skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not if the goal is simply to create a competitive moat and dependent population before gouging them. I'm not saying Mongo will do that but I will be curious about how they interact with companies like MongoHQ and MongoLabs over time.(And hi Andrew!)

While a bit extreme I might compare it to the agricultural aid practices of Western governments. In many cases they are fantastic, but often they also serve as a way to destroy blossoming agricultural economies. Without working domestic agriculture country development is often stunted (in the case of Mongo, work on a truly open source alternative).

Separate digressions:

I would also argue that much more of modern software is actually built on progress made by proprietary technology than people give credit, but that's a separate debate. I fully recognize the value of open source and it is my preference

An interesting counterpoint to my agriculture argument would be free trade across borders debates. Much like the US can feed the world for nothing, manufacturing was done more effectively in one place (China for awhile) but I wouldn't argue for restrictions on how China behaved to get us dependent on them (though currency manipulation and workers rights might come up).
Nice work.

I'd tinkered with the same thing and actually came up with https://github.com/mtigas/django-medusa but never got it clean/stable enough to talk about (though it now runs my blog to S3 where it's served now). Some of the same ideas, but very different execution of the concept. (Up to the apps to define a `renderer` to generate a list of URLs to render; management command then abuses the test client to fetch each one, which also allows storing header information like content-type when using a backend like S3.)

Baking in the build bits as part of the generic class-based views = very cool. Pun intended.
Wouldnt it then shift from being a copyright enforcement issue to a contract/license enforcement issue? I.e. you agreed to share your source code if you distribute, but now you didn't, so sue city?
We need to redefine what 'copy' means
Would love for any down-voters to tell me how I'm wrong...
Yea but he's that much closer to multiple exits
Free tools to split and merge PDF Files
That's true for pulverized coal, but gassified coal could be used like natural gas.
If you were going to do the 'review anything' concept you'd need serious marketing cash. You'd also build verticals within the service to target, to benefit from search engines and try to narrow on the big core markets (but still stay open to literally any kind of review someone might want to do). Same way Oracle etc customizes their business software "solutions" for verticals.

I'm terrible about that (the licensing idea), I'd be far more likely to just code it from the ground up, even if that's the stupid monkey approach. I like having a personal relationship with my code (lol), the structure of the site, and knowing how that correlates to projected scaling, and so on.
Application Security and Bug Free Coding - The Infographic
I'm sorry, but this reply doesn't make any sense to me. If applications have to cache something, they should use the file system, which would not affect their resident memory at all. Maybe I'm just old school, but where I come from operating systems handle the memory hierarchy, not applications.
Dude great to hear from you! I'd really love to talk some time if you're interested. Feedback Army is awesome and I think we might have some cool stuff to share. Couldn't find any contact info in your profile but my email is dshipper [at] gmail.
"You simply can't use the system properly when a background-process uses all ressources. And one normally want do something else than wait for the system. I consider such behaviour a bug."

Agreed, but to add to your point, if your background process is taking up all the resources in my system, that defeats the purpose of being a background process.
That's what I was saying. Its still possible to use TouchDevelop and compass apps without the gyroscope, hence why it is only a warning.

I was wondering though if there are any apps (or if developers have the option to set this) where an optional device feature such as the gyro is so integral to the app that it won't even install without the device capability. This is what I haven't seen yet - though maybe the marketplace is already filtering them out for me.
No, not at all.

Virtual memory isn't really memory at all, it's just an entry in a table which marks addresses as accessible to your process. It's up to the OS to decide whether or not these addresses correspond to anything physical or not.

In Linux (and every other modern OS, AFAIK) the OS allocates physical memory on-the-fly, only when your program actually starts reading or writing addresses in the virtual memory table.

Thus, on a 64-bit machine you can allocate thousands of gigabytes of "virtual memory" without using any real memory at all.
> Why downvoting?

> you must read a book if you want to understand it.

"Go read a book" is not a very constructive or helpful answer to a question that - as it turns out - could be answered with a brief comment.
I don't think that is necessarily true. Most modern programming languages, as well as the relative cheap nature of RAM, have rendered a true understanding of the inner workings of RAM less important.

Would they be better at their job if they did? Probably. But do they have to? I'm not so sure anymore.
I think the idea is that with nuclear power plants while you can bring down the output you don't want to because it saves you very little money. Most of your costs are huge and fixed.
Agree if you have enough marketing power (or good press hookups) it's much easier to make something like that work.

And definitely on the same page in terms of code. I like it to be mine!
> An analogy absolutely draws a comparison.

An analogy illustrates common logical features of two commensurate problems. Man:woman, bull:cow. If I state this analogy to my wife, am I "comparing" her to a cow?

> So you think it's permissible to condemn a human being while knowing essentially nothing about him, just going by what the groupthink tells you.

If the groupthink is right, yes. Groupthink isn't always right. It isn't always wrong. It's not wrong about Hitler. It's not wrong about patents, either.

> I write patents for inventors.

In other words, you're a patent lawyer.

I'm quite confident that you have never, ever once told any of your "inventors" the following: yes, I can get this patent issued. But I don't feel it's genuinely novel or non-obvious, so you'll have to find another advocate.

"The rockets go up - who knows where they come down?
That's not my department, says Wernher von Braun."

> And for what it's worth, to my knowledge none of my clients have ever engaged in patent trolling or sold their patents to a troll.

And if they did - you wouldn't want to know, would you? Since you're a patent lawyer, you probably know the term mens rea.

> Patent reform, coming down hard on the trolls, whatever you have in mind... it would have essentially no influence on my business. Getting rid of software patents altogether would have a small effect, but it would basically be de minimis. Certainly not enough to color my opinions about software patents.

Since you're a patent lawyer, you know perfectly well that our patent system does not have the power to distinguish between "inventors" and "trolls." You also know perfectly well that the controlling legal authorities do not have the power to identify and bar "software patents," "business method patents," etc. Legally there are no software patents in Europe, for instance, but the patent bar is not to be stopped. Same with the Supremes in Parker v. Flook.

Therefore, the only practical reform of this system is to destroy it entirely. This would change your life, wouldn't it? And not for the better.
freehunter: "If Windows 8 is a failure, it'll be because of wild, speculative bullshit, not because it's a bad product."

acqq: "Vista"

freehunter: "Windows Vista is a great example of a product that died for the exact reasons I described."

I still don't see how you can be sure that "Windows 8" is not going to be the new Vista. You claimed that "complainers" make Microsoft's OS's fail, but the truth is -- Vista was bad OS not because of complainers but because of poor execution. The whole process of failed development is properly documented, all with the need to "start over" and "to release anything" fast after too much time went by.

That MSFT can earn money because of lock-in and a lot of companies that are practically forced to subscribe is independent fact to the quality of the particular OS release. Or the quality of their UI decisions -- not once they had to "undo" some of their UI "improvements."
Microsoft Java
TVShack's Richard O'Dwyer extradition to USA to go ahead, says UK
Yes actually it is well within your powers to control their offence levels.

I didn't say it was easy, but since when were humans easy?
L♠A♠U♠R
If you want to be more enterprisey, you can pipe it to SNMP counter and then draw a graph with your Network Monitoring System. It is much more convenient if you have more that few servers.
I think the problem with this attitude is the assumption that what you are filtering for, which for the sake of this discussion is called 'intelligence', is the sole scalar factor that makes an employee great.

Haven't we all worked with that guy (or gal) who can't explain things as succinctly as the great, super-quick-witted double-800 SAT guy, but who has something different, a creative spark, a way of thinking outside the box? To assume that that character is simply a 'false negative' that an organization can do without, I think is very naive.

It comes down to risk and reward. Google has a proven business model; maybe they don't need that extra something that is worth the risk of a few non-performers. Or, as I suspect, that spark comes mostly from people who ended up at Google through acquisition, or the few who have reputations that allow them to bypass the traditional screening process, or they were just there at the beginning before the process was so ironclad. Or they got lucky and the interviewer liked them and gave them a bit of a pass.

TL; DR: Do you really only need an army of facile, confident test-takers who are good at making first impressions?

[Addendum: it occurs to me that if you are as large as Google, you can accept a process that only produces 0.1% (or less) creative geniuses (because lots of false negatives get rejected). You may even prefer to keep that number small but non-zero (a surfeit of true creative geniuses has its own problems). But is a ratio like 1:1000 the right number for a 20-person startup? I think the dynamics are much different at a small company. Let's remember, Google is not a startup, they are one of the largest companies in the world.]
I was astonished in my computer architecture class as an undergraduate to find out that the C language specification requires that all single-precision floating point numbers be converted to double-precision before any operations are done on them. So working with float's rather than double's in C is not only more vulnerable to underflow and what-not, but it's slower. Since then I've never declared a variable to be a float again.
Where does all the R&D money go? Somehow I get the impression that developing a new drug involves way too many people and processes and that disintermediation and automation along the R&D chain could greatly simplify and cheapen the process.

First of all, you need the brains to develop the drug. I can't imagine that this involves a team much larger than a pre-series A startup.

Does the development process for creating a new drug promote failing fast?

Does keeping the entire R&D process in house help or hinder?

How far can a team get before it needs to try a drug on humans and how much does it cost to get that far?

Are there any startups that just manage a portfolio of patients with symptoms/diseases/disorders and automatically pair those patients with drugs that might benefit them?

Should the process allow the patient to "price" his or her own life/health, whereby patients can opt in to Phase 1 trials for a lot more money than Phase 2 for example and name their own price in the process?

How much of the money spent is actually (time*wages) for a lot of people for an unnecessarily long process? Is burn rate a consideration when creating a new drug? How long does it take to get a drug to market? Can price be reduced by half by reducing the time it takes by half? Do a lot of people in the process spend their time waiting?

Is drug development in the US far more expensive than elsewhere because the entire healthcare system here is more expensive (vicious cost cycle / positive feedback loop)

Anyways, just tossing some ideas out there because I get the suspicion that pharma R&D is ridiculously archaic.
I'm not sure I understand the "nexus" part. Does it means the judge ruled that he specifically targeted the USA with his website instead of it being just a consequence of them being just another country in the internet? The quote from judge seem to imply the later. What exactly does this mean?
Do you never watch TV past 3am?

The page just makes it sound too good to be true and that makes some people skeptical.
I wonder if its possible to wrap an Android emulator in the Metro shell.

Would make buying an Android tablet pretty pointless.
They cache it in memory to avoid latency. Writing to and reading from disk increases latency. Even crossing the kernel boundary will increase latency.

Modern web browsers have architectures similar to OSes at this point - because they have requirements similar to OSes. I think it's natural that they will take on some of the same responsibilities.
But if there is no copyright, there is no need to license the software, you can just copy it without agreeing to anything. That's what it means for something to be in the public domain.

Contracts are only valid if there is an exchange of value; you could reasonably argue that there is no value in being granted a right you already have.
We're nowhere near that limit. From Wikipedia:

According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the contiguous United States has the potential for 10,459 GW of onshore wind power. The capacity could generate 37 petawatt-hours (PW·h) annually, an amount nine times larger than current total U.S. electricity consumption. The U.S. also has large wind resources in Alaska, and Hawaii.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_States
Forget about superconductivity.

How about flywheels?
At the same time, it is also common sense that you don't need to explain how poorly mismanaged your employer is when communicating with external customers.

With that said, had Google said something earlier, Jia wouldn't have had to say anything and this would be a non-issue.
I know that. But what we are talking about here are servers that do use a white list. You can’t even make them public, you have to invite people.

If you play with fiends you don’t need anti-giefing. (Ok, if you do need anti-giefing even though you play with your friends you may not have the best friends.)
Can you please write a word or two what you see as an advantage of AVR? I admit I don't have any experience but I'd really like to know. Thanks.

For other readers, AVR:

http://www.atmel.com/products/microcontrollers/avr/default.a...
Sure, but we're not talking about the "narrow, career day-job programmers" here. We're talking about the "wear multiple hats and diagnose problems wherever they lie" set. Those people shouldn't be diagnosing problems with their own ignorance. At the very least they should understand what they don't know.
Very nice! I find this one even more impressive though http://js1k.com/2012-love/demo/1100
Honey, before you were born I had some great flamewars with Mike Godwin on rec.arts.sf-lovers.

HN is really turning into Reddit, isn't it?
I watched Rands speak at CUSEC in 2011 in Montreal. The way he speaks is similar to the way he writes. His thoughts are though-provoking and insightful, generally teaching you at least one new thing you hadn't known before.
New Tech Could Let You Control Computer with Your Eyes
Matt Cutts: One of the more fun gadgets I've been playing with lately…
Good to know I can fax them if I have any questions. https://developers.google.com/events/io/register
Replacing regexps
Here's what's funny: Rands begins with a story about Borland, and how it was this amazing software company run by hacker barbarians who by 1992 were converting their products with "complete object-oriented rewrites." What he doesn't say is that Borland's hacker ethos is what greatly diminished the company.

The company indulged a well-known programmer tendency to bulldoze and rewrite code. The company tried to rewrite Arago into dBase for Windows and in the meantime was surpassed by Microsoft Access. It tried to rewrite Quattro Pro for Windows, ended up with few new features to show for years of work, and was surpassed by Microsoft Excel. Joel Spolsky wrote about both cases in one of his best known essays http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Rands is making the point that companies need hacking, or, as he puts it, "well-maintained Barbaric chaos inside the company." In this he is right. Facebook is trouncing Google with a more hackerish ethos, and is not making the same "rewrite everything" mistake as Borland.

But Facebook /is/ making some fresh mistakes. If you were to ask yourself, "Is Facebook maybe taking an excessively hackerish view on anything like Borland did?" it would not be hard to find affirmative examples, including a series of features that use private data in a way that tends to offend non hackers, and a series of privacy defaults that do likewise.

By more fully acknowledging the ways in which the hacker ethos burned Borland (beyond the understatement that Borland's products were "running late"), and by acknowledging the problems hacker culture contributed to at Facebook, Rands would have an even better essay, one that both asserted the importance of the hacker way and that acknowledged the potential downsides of hacker thinking. I'd be interested to hear his thoughts on how to embrace hacking while also instituting some checks on the less useful impulses of programmers.
Show HN: Instamazing, discover Instagram pictures taken around you in real time
Sweet negativity, bro.

An exit is an exit. He made something, and sold it FOR PROFIT in 6 months, while being in college. Pretty impressive.
The title of this changed from:

"They are dead to me. Dead and gone. I hate them now"

to:

"Yahoo Crosses The Line"

Curious about the reason this was done.
Comodo Internet Security 5.10.228257 | Andra Little Notes
It looks like they upped the price. We will see if it influences demand.
Flywheels are for energy storage, not transmission.
Who Stole The Moon? - the interactive book for iPad written in HTML
Patent reform is not going to happen until people start hating the player. Whenever someone says "don't hate the player" we end up a little bit further away from patent reform.
Running Feng Office On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.10
Yup, I thought D (for the language) and Digital for DigitalMars (for the compiler).
We organise a smaller (a lot smaller!) conference¹ in Helsinki, Finland and I can tell you that a surprising number of things increase in cost linearly as you add more days.

Of course adding one more day to a two day conference doesn't double your costs, but I'd image that Google is taking into account inflation as well as just trying to increase their profit margin (though taking into account the amount of hardware they give out they give out to attendees does indicate that they're also trying to limit the audience to actual developers).

¹ http://2012.frozenrails.eu/
PayPal backtracks on "obscene" e-book policy
Idealism vs. pragmatism: Mozilla debates supporting H.264 video playback
Try clicking in one spot quickly and repeatedly for a heart-gasm. Chrome handles it fine, though this technique might crash lesser browsers.
to henrikschroder:
I expected that this reaction was caused by mentioning a book.
It is my deepest belief that questions like memory management can not be answered with brief comment.
You must read at least a basic book if you want to understand it in depth.
MVP?

https://developers.google.com/events/io/input-output/ahNzfmd...

edit: looks like you might need to open up in incognito to go straight to the machine I built (2 parts)
He's saying that since the site was accessible in the US that it affected the US, so, consequently the extradition was approved.
Google Loses WIPO Arbitration over YouTube.com.pe
from menagerie.models import cat as cat_models

This is not recommended at all
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Tweereal - real-time Twitter activity map
Data visualization app - Twitter API + Google Maps mashup builded on Node.JS and Socket.IO
Should doctors really be finding out about drugs from salespeople?

It seems to me that this is a large part of the problem and perverts the incentives in the industry not to produce what people need but what they can sell.

There has got to be a more efficient way for doctors to discover what drugs are useful to the patients they treat.

Heck, look at the tech startup industry. Very few if any of us learn about new startups from traveling salespeople. We learn about them from websites like Hacker News, TechCrunch, TechMeme, etc.

Do we have doctor bloggers that make an effort to learn about new drugs and discover what is and isn't worthwhile?

I would imagine that the very reliance on salespeople actually makes it harder to bring good, useful drugs to market because the industry generates its own noise for doctors that they themselves need to cut through.

Every pharma salesperson I've ever known has been for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from viagra spam emails in my inbox, except for they have a pulse and "pay" for readership through expensive dinners and other niceties.

The entire drug information dissemination machine is broken.
Great point. A coding challenge would stop the attendees who just plan to get the free hardware and flip it for a quick profit.
Forget fragmentation, lower app spend per user, etc complaints about Google play and android this is the big one.

This is the only issue that has seriously given me pause about selling apps on Google Play. If something goes wrong you're stuck in forums, unhelpful issue submission forms, and you can be left out in the cold for weeks.

The lack of support for end user market issues compounds the problem. There's no easy help from google so customers contact the app developers who can't do anything to help but direct them back to the Google support labyrinth.
MIUI Music Player Now Ported To Work With All ROM’S
"It costs about $40,000 a year for a homeless person to be on the streets."
Samsung official claims Apple’s releasing a 7.85-inch iPad
Tablet computers added to UK inflation basket
Wow, those are pretty cool. Hate to be around when they lost cooling (dropping out of superconductivity would be a pretty energetic event :-). But its good news on that front.

If you've ever seen the insulator jacket in an underground HVDC cable it is huge.
At what point will non-US websites just start blocking US-based traffic all together? I suppose one day in the future the US will be like an island on the internet - disconnected from other country's websites due to situations like this.