skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, thank god for everything else you're exposing yourself to by using a decade old operating system without UAC.
Did you read the article? In the third paragraph, he says it's impossible for a government to promise not to bail out banks. The banks will outmaneuver everyone when the time comes.

Another way of making the same point:

- We can't guarantee that future governments won't bail out banks.
- We can discourage one-sided risk-taking by banning bonuses in institutions that likely would manage to convince the government to bail them out.

Why not do the thing we can do?
I don't disagree about the use of "impact". In fact, I'd be happier if people went hardcore by saying "fucking impact". :)
Can the Average Person Really Make A Living Online?
Index Ventures Raises $700M Fund
Address spaces based on paging rather than segments. Much clearer context switching code. File system crash recovery via logging.
You're recommending he start with fraud and then move to extortion? Seriously?
Global CO2 emissions rising faster than worst-case scenarios
I'm not making any representations as to Raystream particularly, but it is not true that you can't make fancy encoding algorithms that will then run on a standard codec in a phone. Video standards are decoding standards, and specify what steps the decoder needs to do to take compressed video data and uncompress it.

Of course, this company may be a pump-and-dump, but it is also true that some kind of super-clever encoding algorithm may exist that would be much better than existing encoders and still run fine on existing phone codecs. That is, the fact that they claim an algorithm produces correctly-formatted mpeg is not a disqualifying factor.
Wow, congratulations. Looks like a great mix of investors, too.
Paypal, but from the seller side. A lot of banking regulations would prevent Paypal from holding money at whim, etc.
portrayed on Chaplin's City Lights

I think you mean "Modern Times".
> The solution is for the government to stop bailing out private institutions, regardless of whether they are deemed "too big to fail."

We tried that by letting Lehman go bankrupt. While your "solution" has a ton of populist appeal, it seems lack an understanding of the events of the past few years. Let's accept the fact that banks are going to fail, and ask the government work on the "too big" part. Denying that it is even possible to be "too big to fail" is only compounding the problem.
I do like this idea, but I'm a bit skeptical that a relic of the 1930s would work in our modern economy. Thus, I suspect the answer is a bit more complex than "Bring back Glass-Steagall".
You do realize that there were tons of bugs fixed between 7 and 8, right?

It's just that bugfixes never make the news.
Conveniently, the sox project on sourceforge has Mac OS X binaries available.

http://sox.sourceforge.net/
I like the decimation idea. Before they can be bailed out, capital punishment should be randomly applied to one-tenth of the bankers of the failed institution. The lottery can be weighted based on bonus size, to ensure that the big wigs are fairly represented in the sample.
Exactly, which is why any non-free market solution will eventually accrue capital (or other benefits) to those in power, rather than to those who produce.

See regulatory capture and moral hazard for why our system is screwed.
What are you talking about?

The basic text -- 12 px Arial? -- is pretty standard. I'm sure I'm not the only person who read it without issue.

But what's more -- unlike most things I read online -- this essay even has text that's much bigger!, darker!, blue-er!, and illustration-y! where appropriate.

That's perhaps the most snide, trollish, unimportant pot shot I've ever seen here. Don't blame the author because your own display resolution is apparently too fine to support your eyesight.
We had a lot of fun with this in University 20 years ago. Our computer lab had a handful of shiny new Sun Sparcstations. The freshmen would regularly end up hogging them (no timelimit) and we needed them for project work, so we'd just remote login to them and cat some pre-recorded messages out to /dev/audio. A very official-sounding "Please log out now, system going down for maintenance" usually worked wonders, although occasionally more serious messing with people's minds was done. Some of the 1st year students had literally no idea what a computer was capable of and would believe anything that came out of its speakers. :D
Now can you drop the systems out of the name? :)
Or like a tax refund they could give one to every adult in the USA!
Live The Dream
http://xkcd.com/75/
The Social Graph is Neither
Wedding registry opportunities?
Yes, that struck me too. Some developers do randomized trials of user experience, but such trials aren't tests of development techniques - unless perhaps you are working on an IDE.

And yet I think the points about negative evidence are relevant to software. Whenever a hot new trend surfaces, it seems like negative early experiences aren't reported. Later on there is usually a backlash, but it would be in our interest to shorten that cycle.
"Falling costs and shrinking size mean that over time, your standards of 'walking up and attaching' and 'detection and removal is allowed' will become less meaningful over time."

Not to mention co-opting devices like those employed by OnStar. No way to remove that one.
According to HN Guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), next time please append [pdf] to the title. Thank you.
Another major problem with "research visions" like this is that they portray a thoroughly "bourgeois" future. We know already that in order for every human on this planet to have basic needs taken care of, highly consumptive 1st world lifestyles like the one portrayed in the video will need to be replaced. If you've ever built anything, you'll know that it takes an immense amount of resources to obtain that kind of polish. I know that some designers like clean, shiny things, but perpetuating the meme that the future won't be characterized by rough-edges is escapist if not simply irresponsible. If we don't imagine a future for ourselves that involves patterns of behavior that are conducive to conservation of resources and supply-chain+community resilience, then I'm afraid that the only people using tools other than shovels and guns will be a super-elite living in fortified micro-cities (so perhaps it's accurate after all).

Some more silly videos:

- Nokia (w/ AR goggles): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4pDf7m2UPE

- Cisco Songdo City: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1x9qU-Sav8 (this one's real!)

For those sympathetic to the argument of the OP, you may be interested in Bill Buxton's papers on bi-manual interaction. Bill is a huge (and early) proponent of this point of view (that computer interfaces should make full use of the capabilities of the human body): http://www.billbuxton.com/papers.html#anchor1442822
So the main thing I take away from this thread is this: Simple isn't.
We already tried this in the 1930s and that didn't go so well. Banks are different than other business because they act like a heart to pump cash through our economy. Allowing banks to fail would only make it harder for new businesses to find cash and for people to trust saving their money.
I think I disagree with the rant.

It's a little inconsistant as well. On the one hand, he argues that Pictures behind glass isn't where we should be heading, and instead we should come up with better visions, as an example he uses the someone who came up with the original idea for a "goddamn ipad"...

But wait, didn't he just say pictures behind glass was a bad model to work towards?

Personally I think if we could implement a fraction of the things in that vision video, the world would be a better place for it. If some of the things don't work, or the interaction feels wrong... we can always change the vision.

The Apple Knowledge Navigator doesn't resemble the iPhone at all... But it was/is a good vision to work towards.
Plumbers In Swindon Hubpages
H.264 is not "free software." You're thinking of x264, the free software implementation of H.264 that everyone uses.

There is a large market for proprietary optimised implementations of various codecs for use in industry. The same goes for mp3 and so on.

Unless people have found x264 headers left in the files, in which case, fail.
Wise words of Bruce Sterling in "Shaping Things" (MIT Press):

"We need to understand technology with a depth of maturity that mankind has never shown before. We need to stop fussing over mere decade-long "Ages" and realize that there are only three basic kinds of "technology" truly worthy of civilized use. None one them are entirely possible yet.

1. The first kind, and likely the most sensible one, is technology that can eventually rot and go away all by itself. Its materials and processes are biodegradable, so it's an auto-recycling technology. The natural environment can do this kind of work for itself, while also producing complicated forests, grasslands and coral reefs, so, someday, an artificial environment ought to be able to biomimetically mimic that achievement. This doesn't mean merely using available "natural materials" that we repurpose from crops or wilderness. It means room-temperature industrial assembly without toxins. [...]

2. The second kind of technology is monumental. These are artifacts deliberately built to outlast the passage of time. This is very hard to do and much over-estimated. Many objects we consider timeless monuments, such as the Great Pyramid and the Roman Colosseum, are in fact ruins. They no longer serve their original purposes: a royal tomb and a giant urban playground, and they no longer look remotely like the did when their original builders finally dusted off their hands and demanded their pay. Bat at least these "monuments" don't crumble unpredictably, leach into the water table and emit carcinogens while they offgas. [...]

3. The last kind of decent technology is the kind I have tried to haltingly describe here. It's a fully documented, trackable, searchable technology. This whirring, ultra-buzzy technology can keep track of all its moving parts and, when its time inevitably comes, it would have the grace and power to turn itself in at the gates of the junkyard and suffer itself to be mindfully pulled apart. It's a toy box for inventive, meddlesome humankind that can put its own toys neatly and safely away. [...]"

Full quotation here: http://msutherl.net/txt/3kindsoftech.txt
> It's still the correct solution.

And wouldn't it be great to design airplanes in a world without gravity? It would make things so much easier!
Almost true. You can have the front side windows tinted as long as 70% of light still gets through. Which in actuality is fairly close to not tinting at all. The windshield of course can't have any tint whatsoever except on the top 4 inches.
>You may get better results by buying normal and giving the savings away. //

Kinda like beating people up and then paying their hospital bills? Nice.
There are all sorts of cottage industries in the firearms business. My midwestern and southern relatives are extremely enthused about such things. Mostly it amounts to "customizing a stock weapon with aftermarket accessories" as far as I can tell - personalizing it and suiting it to your tastes and build. I'm not much of a gun guy - I can tell that this one has a better scope or a more comfortable grip, but the rest of it's kind of lost on me.

I think it's much the same sort of mindset as the folks who who like to customize their vehicles. In some cases, it's the same people, but if my relatives are any indication the overlap between those two circles isn't that high.
thinking about it, yes and no.

yes, because in windows traditionally third party firewalls are sandwiched between the tcp/ip stack and the network card driver. the firewall will see packets before the TCP/IP stack does and it can make a decision then.

but probably no, because since this is a refcounter bug there isn't anything specific about the packets that you are interested in blocking. you can probably try and apply some kind of ratelimiting action or something else, but what you're working around a failure in object life-cycle management on the part of the OS so you'll be guessing. it isn't like there's a "bad pattern" that you can match and drop to make everything OK.
I tend to say "fuck" a lot. I've been reading these replies and I really don't think I say it for the reasons people are hypothesizing here. I say it because it is (at this point a bad) habit.

Saying "fuck" instead of something else is a cop out. It's so easy to apply this general, emotional term, and much harder to express what you actually mean. I've taken to, after I say the word, to try and think of a better way to express myself. Rarely was it the best word choice, but it's such a habit that it's hard for me to do this analysis before I say it.

Another mode I get into is saying it out of frustration. It's like a tension release valve. It seems to make me feel more calm. Of course, during this latter use I'm almost always alone, so it's not applicable to the linked article.
Ballet Shoes and Ballerinas as Technology: A History En Pointe
Taleb rocks. The funniest thing is that he hates the NYT but is able to recognize the chance for a big audience.
Microsoft's Channel9 now runs on Azure
rsh coworkersbox "cat /dev/audio" > /dev/audio

Or vice-versa. Not sure what systems it'd still work on, but it was a lot of fun on pre-Solaris SunOS machines.
Completely agree here. Ramsey is about shock value - something that's incredibly cliche. You have to be damn good to be able to pull it off. 99% of the wannabe-dhh's out there aren't.
Honda Reveals new Asimo Robot
Greg Wilson did a book, which I did not enjoy, on this topic: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596808303.do and a slideshow, which I recommend: http://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/bits-of-evidence-2338367 .

My take is that there is much to learn from science about how to evaluate propositions regarding software engineering (most, but not all, of them are unsupported) but few new useful ideas.

Another reference along these lines: http://www.amazon.com/Facts-Fallacies-Software-Engineering-R...
> The main thing to take away from all of this is that iOS apps aren't as secure as we once thought

Really? Because the main thing I took away from it was that Apple and Microsoft both have this power, to essentially tell people that they can't use a piece of software in a certain way. They also have the power to stop someone from understanding the vulnerabilities of their own devices.

This is why I use Replicant and Trisquel GNU/Linux.
I like the general idea of linking the consequences of some actions to the actors involved to prevent cheating and bad behavior. The examples from Babylon and Rome were probably much more effective in this than cutting the bonus of a banker (ie they paid with their lives).

I had a similar thought when I started reading about fracking (http://www.propublica.org/series/fracking). A simple solution there for the pollution caused by the wastewater is to force the executives and their families from the companies doing fracking to live in the communities they affect and use/drink the water they claim is safe.
> but strings in most languages such as C, Python or Ruby are exactly random access sequences of bytes.

This is true, but at least with Ruby it's widely regarded as an embarrassing design mistake. (Not that it's a mistake in Redis; a database has different goals from a language.)
The point of the vulnerability was, it wasn't even designed to be malevolent. The application simply had a hole that every application had, under certain circumstances, and he was demonstrating it. I imagine that he was as interested in fixing his app as every other developer is!
It's a web font, PT Sans, it ends up being smaller than Arial or Helvetica because of the awkward smoothing.
"Messy" cap tables certainly have the potential to scare off larger investors (VCs, super angels) in the future. Lots of very small stakeholders (not counting vested employees) add to legal costs at each round, and VCs sometimes refer to them as "ankle biters." IMHO $5K is not even close enough capital to consider adding 100 line items to a cap table.
A debate with some merit, but not "hacker news". I say flag it.
IMHO they would also have been considered "politically important" enough to have their losses covered, given their long history of private => public => private employment.
Google Talk and Hangouts to go native in Chrome (WebRTC)
I agree, Zed would post under his own name.
Is HotSpot is GPL?
"The Art of Writing Software" [video]
And one more thing, voice control. Apple has a knack for refining old ideas and making it mainstream. Voice controlled computing has been available for years. Perhaps in the future many of the computer interactions for the non techie consumer will accomplished without using their fingers, swiping.
Mark Zuckerberg discusses Steve Jobs with Charlie Rose
Swearing is more a sign of laziness, than a sign of poor education. Speakers should consider the culture of their audiences and the atmosphere of the event before swearing. It just gives off an image that the speaker is self absorbed and not willing to adapt to a situation.
Only mildly related, but I have fond memories of my friend and I needing to wake each other up at different points in the 90's, and we had our neat-o Linux boxes next to our beds, and we would create loops that would echo ^G's to a tty on the console.

But if you sent them too fast the sound would completely cease, so we would have to put a sleep 1 in the loop to make a nice consistent beep-beep-beep-beep, etc.

That always amused us, and sure was useful.
Exactly. For business who have legal or medical requirements to keep track of Browser Capabilities, Firefox is already known to be a rogue browser.

Browser capabilities are very important, and how it behaves must be expected for legal and medical requirements.

Please join us in the real world, and leave your fantasy behind. The plane boss! The plane!
Cool Point And Shoot images
Things you might not know about CSS3 (presentation)
There's a problem with the "go back in time" policy proposals. If the banks beat the regulations we had in place before, what makes us think they won't beat them again?

This is why Taleb is proposing a simpler solution - it might be hard to get around.

I am skeptical of all proposals, but I think it's important to understand that going back to the previous set of regs might not work since the banks busted through those.
Stronghold 3 | Trends at a Glance
Haha maybe not safe for work if your computer screen is being projected on the front wall of a kindergarten
Dennis Ritchie: Experience with Unicos on the Cray X-MP (1986)
10 Reasons for Women to Start an Internet Business
30 Days to Learn HTML & CSS - Free Video Course
I think there is a lot of culture behind the appropriateness of swearing.

I find Australian's are much more relaxed about it, than Americans. (purely anecdotal), but I don't think it can simply be categorised as being about 'status' or something else, it's dependent on the culture you are in.
It could have but the message didn't tie into spurring someone's imagination. Perhaps if you had something interesting such a picture, illustration, or even brief write up of what you expect this section to become it would have allowed for the user to imagine the potential. However, most of these pages just show "coming soon" or "tba". In many cases this leaves the user slightly annoyed by feeling tricked into clicking a link that had no content.
Google Code playground for graphs with time (like Rosling's TED talks)
Ask HN: .NET vs. PHP/Python/Ruby
I'm a 24-year-old liberal arts major in Kansas City looking to start a career as a developer. I've been teaching myself C from cs50.tv, which has been great for learning programming fundamentals.

Right now I'm having a tough time deciding what language to focus on so I can get my first job as a developer. I think I've narrowed it down to two areas: .NET or PHP/Python/Ruby. (I ruled out Java because it seems like every computer science major already knows it, making it more competitive.)

.NET is definitely in demand where I live. There don't seem to be as many Dice job postings for PHP/Python/Ruby people. I know Python and Ruby are "sexier" languages, but at this point I'm just trying to find stable entry-level employment at a decent salary.

What are your thoughts?
The OP is rehashing the concepts around pervasive or ubiquitous computing: the notion that computing will expand out to meet us in tangible products, as opposed to being solely accessed on dedicated computing devices.

There's been much more than "a smattering" of work in this area. Lots of really smart industrial designers and engineers have been working on these ideas for quite some time. I personally based my Industrial Design degree thesis around these concepts almost 12 years ago. Hiroshi Ishii’s Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab comes to mind. The Ambient Devices Orb was a well-covered, if early and underdeveloped, attempt to bring a consumer pervasive computing device to market.

These products are here today and will continue to emerge. A recent example would be the thermostat from Nest Labs, a device that beautifully marries the industrial design of Henry Dreyfuss’ Honeywell round thermostat with a digital display, the tangible and intangible interfaces working seamlessly in concert.
It has been my experience that American craft breweries make the best beer in the world, period. German beers (in Germany) are very good to be sure. However, I feel like you're just spewing the company line. Everyone "knows" the Germans make great beer. Whatever. American craft breweries use better ingredients, have better process and infinitely more imagination. 20 years ago the Germans and Belgians made better beer than us. No longer.
glad you're learning. Can't wait to see the MVP.

Just keep in mind that your final successful product probably looks nothing like what you're doing now. And that's perfectly OK, pivot away as long as you build a sustainable business model based on delighting your target customers.
I dont think the author thinks kinect is wrong. What he criticizes is that a touch interface we you physically touch something needs to supply tactile feedback.

Kinect however is IMO not bound to the same scrutiny for tactile feedback. If you take the Kinect Sports games, you can pretty much see yourself in the game in 3d, making it really intuitive and very natural to move to the game.

I agree though, the menu navigation in Kinect is horrible.
Are the TechStars Results accurate?
>Of course, the key thing is that the farmers get a fair price. //

As a consumer of fairly traded goods this is the main benefit to me; that my purchases aren't forcing other people in to abject poverty, uneducation and poor health.

FWIW in the UK nearly all major supermarkets have own-brand Fairtrade marked coffee (for example) and there are Fairtrade coffees at a wide range of prices.

Yes bastard capitalists try to leverage people wanting to do right by their fellow man for profit but when fair trade becomes pervasive they are no more able to do this than with regular coffees now. That is when requiring that workers are fairly paid for their labour and protected from dangerous working conditions is considered part of the product (as it is for goods made in Europe say), as much as a packet is, then it becomes harder for middlemen to leverage this moral position to increase shelf prices.