skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice proof of concept. It'd be more impressive with more sensible markup. The <b/> and <i/> tags are deprecated, and have always been intended to define the display of their innertext -- not much more. This requires the tags with or without any actual text inside them to function. Without them, it's just a box. With text within them, it looks terrible.

I've dealt with designers who do this before -- implement HTML and CSS approaches that are not quite ready for the big leagues, to the absolute detriment of sensible markup within a real web application, or even a simple website. It's not just a problem for implementation (since you often have to unnecessarily decorate the data you're displaying), but it's a problem in terms of intelligently applying semantic markup to improve the machine-readability of what's being displayed on your site.

It's important to keep in mind that effectively implemented markup is leveraged not only by search engines, but by individuals with disabilities. You should always aim for informative, compliant, and forward-thinking markup before bending basic rules to make something look nice.
It's a Techdirt article, so it is not surprising that it gets the facts wrong. No works are being removed from the public domain.

Furthermore, this only applies to sound recordings. Under current EU law, the copyright in a sound recording does not last as long as the copyright in the underlying musical work. Wouldn't that mean that even if the sound recording passed into the public domain, the public would not be able to make use of that recording because the underlying musical work would still be under copyright?

The only ones who benefit from the sound recording going out of copyright before the underlying musical copyright, it seems to me, are the record labels--they get to go from paying royalties on both the performance and the composition to just paying royalties on the composition.
The New Apple Advantage
I read the HTML and wondered what I should be making of it. So I took a trip down to the old HTML5 specification at: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/text-level-semantics.html

"The i element represents a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose in a manner indicating a different quality of text, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, a thought, or a ship name in Western texts."

"The b element represents a span of text to which attention is being drawn for utilitarian purposes without conveying any extra importance and with no implication of an alternate voice or mood, such as key words in a document abstract, product names in a review, actionable words in interactive text-driven software, or an article lede."

And none of that markup made any sense to me.
Hey, they’re empty — the markup is irrelevant. The only reason I didn’t just use pseudo-elements is so this would work in IE7 and older. <b> and <i> were quick and easy to type. I would not recommend copy and pasting any of the code on the page, just the technique, if a scalable, fast-loading arrow is desired :)
The Deer Hunter is a very strong movie that still stands on its study of how relationships change under stress of war. It's not really about Vietnam specifically, or its time. Perhaps you were too young when you saw it? (Born in 79 FWIW.)
Er, yes, it does. However, gradients weren’t defined for those browsers. But 100% of the ways you would normally deliver gradients to those browsers will work.
Flash Media Server 4.5
The most depressing thing about A Scanner Darkly is the author's note about how the novel is mostly auto-biographic, as well as the list of his friends and their punishment. It hit me rather hard at the time.

http://www.american-buddha.com/scandark.authornote.htm
8 Elements of an Organic Marketing Strategy
I think the intent is closer to "we would remove taxes if it were possible but because we can't, we want you to pay so that we can compete on price." As a consumer, if I see Walmart selling something for $3 cheaper but with $4 taxes making it higher, I'll go with Amazon as its cheaper overall. It sucks for Walmart because they were willing to mark their item down further than Amazon and still lost the sale. Then there are some items you know that everyone has to charge one price for. It will always be higher at Walmart
That chart shows per capita income without adjusting for inflation. It's not very useful for drawing conclusions about real income.

And per capita is a simple average, while looking at medians or quintiles gives you a clearer picture. Per capita, a roomful of middle class workers all become billionaires if Bill Gates walks in.
> the CEO would be in the office from 11am to 8pm and it drove me crazy

It's probably worse than you think. I would bet that the CEO works 8-8, but like many managers has trouble getting dedicated blocks of time while in the office and so does all of their focused work at another location before coming in to the office.
There is no problem with empty <b> and <i> tags which, by the way, are NO LONGER DEPRECATED in HTML5. (Learn the standards before becoming a standards Nazi.)

And anyway, guess what? This was, as you say, a proof of concept. It would work with different elements, or even pseudo-clases (and pseudo-classes in pseudo-classes), though then IE compatibility would be lost.

Anyone who copy/pastes this without changing the CSS selectors (styling all <b> tags as if they were triangles) clearly misses the point, you know?
The more relevant question in this global age is: what are the global stats? How many people were lifted out of poverty during these "bad" decades on a global scale? Country specific stats just don't mean as much as they used to.
I can't help but feeling like this doesn't really matter. Music has been for me, as a listener and as a musician who sometimes uses samples, effectively free and without copyright for years now. It's already nearly impossible to make money by selling recorded sound. This just slows down the decay of the music industry, easing the transition to whatever new model will arise. And I don't mean economic model - I'm prepared for the recorded music industry to die completely. What replaces it may be an industry based around live, communal, algorithmic, etc. modes of music creation or music may lose importance to Western culture altogether. (As for other industries like SFX, movie soundtracks, etc., I don't know the story.)
"link to paper" comes to mind...
Firefox limits feedback to 140 characters
There seem to be quite a few ex-Microsoft people involved.
Every company in every country in Europe.
Microsoft shows off Windows 8 super fast bootup
Interesting that they blame the rise of apps on easier to use platforms like iOs rather than the bigger issue of closed ecosystems with better hooks to devices and vendors crippling browsers.
It's amazing how the FBI can study how each person uses a language, in order to develop a theory on intelligence,social status, etc.
ever heard of something called murphy's laws!
This is from a year ago, but this is also the first time I've heard of it. Do we know the progress of this movement today? Googling for "Dash Language" and variants doesn't give me anything of note.
Pagina web con blog
Curso gratis de blog
Rent -- I've lived in multiple places built in the 1960s and all had enough bedrooms for 2 kids and a separate bathroom for parents and kids. These places were built for middle class families.

This comparison also matters where you are. At least in the SF Bay Area, housing prices have doubled in real terms since the mid 1980s (for the same house!). You aren't getting better housing now.. just more expensive housing. (Note: Such price rises are not the case in areas w/ plenty of land, e.g. outside major coastal metro areas)
Introductory econ courses need to start citing startups as an example of why economic profit is always 0 in the long run.
Yes: http://www.paymeovertime.com/overtime-pay.php. The law changed sometime around the end of the .com bubble.
Crunchfund.com is now on eBay
Voldemort vs. the Foundation? Don't go giving me ideas.
And neither would be accurate. Most users, both businesses and customers, are wildly happy with group on.
Why should I start reading science fiction?
I saw this post - http://blamcast.net/articles/best-science-fiction-books - about a collection of best sci-fi books as determined by Reddit, and it looks intriguing.

I must admit, I am not a sci-fi reading type of guy.

I don't read fiction at all, actually. I much prefer non-fiction books - because I feel like I am learning.

However, I love the screen adaptations of science-fiction. Game of Thrones is an all-time-favorite of mine, as well as many movies that started as a novel.

Seeing this list has kinda tempted to me to partly revise my position, but I would love to hear from fellow HNers that were either like me and have since dove in and loved it, or just loved it from the beginning.

I love words, and language.

I just fear that if I sit down with a sci-fi book, then I am wasting time. It's not as if I will ever recall any of that information to reference in the future.

But I kinda feel like I may be missing out on something huge (e.g. interesting wordplay that authors use, or anything else that I might be overlooking).

Help convince me.
Autocomplete when right click sharing
That doesn't make any sense - couchsurfing.com existed long before airbnb, as just one example.
Please email support@insynchq.com
"God" will never be disproved by science since there's no real definition of God. Between the thousands of conceptions of God and the eternally moving goalposts (under which god will eventually be (or already is) defined as 'something impossible to test by science'), it's completely meaningless in an empirical pov.
While the charges of whining/evil has a whiff of truth to them, this is just example #1001 that Microsoft and humor should be kept at a very safe distance from each other.
As a UK guy, this is a great service for us: We always keep a tent, chairs and stove in the boot of our car.

This service will help in finding somewhere to camp if we are in a random area of the UK and want to see a little more of it the next day.

They should have a "Ok to pee in bushes" search option though ;-)

A.
AT&T responds to DoJ lawsuit: T-Mobile deal a boon to consumers
As interesting as this is from a messing around POV .. As long as you add a single presentational tag to your markup, You're doing it wrong.

Nobody should implement this on a real site (using b/i or any other tags for that matter)

(Edit: To clarify, anything more than
`<span class="arrow">Try it!</span>` is too much markup IMO..)
Beezid
A few points in reply: as a retroactive extension of a copyright term, it prevents works from entering the public domain when they otherwise would have. I'm not sure how to interpret "seiz[ing] the public domain," but to the extent it implies that works that were PD are not now PD, you are correct. Works that would have been PD, though, will not now become PD. As you point out, this only applies to a certain type of musical copyright, and musical works are subject to several (performance, recording & composition, if memory serves).

The record labels already have plenty of ways to pay less in royalties. Their business model probably has fears cannibalism from works that are freely available, even for commercial use, the most. But that's just my opinion.

That said, there is sense in having a single, standard term. I note that reducing the length for new works was never seriously considered.
There is an interesting book, "The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone" by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, that makes a very strong argument that in developed countries inequality is correlated pretty much every "bad" metric (health, crime, teenage pregnancy, etc.) of a society.

Now, of course, correlation does not mean causation and it's perhaps more interesting what the true underlying causes are. But if inequality is such a strong indicator, it is worth wondering whether inequality isn't a bad thing in itself.
LexisNexis calling this a "Hadoop alternative" is pure marketing, grabbing on to the tailcoats of fashionable tech. HPCC is not a MapReduce framework. It's not a framework at all. Instead of letting you plug in existing code in arbitrary languages to process your data, everything you do has to be rewritten from scratch in a new declarative query language called ECL ("Enterprise Control Language"), which isn't supported by anything but HPCC. LexisNexis even tries to position this as a feature, describing HPCC as a "complete" and "homgeneous" environment.

The success stories given in the HPCC white papers are almost exclusively government agencies, and what few commercial customers there are seem to be using HPCC to replace legacy mainframe systems. There are, notably, no examples of companies that previously used Hadoop and switched to HPCC.
It sure is. We are probably only a few steps away from Minority Report where they could stop crimes before they happen. Ever seen that movie?
For some reason I feel that a thorough understanding of most of these papers(except perhaps Lamports Algorithms) is beyond my current intellectual capabilities.But nevertheless I will try.
I remember how we all waited with bated breath for Design Patterns to come out. It was a bit of a disappointment, I recall. Seemed kind of complicated. So now for some of our patterns we need four C++ files per object? Heck with that.

I would disagree that there are tons of Smalltalk examples there. There are in fact a few examples, and they actually don't weigh very much, because they are pretty small, and you don't really need the whole Design Patterns concept if you are a Smalltalk dude. I have a friend who first picked up the book after programming for 17 years in Smalltalk. He put it down after scanning through the first few chapters because it was very self-evident to him.

For young up-and-coming programmers, I recommend setting aside Design Patterns and reading everything you can find written by Peter Norvig. Start with his design patterns essay. The short version of which is that if you need design patterns, (in the sense of the book) then there is something lacking in your language. They are an unnecessarily.

I would never recommend Uncle Bob to anyone looking to improve programmming chops. Read Norvig instead. Uncle Bob came down on the wrong side of TDD and the fellow who failed to TDD his way into a sudoko solution. Peter Norvig comes up with a different notation, not a methodology, not a design pattern, and produced a very elegant solution.

So to improve your programming skills, avoid Uncle Bob, read Norvig, go easy on the methodology.
Assuming I ever finish, it'll have a central chest-high "lava blade" as the wiki called it to kill monsters. The rest is just a large area with water flows to push monsters towards the water blade.

It's big enough that cobblestone generator is pretty much mandatory. It probably spans roughly an 16x16x8 volume, though not all of that is filled in for obvious reasons.
On a related topic, I've been thinking about the interviewing problem and had an insight that is probably blindingly obvious to everybody else.

In engineering terms, interviewing is benchmarking. Making an effective benchmark is somewhere between very hard and intractable.

A benchmark has to be...

* Difficult enough to clearly differentiate between good and bad yet be simple enough to "run" in 5-30 minutes.

* Repeatable, yet not beatable. Remember the compilers that recognized drystones and compiled them to the final answer? That is what google does to interview "trick" questions.

* Applicable: drystones are totally worthless if your algorithm is dominated by floating point calculations. Having said that, "comes up to speed quickly" is the most applicable metric for a candidate, but is awfully hard to benchmark in a limited interview.

Anecdote: I had lunch today with the engineer that hired me on my first "real engineering" job (I was a freshman in college at the time). He commented that I was "the smartest guy he knew, until he met my younger brother." My brother is several years younger... Bob was working for a different company and my brother applied for a summer job there. Bob's take, and the other folks at the company's take, on my brother's resume' was "meh". Bob told them "never mind his resume, hire him. Just do it! Do. It."

Moral of the anecdote: benchmarks are poor stand-ins for real life. Unfortunately, I don't have a better way. :-/
I have several, but sometimes you want to walk home. And they help you know your relative location when exploring so you can find your items if need be.
He also wrote THE Multiprogramming system.

His software, of which these are two examples, have low enough error rates that anybody who seriously evaluates today's software would do a double-take.
If you liked "Game of Thrones", try "Chronicles of Amber" by Roger Zelazny. I hope one day they will make a movie or TV series based on it.

As for sci-fi, you can learn from it too (the science part). Also, many older sci-fi ideas became reality (robots, flying cars, digital billboards, 3D printing, space tourism, video chat).

Sci-fi describes what one day our world can become, it sometimes tries to warn us about certain things.
In principle, I can appreciate the need to be 'lean' and nimble when starting out, however, these concepts are not new, and Eric Reis certainly did not spearhead this method.

Eric Reis has done a great job at making noise and he has demonstrated that he is a consummate salesman. While the concepts that he espouses aren't exactly innovative, there is no doubt, a deep appeal, particularly to those who are seduced by the 'gold rush fever' that is driving this current tech boom(bubble?).

Ultimately, it strikes me that this guy is a huckster who is fast becoming the spokesperson for a growing league of entrepreneur-wannabes in search for a piece of 'social' pie.
Oops. You are correct. I have one, but I leave it in my base. And I'm still miffed that you can't put clocks on the wall.
Is Chronicles of Amber a book or is there a TV/Movie adaptation?
I laughed. Hard. The mathy allusion to Googol is a Google-style nerd-joke, which adds another level of awesomeness. (Sorry for the lack of substance in this comment.)
PG don't you think granting TechCrunch exclusive rights to all YC launches is a bit unfair to the other publications? Why don't you let the founders decide which publication they want to talk to regarding their launch? I'm sure you have a broad range of personalities within YC and some founders might not have been comfortable with Arrington's style.
Honest questions:

a) Are equally powerful android devices really cheaper?

b) Does Android have any form of 'policy' or 'corporate' control capability like IOS devices do?

I've not seen anybody talking about 'b' anywhere, but I honestly haven't been looking very hard.
There's no reason – none – to continue developing the Java programming language.

It can be frozen to current release, with bugfixes, while the developers transition to another, modern, JVM language without the Java baggage. The old code is still accessible through the new languages.
There's a story that I've heard told about Tim Cook numerous times. I can't remember the original source (there's a reference here: http://www.cultofmac.com/who-is-apples-new-ceo-tim-cook-bio/...), but I think it basically sums up Tim:

> When in a meeting discussing a problem in China, Tim Cook noted that the problem was “really bad” and that someone should be in China fixing it. Thirty minutes later, Cook then famously looked over at Apple’s operations manager, Sabih Khan, and asked “Why are you still here?” Khan was on the next flight to China.

But what's most remarkable is that like Jobs, Tim has managed to infuse this attitude into the very fabric of Apple. Once, when I worked there, a friend called and asked if I had plans for lunch. I replied that I did not. "Good," he said, "Can you drive me to SFO?" So I picked him up. He had a seat on the 1:30 PM flight and we were barely going to make it. "Do you think we have time to stop by my place so I can grab a change of clothes?" he asked. I told him that we did not, and his reply was "Oh well, I guess I'll just have to find a store in Boston"...
Once you get rolling with Chef or Puppet, updating your servers feels great - no need to manually fiddle with shell scripts, or wonder "have I installed that package on all my machines?"

Getting to that point can take quite a bit of effort though. In my most recent attempt to install a Chef server on a fresh Ubuntu box, I quit the installation halfway through as I realised I wanted to change some of the values I'd entered into the setup script. After re-running the script I encountered errors, and all my attempts at scrubbing the aborted installation failed. It was easier to just start with a fresh image. I had these sorts of experiences all the time when using Chef and Puppet, they were really frustrating to setup.

I felt more comfortable writing my scripts in Chef because it didn't limit my ability to use Ruby, and the more relaxed approach to handling dependencies suited me. Puppet was easier to setup, had better documentation, and behaved more reliably for me. Neither seems like a clear winner, but I haven't spent a lot of time with them in about a year now, so things may have changed!
Like Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, or Jules Verne.

Anyway, who cares, de gustibus something something.
I wish HN had a way of presenting content but masking who wrote it, so we could discuss what's written here without getting dragged down into the usual (of late) bashing/defending John. I feel this is an interesting point he's raised here, and I'm interested to see peoples take on that point, not the usual meaningless back and forth that goes on
Whoops, I misinterpreted what you meant by "single random sample". I will definitely check out that paper though.
Google is unveiling this new language at the Goto conference next month:

http://gotocon.com/aarhus-2011/presentation/Opening%20Keynot...
Since they are the ones (IIRC) that started writing Java and converting it to Javascript (GWT), they wouldn't be pushing for a language without some static typing, right?
There was an article about how 90%+ or something of the world doesn't know what crtl-c & ctrl-v do. I wonder if the jury (or the judge) will understand that part?

But at least, maybe, they'll understand that all cars give us a steering wheel, brake pedal, gas pedal and shifter even though the car companies don't copy each others' schematics.
Uhm... I just tried it, and it doesn't work for me...
... and you're willing to forfeit your position in the gene pool by not having any kids.
TPM Under DDOS Attack