skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Economist is a great example for print media to follow. Here is what they do well:

1) Have an opinion, state it clearly and incorporate it into every piece. Articles can be a lot shorter and more informative if you don't have to "show each perspective" (which I think is impossible to do well.)

2) Create content that is so good, people will pay for it. Part of this is hiring insightful writers, part is sending them all over the world where a story is always happening and part is journalistic integrity. An untrustworthy news source is not valuable.

3) Avoid the butter battle. They don't play the tit for tat game with other columnists. The paper would read nearly the same whether they had a million competitors or none. It stands on its own axioms.

4) Understand your market:

http://fora.tv/2007/02/05/Uncommon_Knowledge_John_Micklethwa...

In this interview the editor of the economist talks about how they compete not with other newspapers but with people's time. He says that his customers are busy people with lots of money and they are willing to pay for a concise view on the world.

5) Give people the tools to win debates. Reading the news is really pushups for your next dinner party debate. Hardly anyone acts directly on what's happening in the news other than through conversation.

When I read the Economist cover to cover for 3 years while living in DC, I could go toe to toe w/ anyone in the think tank / foreign policy / political circuit even though I was an engineer / outsider. Not sure it did me any good other than satisfy my curiosity and competitive streak, but it was really fun and worth the money.
Technology Quarterly in The Economist is great. The magazine "New Scientist" is also quite good.
Inline Validation in Web Forms: Putting inline validation to the test
Homeowners Shopping for Solar Panels Find Prices Have Dropped
The cloud storage way is to avoid RAID 5 or 10 etc completely and just use triple JBOD instead - store each file / chunk of data on at least 3 JBOD drives and manage replication and whatnot in software. I think Google first popularized this technique.

The whole point of this excercise is reducing cost across the board and upgrading consumer SATA disks to enterprise ones will make this setup a whole lot more expensive since the drives make up most of the hardware cost.
It was confusing b/c the pictures didn't show that the bit's axel had to orbit independently of the bit. This animation cleared that up for me even if it wasn't the exact case.
Sorry for the lack of information, but the engine I'm looking for is web-based and able to do group chat or real time collaboration, and assume the engine can communicate with Ruby On Rails.
Or at least be precise about which unit is being used where, by using the 'binary prefixes' system:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

4GB (SI) == 3.7GiB (binary)
You think long, hard and often.

As long as you're the least bit creative, after a while (days, weeks,...) your brain will come up with something.

Try deforming an existing word à la Google, try combining two words into one (techcrunch), try using numbers or you can even try and invent a new word.

Squatters can't buy up everything, there are still options.
Except for those who secretly use Gmail at home.
I search and found Ajax Push Engine, is it belong to Comet ? The exactly technology that I need is group chat or realtime collaboration, does this technology serve well ?
Because SSDs compete with spinning HDs, and are already at cost-per-byte and available-sizes disadvantages, they're unlikely to embrace a different unit that makes them look even smaller and more expensive in comparison to HDs.
For large collections of homogenous values, using the array or struct modules is best for memory (and often for speed as well).

Or if math is needed, then numpy arrays are best.

Storing homogenous data in lists/tuples is fine if performance/memusage is not critical, or for small collections (i.e., 90% of use-cases).
Thank you! These are great counter points to all those that follow the "school dumbs you down" meme.
Worker Tapes Himself While Working -- Got Fired
Can mibbit do realtime collaboration ? Actually the one I need is web based group chat and realtime collaboration, so other than chat the group can do realtime collaboration too.
Why th and tl? You already have gt and gT.
The implication in the article was that people were using pre-written code that didn't include 'HTML 5 features', so now they'll have to write the code 'by hand' instead. So at least in this case, the usage is different from what you're calling 'ALA convention'.
More Evidence That Snow Leopard Is a Touchscreen Operating System
Aside from giving the user feedback, I find it helpful when forms help fill themselves out. For example, using ajax to suggest the city name when the zip code is entered, or only showing followup questions when a certain response to a previous question is given. I used this in a survey application I made...if users rated 3 or below on a 1-5 scale, a "please explain" box appeared.
Bleh. This is like those people who call Yahoo a failure.

The GPL radically changed the IT landscape in the last decade. Whether or not it achieved all of its initial goals (as interpreted by the author of this post) doesn't mean that it hasn't been a massive, disruptive force in the IT world.
Anything that takes more than a minute to load when my system has a load average of 35 is simply not worth using.

It's why I gave up on Eclipse a while back. (Well, that, and its tendency to crash with out-of-memory exceptions when using the syntax parser set to "full." That was the final straw.)
I doubt it very much. When drives start failing out of a RAID6 array, you lose it's ability to automatically detect and correct single bit errors on disk.

With that much data, single bit errors will happen predictably.

If their usage patterns are anything like ours, disk failures are well under normal rates. Most backup data is stored and ignored. The drives just don't get much stress. Downing a machine for maintenance is probably acceptable to their usage pattern.
When I read the Economist cover to cover for 3 years while living in DC, I could go toe to toe w/ anyone in the think tank / foreign policy / political circuit even though I was an engineer / outsider.

Read Unqualified Reservations and you'll be able to knock them out cold. You might end up in padded room though.
PEBKAC, actually.

Though it can be (sort of) argued that regular HTML files that don't validate are just as destructive to user experience as XHTML ones. If your file doesn't validate, the browser has to discard it's "pure" parsing mode and start again in quirks mode, which can really slow it down.

I don't have the figures to hand, but there have been some neat studies done that show that changing a website so that it validates appreciably increased conversions.
Wow, HN is becoming a really shitty filter. This update says nothing more than what's on the Apps Dashboard. How about waiting for some actual news before voting nothing up to #5?
Rails Rumble: Micro-App Competition Winners Announced - ReadWriteStart
Any web company should have a policy of making its pages validate to the extent that is possible. And we do.

In the real world -- when you have to do Stupid Web Tricks to make things work in IE6, or you have advertisers who can insert random awful FONT tags -- a fully validating page is an impossible dream, especially when (for the front page, for instance) that page is different for every single user in scores of countries and dozens of languages.

So we get as close as is practical, and rely on the wonderful resilience of the web to take care of the 3% of edge cases.
Buy a monitor with a lower DPI so everything looks bigger. The opportunity cost is too great to support 800x600 at this point.
Yes, like some did with Squeak. You can generate a vm using Squeak itself, so it will easily flow to other places
after a rough day at the office (drama) seems - like his assumptions are at least in the zone of 'right'.
I like it, but it's a long march - I'm at about 320, and a had a similar pattern; 40 a day while on holiday, five or so while at work.

Seems like once you clear 200 pages or so, you're in it for the long haul. It's intimidatingly large, but I couldn't think of not finishing it.
A suggested alternative is to use span pcap dumps of network environments that have viruses spreading through them (I used a few of them for a earlier project for worm detection), although I can't seem to find those website at the moment. But something to keep in mind. Try searching for Defcon packet dumps.

A added benefit would be replaying the same test environment repeatedly while tweaking your detectors parameters.
If I remember it right, Joel's "Perils of Java Schools" was about college CS programs which should be a lot more fundamental than just practical. This guy's essay conflates the equivalent of weekend carpenters, building maintenance, and civil engineers into one set of "programmers".
Either way it's still a good argument to prefer other licenses over the GPL today.
I think you are talking about me
Sony adds a little chrome to the VAIO
Flying Into The Mushroom Cloud
I dare you to list a more reliable service with a comparable price.
This would explain the effectiveness of marketing. If you can increase the perceived glamour (or ability to generate drama) of a product, people will be more likely to buy it.
Best Optical Illusion of the Year
you need:

1) less text (as others have mentioned)

and 2) a punchline. Perhaps involving a scenario where the programmer tells the boss that he's using SQL in Excel, causing the boss to irrationally fear that powerful programs are breeding with each other (from which the only logical conclusion is Skynet), and he starts making preparations for an apocalypse-grade bunker while the programmer is trying to reassure him that it's merely some awesome product that will blow his wig off when he buys a copy.

In my humble opinion, you need to have some sort of engaging scenario that will keep people reading through the pitch, and then you need to pay off with a punchline.
Has it really been such a massive disruptive force, or merely an entirely secondary factor in the open source software world?

I honestly don't mean to troll, but Apple, for example, has built an entire business on open source (but primarily not GPL) software components. They used GCC insofar as it met their needs, and then switched to something else when the GPL became an obstacle. Likewise, most companies use Linux because it's a pragmatic choice, not because of the license.

I think it's overreaching to claim that the GPL has changed the landscape. Liberal open source existed before the GPL, and will continue to exist if the GPL where to somehow disappear.
But 3 jbod takes more space than raid5- in terms of disk cost, that's worse than raid10, zraid, or mirroring. The enterprise drives are maybe 20%-30% more expensive than consumer disk, while replicating your data 3 times is 50% more expensive than a mirror or raid 10.

Zfs, if it does deal with consumer drives as well as it claims to, would solve the problem at the same disk space cost as raid5.
FONT tags in advertiser injection, I understand. We do some mangling to avoid that, but you're right. It doesn't kill everything.

I'm wondering what kind of stupid web tricks you're talking about that go against XHTML validation, though. Care to share a horror story?
Vonnegut's book A Man Without a Country has his full analysis (with drawings) including his thoughts on Kafka and Hamlet.
Er, I'm seeing that phrase the way I described it, and as it was described to me.

"If you are like most designers, you probably don’t write all your markup by hand. But until the tools you use catch up to the new elements in (X)HTML 5, you will be doing some markup by hand while you learn."

Mind you, that speaks to templates like WordPress layouts, Django plugins, Rails gems that generate their own markup, Drupal modules. The list goes on.

What did you have in mind?
Of course it is, and can I coin the "ugly brackets salad" phrase?
Good point, but I'd bet that not displaying a page at all will decrease conversions even further.
That is a really cool looking keyboard. I'm not sure how useable it would be, but it is definitely a conversation piece.
Not sure I buy it, but I like hearing Vonnegut's thoughts on the subject
At a low level, libraries tripping over each other. At a higher level, just weird interface "quirks" that would come and go. No such issues after a proper install - it's been entirely issue free.
PrizeDB Search Engine - Better Prize Search
Spawning a Thread, the D way
Trollish article and sensational headline.

Foss code licensed under GPL and variants thereof is more common than every other license combined: http://license-info.appspot.com/ . The plural of anecdote is not data -- N examples of individuals/companies who choose not to go the GPL route cannot refute the fact that it has spearheaded free software.

His example of Apple's use of LLVM as evidence that "you don't necessarily get good results from forcing people to do things" is purely confirmation bias. If he really went looking, he'd realize that Apple also used WebKit/KHTML despite being 'forced' to release their contributions to that library. It is also telling that they stop contributing back the moment the LGPL allows them to.

What about his point that the GPL causes harm:

"A few people in different companies have recently told me something that leads me to believe that the GPL actually does cause harm.. [they use bsd due to compliance worries]"

Oh noes!!! A few people in different companies told him they use BSD instead of GPL! This is the real smoking gun against the GPL, folks! How will it ever survive now?
Are SpaceX and Tesla Motors the Future of 21st Century Transportation?
The weird thing about this is that to make it bigger you drag the corner, which would be hard to accurately "click" with your finger. Also, if it's to be used widescreen, it takes up almost all of the screen, much more than the iPhone's keyboard (although similar to the widescreen keyboard on the iPhone).

To me, it seems more like they are just doing what they should do and making it resizable like everything else, and putting it in a more findable place.
Good to see Con back. But three letter acronyms have too many collisions and this is one of those cases.

As soon as I saw the title of this post, I was instantly reminded of BFS - the Be File System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System

Although in this case it's a Kernel scheduler rather than a Kernel mode Filesystem driver (even though Linux already has kernel module named bfs - Boot File System!) - indeed a TLA may have been a poor choice for a really useful project!
It's pretty amazing to think that Star Trek TOS had only 3 seasons, and yet you see how the vast influence it had on so many different things.
In HTML5 that you can use any syntax you prefer. Whether you live in XMLland is defined solely by MIME type you use to serve your pages—if it is text/html then it is HTML serialization, if it is application/xhtml+xml only then capable browsers will switch to XHTML parsers.

Of course this is the same story as with XHTML1.0 only in HTML5 case XHTML5 syntax does not pretend to be something it is not.

The added benefit of HTML5 not being the child of SGML is that stupid controversy regarding "/>" which means completely different thing in SGML applications and XML is finaly resolved.
'Hot' jobs? Health care, energy, many not requiring bachelor's
That's an absurd conclusion (which is not to say that it's necessarily untrue that there'll be touchscreens for OS X soon, but this drag-resizable keyboard has nothing explicitly to do with touchscreens). Previously, you could make the keyboard 2.5x bigger than the 'small' screenshot by clicking the green zoom button. Now, you can drag the corner of the window to make it an arbitrary size, but the rendering is identical to the prior version. This is nothing more than a trivial incremental change, if perhaps a welcome one for people working with 30" monitors etc.
Well, that's if you accept that having a SLIGHTLY higher IQ is the same as being "smarter" in any real-world sense.

But I think the concern about many school situations in the United States is that they are plainly unsuitable for gifted learners

http://www.accelerationinstitute.org/Nation_Deceived/

(however "gifted learners" are defined). Another concern about United States schools is that they appear to badly underperform compared to schools in many other places, for learners of all ability levels.

http://nces.ed.gov/timss/

Concerns of these kinds have motivated hundreds of college-educated parents I know to choose to homeschool their children, to make sure the children aren't slowed down academically. Some seventeen-year-olds find it fun to study abstract algebra with the Artin textbook (through dual enrollment at the local university as a "twelfth grade" homeschooler) or algorithms with the Cormen textbook. The standard K-12 school curriculum doesn't fit all learners, and especially not the most able learners.

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/AoPS_R_A_Calcul...
Thanks to the author and to the submitter.

Some of these are really works of art.

I especially love TinyScheme (BTW, did you know that it is embedded in the iPhoneOS?).
You said:

> the ALA convention of "by hand" means "we're not writing flat files full of markup anymore." And we aren't. We use templates now.

This implies that "by hand" means writing templates by hand instead of writing flat files by hand. I'm merely pointing out that the article uses the term to mean something like "most designers aren't writing much html at all", instead using "tools", which "haven't caught up". That's quite different from writing templates.
but had the GPL not existed when it did - would the foundations still have existed that make open source of any licence as mainstream and commercially acceptable (in some cases preferable) as they are today?
they do fail, often, in fact, but the difference is that its a decentralized system and several towers being down isn't a big deal, its just a normal day. They contract with many carriers to carry data and often a single cell site is multihosted so any one carrier switches to another provider, who now has them over a barrel so charges them more. Cell tower failures affect the mobile carriers profits, and not necessarily the users service.
I just viewed the site on my G1. It looks like ass.

It need not be that way, and not accounting for assorted screen sizes and devices is lazy.
Like nearly all corporations (who are the primary sponsors of a vast majority of major project's open source development), Apple's use of GPL/LGPL software is a pragmatic one based on the value of the software, not the license. If the license becomes too onerous (which it now has, with the FSF's push for GPLv3 and desire for broad adoption of virally licensed GPL software), Apple has -- and will continue to -- move away from GPL software.

In other words, the GPL is something that is tolerated insofar as it doesn't conflict with business goals.
I know that HDD capacity and network bandwidth are generally reported in decimal units, but this is the first time I've ever heard of decimal prefixes being used in a logical as opposed to a physical context.

I think it's a terrible idea. This will break capacity calculations for many apps, potentially leading to inconsistency in space and size reporting between different programs running on the same system.

It will also lead to file size confusion when moving files between OSes.
I think that there is a problem with scale in Vonnegut's analysis: sure, most weeks things go up or down a little bit but remain basically even and boring. But on the scale of years, there are turning points at which there is a HUGE amount of drama and VERY high stakes for the ensuing years. Cinderella probably had her boring days once she was "living happily ever after", but the week or so it took to get hitched by the prince WAS just as dramatic as all that, and the outcome was worthy of the drama.

I think because high stakes and high drama processes DO happen in real life, we simulate them with vicarious experiences of narrative so we can be ready mentally. If we don't digest stories beforehand, we won't have a model for when we discover we have cancer, risk losing a job or a deal, court a loved one, try to get accepted to an ivy league school, etc.

And if there isn't SOME drama in your life with real stakes and real risks, you probably need to go out and take on some challenges. Such a desire for drama is hardly pathetic or dysfunctional. That is, unless you stay at home and only satisfy it vicariously with HBO, or create needless challenges without any real stakes like driving too fast...
I think that turn of phrase "dumbing us down" was popularized through the title of the book by John Taylor Gatto, New York State teacher of the year in some year in 1991.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbing_Us_Down
Not the case at all. Let's work through the math:

eBay spent 3.1B for Skype. They sold it at a valuation of 2.75B. It's fair to assume that the price they sold it at is a market value for the company, and therefore a fair way of valuing the 35% they still carry.

So the loss from reduced valuation was $350M. But according to TechCrunch, Skype's net profits over that time period come to $324M. Take those numbers together, and it was basically a wash.

Factor in the fact that the deal was largely paid for in eBay stock which was basically monopoly money at the time, and it looks like they did pretty well.
Well I thought the point about it being a distribution of software licence (not a usage licence) meaning companies like google can use it without sharing changes was interesting (but I am sure that point has been covered in lots of other places).
It only took 24 out of the thousands of people that read here to do that. No downvote available and no reason to flag the submission.
Well actually I use an OS X service, so it's just a single keyboard shortcut.

But Tofu is much nicer for reading long prose than the Readability bookmarklet. Try it some time.
I wish I could upvote this twice. I love minimal/tiny languages.
When a person only buys drugs for you he's called a 'personal assistant' instead
There is a very long history of commercially acceptable non-GPL open source software. Here's some widely corporate-used software that played an integral role in both commercial products and early internet/network services:

* BSD-derivative Operating Systems (code available with first releases since in 1977)

* Sendmail (1983)

* Apache HTTPD (1995)

* Qmail (1997)

* MIT Kerberos (late 1980s)

* UMich LDAP (now OpenLDAP) (1995)

Modern examples are considerably more numerous, ranging from Apache Project's Java projects, to LLVM.

The places where the FSF and GPL have really succeeded are where there was usually a strong network effect (compilers and operating systems are large individual undertakings, for instance) and limited downside to the use of the GPL.

[Edit] I realize that some fringe downvoting GPL proponents take offense at the idea that the GPL isn't single-handedly responsible for mass adoption of open source, but come on guys, there's a long and rich history of commercial open source adoption outside of the GPL.