skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right, so you are arguing exactly what Kay argued, and what the Adobe guys argued. I am saying that is wrong for the reasons above (i.e., exactly what Tim Berner's Lee argued).

Anyway, Kay basically attributed it to ignorance and stupidity on the part of the TBL and the web's designers, which I think is incredibly arrogant, especially since he is wrong.

You didn't really address the arguments above -- you're basically saying "it would have been nicer and cleaner if we started with a VM".

I can sort of see how it would have been nicer in some theoretical world, just like using PDF/PS instead of CSS would have been nicer (in a way).

But I am arguing that it would have never happened. If you started with a VM-based system, there would be technical problems that prevented it from being widely adopted.

Actually, Java was pretty much exactly that. It was supposed to be a VM that ran anything, and disenfranchised Microsoft's OS. And we know JS is more popular than Java, despite way more marketing muscle behind Java in the early years.

It's already been tried. I'd argue that it wasn't just beyond the abilities of Java's designers, but actually impossible (this is as much social problem as a technical one).

You make the vague statement as Kay does that "we should have started with a VM", but it would be impossible to come up with a specific VM design (actual running code) that actually worked as well and as widely as the Web does.
My last job featured a database written by me, which had to be done because there was no way to pull proper data out of the company database.

The problem was that there was several people over several years who used the company database and they all had their own silly opinions about how to update and enter information. There was a few things that were firmly set by the system. For example, once you entered any information on the UI, the letters auto-capped so the data had some integrity.

The biggest problem was the product entries. The logical way to create the UI would be:

SKU:

Color:

Product Name:

etc.

This is how it actually was:

SKU:

Product Name:

And whilst there was a color field, it was buried so deeply in the morass of entry fields that I didn't even know they were there for the first 6 months I worked there.

So, the data was entered like this:

123-BLUE

123-RED

123-BLACK

123-BLK

123-BLU

etc....

I come in and am asked to compute sales history by SKU, Color, Product Type, and all sorts of ugly things. As you can see, there was no way to even get things by SKU, much less by any other important metric. It didn't help that it was all GUI and no one had access to the raw SQL.

This was the time that Excel came to the rescue in spades. I exported everything off the database, pushed everything into CSV and hand-separated all of the data into something that I could use, then pushed it into Postgres on my machine.

Moral of the story for me: Yeah, Excel isn't the best thing, but a poorly designed database system made by a half-baked company with 15 years of rot creates a nightmare situation as well, and at least in this experience, having the ability to examine the raw data, do find-replaces in wordpad, and other odd ends like that was the only thing that saved me and my job.

After I had left, I was asked to return for a week to encode my job to the best of my ability. There was just no way to ensure that the uploads had the correct integrity considering the size and time-constraints of the project.

I knew it wouldn't go well because my replacement was partly tasked with helping me clean the data for the next importation, which I tasked her to do since she kindly deleted the entire database that I spent the prior year building up. I told her that x, y, z, etc, had to be done manually and she couldn't understand the simple concept that you cannot navigate an Excel document with a mouse, so she kept handing me broken files and blowing up the imports.

I'm sure you can figure out what happened next: first time she uses it, despite stupid-simple step-by-step instructions, she destroyed the database and I sat at home tearing my hair out on how to import all the data back in. I really didn't have time to get this part perfect. I just docked it as a non-feature I knew I'd regret later and hoped against hope.

Companies should never ever hire people to do anything semi-technical that has anything to do with tech.
Try Android stick PCs, there are quadcore models on the way and its amazing how well it works considering its not much bigger than two packs of juicyfruit.
It's their lookout - if it does collapse, it's small enough that it won't cause real harm. If it doesn't, then it's a pretty exciting new development in the world of currency and money.

People trading Bitcoins and working on it are doing no harm to anyone, so I find it odd that anyone could get upset about it. It's like getting upset about people who trade dolls or toy soldiers or rare oil cans.
This looks awesome, I've been curious to how we might be able to programatically solve for "surfacing interesting content". Upvote solutions are on a decline, and curation/moderation is on the rise as we realize those solutions don't scale all that well. Apply to music, videos, photos, links, comments, etc...
Playing with Go1.1beta2, it's much faster
Once people are reluctant to spend then, the economy will stay depressed because, people expect deflation AND deflation will continue because the economy remains depressed.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but isn't the value of the total money supply supposed to equal something like the total value of the goods and services in the economy that that money supply represents (not sure if the wording is correct but hopefully I got the idea across). If that is the case, then won't a decrease in spending cause the total value of the money supply to decrease, meaning the expectation of deflation will cause some amount of inflation, such that the system stabilizes? Because of this, I don't see how you can have a deflationary spiral in a depressed economy based on anything other than speculation (and thus a Bitcoin bubble which will eventually pop). I do agree that Bitcoin is naturally deflationary; if there is economic growth, the money supply can't expand to keep up. And Bitcoin's deflationary nature slows this economic growth. Thus, I think that Bitcoin will eventually reach a stable real value. I think there must be a flaw in this reasoning because I'm sure many economists would disagree but I can't seem to find it myself.
I think that its both. Current traffic is like position and the delta is velocity. To know who is bigger now, the velocity is relatively unimportant. To try and guess who is going to be bigger next year, current position is less important.
I guess I got lucky. I applied for H1B in 2009 and the annual quota remained open for 280 days that year. I know great number of engineers who were able to stay because of H1Bs. Company has to offer what is a comparable wage in that region for a particular profession.
I was really hoping to come to this comment page and see a dozen top-level comments claiming you could easily parse a PDF with XYZ tool, because the PDF represented the table with reasonable data, and how could you not know that, you poor excuse for a computer geek, in true HN (and Reddit and 4chan and whatever you your flavor of BBS) fashion.

But no, we are well and truly fucked.
Homegrown Developers, Localization Breathe Life Into South Asian Gaming
I wouldn't expect such a tool to come from Microsoft, could be fertile ground for a startup maybe? The hard part is of course gaining the acceptance of existing excel users which is why I would make it look not too dissimilar from excel.

The complicated technical part is making something that enforces strong schemas and good support for concurrent users without feeling complicated or overly constrained.

It doesn't necessarily have to do everything that excel does, just be good for use cases like "make a customer list that everyone from the CEO to the new temp can use at once"
"At least XLSX is an open and documented format."

The documentation diverges from the excel implementation in so many places that there's a special document (which itself is incomplete): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd922181(v=office.12...

"Are the rules for Excel CSV parsing written down anywhere?"

They are loosely described in ECMA-376 section 18.8.30 under the "General" format code. But like with most details surrounding XLS and XLSX, the documentation is barely coherent and incorrect in some places.
http://www.cracked.com/article_17299_6-famous-characters-you...
Would you care to explain why? Cash is really useful, lots of little places don't take cards and couldn't if they wanted to. As much as I despise it, the vagueries of "I owe you four fifty for lunch but all I have is a ten, so take the ten and that'll cover pizza next week." are a nice part of my social interaction with my friends. Electronic transfers (either bank account to bank account or paypal etc.) are useful for stuff >£20 but I can't see myself splitting lunch and going through the (understandably) rigorous security checks my bank enforces to pay a couple of pounds (says the guy who once wrote a cheque for a copy of the i[1] (I'd been given a cheque book by my bank and cheques are novel to me, not having been old enough for them to be anything other than that thing grandparents send you that you can swap for money)).

Bank tellers are useful in that they are a human being with whom I can discuss things about my account with face-to-face, which is useful when something's gone belly-up with their systems and you need a real person who can see you're also a real person and hit the damn thing a few times until it works.

Finally, I'm still going to need a proper bank account for things like credit, overdrafts, standing orders of rent and such to people who haven't moved over to bitcoin yet, not to mention paying my taxes and taking my earnings from companies that pay in pounds sterling, US dollars, euros or other traditional currencies. It only makes sense that instead of holding a mass of bitcoins, that my bank (nominally HSBC for myself) holds a much larger mass and allows me to make payments in BTC much like I would in any of the hundreds I already can. If I wanted to hold BTC myself, then I could open an account in BTC much like I could open a EUR or USD account now.

[1] The i is a 20 pence newspaper by the makers of the Independent. Prior to moving to London where if you're not paying attention you can amass fifteen copies of the Evening Standard whilst walking across the river, I tended to buy a copy of the i every day going into college because it was something I could read entirely whilst eating breakfast and tended to avoid the fluff I noticed in larger papers on slow news days.
As this software is in response to the "The Copyright Alert System" used by the largest ISPs in the USA, I would like to know what the impact of this program has been so far. I haven't seen many reports online of users getting notifications. Does anyone have any insight into how this program is effecting average users? Is it scaring some people away from torrenting?
Nice! I have a "pod" in the Cocoa Pods repository and the documentation has been reproduced faithfully!

I like how you pull the github README to use at the documentation landing page.
"It is a closed format created by Wolfram Research"

"CDF files can be read using a proprietary CDF Player with a restrictive license"

No thank you.
Connecting to a remote machine using Win32API and Ruby
This is silly. You've licensed nearly every game you ever bought since the 90s, likely even before that. You've never owned it; you just felt like you did. Server-side storage and 'online-only' gaming just solidifies this in a technological sense, not a legal one.
When you don't have deep (insider) access to key metrics, you have to rely on other indicators of success. Alexa provides one piece of data that is semi-meaningful: if nothing else, I'd wager it's roughly correlated (on average) with market cap and/or exit price. (dmor: this would be a cool graph!)

Plus, these companies are in drastically different markets. Their key metrics are probably quite different, or (at the very least) not directly comparable to growth in value / profitability.
Yes, but fiat currencies are designed to lose value over time, which makes it difficult for people to save effectively. Governments and large banks get the newly-inflated money first, which gives them first bite at the existing value of money with money essentially made from nothing.

Encouraging people to spend money for the sake of it sounds like a good idea when people have created the concept of 'hoarding' - which is just saving with a scary name. But future productivity has to come through capital appreciation, which has to come through saving. By working against this, wrong investment choices are made because the time horizon is altered.

The concept of fiat currencies in terms of being able to expand the money supply is superior to having a fixed money supply, but the way in which it is implemented works directly against capital formation and feeds directly into misdirected investment and speculation by allowing money creation to run ahead of sensible investment. As aptly experience by the excessive amounts of capital diverted into residential real estate, caused by excessive amounts of new money. Without the easy money, the level of investment in real estate would have been much lower, and the subsequent crash much less destructive.

Fiat currencies have been around for 250 years or so, and not one single one of them have survived that long.
MiniSWARM - 802.15.4 wireless mesh Arduino on the cheap
Unfortunately, computer geeks like us are far more interested in making interesting features than making things discoverable and accessible. It's hard enough to get an OSS dev to make a GUI, let alone a good one.

I think the most prescient point so far has been that Excel quickly gives you a sanity check of you data, because it gives you the full view of days right away. Working on an ERP rewrite right now, this has been our continual issue, making all of the data visible, in ways that the old system never did.
I think this is wrong: "Error:Chrome's version of flash has a bug which prevents sound from being recorded."

A quick search in Google found that you can use HTML5 to record audio in Chrome:

http://codeartists.com/post/36746402258/how-to-record-audio-...

Then you don't have to ask people to disable pepper in Chrome to try out a demo. :/
Ok. That clears things up a bit. So a PCIe device and a DP device can share the same 10Gb channel at the same time? Does this mean that the presence of a DP device will mean that writes to the PCIe device are much slower than the corresponding reads (since the DP device is only using bandwidth in one direction)?
"As schools become more global in their locations ... their culture of openness and international collaboration makes them increasingly vulnerable to theft of research conducted for the government and industry."

Excuse me, but isn't this obvious?

"Foreign countries “can never become competitive by stealing,” [University of Maryland President Wallace Loh] said. ..."

Maybe I'm too naive, but I would think virtually any foreign company can become very competitive by stealing.

"... In another, an Asian graduate student arranged for researchers back home to visit an American university lab and take unauthorized photos of equipment so they could reconstruct it, the report said."

...which lead to Kim Jong Un and Dennis Rodman making very delicious mini-cupcakes from their recontructed Easy-Bake Oven (TM). Seriously? Where is Bruce Schneier to talk about "Security Theater"?

"A foreign scientist’s military background or purpose isn’t always apparent. ..."

I had to stop reading the article at this point...
In Europe, New Protest Over Google
trying it now, few interesting facts,

goto the web inspector console, make sure the page_context = rb

* Ruby 2.0.0

> RUBY_VERSION
"2.0.0"

Yay

* automated string conversion does not happen, you would need to do it your self

>Time.now

Time {}

>Time.now.to_s

"2013-04-08 19:47:14 -00700"

* top most object is not Kernel

>Time.ancestors

[Time, Module, Object, Kernel, BasicObject]

curious to know what standard libraries are included, hope will update the post with new findings soon
This horrible UI is true of most "smart devices" that are designed by companies whose primary proficiency isn't software. I own a PS3, Vita, and Nintendo 3DS which all have unimaginably shitty UIs with long loading screens. Prior to these devices, my video game machine was an XBox 360 and a PC. While we all like to poke fun at MS for the quality of their products, they have amazing UI compared to the majority of companies. The only companies that seem to be able to be able to create usable UIs for complex machines are Apple, MS, and Google (disclosure: I work for Google) who have been able to apply their skills at creating general software UIs to creating high quality device UIs. Any time I use the UI on my TV, cable box, car, video game machine, or other "smart" device, I always feel like bashing my head against the device to make it work faster.
Understanding Encryption and Security through Java Cryptography Architecture
That's exactly the question: was the t-shirt was inspired by the artist in question, or not. And I'm starting to come around.

The dress of T-shirt Alice bears more resemblance to the artist's original than it does to the Disney version:
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lnarc6bdBm1qfkdyso1_500.gi...

The arm/hand position seems nearly identical as well. http://25.media.tumblr.com/0266dadc485f9ffa5a1fee696fd8a32c/...

Before you say "that could be a coincidence" - of course it could. The question at hand is "is it coincidence, or did Disney copy the artist's work?"
Have you played Amnesia: The Dark Descent?
Is that another name for lifestyle business?
Excel is a great flat file database.

It's also a great way of formatting a small amount of data for human consumption.

Its not a database in the modern sense of the word, nor should be used as such.
Great point! I've also written about this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5265181

Although my views have slightly changed since then, I think many of the points still stand.
If PDF is all you have, at least there is pdfescape:

http://www.pdfescape.com/
I think the dwolla.com interface is nice and have good (but limited) experiences with them.
She probably said that because might not actually own the copyright to it.

Based on what I read on her site, this image was created for her final coursework.

Although I haven't been able to find out which University she attended to eliminate this possibility, it is quite possible that the University in question may actually owns this image.

Certainly in UK some Universities have IP clauses written stating who owns what.
In the US, a corporation is a person in matters both legal and grammatical.
VC Fundraising Up 22% In Q1 2013, But Number Of Funds Raised Down
I hate to sound rude but.."Hope"?!

Surely you have some ironclad clauses saying that the product cannot be killed or something along those lines?

Otherwise your roadmap is pointless since you do not control it anymore.
This problem and its implication to the finance sector were the genesis of our startup: Addepar.
Do you really not understand how fundamentally anti-open-access Elsevier is? Have you not seen what happens to the other companies they absorb? Many of us have experience in this particular field and it's not a pleasant one.

Your official blog post is inane marketing-speak that has no basis in the reality of the damage Elsevier has done and continues to do to the fabric of science publishing. Mendeley should be ashamed, and you personally should be ashamed for perpetuating this nonsense. Within a year your company will be effectively dismantled and anyone left over who actually cares about open access can start over from scratch. I wish them luck.
> Why do most companies that scale out (and thus massively benefit from free-as-in-beer software) actually choose MySql over PostgreSQL?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence
There is one common mistake that teams tend to make when deciding on a rewrite: committing to the rewrite too early.

Here's some ways to do a rewrite well:

Set up the rewrite as an alternate, competing product and let the two compete in the marketplace. This requires having the resources to support developing two such products at the same time using separate teams for each, which is not something many companies can afford. The advantage to doing it this way is that it gives the rewrite time to mature before it's fully replaced the old system. What most people tend to not realize is that mature software with fundamental flaws can often be superior to immature software on a better foundation. Real-world use is orders of magnitude more effective as a QA process than any sort of in-house testing, and always well be, products that have been tried by fire and made the cut should always be respected no matter how horrible their underlying code is.

If you look at a lot of the major switchovers in software you'll see this sort of trend fairly often. For example, consumer Windows took several generations and almost an entire decade to fully switch over to the NT core.

Another good way is to rewrite piece-wise, in place (refactoring). There are lots of different ways to do this regardless of architecture, ultimately you're essentially creating a bubble of new code that grows and grows until it completely replaces all the old code. The advantage of this is that it takes much less effort than a full rewrite and you can do it incrementally and slowly. Often it's easier to mature each new component in isolation than to try to mature an entire new product.

And, of course, there's the hybrid approach. Work component-wise in an "add + deprecate" fashion. Create the new component, have it work in parallel along with the old component, and then deprecate the old component and work toward moving client code to the new component.
"Elsevier tried to sneak in legislation through lobbying – the so-called Research Works Act – that was to undo the National Institute of Health’s Open Access mandate and therefore would have prevented public access to millions of bio-medical research papers. They had to pull back after outrage and boycotts from the academic community.

Our vision is to crack this open by, first of all, encouraging academics to be aware of their rights, be aware of the lobbying that is going on, and also by enabling them to post their own publications over which they retain copyright, from their Mendeley profiles. A ton of papers have been made available by Mendeley in this way, by academics uploading their own papers. So, that’s our attempt at making content more accessible and science more open."

Quoted from the founder in an interview just a few months ago (17 September 2012). Speaks for itself really.

http://www.kernelmag.com/features/qa/3322/cracking-open-scie...
That's how the Postgres team works. They tend to start with the primitives and build a bit more of the niceties in each release. And they do so very carefully, which is important.

People forget that this is true of every software system ever. No successful system ever starts with every feature it's going to have.
"Why Canadian Startups Should Choose Canada over Silicon Valley."
KDE PlasMate Software Development Toolkit
Designing a game to behave in ways for which it was not designed
Yes, there are gold dealers all over the place. You might get a lousy deal, but the currency exchange at the airport will give you a lousy deal on a pocket full of Euros, too.
What has done what to what? Neither of these names have any meaning to me. This is literally the first I am hearing of either.
And, over two years after hardware first shipped, there's still no Linux support for first-gen Thunderbolt from Intel. This is, to put it mildly, disappointing.