast, so you'll inevitably get disappointing results.

More info in this reddit comment:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/badl2/luajit_2_...
What is the legal status for government documentation in the U.S? Are you able to keep everything in your life electronic? E.g. invoices, company documentation and so on?
The place I used to work had a hydraulic paper sheer that could cut a ream straight in half. I've also got the above mentioned Fujitsu Scansnap.

I started out by chopping the spines off those old textbooks I'd been lugging around and feeding them to the scanner. It was so easy, I started going by the used book store and grabbing handfuls of 50 cent curiosities.

It only took about 10 minutes to scan a book this way. The downside is that the book is destroyed. Think of it as a religious experience. The book can live on forever in the digital realm but it must sacrifice it's paper form to do so!
You seem to be harboring a lot of complacency. What is really going on here?
> Nothing will protect a computer from a determined user.

But their are numerous things you can do to protect a computer from your average user. Not doing these things because of exceptions is wrong.
the perception of entrepreneurs has been tainted by the mafia that took over right after the Soviet collapse

If that were all he was saying, I wouldn't be arguing with him. I think Russia is a mess right now, and a lot of it has to do with the mafia and former KGB running things. But, that's nowhere near all he's saying...that was just the tip of the iceberg.