skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"There are students who can't be stopped, and there are students who can't be started. The latter have always been more numerous."

Best thing I've read so far this week.
Meh. It's an operating system... How exciting can an o/s get these days.
Good point, I've never heard of them before either but will likely use if not try what they're offering.

The benefits of this community are awesome btw... is love.
bs. Anyone with a clue on large computing centres know, that today any "green agenda" in practice is only PR. Physical constraints of today's realities forbid anything "green": it is not viable economically, therefore doomed.
Microsoft to offer Office-in-the-cloud
This does highlight a few more changes than the Ars Technica article, but it still looks very unimpressive. A slidebar setting for how often you to be notified about changes you made to your OS? Really? Is that a "can't live without" feature? Or even a mildly useful one?

Most of these are rip-offs of toolbar previews from Ubuntu, and Expose, smart folders, and file previews from OS X. These aren't original ideas.

Ooh, I like this part "Gadgets now sit directly on the desktop…which they could do even in Vista if you preferred." Wow, so they changed a setting's default value. I'm sold.
Serious question: what do you do on linked in? What business value do you get?

I know several recruiters and speakers who use LinkedIn with great success. But outside of those two fields, most of the people I talk to use linkedin as a glorified rollodex and nothing more. I would be really interested in examples of what you have used it for.
Looks like politics to me. Flagged.
At the Grand Palais, the Masters Trump Picasso
The Swiss Franc is known for it's stability against other currencies.
Really? At the PhotoPlus Expo in NYC last week the most expensive app I saw was Dg Foto Art for $599, and that had a million features. And most of the labs offered the ROES desktop app for free.
Why is this rubbish being linked by hacker news? This is a barely-comprehensible, illogical rant. There's nothing wrong with being self-taught, but I'm getting sick of this anti-intellectualism. There's nothing wrong with learning how to teach yourself more efficiently, either, which is precisely what modern liberal education proscribes. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_education)
I personally think it is too early to appreciate or criticize it. All we have seen is early screenshots, we can't judge a book by its cover nor we can judge an OS by its early screenshots.
Detroit doesn't make the right things for right now. This does not mean the need for automobiles disappears. Same with IT. The landscape will change but it will not become a desolate void; at least that's the import of the article.
I totally agree that these "new" features seem like a rip from other OSs.

I think the new and bold thing about Windows 7 is that it doesn't suck...as much. You gotta look at it from the perspective of a typical non-techie users. My mom had Vista and whens she needed help it took me quite a while to figure out all the crazy control panels and cryptic hidden settings. She once even deleted her network connection and couldn't get it back. Windows 7 will hopefully reduce the clutter and make it easier to use than Vista.
How much revenue will it ultimately translate into?
West Virginia touchscreen voting machines have serious calibration problems
"to be taken .. as a preface.."

When he gets to trashing one of the candidates, make your objections then. How about that?

Or you could complain that if he had written the other article, and if it had appeared on HN, how inappropriate it would be (and I would agree)

Geesh. Looking for any fights lately?
100,000 Layoffs in Financial Services YTD... a Good Thing for Innovation?
Aren't they facing serious trouble right now because of the extremely heavy emphasis of banking in their economy?
I agree. This was really finance's big bubble, inflated by nothing but hype. There was no production in that field, nothing more than an elaborate, unethical shell game / pyramid scheme.

The MBA folks had their brief moment (cheating) in the sun. Now it's time to get back to fundamentals. Tech can lead that.
Rescue Memo to Steve Ballmer
I'd like to see tech focus on making things with things that make things. As advanced as robotics appears to be, it still feels like it has a lot of untapped potential.
Finding a Gold Mine in Digital Ditties
He mentions the political candidates in the last graph, as simply what he'd like to write about next time?

If you say so.
Natural Settings Help Brain Fatigue
did i miss something, or is this just a picture of a book?
Happy Internet Day | TechJaws
I have no idea. But say they get 1,000,000 visitors from this stunt, none of whom had ever heard of CodeWeavers before and none of whom will ever pay for another CodeWeavers product again (the folks who read Digg/Reddit/blogs tend not to pay for software ;-)). Then say that each of them tells 5 other people - that seems reasonable based on who I've told, and amounts to 5M people who know about CodeWeavers and didn't before. Then assume a 1% conversion rate. That's 50,000 new customers, and at $40/copy, $2M in additional revenue. Not bad for a publicity stunt.
Fundamentally this is an investment question. Because currencies trade against each other on an open market moving your money from one currency to another is speculation.

In the case of total economic collapse the only things of value will be things that cannot be bought: friendships, trust, favors, etc. Maybe you should make friends with a local farmer.
Full videos from Merbcamp 2008 now available
Even as a dictatorship, to call China unstable is to buy into Western propaganda that dictatorship is inherently bad. Rather, dictatorship is the best government for China, as long as the goal of government is to maintain the stability of China. China spent millennia not united; the only thing able to keep a country of that size together right now is strong, authoritarian leadership. The leaders of China are not stupid, they understand that democracy is necessary in the long run, they are just in absolutely no rush to bring it to the people, looking at the failure of Russia as the only example of a rush from Communism to Democracy.

A democratic China would be unstable. Right now, while the Communist Party continues to rule indefinitely, they have perhaps the only currency in the world guaranteed to slowly appreciate against the dollar, with a not insignificant chance of suddenly appreciating faster.

Is there truly no currency market in the RMB? I understand that it doesn't make a good "bribe your way across the border" reserve, but I would think it could make a good hedge in a portfolio.

And the Japanese banking system is still facing smoe collateral damage... http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_i...
Microsoft finally unveils browser-based Office apps
Practice and principle are often to very different things.
For true "bribe your way across the border" purposes I would go with 1oz gold coins, or silver if you'd prefer more coins.
Looks like they managed to copy some simplicity from OS X. Good for them and good for the users.
Actually, the writer is saying that the entire article is to be taken as a preface to that last statement, which is clearly about politics.
Google settles copyright lawsuits with publishers, authors
Sure, but that isn't going to necessarily affect their currency's stability (only it's valuation). The stability of the CHF is rooted in the country's deep history of political and social stability.
Could also be titled, "Why I stopped reading newspapers".
And..? Please state what you're trying to insinuate, so the rest of us can learn from your knowledge.
WSJ Sticks A Fork In Ad Nets
And prefaces are not content. One can agree with the preface and not the body of the argument.

I'm not going to argue. I give up. Logically the preface is part of the rest of the text. Problem is, there is no rest of the text. But I guess that doesn't matter. If the preface is supposed to lead to a political discussion, even if the preface is non-political, that makes the entire preface political.

I just wish I had such keen eyes. Without the author's last graph, who could have known the rest of his text was so political in nature?
They probably brought in some consultants or authorities to do the investigating.
I never heard of them or the product either until Bob Lee twittered about it http://twitter.com/crazybob/status/978195842 17hrs ago.

I told my friend shortly thereafter (sorry, should have also submitted it to HN in hindsight), who then looked at the site and product features/comparison and costs(http://www.codeweavers.com/products/differences/), and for the last several hours has been building up a huge repository of serials.

Asking him what he intends to do with all the licenses, he replied "they come with full technical support from the company, so I will ebay each for $1, build up a fantastic ebay profile to market my other products and make $$$".

Most of this is done automatically, from harvesting the serials to automated auction listing and delivery, but none the less it seems extreme to me.

BUT, I guess, that is what being opportunistic and exploiting all the verticals is about. :-/
Regardless of what anyone says, always keep the infamous tulip mania story in mind. It keeps happening over and over again:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
The Ad Network Shakeout Has Started
DarkStrand Launches to Commercialize National Lambda Rail
I'm saying that the strict definition of liberal education is not of much use when discussing the actual state of higher education because we can't assume an absolute corollary between the two.
And math eventually becomes too abstract to calculate manually.
This is news from April!? Interesting my Framework "Hartija" is on the list :)
First Aid Training Courses and CPR Classes
We are licensed emergency specialists with a different approach to learning. We provide CPR training and customized training to: industry & business, healthcare & childcare, security guard services, commercial transport.
The problem with Digg traffic is it's garbage. The conversion rate is almost zero. It's not high-quality views. It's like showing ads to college students on Facebook: you're getting tons of eyeballs but the eyeballs spend what little money they have on ring tones and beer.

But, I've never done any real Internet marketing stuff so I don't speak from firsthand experience.
I've used it to look up customers, and people who work at various ISPs I was dealing with. I've also used it for the post-conference lookup to solidify connections that were made in person.

It's main utility to most people comes in the job hunting phase, but I've found it useful for building and maintaining weak ties with lots of people.

I'm always looking to grow my network, my public profile is at http://www.linkedin.com/in/laprice
When you're running Linux as your desktop, it's impossible to not hear about them.

Their product is based on Wine, which is a pretty decent emulation of the Windows APIs, but it is a bitch to setup properly, so you start looking around for more professional solutions.

CodeWeavers, besides their own contributions to Wine, have the advantage that they test their setup against popular software.
It teased me as well. No instructions, just a discussion of getting rights to freely reproduce the book.
Hmmm... when I was young I was told the peak is 25 not 39, go figure.
Well, the under-the-hood tweaks were exactly what made Vista a disaster! So I'm glad they're leaving most of that alone and polishing the UI.
MIT Boosts Methanol Fuel Cells Efficiency by 50%+
I don't think its right that he is being brought with three felony charges AND suspended from school. I could see some sort of school related reprimand...but really...fifteen years old and he shows them up and their best response is lets press federal charges.

Now, assuming that it is true that he has had disobediance problems previously, attempted to break security previously, and was not acting in the form of a white-hat, something should definitely be done. However, that's like saying you're pressing charges against someone for logging into your computer when your password is on a sticky note at the edge of your screen. Not just schools but everyone has to do their own part in order to protect information and the school didn't do their part. I don't have the facts but it would appear that the student did no extraneous work in accessing the information.

I have to say that I, in a way, relate to this situation. When I went to High School I was pretty much watched like a hawk due to my well known understanding and skill on the computer. I was attempted to be blamed numerous times for when something would happen, mostly by a specific administrator who had a grudge against me. Luckily, nothing to this extreme ever happened and its not like I did anything wrong anyways. I ended up working for the school as an Assistant IT Coord my last couple of years.

I'd also like to bring comment to a point made by another comment on here. As far as poor technology policies and idiotic administration, that's one of the things my venture is trying to work on. Understanding that most of the reason these very restrictive policies are there is because of a lack of understanding compounded with a lack of control for what they don't understand. The other major source is fear of reprocussions and dangers. My venture is focused in the area of Educational Technology and part of what we're doing, especially in southern Illinois at the moment, is trying to create tools/programs/systems and structure policies with schools that alleviate the problems both on the administrative side and the student side. Policy work and simplistic administrator friendly systems are something that are a necessity to persuade uptight school districts into not only accepting technology but being more open with students use of it.

...I may have ended up a little off-topic. :P
I build a kit form of the ZX-81 back in the early 80's. It was a terrific machine for me at the time. Now I think these chips are still sold into traffic lights.

Who else here remembers their Z80 opcodes? I remember C8 Return of Zero, and just plain old return, C9. Been a whole though...

These days a single line of PHP would bring the Z80 to its knees...
> By default, new tray icons are hidden and invisible; the icons are only displayed if explicitly enabled.

So now it's even easier for crapware to sneak onto your system and steal all your resources if you don't remain vigilant and constantly check the control panel for what tray apps are running?! Where do I sign?
have you tried heroku.com?
Maybe I shouldn't have said "right away". Rather, "with a few small tweaks".

One thing that comes to mind is to push it as something photographers can use to create book/album pages. Instead of File->New and choosing a size, have some pre-built page sizes that work with a partner printer.

In fact, with some of those tweaks, you could probably license it to some album companies–they already license software like photojunction for this purpose. No reason it couldn't be online and automatically order/push your files.

If you had an online archiving service, similar to Photoshelter, this would be a great add-on. You wouldn't have to pull your image(s) down to convert to B/W or prep for a certain print size. I think there's definitely room for a small agile company (leverage cloud services) in this space (with Digital Railroad going out of business).

Also, since this is Flash-based, why not convert this to an AIR app ... then you have access to the local filesystem but still have great networking features that let you push files to labs/S3/stock sites. Subscription for $3/month.

Would love to see the ability to record actions on here.
Free Windows Emulator For Your Mac Or Linux Box
Does anyone know if these vids can be had in a download form instead of streaming? I'm in China and streaming from the U.S. is painful. Its much better to be able to download in batch and watch them in a day or so once I have the files.
Have you read this yourself; and if so, how strongly would your recommend it?

Has anyone else here read this? Does it stand up to close inspection?
I have a LI account, but I don't use it effectively, so I can't speak from personal experience (which speaks to your point)

But I do believe businesses like Angstro could build a valuable business off LI (they could build it off FB too, but the value is much less obvious). This is, of course, an in theory statement, not an in practice one. Presumably LI could add Angstro like features themselves?

http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference/presenter.php?pr...
(I have no affiliation with Angstro)
The question is not who makes money _from_ linux on the desktop, the questions is, who makes money _because_of_ linux on the desktop.

Canonical's profits are going to come from training, certification and consulting partnerships; but they aren't the only ones who will be making money from the existence of capable linux desktops.

Any org that has a large number of client installations would probably save money (easiest way to make it) by implementing a linux desktop.
New steps to protect free expression and privacy around the world
If the site contains any sort of CMS or code generated html then don't remove padding and margin with a wildcard (unless you plan to specifying it manually for every tag).

Some things are supposed to have margin and padding.
Free Press Asks FCC for Broadband Bill of Rights
Games came out later. If I remember correctly it was released as more of a stop-gap version to get games-specific fixes out sooner than the regular release cycle.

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrossOver):

* The difference with regular CrossOver is that CrossOver Games will have a shorter release cycle in order to update faster to the latest work on Wine than with regular CrossOver, which targets stability and reliability.

* Crossover Mac was divided into Standard and Pro versions like Crossover Linux. The standard version includes 6 months of support and upgrades, while the Pro version includes 1 year of support and upgrades and a free copy of Crossover Games.
Correlated Subqueries in MySQL
Both in job hunting and filling positions. It goes both ways. Rather than trying to capture everything social it has focused on just capturing the career network and doing it well. If I'm on LinkedIn it's for a reason: Jobs.

If I'm on Facebook it could be any number of reasons all of which probing raises privacy concerns.
Are you looking for something low-cost or more of a high-end managed service?

MediaTemple has RoR grid containers and other hosts support Rails now, but I don't know of a turnkey solution ... although Heroku looks interesting.

Seriously, if you get a slicehost slice w/ Ubuntu Hardy, Apache and mod_rails, you can get your app up in < 3 hours.

Plus, there's something to be said for getting on the server and learning how to do some things yourself.
This is true, FB's volume potential is higher than LI.
But it is also true that those people who are interested in their "business social network" are accustomed to paying for services that create business value, sometimes paying handsomely. Those people interested in their social network are less accustomed to paying for "social services", and may be less able to put a value on the service (telecommunication services excepted).
you need new friends.
Techcrunch comments could be a great launch pad for an anti-comment-troll API/service. Ultimately it does come down to trust networks. Couldn't pagerank methods be applied to the 'trustworthiness' of commenters, and therefore people who consistently troll could be removed from the conversation entirely?
I haven't used Windows in years, but this looks like a significant step forward. Its always easier to criticize, but to me this looks like Microsoft is 'getting it' and going to a lighter, simpler, less fussy UI. Good for everyone.
Hopefully. I'd love to see "Cleaned up Control Panel that finally makes sense" in that feature list... ;) Vista wireless setup is ridiculous.
I mean control of the development cycle.

We use a web based software to report errors and software change requests. The control board should decide priorities and whether new features should be implemented or not. This requires a lot of know how about existing features, about the direction the software should go and if there will be clashes.

A big problem is, that discussions take a long time. Another problem is, that some developers don't care and simply decide themselves. This sometimes creates instabilities in the software and not wanted features.
Oops. I must have missed the last paragraph.
I guess we'll see if Apple can get that right with their next OS being almost purely under-the-hood changes to improve speed.
http://blog.fiveruns.com/2008/10/20/automatic-production-rai... -- it's a no-fuss script for bringing up production Rails on slicehost.
Take Google away and how much money does Mozilla still make from the search bar?
Steve Ciarcia is the man - I still remember reading a BYTE article he wrote showing how to build your own 80286 computer using some VLSI chipset (this was in the mid-late 80s). By build, I mean schematics, soldering, etc.
So, how often are you on linkedin then? every two years? Or how often do you change jobs?
They're not free to make that sort of modification to Firefox. Patches for Firefox (and a number of other Mozilla products) need to be vetted by MoCo, and I doubt they'd be approved.

They are, of course, allowed to rebrand and then make all the modifications they wish.

This was the impetus for the creation of Iceweasel.
Another reason this one might be different: tech led the "recession" of 2001-2003, whereas housing and banking are leading this current recession.

I don't think that the general economy did technically go into recession in 2001 (partly because a housing-bubble fueled consumer binge delayed the reckoning and probably made it much worse). But high tech went through a brutal correction. For a couple of years, it was crickets chirping out there.

So I think that tech took its lumps the way the general economy probably should have. And it worked. We got rid of a lot of crappy products, companies, and (sorry to be so blunt) a lot of crappy people who really had no business in high tech. While those crickets were chirping, a lot of very motivated entrepreneurs put down the groundwork for the next wave of excellent high tech companies.

I will agree that things got a bit bubblicious toward the end of 2007 in high tech... but in the end, I just don't think high tech has the same kind of delayed reckoning that banking and real estate are facing. Perhaps 2001-2003 should have been a nuclear winter for those industries as well - then they would have gone through the same soul searching, reckoning, culling, and rebuilding that tech had to do.

Yeah, tech will take a hit - there's no way it'll completely avoid the credit crisis. But this time, we're on the peripheries, and we've already taken a lot of our lumps..
Photo of Tesla Model S electric sedan (whole thing, not just teaser)
I've picked up a couple of consulting gigs through providing decent answers im the Answers section.

If I have a few moments spare at the end of the day, I'll look through open questions and answer them. Sometimes they are interesting questions that I would like to think through myself; sometimes they land directly in my area of expertise. But it's a win-win you help someone, and at the same time advertise that you are a reasonable, helpful guy who knows at least something about an area.

By comparison, I find Facebook completely pointless.
I used it to find out that I knew someone that knew a CEO-type at a potential acquirer. That was cool.
I have heard rumors of such. I hope that will be the case, so I can stick them on the iPhone.
Crapware can always just not show a tray icon and keep on running in the background. Preventing the installation of crapware is a very, very different problem to solve than putting the user in control of the user experience.