skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like it. Hopefully users will be more likely to try the apps when there are fewer and of higher quality. Therefore I consider writing an app now with more enthusiasm than before.
just use comet istead
Here's why I don't like Mike Arrington's style of journalism. Earlier today, he was singing their praises ("One hell of a revenue model"): http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/17/facebook-rolls-out-veri...

It's great that he gets twice the hits for one story, but both pieces have been extreme in their expression to the point that I'd call them misleading.
before they make a space elevator, they need to build a proper space station. The current one is tiny. I want something the size of an oil tanker.
Exclusive Video of the Moon from Chandrayaan
Well I wrote the article, and I did not really think of the GUI using system resources.

You see, in our case the biggest resource hog is the MSSQL server, and we have quite a few people who have a windows only background and need the Gui in order to do their daily tasks - like add pages to IISAdmin.

If I could do away with the GUI I would, but in this case it is a real necessity to administrating the system, and the other drawback is as a reply below noted - it is either all or nothing.

Without the GUI you would not be able to use IISadmin properly, not be able to read and diagnose system logs or even administer DNS.
do facebook apps make any money? Seems like you'll be paying to improve facebook's product.

What do you gain really from the verified status? If you have a good product people will install it anyways, whether its verified or not. And if your product is crap, you just threw away good money, that could have been spent better on ads
Defacto timezones
better titles on "This wikipedia page is interesting" posts, please!
True, but I don't think they're saying most people will vomit playing this game. Some people just feel a little queasy, others just feel totally immersed and happy. Same as with rollercoasters.
This lends credence to Cuban's goal of "demonstrat[ing] that the Commission’s claims are infected by the misconduct of the staff of its Enforcement Division".

It doesn't seem to absolve him of insider trading though.
Thanks for the pointer, but as Matt Maroon says, we're looking for something where people can post original content.
Do you have the rights to publish that speech on your site?
google adplanner says that you get 36k unique users with 430k pageviews
Aside from a) the Mac OS to Mac OS X transition (though existing apps worked under "Classic" mode), b) some apps during the PPC to Intel transition (namely apps with assembly or endian issues), and c) apps that used private / unpublished APIs, that's not really true.

It's true Microsoft goes to extraordinary lengths to keep backwards compatibility. Consider the Joel Spolsky anecdote about SimCity: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

In case you missed that, SimCity had a bug where it used memory it already freed. This worked under DOS for whatever reason, but not under Windows. So the Windows team hardcoded a special case just for SimCity.

That is going too far, IMO. Why should my OS have all this extra bloat to check for buggy applications? This is why OS vendors seed preview releases to developers, so they can test their own damn software and issue fixes for these kinds of bugs. While it may have been hard to distribute updates 20 years ago, with the internet it's trivial.
I think what you're talking about is more commonly known as marginal revenue.
Podcasts from the University of Oxford
iPhone JavaScript Apps
one good way to start seeing more objects around you is to try to search for a pattern like this one in your procedural code : a group of functions operating on a certain kind of data structure. A classic example would be the stdio functions in C. You have FILE (which is your data structure) and then fopen,fclose,fscanf etc. which are the functions operating on FILE. This is object orientation at it's most basic (an object is some data and methods to process that data) even if C is not regarded as an OO supporting language.

There is only a small step from writing stuff like this :

FILE* ofile = fopen("test.txt","w");
fprintf(ofile,"%s %s %s",1,2,3);
fclose(ofile)

to writing code like this :

FILE ofile("test.txt","w");
ofile.printf("%s %s %s",1,2,3);
ofile.close();

So. you've grouped some data and some code together so it's easier to work with it. This is just the first step though, but the small objects you make will be very useful. You can make a small library of useful objects that way : file, string, date, time, point, rectangle, socket, regexp etc.

Also, you don't have to make the whole program OO. You can keep it procedural (and for most scripts that's the case), but you can use the above objects just like you'd use their procedural counterparts before. Slowly, and with experience both with OOP and larger programs, you'll see other parts of your work that would make sense as an object. On the other hand, some of them won't. And it's perfectly ok - not all problems can be naturally modeled as a system of objects.
is anybody tired of this lowercase debate here everytime there is a Yang memo posted? Any other thing to comment about?
Distribute Your Content With Amazon CloudFront
Storm - Python ORM from Canonical
adwords came from overture/goto.com - a separate company. Actually, google stole it, and got their pants sued off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search_Marketing

note that "adwords" isn't just the idea of putting ads next to search, but mainly the auction aspect of it (so google always gets the highest price possible; and advertisers never pay more than needed - the idea is it's a little market), and linking it to search.

Overture/goto.com was basically adwords alone (no search results), and was quite profitable I believe.

Unfortunately, my little correction doesn't contribute to the topic of the debate... um, departments can certainly be entrepreneurial, also, in some companies, with skunkworks and so on, you are certainly doing all the things an entrepreneur does: funding, new products, marketing. The only difference (and perhaps a key difference, according to fallentimes) is that it ain't their money. Entrepreneurialism certainly has a gut-test component... and maybe that risk/reward of ownership is essential.

Otherwise, you're gambling for matchsticks. Using all the same skills, but you ain't gambling.
CD Business NOT= Music Business
Journalism?
Scout Oath is similar: http://www.scouting.org/Media/FactSheets/02-503a.aspx

The "BRAVE" one differs, because the article talks about such confidence and optimism that one doesn't experience fear. Courage requires fear, as the article says.

The Motto reminds me of: "One word sums up probably the responsibility of any Governor, and that one word is 'to be prepared'"
Tom, that was very inspiring.

Coincidentally, I decided to roll my own blog a week ago.

It's written in Lisp.

http://jamrides.com/blog/s/20081114004158.html
Or maybe the viewers don't care. These days, a good upconverting DVD player can produce high quality 1080P images.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=365&tag=nl.e539

My personal favorite:

http://oppodigital.com/
Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs
What are the failure modes of this technology? It appeals mosly to SF fans, and every SF fan who has read the Ringworld novels will think of cities crumbled to dust by flailing nanowires...
Amazon CloudFront - Amazon CTO on their CDN launch
Amazon Web Services Launches CloudFront
Hands on with Google Voice Search for iPhone: Not a Breakthough, But Nifty
Why do you think paying will equal higher quality? This, IMHE, will just rank higher more applications coming from random aspiring entrepreneurs hiring people in rent-a-coder doing one time lol-apps, instead of passionate skilled developers who might already have a day job or are students.

One of the typical killers for corporate software projects is too much budget. I remember reading studies about project size and budget vs. delivery.
Usb standards set in stone
The $64K question is whether the board of directors itself is competent enough to evaluate and select a new CEO.

After all, the board is the one who asked Jerry back and also had the power to audit Jerry's decisions.

To show good judgment, they should fire themselves first.
So many people knock Jobs, but I find this commencement address really stirring.

It's also nice to read a biblical "Job" interpretation into it, for my aspergers-like enjoyment of nominal determinism.
as I say this will save mibbit 300GB/month
So yes it does matter for me
> 3. The requirement that porn stars have regular STD test to minimize infection. These are paid for out-of-pocket by the actor.

Is that a law or is it just the way that reputable porn companies operate? If the latter (which I think is how it actually is), you're free to skip the STD tests - you just have to find folks willing to do the same.

"do it my way or do it with someone else" is not a protection racket.

I'm pretty sure that there's no law requiring "assessment fees and membership fees" for professional coaches either.
Did you skip the bit where I said it would save mibbit 300GB/month transfer?
That's worth doing.

I can see the confusion, but you can't compare files with network. Files are allocated in chunks. So shaving off a few bytes of a file does indeed not always save you disk space.

However, if you send half as many bytes in your HTTP headers, you save that bandwidth. If you handle 600 of those HTTP requests a second, shaving every byte off that you can, is important. That's not premature optimization.
Why waste time learning to use JS on the iphone, when you may as well just write the app in C++ or Obj-C? At some point, you'll need to go native, and then you've lost a portion of your time-investment. Instead, just learn it properly, and you can always do things.
Host a Passion Party | Passion Promises
Regarding the idea of modifying video, CBS inserted fake billboards in their countdown to the Year 2000 during that year's New Years Celebration. It didn't go over well, so it will be interesting to see what people think.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C06E7DB173AF...

I've seen this ability to replace a moving rectangle in a video with other content in 3D software before. With high definition video, I imagine this process is more accurate than ever.

I think a bigger question is how to get someone to pay you to add fake ads to your YouTube submissions, and how to track that somebody is actually doing this, and for how many seconds. That could get very interesting.

Also, related:

Related, the other side: how to detect that a video WAS modified:

http://news.cnet.com/Are-fake-videos-next/2100-1008_3-611344...
Silverlight Enigma Simulator
Just because some parts are wrong, that doesn't mean that no parts are right.

Models are expectation limiters, and experience predictors. Not all models are created equal; they vary in specificity and in accuracy.

The phrase "there are two cats on my bed", I'm pretty sure, is about as right as possible. This is my bed. I'm looking at two cats sleeping soundly on it. When I close my eyes, I can still feel them three. EVERY prediction that is limited by that model turns out to have been properly limited. EVERY prediction that model suggests is accurate. It is, in fact, as true as true gets.

On the other hand, the sentence "light is a wave" is saying a much more specific thing about the universe. Like the two cats on my bed statement, it rules out some expectations, and suggests some predictions. As it turns out, some of those expectations are correctly limited, and some are not; some of the predictions are validated, and some are not.

Therefor, we can say that, while it may be useful to consider light being a wave in some instances, it clearly is actually something other than a wave that just happens to be wave-like. If it was actually a wave, then every prediction would be validated, not just some of them.

We can go a step further, even, and in some cases talk about the degree of truth of a given model. The truth value only has to be predictably higher than 0% in order to be useful; but it has to be 100% to be considered actually true. Furthermore, specificity effects the value of truth. A statement about cats on my bed may be 100% true, but it's not nearly as risky or specific as a statement about the fundamental nature of light. The main usefulness of this 100% true statement is for me to know that my feet will be kept warm.

And, while I personally care deeply about the comfort of my feet, in the grand scheme of things, it's just not that big a deal.
I decided to write my own. Gives me much more flexibility and am able to change, adapt, streamline the backend as much as I like. (Java nio) It peaks at about 10k connections at the busy times at the moment (incoming and outgoing). The backend code is about 22k lines of code, but that's everything - not just the base comet server.

I did have a look at Meteor and some of the other comet type servers but they didn't look like they would be a great solution for what I needed.
"... Why waste time learning to use JS on the iphone, when you may as well just write the app in C++ or Obj-C? ..."

Answered the Q right there.

"... It's pretty obvious that in order to be able to build the best possible iPhone application you would have to know Objective-C. Having a clear path, paved with JavaScript, to that end result should be any JavaScript developer's goal ..."

I can see a time that the browser on the iPhone will be a nice WebApp platform without entirely having to "go-native" (but still understand).
Hm... isn't Yudkowsky's first name Eliezer? ;)
Why Google defines the new digital economy
And if lyrics in Icelandic aren't obscure enough, that's really saying something.
Microsoft files suit to defend Visual Studio users
Review of CloudFront - Amazon's new CDN
The newspaper "experiment" is starting to sound like an urban legend.
Silk the key to rebuilding bone
Very sad news that two OB contributors are stepping away.

I find that the reason why Overcoming Bias is a great source of articles for me is that the articles there are without exception written by extremely sharp, clearly brilliant people with both an excellent brain and a top notch writing ability. The topics aren't what brings me there, it's the quality.

I don't think I'd bother reading a community powered Overcoming Bias... maybe I'm wrong, maybe I will read it, but it doesn't sound appealing at all.

Perhaps it's better to just reduce the posting frequency but keep the quality... as it is OB is too frequent for me to read everything, since each post requires careful thought and concentration to get the many points made within.
Just read the docs, it seems that when you put a file in the CDN they distribute it on all edge servers and you paid for that (which is normal). But it would be great if you can chose on which servers you want the files distributed to. For example I might need the servers just from the european region.

If you have couple of files in the CDN it will not make sense, because the cost to distribute the files around will be marginal, but if you have many GB of data, distributing them to all unneeded servers might be not cost efficient.
Using compression signature to detect if photo or video was modified
Agreed. Not sure how long that will take though.

I'm not sure it's marginal though. Consider a site that has a gallery of 100 thumbnails, each one say 200 bytes in size.

With firefox3, the browser would have to send 49,500bytes of HTTP headers just to get those 100 thumbnails which are only 20,000bytes in size. That's a ridiculous overhead. Even if you're using deflate or gzip, that's only gzipping the 20k data, not the 49.5k of headers.
The fewer developers compete for the attention of fixed number of users, the more resoruces each developer can dedicate to further development. Too much competition == race to the bottom.
You want Cult of Luna.
"> 3. The requirement that porn stars have regular STD test to minimize infection. These are paid for out-of-pocket by the actor.

Is that a law or is it just the way that reputable porn companies operate? "

"reputable porn companies" :-)
"It's absurd to suggest that deliberate practice has anything to do with body memory intrinsically. "

Since no one actually made that claim - the intrinsically part that is - ..... :)
A strategy to manage complexity by decomposing problems into hierarchical type relationships through the mechanisms of
encapsulation (code and data together in an "object"), polymorphism (actions on abstract types trigger behaviors without knowledge of their specific implementation), and derivation (relationships between classes) such that specific behaviors increase toward the leaves and decrease toward the roots, leaving implementation and general behavior isolated at appropriate levels.
Love the fact that you guys added the service to the Service Health Dashboard immediately:
http://www.transparentuptime.com/2008/11/amazon-launches-fes...
Malcolm Gladwell: The man who can't stop thinking
The upper half would fly off, and the lower part would burn up in the atmosphere. I think.
"... On the eve of his new book about the nature of success he discusses racial politics, obsessiveness, girlfriends - and his own fear of failure ..."

Placed for his new book but a good read.
There is a large class of applications for the phone that do not need to be native. I'd guess (unscientifically) that its about a third of the apps on the app store, and probably growing.
no worries.

i'm a scientist as well, look up my profile :)
Microsoft is a software juggernaut. They can throw as many developers at a problem as it takes, and backwards compatibility is one of those problems they've chosen to focus on since they're used so much in business. Apple can't do that, and it pays a lot less for them. Mac apps tend to be more consumer based, which means backwards compatibility isn't nearly as important.
Lisp static file blogging
Cool, though Leopard's Core Animation blows this out of the water.
Search people
In today's world, it's important to be aware of your surroundings. From hiring new employees, to making sure that the person you are dating is the right one for you, to checking out your child's daycare... That's where we come in! It’s fast, easy and very simple to do a background search. . http://www.recordcheck.com
Lots of modules and ideas at http://www.sparkfun.com, and lots of activity in the support forums.

Other sources of inspiration & contacts:
http://blog.makezine.com/
http://hackaday.com/
So let's not be afraid of losing our jobs, on the contrary let's hope to get fired. After all Jobs is just another regular guy. There are thousands of clever, dedicated people around, just like him. We will all win, be successful for sure..

Yes, it's encouraging to have success stories but let's face it, there are a few Jobs and many other clever, dedicated people.. who happen to lose their jobs without their control..
The other article is actually much better, never mind the revenue model references.
You'll have a single code-base for multiple platforms (iPhone, Android, web, even desktop with something like Adobe AIR)

The interface may be tweaked to fit the format of each platform, but the application logic (which is likely the complex part) will be entirely the same.
It's not a bug but a feature, that's the base concept of the UI.
That's not the point. There is a large class of desktop apps that could be programmed in Javascript also. The point is - why would any developer or any development studio bother with investing time and effort in learning Javascript for the iPhone, when you can just invest the time in learning how to use C++?

Using Javascript will give you a short-term boost, but at a long term cost. And at some point, when you do switch to the native API, you need to restart learning.

The difference in using C++ and javascript on the iphone is pretty small - they have similar syntax and organisation. C++/Obj-C actually has some advantages in terms of speed, because of the much larger availability of sample code and tools to work with it.

And of course, there is the native vs intepreted advantage of C++ code.
4GB of memory in a MacBook Pro is a marvelous thing.

I can develop in whatever OS I like and still enjoy being at my computer. It's the little things, I find, that make me stop working. It's the little things that Mac takes care of. I don't have to be frustrated, I can just open up whatever tool I need on whatever OS it needs and work away.

A lot of credit goes to VMWare too. Fusion is a terrific product.
Amazon is a bad-ass.
Hulu is awesome! No need for cable TV!

I was thinking someone needs to make a Twitter/online TV Guide service. Like blip.fm sorta... maybe this is an idea worth working on? I have more ideas on it if interested...
What are you talking about? The GDP of the AU is 1 and a half trillion, and of Netherlands is 600 billion. South Africa alone has a GDP of 500 billion.
Why not ask Alan Kay?

'OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things.'

He might know....
I enjoyed reading your blog, I especially liked the "And nothing big starts big". quote in your about page. Intersting startup too!
Why do you feel compelled to prepend 'depressing' to Africa? Don't you think a focus on the positive is more helpful than a constant focus on the negative?
> "do it my way or do it with someone else" is not a protection racket.

I totally agree. Perhaps my post was ambiguous as this is exactly what I was trying to say.

My comment was not about the law it was about rules set by private institutions - Facebook are not making any laws. I do not know whether (2) and (3) are required by law, but it is irrelevant to the point I was making, which is: Arrington's definition of 'protection racket' would clasify lots of rules that we consider beneficial to society as 'protection rackets', therefore his accusation is unfair.

You're quite right in saying that "..you just have to find folks willing to do the same..", this applies to (2) (3) and Facebook. I.e. the analogy holds: Just as a porn-star can look for work where STD tests are not required#, developers can choose to not develop for Facebook (or be unverified). If the market of non-STD-requiring-studios / webapps-outside-facebook proves too small to be viable for them then they have to get-the-test/ get-the-app-verified. It's no different. It seems to be that in both these cases the person would be best served by paying the cash to get verified, but it is a free world, so they can choose to do whatever they think best for them.
(# - even if it is the law, they can always go outside the US)

> I'm pretty sure that there's no law requiring "assessment fees and membership fees" for professional coaches either.

There is no law that I am aware of. But the professional bodies of which I am a part all have rules that do involve the payment of fees for accreditation, and I'm glad they do.
People seem to be terribly confused as to what Comet is.

This is Comet if you really want to use that word. Comet goes over HTTP.
But Earth's population density is off the chart compared to other planets.

You don't say...
I have found that the most worthwhile projects take simple data and applies it in unique and useful ways. It's so difficult to get to interesting/relevant data much of the time. Algorithmic complexity is great, but for my part, I just want to make something good. This thing is fun, and that's pretty good.
On the subject, to the people who have rolled their own similiar blogs: What text formats are you using?

Many seem to follow the "title: \n date: \n tags: \n" type style which seems to do the job pretty well (and can be easily parsed).

Any other formats worth investigating?