skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could you go into more detail about what problems you had with sbt? What you describe doesn't really match up with my experience. If you want to use it simply to compile Scala code you can just do 'sbt compile' in the directory containing the Scala files. If you want to add dependencies you just create a file called 'build.sbt' and add lines like:

libraryDependencies += "org.scala-tools" %% "scala-stm" % "0.3"

Although this may not be clear since sbt presents 2 configuration methods, a simple one (as seen above) and a complex one.
There is forced attribution and the fact that in some countries putting work under the public domain doesn't mean you give up a lot of rights to it. You need to have a specifically liberal licence in order to do that.
Vehemently disagree. What you're proposing will put all government data behind paywalls - even if some of them will be relatively short ones.

Right now my transit authority runs a halfway-decent website along with a freely accessible API. The website is functional, but not perfect. There is a thriving market for people who can present the same data in much more usable ways, for profit. This seems ideal.

What you're suggesting is that the government never engage itself in building frontends - and stick strictly to building data backends instead, and leaving all the gooey UI to private industry. In other words, people will no longer have free access to census data, bus schedules, budgets, or anything. Well, unless you're a geek who knows how to figure out the documentation to the API, craft some API calls, and parse the results into some human-readable form.

I can't think of a worse techno-dictatorial dystopia. The only people who gain freedom are the geeks, everyone else loses free access to their own government's data unless they cough up the cash.
EOL of couchdb in Ubuntu One
very cool idea. anyone considered doing this on the east coast?
Since most Android phones have no physical keys...
What's the chance though, that the rich person in this scenario got rich way by doing what the poor person did but better/faster? Pretty low I think.

Likely they applied for a patent on some obvious technology, or invested in a company that did, like Amazon, and are essentially being given that poor person's tax money to support these government monopoly grant.

Ditto anyone rich from resource extraction. Our laws give the resources to the people who currently own the land, despite that our countries really hold all land in trust for future generations (see the right of eminent domain). You can be rich off public resources simply because you siphoned them off via a tiny chunk of land you hold while turning a blind eye to any environmental problems you were causing.

When the rich actually, in general, contribute a tenth as much or work a tenth as hard (mentally or physically) as the poor, dollar for dollar, what you said may be valid. And there are some who do, but in general, riches come from exploitation, and until this is corrected it's got to be handled at another level (like income taxes, etc).
Kinect hardware specific for PCs
Heroku Postgres Launches
Umm, I'd say Scala is to Java what C# was to Java. It cleared some things at expense of come other things. Overall it's pretty cool language (I rarely use :P).
May be if you use 100+ of these (~14400 'computers') you can build a machine with emerging behavior, brain-like?
Here are the questions I have every time I see these music lawsuits:

How many of the people using this Grooveshark service are present/former/would-be Universal customers?

How do you prove this? Should you attempt to prove it before deciding to sue?

What if the people using Grooveshark are just too cheap or too poor to ever buy Universal releases? Is that possible?

On the flipside, what if they are also Universal's best customers? Is that possible?

The article says they named specific uploaders in the complaint. Maybe they have been able make some assumptions about them as existing/potential customers? (e.g. They have some assets and/or they've bought Universal releases in the past.)
There are limits to its adaptability, especially for processing-heavy tasks like vision for which the brain has specialized hardware. There is a world of difference between interpreting 144 electrodes to pick out just a couple of bits of information, and seeing.

In particular, if the brain were infinitely plastic then you could just wire the output from a HD video camera to some random spot on the brain and wait for the brain to figure it out.
Somebody did: http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/tex-touch/id377627321?mt=8
As I read it, the alternative implementation should branch of at a single point in the code. The alternative path usually requires modifications in the functions and data it's calling and using. But instead of going through the code adding flags everywhere, the idea is to make a source code copy and modify that. It duplicates source code, but keeps the original implementation untouched.

I can imagine that it allows more freedom re-working the code. You don't have to worry about breaking the original implementation this way, freeing up mental capacity.
Doom 3 source released
Doom 3 Open Sourced
Adsense İle Para Kazanma
Motorseo - Peterborough - Search Engine Optimisation
Natural Remedies for Joint Pain
CrunchBase Reveals: Formulas For Talent Acquisitions With Opani
Customer service based on customer loyalty. Don't accept anything else.
Amidst all of the government-bashing comments, I note that no one has remarked on a few things:

* we don't have any actual evidence to support the author's claim that this sort of bloat is routine (remember, plural of anecdote isn't data)

* we don't know what kind of wasted money gets tossed around in major corporations (assumptions about how corporations must be lean do not constitute actual evidence)

* we don't even have a way to find out what sort of bloat and waste takes place in corporate america - the government at least lets us find out

so it maybe doesn't make a lot of sense, in an observable-evidence sort of way, to make with the government-bashing..
Mobile ‘Rootkit’ Maker Tries to Silence Critical Android Dev
I think it's safe to assume without digging up legislative history that those amounts represent a theoretical deterrent, not an estimated measure of lost profits.
Specialization is most definitely not outdated.

- You can specialize in embedded development.

- You can specialize in DSP development.

- You can specialize in iOS or Android development.

- You can specialize in Windows, Linux, or Mac development.

- You can specialize in various forms of enterprise development.

- You can specialize in web app development, using some of the various technologies available.

About the only thing that has changed is that web apps make up a much larger segment than they used to.

Web development is more complicated than traditional app development because your model is always served over a network and is few-to-many rather than one-to-one, you have far less control over the client environment, and the number of technologies in the space is still huge since there hasn't been a major shake-out yet.

But even web development, big though it is, is a specialization.

Programming + UI design is fine for a startup, but for a larger company you wouldn't want to do that. Hire a specialist for the UI and a specialist for the software development.
Check it out. A way to remove apps without GUI.
I've been wondering how Grooveshark's existence was even possible. I assumed they just hadnt been messed with yet by content owners, and that was why it was still around. Maybe that's about to change.
Noah Wyle hands down!
Palantir, the Vanguard of Cyberterror Security
This is addressed in the article -

"Ok, then what shouldn't I open source?
That's easy. Don't open source anything that represents core business value.

Here are some examples of what we don't open source and why:

Core GitHub Rails app (easier to sell when closed)

The Jobs Sinatra app (specially crafted integration with github.com)"
I see they are shutting down their clean energy program. The renewable energy cheaper than coal initiative showed a unique level of arrogance. We, a software company, can solve a problem in which we have no experience better than people who have devoted their lives to the subject.
Google Shuts Down Knol, Friend Connect, Bookmark Lists and Wave
Final steps for Google Wave
I packed up the house, wife & 1yo last year to spend 6 months skiing in the Alps. Best thing we have done in many, many years and it actually cost less than the 2 week holiday we had their the year before.

Yes life gets more complicated with partner/kids/mortgage and yes its really hard to see before it happens. But now we've been back in the 'real world' for a year we realise just how abnormal the real world actually is. So we are doing it again next year and hopefully every year (with an extra kid this time).
My understanding is that there are more legal gray areas with public domain than there are with even very permissive licenses (MIT, new-BSD, etc). I vaguely recall something about potential issues with public domain and other license incompatibilities, but I don't recall the specifics (and am certainly not a lawyer), so that probably isn't a useful datapoint.

Apache license has patent clauses that make it quite different than the new-BSD/MIT-style licenses.

In general, since I don't know a huge amount of the legal issues involved in public domain and national jurisdictions in regard to such, I simply err on the side of caution and choose MIT license for software I want to release as freely as possible. Others use it so it likely has more legal precedent and courtroom experience around it (should it ever come to that), and I like the notice of warranty disclaim (a bit of cya).
I don't care enough about your ridiculous statement to go dig up evidence, but I care enough to relate my own anecdote: I have chemically induced depression in myself, as a side effect of a drug. As soon as I went off the drug, the depression went away.
Microsoft's new incentive for engineering hires: bacon
Not being much of a hardware geek, I'm having a hard time evaluating how fast each core is.

From the site: "With instruction times as low as 1400 picoseconds and consuming as little as 7 picojoules of energy, each of the 144 computers can do its work with unprecedented speed for a microcontroller and yet at unprecedentedly low energy cost, transitioning between running and suspended states in gate delay times. When suspended, each of the computers uses less than 100 nanowatts."

How does this instruction time compare to other modern processors?

It sounds to me like some of the benefit to be had here may be from the low amount of power necessary per core. Power and associated cooling is a MAJOR source of cost for datacenters, and so if this really is a significantly lower power consumption (again, I don't know how much power the alternatives use), then it could have a big impact on the cost of commodity computation power.
Any advice on how to dive into reading this codebase?
Honestly, it's also slightly easier to train a good junior Rails dev than a good junior iPhone dev, given things like tracking allocated memory.

Not sure about Android.
A much better reason is that you can't easily put things in the public domain and many countries don't recognize the public domain.
I've been running Koush's builds of ICS on my Nexus S, and I honestly feel like it runs faster than Gingerbread/CM7 did before. The biggest factor is that ICS responds so much more quickly/sensitvely to touch movements than Gingerbread or Honeycomb did, and that goes a very long way to making the entire experience feel smoother and more responsive.

Between that and the new interaction features in ICS, I'm never going back to Gingerbread on my phone again, and I'll be flashing ICS on my tablet as soon as someone releases a stable build for it. It really is phenomenally better than previous versions of Android, hands down.
Exploding Offer Season
Why your startup needs an engineering blog
In regards to checking if an image has loaded, there is an an onload event in JS which, as the name implies, triggers upon the image loading.
Tanenbaum Talks MINIX, Linux (OSnews)
I've started open sourcing more things lately, mostly in the realm of things that solve a problem I have that might solve someone else's problem. Sometimes I build tech for tech's sake that improves my software or apps, but it isn't a product in itself. Frameworks, libraries, templates, and tools all tend to fall into this category I think and github is a great example is open sourcing these things.

You shouldn't open source your product itself unless you want to be a service company. I personally don't care to become a service company, so I keep the "product" and the data behind it closed, but the frameworks, tools, etc. can and should when possible be open source.
Great writeup, and fantastic adventure.

Do I understand correctly that the story currently ends by working on location at Twitter?
5 Things to Know Before Dating a Tech Entrepreneur
The site is down for me right now so I'll plead ignorance about #4.

How does one goes about implementing #4? I can abstract away a REST API call for Avatars, but how does one do that for a database? Or is this just a fancy way of saying (in Java-speak), use Interfaces.

[Edit: the site is back up and I was able to read it. The premise reads differently than how the parent wrote it. I read it mainly as, the sysadmin should be able to switch to a new host, change the configuration file, bounce the application, and everything should work.]
RIP, Anne McCaffrey
GitHub _is_ service company.

The primary advantage they have over competitors is a trusted brand name. This name has been built, in part, by engaging and contributing to the open source community.

If GitHub were to open source _all_ of their software, some copycat sites may appear. These sites would not have a trusted name, thousands of well known open source projects backing them up and the expertise to properly run an instance of GitHub. As long as GitHub doesn't try charging users too much to use their service, there is no reason for people to use competitors to save a few dollars a month (reliability is far more important than a few dollars here and there).

Some open source projects may decide to operate their own infrastructure. However, this is highly unlikely because GitHub _as a service_ is much easier and more reliable than an independently managed instance. If GitHub can retain the open source community, they become "the hub" that everyone wants to be part of. As long as GitHub is known to support open source in a meaningful way, given the resources available, I'm sure they'd benefit from hundreds of open source projects improving upon and patching GitHub code.

I think they could quite readily open source _all_ of their software.
> This dream lasted a few days until we discovered that TeX, the typesetting engine underlying LaTeX, isn’t written in C. TeX is written in WEB, Donald Knuth’s “literate” programming language.

Seriously, they discovered that after starting the project???
I thank you, Alex, for allowing me to live vicariously through your year for the past 5 minutes.

This comment made me perk up.

I've eliminated all of those things you mentioned from my life and replaced them with:

1. Alcohol
2. Traveling
3. Triathletics

In the last 3 years I've been to over 20 countries, been to every continent (except antartica), boot strapped two companies in NYC and have completed a half-ironman (and on my way to do a full next year). I realize I couldn't have done any of that if I had any of those aforementioned responsibilities.

Random, but honest (meta) question: Would people be interested in reading more about this? I always feel like if I blog about these things it would just sound like bragging.
The peculiar thing about programmers is that they're the one profession that can easily work remotely and travel, and yet they're the one profession that doesn't.

Just don't try to build a business as an indie iOS dev if you want to travel. I've been trying to do this for the last year but this week Apple disabled my iTunes account, insisting that I'm not allowed to access it from Asia since my credit card account is a U.S. account. They've categorically refused to budge on this so now I can't even update apps I've bought through iTunes or the Mac App store. Since the apps I write have to be able to interoperate with other music apps, they've effectively shut me down.
It seems you're being overly sensitive.

I don't really know what you mean by moral failing. To morally failyou have to start doing something that is immoral, like killing kitten or something

Just out of curiosity (I don't really know what the answer is because I don't have depression), but do you think it's impossible for a person to become depressed due to being weak or having a weak character?

Could for example being a loser make your life difficult and lead to depression?

Now I understand "loser" is kind of a meaningless term, but I'm just using it as an illustrative example.

Say for a particular set of reasons (having to due with your character/personality) everyone around you always teases you. Couldn't that lead to depression; and if you were that kind of person, wouldn't addressing what makes you a "loser" be the correct way ultimately to deal with your depression.

Or is depression never caused by problems with one's own personality/character?
This example gives something of an idea:

http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/pub/AP002-OSC....

The picture I get is that the boundary between computing components and control/sensor electronics is dissolved.
git clone https://github.com/TTimo/doom3.gpl.git

and just browse around locally in your favourite editor.
More like 5 reasons NOT to date an entrepreneur
Anne McCaffrey Has Died
It's also worth noting that Congress is threatening to cut the budget for the project that tracks overspending on IT projects - the IT Dashboard. While the IT Dashboard tool was properly open sourced and the codebase is doing well out in the wild, the continued use of it for the Federal Government isn't totally free, but the very small budget required to keep something like this running can prevent spending hundreds of millions of dollars on excessive IT projects.

For more info on budget cuts that could effect projects like the IT Dashboard, see:
http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/11/16/crunch-time-in...

For information on the open source IT Dashboard project, see:
http://civiccommons.org/2011/05/it-dashboard-six-weeks-in/
I'm no software license lawyer (and admittedly I haven't read Apache in depth), but I understand that the Apache license has at least one requirement I'm personally not too keen on.

4.2 in the license: "You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files", I'm not sure how "legal" it is to follow the convention of sticking a LICENSE file in the project root and have that assume to cover all contents therein, but that seems reasonable enough, versus 4.2.

I'd love to know further opinions on MIT vs. Apache.

[edit: engaged brain.]
1) Ratings slightly higher on the Android store.
2) Both are paid
http://www.meetup.com/ ?
This is an interesting business model. I like it, but am interested to see how you will commit people to paying you $100/month for the next 5 years unless structuring it as a loan (which has it's own headaches)

For those interested in something similar, my understanding is that Code Academy (Different than YC startup codecademy) http://codeacademy.org in Chicago is phenomenal. I met a bunch of their students at the HN meetup in Chicago last week and they were raving about it. From what I understand, the 35 folks in their current batch are going to have multiple job offers, and DHH is a huge supporter, so much so that he's taught a class.
Its 2011, githire.com should work the same as www.githire.com. This is my biggest pet peeve with any site.

Agreed. At the very least, either CNAME one to the other. If you really want/need one canonical domain, it's not hard to define a 301 redirect to the appropriate domain.
Well if you ever wanted to be 'out there' Chuck's processor would be a great place to start. Chuck Moore invented Forth and has been building machines that can run Forth efficiently for years. Think of it as a Turing machine that can do useful work. He has pushed the edge of computation per watt for years.

That being said, I've heard him talk about this chips for years and it is great to see it finally see the light of day. If you were familiar with the Transputer technology, this is a better take on that, if you are familar with FPGAs you can think of it as an FPGA with processors instead of CLBs.

Things that it can do are similar to what Intel is doing with Larrabee or some of the CUDA stuff that nVidia has done. It doesn't have a GDDR3 interface to a GB of memory so you can't custom build your own GPU, but you could do your own PhysX type engine with it.

It also makes a helluva differential cryptanalysis tool, or a signals analysis tool in general.
According to Tim Sweeney, the lead developer at Epic Games, there are three types of code in a modern first-person shooter: gameplay simulation, numeric computation, and shading. You've described gameplay simulation. Shading is very data-parallel. And the numeric code is essentially functional.

Even for gameplay code, it could be nice to have explicit tracking of what the mutable state is, to prevent bugs. He has some fascinating slides about this, if you google for "The Next Mainstream Programming Language". Extensive discussion on Lambda the Ultimate here:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1277

Definitely one of the most interesting things I've seen in a while.
Happy to stand corrected on that one. I had thought that autobahn fatalities were worse than Euro average (noting that Germany but it seems that Germany pays no penalty for unlimited motorway speeds.
I'm a big fan of Knockout. I made a demo kit to supplement the official docs, get it here:

http://notes.dylanized.com/knockoutjs-demo-kit-now-on-github

That said, the comments here are right. Knockout is good for scenarios where a dynamic UI is needed. For a more data intensive app, Backbone is usually a better choice, but at a cost.

Excited to see what happens with Knockback....
I spent a good part of my youth reading Anne McCaffrey (and part of my adulthood too) RIP
Let the forks begin! (And maybe new versions of popular Linux Open Source FPS games, rebased on Doom 3?)
That's why I'm posting it here.

Some possible ideas

====================

- Sound processing (think 144 cores preforming Fourier Transforms)

- Pico Satellites (This chip has a surprisingly extreme low power requirement).

- Wireless communication (small power requirement means small batteries)

- Computer Vision processing. Imagine toys or tools that can process visual information faster than an Xbox.

- Basically anything that can be done in parallel, that is suited for small size and low power, but doesn't require much on chip memory.
My ex-girlfriend would agree. Sadly
Buffett May Be No Match for Mobsters With Tattoos
I wonder why the depth fail shadow rendering algorithm had been explicitly excluded from the open source release. It's been around for years now, after all.
So the next hot article will be "OMG a GNU/Linux distribution has a messy code base"?

Once you are talking about a multiple GB system, of course it's messy. Except it is actually a very poor choosing to describe the situation. E.g. mixing multiples programming langages in a big system has nothing messy, it would even be a HUGE warning not to encounter multiple programming langages in such a huge system.
There is going to be some cool stuff to come of this!! (rubs hands together)
Bummer, loved Pern Novels as a kid.