skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a glider pilot we fly right next to lenticular clouds (see pictures here: http://www.glideomarama.com/Blog/blog-january-2009), see them form in place and evaporate before our eyes (I have), and sometimes we're trapped above them when they form under us and a solid undercast though that has never happened to me.

The simplest answer by far is - they are clouds.
Not that rare, I remember a dozen or two across Northrend. Almost every major quest chain ends with such a sequence (and most of them involve the Lich King taunting you). Admittedly the many many quests along the quest chain typically don't have machinima sequences.
So a buck fifty a year with no mortgage and (I would assume) a really nice house... seems pretty decent to me - :)
thedesigninspiration.com is great
Gourmand: automatically import links into delicious
Exactly. And how did sunglasses get to be a status symbol in the first place? Because in the "early days" of Hollywood, celebrities had to wear them due to the brilliant lighting required on sets. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunglasses#Modern_developments [citation needed - I know]
I disagree. Without adequate coverage of financial institutions, a nice frontend is useless. Users don't want to use a pfm that they can't add all their accounts to. I'd argue the backend (Yodlee) was very instrumental in making Mint easier to use and thus more popular. Competitor sites did not have as much coverage.
To be fair, I don't think the President (Jason) responding to Matt (a high-profile user) in a forum both contribute to is an example of shining customer service.

Key relationship building, certainly, but that's a different metric.
Oh I agree, that didn't stop me from reading the entire thing :)
Yeah but the whole O'Reilly empire sells books, conferences, webinars, etc. all bearing the Web 2.0 scarlet letter:

http://search.oreilly.com/?q=web+2.0&submit.x=0&subm...
Well yeah. They're releasing spiders!
Top SEO Books for the SEO Newbie
I'm saying "It depends." My experience with that behavior indicates that it's usually counterproductive- either nitpicking like my previous example, or axe grinding that isn't really helping. Think an Ayn Rand follower interrupting a class on Marxism every few moments.

The problem, really, is that it's impossible to make a fully qualified statement and still be engaging. As a speaker, you have to skip over some detail somewhere, thus there is always going to be a place to jump in and act an ass.
OK, I've talked with some people and it seems to me that the issue here is primarily ownership of money. One of the major advantages to having a corporation is separate bank accounts. Basically, the corporation, as a "person," can own money and property that is legally separated from its owners'. This means, among other things, that if a corporation is sued, the owners don't lose money out of their own bank accounts. But it also means that they can;t give that money to a campaign in their own name. If they want to use that money, it has to be given in the name of the corporation. If corporations lose their right to free speech, campaigns could never be given any of the money in corporations' bank accounts.
From Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink#Pink_in_gender]:

"In Western culture, the practice of assigning pink to an individual gender began in the 1920s.[5] From then until the 1940s, pink was considered appropriate for boys because being related to red it was the more masculine and decided color, while blue was considered appropriate for girls because it was the more delicate and dainty color, or related to the Virgin Mary.[6][7][8] Since the 1940s, the societal norm apparently inverted so that pink became appropriate for girls and blue appropriate for boys, a practice that has continued into the 21st century.[9]"

So yes, you're right, this association is recent.
_why's actions remind me of a quote from Hagakure:

"In the Kamigata area, they have a sort of tiered lunchbox they use for a single day when flower viewing. Upon returning, they throw them away, trampling them underfoot. The end is important in all things." (emphasis added)

Rest in peace, _why! You were but a hero, but now you are a legend.
Yes, absolutely. Rackspace has TONS of idle inbound, outbound is what they're buying bandwidth for. The reason for this is very simple, the vast majority of their customers has a roughly 20:1 outbound vs inbound pattern.

Almost every big hosting provider is in the same position.

And, predictably, on ISPs it is the opposite. That's also why as a rule you don't get much uplink capacity, because as soon as you have that you can start hosting serious stuff on your home network. For instance, I have 20 Mbit down but only 2 Mbit up (well, what's only, but still the difference is huge).

I have a small (5 node dual opteron) cluster in Amsterdam co-located with a friend on a similar deal, so I really have absolutely no problem believing this.
Wow, I had never seen that before! The lights totally makes sense, though.
Please help me gather data on the Nature of Games
(crossposted a few places)

I am soliciting responses for a survey I have crafted. I'd appreciate it if you would fill it out and/or pass it on. I'd like to get as many responses as possible.

This isn't for a class, its just a personal project of mine that may yield some interesting data.

It's an anonymous survey I created in order to begin answering some questions I have had involving the nature of games that we as humans play. Games can be quite varied, and there is a lot of individual taste that allows for a wide variety of game types.

The Paragraph entry parts are NOT required. Just encouraged. If you don't have a lot of time, you can just do the multiple choice.

This is not solely pertaining to video games. I mean all games: Card games, sports, board games, video games, and so on.

More details are in the Survey itself:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dENFQUZIZUdmMVpPUmFtTGl1WDl6N0E6MA..

Thanks everyone!

If anything interesting arises from the survey, I'll be sure to post it.
I second this question. As soon as corporations stop having 1st amendment protections, Fox News is going to have trouble putting Glenn Beck (or the bogeyman du jour) on the air. I can't conceive of any other (real) reason for this...
And it worked, right? Instead of complaining about the way the world works, perhaps it's more rewarding to exploit it and become better at framing your work in a way that fits with how the average Joe sees the world.

People reading this should instead take note that Farhad is pushing a web 2.5 theory and therefore might be more receptive to pitches that fit his outlook.

His job is to filter out all the noise to present a semi-coherent view of the tech scene to upper-to-middle class consumers. Concepts like web 2.5 are his way of guiding the reader through a world they're probably only visiting.
I'm thinking interesting project, but beauty of design points = fail.

For the ultimate in elegant, jet powered simplicity, I think Mr. Maddox and his pulse jet bicycle is leagues ahead:

http://thekneeslider.com/archives/2009/06/02/pulsejet-bicycl...
Surprise, surprise: TechCrunch50 already back on for 2010
I've also done quite a stint at IBM, and I can tell you there is nothing easier than getting approval for a software license. The max it'll take is 1-2 days for basically anything you want. Obviously your tech writer friend wasn't too important if he couldn't even get a license for Office. Also, I had a friend in tech writing, and they didn't use Office; Instead, they used some sort of XML mark-up for designing documents.
You do realize that f(x); is a valid statement in python?
Sure, but the ';' can be lost without penalty.
In which Scott Cook demonstrates he still doesn't have a clue.

I'd have to concur with many of the comments on the blog post. I didn't switch to Mint.com because it was free, or it was the latest shiny product. I may be young, but I'm not stupid, nor was Mint.com a fad decision. I switched because Quicken was big ball of a program, with poor support on my platform, a horrendous upgrade path, and notoriously poor customer service.

I didn't flee Quicken because I was rebelling. I left because I made an informed consumer decision.
Remember with Rackspace Cloud you are also charged for "compute cycles" (a measure of CPU, memory, and database operations), storage space and outgoing bandwidth. They know that every incoming GB of data will have to get processed on the server, so they'll get you with the compute cycles, and storage, and you're going to have to send a response back to the client, so they'll get you with the outgoing bandwidth.

I host with Rackspace Cloud, and I can tell you that compute cycles go by pretty quickly with PHP/MySQL operations if you're not careful.
"Blizzard online network services" includes Starcraft, Warcraft II, Warcraft III, as well as WoW.
Google's UFO connections
Here is a great post on taking money off the table by Mark Suster: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/09/02/should-founder...
Your guesses are no more than preconceptions, and asserting that she's wrong on the basis of what you imagine her views to be is a poor standard for evaluating anyone.

Your argument for why 'corporate severability is bogus' is mistaken, I believe, but first I must correct myself - 'severability' was not the right word to use, and refers to the validity of a contract if one of its terms is violated. What we are actually discussing is the idea of limited liability - I apologize for the mistake.

Anyway, I guess what you're saying that that the issue of shareholders' limited liability is bogus because they can't be profiting from criminal behavior they don't know about, and when such criminal behavior is discovered it is stopped so there is no profit.

I am unpersuaded. This is like saying that if I am arrested immediately after robbing a bank, I should not be penalized because I haven't had an opportunity to spend any of the money yet and therefore derived no benefit from its theft. Surely, when a company is found guilty of some abuse (eg Pfizer's recent $2.5bn fine), haven't shareholders already enjoyed the profits in the form of dividends? OK, so after such a fine there won't be any more fat dividends for a while, but this is of no consequence to the shareholder who has already sold his holdings I'm afraid I see the doctrine of unlimited corporate rights but totally limited liability as a clear case of moral hazard.
Why not post that up somewhere. I want to take a look at this.
I think the chances of you becoming Linus are remote :)

But still, HN feels like it is purposefully limited. That's fine if that is the stated policy, but then you might as well shut down the 'feature request' thread and state that the policy is to keep HN in the form that it is today besides tuning things to accomodate growth.

On another note, I realize that HN being written the way it is must be quite hard to split across multiple machines, should the need come for that do you have plans in that direction ?

And while we're talking about the feature request thread:

I put a fairly simple one in that would make flagging nonsense a lot easier for the people keeping an eye on the new page as well as less load on the server because of the extra pageview to get the 'discuss' page for spam links. Simply add a 'flag' option to any articles appearing on the new page that are also on 'noobstories', or alternatively add 'flag' links to the 'noobstories' page.

The main reason for this is that HN can be very slow and if you do not have to leave the page it will save a lot of time while flagging.
You get 10000. Here's bumpf from their site....

--------

What are compute cycles?

Compute cycles measure how much processing time your applications require on the Rackspace Cloud. Using 10,000 compute cycles in a month is roughly equivalent to running a server with a 2.8 GHz modern processor for the same period of time.

How many compute cycles will my applications use?

Since web applications vary so greatly, it's hard to make a perfect guess. However, there are some guidelines that can help. First, you can think of 10,000 compute cycles as being about the same processing power as you'd get from a decent dedicated server or Amazon EC2 instance. For example 10,000 compute cycles would power:

* about 2.1 million page views using a database-driven content management system

* about 11 million page views of rackspacecloud.com

* about 25 million requests for a static 15KB image
Ah, but ack supports an options file, so you can actually change your own defaults. Consider adding "--text" to "$HOME/.ackrc". In case you want more, specify just one option per line.
Clickable?

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=d....
Same for me. Pity, I really wanted to try this.
I just want to see this thing pass me, full after-burner on.
Leaders of large companies often understand that they need to bring in outside influence and new ideas to remain competitive; that's a good part of why they make acquisitions after all.

The issue is - and you'll understand this if you've ever been acquired or have have tried to innovate in a large organization - that large companies are not run by their C-Suite Executives.

Large Companies are run by their internal cultures, bureaucracies and departments; often there are several separate instances of these things too. Like all cultures, they are resistant to being changed unless that change comes from within.

Given that, acquired companies tend to be mis-matched in trying to contribute what they know. Even if some of the company listens, there are many areas that aren't interested in what they have to say.

The best thing that could ever be hoped for in an acquisition is that the acquired company is run as an independent subsidiary, simply required to funnel money to to parent company. Any time the two companies are asked to merge in any real way, the result is inevitably, regardless of how it is done, the loss of the bought entities ideals, culture and business practices is inevitable.
I'd say that Bell's theory is completely accurate, and that fcuk is a terrible example of it. Without wanting to offend anyone, the only people I've seen wearing obvious fcuk-branded clothing are what someone else referred to as the Bridge and Tunnel set.
Entepreneurship 101 - from MaRS institute - Great HD videos
I'd like to know exactly how old the author is, actually.
Well, in this cast Mint did choose to raise outside investment.
How to Make the Free-to-Play Model Work for You : Great examples from Gaia
Hi Scott. Thank you for taking the time to comment on my question. Yes, this is my third time asking this same question but only because I thought different submission times would make a difference in the number of responses I got.

Anyway, I didn't give you a specific response because I didn't want to limit possible solutions based on a price ceiling. If the solution costs X, whatever X may be, then an assessment of whether X is worth paying to create this solution would be in order.

I genuinely hope you don't take this as a runaround to your specific question - it's as specific of a response I can offer you with the limited knowledge that I have of the solution costs.
Building a native database in Perl.

I had already built the storage subsystem, indexing and single-column search ... when I found out that the size of data types differs across platforms and I had hardcoded the size throughout the database.
IT's true that my first example is a case of credit rather than stock, but I kind of wrote it as a throwaway example of why you'd want to be liquid.

Rather than a loan, suppose that in the case of being broke I instead opted to sell something - a book or a guitar or a car, say. Now, would it be fair for someone to say 'no way, you can't sell that because you haven't owned it long enough?' I do think your heart is in the right place - managing for the long term and so forth - but your 6-month hold is extremely unfair to the individual investor, and would just result in the creation of unregulated off-market exchanges, like pawnshops for stock certificates. I mean suppose I buy IBM but next month they are hit by some financial scandal, I have to sit with my bad investment for another 5 months and watch the price crater as most of the existing shareholders sell?

Short term investments are always (no exceptions) an attempt to game the system or trade on inside information

I don't agree. I can think o a wide variety of reasons for short-term buying, and don't think regulators should be in the business of judging motives. I'm afraid I think this forceful imposition of long-term ownership criteria would only cause the market to become bloated and sclerotic and the cure would be just as bad as, if not worse than, the disease.
I actually kind of like it. I do hope you weren't planning on making any money off of it though ;)
I'm not complaing, just making fun of :). It probably worked in terms of sales. But unfortunately it has the unintended consequences of all these people trying to coin unnecessary gobbledygook words when simple English will suffice. Now sometimes reading a newspaper article feels like sitting through a business school class. IMHO if anything making up terms and introducing more jargon just makes communication harder.

>Many of the basics are now essentially free, which means a business built on the infrastructure laid down by the first two generations of Web companies can gain scale on a shoestring budget, all while giving away its products and services for free. Call it Web 2.5.

Or in other words, things have become cheaper and it's easier to start a web company. Call it technology. Also, this has been true for much longer than the author acknowledges. He's trying to a fit a company into his cookie cutter view of the internet while coining an unnecessary word.

Your perspective seems to have more to due with pitching him than the merits of the article.
Many of these are, I think, signaling of things other than status -- e.g. membership of a group.

I also think this thread is missing the point slightly: status signaling doesn't explain every clothing decision ever made by anybody, but it does explain why fashions change the way they do.
that was a fun read. lol
To abossy's point, I know the tech writer in question, and remember the struggles she had to get a simple piece of software. I don't think it should matter "how important" she was -- if she needs it to do her job, she should get it. IBM's policy cost them more in her un-productivity than it saved in the license cost.
>Intel improved the resolution of its lithography with a technique called dipole illumination, a process that splits light into two beams, sends them through reduction lenses, and projects features from different angles.

That's so cool that someone had to figure out how to shrink LIGHT so that one can watch cats doing cute things on YouTube.
Craigslist is the epitome of simplicity. Any change would complicate it and reduce it's usefulness.

I think the guys at CL understand that.
Junk DNA does (or did, in many cases) have a purpose. Its just that any DNA which we don't understand the purpose for is labeled as junk. That definitely doesn't mean it doesn't do anything or that its useless.
Django Debug Toolbar is a must use for Django development. I hope it becomes a contrib app at some point.
$2M to buy a decent house

Friend, it's time you moved out of the Bay Area :-)
This more of a case in point than a because of. 37s has always had very very responsive customer service.
For relatively young drives, the opposite is true -- if the drive has survived a few weeks of heavy use, it is much LESS likely to fail in the future than a fresh drive off a shelf

References, please.
http://www.lmstfy.com/?q=doody
Mint.com will be migrated over to Intuit's inhouse platform, away from the service Mint.com is using now.
> Lift is rubbish

Could you elaborate?
This guy was on David Letterman some time ago. He did a test run and I believe caught some of the grass near the track on fire. :-)

edit: found it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJyAA0oPAwE
Cool stuff, much appreciated.

I notice that the code contains the use of 'goto' to handle an error condition. Seems clean.

Being somewhat of a intermediate programmer I've always read to stay away from 'goto'. Anyone care to comment on the use of it in Objective-C?
http://www.behance.net, hands down
Your guesses are no more than preconceptions, and asserting that she's wrong on the basis of what you imagine her views to be is a poor standard for evaluating anyone.

I will bet you $25 that she will not vote in favor of corporations having the right to free speech.

As for the criminal liability issue:

Imagine you loan money to a friend. Your friend tells you he is going to use the loan to buy a bus ticket to a job interview. Your friend promises to pay you back plus 20% in a week. That friend then uses the money to buy a gun, and uses the gun to rob a gas station. He pays you back the money, with interest. You do not know about the crime, but you have profited from criminal actions.

A court would likely not hold you criminally responsible, as long as you had no reason to suspect your friend of using the money to engage in criminal actions. It would probably require you to pay back the money.

If you knew your friend was going to use the money to buy a gun, then you indeed would be criminally liable.

If there was a "wink wink" arrangement (ie, you say to your friend, "here's some money, turn it into more money, but don't break the law, wink, wink"), you could be held criminally responsible.

Figuring out if you knew the intentions of your friend is a judgement call.

Likewise, if I invest in a corporation that I know to be engaging in criminal acts, I should be criminally liable for those actions.

If I invest in a corporation that is secretly engaging in criminal acts, and I have taken reasonable precautions to ensure that my money is not being used for criminal acts, then I should not be criminally liable.

If the company is later convicted for criminal/third party tort charges, and the amount of the fine exceeds the liquidation value of the company, it would make sense to claw back into previously paid dividends, the same way as you confiscate any blood money.
Didn't we have this just a week ago or so? And it probably wasn't Bohr and/or Rutherford.
Unfortunately, it looks like they already sold out.
SoftLayer switched to free unlimited incoming traffic earlier this year: http://softlayer.com/press_2009_04_21.html
In the case of Apple and NeXT, it was Apple's culture that was lost in favor of NeXT's.
You should remember that bandwidth is sold wholesale using bit/s in chunks of (eg.) 5Mbit; limiting users by some arbitrary number of bytes is an invention of hosting companies.

Thus for "serious" levels of traffic, you should look at the actual bandwidth (as in, bit/s) you would be connected to, not the byte cap. I'm not saying they are trying to deceive you, but just that it would explain your surprise.
What value does it gain from becoming a contrib app, other than slower releases and less experimentation? I really don't understand the feeling of wanting things to go into Contrib. Hopefully soon, Russ's "No Bad Pony" talk from Djangocon this year will be online to point people to.