skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the important points I've heard Clay Christensen make is that incumbent companies often get destroyed (disrupted) by small players not because they're incompetent, or even because they're making bad decisions. Each decision along the way seems perfectly rational. Christensen frames it ultimately as a problem of measurement, that people are measuring the wrong thing, therefore optimizing for or solving the wrong problem.

I think this article correctly points out that Hastings isn't stupid, but he's in a tight spot, just because of the circumstances.
The cool thing about VP trees is that your space doesn't have to be Euclidean, i.e. you can have dimensions that depend on other dimensions, e.g. in RGBA color space values of RGB are meaningless when A=transparent. You can't search that space with KD trees, but you can with VP trees.
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Looking at that domain name with the headline, I get the feeling someone is going to try to sell me something.
Can anyone comment on the page turn speed of the non-touch Kindle4 vs the Kindle3? I picked up a Kindle Touch thinking that the refresh speed would be better than the 3rd gen model, but, like Marco, I didn't really find it to be the case.
Hacker News was originally called Startup News; that would still be a more accurate title.
Free air traffic control software doesn't really sound absurd. Software doesn't give one air traffic control centre any advantage over another. That's not how they compete if they compete at all, so they may as well give it away.
More than just digital quilting
Does emacs count?
Sure, but private investors might cut your thumbs off if you skive.
NFP Prints At 120K, Below Expectations Of 125K, Unemployment Rate Drops To 8.6%
I've come to see the key distinction between git and SVN as:

* Old workflow: "commit code" and "share code with team" are jumbled together.

* New workflow: "commit code" and "share code with team" are separate actions.

This looks so obvious, but coming from years of using SVN, it took me a while to understand the implications. With git I could fix (with commit --amend) those embarrassing "whoops, forgot to add an untracked file" kinds of mistakes. Over time, I found that my local commits became smaller and more frequent because I can reorder and squash them before pushing (or git-svn dcommitting, as most of my clients run SVN).

Consider a larger change where you might implement it one way, decide you were on the wrong track, back off a bit and implement it some other. With SVN these false paths are either in the common repository confusing the history, or I'm in a disconnected state for an uncomfortably long time. With git, all these changes are local commits that are ultimately kept out of the main history because I've reordered the change history into something comprehensible.

It took me a few months to grok git. Reading an article on the filesystem structure of the repository helped me a great deal.
There are a number of good science posts that make the frontpage. This is originally what kept me on this site.
I agree. I'm sure you could get some improvement over the Kindle 3, but it's already as good, if not better, for reading novels than a paper book. Any improvements in that direction would be, at best, marginal.

However, there is one thing that could really be improved: typography. The default setup is not particularly good for English text--manageable but subpar--and is even worse for Russian. It's still readable, but they do not wrap long words with a hyphen leading to an annoyingly ragged margin.

If they fixed the typography, the experience would be even better. I know this because I took several of my books and reformatted them using LaTeX (I had way too much time on my hands :)), which does wrap words and generally produces a much better-looking result. The LaTeX books were significantly easier to read than the Kindle ones--I think they were even a little better than what I expect of most paperbacks. However, they also take up more space and take more effort to make.

So, since my only issue can be fixed by changing the ebook format, and isn't much of an issue at that, I think its safe to say getting an ereader now would be a good bet.
Yeah, really offensive how someone ripped off Monster Galaxy's completely original concept, which sprung fully-formed from the untainted mind of Mike Sego. (note: not ripping on Mike, he seems like a really nice, cool guy who's worked hard to build a successful business.)

When will this "rip-off" meme finally die? It's entirely absurd and usually reeks of sour grapes.
I don't think that analysis is complete. Obviously the point isn't that there no duplication within free software; just that there is less. Sure, clang competes with gcc. But as recently as the 90's there were dozens of commercial compilers were competing in the market. Now, everyone (outside of a handful of legacy platforms like windows) just uses gcc. Clearly that's a gain in productivity.
Yes, you are right - unless they are a service-oriented company, in which case, they will jump through hoops to make it right for you, no matter how surly you are when you present your issue.
I own the Kindle 4 (non touch screen) and it is great. Works exactly as advertised. As far as I'm concerned, that is all I need.
Very, very nice. Your main differentiation, as I understand it, is that it works on iPad, correct? Don't be afraid to mention that clearer. Right now it's a little hidden.

In fact, show more clearly what it looks like on an iPad, and on an iPhone. And say something like "your website works on the web, on the iPhone and on the iPad".

I really like the simple pricing too.

Awesome.
And what? He couldn't find any credible media to speak to?
Just got an email from Kontera ads:

Denial Reason: Insufficient Text.

What happen to saying: "picture worth thousand words"?
Sounds more appealing than "Windows for Submarines" - http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htiw/articles/20081225.aspx
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"Either you pay programmers to duplicate effort or you don't."

That's not what I'm talking about. Free software doesn't just kill duplicate effort. Free software kills the original effort that is there to be duplicated. You're saying "well all the unproductive leeches will go do something else". What actually happens is all the productive people go and do something else too.

If you fix the price of automobiles at zero, you don't get an automobile revolution that puts horse breeders out of business. You get an artificially created dark age while you wait a few extra decades for hobbyists to create the model t.
Funnily enough, if I understand it correctly, it is illegal to import counterfeited goods into Switzerland and border guards will sometimes check your purchases when returning from holiday to make sure you haven't any in your luggage.
It's shocking that only a minority of people in technology know about post-scarcity concepts. Un-employing others is our main goal and when we cannot sustain an income from supporting an application, technology has done exactly that to us. Support has either been crowd-sourced or enough able people are able to add enhancements themselves. We should be the ones that are most aware of these consequences and simply move on to new technologies and projects instead of artificially limiting our products.
That's like worrying that sharper knives will make stabbing people easier. It's true, but stabbing is already easy enough with the knives we have that the difficulty of the act isn't really stopping anyone. Similarly, games get hacked, open-source or not.
"before copyright, full-time artists either had wealthy patrons (Roman Catholic Church, the nobility) or lived in poverty? Copyright made it possible for an artist to make a living without having a wealthy patron."

Even if the former is true, I don't think the latter is.

"I don't think we want to go back to a world where artists are funded by rich people because in that world, the rich decide what works get created."

How is this not the situation now? Musicians and filmmakers work at the pleasure of large corporations, who have neither the general enrichment of the culture nor the livelihood of the artist as a priority.

"I think it should be possible for a writer, musician or developer to make money from ACTUAL creative work..."

That's not really the way capitalism works, though. They don't have a natural right to be compensated for the work they want to do. If they did, I'd sit at home and write essays on my blog for 40 hrs/wk instead of going to my government job. Artists have to figure out how to get paid just like the rest of us. Copyright isn't working. See Amanda Palmer for a model that's an alternative both to being owned by a corporation and to starving. It involves a lot of direct relationship with audience.

(You'd think HN of all communities would get this.)

Environmental regulations are not really artificial scarcity, though. It's more like trying to internalize tragedy of the commons externalities. I think of it like an insurance policy, where you charge people who are having a negative effect that won't be felt until later, so you can pay to deal with it when the time comes.
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Our world is already struggling to keep people employed despite continuous productivity gains.

In a rational world, that should be "because of... continuous productivity gains". I admit that the way you phrase the situation is how most people today view it but just as much it is a statement akin to "despite digging deeper and deeper, we keep getting closer to China"...
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Whys is working for BAE worse than CIQ or Zynga? Is your idea of boring worse than your idea of evil?
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> "Hell I'd pay several hundred dollars to George R. R. Martin to get him to hurry up on his next book."

Put me down for a wad of cash too, maybe not that much though.

But you/we don't need to appeal to a hypothetical on these things, the crew of SMBC Theater got 5 times the capital they asked for from their fans using Kickstarter to produce a movie.
You may be doing it "wrong".

My old Perforce workflow:
code, code, code, code, code, code, code, code, commit

My new Git workflow:
code, commit, code, commit, code, commit, code, commit, code, commit, code, commit, push

It's the difference between single-piece flow and large-batch production in Lean Manufacturing.
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OK, I've taken a look at the actual article and it was basically what I suspected. First, they entangle the two diamond modes by beam-splitting a photon and directing the two possible photon paths towards the diamonds. (The photon scattered off the diamonds is recombined with a beam splitter and then detected, to ensure that the scattering occurred.) Then, they hit each diamond with a lazer pulse which, if the diamond's mode was excited, produced a second photon. They were able to coherently interfere the second photon, which was in a super position of originating from the first diamond and from the second diamond.
Insert obligatory post from Netcraft confirming that XYZ is dying.
Indeed. SVN is far from the worst source control system out there, and even as we move on to better once, it's pointedly the system that got a lot of coders into using source control.
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First of all, it makes you take it seriously. It's not a side project that you are doing. You think of it as work as something that is going to pay your bills at some point. You work harder, you take smarter decisions and you start thinking about customers early.

Secondly, other people take it more seriously. Everyone has some sort of a side project, very few people have a start-up. They give you more time and listen to your more intently.

All anecdotal, no data to back any of the claims.
I totally agree with you on the typography, though at this point I've gotten used to it.

Could you elaborate a bit on your reformatting? Does typesetting it in LaTeX make each page a fixed width? Do I understand correctly, then, that you wouldn't really be able to resize the text?

It's a bit crazy to me that algorithmic typesetting isn't a lot farther along than it seems to be. Hyphenation doesn't seem like that hard of a problem. Am I wrong? I guess the demand just isn't really there?
The link in Daniel's exophrine URL is very not work safe, due to the pics in the sidebar (a topless woman, in my case).

I'm not a prude, I just want to help prevent people from getting in trouble if they're browsing from work.
Does PEP 3333 take WebSockets and other long-running connections into account?
I didn't quite get where the author was going with that. Windows Powershell has access to the full Windows .Net API. If you want to spawn a window to display graphics or what have you, you're free to do so.
I know about (not personally) a couple of Russian who are currently employed there.
Additionally for working with multiple fixes at the same time git stash -p, git add -p and friends are great tools. I sometimes see a bug when either fixing another bug or implementing a feature. And if that bug is trivial (i.e. it would take less work to fix it right away compared to remembering it) I can fix it right away, and commit it later in a new branch unrelated to the one I was actually working on.

With svn you really do not want to do this since in my experience you can only work at one thing at a time per checked out directory. Instead you have to write it down or try to remember.
No idea why you're being downvoted. This is some interesting context on paying for organs:

In Pakistan, 40 percent to 50 percent of the residents of some villages have only one kidney because they have sold the other for a transplant into a wealthy person, probably from another country, said Dr. Farhat Moazam of Pakistan, at a World Health Organization conference. Pakistani donors are offered $2,500 for a kidney but receive only about half of that because middlemen take so much.[33] In Chennai, southern India, poor fishermen and their families sold kidneys after their livelihoods were destroyed by the Indian Ocean tsunami on December 26, 2004. About 100 people, mostly women, sold their kidneys for 40,000–60,000 rupees ($900–$1,350).[34] Thilakavathy Agatheesh, 30, who sold a kidney in May 2005 for 40,000 rupees said, "I used to earn some money selling fish but now the post-surgery stomach cramps prevent me from going to work." Most kidney sellers say that selling their kidney was a mistake.[35]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_transplant#Compensated_do...
I'd like to live in a world in which people are rewarded for their contributions to society, how about you?
There are companies which don't rely on copyright. One really big example is "on demand": non-software company needs software which does X (and doesn't exist yet), so they contract with a software company (or just hire developers) to write it.
I know some companies like that - they basically get paid to adapt FOSS software to specific needs.

Another example are companies which rely on other things besides per-copy licensing; Red Hat is a good example.
Wealth does not necessarily correlate with intelligence.
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Data really is an attractive nuisance. It is not too hard to see how many legitimate carrier questions could be answered to the benefit of consumers by having phones log data. Perhaps the simplest one is "Where do I have areas of weak coverage and so more dropped/distorted calls?" If a large percentage of the handsets can log GPS + signal strength info over a long period of time, the phones that are in suitcases (erroneously recording poor signal strength) and those in airplanes (erroneously recording great signal strength) will be balanced out by real world scenarios. Given 12 months of data (which covers various weather conditions, and correlating by date) one could quickly and efficiently decide where additiona transmitter/receiver resources should be deployed, and under what conditions it might make sense to bring up more resources and when you could shut them down (rain for example absorbs 1.5 - 2.5 Ghz radio signals.

Of course that information can be accumulated much more painfully by driving around in a van to pick up this information. And the quality will be both better and worse, better in the sense that a signal-quality-van could have equipment to evaluate the signal strength very accurately, but worse in that you wouldn't get the time of day and conditional variation from weather.

The 'attractive nuisance' aspect of it however comes into play when you've created a logging/monitoring platform and now you can collect other kinds of information. Like warrantless wiretappers who are unable to restrain themselves from listening in on conversations they have no reason to listen to, once the infrastructure is there the humans in the loop seem unable to prevent themselves from succumbing to their desire to 'know.'

I had a long discussion with some law enforcement types at a security conference along these lines (I was advocating outright bans on some of the tools they consider 'essential' for fighting crime). The economic cost of not using the tools is higher (higher taxes (to pay for more cops), higher phone bills (to pay for signal strength vans)) and, until it is actualized, only a "potential" risk of abuse. That is such a terribly hard equation for people to evaluate on instinct.
Not quite sure which (or who's) whining you're having a go at, but as an identity system OAuth is indeed a pile of poo.

First, OAuth1's poorly-spec'd signatures make implementation difficult. That's an accepted and pretty well-documented fact.

OAuth2 removes all crypto and instead relies on bearer tokens and SSL/TLS, while not mandating it. It does away with signatures in favour of ease of implementation. [edit] This is a bad thing.

OAuth2 is also susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks where a malicious party could gain access if it intercepts a token.

That's a pretty poor implementation.

As an identity provider OAuth 1 and 2 have problems beyond the technical interpretation of the specs, or implementation difficulties. Both fail as an identity system (ref. http://www.identityblog.com/stories/2004/12/09/thelaws.html).

I'd love to hear why you think OAuth is a solid solution.
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The copyright model and the arts have thrived for the last few centuries because copyright was such a vast improvement on what came before it. It led to an explosion of creativity and entertainment industry.

Now while a fatted arts industry will always contribute a lot of bloated, formulaic works (although I think people would have to admit that even the more braindead hollywood titles have a lot going for them beyond the plot and script), it also allows big money to spent on worthwhile projects. Think of all the great movies that have been made in the last 70 years - they may not have been the most expensive for their time but they were generally still pretty damn costly to make. And even the shoe-string budget attempts probably would not have been made if the possibility for a massive pay-day did not exist (eg. Blair Witch Project).

I think people have got their priorities mixed up. Accessing art is not the problem. We have limited leisure time to spend, so even if we could, we would not want to buy every album/movie/book we could. These items are cheap, though, so since price is not really a concern, our worry should be ensuring that artists and the creative industries have economically viable roles. And do we really want to live in a world where the quality of the TV and film output never rises above the level of, say, Spain?
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I can relate. I dislike running a company myself, but when I work for someone else, I get upset that I'm not involved with those operations.

Perhaps in my case a partner would help. Someone who is in charge of that end of the business, but I can still jump in and help.
You are very good sir, and also lucky. You are talented and hardworking, but, still lucky.

There's a lot of talented and hardworking people here, like you, not as lucky tho.
I recently got a Kindle 3. I actually won it rather than buying it, so I didn't do much research into alternate options, so I only really know how the Kindle works.

You can just buy ebooks outside of the Amazon store and load them onto your Kindle. Calibre is a perfect program for this--it helps manage your collection and converts the files for you. It's very good at converting epub to mobi--which makes sense; the formats are related--and is pretty good with other formats. Pdf is more difficult, but it does do a decent job sometimes. Other times it's a complete mess.

Thanks to Calibre, you are not really tied to Amazon for getting ebooks. If you do opt to use Amazon, you might have some issues, but I don't know because I haven't bothered. I also have no idea about periodicals because I don't read any. I basically use my Kindle to read random science fiction novels when I have free time.

The real advantage of the Kindle isn't in the market (as far as I'm concerned) but in the convenience and form factor. I've actually found it easier to read than a paperback, and it lets me carry a decent collection of books around easily. I suspect other ereaders are similar in that regard.
Why is that? I've been reading it for years (given at a high threshold) and it seems like the same old slashdot to me. It's also a great deal friendlier place than this one.
Zealotry is not compatible with nuance.
If I had that background, I'd probably be most interested in some kind of political/activism startup (e.g. Votizen), or some kind of project/funding startup (e.g. Kickstarter). Presumably there are non-competes to make starting "unslashdotted.org" or something a no-go, and I don't think I'd want to after working on one from 1997-2011.
And intelligence does not necessarily correlate to good decision making (or business acumen).