skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hopefully this will be less of a problem going forward with ebooks but the internet is full of stories of writers with several profitable books published who ended up sitting on novels for years when the horror market collapsed, good well edited books that went on to be profitable when "Urban Fantasy" started selling.

Or just a case of publishers not wanting to publish more than X books a year from a given writer, regardless of output.

Those are books of course. Movie scripts are notorious for floating around Hollywood for years, sometimes decades.
I'm sure we agree on the law and even on when and against whom it would be enforced. I'm not sure you would agree that there's value in pointing out to the companies advocating for a law which of their actions would technically fall outside the provisions of that law. And realistically, the value is probably only cathartic.
Yes, it is extremely difficult to predict which technologies will win over a 5-10 year period vs their competitors. Eg, predicting that jQuery would appear vs the evolution of some other system (ExtJS?).

On the other hand, predicting what changes will occur to a legacy enterprise system tend to be much easier.

In the overall scope of things, Java hasn't really changed that much over the past five years. I think that some long-range planning of the kinds of changes they are thinking about actually makes sense. The need for closures, reified generic types, and an improved type system is unlikely to change in the next 5-10 years.
I once had a cow-orker who thought software came from "the internet" - he literally could not fathom writing a program himself.
The thing is this - configuring a server is one set of problems, building a decent CMS database/backend is another set of problems, and building a decent browser-based UX for content authoring is a third set.

Very few people have all three of these skills, and it's fair to say that 2 and 3 are not yet solved problems. Rolling your own CMS for any non-trivial purpose is always something that sounds like a good idea until you try it, and then you start hitting all of the incredible idiosyncrasies and speed bumps that other CMS have already solved, even if they've done it poorly.

I'm not exactly defending Wordpress and its lousy code, but in my experience with publishing CMSs, if it's powerful enough to flex to non-trivial needs (Modern WP, Drupal, Django, CQ, etc), then it's probably going to feel like a bloated/complex mess to a programmer, because of all the nuances in the problem space.

Having worked on both sides of this one, i'd rather solve the 'scale this crappy software' problem than the 'Build a useable UX solution that does everything we need and works on mobile and in IE8' problem.
Thx for putting the effort into this long reply, I've enjoyed reading it
RIM isn't dead until it does what all dead companies seem to do these day: get a new CEO and explode in one final conflagration of litigation when it digs around and finds a patent on the letter E.

That being said, their trajectory seems to be downward and I have trouble imagining how they will survive long term. It's simply becoming uneconomical to have your own mobile OS without significant market share. The future here seems to belong to iOS and Android, at least for the foreseeable future.

Windows Phone 7 only survives because it's being pumped up by the great cash engine of Windows/Office. Perhaps MS will plant a poison pill into RIM and eventually buy them out to buy marketshare, much as they've done and are doing to Nokia.
No they could not have. Certainly not in the later versions and, I think, not in the earlier versions but I couldn't swear to it.

In the later versions the site in question would have to be a non-US site (they don't need SOPA for US sites as we've seen with Megaupload) and the site would need to operate with the intent to promote copyright infringement.

Obviously that is very broad, but I don't think anyone could stretch it to one misappropriated jpeg in a site completely dedicated to something else.

Don't get me wrong, I'm completely opposed to SOPA and legislation like it, I just don't think this is relevant.

Edit: typos
Blackberry surrenders to iPhone
Also, stop showing successful, well dressed business people in your advertising copy. Humans beings shouldn't have to put up with the indignity of being valued solely on their career success. We are people - not business objects.
UI responsiveness: OSX vs. Windows, iOS vs. Android
Why do I get 2 down votes? I was just pointing out that they are down (they still are)
Well done on the article, man -- very detailed.

I would say you should dump the caching plugin, however, and just do everything it's doing in nginx itself. My mix also adds CloudFlare as a caching system:

http://danielmiessler.com/blog/how-to-run-a-wicked-fast-word...
I should also probably add that my statement shows my cultural biases, namely that being committed means being married. There were many long-term couples in NYC who were together but not married.
I wasn't aware that I was making that contentious a statement.

I agree; in fact I found your comment insightful and relevant. Seems strange to me that people were voting it down.
For some more background, the local newspaper looks back on this story 35 years later:

http://www.minotdailynews.com/page/content.detail/id/519549....
I'm not so sure that this type of book-burning is tied to the physicality of books, rather than a symbol of rejection. Certainly, there have been instances throughout history, such as when the Nazi government or the Catholic Church have carried out organized purges of particular written works on a societal level, where the supply of the work has been materially impacted to the point that it is difficult to obtain.

But I assume you're referring more to examples such as this story, of small groups using book-burning as a publicity stunt, or a public symbol of their rejection of the work. In those cases, I doubt the lack of physicality makes any difference; if they wanted to protest a digital-only book, they'd simply print it out on something flammable first.
The way I read this it looks like you are placing the data part as more difficult? Although the system you speak about sounds like it is AI Complete. Figuring out how the human mind manages to maneuver combinatorial explosions in interesting search spaces is a very hard problem.

The field is very exciting but not without grave risks. I am of the opinion that The final key breakthrough(s) in Artificial Intelligence will be raced and not collaborated towards. The advantages the possessor of such a system would have would be enough to test the purest of saints. Also, Computational Ethics lags far behind even current primitive attempts at AGI. Furthermore, there are insentives to leave off the moral breaks since the consequences seem ephemeral, burdening your system with ethics would further increase the search space - doing the right thing is computationally harder than doing what is best for just yourself. The future: step carefully.

For what it is worth, you can merge large data sources with automatic program construction today. I recently started a project in this area. ConceptNet has an excellent API. Then look at Genetic Programming, Markov Logic Networks, inductive logic programming, each with its own strength and weaknesses. Program Transformation is a related area where it deduces programs from formal specifications that are unoptimized or non polynonmial in time or space. The most interesting take on this I have seen: http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~kahl/HOPS/ANIM/index.html.
The thing is, doing it correctly still actually requires quite a bit of understanding.

The hard part has always been key management. If a user doesn't have a properly managed web of trust, they have no real assurance of privacy or authenticity.

I think the people who are actually in a position to fix this problem are the social networks. Imagine if the act of joining Facebook caused a keypair to be generated by you, and friending someone brought their key into your web of trust with some sensible defaults.

Unfortunately Facebook has no incentive to build such a thing. But maybe something third party can leverage all those social connections to help users manage keys in a more natural way.
Katz kickstarts project for better Rails on Mac OS X
An AI developed by the military and without oversight would be a very bad thing. A very bad thing indeed.

Ask about the motives. It wouldn't be an Asimov machine for starters
Do you have an example of RESTful SOAP? I think SOAP's lack of situational HTTP method adoption (i.e. it uses GET or POST for everything, vs DELETE/PUT/etc. when appropriate), and the fact that it wraps another envelope around an already available HTTP envelope makes is hard to deem any SOAP implementation as RESTful. I'm not trying to prove you wrong, I'd just like to see an example (a quick google search yielded nothing for me).
They know.
Don't get me started on T-Mobile's Vibrant:
http://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/cell-phones/SGH-T959ZKATMB

Nice cable design:
http://image.made-in-china.com/2f0j00BetaYigGqnkp/Data-Cable...

Here's an article that covers some of the other apple inspirations:
http://www.phonesreview.co.uk/2011/09/29/samsung-copying-app...

I am not an Apple shill, I own 3 android phones and an iconatab, but the blatant copying is not becoming of a company like samsung.
I think the point Apple is trying to make is a little different than how this article described it.

I don't think anybody would disagree that the tablet form shown in the 1994 video is the natural form a functional tablet would take on: thin, large screen, rectangular, etc. Including Apple.

However, Apple is not happy because, to Apple, it is the first to figure out how to deliver this "natural" form factor in a tablet, and Samsung (and subsequent Android manufacturers), ripped Apple off in the delivery process. I imagine Apple's logic is that no other companies were able to engineer the "optimal" tablet until the iPad came out and they disassembled it and, through imitation, engineered their own. The Android tablets exist because of the iPad.

Which is not unreasonable, honestly. If the thin, rectangular, and large screen form factor is the final product of natural evolution of tablets, how come nothing even came close to it until the iPad came out? How would one explain the the sudden shift in tablet design if the iPad never existed?

If I came up with a way of actually making a hover car (envisioned through countless medias) that works and everyone copied the way I did it, I'd be pretty pissed too.

I'm not good with words as English is not my first language. I hope I got my point across.

EDIT: spelling.
Comparative Technical Review of Windows Phone 7.5
I don't claim to be an expert on Blackberry, but for me the real sell for Blackberry has always been BBM. Kids today all have mobile phones, and most of them in the UK have Blackberry's solely for contacting each other through BBM.

I feel that Blackberry could save themselves by targeting both those who love BBM, and those who want a simple, cheap phone. I think parents and kids would love to have a basic phone with a physical keyboard, BBM and a great new UI.
Do you believe that design patents in general should never hold?
Wynn, thanks again for a great interview, I'll check in on this thread again later. Some thoughts that I'm not sure I mention in the podcast (maybe I snuck them in, but I think not):

* Fedora is doing some neat stuff in terms of trying to improve Linux color management (colorhug by Richard Hughes, generally improving ease of color management)

* During my gimp mini-rant, I thought about mentioning that gimp does have a lab plugin, but this doesn't solve the basic issues with gimp for me, by a long shot

* I'm going to set up some sort of a channel for comments and requests for Solarized 2. Not sure how best to do that yet, I'm considering github issues, a different bug tracker, g+ page (not my preferred method), etc. Ideas welcome. I may just default down to a mailing list.
Everyone seems to be confused by the "I am sending you the only copy" aspect of this letter. I'm sure he kept excellent records, and keeping a copy (or the original) for himself would be a standard business practice for someone in the communication business.

It is no different than you sending an email to someone saying, "I'm sending this note to you alone rather than posting this publicly, ..."

As for why he would keep a copy: no different than why you keep copies of your emails. Should the recipient respond, he'll have his original to reference if the person responding takes items out of context, attributes statements not actually made to Vonnegut, amongst other benign or nefarious mistakes.
Agricultural Biotechnology
I think this is not a good idea.

1. what kind of security properties do you want to verify. I cannot think of one that could not be checked at runtime when the dangerous function is called with actual parameters.

2. turing completeness has nothing to do with security. Before Haskell had IO it was totally safe but still turing complete.
What I remember of my first-grad year in psychology (in Europe and I changed orientation after that year), anthropology course:
The picture shows a black person in a room and you're looking at it in such a way that you don't see any perspective lines (3D construct), only a flat surface for the Wall. A square is drawn on the wall and filled with a scenery. "White/Occidental" people think the square represents a window and "Black/African" people think it's a painting or a hanging frame. Because, when the study was conducted, in that particular part of africa where it was conducted, people didn't have windows in their house.

So, that's another example of that cultural bias but it demonstrates we don't need something "complex" to make it stand out.

PS:Sorry for this atrocious use of english, it has been a long day.
If I understand correctly Connex.io syncs back changes from other address books to iOS and OSX address books. Doesn't that lead to problems if I also use iCloud (especially if synchronizing my iOS and OSX address books via iCloud between devices and at the same time also synchronizing via Connex.io)? Sounds like a lot of merge conflicts to me.
Does anyone else have trouble reading the website with the background/font style or am I just realizing the gifts of middle-age?
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=GsM-aeEAAAAJ&hl...

Seriously
They're not bad people for doing this. Doing this just demonstrates that they're bad people for pushing SOPA.
WEB != INTERNET
Congress: How Are Developers Using Personal Data?
Probability of Poultry Development ~ Methods of Modern Farming
"I'd really like to see the source of the data and what exactly is being measured."

Following the source link in Yglesias' post [1], the graph seems to come from a presentation that Paul Heald (a professor at the University of Illinois) [2] did at the University of Canterbury [3]. A video is available on YouTube; the graph in question (with a different title) seems to be available at the 12:50 mark: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DpfZcftI00#t12m50s

[1]: http://offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.co.nz/2012/03/copyright-...

[2]: http://www.law.illinois.edu/faculty/profile/PaulHeald

[3]: http://www.econ.canterbury.ac.nz/research/seminar2012.shtml
Nope. An iPhone 3GS isn't terrible...even in 2012.
As a cultural note: "litigant in person" tends to fall into two broad groups. Plucky rebels with no money fighting huge corporations[1] or wingnuts. Here we appear to have both.

Here's the review page.

(http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/0956471404/ref=cm_cr...)

[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_Case)

[2] (http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/184/4/352.abstract?ijkey=9fb1...)
FWIW, as someone who has been following Schneier's commentary on airport security for at least a few years now, Schneier and Hawley have discussed many of these issues previously: http://www.schneier.com/interview-hawley.html
Schneier previously interviewed him back when he was still with the TSA: http://www.schneier.com/interview-hawley.html
> Its the best, unless you're trying to find a nice cheap bratwurst, then NYC sucks it up big time.

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?q=wechslers+currywurst&...
How to get 200+ comments without saying anything: ask people about their favorite food

Firefox 11.0
Why Old Books Smell Good
I actually don't understand why the so-called Mickey Mouse copyright extensions aren't treated on a case-by-case basis or at least don't require renewal say every 20 years so truly orphaned works can do what they're meant to and go into the public domain.

That being said, patents have time limits. Why do copyright holders feel like they have the right to profit in perpetuity? It seems inconsistent and not in the public interest but I don't need Mickey Mouse to be in the public domain. Orphaned works however should become so.
> Wow, how can you seriously plan releases of a programming language out to 2021?

"A plan is useless, but planning is essential" [1]

More true than ever, if you ask me. Sure, you make plans, why wouldn't you? But you also retain the flexibility to adapt the plan as the environment changes. You don't chisel the damn plan into a stack of stone tablets and render it immutable for all time.

I don't see any conflict whatsoever in planning out through 2021. I would say that in doing so, there's an implicit assumption that the plan - especially the farther reaches of it - are subject to change and are based on current best guesses.

[1]: paraphrase of a quote attributed to Dwight Eisenhower, which was probably in turn a paraphrase of another quote. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower
First, what exactly is the Y axis? Titles stocked or volumes stocked, and what is the order of magnitude?

Second, what is the effect complained of? That it costs too much to purchase books, movies, and music, or that one can't "read a version of Good-bye, Mr. Chips in which he protects his students from the werewolf menace as well as offering them solace through the Great War."

If the former, among the moderately prosperous of the developed countries, is this really having a large economic effect? Grabbing at random some non-tech stuff that happens to be in my office, I find, all in copyright: one novel at $15.95, one volume of humor ditto, one collection of essays on food at $12.95.

Second, if the cultural effect is the problem, just how grave is that problem? We do not seem to be thinking of Mozart and da Ponte overhauling Beaumarchais here.
This submission could not have come at a better time.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been contemplating making a submission urging HNers to be human, and to recognize that everyone else who comments here is also a human, and that stories about startups and notable figures are essentially about humans - humans who all have families, friends, ambitions, desires, flaws, struggles.

All too often I see people here forgetting about that. I myself have been guilty of it in the past too. But there's something about the negativity and criticism here that grates on me more than on other sites. I think people here tend to assume that being an engineer/programmer means that not only must they treat their code with utmost logic and rationality, but that they should look at life in the same manner - that to be an empathetic and emotional person puts them at some sort of optimizational and productive disadvantage. All that leads to is cold, harsh discourse and criticism without considering the more abstract, but very real ways humans feel and behave. It's sad to see.

So, I guess this is that submission. Next time you write a comment, ask yourself if you're being human and remind yourself that whatever you're about to say is directed at another human.

Stop being robots, and just act human.
Steve Blank has been in the StartUp world for decades, just check his about page: http://steveblank.com/about/

And compare it to the author you're talkin about http://www.ashmaurya.com/about/
that clearly states in his page "In late 2009, I ran into into Steve Blank’s lectures on “Customer Development” from where I followed the trail to Eric Ries’ early ideas of the Lean Startup."
The thing is that hydrogen has very limited utility as a fuel. Compressing it is as energy-intensive as producing it in the first place, and even compressed, it takes up a very large amount of volume. A pressure vessel identical in volume to a standard 15gal gas tank would hold less than 2.5 gge (gasoline gallon equivalents) of 700bar compressed hydrogen.

There are all sorts of storage media under development to get around this hydrogen volumetric density problem, but none are much closer to market than this butanol project. At the very least, an existing vehicle fleet would require significant engine modifications to run on hydrogen (not to mention fuel storage and delivery system modifications).
If you wanted to identify such privileges, what would they look like?

People have done this already, this is what they look like:

White Privilege Checklist: http://www.amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html

Male Privilege Checklist: http://www.amptoons.com/blog/the-male-privilege-checklist/

Heterosexual Privilege Checklist: http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~hyrax/personal/files/student_res/...

Cis gender privilege checklist: http://takesupspace.wordpress.com/cis-privilege-checklist/
Java is already 30 years behind the state of the art, so planning 10 years ahead is very easy. Just do what other languages were doing 20 years ago.

(Fuck boxed primitive types. How about generics that weren't designed by drunk retarded monkeys?)
Oh, look: an appeal-to-emotion on "political logic" consisting of ignoring eight hundred years of the racist "political premise" (extending to present day) that whites are superior to blacks, followed by straw man, followed by false premise.

A tutorial in basic logic is more in order.
"Never tell a person something that they already know. It wastes your time and only annoys others." - Old Farsi Proverb
Did find more eligible women looking to get married in Wisconsin?
It is amazing how much that kind of thinking can help. Especially since I have tried to adopt considering the persons situation before getting mad at them, when I see myself or others getting mad at somebody and accusing them of something, when they are in the (car|line) (next to|behind) us.., it makes me ashamed to realize 1) I'm being just as much, if not more of a jerk, and 2) maybe they aren't actually being a jerk at all...
I guess I should add, my experience was with Chrome 13.0.782.215
Good point. I was not necessarily referring to the physicality of books but the notion these book-burners subscribe to, that if they symbolically burn a book, the idea will perish.
Your point of the Nazis burning the books out of supply only illustrates the point that to burn a book in the hope that the idea will perish, did not necessarily work.
And this in a day where CSS is turing-complete...
The standard may not be Turing complete, but I know of no decent SQL implementation that isn't; they've all added loops or some form of cursor.
Nope. Guy's got it right. 'Perpendicular' (or 'orthogonal' if you prefer), meaning that the concerns are on separate axes, and thus independent of each other.

SOAP is a bit weird because it's both an envelope/delivery mechanism as well as a discovery/interface negotiation methodology.

REST is just straight up a set of interface design principles. It doesn't care what you're delivering, it doesn't care about the channel you deliver it through.
I can't understand this logic. Did he think the internet was some magical place that created all his games and apps and so on?
How did he think about manufacturing then? Or artwork? Or movies?
How does someone get so far in such a technology based society without knowing that there are people behind all these things?