skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How much financially is a customer worth to Google?

I know its a coarse metric, but in the "Twitter should have paid ad-free Pro accounts!" conversations, people always point out that if you look at Twitter's userbase versus its valuation, customers are worth more to Twitter as advertising eyeballs than customers would be willing to pay to become ad-free subscribers.

If that's the case -- if people are actually worth more to the company "for free" -- then the company should take care of those users when they try to leave.

I don't know if that metric actually holds water, even in the Twitter examples where it's frequently used, but the point remains that while customers aren't directly paying money for Google services, they are not without value when it comes to Google functioning. Google isn't offering its services to the public as a public service.
Compaction of coal in to a denser form of carbon is quite different from the crystallization of carbon out of a liquid medium (magma).
Sorry, added the poll option just now.
Actually, Apple and Oracle made it clear that Oracle is going to get Apple's changes and integrate them into the JDK.

You could argue that they didn't specify which ones, or make some interpretations of the vague statements involved, but let's all wait until it happens and then judge, eh?
Would have been more fun if Jamie Foxx was a character named 'Firefox'.
I have maintained Java apps running on FreeBSD servers, it was a nightmare. And don't even dream of doing that in OpenBSD (which IMHO is the sanest BSD and even nix around).
The jibberish in the result seems to imply that it isn't cracked (or yet fully cracked).
Outsourcing your way to an Automatic Business
Interesting article on how outsourcing can change the fate of a startup...
I remember when OS X was promoted as the "greatest platform for running Java".
Apple has gone to the same general distribution scheme for Java as they've implemented for themselves with Lion, Xcode, and many other pieces. Download it when you need it, and download the newest bits. (The Java download is certainly not as integrated as the Mac App Store stuff, but then the Xcode download that is in the Mac App Store is also a little weird, too. Download on demand, or whatever you want to call it.)

What's more interesting (to me) is the remote satellite boot that's now feasible during Lion recovery (where your Mac can boot off software loaded from Apple's servers via the Internet), and additions such as the ability to perform a recovery boot that can go as far as to launch Safari and get to the Internet to access services or to research whatever has caused me to be in the recovery path.

This certainly looks to be an operating system that's moving out onto the web/cloud/Internet.
G+ shows us how there is no speed limit in life
Which raises an interesting question: Should local hacker/nerd/entrepreneurial communities adopt an all-English approach or should they strive to invent at least some new vocabulary and use those.
I still can't believe GWT is not an April Fools joke, and I'm stunned that anyone ever took it seriously.
No, I don't. I'd rather he have to take responsibility for his actions and decide whether he really needs to take that chance instead of thinking "it's okay that I'm exhausted…my car will wake me up."
Plus, the damage in loss of reputation is very real.
Does this mean all Java software that's distributed in this new way has to be compatible with OpenDK's license?
> I'd love to try a strict language, having used only Clojure and Python lately. Playframework might be an alternative.

Try Go.
I have now learned why we need to address people directly, as in "name:" Same thing for IRC logs. Ugh, deleted comments just confuse people.
It does...but you can put it right back.
The Indian fine art of faking security
Presumably Allen & Co (the "mediator" in the deal where AOL overpaid by $550M) is an investment bank.
(I find the term "Statutory rape" quite misleading. It is definitely not the same thing as plain rape, or worse, child rape. It looks like it has been pushed by a lobby of afraid, protective, conservative, possibly religious parents.)

One of the saddest things I can remember (though, unfortunately, the details escape me due to time) was a couple of rape cases that occurred in the US maybe a decade or so ago. One was a case of a very violent rape where the sentence was something on the order of 15 years. The other was a case of statutory with a fully consenting 16- or 17-year old where the sentence was something closer to 40 years. I was pretty young at the time (if it was a decade exactly I would have been 12), but that's definitely when I first realised that the "won't somebody please think of the children" arguments are bullshit.
They didn't remove Flash hardware acceleration.

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/07/22/adobe-retracts-claim-sug...
Doesn't google have an IP assignment like every other tech company, that affects what you can work/own, on the side?

Also, as oft-repeated, part-time startups don't quite work.
Reinforcing my point. If those are "anti" patterns, they must be bad, right? Hence, patterns as described in GoF are good.
If they didn't put links in parentheses, they might break compatibility with teletypes! ...I'm not actually suggesting any newspaper still uses actual teletype machines, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are still plenty of workflows that evolved from teletype use.

The teletype and Baudot code do have a pretty amazing legacy. Baudot code was invented in 1870 as a 5-bit mode-shifting character set. This, of course, predates data processing with punch cards (1889), alphanumeric data processing (1929), and binary computers (1937-1941). Even after the introduction of ASCII, the smaller Baudot character set remained a common subset available on a wider range of machines. This is seen in C's "trigraphs", where ??/, for example, may be substituted for \ on machines that don't support that character. Even the Apple II+ had a teletype-style keyboard, supporting only the characters found in Baudot code (the Apple IIe keyboard was the first to support all of the 7-bit ASCII characters).
They do plain GMail too, along with a handful of other services (flickr, facebook, twitter). It looks like their emphasis is now on Google Apps. I just took a look and if you click the "social media backups" link (unintuitive), you can find GMail in there.
Again, you can call X "effective default" or say X "amounts to default" all you want and I wouldn't argue with your definition. But since the OP called default an absolute binary, then if we want that, we have to wait till we have literal default. IE, what I tell you doesn't matter, we have to wait till it is tomorrow and I haven't paid.

The point is that in an "effective default", there's no violation of any explicit contract however much the loaning parties may have lost confidence. IE, if Greece was home-owner renegotiating its mortgage, there is no point where the bank can go to court and demand the house (though against sovereign nation, banks, of course, have no such recourse but its considered important, I believe).
In addition, might I also suggest the illustrations done by Tim Denee.

* Bronzemurder: http://www.timdenee.com/bronzemurder.html

* Oilfurnace: http://www.timdenee.com/oilfurnace.html
I like the part where he says "if you aren't one of these types, keep calm and carry on."

A lot of articles seem to try and classify all startups into 2 or 3 types which is honestly pretty silly.
Wow, taliesinb is making a lot more sense than you guys.
I would have to agree. In recent years I'd have to admit that most Microsoft software has been improving...but not Live Messenger. You'd think removing all the features would make it work better. Not so.

No wonder they bought Skype. It must have been for the UI IP. ;)
Know of a List of Android Dev Camps? 
Anyone know of a good list of US and International Android hackdays, devcamps and meet ups?
This sounds awesome, and the potential to monitor other chemical levels is even more exciting. My concerns:

Do the polymers wear out? Presumably they are binding to the target chemical. Can they rebind afterward? Does the body clear out the polymers at all?
AirBnB in my opinion is no longer a "Twitter Startup." Maybe at first, but now they've proven people will sacrifice some level of comfort to save money, which in my opinion took a lot of gumption. This now proven disruptive model (sacrificing some comfort/certainty/social norms to save money) I think is only beginning.
Wow, you must have read my blog posting!
iPad, iPhone, and Android Phone (but just used for testing)
Driving at a high level is one thing. It requires a lot of skill and concentration.

Not killing people is completely different: it requires basic skills and some small measure of multi-taking ability. Which is more important, reacting to the car changing lanes without a signal in front of you or finishing your sentence RIGHT NOW?

The problem isn't even skill level. Driving normally at city and highway speeds is easy. The vast majority of 1st world residents know how to do it, and very very few of them make mistakes severe enough to affect anyone else's lives. The average driver is nowhere near as bad at it as most people seem to think.

But taking the driver's commitment to and awareness of the risks inherent in driving away and placing that burden on active "safety features" is a bad thing. I know their hearts are in the right place and that I'm not the person these systems are designed for. But they're going to get people killed.

My issue with Mercedes's Traction Control in particular isn't even that it makes drivers lazy. It's that in at least that situation, it can't tell the difference between power-induced oversteer and breaking-induced oversteer. In that situation, it reacted EXACTLY WRONG. It doesn't matter whether the driver is competent or not if the system makes the opposite changes that it should.
I sense that we could construct an amusing zoo of subcategories here.

e.g.

The Oyster: A species of Hoverboard that appears to magically parse natural language or generic web data but which on close inspection turns out to be a slick-looking wrapper around a rat's nest of Perl regular expressions which are being frantically updated by a harried group of hackers to deal with each "edge case" as it arises.

The Turk: Like an Oyster, but without the regular expressions.

The Esperanto: A Hoverboard that promises to help non-programmers write programs by using "natural" syntax that is "just like human language". See e.g.: AppleScript.

The Gift-Horse Engine: A Twitter that is in fact virally popular, but only because it bribes adopters by giving away something below cost in an unsustainable way.
When I first launched Xcode after installing Lion, a dialog popped up saying I would need to install Java and relaunch, and gave me a button to press that would do that for me. It worked exactly as advertised -- literally one mouse click. Not at all difficult or confusing, and in fact simpler than the command-line approach your post describes. Other folks I've talked to had the exact same thing happen with apps like Photoshop and Java-dependent games: just one click. Was your experience different?
Why did this post get downvoted?
I'm afraid this is whats going to prevent adoption of more automatic cars. The people who care about cars don't want the features, but its the people who don't care about cars that would benefit most. And they don't pay attention.
Yeah, current theory suggests that most oil deposits are formed from ancient phytoplankton (http://www.museumoftheearth.org/outreach.php?page=s_us_under...)
OK, yes, apples and oranges, but it is not a "stupid" graph.

The graph provocatively illustrates that google+ could steamroll over facebook in a very short time, if they play their game right.
This article mentions that the kernel now has support for Microsoft Kinect. How so? It seems odd to support that in the core kernel...
Does a wiki article really merit posting?
That's a rather pedantic distinction. I understand coal is not the source of diamonds, but the analogy gets the point across to the general public, and covers most of the key elements.
I am generally not the one to speculate or judge - I remember reading something to that effect on I think - Apple mailing list - although I can't find it right away. Take a look at Gosling's post on the subject as well - http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/steve_jobs_comments_o...
Be sure where your methods are chained to…
I've applied to TechStars about 4-5 times, maybe more. Each time I applied I made more and more progress, and got as far as being a TechStars finalist [Top ~30], but no further. Despite each time being "nonselected" rather than "rejected", I still felt pretty discouraged (especially after not even being a finalist the final time).

When I looked back however, I changed my mind. While I may not have gotten into TechStars, that didn't mean they didn't have lessons to teach me. I learned a ton about entrepreneurship, learning to code, building a product and userbase, and networking, that I might not have ever learned had I not been striving to get into the program. I can't stop the entrepreneurial fire in me now, and I have David Cohen, Brad Feld, David Tisch, and more to thank for that.
Only on hackernews: 12 comments and no mention of xbox, one of the powerhouses behind this result. Guys, there's more to this world than cloud, JavaScript and iPhone apps!
NASA's current planned Shuttle replacement is derived from the Shuttle and has the same basic configuration apart from the orbiter, plus it's bigger. So I'm pretty hopeful...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System
That doesn't necessarily rule out al qaeda involvement, there have been caucasian taliban et al before. But we shouldn't jump to conclusions until we have the facts regardless.
Heh, 4M is considered a "really awful" internet connection these days? I have 6M and am perfectly happy.

Then again, an apt-get upgrade once a week is a lot more efficient than a 4G monolith every year :)
There are open source replacement for most of App Engine's services and API. The old language choice Java and Python are open source. GO is Google's language just like #C for Microsoft. Currently it's really easy for me to port my App Engine apps to AWS; I'm not sure if I use GO.
Quick note: they do not sell 64Gb MBAs anymore. I don't think they have since last year.
Heya. One of the main reasons was due to many user confusions surrounding the name. We are still displaying Min.us by default when users share new files, but it acts as 301 redirect for being short url. Just linked to the site as it was a bit faster :\ Sry about that. Cheers! ~ John
I'm curious, why would you imagine that al qaeda et al wouldn't want to attack Norway?
And monster.com.
I believe the writer had started his last startup, while doing it part-time, and the company is doing alright. The proof's in the pudding.
Can you even work 9-5 at google?
Well no, you posted a linkbait title and that tends to drive people to click. (Even HN readers like sensationalism.) You have to admit the title is a bit dishonest: the answer is "No, they do not remove Java."
Ah, it looks like you are correct. Perhaps shedskin would work better for this idea, except for the fact that it produces C++ rather than C.

Added: Also, I missed that you were talking about creating human readable C++. I'm not at all certain that shedskin produces C++ that is readable.
If you're going about it for the first time, I'd recommend the Lazy Newb Pack:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=59026.0

Because of the somewhat eccentric nature of the DF menus, this contains a number of utilities like Dwarf Therapist that are, IMO, indispensable for running a fortress of more than about twenty dwarves. It also has a custom tileset built in and an isometric visualization tool.
- How easy do you think it is to get a job back should something go wrong with your startup endeavors?

- Are you married? Kids? - If not, taking a plunge obviously becomes much more easy.

- Would you be able to remain motivated for a fairly long time while living frugally?
Ebay is frustrating. They haven't changed the functionality or even the fit and finish of their site substantially for about a decade. They're still the de facto leader in online auctions but I feel as if they're slowly being bled by a lot of more specialized sites (amazon, craigslist, etsy, etc.)
good for instalook, at least they got some press. Now, that app, Color, what does it do?
I tried DF awhile ago and liked it, but realized it would take more time than I was willing to put in it. Reading this article makes me want to try it again, just out of respect for Tarn's humble devotion and his pursuit of the joy of "just building things". I'll definitely check out the MoMA exhibit next week.
I like how this made it sound like geeks were not humans, but something completely different.
Great work - can't wait to see more themes!
This is pretty fantastic. So very many applications for such a technology. Obviously the primary indication for the technology in its current stage of development, quantifying blood sugar levels, is in and of itself, a large enough market to make this attractive. But this is early stage.

Consider the possibilities for the next stages of development:

- Advancing the formulation to obviate the need for a "tattoo." The next generation could be a solution simply applied to the skin that would penetrate deeply enough over a short period of time to test blood glucose without the need for a tattoo. The real time, point-of-care diagnostic frontiers, cost reduction, and other factors implied here are phenomenal.

- The article mentions glucose, sodium, and oxygen levels in the blood. The "sensor molecules" simply bind to the target molecule or ion and change the fluorescence, providing a reading. Think about the applications for other ions, lipids, amino acids, and even proteins and cytokines using antibodies. Molecular binding assays are prevalent across many, if not most, diagnostic assays. This could have application in such a wide range of indications it boggles the mind.

- Combining the testing to assess for multiple diagnoses in the same test. Think of a kind-of multiplex assay (such as an ELISA) in a single unit. iPhone aside (which is an awesome way to do it), think of a single unit that applies 50-100 small droplets of solution on the skin and sends a focused LED for testing each droplet individually (think of a bunch of small capillary straws, instead of the hundreds of needle pricks such as in an allergy test).

Glucose for diabetes: check.

Sodium for evaluation of electrolyte levels, kidney and adrenal function, cystic fibrosis disease state: check.

Bacterial infection (nosocomial infections especially, like MRSA), viral infections, toxin screening, hepatitis, rheumatic disorders, cancer, the list goes on and on...

Again, fantastic.
It's support for access to the video and IR sensors.

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6...
Data is stored on Amazon S3, according to their home page[1]. So, yeah, it's backing up one cloud to another which HAS had outages, but it does reduce risk/exposure.

[1] Features

...

Nightly Backups using Amazon S3
> I don't see what this has to do with real-life urbanization, either.

The problem on the server in this article isn't "urbanization", it's a failure to create appropriate infrastructure for the task at hand.

The repeated question and answer pair of "where are the trees?" "Try the edge of town" suggest limited Minecraft-life experience, and probably limited life experience in general. Had they simply set up a policy of "every time you harvest a tree, replant two saplings" there soon would have been a large enough tree farm to satisfy all 50 players, as trees in Minecraft grow quite fast. Had players built deep mining tunnels and used any of the common mining techniques [0], they'd have had all the cobblestone (and various other ores) they wanted, without stepping on each others' toes. Instead, they were so short on resources that they felt it necessary, when fleeing their initial city, to salvage torches -- which are quite easy to create in bulk.

For comparison, my mostly adult gaming clan runs an invite-only Minecraft server. We've built up a ton of infrastructure -- a five-acre ranch [1], a greenhouse, mushroom farms, tree farms, strip mines, and monster farms, so we have easy access to virtually every type of resource. Everything is interconnected via rail lines or portals, so material transport is not an issue. If someone decides they'll need a lot of a particular type of material, we set up a system to allow us to harvest that material in large quantities. This allows us to build ambitious projects fairly quickly. This is typical of well-run Minecraft servers.

[0] http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Tutorials/Mining_Technique...
[1] http://ripminecraft.blogspot.com/2011/04/tomcat-ranch.html
Fonts In Use – Type at work in the real world.
Arabs tend to be caucasian as in Europoid - they're semitic, and semites are usually Europoid. I don't have a word for what you wanted to say readily available, sorry.
Bravemule (http://www.bravemule.com/matulremrit/) is the best Dwarf Fortress-related writeup I have ever read. It is fantastically illustrated, and captures the black humor and horror of Dwarf Fortress better than anything else I have read. Check it out.
Pre-launch, as in just a coming soon page? - LaunchRock.com

Pre-launch, as in some beautiful minimalistic page(s) with some info.? - 99designs
Actually eBay have made changes through the years - it is just that all of them are bad. The move to favour large corporate sellers, and to only give feedback as a buyer completely broke the "swap meet" feel that eBay had. Buying and selling on eBay is just not fun anymore.

The problem is that there is no real online replacement - the auction space is hard to disrupt because in auctions the largest marketplace is, at face value, the best marketplace.

I know I have gotten to the stage where I will Freecycle something before I sell it on eBay, and from reading the forums out there, I am not the only one.
Courtesy of Tom Anderson (founder of MySpace)
Causation or correlation, hmm. I never thought of it like that, but the idea has merit
In case you are interested in the actual distribution, it seems to be here:

http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm

but the server looks busy.
And Afghanistan.
I think this article isn't describing startups so much as startup ideas, and/or very early startups that have yet to demonstrate the elusive product/market fit. Once you've proven that your Hoverboard works, and that it really is a Hoverboard ("an idea that, if it works, will practically sell itself") then it isn't really a Hoverboard anymore. And once your Twitter concept has users and a viable business model it isn't a Twitter anymore.

Ironically, AirBNB is no longer a Twitter startup, but Twitter arguably still is. ;)
Ooooold games (DOS days)

Business software
How Does Google Protect Your Data in The Cloud?
I suppose bad people do bad things, regardless of an honorable ideology. Still, I see Norway in the same way as I see Canada. They do not take strong statements for or against others, they do not engage in the affairs of others, they have had a long (modern) history of peaceful relations/intentions. The most aggressive thing they've done is commit handfuls of troops to a multinational "peacekeeping" missions.

I guess I just feel like they have more important enemies, from their perspective, to attack.
An amazing crossword puzzle
Well, I would probably develop just for the experience but I'm not sure about releasing unless it was something quite interesting.
The article doesn't specify what distinguishes this from a regular liveCD Linux distro. My guess is that the DoD has hardened the included kernel (possibly included SELinux) and curated the included packages for security, but article doesn't say. It also doesn't specify what if any special configurations it has made to the standard included packages to make this more secure.
Comcast Hijacks Firefox Homepage: "We’ll Fix"