skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a large difference between the rights of society to well-being and the rights of a private company to profit. Emissions-regulating devices are a requirement because removing them will physically harm other people, in a measurable way, over the long-term. Removing the anti-piracy features from your console harms no one real person—that a corporation loses profit is simply a reason for its employees to seek employment in a different company, presumably one that is not relying on such volatile externalities; it is not a reason for laws to be passed.

For an example that is almost equivalent in every way: cheating at casinos is completely legal. You are "harming" a company, and they really don't like it (and they'll show it, too) but it's not illegal. Console companies simply find it a lot harder to kick people out of their "casinos" when the house advantage falters.
Cyclops - a network audit tool for service providers and enterprise networks
I agree that we shouldn't automatically copy and past UI elements from one platform to every other, unless they present real usability benefits to those other platforms.

But one benefit I can see is that these switches increase the target area, which I've always found to be somewhat small with checkboxes and radio buttons...
I think you should look at return on assets, return on equity is too easily skewed by leverage.
[usability] The aristocratic desktop (part 3) : There's no tray icon in GNOME
I'm not sure I buy this as the reason. They're not going to drop the Flash version on YT, and people aren't going to upgrade to a very new browser with On2-supporting-<video> for no obvious difference in quality.

My guess, knowing nothing at all, is that it's probably 100M for some patents, either to push into the <video> standard, or to fend of something they think is coming.

Also, how do Adobe & Docs compete?
Researchers should simply buy these seeds, do all the research they want and publish the results, and put the EULAs that come with the seeds to good use in the smallest room of their department.

Let them sue.

Some 'agreements' (that's what that 'A' stands for wasn't it) are meant to be broken, this one seems like a particularly good example of one.

GM is good, or it is bad. Knowledge about that concerns all of us. Imagine a country where the politicians can gag the press, this is very much comparable to that.
Matasano's "Chargen" blog has a few posts on the Flash vulnerability Mark Dowd found last spring. They make it understandable.

Their site is currently down, but Google has a cache:
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:5VHY2EwpC-8J:www.matasan...
clever! thank you!

Still, it wouldn't be too much work to change arc to give us something a little nicer by default.
That's actually a bastardization of an Andrew Tanenbaum quote:

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes"
I can easily relate to the frustration behind the crude methodologies that dominate software development these days, but I think the author is missing the crux of the whole issue.

Software is pure thought-stuff. Its complexity knows no bounds. The software universe already has many orders of magnitude more complexity than all physical engineering disciplines combined, and that quantity will continue to grow.

To say that we just need to buckle down, measure things, and design rigorous and optimal methodologies is at best naïve. There is no consistency or reproducibility in software development. Every project is different, the ecosystems in which development is done are constantly shifting, the dependencies are often unknown, the big picture is too complex for any one person to fully comprehend, and individual skill sets vary so much as to make any hope of "optimal" architecture all but impossible.

Contrast with bridge building. Consider the enormous amount of experience and study that has been expended tens of thousands of times to fulfill basically ONE requirement that 99% of the population can easily understand. "It needs to be able to support the weight of the traffic going over it". Think of all the complex load bearing computation, materials science, fluid dynamics, and everything else that goes into meeting this one basic requirement. Sure, nature makes this a challenging task, but at the core you have one simple requirement which you can design your whole process around. You can try different things and over time iterate to optimal processes because the requirements are essentially the same every time.

With software you have no such grounding requirement. On the plus side abstraction allows simple software to be very very simple. However for any software of significant complexity the interactions of concerns and requirements quickly balloons out of control. The only way to manage this complexity is on a case-by-case basis. There are many best practices and common techniques that can be applied to improve the quality, but they all have a cost, and they will all have varying degrees of benefit depending on the project and the team. I'd say NASA has very very good methodologies for ensuring quality, but it costs more than the vast majority of projects could even fathom paying 1% of.

Should everyone that is willing to tolerate some bugs in exchange for a 99% discount tag get out of the software business? Should all the developers just go home and leave software engineering to be practiced and defined by corporations and government programs with 9-figure budgets?
Sony Ericsson W995
The Sony Ericsson W995 Walkman player offers the standard range of features, including album art, shake control, TrackID, and an adjustable bass level. You'll also be able to save MP3 and AAC files as ring tones. The 8.1-megapixel camera is straight out of a Cyber-shot line.
I don't have to point out the reason we have emissions regulations is limit the pollution in our shared environment. Thus I am very directly affected if a large number of people decide to bypass their emissions-regulating devices from their cars.

However, I am only indirectly affected if a large number of people choose to mod their consoles (or jailbreak their ipods or what-have-you), maybe the cost of games increases. Maybe some developers fail. Now, given the choice between owning my hardware and the DMCA, I choose owning the hardware. Even if my beloved Nintendo has to die to make it so (ok not Nintendo, maybe Sony, or Microsoft, preferably Sony).

(Next time segway into a seat-belt analogy, though that has the same fault; we require insurance and seat-belts keep insurance cost manageable. I think commenting on removing your cars governor would work, but then I would just point out that you only break the law there when you are speeding. As should be the case here, when actually pirating.)

[Is my comment rhetorically weaker than derefr's?]
How to write good tests. Top 5 considerations to build software without defects.
>> Also, how do Adobe & Docs compete?

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-311956.html - "Adobe launches competitor to Google Docs"
Top Tips for Finding the Best Credit Card Deal
> I doubt its a game, if you are not creative enough to come up with a compelling story, you probably aren't creative enough to come up with designs for the game sprites.

How could you possibly know that? Most retail games right now employ several writers. Granted, this is about an iPhone game, so it's of a smaller scale, but a good adventure game could definitely use a writer.

Also, building a game isn't about "designs for the game sprites" alone. He could outsource that too. It's perfectly possible for a person to be very creative, yet be unskilled at art and/or writing.
1) No, it doesn't. The wording is typically "read everything before doing anything". That completely ambiguous. Most exams start with meaningless instructions about which pages you can and can't write on. How to fill in bubbles completely. What type of writing implement to use. It is a complete waste of your time to read initial instructions on exams, just as it is a complete waste of your time to read the initial remarks in most other aspects of life.

2) Even if it did teach you to follow instructions, is that a good lesson? I think I've only gotten to where I am in life by explicitly NOT following instructions.
Bit off-topic, but the Rsync project als has a canary for when things go wrong: http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
I've never seen an ad and felt better afterwords.

Ever.

To the extent that I'm freeloading by continuing to patronize sites after blocking ads, I justify by directing other people to those sites when I see interesting content.
Twitter has already been around and popular for too long for someone to try and sue now for the basic concept underlying their whole service. Twitter's defense will be that this should have been brought up before -- before they've put in a few years of effort and millions of dollars.
Yahoo Has Clause to Back Out From Microsoft Deal
US Marines Ban Twitter, MySpace and Facebook
Enhancing your Online Presence
If you are impressed with this one follow the link in the video to here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlkMs4ZHHr8&annotation_id...

For all my hours as a kid I was never this good, I never even realized I could kill the pipe fish by jumping from below.
Actually it sort of is. If you have your own racetrack, or a big land you can do as you please. If you want to go on the public road there are other things/people to consider.
In belgium you have to get your car checked by an approved center every few years (stability, rust, brakes, ligths, ...). There's an option to go for a special check if you've modified your car.
Processing.js is a port of Processing to javascript and uses the canvas element.

http://processingjs.org/
To answer my own question about how these machines stack up against present day hardware: the CM series machines rated about 5 Gflops, a 2008 run-of-the-mill desktop CPU does 70 Gflops!

Special purpose CPUs such as the AMD FireStream 9270 can do 240 GFLOPS...
Wow.

My first reaction to this was "why would this guy need to send off more than half a dozen resumes to get a job?", followed shortly by "my god, how much damage is this guy doing to his career?"

One thing you'll quickly notice if you have to do any hiring in this industry is that there's a vast pool of unhirable developers out there. These guys have very little chance of landing a job, so they're forced to apply for every single job out there in the vain hope that they'll be able to fool somebody into hiring them. Because they don't have time to craft good cover letters to each of those shops, they are very easy to detect, and their resumes tend to go straight into the trash.

By emulating their tactics, the Parent is essentially placing himself into this "untalented pool" voluntarily. Dude, if you're listening, please stop. All you're doing is blacklisting yourself out of the industry.
The problem is that firmware is software. It is also legally recognized as software and gets the appropriate protections. However, it is functionally hardware in that it determines what is possible and in its often astonishingly low level -- we don't stop to think about how such and such a device contains software to help it do its job.
He wasn't but that's beside the point.

There is a -limited- market for 'real' supercomputers, and with that I mean computers that have been geared towards a special class of problems. They too exist in SMP versions, but it would be a serious mistake to think of the individual machines in those arrays as comparable to a machine in a run-of-the-mill beowulf arrangement:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SX-9

The reason these machines still have a right to an existence is because not all problems are solvable in a massively parallel fashion. Some parallelization may be possible, but the speed up from such rearranging of the problem has an upper limit. That's where these machines come in to their own.
I was worried that nobody else here would get the reference. Whew!
I'm pretty sure a lot of people would donate for a statue in your likeness if you solved that.
Damn! I knew I should've trusted my surreality radar.

In my defense, posts like the parent's -- except earnest -- aren't uncommon on HN.
First thing I do is configure the backup software!

It defies belief that a lot of people don't consider this in these guides.
Google allows you to turn the ads off.. so why the need for this 'hack'?

Go to Settings -> Web Clips and untick 'Show my web clips above the Inbox'.
I have some background with machine learning and I'm reading this book now. It doesn't seem like way a good way to learn much about applied statistics, but it does a good job of illustrating how data mining impacts people's daily lives.

There's an "aren't you shocked that they're gathering all of this data?!" tone that gets old as the book goes on, but it's generally a good read. He even describes some of the major algorithms (support vector machines and clustering) in layman's terms.
I don't mean to be negative about a fellow human (especially one in the tech industry) but Zed comes across in that 'advert' as thinking he'd be doing a company a favour by working for them. I don't know him, or his work, but in my experience touting for general jobs by making out you're better than them rarely works. It'd be ok with a company you know but in a general blog post? It's a big 'no' from me.

Good luck to Zed though, I'm sure someone will snap him up just because of his online status and it's certainly a different way to find a job!
does nicest mean most elegant design? because software support had been weak even if for a period of time microsoft made NT avaliable on mips and alpha. i'm curious about what went wrong primarily.

another thing is that in today's power first times where are the mips guys? how would they stack up against arm or ion?

last thing is can we have fabs that custom produce cpu much bigger than intel/amd ones but smaller than homebrew ones?
Sofware Pricing: Are We Doing It Wrong?
Yeah, Tweetdeck or something else that used the old password got your account locked out. This happened to me! You can get around it by going to http://help.twitter.com/portal and using the log in. It allows you to login even if you are locked out, and if you login there apparently it sets up a session or cookie that logs you into the main site. Pretty much makes the lockout thing useless!
So, for those of us who have mostly forgotten math that doesn't get used regularly, what's a good way to get an overview of at least what's possible, and where it's applicable? Enough to get an idea of what to go study in further detail in order to accomplish something, or at least ask for help/hire someone.
#2 is not the lesson actually learned. The high-level instructions contradict the low-level instructions, and the lesson is on how to handle that (usually by following the high-level instructions.) This is the lesson that the Swedish military qualification exam posted here earlier tested (with "orders of a superior" as the low-level instruction and "Human rights" as the high-level instruction.)
FUJITSU LifeBook P8010 Laptop Battery 7800mAh Fits FUJITSU FPCBP194 Battery
Agreed. I normally don't talk to people on facebook unless I already know them offline, so it really just becomes an alternative to email. If Facebook starts charging, I'll just switch to some other form of communication, because thats what I use it for - to communicate. And guess what? Theres many many alternatives for that.
The One True Text Editor
Obviously I was being unclear. My point is that Google's behaviour is already like 'hitting at women at a funeral'. Do you honestly believe they are taking trouble to 'respect sensitivities' out of sheer goodness? Hell no, the budget for that was approved by the PR department. It's already a case of exploiting cultural sensitivities.
Everyone Has a Blog - Even Mass Murderers
You know, maybe it's just me, but the picture just doesn't look as good with that spot filled in. The the composition works better with a central empty point to balance around.

Escher may not be a mathematician, but this mathematician's no artist.
Everyone I know uses gmail for the same reasons I use gmail: it has a nice itnerface, is easy to use, has plenty of useful additional features, rarely goes down, provides loads of space so I don't need to worry about deleting stuff that I might want later, its spam filter works well and ... its free. Being free is the main thing though, because google could drop one or more of their other features and I'd still use it, but force me to pay and I'd look elsewhere. Why? Because I can.

Not that I'm not willing to pay for a good service - I am (and do), but I need a lot of additional value over what I can get for free. Gmail gives me a lot of value, but I have yet to be convinced that its enough to pay for.
To me, it's not even the logo that's the problem with their current branding (as represented on actual bottles/boxes of product); it's the fact that, given the solid, sparse colors and the lack of copyright emblems or extra PR-shpeel on the label, they look like a no-name brand, a cheap knock-off of themselves made by a company that's not allowed to be them.
This was my first thought as well. In a way, this is the best thing that can possibly happen for software. It could be THE case that sheds public light on the ridiculousness of software method patents. If only patents weren't such big business for the government in the U.S.
That kind of sounds like "It's better to improve than invent"?
"Ofcom research shows 5% drop in 15 to 24-year-olds using social networking sites"

What sort of conclusion can you draw from a single 5% change in data? What's the noise level in that sample?
Have you checked out Head First Statistics by O'Reilly?
Didn't the Apollo flight computer crash/have to be restarted during the landing phase?
I think there is an important point to note in relation to this: which is that Appstore and Steam are similar ideas. i.e. a platform with games/software within easy reach and all purchasable via the same standard mechanism. But more crucially they also have a community aspect (less so Appstore I suppose) that means word spreads very quickly.

It would be interesting to see the same thing tried with a more standard retailer like Play.com or perhaps EA (with it's smaller store).

I have no idea of what would happen - but it would be interesting.
Its not always that simple to seek employment in a different company, and the process might not so harmless.

The problem is with the gaming market, and your suggestion for the developers to move to a 'safer' company - simply means leaving the gaming industry.

And I'd say that this has a negative influence on the quality of games, and it does harm customers.
I'm starting to like the sound of this "creativity" thing I keep hearing about.
But the logos are just for their flagship products, not for the companies themselves. PepsiCo sells Aquafina, Tropicana, Fritos, Aunt Jemima and Life cereal (they also used to own Pizza Hut, if I recall.) The Coca Cola Company sells Dasani, Powerade, Minute Maid, Nestea and Rockstar. These facts have a lot more to do with your stats than one product's branding.
this site contains animations about the droste effect.

http://escherdroste.math.leidenuniv.nl/index.php?menu=animat...
If your site needs an FAQ, you have failed [END]
ZS built a lot of his reputation before he switched to python -- see his rants on Ruby on Rails etc.
I've not yet seen any credible source claim that VP8 is better than H.264.

Claiming your codecs is better than H.264 seems to be standard operating procedure for codecs since it's currently the gold standard. (You'll know VP8 is the best when all the other codecs compare themselves to it!) But these claims are either just blatant PR BS or like On2 you make some very specific claims. If you read what they actually say it appears they think VP8 is "better" than H.264 when you also consider licensing.

Now I personally think that's very valid, as any royalty free codec that Google releases from this purchase will have a big advantage due to it's licensing, and that will make it "better" for many purposes. But it's not what codec nerds mean by "better".

Personally I agree with your point about codec improvements and think that Google should get something out fast based on what they've bought, but they should also be looking for defectors from MPEG-LA to work on a next-gen royalty free codec by pooling a bunch of patents and expertise. It seems MPEG-LA has either been mismanaged or has fallen victim to internal politics so there's been plenty of unrest over the years.

Sun had some patents it was going to use in a royalty free codec called OMS and they're already licencing VP6 for JavaFX so that's a good place to start.
I was living in Buenos Aires at the time, and Googled around various language schools. I paid about $15/hour for a three-hour daily session. The fact that it was costing me a significant sum of money motivated me to work harder.
This was a good read: http://www.zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html

He even mentioned just about every topic we covered in my stats/probability class. There's a book list at the end.
Directed Edge sees a post-search web where recommendations rule
If your rant can fit into 140 characters, you have failed.
When you are using a social network, you are talking about what you are doing. When you are in the military, that typically is not something you want on the internet.

Seems to make sense.
The comparison with OS pricing seems like a fallacy. You need an operating system on every computer; most people are scared of "that Linux thing". You can only sell as many Mac OS upgrades as there are Macs out there, so the way to sell more copies is to sell more hardware. For a large part of the population, Windows is therefore more or less inevitable.

Now, if Microsoft wanted to get more people to abandon XP, then offering a direct upgrade to Windows 7 and lowering the price would probably work.
I think I disagree with both of you. Some sites need FAQs simply because the issues raised are not under the control of the site owner.

For instance a forum about hardware might see the same questions pop up over and over again and can save on pollution and improve the quality of the answers by creating a FAQ, much more time can be spent on a single answer that way than it ever could be when answering the questions ad-hoc.

Even HN could probably benefit from a FAQ, there are plenty of things that pop up over and over again in 'Ask HN' threads.

And in tribute to the OP it is certainly possible to have a short but strong statement about a subject that you can qualify as a rant and that still comes in under 140 characters.

'Goto considered harmful' would be a nice candidate.

Maybe one of twitters saving graces is that it is actually quite hard to get a good flamewar going in 140 characters ;)
Hacker News user "Wheels" is a founder - congrats on the write up.

Didn't realize you were YC funded
Apple now bans e-books from the App Store
what amazes me with emacs is that every time I learn something new AND use it. Recently I've found out about irc in it, I use eshell constantly, now I've found out about gomoku.
I believe it is Wojciech Purczynski.
I've lived in Poland for a while and picked up some Polish, lived in Canada (which did not exactly help my English).

German, French and English are taught in school here as well.

Very hard not to end up at least bi-lingual.

I have a very hard time studying languages from books but I find it incredibly easy to pick them up while listening to them and being forced to communicate with people that I do not have a shared language with.
so what about apps already in the app store?
Should we form some kind of support group for writers of needless compilers? Programmers Against Needless Time Sinks...
Be Aware, Hollywood Steals Copyrights
This story began in 2003 the Santa Monica-based filmed entertainment company released the long-awaited sequel to the blockbusters The Terminator and Terminator II which was called Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines. Terminator 3 was quite a success and as every movie in the series it has got its fans.