skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have some friends in this person's position. Reasons they give for not wanting to set out on their own:

1. They want to write and report, not sell advertising and there's no ad network out there that can get them real money ($10-15 CPM) as opposed to "internet" money ($2-3 CPM).

2. They want to be seen and read, now. Giving up a byline in a print newspaper for a blog that will take years to ramp up is a bit daunting and intimidating.

A great example of someone doing a fine job of this is http://capitolhillsfax.com He's the authority on Illinois state politics. A good number of his posts are members only. Membership costs 365/year or $1 per day.
The company shouldn't fire someone for not knowing their place in front of a vice president and making a snide remark? I think that's absolutely acceptable. If the vice president wants to touch your screen, you're not really in a place to chew him out about it. I would venture to guess that doing so was most likely indicative of broader issues with the employee in this case, i.e., if she doesn't know her place in front of upper-level executives, how is she interacting with important customers, contractors, vendors, government officials, etc.?
Newspapers have always been editorial-papers. Track down articles from your local from the first quarter of the 20th century. I just commented about doing this with the Trib. There's no objectivity to be found, or even feigned detachment.
A web app is an application that requires at least a browser to run. Why? Because the web as we traditionally know it is accessed through a browser and any application that still requires a browser to run cannot be considered a desktop app.

As for prism it still doesn't actually make that app a desktop application because all it still contains the environment designed to run web apps and just simulates a desktop app. You still use it to run apps designed for the browser.

The blurring of the lines will come as web apps start to no longer need a browser to run. So when the day comes I can start up my OS, type gmail.com, and it runs the Gmail app, then the distinction between web and desktop app will truly have vanished. But until then anything that still requires a browser, or browser technology is still in the transition stage.
He didn't found LOLcats, which isn't a company and wasn't started by this man / icanhascheesburger.com, or by The Times (who also publish a LolPets section), but by 4Chan.

Kudos to him for taking something niche and making it accessible to the mainsteam though.
In Chicago we have the Gapers Block Mechanics blog and (for Springfield) Capital Fax. I have to believe other major metro areas have similar resources.

But you're right. I live in Oak Park, just outside Chicago, and there is zero coverage of Oak Park politics or business, and yet our politics matter a great deal to the residents (for instance, they just re-engineered the main drag in the city to suit real estate developers).
Why doesn't every programmer start a company? It sounds easy enough, but not everyone has the chutzpah (or talent) to start a blog that will support 1+ fulltime salaries.
Grab The Little Schemer and a notebook. Do all exercises in the notebook with a pencil, without a computer.

It'll make you a better Python programmer for sure.
My soon-to-be-brother-in-law is a journalist-type; he's working for the Reader as their web guy, but he's been placing freelance pieces for years. He's got a blog at the reader and has been doing a good job with it.

Maybe an option here is to find a blogging spot under a local paper's masthead. You might be able to build up a readership in your spare time, and then take them with you (away from the paper) when you get your sea legs.
I call shenanigans.

Wholly oriented towards investigating and changing the material world, science rejects anything related to practical self-discovery or spiritual truth. In this lies the crisis of the widespread modern intellectualism that swears itself to science; it is incapable of investigating, understanding or dealing with human purposes, eternal values, spiritual realities or the challenges of the meaning of life. On the contrary, science relativises values and makes a private matter of them, thereby undermining them and consequently a moral and good society too. Discovery of new truths about the human soul and destiny will remain beyond its scope until the extent of ignorance about this is better appreciated and much wrong physicalistic thinking about the constitution of the human being is more widely discredited. Only when science is put firmly in its place for what it really is, a study of physical reality by physical means chiefly for material and economic ends, will the crisis be overcome.

As far as I can tell, Priddy isn't saying anything the deconstructivists haven't already; and by that I mean the same hollow self-justifying outcries that have dominated the humanistic part of C.P. Snow's Two Cultures since, well, since Wordsworth. If Priddy and his ilk could ever dream up an alternative which would "put science in its place," I'd be happy to hear it, but so far, science makes progress regardless of whether or not we have the words to describe its journey. It's a simple fact that the humanistic vanguards apparently have a very hard time coming to terms with.
I hate that. It's the same as people starting a sentence with "I'm sorry, but..." And then saying something that they're not really sorry about.

It's not silly to not want someone to touch your screen. I think you should just come out and say it. "Please don't touch my monitor."
We should make more, then. All the time, or at least try.
If you want an RDP like thing for X, try nomachine.

http://www.nomachine.com/

Its free and more or less duplicates RDP on *nix. It even allows multiple persistent sessions.
This is a vulnerability in one SCTP stack. Linux's. I'm not sure there's a single mainstream protocol that hasn't had a vulnerability.
Designer Fights for Second Life Rights
"making such a device that will survive the initial acceleration is unlikely"

Bear in mind that using an electromagnetic launcher you could accelerate (relatively) gradually over a length of track, the so-called "Mass Driver" concept.
Does there exist even a single non-trivial Java project that does not have loads and loads of them?
First of all, you shouldn't apologize for telling people not to touch your screen.

I would be curt about it when it happens: "Please don't touch the screen, thanks." And say it with a smile. That way it would almost be a disposable, passing remark like: "Watch your step.". Making a big production of it would be worse for both sides. You want to say something and just move on so the incident doesn't linger too long. In a way, you are trusting the person to get the point. If he/she doesn't get it then it's their fault, not yours. I can see how this would be difficult if it doesn't suit your personality or the one you project at the office.
12-billion-nhs-disaster. Cloud opportunity?
Beijing Car Sales Tick to 1,200/Day - Up 9% from Last Year
That just makes the story even more amazing: that they have so much size, money, and power in the marketplace - and leading research at their fingertips - yet the research doesn't seem to be translating into compelling products. I've long been teased by the promise of Intentional Programming, Singularity, or Volta - but nothing ever emerges that advances the state of the art.
SCTP does two things that I think are hugely important.

First, it provides a datagram/record transport that is TCP-friendly. The most important thing TCP does isn't reliability; it's the insanely complicated interpretive dance it performs with other TCPs to keep them from melting the network. Right now, your only scalable transport option is TCP, which means you're boned if you want real-time.

Second, it provides reliable out-of-order delivery, which is exactly the happy medium that I assert without evidence 99% of UDP apps actually need. Reliability good. Enforced ordered delivery bad; means updates lag behind stale data.

The big issue with SCTP is that firewalls will block it.
You could read Sarah Lacy's "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good" (which was called "The Stories of Facebook, Youtube and Myspace" when I bought it in the U.K.)

It's a light read (suitable for a holiday) and it will inspire you to build your startup when you get back.
FYI: 100m in 9.58s ~ 23.35mph.
When thinking about nukes, remember that the whole point is to not fire them - their value lies in deterrence, and in everyone knowing the horrible things that would happen if they were fired (this is less the case with tactical nuclear weapons, but Iran doesn't have those). So if you're using them for deterrence - especially in the case when you're up against a much stronger enemy - you target them (and announce this) in such a way as to cause the greatest damage for the greatest number of parties.

Let's say Iran had a nuke, and was feeling so threatened that it had to launch its nuke. If it takes out Jerusalem, it destroys a significant pilgrimage location for Islam, as well as the capital of the (local) great enemy. The US then comes and levels most of the country, and the Israelis likely drop a nuke on Tehran. There's also the pretty good possibility that the Israelis would be successful in shooting down the missile, but would still launch an overwhelming military response. Israel is now in bad shape, Iran is gone, and the rest of the local Arab countries are pretty unhappy, but still alive and kicking.

If they launch on Mecca, there's a much greater change of the thing detonating where it's supposed to. They also destroy a very significant Islamic pilgrimage site. The rest of the Arab world then converges on attacking Iran (with American blessing), as well as Israel (the Sunni states would use the logic that those evil Shiites must have conspired with the Israelis to do this). This results in the US now getting involved militarily to protect Israel, and now you've got a pretty serious war going on in the Middle East, disturbingly close to both India and Russia.

Of those two, the second causes much more hell - which is what they're going for. The second also has the benefit of making the Islamic states much more interested in dealing with their threats, and possibly getting the US to (covertly) be more accommodating.
He dominated as expected. Tyson Gay ran 9.71 (personal record) and did not stand a chance. It remains to be seen how the prototypical sprint athlete will look like in 10 years. Bolt was the first really successful one who did not fit into the usual pattern (5"9', broad)
I had wondered why that might be, but never thought I'd discover a plausible theory - thanks for posting this!
That seems to presume Svn is easier to use than Git, in my opinion it is the other way around.
That isn't fucking acceptable, invite the douche bag to clean your screen for you the next time he does that.
Would it be ideal for HTTP to be delivered over SCTP instead of TCP? If so, how the heck can the internet migrate over to SCTP?
The largest technology company in the world is Hewlett Packard. The largest software company in the world is IBM. Clearly that proves IBM never did anything "hopelessly clueless" then, right?
First, it was not Apple's decision: it was NeXT's. NeXT chose to use Display PostScript for the NeXT OS. It had X as an option, IIRC, but, at that time, X was more suited for the Unix hard-core technical user. Not because X is hard, but because there were no user-friendly desktop simply because Unix machines were so expensive their use would be restricted to a technical elite that was more concerned with the precision of their crash simulations than with cute icons. They were happy to live with xterm and twm, as long as they had enough MIPS.

At that time, the choice of DPS gave the NeXT a unique ability to provide beautifully readable fonts on a 2 bit-per-pixel screen. OSX built on that, removing the DPS for a PDF-like structure built on GhostScript (IIRC), for cost reasons.

The ease of use of OSX has nothing to do with the choice not to use X.
Professor Pigskin, is that you?
Personally I would use the "I'm sorry, but..." approach because I'd be legitimately sorry that I have to take conversation into an awkward direction for a moment. I think the direct approach, while some would appreciate it, is taking a bit of a gamble: there's too much of a chance the person could take it the wrong way.
"Microsoft on the other hand writes an OS for any PC and any user"

This reminded me of another phrase I see a lot:

"Build a tool monkeys can use and monkeys will use it"
Here is a good / bad list I made of attributes of desktop sw:

Good:

-Drag and drop eg: Easier to attach a photo to an email

-OS integration eg: iPhoto => set as desktop, Excel => uses outlook contacts

-Access to hardware eg: GPU, usb, accelerometers, camera

-GUI responsiveness

-Fully customizable flow eg: Not forced into the "back"
button paradigm.

-Control over version eg: If there is a bug, you can wait to upgrade.

-Control over data eg: I can't get my FB contacts

-No need to upload data to another app to edit it. eg: photos etc

-SPEED

-Works w/o connection

-Keyboard shortcuts

-Richness of GUI

-file assoc - mailto link etc. You determine what app uses what extension.

Bad:

-Installer eg: no "insta-play"

-Spyware

-Manual updates

-no HUGE data sets eg: youtube / wikipedia

-Uninstaller eg: doesn't uninstall potentially corrupt prefs

-expensive for developers eg: No knowledge of user's
environment.

-!Cross platform

-No Data sync across machines

Now, before some wise guy says that all n things can be solved w/ n different plugins, let me just say this list is for the general case. Since most people don't have those plugins it's silly to build a business around them. Unless of course you have some way of spreading them, which you usually don't.
I think children learns fast for necessity. We could do the same. I see proofs every day in Italy where immigrants learn italian in a few months without school and only for necessity.
No. SCTP is good for applications that were designed to use SCTP. Practically the entire TCP/IP infrastructure we run today is already optimized for the HTTP case.
John Harris (UK) - 'It's an illusion' (Their 'laws' are not lawful)
I recently learned about SCTP because I had to write a SIGTRAN interface for work.

SCTP is interesting to me because it offers choice:

- Do I want reliable or unreliable?

- Do I want ordered or unordered?

- Do I want multiple streams per connection?

- Do I want multi homing?

And a few other benefits:

- Resistant to SYN attacks

- Proper shutdown procedure/no half open connections

IMHO, it IS the superior protocol. Obviously since its not widespread, it won't work too well for some things yet.
Mythbuster Adam Savage on Obsessions
Cormac McCarthy is a depressing motherfucker. I'm halfway through Blood Meridian and ready to slit my wrists. Good programmer read: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace.
It still bothers me that web browsers don't really "do" REST without Javascript.
Pen is something different though as it doesn't live a fingerprint or any trace. People touching my display with their fingers really pisses me off but a pen (or a ruler or anything) okay for me. Or even if they must, then at least touch it with the tip of their nails and not with the skin.
"You're truly better off $$$-wise to just run the AP stories or copy-pasting your competitors stuff." This is gist of the problem.

As an aggregator you have a lot of upside and little downside, as you mention 'simply linking to coverage you can't match in house may save you money, but you won't make any off of it' but some are making considerable money with little downside.

The act of 'creating' the content takes a lot more resources, creating a greater downside. With aggregators much of the upside is taken away, there is no more exclusivity.

There is a reason why tabloids and TV networks pay 'exclusive rights' for pictures and stories, to woo advertisers with unique value. If the story is being run everywhere the value is split. The greater risk is taken on by the content producers with aggregators vying for a piece of the traffic that advertisers want.
A New Experiment: The RFS
How do you define a browser?

If you strip away the visual chrome, a browser is simply a piece of software that interprets a certain set of languages and displays the result, not unlike the JVM or the CLR.

As for your example, I can do that now - when I type gmail.com into the Vista Run dialog, my browser opens up and runs the Gmail app. How is this different from typing in the name of a JAR file and having it run, aside from a different program being run to interpret the code? Also, what about the tight IE-Explorer integration in XP, where I could open a normal Explorer window, type in gmail.com in the location bar, and then Gmail would open in that window (and have the UI change to IE's chrome)?
In 2010, you'll be able to fly without your passport in the Schengen-area.
My boss used touch my screen with a pencil. He'd actually draw light lines on the screen with the graphite.

I had to buy a box of wet wipes to clear the screen whenever he left my desk.

Drove me nuts.
I believe you mean john gilmore rather than jpb.
In my opinion comedy only works in situations like these if you're also a bit silly/comic in other situations. Otherwise it's obvious that you're just using it to try to diffuse the confrontation and it doesn't work.
Back home in India, some state governments include fines in the contracts (not sure about the software contracts, I am talking about rail/road related work here) - for every day the project is late, the companies pay very heavy fines. This scares them so much, sometimes they work all 24 hours (3 shifts, which is very uncommon in India) to complete the project.

Why didn't the UK govt include clauses like these? Especially with Accenture, they aren't exactly known for their quality deliveries.
I personally really liked the story. It had some interesting ideas and the author seems (IMHO) quite good. I'd reccomend it.
It's convincing, until you realize that the author is treating nukes as just really big bombs. If he's only looking at the area of total destruction, then he should be counting all explosives, since that's ignoring where the real deadliness of nuclear weapons lies.

First off, the heat wave let off will be lethal at a much larger radius than where it will cause total destruction. Total destruction means that everything is gone: buildings, cars, people, anything that was there will be unrecognizable/gone. For a nuke, this is a very small part of the destruction caused. The fallout and radiation will carry much much farther than that. If you tried, you could probably cover the entire earth with fallout with fewer than 100 strategically placed nukes.

It's not beyond belief that ten thousand would both cover the earth with concentrated radiation, and cause enough fallout to create nuclear winter. Volcanic explosions are often enough to affect sunsets on the other side of the world. If we exploded nuclear weapons all over the world, there'd be enough debris in the air to block out the sun, causing a significant temperature drop, and killing plants around the world. Scratch the global food supply, and we're all toast.
Only if he buys you dinner first
You can work 20-25 hours a week at a regular job and spend the rest of your time doing your own stuff. It's a reasonably safe setup (if you don't have kids) where you don't give up much but gain a lot, esp. on a personal level. Yes, of course not everybody does that, but I think the argument that your startup (or whatever we call it) won't support you from day 1 is an empty one, if you can make some safe money on the side. I would think journalism is a trade where such a hybrid transitional phase is possible.
Moser? If so, your soon-to-be-brother in law is one heckuva writer. Dropping you an e-mail now...
Programming Pearls is nice to read while traveling. Doesn't really require a computer, essays are short.
Logo Design RoundUp Part 10 - How Designers Promote & Brand Themselves
40 now, seems like there is a 'Z' and an '@' there now :D
Seriously even if he makes 100K, heck 10K im going to label this guy as one of my idols LOL ...
I'm at peace with the notion that non-technical users aren't interested in and shouldn't have to learn what's under the hood.

However, the author of this article is not a non-technical computer user, despite his claim to be one; if you're aware that VLC has "output modules", one of which is "XVideo", by the standards of the masses you're a geek, period. Claiming to be "just a user", and at the same time spouting various kinds of technicalities that "just a user" would have no idea about is actually another symptom of the web forum pseudo-technicalism that has infected "IT website" articles in this vein.

*nix is a technological paradigm that allows certain possibilities, the most prominent of which has historically been building "by geeks, for geeks" operating systems. In years of reading through discussions similar to this one, I have yet to see a convincing argument for why it can't possibly be used to build systems for non-geeks to use as well. And along those years, Apple provided very strong argument, if not solid proof, for the opposite, in the form of OSX.
"What's seventeen inches and resting on my thigh"?
No, the article is retarded. It compares fiction with fact and then goes on about why the fiction is wrong - its fiction! Its not meant to be right. Also, we don't KNOW that what he said is actually how time travel would work, were it possible. So its stupid.
minimum income programs have often come from market-oriented economists, such as with Milton Friedman's Negative Income Tax

INTERVIEWER: Some of those debates became very, very heated. I think [Ludwig] von Mises once stormed out.

MILTON FRIEDMAN: Oh, yes, he did. Yes, in the middle of a debate on the subject of distribution of income, in which you had people who you would hardly call socialist or egalitarian -- people like Lionel Robbins, like George Stigler, like Frank Knight, like myself -- Mises got up and said, "You're all a bunch of socialists," and walked right out of the room.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/in...
Really neat idea. It could also happen someone outside YC could take the idea and work/improve on it.

Where do these ideas come from?
Academic Programmers - A Spotter's Guide
If nothing else, it's possible to tunnel tcp over sctp. But you could write a webserver that delivered HTTP messages over sctp directly. In fact that would make a good research project for someone. And it would likely be useful, if only for the sheer amount of stuff that uses HTTP as a transport.
The thing is that as an asynchronous protocol HTTP doesn't get that much benefit from being delivered over sctp whereas protocols that depend on continuous session state like ssh or XMPP or VOIP streams would potentially gain much more.
Make sure to list that on your alternative ideas on the YC app!
Its not every day you see remote code execution exploit of a Transport layer protocol, and what OS do you think people are going to be toying around with SCTP... Linux. This is serious.

edit: needed to review the OSI model.
Where do things like all-Flash web apps fall? Are they web apps, since I use my browser to get to a web page that contains no more code than is needed to launch the Flash movie? But what if I chose to download (or otherwise receive) the .fla file and launch it using Flash Player - someone could launch it this way without ever having Firefox installed.

Or consider Java Web Start applications - you click one link in a browser, which causes a helper to fire, some code to download, and an app to be launched? What are they?