skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is there really freedom when you sign that contract though? Freedom of contract refers to cases where both parties are able to negotiate.

In this particular case this goes under unfair contractual terms, which is the way the law protects the small guy against the big guy who only has one contract and you either accept it or not. It is like a supermarket saying that we will not refund products of a very low quality. Your option is either to not buy anything in any supermarket, cus sure if it was legal they all would want to have that term in their contract, or buy and have no way of recourse.
the graphviz suite (in particular dot) is pretty easy to use and produces decent results
The rights of those accused of crimes have no bearing on the TOS, a contract he agreed to, which clearly states that his account can be cancelled for any reason

I am a bit confused by the article. It starts with saying that he won against google as apparently google has no right to terminate the account without giving any reason.

Once we are in the appeal court however, the whole discussion is on the reason for google terminating his account and if this was right. There is no talk whatever of whether google can terminate the account without giving any reason, which I thought and assumed this was the whole point of the appeal.
CheckMyColours.com - New tool for color contrast analysys of webpages
Checkmycolours is a tool for checking foreground and background colour combinations of all DOM elements, and determine if they provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits.
All the tests are based on the algorithms suggested by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
What does "bubble lifestyle" mean?
Here it is: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7cedl/dear_reddi...
You are correct - but - at your initial point of contact you have (perhaps) a single opportunity to make contact with your prospective customer. You should do all you can (without boring or annoying your prospect) to capture enough accurate information to ensure that the next step succeeds.

I agree - long term relationships are built on (in the context of this conversation) an exchange of emails but why blow it at the first hurdle?
Idiots rule our countries. Why would online be any different?

(Not being snide - wherever you look, politicians seem to unfailingly be raping and making a mockery of the democratic system. I may be slightly more cynical than usual as we discussed Berlusconi at lunch today, though).

Does anyone have good real-world examples of the the kind of communities we would like to see online? I'd like to hope that degeneration into idiocracy as communities grow is not some kind of natural law.
In Chile, firemen work voluntarily, and with a very similar weather to North California, they are one of the best forces in the world. None of this 200k a year bullshit.
Are downloads really killing the music industry? Or is it something else?
If this was the Court of Appeal, then it is binding on the lower courts. I really thought that the reason why google cared to appeal this case was because the court of claims decided that google can not terminate an account without giving the reasons for doing so. That I would assume, is quite a significant decision for google, bearing in mind the way they currently operate. If that was the case, and if I was this guy, I would take it up to the Supreme court just on that one point and nothing else.
Nokia 5310 XpressMusic unlocked at keepontalking
With a sleek aluminium finish, the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic phone blends an array of features with an iconic design. At only 9.9mm thick and weighing less than 71 grams, the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic fits comfortably in a pocket or purse. Equally important, the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic offers up to 18 hours of music playback, memory for up to 3,000 songs on an optional 4GB microSD card and dedicated music keys. With a 2-megapixel camera and a bright 2-inch QVGA screen with up to 16 million colors.
This chart is terrible - it only plots 20 points and is just loaded with what Tufte calls "Chart Junk."Sure the sinking boats look kind of cool but seeing them drawn in multiple colors actually hides interesting info - no major bankruptcies from 1991-2001. The x axis is not used at all. While it looks pretty this could be a counter-example for good data visualization.
Offshore Web Development Services
and a lot of publicity, perhaps worth much more than some 700 dollars.
It could also mean the resignation of French Culture Minister Christine Albanel, who was responsible for pushing the bill through the National Assembly and who threatened to resign if it didn't pass. She will hold a press conference in Paris this afternoon to discuss the decision.

She has already spoken, and argues that the decision is somewhat of a victory as it has actually validated 90% the law, including the right for internet users to be monitored and notified of potential infringement.

She also argued that there are already laws in place that allow administrative agencies to impose fines and punishment on people without a trial (like the fine imposed on companies for leaking their customers' private data)

So moving forward, they are either going to rewrite the part of the law that was ruled unconstitutional (in which they will require a judge's approval before taking action against users), or just proceed with the law without the part that disconnects users from the internet (they will still receive the mails). Sarkozy will decide which course of action they will take.
I'd recognize those Shindo Latour loudspeakers anywhere. That's a serious audiophile system costing more than a typical U.S. automobile.
It is nice that they availability zones so you can get around these kinds of problems if you have the money, their outage report confirms the problem was isolated to one zone.

The report also states it was a problem isolated to a group of racks, a failing power distribution unit which I take it was on the "wrong side" of the UPS. A lightning storm affected something on the "inside" of the UPS, but nothing else in the datacenter? I'm curious how that would even happen (and shouldn't a lightning rod be in use?).

Also, it seems like Google's per-motherboard UPS system would have been the setup to have in order to avoid this problem in the first place.
Thanks! 2.
> A link would have sufficed.

Maybe it was self protection against edits or deletion for the original post.
Adobe Security Patches Good for Win and Mac, Linux has to wait
Did you see the development of the MRI data interpreter that was one ordinary PC stuffed full of ordinary video cards and used their GPUs?

Did you see the burst in development of comms and personal devices in the past 20 years?

Do you see that someone (a westerner, anyway) who died 50 years ago and someone who was born 50 years ago would have very different lives?

Do you see that we don't need AI, we could go with human-computer hybrids (and I mean very good personal assistants acting as external memory and computers, not even brain implants) or effective collaboration instead.

We already have one form of effective collaboration - the company. Groups of people working together to do more than any individual. View that from the perspective of two thousand years ago. See how fast change seems.
Printable Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/magazine/14search-t.html?_...

EDIT: Doesn't work unless you have the correct Referer...
It's a shame that he quits, as he is one of those few people who could make it work. When he quits, it's almost like "game over" for the medium.
Agreed. At [old job] we saw a lot of user-entered e-mail addresses that were "correct" (according to so-called validators) but wrong, like "www.screenname@aol.com" or "example@yahoo".
Keeping the original document in RTF seems to help Word play nice. Unfortunately not all of Word's features are part of RTF so YMMV.
Hudson Sonar plugin 1.0 : to industrialize the ultimate build system
:)
Thanks (all) for responding.
I guess I never realised how much of amazons purchases must be spur-of-the-moment. (NOTE: I order stuff from amazon - but usually in groups as I'm shipping it to australia - so all of my stuff is planned - i'm going there to buy something)

But - if anyone has the metrics to prove a figure like that - it would be amazon.
> it's clunky and cobbled together

You mean, just like the natural human body? Visit a nursing home.
Create the Filter
Mark, how come your blog's empty? Something to do with those fans?

No, nothing like that.

I did have the intention of writing some essays on the site (I really just registered the domain to have my name as a TLD and for the email) but I've been working on my startup, so really haven't made the time to write essays.

It's not really a priority right now, whereas the startup is.
I hate to be contrarian, but was this really a fight worth winning? All that was accomplished is that the professor now needs to spend time every year retooling all of the homework problems so students can't easily copy from the now web-published version of) last year's answers.
The multiple colors represents sector, and looking at all that green you can large finical companies often die.

I think a more interesting chart would be companies that lost 90% of their value in one year as a scatter plot, with the same color codes. (year vs lost value)
Is AT&T going to charge extra for new iPhone services?
Gucci Pulse Concept Watch
Yeah...

But rather than just section headings, perhaps complete sentences that you could "zoom-in" to more detailed wording. Or if things seem to be too detailed, you could zoom-out.

Seems hard to automate.
Better writing could probably solve a lot of my frustration (not for this article though).

An ideal application would be for educational material (such as this post). Where it's worth the significant human effort to craft the multiple variants of the subject.
There are many kinds of trolls. Most can easily be ignored, but there are many that can't. Two that spring to mind are the persistent attention takers (switching or maintaining multiple identities as necessary) that amount to a DOS attack, and those who are able to look like signal for a long time before it becomes clear they're just trolls.

In other words, not caring what trolls say is necessary but not sufficient.
Install Popular Programs in One Go After Windows Reformat
A poem about humility (or lack thereof)
ε-Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Bolzano-Weierstrass Theorem [pdf]
Swakopmund Guest House
Swakopmund,
is one of the most surreal and unique destinations in Africa. A special feature of the town, is its jewelry shops, which offer pieces ranging from contemporary African to continental designs. Art and craft shops offer authentic products, while street vendors sell Namibian art.
Swakopmund has several excellent restaurants, pubs and discos and a few nightclubs. As a great coastal town it offers a host of water ttractions,
including boat trips to see dolphins and seals,
diving, surfing or just simply relaxing on the beach.Just outside Swakopmund, a section of towering dunes, have been set aside for all sorts of adventure activities such as desert tours, sand boarding, sky-diving, camel rides, off-road driving and quad biking,.
Swakopmund is surrounded by a one of the most magnificent desert wilderness areas in Africa,
Hot Air Balloon flights are very much part of the Swakopmund scene and are easy to arrange.
the coastal town of Swakopmund is a must-see for travelers to Africa.
You're right, housing is a problem. That is yet another lobby. If you look, Palo Alto might have a land shortage, but it does not have a volume shortage. Think of all the space in the air and underground that is not being used because of ridiculous agricultural zoning.

Also, it's true that unions help make sure that their members are treated more humanely. But it gets troublesome when they capture budgeting, like the previous poster said. Definitely an argument with many dimensions and, within those, sides to it.

But one thing's for sure: if the Cali government is going bankrupt, it has to either raise taxes or fire people.
How to select your 3G phones?
India is slowly opening up its network to 3G network. BSNL, the government owned mobile service provider is the first 3G network provider in India. The 3G network is very slow to enter the Indian market. While there are lots of people waiting for the 3G network, not all cities enjoy this mobile broadband service at the moment.
PR disaster alert: Asus attacks on Linux
Hacker news on Hacker News.
Adult pleasure products
Why Everyone Talks about Cloud Computing ?
I don't know much about the other things they're talking about, but I can't say enough good things about Hudson. It's very effective even for non-java projects - I'm using it now, relatively painlessly, for doing CI on a bunch of C# and Javascript code.
The only thing that matters to a company of any size is its product and customer experience.

That's a load of crap. What is true for a small start-up is not necessarily true for a huge behemoth.

There are many other components to the mechanisms for making money (which is what businesses are - human machines to make money), and although product development and customer services are very important in the early stages of a company, the focus shifts, later, to other areas (like sales or value chain optimisation). Those can make a much larger difference to the company's profits, once it is at scale, and so they deservedly get more attention at those scales.

This article represents a very narrow-minded, naive view of business. Perhaps you should work in a wider variety of companies before making such grand statements. Maybe read a book or two about corporations. I recommend "Management" by Peter Drucker as a (heavy, but excellent) starter.
You can always make it sound like a plan of action: "I don't remember/know off the top of my head, but I will after 5 minutes with Google". (Provided that it's one of those ultra-specific questions that have nothing to do with the actual job).

Personally, I wouldn't worry too much, since chances are that no one else actually gets these questions right anyways.
Nah man, it's like this: free stuff given away in order to convince you to buy other stuff seems less valuable. That's what the experiment says, anyways.
the glass bottle isn't concerned with usability. it's a branding thing.
A real interview question I've seen that seemingly no one gets right: what's a transient variable in Java?

I figure wildwood's assuming a job where you deal with databases.
Virtual Users/Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL, SquirrelMail (Ubuntu 9.04)
Of course those things matter, and they're part of the customer experience. Your marketing and sales strategy should be of the same quality as your product. Don't think of them separately. You're providing value with the product and convincing people to buy it with the sales and marketing strategy. Sure, the budget allocations shift back and forth, but both should always be above some minimum threshold of quality.

If you think of your entire company as providing a "customer experience," then you only have one threshold, and everything is held to that standard.

The companies I am angry at are the ones sacrificing product quality and value for sales and marketing. (And also companies that just ignorantly release crappy products and ignore their customers/employees.)
Rajeev Motwani, a Professor Behind Google, Dies at 47 - Obituary
The left side menu ... I did not understand what's good for. The first impression was that selecting a site component will show that component live on the right side with WYSIWYG-like editing. Than realized this is not working, or was not designed to work such way.

It was just a quick overview maybe if I would have more time I could figure out better.
I gave up validating an email address a long time ago. Now all I will do is sanitize it to be safe from malicious attempts. The tipping point for me was trying to decipher an unreasonably long regular expression written months prior to find out why someone's funky address (like the author's) was failing -- wasted time.

You can try, but you can't prevent people from doing dumb things, and in the attempt you end up potentially making mistakes like in the case of the article. Users will always do something unanticipated. With that in mind I only validate the things that really matter (e.g. credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc.). If someone wants to enter "jane at aol" as their address, I have to think, "is this going to a problem for my company?" If not, don't bother to try to fix it.
Possible cause of death is drowning.
As a founder who makes a modest living from his site, I can say that you don't need to be rich or have "F You" money to enjoy the experience that Derek writes about. You just need to have enough of a reputation that people will be interested in giving your new projects a chance.

It's such a great experience to come up with an idea, integrate it into your site a few days later, and instantly have thousands of people using it, giving feedback about how great it is or how much it sucks. Watching your ideas instantly take off or dud.

When you work for a company, you may have a very large potential audience, but you may not be allowed to try out some of your best ideas (and even if you are permitted to work on them, they may never launch to the public). Likewise, if you are an individual working on ideas in your spare time and not giving them your full attention, you may never gain enough of an audience to know if your ideas are good.

Really, "your own company is one of the best playgrounds of all" sums it up perfectly.
Atomic Warfare
Amusing and quite well done, I thought. He did a good job capturing several internet memes. But the part that made me laugh the most was the throwaway line:

and everyone else considers reading the short bit.ly URL to be equivalent to reading the post.
Does anyone know which availability zone was affected?
Mine is not to re-write the wheel. Writing a correct email address is indeed non-trivial, but there's at least one well known module written by someone who's actually read the RFCs and won't trash users using plussing and minusing. Use that, don't write your own.
Sturgeon's Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law) seems worth invoking here. The thing is, if big companies didn't get weighed down by their own bulk and bureaucracy, how would small companies ever compete with them?
But if crappy products sell and don't sell any worse than better (and more expensive) products, then it is a mistake to invest effort into making them better.

customer experience != maximizing value to shareholders

I wish it were. I really do. But it isn't.
I might try that. Thanks.
"How close are they of hacking your brain"?

Not very, despite the author's thorough Wikipedia research.

Mind reading, though, that might not be so far away. If you're curious search around for "MRI SVM whole brain classification".
Doom Resurrection: next week on the iPhone
Can you provide a real world example of where this is the case in a healthy market? I do not think this is true except in very poor market conditions like with monopolies or odd social situations.
And I get that. We (in our apps) have captchas, crapflood limits, banning, etc. that Trent doesn't have IRL.
plus, it's easy to get the ketchup out if you know how. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6faDt5trSE
Cracker news on Hacker News.
"CEO, or the design director, or someone with a huge amount of power at Heinz should personally use every one of its products for some arbitrary amount of time before it is approved to be sold."

Do you really think the CEO doesn't use Heinz Ketchup in the new bottle? I love the new bottle! It has never "jammed" up for me and its a huge improvement over the glass bottle. I guess you should use those tiny ketchup packets if you're having a problem with getting ketchup out of the bottles. Did you know that Heinz is in the process or might have already released a bottle that doesn't let that "watery ketchup" come out when you first use it. It was their number one complaint from ketchup users. That's customer focused innovation!

I know that your an Apple fan boy but believe it or not - not "everything Apple" is god-like in fact I find the iPod Nano lacking and it was the first product I ever bought from Apple.

Getting back to the Heinz ketchup bottle - I eagerly await your better re-design...
It used to be that this was a valid interview tactic - asking people hard/obscure stuff and seeing if you could get them to admit they didn't know, then get them to explain where they'd go to find out. It used to be that there were many different places to go to find disparate bits of technical know-how, each specific to the task in hand. It used to be that knowing how to find out was a valuable skill, required of any developer - every developer looks stuff up, no-one can know everything.

This has changed a lot over the last few years - now the answer to all of that is basically just 'Google it.'. The only value left in this interview tactic is to probe the depth/breadth of the candidates knowledge and to see how they respond when they get to the end of it, in an interview/pressured situation. It's a good sign when they calmly admit they don't know and suggest sensible strategies for finding out. It is, however, a terrible sign if their domain knowledge stops before you get to 'What's a class?' - you really need to know the important stuff, end of story.

I'm always shocked by the number of candidates that I've intervied who get weeded out by questions like that.
Microsoft Dumps MS Money: Yes, Web Apps Had Something to do With It
Am I a Founder? The Adventure of a Lifetime.
Cash to Trash: Woman Throws out Million Dollar Mattress
An Israeli woman has sparked a desperate search through landfill sites around Tel Aviv after accidentally throwing away a mattress containing $1 million (approximately £700,000) in cash.
A careful and thoughtful study of marketing practices and techniques might lead you to different conclusion in terms of how close they are to hacking our brains.

Also, thanks for the tip on the mind reading, that's some interesting stuff!
600 per year PER user. 10 users? That is 6k.
Short answer: no.

Long answer: there's no way to know. The names that Amazon gives a specific location aren't something you can rely on. So, your us-east-1a might be a different availability zone from my us-east-1a. I'm guessing Amazon did this to avoid everyone "going with the default" and launching instances in us-east-1a and having way more instances wanted to be launched there than their other availability zones. But it does mean that there is no way of identifying by name what the availability zone was that went down since the only names we have identify different places depending on our account.
The problem with the airline industry in general is that the old axiom "Fast, Cheep, Good - pick any 2" doesn't hold up.
Tickets are so cheep the airlines bleed money. The whole point of flying is the speed. As far as "good" goes they can't compromise on safety so it's an industry that sort of has to pick "all three". That is a challenging business model to say the least.
"The only thing that matters to a company of any size is its product and customer experience."

Many things matter. Although every company is different, the 3 most important are almost always:

- Profitability

- Cash flow

- Owners wealth

Of course, product & customer experience are important. As means to get to higher objectives. But certaintly not the only thing.
How Stereotypes Defeat the Stereotyped
Libre.fm: Alternative to last.fm Scrobbling Feature
I think that's pretty much the only way to guarantee that you ARE stoppable.

Similarly the best way to ensure that you are always in danger of getting shot is to carry a gun around.
The biggest risk in this is the stick situation you come to when somebody who feels that a legitimate comment was moderated and feels the need to make a fuss about it. It's a little hard to come up with a thoughtful response to that. "Well, my moderators made the decision." "Who are they?" "I don't know them."