skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
19 hours on a plane must be quite a sufferfest. I do Europe->Oregon every year or two and 12 hours is already agonizingly slow. About the time you're thoroughly sick of the movies, reading, drinking or anything else, you realize you still have another 4 hours to go.
The No. One VC in the World: Customers
This seems to be a fairly standard gripe from the W3C. "Listen to us, because if you don't the sky will fall!"

They are making themselves increasingly irrelevant because they exist primarily to restrict and limit rather than to expand and innovate.

Partly that's the nature of the beast, standards are after all rules.

The problem is that the rules need a clear and timely mechanism to evolve. Clearly the W3C is the wrong answer to that problem.

I remember well what things were like in the days of horrible tag soup trying to support internet explorer and netscape, and that sucked too.

Standards are good, having a single rule set for everyone to test against is good.

The W3C though, yeah they suck hard.

Way past time to move to a usage-based standards adoption mechanism. Let people innovate, if that change sees wide support adopt it as a standard.
Speaking of `<video>`, i came across a site today that used <embed src="foo.wav">. As long as video and audio formats are loosely specified, we could've used the existing syntax and existing browser infrastructure (you still can't disable HTML5 audio/video in Chrome[1] for e.g. data cap reasons)

__________________

1. http://crbug.com/50132
yeah, would be great to test such stuff, i couldn't figure out how to make any of them to work.
Twitter / timberners_lee: Texas jury agreed Eolas 906 patent invalid
Monitoring your Continuous Integration Server with Traffic Lights and an Arduino
Here's a nice, short blog article on the subject

http://timothylottes.blogspot.com/2012/01/games-vs-film.html

"The industry status quo is to push ultra high display resolution, ultra high texture resolution, and ultra sharpness. IMO a more interesting next-generation metric is can an engine on a ultra-highend PC rendering at 720p look as real as a DVD quality movie? Note, high end PC at 720p can have upwards of a few 1000's of texture fetches and upwards of 100,000 flops per pixel per frame at 720p at 30Hz."
One of the biggest problems with this style of "scan all memory" GC is that you have to stop all threads (flush all pointers to memory) to perform a collection. Pointers held in registers in other active threads are inaccessible to the GC thread.

Failing to stop the world (or ensure all pointers are in memory rather than registers) can result in live objects being collected. This happened to Ruby at one point: http://timetobleed.com/the-broken-promises-of-mrireeyarv/

Edit: This boils down to breaking the compiler's model of memory as specified by the C standard; all bets are off.
According to my experience, it's not so much a "moral model" but the conviction that the current model is necessary to ensure the creation of professional works. And "professional" means an equivalent amount of sparkle and glitter.
Well, I don't blame them. If you're walking a thin line between success/failure you want "the best" with you and often "the best" want to do it on their own (like you said). Makes perfect sense; thanks for the reply.
Together they built Check Point, separately they've gone even further
Yes, we do (we're about the only serious production site running Rivet left). Our codebase is almost entirely in Tcl (sigh). Apart from that, our core algorithms are in C and we run a pretty serious production Node.js app.
Free Indie Games not featured on TIGS / Indiegames: Extranaut [Matthew Fister]
So is the contribution a donation?
Cathode: A terminal app for mac that looks really cool
For the example given were activeX open source then its windows-specificity would be rendered moot as some fork would displace it.

Or, if were webkit not open source then it would probably not end up being a joint apple-google production. Joe-bob's ideas for CSS that he compiles into Firefox himself may not be relevant, but eventually if FF sucks enough some fork of it will displace it as it did for Mozilla (cf. V8 displacing JavascriptCore) per some version of Kuhnian paradigm-shift.
Great news. It seems like everyone who ever mentions Four Steps to Epiphany says the same thing: Amazing content, you should take the time to read it, but I haven't actually been able to get through it yet.
A competent programmer
Fool me once, shame on you. Why would they pay out again, if the attackers have made it clear that there's no reward for paying?
To be honest with more and more of the UI portion of web apps moving to pure HTML/CSS/JS the back-end choice is becoming less and less relevant. A lot of us are implementing the entirety of the UI in client technologies and utilizing the back end via REST as a service layer. In this architecture, the stack you choose becomes less important because if you decide to swap it out you just start writing new services in the next languadge that you choose. For example I was doing quite a bit of REST services in Java but I just switched over to Clojure and have been implementing new services in Clojure. I could have (almost) just as easily switched over to Ruby or Python if I wanted to. Getting the UI out of the back end stack makes the choice of which stack less of a huge decision because it breaks a great deal of the technology lock in that happens when the UI is locked away in back-end languages. It's not for everybody, but it is something to consider when looking at how the future of the web will be built. The trend of architecting web apps in this fashion is growing as it offers some pretty compelling benefits.
Wow, I saw this over 2 years ago. Whoever made this site took the original SWF and put it on this domain behind ads to make money.

Anyway, its still very cool at any rate. I wish someone created a CGI version of this thats more realistic
It would be a start just to find an industry where some participants are VC funded and some aren't, and then look at how they each fared.

As appealing as such a question might be in abstract, I think the results would be pretty useless in practice. There's too much diversity, too many variables. Every startup is at rather incommensurable with every other, beyond the basic financial anchors. Every product's success is a highly stochastic combination of team, market conditions, direction of winds, luck, etc.

What would such a study--regardless of "scientific" rigour, which, if desired, may itself may be an unintelligible criterion given the complexity of the question--really tell us?
Anonymous take down cia.gov
I should have specified that the solution is in the $19-$499/month, so it mainly targets the small to medium companies (where I beleive the IT guy can still propose solutions). Big corporations will buy a licence from the non-Saas companies and install it in their datacenters.

But I'll think of a strategy to target the CTO/CFO/president, which is not a "scalable strategy" but it could pay for itself (more $$$/month).

Thanks for your input.
I remember plenty of people making exactly this argument actually.
True, in indie music that's possible, though that also predates the internet; e.g. Fugazi made millions in the 90s with self-distribution (Ian MacKaye's estimated net worth is something like $20 million these days). Would be curious if it's accelerated, decelerated, or remained constant in frequency.
Well via my ex employer I can get $25 CPM, and ad sense is around $0.40 CPM on average. Its just foolish to use google advertising IMO
> Stories like this, and laws against collusion?

What laws are those? Be as specific as you can. (Anti-trust doesn't apply here.)
The 'Oxford Companion to the Mind'

http://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Companion-Mind-Richard-Gregory/...

And also the Oxford Companion to Philosophy are my go to reference points on the subject. Just really great encyclopedias on the two areas.
stating as some kind of law that unless you work obsessively all the time you can not succeed is rather simplistic for something as vague and at the same time as complex as "success"

Did I do that? It seems to me that what I said was:

"you'll find many if not most are by ordinary people's standards excessively dedicated to their work."
Too bad that the Kindle version will come later this year. I'd buy this one instantly.

EDIT: Before you buy, check this link out: http://www.bookdepository.com/Startup-Owners-Manual-Steve-Bl... - it's 25% off + it offers free shipping (worldwide!).
Although I applaud the focus on health care in this batch I think the real issue is human rather than technological.

Some years ago I did a project for an affiliate to the Danish health department.

I was working on an interface that would allow for better tracking and thus early warning of a flu epidemic. This was done through doctors reporting when ever they had a patient.

It turned out that the real bottleneck was to get the doctors to report. There simply wasn't the right incentive.

I have also had other experiences within this field which made me realize just how hard a problem the human factor is.

So it seems to me at least that they real challenge to solve is how to get the data into to the systems rather than the actual systems themselves.

At least in Denmark (and we are pretty progressive when it comes to tech) this is a huge problem.
http://code.google.com/games/technology-nacl.html
Networking thru LinkedIn ? How could I forget!

Thanks :)
Congrats guys. This is proof you guys are amazing and killing it. Keep up the good work. Continue to deliver us great things.
Exactly. The vendor prefixes are a compromise. The majority of the time the prefixes are used to implement features which have been proposed (but haven't been ratified) now.
Would you want to have an identifiable reputation if you're DDoSing people?

Your logic is sound - why trust a criminal?

But it's not like there's a better business bureau from organized crime.
Social networking tools for scientists have not been really successful so far.

There are charities collecting money for research. And there are rich donors giving money to specific groups in academic institutions. Charities would probably appreciate more traffic and exposure but there are google adword grants for non-profits and other channels they can use.

Regarding fundamental, curiosity-driven science - it might be too expensive to be crowdfunded. The use of citizen-science networks might be more realistic.
Google, Yahoo under fire; Enforcement Directorate to probe forex law violation
Looking at that example, I would ask ....where exactly is that function definition getting defined? Why would you put a function definition inside a catch block? Do you think it's getting defined when the catch block is called?
Are you programming in Javascript, or are you just writing javascript the way you would write code in some other language?
Фильм: Дж. Эдгар / J. Edgar (2011) DVDRip на megashara.com
This only works if you decide you want to never accept a new customer again.
Sinatra up and running, is a good introduction to Sinatra.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920019664.do#PowerReview
Giant purple blocks invade the world of Google Maps
Seconded - the Django tutorial is very well written and extremely informative. Django's documentation in general is a valuable resource.
Arguably, if your load balancer setup is such that traffic can increase 10000x from the minute before and nothing falls over, you were probably incredibly over-provisioned in the first place.

Unless your regular traffic pattern has 10000x increases built into it, why would you spend all the extra expense to be able to handle that level of load?
Adobe: 'Offensive security research community helping bad guys'
Posters for All
I hear a lot of people yelling about this, but is there anybody else who thinks this is totally awesome?

To me, this is just more ammunition these companies are giving to the people they're trying to prosecute.

And in this case, you actually have video supporting the notion this was not an "oops" situation.
> if they want more workers, they could try moving out of the San Francisco-Seattle bubble

"more workers" isn't the only problem.

And, even if it is, do those other people have enough of the relevant workers?
Literate programming can be done in any language. Here is an
example in HTML:
http://axiom-developer.org/axiom-website/litprog.html

In addition to the benefits mentioned there are at least 3
others I can site.

First, since you spend time explaining why you are writing
the code and your thoughts on the design and implementation
you naturally discover edge cases, missing cases, and bugs.
As a result, the quality of the code is higher.

Second, if you program in a team that does code reviews,
the team can see your approach to the solution and the
reasons. They can critique your work at a more profound
level. If the code review happens before accepting the
change commit, the quality of the code is higher.

Third, code lives. Sourceforge is a gravesite of hundreds
of thousands of programs that have died because the authors
are no longer maintaining the code. New users are confronted
with a source tree of tiny files which they are unable to
understand and therefore unable to modify and maintain.

I have the "hawaii test" criteria. If you can hire a new
developer, give them your program, send them on a 2 week,
all expense paid vacation to hawaii, and when they return
they can modify and maintain the program as well as the
original authors, then you have a fully literate program.

As for the question of debugging, I find that it is no
different. Generally the source of bugs are the same (e.g.
using copy/paste and failing to properly fix the copy).

Literate development, for me, takes on two different styles
depending on the language.

In a language that allows a read-eval-print loop, like lisp,
it is trivial to work in emacs with a command line in one
buffer and the literate sources in another buffer. You just
point at the changed code and evaluate it immediately in
the other buffer. It is very productive.

In a language like Java that is a pure compile environment
I create a makefile that extracts the code from the
literate document into the proper com.foo.baz.... source
tree, compiles the code, and runs the test regression suite.
This generally takes less than a minute or two for most
reasonably sized Java programs. So I make a small set of
changes, save the buffer, run 'make', and see if the tests
pass. For TDD programming I find this works very well.

My last large program was 60000 lines of Lisp in a latex
literate file. Tex'ing the file with all of the literate
documentation generated 6000 pages. The technology scales
quite well.

Learning literate programming is like learning lisp. You
keep wondering why anyone would program this way until you
suddenly "get it". Once that happens you wonder why anyone
could program any other way.

Tim Daly
Is there anything similar to Pandas that runs on the JVM?
49ers Name Yu President & Co-Owner
Actually there are very real ways in which this sort of thing can impact one vs another. eg. Adobe may push for a format that natively supports the double sided color filling rules they use in Flash to make it easier for them to produce Flash->HTML5 conversion frameworks without a lot of code rewriting while other parties may not have this as a concern.

That aside, you picked a ridiculously low-hanging fruit of a concern. Consider something larger, like JavaScript and the fate of ECMAScript 4 due to the very situation I'm talking about. But even the minor bikeshedding concerns can be used as political levers one way or another regardless of how (in)significant one implementation is compared to another.
Besides reasons mentioned, it could benefit their competitors. Remember that sourceforge was under heavy ddos not even a year ago.
I'm not saying the words "elegant" or "beautiful" is wrong. I'm just saying from my experience, non-programmers think I'm a fanatic and give me funny looks when I say that. Could be the way I'm saying it :)
Show HN: Org Charts using GraphViz
This is the result of a standards process running in reverse: first the specifications, then the implementation. There was a time when the "Internet" could if you squinted right be defined as "the collection of people who make fun of that process and do the opposite"; their motto was (literally) "loose consensus and working code".

First you get things working. Then you standardize on them.

Complain when the Webkit team refuses to implement standards. Have they shown any unwillingness to support W3C standards once published? No? Then what's the gripe? The browser vendors are doing exactly what they're supposed to do: come up with new things. If the W3C was doing its job, it would watch those new things carefully and, when enough momentum existed, start ratifying them as standards.

It's not enough to say, "you could have used the same argument to defend Internet Explorer". To indict someone for "embrace & extend", you need both halves of the behavior: creation of new features, and unwillingness to support subsequent standards for those features.
These guys probably have no idea what piracy is... They must've been very surprised when they learned that streaming a game is pirating content. Hopefully, they'll start thinking about it more and come up with better solutions (like, you know, making the damn paid content available anytime, anywhere, for anyone)...
Correct me if I'm wrong (and IANAL), but I believe it doesn't matter if the injured party does or does not want to pursue criminal charges. That matters for civil charges, but not criminal charges. Those are made at the discretion of the District Attorney.

The injured party can influence the DA's decision of course, but ultimately it's his/her call.
It wouldn't have been a problem if they had done so the way that WebKit, Opera and Mozilla developers have done so. By prefixing it clearly lays out that it is a "vendor" specific property implementation.

That implementation can be discussed, modified or accepted and become a standard non-prefix property. It's happened a few times where the WebKit implementation has had to be reversed to match another vendor's approach. This is good.

It has gotten us closer to using CSS3 in a shorter period of time than we have with any W3C standard.

The way that both Microsoft and Netscape did it in the 1990s was not only the wrong way to do it, it was a malicious approach aimed at segmenting the web.

And Microsoft's biggest sin was that they froze IE at version 6 for over 5 years, ensuring that their mishmash of standards and proprietary implementations would weigh on the Internet.
you really do have to properly vet these things. i didn't realize the work involved either until i started following the rdfa spec. beyond the bureaucracy (which is actually pretty good, like a software development process) there are unintended use cases and side effects, and the concept needs to be as complete as possible and not self-contradictory. there must also be prior art to be researched and understood and incorporated wherever possible as to not throw out good ideas with an off-the-cuff implementation. second, it is actually done sort of slowly, and with your input if you want, and you can start to use a lot of the core features of drafts, just like a beta program.
I applied, interviewed for, and then (stupidly) realized that I couldn't attend the coming batch. But I did get a chance to chat with Nick for 45 minutes or so - these guys seem very with it and I really admire how the primary focus of the school is to help people become better hackers. The press they've received in the past couple of weeks has focused more on the business/recruitment aspect of the operation - the feeling I got was that that's more of a peripheral advantage of the program.

I hope I have the opportunity to attend in a coming batch - if nothing more than to become a better hacker.
صور مى زيادة - مى زيادة - mai zeyada
ease.js - Classical OOP with JavaScript
Should I switch to Ruby?
Hopefully a question like this can be useful to more people than just me, basically I'm someone who likes to create, both at my job and in my own projects and to do so efficiently. I've been working primarily as a Java developer the last couple years and there are things about the language that are great and necessary for some types of projects but I can't help but think sometimes it just ends up making for a lot of drudgery and the whole culture around doing java dev is a bit stodgy, I'm fairly young, just a few years dev experience basically wondering if transitioning to Ruby may open up my career a bit, would be interested to hear from anyone who has done something similar.. More and more lately I've been finding its hard to feel, think and operate like a hacker when working just in Java
Why's that? They've spelled out quite clearly what they're for. Besides, knowing what you're not is an indispensable part of ascertaining what you are.
I was just jonesing for just such a device. I'm in the same bind and would love to play with a similar design but with a dial to log different jobs.

Excellent job.
It would be nice if I could just see examples instead of being forced to download a file.
Wes, was just on your blog and see you are also into data visualization. Wondering if you have any recommendations for web based charting tools? I've used flot (jquery plugin), but looking for alternatives. Thanks!
> You cannot punish one if you must punish all.

That's mindless twaddle.

"if you must punish all" is never true. In fact, you usually don't want to punish all.

And, you can always punish one.
Can a citizen seek legal action in regards to an event which didn't directly involve them? For example, you saw a crime and want to sue because no one else will?

This can't just "go away".
100% agreed. The process has to move faster.
I think this is the even bigger story. If they did it on purpose, then it's hypocrisy. If it was by accident then it proves how hard is it to be compliant with the law 24/7.

Personally, I think a law with high consequences shouldn't be something you can accidentally break. I can understand something like accidentally going over the speed limit (within reason) in a car and getting a citation, but copyright laws allow for big fines and jail time.
To me, the article comes across as a bit of an uninformed rant.

> I hope it does kill the W3C and CSS Working Group standardization process.

To this, I have to ask "Mr Curtis - are you _CRAZY_?"(!)

Do you not realise that it's taken over 12 years to say good bye to IE6. Have you not had the pleasure of battling with the ramifications of a browser that doesn't play by the rules?

--

There are some understandable reasons for not making use of vendor prefixes.

The article that Dustin Curtis links to makes some valid points about the dangers of continuing to use vendor prefixes. A similar line of thinking is presented here [1]

The alternative to using vendor tags isn't to stop using the features - it's to simply drop the vendor prefixes and use the property names from the (non-ratified) CSS specifications before they're fully approved.

For all it's failings, the W3C does a grand job. Negotiations take time. Best we don't throw our toys out of the pram.

--

[1] http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/03/css_vendor_p....
NaCl is specific to individual processor architectures by design, much like ActiveX was specific to Windows.

Prefixed WebKit features are certainly not consistently well-documented. CSS animations, transforms, etc. had to be carefully reverse engineered by other browsers.
W3C isn't the only game in town. There's the WHATWG because of W3C's shortcomings.
RIAA Backs .music Proposal... If It's Only Limited To 'Accredited' Musicians
Carmelita Jeter shows value of technology in speed training