skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think Fred is arguing that it's often necessary or quasi-necessary or something.

I think he's trying to say something along the lines of "even if you're mocked and misunderstood, persevere, because it does not mean that your product is not good."

It's a pretty poor way to go about saying that, though, and it comes off as if he's bitter about what he heard and trying to reassure himself that his product is good.
I learned Javascript, Coffeescript and did some cool stuff with that, and have studied German and Japanese a bit.

But I have studied language itself more than a specific language.
It's not quite true to say reference counting adds overhead "for each access" -- for example, you can easily have a loop which accesses an object but doesn't modify the reference count. Reference counting adds overhead each time someone "expresses an ownership interest" in an object (wording from http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/genera...).

(That's not to say your main point is false. I don't actually know which is faster in general.)
Yeah, the inventor David Kotkin is/was a teacher and inventor in Miami Florida, he was actually on local news demoing it. It seems it is being sold by a company called iNcontrol Enterprises LLC.

Interestingly, all the press releases up until march 2011 for iNcontrol were done by a florida operation called The HAND Media who seem slightly more legit than Ocean Marketing.

Ocean marketing seems to be mainly interested in promoting his ebay auctions on Twitter.

Someone needs to get in touch with Kotkin and let him know the situation, that his marketing firm seems to have fallen down on the job.
As someone who works in support on a daily basis, I can vouch that being nice makes everything go a whole lot smoother.
Dropping the ball implies a mistake. I'd say he took the ball and threw it right at the other guy's nose.
Tangled Web by Michal Zalewski.
Not really.. I was comfortable with javascript/php :)
Yes. To be listed on a public stock exchange (NASDAQ, NYSE, etc) a company must be extensively audited (e.g., "does this factory really exist? lets go look") and is subject to various regulations (e.g. Sarbox).

When Chuggy G. raises money for an album on kickstarter, you might be surprised to discover that Accenture does not actually audit her.
How so? I ask because I received a Kindle Fire for Christmas from my parents because I had been debating whether to buy one. So far I have used it for reading books and some light web browsing.

The experience has been good so far, although I have not attempted to stress the device or perform an action it was not designed for. Every person I know, who has actually used a Kindle Fire, has had nothing but positive comments; most of them are non-technical.
3 Reasons Entrepreneurs Need To Interact With Real People
BitTorrent Zeitgeist: What People Searched For in 2011
I'm in the process of learning Python. I don't know the internals as deeply as I'd like, but I've used it superficially pretty effectively. It has pretty much replaced Perl for me, but there's still some things about it that annoy me. However it's easy to use, and I'm happy I started the ball rolling on it.
Here are the prices, http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html
Big +1 for Daemon, one of the best modern science fiction novels I've read.
"Accelerando" by Charles Stross. I think this was the third time I read it. There will be a 4th, and a 5th, ...

It's a very interesting idea of how "The Singularity" might look.
The people who have executive power in the leadership structure of companies control what companies do. When ownership is diversified, business owners do not determine what their businesses do; your "tautology" is actually false, obviously so with more than a cursory examination of the world as it is. I myself am a part-owner of ARM, for example, but I have zero effective control over them.

And the question as to what should a company do is very definitely an ethical one. Some people try to argue that ethics only apply to companies in so far as they apply to the people that form the company; but others do not. Because the question isn't "what can a company do within the constraints of law", the question is actually what ought a company do.

Companies help match supply and demand where the supply or demand or both are divided and scattered enough that they can't be efficiently matched through individual contracts. But in this formulation, just like free markets, they have no moral content. The mere fact that there is demand for something does not imply that it is good that the demand is satisfied with supply. Lynch mobs frequently have short bursts of popularity, and they demand someone be lynched; irrelevant of whether they are legal or not, it should be clear that the fact of the demand does not amount to an ethical justification.

So when we ask what ought a company do, it is not enough to look at ownership structures; nor is it enough that we look at the operations of the company in providing supply to market demands. Merely following the law is not enough either; many immoral things are permitted by the law (to the point that later, the law changes), and many moral acts are taxed or prohibited by the law, for various formulations of morality. But more importantly, the law is itself informed by the ethical question over what ought companies do.

For example, it may be the case that child labour is legal in country X, and company A employs children in country X to meet supply for products in country Y, where such child labour is illegal and everybody agrees that it is unethical. By your formulation, there is no way to argue that company A is violating ethical norms. At best, you would suggest that shareholders - e.g. people with pensions, ultimately - should be held ethically responsible. You'll forgive me for thinking that that sounds rather ridiculous.
One lesson I have learned:

Embrace failure, embarrassment, confusion, pain. Don't go seeking them exactly, but don't avoid them. If you are at all ambitious and adventurous in anything -- entrepreneurship, grad school, dating, whatever, then you will fail spectacularly and often. It will hurt. Badly.

But don't flinch. Consider it a good thing, it means that life has not forgotten you. As my Buddhist friends like to say, experience what it's like to feel pain. Remember that it will make a good story to tell your grandchildren, and try again.
The Distribunomicon
I am relearning PHP for a job, and additionally have fiddled around some with haXe.
C++ and (unrelated project) starting to play with ruby and rails...
We have to remember two things about this law:

1) it's "for defects present at the time of sale" (as you stated), and this leads to various (mis)interpretations (like "how can i demonstrate that a non working hard disk was already not perfect at the time of sale and that's not my fault, or just the normal effect of the time and usage?)

2) it's valid only for consumers, so if you're a business and you buy anything using your VAT account, you're not covered by this law and you must stick to the typical commercial warranty (in Italy it is minimum 1 year)
I would hate to be involved in a community (academic or otherwise) that mocks what has been widely known to be a reliable source of information. Wikipedia, that is. Opinions on Tim Ferris vary greatly.
The GoDaddy Saga Continues
New Zealand agencies can be next target after US host was hacked
I started learning C.
What happened to the site?
Hey Zed!

I made a start on your Learn C The Hard Way but after reading several comparisons I believe C++ is better to learn without learning C first. And I believe C isn't a very strong language.

No chance of you starting a C++ one? :D
The obvious answer is that he/she was a child, and simply received the religion from the parents. As far as I can tell, most people are religious because their upbringing was, and of those most simply adopt an interpretation of the religion they were brought up under.

Even in adulthood I'd be absolutely astonished if even 50% of any major religion have read to completion the core text of that religion, indeed I would expect the number to be far lower.
Sunglass - Other product - Oakley Sunglasses -
Variable retail pricing is a multi-billion dollar industry, the mechanisms are just a wee bit different than revenue management in the airlines. Examples include variable pricing by region, outlet, and season. Other examples are sales, coupons, and rebates. You can trivially pay five different prices on the same day for bitwise identical copies of the same Chinese sock if you want to.

A wrinkle for the retail apocalypse: wonder why X/Y/Z is closing but you can find a bank branch and cell phone shop within one block of any arbitrary location in a middle class neighborhood in an American city? Answer: lucrative backends to their retail transactions. (Starbucks is essentially the same, in that siting is less about selling coffee and more about selling habitual coffee consumption.)
I'd read Ender's Game some time before, but recently someone lent me the next three and they're similarly brilliant. Can't decide which is my favourite though; probably not Children of the Mind because the aiùa stuff is weird.
Players (2012) Action Thriller Movie Wallpapers, 
The dynamic director duo Abbas-Mustan are back again with biggest action extravaganza for audiences. Players is an Bollywood action thriller movie, starring Abhishek Bachchan, Sonam Kapoor, Bipasha Basu, Bobby Deol, Neil Nitin Mukesh, Omi Vaidya and Sikander Kher. The movie is directed by Abbas-Mustan, and is the official remake of the 2003 Hollywood film 'The Italian Job'. The music by Pritam Chakraborty and Ashish Pandit is the lyricist. The movie story shows the thieves that set up plan to rob gold bullion from a former partner who has actually swindled them. Sonam Kapoor is extremely optimistic about her role in the movie. The Players movie sets through India,
Typography Poster Design: 20+ Most Beautiful Typography Posters
Nothing really much for me.. Improved my Javascript by writing Chrome Extensions, but I do want to learn Node.js and MongoDB.
The other tip I heard (which has worked for me) is to say something like "I need help to ask the right question, because I don't know how the process works. Here's what I want; what do I need to do to make that happen?". This is more for bureaucracy but also works for some customer service stuff.
"To Kill a Mocking Bird", "Logicomix" in English.

A play called "Andha Yug" (The Age of Darkness) in Hindi. English translation is also available for those interested. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0198065221/
I learned Prolog and logic and constraint programming in general. Not only did I learn the Prolog language and some of it's dialects for constraint programming and fuzzy logic as a part of a logic programming course, I also wrote an interpreter for a Prolog-like programming language in Haskell as a part of an AI course.

Prolog and Logic programming in general are really worth learning. They will definitely widen your horizons when it comes to programming. Implementing a logic programming system will also teach some basic pattern matching and unification algorithms and applying them.
Staying the Course - Saving a golf course, an island, and a life
The burden of proof for the mandatory warranty reverses after six months (not twelve) in Germany.

For the first six months the manufacturer has to prove that the damage was inflicted by the customer and not a problem with the device itself. After that for another 18 months the customer has to prove that the device was already defective when he acquired it and he's not to blame.

Adding to that the manufacturer itself can give any voluntary guarantee he wants (Apple usually offers one year and you are able to extend it with AppleCare). It's a private contract between the manufacturer and the customer.

It's seems that "Apple pushed a paid warranty service with its AppleCare service" and Italy wasn't happy about it.
Google Code-In – Perl Progress Report (and how you can help)
Amazon certainly never promised a year of Prime.
I played with Haskell, to the point of being able to read and understand larger chunks of Haskell code - but I haven't written anything of note in it yet. Not sure I ever will, either. I started playing with it due to git-annex (which was written in Haskell, and that triggered the interest) and the LYAH book (which is beyond awesome, by the way). Coming from an OO/imperative background, functional programming seemed interesting, and even though I didn't end up using Haskell, the tricks and ideas I borrowed did have a huge impact on me.

The other language I played a lot with, and ended up using a lot this year is Clojure. The main reason I started learning it is because its not only a LISP, it's a mostly functional, yet, practical language, whose concurrency and paralellism support is unparalelled. Being a JVM language, with great interoperability with Java also means that I can use existing Java libraries. All in all, it had great properties, and a syntax I was already somewhat familiar with (being an Emacs user for the past 12 years or so did expose me to at least some lisp, after all!), so my next few projects, which will likely see the light of day in early 2012, will be written in Clojure.

I also learned a bit about sparc assembly, because I had to, and as much as I didn't want to, I learned to read PHP a little bit better than I used to. I'm not exactly proud of that, but nevertheless, that's what happened.
2011/2012 new season real madrid red soccer jersey
Here are New Real Madrid Shirt Boy of different clubs, teams, countries. Our selection of Soccer Kit Children will keep you at the top of your game! You will get all kinds of Kids Football Jerseys with the price you would expect to pay
Avatar: Brain Hacks with Neurocinematics
I'm going to follow your anecdote with my own, for whatever it's worth.

For decades, my family has considered various members to have been "ripped apart" by drug and alcohol abuse. As it turns out, some were self-medicating, such as the schizophrenic who went undiagnosed and unmedicated for so many years it caused irreparable damage to his brain. Others were survivors of terrible abuse who drank, used drugs, and engaged in other rote addictive behaviors to shut out the pain and demons.* While more complicated than the more physical, medical problem of schizophrenia, the fact that these mental health concerns have also gone undiagnosed and untreated is the reason the substance abuse continues.

Addiction and addictive behaviors, whether involving substance or not (and there are many horribly destructive addictive behaviors that have nothing whatsoever to do with mind-altering and/or harmful substances) are not what we were taught to think by scare tactics in school. I see a lot of commentary throughout this thread that indicates a lot of people are educated in an adult manner on the topics of addiction and substance abuse, which is great. Getting there is a bit of a challenge, though, and one you have to undertake personally. Public policy regarding drug awareness, unfortunately, still revolves around cheap scare tactics.

* Homeless street addicts use substance to stop the voices in their heads or escape great mental pain. The substances are not where the problem originated. They're simply the way the person has of dealing with those problems.
We're in between: full-on dedicated servers with SoftLayer for more intense tasks. We like being able to have other people work on the machine without having to drive to a data center in the middle of nowhere, but knowing that we have 100% of the hardware at our disposal (as opposed to virtualized disks and sporadic performance on EC2). It's really not that expensive either and we can still bring new machines online in a couple of hours if necessary.
Data point:

Last month I had to choose an ISP in Spain. The experience was painful. Every company has only "special offers" in the front page and I had to dig to the very deepest of their webs to find the real numbers and, even then, cut through a lot of BS, intentional poor phrasing, and all kind of misleading statements.

The provider I chose was not better than the rest. The real price was striked-out and a lower price, only valid for exceptional circumstances presented as the norm.

On the phone it's worse. They consistently scam people.

I spent several hours hating all them. But that's a recurring expense of forty euros a month, plus a hundred up front. If this scheme was imposed for small purchases, no way. Either I would choose a simpler retailer, even if more expensive, or wouldn't buy at all.
I learned Verilog at my summer job, and discovered that FPGAs are freaking awesome.
(I also learned Perl and Python there, neither of which are awesome. Abandon hope all ye who enter the NetFPGA toolchain!)
Did Apple patent all pads and smartphones?
"Lila" (http://www.amazon.com/Lila-Inquiry-Morals-Robert-Pirsig/dp/0... ) gave me most food for thought this year.
This. His writing was life-changing for me in many ways. Incredibly accessible, useful discussion of various human logic fallacies. Fundamental misattribution error FTW!
Download Corona - The iOS 5.0.1 Untethered Jailbreak
I learned Smalltalk (Pharo dialect). It was awesome. Took me two weeks to go from zero to write a small rss reader in it.

Resources:

http://www.pharocasts.com

http://www.usmug.org
Welcome to the Age of Planets
I was in roughly the same prior-Harry-Potter-knowledge state as you are and I enjoyed it.
The Internet's Perilous New Year's Resolution
In EU everything you buy is protected with a minimum of two years by law.

It would be odd and not clever for Apple to intentionally and illegally try to be paid for one more year of customer support.
I think this didn't happen for two reasons:

- They just did want to keep it simple and have the same customer service rules across all countries.

- They just didn't deepen into the EU laws, which I think is a syntom of "corporate laziness".

Actually there is another option: they did know about the law, but the costs of supporting a longer free customer service is higher than paying a fee: lots of free product replacements? Just thinking.
Yea I didn't say it was good, but it's there. I had a similarly terrible experience with their mail client.
I picture Paul like a real life Tom Haverford from Parks. The "you got told bitch" line is pure Tom.
It's set in an alternate universe to the actual Harry Potter series, and starts from the events in the first book. You won't miss much from not having read the actual books.
I hear they are doing the same thing in Norway, too, offering 2 years of warranty instead of the usual 3 year warranty there. It's strange that the company that wants to be known for having the highest quality products offers the smallest warranty period.
Agreed neither came off very well. But for the PR guy this should have been a walk in the park to deal with. I used to do customer service at an oversized health insurance company this would have been considered a mild case. You make a note in your outlook (or whatever you use) to check on the situation every once in awhile, send a nicely worded email saying you are personally following the situation and when it is done thanks them for their patience. Sure customers are not always happy but let’s face it the company broke its promise. Instead this PR guy gets his ego on and for that he should be fired. He was unprofessional when he should have known better.
Ah, yeah, six months, right. I think that was changed sometime ago. I'm still stuck on the twelve months.
Safety in numbers. Sony and Nintendo are both on this. They're counting on nerds being reflexively unwilling to switch to Microsoft on a matter of principle, even though Microsoft seems to be the least evil of the three.
What blows my mind even more is to imagine the sheer immensity in the scale here: A tiny speck of a probe in the vastness of space.

No matter whether those aliens are hostile or not, kudos to them if they can even find the damn thing!
Introduction to System Testing
Would that be the very same Japanese K-computer referred to in the second paragraph of the submitted article?

> To reach 10 petaflops, which is just marginally slower than the world’s fastest HPC installation, Japan’s K computer,
In a similar vein, I'd recommend Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe.

Before SS, my martial arts instructor always chided me: "Crazybear, don't power through the disarm. There are lots of guys bigger than you. Get the leverage right."

Now he tells newbies: "Don't power through the disarm, it won't work on a guy like Crazybear. Get the leverage right."

It's a simple how-to guide to getting strong. Just follow the program he gives and you become stronger - it's time tested and works well for pretty much everyone. Be really careful with deadlifts, particularly if you have back issues.
Yes, I think I use ICQ for communication with precisely three people. So I guess I see your point ;-)
What he means (I think) is that it's only a surface understanding. You won't be able to hold your own in a serious conversation with experts on the topic.
Nope. Far too busy building out our product.
The original Groklaw post says:

> "The USPTO has delivered one final (rejection) holiday package to Google, this one at Oracle's expense."

The 9to5google post says:

> "The United States Patent and Trademark office delivered a final rejection to Google at the expense of Oracle."

Almost exactly the same sentence but with completely different inplications.
I'm not sure that I see the need for the jailbreak anymore. I used to jailbreak all of my devices, but Apple has removed most of the reason for it now. They have legitimate tethering, its available on multiple carriers, improved notifications, and pretty decent multitasking.
IPhone Apps Videos "Its all About iphone"
GPL/Commercial dual-licensing is evil for libraries
E) A large fraction of GoDaddy's customers know what DNS is and what SOPA would mean. If every Walmart customer who knew what DNS was walked out, Walmart wouldn't feel it. GoDaddy is noticing this.
Mobile Morning Coffee (12/27/11)
I think the introduction of Windows/Xbox Live was the driving force that pushed it in the triple digits million userbase here, not an actual decision to switch to MSN. If all of your friends are suddenly on another service, it's no wonder you'll switch eventually.
How about this:

When you throw a ball, you are converting the potential energy in your body to a kinetic energy stored in the ball. In order for the ball to slow down, something has to get that energy out of it. Since energy can't be destroyed, the ball is forced to keep going forever until the kinetic energy is taken away.
This year:

- I wrote my first C++ app using Qt

- I tried getting into Django and RoR, coming from a PHP background. Unfortunately, I haven't yet had a chance to code anything worthwhile in either Python or Ruby.

My goals in 2012:

- Create a non-trivial Ruby or Python app. Still haven't chosen between the two. Ruby currently seems more popular but Python is used quite a bit in my company and for engineering applications in general.

- Program an HTML5/JS game, eventually using GameJS.

- Maybe learn Java for Android.
Common Lisp, although I started learning it last year. I don't know if it counts, but I learned SQL and I’m currently studying relational theory in more depth. I also had to take a course on Prolog, but I'd be bullshiting you all if I said I knew prolog, I know enough of it to write factorial and reverse lists.
a few questions about Voyager 1- Is it designed to withstand re-entry into an "earth-like" planet? It just seems like the odds are astronomically low that this thing would find its way to intelligent life. I understand that it makes sense to put some information about our existence on it, but it seems that worrying that someone will come hunt us down and take our resources is not even worth thinking about.