skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, Compete is probably really inaccurate, but still. I'd bet good money $2 million isn't coming through that web site.

According to Google, there's exactly one link on the entire web to FreshJerky.com. All these happy customers would be linking and talking about it, if it were true.

It's not like journalists actually verify claims like this. If the guy says he has $2 million in sales, that's what gets written.
Protecting every single packet on the internet... Isn't this why we have IPSec?

I would also say he misses the mark on why https/SSL is underemployed: Either you have to pay outrageous sums of money for wildcard certificates or you have to have a public IP for every domain you want hosted.

Had https allowed sending host-headers etc before authenticating (like with TLS) this would not have been a problem, but given the current state of IPv4 addressing space and the refusal to support TLS in the https protocol, this is unlikely to change any time soon. At least not before IPv6 goes mainstream. IPv6 which mandates that IPSec must be supported.

I'm not sure I see how this effort is being particularly useful. Am I missing something obvious here?
Microbilling in the form presented in the article is still so unpopular as a method of payment that I doubt its worth considering at the moment.
This reminds me of another manifesto arguing to expand our ideas of what's possible, 'The Hedonistic Imperative', that takes a mostly pharmacological approach:

http://www.hedweb.com/

For that matter, this piece has strong similarities to the Unabomber manifesto, aka "Industrial Society and its Future".

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_Fut...

All such romantic manifestos are interesting in how they make you think, but the devil is in the details. Humans compete for power, for status, for reproduction; if you somehow remove economic competition you might get something worse, corrupt and oppressive and murderous in another direction.

And the hunter-gatherer past was a bit nastier than this piece lets on. Some alternate views:

http://www.troynovant.com/Franson/Keeley/War-Before-Civiliza...

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html

Pinker summarizes the knowledge of prehistoric combat death rates: "If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million."
1.2 Billion cards? They better not use a smallint as a primary key then
48 hours total. Probably around 10-20 "man-hours" actually spent.
There's a rather simple metric actually: A good programmers stuff works.

You don't have to go back and fix it, you don't have to rewrite large parts of it to extend it.

One day I want to write a VCS history analyzer to quantify these things. Svn blame ($yourtool annotate) works to an extend, but there's a lot of untapped potential in that data.
Ditto - these are going to be perfect for non-tech savvy family members
It's a valid question in applied sciences, where techniques change rapidly - though perhaps more at the graduate level. In many other fields, not so much. Call me naive, but I think college should emphasize fundamentals rather than what's hot, and the fundamentals don't change that rapidly.

Anyway, to answer your question, sell them. I buy computer books that are an edition or two out of date because I'd rather pay $10 than $60+, and I can catch up up on the new stuff relatively easily. This works most of the time.

Cheap trick: get textbooks from amazon.co.uk - same edition, paperback, less than half the price. They don't jack the prices of the Euro editions to anything like the same extent that they do here.
They certainly look the fanciest, and I admit to the quality of their recent hardware (but really only the recent one). But I'd argue that they also sacrificed some usability to the fanciness. I must even hand it to Microsoft that in some cases they added features that make it easier for power users, even if they don't look as pretty.
IPSec probably introduces too much latency for DNS. As far as I know, DNSCurve doesn't add any additional packets to the transfer. One packet request, one packet response. I doubt IPSec works that way.
How much new information is in the 8th edition that justifies the price difference, do you think?
Actually I remember a few years ago reading an article that said that the Federal Reserve was studying the feasibility of embedding RFID tags into paper currency. Doing so would allow the banks to know how long a particular note had been out of the banking system and stuffed in a mattress.
Then a penalty could be assessed when the note was redeposited. The article said that such a system could allow banks to pay negative interest rates but still be less of a penalty than the penalty for hording cash. As I recall the article said that a $100 bill would be worth about $10 less every month that it was kept out of the banking system – just as an example of how it could work.

This is a different article that talks about the same idea in Japan http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/art...
Which is why they are on reserve. Essentially reserve only allows you to have a textbook for 2 hours and there are usually conditions which do not allow you to reserve it more than x times per week etc.

If there are 3 reserve texts for a 150 person class where likely 80% of the people in the class own the book/are not aware of the reference section, you can assume that you will be able to get a book reserved for a few hours at your leisure (or at least get on the waitlist).
Flagged because currency discussions are not distinguishable from politics discussions.
MS won't make a mistake of forcing people to adopt WIN7 otherwise the result would be same as IE - there are many, especially in the 3rd world countries where they are just looking for a reason to dump windows but they keep it because it came pre-installed - just 2 countries (china & india) can make windows dead in matter of years (if not months) if they try to force it ...

also who knows??, there are new guys (read Android, WebOS, OS-X) who MIGHT be waiting for the opportunity to jump in ... i dont know why but i feel that eventually google will enter the game by getting android from phones to netbook to notebook....!! if the brand like HTC starts making netbook/notebook then i won't be surprise if it comes pre-installed with android !!
Yeah, I would say its something a lot like the new Google Wave that they announced a while back. NotoAir is note-taking software first and a collaboration tool second. First, you use NotoAir to take notes, stuff for like classes, etc. Then, if the note isn't personal you can make it public. So if I where taking a note for a class... I wouldn't have any good reason to keep that only to myself - so I could let other people see my notes. The application (the Air app) started as a simple html/wiki based note taking application that I decided to see if I could turn into an service and maybe eventually a product.
How can a model that has never been tried be unpopular?
At least the idea was derived from scientific results, not the other way, which makes me a little more comfortable.
Some reasons I could think of, off the top of my head..

* Doing a lecture series only takes as long as it takes to film. There is no post-lecture work, such as rigorous editing or re-organization of ideas.

* You can rant. As long as you are speaking and guiding the listener along with you, you can easily make reference to things that are explained later on or go on tangents. If you are publishing an article and go off topic, people might skip it sections all together or become confused by the switch as they only skim text.

* Publishing a piece of text in your name is a bigger deal than posting a video.
Paradoxically it's because it seldom happens.

The fact that it's a rare and big occurence makes it newsworthy. It plays to a lot of peoples natural fear of flying[1] which makes the story that much better. The fact that a lot of people usually get killed helps too. Even though it's a rare event it seems like it happens all the time, simply because it's a major worldwide newsstory every single time. This tricks people into believing that flying is unsafe - they constantly see newsstories and documentaries about people who have died in an air crash.

People are afraid of sharks for much the same reason, even though your chance of being devoured by a shark is significantly smaller than the chance of falling down the stairs and dying

[1] This natural fear could well be rooted in the evolutionary advantage of being scared when you are up high looking down. The ones that weren't scared fell off the cliff and died.
How could that possibly make a difference for the intended application? Is the server CPU-maxed and never faces IO waits where more calculation is free?

If speed were a valid goal (and it's not), then:

(1) You would only use overkill 64-bit integers if on a 64-bit processor and profiling had proven them to be faster.

(2) Precalculating the factors would speed the clearer code, possibly making it faster:

const unsigned long factors[5] =
{ 1, 52, 52*52, 52*52*52, 52*52*52*52 };
// decode a 5-digit base52 number
unsigned long b52(const char *c) {
unsigned long result = 0;
for(int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
result += factors[i] * b52map[c[i]];
}
return result;
}

...or unroll the loop...

// decode a 5-digit base52 number
unsigned long b52(const char *c) {
unsigned long result = b52map[c[0]];
result += (52) * b52map[c[1]];
result += (52*52) * b52map[c[2]];
result += (52*52*52) * b52map[c[3]];
result += (52*52*52*52) * b52map[c[4]];
return result;
}

(Here I'm trusting the compiler to precalculate the powers of 52, but the code is still clearly 'parsing a base' rather than 'mysterious multiplications and divisions'.)

(3) You would strongly consider using a Base64-based approach, so all conversions involve bit-shifts instead of multiplication. If certain characters can't be used -- eg vowels -- you might still prefer large gaps in your ID series. (If you're using a SQL database, it won't care -- but then again, if there's a SQL database anywhere in the system, its operations will make these micro-optimizations even more ludicrous than they are already.)
IPv6 doesn't help, since it doesn't mandate any particular key management (and BTNS isn't even finished), nor does it mandate that IPsec be enabled.
If the train disappeared and most of the bodies could not be found, then yes.
Info shared | Michael Jackson Email Worm
It's not the number of people - modern aircraft are built to be extremely airworthy, and if a plane goes down, it means that many things at once went terribly wrong in a very unprobable sequence.
Related discussion from Brad Templeton about why crypto isn't widely used: http://ideas.4brad.com/overengineering-and-non-deployment-ss...
It depends on how you count...
Review my app coded in the past two days: BookBox
http://www.lkozma.net/bookbox

embedded for ex. on my main page: http://www.lkozma.net

I made this small widget during this weekend to learn a bit of javascript. I'd be glad to get feedback on how understandable, usable, etc. it is or feature ideas, suggestions.
No, you are completely wrong. Taking a paid summer job that is "character-forming" just to make ends meet instead of pursuing the career you want is just a diversion. Any time someone says that something builds character, I am very suspicious.

"Unpaid internships are a scam?" Wrong. You have never heard the wisdom that you should give the first one away.

Obviously, you've never tried to work in a highly competitive industry in which it is difficult to judge aptitude. Most of these jobs are filled by networking and word-of-mouth references.

If you want to work in, say, fashion, it will be nearly impossible to get a decent gig if you don't first work as an unpaid intern in NYC. (Unless, of course, daddy is rich and powerful.) So you start at the bottom, doing shitty menial work for an established person, and working hard, and then you leverage their professional network and credibility to work your way up the ladder. At the very least, this system filters out people who can't get shit done.
Is this more secure than Freenet then?
I could not disagree more with the article. Work is not evil. Oppression is evil, sometimes the way people treat each other in the context of work is evil. But work itself, especially hard work, is good for the soul.

It's not the drudgery or labor that's so satisfying. It's the sense of working on something necessary. No one would drive rail spikes or write in machine code for fun--at least, not on the scale necessary to actually achieve something. But once upon a time, the tasks were necessary, and those who undertook them rightly took joy in what they were achieving. That's work. Doing something necessary and useful is satisfying, even if it isn't fun.

Automate all you want; I'm all for it. It's one of the ways we make ourselves rich. I'd never argue that writing in machine code or taking out the garbage are inherently good for the soul, and eliminating the need for such things is good. But while they remain necessary, they are a source of satisfaction. There will always be tasks like that, because there will always be great things we can achieve that aren't possible without a lot of work.

I'm constantly pursuing projects, some for pay and some for play. But the funny thing about projects for play: most of them I never finish. The ones that do become great have a lot of the characteristics of work: I can see a need for them, I expect a big payoff for completion, others ask me to get them done, there's some sort of time constraint, I approach in a disciplined way and power through the dull bits. Of course, the inverse is also true: those projects I do for pay which turn out great have a lot of aspects of play: I make them interesting, I learn things, I experiment and inject humor, I have time to make them beautiful, to do things right. Great achievement lies in the intersection of work and play, I think.

I certainly wouldn't advocate unemployment, as this fellow does. I spent a year or so unemployed, once--and with no real financial pressure to get a job. It was absolute misery. My creative and passionate impulses slowly dried up. I always say, "I'll learn this new language when I have time," but in fact I learn things exactly when I don't have time, but need them to get something done. When I had all the time in the world, I didn't pursue all those projects I was so interested in. After a few half-hearted starts, I shriveled into a TV-watching video-gaming internet-reading ball of goo.

I plan to never pursue that lifestyle. I may retire early from financially necessary work--in fact, I plan to. But I don't plan to ever actually stop working. That was hell!
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with JavaScript, but I'm just curious as to why you want it to be the only language on the server and the client. What do you see as its advantages over (Python|Ruby|PHP|Java|etc.)? Why would you want to tie yourself to a single language when you could have your choice of languages?
I was amazed to learn that ~15% of adults in America are functionally illiterate. They can put letters together and sound out words - but couldn't, for example, answer simple questions about a short text they just read.

Over 20% of American adults are 'quantitatively illiterate'. They are unable to add two small numbers together - or parse a simple chart or table that has numbers.

Only 13% of the adult population is proficient in reading, writing, math - where proficient means being able to do simple things like compare viewpoints in two editorials or compare the cost per ounce of food items.

That means ~9 out of 10 American adults are seriously lacking in their ability to read, write, or interpret numbers.

http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/datafiles.asp
"Taking a paid summer job that is "character-forming" just to make ends meet instead of pursuing the career you want is just a diversion."

Alternatives? Remember, this is after the "pursuing the career you want" was already tried, not before.

This story could be about my little sister. Her degree is in social work. Putting aside for a moment the wisdom of that (ahem), what is she supposed to do? Entrepreneur-up a job or something? We aren't all in computer programming, where we should if nothing else at least be resume-building with work in open source. That's the exception.
We are all writers now
What plant is that? It's repulsively beautiful.
I'm not sure I see how that'd work with the really smart children. They can often get their homework done with the fraction of effort required from other kids. Praising the effort will then look ridiculous and seem like a lie. "Oh, I see that you've finished your math homework in 10 minutes. You must have worked really hard on that!"
many students on visas have to maintain a very high cumulative gpa. if they slip below 3.5 (some have told me they have to maintain a perfect 4.0), they could be kicked out.
I sell and ship all over the world and collect sales tax for Florida sales.

I use my county's tax rate which is State of Florida's tax rate plus my County tax rate.

There are 67 counties each with different tax rates. I assume other states are similar. With the exception of the 20 referenced here:

"An effort by some states and retailers to streamline sales tax laws eventually could be used to force e-commerce companies to collect tax in 20 states. Congress has considered bills that would allow states that meet certain uniformity and simplification standards in their tax systems to demand that out-of-state sellers collect sales taxes."

However even if all 50 states were to 'Streamline' one would be expected register with 49 State Tax Authorities and to fill out 50 sales tax filings each month.

After all even if I don't have a single sale I am required to file a report each month.

So then will the paperwork burden be transferred to me personally, or will my State do the work by providing me with a new huge monthly filing form in which I will be required to itemize sales to each state and tax collected for each? How much will this expanded paperwork and bureaucracy cost?

I believe that this all falls under barriers to interstate trade and is an incredibly shortsighted view for the Sates to take.

If I am selling goods to another state I am bringing money into my state which I am then spending here. Which helps my state's 'balance of trade'.

The real question which I think is not being asked is this.
Is the economic benefit of barrier free interstate trade to an individual state greater than the sales tax revenue 'lost' to mail order sales.

Internet sales are mail order sales and I think the laws pertaining to them are clear and firmly established.
One can't necessarily conclude from what people did answer correctly on a test what they could answer correctly. Were they trying their best? Why would they? It's boring and they weren't presented with any powerful reason to really care a lot about doing their best.

There is a further issue of how long it would take people to learn these skills, if they genuinely wanted to, and got helpful explanations. If someone doesn't know a skill, but could learn it in 30min if he ever wanted to, then that's no reason to call him dumb. I think to judge people you have to look at how well they learn rather than what they currently know.
I do a lot of audio/video editing. Linux, sadly, does not cut the mustard in this area. Not that there aren't many cool tools, but cool =/= industrial strength. Now the tools I use are (mainly) equally available on the Mac, but that requires a hell of lot more cash than building my own PC and putting Windows on it.

I also prefer Windows for a variety of other reasons, but cost is a significant factor.
That, and a reaction to the unknown. Accidents of unknown cause are naturally much more interesting than well-understood ones - and airline accidents, as a rule, tend to be much more mysterious than car/train accidents.
The TDR - Typographic Desk Reference Giveaway
Three more reasons:

* It takes time to figure out which details are essential and which are not. When extemporizing about a topic, which happens frequently no matter how well you prepare, you may throw in extra material because you don't have time to figure out exactly which bits are necessary to form a coherent picture for your listeners. Academics especially will err on the side of verbosity: adding a few extra facts feels like a lesser evil than leaving an important point unaddressed.

* When writing a book, you have time to pick the very best and richest examples, accomplishing as much as possible with each detail. In a lecture you may end up using many details, because each detail only illustrates a small part of what you're trying to say.

* Lectures are delivered live, with no opportunity for rereading, so repetition is important. In a book, a difficult point should be stated as clearly and precisely as possible with the expectation that a reader who is confused will reread the point many times until it becomes clear. In a lecture, you can't simply repeat yourself five times because a few of your listeners didn't understand, but you can't abandon those listeners entirely. You have to give them time to grasp the concept while at the same time keeping your other listeners engaged. Going over many examples and explaining the connections to related ideas serves the dual purpose of clarifying your point for those who are floundering and providing extra information for those who understood you the first time.
Why not right? You may soon get more than just protecting 3rd party developers when the bill to regulate VC funds is passed. I think it will be big blunder. Nobody who is an entrepreneur has any delusions of safety, we know the risks we are taking. The whole reason that this model has worked so far is because people have the freedom to take these risks. Take that away and you will probably end up killing a lot of innovation.
A few more:

* Lectures let you see how well your audience is getting it (assuming you're lecturing to an audience). So you can tell what's making sense and what's not.

* You can talk faster than you can write. In fact, in my experience, I can talk about as fast as I can think. I can't write as fast as I think. This makes me inclined to skip over some thoughts while I'm writing, simply to keep up.

Incidentally, I don't see why the first point ("There is no post-lecture work, such as rigorous editing or re-organization of ideas") is really an advantage of lectures. Certainly there are many lectures I've seen that could have used some reorganization. And, at any rate, any decent lecturer will do preparation beforehand to organize the presentation.
Make Magazine: Manual of Anti-Inventiveness
Sure, with "site code" I mean HTML + CSS + Javascript
Close to 20% over many years... at least that was the number before the current crisis. I'm guessing it's still well over 10%.
At the extreme end of this argument I can see a Matrix-esque existence where everyone is "plugged in" like so many electronics in a home.
Not true that "a lecture series only takes as long as it takes to film": they entail lots of preparation, including re-organization of ideas BEFORE the lecture.

I think that live feedback from an audience is more important: In a lecture you can relatively easily gauge audience interest and comprehension of details, so you get rapid feedback about the audience demand for the focus and degree of details.