skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article only said "few doubt Apple snapped up the pair [co-founders]". It's a rumor. I think it's highly possible. But it's still only a rumor.
The number is certainly believable. Extrapolating from my own MySpace app, they would make $22.5M annually. Doesn't surprise me that they are able to monetize a lot better ($100M), considering how much more addictive their games are and their scale benefits.
Rudy! It's a development and deployment tool for Amazon Web Services that's configured via a Ruby DSL. It helps organize EC2 infrastructures into environments and roles (plus some other cool stuff).

http://github.com/solutious/rudy

environment :stage do
ami "ami-5394733a"
size 'm1.small'

role :app do
positions 2
addresses '11.22.33.44', '55.66.77.88'

disks do # EBS volumes
path "/rudy/disk1" do
size 2
device "/dev/sdr"
end
end
end

role :analyzer do
ami "ami-6aff24aa"
end
end
I still can't get used to the "stupid" URL bar (I'd call it too smart for my liking). It's a pity it is a pervasive trend amongst modern browsers. I have a copy of Opera 9.27 that doesn't yet have it, it's a pity it cannot render more and more sites properly.

Can I switch to the classic URL bar?
They need to use standards that are different and incompatible with whatever competitors use. If Microsoft went BSD with, say, Windows 9, it would be easy to port Unix stuff to Windows, which would be nice for them, but it would also be easy to port, say, Windows 9 applications to other unixes, which is a big showstopper for them. They didn't achieve market dominance they enjoy by making easy for their customers to port away Windows apps. Once you write one, you are pretty much stuck.

If you can't suffocate, there is little point in embracing and extending.
It seems there are a lot of Microsoft employees hanging around here. What's going on? Last time I saw, you were astroturfing on Digg...
Many identities give out higher level of comprehension. You could have more identities and keep them as resources to use instead of as labels to show off. But, that's rare, most people don't have that ablility to learn as much as possible. So in common, sticking on fewer identities normally prevails.
> I dig plugins as much as the next guy, but it's not enough to make me open Firefox...

Then you don't, in fact, dig the plugins as much as THIS next guy. Mind you, it's the only thing that brings me back to FF, but if Chrome supported even just adblock, I'd jump in a second. But the plugins are its killer feature, ^2.
You can switch off the feature in the settings, afaik.
Tried the 3.5 beta? It made me switch back from chrome. They fixed the speed and it's got all the plugins :)
IBM developerWorks : Community
A .NET interpreter for embedded/constrained systems where MS.NET or Mono aren't suitable: http://www.dotnetanywhere.org/

It now implements most of the core .NET 2.0 spec, a usable subset of the base class library, and an implementation of a Graphics device suitable for embedded devices.

Not the fastest of .NET runtimes, but its disk/memory footprint is surprisingly small, and it (mostly) works!
Boom or Blurst: A New Business Model for Videogames?
i love it too. Another great advantage: you don't have to remember the exact url/domain name, which is getting difficult to spell these days.
Hg on GitHub
In the fringe world of extreme metal (thrash/death/black metal) vinyl never went away (cassettes are still used for trading as well).

The fans are interested in the large cover artwork and extensive inlays. The bands are able to eek out a living selling premium products in this niche format.

It's easy to dismiss it as kids just trying to be different from the iPod generation but for the bands it's a real lifeline to hard cash for a very niche project.

While the quality of the recording is better then on CD the artwork seems to be the primary reason for kids/bands liking the format. These niches have not suffered as much from the loudness war as they are not competing with mainstream artists.
His analogy is not appropriate in this context. Security is a special case in which getting around it is a good way to learn about it. It's not the same as arguing that wrecking a car means you're qualified to repair it -- it might be akin to a company hiring people who've been in accidents as a focus group for a new system that seizes control of your car and attempts to avert a collision.

Most of the appropriate analogies are related to crime (hire someone who picks locks to test whether or not your lock can be picked; hire someone who breaks into houses to test whether or not your house can be broken into). This is because crime is a special case, but you could also imagine a search engine hiring black-hat SEOs, a casino hiring card-counters, etc. If you want something to be exploitation-proof, you probably want to see what happens when experienced people try to exploit it.

It looks like people are seizing this as a PR ploy -- shame General Dynamics, and make sure people who Google "General Dynamics Hacker Ad" get to see you tut-tutting and defending virtue.
Take languages for example, one speaks more than one languages could obviously strike dumb the one sticks on his mother tongue in an international stage.
I've found that writing is a lot like programming.

For a skilled programmer, programming is easy. Designing a complex system might be hard, understanding complex programs may be hard, and designing algorithms may be hard, but the actual act of putting the concepts into code should be pretty easy.

For a skilled writer, writing is easy. Designing a complex, believable plot, characters the reader can empathize with, a detailed universe, and so forth, can be quite hard, but the actual act of putting it onto paper is easy. Of course, as any good writer will tell you, once you've written it down, there are another hundred revisions to go before it's actually ready, a dozen of which will involve a complete rewrite. So you have to be able to put thoughts to paper quickly. Also, at least personally, I've found that I have a short attention span with regards to writing: there's a window of a few hours between when I have an idea and when my mind wants to throw it away, and I have to get something passable written in that time.

When I get an idea for a short story I can often write out 5000 words in a couple of hours. But going from that basket of words spurt out at 3:00 AM to a publishable story would take far, far, longer.

One interesting bit of advice I've heard is that aspiring authors should start with fanfiction--because that allows them to work in an existing detailed universe with existing characters. This lets them get practice making writing easy so that when it comes to actually creating a setting from scratch, they don't have to worry about writing it down. This is much like programming--by the time you're doing serious work, it's expected that coding itself is second-nature to you.

Also, a good read for any HN user interested in writing (especially Sci-Fi/Fantasy) is the classic Turkey City Lexicon:

http://www.sfwa.org/writing/turkeycity.html
Hollywood Free Movie Download: X-Men Origins - Wolverine avi 2009
Plus, chrome has the added advantage of not hanging when a js/flash intensive app is cranking away. So overall its faster.
They've been filing patent applications assigned to Apple since early 2007. I think that's pretty conclusive.
depends typos and tries to correct them
It would be nice to see some actual data rather than just that graph. If you look at the graph your eye is drawn to the dramatic upswing in the 2009 line, but is all of that upswing before media reports? It's unclear from the presentation.

Also, if you look at the data from previous years there's also an upswing in a similar timeframe.

What's needed is some concrete analysis of the data so that you can see if there was a detectable deviation from the norm prior to media reports. Unfortunately, Google has not released the historical data for Mexico (they've released it for the US only).
Nokia 5800 Theme : Green Leaves
Never had I felt more like I was tricking software into doing what I want to do than when I was trying to use Peach. I mean Michael's a nice guy, but you email the peachfuzz list or him personally on issues you're having and he convinces you that it's you not using the tool correctly and that you really don't want the feature you're asking. Modifying code was hellish because it's just thousands of lines of kludge, written as far from Python's usual styles as possible.

Good stuff on the Burp clone. Any plans to publish it eventually?

--

As for me, the last project I was working on is a complex structure analyzer plug-in for HexFiend along with basic plug-in functionality to support it.
A Summary of the Tax Situation in the US Surrounding Virtual Currencies
I use (actually use) about 35 plug-ins, around 50 user styles, and a few Greasemonkey scripts. Until Chrome gets all those, no way I can use Chrome.

I've customized my Firefox experience so much, most people can't even recognize it. No way I can do that on Chrome.

And in Linux, I run Firefox totally in a ramdisk, so it's ridiculously fast:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1120475
Xen Live Migration Of An LVM-Based Virtual Machine With iSCSI On Debian Lenny
Nothing that's helpful for content providers in general, if you assume that it's impossible to enforce copyright.

"Intrinsic value" would work for some content providers (an indy band composed of guys with day jobs), but it's not going to work to make an expensive blockbuster.
I don't agree with that... If the only good economic reason for making content is that you love doing it, then we're more likely to content made by passionate people....

Some content maker can make money on TV (with reality shows and the like) or as movies... but when you look at some of the commercially successful shows or movies are they really good content? Can you feel any of the passion of their creators? Same thing for some of the bland music produced by some of the big labels... I like content creator to have intrinsic motivations to create, not to be motivated by the potential rewards they could get by pandering to as many different segments of the population they can...
I've been thinking that Perl, Python, Ruby, and GNU Smalltalk have really hurt the case of Garbage Collection by being so Open and visible, and yet having such low expectations for so much of their early life. In the meantime, Java has really helped it by putting some great GC technology in front of a large audience. (Basically lagging the commercial Smalltalk engines by a few years for the past 10. They've since caught up and surpassed.) The new Javascript engines are also doing this.

(At one job, I wrote an infinite loop background process that did nothing but allocate memory, and ran it in the test environment of the Smalltalk trading application I was maintaining. Unless you did certain intensive operations, you couldn't tell the difference. The GC handled it without a hiccup. I could've put that into production, and almost no one would've had any idea it was there.)
Firefox Add-ons You Shouldnt’t Use
It's still going to be expensive to deal with actors, sets, animators, etc. I doubt better software is going to cut into the main portion of the cost of making a movie.

This model would lead to a lot of reality shows and things like that. Maybe machinima if it ever catches on.
I recently inquired for the cost of a particular four-letter domain (an english word) and was quoted $25k.

I didn't buy it :-)
Basically right now nobody knows what they're doing.

That's going a bit far. We know how to design hashes which are provably at least as strong as block ciphers (i.e., "if you can break this hash, you can break AES") -- but synthetic constructions like those always end up being much slower than constructions which are "native" hashes.
They don't do a majority of their sales in the <$5 range. Those are price points they offer, but they aren't the ones they push.
Ideas, hah. The real challenge in this line of work is
being able to weed the productive ones from the chaff, to
decide which you’re going to spend the next six to nine
months turning into something that people will pay for.

It's so true. I remember hearing about both Buffy and Heroes, "how can this not be completely and utterly rubbish" and yet they turned out amazing (well - one series of Heroes, at least). The pitch for Lost is: a bunch of damaged goods people crash on an island. As time goes by we learn more about them via flashback. Weird stuff happens.
ISTR that the "rule of thumb" is that the NSA is a couple of years ahead of the mainstream for both Mathematics and computer tech.

For cryptographic research, that's probably true. For "computer technology" in general, probably not -- they have a large budget, but not so large that it would make sense for them to independently replicate all of the work companies like Intel and IBM do on lithographic processes.

I'm sure the NSA has access to fabrication capacity, though -- almost certainly via deals with US companies to allow them to run a few wafers here and there.
Sub Contractor Los Angeles
Home Improvement Los Angeles - Home improvement - offering High quality kitchen remodeling, bathroom remodeling, roofing, renovation, builders and providing referral services for contractors and sub contractors in Los Angeles
Zynga's Mafia Wars is anything but low-bar. It might not be much to look at, but their execution has been nothing short of brilliant to this point. They flat out COPIED a game that was huge on Facebook (Mob Wars) and iterated their way past it. They relentlessly used short iterations, A/B testing and customer validation to beat the established competition.

Mafia Wars is now 5x bigger than Mob Wars.
Well, it’s complicated.

The restructuring caused some chaos, quite a few problems and for many Professors to be unhappy. Universities are still reluctant to give one credit for things done somewhere else. Many universities offer increasingly specialized study courses. So what became supposedly easily possible for the first time due to the Bologna process (I’m talking about Germany here) – switching universities after the Bachelor (didn’t exist before in any way, shape or form in Germany) – became at the same time very difficult because nobody offers (exactly) the same.

Much of this is Professors fretting about additional work – they have to talk to all those strange Bachelor people and actually negotiate about what they are going to give them credit for (“Oh come on, your seminar on medieval literature doesn’t count as fulfilling your modern literature requirement!“).

I’m quite happy until now (first generation “Bologna”, now in the fourth semester), but the Bachelor’s degree seems pretty useless here in Germany. I’m not sure if anyone would hire someone with a Bachelor’s degree in Germany at the moment – we didn’t have anything like that before, companies are not exactly sure what having a Bachelor’s degree means. And my university seems even to think that it is necessary to write "Equivalent of the (old) diploma" on their Master’s degree.

Was the Bologna process useful? – Hm, I’m really not sure right now. Ask me in five years.
Model-Facade-Controller-View Design Pattern (MFCV)
But the reason why DRM will never work is because your average user is not the one that cracks the DRM. The pirates crack the DRM, and the average user downloads it over Bittorrent.

The only way to reduce casual piracy is to convince people that they should pay for your product.
We do that with Twitter:

http://twist.flaptor.com/trends?hot=true&gram=swine+flu
Yes. You have to pay some attention to the rule set you use (if you are into formal debate). Some commonly used rules can have strange effects and encourage behaviour not useful in presentations.
It needs some effort to connect, but you can learn from a lot of people.

(And even if you just brush up your social skills, that can be helpful.)
As far as I know the OED does describes language and does not prescribe. So it does not have the 'official' definition, because there is none.
I like Chrome much better. The only thing that I use Firefox for is Firebug. Other than that, I try to avoid most of the plugins Firefox is famous for anyway. I find that they just make it slower. Maybe 3.5 will change that though.
+1 - At first I was kinda angry because Safari 4 is essentially Google Chrome by apple (at least in terms of user interface). But then I was happy because there isn't a Google Chrome for the Mac.
Out of all the reasons a person could dislike Firefox 3, I never understood why this one is so important.
You can kinda get adblock with Privoxy (http://www.privoxy.org/). Notice that I said "kinda." :-)
A sense of the past: Exploring sensory experience in the pre-modern world
+1 for that link. I've also got tons of add-ons, and that just made my Firefox 3.5b4 run even faster than it already does.
Peace Ph.D. in Thailand
C'mon, man! Andromeda strain!
Reaction Overview - An extended MVC framework (built on top of Catalyst)
I'm working on the API for my PDF/Web Form site http://www.doculicious.com. The initial release will allow reading of saved entries and posting of new entries. This is cool, 'cos it will let people use their own HTML forms to submit data and create PDF's from the templates they've created.
Ze Frank on the subject: http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/07/071106.html (sorta)
I must admit that I've stopped using firefox completely since I got hooked on Chrome, but I was never a big plugin user. I wouldn't go so far as to say firefox was dead as a result though. The oddest thing is that I don't miss having an ad blocker in chrome, and I have no idea why! Maybe I've just gotten used to seeing ads again, or maybe Chrome blocks popups better than firefox did back before I got the adblock plugin.
Agreed.

The intention was to find things that hackers would think interesting to look at or visit when travelling. Perhaps hackers either don't travel, or when they do, don't bother to look at things. I found the Falkirk wheel utterly brilliant, and the Musee de l'Air fascinating.
Reaction Tutorial (Moose + Catalyst + Layered Models)
Pekosz is an idiot. Where did they find him? Swine flu is killing the young and healthy in Mexico. This is dangerous. They've probably got a few 10s of thousands of cases right now, and a death rate of 1%. By winter, absent a strong vaccination program, we're going to see around 5-10% of the population infected. Do the math for that and tell me you're not worried.
I find this post some what interesting, but I'm disappointed he didn't go more into depth on specific examples of what inspired him. I've been reading Accelerando (http://www.accelerando.org/ It is quite nicely free, and I highly recommend it), and I've been fascinated by how many ideas he managed to cram into there. It's an excellent book, but it's so dense with ideas I find myself only able to read it in short bursts so I can wrap my head around some of the ideas it discusses.
Only 36,000 odd Americans? Does that include the unusual ones? What about the peculiar ones?
The Snackwell effect
Marvell Bets on 'Plug Computers'
Firefox has become the thing it was created to replace, a beast of a browser that seemingly sucks up resources from nearby computers just to open a new window.

Also, the term "jumped the shark" has jumped the shark.

[edit: that said, as much as I like Safari 4 and Chrome, I find it very hard to live without Firebug and the Web Developer extension when it comes to building websites (though the webkit inspector is getting closer with each release)]
Lumineers and Porcelain Veneers | Find a Cosmetic Dentist
Looking for a cosmetic dentist? User 1-800-VENEERS to find an experienced cosmetic dentist in your area that provides Lumineers & veneers.
The use of the word 'why' in that title is entirely disingenuous - his whole point is "just because".
Or, in some cases, specially when they're being hostile ;-)
This is top of the new page, why?
As always, it depends. For most cases, Garbage Collection is faster than malloc/free. On some platforms, Java can allocate objects in like 3 instructions. It does this because garbage collection allows for optimizations that simply aren't possible using manual memory allocation.

Of course, there are apps that require manual memory management, but they are becoming few and far between.
Panda Offers Cloud-Based Antivirus
Ask HN: I have a great idea for an iphone app, where can I get it developed?
Ask HN: I have a great idea for an iphone app, where can I get it developed?
check out http://www.rightsprite.com/
Steve Blank: SuperMac War Story 9: Sales, Not Awards
Stand and be counted (on exclusivity in the Ruby/Rails community)
If its impossible to enforce copyrigt, content becomes a public good.

Why should dominant assurance contracts not work?
I stopped using Firefox as my main browser when I got a mac a little under 4 years ago, and started using Safari. I was using adblock prior to that switch, and while I don't have any ad blocking now, except for the fact that pop-ups are blocked, I am barely ever bothered by an ad. I'm fairly convinced that ad obtrusiveness has gone down in general over the past few years. There are some exceptions (I'm looking at you, weather.com), but in general people seem to have realized that they had to tone down the ads if they wanted people to see them at all.
Catalyst, DBIx::Class and PostgreSQL (and Reaction) [lightning talk]
I'm pretty sure developerWorks has been around for a while.
I hear you guys and thanks for this great article. I will let it flow and focus on having fun while learning instead of following a plan.

Thanks again
Intel's Pain Party
Last night, I was browsing the Digital Mars D compiler source to see how they detect and convert files in all the various UTF encodings to UTF-8. This is for a C++ pre-processor that I'm writing in D.

I'm also trying to get a basic OGRE 3D app up and running on my MacBookPro. I want to use D + OGRE to build my personal editor / IDE. It has to be PC/Mac/Linux.

I'm slowly finishing an update to my iPhone app, iLightning http://www.shinyfish.com/ilightning. Right now I'm working on some animated transitions between the main view and the prefs screen.
Solitary Confinement: The Invisible Torture
Except that it is actually always less of a pain in the ass to pirate something than to deal with the DRM. DRM punishes the buyers.
The Challenges of Socializing at an Office Job
Google pushes back in tussle over book search settlement
What kind of data center can you build with $500 million?
No matter which platform you're on, there's always this tug of war between back-compat and pushing the state of the art forward. With VM/emulation-based solutions we can now have our cake and eat it too.

Why virtualize XP? Simple: version 1 of crappy XP app may only run on XP, but version 2 may run on Windows 7. By pushing apps that refuse to update themselves into a corner, the hope is that app developers will be more motivated to keep their crap up to date, and remove the horrible "meh, we'll call on Win95 APIs" laziness. All this can now be done without harming the consumer (who still gets to run his apps).

IMHO virtual XP is one of the more brilliant moves on MS's part in a long time. Their OS has been stagnant for a long time owing a large part to the obsession with backwards compatibility. Thankfully that may now be behind us.
When I was in college, quite a few girls left CS for Business cause it's so hard to get good grades. If I was getting a few C's in classes, I'd switch majors too. If I wasn't so comfortable without a social life and spending a lot of time in front of the computer by myself, I probably wouldn't have made it. It doesn't have to be this way, but that's what happened for me. As the whole experience improves there'll probably be more girls. I think creations like Ruby on Rails makes the experience that much better and that much more appealing and productive. I guess whatever that makes programmers in general happier, will have women programmers happier too. Ruby on Rails rocks.
Twitter Admin Screenshot Leaks Reveal Internal Data