skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
About a year ago there was a lot of publicity when Kip Macy (a FreeBSD developer) and his wife were arrested and accused of carrying out a "campaign of terror" against a tenant; the story was posted here at the time: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173640

I'm not sure if this is precisely on-topic for HN, but I don't think it's any more off-topic than the original post last year.
Libel has to be a lie. Someone harshly laying out their opinion on a business's practices and saying those practices resemble extortion isn't even in the running for libel unless s/he says something factually untrue about those practices. Opinions aren't libelous.
Smellr: Its like Flickr, but for your nose
The End of Universal Rationality - A Talk With Yochai Benkler
Speaking from experience Owen. :) You would know what you're talking about.
You think it's better...because it would decrease awkwardness? I'm not sure I follow. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you...but I think it would increase awkwardness.
Nice. Maybe he'll undo that recent goofy change of @replies to @username.
What's the goal with a response?

As I've said elsewhere in this thread: To reach the people -- potentially thousands of people -- who cared enough to type the name of your company into a search engine, but who then read some misleading but official-looking information, came away thinking that your company is kind of lame, and will never be heard of again unless you act.

Just because your prospective customers are invisible to you doesn't mean that they don't matter.
I actually live in the Belmar development in Colorado that is mentioned in the article. For the most part, we've been quite happy with it. With a Whole Foods, restaurants, bars, public library, and many stores only a 5-minute walk away, we can go days without needing to use the car.

You're definitely making a trade-off though, paying substantially more per square foot than you would for older, traditional housing stock in the same area, and foregoing space and a yard. I get the feeling most people in this area will still choose the horrors of a 45-minute commute so that they can live in a cookie-cutter home with a postage-stamp yard, as opposed to a relatively small condominium.

The article doesn't hit this point very hard, but I also think it's important to get public transportation into the equation with these developments. Mass transit options are limited in this area, and I hate that I pretty much have to use my car to travel to downtown Denver or Boulder.
Agree with the use of monospace. Looks clunky. But otherwise really nice.
Has anyone read this book? Is it any good? Any input is appreciated.Thanks.
And yet the whole App-Store part always seemed oddly tacked on. There were times when web apps were all the rage on the iPhone.

Only shows that either Apple are just making stuff up as they go along (which seems implausible as the results more often than not are pretty successful and look pretty polished) or they perfected the art of misleading everyone that follows them.

A strange creature, this Apple company.
Also, and please correct me if I'm wrong, when you hit F11 in Firefox or IE7 you can just hit escape and do whatever you want. I think part of the value is that you can "lock" it in full screen, asking for a password to exit that mode. Maybe you could modify Firefox to do that, but I don't think the functionality exists as of 3.0.8, or whatever is current.
To what extent is this a problem with relational databases as a whole versus MySQL in particular?

Also, is it known what problems couchdb encounters as it scales? Issues with indexing?

I'm curious because JSON is a subset of Lua's primary datatype in much the same way it is Javascript's object notation - if you change surface details like braces and string quoting, it's semantically identical.
If you raise the cost of sending a single piece of spam sufficiently, spam will vanish.

Assuming that sending spam costs the same as sending other mail, the cost is limited by what people will bear for their legitimate mail. I claim that spammers can simply steal enough money (possibly out of users' mail clients) to pay for their spam.
The handful of times I've contacted getsatisfaction, they've responded quickly and like a startup that cares about its customers and what they think. I agree this could have been emailed first.
Did you discuss this in private with 37signals before attacking them in public?
Yeah, that's my point; they look pretty equal to me.
I love the barbarian group. Everything they touch turns to awesome.
it has been claimed many times that apple at one time said web apps were enough, and that no native app sdk was needed. i have yet to read any credible evidence supporting that claim.

i think apple was simply holding off until they could make it good. a decent sdk for a whole new platform is no mean feat.
Who says that drag and drop, or context menus, need to fail? And why would any sane user, who's spent the last 15 years getting used to the way desktop software works, want to switch to a completely different, entirely text based user interface?

Any existing user of Office will feel far more comfortable in 280 Slides than in Google's presentation app. Desktop-class applications are not always the right answer, but to say they are never the right answer seems pretty silly.
Population growth is rapidly shifting to urban areas, which also means less people buying cars because of shorter commutes and mass transit.
You are not the only one. Supposedly someone is offering to pay 25k to a fund in support of a class action lawsuit.
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1650-get-satisfaction-or-...
I'm not so sure. GM's stockholders and employees are being cast as the losers. Are they really?

GM employees have been getting a great salary, great job security (until now), with excellent health care and pension benefits (the latter guaranteed by the PBGC) for semi-skilled labor.

And GM stockholders also got a good deal. Even if (when) the stock price goes to zero, they'll have received dividends over a 45 period. Dividends seem small, but over a long period, reinvested, they've gigantic.
(dividends: http://is.gd/pXny )

And any investor who understood the consequences of this deal would have sold their stock in the late eighties.

When you look at it this way, GM is not so different from Bernie Madoff's pyramid game, with the U.S. taxpayers and bondholders left holding the bag.
Protection from Conficker
Conficker aka Downadup, is a computer virus that will release its payload on April 1, 2009. This site contains Conficker info and removal instructions.
disclaimer - Im a daily vim user.

I think the {derivative of the} learning curve has a long tail.. I keep finding new cool things I can do with it, I guess emacs is the same, or even more so as you can start hacking lisp...

I recommend printing out a cheat sheet with the most common commands - you can start small and get work done.

Things like <esc> :E for browsing files is handy and youll forget them at first. I map a hotkey for :bn :bp so I can flick through the open buffers.

Good tuts on the web. It packs a punch.

oh, on ubuntu youll need to install vim-full

sudo apt-get install vim-full

.. thats annoying, but you'll be crippled without it.
Aren't there companies that are much more important pillars of the world economy that deserve a bailout more (e.g. AMD).

Haha. I agree that there are more deserving companies, but I would argue that none of these companies should be bailed out. Take your medicine and be done with it. IMO the bailouts are doing more good than harm.
1) ACK, you are right, actually I'm probably going to use in the future this lib for Redis (http://code.google.com/p/redis), and it is important that an untrusted DB will load correctly without memory corruptions or invalid accesses.

2) Right, but a define to don't this checks is useful for environments where data can be trusted but speed is very important.

3) Good point. I'll fix the code. Btw what is nice about that kind of things is that testing against random data helps a lot.

Zlib should do that. For example, do you remember the old security bug of old bind implementations of using a 'ptr' opcode (used for compression) in DNS packets in order to create an infinite loop and mount a DoS? Years ago I tested how this bug were trivial to spot just processing random data. This is true for a lot of applications.

If you know how the application works you can "tune" this random data with biases that will stimulate a lot more the code. This is a worthy testing tool that is underused IMHO.

Thanks for your comment.
agreed. not only can they throw a good SXSW party but they can come up with a slick browser. loving the completely unique interface so far. might use it when making a screencast showing off my startup
HTML and "the web" were designed as a simple information-sharing platform based on hyperlinked static text documents.

Building actual business applications on top of this, even if you know how the web works, has always been pretty much a kludge.
My understanding is that there are

(a) minor personality issues like neuroses, for which therapy is sometimes useful and sometimes useless

and

(b) major organic mental illnesses like schizophrenia, for which therapy is almost entirely useless.

In that light, asking "he's got schizotypal personality... should I advise therapy?" is much like asking "he's got schizotypal personality... should I advise a trip to Montana?"
6. Make sure certain callers only ring certain phones

8. Never have your dinner interrupted by a telemarketer again

13. Block your boss from your BlackBerry on the weekends

These three points assume that your friends, your boss and any telemarketers that call you have all been given your Google Voice number, and have all thrown away your existing office, home and mobile numbers. Or am I missing something? What incentive does your boss have to not call your other numbers?
You would if you owned one. Why _we_ would want to, I have no clue.
YouTube - Barbie Girl
I suggest you to read this: http://code.google.com/p/redis/wiki/TwitterAlikeExample

A lot of people not getting distributed DBs changed their mind after reading this tutorial. I hope it can be informative in some way for you. Sorry my English sucks but the article should be understandable.
Gotoandlearn.com - The Throw Slider
I'm a bit amazed by a lot of these responses. I sympathize with the idea that problems should be worked out with friendliness and civility, but this sort of thing is not a question of etiquette that Fried mishandled. These are actions by Get Satisfaction that could easily lead to serious lawsuits.

I suggest that folks in web businesses who look at this and see the major concern here as the tone of an aggrieved blog post should make sure they have good lawyers to run their ideas by.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapreduce
http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html

CouchDB uses the map/reduce query model which achieves its scalability by being intrinsically parallelizable. It aims to provide the foundation for databases that are scalable from the beginning, or at least offer a straighforward path to scalability.

Judging by all the "How we scaled MySQL with mad hacks at [some growing startup]" articles that appear here, I would say there is a serious need for CouchDB. If your company starts growing as fast as Twitter and you don't have a team of brilliant ninja developers to build you a custom messaging server from scratch, you'll see the need for it too.
They use the term 'discover,' I would presume, because it's the most technically accurate term for what they do. As near as I can tell, as a relative layperson, mathematicians look at the existing state of mathematics, embodied in proven theorems, and consider the implications of those theories, looking for unanswered questions or outright contradictions. They then attempt to find the new theory that will provably answer the question or resolve the contradiction.

The only 'invention' that goes on seems, to me, to be on the order of brainstorming, i.e., inventing hypotheticals to test their implications or shed new light on an existing conundrum.

Fundamentally, I think the use of 'discovery' terminology, rather than 'invention' terminology arises from the nature of the new thing produced. Discoveries, in the scientific or mathematical sense, were 'always there' within the corresponding realm of inquiry (e.g., the set of axioms that comprise mathematics, the physical world for scientific discoveries, & etc.) and represent a mere formulation of an existing but previously hidden truth. Inventions, on the other hand, represent a novel application of existing principles for some external purpose. The implementation cannot be said to have flowed from existing knowledge in any meaningful way. Nor do inventions have any general theoretical utility. (Mousetraps are fun little inventions, but don't contribute to a 'Theory of Pest Control' and we certainly would not refer to the 'discoverer of the mouse trap.')

Additionally, other scientists do in fact use the terms 'discover' and 'invent' in precisely the same sense as mathematicians do, and for similar reasons. In fact, these are the commonly accepted notions of the terms even among nonspecialists.

Using 'mathematical invention' rather than 'mathematical discovery' erroneously (or maliciously) ascribes arbitrary subjectivity to mathematical thought.
Opera supports fullscreen browsing on Mac. But, yeah, that's it.
The issue of oversized compensations/retirement plans, accounting legerdemains, bad car design and bad car quality, is all related: horrible management. They didn't stand up to the unions, decided to play games with numbers instead of running a business, kept their head buried in the sand about the relative quality of their product vs. the Japanese, and chose lousy products.

Nothing overcomes bad management; not just years, but decades of horrible management. But we'll do so much better now with the government choosing new management. Bad business decisions surely will be ended by inserting politics into the equation.
We’ll be offering “data transfer in” to Amazon S3 for only
$0.03 per GB (vs. the standard $0.10) for 3 months, April through June.

I wonder if its $.03 for everyone, or just for those that transfer more than 150TB/mo(@.1/gb).
NextStart Gives South Carolina A Startup Incubator
As the world shifts from desktop software to web-based software, tools like this are going to be huge.

Atlas is going to enable nearly every single cocoa developer to start making webapps instantly. No learning Rails or self-teaching JavaScript.

Apple should have done this already. 280north has a huge headstart.
It's large, not big :-) and it has a different meaning

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
The testing you're describing is called "fuzzing", and it's the dominant way researchers find vulnerabilities today (I didn't fuzz your code; I just read it, and then wrote a little test doohickey).

David Molnar at Berkeley has done a ton of work on smart fuzzing: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dmolnar/

Ilja van Sprundel wrote what has got to be the most popular "dumb" fuzzer, mangle.c: http://www.digitaldwarf.be/products/mangle.c

Mangle routinely finds horrible, horrible things in modern code; Ilja deserves some kind of anti-Nobel Prize for it.
What's the difference between something like this and Yelp? (Why is this bad, and Yelp's not? Is it because people here all have online businesses, and don't want a forum where people could say something bad about them?)
I understand that cycles can be stolen easily, but somehow I think cash might be a tipping point. The reason that spam works is that they only need a 0.00(ridiculous)1% response rate to make money. The risk of getting caught stealing versus the reward of what they'd make sending spam would probably get way out of balance if cash was required to achieve that response rate.
I think this is the worst one yet, these guys don't even mention who the mentors/founders are
That's a really great idea as troubleshooting and checklists are much more deterministic than "what city you should live in" type of questions
True, true. Apple just says nothing so everyone makes up whatever they want to. Now, you certainly cannot blame Apple for all those writing about them feeling like they know everything, but I would argue that there at least exist PR strategies that don’t make the tech press go crazy when writing about you. You would most likely have to give up some secrecy and drop a small hint here and there, but oddly enough, that is not what Apple decided to do. Seems risky to me, when you consider how much stupid rumors can influence their stock.
Well i checked and to my surprise, at least FF3 can't fullscreen on macs !

On a pc you could probably do the same thing with firefox and a few plugins : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4650 for the slideshow abilities

and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1659
for full-screen locking.

Also :
[From the Plainview FAQ]

How much does Plainview cost?

Plainview is free. Enjoy.

Really?

Yup.

[End]

Well, seriously, what is that surprising about a free browser ?

Besides that, the browser just looks very nice. I like the multi-windows approach, it could certainly have it's charm on bigger screens
New app for April Fools: iPrankd.com. Prank your friends
Look at it this way: If the individual is supposed to personally save for his own retirement, you'll have 20% or so that will not have any money when they retire. So your society, whatever it is, will have an extremely poor and old social class. These are the people who will also have the most problem with health care. When they get sick, the hospitals will not let them die - their medical care will be paid - by the government. Those people will turn to begging, alcohol and create a new class of homeless people.

It's nice to want to put responsibility on the individual, but those 20% will make your society an unpleasant place to live in. Are you willing to deal with all this?

Retirement has to be be made into an institution that runs on its own. Don't let people work their entire life, and then retire into hell.
Or you can just use Megazoomer which will make any Cocoa app fullscreen:

http://ianhenderson.org/megazoomer.html

Combine that with "Hide Statusbar", "Hide Toolbar", "Hide Bookmarks Bar" and you've got a chromeless Safari.

I use Megazoomer a lot with Terminal.app.
Respectfully, I don't think this blog post addresses the substance of the Chronicle story, which alleges:

* Macy bought the apartment and immediately tried to evict all the tenants.

* Macy failed to evict Morrow.

* Macy then structurally sabotaged Morrow's apartment by cutting load-bearing beams.

* Macy cut off Morrow's electricity and phone.

* Macy cut a hole in Morrow's floor.

* Macy stole $2000 out of Morrow's apartment.

* The prior tenants of the same apartment filed a lawsuit against Macy.

* Macy's wife illegally entered the apartment and spilled ammonia on the clothes she found.

The Chron has quoted multiple people, including a Deputy City Attorney for the city. This blog post doesn't quote anyone, or, from what I can see, do any actual reporting.

That's not to say the Chron story is true; it's just pointing out that while we have the Chron's side, we don't yet have Macy's.
Not every wrong in the world needs to be righted. Sometimes righting an old wrong creates a new wrong. Personally, I find new wrongs to be more costly than old ones.
Well it probably took years to bring the quality up to par, so in the meantime, there wasn't much else they could do to fight that perception.

Now they suffer from a branding issue (on top of their other problems). It's like when the original AT&T was split up, and one of the companies to come out of it was GTE. GTE had horrible service and customers hated it. It perennially ranked at the bottom of the baby bells for customer satisfaction, etc. So GTE went and rebuilt it's whole network and suddenly had the best service and support. But when people heard 'GTE' they still thought 'crappy and unreliable'. The solution? They changed their name to Verizon.

So building high quality cars that are stylish and true technical leaders might not be enough. (Especially now that the public associates 'GM' and 'Chrysler' with 'bailout'.) In all this bailing out they might have to change their brand name as well.
I love the trumped-up charges. Fraud? I am sure the average Pirate Bay user costs Comcast more money than this guy.

Either way, he is a $50/month business DSL line away from being back in business.
Diomede Storage is also matching this for the next three months:

http://www.diomedestorage.com/b
password: hackern

(Diomede standard upload bandwidth price is $.08/GB [20% less than Amazon to start])
omgpop
Agreed. The UI for the desktop just gives me a headache but there are some really cool projects coming out of Redmond. There is some really interesting work in computational photography:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/au...

http://livelabs.com/photosynth/
Because when I go to Yelp and look up Morton's Steakhouse in Atlanta GA, I see clearly marked reviews, not "Complaint Department and Feedback for Morton's Steakhouse". I don't see ads for Morton's competitors that only go away if Morton's sends Yelp money.

Seriously, you might find the linked blog post interesting.
The blog post doesn't have many details, no; but it includes a link to a court filing on scribd (http://www.scribd.com/doc/13481284/Kip-Macys-995-Absurd-Indi...)
which casts light on some of the allegations.
Yes, of course you can grasp it! The tutorial stuff on Rails is really easy to follow - it's a complex process, but it's not intimidating if you get a good book. Out of everything in the space at the moment Ruby and Rails are probably your best bet, if you want to build a lean mean fighting app machine, especially if 37signals is your inspiration, as that's their platform. (They even wrote the book on it: https://gettingreal.37signals.com/)

Of course, others will rabidly disagree. Do a bit of homework, flick through some books in a shop and see if you can follow along. Maybe others will recommend good web based tutorials but I always prefer paper.

MooTools.. another buzzword.. don't get hung up on using that over the alternatives like prototype and script.aculo.us, but again, it's fairly easy to use (I haven't looked at the for-newbies tutorials though). I'd focus on the stuff under the hood first and worry about learning MooTools later.

The learning curve won't be easy for a complete novice, but it will be masterable. Good luck!
In law, defamation (also called calumny, libel, slander, and vilification) is the communication of a statement that makes a claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may give an individual, business, product, group, government or nation a negative image. It is often, but not always, a requirement that this claim be false, and, or alternatively, that the publication is made to someone other than the person defamed.
I used Plainview a few weeks back for a small temporary kiosk setup at a convention we were doing. Worked really well. Obviously having a separate app is a little more cumbersome than just being able to grab a kiosk plugin to lock out basic browsing when F11'd in Firefox or whatever, but Plainview does do what it does more elegantly than a Safari or FF plugin would do, so I'll be using it again.

Also, the milkshake icon is a nice touch.
You could run standalone apps made up of static JavaScript, HTML and CSS where the browser clients talk directly to CouchDB. Check this out: http://books.couchdb.org/relax/hosted-applications
Rather ironically, I feel like Doug left a company which was being run by engineers, when what it really needed was more designers, to join a company that is being run by designers, when what it really needs is more engineers...