skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ben Bagdikian wrote a book called "The Information Machines" about personalized news circa 1970.

One chapter in the middle of it makes the most damning indictment of the concept of "news" that I've ever seen.

At that time, the editor of a local newspaper had to look at thousands of news wire article that he could run and had only a few seconds to evaluate an article and decide if they want to put it in or not.

Fast forward to 2011 and a small media market like Tompkins County. We've got a daily paper, the Ithaca Journal, which seems to get a page thinner every month. Most newswire news is now in a section with USA Today branding, and the local news in the Ithaca Journal is largely about crime -- this works because a single crime can generate a large number of news stories: there is a report, an arrest, an indictment, an interminable trial, a conviction, appeals, imprisonment, parole hearings, a release, etc.

The serious newspaper in Tompkins is a weekly paper, the Tompkins Weekly, which is actually profitable. It covers things that are going on in the area that are ongoing... And that's the point: most of the things that are important are ongoing processes, not event. The fact is that there just aren't enough significant events in an area of 100,000 people to fill a daily. And who needs wire news stories in a local paper when you get them online?

"News" in the conventional sense is entertainment; even if you're watching the events in Egypt on Al Jazeera, it's probably something that isn't going to change your behavior or make a real difference in your life.
Coulomb Gets Patent for LAN-Connected EV Charger
The reason those companies send HTML emails is because they convert better. It has nothing to do with "executives" liking them more. The deal and advertising businesses are very metrics driven and if text performed, they would use it. It doesn't do nearly as well, especially for products.
> I've a lot of respect for Dr. Kay, but history has shown him to be wrong on this point: strong static typing and binding things as early as possible is how robust systems are built and how errors are minimized.

Could you expand on this? I don't see how late binding is incompatible with the robustness that static typing provides. In a traditional (C/++/#/Java) OOP setting, virtual methods and dynamic method dispatch allow for late-binding of method names to behavior based on run-time type specializations, but you still have the static compile-time guarantee that a method with the appropriate name and type signature will exist. This seems to me like it has the same robustness as an early-bound model, bounded only by the sophistication of the type system. Do you consider it qualitatively less late-bound than the message-passing paradigm, or am I missing something?
Bjork's iPad Multi Application Album
"War on EMR usability" - Should the government get involved?
> For one, iCloud will allow you to keep "the last 1000 pictures", but the mac or pc will be where all of them are supposed to be. I am not a big photographer, but I have at least four times those.

It's a bit more complex:

* Photostream will keep 1000 pictures on your device

* And the last 30 days worth of pictures in your iCloud Photostream

* But that's for uncategorized pictures (your photo stream, evolving is kind-of the point of it being a stream), those in albums are there forever, separately, in your iCloud account
That's one possible outcome. Another being bitcoin traffic provokes government-mandated deep packet inspection/filtering or other further intrusions into online privacy.
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Very true - I stand corrected.
Live updates on the first Chromebook preview
On iPad2 it's supported. Someone can try it on an iPhone?
A Mapnificent World
Thank you for posting this. Linux Flash is insane, and it is crazy that Adobe can have any respect for putting it out the for download in the state it seems to be perpetually in. It is nuts specifically because Compiz can zoom into this video fullscreen without issue, but hitting a fullscreen button 9 out of 10 times is cause for flicker and tearing. The only two instances I've had some good success are 1) Google Video and surprisingly 2) Amazon Prime.
Software, jpegs, and mp3s are digital versions of things the law has seen before (well, software not quite, which is why there are still some controversies regarding it).

What you wrote reminds me of the anti-spam service that attaches an X-Header to emails with a little copyrighted Haiku, and thus considers spammers to be in violation of copyright.

If each bitcoin contained a little tiny piece of poetry you could make it robust against a legal challenge. It would just be a micro-poetry market.
Based on his references to biology and cell signaling as inspirations, I think you're on the money.
Boys & Girls Club - Speaking in Code
I wonder how many of the 59,646,778 are parked there.

Must have been expensive.
Music in the Clouds
Having news that doesn't interest me show up in my news aggregator of choice doesn't magically make me want to read it. If I have a bias, I'm going to apply it to a set of news articles either way, so I might as well use something that does that work for me.
I call BS. If she's asking for help, help. Figure out a way to help. I'm the same way. I'm industry agnostic and have worked in both large and small companies. When I talk to recruiters or friends looking for intros the ones that sit and talk to me for more than 2 minutes get a good idea what the types of projects I'm looking for.

By limiting myself to a certain industry (finance for example) I might miss out on a completely perfect project in BioTech or something. If I say 'small' companies, something in a big company might be skipped over because of it.

OP should have asked more question to find out what 'type' of work she likes and gone from there instead of dismissing her as unfocused or hasn't figured out what she wants.
ICloud Demystified [infographic]
This (#doesNotUnderstand:) is not very widely known but extremely important:

http://carcaddar.blogspot.com/2009/04/closure-oriented-metap...

http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...
The point of this post isn't to judge how he handled the situation. His handling of the situation is a framing device for advice about how to ask for job referrals. Comments like this muddy the waters; his advice is obviously correct.
They might legislate against it, but will they be able to enforce the legislation?
And how's that not cherry picking? If you decide to compare IIS with Apache only in the segments IIS is present, aren't you cherry picking already?
> A huge number of apps within the Chrome Web Store work offline without any connectivity. Many regular web apps work offline.

Could you name some for me? SourceKit died so many times at that conference I felt physically ill. Switching to qemacs was an easy decision. MagicScroll for my books never really worked.

Seriously, I would like to know because the Cr48 form factor, battery life, weight, temperature and speed would be great in Japan, but for me it was a paperweight, while my roommate brought his iPad2 and was loving life by comparison. I'm not talking about being offline for a few hours. Try weeks. Sure, the military provides me plenty of wired network access, for ports 80 and 443, for sites they believe are appropriate (like Fox News, but not NPR). But if I'm in the field, not at headquarters unit or near a WiFi hotspot, the Cr48 has only been truly useful for qemacs. In my experience.
I prefer IRC instead of Skype.
Idempotence to the limit!
Oh my god, did you really didn't understand that I was sarcastic? That was my point, I felt that in the article there was a negative angle about Apple trying to make more money and I just wanted to point out that the nemesis of Apple, Google, who is trying to bring everything online, does that for the same exact reason, to make more money.
I once worked for a company that had a large Java-based application. Microsoft (a then client) demanded the application should run on IIS and be written in .NET or they wouldn'
i gave up trying to do creative spam filtering long ago. email address obfuscation, greylisting, etc. i put my domains behind postini (shame they got bought out by google) and never have to deal with spam anymore. my e-mail address is in plain sight in lots of places, and i only get false positives once in a rare while that i have to login to postini and forward to my inbox.

same thing with spam comments on my site. i didn't bother with captchas or other annoying requirements like openid. it submits everything through defensio (http://www.defensio.com/) on the backend and if it looks like spam, you just have to put in an email address to manually confirm the comment and re-train defensio. otherwise people can leave anonymous comments without any hassles. the amount of comments that need to get manually verified are very low, and i never see spam get through.
Sounds like Erlang is close to Dr Kay's notion of OOP - though my Erlang-fu is not strong enough to know if it has polymorphism.
I don't want to get metaphysical here, but this is starting to meld into something a little too abstract.

An argument doesn't need to make perfect sense in order to make sense. With math you might try to make it perfect, but even mathematical projections can be guesswork. With a certain level of uncertainty, it's not about the math. And when you're looking toward the future, you're mostly using theories. Maybe the theories don't become clear until they've proven themselves, but we can still understand them, because you can have a reasonable amount of uncertainty and still make sense.
6 Tips for Beginning Mobile App Developers
I once worked for a company that had a large Java-based application. Microsoft (a then client) demanded the application should run on IIS and be written in .NET or they wouldn't hire us.

That may be part of the deal.

Note: We wrote an IIS-based proxy that masked away the Java-ness of the application and replaced it with .NET-ness. Worked perfectly.
Erlang is very good at making systems that can sort of muddle along and keep running despite containing serious mistakes, but it's almost no help with preventing or fixing them. Every static type (even inferred) does the work of a number of unit tests, though of course not all.
What are my rights if website who has my credit card details, was hacked?
What are Consumer rights if an online merchant who have my credit card details, has been hacked? Say, I have registered my credit card with xyz.com and it was hacked and possible my credit card details have been stolen. What are my rights here? Is there any law, by which the merchant should inform me or the credit card issuer bank?
I love the flowchart. "Ah, now it all makes sense!" I even printed it on the wall at my work right next to Ballmer Peak strip.
Groupon ignores wisdom of Silicon Valley
True but the situation is improving. A lot of the latest crop of ARM-based dev kits are around $100-$300 and come with complete schematics. Full-featured, size limited toolchains tend to be available for free so it's pretty easy to assess what you would get for your $1000-$1500 investment.

Eclipse-GCC-GDB with open-source JTAG dongles is a great way to get started for very little investment. So is Arduino for the lower end.

The big investement tends to be around high-end debug tools like trace probes and debuggers. It would be great to have an open-source trace probe for Cortex.
Chrome 12 Goes Stable: Gains Speed and Security Features, Loses Google Gears
Your examples seem to be pretty small corner cases. I'll add one though: when I got the Adobe Lightroom beta, I got executables for Windows and Mac. And with my upgrades, I still get both executables. But the elephant in the room at the time was that the vast majority of software was being sold into Windows boxes and the only upgrade path was up. the lateral transfer schemes were many and varied, but all trivial compared to the big pipe called Windows XP.
You've got some major security issues. http://bit.ly/iSEvWu
In addition, the type of shares on the market have less voting power than what Larry, Sergey, and Eric have. From their most recent yearly report (10-K)[1]:

"Our Class B common stock has 10 votes per share and our Class A common stock has one vote per share. As of January 31, 2011, Larry, Sergey, and Eric owned approximately 91% of our outstanding Class B common stock, representing approximately 67% of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock. Larry, Sergey, and Eric therefore have significant influence over management and affairs and over all matters requiring stockholder approval, including the election of directors and significant corporate transactions, such as a merger or other sale of our company or our assets, for the foreseeable future."

So while this "Google Eats Itself" thing may accumulate a fair amount of Google shares and be worth a lot, it won't really give them any power over the company.

[1] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/0001193125110...
Thanks, but I think that just confuses me more. To me, value is directly related to price.

From my perspective it makes sense to compare companies in order that I understand the differences between them. I would have to try hard not to compare them.

Sorry, I'm not trying to be obtuse.

In relation to the point about Rohloff as a metaphor for the Germany vs America emulation, I think the comparison would be quite useful.
On Not Buying an iPad (a poem)
Man I hope the datetime picker allows masks/filters. I'd like to limit minutes to say, every half an hour.
I'm not sure why you would say this isn't garbage collection. It performs automatic management and reclamation of resources without programmer intervention. It doesn't operate like the GC's of the JVM or .NET CLI, but then neither to the GCs for other languages like Lua, Python, or Perl.
But why no 64-bit support on Windows or Mac OS X, where 64-bit is on track to become the norm?

The lack of 64-bit for Linux is just a symptom of what seems to be a problem at Adobe.
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Let's separate "bitcoin-as-a pure speculatory play" and "bitcoin-as-a cryptocurrency".
At any time T, a bitcoin is worth W on the bitcoin exchange. Volatility means that at T+1 the bitcoin's worth might increase or decrease, but supply and demand still provide a pretty decent arbiratry price at this time T.

When seller A and buyer B (who are involved in a dubious transaction) are looking for a safe way to transfer money, they can simply agree (at time T) that their 1000$ transaction can be translated to 1000/W bitcoins. It doesn't matter if 1 bitcoin = 1000$ or 1 bitcoin = 10$, what matters is that both parties agree on what bitcoin price they are doing their transaction in, and therefore how many bitcoins A is expecting from B.

The transaction is then 1) Buyer buys agreed number of bitcoins so that at market price it represents the dollar amount of the transaction 2) sends over the bitcoins 3) Seller cashes out the bitcoins IMMEDIATELY, thus getting the real-market value for his "good or service"

The argument as to "why would seller A want to cash out his bitcoins if deflation means they will increase in value" is besides the point here.
Seller A is a drug dealer, not a bitcoin speculator. All he cares about is that receiving that money was as simple and anonymous as downloading a software client and logging in from some internet cafe somewhere.

In this scenario, bitcoins are extremely valuable, and not going anywhere. I suspect that market will adjust, and at some point supply and demand (from people who actually use it for these kinds of activities) will lead to less volatile price variations - and therefore increased use on the black-market. Whether you want to profit from these activities is another question.
>"Our descendents"

One of the potential issues which accompanies nuclear power is the "what descendents?" issue. Sterility and infertility and death are known side effects of exposure to common fissionable materials and their byproducts. One need not even consider the potential consequences of deliberate human activities designed to harm people or fulfill religious prophesy.

In other words, it's not so much the last 4.99999 billion years that's a concern as the 1000 years which must precede them.
I posted the link into Yammer, which tries to find the most significant image for the thumbnail. I couldn't figure out where that image came from.
Evolution selects for survival, period.

No. Evolution selects for genes that manage to leave lots of descendants. This is a local optimization that is not the same as long-term survival. In fact there are lots of examples of species going down evolutionary dead ends where eventually they get wiped out.

Thanks to the miracle of exponential growth, a successful trait that is possessed by a small fraction of the population will spread like a cancer until it dominates the population.

In the case of humans, any trait that leads to lots of kids despite economic pressures to have few of them is going to be evolutionarily successful. And it will be successful in a surprisingly short time. To take a simple model, suppose that we have a recessive allele that is 1% of the gene pool. (So 1.99% of the population carries the recessive, but only 0.01% of the population expresses it.) Suppose that people without it just replace themselves, while people with it expressed have twice as many kids. At first the trait will be utterly invisible. But in under 100 generations it will completely dominate the population. That is only a few thousand years.
Upvoted b/c I think your rejection of Cringely is right, but the reason is different. Jobs/Apple are not in this for the money. They simply believe that iOS + cloud is a better way to compute.
upboat for rage faces
"2. Bitcoin's quasi-anonymous nature will be highly desirable to many people, including very large criminal organizations who'll definitely be moving those coins."

Acceptance of a currency is a tricky thing. For less-than-legal uses, you need someone willing to launder the money at some point. Your arms dealer isn't going to take bitcoin unless they can exchange it for a widely accepted currency or pay their supplier in bitcoin, and the supplier won't take bitcoin unless they can buy raw materials with bitcoin, and the mine isn't going to take bitcoin unless they can exchange it for something useful to them.

Breaking out of the cycle is much easier with a currency that is accepted by everyone for everything. With dollars, just set up a restaurant, people pay in dollars in those, and there are more legitimate restaurants than money-laundering restaurants (in most places). You'd need enough legitimate use of bitcoins to hide laundering, and it's not clear to me that will ever happen.
"If you have to have everything on your requirements list, you can't be agile"

Anything on the requirements list which isn't necessary to the product shouldn't be listed as a requirement in the first place.

"If you need to plan beyond the next sprint with any degree of accuracy, you're not agile"

Sounds to me like engineering and agile process are incompatible.
You're right. The assumption would be that there's a countability difference between Naturals and Reals.

That Naturals are infinite but countable and Reals infinite and uncountable.
You're only liable for the first $50, but most banks won't even make you pay that. Once you report a fraudulent transaction, they will typically reimburse you within 24 hours but some banks take longer.

I never really looked into whether there's any obligation to notify me, because I'm not responsible for any fraudulent transactions anyways.
My Startup Is Failing
Definitely not. Short lines are easier to read. There is a reason why 72 or 80 characters are normal.
> Just follow the money. Now lets remember where Apple makes their money and why they paid over $2.5 billion to developers… Revenue for mobile app markets is on the rise. Apple wants their users to buy apps that have the advantages of web apps

If you follow the money you find $1.8 billion in revenue from the App Store (2010), which would be 2% of the $87 billion revenue Apple has earned in the past 12 months.

Sources:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/18/apple-maintains-lead-in-m...

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AAPL

This thesis pops up every couple of months, and it's always ridiculous.
World IPv6 Day looms: what might break (and how to fix it)
Cloud9 IDE meets Bitbucket
In principle, a government can make any kind of property contraband.
I agree. The point of this article is to refute the belief that a broad and open field of employment interests will increase your chances of finding a job. The reality is that a refined interest is better. Same goes for job postings; it's better to pick a company and hone in than it is to blanket resumes across a number of potential employers.
I fervently disagree. Having 'nothing to hide' most certainly means not caring whether someone is watching or monitoring you for a specific purpose. Should we let an irrational need for privacy stop major advancements in science and technology? I don't want to get too political here, but I'd like to point out I was part of a very effective stem cell cure to Parkinson's Disease (multiple years, no signs of deterioration with no upkeep), that was discontinued for legal/moral/'sense of' reasons. If you're not familiar with current treatments, youtube the surgical procedure for Deep Brain Stimulation implants. If this technology ends up being incompetent, and does not help separating good people from bad people, there is obviously no reason to implement it. However, if there is a statistically valid difference, should an absent need for privacy discredit the advancement?

Your second point is correct: the law is to be interpreted, and anyone can be convicted of a crime, if the prosecution tries hard enough. However, that's a very specialized case, and there isn't someone out to get everyone. Even being wire-tapped and watched 24/7, chances are you'll never interact with the people watching. If there's almost 0 chance of someone interfering with your life, why does it matter if your privacy is lost to them? I'm not trolling or playing devil's advocate - I really do not see why it matters. Someone I'll have 0 interaction with can watch me 24 hours a day, and it would not phase me at all. I only bring this up because you brought up terrorism. I also argued (your view) on Ex Parte Quirin several years ago, so I really have considered the subject.

Your Megan's Law example is really a tangent. I don't like child molesters, and I don't agree with statutory rape being subject to such communal ostracism - just like you. In such a case, yes, the law changing has screwed things up. However, it doesn't apply to our original point. You're arguing whether specific information should be publicly available, while I'm arguing whether already publicly available material should be analyzed. They already see your face, just humans aren't able to spit anything useful out.

I hope my point is clear.
The funny thing is that there's no obvious way to use this "web app" from anything but a mobile device. Why can't I use a web app from my laptop or desktop?
RXC's got a good point here, of course he takes it way too far in link-baity fashion.
I guess the real question then is whether the bitcoin equilibrium value is stable enough to be a price unit for real economic transactions, or whether it will fluctuate wildly as people jump on and off the bandwagon.
Hey fellow hacker, the web app is cool. My suggestion a good value add would be writing browser extensions. You can start with Google Chrome since its all HTML + JS. You might want to think about Safari, IE and Firefox later.
Try http://aloha-editor.org/