skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't mind too much when it's actually relatively easy to upgrade. (though the attitude annoys me - what the hell am I supposed to recommend to my less tech savvy friends & family?) My white MacBook is currently running a 500GB HDD and 4GB RAM, all of which took me about 10 minutes to install.

With a Mac Mini, I'd need to get special tools (some kind of spatula I believe?) to get the damn thing open, and run a serious risk of ruining my warranty. Same thing for my girlfriend's iMac, at least for the HDD (you need to remove the screen with glass handling equipment apparently) - the RAM is easy at least, which was the main worry, there's always gigabit ethernet and the file server for disk space.
I love my Macs, but man, I wish they would update on a more continuous basis. I have a 3 month old Mac Mini, and this is pretty frustrating.
I've been trying it with various news sites: nytimes, cnn, arstechnica, etc.. and it's worked flawlessly so far.
No, look at TextMarks.com or ZeepMobile.com for SMS. A mashup between a service like that and Twilio would be very cool, however.

Twilio is great for building the kind of phone apps you get when you call your credit card company to get your balance, for example. It makes programming an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) application a piece of cake. Once you learn the REST interface and the really simple XML syntax, you can use whatever language/platform you want to build your app and host it on your own web server. When a call comes in, Twilio hits a URL that you set up and executes your script.

I was able to set up a pretty complete voicemail/calling card application in only about three weeks of spare time hacking. Please check it out: http://ThisLineIsSecure.com. Twilio made this project absurdly easy.
Thank you for calling that to my intention. When I went to Apple Store the default data showed - for the 1TB: $499.

For small home use the 500GB @ $299 - does sound great: way better bargain than an Airport Extreme. Why ever buy one of those now?
The exchange rate makes it even worse, they are priced the same in Dollars and Euros. So that €799 model is $1000.
The company was going to be nationalized, essentially stolen from him, anyway. Thus, investors didn't matter in his decision to give the nation nothing in return for stealing his company.
with the economy in the state it's in today, I don't think many are contemplating a new computer. I thought they would wait until the fall. I'm not planning to upgrade until at least when 10.6 is released.
Apple Updates Just About Everything
Well, now I feel like kind of a schmuck for buying one a couple weeks ago.
The problem with seeds based on time in seconds is you only have a few dozen possible seeds, or a few thousand if you don't know when the game started. Make the seed based on more things, like milliseconds, process id, and hostname of the computer.

The second problem is you can't use just any random number generator, you need a crypto-safe one. For example, the "Mersenne Twister" random number generator used by python's random() is fast but it is not crypto-safe. If you can observe a sequence of 1000 or so random numbers, that's enough to predict all the future ones. But there are better random number generators like stream ciphers that you can use if predicting the PRNG is a problem.
Using Relacy to Verify Lock-Free Threading Algorithms
Why not use colorful language?

It's not like the Flickr, Twitter, Rumblr, Tumblr, Dumbler, Fumblr thing we have going on in the web 2.0 world is any better.
HTTP Made Really Easy: A Practical Guide to Writing Clients and Servers
"build /one/" has proven time and again to be a failing strategy if you want that /one/ to be any good.
As a European, I'm already used to being fucked over for exchange rate on imported goods. ;) Don't forget the €599/€799 already include VAT (20% here) which I don't pay if it's a business expense. In this case, I can hardly buy my living room media centre in my business's name though.
Eh, I wouldn't romanticize it too much. Silicon Valley is just a bunch of strip malls, suburban homes and office parks.
The example he uses throughout is pirate.net attacking penzance.org. Lovely Gilbert and Sullivan reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance
I still only see one DVI slot, so I don't think so. I could be wrong.

Edit: sure enough I am wrong, see reply.
Exactly my thought, it's a simple bookmarking application. And I can't run it on IE7 because author must use rounded corners and at the same time doesn't want to go through the hassle to implement them under IE. ;-)
Interesting that Chicago had the 3rd highest diversity (after SV, Tokyo)
I swear they do this stuff exactly so that people like you keep trying to figure out a pattern and keep their brand at the front of your mind for long enough to go subconscious.

EDIT: I'm about half serious and half joking. In any case, this isn't intended to be a (lame) attempt at trolling.
It's even becoming hard to hold academic conferences in the USA. You can't be sure that invited speakers from countries other than Europe/Japan will be allowed in.

Then there are the cases of people being arrested for speaking at computer security conferences, people working on eg. stem cell research outside the USA are worried that they might be next.
I worked for GM (I was salaried if you care) and I agree that the culture of entitlement that the executives have is deeply bred into them. The people causing the problems are the top 3-4 layers of (mis)management, and in the case of a bankruptcy petition, they'll be the ones handed lavish sums to stay on board.

I think the company can turn around and become not just profitable, but innovative. However, it will take a large bloodbath just to get rid of the deadwood at the top of GM that got GM there.
There's a Mini DisplayPort as well. It's the smaller port to the right of the Mini DVI port. Adapters are available at the usual overinflated prices... I hope there will be more of a 3rd party aftermarket for these than for the Mini-DVI adapters.
Poll: Will this recession affect Moore's Law?
A posting earlier about slowing desktop sales made me think. If the recession gets much worse, or if it's already that bad and my head is in the sand, could this slow down Moore's Law?

We like to think ML is a fact of nature, but it's entirely a human construct. If the big companies like Intel cut their R&D or production schedules it could slow down the predicted doubling of processor transistor count.
Nothing will stop the march of progress.
Other(explain in comments)
Qt 4.5 arrives
Exploring MapReduce with F#
Summary of the article: the elimination of the uptick rule is responsible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uptick_rule has some good background).

This is all new to me, and sounds compelling, but I have a question. If the elimination of the uptick rule in mid-2007 is exacerbating market volatility, why don't the market authorities (NYSE, NASDAQ) reinstate the uptick rule on their own?

Is it that they aren't allowed to make their own rules, within the SEC's regulatory oversight? Perhaps they see the increased volatility as a good thing for them? Are they so spooked by the current economic weather that they don't see the larger picture?
The problem with "number of patents" is that it counts the touch-scroll-wheel for the iPod as the same as any random patent, although it will have a lot more influence on the world.
Drupal vs. Joomla
Mosdef was never just raw system call stack frames, but if you ask me about commercial syscall proxies, I don't think of CORE Impact; I think about BMC/BladeLogic, which provides a "remoted cygwin"-style interface built on syscall proxying.

Again, you're right that just being able to compile and run an oblivious application is nicer than having a good remoting implementation; however, most exploits just use remoting.

(I'm actually prepared to concede that this is a big win, since you're closer to shellcode development than I am.)
Funny that the Mac mini has FireWire, but the base MacBooks don't. Sigh...
You're getting screwed by the GBP exchange rate plunge. (some might say: correction, and having lived in the UK during times of the €1.50 pound, I'd tend to agree) Euro prices have stayed the same. And yes, ordering Apple gear via the UK store or UK Amazon was a bargain for mainland Europeans for a while because Apple only seems to adjust for fluctuations when they update products. Shows you what kind of mark-up they're using to be able to afford to do that. On the plus side, you'll be able to get cheap Apple gear from the continent if the pound picks back up.
Software Quality: A Survey of the State of the Art
I wonder if the profit will ever recover, or if by the time this economic situation is over, we'll all have learned to love netbooks.
Twitter is to Facebook as Google was to Yahoo
Startup Life 103: Love
I don't think the recession will affect Moore's law.
I don't know... I've budgeting money for a new tower for over a year now, waiting for Apple to finally refresh. I had to buy a used G5 on eBay as a stop gap in the interrum... now I can finally buy the machine which will probably be the last new Mac I'll ever own. (I think Moore's Law has finally run it course for home PCs, and most of the current development work is Web based anyways.)
The latter. The gov't will no longer provide water coolers or bottled water as tap water is acceptable and available.
I recommend you take a weekend and read up on TRIZ.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
Collaborative Map-Reduce in the browser
The bigger story is how Moore's law has switched from "faster and faster" to "more and more cores". Many people (for example Rich Hickey the guy behind Clojure) point to this as evidence that parallel programming will become more important soon.
Pet peeve: whenever people say "quietly" about product releases.
This will make sense if it turns out the most monetizable part of Facebook is the status messages. Otherwise, social relations are naturally a lot more rich, detailed, and complex than a single person navigating around the web. So perhaps it makes sense for social networks to be handled by a more complex interface than web search.
Thank you. I have "Ask Before Deleting" turned off. I am also unsure what the default setting is. Nonetheless, Apple should not put delete buttons near the most-used button. Especially on a touchscreen with zero mechanical feedback.
I've been waiting for this keyboard. Unfortunately the same nitpicks I have with the bluetooth version remain:

* Function key!? Oh how I wish we could banish the function key, or at least move it out of the spot where control belongs.

* Control! It's in the wrong place because of the damn function key!

* Why do we need the right option key? Wouldn't forward delete be more useful there? I know I can just type Ctrl+D to forward delete... but control is in the wrong place!

I suppose I'll still get one, remap caps lock (even more useless than function!) to control and get used to it. The form factor will be worth my trouble, I think.
I think it's very soon to tell that
Are you saying that it's OK to violate a contract if the other party to the contract is a "looter"? Why not just avoid making contracts with "looters" in the first place? (D'Anconia, after all, could have simply cashed out all of his holdings and let his successors decide how to deal with the threat of nationalization.)
WordPress and Search Function
Is WP really that bad? I never used it and never will, but by reading the entry it appears to be NOT for the average end user. I guess clients love WP because it is "Free" and freelancers love it because without them wp users are like fish out of water.
Easy.

Control is wherever you want it. The physical key it should correspond to is Caps Lock, and it's all in software, so here we go: Apple Menu, System Preferences, Keyboard&Mouse, then (all the way at the bottom of the window) Modifier Keys. "For each modifier key listed below, choose the action you want it to perform from the pop-up menu." Caps Lock key, just map that to Control.

Done.
The Daily Show: “My Stalker Just Grunted On My Twitter”
Another new (I think) thing is the Radeon 4870 GPU for the Mac Pro, now sold in the Apple store. Finally an upgrade path.
Without wishing to belabour the point, the prices for the same unit (the lesser-spec'ed Mac Mini) also seem to have gone up in the Irish and German stores (to pick but two), from €499 to €599.
If I tear your wallet out of your pocket and set it on fire, I can't escape prosecution for theft by saying "there was this guy coming down the street who was going to mug us anyway, so you haven't really lost anything".
I think you either didn't notice the part of my explanation where I addressed categories, or wouldn't agree that categories are ideas. :)

If I create a product -- say, a book I write in longhand with pen on paper -- the product is covered by existing law without copyright. That physical book is mine to do with as I please, assuming I owned the raw materials in the first place. At this point, copyright isn't needed: I could contract with those I allow to read or copy this book. Where copyright comes in is in asserting a right to prevent copying over other physical books which are sufficiently similar to the one I just wrote. I'd be asserting a right to control an entire category of physical objects, rather than specific objects. I think the burden of proof is on those who want to extend property rights to categories of things, as an analogy with property rights in things. I used to use an example wherein I pointed to the absurdity of a car manufacturer asserting a right to all photos of their cars, but some car manufacturer actually did that without widespread derision recently.

About ideas/processes: if processes can't be protected, then what about a process which, followed strictly, produces a copyrighted work? Aren't copyright and patent isomorphic in this way?
It's mostly a number-of-users problem. When you have hundreds of millions of users, a few bytes add up.

Client-side network latency as well. A large number of our users are still on dialup.
There are many, many different models that can explain economic instability. It is much harder for a model to predict what would happen if you changed a rule. In particular the uptick rule is the sort of thing that could easily have drastically different effects in a model than in real life, since it is focused on stopping "panics".
Great moves may be greeted by yawns, but moves than are greeted by yawns are not necessarily great.
I just checked amazon.de and you're absolutely right, sorry. For some reason I thought the old minis were €599, too. 166MHz and 40GB more, the nvidia chip, and losing the remote are worth €100? Hmm.

Nevertheless, around 50% of the GBP 392->599 increase is down to correcting for the new exchange rate. Not that that helps you at all.
It is far from clear that the uptick rule has anything to do with volatility, and the NYSE and NASDAQ want to be impartial third parties; they don't want to impose restrictions that are controversial among the traders.
Oh, and one thing I forgot to add. If you're a Canadian in a salaried position but think you will jump ship and start your own business one day, by all means maximize your TFSA contributions. This is money that you can use in your small business initially and does not have the tax repercussions of withdrawing funds from your RRSP.
The Twentieth Century Motor Company (Excerpt from Atlas Shrugged)
I found a list of the most expensive colleges (http://www.campusgrotto.com/most-expensive-colleges-for-2008...). I don't claim that this is an authoritative source but I've seen very similar lists elsewhere). There are three colleges in the US that break 50k per year for tuition, room, and board. There are quite a few more between 48k and 50k, though, and so with a standard tuition hike of a few percent they'll be over 50k next year.

My own institution is proud to be doing its own "lowest tuition hike in 41 years", at 3.8 percent. Thankfully I'm a PhD student and so I don't actually pay my own tuition.
It really depends on how you give out rewards. Give your employee $1 every time they finish 100 lines of code and they will be insulted. Give everyone a surprise $1000 to celebrate a product launch and they will be excited.

It seems like scientific studies often ignore this factor because it's hard to measure. So it's no surprise there is conflicted data.
UK Entrepreneur Dies In Tragic Skiing Accident
Can you reasonably expect people who pick a specialization at 18 or 19 to know what they want to do for the rest of their life?
Has anyone seen any economic case studies, predictions, or articles, that can shed some light on what is REALLY going on here.

Look, this is all wrapped up in politics. You're not going to get any light shed on this because it is against the interests of the parties involved for that to happen. And watching the news, you can see that one party wants the other one to fail so much that they'd let the country crash and burn.

Some people are going to do fine. Some people are going to end up living under a bridge, or having to make the decision to sell their gun or eat it (weasel words: when I got to that point, I sold mine). 2001 and 2003 were good for some people, and horrible for some (like me).

Read Calculated Risk if you want case studies (look for the Ubernerd series) on why this happened.
I don't remember anything in his platform about supporting a bailout. I don't even remember it being an issue during the campaign and nothing about a bailout is mentioned here:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/national/politics/2008/bios...

So, what did I expect from him? Change.
What has he delivered? More of the status quo, big spending, bad decisions, and an extreme lack of long range vision. Instead, he's solving acute problems by putting the younger generation in even more debt. He has blown the budget deficit from $500B to over a trillion. That's not change, that more of the same.
An ideal for democracy, a hate for war, and a hate for those whose reality and religiosity exclude the vast beauty of the knowledge we can not yet observe.

I have a feeling if Einstein had been alive today, enduring the Bush administration may have killed his soul.
Nokia 5130 XpressMusic – A gift for music lovers
Nokia has come up with an exclusive music phone via introducing Nokia 5130 XpressMusic on the market. The phone works towards providing awesome features at remarkably lower price.
I prefer 2b: If you feel angry (real anger is not a choice), express it in a passionate but productive way, and stir others into action.

Anger can be powerful and useful when its righteous anger directed appropriately. Think about Jesus driving out money changers.

When it makes you a raving monster that hurls obscenities and nearby objects, well, that's not my style, but I've known big corp VPs that were like that.
That is only valid if the new seed is reasonably random and unguessable. Hence the idea of basing that new seed on server activity.
I don't know. Did previous recessions affect Moore's Law?
Not true. We have /one/ interstate system. We have /one/ electric grid. We have /one/ internet. Most people have one water/sewer system. These things have worked fine for many years.

Just extrapolate the situation from what it is to where it would be if there were 100 browsers and they all worked differently. /Then/ how productive would developers be?

Look at the recent post from instapaper not supporting IE anymore. Look at how much time and energy is lost due to browser incompatibilities that would be solved if all content looked the same in all of them.

Imagine some new electricity company coming on board saying, "Yeah, but we want to pump DC into the grid."

It would never happen, yet, because no one setting policy understands the internets, they don't understand how much productivity is being lost due to competition in the browser market.

Competition is not always good. Almost assuredly not in cases of public infrastructure. Look around the world at privatizations of water systems, utilities, etc in poor countries around the world. Costs almost /always/ go up.

Competition is good in some areas and bad in other areas and when we /all/ need to be on the same page, collaboration is better than competition.
I really don't see how the status messages on Facebook are monetizable, unless you put ads next to them.
“There are suggestions of students making in the thousands of dollars,” he said. “The stress of that, for kids from homes with no money, I frankly think it’s unconscionable.”

There are a couple of options for students from homes with no money to make thousands of dollars at the price of significant stress. Would you prefer they try one of the other ones?

"Our children are too stressed" is a high-class problem in every sense of the word.
"how hard would it be to assemble a million people to contribute a fraction of their compute time?"

The BOINC project's done it, they've seen 1million+ computers. And they even have an installation barrier which is different than what you are suggesting (their software is robust and easy to install but you still have to do it).

One thing BOINC and BOINC projects do well is establish non-monetary incentives, whether it be competitions, fancy graphs, etc. That's something to solve, not sure enlisting just your social network (manually, with an URL) is going to be enough to cut it if you want thousands of participants (unless you are particularly "influential" I guess).

Or maybe this is something a legion of mechanical turkers would be interested in?
> I had hope in Obama, not faith, but hope and he's disappointing me. What change is he bringing? He's exacerbating problems, not fixing them.

It's been two months. Real change takes years. Give him some time.

I'm not a huge fan of the bailout either, but I think that just getting rid of all the claims of executive privilege and putting qualified people in office and trying to run the government with more transparency are huge steps forwards. Think of it this way: we know where the bailout money is going, if you bother to pay attention to the net. Would Bush even have allowed public debate?
Oh come on. The uptick rule?

Great example of a thought experiment used to contradict the results of experiments actually carried out under real circumstances. (+ 5 points: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html)

Letting traders, market makers, and other market participants make bets on the value of a stock is vitally important. Liquidity is a good thing, highly informed markets are a good thing.

Is it really so terrible that insolvent companies' stocks go down?