skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They put years of frustrating, boring work into Google search, Maps, Mail, Chat, Calendar, Reader, etc.

Why should we doubt their ability to stick with a Linux Windowing and Usability project?
This 'Google is unfocused. Google doesn't follow through. Google leaves projects to rot' meme is particularly annoying, because there is so little evidence that it happens to anything on a significant scale.

Several of their large acquisitions have appeared to be neglected, but each and every time that I can recall, it's been a seeming public neglect followed by the introduction of the 2.0 successor.

Case in point: if you think their social networking acquisitions are being left to rot, vs their energy being focused on new services that integrate with WAVE, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Good article (if a bit long). Wolfram Alpha has exactly the kind of interface that you would expect from a company founded by a person that wrote a book called "A New Kind of Science." Stephen Wolfram is a very intelligent person with a world-crushing, fire-breathing ego. This is unfortunate, because a more modest man could create a great tool like Alpha but then assume that he didn't know all of the ways that people would use it, and therefore not require interfacing with it through a broken natural language engine. Wolfram, on the other hand (like many bright people) assumes that only he knows the answers and doesn't bother to think that others might be able to do more with the tool than he could ever think of.
A Drug That Could Give You Perfect Visual Memory
Marc Andreessen puts his money where his mouth is
He lost me as soon as he said that the handshake is outdated.
I'm incredibly wired into the digital world, but some things just shouldn't be 'digitized'. We live in a physical world and our brains are built to deal with a physical world. Everything else is a hack.
Google OS could put squeeze on other flavors of Linux
No, I wouldn't think that actually. Can you imagine how much legal wrangling it would take to understand the law in 100+ countries? I don't make any guesses as to the size of amazon's legal team nor to their scope in terms of country coverage but really - that's a massive job. Just take the USA for example - Amazon's legal team is working overtime dealing with taxes. Should they hire 60 new attorneys just so that they can make this content utterly global? At that point, they'd probably say, "Let's just forget the entire thing. If people are gonna complain about it, then we just won't do it."
As I've mentioned here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=684343

Since many think I'm being disrespectful towards the hardwork of others, i've abandoned cloning SO and decided to write something else for fun.

As for what I did over the weekend. I didn't get as much done as i expected but the project itself is coming along, as I have a working first prototype, i will put it up somewhere and then post about it.
There's a weekend, and then there's $18 million.

How much do you think recovery.org spent? And they're not 6 months late.
I'm surprised they even allow participants from outside the US.
This is the real deal - my company works with one of last year's finalists, encoding.com, and they are pretty great. Not perfect, but it's a small company using AWS as their infrastructure - and everything has worked so far.
If you are selling something in another country, I would understand your point but this is a startup challenge. The onus is on the participants to see if their country will allow them legally. I would say that this would apply to over 90% of the civilized world.
“The UFOs I Saw Were Structured Machines” says Colonel Charles Halt
there is also a very good movie (the hustler, paul newman + jackie gleason) concerning these two characters.

however, the movie connections aside -- i am not buying this "sw-engineering" equals "it's a paycheck"-mentality. IMHO, the two disciplines are not easily comparable, this mostly stems from the fact that CS deals with "computing in the small", while SWE deals with "computing in the large" (actually, more "programming" than "computing"). i think this is also a major reason that research areas in both disciplines are not overlapping (aside from code generation which obviously uses theory from compilers, i am mostly thinking in terms of product-lines and variability-handling; please post if you have other areas in mind that i fail to remember ad hoc)

also please note: the mutual disregard for CS towards SWE and vice versa is actually counterproductive and i am sure that some interdisciplinary efforts could be mutually beneficial...
The Sunlight Foundation tried to put together a bid on this. Here's their recap of the process:

http://www.sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/06/25/recoverygov-bid-...

Think you're better than a bunch of freetard hippies? That's a joke; I'm a big Sunlight Foundation fan, and they do some great work. The fact that they couldn't pull together a bid should give you pause.
Unix Wizdumb: Clean up empty "in use" files with "cat /dev/null"
I thought they were a backwards agricultural communist country with no electricity and now they launch cyberwar? Maybe their media is not the only biased one.
"My bet is that Chrome OS will have similar impact to the Chrome browser - encourage everyone to step up their game, but not dominate the market."

Fire and Motion.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

The only way this makes sense is if they are trying to keep Microsoft distracted and too busy defending their core market to attack Google. If this forces MSFT to further lower their asking price for Windows 7 on low end devices, it is probably a success for Google.

The danger is if they take it too seriously. They do not want to get in a serious competition with MSFT for OS market share. But if this is costing them relatively little in engineering costs and executive focus, it's probably a good idea.

Fake Steve makes this same point: "Nah, the only point in Google giving away a free browser and OS is somehow to fuck up Microsoft."
Google's Native Client security contest found (minor) flaws
And it still can't even calculate: http://www07.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+attoparsec+%2F+mill...
First thing is to put credit freezes on his credit accounts. Call up the major credit reporting agencies and explain what happened - they will tell him how to put the freezes on and those freezes will require manual confirmation by telephone for any loans (asking sensitive questions like, "What year was your last car loan? What was the amount? Who was it through?").
"I can't see much of a downside for this potential drug"

Really? The brain is one of the most complex organs in the human body. It is also a finite resource. There is a very high probability that increasing performance on one area will have complex side effects in other areas.
I think he refers to the "scientific" discipline of Software Engineering, which earns you no more lunches (probably fewer) than creating algorithms.
That comparison makes no sense to me. Software engineering is to computer science as mechanical engineering is to physics. They're not in a competition.
Notice the Gtalk icon on the desktop. Which is not to say that I believe this is real, just that this is not the startup screen.
Really not sure what the point was, other than to see if concerned parties would snoop around—which, of course, they did.
This type of thing may have the opposite effect. I like my Tivo as-is; I don't want some ####wad from BestBuy's marketing team fiddling with it. And I sure don't want Napster on it lol
I use both Safari and Firefox for my web development. Safari's web inspector has a nicer user interface for javascript debugging, but Firebug has better support for editing CSS on the fly.
kiddie games
Except that Safari has not been released for the operating system that I do web development under. So no.
Sounds fine to me. They aren't locking you into anything. All their technologies are open and free, it's just that no other companies can offer Google's quality and breadth.
I somewhat disagree. It is _difficult_ to change certain aspects of yourself. If it were so easy, everyone would do it; nobody would be lazy, nobody would procrastinate, nobody would be addicted to any substances or have bad habits. Nobody would get into (or stay in) depression.

The human condition is such that, with respect to various things, what we are and what we know we should be are different, and sometimes quite distant from one another, and moving from the "are" to the "ought to be" is often a struggle.

I have learned some strategies over the years, but these strategies are not ones that everyone is willing to employ.
Not just a redesign (where design means making the entire system), sounds like it's also maintenance until 2014. It's a complex project, just getting everyone to submit the data would be a huge chore. Actually doing something with it and keeping it all up to date for 5 years is a tall task.

Update: here's the RFP and it is indeed a huge job

http://www.scribd.com/doc/16515421/RAT-Board-Solicitation
I'm a fan of the 48/12 system for creative work.

A simple timer and a list of 'stuff i did' per work chunk have been getting me all the useful information without becoming a burden or forcing me out of my natural rhythm.
how about not converting to binary :)
try thinking about chunks of two
There are a lot of things you can do efficiently and well that can't be done when working with the Gov. due to politics and a massive overhead imposed by red tape and design constraints.
I "get" it, but the delivery falls flat like a stand-up comedian that makes the audience uncomfortable because no one is laughing. At least that's how it is in my head.
"I'm 12 years old and what is this?"

Seriously though - I'm a Windows guy so I'm assuming that is for *nix?
After seeing the cesspool MySpace turned into, I'm okay with this.
I got the email, but puzzle isn't complete. Don't understand whats missing. Maybe correct email subject?
Search the old YC posts - comes up about 1-2x a month. http://searchyc.com
This isn't exactly easy. The site will need a heavy backend that talks to a whole array of old legacy databases to pull the data out, meaning you will probably need to have people proficient in cobol, db2 and all sorts of other greybeard stuff. You'll need to be able to scale well with large amounts of data, and you need backups and redundancy of this. You will also have to be able to play the political game, expect pressure, and expect specifications to change often due to politics.

I think I could do it in a weekend.
CoTweet Secures Funding and Launches Public Beta
i too am struggling...can anyone who solved give more hints?
I see. I still haven't been able to decipher it to get the email address, how were you able to?
"Basically, if some HTML/CSS works on Safari, the chances are very high it will work on Firefox 2 and higher, and on IE 6 and higher (with minor tweaks)."

I don't get it. A lot of the hardship that comes with web development is that stuff that works great in modern standards-based browsers like Safari doesn't work when you try to view it in IE. I can't count the number of times I've taken a webpage that I developed to work in Safari (or Firefox) and seen it break completely in IE. And it often takes more than "minor tweaks" to fix it.
Triadic Programming
The trouble is it is not only you that has to follow those guidelines. Friends can put up pictures of you and tag you. Not all content about you is placed there by you.
First thought: nippleBox

Second thought: Sites like this need tons of marketing to gain traction. I hope they have investors with deep pockets

Third thought: design looks a bit weak

Good luck!
The hits are a result of an OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) procedure that every investigative agency or department typically follows as part of an investigation. The modus operandi being that personnel scour public sources for a given set for amalgamated analysis.

That said, it is not necessary that people related to this investigation are the ones who visited that link. The organizations in question are large entities with a multitude of people curious about what is possibly the biggest corporate 'espionage' case of the year. Cool experiment nonetheless.
Hacker friendly multitouch hardware, at last
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=686802
<shrug> that's not the point. The whole discussion was a bunch of people saying "No, I'm right!". A source is at the very least the beginning of intelligent conversation.
Yes, and so that everything Just Works :p
Plus the update was already planned on being installed later in the week, so it was not like they were ignoring it.
So, because Google is invalid as well, then we should all strive to write our pages with malformed and non-accessible HTML?
I think the author of the blog post meant that given the drug a) works in humans and b) is determined to be 'safe' by some level of metrics, she doesn't see the downside to remembering visual memories for much longer. I don't think it's fair to leave it to bloggers to assess the dangers of a neurological drug.
And you can set who can search for tagged pictures of you...
Banks in India Say No to Stock Markets
Are you a night owl or early bird? It matters
Cool looking game - am DL'ing now. The first thing to me is that you should NOT have both on the same page - that is confusing as hell to me. Each version should have a separate page/section.

Okay - DL'ed and am playing. Tutorial is very well done - that is, until I got to the first Math move explanation. "Try adding 1 to row 2 by tapping it twice with the second tap to the RIGHT of the first one"

Whoa!

I did it but I don't know what happened. A highlight of, "Here's what happened after you did that" would have helped. I have no clue what I did because the popup screen completely covers up that section.

I was able to "get it" after going through the tutorial though (and solve my first one). I dig it - very cool idea.

So... to your question:

The terms "rotation moves" and "math moves" are confusing. I get "math moves" better than the other but it still isn't great. I don't think, actually, that you need to name the moves. In your explanation, you simple explain that you can move entire columns and rows and you can add or subtract 1 to entire columns and rows. "To move columns and rows, simply swipe the column or row in the direction you want it to go."

Thats the simple part - the hard part is explaining addition/subtraction. I think it needs more text than you currently have yet without the term "math move"
I agree that you've probably nailed the intent, but it makes the statement seem rather vapid in the first place.

"If the drug [does this great thing] and has no destructive side effects, then I can't see much of a downside to it." Well, duh.
Best new way to make an internal sale
I fundamentally agree with the author, even though I'd frame it differently. I vastly prefer living as a Software Engineer than my days studying Computer Science, because it's not all sterile, formal, and rigorous, but is open to more complex analysis, more open-ended, and always with new things to learn. It appeals to a different mind-set, to be sure, and our traditional educational path has a serious mis-match for people who want to be Software Engineers, but I like dealing with the real world cases and the human element.
My sad affair with the iPhone 3G S
Botnets are not a new invention. They are being rented for DDoS attacks for a while now. "Cyber Wars" aren't new either: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberwarfare#Known_attacks or: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack#Incide...
How BAA uses IT to find bags and sell an airport
Apple needs a netbook because, uh, Chrome OS?
And you can also un-tag those pictures of yourself.
Yea this line also baffled me. I love safari and I use it for my development, but I didn't understand his reasoning behind this.
There's an amazingly good article on the subject here: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/06/self-discipline/
For all the talk of how Lisp is so well suited to making minilanguages for expressing things own their own terms, the lack of infix arithmetic seems particularly jarring.

I think that infix (Lisps), postfix (Forth), or all-left OR all-right associative (as in Smalltalk and J, respectively) are better choices than infix with order-of-operations (which is just historical cruft, IMHO), but making basic arithmetic awkward is an easy way to give people a bad first impression of a language. In OCaml, which has order-of-operations arithmetic syntax, people instead get mad because it uses different ops (*. +. etc) for floating point math. You can't win.
Getting to Silicon Valley: BART San Jose extension up for $40M
It's good to hear this argument once in a while - and I think it deserves to be extended to most things that are not formal figments of human thought.

In other words - can someone please forward this to the humanities department? Tell them it's OK to stop formalizing literature, politics, ethics, and the other messy fields of human endeavour. It turns out that things change regularly and generally applicable advice is much more helpful than obscure formalism founded on obsolete assumptions.

(Also: To those who say the above goes double for the economists: take it easy on the economists. They do get real results, it does work (mostly) - but realize their job is much more difficult than, say, that of physicists.
Physicists have merely to understand and model the crazy phenomena that make up our world. They are lucky in that these phenomena tend to co-operate by not changing very often. For the economists, things are not so easy - so take pity on them.)
To a certain degree it already is configurable on a per-user basis, right? Your upvotes are "saved" for you. The only other user-configurable option would be to "hide" items that you have voted on or manually hidden (a la reddit). Does that require more server power? Sure but not 2x, right?
Maximize Productivity Without Burning Out
Calculating the aggregate age of all facebook users is irrelevant since the only people who matter to you on the site are your "friends". So my 15 year old cousin's friends are mostly her real world peers and her 45 year old dad's friends are mostly her peers. While there is a tiny overlap, it wouldn't be considered significant.

It isn't like a bunch of old people are now trying to hang out with the young cool kids causing the entire system to be less cool.
Bruce Schneier: Chrome OS's Security Claims "Idiotic"
Of course not. It takes an entire weekend. ;)

Seriously now, is hard but doable. They could start by hiring the SkyOS guy: http://skyos.org/?q=node/650
I'm just wondering if the U.S. government will ever be Ramen-profitable... 'cause I'm sick of them always taking my Ramen.
> The onus is on the participants to see if their country will allow them legally.

You typically can't shift liability that way. In particular, Amazon can't. If there's a problem and someone has the choice of going after Amazon or some local little guy, Amazon gets it, especially if said someone is said little guy.

Plus there will be arguments like "if you just changed {rule}, everything would be okay", and different groups from the same country would name different rules.

FWIW, this is an example of the constant yet mostly invisible drag of "consumer protection".
As a government contractor, I can attest to the complication of process involved in getting work via FAR (Federal Aquisition Regulation) process. It, simply put, is very, very hard. Companies like Lockheed, Boeing, SRA and SAIC literally spend millions to write a contract. There are teams of very experienced people who specialize in FAR contracts and government bids, and if you don't have those people -- good ones bill $600 an hour -- you simply cannot possibly win a contract.

In addition to just being able to put together a team of people who can do the work, a team of contract writers who can summarize the work, a sales team who can establish the necessary relationships to sell the work and a contracts management team who can take all of the above input, translate the soft requirements to get what the customer really wants, rationalize that with what they really need, and win the work for the lowest bid, you also have to include unknown entities, You also need to have a certain portion of your team consist of minorities or disabled veterans and such. This is typically done by sub-contracting out portions of the work to Veteran owned or Minority owned businesses. In addition to that, you have to have past performance qualifications within the government sector. Unless you've previously developed a website for a government agency satisfactorily, and are able to get a good review for that work, you don't have the past performance quals to win work to do that work in the future.

And through this entire process, you're bidding against Lockheed, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, SAIC, EDS, SRA et al, and they do this every day. That Sunlight couldn't do it really isn't that surprising to me, having done it before as the least experienced member of a very experienced team. Without the necessary guidance, I'd say the process is damn near impossible.
We're going the bootstap + day job route. It's very hard, but we spend our time working on the project instead of worrying about funding.

However, I'm also very curious about SBA loans, and other loan financing.
I really want to use Safari for debugging but every time I get down to trying to do so, I find some irritating hangup in terms of clunkiness and polish versus Firebug, and I end up heading right back to Firebug. Two things off the top of my head:

1) console output is just not as good as Firebug. Example: try going on jquery.com and doing console.log($("p")). Instead of a pretty printed array with styled items as in Firebug in the form of <p>, with all their classes and ids and visibility status hinted in the rendering, you get an expandable HTMLParagraphElement object (and its name doesn't even respond to a click..). If you expand that, the first thing you see is a big list of DOM constants like DOCUMENT_FRAGMENT_NODE: 11, etc. In Firebug these are sorted, filtered, censored to fit to the way web developers actually work.

2) I've never been able to resize the Console/Debugger when displayed as a split pane in the Windows version. In OS X, it seems to work, but in Windows, nothing. Again, a huge irritant when you're trying to get a better look at something that's gone wrong.

Nit picks? Yes. But some of us work with these things many hours a day. Workflow issues and missing little details like these prevent my uptake of the otherwise very impressive developer tools in Safari.
> I can't see much of a downside for this potential drug, unless the act of not forgetting what you see causes problems or trauma.

Many years ago I read about a professional gambler with photographic memory who was unfortunate to be caught in a deadly casino fire. Since the fire, he was unable to enter another casino because he would be flooded with perfectly horrific visuals of the deadly fire.
According to the author that just means that you are using the wrong OS for web development, because despite how the world wide web is supposed to be platform independent, there is only one OS for web development</sarcasm>.

Besides a few profiling tools, his list of arguments seems to boil down to "things are prettier in Safari". Maybe it's just me, but that's really not my number one feature when looking at development tools.
Tim Berners-Lee Pt 2: Search, Data Interfaces, Wolfram Alpha, Semantic Web
The last sentence was the most interesting to me. Despite the high tech, you still need reliable people on the ground, and that people will always try to game the system.
Indeed. Sounds very much backwards to me.

If anything, stuff developed to work with the restricted CSS-support in older MSIE versions (MSIE8 is actually not that bad) has a much higher chance of rendering correctly in Firefox, Opera and Safari than the other way around.