skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As I understand it, modern nuclear warheads make Little Boy and Fat Man look like toys.

They mostly look oversized: high-yield systems were all the rage when bomber was the only means of delivery (culminating with the Tsar Bomba test at 50MT), because it was expected most bombers would fail to deliver and the aim would likely be off, so each and every hit had to "count".

With the rise of ICBMs, yields went way down and systems deliver multiple warheads instead (per-head yield got down to 50~100kT e.g. W62, W76, W80) although it went up again following SALT and SORT agreements (which reduce the number of warheads the US and Russia "can" own, and thus makes it interesting to push yields back into higher range and use less warheads per missiles)
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Just a novice posting...if Google isn't extracting patent licensing fees from anyone, is it because it chooses to do so or is it because it wants to but can't, owing to a lack of patents?

I don't know enough to take sides, but I do know that non-specific software patents are 24-carat BS as 'defensive use' is super subjective. I just think that Google could and should have stayed away from Nortel bidding, or at least voiced concern before losing out to a consortium. That ways, it could have avoided the 'sore loser' argument entirely.
I end up using Python. In the end it's much more powerful and less error-prone (the oops factor of spreadsheet apps is ginormous). Quality plot, graph and stat modules abound.

Plus it has the advantage of being able to trivially scale in any direction, like refactoring or working on a real database (sqlite) when the dataset grows instead of shoehorning a database into a sheet, or making a module out of it, or integrating it with other random tools.
Ah, cool to know. I used bugmenot.com, though ;)
Fair points, but:

1: This isn't exclusive to Groupon, and I'm not sure they're doing anything that CitySearch and AOL weren't doing in 1998.

2-3: Purely anecdotal but I've heard too many horror stories of small businesses being screwed by their groupon deals, essentially losing money on the discount and not attracting enough repeat business to justify the deal in the first place.

The problem with the model is that it attracts customers who are focused on price, not value. That's at odds with the proposition behind many specialty stores and boutiques (eg vinyl records, hair salons, upmarket clothing, etc).

Groupon as a standalone business just digitizes those local coupon books that used to come in the mail or be sold at bulk for ten bucks or whatever. That's a good web based business but not a great one.
Google’s Invasion of the Tech Industry.
This article is basically judging Google for competing against market leaders.

By the tone of this article, it would seem the author (MG Siegler) prefers instead that a monopoly exists in every sector of the market and that the companies are all buddy-buddy with one another.

Fuck everything about that.
I don't use a smartphone because I just prefer to mostly be disconnected unless I'm explicitly at my laptop and secondly, I really have actual use for the GSM phone, text messaging, calendar, and the alarm clock features.

My previous phone lasted almost five years. I was given a smartphone from work but it was full of "nice to have" things that I felt didn't matter in the end. And it consumed battery like a proverbial sponge. Now I have a Samsung E2370 Xcover which gives me a month of battery life. It has lots of features I probably haven't even touched yet because I haven't actually needed any of them.

I work for a company that develops smartphone platforms themselves and I find the mobile architecture quite interesting but I just don't want to use one myself.
Solid, dude.
i was just about to do the same! :)
I didn't mean in terms of size, but destructive potential.

Do you not agree that a salvo of 100kT devices would make 1x 15kT look pretty tame?
I like the idea, but it feels a lot like the W3C in the 90's all over again: solving a perceived problem with a standard instead of a product.
> I continue to push my creativity and find new things to throw in to the protocol, ideas that wouldn't have to be there when the first part hits, but that its extensibility would make possible.

This by itself makes me believe this is doomed.

Part of the problem with IMAP is that it's incredibly complex. That complexity, and differing interpretations of that complexity, is a huge part of what makes IMAP such a headache to deal with.

Simplicity is a virtue. Don't add everything you can think of, strip out everything you don't absolutely have to have. It's fine if the protocol is extensible, but your first and primary goal should be to have a system that synchronizes email reliably and efficiently. Get that right, then start worrying about the extra stuff. Until then, you're just making life harder.
3 Weeks of Hacking
I recently quit my job to dedicate time to learning before I leave to go to university (Computer Engineering). As it stands I have 3 weeks of free time that I am looking to put toward a project.

Here's my problem: I have no idea what to focus on.

I have a decent ability to program in C/C++(More so C) and am familiar with Linux/Unix systems. My aim is to become a contributing member to FOSS and collaborate in a multi-developer project or to learn as much as possible about in the given time frame.

I have never worked on any kind of project like this and hope to treat the entire thing as a learning experience.

So here is what I'm asking you HN readers: Do you know of a project that needs a little love? Or have any other ideas as to what I should do in this time?

I would prefer to work fairly close to the hardware and maybe even pick up on some skills lost to newer developers (optimized inline assembly, oh my!).

Any/all feedback would be amazing.
I read the article wondering the same thing. It didn't spell out whether the historian had formed his opinions based on personal accounts and comments, or whether he accumulated evidence to support a theory.
Groupon is a legitimate business, which sells a real product for real money, in a manner that attempts to generate value for customers in a two-sided marketplace. It is an exceptionally risky business, like every other startup that aspires to the trajectory of "Go from nowhere to selling a billion dollars of product in two years."

It is entirely possible investors will get burned in an extraordinary fashion on Groupon. It is also possible they will end up with money hats. Capitalism happens. If capitalism happening to you would negatively impact your ability to feed your family, do not buy stock in Groupon. (Do not buy any individual stocks, either.)

With regards to their accounting practices: I'm agnostic as to whether any particular treatment of another company's numbers is maximally reflective of the interests of third-parties wishing to invest in them. That said, have you noticed we are not exactly a paint-within-the-lines industry?

Heck, even answering very freaking simple questions with intent to be maximally honest while complying with all regulations gets very difficult. For example, when do you think you can recognize revenue for selling someone $10 for 1,000 gold coins if they then immediately spend 500 gold coins on a Sword of Dragonslaying? If you have not read about this specific case before, I guarantee your first three guesses are wrong. Or, to pick an example near and dear to my heart, what exactly is getting sold when you take $29.95 from a customer and mark their account as Registered? Is it real property? If so, where is that property sold? "The location that a customer takes delivery", swell: do they "take delivery" at my business or at my server or at their home address or at their place of work? Is it perhaps not a real property and instead royalties? Is it a fee for a service? Oh, that depends on whether customization and support is offered: how much support is support? Answering emails is support if I make changes to the product on the basis of them?

I have given tax offices on two continents head-explosions just with the accounting for BCC. This stuff is hard.
As for the Unicomp models, I recommend them highly. I've one set up like the old Sun keyboards for *nix use. I had used the original IBM Model M's and the Customizers are as close as it gets to the genuine article.

I'm very much a fan of buckling spring, positive keyclick switches with the famous tactile feedback. There is absolutely no uncertainty that a key has been engaged and one of the effects is that you don't use as much pressure or resort to the temptation to mash keys; it could help prevent RSI. If you're a touch typist they are fantastic.

The only real downside to me is the noise they make; it's fine if you're in your own office but in an open workspace I doubt your colleagues will appreciate the noise-- in heavy coding mode they sound a bit like warfare.
Each message is just a resource, and we have a fabulous protocol for transferring representations of resource state -- HTTP. "Just add a push mechanism et voila." Given how much better HTTP authentication is compared to IMAP authentication, as well as easy support for multiple streams, statelessness, etc... it's hard not to be sold on HTTP.

Of course it's not that easy. But let's not go inventing new protocols when we can avoid it...
Buffett to FBN: S&P Downgrade 'Doesn't Make Sense'
Well, I'm not in the position to make a product out of it, or I would. The most I can do is program a server using the open source protocol in Node.JS or PHP.
Maybe you can call it, "Wave."
If you'd read Gabor's original article as well, you'd know that this is more of an API over HTTP then a TCP protocol. I guess I didn't make that clear enough.
That's great if the businesses purchasing Groupons are aware of this and know how to use the deals to their advantage. The problem comes when Groupon doesn't care about the businesses they're selling to at all and push sales that actually hurt those businesses. It's great for Groupon's current revenue, but it's horrible for their long term prospects- there are only so many small businesses you can screw over before they all realize it isn't a good deal for them, and Groupon's business drops off a cliff.

And I'm not excusing the small businesses here- certainly they should do their own homework and determine whether doing a Groupon deal is a good business decision for them, but when Groupon sales people are pushing these things like crack and pressuring businesses into buying what is an obviously negative value deal, they (meaning Groupon) won't get good referrals in the business community, they won't get repeat customers, and they'll run out of 'users' to exploit.

From all accounts it seems sales reps at Groupon have no interest in helping their customers come up with deals that actually make sense and are only interested in volume because they get commission bonuses- this is not a long term business model.
And whose idea of "best" do we use? The government is about ensuring a framework of freedom for its citizens to operate within, and if the citizenry refuses to be productive or healthy there's nothing the government can do about it.

Do you support alcohol prohibition? Alcohol leads to much more damage than even smoking from an emotional and psychological perspective.

What if, one day, the government decides that people who buy Japanese cars are a danger to themselves since they are costing the American car companies so much money by refusing to buy home-grown goods? The people just don't have the foresight to understand that buying Honda today means depression throughout Michigan tomorrow. Shouldn't we protect people from that eventuality by ensuring that they only buy domestic vehicles?

How far do we take this? Why do we believe that the politicians have such a heightened sense of foresight and such impeccably unselfish motives? I don't vote for people so they can do my thinking for me, I vote for people who I think will best represent important core principles, like retaining individual free exercise of conscience (like the choice to buy American or foreign cars, even if it will cost Michigan a lot of jobs).

The attitude that we need the government to protect us from our own decisions is in fact extremely dangerous and insidious. Old people survived for thousands of years before the implementation of social security -- if the industrial society doesn't support old people well enough, we have to tweak it so that these things work instead of doing these grotesque hacks of taking > 10% of an average person's salary every year to pay to support your grandpa's RV tour of the US.
I use an Android as the carrier I was on in Canada (Wind), like T-Mo, doesn't get the iPhone, and Android was the best smartphone available.

That said, I'm not a big fan of the phone I got (a Samsung Galaxy S), and Android's UI inconsistencies and lack of a culture of UI excellence really, really, really drive me up a wall. Going to switch to iOS as soon as the iPhone 5 comes out.
Your first problem is marketing (no one to help you, etc)... So pick a name for the project!
For me, breaking the lock is fun too though.
Wave was a really neat idea, but it had no backward compatibility in place.

In theory, MSAP would address that and have systems in place for backwards compatibility and communicate with the older SMTP protocol (and IMAP if necessary) while things move forward.
MSAP! Nobody follows the links =p
Spot on. I'm surprised he likened it to a 'Canon vs Nikon' debate. Transitioning from membrane to mechanical is the biggest difference though... Love my Cherry Blues.
What do you mean the LinkedIn IPO 'popped'- isn't LNKD currently around the same value as it was after the first day of trading? (90ish)
Bjarne Stroustrup's own "The C++ Programming Language" introduces them that way on page 515 as "a function-like object, a functor, or simply a function object". I don't like the term either, but that seems like a pretty authoritative source giving its blessing.
I've found Apple to be surprisingly responsive in the past. But here's hoping.
For example, would you have made the same decision in the same circumstance in 1945?

I have absolutely no way of knowing. Not in the least because I don't know what I would have known, and that is often my issue with this sort of hindsight-criticism. Besides the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-dont aspect of these types of huge decisions (I'm quite sure Truman would have received plenty of criticism if he decided NOT to drop the bomb), they often assume- this one somewhat included- perfect knowledge. Sure, the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria. Did the President know that? Sure, Japan was secretly hoping to use the USSR as leverage in negotiations with the USA. Did Truman know THAT? It goes on.

I suppose perhaps I do dismiss it a little too quickly, but I wish more revisionist criticism would focus a little less on what is right from the grand, 20/20 all-knowing-birds-eye-view and a little more on individual knowledge and perspective.
it sounds as if you didn't read the article. It doesn't say LinuX isn't still relevant - quite the opposite in fact - just that Linus has:

"Although he can claim credit for popularizing one of the most powerful ideas ever to sweep through the software industry, Torvalds's project has matured to such an extent that it's largely outgrown its illustrious creator."

I think it's fairly reasonable to say that Linux will continue on even if Linus disappeared. Same with git, for the matter.

The article was wrong re: Netflix, but the point they made - that Netflix didn't have a capable video over IP product at the time - was reasonable.
I'm still using an iPhone 3GS, and the browser is pretty damned sluggish even with iOS 4.3, which is a huge improvement over jailbroken 3.1.3.
A Very Interesting Personal Website
Not really. It's out of place in both.

Beautifully written, at any rate. Very catching and appealing!
I have a 17'' (1920*1080) laptop at home and a 27'' iMac at work.

For displaying the likes of Netbeans, both are comfortable. I don't display the browser in full screen on the iMac because it's ridiculously large. For watching videos however, the 27'' are impressive. I would say programmers don't need huge screens nor multiple ones but I suppose it depends on one's preferences and habits.
I still dont understand exactly what you are trying to ''sell'' but i understand that you might be trying to protect your idea with some vagueness. In view of the above i can say the following. 1. Use facebook connect and allow users to post their activities on their wall (not automatically though because you'll be banned)
2. Target 2 schools close to each other and ensure scholars in those schools use whatever it is you ''selling''
3.Get inside info on the popular kids in that school and pay them to use your app for a month or 2.
Are you replacing IMAP and MAPI (mail delivery protocols, per your article) or SMTP, or both?

I think this will take a lot more than a single blow.
99% of the morality is decided by whether you think strategic bombing can ever be acceptable

Perhaps this is why the bombings are so divisive even to this day- that dividing line is really pure opinion, and you know what they say about opinions...
I'm curious if Groupon has some minimum discount levels, because I frequently hear that people lost a lot of money on Groupon, and logically if you're going to lose a lot of money on a coupon you're offering, you won't offer it. Obviously some reduction in margin is necessary, but if it actually costs money to provide the service after the Groupon, that's a bit past the point of reasonability. The same rules that apply to traditional coupons should apply to Groupon because it's a similar target audience -- coupon clippers have never really been known to be "great customers".

Is there a reason so many businesses provide such deep discounts to Groupon? Are they just caught up in the hype, and Groupon can demand huge discounts because so many merchants want to use it?
by a single blow i guess i really meant just the protocol itself.

But its set to replace IMAP/Exchange/SMTP.
Except one important fact - there was a large group of scientists who begged the US government to drop the bomb offshore Japan instead to demonstrate it's power. There's even a letter to prove this.

President decided to ignore that and drop it on civilians first anyway. It's just military bloodlust.

Remember half the US was practically foaming at the mouth to kill any Japanese at that point (we even had concentration camps for Japanese-Americans) so the mentality was there would be no repercussions, certainly no-one vocal enough to protest the morality.
And also, as I learned recently, gdb. That took me by surprise, until I realised that .inputrc does not contain settings for the shell, or any individual CLI program, but for readline.
According to the article, this scheme was probably just a fabrication by a journalist who wanted a juicy story:

"Here at last was a criminal brain worthy of the Mona Lisa. The only problem is that Decker almost certainly invented him. There is no external evidence for Decker’s story, nor even for the Marques’ existence. A century later, none of the six supposed copies has surfaced. Most likely, Vincenzo Peruggia stole the Mona Lisa single-handed, largely because she was small."

(Also, this is somewhat off-topic, but the typography and layout on ft.com are really superb. This is one of the few websites that doesn't make me immediately turn to readability.)
You're absolutely right! Thank you.

I'll need to take extra care to focus on the main issue before extending it.

I just also want the extensibility to be a center focus, so that it can expand to be a synchronization protocol instead of only an email protocol.
I think most of the complaints were about UAC, which was acknowledged to be overly chatty by Microsoft when they refined it in 7.
So it's OK if you raise money in an IPO from a lot of small investors, but it becomes illegal if you raise money from a few experienced investors?
Watch Live TV with Satellite Direct
Are you fed up with the high price of cable TV? What if there was a way for you to watch all of your favorite channels- including premium movie channels, all of the best sports programming.
Because Google wanted to buy time AND customers.

By buying Groupon, Google wouldn't have to spend their own developers' time to create what is now Google Offers. And time is expensive. Time spent on Google Offers was not time spent on, let's say, Google+.

Customers: E-mail addresses of 115M people have to be worth something. To Google, those addresses are probably worth more than something.

Also, Google has something Groupon does not: real cash in their pockets. Groupon must spend a lot of $$$ on avertising; to Google, marketing would be virtualy free.

What I'm saying is this: Groupon is running itself into bankruptcy; Google probably found a way to use their own resources to make Groupon wildly profitable.
It seems you're hoping for a community to emerge and help you. This is much more likely to happen if you flesh out your idea and write up preliminary documentation of your protocol.

A FOSS community is great when things are already rolling but it's up to you to put in the effort to catalyze it.
Wave, although abandon by Google, is still pretty much alive and complete set of tools.
Those cities didn't get vaporized. Relatively small sections around impact did. As the article pointed out the allies had been fire bombing cites for awhile. Which does as much or more death and destruction. We should be agonizing over slaughtering civies to compel our enemies to surrender, A bombs or not.
This is more of a thought on Google's awkward situation rather than patent laws in general:

What if the DOJ scrutiny around the Nortel patent bundle went well for Google and Apple/Microsoft etc were forced to put essential patents in a pool and license it to other vendors under fair conditions? As Google's CLO said, it still does not give Google the weapon to negate Oracle or Microsoft or Apple's IP lawsuits. What if DOJ smites down the same way everytime an important patent auction is happening? As long as Microsoft/Apple etc is willing to throw money at it, the best outcome will always be everybody gets its fair share. Again, Google's patent WMD remains a dream.

Unless a patent reform retroactively grands Google all the immunity in the world I really do not understand how this would end well for Google without sorting everything out in court just as it is.

* Of course theoretically Google could buy up MMI or other companies with a giant patent trove in mobile space to balance things out. Then again all public companies' board have fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value and as long as Apple/Microsoft are willing to pay more, Google has slim chance of exclusivity.
Put on your tin foil hats.
If you're interested in learning more about the painting, I created an entire mini website about the Mona Lisa a few years ago:

http://hepguru.com/monalisa/

It was featured by USA Today, etc. You may like it.