skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Statistically speaking you will use more bandwidth on your laptop than on your phone. Quite simply because it's easier.

"Unlimited" data isn't really unlimited just like your unlimited cable modem at home isn't really unlimited. The carrier reserves a right to dump you as a customer and you will be dumped if you start losing them money (which is what you'd be doing if you saturated their network 24/7).

So I hear what you're saying, but this has been argued 1000 times before and you're not going to make AT&T change. It's much cheaper for them to take the PR hit and fire you.

While iPhone users consume a lot more bandwidth than other users, AT&T can sort of keep it in check thanks to the tight restrictions on the AppStore. Once they turn on tethering those restrictions go away and they'll have people using it as their main connection and all that comes with it (BitTorrent comes to mind).

Personally I'd rather pay by the megabyte--I don't want to pay $30 a month for data so I can have an iPhone. I just want to SMS and from time to time check a map. I'll let people like you subsidize their network build out.
Same for me. Trance is a good coding music. I get mine from http://www.trance.fm
It's fun for a few minutes, but there's no reason I would ever go back again. Reminds me of 43things in that way.
HostGator Enters The World Of Tattoo Advertising
"So why is it that, when it comes to CSS, we’re stuck in the past and so afraid of experimenting?"

Because we like our websites to work in more than just the latest version of Firefox?
Yes, I know... :-)
In this case, the reviewer is the very same Anand that built the respected site.
Guy is from: http://www.tapinko.com/billythebillboard/profile/
Exploiting a position of power
good point. how about "relatively successful"?
Well "Detroit" is really 2, or maybe 3, different "holding" companies, making up about a half dozen brands (give or take after everything shakes out).

Additionally, 1/2 of "Detroit", Ford Motor Company, while not posting stellar returns has managed to stay viable and not take any government bailout money. We will see what the future brings...

So, what he is really saying is "Let me run GM", a job for which he is fully underqualified and unprepared for.

Paypal was a pretty big success for him. It is unclear if that was more skill or luck, although it seems like it lands on the side of luck if I had to pick one or the other. Paypal also gained a rightfully earned reputation, even before ebay bought them, for having fairly horrible customer service. Maybe Elon's plan for fixing GM is just to randomly deny valid warranty claims and seize customer cars without warning (you could file a dispute process though, if you really wanted to).

Yeah, this whole thing is a PR stunt, but it kind of makes him (IMO) come off looking like an ass. I might feel differently if his tenure at Tesla has produced something that has a chance of being a free standing viable car company, but that is so far not a foregone conclusion.
I'm in the UK, and use my iPhone a lot, and mostly for browsing,email,ssh.

I know, it's a fact of life. Unlimited!="unlimited", free!="free" and life sentence!="life sentence" but it still sucks.
He raises a great point about the new nature of free but I don't quite agree with his proposal to charge for niche items and give away popular items for free.

It seems to me that the market will be significantly more subtle than this. Popular items will be the easiest to charge for (think about the excitement about the Harry Potter books) but they could also be used to promote stuff (give away music but then make money from concerts).

By his logic, niche items can be free and most likely will be free. In my view, you will be able to charge for niche items that are extremely popular relative that niche (consider how expensive general math books are) or for content that is markedly higher quality than the free stuff (think premium software, i.e. Oracle vs mysql).
Elon Musk is CEO, not founder, of Tesla.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk

That typo is an interesting coincident given the recent lawsuit by Eberhard (one of Tesla's two founders who was ousted by Elon). It seems like Musk is using Wired to publicly disparage him: “I said .. 'There will be no assholes.' I fired someone for being an asshole. And I only had to do that once, actually.”

While I'm no fan of Detroit's management this Silicon Valley in-fighting is definitely not what they need.
Credibly Mashable
I hope they will publish the specs for RTMFP soon as well. There're some interesting things to be built with flash P2P using UDP.
I could be remembering my history wrong, but wasn't Paypal successful because they didn't do any of the stuff Musk suggested when Confinity and X.com merged?
Also because of good looking young students looking to get better grades from their Professors.
progressive enhancement > graceful degradation
Depends how large. If it fits in video memory, very well. If not, pretty badly.
This is one of the most ridiculous patents I have come across ever by such a big corporation.
Django internal architecture: a nice PDF
what about options like the verizon global broadband satellite service? or similar things? are there any globally-available reasonably-priced global mobile broadband solutoins? tethering? etc.?
Living abroad linked with enhanced creativity
Backbars: Turn Headlines of Social Link Sites into Ambient Bar Charts
i agree, as i mentioned in a post on one of the other comments, i think the best way to make this happen would be through developing a subscription-based app of some sort and spend the "working time" maintaining/improving it.
An emerging metric: the GoodGuide score
It take care of it to some extent, but you still have to be aware of it as the programmer. MPI and associated infrastructure are set up such that they'll pick the right nodes to keep the network topology and your code's topology well matched. But you have to do your best as a programmer to hide the latency by spending that time doing other things.
You do not need command line, windows explorer can open ftp address.
Surprising Source of Grade Inflation
How to Win a Business Plan Competition
You're right, it is a concern for many companies. However, as services like GitHub, EngineYard, and Heroku show, many companies are willing to send their code to 3rd party services if the value proposition is compelling and the security is good.

In the future, we're certainly going to work to support more languages, but we felt it was important to focus on a single language early on.
Assuming your point for a minute, it seems that your idea of governance does not include self defense. Not sure how useful a great leader would be without the ability to defend/protect the populace. Isn't protecting the lives of the governed a little higher on the importance ladder than ability to formulate and implement policy?
Scientists Discover Magnetic Superatoms
From the article I can clearly conclude that webkit based browsers support more than even the latest version of FF.

It's not 2003 anymore.
I often listen to...

David Sylvian - Look for albums: "Camphor", "Alchemy" & "Approaching Silence"

Brian Eno - His Ambient collection.

and some varied classical music.

Strangely when I get into rhythm I tend to switch to something more "driving" like Radiohead
You're aware that it wasn't asking for your HN credentials, right?
Please don't use lightboxes. In my opinion they break the natural flow of web browsing.
Once between YC cycles Jessica and I lived in Paris for a month, and I spent the time writing software for YC. (I wrote the code we use to generate funding documents.) I rented a separate studio as an office and went there every day to work. It is kind of cool to work in a place instead of just being a tourist. But I found I missed the hacking community somewhat.
When you have a billionaire founder in your board of directors, one who is completely obsessive in whatever he does (Paypal/Space X)... how can you be surprised that you get kicked out when you don't do things his way?

And I don't blame Musk either. If you invest $70 million in a company you should get to say who the CEO is.
I've briefly looked up mobile satellite internet, and the cost is extremely restrictive: starting at like $600/month for a few hundred megs of transfer. This was for the ultra-portable satellite setups (the kinda thing you can throw in a backpack or a laptop case).
I don't think your explanation is correct. There's only a small subset of English verbs that exhibit this behavior.

For counter examples: if I were to say "I don't drive fast", you would likely not interpret that as "I drive slowly"; if I say "I'm not rich", you wouldn't hear "I'm poor".

Yet in all these classes, we must be using some resolution. So your explanation only begs the question of "why, then, do some kinds of statements get treated to higher resolution than others?".
Air France? There were no outlets in economy on CDG-SFO flights (last checked last year).
How does this compare to solr, compass and other "search frameworks"?

I'm currently using Compass (Java wrapper around lucene), but that was just to get something implemented quickly.
Protecting individual privacy remains an externality for many companies
How would you build a secure, anonymous twitter?
Curious for the community's thoughts as it seems the Iranian government has started to monitor twitter traffic to find the people responsible for getting information out of the country and to block proxies.

How effective would something like this be to disseminate information from authoritarian countries? Is it even possible?
1. get text editor (textmate if you are on os x, vim if you are on windows)

2. pick up a dead tree book on programming on a programming language you think you'll like. There's more commitment if you actually buy a book

ruby => 'the ruby way' (the book that finally made ruby click for me -- I cannot recommend it enough)

perl => 'programming perl' (my first love affair with a language, I love perl)

scheme/lisp => SICP (too expensive to buy on a budget though)

3. you must have a project you really want to do in code. Without a real program to write, you have no path through the library of form, because the possibilities are endless :)
One problem with that approach in the enterprise is that most of that $100k+ software is stuff that takes a long time to customize and integrate; there's just no low-cost way to try something out.

More peripheral services like instant messaging or collaboration tools are easier to do that with. Something like a CRM system is probably harder due to the volume of data you'd need to port and the large change in how people do their work, re-training required, etc. Something even more core like supply-chain management or an accounting system is even harder to try-before-you-buy, and the penalty for trying something that doesn't work is way, way higher. In order to get to the point where you know if it's going to fail or not, you have to take some big risks and sink in a huge amount of time and money.
Recession May Be Followed by Years of Slow Growth
Four years later: Why Apple dropped PowerPC
Do like other languages, and have a glyph represent a letter, and not a word.

So take all those old words, and add a prefix character which means the next glyph is an old word. Unicode already has the concept of combining characters (for diacritics usually). Make a "diacritic" character that encodes the regional flavor, or variant of the character.
http://www.torproject.org/ would theoretically allow them to get around any restriction anonymously, provided they could find public tor servers to contact, which perhaps the CIA or whoever could setup
Great observation. I assume you mean because of the Screen Shot button on the bot software. I had to do that because when I tried taking screen shots of the few CAPTCHAs I saw, I wasn't able to paste it into MS Paint, so I built my own screen shot procedure. Not sure how they did it.
Bezos Doesn’t Like Google’s Book Settlement Either
With only a hint as to what this Pregel thing is about, my guess would be that Neo4J and CODASYL are focused on persistence/storage whereas Pregel is meant for high-performance OLAP stuff. Storage issues like replication are probably less of a concern.

Notice that they're submitting the paper to a distributed computing conference and not a database conference.

Ultimately I doubt anyone but the Googles of the world have a need for this kind of technology.
NYT transformer - covert between data formats, eg from XML to SQL
I really want to see Adobe focus a tad bit more on AIR and making it so applications can actually be launched without using the browser. This announcement does bring a lot of possibilities into the mix in the swf/air/js world.
"relative" to what? Relative to Toyota, Tesla is not successful. Relative to, say, General Motors, Tesla has, so far, successfully avoided bankruptcy. Tesla has built cars and sold a few of them, but they are years away from making money at it. Which is OK, of course...car building is capital intensive and takes a long time. But the jury is still out on whether Tesla will succeed or fail. I just think it takes massive chutzpah for Musk to present himself as someone that knows the answers to fixing Detroit, when his own car company has a lot of blunders in its history (which it may have learned from, and it may very well turn out to be a great car company...but, as I said, nobody knows that yet).
Some developer blogs might show graphs so you can see the trend of their sales, usually with a line showing where they finally become a viable business, but few release hard numbers. I'm happy to share more hard numbers if anyone asks, since I feel this is very valuable data for anyone considering ISV or the "name your price" model. Feel free to contact me via the site: http://www.irradiatedsoftare.com/contact
that was not a cornerstone of his argument in the least. I wouldn't even say it was a part of it at all.
Processing them in Python. :) No, really. Python is horrible at dealing with strings of different encodings. You could generalize that to any complex app with lots of data sources: the only sane way to do it is to convert everything to a single encoding at the door.

(edit) whups, I hadn't thought about PGP/etc signatures. sigh
Interesting to hear. I think it definitely adds a little bit of credibility to your service to be able to offer the free phone support (for as long as it's feasible anyway).
Was he the guy that pushed for a mass-migration to Windows for PayPal infrastructure (despite the fact that the existing UNIX infrastructure was working fine)? If so, I retract anything nice I've ever said about him. The man is clearly an idiot.
I have a gen 1 early 2006 "thigh burner" model and I'd be lucky to get 1.5h doing anything that requires the screen to be on... Now I got really, really tempted to upgrade.
Where are the women in Startups?
My biggest complaint about Tesla and the reason Musk is not ready to 'Run Detroit' is that we have not seen manufacturing innovations from Tesla, and it seems they are building a similar infrastructure to the Detroit.
Compare that with Fisker who is designing and marketing cars while leaving manufacturing and distribution to those with expertise.

What other modern consumer brand manages the entire eco-system from design to sale? (somewhat ignoring the fact that the Tesla Roadster parts was sourced by Lotus, the Tesla sedan I believe is completely an in house product).
Be very careful with these new batteries. The chemistry is very heat-sensitive and if your laptop gets very hot for extended periods it will lost most of its ability to hold charge after only 12-24 months.
I agree with those recommending Python as a great first language to learn. You can download it for free at the Python web site, which is www.python.org. Get version 2.6.2 for now. Experimenting with the interactive interpreter and with running programs you save as .py files is easy with Idle, which is included. (You can write Python programs in other editors, but Idle should be fine to start with. In particular : VIM, mentioned by sunkencity, is an extremely powerful editor, but not at all intuitive, with a steep learning curve requiring a lot of practice to get productive with it - so save that for later.) See the tutorial and other documentation on the Python site, as well as its links to other information.
i have an even simpler explanation: most people think that increasing government size/scope will make their lives better.

These are the same people of whom 40% believe Elvis is alive!
In Boulder less than 10% of startups are by women - and Boulder has the highest number of startups per capita in the US and one of the most supportive startup communities. Why aren't there more high profile entrepreneurs?
Well, the battery isn't replaceable, so there is a downside. You can not get more runtime by carting around batteries (unless you jerry rig a 15V battery and the airline adapter...)
United has no outlets in economy at all, afaik.
Yes. The iPhone is unquestionably more useful to me than my Blackberry was, just because the app support and mobile browser is so good. I find myself using the data about 10x more often than I did with the Blackberry.

I haven't had a regular "free" phone since 2003, so it is hard to compare. Having constant access to email and the internets seems so essential now, I don't think I could rationally compare the value to of the iPhone to a phone that doesn't have a data plan.
If you work 100 hours a week for someone else and are not bringing in a million plus per year, your wife is going to think you are a chump, because you are.

How many people like this exist in silicon valley? a lot. wall street as well. and more and more, "traditional" corporate america as well.

edit: i meant to add that i think it's a poignant, alarming, and relevant statement.
I've been developing for several years, and I usually visually tune them out.

I only adblock the companies that do pop-ups/pop-unders, or verbal ads. Flashblock tends to take care of the worse offenders anyway. If the ads are supporting a community then, I figure they deserve the change to appear, even if I'm probably not going to do anything with them.

Same thing with the PVR ... if it's an interesting looking commercial, I'll occasionally go back to watch it the first time I see it.

Of course, that might just be me.
the missing piece of the essay is the question of whether "political entrepreneurs" should be considered legitimate.

Using group dynamics to achieve power is just a reality of human nature, as Elezier points out.

But Elezier jumps from this fat to assume that we should then be concerned about the unequal distribution of power between most people and the few political entrepreneurs (aka "power seekers").

It's hard to argue that all power seekers are bad, even if all do use group dynamics to gain and keep power.

So how to we determine which power seekers we consider legitimate?
The startup lifestyle can be challenging for everyone. While Boulder has up to five events every week, they're full of men. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but there are women-focused conversations that need to be had in a non-male environment. There are women in startups in Boulder. But where are they?!
It's hard to find actual data on this. Here are the radio licensing fees, most seem to be in the $500 to $5000 range.

http://www.fcc.gov/fees/am_fm_2008.pdf

This page suggests TV broadcast license fees up to ~$70,000, but it's not at all clear to me whether it applies to the major networks:

http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-284863...
Everyone's talking about graph databases lately. Who hasn't designed some relational data structure and then refined it a bit and tweaked it a bit and ended up with some sort of adjacency-list monstrosity and the realization that the relational underpinnings for that are rather awkward?

I'm really looking forward to reading more about Pregel. In the meantime I just found Greg Malewicz's PhD thesis. He seems very interested in scheduling, which must be crucial to Bulk Synchronous Parallel: http://www.cs.ua.edu/~greg/publications/Malewicz_PhD.pdf
Yep, lots of Obama support. On the other hand, I didn't see much McCain support. On election day, McCain had roughly 85% as much support as Obama. Most of those voters were invisible to me. Probably partly because they're underrepresented on the internet, and probably partly because I would only visit the sites where they congregate if there was something unintentionally hilarious there to point and laugh at. The internet is kind of like a big city; once you get your bearings, most of it becomes invisible to you.
As I understand from the article, Virginia schools started awarding students an automatic GPA increase for doing well on a standardized test, and a researcher observed that the average high-school GPAs of college-bound Virginian students went up relative to the rest of the country.

Am I missing something here? How is this conclusion surprising?

(Or are they saying that the fact that Virginia is awarding the increases at all is surprising?)
Probably closer to 40% (in the U.S.):
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/19divo.html
Yes. But two points: 1) the military superiority of democracy was due to its ability to mobilize mass conscript armies. At the time, winning wars was a matter of bodies. Post 1945, great power wars are determined by of nukes, planes, and missiles. The age of mass armies is over. 2) Even if democracies were still superior military, monarchies and aristocracies could recognize the fact and nip them in the bug before they became dangerous.
It wasn't necessarily that simple. They were trying to merge a company with a Windows infrastructure with a company that had a Unix infrastructure and were trying to decide on one infrastructure moving forward. But yes, he was the one pushing for Windows.
Brain farts -- how twitterific was bitten by the twitpocalypse
The results are small. 2% change in something that is fluctuating anyways is minor - the numbers are unimportant, a 2% change does not qualify as big results.
CSS3 breaking in the design community
I have a question for people who are upset over non-removable batteries:

Have you considered a universal external laptop battery?

I haven't used them personally so I don't know the possible drawbacks but I'm browsing a few different models and it looks like a better solution than carrying around a spare, model specific, battery. Some have USB 5V ports so you can charge other devices off them. Some are pretty beefy but I'm also seeing a lot of models that are barely any bigger than a spare laptop battery. What's the drawback?
Minor nit: Betamax is a standard, but flawed example. The original betamax cassettes only worked for 1 hour, but movies last 1.5-2.5 hours. They eventually fixed it (at the cost of lowering quality), but too late.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax#Criticism
I did this for over a year with my wife and kid. I originally planned on quitting my job as a government contract and doing only freelance, but instead ended up working things out so I could work remotely ~4-6 hours a day. It was nice having a fixed schedule and fixed paycheck and it left my mind free to enjoy Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina.

I can't recommend it highly enough, it was surprisingly easy to do and definitely one of the best years of my life.
> "In Pregel, programs are expressed as a sequence of iterations. In each iteration, a vertex can, independently of other vertices, receive messages sent to it in the previous iteration, send messages to other vertices, modify its own and its outgoing edges' states, and mutate the graph's topology [...]"

This sounds very similar to how neural networks are updated through time. Could this be used to easily simulate biological cognition? Am I missing something? And, scalability isn't a problem:

> "Currently, Pregel scales to billions of vertices and edges, but this limit will keep expanding."

The human brain only has about 100 billion neurons.