skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"At some point, maybe soon, the Registry will be the death of Windows. At some point people will simply refuse to go through this sort of upgrade process to accommodate what is essentially a mediocre architecture based on ideas from the 1980s."

If I remember correctly, the story of how the Registry was invented (for the first version Windows NT) was told in the book Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft by G. Pascal Zachary. The rationale for the registry didn't inspire confidence (in me) at that time, and now the registry seems to be an idea whose time has passed.
For comparison, here's what computers could do outside the browser, two years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACQW8iVCbhY

Why do our expectations drop so drastically just because something is downloaded from the web and run in a browser? Not that there's anything wrong with that, but accessing something via web and running things naively aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
No. They field abuse requests for phishing sites, DMCA requests, etc. When notified, we take them down promptly.

However, whenever someone makes a phishing abuse request on the .weebly.com subdomain to GoDaddy, they don't even look at your traffic or website and just override your DNS servers/records to be blackholed if you don't answer your phone when they call.
Actually, I think MS's approach here is riskier. By not providing an upgrade path and admitting up front that many things will break they are essentially saying "OK XP users, you will have to do a clean format, reinstall everything, and it will be a pain, but it is worth it because of how amazing Win7 is." Providing a compatibility layer requires fewer balls because people have to make less effort to switch.
I've been using gandi.net and like them a lot. I'm surprised no one of the YC companies use them.
Ditto on NameCheap. I have a half dozen or so domains with them and have had a good experience there as well.
FTA: We like the element of discovery that comes from not knowing exactly how things will behave if they are joined together or taken apart. We like to say things like, “oh”, “aah”, or “that’s cool” when we half-intentionally fumble our way into a surprising design that does exactly what we want it to do and more.

Dijkstra, EWD 1041:
The programmers were horrified too: they derived their intellectual excitement from not quite understanding what they were doing and their professional satisfaction from finding weird bugs they had first introduced in their daring irresponsibility.

I'll add, people (users) tend to like it when their professionals know what they are doing. Surgeons shouldn't use chainsaws, even though it'd be more fun to do so.
And an ID card prevents this...how? ID cards will be optional for UK citizens...
A link between wealth and breeding
I'm sure you've already come across it, but the best-known alternative is the Harvard Architecture, which is commonly used on DSPs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_architecture

I don't have enough low level programming experience to say one is better than the other or that the Harvard architecture is as flexible as the Von Neumann architecture has proved to be in practice. I am just not that good of a computer scientist.

I can say, though, that I found Harvard an awful lot easier to get to grips with conceptually and fun to program - perhaps because I could map me+tool+task onto instruction memory + DSP + data.

If you are seriously interested in this I recommend getting hold of a DSP evaluation board for about $100. Analog Devices make the Sharc (and many others) which some people like because of their floating point capability; Motorola's 56k DSP series are fixed point which makes for a steeper learning curve, but many people say they're a better architecture. I learned 56k DSP. You could also look into PIC uControllers.

Please summarize and share your findings when you reach some sort of milestone.
Observational: Better Observers for ActiveRecord
Really love the layout of your marketing website. It is beautifully simple. I'm taking notes!
I'm happy to see you agree, but---to play devil's advocate against my own belief/desire---consider the following Mad Lib:

An online reference crosslinking lay and expert knowledge would be an excellent resource, is technically achievable, and would further the worthwhile (in my judgment) goal of undoing the guild-like control over [PROFESSION (adj.)] knowledge once held by the [SAME PROFESSION (pl. n.)].

Are there professions about which this doesn't fit? For example, is WebMD satisfactory for medicine? More to the point, this doesn't really exist for computer science, the first field you'd expect to have it. What do you (and others) think the barriers are? Unwilling/absent expert users? Lack of incentives?
Another crazy question. The short answer is, no, I wouldn't want any kind of specialized program DESIRED BY LEARNERS AND THEIR PARENTS to be banned, unless there was irrefutable evidence that the program was actively harmful. (And if we are going to ban something for being harmful, let's start by banning the way that mathematics is taught in elementary school in most schools in the United States.)

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/fall99/ame...

http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Skywalkertalk.pdf

I know of some worthwhile secondary school gifted programs, such as the Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology

http://www.tjhsst.edu/

or the Montgomery Blair High School Science, Mathematics, Computer Science Magnet

http://www.mbhs.edu/departments/magnet/

or the Davidson Academy of Nevada

http://www.davidsonacademy.unr.edu/

and those school programs serve the needs of some learners who don't find their needs well met by conventional school programs. Some of the alumni of the better secondary schools for gifted students end up being start-up founders, and that is great.

I didn't go through any such program. I wish I would have. No such program exists in my state, so I have sought a distance learning program

http://epgy.stanford.edu/ohs/index.html

for my oldest son, which has its own set of trade-offs. Like I did, I think he will enjoy being off to college and nearer to more intellectual peers more of the time.
Interesting, I got near perfect on some provincial exam in elementary school and was about to go into a gifted course but fell short on the pre-screening test.

I always regretted not having that opportunity because normal school always bored me. Maybe it wasn't such a bad thing.

Also, I strong disagree that they shouldn't exist. Only that they not consist of social isolation and 3 person class rooms.
does anyone have experience with http://www.fdcservers.net/ ? I was looking around for unmetered 100MBps and what I am looking at looks really good and cheap. I have a dedicated server at local ISP and one at theplanet.com - I am not really satisfied with theplanet.com one and prices for local ISP (though superb ping, of course) are a riot.
My son recommended that I listen to music (stuff without lyrics) while coding my websites. He had some theory about engaging different parts of the brain or something to help me stay on task. It did help.

I also get up about once an hour or so at work and walk around. When I find I can't concentrate anymore, physically getting up and coming up with some excuse to walk somewhere (the bathroom, the breakroom, the mail drop off) does help me concentrate again when I get back to my desk.
For comparison http://www.quakelive.com/

I really hope that id release an sdk.
Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics
There is only one process in IT which I worship:

USER PID COMMAND
root 1 /sbin/init
This article appears to argue against basic facts about formal languages and the limits of machines. The argument seems to go something like "I don't like programming languages because they force me to work in a certain way! Now, here's another way to do programming!"

The "programming environments as toys" argument seems to be at odds with fixed syntactic and semantic interpretation for programming languages, which is a bit like arguing against steering wheels for cars - sure, having the car drive itself would be nice, but throwing away the steering wheel is really not going to have the desired effect.
Because the stock radio will still work. If your browser stops working for half the sites you visit daily, you can bet almost everyone would upgrade.
TechStars Hatches 10 New Companies
GoDaddy has a no-frills solution with wildwestdomains. We use the api in our systems and it was a nightmare to implement but works well enough.
Does choice of hosting provider figure in selection of startups? Will one startup get preference over another otherwise equal startup if the former is (not) using a particular hosting provider/mail/registrar?
Crush It: Gary Vaynerchuk's new book on making money from your passion
Some interesting/impressive startups.

I'm especially impressed that TechStars got 150 investors to their demo day. That's a pretty good draw in this economy (especially if it was in Boulder-- was it?).
I venture most of these are already present. Eg I've read elsewhere about "indicator strips" on the casing which divulge water exposure, the accelerometer ICs these days usually can be programmed to generate an interrupt on high-g, and there may already be a temp sense in there (eg some accelerometers carry these on board for temp compensation).
The short answer is, no, I wouldn't want any kind of specialized program DESIRED BY LEARNERS AND THEIR PARENTS to be banned, unless there was irrefutable evidence that the program was actively harmful. (And if we are going to ban something for being harmful, let's start by banning the way that mathematics is taught in elementary school in most schools in the United States.)

The harm done is that students are wasting a huge amount of time that they could have spent on a startup. There is nothing better than being able to make money on your own and gaining financial independence.

Brain power and energy decline with age after your mid-twenties. So pursuing a startup later becomes more difficult.
Ask HN: If you play an instrument, which is it?
Most of the coders I've met either play an instrument or wish they could play one.

I play the violin, but not at concert solo level. So I just play for my own enjoyment (digging into classical, modern and folk).

On the coder side I've run into people who do drums, piano, flute, etc over the last several years. Playing music or just wishing to play music is a consistent thread here.

I'm just wondering - what are you guys/girls playing?
"If anything will drive people to Linux, it will be this Registry-centric architecture of Windows."

Wait... what?

This whole article is laying things on a bit thick, but this quote is especially hard to swallow.

The two groups of people that primarily buy Windows are individual consumers, like my dad, and corporate IT decision makers, like my boss.

I can't imagine either man saying to me, "I'd love to stay with Windows but its damn Registry-centric architecture is something I just can't get past. It's sure making Linux look pretty attractive."

There are plenty of legit reasons for choosing or not choosing to use Windows. I have a hard time swallowing that its Registry-centric architecture is high on most people's lists.
I think they might just be talking about using it for mass-outbound messages from an app, not for actual human-to human messages. (Never had a problem with Gmail for my personal/work e-mail, anyway.)
Yeah, the registry is great. It would be much better though if the data was stored in application specific data files. They could still provide a unifying API but make it really easy to remove an application.
I thought the point of hacker news was to give an opportunity to small teams and startups, not just because it comes from google
But might your dad (or your boss) say that the upgrade to Windows 7 is so troublesome that they might just as well switch to Linux? I've been amazed at how easy a switch to Linux (by other family members) has been in some cases I have observed.
It's not clogged from the machine's perspective, but the user's. The problem is cleanly maintaining a computer with a registry that's gone through hundreds of OS updates and driver/application installs and uninstalls.
Combined with http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639266, it seems like Twitter is less about inviting millions of strangers into the minutiae of your life than it seems from a naive view.

I seem to remember danah boyd talking about something to that effect at one point; that a lot of the Twitter activity she'd observed among young people was about talking amongst a small circle of friends. The only people really broadcasting on Twitter are people who were already famous for something besides their 140 character brilliance.
Then your argument is actually against making schooling compulsory after the age of fourteen or so.
I apologize. I had just hit another site in which I received a nasty message. I should have clarified that my ire wasn't necessarily targeted at the article, or the site in general, but at the holier-than-thou who feel the need to rub my nose in it.

Again, my apologies.
If you're going into plugin route, then Java applets can already do OpenGL without any hacks, and will blow away anything that Flash can do. Quake 2 has already been ported, for example (http://download.java.net/javadesktop/plugin2/jake2/).

But that's not really the point, is it?
Getting rid of compulsory education after the age of 14 or so would be great. Gifted programs are a step in the wrong direction as they require even more time from students than normal programs and encourage them to pursue a life working for others.
Switching to Linux is as easy as switching to Windows 7 -- both options require reinstalling your operating system and all your applications.
You're right. We still use it for inbound, and human based outbound. We do things like send monthly reminders to pay for Tipjoy, meaning lots of emails sent regularly.
Twitter Tries to Regroup After Web Attack
No, they're testing for reproduction of the bluescreen crash that someone attributed (without a dump, or even a screenshot) to the memory usage of chkdsk.
Ah, another silver bullet.

Programming is not the only discipline that has adopted specialized languages. Disciplines like music and mathematics also use their own unique descriptive notations. Programming is not hard because of programming languages; on the contrary, learning a programming language is by far the easiest step in learning to program. Becoming a good musician, or a good mathematician, takes years of practise and study. Programming is no different.

That's not to say you can't simplify programming, in the same way that Guitar Hero and Wii Music simplify music. But you can only do this by hiding complexity, by restricting the user to a small subset of a very broad subject. This can be very useful; but you can't replace programming altogether using this technique, any more than Guitar Hero has made the electric guitar obsolete.
This system could save Apple a lot of money. However, there is a tradeoff: the perceived quality of Apple's customer service will take a hit.

One of the reasons Costco became really popular was their return policy. You were able to return any consumer electronics device without any questions asked. If word spreads that Apple refused to accept faulty devices, they'll end up pissing off their existing customers and scaring away new customers, even if the fault was due to abuse.

Another issue: will they count jailbreaking as "abuse"? What about using an unofficial app store like Cydia? (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=746198)
Collapsible Tab Groups - Mozilla "Reinventing Tabs" Challenge Entry | capcloud
Start with Wubi http://wubi-installer.org/
Switching to Win7 doesn't require you to give up all your applications.
Hugo Awards are this Sunday
I play guitar very poorly. When I'm stuck on a problem I'll run scales for awhile until the answer hits me.
I think this goes well with the whining story posted a couple months ago about how the higher ups at twitter weren't using the service right, by which, they weren't using the service as useless "social media expert" follower whores want to use it.

One of the problems I've had to address in developing a social media analysis product is figuring out whose tweets get read by humans, and which ones are just followed by other bots. It's hard to approximate without access to lots of data which isn't available over the API. On the other hand, it will be easy for twitter to figure this out.

A few days ago, some users stopped showing up in search results. Are they starting to tighten the noose around spammers? The beauty of twitter is that I've already whitelisted those who I want to hear from. It can completely eliminate the spam problem with email.
The Baldwin Effect - how distinct levels of evolutionary systems interact
Wow this is a good javascript engine benchmark. Chromium 3 gets twice as many FPS as Firefox 3.5
said hard limits don't apply to consumer level devices since they are concerned with economies and not absolute limits. it will be a long time before consumer level devices actually approach the hard limits that are still being talked about in the silicon world. by that time some new tech will take over.
about 25% - 35% of posts on delicious were due to spammers/bots/crap as well...
How about using GUID as another namespace on top of registry's key value?
I like the service a lot. Any plans for an undo feature? That is a fairly essential feature. Maybe have it configurable so that the undo history can be shared or it is per user.
Apple called Microsoft and said "Hey, can you guys port Office to our new OSX thing?" and Microsoft said "Sure, why not? But we're not using Objective-C" Then Apple called Adobe and said "Can you port Photoshop to our new OSX thing?" and Adobe said "OK, but we're not using Objective-C". So Apple made Carbon and their entire legacy ecosystem was more or less a solved problem.
He is arguing against "linguistic programming" and apparently proposes a graphical form of component-based programming.

This has been proposed before, and here is why it will not work: Core to programming is creating abstractions and naming them. No other tool (that I know of) beside language can do that. Sure, a graphic environment might let you connect a bunch of pre-defined components on the same abstraction level to solve a task. However, what will you do if you want to reuse this construct as part of a larger program?

Graphical tools/programming can be used for very specific pre-defined tasks on a single abstraction level, but it will never be useful for general programming.
Things We'd Like to Throw in a Black Hole
I don't want to be protected. I want to be informed.
I'm in the same boat. I'd love to have one of these, but the price is pretty high for a recreational gadget.
The AXiS49.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9-OSCl7kOc

It's like cheating at music.
I've been using the RTM and so far I plan on installing XP on my newish notebook that came with Vista. My biggest issue with Vista is the way it keeps pinging the hard drive:

http://forums.techarena.in/windows-vista-performance/974285....

I could never get it to stop completely and it runs down the battery and causes extra noise and heat. And its the same thing with Windows 7.

I'm going to pay $140 for a XP 64bit license. I would love to downgrade but MS doesn't offer that for Vista Home.
Wouldn't it be fairly simple to just fork Ubuntu?

If that completely misses what you meant, I would probably recommend just stepping back to Debian.
I agree. All of the graphical programming environments I've seen start to get cumbersome when you use them in unexpected or non-trivial ways.

And by "cumbersome," I mean it gets to the point that just using a programming language would be both simpler and clearer.
I used to play saxophone - but I sucked. I also play a teeny little bit of piano.
Let there be light: eSolar switches on first U.S. solar thermal tower
I've heard good things about Arch, if you want another bleeding-edge desktop distro. The nice thing about Ubuntu, though, is it's good for both desktop and servers, and makes it really easy to use the desktop distro for development and then use the same stuff on the server.
I've gone through some pretty painful Linux upgrades.
That doesn't work on my 64-bit Linux :(
Not to disagree with your substantive point, but I think Guitar Hero is a very poor comparison. As far as I'm aware, there's no way to take one of these toys and create any kind of original music with it, other than by smashing it into something and recording the resulting noise. A better comparison would be instruments for making (mostly) electronic music, such as synthesizers, samplers, and sequencers.

These things too can become arbitrarily complex within their specific domains (Csound being a prime example), but most of the innovation is devoted to making it easier for the mediocre player to obtain interesting musical results, at the expense of some flexibility or authenticity. This can aid learning to some degree, and substantially democratizes toolsets - for example, although I have neither the space nor the cash to buy a piano, I have access to such good emulations that it doesn't matter. Of greater importance than either of these are the innovative possibilities for creating new kinds of music that are not achievable by conventional means - even if you dislike electronic music, you probably enjoy the contributions from of audio technology to film soundtracks.

You are quite right that electronic emulations will not and should not displace real instruments like guitars, trumpets, drums etc., no matter what their level of sophistication. The same is true is of domain-specific modeling tools and pure programming. However, I submit that within their limitations, such tools have the potential to vastly increase overall productivity. And as I've observed before, patch-based 'analog computers' have a trick or two up their sleeve yet: now that cheap digital von Neumann computers are a commodity, people are doing interesting and usual things with the emulated versions that would have been prohibitively expensive in the past.
How so? I thought debt will cancel out in calculating net equity (e.g. you borrow $100 million to buy a $100 million plant, and the net equity is unchanged).
Computer model warns about 'unexpected' Central Bank announcement
Programming is hard, let's go shopping.

People have been experimenting with object models and component models for 30 years. Despite considerable progress, no one has found anything that really knocks your socks off. Old news.
HTML 5 with the 3D css feature should allow a whole different approach to this sort of thing, yes?
And what does the market share bring you? Have Ubuntu and Canonical got large userbase willing to pay for a support and further development (like redhat), or have they attracted people willing and able to contribute someting (like debian)? Not so much.

They only can (try to) dictate to others and make them do what they want and need. Which is hardly making Linux any better, I think.
IANAL and haven't looked hard into the issue at all, but surely the Jailbreak developers are in danger of being sued for some DMCA infringement?

(ref xbox mods for ppl who want to play Japanese games)
Fun with Ruby case/when statements