skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The context of the article is that a former FCC official was claiming that Google Fiber is an example of what can happen when the government gets out of the way of private enterprise; that Google Fiber shows that deregulation is the way to go.

In that context, the Ars article is meant as a counterweight to that pure free-market argument.

It seems to me that the reality is that Google Fiber represents great cooperation between the Kansas Cities and Google. Yes, Google gets subsidized access to buildings, right of ways, etc... Yes, the Cities get free service. And the rest of the country gets jealous.

Overall though, I think that is also part of the grand experiment. Google wants to know if it is possible to build a profitable gigabit network, but also how do to do it. Part of that is navigating the governmental bureaucracy and lowering the barriers to entry. I think that if the Google Fiber experiment works, we'll see the corporate/government cooperation model used as a template for other roll outs in the future, not just from Google.
Using IronCache as a Persistent Key Value Store for Real-time Chat
Creating a Referral Engine for Your Startup
TheNextWeb appears twice on the page: first one after Mashable, and second after Geek. But, only the first four items are same in both lists. Fetched from different feed URLs?

Others have already said it, but I will say it again. Please remove the share buttons on top. On my phone (Firefox Mobile on G2), the share buttons keep scrolling down along with the content. In addition to taking up valuable screen space, it is quite annoying as it is quite jumpy and hides the actual content.
Slow Down Your Beer Drinking with the Right Kind of Glass
I truly hope you're right. I wouldn't personally pay for ADN (I don't think) but I do wish there were more services online that were funded directly by customers. I think the web would be a better place if more of those sites existed and users got more accustomed to not having everything for "free".

There are a couple online services I absolutely love paying for. I wish there were more. ADN seems like it might be that for a larger number than I had originally thought.

Here's to the future of everyone using Appetizer to post photos from their OpenPhoto site ;).
Hey Joshua, sounds like we are/will be competitors though with a different focus probably (I run Codiqa). Nice to meet you and good luck with everything.
Apple v Open Source (particularly since the iPhone).

Google v Privacy (always).
What percentage of the world's population was using the internet in 1983?
Early Reports indicate that App.net is not generating very much user engagement. In fact, most of their 10,000 daily posts come from about 250 users, a far shot from Twitter’s 150 million users and 350 million tweets.

That's not a fair comparison. How many users did Twitter have a month after launching?
Perhaps. I haven't been able to find any articles on stereo separation / minimum distances but the generally accepted criteria (and you can test this at home with a hi-fi) is that you and the L/R speakers should form an equilateral triangle for "best sound". (see http://www.linkwitzlab.com/accurate%20stereo%20performance.h...)

Anyway, I agree with the OP that stereo speakers in a device so small, situated so far away from you, is likely not to produce much of the intended effect, unless the intention is featuritis.
I have no idea how this will play out, but note that Sotheby's is still in business and made a profit of $171.4 million. Which is to say, exclusivity can pay pretty well, especially if they manage to keep money that would usually go to recruiters' fees for themselves.
> This way comments with so little value to the community that they are ignored completely or just downvoted would reduce the commentator's Karma

If a comment gets downvoted the user already loses karma on it, does it really matter if you award one extra karma penalty point? And given that downvotes are free above the threshold I don't see how a comment that adds very little value would not get downvoted by someone, I think that comments that get no downvotes and no upvotes aren't inherently malevolent.

> My reasoning is that the trash comments we all hate are kneejerk criticisms with little thought put into them, which I suspect are largely made for the sake of saying something and collecting Karma.

If collecting karma is the reason they are made not getting any upvotes would already be a deterrent, no?

IMHO this suggestion makes no sense, all it does is deter people from posting on long threads, because few people tend to read those and posts there often end up with no upvotes or downvotes, and to comment articles with many comments, because the pages after the first one are effectively inaccessible.

But I also think that Hacker News has been improving in the last year, so we probably disagree. What I would fix is the "new" page, which is getting filled with trash and too fast moving, decoupling submission karma from comment karma would help. Requiring a minimum comment karma to submit entries would help a lot too and it would single-handedly kill spambots too.
You can't relate the privacy risk to 'those particular ads'.

The advertisement you see doesn't mean anything- the risk comes through complete usage gathered by the advertising networks who bought the ad, and then resold to partners and affiliates.

The risk some of us worry about is that a data tsunami will eventually push total awareness of device users to a hostile government or facet of organized crime.

And while you would have worse things to worry about if the NSA or Google are compromised, there are millions of advertising affiliates and companies that share information and go bankrupt, which makes this concern a plausible fear in my mind
I disagree slightly, as I don't think that following that path of reading instead of jumping in is inherently worse.

Just jumping into writing code is great for motivational reasons because you'll have something tangible, something to be proud about and to help you get excited and keep learning. But you'll still lack insight in a lot of the surrounding environment, things that any programmer should know.

Attempting to do this the other way, reading as much as possible and as in depth as possible, will be good to give you some insight, but you'll have nothing to show for it until you start coding and it'll still take time for you to learn some stuff that can only really be understood with practice.

What I'm trying to get at is that it doesn't really matter how you start, as you are going to have to dedicate 10,000 hours to learn, polish and excel at any craft.
A bit more concrete information on how to defeat facial recognition:

http://cvdazzle.com/
Is it possible to get a video demo?
How're you affording this?
TapCanvas is built on the shoulders of Node.js, MongoDB, jQuery Mobile, Backbone, Bootstrap.

We hope you have fun using it, don't be shy with the feedback!

http://t.apcanv.as
"I worry for my financial future" - love it. Marketing worked!
Twitter already said that most people access Twitter through their web ui and mobile apps. So even if they were shutting their whole API down, it wouldn't have such a negative effect on their usage growth. The only thing that's happening is that devs won't be able to build toys around Twitter, but Twitter doesn't care as most people don't use nor need these toys.

Some of us devs just have to admit that we are not that important to the success of Twitter, at least, not anymore. It's also not a charity so they need to make money somewhere, I don't really see the problem here.﻿
DARPA/BD Cheetah legged robot at 28.3 mph
I'd prefer "relevant stack designer." Full stack implies backend and database, about which the designer really need only have a basic understanding of constraints. Relevant stack would mean a mastery of front-end technologies.
Twitter is evolving into a media conglomerate rather than a social tool. Too soon to tell which will be more valuable in the long run.
In certain cases the Bing data is better, and in most, I think it's on par for my region (Northern California). Half of the Sierra in the newest Google images is snow-covered... not so useful.

But you're right—more would be better. I'm a little surprised MS went for it, but I doubt Google will.
Excuse me? My hacker friends and I have all discussed this at length and agreed that the largest motivator for us is working on hard problems.

This is how some of us justify working for the military; they offer really tough problems to solve.

Twitter is the same; if twitter offered me a job, I would practically move to the bay and live out of my jeep to do it.
> "First, sorry to break it to you, but a little over 49% of developers are below average".

Nope -- 50% of developers are below the median. If I could hazard a guess I would say something like 80% of developers are below average.

I think the best developers tend to already know where they want to work anyway; the wording of job postings probably has little effect on these people.
It's probably like per-home connection fees for connecting to water/sewer lines. Google has run the fiber through the city, but you still need to splice the houses to the lines. You only want to connect the houses that are going to be using the service. And that will necessarily mean construction fees.

From the look of the construction fees, they are still pretty cheap and below actual costs.
Rejecting Google's Money, Marissa Mayer Just Made A Risky, Billion-Dollar Bet
Amazon charges about $40-$50 for the no ad versions of some gear so let's say ads are worth that much to them. Ads that show up on lockscreen of a low battery tablet might be more of a nuisance then those on a kindle where the battery lasts weeks however.

Let's also not pretend price and ads are the only difference:

iPad "3": better screen, bigger screen, better SoC, better apps, better battery life, actually on sale at the moment.
Well, the moral rights available to most authors are not generally Orwellian. One of them, for example, is a right which you cannot waive to say "I made that" and perhaps to coerce others into admitting that "she made that" (i.e. attribution). CC-BY already does this, as do most open-source licenses. Another is a right which you cannot waive to be able to later say, "stop using my work," as if, for example, some organization you detest, let's say NAMBLA, decided to play your music as inspirational anthems at their meetings. Crucially, if they are economically impacted by this (e.g. they place your music in a film and now your claim forces them to redo the soundtrack, recall all the copies which they've already made and distribute replacements, etc.) then they can usually demand that you pay for the costs involved.

French law goes a little further in this vein. In French law, if you paint something racy for a private collector which could perhaps damage your reputation if it went public, you can decide that the private collector is not allowed to put your painting up for public exhibitions, and they have to respect that (at least until you die). If they are going to make a ceremony of burning or defacing your work, you're also entitled to forbid them from doing so -- though I'm not sure how this applies to derivative works, it demands "respect de l'intégrité de l'oeuvre" -- respect of the integrity of the work.

Moral rights are not strictly copyrights -- they do not forbid copying. They are only incompatible with "free speech" in a subset of cases where, arguably, that speech is being used to harm the author of the work. The only peculiarity is that the author of the work is given a very wide latitude to decide what uses of their work are "harmful" to them -- but this is probably the only way to avoid massive legal complications.
Arguments that people shouldn't be able to license their own personal creations however they like are anti-freedom.

Every year the arguments against artists having any control of their original work get more and more absurd, and more vicious. I may write a story and not mind if people repost it, but I don't want it used to promote Neo-Nazi organizations, so I retain moral rights. Now I am told that doing so is "Orwellian"? Best to avoid all this copyleft stuff altogether given that if you try to retain any rights at all over your own work the groupthinkers will attack you as being a fascist, when it is they who are the true fascists.

Only today R.E.M. announced they had a moral objection to Fox News using their work "Losing My Religion" to attack the Democratic Party.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/earshot/rem-demands-fox-new...

Do they have the right to stop Fox from using their work to promote propaganda they are deeply morally opposed to? Probably not, because the US doesn't recognize moral rights of authors and artists as most European nations do. This song is licensed under BMI licensing, which is available to anyone who pays the standard fees. Should we say that R.E.M. are Orwellian fascists who are opposed to free speech because they have publicly announced their displeasure regarding this situation? To do so seems to me to be an insane, crazed position to take, one which attacks the foundations of artistic freedom.
Hah! If Mike Cowlishaw was here he could give you a wonderfully eloquent treatment on why binary floating point sucks. And he's actually done something about it [1] with both a format and software to deal with decimal numbers.

Further the densely packed form gets very close to optimal in terms of bit representation. Assume that 4 bits (BCD) is 'worst' case, you can represent 0-9 but you 'waste' the information space 'a-f' (in hex, 10-15 in decimal) but 3 bits only gives you 8 states. What you want is a total of 10 states which is 3.3125 bit's worth (best case) or 3 digits in 9.9375 bits, these formats give you 3 digits in 10 bits which is pretty close.

Mike goes on to talk about how to build hardware that does floating point operations on this stuff. I built some into an FPGA and it really is pretty straight forward, especially if you do iterative multiply and divide.

Consider the interesting thing where you take 128 bits (two 64 bit words) where you use 60 bits for the whole part (18 digits) and 60 bits for the fractional part (18 digits) and you've got 8 bits left over for various non-number entities (+inf, -inf, NaN, etc). Would be great for CAD package, or a financial spreadsheet.

[1] http://speleotrove.com/decimal/DPDecimal.html
Are You There Authors Guild? It’s Me, Reality
Former Yobongo team to launch mobile-first photobook service for Mixbook
Making web applications more efficient
One could of course write a wrapper function to create strings, like char* someString = makeAString("A String"); where makeAString takes a char* as input, allocates the memory it needs via malloc (I prefer calloc though as it is safer by setting the allocated memory to a default value, IMO), and returns a char* as output, thus saving lines of code whenever one wants to make a string. Probably stating the obvious I guess, but if one takes a few days to make some wrappers like that one saves time down the road. Were it my boss, I would say, OK, we can do it in C, but you need to give me time to make some wrappers that I need in order to get this done efficiently. Just a thought. :-)
The complaint was looking good 'n normal until that last part. There was no need to tell them that they dont know how to do their job. Could have just said that it wasn't a pleasure working with their company, and left it as that...

But yea, telling a customer to F* off is a really bad idea!
Dijit Goes After Personalized TV Discovery With The Launch Of NextGuide iPad App
... wonder about what is going on around them in the valley ...

Why does it have to be mainly about Silicon Valley? I like to think that there are a lot of interesting people and companies outside Silicon Valley.

In my opinion, there can be a lot noise here, but the quality postings and comments are much, much better than anywhere else. And, yes, the bigger picture moves more slowly than a lot of us would like. But isn't that the way things work?
I'd have my resume up to date (and start shopping it around) if my manager was telling me the names of global variables I should be using.
As Nielsen said, the ultimate goal of usability is cash. Unfortunately, this article comes off more as a designer rant, as if startups should invest in usability just because it somehow makes the world a better place.

When, in fact, the positive ROI of usability improvement has been established for awhile: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/roi.html

A good UX guy will realize this and design to the situation, rather than preach some esoteric heuristics.
New Evidence Also Points To September 21 iPhone 5 Release Date
It is widely speculated that Apple will start taking pre-orders for the new iPhone soon after the announcement and will launch it nine days later on September 21.
Does Daring Fireball really make $500k a year? I know it says that Gruber won't confirm it but that figure seems awfully high.
Hey, I see you mention the iPad mini. I've heard nothing about this, and I thought it was a rumor. Brief internet searches are very unclear, and a lot of the info seems circular. Could you post the main source for the iPad mini information?
I definitely agree that the copy is a bit too casual, and not only because of the vocabulary, but also because of the punctuation just like in "Holy smokes!!!!!".
It is actually "incorrect" to use multiple question marks and/or exclamation points.
It's like misspelling a word. I would recommend removing the extraneous punctuation and maybe change a tiny bit of wording ("pain in the ass" is a really ugly expression).

On the good side:

- GREAT idea

- Simple, clear and easy design

Keep on the good work!
>> "3. People talk about how Amazon and Google are "giving away the razor and selling razor blades" and Apple is in the hardware business. That's quite simply BS. Apple gets 30% of the gross from the App store, including in-app purchases. Those 99 cent Angry Birds downloads add up. The app store may not have been a big profit center in 2009, but we're not in 2009 anymore."

Apple has paid developers a total over $4bn as of June this year. That's nothing for them compared to what they make on hardware.
Not to try to temper your frustration (which is quite legitimate), but in this context, "we're looking for a different skill set" is almost certainly a foil. Quite often companies will say things like that when really they mean they were just fundamentally disappointed in you for reasons X or Y they would find too awkward or risky to disclose to you.
I don't see how cursive script makes Arabic less “modern.” It might make carving it onto stone a bit harder, but the printing press, the typewriter, and the computer all had no problems producing quality Arabic type.

Having written code which renders Arabic text, I found “joining” up the letters to be quite simple. It's just a few rules to choose which glyph to display for each character depending on context. The tricky bits, I found, is in integrating a right-to-left script with systems which were made with only left-to-right in mind.
Thanks for the link - CEO of Dijit here - happy to answer any questions anyone might have, or any good feedback!!!
I'll agree to disagree on 'largest'[1]. But there's a huge difference between 'largest' and 'only'. Which is what grandparent implied.

[1] I lied. I can't sell you a bridge because I suck at it. But somebody will. To you and your friends. Let's talk again in 10 years. Sigh, when did I get so cynical? Then again, it's not cynical to see the feedback loops between who you work with and what you work on and the million other seemingly minor details that go into liking what you do. Yeah, maybe I'm ok. The comparison to suckers is entirely unfair; for that I apologize. It's just the circle of life.
If you read the website it does say it closes the apps. An easy solution to your problem would be to add a "whitelist" where you can specify apps that Foreman will NEVER close.
I have the impression the news is catered more towards silicon valley & YC people nowadays. Earlier HN was the best place for interesting tech & startup news. Now I don't really check HN that much.

To much dumb posts about something insignificant by somebody in SV or YC that are not interesting to me.

I do think that's their good right, to make their "own" new community ofcourse:) but then we have to look to other sources for quality tech & startup news.
Python's hashes for small integers never collide.

Python 2.6.5 (r265:79063, Apr 16 2010, 13:57:41)

>>> map(hash, range(10))

[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
I guess it depends on your deployment system, if there is an automated system watching that branch on a central repo, you assume any commit is rolled out and who ever pushed triggered it via commit.
Question: Does virustotal scrape data from Norton, McAfee and the 20 to 50 scanning engines they use, or do they have a paid licensing arrangement with them? [I use the term scraping loosely e.g. they could run the file against a local instance of each scanner, upload the file to other websites, etc]
Which hard problem at Twitter would you love to work on?
Innovation doesn't run forever. What's left to innovate on a tablet's hardware? Non-zero, but it's not like next year Apple's going to equip them with little robotic arms and legs or anything. There's more room for innovation in the laptop market, and that's a market that hasn't been driven by very much "innovation" for a long time.

Innovation isn't a magic word you can just wave around like a mantra, it has to concretize into something real if it's going to have any effect. There is, quite literally, not much room left for tablet innovation.
i must wonder how many here realize what the aspirations of an ipo or even a corporate investment mean in this age. so many of us are working for what we disdain - without even realizing it. yet we are the same people that can make the most difference - if we see our responsibilities in a future determined by technological opportunity.
This is actually just 1 mistake.

Start writing code, make it do what you need it to do today. This will focus your efforts to what you need to do at the present moment and you won't end up trying to figure out how to deploy an app you haven't built yet.
I'm with you. And as both a consumer of Twitter using various clients, and as an implementer of Twitter-based services in production applications: Their recent API changes have had absolutely zero impact on me. shrugs
Is this a good time to mention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_standard ?
Beautiful design, noticed a bug though, on iPhone: http://imgur.com/2nOJc (background image doubled).
Yes, ASCII text of three decimal values per line (if I'm remembering correctly):
3.0 4.0 5.0
4.0 4.0 8.0

One of my favorite sort of problem was one that could easily be solved if you could handle arithmetic with integers larger than 32/64 bit types.
Probably because they are too big to be bought by anyone but Google and Google has already moved on.