skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Try gnu screen + vim/emacs/nano
Social news site for women with a BIG twist launched tomorrow 
Smaknews is a social news site that mixes twitter, facebook and digg and comes up with a new way of displaying and following news. the categories will focus on celeb gossip and For Her type content, sign up to see the most original news platform and of course give us your feedback:)
The irony of course is that the site has Google ads all over, and they all push Microsoft Word...

Anyway, I'd like to hear the story of how the book rights went back to the author, that's unusual.
Corporate Venture Capital (2008)
This is an older one, but Fred mentioned in his current update that it still holds true for his views on Google's new VC arm.
I remember running WordPerfect 5.1 on an 8mhz 8086 with 640k of ram. Amazing achievement considering the multi-gigabyte bloatware suites of today.
There are a lot of businesses that could be brought down through the seizure of their datacenter, if even only for a few days. It could be something like an IP address in some log, connected with a kiddie porn. The authorities could easily concoct such a thing after they seize the center, then backtrack, later saying that the log entry turned out to be faked by the real criminals hiding their tracks. In the meantime, the business has been completely inoperative, it's websites utterly gone.

I could envision a corrupt branch of the FBI doing this on the behalf of an organized crime group.

There should be guidelines for the seizure of a datacenter, as this constitutes the ability to destroy a business, especially in cases where high availability is critical. (Often the entire center doesn't have to be seized, only access granted to forensic specialists while access by employees is severely restricted.)
This is an older one, but Fred mentioned in his current update that it still holds true for his views on Google's new VC arm.
I like the new core api a lot. Ext.select acts similar to jquery's $() and Ext.request acts similar to jQuery.ajax. Good to see more standardization in the js framework library design.
The Dallas Observer is part of Village Voice Media (http://www.villagevoicemedia.com), which includes similar local weekly newspapers in other cities. They aren't exactly incompetent rabble-rousers, but they tend to do more investigative journalism and "what-if" scenarios than your average major daily newspaper. I doubt they have any real direct experience with this particular corner of the IT industry, though, because it's incredibly unlikely that pirated movies prompted the takedown.

I've worked at various hosting companies around Dallas for 5 years, and have worked or observed quite a few abuse cases involving the federal government. This sort of heavy-handed action (killing an entire company's operations for a single client) has NEVER happened in my experience, and definitely not for something as innocuous as copyright infringement. That's what the DMCA is for. The feds don't get involved unless it's some seriously nasty stuff going on, like child porn, suspected terrorist communication, fraud, malware distribution, etc.

In the event that the government gets involved, they will have a field agent demand access to individual systems under a subpoena, but only to the systems actually involved (maybe some switches/routers as well). Unless Core IP has been proven to be complicit in some kind of ultra-illegal activity, e.g. the CTO is the kingpin of some hardcore piracy network, I have a hard time believing that this has anything to do with a leaked movie. I'd think that the Secret Service (US Treasury) would be involved in such a case, rather than the FBI.

This really is completely ridiculous, though. Makes you want to go read the common carrier laws cover-to-cover :)

edit: I guess this piracy thing has been confirmed as a rumor for some time... but hopefully this sheds some light about how the process works :)
Good point. There could be a language that made 0 trade-offs "that matter" vs all other languages. The problem remains that there will likely still exist at least one person for whom some trade-off of little or no substance is important (even essential).

When people talk about power, elegance and abstraction of a language (not compiler, VM, libraries, etc) they are talking about the language platformed on the human brain (something unique to the individual). Ruby targets a certain brain platform while C targets a different one and Scala yet another. Twitter engineers sound like they have brains appropriate for both Ruby and Scala. Scala makes less technical trade-offs toward their end and so there arises a clear winner (for them).

The day we're all using the same brain platform then there could be argued to exist a best language.
In our company almost everyone uses Skype for voice. But that also means adding contacts for everyone you want to talk to, so it's not really a company standard.

We use IM extensively and have a public (as in 'on the open net') Jabber server. If you have an account here, you'll automatically have the whole company at your disposal.

We also have conference rooms for collaboration and a bunch of bots operating here. If you're in software, you'll have access to the dev room, for example. All the build information and unit test results get dumped there. Conference rooms are also great for a-synchronous group communication.

The main office has a high speed data link and you can connect to it via OpenVPN. This gives you access to the code repositories, testing databases (mainly for projects), wikis and other stuff depending on your profile.

Oh, yeah, we use email too :) But that's mostly for announcements, long-running discussions and communicating with third-parties.

I've used gotomeeting on my virtual windows machine for going through some project-specific details. Voice still goes through Skype.

IRC is great for a couple of developers on a private channel, but generally sucks for running a project or a company with non-techies. Run your own XMPP server.

Disciplined coding ninjas are rare. Use a centralized source repository and have everyone commit to that. We use SVN and with trac on top of it, it's a win situation all 'round. People that want to use git can use git-svn. (If you have developers complaining about SVN and not being able to use git-svn, you shouldn't have them committing in the first place).

Wikis (especially those from trac with integration with your source code) are a really good way to document some knowledge.
I take his point, but I think you can agree with it and still treat consciousness as something that takes place within the brain. I guess the disagreement is over whether body, brain, and environment are all literally parts of consciousness, or whether environment interpreted through the body is an input to a consciousness process that takes place within the brain. Noë doesn't make much of a case for his position, he only says it's a more comforting way to go about things. Well that's fine, but that doesn't say much about whether it's true.
why not post it tomorrow when it is actually open?
Well, here's an interesting tidbit: Mike Faulkner's side of the story.

http://www.uwwwb.com/

And some BBB-style fraud reports, fairly recent (July 08):

http://voip.yuku.com/reply/421/t/Re-premiervoice-net-aka-pvo...

I don't mean to cast aspersions or commit libel, but it looks like Mr. Faulkner might have a bit of a spotty history, and according to these reports, has used multiple names in the past. This might get interesting :)
The original "Real Programmers don't use Pascal" was quite obviously an ironic piece. Debunking humorous writings is somehow never humorous :)
While reading this I kept wondering "what's the point of this article?"

"My intentions in being critical of Twitter and the state of declining tweet quality is not to bask in my own whining or seek consolation or apology. I honestly think that by rethinking the situation, we’ll decide what kinds of tweets are of best service to us all."

I haven't even seen the types of tweets the article is talking about, ever. I'm not sure it's as big a problem as you think, and I doubt the people who are irritating you with their arguments will ever read the article, so unfortunately it does end up as coming across as basking in your own whining.
I'm getting a 404 message that is trying to sell me novelty gifts.
Open Source projects are used in war technology. Linux powers a lot of robots.
"To prepare bids he locked himself in his office to write a computer program with 50 variables (now 250), ranging from home price changes by neighborhood to interest rates to origination dates." - Forbes.com 2009

"Beware of geeks bearing formulas" - Warren Buffet 2008
Thanks, but I don't want a nightly. Anyway I was "inspired" to go get 0.99 for myself, so thanks.
Acunote, Skype, Google App
If it is indeed comparable in speed to the excellent Safari 4 beta, I'll stick with Safari. It has worked very well for me over the past few weeks. In fact I've yet to find a single problem with it.
I also recommend GoToMeeting. It's indispensable for team meetings, real time collaboration, and demonstrations. It'll set you back $50 a month, but is leaps and bounds ahead of their competition and vastly cheaper.
Drama is an understatement. There is a lot of yelling and hand-waving in that post. He even goes so far as to start impeaching the FBI informant by showing his picture and labeling he and his wife "drug addict" and "mrs. drug addict"

I'm thinking he's looking for slander charges on top of what he already has? Not sure though -- and quite frankly its not worth my time to investigate.

If -- and its a big if -- the FBI is screwing him over accidentally, then this will make a great case study for law enforcement on how not to do this. The truth will out. If, on the other hand, somebody has been playing in the cookie jar, no amount of yelling "gestapo" and "police state" is going to help him. The best it will do is play to the mindset of folks who are already paranoid to begin with.

This is a brave man. He should sit down and shut up. That's always the best criminal defense publicity strategy at first. The only thing you're going to do, innocent or not, is provide facts which can be discredited later on. You're also providing testimony in your future court case. Trying to make it a political case by personally appealing to the net? That's whacked. That's really whacked.
I was able to figure out the point of the site by finding the greyed out "about" link at the bottom. It was too much work.

Also, I think the ratings system for different products is difficult to understand. (I clicked on the anti-virus link from the about page, then on the Avast link. "objectiveness"? huh?)
It's dangerous to suggest that working long hours is necessary to win. Knowledge workers become less productive and make costly mistakes after they work longer than a particular (surprisingly low) threshold per week. It's one thing if you're just on the phone all day making sales or sitting in meetings. It's something else entirely to try to produce working, debugged code when putting in 60, 70, or 80 hour weeks.
Hey! You should definitely use Voxli (disclaimer: this is a shameless plug since I'm a cofounder). We're easy to use web based voice chat.

1) You get your own URL so you don't need to conference call people in each time.

2) We're client-server, so you can have tons of people in each conference room

3) We're free since we're in beta =)

https://voxli.com
Lot of upmods for an extremely confused post.

Mine can't loan out money at 26 times my deposits. Can yours? Of course not, your not a bank.

...oh kay.

A class that recognized they are hybrid entities, and not the same as a typical private company

Umm. You seem to be getting at GSEs, a standard corporate form.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-owned_corporation

Generally, this doesn't seem to work out too well with financial companies, see Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac (which weren't GSEs, but close enough...) The truth is, the vast bulk of banks were perfectly healthy and responsible. Almost all the trouble came from a few gigantic ones, and the reasons for their behavior were many.
I don't see irony here. The book describes the rise and fall of WordPerfect. The final part is about, as you can guess, losing to Word.
Latest iPhone developer contract appears to forbid jailbreaking
it is called Hacker News for a reason
My comment is directed to the argument the author makes that working 60 hours a week is a horrible thing and, indeed, exploitative. I could not disagree more.

Speaking as an employee of several businesses (;D) I disagree. I've seen managers make unrealistic schedules all the time AND fail to deliver. This practice results in low morale, low work-quality and increased turnover.
HAHAHA

out of all 4 strawmen you posted, you hiring me was the funniest . . .

"self-proclaimed technical prowess"

Ok buddy, please quote me proclaiming my technical prowess or do STFU
Frankly, I'm not certain that the part saying that applications developed using Apple Software may not be distributed outside the App Store is even enforceable. Where do you draw the line - if you loaded your work-in-progress on a development iPhone? what if you didn't, but used XCode as a text editor? does it kick in if you used the autocomplete feature? It all seems quite silly from a certain perspective - imagine the New York Times selling a typewriter and saying that they had right of refusal for anything you wrote with it.
Big headline claims, nothing (yet) to see, you've wasted your first impression. Are you trying to maximize the count of pre-launch signups to impress someone?
List of 74 URL Shortening Sites
I gathered these while working on my own project, perhaps it might useful for someone:

b23.ru bit.ly budurl.com canurl.com cli.gs decenturl.com dolop.com dwarfurl.com easyurl.net elfurl.com ff.im fire.to flq.us freak.to idek.net is.gd ix.lt kl.am korta.nu krunchd.com ln-s.net loopt.us memurl.com miklos.dk moourl.com myurl.in nanoref.com notlong.com ping.fm piurl.com poprl.com qicute.com qurlyq.com reallytinyurl.com redirx.com rubyurl.com rurl.org shorl.com short.ie shorterlink.com shortlinks.co.uk shorturl.com shout.to shrinkurl.us shurl.net simurl.com smallr.com snipr.com snipurl.com snurl.com starturl.com surl.co.uk tighturl.com tinylink.com tinypic.com tinyurl.com tr.im traceurl.com twurl.nl u.mavrev.com ur1.ca url-press.com url.ie url9.com urlcut.com urlhawk.com urlpass.com urlx.ie xaddr.com xrl.us yep.it yuarel.com yweb.com zurl.ws

(I'll try to keep an updated copy here: http://niryariv.wordpress.com/2009/04/04/list-of-url-shortening-sites/ )
Does anyone know if it's possible for an individual to buy a CDO?

Supposedly everyone wants to get rid of these things and is desperate for cash, which makes it seem like a decent opportunity for buyers. If I had $10,000 I could afford to lose (and was willing to take a long shot with) is there some market where I can buy those sort of assets?
For the most part, several Javascript libraries have solved the basics of cross-platform browser support quite well and entire ecosystems were built using them.

I regard Ext Core to being quite similar to other libraries even though it could pack more quality features into just a relatively small file. That is, If I were looking for something "current" I would look into Ext Core as well. But I have high hopes for YUI 3 which will have dynamic loading of features and contextual programming with both CSS and Javascript to let folks create relatively safe and packaged Javascript programs that could then be embedded in other sites without disrupting their looks or functions.

Perhaps YUI 3 is a little bit on the "over-engineering" side, but so long as it works as a stable foundation down the road it could well be the future.
After all, who can resist a woman with a BIG twist?
The data Google can collect is no FUD story. Whether it will turn bad eventually or not is another question.
I think it's pretty telling that this guy was investigated for not consuming the fraudulent crap coming out of Wall Street.

Wouldn't that be like a 1999 startup being investigated because they didn't have exponential growth projections in the IPO prospectus?
The author seems never read the classics -- The Story Of Mel, Real Programmer, from Jargon File. http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon_49.html#SEC56

Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.

Maybe they do now,
in this decadent era of
Lite beer, hand calculators, and "user-friendly" software
but back in the Good Old Days,
when the term "software" sounded funny
and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,
Real Programmers wrote in machine code...

Year 1983.
(YAWN)

(YYAAAWWWWWWWNNNNNNNNNNNN)

Here is one you can understand:

Successfully represented myself in US Federal Court as a plaintiff in a civil rights case, and won! no legal training at all, just read a couple of books, went at it, won, no help, nothing, just me and a couple of books, oh, and I did most of this over the US Postal service, while locked up in a US immigration jail, with a barracks full of neanderthals around me whom I didn't get along with (but I held my own, no one fd with me), and neanderthals in uniforms on my case . . . want a docket number? 98-0711-CV-W-2-P Roman v. Conard, US District Court for the Western District of Missouri, Kansas City, Missouri . . . Law is at least a somewhat interesting topic that I can respect, it can at least be intellectually challenging (for some time anyway) at times . . . but MBA crap? PUUUHLLLLEEEEEZZZZZ PUHLEEZZ
I highly recommend reading "Concsciousness Explained" by Dan Dennett. After reading that it will be very easy to see how one's self can be identical to one's brain.
lol - i still don't get how bit.ly is valued so high, esp. in light of this.

thanks for the links!
Facebook And Digg Are Stealing Content, Traffic, And Revenue From Publishers?
I can't attest for South Korea and Scandinavian countries, but Japan's internet access was unbelievable when I was there for a week on vacation. From what I understand, they're working on getting 1GB of bandwidth to the home over there.

Meanwhile I see more Comcast commercials here telling me how good we have it, but no comparable service to back it up. Torches and pitchforks indeed.
Yawn

yah MKAY

So I speak the truth, and that makes me a non "team player"

lol
Google sees voice search as core
It’s a Digital Book, and a Video, and a ...
> But to say he doesn't rely on government help makes it sound like he runs a normal corporation. Banks are not normal corporations. Mine can't loan out money at 26 times my deposits. Can yours?

You might have a point there. I guess the question (regarding whether my point was valid) is whether federal deposit insurance is underpriced. I suppose there is a good chance that it is.
In order of importance: IM, skype, email, phone conference, trac, wiki, yammer (just starting)

Ironically, most valuable collaboration/project management tools are "generic" like im, voice, email as oppose to those designed specifically for collaboration/project management.
This, to me, seems like a case of people having unrealistic expectations.

I think my generation (under 30) has forgotten that sometimes you have to work within the system to beat it. Android is a huge step in the right direction and the fact that carriers are letting it on their network at all is a big win.

But, for now, the carriers still run the show. And while I hate that fact I realize it’s the reality and forgive Google for not wanting to get in a war with providers over tethering. A war that would risk getting them booted off the network entirely.

Right now Android needs to be given time to grow and get some market share (and with it some leverage). Once it gets that it can start to dictate terms (look at Apple and AT&T)
On the other hand, Warren Buffett is equally contrarian, and is doing a lot of similar things with his money, though on a larger scale (writing massive loans to Goldman, Harley, GE etc for 10-15% interest rates). He also has the same complaint about the government. His AAA rated business pays much higher rates to borrow money than Citi, BoA or any of the now gov't sponsored entities.

In any case, everyone loves a good contrarian.
Internal cloud's big test: Amazon vs. Cloudera
No true Scotsman would reduce too far.

"Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler."
The only advantage from what I understand, is that Chrome is supposedly more "secure".

I don't think it is enough to be worth giving up flash/etc for, however.
These questions should (rightly) be raised about the Market.

But calling into question the openness of the platform itself may not be the right approach, because anyone can distribute any APK just like anyone can distribute an EXE or DMG (or, for that matter, a Windows Mobile or BlackBerry application binary). It seems that with the proliferation of the App Store and its exclusivity, people have forgotten that on every other major platform, there -are- ways to avoid carrier limitations through other distribution channels.

And if I remember the clause in question correctly, the Android 'kill-switch' only applies to applications downloaded through the Market (as it is only found in the Market TOS and specifically applies only to the Market Developer Distribution Agreement).

I really wish more people would speak to the ability to distribute your app as you wish on other platforms, and not talk about the BlackBerry App World, Windows Marketplace for Mobile or Android Market as if they were the only possible way to distribute an application.
Has google actually claimed the marketplace to be open? I haven't heard them do so, but I may well have missed something where they did.

But if not, I don't see what the issue is. Unlike Apple's app store, the Android app store is not the only distribution channel. It is still an open platform, IMHO.

EDIT: While I was writing this comment, BenFeldman and TomOfTTB made my point better than I did.
This suggests two interpretations for me: one is that the environment directly affects the flow, shape and composition of one's conscious experience (i.e. what I said), the other that the conscious process happens to some degree extra-corporal so to say. Maybe there's some third interpretation that I miss?
FTP On The Go - an FTP client for the iPhone
Buy low, sell high. This is not rocket science.
Distinguishing Necessary and Sufficient Conditions (philosophy)
> Beal shrank his bank's assets because he thought the loans were going to blow up. He cut his staff in half and killed time playing backgammon or racing cars.

I have always respected a man who drives his cars hard and plays a mean game of backgammon -- and actually makes money while doing it. Upvoted.
FTTH, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_premises#Fiber_to_...
Do you actually think your datacenter employees are going to (illegally, mind you) risk life, limb, and imprisonment to fight the FBI in enforcing a warrant, granted in a court of law by a judge?

There are datacenters that have bullet-resistant riot glass, guards armed with submachine guns, guard dogs, and so on, but they would hand your servers over to law enforcement in an instant, as long as they had the appropriate paperwork.

If you're truly concerned about the data, encrypt it. You can still be compelled to reveal the key by a court ruling, but that's more work than a warrant, and something your personal lawyer can fight, or at least stall, much more easily.

For downtime, have multiple datacenters, and spread them across national boundaries. It's not that hard to get a few boxes in Canada or Ireland, or Sweden, and it's a much bigger pain in the ass for the police to coordinate internationally to shut you down. Taiwan is probably a better bet, as they have no treaties regarding this sort of thing with the US (to my knowledge).
So what is the point of this? Why not post a link to Abrash's article instead? ... Atwood posts article without a point. News at 11.
Abstraction as Leverage (PyCon 2009 Talk)
If it was a joke, it flew over most everyone's heads, especially considering the way the presenter said it.