skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Go to any consumer electronics store and try to buy a computer not running any code from one of these two companies.

Yes, if you're a sysadmin, getting naked iron is no problem. But you're gonna have code from these running on your network, as it stands today.
The major problem (which is addressed in the article, by the way) is that once you've set a course you can't really change it much at all. Newtonian mechanics really limits your options here. Warships and space battles would be completely preprogrammed: detect enemy ship; set course for enemy ship; accelerate to maximum velocity; attempt to kill enemy ship with automated systems and not die as you shoot past.

This isn't really an "engagement" as we think of it now, it's more of just a fire-and-pray scenario.
Api.jquery.com is down.
http://api.jquery.com is currently down. I can understand the plugin page being down, but isn't this too much?
$300 for three guys.

Once you factor in the girlfriend subsidy, they would have made better money with far less risk by getting shifts at local fast food restaurants.
Do you take the plane much?

The overwhelming majority of these systems are verified using rigorous but non-formal methods (tests and code reviews). An application of formal methods here or there is so exceptional that it's publication-worthy (for instance http://www.springerlink.com/content/h33p602vh34634v8/ ). The currently applicable standard (that has been applied in the design of all the planes you have taken), DO-178B, does not even mention formal methods, so that when you want to apply them in substitution to the rigorous mandatory process (instead of just applying them in addition to it and doubling your costs wrt your competitors), you need lengthy explanations.

Things are changing, but they are changing slowly (I think you want this culture to be conservative, in fact). The next revision of the aforementioned standard will mention formal methods (but certainly not make them mandatory).
Check out domize.com - great interface, tells you quickly whats available. You can set it to use namecheap as your default registrar, so clicking on one takes you right there. Works really well, but only for searching.
On the contrary, I think it's great that they're sponsoring PyCon! I'd love to see more companies get involved, including the one I work for. I was merely pointing out the hypocrisy (for lack of a better term) of them sponsoring PyCon and then nuking their Python SDK.

There's no reason why Facebook, with their size and engineering talent, shouldn't be able to allocate the resources to maintain their Python SDK. Making it the 20% project of a single engineer would be enough, I should think, with a few extra hours thrown in when major API changes come through. Even if they let the community drive the bulk of development, they really can't spare a few hours a week to look over bug reports and pull requests?

It's easy to write a check, but I'd like to see them take some real action and make Python a first-class citizen for Facebook app development.
http://jquery.com seems to be working fine by the way.
My roommate in grad school did this. He'd buy toys on clearance from local toystores, and then sell them on EBay for twice the price. He wasn't selective at all w/ respect to the actual toy. Just looked for large markdowns.

He made decent money, but said that putting stuff in boxes and going to the post office was a hassle. He eventually stopped -- he was finishing med school at the time.
Concert Tickets Make The Holidays Fun
Yes I quite agree with you, for established domains. It's interesting that only 3% of resolvers are parent-centric.

I was referring more to when registering a domain. To prevent the IPS resolver caching a non existent NS record for negative TTL.
There Is No Such Thing As Android, Only Android-Compatible
Cool thanks. Sounds like it's exactly what I need.
http://notes.avaaz.org/kRBXB8P1Ci check it out!
These look like pre-paid power-minutes or something similar. So you pay for 500 minutes of power, and when you've used it all the power stops. When the solar panel knows when you've paid for however many minutes are required to "own" the device you stop having to buy minutes for it.

So they could run the risk of people just not paying for the device anymore because they can't afford or don't want it anymore, or tamper with it to try and get it working without paying it off. They'd still have the 10% initial fee plus any minutes they paid for already.
Would Obama Veto SOPA? Extremely Doubtful
No, this act of defiance was counterproductive, since it paints reasonable people with the same lunatic brush and is based on an illogical and ignorant argument.

But I don't so much care about ineffective vanity protests as I do about the fact that a DailyKos article about one was on the front page of HN. Which is why I flagged the story, and think you should too.

Stories like this are a trap. Most of us, being reasonable, logical people, have a litany of valid arguments against the TSA. A story like this confirms those beliefs and is conflated with them, so that pointing out that the story (a) sucks and (b) isn't germane to HN is taken as an argument against the beliefs, and not just the story.
Did you really think arbitrage of used goods could be a business? I think the best thing these types of experiments do is expose pain points and inefficiencies that you can make businesses out of.

When I was in my ramen phase of startup life (and newly married), I used to (among other things) buy clothes at local thrift stores and resell them on eBay for a decent margin. You quickly learn what brands/items sell and occasionally I'd hit gold and find a vintage Hawaiian shirt that fetches $200 (and cost $2).

In the end though, you realize it's just a way to make some extra money. It's not a "business" IMO–and definitely not a scalable business. But you learn what sucks (like dealing with shipping & getting photos from a camera to eBay pre-Smartphone) and realize other people also feel that pain. That's where your business is.

UPDATE: Downvotes, seriously? Read my reply down this thread. Some people on here are, frankly, ridiculous and have no clue how to engage in a meaningful discussion.
Did you read the rest of his post? He didn't predict general intelligence within the next 20 years. Rather, he predicted that the special purpose weapons AI would be sufficient to handle the sort of latencies that would happen in some hypothetical space combat.

Perhaps I'm reading your posts wrong, but it seems a fairly conservative prediction to me.
If I walk into a car dealer, lay down my cash and refuse to sign their EULA, would they really refuse to accept my money? Is an industry that's hard-hit by the bad economy going to put additional impediments in the way of sales?

Also, requiring this kind of EULA would be bad publicity for companies since it would emphasize to potential buyers that the seller is afraid of being sued for defective products. Companies that don't require such an agreement would be at a competitive advantage since they'd project an image of higher quality and more respect for the customer.
Was Fred Wilson being literal, or just encouraging folks to be contrarian? Contrarianism does have some empirical support. (Low PE stocks have outperformed high PE stocks over long time horizons)
Tank and plane crews are also "sitting in a glorified tin can", but that didn't preclude, say, WW2 from being vastly more strategic than any preceding conflicts.

That was because military doctrine had adapted to the invention of radio at that point. That would actually go away at the kind of distances we're talking about. Thirty-second communication lag is enough to ruin the command battlefield view.

Almost all of those things were actually decided by the officers commanding the tank / plane battalions, not the crews of the tanks themselves. Those officers had unprecedented battlefield knowledge. None of this would be true of spaceships.

That's not even considering that spaceships operating at interplanetary speeds have far smaller effective maneuvering envelopes than any WW2 vehicle. Even the clumsiest terrestrial vehicle can turn around and leave. A realistic spaceship cannot, unless it had planned for it in advance.
Why waste bombs. If you can create wormholes at arbitrary locations just teleport piece of a star into a planet.
Huh, why do you require human-like AI to control a bunch of high-velocity objects, calculate intercepts, and release other high-velocity objects on those intercepts?

The only human-level decision that needs to be made is simply confirming the object is a target and should be attacked.
Once you fire a rifle, everything is also Newtonian and deterministic. You still have to move into position, decide which target to fire at, with what ammo etc

What you describe is quite close to an actual weapon used in WW2, the SG 500:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagdfaust
Things have indeed changed, then.

I used to write software destined for avionics (assembler stuff in the 80s) and that was required to apply formal considerations.

I think that conservatism in certain avenues of software implementation is essential and one can't even truly be considered an engineer (or software engineer, whatever that currently means) without exposure to formal discipline.

Edit: I've never considered myself to be an engineer of any kind nor have I claimed to be one.
Google+ passes 62 million users. Adding 625,000 new users per day.
Maybe I'm confused. It seems like Facebook has the ability to hire as many 'resources' as they possibly can. Are you saying that there are no Python developers out there that you could hire that would be willing to work on the SDK?
My son (an occasional Hacker News participant) was in a similar position a few years ago. I'll list here a variety of books that should be helpful, some of which were recommended to him by summer program instructors, and others of which were recommended to me by parents of other children with similar activity backgrounds.

For access to a lot of mathematical concepts at a reasonable reading level, not at all expensive, I recommend Concepts of Modern Mathematics by Ian Stewart.

http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Modern-Mathematics-Ian-Stewar...

Ian Stewart is a mathematician who loves to write popular writings on mathematics, and you can hardly go wrong with anything he has written.

From Zero to Infinity: What Makes Numbers Interesting by Constance Reid

http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Infinity-Makes-Numbers-Interestin...

is very accessible and covers a number of interesting topics.

The Art of Problem Solving by Richard Rusczyk and Sandor Lehoczky

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Store/viewitem.php?item=p...

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Store/viewitem.php?item=p...

is a straight-up contest preparation book, in two volumes, that your son may find interesting. Volume 2 is for high school level contests.

For an interesting (in places laugh-out-loud funny) book about the place of mathematics in modern life and how mathematicians think about mathematics, I recommend The Pleasures of Counting by T. W. Körner.

http://www.amazon.com/Pleasures-Counting-T-246-rner/dp/05215...

This one is more challenging as to reading level and as to mathematical level than the recommendations above, but well worth having around the house.
The really funny thing is that the LCD panel business is generally horrible. All profits must be reinvested in expensive new production lines, there's little differentiation among makers, and everybody's been gunning for market share in a growing market. Net net, the panel makers have made next to nothing, even with price-fixing.

The current situation is even more dire. None of the LCD panel makers have turned a profit for almost two years now as rapid LCD TV demand growth has slowed down. I'm not saying their behavior should be condoned, but this is kicking them while they're down.
> this "press release" doesn't say anything interesting, and seems to have a "grudging" tone.

Indeed. If GoDaddy want to convince people they're sincere, they might try a large donation to the EFF.
Why is your conclusion that it can't scale? You are making 20% profit on these chairs. There are many people you can pay 30% of your margin and they'd be happy. You can automate the buying and selling, sourcing people who can do the "heavy lifting." Actually, you can use your site to facilitate it.
It's an interesting topic for discussion, but the writer makes lots of "realistic" assumptions whil ignoring many others. Assuming this level of "realism" -- I.e. no unforeseen technologies -- we basically don't get enormously high delta-v for most kinds of useful ship, so the very high sustained accelerations (e.g. 4G) aren't going to happen. The discussion of perfect intelligence is good but fails to mention that most plausible spacecraft would be detectable at enormous ranges even with their engines OFF. Clearly almost everything will be automated and networked.

I think the writer starts out with the a priori assumption that there will be spaceships with a crew at one end and an engine at the other and works from there. I suspect you'll just have a swarm of networked drones. Why put so many eggs in one basket?

(We're already seeing this approach being experimented with on nuclear hunter killer subs, where firing at an enemy gives away your position, and giving your position away gets you killed -- the US Navy has been working on submarines tha launch drone firing platforms.)
Interesting. I've definitely looked for & removed boxing/unboxing. I haven't touched MaxInlineSize tho.

What performance improvements/degradations have you seen in altering MaxInlineSize?
Voyager I - entering interstellar space - has 8,000 words of memory
I agree with the author in that it's unlikely we'll get a Star Trek scenario where a single ship can continue taking hits without much consequence. In all likelihood the first hit a spacecraft takes will destroy it.

In that environment you really want as many small ships as possible - large capital ships really work against you. Any centralized command system would also be trivially easy to destroy by concentrating fire on the command ship.

A swarm of distributed ships seems much more viable in this system.
His point is how he explained REST to someone with out a technical background. It just so happened that that person was his wife.

If it was his dad instead, would there be any issue? https://gist.github.com/1525252
I think the big missing point here is that it can take up to 48 hours (or even 72 hours) for every ISP to reset their cache and get your new destination. Sure, I can always run dig or even dscacheutil manually to wipe my computer's DNS cache, and I'm pointed over at OpenDNS and Google's DNS so I don't really have to worry about DNS caching issues, but my customers aren't.

I can't say "Hey look, it works on my machine so you must have a lazy ISP, your fault!" when they say "Hey it's been 6 hours and my website doesn't work yet", the proper answer is simply that in most cases it takes up to 48 hours to work.
Wife: How does it work?

Ryan: The web?

Wife: Yeah.

Ryan: Hmm. Well, it’s all pretty amazing really. And the funny thing is that it’s all very undervalued. The protocol I was talking about, HTTP, it’s capable of all sorts of neat stuff that people ignore for some reason.

Wife: You mean http like the beginning of what I type into the browser?

Ryan: Yeah. That first part tells the browser what protocol to use. That stuff you type in there is one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of computing.

Ryan went down a completely different path than I would have. I don't think most people who ask how the web works care about the http protocol. At least I wouldn't, if I didn't know better. I think I'd be more interested in how the network infrastructure is laid out and how requests get from my computer to a server and the data back and rendered. http is really just an implementation detail (people did this far before http existed).
Haha, I just about wrote the same thing but scrolled down.

Having line numbers will be a nice addition when I'm not using Firebug as a simpler way to quickly find something.
The $1 chair is very unlikely to still be a chair in a couple of years if it is sat upon for ~4160 hours. Perhaps you could still sell it for $1 as firewood, though.

If you're happy with a "doordesk" and a metal or wooden folding chair, more power to you. I bought my own personal Aeron years ago, I've used it at multiple different companies and at home when I was freelancing. In the approximately 10 years I've been sitting very comfortably on that ~$800 chair I've gone through dozens of thousands of dollars of now obsolete computer equipment (desktops and laptops). From that perspective combined with the fact that the chair is still in very much like-new condition, even paying $800 for it was well worth it, IMO.

I'm also quite fond of the Ikea Galant height adjustable desk I also bought ~6 years ago, and that one doesn't have the premium price of the Aeron. I do like a good value... IME, the Aeron actually is a good value despite the high price.
We're talking about replacing people in combat vehicles with AI. Considering the need for tactics, strategy and improvisation in a conflict that can take place light-years away, that won't work with anything less than general-purpose AI.
S2Games ignores a 46+ page thread of Mac Users - No support
S2Games, makers of Heroes of Newerth, have been ignoring the Mac community for over 3 months because of an issue where there's no sound in-game on the client for OS X Lion, which many users have payed a decent amount of money for. Pretty ridiculous.
It’s unlikely Priceonomics could build a massively successful business arbitraging used goods if we have to take possession of them.

Did you consider letting the buyers and sellers do the leg work?

Setup a distribution center. Sellers who want to offload stuff scan the items and their details to you and you give them instant, fair quotes. If they like your offer, they bring the items to your center, and you check to make sure everything is as it was stated.

You put the items, their details and their new prices (with your margin markup) online for buyers to peruse. If interested, they'll come by and pick up whatever they want.

Like an online pawn store w/ local centers, except there's no pawning, just selling & buying.
Wow... His "wife" seems to know exactly what questions to ask, and how to respond in precisely the correct manner as to move the conversation along:

"Sounds like GET is a pretty important verb."
there have been stories of people who scavenge for used/old/rare books and resell them for an exhorbitant mark up (http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2010/10/confes...)

some arbitrage of used goods can be a business; but it ultimately depends on the effort required and sustainable the income generated.
The dumbest attack on the netflix free ride
I'm going to assume you're at least open to the idea of computer programming. I was in a very similar situation at 20. I had a very hard time finding a job, and when I did it didn't pay very well. I later moved, and repeated the experience. Finally I figured some things out, and 3 years later I'm making 3 times as much and jobs are applying for me.

Here is my step-by-step advice:
1. Look at the job postings in your geographical area and try to find out what languages/technical skills they are looking for. There should be a fairly common job title, such as "SAS Analyst." You are going to paint yourself as the ideal candidate for this job title-it should be pretty common amongst different companies, but also specific enough that anyone will know immediately what you're looking for if you say "I'm looking for a position as an XYZ." Being overly broad ("I'm looking for a position as a programmer") is the kiss of death here!
2. Learn at least one of those languages/skills really well, and try to get some proof. This may be a certification or some sort of app you build. I recommend SAS if it's desirable in your area-it's very easy to get SAS certified and get SAS jobs in my experience.
3. Follow this approach to applying for jobs:
i. Network. Talk to people in your local area, especially those who are interested in the skill you learned. Tell them you're looking for a job as a XYZ (your chosen job title). Since you have a specific position in mind people will very easily be able to refer you if someone they know is looking for a person in that field.
ii. Learn how to write a good resume. One very important tip is to add the keywords
related to that job. I found the advice at this site [1] very useful, although beware that some of the other content on the site is a little out there.
iii. Apply to jobs using your improved resume and network. Note that even with a great resume maybe 10% of job postings will reply-don't be discouraged, this just means you have to apply to a lot and network a lot.

This advice is not optimized for getting you your ideal dream job-it's optimized for getting a $50k job that will help improve your situation and give you the resources to continue improving your life from there. Feel free to ask/email me any questions.
Honestly, I didn't even include the iPad in the analogy. I would say the iPad is the 767.

The Nook Tablet is borderline DC-10. Of course, I'm looking at these devices with a rooting perspective as well. The screen quality, RAM, and extra storage space giving the Nook the edge. I have no desire to listen to music on a tablet, so I really only care about web browsing and video. The e-ink devices are still superior for regular text IMO. Unfortunately, since the publishers adopted the agency pricing model, these devices won't decrease in cost as quickly as they would have under regular retail pricing that would've allowed the razor blade model to defer the costs.
i imagine each planet/unit of an inter-system civilization will not be self-sufficient. seige, baby. i think a study of earth's military tactics and goals will answer the questions raised by this post.
Pro: They've refused to disable domains or turn over private WHOIS data to lawyers representing trademark holders and celebrities. GoDaddy's standard response to an abuse complaint is to yank the domain same day, Namecheap's is to say "get a court order or GTFO".

Con: Transfers are absurdly slow. It took 'em 5-6 hours to initiate the transfer after I ordered. I approved the transfer on both ends instantly. Within the hour the root registry showed the domains moved to Namecheap/enom ownership. 12 hours later, Namecheap still shows everything as pending in their interface. That means I have no management of my own domains -- if I needed to change nameservers or such I'm SOL.
I'll never forget what John Carpenter taught me in They Live. "The golden rule: He who has the gold makes the rules."
The article suggests that both Google Public DNS and nominum are parent centric, which might be a significant portion of the 3% (or larger at this point).

These days with the number of resolvers that have fall-back catch-all records designed to redirect you to a search / suggest feature, I think that you also need to worry about positive TTLs.

You're right that if a domain is pristine, and has never been queried, that in all likelihood, you'll be able to have it resolvable within minutes, not hours, but this still seems like a relatively uncommon case.

In practice, people do query for their domain as its propagating, and do buy meaningful names that are likely to have some low-level background rate of queries, and there's not much to stop the legion of bots that are watching for whois updates either.

I guess I take the most issue with your headline. DNS taking 48+ hours to propagate is not a myth.
You can add and remove it on a month to month basis, though, if you only need it intermittently. In any case it's well worth the cost if you do need it, and is much cheaper than other ways of obtaining cellular Internet access.