skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your point is barely (if at all) relevant here. To the extent that you are specific, you are wrong too.

If you want to pass blanket judgment on the complexity of an industry and the technical capabilities of its engineers, you should at least pick a better metric than the amount of blogs and guides that discuss the technical details of that (still unspecified in your post) industry. The world of programming is unique in that a common culture of openness and freedom of information pervades it. Other industries do not have a culture even remotely similar to that. If an elevator control system designer blogged about how his wonderful algorithm works he might be fired (since the algorithm is the property of his company). Unlike the world of software development, where the product is code, in industries that require heavy, expensive hardware (like elevators, for example), a lone software developer is useless. You need people to do CAD and perform load analyses on all the critical components, installation technicians, lawyers to handle safety compliance, etc. In other words, you need a big (or medium, at least) corporation with all of its hierarchy and need to control information. And when you work in that kind of environment, you don't just blog your thoughts whenever you feel like it or discuss technical details of your projects. Because they're not your projects; they belong to the company and your code is just a fraction of the whole system.

I'm not just making this up either. I'm an engineer (who does a lot of programming) in the aviation industry. Even if my company wanted me to blog about what I do, I wouldn't do it simply because nobody reading the blog would be able to understand it. The programming would be the easy part to understand, but if you don't know the context of the work it won't make any sense.

Your post makes a lot of assumptions, but it's good that you recognized that you might have overreached when you made them.
The number of works being written for no financial gain and the number of people who have successfully made those models work for them combine to be a tiny fraction of the regular commercial market for books.

If you want real data, survey a couple thousand professional authors at random and ask them if they would still write if they knew they had no copyright protection and may have to put together some innovative new release schedule on a per chapter basis just to have any chance of making some money for their work.
What is Bullet-Proof Glass?
The term bullet-proof, though commonly used, is misleading. Bullet-resistant is the correct terminology used within the glass industry. Bullet proof glass would actually be too heavy and too thick to be of any practical use but bullet-resistant glass can withstand significant impacts.
I don't think my own Lisp code is really worth showing off so I'm going to cheat.

Here's some impressively awesome Lisp code, that leverages features that might be considered "too powerful". It's some Common Lisp from Peter Norvig's Paradigms of AI Programming: http://norvig.com/paip/auxfns.lisp

Checkout any of the macros in that file (search for "defmacro"). If you need a primer on Common Lisp macros I think Peter Seibel's intro is sufficient: http://gigamonkeys.com/book/macros-defining-your-own.html

The memoization stuff is pretty cool and so is the stuff for managing resources (defresource and with-resource).

That's one of the best books on programming I've ever read (I mean started and set aside then picked up again and again for many months and haven't finished), and there's a lot of really nice and elegant code in it. The way he describes searching graphs and trees is really nice but that code doesn't use any of the really Lispy stuff. It would look pretty similar in Python or Ruby. The rest of the code is here: http://norvig.com/paip/README.html
I was trying not to focus on that aspect of the conversation, but this is what my comment was based on:

https://twitter.com/#!/SuperMeatBoy/status/14761253025520435...

In my opinion, this isn't the sort of behavior that should be advocated. If people pirate the software produced by these companies that support SOPA, then that just validates SOPA. Additionally, he doesn't exactly give his games away for free so it's a strange stance to take in my eyes.

Anyway, my thoughts and feelings on copyright infringement weren't relevant discussion for this thread. I instead chose to focus on him acting as if nothing had happened, when the rest of the Internet proved otherwise.
Phew, my monitor is not broken.
Happy holidays!
The FSF rarely engage in enforcement action themselves, even on works they hold copyright on. The Linux kernel has probably been more actively enforced than any GNU project, with the possible exception of gcc.
Apple doesn't promote Safari for Windows and it doesn't offer a very compelling experience on that platform. On the other hand, Google has been pushing Chrome like crazy.
Would Mozilla stop making Firefox an open, web-advancing browser if Microsoft Bing paid Mozilla's bills? I don't think so. So why didn't Google save its shareholders $1B and let Microsoft foot the bill to continue Mozilla development? Google clearly must profit from their relationship with Mozilla.
Yeah, reading it again I see the .zip file for download. I think the message would be more accessible if they had an example site that didn't didn't require one to download and unzip stuff onto your local drive. (hmm...)
I'm wrapping up a D3 project as well. Grabbed some data from the US Govt (Foreign Aid over time) and have been playing with visualizations.

D3 is pretty cool :)
2nd Place AI Challenge Bot Postmortem (Translated by Hand From Russian)
Mr. Knuth is a personal hero of mine both as a programmer and as a Christian. He's pretty awesome.
802.11 Packets in Packets: A Standard-Compliant Exploit of Layer 1
Similar to correlation and regression. Great concepts, and can add a lot of implied rigor to a mountain of BS.
Merry Christmas, Hanukkah (or however you spell it), Kwanzaa, Festivus, and the New Year!
Mozilla's decisions on what technologies to support and what to oppose are not influenced by our business arrangements.
It's great because the very statistics he cites are proof that Japanese consumption has fallen and deflation is still happening. A strong yen is terrible for Japan, they want inflation. A high current account surplus means that they can't find enough demand domestically to sell all their stuff.
Orang-utans love iPads.
Keeping children safe on their new Internet technology ~ Daily World News
The news story about how GoDaddy is facing a groundswell of anger just might be something that influences congress.
I've been using Safari on every Mac I use since I switched back to the platform in '04 or so. It's a nice browser, has all the features I want, and it's quite fast. I've played with Chrome a bit, and it may be faster, but Safari is fast enough.

But that's on a Mac.

At my last job I had a Windows box. I installed Safari as soon as it was released on Windows for testing purposes. I wouldn't have minded switching, but there was one cold fact in the way: Safari was a pig.

I haven't used it on Windows in about a year, so it may be better, but at the time it took a long time to start Safari up. Later releases were better, but it still would feel slow launching and opening tabs. All and all, I stayed with FireFox.

I recommend Safari as a good browser for anyone who uses OS X. When people I know have bought Macs and asked if they need to download FF or Chrome, I tell them there is no need. Give Safari a try. Only one or two hasn't stuck with it, it fits all their needs.

On Windows I would tell them FF or Chome. Based on my experience there was no reason to recommend Safari.

I think it's too late. Even if Apple made Safari an amazing browser on Windows it's a very crowded market. FF is huge, Chrome is big and gaining. IE 8/9 are pretty nice browsers. That's 3 good choices. I have a hard time seeing Apple get any meaningful Windows marketshare.

Frankly, I think Safari is only on Windows to allow developers to test their sites to work better on iOS without having the devices or Macs. Any promotion to consumers is very half-hearted.
Safari gives me the feeling that IE does for some reason. Maybe because it's linked to the OS creator?
If the red bothers you, go to your profile page and set the "topcolor" to something that you like better. (This might require a certain karma level, not sure.)
I would add it seems to work almost intuitively, but I find Safari works against me (on Windows).

And it may just be a coincidence, but it's similar to QuickTime.

Yay! There's a new trailer for the Alien prequel out, and it's ... hosted at Apple. That means I'll see it in a window that doesn't full screen, whose controls don't work right, and it probably won't even download regardless of how often I click it. Thank the FSM, someone has posted a link to the trailer on YouTube.
Sorry about that. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is a bill that is passed every year and appropriates funding for military expenditures.

This year, there are clauses that legislatively codify the President's authority to indefinitely detain terrorism suspects, including American citizens, without trial.

The govt. has been claiming that capability under the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF) already, but Congress has always been vague and handwavy about supporting it. This codifies and effectively rubber-stamps the process, saying "We approve"

You can read a sane and reasonable explanation without FUD here: http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/12/ndaa-faq-a-guide-for-the-...
I think that definitely depends on where you live. Here in Shizuoka, in the 90s, pretty much all big public works projects came to a standstill. Roads they were building just stopped being built partway through construction. A few years into the 2000s, and they revved things up again, at a pace that makes it look like they were trying to catch up on all the projects that were abandoned in the 90s. A few years ago, the papers announced that rent downtown had bounced back up to Bubble-era rates, and construction downtown has been particularly active.
This article arrives at the answer and keeps walking. It points out that most people who have used it think Safari on Windows sucks, but somehow refutes that with the fact that it's only a little slower than Firefox and it's version 5.1. What?
Your Esoteric Language is Useless
Go Daddy loses over 37,000 domains due to SOPA stance
The second paragraph of the stanfordlawreview.org link is pretty succinct:

"To begin with, the bills represent an unprecedented, legally sanctioned assault on the Internet’s critical technical infrastructure. Based upon nothing more than an application by a federal prosecutor alleging that a foreign website is “dedicated to infringing activities,” Protect IP authorizes courts to order all U.S. Internet service providers, domain name registries, domain name registrars, and operators of domain name servers—a category that includes hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, and the like—to take steps to prevent the offending site’s domain name from translating to the correct Internet protocol address. These orders can be issued even when the domains in question are located outside of the United States and registered in top-level domains (e.g., .fr, .de, or .jp) whose operators are themselves located outside the United States; indeed, some of the bills’ remedial provisions are directed solely at such domains."
It seems very weird that you need a high karma level for such a feature, no?
I was actually unaware that people used their registrar as their DNS provider. I've personally only used GoDaddy to purchase domains and couldn't for a second thing anyone would want to use them for something as important as DNS.

Other people have mentioned having to move Email as well, but I don't understand why people don't use Google Apps which is free and stops you from having to migrate your email all over the place when you switch hosts.

The person I replied to specified "major sites". How many major sites do you know that use GoDaddy to host their DNS?
It gets monetized indirectly. Ycomb gets first look for many firms, and these firms get first look at many great developers. This site is plenty monetized - just not with ads or user fees.
I use both on my machine. Safari is my "Facebook" browser -- I use it for Facebook and Facebook alone.

Chrome is my everything else browser. Mainly because it has a unified url/search bar. I have no idea with Safari hasn't picked this up, but that's pretty much it.

Oh and also because all the google apps just seem to work better on Chrome.

I used use Firefox as my everything browser, but it got just too slow. I mostly only use it for testing and doing front-end development.
Email from Stratfor to its members:

> Subject: Important Announcement from STRATFOR

Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 19:49:58 -0500

From: STRATFOR <mail[at]response.stratfor.com>

Dear Stratfor Member,

We have learned that Stratfor's web site was hacked by an unauthorized party. As a result of this incident the operation of Stratfor's servers and email have been suspended.

We have reason to believe that the names of our corporate subscribers have been posed on other web sites. We are diligently investigating the extent to which subscriber information may have been obtained.

Stratfor and I take this incident very seriously. Stratfor's relationship with its members and, in particular, the confidentiality of their subscriber information, are very important to Stratfor and me. We are working closely with law enforcement in their investigation and will assist them with the identification of the individual(s) who are responsible.

Although we are still learning more and the law enforcement investigation is active and ongoing, we wanted to provide you with notice of this incident as quickly as possible. We will keep you updated regarding these matters.

Sincerely,

George Friedman

STRATFOR

221 W. 6th Street, Suite 400

Austin, TX 78701 US

www.stratfor.com

— http://cryptome.org/0005/stratfor-hack.htm
A little more detail on the topic:

http://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/section/domainregistration/d...
Can't access it, is there anyway for me to access the content?
Interesting take Andrew. It's true there's a lot of clever ways that SEO's promote themselves. If you're looking for a comprehensive SEO training class in the San Francisco Bay Area, check out http://www.clickminded.com for less "fakeness is how you win at the internets" tactics like the one you described here :)
I mainly use Chrome now, FF sometimes. There's a simple reason I never installed Safari on Windows: it was pushed on me through Apple Update.
In pictures: 2011 as seen from space
Not officially, no, but I'm sure if google goes to mozilla and says, "hey, we think you guys should support technology X, it's really great" I'm sure you'd listen and probably get a good nudge from the higher ups that, "hey maybe we should listen to those google people".
Merry Christmas pg & the YC crew!
Firefox isn't quite on par with Chrome anymore. It still has a lot of benefits from its legacy advantage in the plugin area.

But I don't think this really matters to the consumer. Firefox has improved rapidly, mostly as a result of chromes competition. It stagnated for years until chrome came along.

It's like Android vs iPhone. Competition creates better products.

If there wasn't a good competitor to keep innovation going, it would be just like Windows in early 2000s.
Online Gambling Given a Boost in U.S. Ruling
Safari has the same problems that Firefox has had in Linux for me. Slow startups, not terribly responsive tabs. In addition, it hides downloads on the FS until they're finished, the download box is awkward, and frankly, it still inferior to Chrome.
Using HTML5 and Navite iOS within same app
Are there any good reads on designing iPad app using HTML5 and native code to maximize benefits of both world.
My concern, how easy/tough it would be to pass control along with states from native to HTML5 and vice-versa.
Chrome ruined Safari for me. When I fire up Safari more often than not I end up doing this: http://i.imgur.com/nDk2R.png
I love this alternating-color feature, it's much easier for me to browse news titles, hope it will be kept for long in future.
Nitpick - the Webkit layout engine wasn't born at Apple. It's derived from KHTML, which is part of the Konqueror and KDE projects.
Could just be me; But I've never found any "Apple" software that wasn't miserable to use on windows. iTunes, QuickTime, Safari... I assume laziness or the feeling that it just isn't necessary on the part of Apple; But who knows.

As for why I use Chrome (Even on my Macs); It's just more pleasant to use. It's the sort of thing that's hard to put a finger on, though it does run google web apps way better than the competition which is a huge reason for me also.
You're right that Oakland is in Alameda County, but you're totally wrong about the highway. Even in morning rush hour it's only 60 minutes from Oakland to SV. I used to commute from Berkeley to San Jose every day.

With no traffic you can totally get from Oakland to the Googleplex in 45 minutes.
He reveals quite a bit of his character and interests in his seminal Art of Computing series. It's a great read for both it's content and it's prose.
Safari's interface is obtuse, slow, and unintuitive. Also (Apple-style) the hitboxes for important buttons are smaller than they need be.

There, I put my finger on it.
This is sort of an aside but what of anything of real value is in these source code releases other than things that would only apply to HTC phones? Just curious if there is anything in these patches that would apply to linux in general.
Sorry, I didn't see that this actually posted. What I intended to say is that a less verbose expression is not necessarily easier to understand. The article is really about the balance between elegance (or performance) and accessibility. An expert coder working with a powerful language like Lisp can implement a lot of functionality very quickly, but there is a point where less skilled programmers working with common understanding of a less flexible language can implement more functionality more quickly, simply because there are more of them working in parallel.
http://www.crazyontap.com
I'm not sure if you're using "translation for "transcription" here but I think I'm in the same position.

I've been using foreign movies subtitled in the same language as is spoken, as a method for studying languages for years as well and really hate it when the transcription is different from the dialogue. Problem seems to be that the transcription is taken directly from the movie/show script, but when filmed, actors rarely go with the script word-for-word. Unless the movies has been fanSubbed by native speakers, it quite hard to find subs with the exact transcription.

I initially thought fixmysubs addressed this somehow, but i guess not. Cool project none the less.
I too abandoned Firefox for Chrome as FF got worse, but Firefox 8 is pretty good again- if you don't load it up with addons.
Myth my ass. Japanese public debt has gone from about 50% GDP in 1980 to over 200% today. Just like the US (but in spades) the Japanese have maintained the illusion of growth by borrowing it, and the moment they have to go outside the home islands to roll over that debt interest rates will rise and render the illusion unsustainable.
Think about who the higher ups at Mozilla are. Brendan Eich is CTO, for instance, and you can see exactly what he thinks about supporting NaCl right now if you look at his recent posts :)
Firefox has become absolute bloatware. Opera is the only browser that is doing any kind of new innovation.
UI is great. I wrote one serveral days ago, aiming to offer real time chat featute(http:zhonglichat.cnodejs.net), new I see how ugly that is.. Nodejs moke chating really fun.
I can't speak for the average user, but I would argue that until Chrome gets the ability to add a separate search bar, it will never be on par with Firefox. Albeit, Chrome is much faster than Firefox, but without that search bar I just can't use it fluidly.
Wow, even the transcript is hard to follow. I wonder if he wishes he could edit it himself, since he is a writer too.
Why is this on the front page when the original Google+ post that this article summarizes is also on the front page?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3389972
We might prioritize things based on input from Google (we tend to listen to things Google's web properties have to say since they run some of the biggest websites on the planet). This is usually a collaboration between the technical folks at both organizations to drive things that are best for the web.

We're not going to implement things that we think are bad for the web just because Google says so. You can look around to see what Brendan Eich (CTO of Mozilla, a higher up by any definition) has to say about Dart and NaCl. Google's money doesn't buy our cooperation on these kinds of issues (and it's worth noting that we work with plenty of people who aren't paying us money, such as Facebook, the same way that we work with Google).
Color of Woman เรื่องย่อ นักแสดง ตัวละคร
The two statements are not necessarily in conflict. It helps Google's bottom line to move the web forward, and make more things possible through browser interfaces.
That notion could not be more wrong.
Safari's integration of bookmarks and reading lists over iCloud is just such a useful feature to have out of the box. I switched back to Safari just for that. Keeping all my devices in sync is a huge gain over slightly faster rendering times.
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/mobile/ios.html
This is entirely backwards looking; of course the people who benefit from the current system will want to keep it in place. The real question is whether others would step in if everyone who is currently writing books suddenly just quit. In practice the authors wouldn't have to carry all the load for the business model innovation; there would be third parties that figure it out and play a role analogous to the role currently played by publishers, e.g. there could be a company similar to kickstarter dedicated to helping authors fund their projects.

We're in early days right now, so the old models still do have a large market share, but we need to be forward-looking and consider the long-run effects.
Android Apps and Games of 2011
> Mainly because it has a unified url/search bar. I have no idea with Safari hasn't picked this up

Privacy, perhaps? Doesn't a unified url/search bar require giving more information to Google (or whatever your default search provider is)?
Apple products just suck on windows. Look at the massive piece of shit that is Quicktime and iTunes. I don't think that anyone that has used either wants to use another Apple product on windows.
Not entirely on-topic, but since you're our local Forth enthusiast: can you tell us anything about Moore's recent (say, last 10 years) chip and language designs? I look at the GreenArrays and ColorForth stuff and feel like Bob Dylan's Mr. Jones: there's something happening here and I don't know what it is.

My spidey sense tells me that it's disruptive enough to represent a major opportunity of some kind. But Spidey could be wrong.
-1. I never got what was so funny about Will Ferrel in tights.
This is a terrible article. The number of people moving away are people moving away from GoDaddy's DNS servers, which does not necessarily have anything to do with the number of people using them as a registrar.
Christmas: Brought to you by chinese slave labor