skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
65MB is our current unoptimized, uncompressed version. I expect the final version to be around 5-10MB. Still large, but not quite as bad.
That's just it, he spoke about free software, not these larger issues. And getting people to adopt free software is an orthogonal issue.

Even if GPL software had 99% market share in the US, and everyone in the country were running the same kind of computer as Stallman, the government could still step in and pass all kinds of draconian laws.

Getting regular people to adopt the GPL ethos is fine, but if the ethos doesn't permeate government as well, Stallman might as well be touring around promoting the Spice Girls for all governments will be prevented from doing intrusive things.
How about printers that secretly record tracking info on each page you print? Or the code in PhotoShop that makes sure I can't scan money? We know about these now, but only because they were discovered. I'm not sure if it is even possible to buy a printer with out this "technology".

These are only examples: how about when we find that the government has not only been tracking us via our cellphones, but also activating the mic and activly collecting data? It just is not possible to "choose" not to be spied on, unless you know all the ways the spying is done.
OLPC Tried to make a $100 /computer/ (laptop, and got pretty close (~$185). And Raspberry is making a $25 development board. I applaud Raspberry Pi and their intentions. But putting all of the necessary devices to make this also a /computer/ will probably cost at least $100.

Without contrasting $25 and $100 pricepoints, what else is the author trying to say?
Looks like it means it handles 8-bit character sets properly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-bit_clean
You don't have to be trapped in the ecosystem. I made a transition from a .Net ecosystem into Linux + Java a while back. It's hard, but not impossible, especially if you keep up to date with your non-.Net skills.
Not quite. It will support everything that SpiderMonkey's API supports when embedding the interpreter into a C++ application. Much more powerful than eval().
Here are some of the things they did to get to 100k members. (I couldn't squeeze them into a headline, but the substance belongs in the interview, not the headline.)

- Bo got well-known backers because he did something that many other founders put down -- he got a job. He worked for the Kauffman Fund, which introduced him to the startup community's founders, investors and other supporters. He built up a reputation by helping the community. That helped him get top investors and supporters.

- When some of his famous backers tweeted links to his site, he converted those hits into email subscribers so he could build a relationship with people who were interested in Zaarly's vision of the world.

- He converted early fans into communities. These communities met both online (Facebook) and offline (meetups) and helped introduce others to Zaarly.

- Zaarly cultivated evangelists, some of those evangelists came up with promotion ideas that Zaarly's team couldn't have come up with on its own. One guy lived on nothing but what he could order on Zaarly, as a way of dramatizing how helpful the service could be.

- To ensure that new users who wanted to hire help on Zaarly got service, it partnered with other companies. At SXSW, for example, they teamed up with rickshaw drivers and paid them to fulfill requests. (If anyone reading this is trying to build an online marketplace and is having trouble solving the chicken and egg issue, I think our discussion of how Bo activated his marketplace through partnerships like this will really help.)

I don't want to turn this comment into a rehash of every point in the interview, but I promise that I care about useful tacts and ideas. I give you my word that I go after them and pack them into my interviews.

That headline is backed by hours of research before the interview, and a mutual goal with Bo during the interview.
Happens to the best of us. Don't let it discourage you.
OLPC == hype, true. But it's not like OLPC took pre orders either.
(This is not editor related but in a similar vein...)

At my previous job we had to get a QIDO[1] since I type Dvorak and switching layouts with Cmd-Space was driving us both insane. We would invariably forget to switch and either write gibberish into the file or, worse, hit some unintended keyboard shortcuts. After getting a QIDO it was fine though.

[1] http://www.keyghost.com/qido/
> Elsevier's stated position is that publishing the manuscript version is not copyright infringement.

Do you have a link to a place where Elsevier states this explicitly?
He co-authored a license that anyone can use to share software, prose, and other copyrightable material.

That license, and others derived from it, are at the root of most non-proprietary software and many types of user-created content. Using the internet means you've used software that likely could not have been created without such licenses. Wikipedia is another example of something using a license derived from the one he helped create.

Helping create flourishing communities of people legally sharing each others' work, collectively creating great works, influences legislation. Imagine if no licenses existed for people to legally remix each other's work without explicit permission. Disney, the MPAA, the RIAA, and others would have had greater ability to lengthen copyright terms, increase penalties for infringement, and so on.

Microsoft had a strong play for extending from the desktop to servers when Unix was fragmented. I wonder what might have happened if apache didn't exist to compete with Microsoft -- how much more influence Microsoft might have had over U.S. legislation.

He's done a lot more than just help write the GPL, but that alone contributed a lot.
"you're stumbling across the app that is misbehaving and signalling to the app that you're done with it, at which point it kills off its own misbehaving background thread."

Yes - this most likely is precisely what I'm doing. And it works. Consistently.

I'm not sure whether you are upset that (A) I have an iPhone in which shutting down all the apps on the Multitasking/MRU/Task Switcher bar fixes its battery/CPU problems or (B) that I disagree with Speir's when he states that "To maximise performance and battery life, you should kill them all manually." is wrong, wrong, wrong.

I suspect that it's mostly (B) - I hope you'll grant me my own observation of (A).

I actually agree with 95% of your last statement - particularly the part about throwing out all of the food in the house when the milk goes bad - but I don't really have an option - no (easy) way to figure out which app is sucking all the battery.

The "Magical Thinking" statement was a bit over the top though. I think we can avoid the ad-hominen on HN and keep the discourse at a higher level.
These kinds of things always make me think of PyPy and its snake-eating-itself (ouroboros) logo.
Isn't Narcissus primarily for developing Harmony features?
profit = paying users * price per user - total users * expense per user - overhead expenses

Business on the internet seems to be much more about driving up total users while driving down expense per user, rather than driving up paying users / total users.
It's a good thing if the public understands. If they don't, you're hosed, because the bill passes anyway (there were 2/3s margins in both houses of Congress) and you get a Republican president, who is highly likely not to apply the already sad principles set forth in the signing statement.
Traditional Media Outlets should take a few cues from Silicon Valley
Where can I access the raw Israeli Census registry? I'm an non-resident Israeli citizen; I'm curious as to what it has on me (and if I can de-anonymize myself.)
If you are thinking USA, shoot me an email. Most of my contacts are telecom and medical.
The more I think about this more I dislike the idea of sitting around and thinking in a room.

To really figure out unknown unknowns for a business model, you should be talking to the people who are already in the market, customers or reading trade literature.

Sitting around in a room alone doing this is probably a just a huge waste of time.
Kinkos doesn't need a sign above their store telling me it's a copy shop, nor does Tim Hortons need a billboard in the air above their local franchise telling me they sell coffee and donuts; they've successfully gotten that information to me in other mediums that are less visually intrusive upon my neighbourhood. But I frequent the Campus copy shop, not Kinkos, and their name "Campus Copy Shop" seems relatively unambiguous anyways.

Small businesses need not be able to afford a TV presence to advertise; indeed, I do not know what your neighbourhood is like, but in mine most small businesses already cannot afford large billboard-like signage on their stores and already rely upon simple names on their store-fronts. Their primary and most effective tool is, and always will be, positive word-of-mouth.
PCI compliance is worth as much as the party that signs off on you being compliant, in most cases that is you.

Audits are few and far between, lots of places have shoddy security but claim they are Fort Knox.

PCI compliancy is quite meaningless unless the people that implement it take their job seriously. That's very frequently not the case, it is just seen as a small obstacle in the way of doing business.
great suggestion. I added an alias of 'dotfiles' to my environment which prefixes the git command with the GIT_DIR and GIT_WORKDIR described above. Now when I want to work with my dotfiles I just use that command instead of 'git' directly.
Yes, but what has he done that has been directed towards US laws, regulations, and policies, to protect the right to read?
Hah, ironically Times Square is already zoned other way around - when new building owner wanted to reduce number of the billboards on the building, they couldn't because city quickly passed regulation to keep them up.
Yeah somehow "the best phone money can buy" doesn't sound like an MVP.
"Is public shaming without warning allowed?"

Since when was "public shaming" not allowed?
A few paragraphs in to the article I was wondering what font the article was written in. I figured it might be Roboto and sure enough, a quick trip to Web Inspector shows it is.

I'm not a fan of Roboto personally as each character feels too narrow, squashed, and makes for tiring reading. I frequently check what fonts are in use when it's something unusual. The most beautiful by far that keeps cropping up is Proxima Nova.
He was and is a major inspiration for the international pirate party movement, which if the power of the MAFIAA is to be destroyed, is the most likely actor to do it by political means.
Startups? No thanks. I prefer startup people.
I am pretty sure someone's implementation (Sun?) of tar used y for bzip2 at some point.
I think you can increase your ROI if you spelled out San Francisco.
Discount Price In Us Store
Discount Price In Us Store. Lowest prices guaranteed Free shipping.
I do not agree with this.

The percentage of users that convert should be a closely watched metric that is very important to any freemium business.
You can actually induce your own pressure on the free users by changing your product so that a very valuable piece is now in the paid section.
Sometimes you can create your own demand. Have a look at avvo.com. They do it well.
Define 'work'.

Figures from several freemium businesses that I am familiar with suggest that this model works on the 'lifestyle' end as well as on the 'more money than you could reasonably spend in a lifetime' ends of running a business, and I presume on many points in between. The trick is not to lose too much money on your free users and to make them pay in some other way, for instance by selling advertising or by engaging them to promote the product to others.
Via the technological route, or the political route.

The technological route involves software to enable darknets, and hardware/software to enable ad hoc mesh networking.

The political route involves electing representatives that care about these issues, which the Pirate Party have had success doing, e.g. in Germany and Sweden.
Can we just start calling these folks "Anonymous USA" to avoid naming something important with a term that anyone else on the planet can alter at will? Is there really any logic in choosing a brand that is interchangeable with the phrase "anyone on earth"?

Wouldn't that seem to suggest that staying completely anonymous while being taken seriously on the Internet is impossible?
I've been consuming the free interviews for about a year and subscribed to Mixergy Premium about 2 months ago and it rocks.

I wrote a blog post the other day with a list of things you can do to afford Mixergy Premium in 2012[1] which is basically just me saying I think it's awesome and valuable and that $200 for 1 year is such a small amount of money that you can make it back in any number of really trivial ways.

Andrew also offers a 100% money back guarantee so that if you think the paid service is junk he just gives you your money back. Can't lose! I love it. Keep up the great work Andrew :)

[1] http://www.workingsoftware.com.au/page/A_list_of_things_you_...
Show HN: Hit Your Resolutions With Leap (we're launching it this month)
Sometimes there's nothing you can do. Most of the time you can try the magic SysRq key combos to sync/unmount and reboot. Wikipedia has a nice article on it.
Not in practice. Usually startups arrange that the incremental cost of one additional free user decreases as the number of free users increase.
Reminds me of a post (from a now defunkt blog) explaining the design decisions of google maps that gives it superior readability compared to yahoo and bing:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110101023957/http://www.41latit...

They're fairly basic and common sense Edward Tufte tips but it's interesting to see what a difference a collection of tiny UI tweaks make in the aggregate.
Startup You
It isn't that he wrote a scary story.

It's that his story looked much less plausible in 1997 than it does now. I remember reading the story at that time. I thought it had something going for it, but was very far-fetched and unrealistic. 14 years later, it seems way more plausible.
We most definitely are looking for summer interns! Please apply (http://www.khanacademy.org/jobs), or even contact me directly (email is in profile).
I'd want to know what kind of companies are being funded. Is it all Eli Lilly pharma cash going to pharma startups? Etc.
If you think I disagree with that, you misunderstood what I wrote.
This title is misleading. 'ed' was written long before GNU existed. Should probably read "GNU revision 1.6 of the Unix' ed command has been released".
Because he can close his eyes and wish, I suppose. It's a netbook, there are microcontrollers. The microcontrollers have firmware.

Besides which, I somehow doubt that all the relevant microcircuitry is open source.
couldn't agree more with the other comments:
awesome promo video.
awesome event. one of the few conferences i attended last year from which i walked away thinking, "i am definitely coming back next year."
Saudi Hackers claim to post personal information of 400,000 Israelis
A cursory glance at Google search results gives an idea of how much American contributes to science (which is just the starting point, you've then got the whole process of industrialisation and market-making):
http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/news/2007-06/8392239/
http://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php

EDIT: for people who didn't click the links, it shows America has more scientific papers among the top 1% of most-cited papers... than all the other countries put together

Bell invented the telephone, but where did he go to get funding and start a company/industry? Where did Marconi and Daniell go ? To Britain, which occupied about the same spot as US as industrial/scientific leader once upon a time.

The point is that a country like Norway say could do nothing but sit on their oil income - and every year life would still get better as they buy new technology from America. But for America, of whoever the world leader is, this is not an option. It's got nothing to do with copying or taking credit or whatever - it's just recognising that the flow of benefit from innovation is not symmetrical.
RMS is difficult because he is consistent, because he is right about difficult topics, and because people have a natural tendency to be comforted by authoritarians. But the issues RMS writes and speaks about are fundamental to human rights, and to the continued ability to create and innovate and create value without getting prior permission.
We've been known to hire remotely for the right candidate. Might as well apply and see!
I agree that for phone apps, this works well, but disagree that it ports well to tablets.

I mean, it is okay for tablets, perhaps better than some other approaches, but I really believe that a different primary navigation method is needed for apps.

Primary nab should be within thumbs reach. This implies that most of the important navigation items are within a couple of inches of the bottom corners of the screen. Much of what is currently being used requires a one handed approach to the tablet which slows the user down unnecessarily.

I'd really like to see more aggressive approaches to tablet UI than we're currently getting from iOS devs.
This is awesome. Thanks for posting.
Apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order and a legal document designed to protect the right to read and modify and a philosophy that has influenced an entire generation of creators...?
Stop listening to Barack Obama talk. Obama talks likes FDR, but Obama's actions have way way to the right. Obama's not way right like Cheney but he is closing in on Reagan.
Obama invaded more countries than Reagan, Reagan cut taxes more than Obama. Obama has kept extending Dubya tax cuts. Obama and Mittens borrowed ObamaCare from Bob Dole. Reagan never executed American citizens without trial. Actually, Obama's a bit right of Reagan now.
I think you'll find that obeying such things doesn't come from deference to authority, but rather peer pressure combined with a recognition of the justice of such regulations. The reason I don't speed in urban streets isn't because I want to obey the government; it's because I'll look like an ass, endangering other road users.

I think there's a deeper issue. I suspect you have confused mechanism with purpose. Government coercion is a mechanism for enforcing system goals, where hopefully those goals are agreed upon in a democratic or enlightened fashion. But it is not the government coercion that is good; it is the goals. It is right that government coercion be resisted when the goals are not noble; and doing so does not risk society falling apart, because it doesn't attack what makes society work.

It's not mere "conditioning and conscience" that keeps people in check. The biggest thing that keeps people in check is actually social norms and risking the disapproval of your peers. And those are surprisingly strong forces.

And if you think the kinds of disobedience we're talking about here risk government overthrow, you haven't seen what governments are capable of doing to stay in power. It's humorous to read about Americans thinking their second amendment right to bear arms defends themselves from the excesses of government. Governments are a lot more resilient than that. The real risk to governments comes from military avenues: mutinies, coups, invasion. A government with nuclear arms (i.e. MAD deterrence of invasion) and in control of a loyal military will not be overthrown by its citizens.

But I do agree with you that what we're seeing is corrosive to trust in government. But the answer isn't to bow one's head, go home and be a good little consumer. The answer is to demand that government changes. In a democracy, a big part of that publicity-seeking actions. Ideally, we'd be seeing dialogue and debate, not riot police and polarizing denunciations.
The triple blink reminds me of back when I used ATI's proprietary video card driver, compiled from source. Every time I would upgrade the Linux kernel and reboot, X* wouldn't start (it would try three times and fail, kicking me back to a TTY login).

I think the reason is because closed-source code can only link to the Linux kernel dynamically in order to be compatible with the GPL license, so the kernel updates would break the linking.

*I use X as a nebulous reference to anything related to Linux graphics as I still haven't taken the time to see how all the pieces fit together.
Richard speaks about more than just free software per se; recent speeches include Copyright vs Community, A Free Digital Society, and The Danger of Software Patents.
São Paulo is one of the ugliest cities ever created by man. Being a Stalinesque ghost town is a huge step up from what they were before.

(and you only thought it looked like a ghost town because the pictures didn't include people in them)
I agree with "reboot your phone if you're having repeated troubles" but not with telling people to clear out the list — sure, there's very little risk of harm to the device, but because people (including authoritative ones) are telling people they need to clear the task switcher out, how many hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of people are spending minutes every day clearing the list out? Not to mention the extra mental "weightiness" to all those people of having one more thing in their lives that's constantly filling with cruft and needing to be emptied?
> they've successfully gotten that information to me in other mediums

How nice for you - and even nicer for those places with large advertising budgets. But that is not the case for everyone. I don't need a huge billboard above a shop. But some ads that show what they do are quite helpful.

> "Campus Copy Shop"

So you suggest that all shops name themself as basically what they do? And what about a grocery store that has a copier? How would anyone find out about it unless they already go there?

> Their primary and most effective tool is, and always will be, positive word-of-mouth.

That's great when you live there, and an utter failure for visitors.

If I'm walking down a Manhattan street and I want to make a copy I'm looking for a picture of a copier or a sign that says "Copies made here".
fantastic. guess they were faster than me :)
One of the neatest hacks in TileMill is the "UTFGrid", used for associating tooltips to regions of the map ... without having to do all kinds of expensive boundary checking on the client-side.

http://mapbox.com/mbtiles-spec/utfgrid/

edit: TileMill is also a really cool example of using Backbone.js + Bones to build a Desktop app: https://github.com/mapbox/tilemill/tree/master/models
I don't get it, are you misunderstanding intentionally so you can smugly accuse people of magical thinking? The 'theory' is that closing all the apps is a no-op. It doesn't matter that most of the article is correct, that everything it describes about mechanisms is accurate. The thesis is not properly supported by the facts.

ghshephard is not some fool performing rituals to cleanse his phone. The milk has gone bad but all the other food is useless suspended junk anyway, so it's simple to throw it all out. Yes it's overkill but it works.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that because someone is acting in overkill that they believe overkill is the only valid path. It may just be the simplest.
Well done, that's pretty awesome.
HERDING CODE 130: DAVE WEAVER ON LOGGR – A REALTIME ANALYTICS SERVICE
Scala: Revisiting Implicits Without Import Tax
Beautiful JavaScript Charts for the Sophisticated Developer.