skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Probably not too far off:

Doom 3 on a VooDoo 2 SLI setup:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUVXAl0dgYY
Nope, missed that.
I don't know the merit of the suit and from the sound of it I don't like their trade secret suit.

With that said, I think it's a very good strategy for Trond to go public with this. He is one person and the other party is a corporation. It will be a lopsided fight in the court. Even if he would win in court, it will have cost him dearly. This is what these kinds of suit about - intimidation. But by going public, he will be able to get public support and Opera is risking eroding their brand and good will. At the end of the day, a cold calculation on Opera's part to see how much branding they are losing due to the suit will convince them to drop it.
So what?

1) People are listening to your IMAP/POP traffic? Then you got worse problems to face: scumbags out to get you.

2) You use the same password in another, more serious account? You shouldn't.

3) You seriously worry someone will hack into your Marvell account? And do what, read your comics?
>Why would I want to write letters in a little box in the corner of my screen, with the center full of a list of irrelevant information?

One way that this design seems nicer than the previous one is that it allows you to browse through your old messages while composing a new one. In the old design, you would have to do the equivalent of closing the compose window every time you wanted to look something up and then know that you have to go to the drafts folder to continue writing. I imagine that often people would think they would have to start over again which would result in the drafts folder growing with many iterations.

I understand the critique presented in the OP, though. Perhaps they should allow resizing the window or go back to the old design and modify it to make it easier to go back to the most recent draft.
and this is indeed the case in reality. Not really sure what to do about it unfortunately, it is quite a sad state of affairs.

However, despite the high piracy rates on PC platforms, good games still do well.
Python question
I was trying to build a wrapper in my environment, but i'm stuck in this problem:

1) The user log in. 2) I mount the user fs from my python script. 3) and i run os.execv("/bin/bash", args).

When it execute the bash, my python script goes out and i can't umount the fs, i have tried every known solution, but python still exiting after running bash.

I just want my python script to continue after executing bash. Thanks.
Matterform offers low-cost 3D scanning, finds crowdfunding success
Perhaps they're taking a lean approach. Before they build the clever stuff, they may want to see if people will use it even with the dumb string matching.
Eugene Linden appears to be a prolific author of books on animal intellect and behavior. It saddens me that you appear unable to operate a search engine and educate yourself.
English Wikipedia recent changes map
An interactive oral history of the anti-SOPA protest
Very nice. I've been curious about the origin of Gough Street and was quite amused by the explanation:

Charles H. Gough - A local milkman who served on the 1855 committee tasked with naming the streets of the Western Addition. He named Gough Street after himself and Octavia Street after his sister, and may have named Steiner Street after a friend.
I've done this sort of microscopy and can verify everything polyfractal says.

EDIT: sadly, I can also verify that there are no jobs in science :(
The realistic way of handling this in Europe would be grants from national government. E.g. Norway sees massive grants go to smaller regions (and actually preferential income tax levels for the northernmost regions, to get more people to live there), as certain services are expected to be available even if the local tax base could not support it directly.

Subsidizing maintenance of regional settlement has been a key part of Norwegian government policies for many decades, and is a generally accepted principle by parties ranging from the various communist parties (none of which have been in government for a very long time) to the conservatives. The only exceptions you find to this is far right libertarians.

This is a similar situation to many other European countries.

It is seen as a key way to maintain the heritage of the country. We talk of "cultural landscape" - very little of Norway is actually untouched nature. Rather most other than parts of the mountain-regions, including forests, have been tended to for centuries, in various ways, whether logging, agriculture or herding animals.
I disagree with this premise. The cost of quality customer support can easily be mitigated by factoring it into cost of your product.

"Software is eating the world"... and it's allowing companies to scale customer support more easily through active knowledge bases and better more intuitive searching. The 3/4 of calls that could be resolved with a one-line fix should never make it to a phone call, they should be directed to an online support tool that could more efficiently answer their question and if not then funneled into a call or chat system.

It isn't happening quickly, but more and more companies are understanding that the relationships customers build with companies matter immensely and those relationships often begin with customer support reps.

Quality, friendly support scales and you don't have to create a shitty work environment for employees. Look at companies like Rackspace or on a smaller scale, 37 Signals for proof. It's not just about finding "friendly and resilient people" it's about finding people who are passionate about your company's mission.

disclaimer, currently building http://awesomatic.com and tackling this very issue
That is a myopic statement. Get off the bro-horse for a second. Opera has a lot of users! Their software, while not oss is pretty damn good!

Whether Opera is being evil or not we don't know and can't know from one filed lawsuits, speculation, and public retort so stop jumping on the bandwagon.
I use Opera on the desktop and on my mobile devices. So does my wife. I'm not going to stop using it because of a lawsuit, let alone for one that has not had any facts proven in a court.

I really don't understand why people who don't know the facts of cases like this (i.e., you don't have an inside knowledge of the nitty-gritty), jump to conclusions to readily. Aren't we supposed to be a community of rational, thoughtful people that use facts and evidence to backup opinions?

Do you stop using Google products when they get sued by various government agencies for things like collecting WiFi data? Why doesn't Google get the benefit of your doubt but not other companies?
I think one of the philosophies behind Now is that you don't need to configure it. Through it having access to your calendar, email, and searches, it is supposed to be clever. It'll probably get better in future, but if users have to configure it, then it's currently failing.
Solar planes are not the future of flight
TraceGL - js code visualization
Crowdsourced cloud hosting. Opt-in, paid botnets?
In my room right now are two desktops I don't use any more. A P4/2gb ram box my parents bought years ago, and a recently built i5/8gb ram computer I built for gaming that I have not used for months.

Why isn't there a way for me to let other people use my inactive computing resources and make money?

In the past I've seen research projects that had software you could run in the background to preform intense calculations, but why couldn't this turn a profit?
Virgin Galactic takes supersonic step
Internet should have a person object like user://ryanpeyton3301
instead of emails and passworded authentications, everyone has a user identity just like a social security number that can be used on any of the plethora of online chat communities, payments for things (bitcoin paypal cc), or personal blog posts.<p>maybe the same for business:// or place:// since the internet is like this hive mind that should have all our useful data categorized well. but URLS are awful at logical categorization since there is no predictable standard patterns -- thats why google's the defacto gateway to the internet
I guess an added bonus of what you're suggesting is that the correct link could be crowdsourced; if the system kept track of which of the options users clicked on, it could figure out pretty quickly which one is correct.
Word lengthening, or, why people text things like "heyyyy."
If you have an idea and keep it secret, it is protected from some reverse engineering or industrial espionage as a trade secret.

Unlike a patent, if you competitor invents it independently, then it is no longer a trade secret. You are only protected against a restricted range of dodgy dealing, and then only if you took adequate security measures (employees under appropriate NDA, not obvious in your product, obfuscated if sourcecode, that sort of thing).

Some people say they are 'software patents done right'. Certainly they serve a different purpose.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret
As far as I know, the one making the accusations has to present proof. Am I wrong? Is it so simple that saying "Oh, by the way, I believe he stole my idea." is enough to sue someone?

No one would (Or "should" maybe) be so stupid as to go for that.
No, I meant to discuss the possibility that disclosure is good for OP, because he'd want his ex-employer to be in a two-front war.
It seems practically required, since the only thing such an action would by them is scorn.
Virgin Galactic breaks speed of sound
This is amusing, as not even any social democratic countries have systems where funding of development is so decentralized as it is in Sim City - usually a substantial amount of infrastructure development is done by central government, rather than the municipal government which you control in the game.

Even in the US, neither the state or federal government has so little impact at the municipal level.
Touch screen navigation, voice control, DVD players, third row seating, dynamic stability control, launch mode, dial-in suspension...etc.
It would be interesting to correlate this to number of views it is likely to get. Hitting the first page at 3am is not nearly as valuable as hitting the first page at prime time despite it being easier to get there.
Like every other CAPTCHA I've seen.

Okay, not every CAPTCHA, but a scarily large amount of them are just plaintext with fancy formatting. Occassionally I see one with an actual image, but with the plain text as part of the image URL.
So it demonstrates that the passwords are not hashed. Which is mostly a problem because people don't follow 2, but plenty of people don't follow 2.
Obviously the 3d printer version would manufacture its own paper. :P
The article touches on this:

Generating plants using steam turbines require station service power of up to 10% of their capacity for boiler feedwater pumps, boiler forced-draft combustion air blowers, and for fuel preparation.
Sloshing all that power around is a complex business and fraught with danger.

Why's that?
I find it interesting that Opera are trying to claw back revenue on old innovations while seemingly stagnating.

The rendering engine they're dumping in favour of WebKit is fast and slick. The number of new user visible features and the rate of releases has seemed sluggish to me for what must be 4 or 5 years.
I have a print subscription (needed to use up expiring airline miles), and my copy does not contain the hotspot.
Given the biggest "trade secret" on OkCupid is the matching algorithm and its laid out so that anyone who wanted to would be able to implement it, I bet he would be pretty excited to hear that 300M people in China found his idea awesome.

Also it would probably be faster to write a copy from scratch in rails than figure out the various dependencies for OKWS and SFSLite (unless that's really improved since I was there). :)
I think, the just coming into programming generation are all enamored by the headlines of big $$$ exits by people just several years out of college.

The entrenched crowd recognizes programming and all the mired number of daily challenges as a way of life they would not change for any other career.
Perhaps better stated as "please, oh please, actually pay attention to history" - there are times when rebase is appropriate and times when merge is better.
Your missing the point of this. It's supposed to protect large companies when they use a photograph withought permission. Because piracy is bad unless your newscorp ect.
1. Fair enough

2. I only pointed it out to show that I actually do GPL compliance all the time, and, more importantly, because one of the siblings said "Do you work for Google by any chance? It's good manners to technically declare any conflict of interest. Not technically required, but technically suggested by the technicians at HN".

Though i've mentioned in numerous comments that I work for Google, I felt it only fair to mention it again.

3. I have twisted nothing, IMHO, only asserted there was an implication. That is not twisting words. That is claiming he implied something.

In any case, the original statement is actually factually incorrect, even if you remove the clear implication.
Let's assume for a second that we remove the internet part and stick with "obligation to release".
It's still wrong, as there is no obligation to release anything, only one to make a written offer. That is not the same obligation as "release source code".
The have an obligation to honor that written offer, which may later result in a release, but the obligation to make a written offer is not the same as an obligation to release.

(not to mention that twisting the language of the GPL to imply an obligation to make a written offer is the same as an obligation to release code, as done by my parent, shows that it's not just lawyers who do it ...)
Slash: Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore
I've been burned a number of times by hg rebase, losing work in each case. Given that our team only has 3 committers, I'd rather deal with the messy tree than lost work.
Facebook Is Losing Millions Of Users In The US And Other Mature Markets
Is it wrong to say this is the peak(IMO) of what the Internet should be? What with people building cool stuff, open sourcing it, and getting help from others who have already gone down the road.
Unfortunately, justice is a one-sided story when large companies sue individuals or tiny companies at large corporate magnitudes. A defense alone can be financially devastating. Second, sadly, it's for "trade secrets" in the the world of software. Come on!

I (and again, this is personal, lest someone drag my former companies into this) stand by my statements, as long as this lawsuit exists.

If the basic facts themselves are wrong, then of course I will back off my statement. If Opera is not suing an individual for ~$3.4MM USD for divulging trade secrets, then great.
"With open-source, my gosh, you actually have to do some analysis and make a sound judgement without having the Microsoft mothership tell you whether its good or bad."

I think you're comment is fair but a little condescending.

Speaking for myself, I play and experiment with tons of non-ms libraries for asp.net work, ran Ubuntu as a desktop for several years, have an trivial app on heroku.

Just because somebody appreciates the simple things does not mean they don't have curiosity and don't appreciate knowing technology on a lower level.

The big divide between the ms and non-ms communities is because of this sort of comment.
Yes, but that's certainly a great position to take for a small for-profit selling a proprietary product designed to interpret content primarily written for other software.

Corel probably would have been thrilled to have Adobe make their formats completely open and "standardized" back in the day to reduce the friction of switching products.
Yes, I think it is inevitable that they will go away. I am litterally at a point where it is easier to copy the image to my computer, and run a captcha breaking program, then it is to actually solve the captcha myself.

Sure, the computer does not get it 100% of the time, but it gets it more often then me, and fails faster.
I've mentioned a number of times i work for google, and try to do so when appropriate.
I removed it from my HN profile after I started getting folks bringing it up randomly.
The rebase extension for hg is still a bit experimental, at least as I understand it.

It will be much better once changeset evolution [1] is turned on by default in a stable release.

[1] http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ChangesetEvolution
Some Gaming Nostalgia
All anecdotal. Wish they would gps-tag a dog and proof it's commuting between a small set of stations regularly visiting the same stations.
I mean, using the train to just get away from where you are would already be cool, but that's not the author's claim.
"Truth is an absolute defence against libel/slander," does not hold up under many jurisdictions in Europe. More like, "people with more money get to decide what the 'truth' is."
Software factories vs software universities
Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
It is sad to see Google get into the technicalities of things rather than doing the right thing in the spirit of doing so.
If you think you’re talking to an expert when you call a customer service center, you’re probably not.

I work at a company that is 2/3 customer support (in employee count) and prides itself in customer support compared to competitors.

Despite that, they all the get the same training on all the products. If you call in about a specific product, you just get the experience that a particular rep has with it (or has been trained on) or can find the KB. There is one team of specialized reps for a specific product, but that's it.

I was just talking to my team the other day about how much better I think it would be if all reps specialized in a specific product/area and then when calls came in they would be filtered and redirected to the right person.

The company pays those reps by the hour, so they lose money

In our case, the customer support is both support and sales, so the call center is actually a revenue generator as opposed to a cost center.
A small nit-pick: I disagree that programming is inherently a job the requires passion. Any job requires passion if you are to excel, but you can trudge along as a career programmer as the person who wrote the second note.
Could we just add friends manually using their email addresses?
The Most Important Part of Your Hackathon? Your Sponsors.
Pebblis - Tetris for the Pebble Watch
Well, this discussion is quickly moving toward the shortcomings of Wikipedia.

There's plenty of opinion of the deletion-happy (if that's the operative term) policy of the admins, especially as it pertains to notability, and I think this is a common complaint :
http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/rants/wikipedia-delete.ht...

I do something that may seem like trying to fix a leaky dam with chewing gum, but every time I see an article nominated for deletion, I copy the source to a private wiki I'm running. Sometimes, the deletion nomination goes away, other times it does get deleted, but at least then, I have a copy.

But we also have to keep in mind that there are plenty of other resources on the web specifically aimed at niche resources. E.G. Wikia. I've lost count of how many comic book related articles were deleted only to show up on the DC or Marvel wikis. ( http://dc.wikia.com/ http://marvel.wikia.com/ )

Likewise, it's not unreasonable that a lot of content gets missed by the editors, since it's a big place and most editors have one or two areas that they focus on. As the editing guidelines state, when in doubt engage in dispute resolution, not edit wars. If you can make a good case for why an article should be there in the first place, be persuasive in the talk pages.

So a few pointers for people getting angry at Wikipedia:

First, ask whether the article is a good fit for the wiki. Can it go on a blog or a niche wiki (like a dedicated Wikia) instead? The Pokémon example is a bit extreme, but I think many of those pages may get deleted or merged. There's always the Pokémon Wikia : http://pokemon.wikia.com

Second, notability is a very tricky thing. Reputable sources may be even trickier. Rather than debating notability, focus on reputable sources (since that's the biggest hiccup for references). If you can link NY Times articles or BBC or some other news source, rather than just community sites, other blogs (depending on popularity) etc... you'll have a better chance of getting the article/section through and staying there.

Third, well written articles have a better chance of surviving than those that give off the 2-3 paragraph stub vibe. The more reputable citations and best content structure you can give, the better the chances an article survives (this may partly explain the Pokémon pages too). If you have trivia, try to merge it into the content body more, rather than list at the end; that feels tacked on and superfluous, if not directly supporting the main content.

Fourth, try to be a bit more empathetic to the goals of the Wiki while being objective to the subject when asserting your views (especially on controversial articles). How you word things is a big hint as to whether that content will remain or get scrubbed the next day/hour/minute.

Now, I hope can go back to discussing Wikidata and how Wikipedia and everyone else will benefit.
Yes, I agree that students' perception of how others would rank colleges is a serious factor that probably goes into their decision process. This type of ranking will tend to reflect all of those factors that go into the students' decisions.

Using just the data that we and US News make public, one could probably do a pretty interesting adjustment for US News rank. (We publish the Elo points for each college, so you wouldn't be limited to just rank-based methods.)
Because you're dealing with enough power to run a city. At a minimum thousands of kV and/or Amps. If something fails, all that energy has to go somewhere...
Why app store ratings are broken
I suspect the movie makes money from the toy's vs paying for that advertising. Plenty of kids will beg for a happy meal because they want that cheap plastic, and the parents eat where the kids eat.
But being able given that level of control over tax rates at the municipal level, and that level of control of funding to municipal services, is far right fantasy land in European politics - setting tax rates is largely the domain of national governments, and a lot of what is under municipal control in Sim City is budgeted centrally in pretty much every European country, in part to enforce more equal provisioning of services.

Separate municipal tax rates is pretty much absent from the political discussion in much of Europe, because it largely doesn't exist - local budgets tends to be handed out as grants from central government. Decentralizing this is seen as dangerous because it would jeopardize the provisioning of services that are expected to be available equally to everyone. To the extent that municipal taxes exist, they tend to be very low and tied to specific limited services under local control.

When Thatcher introduced the Poll Tax in the UK, which is what eventually morphed into the current Council Tax - the UK's version of municipal tax rates - it was a shocking development that even contributed to rioting (though to be fair, in part because the way it was created also explicitly disenfranchised the homeless). But even today, a large part of UK council budgets comes from central government.