skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry to be a hater. I was gung ho OpenID for a while...simple for users, decentralized. But then I tried to get my wife and my mom to log into my site with it and they were baffled. "Login with Facebook" they can sort of get. And then I found that the openid consumer I wrote (I used some library, I don't remember which) didn't work with yahoo and a bunch of other providers, which really got my goat.

But when I said I was happy OpenID was gone, it was more because I think we're one step closer to whatever will be a better, widely-accepted, and more polished solution, not because of any particular disdain for openid. I'm fascinated that Facebook would join OpenID. http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/facebook-throws.html. Sounds like a fox in the henhouse to me.
I've noticed our website traffic consistently peaks on Wednesdays.
Projective Texturing with Canvas
Shrug - call me a critic, but this is another "Why I think Clojure will be good" article, rather than one with some (new) substance.

I'd like to see some more articles on Clojure in actual practice.

(p.s. It's because it's built on the JVM).
I appreciate what I've got, it doesn't stop me for striving for better.
What’s happening with Arc?
Is it life changing? No.

In many places, these same technologies are lifechanging. Here's an "I love technology. I love capitalism. I love technocapitalism" story for you: many 3rd world fishermen lead a close to subsistence existence by catching fish and then having to take it to market. Market conditions at towns A, B, and C vary on a day to day basis. If you pick the wrong town to deliver your catch to, you lose out on earnings and some other town loses out on cheap fish. In the worst case, you may be unable to sell your fish at all, in which case the fish rot while someone else starves.

But now, you have a cell phone.

So you can call ahead to towns A, B, and C and ask them "Hey, what is the going price for fish today?" Then you head to the one that reported the highest price. Problem solved.

This means that you can sell your catch, every day, and never go home to the family empty handed. It also means that no one ever goes to the market and comes home saying "Sorry kids, no fish today."

All because of a little technical doohickey that is practically disposable in the Western world these days.

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/qjec.122.3.8...
Microsoft: Online Gamers Still a Top Malware Target
What s the most common type of malware on the Internet? Viruses? Botnet code? How about password-stealing worms, designed to victimize online gamers?
That was very interesting.

You could spin the part about having new hires ship on the first day off into a talk on hiring.

The part about looking for engineers who've had a project cancelled really resonated with me.

I get a sick feeling in the middle of a project when the management is asking for extra effort, while at the same time making n00b project-management mistakes. It's a feeling of "how dare they waste my effort."
Inside Memory Management (creating malloc, and other choices)
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If you do demos and use a Mac, run and grab OmniDazzle.
I think it depends. Don’t get me wrong, the comparison was a little silly but right now I’m in the process of doing test runs with a few netbooks at work and have found them to be effective replacements in certain areas. Mostly for people who only do data entry into a web application.

For us that means about 97 positions which adds up to big money in the end. So there’s some validity to the idea even if that particular comparison was bogus.

(The caveat being that this only works with the few netbook models that have close to full size keyboards)
Steve McConnell's Construx Offers Free Training for Laid-Off Software Workers
Troubled San Francisco Chronicle in danger of closing
I think it's wrong to assume that the economy, with the cash transaction at the heart of it, is somehow an immortal or god given / evolutionary design. Imagine if it was replaced with a smart-card where your transaction had a programmable, algorithmic component to it. Now all of a sudden the system can become a lot more creative, and even carry a 'vote' like characteristic that will survive multiple successive transfers.
Looks awesome. This is another example of why I'm glad I moved from Australia to the Bay Area.
You demonstrate a big reason why I hate these types of posts/conversations. Realistically you have to create a business plan that meets your needs and looks at your potential market to determine what will be free and what won't. That isn't something that Chris Anderson, Drama 2.0, or anyone else online is going to help much with because each situation is different.

So what's happening here is basically just arguing generalizations which have little consequence in the real world.
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http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=8854
Correction: The stock marked loved Wednesdays until a couple of decades ago.
Other choices include TCMalloc, which is released recently released by Google - http://goog-perftools.sourceforge.net/doc/tcmalloc.html

We're thinking of adopting it for a project here (multi-threaded, lots of memory).
I searched all those product sites and couldn't find any detailed technical specs. The question that interests me is how can I run Debian/Ubuntu on it.

Other than that, the idea is awsome. I've been waiting for somethinng like this for years.
We don't plan on creating a Java version of Cappuccino and killing off the Objective-J API any time soon ;)
Safari 4 benchmarked: 42x faster than IE 7, 3.5x faster than Firefox 3
Study confirms TXT SPK doesn't hurt kids' language skills
In the Open at Last, a Secret All Women Share
These guys are awesome and I feel kind of bad to say this, but it's the perferction of a failed idea. I've been trying these kinds of GUI builders for almost 20 years, starting with VB and PowerBuilder, and I always ended up not actually using them.

The usual criticism is that they generate awful code, but that's not necessarily the case. The problem is really that these tools ask you to keep clicking on lots of little sliders and lines and bars and shapes and then click over there in that text box to enter a name and then select this or that from a list or menu, wait until that three pixel graphic changes its shape into a handle so you can drag that line over here, etc, and there's no way to automate this.

It's a matter of taste whether you like to do it that way when you create _one_ form, but once you create an application or two or three you have to abstract from the repeating patterns and you can't do that with the GUI builder.

GUI builders make you stay on the same level of abstraction forever because they don't have the equivalent of meta programming or even just plain procedural programming.

The reason why code built with GUI builders is so awful is not so much that they necessarily generate bad code. It's that developers who can put up with repeating the same clicks and drags on the same level of abstraction for years and years are in the wrong profession and create bad code regardless of the tools.

Programming is all about abstracting and automating stuff. The pinnacle of GUI builder based abstraction is what Microsoft calls "user controls". All they abstract is a bunch of widgets statically glued together on a panel. Great, but that's like 5% of what you want to do.

I'm afraid GUI builders are hopeless for any serious programming.
And that's the irony of it. Why do companies think they are going to innovate in the area of personnel management, time tracking, accounting and payroll in such a way that it'll give them an advantage over their competitors who also need to do this? These are commodity processes, or should be, and should be deployed from proven, mature technologies. The fact that they are commodities means they should be cheap. The fact that this isn't the case means this industry is broken (again most likely because the people tasked with deploying these processes/services are not going to be the ones using them).
This is a fine overview, but for more depth on alloc/free implementations, I've always really loved "Dynamic Memory Allocation, A Survey And Critical Review", which you can grab online at ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/garbage/allocsrv.ps (I'm amazed this link still works).

On most of the large programs I've worked on, one of the easiest systems programming wins has been replacing general-purpose malloc() with something tuned to the workload.
Arrington hired him and could fire him.
Paraphrasing David Allen: Procrastination isn't about not getting things done. Procrastination is about not getting things done AND feeling bad about it.

I spent a month in India this year. It's a much slower lifestyle there. When something doesn't get done, they just don't feel bad about it.

(Obviously, huge generalizations in that last paragraph.)
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I agree that he's got a point, I just get annoyed when people feel the need to make their point in a way that questions the intelligence of other people. It's unnecessary and counter-productive. There are ways to say "one big advantage of functional programming is that it leads to more testable code" without also saying "and anyone that programs in any other sort of language is clearly an idiot."
I agree with a lot of what you say here, and have had much the same experience, but there is one powerful counter-example in Apple's "Interface Builder". I get the impression that most Cocoa developers use it for at least some part of their code.
Slightly off topic, but, Louis CK --- highly recommended. Heavily inspired by (and probably the heir to) George Carlin. Caught him live this year, outstanding. Apparently, none of his material in his tours is ever recycled, something he picked up from Carlin.
Why I chose Clojure/CouchDB for a new site
Ran across this long after the fact, and I'm not even sure if you'll be aware I posted this, but...

I've been wondering the same thing, as C-x is used all the time and seems really uncomfortable. I've found one mention of it, so I thought I'd pass along Steve Yegge's opinion:

"Incidentally, if you want to fine-tune this tip to extraordinary levels, then you probably don't want to use your ring-finger for typing the x-key when you hit Ctrl-x. I use my left index finger, since I'm used to it that way, but you're probably better off using your left middle finger. The reason is that your hand isn't technically on home row when your left pinkie is jammed down on the Caps-Lock key that you've turned into Ctrl. The point is to use whatever requires the least amount of stretching, followed by the least amount of finger motion. You should experiment until you find what's most comfortable for you."

Found that here: http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs
...except when it loves Tuesdays, or Fridays, or perhaps Mondays or Thursdays. I'd bet my portfolio on it.
The Kindle Swindle?
I think this has some potential to allow more developers to publish a web app with at least a decent looking ui. There are a lot of good backend developers who happen to be bad at ui, this might allow more potential customers to view the product instead of being horrified as soon as they saw the ui.
>"The only way I can see to monetize bit torrent for artists are very indirect and way out of proportion to the enjoyment they create, akin to putting google ads on a popular website."

They don't necessarily have to do it over bit torrent. Television is available over bit torrent as well, and a lot of people use it to download shows. But now that hulu is around a lot of people are getting the same desire met through a channel that compensates the copyright holders.

I'm not sure what the corresponding setup would be for music.
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The biggest issue we've had with Cappuccino is problems with older machines running IE. Given some time they will be gone and it won't be an issue.
Sorry just women's accessories for now :-P
Why Big Brands Struggle With Social Media
A lot of people would be a lot happier if they could back off a little bit and see things for how they are rather than how they wish they were.

I knew this happiness after coming back from a deployment to Afghanistan. The people there had nothing, usually not even power, and our own accommodations weren't exactly... modern. I swore that I'd never forget how good I had it here, and indeed I didn't for a long time -- I even came to severely resent "Westerners" for a while.

During my "time of appreciation" lets say, I was very happy. I found joy and worth in the simplest of things, from showering with clean water to drinking a beer. Unfortunately, over time I once again became acclimated to my environment and now likely take things as much for granted as I did a few years ago.

I've found it takes a large amount of conscious effort to not fall into this same trap. It seems to be very much a case of "out of sight, out of mind"; the things I saw and experienced are mere vague memories now and somehow life has a way of blinding me from what I was once acutely aware: that no matter how bad I have it, others have it worse than I used to be able to imagine.
This is the main thing keeping me using Firefox. Now that I'm used to this, every time I try going back to Safari I feel crippled.
Which feature are you referring to?
There is no reason that side effects have to be difficult to debug. You can think of the lookup chain for a variable as being part of a data structure being passed in to a function. It is just as easy to design a convoluted data structure that gets passed in to a function as it is to design a convoluted object hierarchy.

The difference is that you can't get implicit lookups for free in an fp language unless you implement something like messageSend(name, obj, args).
Thanks for the advice. This issue made me uninstall it almost immediately. Maybe I'll give it a shot now.
wish sites would put a textual description below videos.
Great to see a production site using couchdb. Please keep a running account of how it's working.
To the minimal extent auto-reading of ebooks competes with audiobooks, it also increases the value of those ebooks. The answer for Blount and the Author's Guild is to price the ebook reproduction rights properly -- not legally impair what ebook owners can do with their own books, on their own devices.
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I would still rather pay for an audiobook read by a person if I really wanted it. A human voice can still convey a lot more emotion than any current technology.
Safari 4 Hidden Preferences - Random Genius
I'm sympathetic to the plight of the starving (or even well-fed) writer wanting to get paid for their work. But the opinion espoused in this piece is the classic argument that just because an industry has grown accustomed to a particular revenue stream or business model, they should therefore always and forever have the privilege of keeping it. And anyone who introduces products or technology to prevent that or cut into their revenue is not playing fair, morally questionable, and/or should have to compensate them for lost revenue.

It's a ridiculous argument.
He is ridiculous. I can do anything legal with the purchased file, that's my basic right as a customer.
If I buy a book, I can freely record myself reading it. I then have an audio book. I own the book I bought, so recording myself (or anyone else) reading it is completely within my rights.

If I suddenly don't need to record myself, because technology reaches a point where a piece of software can read my book just as well as I can, then that's just the way it is.

If a temporary inconvenience creates a business opportunity for you, great. But you can't expect to hold onto that business once the inconvenience is gone.

The content industries need to understand that they can sell "a book" or "a movie", or "a song", but they can't sell music that only plays on certain devices, or DVDs that only play in certain continents, or books that you can read silently but not out loud. It's nonsense.
Even with Amazon's DRM?
This is a great introduction to the class of algorithms used for glibc's malloc and seems more meat-and-potatoes than the IBM article:

http://g.oswego.edu/dl/html/malloc.html

Incidentally I'm writing an article now on our graph-database which I'll be submitting later this week and our code for allocating records in files is based on algorithms in glibc's malloc, so there will be some goodies in there about that too.
"Audi--Like My Belly Button?" Life with Four Kids and an Audi R8
At JavaScript. When compared to the current stable version of Firefox 3 rather than the beta where it is approximately equally matched. Using a test suite designed by the writers of Webkit which the engine has almost certainly been optimised for.
They should be grateful that the Amazon Kindle, a complement good to ebooks is so popular. How many books were purchased because of the Amazon Kindle? How many books will be bought because of the extra usefulness of the audio feature? Instead, they are biting the hand that feeds them. Not only that, but they are also obstructing the advancement of technology and innovation by reducing their usefulness. First Google Books and now this. What a bunch of ungrateful bastards - hardly better than the RIAA.
Google should buy Twitter
Xkcd - Kindle
The article is most useful as a very high-level introduction to the topic to a junior C programmer, from a Linux viewpoint. Factually, it's not particularly accurate; in particular:

* Precise garbage collection is listed as having moderate allocation speed (precise GC normally uses just a bounds-check and increment - it ought to be the fastest), moderate deallocation speed (deallocation is free in GC - you pay for collection, but that collects live objects, not freed memory), and "rarely" SMP friendly - but collection is a trivially parallelizable operation in a way that manual allocation never is.

* Reference counting is described as having "excellent" cache locality, when this is one of the weakest areas of reference counting; every reference copy operation comes with an indirection and, usually, a memory-bus assertion to ensure correct multi-threaded reference count updates.

* Manual allocators such as malloc etc. are described as being "easy" to use, when this is definitely not the case - if it were easy, most programs using it would be free of access violations and memory leaks. Meanwhile, if reference counting or precise (i.e. memory-safe) GC is built into the language in question, allocation is actually quite hard to get wrong. To describe malloc/etc as "easy" and most of the others as "moderate" is a severe misrepresentation.
Freebase now available as a public data set on AWS
For the record: no, the Authors Guild does not expect royalties from anybody doing non-commercial performances of "Goodnight Moon." If parents want to send their children off to bed with the voice of Kindle 2, however, it’s another matter.

I really don't follow his logic here. I think the fundamental question is "what is a performance?". I just find it hard to see that kindle reading = voice actor reading. Why go to the concert, when you've got a player piano? Is that really a threat?
Short Information Retrieval glossary
Pirate Bay Trial Day 7: Screenshots for Evidence
Virtualization Takes Market Share Battle To The Desktop
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http://www.marvell.com/files/products/embedded_processors/de...

It has instructions on how to install a stripped down ubuntu 9.04 jaunty image onto it.
First Impressions: Safari 4 Beta
Upvoted you after some baffoon voted you down for no apparent reason.

Seems like downvoting because of disagreement is getting more and more popular these days.
Text to speech is at best a 10% solution for the blind and those with impaired sight. The robotic voice that comes out of synthesizers is such a long way short of human cadence and intonation that the argument that the two compete is all but ludicrous for those in the know - i.e. those who have experience of both.

I can't take this guy seriously.
Am I right in thinking that there's a potential opportunity for Amazon here? If they provide audio playback support for the Kindle they could sell combined Audio/eBooks that maybe even highlight the spoken text and turn in time to the audio?

I think this could be good for both audio books and ebooks as well as when considering the implications for educational books (such as language books or religious study materials).
Err the TC article...

"Despite my attempts to corroborate it and the subsequent detail I’ve been able to gather, I still don’t have enough information to determine whether it is absolutely true. But I still don’t have enough information to determine that it is absolutely false either."

Is his last word on the matter. Essentially he is saying they have denied it but his "rumor" may even still be true.

That smacks of a lie somewhere along the line to me (and as it is my job to find lies I suspect it is the case). :)

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/20/did-lastfm-just-hand-ov...
This is a beautiful world view that can really only work out if you're successful at being your own boss.
I like my netbook because it fits my backpack (and it's very lightweight)!
I also agree that he's got a point. I'd encourage him to build something so awesome with a functional language that the rest of us can't help but be blown away. Ejabberd is a good start, how about some more?

It's not easy to develop things so useful & elegant that you win people over... but it's easier than arguing the Internet into submission from a mailing list.
PopCap Games acquires game maker Gastronaut Studios