skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
50% ? I'd be interested to see some data on that. Do these come up saying "from sms" rather than "Web"? If so, I've never seen one.

This pegs 'txt' as pretty darn low (3%): http://tweetstats.com/twitter_stats

Also months stats from Jan: http://dcortesi.com/2009/02/19/the-real-top-20-twitter-appli...
I'm seeing 2 votes for guilty here, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say innocent.
The charge is "assisting in making copyright content available". Which seems like a very vague charge. Why are they more guilty than any other search engine?
TPB has a name that isn't going to do it any favors - but when it comes down to it, they provide a site that assists file sharing, and don't concern themselves with the files being shared. They, like any other search engine, or ISP, shoudn't be liable for their users crimes.
Am I the only one who finds the attempts of TorrentFreak and others to popularize the term "King Kong defense" obnoxious? It seems like a weak attempt to create a viral phrase with very limited real application. It just irks me every time I read one of their articles.
Eclipse and Ubuntu
Ubuntu just won't move past Eclipse 3.2. Shuttleworth talks about the move to 3.5.
Jaiku is a great twitter clone and can be improved much more to dethrone it.

But the first thing they need to do is change that stupid name.
I agree - I've heard of people considering Lisp (with its garbage collection) incredibly indulgent and inefficient decades ago, but that's sufficiently before my time that it was an interesting read.

I just think that, in general, "voted up because it's funny, even though it's also dumb" is a terrible precedent.
Using Polygonal CSS for imageless tooltips and more
Unfortunately, one of the downsides of CA is the $800 annual franchise tax =[. Can't get around it even if you incorporate somewhere else.

Good news is, if you're an Inc you can waive the first year. LLCs can't though.
Duck Duck Go Firefox Toolbar Blocks 42 Million Parked/Spam Domains
70 Unicode16 chars :) I wonder what twitter does about unicode here...
If only it were somehow possible to just download the current eclipse release from eclipse.org.
> That's why ad-blocking has never sat right with me: it's implicitly accepting that the model of ad supported, free content can not work on the internet.

I'm sure back in the Dark Ages, DARPA and the universities did not invent the interwebs with advertising and in mind. Trying to come up with a "business model" for "generating revenue" while "delivering content" has been bolted on to a system this wasn't designed for. (Aside: and the internet wasn't invented with security in mind, which is why we perpetually bolt together solutions to thwart spammers and botnets.)
If you have kids, not having a TV is plain cruelty.
How to create a star rater with Cappuccino
Our accountant and attorney both said: Delaware if you are looking for investment, or the state you live in otherwise (simpler, more straightforward tax-wise, etc...). So we LLC'ed in WA.
it's stupid to have this huge jump in taxes when you make one more dollar. 5% of the gains on your investments is a big difference.
Despite Iceland's terrible economic state, its people have solid educations and ubiquitous access to computers and mobile phones. If the choice before was between fishing and banking, perhaps now it's between fishing and starting a tech company...
So basically you're just faking blocks?
Took me a few seconds to parse the question (that it was about "35 factorial" and not about some binary representation of "35" ended with interrobang "?!")

One possible solution in Python:

import operator
fact = str(reduce(operator.mul, xrange(2,36)))
print len(fact) - len(fact.rstrip('0'))

>>> 8

Please forgive me for using strings for numerical operation, it was for a brevity's sake (I still remember Leah Culver getting chastised here on HN).
Startups in 12 Quotes
That's the heart of innovation.

We should definitely think different, even if we fail.
This argument is still 100% true:

"First the good stuff: Java doesn't have free(). I have to admit right off that, after that, all else is gravy. That one point makes me able to forgive just about anything else, no matter how egregious. Given this one point, everything else in this document fades nearly to insignificance."
That's good to know. Apple is always doing something stupid with one of its product lines. Its current MacBooks dropped firewire. So, a university I know (worked there) won't be ordering new MacBooks because they own so many Firewire only camcorders, and they let the students check out a camcorder and a macbook to make videos for class. Because people are complaining, it will probably come back next incarnation.

And then, after that, it'll probably be taken out.
"They, like any other search engine, or ISP, shouldn't be liable for their users crimes."

I agree but most ISPs & search engines stop the illegal activities of their users when the copy-right holders bring it to their attention.
You can even go farther and argue that it encourages the infringement because it allows browsing by static categories such as tv, movies and music so they know darn well what's being traded on their trackers. Therefore they can't use the google defense of "we provide a living breathing and dynamic window of what's on the web, and some of it is 'bad stuff' which is beyond our control".
TBP says: "movies? check aisle 1, tv shows? aisle 2, music albums? aisle 3".
For navigation, at least, see http://ctags.sourceforge.net/
cat index.html|xargs sed 's/slam/impune/g' >index.html
This is nothing new from TorrentFreak. They have a long history of sensationalism and pulling things out of context to create a story or heavily bias it in one way.
I'm curious to find out what the pricing model will look like with heroku. For me, it needs to beat (or be comparable to) EC2 on price, not just ease of deployment. Setting up EC2/mod_rails/cap myself offers more flexibility and is close enough to instant deployment that cost becomes the determining factor.
When you hug a fmaily memenber, what is the signal/noise ratio? What people fail to realize about twitter is that it's not about information, it's about sense of beling involved in someone's life. Sense being the keyword. When it's mutual it's just a digital stand-in for a hug and a family small-talk.
Poking the schoolyard bully in the eye
They're just saying time might be an abstraction after all, instead of a primitive.
This is kind of off-topic, but I've been considering using Python precisely for the "easier to write code" reason, but I want to be cross-platform. I don't see any good way of making sure I have a Python interpreter of the right version with the appropriate libraries (audio, visual, UI, sci-py, etc.) unless I ship everything--libraries and interpreter. Is there a good way of handling that with Python? It seems like Java makes it a lot easier (except that the UI looks so bad I'd be ashamed to ship anything with it).
I get the Daily Show and Colbert Report from there. I'm on east coast time, and I usually get it in time to watch the next day, but not always. It never comes in at night.
It would be nice if Amazon released a version of the Kindle software to be used on an actual computer.

Is there some sort of hidden assumption that people will never read an entire book on their computer, only on a portable device? Maybe I am just biased against the idea that no one reads a book on their computer since I do it all the time with technical books that can be purchased in pdf format.

A Kindle software app would open up (as in make available, not DRM free) a lot of books from publishers that do not have any sort of digital download of their books.
"Iceland instantly became the only nation on earth that Americans could point to and say, 'Well, at least we didn’t do that.'"

I'm not sure if that makes me feel good or bad.
Wow, I stand corrected. I must have been thinking "50% of twitter is not from the web" and translating that to "50% is from txt". Apologies.

I stand by the value of SMS as a driver of valuable content, and in the developing world.
Verizon Wireless grills exiting customers about the iPhone
I believe this is the link you're looking for: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/contact/
I think Zimbabwe also qualifies. Probably plenty more...
Not only that, but Pixar type animation is extremely expensive in terms of non-talent expenses. I won't say that you won't ever be able to produce a Wall-E type film on a Woody Allen budget, but we're very far from that now, even if you were to use unknowns for voice actors (which the top ones rarely do).
Can you give a reason why people should do this? We host the Stormpulse blog on Wordpress. It handles the core function of communicating with our user base just fine, and it means that I didn't have to spend any more time on it than absolutely necessary.

My counter reason: what "looks professional" is the kind of thing that makes doctors, lawyers, and real estate agents feel like they have to drive luxury cars. On the Internet, if people love your product, they don't care what you drive.
"Wall Street on the Tundra" by Michael Lewis would have attracted more upvotes, immediately.
Oh, please. Keep these stupid cliche jokes off HN.
I second the other suggestions. However since you already know Python, for a smooth start you can explore its FP capabilities: There's map, filter and reduce built-in.

I found SICP nice. You can try to do the exercises in Haskell, too.
I grew up in the country where we had barely one channel through the fuzz, I maybe watched half hour a week. The rest of the time I played outside, learned how to work hard on a farm, immersed myself in Legos, wrote stories with my sister, and played cowboy in the woods.

Giving the creative mind enough time away from a TV to have to earn it's own entertainment is hardly cruelty.
Life is tough, you're going to have to do things that are boring when you get a job as well. Might as well learn how to deal with it now.

That being said, I'm not entirely convinced this isn't a troll. If you're not trolling, I'd recommend spell checking your post; especially the parts where you talk about knowing more than your "proffesors".
Liveblogging Facebook’s Open Door Press Conference
It's like physicists are discovering functional programming....
You talk to females?
Ex-Googlers Start Up Likaholix, A Micro-Sharing Service For Personal Recommendations
Come on dude, seriously?
Red Hat's JBoss Software Draws Patent Suit
I'm headed to Iceland in a couple of weeks, so this was a very apropos read. Thanks!
Sony Ericsson W595 Walkman white Unlocked
Sony offers the public a great cell phone that has features to get you going throughout the day. There are lots of good reasons to get this unlocked cell phone, and the superior styling is definitely one of them. The cool blue case and darker highlights give this world phone a look which means business.
It does look that way on first reading, doesn't it? I wouldn't have seen it except Fred Wilson commented, saying he agreed with most of it. But look a little more and it does seem to add some interesting perspective to the discussion, not in spite of, but because of the writer's vested interest in having big customers to sell commercial advertising to.
Can you install plugins/custom themes on blogs hosted on wordpress.com?

If not, that's a big downside.
Are there any high-volume apps using this yet?
I loved this bit:

"Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered [problems] peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called “hidden people”—or, to put it more plainly, elves—in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.”"
A big reason for the subdomain is that these days it's all about getting found when someone is searching for something that you sell. There is a lot of "fu" that goes into how Google decides what results to return for a given search, and how Google decides what page or site is the most authoritative for a given search. While nobody knows the exact recipe, everyone seems to agree that your domain name plays into the algorithm significantly. When you spread your content across domains, you're essentially diluting the search value you can achieve for a given query. Maybe it doesn't matter today, because you rank very high now, but that may not always be true.

The other reason is that people will bookmark your blog (if you're lucky ;) ). What if you later decide to switch from wordpress.com to whoknowswhat.com? What if wordpress goes out of business or shuts down for some reason? People will have bookmarks for what is essentially YOUR site on a domain that you ultimately have no control over. It is a bad idea to build up a resource for your company onto a mechanism that you ultimately have no control over.
Oh, please, spare me your elitism. It was an especially good one.
I guess to some degree, yes. It wouldn't be necessary to do any of this of course if Python had a multi-line lambda, since you could instead just say:

app.get('/', lambda req: whatever)

Though, now that I think about it, I guess there's no reason not to just do:

def something(request): pass
app.get('/', something)

or better still

@app.get('/')
def something(request): pass

I just thought using 'with' was an interesting hack.
> Is it being intellectually lazy or socially malleable to enjoy the occasional piece of well-written, high-budget content?

No, it's not. But the television infrastructure as we know it is designed not for people who enjoy it "occasionally", but for hours upon hours every day.
I would have the TV but not subscribe to cable.
So you replace their ads with one for your site? And this is a feature? Sounds almost as handy as ISPs showing search pages for sites that don't exist.
ATI plans major price cuts for Radeons
It has also been a historic source of both security flaws (BIND's problems with DNS compression were remote code execution flaws, not baroque policy violations in delegated subdomains) and interoperability failures (BIND has been unable to decide which record contents are compressable versus which ones need to remain canonical).

But yeah, the experts in this protocol should definitely be the ones to design an Internet-wide PKI.
I don't think our block pages are an ad for our site: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/images/p/30122/1236...
> if we adopt technology that hurts the business models of ad-supported sites, we're inviting those sites to develop more intrusive ways of monetizing us.

So it's an arms race! If I take self-defense classes and install security systems, I invite muggers and robbers to develop more clever ways to monetize me! Yes, I'm speaking hyperbole here. But not really. I do find myself using the word "assault" in my mind when seizure-inducing computer graphics come at me.

Likewise, by turning our heads away from our TVs during the ads, we "invite" the advertisers and stations to develop more intrusive ways of grabbing our attention. I think it was the early '90s when I started noticing ads being played at a louder volume. And in the past couple years, one of the stations here in NYC has taken to showing a bright flash between each ad, between each news preview. For the first couple minutes I happened to be facing away from the flashes, I seriously wondered whether a thunder storm was brewing. But no, it was my TV yelling, "Look at me! Look at me! Eyeballs! Eyeballs!"
i'm not sure if my mother would use twitter in 5 years time. she can hardly read her e-mails :)
IMO I think Google is hoping that twitter becomes a better search platform to compete against it. Google is the top dog and nobody is even close to its dominance in the arena, it needs competition if it wants to avoid the whole anti-trust thing.
RFC: Changing how Hacker News displays links
Currently, the HN article listing makes no distinction between links to new material and links to older articles. While it's good to have some of the more interesting older web content cycled through Hacker News, it would be beneficial for these links to be tagged or marked in some way to identify the items as such. Too often, I will follow a link to something that contains interesting content and find out that it is fairly dated. This in itself isn't bad, but having an identifier on these types of HN items seems like it would be an improvement.
Pirate Bay Day 11: trial ends, verdict awaited
My suggestion to you is simple: if you want to do artificial intelligence research then do it. Make a website. Self-publish. Promote yourself. If you are truly brilliant (as you seem to think you are) then you will be noticed. There are always positions for hard working brilliant people.

It's also worth saying that the majority of groundbreaking research being done these days is being done in the private sector. These people care less about degrees than results. Prove you can produce and you won't find it difficult to obtain employment.

While you research you can work just about anywhere - you don't need access to much to do research - a library, a computer, a notebook. Being poor is actually a good thing for research - money causes distraction. Most grad students are dirt poor.

As a side note, I think we're all a bit confused by your story. What is the "crap" you are tolerating? If you really know all of it already, shouldn't it all be easy? I think that perhaps some of the issues you are experiencing may have something to do with poor communication more than anything else. Most professors are willing to work with you on a more challenging project if the given project is elementary and boring to you.
You would think so, but apparently not...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=502769
Wine, Startups, and VCs: A Report from DEMO
went to iceland on my honeymoon over the holidays, and i can attest to the intense blame the general public places on the bankers and the politicians for what happened. we took a few bus tours, and on each of the the tour guides made a point to bad-mouth them.
Education Flamebait on Grad School
Photocracy.org = Revolutionizing photo-sorting?
Hi everyone,
For my Senior Thesis, I'm working on implementing pair-wise comparisons for sorting photos, in particular for national perception and cross-cultural identity (I'm an East Asian Studies Major). As of now, there are limited implementations of pair-wise comparisons for text or photo (bix.yahoo.com as one of the few).

We're preparing to launch on March 16th and are hoping to get as much activity as possible after that point (hypothesis/assumption: the more people in the crowd, the better the resulting data set). We launched a text-based version for student government issues with a fair amount of success in the Fall of 2008 ("WDYWM").

Any and all suggestions for spreading the word or making improvements are very much appreciated!

Josh Weinstein
I highly doubt that it will beat EC2 on price. The fact is that there's still a lot of value that can be added on top of what EC2 offers.

For example, Heroku I'm sure will offer monitoring, backups, high-availability setup for webheads and databases, etc. That has added value to it and with EC2 you'd have to have several boxes to achieve that.

Plus, one thing that is oft-overlooked is burstability. With Heroku, you might have a pool that averages out to the capacity of 1 EC2 instance, but bursts higher. That's important. That means that you don't have to plan for peak capacity as much since their system will auto-adapt to handle it.

You could make a similar setup, but it wouldn't be cheap as you'd need multiple EC2 instances to handle what Heroku is giving you in terms of high-availability. Heroku isn't for everyone and it'll probably be a premium, but when you're a business that wants to stay up (vs. something where it doesn't matter if your reliability is a little lower) it's probably going to be a nice service.

It costs a lot of money to move from 99.5% to 99.9% or 99.99%. At 99.5%, you can just run one box and fire up a new instance when you realize that it went down. To get to 4 nines, you need monitoring, hot failovers, etc.
"We're active in 26 languages and 30+ countries with our 5 most active countries being Italy, Belgium, Turkey, Switzerland and Germany."
I host both my company blogs with Tumblr but have custom domains setup and created custom themes that fit our site design so I don't really have a problem with using it. The reason we use Tumblr is so we can follow people, reblog industry things and in general interact with users more then just writing long, boring text posts.
Your logo is at the top and there is a link to your search engine. So instead of seeing something I didn't want, I see something I didn't want.

I guess some people may find it useful, but so far the positive reviews seem to be your friends from Philly.

Update: Not only are the reviews astroturfed, but the "Parked Domain Project" is not someone you partnered with, it's you. It apparently exists to generate back links to Duck Duck Go. (Every page has "new search engine" linked to you.) Why be shady? You put out some great stuff, no shame in saying it's yours.
I have noticed this is not unique to hufpo. I would be really curious to know the % of AP stories that use 'slam' in their headline.
I agree that Java suffers greatly from the absence of closures. However, I also fear that Java is designed in such a way, and has so much existing code, that it may be near impossible to add closures in a way that isn't confusing and doesn't break in unexpected ways.

Joshua Bloch thoroughly covers the relevant issues in these PowerPoint slides.

http://www.javac.info/bloch-closures-controversy.ppt

(I'm pretty sure the video is online too, if you Google a little more than I did.)
But one thing I never thought of Twitter as was Poor Man's Email, which is how Google CEO Eric Schmidt described it to analysts yesterday. ...

I couldn't imagine two things being more different, Twitter and email.

1. Twitter is primarily one-to-many, where email is primarily one-to-one.

2. Twitter is by default public, where email is by default private.

So why would Schmidt equate them, if they are so different?

This is the interesting question raised by the post. I'm not sure how to answer it; but my guess is that the answer is unlikely to be found by thinking about the details of the SMS protocol.
Thankfully, the browser vendors are not going to indulge you in this "arms race" fallacy, because most people don't want to antagonize the content providers.
Are We Designing Interactions or Designing Software?
Although strategically it has lost, in my opinion the "strategically" means "will lose quite surely". There are quite many countries where it has still many years before it, in particular because it is a cheaper entertaining and will remain for some years.
Screenshots of Facebook's new real-time homepage
Agree with erso. Much of the internet consists of buskers, and buskers cannot rely on revenue. They sing on the street for the love of it, or for self-promotion, or because they don't have headshots and an agent to book a concert hall, or because they're crazy--not because this will bring them a fortune, because it won't. Pay-per-view, however, is booking a concert hall and charging admission. And selling subscriptions is selling season passes to the shows. Very different. Busking might drum up a fan base, but bona fide concerts are where the real revenue is. Think for a moment: pay-per-view and subscription pr0n are where the internet revenue is.
Funny, I've been calling it a poor man's IRC from the start. I'll still take good mailing lists over Twitter any day, though.