skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Piaget didn't prove that no child can be genuinely gifted over the course of childhood compared to some "average" child--he didn't have a data set adequate to prove such a proposition at all. It's not clear yet that his proposed stages of development are as invariant as some readers of his books, think, either. MIT professor Seymour Papert actually studied with Piaget when Piaget was still alive, and this is what Papert says about how little Piaget's developmental hypothesis constrains profound giftedness: "The case [of Jean Piaget] has a mild irony in that this man, so often quoted as the authority on what children cannot do because they are not at appropriate stages of development, published his first scientific article at age eleven!" -- Seymour Papert, The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer (1993).
Like the author of that article, you seem to be fixated on contributions being the measure of the GPL's success.

Preserving the four freedoms is the goal of the GPL. Requiring people to contribute back is the means.
In other words, the GPL is something that is tolerated insofar as it doesn't conflict with existing business goals.

Which, for the vast majority of businesses, it really doesn't. The number of companies that distribute software, whether compiled or as source, is really quite tiny when compared to the number of companies that use software. Not to say that the GPL isn't a problem for some companies, and it's hardly surprising that said companies would pull out this metaphorical splinter if that is viable for them, but it seems implausible to me that (e.g.) Nike is horrified at the thought that their website is completely dependent upon GPL'd code.

I don't think there are many sane people who expect corporations to stick their necks out for the GPL as a matter of principle; that said, I don't think many people really care. Hell, even the FSF will usually leave companies alone if they just follow the bloody license attached to the software they're using.
A resizable normal keyboard application is just not Apple's style. I can see them adding a hardware key and a popup, like Dashboard or the Dock. They can add more flashiness (pop-in, fade, whatever) that way, and it's also less confusing if the keyboard is tied to one button.
Fashion apparel and accesories
I'm currious if the subset of users affected was geographic based or just a set number of users. I'm i Canada and did not have any issues with Gmail and I didn't see any tweets, fb updates from my Canadian crew on the issue. However people in the US appeared to be telling the world about their inability to access Gmail.
White House tenders contract to harvest data from social networking sites?
Why is it Important to Use Bookkeeping Software?
You didn't do the math.

The announced deal was $4.1 billion. They actually paid a billion less than that because a billion dollars of performance payout wasn't paid. They realized $324 million in revenue. The value of what's left is $2.8 billion in 2005 dollars. They just sold it for $2.75 billion. That's a wash.

The return on the deal gets even better when you note that they paid for a lot of it with stock whose value has declined.

The headlines make them look like idiots. But those numbers show a wash, which is pretty good given the market declines. If the numbers in the article are correct, then my impression of how well they did was wrong.

EDIT: I initially misread how much they sold for. I thought they sold FOR $2.75 billion, and not AT a valuation of $2.75 billion. I've edited this accordingly.
National Statistics: Why [U.S.] Needs to Educate Gifted and Talented Youth
I'm not sure how well it 'explains' Tv but it does provide an interesting overview. It does suggest that now is either a particularly good or a particularly bad time to launch a new TV franchise, though.

The list of surveyed programs is interesting. I had no idea there was a series called Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills, and am astonished it managed to last for 3 seasons.
So what did this explain?

If you answer that, then my next question is, how can plotting shows like Futurama, Charmed and Buffy on the same Graph as SG1 and Bstar explain anything?
Welcome to the future, my friends.
Yes, but this doesn't mean that the GPL is a success -- rather, the software has succeeded on its own merit in spite of the downsides of the GPL. In contrast, there are numerous examples where potential software success has been restricted by the limitations of the GPL.
Information is the (other) currency of venture capital
seems like they've done more than just run a website... I'm sure Derek Sivers & Kevin Hale had to do more than just apache configuration files to get their companies up and running.
Running a mail system for 10 people is a lot easier than running one for a few million.
The point is that the minute the "four freedoms" conflicts with "business priorities", we drop the GPL software like a hot potato. That is to say, the GPL hasn't really succeeded at protecting the "four freedoms", it's merely done so as a side effect of the success of GPL'd software.

GCC sat on the top of the hill for a long time due to the fact that the GPL's restrictions were an acceptable cost. However, when it came time for a library-linkable compiler, look at what Apple did -- they didn't GPL their software to allow linking against GCC -- instead, they decided to sponsor development of a new compiler.
The "default use" of an iTablet might be in portrait mode, so it would use the bottom half (or third, or whatever) of the screen.
it doesn't look good enough to be the touch keyboard they'd roll with for their first tablet OS. not up to their standard.
Inflatable Tower Promises Easy Access to Outer Space
HighlightCam (YC S09) Releases Video Summarization API
The opportunity cost for whom?

I got a 22" monitor. I went to the eye doctor and got special glasses for working. I use 800 x 600 all the time. For all my work and all my web surfing. Almost all sites work just fine.

I spend $5,000 per year on-line. I'm probably not alone. If your site doesn't work for me, I leave (and take my money and eyeballs, too.)

Like I said before, there are 100 million others in the same boat. Not to mention the increasing use of netbooks and mobile devices.

I used to get upset when people here at hn told me how I, as the customer, had to change to suit the vendor, which goes against everything I've ever learned in business. Not any more. Now I just shake my head at the lessons lost.
Looks like good work.

And there are those that say the kernel should be monolithic still.
This is very exciting. I use Linux on my desktop, laptop, servers, and embedded devices. I was getting kind of tired of the latency tradeoffs made to improve throughput. The kernel developers are really good at what they do, but like most geeks, sometimes they need a virtual kick in the head to realize that there might be a better way to do something. I'll be trying out his new scheduler as soon as I get a chance to compile a new kernel. I hope it works with the realtime patches.
Y SIN EMBARGO magazine » laurent koller, trabajos recientes
SecurityTube - finally a YouTube dedictated to Hackers and Hacking
Don't forget with dual contacts we also have 3-D capabilities.

3-D, high-resolution, virtual-reality-mapped information, games, communications.

This is going to be a very cool technology to check back with in five or ten years.
Funny Pictures, Cool Photos, Amazing Wallpapers
Excellent stuff. Two things come to mind:

1) The loss of God probably plays a large role here. Faith provides a meta-narrative that gives the humdrum of life context and a story arc. Without that you just have a random collection of sensations without meaning.

2) We can't look at the last 30 years as normative. Pop culture (eg MTV) has dramatically increased the amount of drama we feel like we need. My Generation Y has an increasing emphasis on disconnected experiences -- and we have a whole new set of cultural artifacts to show for it -- Seinfeld, Improv Everywhere, Garden State, Juno, etc.
Well, don't read 'starting to resemble' too literally. Try 'dozens of categories with thousands of apps'. Similarities (to my eyes) include the race to the bottom on price, the one-trick-ponyism of many apps, the breakout of fights over gatekeeping and so on, for one thing.

Another way to look at Apple and Atari, the former remind me of the latter as chief innovator and dominant force in a proprietary market space with many lesser-known imitators (doubtless, you've noticed the iPhone has had some influence on other competitors in the mobile space).

I just feel a change coming...not sure what it portends, exactly.
Actually there are two different things—the parser and the rendering mode. The choice of the former depends solely on the MIME type—no matter that docypte you use if your page is served with text/html MIME it will be parsed by HTML parser. And keep in mind, that every slash in "/>" is treated as invalid attribute by this parser, so serving your XHTML page as text/html may be not the best idea. BTW, do "view source" of such page in Firefox 3 and you will see all slashes in red.

And if you did happen to server XHTML with proper MIME there could well be the case that your page would take longer to load on Gecko <1.9 — it did not support incremental rendering of XHTML so your document had to be fully loaded before it could be rendered.

HTML engine choses rendering mode (standards, almost standards, quirks) depending on DOCTYPE (for XHTML parser it is always standards mode). HTML engine must be always ready to recover from markup errors (and HTML5 does a good job describing what to do), XHTML parser can just die on the first error it encounters.
IPhone App Finds Disease Outbreaks Near You
As above, they're not, so please disregard the first paragraph.
It would be good to hear a logical justification for the mm-dd-yyyy. I'm not sure I can come up with one. It makes it hard to search and it doesn't follow any sequential order. yyyy-mm-dd actually goes up by one each day. Try it next time you have to number give files a date stamp and you'll find it makes your life a lot simpler.
I highly recommend you follow @kurt_vonnegut on twitter. He's a bot run by one of my friends that quotes Kurt daily. He's by far my favorite tweeter.
That open source has been disruptive I consider indisputable. The question then becomes, "Were the BSDs poised to lead the way to the current world of commoditized software infrastructure?" But that's a different question.

Whether by dogma or community forces, something about the FSF and the GPL transformed open source from a licensing scheme to a movement that produced the mass of software that we have today. Whether or not the BSDs could have done that is a separate question -- they in fact did not, and the massive disruption that we've seen has been an outgrowth of GPLed projects.
This is awesome, Con may have battled with the Kernel Devs in the past, however his focus on improving scheduling for desktop Linux is commendable.

I for one would like to see a module or kernel for Ubuntu Jaunty that we can install from apt to play and test this baby.

D.
As much fun as it is to speculate about the ultimate invincibility of science, I would like to point out that the key to writable and re-writable CDs and DVDs is the dye, not the laser. That after all the selection pressure the eye has gone through, it also happened to be made of a re-writable dye of any sort seems rather improbable.
Ask HN: Is there a stack-overflow-like site devoted to graphic design?
I ask because as a programmer, I often want to do some Photoshop type task, and while Google often turns up an answer, I would really like a site with some reputation information and a concentrated repository of knowledge.

I imagine such a site would be useful to designers too. I can only imagine things get more and more arcane as you become a more advanced designer, just like with programming.
I'm not about to thread-jack here, but I did think it prudent to mention that, as an atheist, I disagree with #1. There can be plenty of non-religious meaning behind those random sensations; it just depends on your perspective.
That assumes the "inauthenticity" of dating sites is a bug rather than a feature. They're not going to attract three groups which to me seem to be almost the entire market:

1. People looking to cheat on their partners with whom they have 50% overlap in Facebook friends.

2. Shy folks --- the ones who don't cold-approach women in meatspace and thus prefer dating sites, are also the ones who are going to be too self-conscious to announce to all their friends that they're looking online for dates.

3. People who plain old want to date outside of their social cul-de-sac.

My most successful experiences with "online dating" has actually been with friends of girls I met through language-exchange websites. Since all the other guys on those sites only want to "learn" by gonadal osmosis, if you show even a small amount of knowledge in the language, combined with active disinterest in the girl, you come out smelling like a rose in comparison. Now if you can figure out how to monetise THAT ...
Looks like they're just a front-end for other tube sites? Latest video is Vimeo, the cold boot attacks video is YouTube...
I similarly think of this every year when I go on an annual camping trip with a group of friends. We have a short group list on a website that we use, but it would be helpful if we could edit that and add to it. Each year it is inevitable that something is forgotten or we talk about something in January but fail to remember it in August/September.

I often check my gear against lists that are published by camping supply companies (Coleman, etc). Much further down the line, it might be an interesting business model to allow for "sponsored" lists.
I've seen an effect that is quite the opposite of what the author claimed.

Netatalk (primarily an Apple File Protocol server for Mac clients) didn't get much love from developers because it was BSD-licensed and companies selling storage boxes would use it and fix many of its problems, but without contributing changes back. This was sufficiently demotivating that many good developers said to me, in so many words, that they didn't want to contribute if companies were benefiting from the project but not giving back. The license was changed to the GPL (with the advertising clause retained) and community participation took off like a shot and its been a healthy project ever since.

Take that, InformIT.
Pay at the top
they seem to have a mix of originals and embeds from other sites ... nevertheless there is some aggregation value ..
I thought Joy was pretty cool too, have never seen mention of it before. So many shiny things to play with, so little time...
toughest industry in the world

Sounds like someone's never tried smuggling muskets to the Spanish Main.
More on today's Gmail issue
Donor says he got $20,000 for his kidney
Why isn't SQLite a part of this list?
I briefly considered the implications of a similar service which would gather checklists of important dates for small businesses. For example, tax return filing dates, sales tax quarterly payments, business license renewal dates, etc.

The rough idea was that you would collect this public information, add a calendar/reminder component and then localize (which would be the hard part).

It sounds as if you may be going down this path at some point in the future. If so, I think it would be a very interesting service for which small businesses might pay a token yearly fee.
Joel Spolsky's talk at Business of Software 2008 on being number one
Sorry no profiling please :)
Just a quick couple comments:

1) There are lots of unifying themes and grounds of meaning besides God -- the motherland, the continuity of the family, evolution, personal actualization, etc.

2) I disagree with most statements to the effect that "everything is different now", though the OP has a couple of interesting points. First -- disconnectedness has been a theme in the arts since the turn of the century (Dada, Sartre, etc). Second, I think that folks sitting around the campfire in the Kalahari probably like drama just as much as we do, they just that their media are different -- stories, songs, and low tech ritual versus TV; but I think the charge of meaning is the same, even if the amount of color and noise is vastly different.
Seriously - why do programmers have so much trouble putting text on a website? What is their malfunction? No other domain seems to run into the issues that software people do. Folks - it's just text. On a website. Please try hard to figure it out. This is one guy we would never hire.
Catastrophic failure at major Russian hydroelectric dam (Aug 09)
Book reviews in the time of amazon
This has sounded ok for me too, but when I've thought a bit about it I've realized that the drives must be synchronized so that each one would "cancel" each others vibrations. The vibrations generated by the drives might have indeed the same amplitude and (spatial and temporal) frequency, but I doubt that they'll have the same phase offset. For this to happen they would need to be started at _exactly_ the same time which I don't think that happens in practice.

Do you have some pictures of those enclosures?
Is this, at some level, why we all want to do startups? To make our lives like fairy tales? It certainly is a roller coaster.
Now I finally know what to do with all of my old videos filled with lots of crap. No more lengthy crappy videos.
These guys are very very good at what they do. Btw folks, no funding and they're already profitable. Gleb and crew rock!
Who still uses the Internet cafe ?
Pay To Drive Traffic From One Place On Facebook To Another On Facebook
www.laptopburka.com
A Week Without Social Media: An Experiment
Was your use of an acronym for three letter acronym that is ambiguous and could refer to two letter acronyms, three letter acronyms, or even three-hundred letter acronyms intentional?
In a RAID 5 set you lose a lot of throughput when a drive fails, and with TB drives it takes many hours for a hot spare to replicate the missing data. During that time another drive failure is catastrophic for your data and the more disks in your RAID 5 set the more likely this scenario becomes. When you get to petabytes of data such catastrophic failures are just a matter of time.

With RAID10 again you have to build large arrays to beat triple JBOD for storage efficiency - a 12 x 1TB array yields 5TB usable space while triple JBOD gives you 4TB. BUT you still have a single point of failure - your RAID card can give out and your array is unavailable. Using triple JBOD you'll be able to have your data on different physical machines or even geographically separate data centers if you wish.

The advantages outweigh the reduction of storage density when you're dealing with petabytes of storage - why else would Google et al be doing it?
That open source has been disruptive I consider indisputable. The question then becomes, "Were the BSDs poised to lead the way to the current world of commoditized software infrastructure?" But that's a different question.

Speaking only in terms of operating systems, the AT&T lawsuit caused the BSD derivatives to stumble just as they started, and at the same time Linux was beginning to enter its stride. The GPL/FSF didn't (through dogma or community forces) drive this, but rather, circumstances and a general hobbiest interest in open source operating system development.

Whether by dogma or community forces, something about the FSF and the GPL transformed open source from a licensing scheme to a movement that produced the mass of software that we have today. Whether or not the BSDs could have done that is a separate question -- they in fact did not, and the massive disruption that we've seen has been an outgrowth of GPLed projects.

That's vastly overstating the reach of the GPL projects. Everything from Apache HTTPD to PHP to Perl was (and is) liberally licensed.
I feel like the GPL's overly political nature is basically a type of political DRM. If you try hard enough you can skirt the restrictions. If you're an end user you have to deal with the fallout which trickles down in a variety of ways but can generally be summarized as "making things harder than they really need to be" The NVIDIA example is a good one. It would be hard to argue that the GPL has benefited users in this case. It's been an annoyance to NVIDIA and a huge headache to end users.
To get reliability without replication, it's not enough to use enterprise drives; you need redundant controllers that are multipathed to the disks. This is fairly expensive.

If you want a shared-nothing cluster with less than 3x overhead you can use erasure codes. The software complexity is significant, but at scale it should be the cheapest option. http://cleversafe.org/ or http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe
Netatalk was primarily authored, maintained, and ultimately abandoned by the University of Michigan -- all under a BSD license. During this process, how many improvements were contributed by corporations/individuals who would not have done so had it not been BSD licensed, or who simply didn't care what the license was?

The resurgence in interest coincided with the interest and engagement with new, GPL-proponent developers. It's hardly a non-biased piece of anecdote.
and he resisted kurt_vonnebot. shame!
Yeah, funnel all those boring family reunion vacation VHS tapes in there. Though I'm not sure if their algorithm will be smart enough to get all the exciting bits since our camera man has a shaky hand and they probably use some kind of motion detection.
It's too bad the article is so lean on details like how much it would cost and how the design would deal with the enormous strains of torque and wind etc. But one thing's for sure, put a revolving restaurant at the top and it would pay for itself in three years.
Why eggheads get the girls and birdbrains don't
I don't really disagree...except that fulfilling "potential software success" isn't the point of the GPL. The point of the GPL is to propagate Stallman's "Four Freedoms", and anything/everything else really is tangential to the issue. Whether or not the license has held back companies, or individual developers, or the evolution of software development as a whole isn't really the primary concern of those who use or support the use of the GPL.

From that perspective, what you refer to as "the downsides of the GPL" really aren't downsides, any more than an apple being green instead of red is a "downside". The point of the apple is to be eaten; colour is more or less irrelevant. The point of the GPL is to make certain a specific ethical belief is followed and transmitted; whether that ideology is convenient or not for others is secondary at best. Calling the license a "failure" from a viewpoint completely different than the one it was created by is trivial and meaningless, in the same way that it is both trivial and meaningless for me to call someone's apple tree a failure for not growing the colour of apples that I happen to like.
Yes, but I regularly need to talk to people who use Windows or Linux.
We actually just improved the algorithm to address exactly that scenario:

http://blog.highlightcam.com/post/176798199/highlighting-now...

Camera motion is no longer considered "interesting" unless there's other motion against the static background. Works especially well with jittery cameras and panning security cameras.
How is that sure, may I ask?
I've seen Kevin speak in person at BarCamp Tampa last year. I almost skipped it b/c I had read so many of his blog posts, but fortunately decided to come in just a bit late instead. It was well-prepared, entertaining, insightful, inspiring, (I'll stop now and not over-do it) and not just a rehash of his blog entries.

I actually decided the networking opportunities were overrated, and I would only go to another conference for good speakers.