skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Correlation does not imply causation.

Which is fine, since I never implied that file sharing caused sales. The study shows that people still buy even if they pirate a lot. Causation is irrelevant.

Most of the artists in the world do not work for Hollywood.

Again, I never implied they did. The claim was that by removing copyright protection, you'd be reduced to volunteer work. The fact that Hollywood has record profits despite increasing file sharing implies that the claim is false, since Hollywood is professional.

That is tiny by modern AAA game standards.

Again, the claim was that professional works would disappear, not AAA games alone. Personally, I couldn't care less about most of them.
Couldn't it just be because you have to do some spatial reasoning to navigate terrain at speed?

That is to say, where is the link to math?
> I believe the HTML 4 spec supports my point

That document is badly-written; a more reasonable way to interpret it is to conclude that user agents will use some form of Unicode internally, after converting whatever character encoding the document they received used. Which is, indeed, a very reasonable way to design your software, but it doesn't make Latin-1 (for example) a Unicode encoding by any reasonable standard.

> A lot of people seem to confuse Unicode with the UTF-encodings.

True. I do not.
i am always thinking how to make my code readable, if not fun as novel, at least it should read like a prose telling stories. For those lit programming solutions on the web, nothing feels right. For me, it is ugly to see the comments when you are working with the code daily, especially when debugging. at last, i decide to keep a file for document everything, arch, bugs, decisions, stories,... The document grows over time, and then i will try my best to keep the code shorter. of course there are inlines comments, but most just little sweet ones. if you are going to print the code on paper, mass comments is not going to help.
Infogr.am launches app for making infographics
> 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.

Both the browser vendors and the W3C could be doing a better job. But neither is really the problem here.

The problem is that WebKit, a single implementation, is utterly dominant in the mobile space (except for Opera on low-end phones in the far east). This isn't a criticism of WebKit. Any single implementation that becomes so dominant is bad.

Any single implementation, once it has vendor prefixed stuff in release builds, will lead to the problems the mobile web has now: People will use the vendor prefixes, after which that implementation can't remove them without breaking websites. And after that, other vendors will be forced to implement those prefixes in order to render the web in a non-broken way.

One way to avoid that is for vendors to not vendor prefix at all in release builds, but all browsers do that. If that is out, the only thing that can save us is for no single implementation to become dominant. But WebKit won on mobile - Android and iOS are by far the leaders, and both use WebKit; in fact, even most of the runners up do (Blackberry, Bada, WebOS, etc.).

My only criticism of WebKit is that, when it saw itself becoming so dominant, it should have been much more careful with vendor prefixing, preferably stopping doing so entirely in release builds. It's ok to vendor prefix when you have a competitive market, but if you do so when you are dominant or about to be, you end up with the current debacle.
Quick tip: get yourself some prescription sleeping pills, and take one every long flight you take (and only for flights—they're dangerous drugs!) They make the flight a breeze.
= GLTerminal, from 2002: http://ldopa.net/2006/01/14/glterminal/
No official sources.
Just to clarify I'm not suggesting there should be no standard, there definitely should be.

However for the initial implementation what's wrong with survival of the fittest? The most popular way will win through, which would most likely become standard. For those browsers that don't implement it in the same way you use their vendor specific namespace instead.

Yes it's likely to be hairy when it's first being put to use if browsers have slightly different implementations but no more so than using an experimental tag in the first place.

The difference appears to me to be that for the next five+ years I could be writing 8 lines of basically the same css for every instance of linear-gradient (and that's assuming we don't get any new browser vendors in the coming years) vs writing 2-4 lines with backwards compatibility or shock maybe even 1 line if I didn't care about older browsers (e.g. http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/).
Tip for being a better spammer: don't include a link to the topic article in every comment you make.
No, just an off-topic aside directed solely at burgerbrain's comment. I bought a BMW in college for cheap (though a bit more than burgerbrain's).
I agree. In general unless there is very good reason to do so I think adding to the grammar is the least elegant thing you could possibly do. Like you say it's often very helpful to effectively assign a new name to something you want to require, I do it all the time too. I really prefer the implicit scoping that we have too, not wrapping things in "module Foo { module Bar {} }" blah blah.
Tips in Launching Your Business Idea
Know what you need to do to effectively launch your business idea.
think of it as an agent of accelerated evolution
In the middle of the night here.
That seems like an awfully arbitrary statement to make, especially when copyright infringement is largely a civil issue. Not to mention that grellas is an attorney, so I assume he knows what he's talking about. As I understand it, criminal charges are only warranted when the copyrighted material is sold commercially.

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#506
The assumption that growing slow is less risky is not necessarily a good one.

Different types of businesses need different growth rates to be successful.

People taking VC money take it because they need to grow fast or it won't work.

Examples outside of tech:
Green Mountain Rosters: They make K-Cups. They have to get as many Americans to buy K-Cup machines as possible so that they don't buy a potential competitor's product. If they went slow a competitor would go fast and destroy them. So they sell the machines near cost or less and try to get market penetration. Once everyone has those machines they sell the K-cups which is where the money is.

That business would be ridiculously stupid to go slow in.

Same thing with something like Twitter. If that started catching on but they didn't put any money in it for marketing and growth some other Twitter replacement would have come along and taken their market by being aggressive.

If your goal is to have control over your world and not have a boss, don't take VC money. Build a slow growth business in a saturated market and deliver top quality products. You will be happy and that is OK.

But don't look at what other people are doing with disbelief and frustration that they are "shooting for the moon" and "ruining customer's lives" (not really your words) because they are trying to win in a hard to win place and trying to represent their investors as true fiduciaries.
Here is a clue if the title says "Easy Green Power" you know they haven't built it yet.

tl;dr version a media company releases 3D renders of a concentrated solar project.

Actual web site is here: http://staimanmedia.com/Aora/

They've built two, one in Israel and one in Spain, for a combined 270kW of power generation. Neither seems to improve on Solar-One which was built in the Mohave Desert outside of Barstow in the 90's and provided 250kW of CSP generated power for 10 years before being dismantled.

Building a CSP power plant in the desert is not hard, its been done and anyone with money can do it again. Building infrastructure that can transfer that power somewhere useful, that is hard.
In case people aren't aware of just how badly competing browsers are locked out of the mobile web, imagine a world where most of the buttons in Google Maps are broken in Firefox. Where bing.com doesn't work in Opera. Where non-WebKit browsers get a degraded experience in Google web search, and a barely-functional version of Gmail.

All of this is true on mobile phones today. And it's getting worse over time rather than better. If you want to build a browser that provides decent compatibility with popular mobile websites, you have little choice but to emulate WebKit's experimental (and often unspecified) features.

[Disclosure: I work for Mozilla on Firefox for Android, and as the editor of the W3C Touch Events spec.]
Do you trust amazon? Because they're owned by them now...
the guy proposes to kill standardization bodies, and that web engines should do w/e the hell they like, regardless of standards.

coming from what appears to be a webkit dev, that's pretty bad.

standardization bodies should certainly be deeply fixed - but this kind of reply is wrong.
http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ

For the skeptics, http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#criticism
See the companion article: http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2012/02/mismeasure-of...
No thanks, Hollywood needs to stay where it is, in Hollywood.
Mars Mission, A Programming Puzzel Game for the iPhone
If you're going to do this (and I've done it myself), be aware that it may increase the risk of blot clots (deep vein thrombosis). You're supposed to try to get up and move around every couple of hours on a long flight, and taking an Ambien or the like may mean you'll go 6-8 hours (or more) without doing that. Plus, you won't be drinking any water, which isn't healthy.

One of the best ways I've found to both increase hours slept and reduce overall stress on long flights is to buy some cheap foam earplugs and wear them the whole time. (Noise reducing headphones are great but they're bulkier, more expensive and have to be turned off during takeoff and landings.) I used to fly red-eyes fairly regularly and having a bag of those bright orange foam earplugs in the pocket of your work bag was a lifesaver.
I don't know about these "developmental learners". I've taught students in college, high school, and elementary school. Mostly bright kids in elementary, and a wide range of skill levels in high school and college. Your responses to others here consistently dismiss others' personal experiences and knowledge while touting yourself as the only reliable expert. Frankly your responses here to others are so argumentative and belligerent I'm having a hard time imagining you're really such an expert in the things you claim.
I'm surprised to see so many complaints about the price. I was happy to pay $10 just to reward the effort for such an impressively geeky toy when it first showed up a year ago, even though I've never used it for real work.

I will be complaining if the developers only support the App Store version now though.

edit: I hadn't thought about it from the perspective of not being able to play around with it before buying. I wouldn't have based on three screenshots and a one-sentence description. As gammarator mentioned above, there's a free version on the developer's site that's well worth checking out. The granular control of the effects and overall attention to detail is really cool.
A fun trick? Are you kidding me? I've never spend money that fast before (I had bought it before it got in the App Store).

Cathode is awesome, especially if, like me, you have ever worked in such an environment (VT100 etc). I even dropped iTerm 2 and use Cathode all day long. Something about the blast-from-the-past feel makes me more productive and feel like an ol' hacker.

Only wish it had tabs.
Everything is adjustable. You can emulate and finetune only the artifacts you did love from displays of old.
I've tested this as of today (2/10) and have technical details of exactly what filtering is going on, and what isn't.

tl;dr: Iran gov't is the actor, not ISPs; filtering most but not all SSL in a couple different ways; specific targeting of privacy tools & Google.

See here (will be updating it soon w/ more): https://plus.google.com/u/0/103112149634414554669/posts/PT3e...
> 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"

Are those the same guys who brought FTP upon us? BGP? 32-bit IP addresses?

There were few moments where it would be better if somebody said, wait a minute, we need to think first, then code.
Google's redirect is not an HTTPS link, so it sends referrer (see my comment below).
How to cool your home server (the wrong way)
Yeah this was not a keeper for me. "Causality is complicated..." yeah and if a butterfly flaps it's wings... blah... blah... blah...

This offers no insight as to how to improve process when failure occurs. Sure dogmatic application of root cause analysis is foolish, but the same obvious conclusion could be reached about dogmatically applying any type of management principle or analytic process. Failure to think outside of the box is a failure too.

What is annoying is that the author suggests that people should be skeptical of root cause analysis and 5 whys, without offering anything concrete as an alternative approach.

Every management technique is simply a practice towards further learning, but failing to practice anything simply because you can find flaws in everything accomplishes exactly nothing.
The proper way of reading blogs
It'd be awesome to hear from someone with product experience.

My experience of DPI is limited to Tenix diodes (which are white-list based, and are more focused around stripping malicious code by converting known objects to another format, eg .jpg to .png and back, or Word to PDF and back), or McAfee's Secure Web (used to be Web Washer), which does URL filtering, SSL scanning, etc. Also white list based.
This gives me a simpler idea -- use a USB drive and run a script that detects it, writes timestamp to it as it is plugged in -- say intermittently every 10 minutes. The log can either be written to the USB drive or to a local file.
What Will You Give Up For Your Startup?
How many actual toys (that cost like $1 to produce) cost lots more than $10, and you wouldn't think twice about buying them? How much is a Barbie Doll nowadays?

Bitching about $10 reminds me of this Oatmeal strip:
http://theoatmeal.com/blog/apps
> Pure brute force is a bad metric, every 12 character password is equally good or bad by that standard.

This is not entirely correct. If you had 12 q's in a row (or any 12 lower case letters) there would be 12^26 permutations that computer would have to check in order to guess it. Adding a capital Q would increase the number of permutations to 12^52. For each additional character set you throw in the mix, you would add the total number of those characters to the exponent part. Adding numbers would make it 12^62 etc. Not all 12 character passwords are created equal and some (like 12 numbers in a row) can quite possibly be brut forced.
Nice trick, thanks!

This also works in node. Doesn't work in python though -- python just displays both values.
What I mainly took issue with was the conclusion: "Thus, alternative energy sources must approach the energy density of petroleum if they are to be competitive."

That seems utterly faulty to me, as I pointed out - there are multiple ways to solve the problem, none of which would necessarily require increasing the energy density of alternative power sources. All you have to do is reduce the amount of energy that needs to be stored in the vehicle, either by reducing use or required range between charges.

For what it's worth, there are already ways to beam energy to moving cars.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/101581-inductive-car-char...
You're right, of course, but I don't think a deep dive into the premises is a practical. There's just not enough time. Any high level discussion is going to require the participants to many layers of premises.

Whether we like it or not, there are basic beliefs about copyright already entrenched in American culture and law. And even that is based on a common sentiment regarding property and ownership. Which can't be justified without a shared belief in having a government in the first place. Etc. I could keep going.

Instead of starting from the bottom up, or from some arbitrary point in the middle, I think a top-down approach is more practical. As messy as it is, that's how the law has to work, otherwise decisions can never be made. Let's just take the status quo for granted, and ask: "Are recently-passed and newly-proposed laws even consistent with the primary goals of copyright?" Or, to frame it ethically instead of legally: "Does digital file-sharing conflict with the societal values that led us to value copyright in the first place?

I suppose it's necessary to clarify exactly what those societal values are. But, from a practical standpoint (not a theoretical one), it would be premature to begin debating the justification behind the values themselves.
mbrubeck and I, who are good friends IRL, just had a spirited discussion about this over IM; I'll just repeat a few of my points here for other readers. :)

NaCl was first announced in 2008, along with a research paper and and source code (http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2008/12/native-client-technol...). The next year Google sponsored the NativeClient Security Contest that awarded prizes to security researchers who could break out of the sandbox. A lot of the design surrounding PNaCl has happened in the open (see http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl). I don't think it's accurate to say that NaCl was developed behind closed doors.

Also, other browser vendors seem to oppose NaCl in principle, and it seems unlikely that any other process Google could have taken to get buy-in would have resulted in other browsers accepting it.

I agree that there is a continuum of behavior here; in the NaCl case in particular though, it really seems like Google has done the right thing.
So you blocked... Australia?

Really?
A special Valentine's day picture
Do you think Valentine's day is a special day for romantic? Then, why don't you show your boy/girl friend your truly love with one simple, but "powerful" picture. I am working as a professional graphic designer and I am ready to create one special picture just for you and the person you love very much.
I suspect you may be oversimplifying the solution or undersimplifying the nature of these kinds of attacks. What would constitute a 'properly' infallible defense to you?
Thanks for the feedback. You make some really good points.

a) You're right. Though we're not going to get to the same density as HN (we've deliberately chosen to show more information per article), we should be able to get more items in there.

b) You're right. It's too large.

c) Right again. We should allow clicking through the article on any area that triggers the hover.

d) This was a deliberate choice. We debated it, and categories won out. Though the right thing to do is to test it (and see what down-side impact the categories are having -- and whether that's worth the additional categorization).

For now, we're working on getting the site back up. The issue is not traffic (directly), but some strange wonkiness with the twitter oauth process.
Outdoor Playground Equipment Manufacturer
Leading the Way to an Active Generation
Here are some examples. I have a lot more. It's hard to develop a new browser when everyone has a "must have" site that serves degraded or broken markup to everything except WebKit.

Google Maps in WebKit: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/maps-webkit.png

Google Maps in Firefox: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/maps-firefox.png

Gmail in WebKit: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/gmail-webkit.png

Gmail in Firefox spoofing a WebKit UA header: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/gmail-firefox-webkit-ua.png

Gmail in Opera or Firefox normally: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/gmail-opera.png

Twitter in WebKit: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/twitter-webkit.png

Twitter in Firefox: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/twitter-firefox.png

These are just some of the big-name sites that I knew off-hand. At least these high-budget sites usually have some sort of fallback. Some sites just have degraded styles; some have parts that are unreadable. Some provide partial functionality to non-WebKit browsers; others won't work at all (like Bing web search in Opera).

This is becoming more common on the desktop too, with sites like Tweetdeck that just lock out non-WebKit browsers using UA sniffing: https://web.tweetdeck.com/web/unsupported.html
Add to that myriad of posts how Zuckerberg's tax rate will be lower than his employees (as if he has anything to do with the obtuse way IRS taxed RSU's). People just take some things on face value and get their daily exercise by jumping to conclusions.
Attempts to create big iterations on successful languages seem to consistently fail to win adoption.
"Leak" may be the right word for some configurations with conservative GC. A "leak-free" GC would presumably guarantee eventual collection of all dead objects, which is impossible with a conservative GC in theory, and in practice it's not especially difficult to get into a configuration with the Boehm GC where the lifetime of a dead object is infinite (usually because it doesn't move and some binary data that the GC thinks might be a pointer doesn't go away, because it's texture data or something).
Back in the days when my employer did a lot of billable work for clients, I used music to track my time. I'd decide which client's project I wanted to work on, pop in a CD, and when the CD ended I'd write down the total time, take a little break to stretch or get a drink or visit the bathroom, and then pick the next thing I wanted to work on and the next CD I wanted to listen to.

This gave me convenient time tracking and reminded me to get up and take breaks.
You just used "real work" in the same sentence as "osx built in terminal"? Has Apple made a lot of fixes to terminal recently?
Bleach 351
Yes, and this is the same shotgun process that managed to avoid congestion collapse. Not by spending 6 years fretting about it, but by writing the TCP stack in 4.3BSD-Tahoe.

32 bit addresses were a good idea. It's easy to look back on it now and say "they should have used 128 bit integers", but until recently, 32 bit addresses were the largest addresses that worked as scalars in all mainstream platforms.
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News, opinions, commentaries and tickets for all MLB baseball fan.
All of this can be made up after the fact. If you want to bill your client a million hours you can. Grow up. Learn. You might spend 20 hours on Google trying to fix an obscure bug. What the hell does your client know to challenge that?

More likely is that you spend 20 hours refactoring crappy code that someone thought was good enough and it wasn't. Or they didn't know what on earth they were doing. Total waste of time but it's officially already been billed for.

Long and short is your consultants will be charging what they think they can get away with. Whether it be less or more than you log.

And utter bullshit like this comes from someone who doesn't actually bill or who hasn't had to ruefully swallow a job where they end up billing far less than they did.

My favourite real life 'story' about time billing, a bunch of straight-from-uni 'consultants' billed at £250 p/h for photocopying sheet by sheet. You bill what you can get away with.
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.

That's easy. Simply link the reporting system and payment system. In the US, doctors pick a super-specific set of diagnoses for each patient visit, and then send the insurance companies supporting data to ensure they get paid. There's your data.