skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that having a bunch of Lego bricks that you can combine at will is nice, but the disadvantage of that is that what you build with it always will be less streamlined (in software, there will have to be code to handle slight interface differences), and may fall apart easier (if there are zillions of ways to combine parts, the probability that your way to combine them has been tested can rapidly go to zero)

There must be an optimum somewhere in the middle. Big question is: where? For some things, the answer seems clear (sometimes after a couple of decades of experimentation). For example:

- there seems to be consensus that pluggable file systems are a good idea. But even there, there is no consensus on the interface, as shown by the VFS vs ZFS discussion.

- Pluggable printer drivers? I have never heard somebody argue that was a bad idea. On the other hand, there may be room for consolidation here, just as has happened on the terminal front (how many different terminal protocols are in active use?)

- Pluggable windowing systems? On Linux, it appears that X has won (for now).

For others, there is no agreement:

- Pluggable schedulers? At least a few years ago, there was disagreement about the question whether that was a good idea.

- Pluggable window managers? From what I read on the internet, these seem popular, but I think there is some selection bias there.

- Pluggable GUIs? I think that is a bad idea. You can build a system where, say, gnome apps and KDE apps and Java apps all look more or les the same, but I have never seen one where the Lego bricks did not shine through.

- Pluggable character sets (aka code pages)? Unicode has won that battle (because it is the best of all the abominations we can choose from :-))

In summary: I like flexibility, but I also think you cannot get a nice coherent system without limiting that. Designing is making choices. If I wanted to create a Linux system for the general public, I would probably have to sacrifice a lot of flexibility to get such a system in a reasonable timeframe.
Seek an internship.
What did it feel like to be inside the World Trade Center on 9/11?
Not as much as I'd like, but not little enough to move to the Bay Area or NYC and take the hit to my quality of life.
XNA Game Engine PloobsEngine, First Tutorial building a simple 3D Scene
You cannot change a fundamental law if you have a Democrat or Republican agenda. You need a broad consensus, only achievable if you focus on the big issues.

Say that you are trying to pass a new amendment to U.S. Constitution. You have to stay away from the most partisan issues like, say, gun control.
So, yes, I disagree with you, and I don't understand how you can come to your conclusions. They simply do not make sense in this context.

Read the OP and the fact that his customers were having this confusion. You seem to think the confusion doesn't exist.

And I don't have a bone to pick with the GPL. It's a great license for some stuff. With that said if I'm selling product using the GPL and a customer comes to me with a question about it, I'll explain it. I won't yell at them, or call them idiots, or say, "how dare you question getting more freedom, you liar!"
What if you price it in such a way that lending someone a copy allows them to still pay the creator?

You do realize that you as a creator are taking advantage of the medium to distribute your creation in much more efficient ways, yet, you don't want to give the privilege of the abilities of the medium to the consumer. It is this asymmetry that fundamentally perplexes me (to which I have no satisfactory answer).
The Silicon Beach Boom?
I have two cats and it would NEVER have occurred to me to search for an app that my cats can play with. I am not a crazy cat woman and don't buy $1,000 cat toys. I mean, good on them for the success -- but I think anyone who actually stops and thinks "I wonder if there's a toy my cats can play with on my expensive electronic device" must be mental.
Android Honeycomb has hidden Gingerbread interface
It would be interesting to find out if using Hans Montanus's non-canonical formulation of GR (which involves a Euclidean metric and perfectly flat space-time) would yield the same numerical predictions, just with different "book keeping".

That would put a different spin on the notion of Einstein "being right" as I think a lot of folks subconsciously equate GR with the "strangeness" of the Minkowski metric and non-Euclidean space-time manifold.
Tablets cannabilize netbooks: 40% down
> Meanwhile, not having up-to-the-minute scores makes the site more pleasant to participate in; one isn't prodded to make statements in reaction to ludicrous (and likely ephemeral) voting swings.

I feel the same. The change makes the site a bit harder to consume - particularly, skimming-quickly-for-a-couple-good-points is harder.

But it makes the site much nicer to participate in. First, I don't feel the need to reply to mean, nasty, or incorrect replies to me unless I have something to add. Second - and I think this is really nice - voting has become less about promoting an argument or viewpoint and more about saying "thanks for this" or "less of this, please" - I find myself voting up thoughtful stuff I disagree with more often now, and voting less frequently overall.

Personally, I'd say the site is harder to consume efficiently now, but more pleasant to interact with.
Dvorak claims: "everyone" who buys an ebook reader quickly buys lots of "trendy" books (say, 50-100 at $10 each) in order to look smart to people who borrow their device.

This seems absolutely barking mad to me, even if we assume he's exaggerating a bit, and take into account the fact that people's status manoeuvrings aren't always conscious. Kindle users: do you have dozens of unread trendy or impressive books on your device? If you have relatively few books on it, do you often lend it to someone else and feel embarrassed? If you were going to put extra books on your device in order to feel better about your bookishness, would you do it by buying lots of books or by getting free ones from Project Gutenberg or whatever? Is John Dvorak completely making things up here, or is there something to what he says?

[EDITED slightly a minute after posting: wording tweakage.]
I'm interested in the indirect measurements that have been done. Where could I find more information about them?
See also: the Firmin plugin, which abstracts away CSS transitions with clean Javascript APIs: http://extralogical.net/projects/firmin/ (Alas, it does not yet do automatic jQuery fallback.)

Though I love jQuery.animate(), it just can't match the GPU-rendering speed on CSS3 transitions and animations. If you can afford the development time, it's absolutely worth it.
The fact Mac OS X is a security pushover is pretty well known[2].

That raises the question then, why aren't we seeing more Mac viruses and malware? Is it purely a question of economics that market share answers? Is it because there's more technical "know-how" and experience floating around about Windows vulnerabilities? Is it because it is easier to profit off of Windows vulns? These are genuine questions to which I'd love to hear some answers.

Edit: The fact that OS X Lion was shared with security researchers in advance[1] is a good move on Apple's part. Does Microsoft do similar things?

[1]http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-20036218-83.html
As much as I like cats, I am rather surprised people have no problem with cat claws on their >$500 touchscreen...
Thanks, that sounds like sensible advice.
Does anyone know who their hosting provider(s) are? I'm curious to know if they rolled their own infrastructure or if they are cloud based.

Also, does anyone know about their funding and the team?

On the surface it looks promising, but I'd like to hear more about the team behind the effort and further details on the back-end behind the black box.
WTF? I just got 2 down votes for this? It was a serious question. I want to know, did they take a negative measurement too, and if they didn't, how does this prove relativity?
I've heard about that about people from South America before, but it doesn't make much sense to me - the USA is the only country with "America" in its name. Every other use is for the names of continents, which have no actual political meaning (except maybe the EU, but not even all of Europe belongs to the EU, and how many Europeans refer to themselves as that before referring to themselves as a member of their country?)
Just seems like such a waste and detriment to the software engineering profession

Imagine a world with no open source: no Linux, Apache, gcc, Perl, MySQL, Emacs, etc, etc. If you want a website, you have to pay through the nose for a commercial OS, web server, database, and compilers and scripting languages. Will the demand for software developers be higher or lower in that world compared to ours?
2mA Transcranial DC stimulation lightens up brain areas
The market share argument implicitly rejects the idea that OS X is significantly more secure than Windows, by saying that when OS X gets more popular, the amount of malware for OS X will catch up and be more comparable to the amount of Windows malware. It postulates that there must be some threshold level of market share that Macs must exceed before this happens.

The current fact that Mac malware is still rare puts a lower bound on that threshold. Whatever that number is, it is larger than the current Mac market share. It is also safe to assume that 50% is an upper bound on that threshold.

If you assume that OS X is not only as insecure as Windows, but significantly less secure than Windows, then the threshold should be lower, because fewer Macs should be needed to reach the same level of successful attacks. If an attack on Windows is twice as hard as an attack on OS X, then OS X should only need 33% market share in order to reach malware-volume parity.

Every advance in Windows security that is not matched by Apple, and every increase in Mac market share, narrows the conditions under which the market share argument can be considered true, and narrows the range of predictions that can be made in accordance with that theory.

While there is not enough evidence to totally reject the market share argument, we do not have the crucial evidence necessary to prove it true, and all the evidence that has been accumulating over the past decade counts against it.
I'll reply here though it's more of a general response to all the people who replied. First, I'm not sure why I got so many downvotes, I believe my response was quite civil and appropriate, my intention was to be helpful.

Clearly many people here do not view "USAian" as an offensive or derogatory term. I'll try to explain why I believe it to be inappropriate and hope I can do so in a polite and effective enough manner to avoid more downvotes.

"USAian" reads to me as someone who, under the guise of disambiguation, is intentionally being diminutive. Very rarely does a situation occur in which "American" as a term for the people from the US actually result in confusion versus the entire continent. It seems most likely that the speaker is using it to intentionally point out the unimportance of the USA to counter an implied American self-importance.

You're using a term for a group of people that they would never use for themselves, which is a strong indicator it may not be a desirable label. Further, given common themes in current global culture, it is very easy for the term to be taken as an intentional insult, as if the speaker is "putting them in their place".

Whenever I see something like "USAian" I assume the speaker views Americans as self-centered, imperialistic, unworldly or similar and is using the term to intentionally remind the reader of the significance of the rest of the Americas, with the implication they need this reminding.

But, based on the responses, maybe I'm an outlier. Hopefully the above clarified my original response.
everyone knows that the Big Mac Index is the best way to compare purchasing power (http://www.economist.com/markets/bigmac/about.cfm)
Is it really that arbitrary? Instead of measuring country- and inflation-sensitive dollars I'm advocating measuring how your income affects your runway.
"What are his actual arguments?"

Here's one:
http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/broken_windows
Mac community has no tolerance.

Here's another:
http://daringfireball.net/2006/11/jackass_larry_seltzer
Fundamentally more secure.

Overall I just think he has more confidence in Apple's drive to deliver ease of use consumer experiences. As he recently recently hinted: "So, for the sake of argument, let’s take it as a given that this sort of thing is becoming more common. What can Apple do? Think about it. (My guess: think about why the iPhone and iPad, despite being far more popular than the Mac, have no trojan horses.)"
Obviously he's thinking that Apple could, if security becomes an issue, offer clueless users a mode where app execution is limited to signed Mac App Store installs or something.
Apple Overhauling Retail For Apple Store 2.0
Ugh, it almost gave me a seizure.
It's funny, I almost down-voted you thinking this was a sarcastic post since my first impression of Pagoda's homepage was "wtf?" - but, their site caught my attention and encouraged me to progress through the process to find out more.

I'm not sure whether the designers of Pogoda's site are flat out geniuses or skating on thin ice.
The Best Way An Entrepreneur Has Ever Spent His FU Money
I'm curious: If you add a new axiom in order to make a undecidable proposition decidable, will this new axiom add more than one undecidable proposition, or is the number of new undecidable propositions unknown? Or are there infinitely undecidable propositions for every set of rules?

If the former is true, couldn't we theoretically just apply axioms in order to solve undecidable propositions which have a practical application if solved? Or will it practically be hard to find these axioms?
Read these Alan Weiss books immediately:

"Getting Started in Consulting" - http://personalmba.com/review/getting-started-in-consulting/

"Value-Based Fees" - http://personalmba.com/review/value-based-fees/

(Links are my short reviews / overviews.)
Then why didn't you ask for that? You asked about salary, mentioning nothing about expenses or other commitments.

That's a different question entirely.

What are you really asking?
I like the iPhone app, but i wish it would continue in the background upon exiting the app. That's a pretty important feature.
Load Balanced Actors with Akka and Scala
How The Four Seasons Helped Apple Store Rewrite the Rules
In New York for TechCrunch Disrupt? Here’s a Visitor’s Guide to Silicon Alley
Thanks for sharing Larrik... Or should I say "Professor" :P
If anyone from earbits happens to be reading - would you please provide an alternative to FB for login? I don't have an FB account and I won't get one just to sign up for your service. FWIW, I've paid for my music for the last ten years and currently subscribe to Pandora and Rdio. I'm in your target market, except for the FB thing.
Free Xbox 360 for American students from Microsoft
Frankly, I believe that Twitter is already great. They have an enormous user base and the participation is off the charts.

The problem is, I cannot for the life of me see how this platform is able to monetize itself into a viable, hugely profitable business. Granted, Twitter now is a profitable business, but my understanding that a significant part of their revenue comes from search agreements from Google.

So, how does Twitter expect to drive significant PROFIT growth on a foundation defined by 160 character sentences?
Want to own a book? Buy a hard copy. Amazon, Apple, B&N eBooks are only licensed
What about the rest of us -- those of us who aren't newspaper journalists and on whom the injunctions are not served, but who may nevertheless be liable for contempt of court if we tweet or blog about something we read on, say, a foreign web site?

We don't know that republishing the information is in contempt of court, but ignorance of the law is not (and never has been) a defense -- at best it's merely a mitigating factor for the court to consider when handing down a sentence.
Steve Blank: Microsoft Is Doomed
It won't burn you, the commits are still around until you get garbage collected.
Indeed, I have looked myself for a costing.

I guess that any disclosure of costs by the court would also disclose who paid said costs, and therefore... Ah, what a calamity.

It's interesting that due to pressure some of the CCTV in the UK is now starting to be removed, but if they remove half of it we'll still be the world leaders of it I suspect.
The 2nd annual Wired 100: Positions 100-80 (Wired UK)
One successful product does not necessarily lead to a thriving market. The authors of Mac Defender have probably made a good return on their investment, but what counts in the long term is whether their customers have, in the form of stolen credit card numbers or botnet membership or whatever.

If Mac Defender and it's forthcoming copycats aren't very effective tools, then we probably won't see an explosion. There will be some short-term growth, but Mac malware would quickly become a low-level endemic problem, instead of the multi-year epidemic that would be necessary for OS X to get to the state Windows is in.

Mac Defender may mark the start of the arms race between malware authors and Apple, but I don't think there's any evidence yet to suggest that the arms race would proceed as quickly or as embarrassingly as it did for Windows.
Wolfram Alpha: The Second Anniversary
I looked into this a while ago, but if I were to fully outsource it, it didn't make sense financially. Out of curiosity, do you use your own money in the machine and service it yourself? Do you own the machine or lease?
Links directly to a PDF, FYI.
Be Motivated Today
This experiment did not set out to "prove" anything. I think you'll find that the original article does not use the word "prove" even once.

The experiment set out to experimentally test the accuracy of Einstein's predictions. The results of the experiment showed that under these specific circumstances, the predictions line up extremely well with observations.

There's no "control group" for this kind of test. Of course, they could potentially run multiple experiments to verify Einstein's predictions under different circumstances. That might provide useful information, but the lack of such information in no way discredits the results of this particular experiment.

If you want to read more about the experimental protocol, check out the final results paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1105.3456v1
How a law firm tested "phantom" AT&T smartphone data use
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/
I just use Billings for OSX—simple timer in the menubar but it takes a few more steps to modify/delete timeslips compared to adding one.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2005/mar/16/europeanunion....

"The International Obesity Task Force estimated that Finland, Germany, Greece, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Malta have exceeded the United States figure of 67% for overweight or obese males."
I still think SML is worthy of study - it's a great introduction to functional programming with an advanced type system w/o the additional complexity that laziness and monads bring to Haskell.
If you'll allow me to pull a quote from the article, I think it would be interesting to discuss. Satoshi said this in the thread where he was introducting Bitcoin at the Cryptography mailing list:

"I actually did this kind of backwards. I had to write all the code before I could convince myself that I could solve every problem, then I wrote the paper. I think I will be able to release the code sooner than I could write a detailed spec."

http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg099...

By the way, if you only want to look at one or two projects, Open Transactions and Ripple are the most interesting imho.
This link included information that the other didn't.
RIAA files legal action against Box.net after winning Limewire case
Anybody tested with a wordpress setup?
Picking BackType
I did and I found some options that have to do with alternative keyboard layouts, usually folding the keyboard in half using a hot key. I was lucky in that I had partial use of my hand and since my injury and surgery were so high up on my arm (as opposed to a direct hand injury) I wasn't as held back as I might have been otherwise.

I also looked into hardware solutions, but those are expensive and more for a person who isn't going to recover (longer learning time, more $$). At the time I also considered seeing if I could write something for my cell phone that would make using the keyboard on it with one hand easier too.

At the time, I certainly would have purchased a software solution if it was reasonably priced (maybe 33-50% the cost of hardware solutions).
Read the OP and the fact that his customers were having this confusion. You seem to think the confusion doesn't exist.

No, I think that comments like the one you made contribute to this confusion. I think the confusion exists because of comments like yours (as he also mentioned, there are even people here at HN that are actually confused, and not intentionally spreading FUD). I don't believe that you, specifically, are responsible for all of the confusion about the GPL, but I believe that enough people making false statements about the scope and power of the GPL can add up to real problems for users and developers. That this was one of the FUD tactics of Microsoft regarding the GPL for a number of years makes me perhaps even more sensitive about it. At one point in time, not too far past, that kind of claim was part of the FUD war Microsoft (and other proprietary vendors) waged against Free software.

In short, I believe that people who make statements like yours confuse people into thinking the GPL is something that it is not, and I would like it if people like you, who presumably actually know better, would stop making misleading statements like the one you made. I don't want people to be confused.

So, if you'll simply stop trying to confuse people with misstatements about the GPL, I won't feel compelled to keep arguing with you about it.

And I don't have a bone to pick with the GPL.

A brief review of your comment history when the GPL comes up seems to indicate otherwise.
There is no need to worry. America knows how to fight conventional enemies and units. It knows how to get air superiority and prevent their enemies from getting it.

The US military and the intelligence community have mapped out the majority of air strips and storage locations for their jets. If there were ever a conflict America can shoot off cruise missles, use stealth fighters to bomb these targets with ease.

They also have the resources to disrupt the paki's entire war fighting capabilities, including its jets, by disrupting its network. With the navy they can block off all resources being sent in their country (like energy and metals),and bomb energy and communication assets with relative ease. Basically making their units useless.

All of what china gives pakistan is a gesture of good will for future economic gain.
nice and simple example for something that confounds people like myself. Thanks for putting it together.
I think it made my point quite nicely. Piracy works in a very small percentage of cases. We shouldn't be clinging to this fact and saying that it's an effective way to market and advertise.