skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do MS have history of vaporous hardware announcements?

No, they have a history of promising breakthrough innovation and then woefully underdelivering.
'Expect' offers just enough programming to meet the requirements
Three blog posts I'd love to read (and one that I wouldn't):

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/10/three-blog-posts-id-love...
Two Non-Fat, No-Whip Starbucks Apps, Coming Right Up.
That's like steve yegge's http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/lisp-wins
Except written by a teenager (in the bad meaning of that word).
http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:QCWrYt03Y8UJ:sloanwordp...

The econometric results reveal that the reviews for the majority of the products have an asymmetric bimodal distribution.

etc. I thought everyone knew this, and it makes sense. You don't review something if you think it's "okay". You review it if you love it or hate it. Rottentomatoes probably has a bell curve because the professional reviewers review everything, whether they want to or not.

Also, the reviews on youtube are quite useful, and a three-or-less star average indicates that something is labeled incorrectly (for copyrighted material, tv shows, movies, videos, and the like).
maybe. but also consider that if the SEC can go after 2 or 3 times as many companies, it may have a bigger deterrent effect, via extra publicity.
Except, such papers forget the power of reflexivity : after the douchebags read the paper, they will start dissimulating very cleverly, rendering the results effectively useless.

It's like that article back in the 90's which said that "gets-things-done"-type of people often folded their shirts up to their elbows, and all the mouths started imitating this.
Microsoft Hardware doesn't exactly have a strong track record. Xbox 360 had a failure rate of 54%. And then there's Zune: http://www.google.com/trends?q=frozen+zune

Anecdotally, I recently bought one of Microsoft's new bluetooth mice, and it stopped functioning correctly after 3 weeks.
The perfect weed: how one species went viral
So the lesson is don't worry so much about authenticating the user, but focus on authenticating the transaction. It would have been a much more useful article if he actually described how (rather than just saying, "do it like the credit card companies").
nice - but looks like it doesn't take into consideration the user agent.
http://github.com/sunlightlabs/rack-chromeframe/blob/master/...
The problem with going after companies and not people is that it doesn't necessarily act as a future deterrent since these people aren't the ones paying for the penalties anyway - it's the companies. So there's that agency problem that the interests of managers are different than that of shareholders (the risks for the managers may be much lower than the potential reward).

Further, as in the case now of some of these prosecutions that are negotiated against companies (as Spitzer arguably did with AIG), the appearance is also that it amounts to extortion. The simple act of threatening to charge a company making it more difficult to do business, may be enough to "settle" to provide some prosecutor with publicity for a future gubernatorial run.
Shouldn't this first check if Chrome Frame is actually used (by using the User-Agent header) before it injects the code? And why not just place the four lines straight into your layout?
While there may be a decline in admissions, this article discusses a decline in % enrollment.

This is similar to talking about the decreasing average height of Americans: you need to account for the change in demographics over time.

It's entirely possible that the groups who made up college enrollment in 1972 are still showing up in the same % in English departments.

I suggest that the increase in public school enrollment corresponds to college becoming attractive/available to a wider group. I'd suggest looking at the enrollment patterns of people who are the first in their family to attend college--it seems like they would concentrate on the "sounds good" majors like business more than English.
From my limited understanding, it is just iterative improvements in fusion that are required. You shoot a laser at something compressed in a strong magnetic field, and use the dissipating heat from fusion to boil water to spin turbines to power the laser and magnet. This whole process already works, but doesn't net energy gains. Improvements in efficiency of the laser, magnets, or power gen could make it tip into net energy gains. It's still an engineering problem from then on, as you need to compete on $/Kwh.
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=839046
SGI aims at 'personal supercomputing' that's cheap, easy to use
70% of journalists say they use social networks to assist in reporting
Lot's of people have said it before and I'll say it again: vocational schools is the way to go.

There are a lot of young people in the United States who neglect the opportunity to learn lucrative trades while pursuing college degrees of net negative economic value for those same learners.

But contrary to this, someone's study of IQ and occupational success (I would cite the study if I had it at hand) found that at ALL levels of ability (as estimated by IQ tests) one is better off becoming an engineer than becoming a technician. Some engineers struggle to stay employed, but so do some technicians. Anyone who can complete an engineering college program at all is well advised to attempt to do so, if that study reports a general fact that would be replicated in other studies.
Note to PG: Rename Hacker News to Healthcare News.

Should I write this to the feature requests thread?
Intel plans to challenge Android with Moblin for MIDs
What do you know about UDTs in database practice? Have you used them at all?
How the U.S. removed a 1/2-ton of Uranium from Kazakhstan
I'm holding out for the second revision, "Courier New".
One wonders, though, whether there is enough room within the company for good hackers and Larry's way of doing business, or Larry his own self. We can all name more than one Sun figure that has industry-wide recognition and respect. I am not so sure that the same can be said of ORCL, as we now are apparently saying.
New build of Reflector lets you debug .net assemblies you don't have the code to
Negative flags are almost always a bad choice for a name.
I'd rather see

if (obj.IsFoo) { ... }

than

if (! obj.IsNotFoo) { ... }

Still, changing a name is minor as far as design goes.
1. "Ahaphora" - Weird word, could it be ...

2. "in Ruby" - ... raganwald/homoiconic?

3. "github.com" - Maybe it's just a new project? Nah, I've never heard the word "Anaphora" before, so it's probably raganwald writing about some weird/nifty/awesome thing.

4. "raganwald" - Yes, yes, yes. But is it homoiconic?

5. clicks link - Bingo!
Rob,
Congrats on the service - it looks like a useful tool for usability efforts. How do you see this differing from the existing competition (a list of potential competitors can be found here: http://labs.depthskins.net/index.php?/article/guerrilla_styl... )

We use usertesting.com and have had good insights from that, mostly because they link us up with testers so we don't have to find them ourselves.

I wonder if in the future you will develop a network of testers so that companies can pull from that network? I think that could be useful as it's sometimes hard for startups to find unbiased people (e.g., not friends/family) to test the site. With your tool plus that service, it could be really powerful for us.

Best,
Daniel
You're assuming they prosecute at all. They're quite inept at their job given the amount of funding that is poured into the organization.

Example: Perot Systems gets bought out Monday by Dell. The week prior we see 2500 calls bought at the offer for $1, and on Monday they traded at 9.60. Do note that the calls were an unusual volume anomaly in the name.

This trade data will most likely be looked over by the SEC.
The author refers to the company Oracle by its name exactly zero time -- instead he uses the stock-ticker symbol ORCL. Why? This habit strikes me as an exceedingly arrogant attitude: "I'm so much of an market insider, my pieces must read like a finance website" -- especially given how he fails to refer to Sun, IBM, SAP, Motorola, Apple and also indirectly to Microsoft and Dell, without mentioning their ticker symbols. He's surely going to have some unpleasant conversations with investor relations.
Eliminate Ranges from Your Negotiating Vocabulary
This is fascinating. I feel its bookmarklet will get way more use than my Readability bookmarklet.
Socialgreat's Third Data Source: GraffitiGeo (YC S09)
--and 10 minutes is the outer limit. Good dense places to live have food shops open long hours within 5 minutes walk, because all those people depend on them.
Keynote: Real world Haskell (Video)
Yes, I hear you. I'm not sure Steve Jobs actually said that quote verbatim, but here's where I first learned of it:

http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/

What's interesting about this dual-screen "prototype" is that we're in the midst of huge speculation about the Apple Tablet. And yet Apple isn't talking, isn't doing demos, and isn't mocking up prototypes for public consumption.

They do this for marketing purposes of course (free advertising), but they also do it for competitive reasons (don't show your cards in poker) and for brand-management reasons (don't show your cards AFTER a hand in poker either).

My team at work has tons of great ideas. We ship only a small percentage. Our annual reviews don't have a line that says "Good ideas that weren't delivered." :)
I feel like a complete jerk for saying this (partly because Sunlight Labs is a non-profit), but it suffers from what I like to call the snippet marketing syndrome: 4 - 5 lines of code being fancied up into a 10 - 30 line "plugin" with heavy references to the consulting studio that 'coded' it.
Biodegradable spider silk is pretty useless.

You would want to use it for things like suspension bridges, bullet proof vests, high tension electrical lines. Space tethers even maybe.

Things that are not disposable.

I have a hard time thinking of a disposable application for a fiber that is stronger than steel. Unless it was really really cheap.
Persuade xor Discover, Parkinson Remix
Rebuttal accepted, observed, and original post withdrawn.
But, but, it's Rack! Everything related to Rack is awesome.
Kirk Cameron is a complete nutter. This isn't worthy of HN's front page.
Is there really a difference between a macro and a method or class definition that makes languages supporting both fundamentally more powerful than languages supporting only the latter?

This "extending the syntax of the language" looks just like defining a class or method to me; maybe because Lisp doesn't really have much syntax.
I agree the secret, sinister stuff is nonsense, BUT I think there are legitimate privacy concerns for citizens. The Presidential Records Act is being, appropriately I believe, extended to social media. The average citizen probably had no idea the act existed; probably more so for anyone who is buying into the wildest exaggerations.

As the post explains, 'The PRA also extends to communications from people outside the White House. So if a lobbyist or CEO emails the White House, that communication is a presidential record and will eventually be made public. The same holds true for correspondence received by the White House from the public. Because of the PRA, Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush all treated letters, faxes, and other communications from the public as presidential records.'

'Instead of sending an email, people often now post on someone’s profile or comment on a video or photo that's been uploaded. When people want to tell the White House what they think, they’ll often do the same thing on our social media pages. A lot of times, we solicit this feedback because we want to hear from you.

These new types of communications from individuals to the White House, even though they take a different form, are governed by the PRA.'

So yes, in the past if you sent a letter to the White House it was archived, but it is an entirely different mindset for someone posting a comment, or sending an @whitehouse on Twitter. We're talking about archiving, for public record, something you probably quickly typed, not a letter you sat down, wrote, and sent via the mail.

Is there anything sinister? No. But I think it makes perfect sense that this is something that needs to be explained to the general public who are a) woefully ignorant of how their government works, and b) rightfully suspicious of how laws written decades ago, which weren't designed for social media, let alone the Internet, are being interpreted and applied on the fly.
Why Does New York Suffer for the U.N.
Giant cannibalistic don't-work-when-its-raining spiders.
Lucid Hydra 200: Vendor-Agnostic Multi-GPU (SLI/Crossfire) in Hardware
I got an error when I tried to search

"Warning: preg_match() [function.preg-match]: Unknown modifier '/' in /home/jjoczpw/public_html/functions3.php on line 1702"
Embedding audio narration in PowerPoint presentations
I don't think OOP is meaningless. It's just diffused by too much talking. For me OOP essentially means polymorphism and here is an article i wrote about that: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/oop.html

My Haskell knowledge is superficial so i'll keep my mouth shut about the various kinds of polymorphism you describe.
HPC on Wall Street: Report From the Front
But Apache isn't misconfigured in this instance - a file was uploaded and people are claiming that being able to view that file is a vulnerability.

I guess it is a vulnerability of the same standard as "My password is: password".

I just don't understand why everyone is up-in-arms and so surprised by this "vulnerability." It's common sense...
Commercial Users of Functional Programming Workshop 2009: complete videos
Loved this article. Amazing how such a subtle difference can cause such a big difference in visual impact
First off: 4 year graduation rates are stupid. There's no other way to put it, they're a stupid measurement and one colleges should stop paying so much attention to. At my school, they've made a huge push to try and get everyone out the doors within 4 years, to the point they have informed academic advisors that they should be advising students to cut corners and "just graduate". While it may be a worthwhile standard for a private university, where a large majority either doesn't work or works a very small number of hours for "spending money", at a public university, with many students paying their own way through college, its a bad measurement. Its better for everyone for a student to take 6 years to graduate and walk out the doors with half the debt of someone who graduates in 4 years (or less).

As far as college/vocational schools, if it is possible, you should go to college. However, don't study what you want to go into, study something tangentally related to it (unless you are going into highly focused field, like engineering or a medical degree, and even then try and get as far away from what you want to as possible while still being on track). Going to a school I was "undermatched" for, and going into the computer science program, I was bored out of my mind, and just wasn't getting much out of it. After switching to statistics, I've found my classes much more enjoyable, and have vastly increased my understanding of both statistics and computer science.

While it may not hold true for everyone, I've found that working in something tangentially related to what I wanted to do (Computer "stuff", originally), I learned a massive amount about both the field I wanted to work in, and in the field I was studying. While it may not help me get a job, I learned quite a bit more than I would have otherwise, which is why I went to college in the first place.
I wonder what the overhead of doing this as Rack Middleware is versus just putting it into your layout.

This is markup, it belongs in your layout files. You're really just disorganizing your app by putting this into middleware.
yet Apple isn't talking, isn't doing demos, and isn't mocking up prototypes for public consumption.

Yeah, it usually isn't a good idea to make big brags showing experimental mockups before you have anything in reality. Apple seems to like to show the finished product.

This demo video is going to disappoint a lot of people if the real device is released and it isn't quite as spectacular as people originally thought it would be based on the video.
If the statement had been "They can't make a reliable X-box, so this hardware will be junk too", you can at least debate that as a coherent idea, but to say "They failed on Vista therefore you can't believe this" is just vague and non sequitur.
The easiest way to tell is that Helvetica is obsessive about straight horizontal edges, while Arial tends to use angled edges rather unsystematically.
Can anyone give an example of what he means by expressions carrying an implicit environment around with them in REBOL?
The idea behind Rack middleware is that it's incredibly easy to implement for the developer and re-usable across the spectrum of Ruby web apps.

Yes, implementing Google Chrome Frame in a given app is trivial. But removing this from the concern of a given app and into a re-usable middleware is where I think it's useful.
"At Apple ATG, I worked with many from the Xerox Smalltalk team, and we pushed for stronger models of OO within software designs. And, we resisted as much as possible the introduction of C++ , which in fact Larry Tesler jokingly called it C+- (approriate, actually.)"

I already read this (I use REBOL), this paragraph was very funny to me :)
You're right, a check for User-Agent needs to be put in there.
I don't think their problem is that they're contrarian for no reason. I think their problem is they generalize from their own experience to say what's best for everyone - even though everyone else may do it differently for a reason.

In this case, the post reflects 37signals' experience building their product business as a "side project" while still doing consulting work as a "day job."

When they focus more on "Here's what we did and why we think it worked for us" instead of "Here's what you're doing and why it's dumb" then their posts are much more informative.
Considering what's been tried before (and fairly recently at that), it's a valid concern.

E.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office
Though the source escapes me, the best advice I've come across for avoiding this (and for living your life in general) was to the effect of "construct your life to fit you so perfectly that it's utterly incomparable with anyone elses."
Can you elaborate? My Google Reader does not accept it either, but it is a valid RSS feed:

http://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipe...
What sort of software do you write in Rebol? I've only read about it and I find it fascinating. It'd be great to hear something from an experienced user.
Yeah you're right. I think it's a mixture of both. In any event following just their advice would be crazy.
AMD's Radeon HD 5870: Bringing About the Next Generation Of GPUs
Hm; strange - i don't seem to get any error? can you email me what URL you're checking? information@seositecheckup.com. thanks!
I hope you're not implying that this could replace Blackboard for some people–I'd say that's highly unlikely (at least in the near future).
Sure, that works for some things.

But what's the transaction in the case of, say, a secured extranet? Is it requesting tabular data? Downloading a file? Kicking off a workflow?

Or what's the transaction of an online banking session? Checking my balances? Initiating a payment? Transferring funds?

Authenticating much more often than once a session is impractical from a user experience standpoint. People are just not going to enter their PIN & token code a half-dozen times. Security has always required usability trade-offs and authenticating transactions is going to be far too much hassle for most services.

I suppose you could batch transactions and ask for a second log-in before you process them. That would offer a sanity check and mitigate potential damage. But even that would require awfully security-conscious users to accept that process, tolerate the changes it implies in how the service can operate and actually pay attention to the batch to see if something was slipped in -- at which point I wonder how much additional security the transaction batch is truly providing.
But it clearly shows some of the problems existing with GAE

No it doesn't show that, because what we're discussing here is is not a 'problem'. The GAE datastore behaves this way by design. It may mean that some developers will experience problems, because they are not used to a non-relational database, but that only means they have problems. It doesn't mean that GAE has problems, unless you wrongly suppose, as you seem to do, that any developer should be able to use the GAE datastore as his relational-database-intuition tells him to.
Everyone gets paid on commission
Explaining falling crime levels: Is it all about Prozac?
So that's undyed? What a fantastic color. Yet again the inadequacies of digital interfaces driving me mad --- I want to see it! And (no doubt I'll never get the opportunity) touch it.

I'd like my VR now, please.
Indeed. It's a consistently good blog. Many thanks to Reginald for his hard work on it.
Yes, even as tired as I am somedays after coming home from a long/busy shift at work, my face lights up once I finally have the opportunity to sit and focus on my special side project. I can't tell you how many times I would literally lose focus during work and be day dreaming about developing new ideas for this potential startup. This project would even actually help motivate me to make it through the rest of the long work day, due to the positive vibe that radiated through me while thinking about project.
I'm thinking the same thing. This is an awfully convenient "leak". High quality images, video, details. This "leak" is just clever marketing at work.
Let me be the first to get out of the way all of the complaints:

1. Why didn't they just use Twisted?
2. Why didn't they predict tornado and make it better?
3. Yeah, but (tornado|twisted|my half baked implementation) is still faster at serving 'hello world' than diesel.

---

I for one welcome this new breed of choice in this space. I'm interested in "real-timing" an application I'm currently working on, so having more choices as to which way to implement it is great.
I was talking to the director of IT risk at one of the top 5 banks in the US yesterday, and they seem to be moving in the direction Oracle is talking about away from multi-vendor systems. Based on SAP, Oracle, and IBM succeeding in this space it is hard to argue there ISN'T lots of money to be made. With most people in the small business area either on some kind of Microsoft stack or FOSS based stuff, the big blue chips are the only ones buying from these companies and it is best to cater to their needs.
Thanks Daniel.

Right now, we're not that different from our competitors - but we will be. Our capture system doesn't rely on video encoding, or Java plugins, or installing Javascript on a site. This allows our test recorder to be much more flexible than our competitors. We're also building a webcam capture feature - something that de-facto in traditional usability testing but so many remote usability testing solution overlook.

At the minute we just want to get something out there (our current motto is 'Minimum Viable Product') - want to get users on-board and then use the feedback to build in features.

We do want to offer access to testers, like you mentioned. This idea we're currently calling 'Business B' (we will think of a better name) and we're looking to start developing this soon after launch. Similar to usertesting.com but we think the value will be having access to a pool of testers across demographics - hopefully giving greater insight into your usability issues from people who will actually use your site.

We've got a load of big plans - this is just the start of it all.

--Rob