skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My point was more that if one person flakes for whatever reason or a startup drops out and you're financing the entire thing directly with the rent paid by the rentees you're in for a world of hurt unless someone comes up to cover it... I assume if you pay for it and then the rentees reimburse you the worst case is you lose money; not that people end up homeless.
It's not that it doesn't seem that way. I think people are generally aware that the benefit is greater, but they're also aware that the cost is greater, so it still loses the subconscious cost/benefit analysis. If it were strictly equal in all other respects but more rewarding, everybody would create stuff. But making a video game is way harder and way more expensive than playing one. (This is similar to the reason people drink soda instead of water. They know water is better in the grand scheme of things, but they also know that water means sacrificing temporary happiness for future happiness, and the future happiness doesn't seem enough to compensate.)
hum, i stand corrected on the technicality.

but still, he is having problem with his account used for gmail, which he pays.

why does he have to pay yet another product to have support for the one he is having problem with?

do you have to buy a 2liter coke to be able to complain that they delivered the wrong toppings in your pizza? makes no sense.
is there not a business opportunity here? to make something as reliable as Gmail, but with better care and attention to Users, that a person could roll their own mail service from it?
There are none. I've signed up for everything that looked interesting two months ago and have been active in... 6 of them (counting CS101 that just finished). The rest I'm glad to have registered for since I can still keep up with the materials and lectures without doing the assignments.
Au contraire: the reason it won't happen is that most folks are not tech-savvy geeks. Most writers want to write, not deal with the minutiae of self-publishing (which is not the same thing at all), and most readers who buy ebooks aren't savvy enough about downloading files and shoving them onto a peripheral device. Oh, and reading books is already a marginal activity: anything that reduces the size of the market by even the 10% who are least tech-savvy is going to hit the producers in the wallet.

(It's easy to lose sight of, but the entire world does not consist of people similar to HN readers gearing up to launch a new startup. Not even close.)
Speed Index: New metric for page performance
If you choose to update all of the old records.

As other posts have already mentioned, adding a new column to a table in postgres does so instantly unless you set a default (telling postgres that you want it to update all the old records too).

If you add the default separately from adding the column, you get the default but don't rewrite all the old rows (which remain NULL).
Vacant Places - Visualized
I'm breaking the rules here, but this article is so good it cries out for a boost. I almost didn't look at it because the topic sounds so boring. What a mistake that would have been. It is simply gripping.
Culture. In fact, the GP answered it. Demos are all about awesome for the sake of awesomeness.

Sell it, and it wouldn't be "for the sake of awesomeness" anymore. And it'd be less fun.

There've been a small number of paid demoscene projects at some points, such as Linger in Shadows by Plastic (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=50170), but even they were simply paid for the project by Sony, they didn't market and commercialize the demo themselves.

I guess it's simply that for most demosceners, once you not just doing it for fun anymore, it isn't really much fun anymore.
The HTTP OPTIONS method and potential for self-describing RESTful APIs
I'd argue it's because they're universally rather dull.

On a technical level, demos are highly impressive and how they manage to overcome the limitations imposed by the scene to create the works that they do is ingenious, but it doesn't make the resulting product interesting from an artistic viewpoint.

For me at least, the glaring weakness is the lack of narrative - there's no stories being told, there's nothing that engages or challenges the viewer. They're akin to videos that show off the features of a game engine where they engender the "that's pretty" reaction, but little else.

To my mind, this is caused by two things - primarily, it's a side effect of the restrictions imposed by the artform. With the limitations of the scene in play, there simply might not exist the scope to create enough content for an engaging narrative structure to be based around and procedural generation only takes you so far when it comes to creating assets in a resource limited environment.

Secondly, I'd argue that the types of people who are primarily interested in creating narrative are going to gravitate to different creative areas - creating short films, or animations for example. As a result, the demoscene is likely to be made up of people who mostly interesting in the question of how pretty the output is, rather than how interesting it is. This is of course also related to the fact that people who 'grew up' in the scene are likely to have a relatively narrow view of what the scene looks like and are unlikely to buck that trend and break out into doing something completely different.

The above is naturally just my two euroyencent of course.
Valums Ajax Upload is also pretty nifty. http://valums.com/ajax-upload/
Solving the LTE Puzzle: Comparing LTE Performance
That's a problem technology will solve. Maybe a startup will move into the space.
A Veritable Piece of Art: The White iPhone 4S
This is great! A great idea for any incubator area.
They may be called development platforms but they are really pretty similar to raspberrypi, actually. Maybe some more I/O pins. They are probably as suitable for your project as a raspberrypi, anyway.

Btw check out the Pcengine's alix, which is x86 and runs on 5 watts or so. Or the Genesi Efika, which is arm based
And what's to keep Amazon from keeping the DRM even if the publishers don't require it?
I actually DO use an alix for home automation, btw. It runs plain unmolested ubuntu.
I'm really happy that my class has gotten all of you excited about this and thank you all for your great comments. You guys have inspired me to keep going. I'm planning more classes with more advanced topics. Whenever I have something fresh I post it on my facebook page www.facebook.com/drtechniko. I would love for you guys to get the conversation going on there as well.

DrTechniko
Phrack Issue #68
No, companies were able to do payments before — they just had to use another payment processor, like PayPal or Google. Now Apple slides into the same spot.
The Altaic languages eh? That's a very controversial theory you got there. Even those still supporting it today mostly exclude the Finno-Ugric languages from the list, btw.
Registering versioned DLLs in Microsoft Transaction Server so that IIS could proxy requests from IE5.5's RDS ActiveX control to allow async callbacks on your 1999 intranet? Priceless.

Those DLLs calling functions in highly specific versions of the library that talks MS Exchange Server's data store protocol? Even more priceless.

Rebuilding an NT box from scratch because a junior developer accidentally installed a new version of Outlook Express which overwrote the working Exchange DLL with a slightly different version that exposes entirely different interfaces (but none that allow VB to access Exchange, curiously enough)? Priceless++
Just signed up. I've been sequestered in my fortress of solitude for too long!!...Now if only I could get accepted to YC and cash in on this deal...
Python for me.
Thank you Josh for putting my work out there for all our fellow geeks to see :)
Outsourcing sucks?
I never heard of any substantially innovative project which was outsourced and worked out well. If you are doing anything that is interesting you need to be close together and read each others body language. Am I right, or wrong?
On work, I believe Steve Jobs put it better:

"You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle."
Zamzar: Free online file convertor service.
URL Shortener Analysis - Tweets from 2009 vs. 2012
That sounds very to-may-to/to-mah-to. Couldn't Apple charge 30% for the kind of payment processing the OP describes and you could break it down the exact same way?
WordPress Dominates Blogs, But Squarespace is Gunning For It With Version 6
Some new company acting as publisher/middleman isn't solving the problem, it's replacing the old answer.
Yup, I note that that announcement mentions OASIS twice - the company that MS found very helpful to get OOXML rubber-stamped and fast-tracked into ISO. I think we should be vigilant for that tactic being used again...
Damian Katz's slideshow on Erlang in the Real World
How much time did you give to the activity? I'd love to do this with some of the kids I tutor but I'm not sure if we'd have time.

Awesome work!
I for one, wish that we could have one career half the week and a completely different career with no overlap the other half of the week.
I find the parent's quote misleading without the context.

"Just the first pictures were enough for her to conclude that the two paintings had been produced in tandem. After that, it was just a question of watching the evidence pile up." is a quote that seems more appropriate to me.

Yes, confirmation bias still applies, but there's no evidence in the article that suggests a hypothesis to her work was established before she did took the first set of infrared images
That's pretty much what I've built. I just use RbEnv to setup the environment for each version of Ruby installed. Running the server, etc. is already built.
I actually went back when you guys removed facebook authentication and made an account. It is a nice little time waster although at the moment 90% of the content looks like reddit's "AdviceAnimals" subreddit.
I'm not sure what the point of this analysis is. That Twitter is wrapping each and every URL, however short, is a known fact. And since people are using different URL shorteners, URLs are bound to be re-wrapped when a tweet is retweeted.
If someones trying to add items to an immutable array, they ought to know better.
True, but money is not limited to the physical form.
I largely agree with the analysis in this essay, but I believe the book market can be more significantly disrupted than is currently being suggested. Here are the significant changes I see:

- Screen technology will improve so that the distinction between e-paper and conventional displays becomes irrelevant. I really think the retina display on the iPad is good enough for most people in most situations, and that the iPad will be a significant rival to the Kindle in the ebook market.

- Currently ebook readers are very limited in what they can display, due to their display technology and limited processing power. This limitation will disappear (see above -- the iPad)

- When the above occur there is no need for a special ebook format. An ebook is just a website. We have a huge investment already in creating websites which makes the cost of doing so virtually zero. Creating a book will require far fewer people (maybe an editor, some marketing assistance, and a few days of a graphic designer's time).

- Once we realise that an ebook is just a website, we can get away from the idea that a book is a single homogenous entity. Why not sell a chapter at a time, and use the feedback to improve subsequent chapters, in the same way we use A/B testing (or hopefully, bandit algorithms [http://mynaweb.com -- my startup]) to improve sites? Why not sell multimedia packages of text, screencasts, etc for technical books? (This already happens.) This gets away from the stupid model of paying advances that publishers currently use.

- People will need a discovery mechanism, but we already many of these for the Internet in general. Maybe new ones specialised to books will emerge. In this more open world it will be harder for anyone to get a monopoly.

So, what have I missed?
I'd have more sympathy for this point of view if the Big 6 publishers hadn't been running a de facto cartel since, well... forever, and basing their relationship with authors on a business model that could be compared, unfavorably, with a payday loan operation.

The DeBeers artificial scarcity model of publishing doesn't work any more. I won't miss it.

Note that there will still be plenty of work for editors, cover artists, and other creative professionals. There's just no longer a need for a "publisher" that essentially does nothing but sit in the middle and siphon off 80% of the revenue. Art, printing, even copyediting are already largely outsourced by the publishers, and have been for years.

The difference between the old-school publishers and Amazon is that Bezos knows the ebook business can be disintermediated if he starts screwing authors and consumers. It could happen in a matter of months. Maybe weeks. All it would take would be for one Stephen King to hire some guys to set up a server farm and start providing ebook distribution for his fellow authors under better terms than Amazon ("Stephen King" used as a placeholder here for "author with excellent name recognition and some spare capital hanging around" -- I doubt King himself would be interested).

"I had to run my own self-publishing op I'd lose half my writing time to what is essentially a peripheral activity"

Nonsense. He could put his books up for sale with little more effort than it took to put up that blog post.

If he's talking about covers, copyediting, and so forth, you can hire that done. There are even people now who will take care of the whole book package for you for an up-front fee (rather than raking 80% off the top in perpetuity) -- quite possibly involving some of the same people that the publisher is already using.

I really can't think of anyone who's been as consistently wrong about ebooks as Stross (I do like his fiction, though :-)).

Note this post from 2007, where he basically pooh-poohs the whole idea of ebooks becoming a significant player:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/03/why-the-...

As Clay Shirky put it recently, publishing is no longer a job, it's a button.

Classic publishing is already dead. It just hasn't stopped twitching yet.
Certainly conveys some sense of 'day in, day out'. I've dithered about reading a Wallace book, mainly because of the length of them.

PS: Do you not have corner shops in the US?
There's enough ideological fervor about reading that someone is likely to provide this service for free.
Cloud-based services are great, but I think it is wise to store a local backup of your data. I wrote an app called CloudPull (http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/) to do exactly that for your Google account. Whether you use my app or an alternative, you need local backups.
I think the main point of DRM, for publishers, is to impede copy, not portability (of the same copy among different devices).

As for the DoJ, I don't see how creating an open standard for DRM ebooks would restraint trade; quite the contrary, I guess!
Har. Nice article and a well-made argument. However I suspect that the big 6 are going to accept a world without DRM the same way as the MPAA and RIAA before them: kicking, screaming and fighting until the last breath to prevent anyone from staunching the massive gaping wounds they've inflicted on themselves.

In an ideal world, a world where media companies do what's best for themselves and their customers, I think publishers would act as you've predicted, for the reasons you've said. But instead I'd wager they'll standardise on some other format, or maybe a few (incompatible, of course) formats, announce some token partnerships with uninspiring hardware manufacturers, and generally mill about without any kind of strategy.

Meanwhile Amazon starts quietly disintermediating its way through the publishers themselves with its self-publishing programme. It starts to look pretty compelling, especially with mushrooming ebook sales. A few medium-big authors make the jump and start crowing about their awesome royalty rates. Publishers freak the hell out. The standard ebook price drops to $5. Repeat until everyone else is out of business.

Frankly, I think the only hope is an indie renaissance a la Bandcamp and the recent wave of DRM-free comedy. A compelling online publishing startup that knows how to appropriately wield its "we're not Amazon" cred could get some serious traction. Most authors I know are pretty savvy, and extremely wary of an Amazon monopsony. Unfortunately, they have to go where the money is, and the available options seem to be dwindling.
Being a writer for a TV show isn't "making it without making it", it's "making it" proper.
Of course. I was thinking of a startup that helps authors self-publish, as (I presume- I've never done it) some blogging software is dead-simple for non-tech bloggers to use.

By getting rid of the middleman, the authors will be taking on the new challenge of marketing their books- by no means an easy task, especially if you are unknown and not tech-savvy.
Technically not true, but in practical terms, it is, because you can't do anything useful in Objective-C on Linux (like write iOS applications, which is the biggest reason people want to use Objective-C these days[1])

And it's true in the context of this post, because the author is conflating Objective-C and Cocoa throughout the entire post, so he's correct in saying that 'Objective-C [with Cocoa] is only available on Apple platforms'.

[1] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=111490
Don’t Try To “Pull An Instagram.” Here’s Why …
How does this compare to Plupload? (the industry standard)
So like...

1. Write Official Documentation (booooring)

2. Use Git Flow (version management, boooooring)

3. Publish Test Runs (oh, testing.. thats fun right? no...ok...)

4. Use GitHub Issues (....)

5. Have fun. (yes!!)

Ill take one number 5 please. And 1-4 is why Im not a professional programmer.
I don't think they are both compilers classes. At many universities there's an undergrad class with "programming languages" in the name (principles of ..., paradigms of ..., etc). Compilers is often a separate, more advanced class, perhaps with the PL class as a prereq. Based on the syllabi the two classes seem to follow this tradition, with the Udacity class being the PL class and Coursera the compilers one.
Not only that but out-sourced code is often much, much worse as the people writing it are usually not the ones that will maintain it down the line.
If only it would always be so simple as posting stickers on street signs.
No problem, really like what you are doing!
The 5 Most Over-Hyped “Future of TV” Topics
I wonder what are the advantages/disadvantages between a PEG and say, a Pratt parser (http://javascript.crockford.com/tdop/tdop.html)?
I was wondering, since the background of Mona Lisa contains mountains(and a lake?), is it possible to locate where it was originally painted?

The background has always been the more intriguing part for me.
please do not use ghetto language, that'd make my puppy cry :-(
Ask Stack: How to mentor a junior developer?
These should probably never be used in an actual list on a real website. Its impossible to skim them (at a stretch, maybe with *skew") and makes them incredibly hard to use.
That's a reckless assumption.
>> That they engage in questionable practices is probably without dispute. For specific instances, well, Google something like "google suspended my account" which returns some 12 million results. If you have the time, read through the first hundred or so and see if you agree with the general sentiment.

I think that's far fetched. Of course you can argue that Google engages in questionable practices, but account suspension are nothing of that sort. First of all, most of the stories you will find are from the perspective of the user, which isn't entirely fair. And secondly, although I'm not saying they can do what they want with your account, if you violated their terms in any way, they have that possibility. That's not an unfair or otherwise questionable practice.
I looked at your project and it looks very nice indeed. Nice work.
What a stupid comment. $44,000 is ~2/5ths of a Sr. Rails Dev's salary. If Engine Yard, Github, Joyent or Force/Heroku announced that they were going to furlough one of their senior devs to work for 5 months on the best possible OS X Rails installer, we'd be cheering them on.

But Yehuda Katz has the temerity to suggest that working directly for his end-users might be a good way to accomplish the same goal, and for that, earns snarky bullshit like this.
>No "wetness" will ever do it. That would require real water, right?

You don't say! (as the meme goes).

I mean, of course, I'm using the word wetness to imply the physical implications of the presence of water.

So, to return to the actual thing under discussion, what I mean is that we can simulate stuff from the physical world, but this simulation might capture some of same information and calculations (e.g down to the individual positions of particles, exchanges of energy etc) but it doesn't have the same properties, unless you simulate the whole of their environment.

>Agreed, what's the point? The important thing is that the agent is able to communicate its internal state with us.

What I'm implying is that you might not be able to get an intelligent agent to even have an "internal state" advanced enough, unless you mimic and simulate the whole thing. Not just "this neuron fires now" etc, but also stuff like the neuron's materials, physical characteristics and responses, etc. Those could be essential to things like how accurately (or not) information like memory and thoughts is saved, how it is recalled, timings of neuron firings, etc.
How College Professors Are Using Twitter to Re-Engage Their Students
Bitten by the maker bug: one man's first steps with Arduino
I'm on Firefox Nightly and the Papercut and Skew animations aren't working for me. Just saying this as the site mentions that it's tested on Firefox Nightly and I'm using 14.0a1 (2012-04-14)
Thanks for this article. I think it's much better than the original, though I suppose it is to be expected that a novelist would write a better commencement speech than a lawyer. I have to wonder about taking life lessons from someone committed suicide, but since what he wrote felt true despite challenging some of my own preconceptions (while reinforcing others -- clever!) I suppose it might approximate something like wisdom. I recognized myself particularly in this passage:

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
Researchers find possible evidence of Majorana fermions
مسلسل روبي الحلقة 37 
مسلسل روبي الحلقة 37

مسلسل ,روبي, الحلقة, 37

http://video.qlbak.com/11146.html
Here are some links:

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

http://t.co/cJgpnX5B

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4BFC3F13B846707B

http://books.google.com/books/about/Mindstorms.html?id=HhIEA...

http://worrydream.com/

http://vpri.org/

Part 4 primarily of:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Design-Essays-Computer-Scientist/d...