skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think driverless cars could be the future of public transportation. Instead of big trains and buses with limited reach, we would have thousands of public vehicles that take you where you need to go when you need to be there. It eliminates the big barriers to public transport--the lack of personal space, timing, and reach.

No car? Just hop on the municipal/county dispatch website, request a car, pay your fee, and wait for the nearest open vehicle to bring itself to you. It can even coexist peacefully with private transportation.
Now tell me they're writing a SQL Server driver, and I'll be very interested...
You twisted his words to imply he stated that the work he did was in fact "above board." He never said that, in fact, the entire point of this article was about the fact that his attempt to "keep it above board" (what he actually said) failed.
High-speed 'space wedge' on track
Interesting insight into RIM and Nortel. It's rather refreshing to read this compared to the sensationalistic articles written by other tech blogs and the media who don't really understand either RIM nor Nortel.
A Week Without Records
Earth.

Here's a neat video of the system in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S14sAYOJQ8A
Would have putting this project into its own LLC (or other business structure) have been beneficial in anyway?
We would, of course. Then we would manually polinate flowers and break down plant waste with chemicals.
Reports: Google to Face Broad Antitrust Investigation from U.S. Government
It could get away with pretending we hadn't- if the efficiency was leaps and bounds greater.

Or rather, if they even bothered to comment on efficiency at all.
The reason a lot of people are still stuck on IE6 is that they wrote apps that depended on a lot of non-standard IE6-specific behavior. Apps coded to today's web standards should age much more gracefully and place fewer constraints on browser upgrades going forward.
I would argue that the Chrome mindset may actually be a more sustainable easier practice. Instead of a large "certification" process you just fix things as they break on an ongoing basis. Small changes over time seem easier to absorb than a Huge change once every few years.
As Goethe once wrote, "Everything has been thought of once. The problem is to think of it again."
Submitted yesterday, many, many comments in the discussion there:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2682320
There is only only one motivation, ever. Actual desire.

In short, these articles exist because people are trying to rationalise their way past the cognitive dissonance of wanting to want things, without being willing to actually change themselves.

Decision making is fundamentally a process of "I want, there is no greater want, I can, so I will". If you're not getting to do what you want, it's simply that you have a greater want. Sometimes that's just a want to not actually exert effort.

tl;dr - you will not change what you do without changing what you are.
Certainly corporate IT guys sometimes take the flak when stuff breaks, but the really good* corporate IT guys manage to turn major breakage into a justification for a bigger budget.

"...blame the big software and infrastructure providers, who haven't yet collectively invented a robust global IT architecture where risk can reliably be localised to the user at fault."

So many of the problems of building a robust global IT architecture have already been solved in the Internet itself. When Big Enterprise resists using the Internet as it's designed, as a loosely-coupled system, with rules (RFCs, etc.) then it ends up with the sorts of problems in browser testing like the OP is talking about.

"Or step up and do something about it and get very rich..."

That's the best thing in your comment. I would have upvoted you just for that. If my previous thesis has any value, that a big problem with corporate IT is attitude, how do we fix it? Send everyone to reeducation camps in the gulag? I can't think of how to profit from that, though it might be fun to watch :)

*Depending on the interpretation of "good."
You're overly zealous to push this point. That phrasing does not at all imply that humans are "special," nor that they aren't animals. Here's a precisely cognate sentence:

I am asleep at 10 a.m. on Fridays, when most people are at work.

Does this imply that I am not a person? No.
Trojans, viruses, worms: How does malware get on PCs and Macs?
Larry Summers to Help Build the Future of Money
They reflect the polls, so they also tell you that the polls didn't have the same choices.

The two sets of data ought to be shown in the same graph, really.

Edit: I have now joined the two years in one graph, and plot the percentages to make it easy to see the change: http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/database/data.png
I did a lot of work under cygwin when I had a corporate issued notebook and corporate policies were (at the time) very Windows-friendly (and anything-else-hostile). It made Windows into a bearable experience for a Unix guy.

A plethora of compilers, interpreters, tools, toys...

It's slow, true, but for development, how fast you need it to be?

And there is an advantage (I will regret saying this) in hardware support. You can use a broader selection of hardware with Windows than you can on Linux. Windows can be brain-dead from time to time (it insisted on rotating my notebook screen when I unplugged the rotated LCD) and I never got that Dell to suspend or hibernate to my satisfaction, but, with Cygwin, it's the next best thing after OSX. The first option for developing stuff that won't run on Windows is, of course, a real Unix (the kind that runs X).
Even biologists have such a category: They call it "non-human animals". You might argue that this category is not generally useful, but it's not "wrong." That is itself a sort of superstition.
I've found that using function compositions/closures for event handling makes my JS code much more testable and readable: http://numbers.brighterplanet.com/2011/06/10/a-pattern-for-j...
I have to agree, and planned to comment just to say the same. SQL Server is incredibly powerful, easy to use, and scales okay. If StackOverflow is any indication, people are seriously underestimating (and mis-representing) the Microsoft offerings.

Just to name a few:

* SQL Server

* SQL Server Express

* SQL Compact 4

* SQL Azure
I'll be honest, I'm waiting for commercially available vehicles so I can be the first to order a fleet of them and do just that :-)
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/skilled/tool/tool_06....

Can programmers even apply under the skilled category anymore? I thought Canada only wanted computer managers since 2009(?).
There are some default links thrown in to let you test the delete button (x) and up arrows (^) and generally fool around. Feel free to delete them.

Enter anything resembling an email (doesn't have to be real, there's no verification) to lock the page from anyone accessing it.
Why just mobile? These requirements sound equally important for land-lines.
Socket.io will work with long polling or flash sockets, so it may end up being the approach people take.

However Websockets is a significantly more efficient, standards-oriented approach. There is a large class of apps that would be really awesome (webkit browsers, websockets + node) that will not be hostable with Heroku. In my personal opinion, these would be really awesome apps.
This explanation is the most thorough I've found. It also happens to be the first Google result for "javascript closures".

http://jibbering.com/faq/notes/closures/
So just to get this straight, you would have no probs if China were to declare war on the U.S. tomorrow, win, kill off people living in America, and settle it with their citizens?
I highly doubt that they are, but I wouldn't put it past anyone from the community to have one shortly after Node for Windows is released.
My thinking was that while the fingerprint is derived from the music, it contains no audio data and there is no way to go back from the fingerprint to any representation of the recorded work. Much like a cryptographic hash.

All the fingerprint comprises is a bunch of abstract statistical data about the music, its not qualitatively different from the output of say, a visualisation algorithm in a music player. Just much more useful.

But then again, copyright law makes no fucking sense, so who knows.
Well since he just bet the company on WP7 you can't expect him to say anything else. If MeeGo is going somewhere then that undermines his MS deal. That said, It appears that there are two factions in Nokia. One pushing MeeGo and one pushing WP7. And like I said in an earlier comment, this "leak" reeks of damage control btw pro WP7 camp.
Those are good points. Websockets are just so awesome that it's frustrating that I had to setup a vps to use them in a weekend app :)
I'd like to see a minimum latency guarantee, too -- it's at least as important as throughput.
Agreed about Windows console - I use http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/.
You can automate GUIs using accessibility controls and/or desktop message bus. If an app is modular, as it should be, it does not matter one bit how many UIs it exposes.

Also all CLIs are not the same — try automating ncurses application.
To counter a point that has been made several times here: it's not just corporations which operate a "conservative" IT policy: many SMEs do so as well. Innovations are great at home but at work, they confuse users, break things which have worked forever, and represent an unknown quantity in support terms. I've already decided not to put FF4 in front of my users because of the interface changes (I know I can restore the address bar, etc, but I don't want to spend my time doing that for each user).

The Firefox team are solving problems most users don't know they have, i.e. I rarely hear complaints that "the address bar is confusing", or "the status-bar is in the way", but frequently "I went to Google Image search and it's trying to install something on my computer". Time spent solving the second problem is far more valuable to me than time spent on the first (non-) problem.
Some people have already said a few, but I can add:

Great wall from 400BC - 1600AD

Angkor Wat 800AD - 1200AD

Chichen Itza 600AD - 1000AD

York Minster Cathedral 1220 - 1472AD
Speaking as an amateur photographer, that strikes me as ridiculous.

Look what happens if you reduce the original picture to four pixels algorithmically: http://i.imgur.com/q2z3w.png

Point being, the final four-squares image in the pixel series bears no relationship at all to the original photograph beyond a color scheme which is only reminiscent of (not identical to) the original. And the color scheme wasn't the original photographer's invention, anyway.

If there's any "inherent beauty" or "balance" in that last picture, with just four squares of color, it was put there by the artist who made the series of pixel versions.
Hidden (2011) - R5
Gamesalad is probably aimed at turning game ideas into profit in the app store. I don't see a problem with this.
mortenjorck made a good point, but I think makmanalp asked a perfectly valid and pertinent question. Realizing that both the old and the new way are imperfect is just the first step in the process. Discussing and deciding on what would be a better way is the meat of the discussion, and what I come to Hacker News to read.

Anyone can make an observation that things are broken (though perhaps not state it as succinctly), but coming up with a solution is both more interesting and challenging. If HN never moved into that stage, every story could be summed up in one or two comments, and it would basically just be a link aggregater.
I disagree. What Nokia is solving here is true buttonless navigation. No one else is using swiping in that way. However everyone is trying to go buttonless. Android has done it in the easiest way, replacing hardware with software buttons and calling them not-buttons. It has been rumored that iOS will go buttonless too, but who knows how. WebOS is the only that has kind of done this. You can navigate WebOS without buttons but it still has a "button" in the gesture area that most people use anyways. Swipe is the first time someone has been able to make the OS buttonless in a way that doesn't feel tacked on. Calling that revolutionary is hyperbole, but it is an important UI development for where we are inevitably going.
Someone should write a quick bash script that'll automatically create a facebook account with random information, specifically for this type of circumstance.

Obviously it would break the TOS, but it would give you a way of checking out some Facebook-only services. And if you have anarchist-leaning feelings, you'll also be sticking it to The Man by adding noise to their signal.
Chance Didn't Create Economic Crisis
Scale your JavaScript, scale your team
The problem jerf is referring to, IMO, is this part:

Therefore, the "entire project" wasn't "above board" and the statement above is disingenuous.

He's explicitly (and literally) stating that Baio was not being sincere. When this clearly isn't the case. I think we both understand the difference between disingenuous and an oversight.

And in particular he wasn't being disingenous with the statement he made. As jerf points out the statement is used as the pretext for the mistake he made. How in the world could that be disingenuous -- unless you think he didn't actually try and is lying about the whole thing?
I have to say, I'm not sure what the benefit of this service is. I understand where you're trying to positon yourselves (a "Heroku for eveything"), but to me that just doesn't work.

If I really want to not deal with the headaches of managing an infrastructure, I'd really prefer to go with a provider who picks a language and becomes a major player in that field (e.g. EngineYard, Heroku); companies that really push the envelope and give back and are a _part_ of the community. It just feels like you're going to be decent at a lot of stacks, and master of none.

If on the other hand I really have a need for 30 different types of services, and I don't want to work with 30 different service providers (Heroku + RedisToGo + etc.), I would probably be a big enough company/app to be comfortable just running things myself on AWS.

About the only way I think you could compete in this space (at least from my personal prospective) is to be cheaper than Heroku, EngineYard, RedisToGo, etc. for those particular stacks -- the idea being that you're not going to get the "major player" in Ruby to host your site, but you're not quite just using bare-metal AWS, either.

I really don't know why I'd pay the same or more than specialized service providers for a "jack of all trades".

EDIT: That being said, I do notice that you have stacks available for PHP, Perl, and other languages/tools that maybe don't have such an established PaaS provider as the Ruby ecosystem does. So maybe it's not too later to capture that market. I just don't see myself jumping on board the generic PaaS train for solutions where there are great, established providers out there (Ruby, Redis, CloudDB, others).
Belfast riots renew calls for Protestant-Catholic dialogue
And yet it should be the artist's choice on how THEIR work is used, regardless of how you, or 99.999% of the people feel.

For the original photograph? Yes, of course.

For a derivative work, which the pixel-art reproduction clearly is in my mind? Of course not.
We'd have to lose the ability to cross the world in timeframes on the scale of a human lifetime

Interstellar colonies, then?
Hitler uses git, Hitler parody video
Google Presentation on API Design
Mark is NOT a role model. Millions of people get duped into sharing information they think will remain private every day. He has screwed over a lot of people in the process.

'Idea people' that hire 'tech people' don't get it. Lots of people have ideas for companies. The twins were not the first people to think of creating a friendster for colleges. They don't get to own 50% of another company because their company was delayed by a few months.
Apple has taken an interesting middle approach on WebGL. They are only enabling WebGL to certified experiences in iOS. That happens to be ads for now, but it would be easy to extend this to other apps distributed through App Store.

That way developers have access to WebGL as an API for 3D, but Apple is not exposing the WebGL attack surface to the entire Internet. As the spec matures, GPU drivers are hardened, etc. they always have the option to open it up more.
The legal process will grind you in any serious dispute against a determined adversary.

Get a supremely optimal outcome and get the case dismissed right out the gate because it is legally defective even assuming all the facts alleged are true? Sticker price: $10K and up (more likely $25K to $50K to make it definitive after several opportunities to amend are given to the adversary).

Go through discovery to find out what witnesses will say on deposition, dig through all key documents, and then move for and get a summary judgment before trial by which a case is tossed on grounds that the law allows only one result based on material facts that are undisputed bearing on the legal point? Sticker price: $100K and up, with a year or more of grief thrown in as a bonus.

Go through trial and get vindicated by a judge or jury based on a complete presentation of evidence? Sticker price: $250K and up, after a year or two (or more) of wrangling.

And don't forget the appeals.

Most cases never get to trial and cost is a major factor prompting litigants to settle even though they are not particularly happy with an outcome. Charles Dickens, though he exaggerated for dramatic effect, got the spirit of this right in Bleak House (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarndyce_and_Jarndyce), and little has changed since.

This, by the way, doesn't mean that you can't defend against cease-and-desist demands. Costs cut both ways. But it is sad how many times parties who are right nonetheless must fold because the costs of engaging (monetary and otherwise) are just not worth it.
You are smart to ask these questions. Reliability is a serious topic that http://www.pubnub.com fits in. I work at PubNub and believe it is the best offering for reliability and uptime being a globally distributed service. During the EC2 outage on the East Coast USA, we lost our servers there. However! Our automated redundant routing system transferred traffic to the surrounding nearby healthy data centers. Customers didn't notice the switch, and went about their day.
Defining 4G service like that is still a scam, as true 4G would be one of the fourth generation network standards. However, laissez-faire non-regulation from the FCC led to a marketing arms race where US carriers had to advertise 4G service even if they had nothing like it. What they have is LTE = 3GPP Long Term Evolution, which is better 3G, and it's barely getting deployed, and which they just agreed among themselves to call 4G.

Not that I'm against better defining consumer TOS, but don't call it 4G. When true 4G gets deployed, prepare for the confusion. This fraudulent 4G marketing could very well have killed investment in true 4G networks from US carriers: "Oh they're deploying 4G ? Big deal I thought all carriers already had that thingamajig." Try to explain this one to Joe Public.
A reputation for hurting someone for tens of thousands of dollars is like saying "hey, please don't do this" in advance to everyone who hears about it.
Money. Google has oodles of it - governments only exist to gain money (and power) -- so it was pretty obvious (to me) that this would happen quickly.
Or you rent your car out to the grid rather than
park it. Like air-bnb for cars.
Off topic/meta: In the days when comment scores used to be shown, I could do the HN-equivalent of saying "hear, hear!" [or as the Internet says it: "here, here" :)] by upvoting a "thank you" note like the above. Now, if I really want to let you know that I too liked your comment, I have to post a "me too!" comment like this one. Anyway, thanks. TIL about "return oriented programming".
“With the right strategic execution, significant improvements in the half-baked Playbook and a big dose of luck, RIM could keep its status as a tier-one smartphone maker.”

I really take issue with this statement. First, what evidence is there that RIM’s management are capable of “the right strategic execution”? They’ve had no credible response to the iPhone in the 4 years since it was released, and to Android in the 3 years since it’s first hardware release. A new entrant came into a market that RIM essentially created, and they did nothing for 4 years. I don’t think it’s valid to use the company’s performance in the time leading up to the iPhone, when RIM had no credible competition, as a predictor of future success. The moment a credible competitor began to encroach on their market, they had no response. IMO this is a much better indicator of future performance in the face of dominant competition.

“significant improvements in the half-baked Playbook”

Again, what evidence is there that this will happen. The first Storm was, by all accounts, a massive failure. The Storm 2 was too little, too late. The current management was responsible for both. People love to talk about how Apple came back from the dead, but what they forget is that Apple was driven to the brink of death by someone other than Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs came back and brought Apple to where it is today. Had the existing management remained in place, they would have undoubtedly gone bankrupt. RIM desperately needs a change of management.

“a big dose of luck”

With a big dose of luck, the 6/49 could make me millionaire. But you can be sure I’m not making investment decisions based on those odds.
To be clear, I'm not the post's author. I just know the guy!
> In particular if you have such a critical system, you should have a plan on how to upgrade, test, and deploy it.

Indeed, but wouldn't such a plan start with building on a firm foundation that isn't going to get EOL'd and no longer support security updates after three months?

The reality is that building on FF or Chrome now means trusting potentially critical business functionality to an outside group you can't control with a history of pushing breaking changes.

(If anyone is about to pipe up with how they only release useful changes and the community testing is sufficient to prevent regressions, please keep in mind that both Firefox and Chrome have each outright broken both cosmetic rendering details and basic functionality recently, in minor/point releases that you wouldn't normally expect to change user-observable behaviour at all, plus of course there are many widely and less widely reported compatibility issues.)

> And having reasonably-well written web apps does help as well

Don't tell that to anyone who uses Java applets and has spent significant time over the past few months working around the repeated screw-ups made by major browsers as they implemented new internal details.

(If anyone is about to pipe up with how Java applets are yesterday's technology and browser vendors don't need to care about them any more, congratulations, you are a walking example of my point.)

> Corporate IT can learn a lot from how application development works on the web,

Or web application developers could learn a lot from corporate IT, depending on your point of view. Personally, I can't remember the last time I saw a business critical corporate IT system completely fail or a major deployment of old-fashioned desktop software block a whole company, while I see the trendy style of rapid-development cause major errors with alarming frequency. That applies to everything from Reddit falling over every ten minutes to Google Docs' seeming inability to display even basic documents and spreadsheets properly on all major browsers at any given time.