skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I am disagreeing with you, but probably over matters of implementation rather than of ideals. I'm pro-patents (and pro-royalties) to the extent to which granting a temporary monopoly benefits society as a whole. I do not believe that that one has an innate right to such a monopoly, rather that it is to the advantage of society to grant such a right to incentivize the production of something beneficial that would not otherwise be produced. I presume this is more or less your position as well.

Where we likely disagree most is regarding term. The term for (non-software) patents seems almost reasonable, but I find it hard to believe that those 75 years after the life of the author (under US copyright) increases the production of great music. The 50 years from date of production for music under UK law seems more reasonable, but I'd guess that very little of the music I enjoy would suffer if this time was reduced sharply.
If possible, please answer the questions I posted alongside your post as well. This is very interesting :-)

As an aside, spotting spelling errors is not the same process as solving anagrams. Did you decrypt the anagram in the OP instantly as well? I would consider these two different things.
I've made one of these before... along with the rest of my third grade class. I guess someone should have called CNN back then.
Old people will die more frequently than others, so with year long subscriptions you'll have a not insignificant pre-paid user death rate as you scale. Still, its probably bad form to mention this in your business plan as contributing to lower hosting costs per user due to decreased-deceased usage.
That applies when people argue over two functionally equivalent options, often to the detriment of more important issues.

How does that not fit this situation? Because there's actually a good technical reason to do it the way it's currently done? Wouldn't that imply that there should be even less discussion of it?
I did the diet for about a month while I was poor. This was a bad time to try it, since finding raw nuts and other things is difficult on a budget, even in San Francisco.

I lost weight, I was often hungry, and I couldn't stop craving meats and cheeses. When I looked at pictures of people that were also on the raw diet, they looked gaunt and unhealthy. So I decided it was all bullshit and gave it up.
Actually, it's also discoverable by experimentation - noticing that usernames are clickable, and clicking them...
I'd argue that you are [a prude], and you have some extremely revealing hang-ups about sex and sexuality, as evidenced by your reaction to a freaking cartoon avatar

Would you say somebody hated finance if they refused to work for a loan shark who kneecapped people for paying late? The porn industry sells a pretty disgusting version of sex and a really sad vision of what women are good for. You can excuse anything by saying they're just roles that some people like to play, that none of the apparent symbolism in porn actually means anything, that the only sides that can be taken are for prudery and against it, that criticism of any portrayal of sex reflects a desire to suppress and control women's sexuality, that nobody's desires should be stigmatized, but....

But the fact remains that 95% of porn presents a pathological and misogynistic caricature of sex, and the other 5% is iffy at best. I've watched more than my share of porn, always with the idea that I was looking for good, sex-positive porn. Eventually I realized that I would never find it at any mainstream outlet, like the local adult stores and commercial web sites. (Now I have a better idea of where I would look for that stuff, but I haven't bothered.)

Porn doesn't have to be bad, not for any reason I know if. It just is (which suggests that there is some reason I don't know about.) The porn we actually have -- as distinct from the ideal porn we could have -- is just the flip side of prudery, a fulfillment of the ignorance, frustration, and sexual neuroses that prudery creates.

Those cartoon avatars are an excellent example. They can be excused as exceptions -- just one way some women enjoy sexualizing themselves, just one-dimensional fantasies that no man would connect with the real world, just a few characters whose existence leaves plenty of room for other forms of female sexuality -- but that ignores the fact that they are entirely typical of the adult industry and freakishly different from the way most women want to dress, act, and be perceived.

I don't have any problems with individual women whose sexual identity is such that they enjoy playing the roles depicted in the porn I loath -- no matter how their sexuality came about -- they are worthy of respect. However, attempting to celebrate and normalize sexual identities that most women find degrading, for a variety of selfish reasons but not least because most women find them degrading, is reprehensible. The adult industry IS scummy, and anyone working in it should be ashamed, unless they are careful to work only with the small, practically invisible minority of products that aren't degrading.
"\n".join(lines) is confusing because you expect the complicated thing to be the object, and the simple thing to be the argument. The confusion is very basic.

It would be cool but probably perlishly unadvisable if join,sum,any,all were just implemented as

"\n".join(lines) -> lines.join("\n")
sum(alist) -> alist.join(+)
any(alist) -> alist.join(or)
all(alist) -> alist.join(and)
I don't have any evidence that would be permissible in court, no. Nonetheless I know a lot of people involved in both worlds (including on the monetization angle) and unless there's a wide-spread, concerted conspiracy to trick me into not releasing an iPhone app, Facebook/Myspace ones monetize at least an order of magnitude better.
>> " still provides the dominant client platform (IE), and a very popular backend infrastructure (SQL + ASP.NET + CLR + ...)."

For most startups I don't think they give ms backend a second thought. It's a no brainer to use free open source.

Also, amongst webapps, IE is no longer the dominant client platform at all in my experience.
You should make a distinction between:

- developing a browser engine
- developing the GUI around a browser engine

The first is not rocket science, but lots and lots and lots of work, and will require some hacks, as there are many areas where specs aren't clear (what to do with invalid html, http headers that promise a text encoding that is not delivered, what to do when http headers say "text/html", but the url ends in ".zip", etc, etc)

The second can range from the almost trivial to whatever your imagination requires.

Unless you have lots and lots of time and/or resources and cannot use an existing engine such as Mozilla or WebKit, stay away from building your own engine.
"if (NULL == foo)" and "'\n'.join(lines)" both feel wrong because you are putting the most complicated object last. The most complicated thing should go first so you can sooner figure out what the heck this line of code is talking about.

I would support making the C compiler just disallow "if (x = y)".
I asked a law school friend a similar question recently. The first order of business would be to rule out a violation of contract. If the sperm bank said the sperm was fit in all respects, or something like that, there might room for a battleground there.

There may or may not be a medical malpractice issue, which exists independent of the contract. Malpractice issues are generally an issue of 1) did the physician have an obligation to provide care? 2) was harm caused. Those are the two criteria. It is not necessary to show that the physician caused the harm. (kind of scary for docs, when you think about it).
No, because the discussion should be explaining that good technical reason. Which is what happened.

Bike-shedding is when the arguments have relatively the same merit, and the choice makes little difference in the end. I don't think either applies.

An example of bike-shedding in this context would be renaming join to fuse.
Selling SaaS to businesses is a whole different ball game. I'm talking about consumer facing apps.

Companies move ridiculously slowly - one of the reasons for there still being IE6 usage out there. So obviously they are going to stick with Microsoft/desktop apps etc, but the general population won't.
I read 90% listed. Good read. I would suggest one more: http://marketingstartups.com/
> As other areas of the financial system become more regulated, he has to be mindful of the money will just flow to unregulated areas.

Presumably he believes that the sole justification of regulation is to produce more benefits than costs for some respectable definition of "benefits" and "costs". One of the costs is that money goes somewhere else.

If he's applying regulation to areas where the regulation does not produce more benefits than costs, where the "benefit" is "it reduces the costs of regulation in other areas", I think that we've wandered into no-respectable benefits and costs.
Most American women I've slept with are writhing bundles of sexual issues and neuroses. I don't have much experience with non-American women, but they've all (might as well say both, not exactly a statistically significant sample, but what the hell) been completely different. It's hard to describe how different it is to be with a woman who doesn't see sex as a tragic minefield that we're dropped into by fate and biology, who instead thinks that the worst-case scenario of sleeping with you is that she might not enjoy it and will be a little tired at work tomorrow.
> It turns out if you want to write one-sentence essays, you have to attribute them to someone else.

Why?
That'd be cool actually, a dual format... CD on one side, vinyl on the other. Might be some optical challenges to get around to compensate for the grooves etc :/
Beanstalk -- http://www.beanstalkapp.com/ SVN hosting. Good customer support, solid service. For me beanstalk is github for svn :)
It was a joke, and the deletion just reminded them that their license choice had been overtaken by events.
Semantically speaking: Why CSS frameworks make sense
None of your examples create closures. You can only close over lexicals, but all the variables you create are global. (Your loops involving $i also affect the global $i. If you want it lexically scoped, you have to say so.)

Your first two examples work because you are adding $_ and the first arg to the function. The for loop you use to print $fs[$_] binds $_, and your anonymous function uses that value. The result is something that appears to work. If you change the loop variable to something else, though, $_ will be unbound, and you will be adding to an undefined value. ("use warnings" will whine about this.)

If you then create functions that add $i and the argument, your loop stops working, because the loop binds $_ instead of $i.

Basically, you need some "my" keywords in there before your example becomes meaningful in any way. "use strict" and "use warnings" are your friend. ("use strict" will whine about the 'for $i (...)' construct that should be 'for my $i (...)', and "use warnings" will whine about $i being undefined when you try to evaluate one of the created functions.)

One last thing, if you were experimenting in Devel::REPL (re.pl), you would have noticed this problem much sooner. strict and warnings are on by default, which would have produced errors and warnings for all of your examples. It also dumps the result of evaluation with Data::Dump::Streamer, so you can actually see what's being closed over. Examples:

> my @fs = map { sub { $_ + $_[0] } } 1..2
$ARRAY1 = [
sub {
package Devel::REPL::Plugin::Packages::DefaultScratchpad;
use warnings;
use strict 'refs';
$_ + $_[0];
},
'V: $ARRAY1->[0]'
];
$ARRAY1->[1] = $ARRAY1->[0];

DDS shows you the code, and it is even smart enough to know that the two functions you produced are identical.

If we do it "right":

> my @fs = map { my $i = $_; sub { $i + $_[0] } } 1..2
my ($i,$i_eclipse_1);
$i = 1;
$i_eclipse_1 = 2;
$ARRAY1 = [
sub {
package Devel::REPL::Plugin::Packages::DefaultScratchpad;
use warnings;
use strict 'refs';
$i + $_[0];
},
sub {
package Devel::REPL::Plugin::Packages::DefaultScratchpad;
use warnings;
use strict 'refs';
$i_eclipse_1 + $_[0];
}
];

You can see that the two functions are different, and that they don't share the same $i.
FCC kicks off hearings on $7.2B broadband expansion
> But Keynesian economics doesn't demand anything of the sort.

If Keynesian economics is proposed as a policy involving humans, it can't honestly ignore how humans will actually implement it.

If someone came to you and said "we need to speed up our system so let's buy processors with bigger caches" and you knew that your system was such that bigger caches didn't help, would you really think highly of said proposer? Would it matter if he then demonstrated that the processors with bigger caches were faster on programs that you weren't interested in?

If Keynesian economics fails with the political class that we have, it doesn't matter how well it might work with a different political class. (I'm pretty sure that the political class that can successfully pull off Keynsian economics doesn't involve humans.)
The most details I've seen are summarized here:

http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture
linode 360
Great idea to serve the elders. Two gripes:

$5 a month? nobody pays for email, you're killing your future growth right off the bat. Set it free, once you have a million users use the landing page as news outlet and ad market.

Flash? WTF?
It's not a different version... it's the same thing on the same site. Saying it's a different version is like pointing at a page in which an image is embedded and linking to the image itself and saying they're different versions.
I would tend toward that idea: a module that can be included. Injecting a sum method into the object's ghost class also maintains scope of responsibility, but feels a bit more magic. I'd opt for less magic. At first, anyway. :)
What are the advantages to them using the MIT license over the AGPL?

The MIT License is very permissive, making the software "free" and allowing you to do just about whatever you want with it.

The AGPL is another open source license making the software "free," but actually forcing all derivative software to have the same level of freedom. This prohibits things like modifying the software with proprietary code and then refusing to publish your improvements.
A Look At Singularity Hub’s Best Stories For The Quarter
I've noticed recently a lot of the IMVU folks seem to have made a concerted push into blogging about the technical stuff they do there. Maybe this is a bit of pushback.
RIFE does it, but it accomplishes this by modifying classes on-the-fly. Is this cumbersome, or does it actually work? http://rifers.org/features/integrated+web+continuations
NickB's wife.
The sperm undergo random crossing-over. The only way you could determine the genetic content of a single sperm would be to isolate it's 3 meiotic sisters, determine their content, and then assume that the remaining spermatozoan contained what was left. Even then you're missing potential thermodynamic mutations that might have escaped the DNA repair process.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiosis
Or you can have a sum method that accepts a block/lambda/anonymous function as an argument.

This is done in Smalltalk with detectSum.

people detectSum: [ :person | person age ].
items detectSum: [ :item | item price ].
Judge Wapner's on in 15 minutes.
Rwandan entrepreneur finds success creating SMS apps that help people
RIM did Not just hire the iPhone 'mastermind'
Jeff Browning talks Application Templates... v.10
A pro-legalization think-tank, like the Cato institute?

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10080
Wow does simple_markup ever totally miss the point of Markdown. By replacing #-headers with !, and replacing 1.-lists with #, and replacing _-emphasis with __, "Simple" is violating the spirit of the format to make implementation easier.

The point of Markdown isn't to create a super-flexible text2html replacement. The point of Markdown is to come up with rules that match the way people write existing email/Usenet messages as closely as possible. Any time you add a semantic to the format --- like !-headers --- that are virtually never used in email or Usenet, you might as well go all the way off the reservation and implement Textile. I hear Textile does tables, too; I'm sure someone's got an implementation that will generate HTML FORM tags as well. Knock yourself out!
The Obama Administration Considers Geo-Engineering to Cool the Planet
This is common practice from Microsoft.

From Windows XP EULA:
Use of Previous Version Of Software. In lieu of installing and using Microsoft Windows XP Professional SOFTWARE, you may install, use, access, display and run ONE of the following versions: Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, Microsoft Windows NT Workstation version 4.0 or Microsoft Windows 98 (Second Edition) (”Downgrade Software”) on the COMPUTER, provided (1) you agree that Downgrade Software support will NOT be provided hereunder by Manufacturer, MS or Microsoft Corporation, their affiliates or subsidiaries: (2) you agree that neither Manufacturer, MS nor Microsoft Corporation will provide you with the Downgrade Software or media; (3) you may not loan, rent, lease, lend or otherwise transfer the CD or back-up copy of Microsoft Windows XP Professional to another end user, except as otherwise provided in the transfer provisions of this EULA….
We're running a freemium model. Users get to view ads or they can pay to remove them and get some other features. The free part gets a lot of people into the game (as a figure of speech, but also literally) and some buy a VIP account.
Even still, SP2 was released in 2004. I would (and did) run 2004's Windows over 2009's Ubuntu any day.
Having seen one built before my eyes during a physics
lecture, I had to make one. There are some "gotchas,"
it's harder than it looks, but I've generated enough
voltage to spark a one inch gap.

It is cool.
Many of the leading minds of the “semantic Web” movement, like Jeffrey Zeldman and Andy Clarke ...

Jeffrey Zeldman and Andy Clarke are phenomenal designers in favor of semantic HTML elements, but they have absolutely nothing to do with "the Semantic Web."
How Sudden Failures Happen Gradually
Definitely. I was bitten by this, and had my Twitter stream flooded with old tweets this morning from bots due to the removal of "since" in the API call. No notice, nothing. In fact, after it happened, I signed up for the API Google Group announcement list and only WAY after the fact did I get the official "we broke the API soz" email. Very very poor form.
Unless patronizing a Starbucks is a good indicator that someone is a prospect, I would try a method that brought me into contact with prospects. If "everyone" is your prospect you may want to narrow your focus. If you need help overcoming painful shyness I would recommend Toastmasters or Dale Carnegie.
I suspect a number of the Cloud providers already peer with each other. Amazon, Google and Facebook are already peering with some providers, and possibly each other. Of those, I believe Google has way more peering partners than anyone.

Mosso's tough because Rackspace does everything over purchased transit, they don't really peer with anyone.

Simple peering isn't going to fix the latency problems, though. The solution is latency tolerant applications. There are numerous ways to help apps be resilient to latency. Things like datacenter local write through caches, the multi-master replication that's easier with newer datastores (CouchDB for instance) than traditional databases, etc.

The real latency problems happen between your assembled bits and your users. Creative CDN use can help with this, and I expect that we'll see much smarter CDNs in the future that offer some of what Akamai does without requiring payments in live kidneys.
Report: Microsoft, Google sparring over Twitter?
Well, there is a tenuous connection in that it's not obvious what to do for casing of ß. I wrote some unicode stuff for CL once and figuring this out was a nightmare. In any case, if you have two data types that that don't make any other sense as an addition, you could always just convert them both to bitfields and sum that... now I'm just being silly. Don't mind me.
Wow that's a great reply. What I get out of that is since each cell can be different (possible mutations) you can't test a statistical sample from the same batch and assume that the one little cell that makes it through to fertilization is 100% safe. Is that a fairly accurate layman's summary?
In Ruby, this would be:

class Array
def detectSum(&block)
self.map(&block).sum
end
end

>> [1, 2, 3].detectSum {|i| i**2}
=> 14

Most Ruby people though would just call #map and #sum in succession on an ad hoc basis.
Great summary. I watched it too and like you was impressed to see how articulate Reznor is. His answers were insightful and nuanced.
I read a fair number of them too, but it worries me. Between my feed reader, twitter, and HN, I feel like I'm in a startup echo chamber. I need to diversify my knowledge generating assets.
I loved SimpleCDN until just recently thanks to the above mentioned services changes. No advanced warning. I didn't even receive an email notice! I happened to login and they talked about new "features" which is really just a significant pricing increase.

For us it's a $275 ransom to keep using the same type of services as before (HTTP mirroring, RTMP streaming). Pay up just for the pleasure of continuing your previous plan!

And, as the above poster mentioned, the two new plans are an odd (and incompatible) mix.

Any alternatives? I'm looking at CacheFly, but I'll have to jury rig an FTP sync (like weex) to get the same functionality as before. Plus no RTMP. :(

Looks like CacheFly and SimpleCDN are the only players in the low cost/adequate reliability CDN market, but I'd be happy to be proved wrong!
Creating more secure SWF web applications
here is a video of it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY1eyLEo8_A
That happens to me too. It's actually annoying. If I could dedicate the mental effort I unavoidably spend on background spell- and grammar-checking to something useful, I'd be a freaking genius.
I find it hard to imagine that any experienced Web producer these days wouldn’t have some “sensible defaults,” or templates, to work from in Illustrator, Photoshop, or – more precisely – for developing HTML and CSS.

Then he must have a weak imagination.
> Because of this, I'm tending to believe that
> adding more strong-typing to languages is a
> losing battle,

I see this at the opposite.

Just because an object says that it responds to a method doesn't guarantee that invoking said method will succeed. I'm not sure why the original poster is so surprised by this finding.

Since this observation is valid in both statically and dynamically typed languages, I prefer a statically typed one since at least, I don't need to verify that the object does respond to that method before calling it.
Ev’s Advice For Startups: “Do Something Awesome”
You're right.

It's just unfortunate, because they could easily be just as successful via a more honest strategy. Costumers need however much support they can get, official or not. Many times I prefer official forums for support, because I get faster response.

I guess greed gets the best of us. But it does make more money. At what cost though.
Physicists discover important step for making light crystals