skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I code on a Mac, but having spent years on Windows platform, I still believe Microsoft software is actually by far the best quality product coming out of big, traditional software shops: their Office, SQL Server, development tools, all that stuff is nicely written. Windows kernel is also great.

However, my humble anecdotic evidence suggests that most everyday Apple users are Microsoft converts and they do have very strong feelings associated with Microsoft brand, but truth be told, MS has nothing to do with their painful past experiences: crappy 3rd party Windows products pre-infected with adware, performance-killing pre-installed anti-viruses, flimsy and cheap hardware from eMachines and the likes, etc.
I've been running on and off for the past 16 years. In my experience, I do not get as wet while running in the rain as I would just standing in it.

I think there must be a missing variable, such as excess water whisking off more quickly, greater evaporation due to heat transfer or maybe something else.
I agree that breaking into someone's account is wrong, but the argument isn't about that. It's about whether it is a felony or a misdemeanor.
McAfee Demonizes "Hackers" in order to Scare People into Buying its Software
I would honestly say that they're all pretty equally terrible, across both the paid and free/OSS segments on the market. Making any of them useful for your environment requires customization, training, and plain old time.

When I was working at a school that had to pick a new LMS, we eventually settled on Moodle simply because it was the only option that was sufficiently hackable for us to turn it into something usable.
Nice work, this is probably the nicest looking technical material I've ever seen (but then I'm a sucker for nice clean typography).
They are trying to figure out how to save the San Francisco Chronicle. If they succeed, maybe that'sthe new business model. Short on specifics.
doesn't seem to work at all for me - Chrome 1.0.154.65
Ask HN: Please review my webapp: This or That
You've basically repeated what I said.

My point is that reducing your exposure time is basically altering a different variable in the equation.

If you control that variable by not running to a place where the exposure to rain stops, it becomes clear that by running you will get more wet than if you were simply walking.

And yes I understand that practically, running to a dry spot is the whole point.
I did the same thing. It's an awesome tool that I found useful, but I bought two domain names from namecheap instead of using the godaddy link.
Ask HN: What (do you think) Scribd / DocStoc uses to convert pdf/docs into swf?
(And what are the best open source alternatives).

We're setting up something private for sharing documents.

Thanks!
Of course, because you've substantially reduced your exposure time. But the act of increasing your speed itself actually causes you to come in contact with more raindrops, not less.
I wonder if the multivariate nature of this problem is throwing you off more than the differential equation aspect of it. If you know multivariable calculus you can think about this problem at a higher level of abstraction (vector fields and flux). The integral you see is the output of the thinking at that higher level of abstraction.

I bet with proper background and practice you could set things like this up rather easily. You just need to learn to think about the problems at the proper abstraction level and then develop some intuition by actually doing lots of problems.
I'm a bit surprised at the poor showing of Tokyo Cabinet in this test, given the amount of buzz it's gathered in the last few months, but the CDB results honestly don't surprise me in the least -- it's a special-purpose datastructure wrapped in a thin library that just smokes any other DB type if your workload allows for a complete rebuild of the database on each update.
I opened up the page and just clicked "go"... seemed like a good place to start. I waited a few seconds and nothing happened.

Then I noticed the little clock at the bottom ticking away. "Okay", I thought, "it's working..." but 30 seconds later it still hadn't done anything (HN effect?). I'd disable the "go" button on click, and move the clock so that it appear right next to it (instant feedback is nice). You can re-enable the "go" button if any of the parameters change.

Also, in the time its taken me to write this it still hasn't generated any results (Mac 10.5, Safari 4). Don't know if it's me or you.
I really should have left link to original bizjournals article. Sorry, here it is:

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2009/05/04/d...

I suppose that's the place to monitor to see if/when he releases some specifics. Of course if he really plans to invest/transform the SF Chronicle on- and/or off-line he'll probably keeps his cards as close to his chest as a new Apple product until he's secured a deal.
Bad analysis - can't forget $54 billion in debt. Minus $11 billion in cash plus the equity, so enterprise value of GM is $44 billion according to the latest financials.
Also, fun: If equity is an option on the underlying firm, then who wrote it?, the debt holders. So more accurately "The long tail of GM's upside worth double Tesla Motors" since the value of GM's public debt, even in bankruptcy, would dwarf Tesla.
Well, there's a pick your battles thing here. Every municipality has some law like "the commissioner may inspect the premises at any time for violations of code", etc. Those provisions are unconstitutional but as a practical matter are not the genesis of a police state.

There are a lot of bugs in the law, so we should probably prioritize the most severe runtime errors.
> I recently discovered I can watch many of the games broadcast by ESPN on ESPN360.

You appear to be one of the chosen who have access. My super-huge-ISP only gets me this message:

ESPN360.com is available at no charge to fans who receive
their high-speed internet connection from an ESPN360.com
affiliated internet service provider. ESPN360.com is also
available to fans that access the internet from U.S.
college campuses and U.S. military bases.

Your current computer network falls outside of these
categories. Here’s how you can get access to ESPN360.com.

Awesome...

> aside from the initial annoyance of waiting for Silverlight to install itself (which I did because it was the only way to watch the Olympics broadcasts).

You know, I tried to do the same thing. And on both machines I tried it on, Silverlight failed to install with some cryptic, unhelpful error message. Both machines were running Windows XP and installing inside IE. I couldn't believe I was seriously having problems with Microsoft installing Silverlight correctly in its own browser.

I browse with all audio/video media disabled by default - and I dislike RMS. If there is something I absolutely must see, I open IE to view it. Fortunately for me, I hardly need Flash and never need Silverlight.
It also seems to be making a web request every second that just returns: {"Results":[]}

Could the sudden popularity and the fact that this page is making a request every second without even hiting go mean that the site is essentially attacking itself?
It would be nice to be able to vote without clicking on a specific category.
tripngroove, could you please elaborate more on this?
edit: some variant of swftools ? others have more info?
Oceans Trailer - The best underwater photography ever shot (starts @ 1:20)
From maddan's link to http://gnuradio.wordpress.com/

"You’ll need a frontend hardware to capture the signal, preferably the USRP (which could cost as much as $1500 with daughterboards)"

Ouch, $1,500! I would love to tinker, but $1,500 is a solid investment.
Sorry, but 500MB DB size is a tiny dataset these days (anything < 1GB is tiny, < 4GB is small, < RAM on a single node (~8GB-64GB) is medium, < Disks on a single node (~128GB to a few TB) is large, huge dataset requires multiple nodes and typically above 128TBs.)
And the original article has nothing to do with the difference between short scale and long scale.

Not being used to thinking in terms of multiples of 10 (or 1000) for all measurements might have a fair bit to do with it.
"(...) but the fact that Amazon is a large company and Eucalyptus appears to have a single developer seems more likely."

I think that's nonsense. There are a lot of small-shop ebook readers on the iPhone, Stanza and eReader are two that come to mind, but there are many more.
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 87 - Optimized
As an American with French heritage, I sometimes long for some of the fluid eloquence that French expressions provide. Alas, we are mostly left to use Americanism's like, "My bad."
Palm Pre vs iPhone vs G1
I found in a job posting:

iPaper is an unusually complex Flash application with many highly technical components.

http://www.scribd.com/jobs/7

So it looks proprietary.
OpenID needs to go away so that something good can replace it. It's a terrible implentation of a good idea, and the longer it limps along, alienating people, the harder it will be to get its replacement accepted.

OpenID's contribution to the Single Signon Quest has been to prove beyond a doubt that nobody wants to remember a URL for their username. Yes, we all know it's the same amount of typing as an email address, but at the end of the day, people are trained to type their email repeatedly and are thus good at it (and remember it).

So please, OpenID, hurry up go away. The thing that takes your place will probably be pretty good because of you.
Should be able to vote without going to a separate sub-page.

Also, it is kinda boring and just too much of a word blur for my tastes.

It kinda has also already been done in a way by sites like http://www.googlefight.com/
Agreed. Business folk tend to think that the technical side of their plans is the easy part, when it's usually the other way around: business plans are a dime a dozen, but a flawed technical execution will kill any business plan (see Cuil, for example).

Plus, from the business/legal perspective: you have all the valuable assets. They have...nothing. You're making the only capital contribution to this company...that means, you own 100% of the company unless they put their own cash in (services rendered don't count as capital contributions).
Depends on how easily it is to integrate into your project. For instance, for Django applications, there's django-openid-auth (see http://blogs.gnome.org/jamesh/2009/04/14/django-openid-auth/ and https://launchpad.net/django-openid-auth ) and Simon Willison is almost ready with his new plugin at http://github.com/simonw/django-openid/tree/master . These plugins are just drop in and go for the most part.

When you have tools like this, seems worthwhile to do so.
Because keys are strings, and strings are wrapped in quotes.
yeah its like that old idea that Facebook had 16 billion dollar valuation which supposedly made them larger than Ford.

GM's Corvette's Brand Value is probably more than Tesla's actual value.
Well spotted. I'll leave it up so that it doesn't get resubmitted again (the person who submitted yesterday had loads of URI params in the URL, which is why it's not identified as a dupe).

If everyone could please flag this so it gets autokilled but not resubmitted... Cheers.
I agree that AA.com is a terrible experience, but consider the decision to redesign the site from a business perspective: will making it an order of magnitude more usable increase AA's bottom line by more than some other project they are considering (e.g. opening a new destination)?

I don't know the answer to that, but AA is run by business people so I would wager that the answer is "no," otherwise they would be doing it already.

I think there are some intangible benefits to having a more usable website, but those are intrinsically difficult/impossible to measure so they don't factor into the business decisions.

As a designer, I feel your pain, but the unfortunate reality of the situation is that AA is driven by their bottom line and a more usable website probably won't net them the greatest ROI right now.
I don't have an opinion about the Scheme -> Python switch, but I didn't find this a very compelling objection.

The author seems to assume that a CS degree is meant to teach you to write software. (E.g., "how exactly do you write software if you don't start with small working primitives (like unit tested classes, PLT scheme modules, or a PHP library script)? Isn't taking a complex problem and breaking it down into testable/reliable chunks a fundamental principal of writing software?") But who said anything about writing software? Certainly many CS grads do go on to write a fair amount of it, but it's hardly the only goal of the curriculum, especially at a place like MIT, where a CS grad is as likely to go on to a career in research as in programming.

The priorities here seem frankly bizarre; the author derides learning about "electricity whizzing through CPUs", but the principles governing how CPUs work are way more core to computer science than is unit testing, which is more of an industry best-practice than a deep principle.

Looking at it another way, a full education in CS is going to have to cover everything from processor hardware to programming techniques to theoretical foundations. Intro courses at most schools have tended to focus almost exclusively on programming. The old SICP-based intro course at MIT blended programming with a taste of theory, and the new intro course sounds like it will switch to blending programming with a taste of hardware and a crash course in real-world problems like faulty and undocumented libraries. I wouldn't say that's obviously a good move, but it's not obviously wrong, and it doesn't seem any less true to the soul of computer science.
GM is run by business people.
splains why the bailout is not freaking everyone out
Consider this: it's not just the cost of making the site these guys would have to swallow if they go with another developer, it's the cost of developing the customer base. This means that there will be a several month period during which they're not able to monetize.

Demand 100%. They haven't offered you anything.
Monetization? Micro-transactions, or subscriptions (i.e., ad-free access). Hm...For that, I think I deserve 90% of your company now. :)
I get an Internal Server error on any link I click.

But to be honest, I probably wouldn't have even bothered trying to click if I hadn't visited the page with the specific intent of giving the app a try to review it for you. It's just way too much text, with no real rhyme or reason for why it's presented the way it is, and no real incentive to do anything but close the browser. I agree with mediaman as well: voting should be possible without need to click through -- think of another incentive to get people to click through (like commenting/debating the merits of the head to head).
It doesn't seem to be working for me. I click on the "Go" and nothing happens.

On second thought, I see the tiny little clock spinning ever so slowly in the corner. I suggest making that a whole lot bigger and more obvious if it routinely takes this long to generate any results.

Must be something to do with my proxy here at work: I'm not getting any results -- even after a couple minutes and tries in different browsers.
Ask HN: Tools for recording product ideas
I am looking for tools to document and present product ideas. I will be using them mainly to share ideas with hackers, but occasionally with others as well, so impressiveness is definitely a criterion. Presentations are too lame and mindmaps are too abstract. I liked prezi but not the pricing plans. Suggestions for alternatives?
Leveraging Twitter on the review pages is a great idea. I don't think I've seen this feature on other review based sites, but it seems obvious now that I've seen it implemented. I am seeing some character encoding issues, but it might be my browser.

Great overall design too.
In Recession, Women Splurge as if Addicted
Well me personally, I love SICP, I think it's one of the most important books to read as a developer.

However, I don't think its importance can really be appreciated by a neophyte programmer. The elegant modular approach to programming that is introduced in SICP seems like too much work until you have been programming for a while using the large, buggy, mostly undocumented APIs that the working developer has to deal with. (the blog post above seems to think that these don't exist, and all I have to say is that he has either been very lucky or doesn't do a lot of coding)

I always felt a first programming course should actually teach assembly first, then C, then an OOP language like Python or Java. If you are unaware of how the higher-level languages actually get mapped into the world of pointers and registers, it's really hard to understand performance issues, and how the various higher-level languages evolved in the way that they did.

All things considered, I think most people would agree Python is easier to pick up than Scheme, especially for someone who has never programmed before. As long as they eventually do teach a purely functional language at some point and introduce the concepts of functional programming, I think this is a great change.

Surely making a robot move around is more fun than calculating the Newton-Rhasphon method? :)
http://holywars.ru/
One part of my idea tool kit is def balsamiq mockups :) / other than that - evernote is good ,drop box or base camp - but as far as one tool ... perhaps that should be your one idea.
As a mac user I do not mind Silverlight, but if it does not play well with all the platforms that I use on a regular basis - Mac, Linux & Windows (In that order), I will never chose to do any new development with Silverlight.

Why chose Silverlight when I can't even test the thing on my Linux dev box? The support for Flash and Flex is not stellar on Linux either, but there are workable solutions.
That's not a reason.

var a = {foo:"bar"} is valid js code. It can be parsed with eval(). It should be valid for JSON.parse() as well.
Interesting. This is the second project that's taking ideas from web frameworks and repurposing them to solve other problems. The other that I'm thinking of, is of course Zed Shaw's Lamson (http://lamsonproject.org)
I agree, plus TC has a ton of parameters that can be tweaked, and the defaults are pretty small. The one that has the most pronouced effect is the bucket size, or the "width" of the hash table. The bigger, the less chance of collisions, which means you have to follow a linked-list to find the exact record. He used 11M keys, so a bnum in the range of 40M would be much quicker.

I benchmarked TC b+tree on a 1TB db with ~350M keys, and it worked great. I would publish the numbers, but I'm embarrassed that they aren't very rigorous.

cdb docs say it has a limit of 4GB, which makes it pretty much worthless for anything I would use it for.
As opposed to the responsible, bread-winner man who is left to pay for "her" credit cards ..

WTF is one supposed to glean from this gross generalization? How about "In recession, consumerist people who have been programmed by marketing superpowers and learned shopping binges, outside their means, splurge as if addicted. However, we only sampled the female population, in one country, and only 700 of them (the ones free to answer our poll questions, i.e. not juggling work, life and family.) Therefore our 'study' aught to serve as a blanket indictment of all women on the planet."

Do these morons realize the entire third-world is pretty much matriarchal and women are responsible for feeding not only their children and themselves, but their men and adults in their family who are often out of work, sick, not to mention several generations of elders?

Please do not let your experience with Fifth Avenue divas color your perception of all women.
Sun hopes to cash in on Java install base with new app store
Python is easier to pick up than Scheme, except for someone who has never programmed before. Scheme has the simpler syntax and semantics, but Python is more likely to resemble programming they've already done.

And yes, making a robot move around is fun. SICP wasn't designed for fun. During the late '80s and early '90s it was a weeding-out course when too many people wanted to major in EECS. I thought it was fun, but a lot of people didn't.
The fact that there are like...10 books total on it. That the MS people I talk to no longer evangelize it. Or the fact that Microsoft is trying very hard to build Silverlight into a viable competitor as quickly as possible.

Take your pick.

(For the record, I don't think Microsoft will ever actually abandon it completely because they need to have something native. But for 95% of developers WPF just doesn't make sense anymore)
Other than utility companies (Symantec, Trend Micro, etc...) and a handful of game developers (most have left for Consoles at this point) I don't see anyone targeting Windows specifically.

Again, I don't think Windows is dead or going away I'm simply saying it doesn't make sense to develop an app that's only for Windows anymore.

I mean, ask yourself this. If Silverlight can run in it's own Window (which will be possible as of V3) than why would anyone making a business app using WPF?
500 Internal Server Error when I try to vote either way on anything. It does not appear to count the vote.

I am not accepting cookies (except from explicitly allowed sites); this might be related. If so, the resulting behavior should be something other than 500'ing.
Here's the key point from Adobe's announcement:

"To benefit customers who want to protect their content, the open RTMP specification will not include Adobe’s unique secure RTMP measures, nor will the license that accompanies the specification allow developers to circumvent such measures."

Adobe never planned to open RTMP all the way. It's open unless you do something that displeases Adobe.
I think missing from the list is the fact that for many immigrants, a Canadian visa is a stepping stone to US residency. While I am speaking from anecdotal, many of my Indian, Isreali, Russian collegeues have taken this path to working in the states.
Though interesting to watch, this is undoubtedly the same method that has been implemented in surgical robotics for years and is little more than a series of go-to-point operations. The fact that both the slave and the masters are of the same general design even makes inverse kinematics unnecessary.
whiteboard + beer
Sorry - I'm a noob - but how else is is supposed to end? Or would you have there be cycle of (beta release <-> feedback)?
Nice catch. thanks
I use a firefox plugin called "Pencil" to make GUIs and design interactions. For more complex stuff I go back and forth between DIA and Paint.NET (a graphics editor.)

The first is good for designing networks and servers, as you can draw lines between "nodes" and the lines snap into place. The second is good because it has layers. I put each object in a separate layer for maximum ease of use.
Voting from the listing pages is a great idea
Perhaps a more forward posture causes the front of your body to be "shaded" by the rest of your body, leaving the front (that you notice more) drier?
Adobe always seems to me like some sort of schizophrenic or multiple-personalities nice-guy + psychopath.

One day, he's babysitting for the neighbour, watering your plants and taking out the trash, and talking about how he's going to fix the potholes in the street. The next day, he's walking out of your house with a blood-spattered knife, and you never see your dog again.

And I say this as someone whose start-up uses Flex heavily.

It's worrying. Can you rely on that kind of character?

More importantly, it's uncompetitive. Flex is still the best tool for a lot of RIA jobs at the moment, but the assorted collection of AJAX toolkits out there has been catching up, slowly but surely, and eventually they'll overtake Flex.

What a waste, considering what they could do with Flex if they actually sorted themselves out.