skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the risk of talking cross-porpoises, I was referring to the parent poster's incorrect use of the term England as a country with the ability to make it's own laws, as opposed to copyright law in general.
Without knowing WHEN folks joined, it's hard to tell. But the real point of the article is that Newt's followers don't stink any more than anyone else's.

Trust me, I am NOT A FAN. When I started doing the research I really was hoping to help blow Gingrich's campaign apart. But there's just nothing going on here.
Spending is so weak that even dollar-store chains are suffering
"I'm waiting for black friday"

Not sure that's worth it. Black Friday is increasingly becoming a gimmick, more lottery than deal, and on the other side, if you're not too worried about exactly what you end up with there's pretty much continuous deals on all the major retailers for deep discounts on one model or another of TV. I doubt you're going to be able to do much better on Black Friday that just cruising Amazon's site for the next couple of weeks and waiting for a good deal to pop up.
New York may have been uncharacteristically late to the party on this one.
Ask HN: review my webapp starter project
Hi HN, I'm looking for feedback on a project I've been working on. It's a kind of webapp starter project- the code is the product.

http://armhold.com/quick

The target customer is an entrepreneur/dev that wants to get a basic webapp up and running quickly. It doesn't do anything novel or earth-shattering; it's just a project shell that gives you some common basic features that you can use to build out your site.

I often see jobs posted to sites like oDesk or Elance asking for a basic website with these kinds of features. The idea is to sell this code as a starter project, so you can get your webapp running faster and not have to worry about implementing boilerplate stuff like:

* totally automated user accounts (sign-up/login/change-password/forgot-password, etc)

* login via Facebook or use local account (uses BCrypt for storing pw hashes)

* drop-dead easy "you must be logged in to access this page" annotations

* "contact us" with CAPTCHA protection

* smart https/http switching for secure/insecure pages

* uses H2 as an integrated database, so it also saves you the hassle of setting up MySQL (though it's a simple change if you do in fact want to use an existing DB).

Again, none of this is rocket-science, but it can take a surprising amount of time to get these basic things working properly.

The main downside to this of course if that you're subject to my choice of tech (Java, Wicket, JPA/Hibernate).

Do you think this is worth pursuing? Do you think it's worth $199? Would you like to use it to build your next project? :-)

All constructive feedback appreciated, thank you.
Connected Cars: Why Your Next Vehicle Will Do More Than Just Drive
Clickable link: http://armhold.com/quick
Say what? The article is bullshit.

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/36000.html

State Population growth since 2000: 2.1%

Kings county(Brooklyn): 1.6% increase

New York county(Manhattan): 3.2% increase

Queens county: 0.1% *

* The city claims this number is way off, and it probaby is.

I think the article is comparing NYC, not to 2000, but to its peak population in the mid 20th century.
Are we talking about the same thing? XMPP federation? If I've got an account on jabber.org or run ejabberd on my domain, I can add you@yourGAppsDomain.com as buddy, see your presence and can message you, without caring about the server your account is local to?

Edit: See elsewhere in the thread: You are correct, I am wrong. Federation is supported for GTalk since 2006: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/open-federation-for-g...
Oddly enough, there actually is a baseball statistic that takes strikeouts out of the equation. It also takes out home runs. It's called Batting Average on Balls In Play or BABIP. You can see the formula here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batting_average_on_balls_in_pla...

BABIP doesn't tell you a ton about a player's overall performance, but it does tell you how lucky they've been if you compare it to their historical BABIP. Some guys have awful years because their skills fall off a cliff (Adam Dunn is in that camp right now). But some player just have terribly unlucky seasons in terms of how defense affects the balls they put in play.

If a player's BABIP is way down (or up), but his line drive rate, strikeout percentage, and home run rates are the same, you can make a good guess that his batting average will regress back towards his historical average.

I'm sure if you told the average baseball fan about BABIP, he or she would call it BS. Yet, it's a great metric for determining whether a player's poor/excellent performance is sustainable.
Subtleties of the X clipboard (+ how to setup a consistent clipboard on Linux)
- XMPP clients usually suck in that area, in my opinion.

what do you use for irc? at least irssi and adium do irc and xmpp, i'm sure others do too.

If someone with high profile (GTalk? Facebook Chat?) would build a product based on this protocol, it would boost the adoption tremendously. On the other hand, as I stated a couple of days earlier in another XMPP discussion: As long as Google or Facebook are not supporting federation, they are not really supporting the core feature of XMPP in my book.

huh? google chat does have xmpp federation. i run my own jabber server and talk to a bunch of people that use google chat through the web interface or a jabber client.
And, as stated in the article : the top 0.1% gets their "real wealth" from government interference. What's the net worth of Obama (or Bush). Who influences policy ? Exactly what has happened to the net worth of Al Gore these last 10 years ?

So it seems that there are arguments going exactly the other way too. The easiest way to make the top 0.1% destroy themselves seems easy : destroy the government regulations keeping them wealthy, and excluding others.

That is of course diametrically opposite of both all forms of leftism and not a very popular option with those upper middle class "liberal" people, whose interests mainly seems to lie in protecting their benefactors. Or, if they get really roused up, they may upgrade their interests to becoming the new power elite, so they can start excluding others.
Fexl version a9 released, with self-configuring build script
We've long speculated that incidents are under-reported. Social and other media are catalysts for transparency. They may also force organizations to be responsible or accountable. I agree this is a good thing. We may not be able to find a good way to capture real numbers, but I suspect that we have a more accurate picture than we did 10 years ago.

RE: benefits to livelihood. My security consulting didn't suffer while organizations chose not to disclose. The only difference between then and now was a clause in the contract regarding disclosure :-O
Another possible scenario is that their new customers account for a significant portion of revenue. Once they hit the edge of the addressable market, their CPA rises significantly and their revenue goes off a cliff as it becomes harder to acquire new, profitable customers.

There are two ways to read these tea leaves.
My last app (http://www.burgerkone.com/grainbender/) was on the New & Noteworthy music page for three days, and was as high as #17 in the U.S. iPad music apps store. Initial sales have been good but if it follows the trajectory of my other apps there's no way it will be pulling in $300 a month a few months from now.

I think you've chosen your niche well. It's popular but under-served.
I get that you are defending their business model, thanks. The whole point of starting a business is to lose money today building an asset that will make money tomorrow, so what's wrong with that?

In days of yore, companies would not go public until they were actually making money, but tail fins fell out of favor, and conservative investing went with it.

All I am saying is that they should use standard financial tools when promoting their business to investors. I am sure that plenty of people, possibly yourself included, will be just as bullish on their prospects.
Yup... Chomsky makes very much that point in 'On Language'; the liberal intellectuals are the elite's best propagandists. :(
Well, thats the honest and straightforward way of calculating, but from a competitor standpoint, you wouldn't want to match feature to feature and then try to compete. You'd attack by taking over the disgruntled users first, and Google has done that well with Circles, and Privacy. Google has its own issues with acting like a drunken sailer kicking off people at whim. But I doubt it'd take 2 years - if G+ managers to build engagement and retention, they are good to go - but honestly, thats a battle for Google.
The Spoilsmen: How Congress Corrupted Patent Reform
The average app makes about $500 over its entire lifetime, so you should be pretty pleased with this.
History's 10 Greatest Hackers -- including rtm
Google in a Nut
Ringleadr: Building a better Groupon by reversing the business model
Also, I'm currently working on a new version of Fexl which doesn't use reference counts. It doesn't use mark-and-sweep GC either. I'm using a "lazy copy" approach which I'm fairly certain will work, and work well. We'll see.
I haven't had a device yet to try that. They're supposedly coming out with a desktop version of "webOS". Will keep an eye out for an early release. I think they'll initially have that for Windows (whatever that means). Would love to try booting into the general concept from a shell on Debian.
To back this up, well over 20% of people eligible for food stamps don't apply.
I went through hundreds of resumes from Nortel employees (and a few interviews) while Nortel was bleeding employees. It was pretty brutal, their skill set was irrelevant and the entitlement high. I felt pretty bad for them. The experience leads me to believe that the sooner someone leaves a sinking ship, the better he or she is. Both because they are able to recognize the problem and because they have options available to them.

Can't it be argued that Nokia's losses are due, at least in part, to bad engineering?
This is how it is supposed to work. JavaScript is single-threaded, and JavaScript execution pauses rendering and event-processing on the page. A synchronous XHR request is just like any other long-running JavaScript: it blocks the UI.
Seriously? All the website does it multiply two numbers together (well almost).
To Design Well, You Need to Accept This...
How Many Secret Wars is the U.S. Fighting?
Title's a bit off. cvs/svn/bzr and any version control system doesn't solve it either, and they weren't meant to. Fowler's article doesn't have that in the title, so I don't think he was even trying to imply that people think version control solves this issue in the first place.
Break the Ice with Another Check In App
TokBox's video chat APIs bring the Hangouts idea to the whole Web
Google's Native Client forges ahead
See also: http://www.irccloud.com/
If you dislike existing XMPP clients, you can use bitlbee (which is an IRC-XMPP gateway you can run on your server) and use your favorite IRC client.
Mass infection of osCommerce sites
The Model is slightly different. The process is split into two parts - the Resident where the focus is on customer validating your product, and the Accelerator Phase where teams are funded with $20,000 to a max of $50,000. The key metric against the Accelerator is also to enable the teams to get their first few anchor customers, so that they can get their "model" in place.

This is the pre-cursor to the programme. 8 months into the programme (since resident programme candidates will be first preference for the accelerator programme) the teams will be eligible for the investment.

Hope that helps.
This isn't a question of whether we should teach SICP, it's a question of whether it's an appropriate introduction.

I love SICP, I think it's one of the most brilliant didactic texts ever written, but I think it's a terrible starting point for most students.

To me it appears that SICP is used as a trial by ordeal, intended in large part to scare off 'unsuitable' candidates. SICP is all about the beauty and interest of computation for it's own sake, but it doesn't really engage with solving the kinds of problems most software is written for. I think we're inadvertently dissuading people who would make great programmers, but who see computer science as a means rather than an end and need to relate algorithms and data structures to practical problems.

There is clearly value in CS for its own sake and academics are obviously inclined towards this, but I think dismissing the practical application of CS is unhelpful. If we segregate programmers into 'Computer Scientists' and 'Software Engineers', we lose the most precious part - the bit in between, where radical ideas meet great engineering.

I want to see more diversity in computing and I think SICP as an introductory course is a serious hindrance to that aim. We don't teach children to read and write by starting with linguistic theory. I think we should teach software the same way - start with Dick and Jane and work our way up to lambda calculus.
While you are almost certainly correct you are missing the point about Google's blog post. The lawyer who wrote is demonstrably lying about the situation.

"They’re doing this by banding together to acquire Novell’s old patents (the “CPTN” group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel’s old patents (the “Rockstar” group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn’t get them;"

If Google was offered a chance to bid along with Microsoft, how is Microsoft trying to make sure Google didn't get them? While it may not have been in Google's best interest to partner with Microsoft, they can hardly argue in good faith that Microsoft is trying to withhold those patents from Google in some sort of conspiracy.
I'll second this very strongly. Compatibility mode is a shadow of what Gnome 2 used to be, and I've spent enough time using it at this point to feel pretty comfortable saying that.

(And if you do any work in a VM, you too will become very familiar with compatibility mode.)
> "People seem to presume that patents are on ideas..."

Pure software patents are, by definition, exactly equivalent to patents on ideas, expressions, really large numbers, etc. Good for you for getting a couple of patents, seriously. But if they really do cover just software, then you just patented bits of speech, literally. The patent system was never intended to cover that stuff, and you only got away it with because of insufficient guidance from the courts over the past couple decades. I believe this situation will be rectified eventually, and patents like yours will once again not be allowed.

> "... and that people are patenting really obvious ideas."

This is exactly the case in the lodsys hubub, as just one timely example. You don't have to look to hard to find many others.

> "there is no need for reform, that I can see, as all these allegedly bogus patents would be quickly thrown out if they really were as obvious as is claimed and if there really was the abundance of prior art, as is claimed."

You're joking right? In all the discussions swirling around this issue, rarely do even the most intransigent defenders of the status-quo say that there is absolutely no need for reform. Even the most obviously bogus software patents require millions of dollars to invalidate; combined with the patent office's utter inability to properly evaluate software patents, the system is ripe for racketeering.
That's direct consequence of how JS/DOM is designed to work. IE is not the only browser that has UI thread tied to JS execution.

Although browser chrome could run in a separate thread, that wouldn't prevent page itself (and any interaction with it) from "freezing".

This is because any interaction with the page is fired as JS events, and if JS is busy, it can't pick those events.

Browser can't react to any clicks (even links and buttons can't be activated, because JS is given chance to intercept and cancel those clicks).
Even if you want to leave the page, beforeunload/unload events will get queued.

Also pages need to be refreshed only between JS events (that's how DOM animation works, that's how canvas buffering is specced), so even screen redraw is tricky when JS is executing.
Nice! In the beginning there's a loss of water weight, but at least half of that is probably straight-up loss. If the one day cheat day helps to sustain the diet, no matter how much marketing hype surrounding the book the diet would still be worth it.
Totally agree with this. Once you get past a certain point the intrinsic complexity of the problem dominates, but the initial learning curve on Obj-C and Cocoa is definitely steeper. You can't just slap something together the way you can with PHP, for instance.
At this price, countries should just purchase a test for everyone, and eradicate HIV.
Moving China Up the Value Chain
This is about the same rate I'm getting on the CFL packs I'm getting from BJs. I'm wondering if there's a particular manufacturer or factory that is skimping on components. I have a couple CFLs that are used daily that have lasted 8 years and still going. They are in non-enclosed fixtures though.
ChuckMcM says:

"...by saving his urine he could start making ammonium nitrate and a 55 gallon drum of the same could have leveled the apartment..."

It would take years to accumulate a 55 gallon drum of ammonium nitrate in such a manner. The techniques you refer to by which nitrates are separated from dung and urine are messy, tedious, smelly and grossly inefficient by today's standards. The neighbors would not put up with it.

As for the portable toilets, methane gas is a more pertinent concern:

http://articles.sfgate.com/2004-07-15/news/17432890_1_portab...

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/07/25/man-hurt-as-portable-t...
I don't think anyone who will go to the trouble of testing their potential partners with this will forego using traditional methods as well. It's a lot more troublesome, after all.
This brings up an interesting point about tracking services. If a user selects 'Do Not Track' in their browser (Providing it supports it), does that mean do not track them at all? Or do not track them as a unique user? May sites still use software like Webalizer/AWStats or similar to track users, it would be very complicated to set those up not to track users that send the 'do not track' headers
It's a risk. But the same could be said for condoms in nightclubs.

Generally, the best public safety campaigns work are "defense in depth". You discourage sex in general, discourage unsafe sex, discourage casual sex, discourage polygamy, provide condoms, and encourage tests. It all generally works, as long as you don't treat any of it as a magic bullet.

It's the extremists who either think a) abstinence is the only protection; or b) causal sex is fine as long as you take precautions; who cause problems, as they tend to discourage defense in depth.

So ideally, they would have an ambiguously enthusiastic "Over 90% accurate!" blurb, and be packaged with a condom or two.
Bamboo bike frames have been around for quite a few years but this is the first time I've seen anyone trying to commercialise them. I guess they might take off with the green crowd but otherwise I don't see people clamouring to buy one.

I wonder how they are repaired when broken. If you can fix them with wood glue they might be of more interest because it's easier/cheaper than getting somebody to weld it back together for you.
I just need to correct myself. That adapter is the one I had picked out. It was the OTHER adapters that I read problems about. :)
How would testing everyone eradicate HIV? You'd need to remove the genitals of anyone who tested positive, which I'd imagine would be a little difficult to get through most democratic legislatures.
What I didn't understand about this lawsuit is the following angles:

> Plaintiffs believe their decisions to disclose or not disclose information is their decision to make.

> To avoid being tracked online Plaintiffs used and relied on their browser controls.

> It is contrary to standard practices to use DOM local storage instead of cookies.

If you are going to put down a practice as a "hack" or "repurposing" why not quote the standard?

http://dev.w3.org/html5/webstorage/#user-tracking

Very clearly it states:

> A third-party advertiser (or any entity capable of getting content distributed to multiple sites) could use a unique identifier stored in its local storage area to track a user across multiple sessions, building a profile of the user's interests to allow for highly targeted advertising.

To me: any effort by plaintiffs to protect their privacy is moot, especially attacking local storage practices, when it is known that it can be used for tracking.

W3C puts the control and responsibility back in the user's hand:

> There are a number of techniques that can be used to mitigate the risk of user tracking, all involve user agent/browser settings.

So in my mind:

- Plaintiffs (or their browsers) did not enough to protect their online privacy.

- Plaintiffs complain about the abuse of local storage practices, when tracking through local storage is a very real option.

- Plaintiffs can configure their user agent to not accept these cookies.

As for information sharing between sites: this I could see as bad, if proven. But a KissMetrics-wide unique ID doesn't proof that such information is shared.

Even with all security efforts in place, a user can still be tracked (By IP and browser/system settings), and this data can still be shared. I do e-commerce profiling, and while I don't really need a flash cookie, I also don't really need your permission to scan my own servers logs: it was you who made the decision to disclose that information to me.

> However, user tracking is to some extent possible even with no cooperation from the user agent whatsoever, for instance by using session identifiers in URLs, a technique already commonly used for innocuous purposes but easily repurposed for user tracking (even retroactively). This information can then be shared with other sites, using using visitors' IP addresses and other user-specific data (e.g. user-agent headers and configuration settings) to combine separate sessions into coherent user profiles.
Some nginx and FastCGI Basics
Definitely agree that standardization of financial metrics is highly useful for comparing across companies.

Strongly disagree that the SEC or any government agency can be relied upon for anything related to "trust" in this space. Did Sarbanes-Oxley prevent the financial crisis? The SEC is just about building Maginot Lines. Caveat emptor has and remains the operative guidance for investors.

Private ratings agencies have had a poor track record of late, but they are at least somewhat more reliable in that they aren't completely under the thumb of the US government.
Many people have actually said they need to find or remember many links or pages they have seen or opened before, but have not manually bookmarked. So you use case makes a lot of sense.
How long would it take to build Facebook as of July 2011?
So true. I needed to go from the Netherlands to Gothenburg, which would be ~200 from Amsterdam. By crossing the border with Germany, taking a Ryanair flight and then a train, I got this down to ~100.

Someone, please build this!

EDIT: And don't forget to add coaches. Whereas they're not that popular, they're dirt cheap.
What feature do you look for in a modern bug tracker?
I am planning to work on a bug tracking software this weekend - mainly as a hobby and to get my hands dirty on grails rather than with a profit motive - so probably will be open source.

But before jumping into development, I would like to know what all features that developers crave in a bug tracker - other than the most obvious features - adding bugs, changing status and reporting.

I you have an itch in your current bug tracker, i will be happy to hear that.

Thanks a lot for your time!