skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The D-Link case on gpl-violations.org fetched ~2,870 euro. Small change perhaps, but if a larger damages could be found on the scale of Microsoft it wouldn't be insignificant.

And as we see from the ffmpeg hall of shame, binary releases of wrongly-distributed GPL'd code often leave telltale strings in the binary. If you'd go to enough effort to obsfucate the binary effectively (not just strings) for every possible source file, why not just write it yourself?
Forget the Trash Bag, Bring a Towel to the Dumpster Pools
I had tons of fun last time at Googleplex when they had an OpenSocial event, and going there (even though I had to fly from Finland) actually ended up saving me tons of money with all the stuff I learned about how to use less resources when making profile boxes and how to make things scale. Highly recommended!
... I for one do think the Newspapers can make this work if they all do it at the same time.

This would imply that all the real decisions are made by just a few key individuals ... which is exactly the structure of Newspaper companies in the first place. Murdoch and friends.

---

Take for instance Paul Graham's solution to Patent Trolls[1].

PG advocates an industry wide protocol not to employ anyone who worked for a Patent Troll firm. A coordinated strike here is what Paul is talking about, and Newspapers are shortly attempting a coordinated restricting of free-to-air content.

The first steps have already begun. Times Online (UK) has restricted content for Mobile devices (try it). I cannot access editorial comment on my phone, browser at work is fine.

----

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html#f8n

---

This John Gruber article is a circular argument.

It smells a lot like ::

"Newspapers don't belive in my set of acceptable bussiness models"

.... ergo ....

"They will not make money because they didn't use an acceptable business model"
Indeed. Why don't we just go the whole hog and begin making up these little rituals where money truly becomes like a deity in it's own religion. Eventually, we could convert buildings to places of worship in the primary financial centers of the world, people will come to count their god and stock brokers could be like high priests.
I'd be surprised if it wasn't Ada. Tho' Ada code was responsible for Ariane 5 exploding, so it's not a 'silver bullet'.
Realtime Engineyard Contest Results (unofficial)
Science and Art in Software Development
PSD to HTML Conversion – The Benefits and The Beneficiaries
Employing services of PSD to HTML conversion is commonplace by now. This arises two obvious questions, who are the beneficiaries of PSD to HTML service providers and how the beneficiaries get the benefits?
The probability that a blogger can confidently say 100% is 0%.
Winning on the uphills
This idea isn't a bad one. In case anyone is interested, the most successful private space company so far is SpaceX, started by a co-founder of PayPal. It recently (December 2008) won a contract from NASA to resupply the ISS. I believe the X is because the goal of the founder is to improve the cost of spaceflight by a factor of 10.

http://www.spacex.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX
>> perhaps there are certain etiquette rules that apply to multiple people talking in a group at a party while simultaneously writing on a single piece of paper. But if there are, I don't know them.

That's it! Google Wave is Pictionary!
This is one of the best pieces I've read in a while.

Definitely worth your time.
I agree with Dabeeeenster on this one, I just spent the last 20 mins playing with wave and although I had a big spurt of "Wow, this is really cool, real time comms", I was also faced with a usability question of "What is this" and more worryingly, "What can I do now".

It's not obvious what you can do with the system easily. I spent about 10 mins trying to tag up a google map whilst other people did the same, the result being a map dragging fight and trying to type in a description before someone deletes the pin.

In summary... er... It might be useful for small internal groups of people you know, but it's going to need some marketing and training.
King Warrior Magician Lover
by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette

http://www.amazon.com/King-Warrior-Magician-Lover-Rediscover...
I agree with all of the points. The knowledge of science across the population as a whole is decaying in the US. Could've edited better.
There's also http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/ started by a crazy friend of mine.

From their mission statement: "Our mission is very simple. We are working towards launching a human being into space.
This is a non-profit suborbital space endeavor, based entirely on sponsors and volunteers."

They've done a number of successful booster tests and are well on their way to the goal.
If Microsoft Word sent information about the documents you were writing directly to Microsoft, or Outlook informed them of whom you were meeting when, there would be a huge outcry.

Google has all this information about people who use Docs and Calendar. It also has access to all the e-mails you've sent and received if you use GMail, and where you're travelling from and to if you use Maps. With search, it's knows which APIs your company is using, who's working on your projects and what you're trying to create.
- You need clarity and good english. A decent source of this is BBC radio 4.

- Humour which is just a case of reading/watching a lot of funnies and generally understanding humour.

- Self-deprecation, grow thick skin and loosen up. ;)

- But most importantly you need some STRONG opinions.

Creative inspiration is required to write the best stuff and strong opinions will mean you are more inspired to write about particular topics. Find those topics, use all of the above skills and then suck for about 5 years until you get good at it! :)
Thanks man, exactly what I was feeling. Of course Apple is not DIRECTLY responsible but in the end it is - they let produce (as everybody else within electronics) in a dictatorship with underpaid wages, low security and a rule by law where the (!rich) individual almost amounts to nothing. But in the end as cesare already pointed out it will be rationalized (everybody does it! free market! yeah!)

Rule of law/by law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_law#Rule_of_law
You may find this reference helpful: http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/assembly_language_manual.html

Found it after following up the http://ibiblio.org/apollo link in a file header. :)
Nice rant. If I think about it long enough, it's depressing. So I won't. I'll code something instead.

(Sometimes I think the reason I program so much is because the big issues seem so futile. This is one thing that I can do something about right now, so I do.)
How to Increase Sign-ups by 200%
Just a blog, the actual presentation is:
http://www.boostcon.com/site-media/var/sphene/sphwiki/attach...
And now we have the code! Woo!

There should be much rejoicing.
HOW TO: See the Longest Solar Eclipse of the Century Online
Schmidt is in with Obama. Schmidt was an "advisor" during his campaign. They wont be gunning for Google (unless something super monopolistic happens)
Sacrificing Quality Costs More Than You Think
Social Skydiving Day 27: Turned Down for a Date, I Feel Great
I'll see it before I believe it. I'd be very surprised if they didn't somehow manage to cripple it on non-windows os'es. Sorry for being such a pessimistic old man.
Palin's Resignation: The Edited Version
What is difference between Line Feed (\n) and Carriage Return (\r)?
9 Marketing Tips from a Six-Year Old’s Lemonade Stand
Jet turbine could power hybrid electric car
This isn't unique to AVG, but it does make you wonder what goes through the heads of corporate managers who decide how to "improve" their products.

Products seem to follow this cycle:

- 1.0 - neat idea, needs more

- 2.0 - wow, nice!

- 3.0 - okay, I can only use some of those new features, but not bad

- 4.0 - um...I suppose it's nice for people who do that kind of thing

- 5.0 - okay, at least they're supporting $NEW_OS_VERSION now; wait, that's odd, someone's added a toolbar

- 6.0 [read: 5.1] - where did these ads come from, and who said I needed an auto-updater?

- 7.0 [read: 5.2] - web integration? and where's all this extra CPU usage coming from?

- 8.0 [read: 5.3 beta 3] - I can't tell what the new features are...but now I have to go for coffee while it starts up
Celebrate the Passionates
"Money won't solve all your problems but it allows you to arrive at them in style." - Tony Robbins
Bad article. It talks about a security issue at twitter where you can/could get a .htaccess file but does not go into any detail about that. It simply mentions general .htaccess things. Boring.
The notion of antitrust law is fundamentally flawed to begin with. What constitutes a monopoly? Is it having a large share of the marketplace? The government grants monopolies in the form of patents so how is that different than a company serving its customers well and thus reaping the rewards of that service? And what's wrong with that?

Has anyone been forced to use Google? You have options of course and you always will.

I didn't support Netscape's complaint against Microsoft when that happened for the same reason I don't support any complaint against Google now-namely that the whole idea of a free market generated monopoly is absurd. This is just another case of someone wanting to advance their career who understands nothing of free market economics.

I think this time though a lot more people are more supportive of Google and realize that Google improves the quality of their lives tremendously. I'll be interested to see what sort of reaction occurs if a trial ever even happens. My guess is that threats will go on for awhile and if Obama is reelected you might see something happen.
Expert Confirms Authenticity Of Vinland Map
Investors in dotcoms very much are paying for software...
Are there many hackers that don't have this already?

I know I'm addicted, I've stopped reading reddit and digg for this very reason, but other sources of data have crept in to keep my "fix" going. One thing that seems to have helped is that I don't surf the internet while I watch TV anymore. I'll do either one or the other. When I do both I get zero pleasure because I can't really give my attention to one.

Does anyone else have any strategies that have helped them with their problem?

http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/addiction.png
San Diego Prenuptial Lawyer
San Diego Prenuptial Lawyer James D. Scott is a Family Law Firm specializing in divorce, separation, mediation, child support and complex divorce cases.
A very good example of the kind of editing any magazine editor has to do with raw copy. I never worked for a magazine more glorious than a trade magazine, but I found that copy editing always turned into manuscript editing.
I find it interesting that the article seems to be pointing the finger of blame at Apple-however I can't Apple really being to blame here. This seems like more a problem with an extremely stressed individual and an extremely controlling corporation that is employing him. Something tells me that if the guy had lost ANY secret product (not just Apple's) the pressure applied to him would have been immense.
It was nice to get an alternative to the idiocracy theory that we're getting stupider because stupid people are having more kids. That sort of thinking is doomed to turn a grave social problem into a two sided us-vs-them culture war.
A Scientific Approach to... Gaining Twitter Followers?
A study of ten separate follower acquisition techniques, complete with "cost per follower" metrics and a discussion of how follower value varies across each technique
See, you're assuming newspapers are actually doing original reporting that's all that expensive. Many stories running in papers and on TV (especially locally) consist of "well, let's call both sides and get their quote on this" or "let's base it off this press release" or "hey, my white house source just fed me the white house's 'unofficial' take", not "ok, let's track down Deep Throat II and launch a full-scale investigation of this incident involving hours of combing through records".

The majority of "journalistic investigation" isn't hostile nowadays. What I mean by that is that they're not getting sources acting against their superiors' interest, and they're not breaking stories they've investigated. It's not like Watergate where you have dozens of people following leads for one story.
U.S. Withheld Data on Risks of Distracted Driving
It's more meta than that. If knowledge was decaying yet interest remained high, then that could be addressed straightforwardly.

What's happening is analogous to children believing that meat comes from supermarkets, not farm animals... Accomplishments of science and engineering are taken for granted. But mobile phones and MP3 players don't grow on trees...
I haven't looked at the code that gets generated by `recur`, but I'm guessing it creates a trampoline, and it looks a bit limiting. (e.g. you can't recur with variadic functions) That said, probably all of the excercises in SICP could be done with `recur` and `loop,` with a few minor changes. Thanks for the tip.
Hey, Gang, Let's Watch the Web Together
"Other ideas are to have men count money before they go out hitting on women, because they are going to be rejected a lot."

That's funny. Same with the giving kids money to count idea. Wouldn't this make people feel more depressed, more in pain in the long run when they realize it's not theirs or some might be like "I can never make that much" etc.

Reading "The power of now" by Eckhart Tolle will totally make you reject these ideas and you will most likely be told to the way out of pain is not with money, rather to be present and accept the now.
Productivity Increases Going To The Already-Rich
A visualization of why 1/4 + 1/16 + 1/64 + 1/256 + ... = 1/3
I uninstalled AVG ages ago. The resource consumption was what did it for me. As for the other complaints, they're not really such a big deal once you learn how to deactivate features that you don't need, and to set it so that AVG doesn't notify that you've deactived them.
VCs are practicing what they preach
My Thoughts on NoSQL
It would be really nice if this person commented inside their code.
The biggest issue I see here is that we are in the middle of a mess caused by lack of monopoly enforcement in the banking and finance sector by previous administrations, and the Justice Dept. makes no signs of fixing that problem or even admitting it exists. In fact, financial institutions are even more consolidated coming out of this crisis.
Sorry for being dense, but although the clicking and prediction and word selection are just fine, I don't understand how this is used to actually type anything _into_ any place else? I couldn't select the typed text by dragging my mouse, or anything like that. How is this intended to be used?

Also: Interesting that you laid out the letters simply in alphabetical order (as opposed to QWERTY, Dvorak, or anything else).
I didn't make the joke, just pointed out what it was.
Barnes & Noble Plans an Extensive E-Bookstore
I have never used it but from what I have read I wonder how much of it could replace Exchange and SharePoint within the corporate environment.

Could you see a company hosting it internally and manage permissions via Active Directory or LDAP groups to allow collaboration on documents or discussion groups?

Does it have potential to help the information overload that plagues corporate email (or maybe it will make it worse).

Calendaring? Does it even exist in the Wave universe?
"We’re having a debate in this country over whether or not evolution is true. They have half a point- evolution isn’t science, not anymore. Today it’s technology."

What an excellent point.
Simple: They forgot to invest in people who can lobby their side in Washington. Microsoft had the same problem in the 90'ies. If you aren't spending 20% of your income on lobbism as a big company, you are a sitting duck. A startup don't have to, since they are mostly invisible anyway.

Yes, this sucks and I would love a world in which it was not. Being realistic, however this is the way out of it.
Mozilla declares crash bug triage day
Monopoly enforcement? Really? Which bank has a monopoly on which industry?
Ad sense lets them know which page you just viewed.

iPhone voice interface for maps gives them your voice biometrics.

Search history must be a treasure trove for a psychological analysis and profile.

Lets hope Google is not an NSA operation.
Marked up in 3 colors? Looks like my source code by 10 p.m. on a typical day.
Most of the code consists of small functions such as

let load_prog_platter a = !platters.(0) <- a; a

for which comments would just get in the way. I don't know if you know OCaml, but that's roughly the same as

plat load_prog_platter(plat a) {
(*platters)[0] = a;
return a;
}

I don't think commenting that should be necessary.

He did comment one part, though: "(* we deliberately use Array.get to check bounds; use unsafe_ for speed *)".

(The only big function, exec, is an Opcode -> Action table.)
That's a lot of red - but it reads much better. Good job, editors. :)
Plastic Logic is to Barnes & Noble as Kindle is to Amazon
When programmers design web sites (comic)
The problem is that they worry foreign companies will muscle into the picture.

Imagine if China landed the first Moon Base in 2020 and was wellestablished there before the US even landed another astronaut. Highly unlikely BUT the fear is there - and with that fear comes the other one; strategic habitation of the Moon establishes something of a superiority over other countries.

Summary: the US govt. will guard NASA as long as it can. It can use it to make sure that it holds onto much of the tech (or at least controls who makes it).
Making of the iQ font - When driving becomes writing
Learning to Love Jetpack
Ask HN: Readability loves readers, but at what cost to authors?
Readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/) offers a great enhancement to my experience of web-based info. And (even at v. 0.4) to printability of pages (esp. of blogs and blog systems whose print systems are often ugly and wasteful of ink and paper).

However, when I want to print and share with someone else there is the following drawback: the author, original web site, etc. are almost always not printed.

Does this worry you? as authors? as readers?

As it is, I have to hand-write the URL and author on a printed copy.

Maybe this is just an issue for Readability to fix in future versions. But another issue is: do not the designers of blogs and sites need to be more aware of services like Readability and take sensible steps (like including date, author, original url, etc) to be sure ownership is displayed in the body of their articles/posts? I sure would if i were designing blog for myself.

Surely Readability is just the first of what will likely be scraping/reformatting apps, especially when annoying bandwidth-sucking, ink-draining ads dominate so heavily the printed as well as screen versions of sites. Your ideas?
An automated way to find cross-browser bugs
J2ME Mobile Development Series Part 9
The way they draw wiggly lines around the coast - is that supposed to be geographically correct? Or is it just shorthand for "beware: coast is wiggly"?
Apollo 11 command module is released to open source
> KType is currently only useful for typing in short phrases and hasn't been integrated into a large text-editing webapp yet.

It shouldn't be too difficult to incorporate this into a webapp that lets the user type lots of text - sort of like the T9 mode on your cellphone. The original goal was to allow the user to type about 140 characters (SMS/Twitter) and hit a Submit button.

The reason for choosing alphabetical layout was to minimize mistyping due to unsteady hands. Three rows like a QWERTY etc. keyboard means when user is trying to hit a key in the middle row, they could accidentally hit a key above or below the desired key. In two row layout, this issue is minimized. Also notice the keys are in a piano-keyboard style layout with ample gap around each key, thus reducing the chances of error further.
That's because, unless your architecture is utter crap and your server is wide open, you can't get yourself into much trouble by exposing the .htaccess (other than that by consequence your site would be down).
Google has invested in lobbying - for at least the past few years. You can read a 2007 Washington Post article about it here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06...

It would have been careless for them to avoid this.
Why is it that testers don’t build communities, but developers do?
I agree with you that it's a problem -- as the name indicates, there's a strong offline metaphor for e-mail.

But I think the way Wave will get around this is by being used first primarily not as a communications tool, but as a collaboration tool.

When you're a business or other team trying to get a project done, you use the tool that lets you work together most efficiently, and you don't care if it feels more like IM or email or a wiki (wikis, here's something with no offline equivalent and whose mainstream usage took off like a rocketship), and so that's how I think it will get traction.

From that point forward, as people use it as a collaboration tool, they'll seamlessly come to use it as a communication tool, and it might progressively replace email and IM (and social networking?), as I believe it can if it's indeed as good as it sounds.
As difficult as it is to find a great programmer, it is doubly difficult to find a great tester.
Except that their "expert" is completely wrong.

A simple trip to Wikipedia would show that he knows nothing. It's really bad when Wikipedia knows more about your field than you do. There have been several studies proving that the map is a forgery.

The problem is that most people don't understand the scientific method. With the scientific method, you take a hypothesis (that the map is authentic) and then you try to find evidence disproving it. Once you have found evidence disproving the hypothesis, it doesn't matter how good a forgery it is, it's still a forgery.

For real scientific analysis:

http://vinland-map.brandeis.edu/explore/material/clark.php

http://vinland-map.brandeis.edu/explore/material/mccrone.php

http://vinland-map.brandeis.edu/explore/material/cahill.php

Sure, there are things that point to it being authentic, but it isn't. If you're accused of murder, you had a grudge against the guy, people heard you say you'd kill him, and you bought a gun that day, that's all evidence that you might have killed him. But if a group of people all saw you at the time of the murder, then you didn't kill him no matter how compelling that other evidence is - in science, a single disproving fact invalidates supporting evidence because that's what truth is.
Just stop using anti-virus? What's the point>
By that reasoning, every Apple customer is also indirectly responsible. I don't see the problem as cut and dry as manufacture in China vs. some place else. Don't you think these condition you describe would persist w/ or w/o the electronics manufacturing industry.
Yeah, the POTUS sounds like a stammering idiot without his teleprompter. But let's keep talking about the irrelevant Sarah Palin...

The double-standard is the religious orthodoxy of the left.
Wave isn't about replacing email per-se. It's about a paradigm shift that obsoletes Exchange and perhaps threatens Facebook's position.

As for contracts, Wave retains a versioned change history that can be replayed, and certainly has a better guarantee of authenticity than unsigned email.
You edit your source code on print outs?
If Apple would put a webcam on the iTouch then they'd have the device I'm looking for...a video phone (using Skype)
For me, the biggest problem with the whole the-browser-is-the-os thing is that all your files and data live in different locations that are sealed from each other. I should be able to transfer a photo from Flickr to Facebook etc. in some standardized way. Perhaps this can help take us a step in that direction..