skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hope that actual smart people aren't really working on this. It used to be that this kind of crazy ambition was what started the best companies. Its an almost Apple-ish goal from yesteryear. If this generation's Wozs spend their efforts simply trying to thwart dumb government, I think society will be poorer for it, even if they can watch all of the free movies they want over the blimp.
EventGuru launched by Gigablast Creator
>Unless if people categorized the above software as non-system-programming.

Probably the case, networked services represent an area where performance is at least somewhat a concern, but BitC is trying to address situations where one is writing a memory allocator, not building a server on top of a GC'd language known for having sloppy memory usage.
"twice as less"

Half?
In Granada, Spain, there are a bunch of such "cave dwellings" in the hill above the Alhambra Palace, from the inside looking quite similar to the photo in this story, small rooms with lime whitewash on the walls. I was graciously invited for an evening in one of those places, and while it was a bit cramped, and maybe a bit roughly furnished (you must use an out-house in most cases, if you were wondering, and the plumbing and electricity can be a challenge), it was agreeable and the temperature stays in a comfortable range in temperate climates.

Here's an interesting and brief travel documentary featuring some info on the cave dwellings in the second half:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMdeBviSO4I

And though I hate to link to the Daily Fail, they do have a nice little overview guide of Granada with a good picture of the cave dwellings from the outside and a bit of historical info here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-569192/Granada-Des...

P.S. Go see Granada!
Quiet, You Cretins: Mad Ramblings from a Half-Crazed Genius
Dabble: A/B testing for class-based Python web frameworks
Hey Josh!
http://server-sky.com/
Yes, but then we all have to use Plan 9.
The online pledge is at: http://thecostofknowledge.com/

Please do sign if you are in any way connected with academia/academic publishing. Your fellow researchers thank you.
It really isn't all that bad. When you compare what we had to do compared to keeping two big data systems in sync (instead of Riak, which is a breeze), I think we got off easy.
According to Confidence Men Obama had ordered Geithner to come up with a plan to break up Citibank, but Geithner delayed coming up with one until after the window of opportunity had closed.
Would you believe, my Irish ISP blocks piratebay access.
Apple to host conference call Monday to discuss its $100B cash balance
I always wondered what apple's plans were for the next 10 years.

The iPad is close to perfection, the next iterations surely will improve but only slightly and in maybe 3 or 4 years most people won't need the newest device anymore.

The same will be for smartphones in a couple of years, the limitations will be in the speed the carrier provides.
How many percent of customers would Apple lose if Apple made the iPhones/iPads Apple-carrier-only?

Not gonna happen.
Git commands for the routined
I think a one-time dividend is much more likely. A recurring dividend sends the wrong signal to Wall Street (we're no longer a growth company). A one-time dividend says something more like, "Yeah, we have a crap load of cash...here, have some."
I'd love to see Apple hack the system. There are a huge number of institutional funds that are not allowed to invest in Apple due to regulation that limits them to companies which provide a dividend. It would be awesome if they announced a $0.01 dividend, simply so that they were now an investment vehicle for all such funds.

edit: I could have been a bit more clear.. I was referring to funds such as pension/mutual funds, not banks.
This is interesting. So you think that being a good speaker negatively impacts one's ideas, although it won't necessarily be noticeable to others? That is because those who are good speakers have counteracted the negative impact with more practice.
Epic Illustrations by Justin Mezzell
This Week in Canadian Startups
To anyone who has made a lot of money off of AAPL in the past X months, I'm sure the dividend would be tiny in comparison. I don't see the point. I do think they should have a $0.01 dividend (see my other post).
Modeling Time Series Data on top of Cassandra
I would love if Apple would try to buy out one of major Hollywood studios or music labels. For instance Disney's market cap is $80B and Steve Jobs also was the largest shareholder of Disney. This could truly cause a revolution in digital content delivery.

I know making films or music has nothing to do with their core business, but if a search engine can buy Motorola. Why the hell not?
I think pg seems to have confused great speakers with great entertainers. The mark of a great speaker is one who conveys complex ideas with (apparent) ease, not simply one who engages and entertains the audience. While those qualities are certainly helpful, unless the audience comes away with some level of understanding, in my opinion, the speaker has failed.

A great speaker distills ideas and arguments down to their core essence so they can be easily absorbed. While, in the speaker, this may not be a source for ideas, it should be a catalyst of ideas for the listener. In this, the speaking is superior to that of the written word. This is especially true if you are in a room full of people who approach you after when it could quickly turn out to be a source of ideas for the speaker as well.

Further, all the issues pg seems to have with speaking could just as easily be applied to writing. I have read more nonsensical fluff wrapped up in a entertaining package than I care to admit. The written word is just as powerful at selling snake oil as the spoken one.

The only talks I find useless are for subjects I know well. However I have seen some fantastic talks on topics that I knew nothing about which sparked ideas I would not have had otherwise. I have given talks that have likewise provoked a lot of discussion which helped me refine my own ideas.

Maybe pg is just going to (or giving) the wrong talks. Or maybe he underestimates how good of a speaker he is.
.. and fuck the rest of the world!
Or prevent the drones from refueling.
That's a great collection of git gems for tasks needed in everyday workflow explained in a pragmatic manner.
Bacon reveals history of anonymous abuse
Link for the curious:

http://akshat.posterous.com/patio11-says-hello-ladies
"Only C"? What about Forth?
Let's hope the 'Bay doesn't accidentally take out a 747.
Honestly, if Android came on top of or with a real Linux base so that I could be assured my existing Linux applications and command-line environment will work... I would totally switch.

The new Ubuntu for Android project will take over the world.
You're right that in a world with varying pixel densities, it's not enough to just design an icon for a given pixel size. But physical size isn't the right design target either. An icon designed for a given physical size on a display close to the user's eyes won't work if the display is much further away.

So when you go from thinking about pixel size to thinking about physical size, you're going in the right direction, but you're not going far enough. The relevant metric is more like "the angle subtended at the user's eyes", kinda like how the "CSS pixel" unit works.

Now, given that it's almost impossible for software on the device to know how far away the user is, trying to design up front for that metric (angle subtended by the icon) is also almost impossible.

And even if you did know both the pixel density and the distance to the display, that still doesn't take into account the fact that users will vary in their visual acuity. The right design choice for a 20-year-old user holding the display close to their face is going to be dramatically different from the right choice for a 70-year-old holding the display at arms length.

You can't really design well for all those possibilities up front. The right answer has to involve allowing the user to adjust the "zoom level" to their liking. And that level of flexibility means that automated approaches (possibly something like freetype's autohinting, extended to work in color) are probably going to be a better approach than manual pixel tweaking.
They only win because we let them. If the majority of people weren't so politically indifferent, there would be a higher probability of change. The highest vote count on PlainSite (http://www.plainsite.org) under Banking & Finance is...20.
Zewnętrzna strona profilowa użytkownika %username%
If this generation's Wozs spend their efforts simply trying to thwart dumb government, I think society will be poorer for it.

No. If they focus just on free movies, then you're probably right, but the statement that today's hackers shouldn't 'thwart dumb government' seems misguided. Government in many ways reflects a codification of societal rules and structures, and sometimes the power centers that enforce those rules need shaking up. That might be via new methods of communication, or new social structures, or something else we haven't really considered yet, but there's no question in my mind that the crazy ambitions of TPB, Wikileaks, and other groups are shaping our future in ways that can eventually enrich us all.
Since when is Apple a charity and should do altruistic things? I don't see how this will help apple and just seems like a way to spend money.
Every time I visit the US, I reserve one of my few days there as "fix whatever BofA did to my account" day.

My English wife has an account with them, and they have a habit of switching her account type without warning to whichever one has the highest monthly fees, thus draining the account from ~$1,000 to $32.50 by the time we find out about it. Then we spend a few hours in a branch, shouting at the manager. And it gets escalated up the line until somebody can do something about it. And we get a case opened to credit it all back and put us back onto the "Free, no fees, honest, we mean it this time" account.

Just did the 3rd round of this last week.

Their advice: "You should log on to your online banking on a regular basis to make sure your fee status hasn't changed." Because "our terms of service allow us to change fees without notice."

Sweet. My bad then. We'll be sure to check in every few days to make sure your bank hasn't confiscated all of our money. Thanks for the tip.
darkorbit
server poland 2
Given how dependent Apple's devices are on wi-fi, I'd love to see them invest in building out real, full-coverage wi-fi in the top 10 U.S. cities available for free to any Apple device.

Getting into the cellular game seems like a mistake, but investing in wi-fi "towers" to side-step cellular companies seems like a win.
Rapidshares servers are in Germany though. And they've been sued (and won) in German courts. They are only incorporated in Switzerland. Not to mention that Swiss server bandwidth is relatively expensive, see eg http://www.softronics.ch/en/products/linux-dedicated-server....
Most database engines of moderate sophistication straddle the "systems" and "application" line because they start directly managing system resources at a low level. Application servers are a bit more like "applications".

Database engines highlight some of the reasons that Java is a poor systems language relative to C/C++. High-performance database engines these days are usually bottlenecked by memory I/O performance and efficiency, or storage I/O if you under-provision the machine resources for the workload. This is why you see I/O optimizations applied to in-memory databases, for example. Java may be fast at many things, but it is much slower than C/C++ for codes that are bound by memory performance and efficiency. You have to start doing very awkward things in Java to even come close to what comes naturally in languages that explicitly manage memory behavior and structure. As someone who has written a lot of database engine-y code in both C++ and Java, the difference in absolute performance for nominally equivalent code is not small, and is generally easier to achieve in C++. So for low-level performance-oriented systems, there is a pretty strong bias toward C++, particularly now that there is a lot of experience trying to implement the same systems in Java.

For performance sensitive codes, systems programming is really about carefully managing resources to optimize for characteristics of the system. C makes this very easy because it exposes all of it. To the extent that CPU architectures are increasingly bound by memory performance, I would not be surprised to see C++ supplanting Java for certain purposes.

This makes sense. Java was designed more as an application language that works well for codes that are unlikely to make heavy use of the memory system. Its popularity and generality has caused it to be widely used but that does not always make it a good choice outside of its original design case (see also: Perl).
It doesn't work that way. "Linux", even GNU/Linux, is not really a single operating system. It's an anarchically-designed, anarchically-run OS-building kit revolving around a vision of what an ideal operating system would look like and with each part adjusting to what each other part is doing on the fly.

Evolution will never truly replicate the results possible with design.
CGI short film - post-apocalyptic
Incredible short film with a motorcycle chase set in a post-apocalyptic era.
"I dunno, I think the definition of "good speaker" really depends on the audience."

I agree with most of your post. But I'd actually invert that relationship. A good speaker is someone who understands his audience, so that he can maximize both his connection to it and his impact upon it.

The intent of speaking, and the intent of writing, aren't altogether different. In either case, a typical goal is to convey information to an audience, and to maximize the audience's uptake of that information. Uptake naturally follows from conveyance, and successful conveyence depends upon successful connection (or "breakthrough"). So, it stands to reason, knowing one's audience is a necessary precondition to engaging one's audience. Some audiences are tougher to engage than others. And what necessarily breaks through for Audience A may fly right over the heads of Audience B, or piss off Audience C, or strike Audience D as a joke.

This distinction is important to make, because too many people write or speak primarily for themselves. They assume a hypothetical audience of likeminded people, and they blame the audience when their words don't hit their marks. This mindset is so prevalent that the exclamation "Tough crowd!" has become something of a cliche. It's true that some crowds are "tougher" than others, but the failure to engage a particular crowd usually lies mainly with the speaker or writer. (Even when it doesn't, it's best to assume it does; assumption of failure provides a useful lesson, whereas blame deferral offers no room for growth).
Take a look at BetterTouchTool. You can bind any key combination to home, end, pgup, or pgdn.
Don't they already have this with iTunes U?
Apple sell products and they sell content. I couldn't imagine them running a free service.
You would then be jamming all cellular activity, which presumably wouldn't fly (no pun intended).
$10b of anything that is locked to Apple-only devices (distributed through iBooks or some other app) would likely help Apple sell more hardware. It's harder to say than it would sell enough hardware to be a profitable decision.
My pleasure PG.

Wayback is instructive for founders. If ever you doubt the value of what you're doing, and fight desires to hold fire and perfect more features, the wayback machine is a great reminder that those companies that succeeded started somewhere less than minimal too, and executed on from there.
Just trim the length of the ums and nobody notices them anymore. Fund a startup that can do um-filtering (speaking through a microphone) on the fly, problem solved. :)

You are in great company, just watched a couple of videos of Elon Musk and Donald Knuth. They are also expert um'ers but everyone keeps listening because the message they are broadcasting is interesting.
Maybe this is a dumb or too personal of a question then, but why not close the account and move to a more competent bank?

I don't understand why people continue to keep their money in an institution that they don't even seem to trust. There are far better choices out there.
Tell us something we're not already #Occupying about, please.
Also, Apple does not hold $97.6B in cash in the United States. Over 50% of their cash is overseas, which prevents them from using it in the United States unless they take a huge haircut. So keep that in mind when theorizing on U.S. centric uses of cash. Think global!

edit: Pretty graphs: http://seekingalpha.com/article/318794-apple-s-foreign-cash-...
Then people would double check their spelling before committing a post ;)
The problem with systems design is that it's all so complex. Multitasking has become an excuse to run everything as some absurd daemon. Badly designed hardware has to be papered over with undocumented binary drivers. Everything is optimised for throughput benchmarks, so we get warm ups and unpredictable pauses visible to the user. And it's all full of security holes.

The plain truth of the matter is that none of these things are due to a lack of special language support. It's that the whole system is too complex, and the complexity isn't even quarantined in such a way as to be harmless. We need to be able to start over (something the author acknowledges). We can't do this if we build yet another complex system in the belief that we'll get it all right this time round.
Antitrust among other non-regulatory reasons.
Someone hit "publish" on the April Fools post instead of "save as draft".
Then buy Facebook.
http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/laptops/NP900X4B-A02US
To suggest that jamming a CDMA signal is impossible is BEYOND ignorant.

It is trivially easy to jam a CDMA signal. Hell, when Qualcomm was trying to get CDMA off the ground, they used to do it to themselves ALL THE TIME.

For the interested, just Google IS-95A for Crtl-F for Walsh code. Mix one part clock sync'ed publicly known Walsh Code with one part bit randomness. Stir gently and enjoy.
With caching, 512 intset entries, and 64 bit intset values, that's under 1 microsecond to intersect using the naive binary search algorithm for intersection.

I don't believe that small sets are an issue for performance.

For me, the real question is whether there are ways of getting good performance and lower memory overhead across the entire range of object sizes in Redis.
Make it available for free but only via their AppStore (platform lock-in).
In theory they try to buy the big blue book of faces. Not sure the merger would be approved, though. Also it would be a waste of money, just like buying Twitter.
A recurring dividend sends a signal that they are no longer a speculative fool's investment but a solid cash-cow.
Using the parallel branch of Fabric
giving this to my mum
Also, this paper suggests that the answer to multi-tasking problems is to move the complexity out into the language. It's funny how PL researchers will always spin the situation so that it demands more PL research. If we're really moving into a many cores future as people suggest, then we should have architectures that give each application a dedicated core. No context switching. Of course, you'd need a simple system and not a billion daemons running in the background waiting to be exploited by criminals.
Mike Bostock's D3-based Hive Plot demo is an excellent showcase for D3, Hive Plots, and their excellent synergy. D3's detailed graphics and highly interactive feedback make hive plots "come to life", showing off their defined and predictable diagram layout, as well as their high data density.

For a summary of the effort's background and prospects, see my status report (http://groups.google.com/group/d3-js/browse_thread/thread/ba...).
Be a key developer on an app moving 2 million photos per day (YC S09) 
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Bump is funded by some of the best investors in Silicon Valley: YC, SV Angel, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Ram Shriram (board member and early investor @ Google).

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Interview with independent videogame developer, Brian Soulliard
Okay. To buy a music label, would be problematic, but Apple is not really a big deliver of movie content in terms of market share, yet, are they?
Now that Oink is gone...
It would be great if Apple could deal themselves into the content creation game a little. If they purchased an existing studio and were able to distribute their own TV shows and Films in the manner that they wanted, then they would not longer have to go through lengthy deals with other studios before releasing new products. And having that content would put pressure on other studios to negotiate quicker (I would think).

Whilst that would be exciting and interesting - I think it will only be something boring like a dividend.
But that would break the backwards compatibility with previous systems and architectures. The markets can't have that.
"Colorizing" Scripts
Mecha is being built to directly solve these exact problems:

http://vimeo.com/30396564
Increased sales of Apple devices -- either via explicit lock-in (delivery via iTunes) or implicit (the iPad is the best consumption device, and maybe could use trusted platform tech to do exams without cheating, etc.) Sell $149-$199 iPad 1 refurb units (or get the iPad 2 down to $250-300), and you'll end up eventually owning the corporate workspace.

I am with you on not liking corporate philanthropy in general (profits should be distributed to individuals, who can then make their own charity decisions; I'd hate it if Apple donated to causes I dislike or find sub-optimal), except in cases where the company can achieve both commercial and charity objectives and do so better than anyone else. At the very least, it would have to provide as much cash return to Apple as the blended mix of investments they currently make.
Completely wild, uninformed, and ignorant guess: They'll buy Twitter or Intel.
This talk really resonated with me. As engineers, I think we can acknowledge the power of abstraction/reason/focus. But too many times we find ourselves idolizing these things.

A couple golden quotes from the video:

"The left hemisphere is the Berlusconi of the brain, it controls the media...the right hemisphere doesn't have a voice"

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” -attributed to Einstein.
US bank accounts are hard to get if you don't live there (and don't have a several-month history of living there currently), but they're really handy to have. So until we can get a new account set up for my wife with a better bank, we're sorta stuck with them.

It's painful, but even if they didn't refund the annoying $20/month fees they keep tacking on, it'd still be worth it just to keep the toehold.
Agreed. And something wrong with the hobby as well. Hacking is one of the least cost-intensive hobbies that one can pursue. Try sailing...
You buy iCloud, just as part of the purchase price of Apple hardware/software.
Since when has doing altruistic things been a bad thing to do with a giant wodge of spare cash?.