skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fascinating article-- too bad the headline is so opaque.

I remember quite a few conversations a few days ago about the outrageousness of the dollar amount of the judgment; it's worth remembering that Tanenbaum had plenty of options to settle for a much more modest penalty, but insisted upon going to court, only to admit to downloading (which he had previously denied in depositions), on the slim hope of a "fair use" defense, which even people like Lessig had said was not really viable.

In other words: what were they thinking?
it's hard to encourage your customers to become resellers without looking like some shady herbalife-like MLM scam.
Siemens AL21 Black Unlocked
Targeting fashion-conscious youth, BenQ announced the new Siemens AL21 cell phone in a slider design and vibrant colors. A transflective TFT LCD display graces the AL21, and is capable of producing 65k colors. Metallic paint finish and translucent plastic rear casing which looks very different from other phones.
China plans universal health care
No info here. Just a random assortment of pop culture references. Don't bother.

I think this article was written by an artificial stupidity (aka, a random article generator).
Also, vibram is an established brand; I have horribly flat feet and prefer large and heavy boots with industrial-strength arch supports over running flats, but when I go to buy boots, I look for the yellow vibram logo. I don't think I've bought a pair of boots without vibram soles in the last 10 years. The idea is that they don't need to use shady marketing practices; they have a good reputation and innovative products.
"Just-in-time inventory control, an end to “time-quality-money, pick two” thinking, and true continuous improvement are at the heart of the supply chains that feed, clothe and sustain the developed world. They were made possible by a combination of new technologies and new thinking."

Seems to me that nearly unlimited cheap labor from the developing world and tarrif-free commerce are what's really at the heart of those supply chains. Maybe that's what the author means by 'new thinking'.

In any case, the article seems to conflate undeniable facts (it has become ridiculously cheap to launch a website, if you are willing to write it yourself for free) with some fairly untested but very trendy beliefs about how startups should run (agile, cat-like, continuously releasing, restlessly synergizing).
> Winters are bright with over 300 days of sun.

That's a long, sunny winter:-)

I'm still curious about Boulder. I was all set to go when we were still in Innsbruck (Austria is nice, but not where I want to live), but being back in Italy, now I'm not so sure. It looks like Boulder is pretty chilly with lots of summer rainstorms. Also, I wonder about the "smug" factor. I detect a strong undercurrent of "we're awesome and we live in the awesomest place" in some talk about that area.
I went to college in Boulder. The first thing I noticed there was that every building seemed to have a telescope on top of it. Lots of tech. Lots of outside. Great place. And they do have the best breakfast. I miss the Village Coffee shop and Lucile's.
Dell to launch China-only mobile phone
2/3 of World Population Uses Mobiles
Ok then, financial institutions. I know a lot of the Irish Revenue legacy systems are in COBOL. Y2K could potentially have affected that too (though obviously nowhere near as drastically as a power plant).
For god's sake, lawyer up.

I don't even want to think about the liability you're walking into if you're not careful.

Is there some reason you don't want to try to sell the recipe to established firms who already have the infrastructure in place?
Google App Engine - Java, Python

Heroku - Rails

localhost with dyndns

virtual machines
This "study" is obviously disinformation spread by the government... :)
does 400wpm really count as speed reading? christ. much slower than that and you are moving your lips.
Ginnie Mae and FHA: The next Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac
Stiff asks, great programmers answer
Camelot : Django for the desktop
2 Cần tuyển kỹ thuật viên đồ họa 3D
Công ty cổ phần Đầu tư Xây dựng và Thương mại Hải Vũ cần tuyển 03 kỹ thuật viên đồ họa 3D .Yêu cầu: tuổi từ :22 -:- 32,...
Small Businesses Chase Big Stimulus Money
Selling When Business Valuations Are Low
This is a great story, but I wonder if it can be avoided. Properly factoring code is hard enough just with today's constraints. You have to think about readability, maintainability, regressions, performance, scalability, etc. Now you want to separate the lower-level bits from the business logic. That sounds nice, but it requires knowing what functionality is going to be obsoleted by some new framework in the future.
People keep asking me about my Vibrams, telling me how cool they look. If "socially accepted" means blending in, then of course, you're right. But I've never had a "what a weirdo" reaction. (I live in Berlin, Germany, and there are far weirder looks here.)

I've had mine for about a year now. I just wear them like that, I don't use them to run. I like them a lot.
been there, done that. Sold to:

- CNN

- KPN (dutch telco)

- Royal Dutch Shell

- dutch government

- NASA

- a host of other large companies (100's of them), government entities and so on.

Payment: UP FRONT, or no deal. It's my product, I set the terms.

So, no, that's not crazy.

Some of them had to make some kind of internal exception in order to be able to pay immediately without having to go through their regular procedure, but if you have what they want there is always a way.

My company was small, 5 people or so at the time, payroll to meet and a simple choice: Am I going to spend my time on small customers that pay or on large customers that do not ?

When told their payment terms were not acceptable to me invariably the reaction was something like: Oh, ok I get it, let me see what I can do here, in all cases (and the list is much longer than the one I gave above, we sold lots of licenses) the deal went through and I could then afford to treat these people just as well as my other paying customers.

If somebody is going to pay you in 60 days or 90 days and you're selling capital intensive stuff, such as software that you still need to develop or customize then you are setting yourself up for a very nasty fall.

In that case get enough money up front that your development costs are covered, money on the barrel on delivery.

Otherwise hope that your competitor will pick up this customer.

Some customers it is better not to have.
But really, is it a good thing that you can read "For Whom The Bell Tolls" in 25 minutes? Do you really get the same benefit and enjoyment out of the book from reading it that fast that I do when I soak it in over the span of a week?

I read for pleasure, not for speed. I'll sometimes re-read a section of good literature several times just to appreciate the turn of phrase. Scanning the entire page in 5 seconds would completely remove that experience. It'd be like swallowing a bar of 70% cocoa Spanish artisan chocolate in three bites. Why would you do that?

So yeah, while I can appreciate that there are cases where you'd just want to skim through something as quickly as possible to suck in some information, I think I'll pass. Increasing my reading speed would actually lessen the enjoyment I get from reading.
Being A Website Mogul
Convert almost all types of fax files to PDF
Batch Fax to PDF Converter is a smart and professional Fax to PDF converter. Fax to PDF Converter can convert not only .apf, .awd, .bfx, .cals, .cal, .mil, .ras, .img, .gp4, .dcx, .fmf, .fxd, .fxm , .fxr, .fxs, .g3f, .g3n, .ds, .qfx, .tif, and .tiff to .pdf, but also other Group 3 and Group 4 compressed fax like .g3, .g31d, .g32d, .g4, .mh, .mr, .mmr, and .raw fax to .pdf in batches in both GUI and command line modes. It does not need Adobe Acrobat.
you are correct. chrome does store flash cookies even when in incognito mode. i logged out of pandora in chrome, started up IE, noticed that i was logged out of pandora, then started up chrome in incognito mode, logged into panodra, then started up IE and noticed that i was now logged in to pandora.
Helicos Machine Maps Professor’s Genome for $50,000
Effects with jQuery 1.3
Experience Planetary Data with BELLA GAIA
Social Bookmarking with WordPress Plugin
True Numbers adds semantics to numerics
Probably, it meant to make him a star?
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Great article. I think it points out something that lawmakers should be aware of.

I'm not sure I see how this bit fits in (and unfortunately I think this also makes it less likely that the rest of the article will get the attention it deserves):
And if you should make the mistake of trying to escape via a brief marijuana-induced high, it’s “gotcha” all over again, because that of course is illegal too.

You can argue for or against the legalization of drugs, but (unlike needing to sleep in a cardboard box) smoking marijuana is not a necessary outcome of being poor. You can try to argue that its necessary as an escape from reality, but this is surely not as strong an argument. Nor is it the case that this is a crime committed exclusively by the poor.
FaceBook of Sex
Want a One Night Stand? Browse 1000s of Adult Personals!
That's a really great presentation!

One observation though, what is sold as a 'game' today is more of an interactive movie.

As to the larrabee, I can't wait until it comes out. That chip is going to give NVIDIA serious headaches.

Lots of good stuff in there, I just skimmed it will go back later to read it again.
Caffeine: Google Tests New Search Infrastructure
a tiny thread - Threaded discussions for Twitter
Joshua Schachter's latest
Aaaargh - I don't want to give away the punchline but I also don't like the idea of some people becoming horribly confused.

If only HN has spoiler tags...
Joshua Schachter's latest project. Beware - submitting a comment will auto-post a notification to your Twitter account.
You need to know how to build a local development environment, anyway, so start with a virtual machine running Linux (I recommend CentOS or Debian or an Ubuntu LTS release; since they'll all work well on a real server later). VirtualBox is free and works fine.

There are a number of projects and products out there to help you setup and manage a LAMP server. (I happen to work on one, that is available in a free version: http://www.virtualmin.com )

A week or two of that and you'll have a good idea of what you want and need out of a host. The free options aren't going to give you a lot of flexibility...App Engine gives you a Python and Django environment, but the back end is downright bizarre if you're following along with traditional MySQL and LAMP based tutorials. Heroku is awesome, but you get what they give you (Ruby On Rails). If you need to send mail, you'll have to ship it out through someone else (possibly GMail), as you won't be able to run local SMTP.

But, if you're just tinkering, you can probably get by with anything that allows you to run the kind of apps you want to build.
aaahh, of course ! I was wondering what was up with those bags... The funny thing is in dutch we have an expression (zakkies plakken) which literally means 'to glue bags', it's slang for being in jail because that was the work they set prisoners to do in the past.

I was wondering whether this was some strange English analogue.
I agree completely. Disjointed mentions of all and sundry, somehow adding up to another economic meltdown here in the US.

As it happens, I'm guessing there will be will be another meltdown, but mostly because Obama and Congress are continuing to block drilling. Oil prices are now above $75 and the world's supplies are dropping about 7% a year. High energy prices will once again cause the economy to do what it did in 2007-2008, when oil hit $147/barrel.
what with the dots?
Because it's not in production yet?
no idea - I think it was a finger habit from always typing del.icio.us. Edited title to dedot.
Convert TiVo to iPod MPEG4, TiVo to iPod MPEG4 Converting software
Wanna converting TiVo to iPod MPEG4? DRMBuster can used as a powerful TiVo to iPod MPEG 4 Converting software, which can not only convert TiVo video to iPod MPEG4 format, but also convert both DRM protected and non-protected video and audio to AVI, MPEG4, WMV, MP3, AAC, M4A etc.
If you have a sound chip on your server which is capable of disconnecting itself from the microphone socket on the back then you might be able to use low-order bits from that and a tool such as the audio entropy daemon or 'randomsound' (the latter is packaged in Debian) however I'd not recommend that as anything other than a stopgap until you can get something more effective.

Simtec expect to release their Entropy Key for around GBP42 delivered in the UK. (worldwide postage costs will obviously inflate that a bit).
I wish more people would move away from viewing the internet primarily as a commerce tool.
Spooky.

I have sites at #3 for "Travel Blog" and #2 for "Software Consulting Services" when you search from Google.com. Neither are on the first page in the new version.

I know that Google mixes thing up every few months and that my results dance around a bit. But it's a little unnerving to see something so important to so many people's businesses change so dramatically.
I was hoping it would be google that would step up to the plate, not facebook to be honest. The friendfeed team is a serious weapon for facebook to wield against google and I don't know why the FF guys would enter this war, on this side. Maybe Google did something to piss them off? On the plus side, the FF guys will now get paid for the FB dev work they have been doing anyways. If I recall correctly buchheit was also involved in adsense, another pain point for facebook. Also the real-time search assets that fb would get from ff may fill the goals that facebook had with the attempted twitter acquisition.

The plot thickens...
The only thing they're not in the same ballpark for is quantity of generated data. If you don't need much, this is as good.
Here's a startup idea for you guys from the article: write something that enables amateur porn to spread over cell phones.

(Is it impossible to comment on this story without making a pun?)
yet another reason not to install Flash.
I'm in Kyiv, Ukraine. There's a small startup scene here too; but most folks here work in large outsourcing firms.
"In any case, the article seems to conflate undeniable facts (it has become ridiculously cheap to launch a website, if you are willing to write it yourself for free) with some fairly untested but very trendy beliefs about how startups should run (agile, cat-like, continuously releasing, restlessly synergizing)."

Hmm I am a bit uneasy about the "lean startup" idea becoming a faddish consultingware trend like "agile". Both ideas repackage some common sense elements with relentless marketing and buzzword terminology. "earlyvangelists" anyone?

"lean startup" has seen relentless marketing of late, trying even to co-opt Steve Jobs as some kind of "unconscious lean startup" person. (See "The Steve Jobs Method" - a blog post claiming that SJ is actually using "lean startup" principles (!!) - http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/08/steve-jobs...)

The author is supposedly a CTO of a company making a million dollars in revenue a month from paying customers(so his slides on "lean startups" claim). I notice today on his blog that he is setting up a 3000$/month (for 2 days/month!) consulting-ey offer where

"this cohort of companies would have the opportunity to act as a learning community, sharing what they've learned and supporting one another as they try to put the techniques into practice. Each month, we'd hold each other accountable for making changes to our product, process, and team. I would also be available to the participants to answer questions one-on-one and act as an advisor to each company"

Source http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/08/introducin...

Why would a CTO of a "lean startup" making (presumably) millions of dollars a year want to take up a "methodology consultant" type role? Where would a CTO find the time?
Here in Tokyo, I see a lot of people sleeping in cardboard boxes outside. They've never bothered me; frankly, I'd prefer them to be there. It forces you to acknowledge their existence, and I'd rather they be there than in jail and being driven into a life of crime.

The odd thing is that you sometime run into Yakuza chimpira types who drag them by the neck and tell them to get lost (especially if there is a political rally going on nearby; go figure)
It's not that hard in and of itself. The problem is developing something for tons of devices, which this specific idea doesn't need to deal with at all; you'd just have one device.
Hang on, an amplification of 30dB at 2.6GHz? Sounds like someone needs to check if a tinfoil hat can be used to improve Wifi reception! Is it close enough to 2.4GHz to be of any use?
This can also be and intro to why Open Source is effective (and why Modern Perl is CPAN based).
Best leather messenger bags
Best leather messenger bags at best price
Twitter wins for you. A critical distinction. I don't see the value in Twitter on its own, especially for a technical audience. Why not just use RSS feeds? Facebook's network is its major appeal, and that applies to everyone, not just techies.
What should you do when you get so excited about doing what you're about to do that you can't get anything done? How do you pay the bills? Start a consulting trend!
My open source porn business model is going to blow everyone away. Traditional models will suck. When open source goes down on the porn market, traditional pornographers will either take it in the ass or wipe themselves down and adapt to a wide open market, at which point more people will tell the tight proprietary porn market to jerk off.
God forbid they make it easy =)
Public fields like that announce that the object is actually an immutable struct with no internal workings. A need to change it to add computed (or worse, mutable) fields is probably a code smell.
Larrabee seems very Itanium-like to me... And something I'd never really considered, but seems like GPUs actually take a lot from the Itanium camp.

Perhaps they were on the right track, but simply too early (afaik one of the root-cause problems of Itanium was the die size).
That was here in the U.K. I think all networks do and have supported it here for a long time.
Yes, the reason they don't state a price publicly is so they can segment the market.
Mahalo 2.0 (why it's working)
Friendfeed is overvalued
Already debunked: http://zapatopi.net/blog/?post=200511112730.afdb_effectivene...
Thanks for posting, that was really eye-opening. I hadn't considered that my code would need to be ported. Read? Yes, but not ported.
Yeah, my sprints do smell bad quite fast. The fabric loves absorbing sweat.

I'd recommend hand-cleaning them with washing powder in the sink, and really scrubbing the insides of the soles and fabric around the toes.
Distributed Hash Tables (part 2)
Very light and old-schooly. Nice.
In what way is the valuation just for the users? :)

$50M might let you put together an all-star tech team. But this $50M brings a team, some users, a decent "techy-loved" brand, some real-time code (which facebook wants so bad) and as a cherry on top absorbs a fairly big (or potential) competitor.

Yes the smart man might have spent the $50M on an all-star team. But the very smart man would have bought FF :)
> why are people giving these things such good reviews?

because they're comfortable! try running barefoot in a grassy field vs. running w/ shoes. no contest which feels better.

with the 5 Fingers you get the same barefoot feeling while running on asphalt, concrete, whatever.

i love my five fingers KSOs!
Perhaps the new architecture means that more pages are indexed more frequently. Could it be an architecture that supports more "realtime search" (after twitter search). I notice the news is pretty up to date.
Unless maybe you need the money and can not find another job? If you can be picky about the companies you work for, you probably don't need an online resume generator anyway?
Facebook in challenge to Google
I wonder if perhaps scripting Open Office could be doable? I have looked (briefly) into the Open Document standard (I think that was the name), but it seemed too painful to me. I have some faint hope that creating word documents via the Open Office scripting API could be easier.

That is, rather than trying to create valid XML, just call a method on an empty open office doc that say 'creteHeading("abc")'

And so on... Of course probably it won't work, but it is the only hope I see on the horizon. (My problem is actually going from LaTex to Word).
Did my comment get eaten , or don't I have the Karma to post? Re-post: Try searching for any term, then click on the 'Try Google Experimental' hyperlink at the bottom of page to see the ??Broken-rewrite-rule-related?? 404
“They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless.”

Any society which in any way thinks this makes sense needs to take a good, deep look at itself and then start thinking over.
All About Creating and Using QR Codes and 2D Barcodes for Marketing
I've done the same thing he describes, of building a large system that would be quite small with modern tools. I wonder what could be to alleviate the problem. Of course good factoring of code and using a high-level programming language so that the existing code-base is as small as possible help somewhat. It feels to me that the real solution would be to make a stronger separation between the business logic and the actual implementation. In a way the code for a piece of software is an overspecification of what that software should do. It contains both a set of decisions that are necessary for the problem, and some that are necessary for the actual implementation, but otherwise arbitrary. In some way, one should build a "problem model" that is executable. Then the actual system would interact with this domain model. Then when the software infrastructure improves, the problem solved presumably does not change as much and most of it could be reused.
Ahh, like identi.ca's Conversation view:

http://identi.ca/conversation/7918366

The only winners in the microblogging-service feature-
war are the users.
That link has pics at the top in the typical web arrangement - a big picture with thumbnails below.

Why is it that if you go to a nice small blog, the thumbnails below would be triggered by OnMouseOver and update the big image really quickly. On a reasonably modern site, the little thumbnails would have OnMouseClick events and update the image in an AJAX-y near-instant fashion.

But at wired.com, they're multi-second full page reloads. Don't they notice how much less pleasant it is? Don't they see they're supposed to be a cutting edge, high tech magazine more than most magazines are?
Ugh. My lovely cafe is in an edge neighborhood. Things were looking up and then a day labor place opened up on the block.

Not all day laborers are homeless but many are. Initially I was very laissez faire about them but eventually they began to create a mess of empty bottles and trash, and harass the customers.

It killed business. It ended up taking about 4 months of calling the police on a daily basis and getting dozens of homeless trespass warranted to get things back on track.

It sucks but I felt I had little choice. If I had left things alone I would have gone out of business. Defaulted on my loan and had to lay off 12 people.

What you gonna do, this problem is huge.
I think it would be fun to go head-to-head with earlyvangelists (I love that!) and try to beat them to the punch by attacking the buzzword when it's still being born -- or even to force labor early, and attack it as a premie.