skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Rascal will cost around $150, though I'll lower the price if I can figure out how to do it. I'm a little skeptical of the Raspberry Pi being sold at $25 in reasonably small quantities. But, if they can pull it off, I'll be delighted, because it will mean I probably can too.

One of my beta customers has a demo up at http://angerlights.com that is pretty amusing and demonstrates the Rascal's basic functions. All the code is on Github too: https://github.com/rascalmicro

If you want to try a Rascal in person, and you happen to be in New York, I'll be doing a demo at the Open Hardware Summit in NYC in mid-September.
Magazines are paid for the number of ads they distribute. And the ads DID make it to you, so even if you go through them all and rip them out, you ARE being exposed to them, if only briefly. And the ads can't be all destroyed unilaterally by installing MagazineAdBlock.

If you block ads, you have NO chance of seeing them, and therefore I have no chance of making the $0.03 that's typical from a single click. And worse, if you block those annoying ads, then you have no motivation to BUY the version without ads!

If everyone blocked ads, you would have no more free games to steal. If you don't want ads, buy games without ads. Don't try to hide behind bogus rationalizations. Blocking ads is clearly unethical, even if you don't want to call it stealing, because the developer intends to make money on his product and is giving it to you with the express understanding that it's ad supported.
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1121596044/how-piracy-works
So Apple doing bad things makes you mad at Apple. But the fact that other companies also play the same game, some less successfully and most importantly, with less press, doesn't impact your opinion of those companies?

You should direct your anger at the source of the issue, software patents. Getting angry at companies doing what they need to in the current environment isn't very productive.
I realize this is an old converstaion, but, just so you know, Motorola bought Symbol about 5 years ago, but more recently, Motorola was split up into two companies: Motorola Solutions (B2B focused-> Symbol is a part of this business), and Motorola Mobility (more consumer focused). It is this second company that Google acquired. They are traded under the symbols MSI, and MMI, respectively.
That is scary, no one would loan money to McDonald's!? Talk about a safe bet - the corporation owns almost all the land their restaurants sit on. Imagine the number of prime commercial real estate properties they have worldwide.
doesn't matter the speed of intel's chip in 2011 because motorola and ibm will already have chips out by then that are more effective, use energy better, and run applications ready for the new iMac's that are introduced at the 2011 MacWorld. They'll run at somewhere near 7GHz and still be faster than an 11GHz or even 128GHz sht that intel puts out.. - by StickWithApple*

I think that's my favorite one so far.
Embedded Serial Number Helps Photographer Find His Stolen Camera
I used my TI-83 for quasi-cheating (it was loaded with extra info and formulas in notes) and playing mario or tetris. It served me well.
So wait - how come Google can be held to the fire for a half BILLION dollars, but there still has not been ANY significant arrests or even fines over the derivatives fiasco (and no significant legislation passed to stop it from happening again).

It boggles the mind.
Calculate Broadband Usage - How Do I Calculate Broadband Usage
Broadband is the type of the connection through which the person can use the internet on better terms. The broadband connection is the faster internet connection which provides the person to perform a
Portland unemployment rate - 9.2%; United States - 9.3% (source: http://bls.gov/web/metro/laummtrk.htm)

Real estate prices are definitely down from 2006; maybe not as much percentage-wise as California, but the equivalent house here still costs much less than one in Boston, NYC, or The Valley.

The rain can get you down sometimes but summers are fantastic (and dry). I feel I have a high quality of life here without having to sit in a car for 12% or more of my waking hours. Not that I don't get annoyed by something or another here from time to time. Every city has its own benefits & burdens.
They also lost 3 navsats (Glonass) in December last year

http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-russia-satellites-orbit....
That's a common rumour in Finland, at least, but they've posted 3 profitable years (out of 26). I don't know about their accounting, but I find it plausible that they'd want to maintain a presence at a small loss.
At least we now have the ability to cut PCBs or print enclosures locally or even personally. I have a CNC enroute for my garage fab lab. Still a long ways and orders of magnitude of complexity away from local chip fab though, but it's a start.
The economy isn't doing well at all, and people are flocking to the cheapest alternatives.

Fast food is absolutely not the cheapest alternative. We cook about 95% of our meals, using roughly half organic ingredients, and seldom exceed $2-$3 per person per meal for our family which includes left overs. Our average is well below that. Fast food restaurants in our area typically charge $6-$7 per "complete" meal.

When you cook for yourself you can take advantage of sales and bulk purchase discounts which can dramatically lower your ingredient cost.

Whatever the reason is for people to eat fast food so much, low cost surely can't be it.
However, food production was one of the worst businesses to be in during the great depression. Food prices plummeted to well below cost of production rates. Combined with some extraordinary environmental events around the same time, farmers were hit hard – really hard.

However, in this recession, it is one of the best businesses you can be in. Prices haven't been this strong in a long, long time. Goes to show there are no absolutes in life.
"Lumbard said the managers had toyed with the idea of adopting Google’s 20 percent time, but they concluded it wouldn’t work for NPR. Google has thousands of employees and extraordinarily deep pockets, which mean it can afford to let employees take a day every week for side projects. Plus, Lumbard says, 20-percent time puts the emphasis on individuality, whereas NPR’s approach values teamwork."

I often hear the 'Google is bigger, so they can afford it' argument... Bigger means they have MORE PEOPLE. That means it costs more.

I can understand a startup saying they can't do it, but an established company with profits? They could, if they wanted to. (Not that it would necessarily make sense, mind you. It depends on the industry.)

And the teamwork thing is nonsense, too. Googlers can work on other peoples' 20% projects in their 20% time. So it encourages teamwork as well. (And I'd likely be one of those, as I have few good ideas, but enjoy helping others flesh theirs out.)
> A grid of icons with text underneath is considered ripping off Apple now? Are you serious?

People keep using this same argument, but there's a little more too it than that. For example, if a graphic designer took the Coca-Cola logo and changed it just slightly. By your logic, they are in the clear because it's just "type", it's not like Coca-Cola invented fonts, right?

I think most people agree that there are enough similarities between the phones that it could be confusing, hence Apple is trying to protect it. You don't hear anyone complaining that MS ripped off Apple. MS came up with something that is different. All though it's still just a "grid of icons with text underneath".
Thanks for the note. I certainly don't think I can make it on my own - I don't really feel prepared for "the real world" (as if you've never heard a 20 year old say that) - but the classes that remain to be taken in the CS program, especially the required ones (Real analysis? Sure, okay) don't seem like what I need to get myself there.

Also, I left out an important piece of information in my post—I'm not dropping out, just becoming a single major (music) instead of double.
Not really "tries," per submission headline, but rather "tried, one day."

"Lumbard said the managers had toyed with the idea of adopting Google’s 20 percent time, but they concluded it wouldn’t work for NPR. Google has thousands of employees and extraordinarily deep pockets, which mean it can afford to let employees take a day every week for side projects. Plus, Lumbard says, 20-percent time puts the emphasis on individuality, whereas NPR’s approach values teamwork."
We haven't tried recruiting from PSU ourselves, but we probably should. Galois (http://corp.galois.com/) recruits students from PSU's CS program. My colleagues from PSU's mathematics dept have also been a pleasure to work with.
Which are (were?) probably flagged... through an imperfect heuristic?
I don't know about Microsoft. Their road to software quality has been long and hard. Do you remember Windows 95? How many new Windows versions did they ship before they got anywhere near the stability and reliability of *nix systems?

They're doing well these days, but it didn't happen overnight.

Also, although I'm not defending anyone, I've never worked on an operating system before but I can imagine QA isn't a walk in the park.
Ask HN: libmemcached resources?
Hi folks,

I am new to memcached, and I am planning to use it via the C interface. I have looked at libmemcached, but there are no good resources for this library (I looked at the man pages already), i.e., I need to understand the semantics of multi_get, quit, advantages of binary protocol vs. auto-negotiate, memcached_st relation to threads, pools of memcached_st connections etc.

Would you recommend any good resources to understand these things?
Indeed-for users that are bound to OpenLDAP its a massive issue. Without knowing those users exact setup its hard to know exactly what the issue is-the fact that its ONLY OpenLDAP servers is odd. The client must be receiving some sort of authentication succeeded message (you will note that it won't accept a blank password-so in that case OpenLDAP is responding with a failure). It may be a bug in Lion that triggers a bug in OpenLDAP.
Have a firm handshake, smile and try and see things from the other person's point of view.
Apache DoS Bug Resurfaces, Spurring New Attacks
Some foreigner (ie, not from either region) starts pontificating about how political borders should be redrawn in Africa and the Middle East. It must be Wednesday.

(Not removed - that's just the mind-numbing pitch that he steps back to just redrawing borders.)

Meh. I wish I could still flag articles, as this is one of those I-feel-stupider-for-having-read-it essays.
Doing more with the +1 button, more than 4 billion times a day
"Linux is only free if your time has no value."
My ancient Dell laptop has a "slide to unlock" mechanical catch on it, and seen such catches on old storage boxes, etc. I fail to see how making a soft analog of it constitutes non-obvious innovation.
Cool stuff.

He has two more follow ups that I thought I'd post if someone was interested. This man is an amazing writer and truly a genius of our generation.

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2010/10/18/the-no-self-defeati...

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2010/11/02/the-no-self-defeati...
Wow, can't believe all of the negative comments on here towards Portland. My wife and I moved here a couple months ago and can't stop thinking about how much we love the place. We were just joking last night about how if we listened to people on the internet, we would have never made such a great move out of fear we would be depressed and living in the streets. We've had a completely opposite experience from the points listed here:

1) Impossible to find a job? My wife just applied to 3 companies and got offers from all 3 within one month of us getting here, all paying equal or higher to her previous jobs -- and we knew literally zero people when we arrived.

2) Filthy and disgusting? Sorry, I've seen some disgusting shit (literally) on the streets in some of the other cities mentioned in this thread. People have tattoos and piercings? I'm surprised that bothers anyone. Who cares.

3) Rain? Sure, it rains. Not many cities have perfect weather. Where I just moved from (Austin), it has been 105 degrees for 70 days straight. That can be pretty depressing.

Since we've been here, we've gone to O'Reilly's OSCon, went to multiple beer festivals, went to multiple block parties, went to the coast, visited Cannon Beach, Rockaway Beach, Cape Meares, went to the Columbia River Gorge, saw many waterfalls, saw the Shins perform live in a small bar, also Phife from A Tribe Called Quest. Frequently visit amazing coffee houses and breweries, went to a neighborhood picnic, ate at a jillion food carts for less than $5, worked at a free coworking space downtown, walked/jogged/hiked in many beautiful parks, and browsed badass bookstores.

I like the food better, the public transportation is better, the rent is affordable, it is bike friendly, there are beautiful flowers in the neighborhood, the people are chill.

Depressing? Not at all.
Two human crew return missions from the ISS were also partial failures.

http://www.astronautix.com/articles/thespace.htm (the bottom 2 entries)
No-if you try to submit a blank password it is (rightly) rejected. If you submit a non-blank password, the login succeeds. This (to me) points to the LDAP server responding with a login success message and the OS allowing the user in. This bug appears to only effect Lion clients talking to OpenLDAP (not the LDAP server shipped with Lion Server) or Active Directory.
The farming and restaurant businesses are completely different. Low food prices hurts farmers, but helps restaurant owners.
Anyone up for iterating that copy for practice? Here's my attempt:

"MicroMaximus helps you fill your monthly Reward Checking Account transaction requirements quickly with $1 transactions."
How Long Will Your A/B Test Take?
“I’d rather do contract work.”

One of the best programmers I know says this.
McDonalds has a really bad rumour in Sweden. Yes people eat there, but people are starting to change mindsets I've noticed. Subway and such a bit healthier alternatives are becoming more popular.

Wort to notice is that what McDonalds is earning money on is not really the food, it's the real estate and speculation around these. IKEA do the same thing: "We want t build a building here" - who wants to have a store nearby? bids by other companies and regions who want people to come there more often and pay tax.
So 500 million dollars worth of ads slipped through?

I think you're right, they probably manually went through the ads and approved these sketchy online pharmacies. Does it make Google more or less complicit? The fact is that they don't really have much of a defence when they made 500 million dollars on it. If it was 50$ I think we could all agree some things slip by.
400,000 employees, for a start.
I have been there. The last semester I enrolled at was fall 2010, about 6 months ago. I did not find any value in pursuing a degree that contained subjects I had no interest in whatsoever (my major was Information and communication technology), I chose not to enroll during the spring semester in favor of attaining professional certifications (Cisco CCIE) as I had taken an interest in them and attained "lower level certs" before that. (The CCIE is considered the holy grail of networking.

Lately however, I have fallen in love with programming and software development, and I have been studying with a passion. This has led me to conclude that throughout the length of my career, I will be involved with different technologies and perhaps even disciplines. Technology is full of uncertainty, you do not know where you will be in 2 years (let alone 5), what if you get a referral for that dream job but it requires a degree? Or if you decide to build a startup and it tanks--you would have to consider employment to regain at least some of the money you have lost.

There are countless other scenarios in which you may regret not having completed your degree. However, the most important thing to consider is that once you quit, you would lose out on opportunities--what they exactly are, you will never find out.

EDIT: This is in response to your edit indicating that you are not dropping out of school. That is good. But if anything, you should drop the music major.
Anecdotal but I was recently contracting for a place that was developing web software for the first time. Even though I had pretty much wrote all the code on their system with them having hired and gone through 5 other programmers, the comment that caused me to leave was

"Why are we paying this guy when we could just hire someone from high school for $10/hr?"
It wasn't your bug to find, it was Apple's, and they should have found it far sooner.
It's really nice and simple .. Again the name is a little creepy! Old or Sweet sound much more appealing.
I think the "extraordinarily deep pockets" has much more to do with Google being able to afford it than the "thousands of employees" part. Although the thousands of employees might be a help in terms of providing coverage for time-sensitive projects.
Outsourcing parts of your software service to other software services via meterable API is indeed like a brick and mortar outsourcing part of their product or service to other brick and mortar businesses. In all the good ways, and all the bad ways. But thanks to APIs, some of the bad ways are worse than others because they impose switching costs.

In the physical world, if FedEx does your deliveries and they experience a “service interruption,” UPS will be at your door within an hour to take over. Simple delivery services are easily substitutable (more complex supply chain relationships such as integrated data processing systems and warehousing are not, of course).

APIs are all about imposing switching costs. We need to think about that carefully, especially when some of these other services can go down.

Which brings me to the next point. Conventional wisdom (“conventional" does not mean it’s right, just oft-quoted) is that you should not outsource your core value proposition, just the things around your core value proposition. So yeah, outsource hosting code repositories. What about notifications? Well, if notifications went down for a few hours, does your service still delight customers? If so, then notifications are not part of your core value proposition. They’re a nice-to-have, or perhaps a checkbox feature.

But if your service becomes useless without notifications, well, this is not something that should be outsourced without a great deal of thought. Your notification service is actually a partner of yours, not simply a supplier. You ought to have a very strong relationship with the provider or have an infrastructure that can fail over in minutes.

I’m not speaking against the article, just pointing out that APIs impose switching costs and that we should be careful when using an external service to implement part of our service’s core value proposition. If the external service goes down or goes away, we need a backup plan.
Eight R Video Tutorials on VCASMO
I don't know how people do it -- I mean, I can cook and sometimes it is delicious, but it's nothing worst than waisting 2 hours on something and then at the end to find out that I blew the dish for some reason.

Don't you ever spend a couple of hours trying out an idea in code only to find out later that it's a complete wash? Making mistakes in cooking is no different from any other activity - it can be a valuable learning experience if you recognize it. Plus, in cooking, you can usually still eat your mistakes.
I've had paramedics tell me they'll go beyond what the protocols say to try to resuscitate people because they won't the extra paperwork involved in dealing with a death.

A paramedic I know failed to revive an elderly woman who'd collapsed at home. The rescue attempts were watched by the woman's (panicked) daughter, who was a nurse. The daughter later threatened to sue, saying he was negligent for not performing a procedure that she thought was necessary. Paramedic was called before some lawyers, at which point they found out he'd actually done a lot more than protocol had required in those circumstances, and the case was dropped.

Nice way to say thanks for trying to save your mom.
On the advancement of science and the useful arts
GAget – Google Analytics Widget for Mac OS X Dashboard
Calculators haven't been allowed on the GRE either but with the new one (it either started this month or next month), they are offering an on-screen calculator built into the test.
Will the PC will be replaced by the Apple iStack?
Thoughtbot Releases Playbook for Building Web & Mobile Applications
Should we ignore cost?
I'll bet the margins on the health-ish food are lower than on the big macs. The supply chain probably isn't as robust yet.
Interesting point - there probably needs to be some alignment between the product and the model - something that wouldn't be limited by volume.
Ask yourself: do you tend to like the bigmouths better than someone who's genuinely trying to have a conversation with you? Does lots of talking really help to establish warmth? It doesn't. The best sales people are awesome listeners - and ask the right questions. If you feel uncomfortable to do the talking, ask your prospective customers about the problems they're facing (related to your solution). Unsurprisingly, most people are quite happy to talk about their problems. Note that this is how most friendships start, too.
"Growing up, my parents had a little display case on the mantel with a piece of the Berlin wall on it."

Two decades later, I'm still kicking myself for not buying a piece when I had the chance.
That's exactly my point. They started off not so great and made mistakes on their way but if you look at how they evolved their Engineering practices in response to grave realities - the XP pre-SP2 security nightmare for instance, created a lot of positive Engineering changes at Microsoft and with Windows 7 they have made a lot of tangible progress in that area.

OS QA is a pain - a huge one for Microsoft given the complexity and volumes involved. The pain is in dealing with unknowns and unpredictable combinations of thousands of different variables and what reaction it produces.

But for something like authentication there must be standard testcases that are automatically executed and verified - blank password authentication, wrong password auth should all be standard test cases that are executed automatically and no software should go out the door until those basics are looking good.
I like #2. Infinite runway from freelancing gives you a lot of options.

As someone leaning toward design rather than programming, you might consider plugging into a platform ecosystem rather than building standalone. In particular I'm thinking Salesforce or 37signals, but I'm sure there are others. Both have big groups of happily paying customers doing real business, and a good framework for API or widget plugins.

Reduces the marketing risk and lets you focus on improving usability instead of starting from scratch.
9/11 Memorial App to Be iPad-Exclusive
See, I tried to address the inevitable "selective enforcement!" argument tersely, and it doesn't seem to have taken. On the off chance that literally repeating what I said before, with more words, will help:

The government cannot, logistically, make a case against every violator of a given law simultaneously. As big as they are, believe it or not, they are generally strapped for enforcement resources.

So, in a sense, all federal law enforcement is "selective". It of necessity has to be.

The principal then is, the selection criteria should be aligned with fairness and the best interests of the country.

Targeting the most lucrative violator of a given law seems entirely reasonable.