skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not only is this chick completely irresponsible, but this "trip" is a joke. He's going to be living in an airport for a month, all for what? No one cares about people who live in airports, nor do they care about the fascinating lives of airplane passengers.

I genuinely hope his trip goes as planned, but this social networking media web 2.0 garbage is a waste of the internet.
The Evolution of Bug Trackers
A virtual forum with contributions from Atlassian, Fog Creek Software, 37 Signals, and Mantis.
Yeah, this is fascism in miniature. Imagine a large scale experiment on that philosophy. Welcome to Italy, circa 1919.
The question for the CEO is whether or not this would generate worthwhile publicity for JetBlue. For example, if Good Morning America brought their camera crew to the coffee shop, then it might be worth it.

But then again, if they offer these guys special favors which they document on their website, everyone who has the JetBlue pass will probably expect the same.

Because of this, I don't think that JetBlue will give them any special favors.
If economists ever expect us to view them even remotely in the same league as scientists, they may want to start by dropping the approach of trying to "persuade" and move on towards "proof".

Krugman's not bad, he writes good mainstream stuff, which is hard to do. I would be far more impressed if he had spent the last 5 to 10 years writing to the mainstream, screaming his head off about the dangers of the bubble we were in. And if his answer is that he wasn't certain is was a dangerous bubble, he can hand over his Nobel to me, because I sure as hell knew.
The funny bit is that rather than arranging this over the phone/email with a customer rep, they apparently need to discuss it over coffee with JetBlue's CEO. This is where the idea moves from Paul Theroux ("Great Railway Bazaar" etc) territory into Julia Allison land.
Someone's holiday reached the top of the HN homepage? Well I hope you have a lovely trip.
I'm not getting one until there's an apple branded version of it.
For all the horrible, terrible, awful things about Internet Explorer (namingly: standards support and UI) ... they are innovating heavily in security: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/features/...
Selling open source software in your company
Millimeters?
This letter really bothers me for a few reasons:

1. The letter did not need to be open at all. If you want to travel the country for 30 days without paying, more power to you but why not just send it to the jetBlue CEO directly?

2. The people behind this letter obviously think their idea is amazingly brilliant. Which it isn't. Everyone has interesting stories. You could go into a Dunkin' Donuts at 3AM and hear some pretty crazy stuff. No need to be at 30,000 feet.

3. These people probably WILL get free flights or some other special support from jetBlue because God forbid a publicly-traded company didn't listen to any and every simple Jack who asked for something on the internet.
When you wanted customer input, what was the most effective way of getting it?
So it's the JPEG version of PNGcrush et. al.?
The real issue is that there is no discussion happening between Apple's AppStore approval staff and the developers. If there was 2-way communication between the two the developer would know fairly quickly whether or not this was Apple having an over-reachingly broad policy, or just an Apple employee misinterpreting the policy.

I think that Apple is running into the same problem that the patent office has. Everybody can't be an expert on everything, and it's increasingly expensive to hire experts to do mind-numbingly boring work like shuffling through applications (software or patent) to approve based on rather broad criteria. Not only that, but there is pressure to just push things through the pipeline (whether they are approved or rejected).

In this case, it's entirely possible that the employee that rejected the app knows there is a program called Bitwise, and thought that this app was trying to tag along on that popularity (I guess?) not realizing that bitwise is a generic term. It might be a different story if he was naming his app Bitwise, vs just adding it as a search keyword.

But all of this could be solved through 2-way communication and making AppStore developers feel like valued business partners -- they are business partners with Apple afterall. Even the US Patent Office -- for all its ills -- has an amount of communication between the patent reviewer and the patent applicant.

If the AppStore reviewer fired off an email or phone call to the developer saying, "Your app seems great, but we don't like the keyword 'bitwise' in there because it's referring to another application," the developer could immediately respond with, "But 'bitwise' is a generic term that describes the functionality of my app. Wikipedia/Google it."

As it stands, the developer feels like Apple is talking down to him/her from 'on high,' decreeing that this app does not seem worthy of the AppStore. Without communication, the developer feels powerless to affect the outcome of the approval process, and gets frustrated at minor details like this which would probably be cleared up over a couple of emails instead of forcing the developer to resubmit his app in the 'Apple approved way' (even though his way might be perfectly fine, and the reviewer was only mistaken).
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I'm happy to read any of his zany ideas because the graphical presentation is so brilliant.
Why does this letter qualify to be on HN. Its got zilch amount of value for Hacker News !
Reminds me of this:

Meet Wired.com’s Terminal Man: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/09/terminal-man/
where is the financial aspect in this paper? this is fan-boy functional programming
Basically. There are three ways to losslessly compress a JPEG:

1) Huffman table optimization

2) Ordinary progressive scan

3) Trying all sorts of split orders for progressive scan

Most image apps worth their salt hopefully do 1) and 2). This script does 1) if it wasn't done already, and 3), which is its main purpose.
That's the only thing I could think of too, but then thought... if smokestacks (et. al.) are dumping it up there quite above tree heights, that's just gone, right? I'm not trying to be argumentative, I really don't know how this stuff works.
Which Schemes?
Luckily it's just a cell phone and there are plenty of alternatives.
I think in general, he also wants to meet with the CEO of a large company.

@dcurtis' tweet: "My two-month goal is to have a beer with a Fortune 500 CEO. Can anyone help me with this?" (http://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/2096133916).

Now, he has an "excuse" to do so.

(Just don't tell him JetBlue isn't in the Fortune 500 :-).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803968
You found a security exploit, feel special. Finding an exploit isn't a voucher to rant against the people responsible for it. The bottom line is that nobody can be 100% sure that their data is secure after they've put it in the hands of a third party.
For someone who thinks the web 2.0 stuff is garbage you certainly spend enough time posting redundant comments in multiple places.
> this social networking media web 2.0 garbage is a waste of the internet.

Why is this necessarily a waste of internet? Are you worried that we're going to run out of internet, and there won't be any left for you?

This sounds like the sort of idea that in years past someone would embark on to write a book about. Nowadays it's on the internet instead. This attitude is just as bad as the 'a crime is a worse crime when it happens on the internet' attitude that people seem to have today...
I'm glad to see any type of open hardware; however, there is nothing intrinsically new about this hardware device. Essentially it is a commercial CCD or CMOS imager hooked up to an embedded Linux machine (such as a Beagle Board).

Something that would be much more exciting would be an open hardware initiative to build "computational cameras" -- such as ones that employ assorted pixel masks for high dynamic range or actuated imaging elements to produce flexible depth of field.

If you're into the idea of "computational cameras", there was a really cool plenary talk at a conference earlier this year -- check out some coverage at Hizook.com

http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/06/26/computational-cameras-...
I have flagged this post, and would request others who agree to do the same. Please, lets not let HN be the next Digg or reddit.
The Power of Social Media (results of Ad Blocker survey)
My comment was about more about the "fundamental physics issue" part than calling Woit a "non physicist". Sorry for the mix up.
"That said, our experience with the Sun X4500s hasn't been great from an I/O point of view."

Of course it's not. It's an IBM PC down inside. I bet it can still boot MS-DOS and run GW-BASIC. ;-)

PCs are not a nice architecture for servers: there are starvation points all over the system, from registers (AMD64 solves some of it) to memory to I/O. Sun could have based the Thumper on a more server-ish (SPARC?) design, with plenty of memory and I/O bandwidth, but then it would not run Windows and the ability to run Windows is a defining advantage in the high-volume server market.

If I were to design such a box from scratch, I would couple the disks close to the network interfaces over a dedicated bus so the CPU could just say something like "hey, disk 3, drop blocks 10239 through 10300 on buffer 12 of your network controller while I go on with header parts and prepare to send it off". While I am at it I would skip the PSUs and go with DC power and a small battery, Google-style.

I fear I probably described something Thumper-ish and I will be ridiculed by someone with lots of server design experience, but that's the life of a hardware engineer who went the software very early. And I welcome such criticism ;-)
You don't have to be wealthy to attend college and study poetry or other liberal arts. I went to my state university with no financial help from my parents, just federal loans. I ate plain rice many days and pay $300 bucks a month on the loans, but I did it and I wouldn't trade it for the world.
an equivalent to how pngcrush works then
A portable computer running my software with free lifetime Sprint EVDO 'Whispernet' access would be really useful to me.

I'm curious if Amazon put in any safeguards against this:

Does the normal Kindle webbrowser proxy via Amazon?
Does it normally have routes to the public internet?
Does the cell modem require keys to run?
Do they tie the modem's subscriber ID to the user's Amazon ID?
Do they or Sprint have systems keeping tabs on per-user usage?
Would it be feasible to tether to a PC as a USB gadget?
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The Porn Bust
Many sites use packed/compressed/minified javascript. That page in particular uses a number of jQuery related libraries that probably come pre-minified. This cuts down on their size, making things quicker. It also happens to obfuscate the scripts.

There are some people who obfuscate for the sake of it, but it's generally not very effective. We have various ad providers try and get us to host obfuscated iframe buster scripts (so they can expand ads outside of iframes). Those types of scripts are so prone to cross site scripting attacks that we've started informally auditing them before we put them out. When they won't give us the nicely formatted and commented source (it's dumb), we just run them through various javascript prettifiers to have a look anyway.
As far as I can see, one of the problems with this gatekeeper thing, is that it doesn't scale very well - you can't do a proper job of talking to each developer and making a fully informed decision in each and every case - they just don't have the time. So they've got a default 'No soup for you' policy if there are any questions about an app.
Given that they apparently aren't short of new app's in the pipeline, then from their point of view, saying no to a few hundred won't make much difference to the platform overall.
Why didn't they just approve the app and remove the incriminated keyword?
I think my point was a lot more nuanced than you give it credit for.
Even more interesting is that C# and VB.NET, the two main languages targeting the CLR, do not make use of it. Before posting this though, I did a quick search to make sure they hadn't turned around and implemented it for C# 4 or something, and found this link:

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeed...

Apparently there are some performance issues with the TAIL IL instruction, though I wonder if it's really as slow as pushing a new frame on the call stack.
Yeah, the fact that it searches for terms you don't type in has really been annoying me for a while. You essentially have to put a + in front of every term in a technical search. I have to say, though, it makes sense for non-technical users, who are apt to type in misspelled and suboptimal terms. For the vast majority of users, Google probably knows better than they do what they should be searching for. Also, I think this change may have evolved as a more generic implementation of an attempt at stemming. For example, it makes sense for Google to additionally search for stereos when you enter stereo, and brings, bringing, and brought (and probably brang and brung) when you search for bring.

Another bugaboo of mine, though, is the fact that hyphenating words no longer acts the same as putting them in quotes. Searching for car-stereo used to be the equivalent of "car stereo" — one less character to type. Now Google ignores the hyphens.
me -- "I work with engineering applications for company X."
them -- "So you work with computers?"
me -- " sigh Yes."
them -- "I'm having a problem with my computer/application/phone/iPod, can you fix it for me?"

This happens all the time. If I elaborate any further their eyes glaze over. If I just say computers, the assume I'm driving the Geek Squad VW.

No one is propositioning my other friends for their services (accountant, doctor, etc). I've contemplated just telling people I assemble prosthetic limbs.
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A machine does two things.

(1) It sits there and says "you spent $500 - are you going to use it?"

(2) It sits there and gives you another place to hang junk.

If (1) works for you, great.

BTW - These are two reasons why the "put under your bed" machines are a bad idea. Out of sight, out of mind.
Does anybody else feel like there's just been a rash of this kind of stuff lately? Apple really seems to be dropping the ball on a number of issues. Whether it's the attempted trademarking of "glossy chat bubbles", lethargic update cycles, or app rejection decisions like the one in this article, I really feel like the Apple user and developer experience has soured. I think the iPhone store (and the iPhone phenomenon) is perilously close to jumping the shark.

Android, anyone?
Man, the comments in this thread make me realize people have lost their sense of adventure.
I'm pretty sure Sun isn't worried about Backblaze as competition in the enterprise storage market. Building cheap storage boxes is much different than building what Sun provides.
Sorry, that link should be: http://github.com/paulbaumgart/GreasemonkeyScripts/blob/mast...

Press 'e' (for 'enforce') on any google search page to automatically add + to all search terms.
zfs performance in 2009.06 has some very serious problems, particularly with zvols.
At which point spending ten times as long on each message is probably still worth it.
Ask HN: 3 Ideas (with slides) for YC W10 - What do you think?
The author did not claim anybody can expect or provide 100% security. The write-up was (among other things) about something more important - how do companies respond when presented with an important security issue. 37signals responded fairly poorly and that's useful information. Interestingly, this is not the first report of a somewhat strange attitude they seem to have regarding possible exploits -

http://evilpacket.net/2009/jul/9/basecamp-one-wrong-click/
I don't think this should be on Hacker News.
Nice Alaska! We love it!
So, any system with a bunch of rules, like Apple Application process if fascism?

Apple has these rules, they pointed it out to the developer, and let him resubmit his application. Only a complete moron would compare this to fascism and what happened in Italy. I guess it is only a certain law stopping you from comparing them to another figure.
Are we running out of helium?
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My main interest is combining the web with custom manufacturing technology to help people build anything they can imagine. I'm also interested in ideas usually discussed under the banner of "Web Meets World" "Internet of Things".

In short I really like the internet and plastic. I'd like to combine those two things in satisfying ways.
Because business doesn't work like that. You can't go around changing someone application, or removing words from the description that you don't like. That is really bad. They have given the guy the option to resubmit, so all that happens is his app is a couple of weeks late.
This is cool, but I think it's missing something. My startup will address the something that it's missing. :)
I don't think they're asking for free flights. I think they are asking for the 'missed flight' penalty to be waived. Since they are trying to pack so many flights into 30 days, they understandably might miss a flight or two due to delays.

42 flights in 30 days does seem a bit much though. For many of those flights, they are just going to be sleeping through the flight anyways (and unable to talk to 'interesting people').
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I wouldn't expect the average application reviewer to know what "bitwise" means. If he responded explaining it and they still didn't allow it that would be worthy of a rant.
Thanks for the link. Interesting analysis.

Still, I think it proves my point that you can always blame the government if you want to.

In my view, the reasoning has one major flaw. If money supply was the cause, then why weren't there other bubbles in addition to tulipmania?

If you correctly identify the cause, then it should be both sufficient and necessary for the result. If the cause was the Dutch monetary policy, then there should have been other bubbles contemporary with the monetary policy.

As far as I understand it, the tulipmania did not cause a recession or depression even if some very rich people lost all their money. If the author's reasoning was correct, then there should have been other bubbles caused by the same government policy.
It was a joke, but it was also the truth.
Esimate distances with your arm and this rule of thumb
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I can't visualise these institutions.
Pynomo
I would have expected a social elevator pitch to be a no brainer for a bunch of entrepreneurial hackers.
When you asked for a cheaper source, I assumed it was somehow about the money.
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Exactly. Why did they have to make it public? To put pressure on Jetblue?

I don't think this trip is a smart idea. 43 flights in 30 days? They'll be spending their time running to and from and around airports. I doubt they'll enjoy it.

I have to admit that I'll follow the blog though.
In late nineteenth century, the term "political economy" was generally replaced by the term economics,

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

Economics isn't a science. Physicists can agree on 99.99 percent of what they talk about, and the other .01 percent is agreed to be unknown or arguable. Economists can barely, just barely, hold a tenuous consensus on things like comparative advantage. The reason economists "get it wrong", is:

1. They want to direct the money into XYZ set of pockets instead of ABC set of pockets, thus they're always "wrong" as for as ABC is concerned, and

2. They don't have the predictive consistency typical of scientists because...they aren't scientists.
Microsoft is actually decent at security now. The AV they released for free was actually on par with a few commercial products out there (all AV at the moment is pretty bad though, if you're curious). The really difficulty with Microsoft and security is countering their reputation for bad security that they earned over the past several years.
I think the interesting point to look at is the 'traditional' non-university institutions teaching university-like courses (Nursing, IT, etc.). They tend to move faster then anyone else because of size and their economy is more straightforward in most places. They provide education & accreditation in exchange for tuition. For this reason.

They are moving towards self paced learning via the kinds of 'modules discussed here. They still have buildings and teachers (standing around or answering questions). But the distinction between this and online schooling is much harder to make.
They made it an open letter because they wanted to get attention. I think it was very well done and I wish them the best. It sounds like it is going to be an incredible experience - reminds me of Taxi Cab Confessional but a little less Hokey. People have incredible stories and I bet within 30 days they're going to hear some amazing adventures. Best of luck guys.
Perhaps this is really naive, but why haven't any lawsuits been brought up regarding the app store? Maybe they have but I haven't heard of them?
> the fact that often it is the speculators themselves who are most demanding that the government aid and assist the inflation of the bubble.

"He asked me to do {something stupid}" does not relieve you of the responsibility for the dumb things that you do.

More to the point, the "govt should fix things" belief leads to govt doing dumb things. These things never look dumb up front.
Yahoo Open Hack NYC
No a system where the local police/magistrate is allowed to interpret the rules however they wish and you aren't allowed to question them, ask for an explanation, appeal to a higher authority or have any sort of representation is facism.
Right.

On the other hand, in this case it was a search keyword, not a word in the description.

They could add a disclaimer to reserve the right to remove inappropriate keywords.

Asking the developer to do so and resubmit the app is a waste of time for both parties.
I have a couple ideas for startups in this space. Would love to know what you all think. Products/Companies that cater to a largely female, largely suburban audience have a tremendous amount of potential.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804063
I didn't read the post as a rant at all. If anything I think that the author has articulated an important factor in evaluating any third party provider's security infrastructure: attitude.
You know, the best programmers/engineers I have known did almost no course work. The material was so easy they breezed through, while reading papers of interest or doing extra research projects with faculty.

If you are truly interested in your field, you should rarely cover new material in undergraduate courses.
How does language shape the way we think?
ORLY? Then tell that to my current flash only performing client how you easily add the flex libraries to his project.

Oh wait, you can't.

Seriously, they're not the same thing. Flex is a toolkit that compiles to swf but its not flash.