skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The device will look like a slab with a distinguished direction (say the Z direction). Suppose the black hole is at (x, y) = (0,0), z=anything.

If you shine a laser/microwaves/whatever the relevant frequency in at one side, it will always come out of the slab near (0,0). Basically, laser beams shined into the slab will be attracted to the line x=0,y=0, z = anything.

[edit: really curious why I'm getting downmodded. Did I wildly misunderstand the device?]
Well duh. Urgent not in the sense of subsistence but definitely in the sense of timing. When that kind of thing happens you are usually in a bar, at a party, in the car whatever, and you've got to find a way to somehow write the song down or remember the lyrics for later googling.

I love music so having a good fingerprinting technology at my fingertips is a simple pleasure I'm really thankful for.
Ha, you don't have admin rights and were installing groupware software ...? That's not exactly Microsoft's problem is it, that's messed up.
I loved his blog too!

I was looking for this, because I had a feeling recently that some of his recent moves were something he himself criticized only few years ago, but I can't recall what or when it was :) Is that the cause he purged his blog? ;)
The Challenges With Enterprise Content Management
I only started working with Rails about 6 months ago and was blown away by how easy it is to deploy apps. The whole set up literally took 5 minutes, and I didn't even know how to use git. I seriously considered their paid plan for a side project. But then I found myself reason "yea, I'm paying a premium for the elegant deployment flow and easy scalability. I'll use an extra dyno and turn it off at night to keep cost low. Maybe I use ferret first and then if thing picks up I set up an EC2 for Solr or Thinking Sphinx. Permanent storage? Well, I'll force my users to post picture somewhere else initially." So then I started looking at Linode and Slicehost and found that it's not that bad, especially with Passenger.

I'm a potential customer, I love their simple design and can't stop promoting Heroku to friends. I hope they succeed in solving those limitations and keep cost down in a reasonable range so that I can happily give them my money.
I think "best" is part of the perception they market, but the reality is that they off er a variety of products that don't suck. Sometimes that comes across as "high end" because of how many other bag-sucking PCs are marketed as "cheap."

But seriously, when was the last time an Apple computer has the fastest CPU? Or the largest laptop screen. Or anything with a card reader. Or blue ray... Just pointing out that they are entirely willing to avoid the absolute top of the line and have done so consistently.

Maybe it's a margin thing as you say, I don't know...
Blogger vs. Wordpress
Interview with founders whose startups didn't survive (video)
An interview with 2 Atlanta entrepreneurs whose startups didn't quite make it.
Stockholm's bunnies burned to keep Swedes warm
Drifting away when the bandwidth is low is fine and can still be done. I should have said that avoiding drifting is novel for me when both (or more than two) parties are capable of expressing themselves quickly (both typing and composition). I just never had that experience before except in person. (Even voice and video were just laggy enough to make them lower bandwidth than face-to-face talking.)

Voice and video are fine, too, but there's no easy record of what happened, they're one-to-one only, and you still can't talk at the same time or edit what you say. And if you say something complicated, it can't be reread until grokked. Plus, you can't use them as easily with people you don't know as well.

Maybe I'm not explaining it clearly. I've just had great experiences with Wave so far, having discussions that I would have only been able to have in person (and would not afterward have a record of), at even higher speeds than I would have had in person. That's cool.
I read your explanation, understood that it's a kind of external javascript combining machine to limit http requests and size, while increasing reliability.

I then went to your site to check out the demo and found a page with lots and lots of external javascript requests, and something about a microformat.

I'm still confused.
The second to last example looks like it is incomplete:

include time // equivalent to #include <time.h> in C

TimeT: cover from time_t
Tm: cover from struct tm {
tm_sec, tm_min, tm_hour, tm_mday, tm_mon, tm_year, tm_wday, tm_Tm*

main: func {
timestamp := time() // timestamp is now a TimeT
t := localtime(timestamp&) // t is now a Tm*
printf("It's %dh%d.", t@ tm_hour, t@ tm_min)
}

I would have expected a closing } in the definition of the TimeT cover.

Generally speaking, ooc looks really promising. Compiled to plain C, hence fast and super compatible, and with syntactical treats borrowed from Python and Ruby. I wanted this for a looong time. :-)
Give it time! It's still in beta :-)

It should get out of beta in, oh, what, 5 years' time, going by GMail's timeline?
If you're ignorant of C#, then you probably shouldn't make declarations about it. Your definition of "modern," while reasonable, is not a commonly accepted one, so be careful about using it without defining it.
Oct. 15, 1956: Fortran Forever Changes Computing’s Fortunes
I'm working on a second post about the microformat side of things. But here goes:

Suppose you accept that idea that instead of having 10 different web analytics tags on your page it would be better to have one tag (let's assume it's jsHub), then you can move up a level.

Rather than have each vendor define the metadata they want from the page, it's better to have a single set of metadata that all the vendors can use. So the point of the microformats is that they'll simplify even more the art of page tagging.

If vendors agreed to mark up the page name, or the products shown on the page, using a microformat then a single tag could read them and then fan the data out to various vendors. That way there's no ambiguity about what's being gathered.
There was a press release directly from T-Mobile declaring that the data was gone, and it was most likely not coming back. That's as credible as any news can get, and no organization can be blamed for publishing that.

Also, the fact the MSFT is recovering the data does not mean that they had backups, they might be manually recovering the data from the disks instead (and given the timeframe of the recovery that sounds about right).

It's true that web journalism has a tendency to jump the gun, but not this time. This was a fully corroborated story worth publishing.
If you look at the wording of the original press release - it never mentions backups. It talks about "in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely."

In this latest press release, however, it seems like the backup process itself was flawed. The backup database became corrupted.

"Outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up."

"Microsoft said it had taken steps to strengthen the stability of the Sidekick service and started a more resilient backup process."

"more resilient backup process to ensure that the integrity of our database backups is maintained."

So perhaps the rabid bloggers (even though they may have overshot themselves declaring no backups) were on the right trail. But a flawed backup system is the same as no backups, right?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870410720457447...
The short explanation (from jgc's post):

"jsHub is a single piece of JavaScript (a "tag") that can handle reading different sorts of page information and then send them to many different vendors' products. One piece of code to send to Google Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst, WebTrends and Mixpanel."
One goal will be to produce electricity instead of heat.
I have seen a bunch of these and many are priced at this level, which is around US $0.15 per test. It astounds me as it seems ridiculously high.

Most of my automated tests run in about 5 seconds or less. With EC2 prices at about $0.10 per hour, I can't imagine ever using a service with such a high premium. Not only because the price is nominally expensive, but also because it's a commodity service that's being priced at a HUGE premium.

For me, I'd consider the service if I could offload my grid testing to the cloud for around $20 / month.

That way I could run a bunch of smoke tests after every push to make sure nothing broke and a larger set before commits. But that can get to be a lot of tests especially when you re-run for failures.
Memorable quote: "The VC business is not about grabbing the largest slice of the pie. It is about getting involved with very big pies."
I fully agree with the closed-source part. I've written tons of Ruby and Rails code for a company who is protecting their IP, so there's no way for me to say "Hey, I've written this and you might like it and use it". This, however, seems to be a requirement of the small startups.

It gets really frustrating, because the interview will be so much harder.
That your compiler produces C doesn't imply anything about performance. When you introduce general abstractions, you also make it harder to perform certain optimizations. It's still worthwhile, and potentially informative, to write an idiomatic OOC program, an optimized OOC program, and compare their performance to both an idiomatic C program and an optimized C program. (Solving the same problem, of course.)

Your statement "it's often the C you would write yourself" is a claim that you can support with numbers.
It's hardly spying when anyone can view the page source and see what's happening. Or install something like Ghostery.
>a CDO (collateralized debt obligation) is a security formed by packaging together hundreds of home mortgages

there's actually another layer of abstraction involved. a mortgage backed security, or collateralized mortgage obligation (CMO), is formed by packaging together a large group of home mortgages. a CDO is made by packaging together hundreds of MBS obligations or CMOs.
As I've said in another reply, what if you write Ruby and Rails code, yet it's closed source or protected by an NDA? You could be a better programmer than most of the open source guys, yet no one would ever know.
Yes, but even that is going to have to be either moved 'off site' generating an electromagnetic signature somehow, at a minimum some infrared because of line losses, or consumed on the spot, in which case it all comes back out as IR.

It is really terribly difficult to 'get rid' of anything without a trace.
Delloway | user details | folkd.com - best links and social bookmarks
It's well-established that this wouldn't apply to those places.
This is relevant:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/12/04/the-economics-of-progr...

Summed up: for 50 years, programmer time has been getting more expensive relative to machine time, so optimizing for programmer time makes sense (in broad terms - clearly there are plenty of cases where speed matters).
Augmented Reality in Aisle 3
Augmented reality could change the way we shop - something big retailers must consider now.
That you compile (not translate) down to C is an implementation detail. I think you've deviated enough from C that a name change might help people's first impression - I had very different expectations because of the name.
'Magnetricity' Observed And Measured For First Time
I tried to convince one customer to use Heroku, and we did for a while, but they ended up paying big $$ to RackSpace. Considering increased admin/engineering time, I have little doubt that they would have been better off paying $500/month to Heroku, rather than RackSpace.

Another customer wanted to use Heroku, but we ended up building our own system using multiple EC2s - again, long term the hosting costs will be much less, but the admin/engineering costs especially during development were a large expense.

For my own web portal project? I am using AppEngine (code in JRuby+datamapper+Sinara, but I am considering a rewrite in Java because of the superior tool support).
Compiled to plain C, hence fast and super compatible...

In the beginning, there was cfront... ;)
Why do we use checks?
the fact the MSFT is recovering the data does not mean that they had backups

ahem. From the OP:
"We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up."
I can only guess he purged his blog in order to create a "clean slate" for posting about Andreessen Horowitz. It was a shame that so many awesome posts were removed, which is why I decided to collate everything.

I really hope he doesn't ask me to take it down...
I've added the optional {} after the empty TimeT cover =) Is it clearer now?

I'm really glad to see that it scratches an itch for many people out there. As always, suggestions are welcome.
http://github.com/nddrylliog/ooc/issues/#issue/25

=)
This is what happened when non-engineering people become part of engineering. Everything is looks wrong.

'90: "Dear X, your program does not work in my system, here is a patch."

'00: "WTF, i cannot run this program, what should i do ?"

There is nothing wrong in Linux as OS, in fact it's become more mature and usable since i first install it. Most problems that i read in forum now is about not working hardware or from people that does not know how to read manual or to lazy.
I bought a G1 SSD for my desktop over a year ago; it was the best single upgrade I've ever made to a desktop machine.

When the G2s were released, I put a G2 in my desktop and the G1 in my laptop. Having a SSD in my laptop is great, but the improvement from the SSD in my desktop is actually much more noticeable.
Writing bad code never increases your net worth

This is a really silly point to write, and obviously disprovable. Here's a really simple and realistic example:

You've just deployed your app. It's perfect... except there's this huge performance issue with one of the most important pages. Your app's just gone up on Slashdot, TechCrunch, and everywhere else. Zillions of people are using it. You have two options:

1) An ugly evil hack that will sort out the performance for that page. Total time: 30 minutes.

2) A re-architecting of that part of the application that will cleanly resolve the performance problem with efficient use of caching. Total time: a week.

If you choose option 2, you're a moron (sorry, no other way to put it). Option 1 obviously increases your net worth. Yes, you need to go back and do 2) as well, but this is a pretty damn good scenario where it makes a lot of sense to write and ship bad code knowingly. And yes, it does increase your net worth - those zillions of users might stick around instead of claiming your app's broken and moving on.
New Rivals Pose Threat to New York Stock Exchange
A painful job search: One IT security pro's story
When he said that his firm owns less than 10% of a company and it will probably end up as the biggest payoff in his portfolio, I assumed he was talking about Twitter. But in the comments, he rules that out by saying "We own more than that of Twitter". Interesting. Maybe it is Etsy? Any other guesses?

He also says "I am calling bullshit on it and will do it to your face." Wow, really laying it down there.
http://mail.google.com/mail/?hl=en&tab=wm what is this doing?
You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job
>and stretching is always a good thing.

Dynamic is. Classic static "stretch and hold for 20 seconds" stretching isn't. It's actually hurting you.
Multitouch webkit project
Seriously, the idea of having the data on the cloud is very appealing, but only as long as the infrastructure is properly managed.

That's probably the only reason for tolerating MS Exchange. The phone integration - calendar, contacts and mail - are excellent - and you manage the server the way you see fit.

On the other hand, you get an Exchange server to manage.
I strongly agree with this. Also, the prices seem quite steep to me -- though they may not be. Instead it may be that I'm not seeing how many tests can be completed with the allotted actions at each price level.
The "what can I do with 15000 actions" is a step in the right direction, but I think it would be easier to comprehend if you said something like "a typical application of x size can be thoroughly tested y times a month w/ z actions".
You're right, now that I'm a public person, I must be careful what I declare. (Damn you, scope)

No seriously - who cares what I say? ;)
Funny text messages, SMS Jokes, free sms joke, short sms jokes
Sadly, I think the issues mentioned in this comment are exactly the point, primarily the last issue. Most desktop consumers using Windows and MacOS aren't used to dealing with a product that isn't a household name.

While lack of vendor support and advertising (no "one right way to do things") appeals to those of us who can invest time learning to maintain our software, people like my parents need someone to call when things go wrong. And it is extremely important that the person they call be courteous and accepting to a fault; my experiences with Dell customer service have been nothing but unhelpful, but none of them have ever chewed me out for failing to read the manual. My experiences with people apparently acting as volunteer service-providers for GNU software online (via IRC) have been both unhelpful and insulting. Perhaps the fault is mine for trying to find help on IRC; sadly, with a lack of a well-advertised vendor offering support, I'm left to scrounge help wherever I can find it.

To be fair, it is perhaps reasonable to ask the question of whether people in charge of most Linux distros actually should want to dominate the desktop. But if people do want to create distros that would move in on that space, they should understand that it's exactly these sorts of "subjective" assessments of the OS that would block widespread adoption. This isn't a technical problem. It's a sales problem---a problem of not investing as much time and money into the people-to-people interactions as into the people-to-technology interactions. Both are needed for widespread adoption.
Uh, no. I guess I picked the wrong declaration; I meant Tm. There is a bracket/scope opened after 'struct tm' that, as far as I can tell, is never closed.
True, but it wasn't exactly Ruby/Python/IO inspired. ;-)
You should watch the episode of Bullshit! where they get people who claim such differences to try and differentiate between local/organic and 'regular' fruit and vegetables.
One of the problems with the current collection of apps and protocols currently used for networking is the very imperfect seamlessness. This is one of the most confusing things to mainstream end users, perhaps the single most confusing thing. They are already confused by the distinctions between the browser, search engines, the desktop, the OS. For example, when a user can drag and drop a picture from one app into an IM, but not into their blog comments, this is incomprehensible if they don't know how the underlying mechanisms work. (And, frankly, irrelevant to what they want to do, which might be to share their vacation photos.)

Something which can let you do a small, but consistent and very useful set of operations everywhere will eventually attract the largest body of users. This is what Google should be aiming for with the Chrome OS. They should make sure that the Wave protocol is throughout that product, and everything else that they do. If they can eliminate the dozens or hundreds of minor frustrations faced daily by users due to the imperfect seamlessness of the current OS/browser/apps toolset, Google will garner tons of mainstream love.
I can't help but wonder if it's a mistake to try and push widespread adoption of Linux distros in the desktop space. It's possible there's insufficient money to be made in that space--Apple is a hardware company; Microsoft is a de-facto monopoly but rumor has it that they're going to have to struggle to recoup costs on their desktop OS in a world that cares less and less about the details of the host system.

Maybe the right solution for desktop adoption is "If you want to run Linux on your desktop machine, that's neat. But don't think you're going to be pushing Windows off of your neighbor's desktop."
This whole thing is starting to get way out of hand. I know a vietnam veteran that pointed out to me that everything is a weapon.

And he meant it very literally, a rock or a club seem obvious candidates, but a pencil, a or a piece of electrical wire are less obvious.

My kid sister knocked a guy out when she was 5 with a battery powered dog (he was harassing me and she figured enough is enough, it seems that when you don't have a bigger brother a little sister will do just fine).

What much more important than to continue to redefine 'weapon' is to educate kids to get all this violence under control.
This article is symptomatic of people thinking about "Linux Desktop" as a concrete thing (or project, or idea), while it isn't. It's an ecosystem of vendors (targeting different markets), projects, technologies, and you can't directly compare it with standalone companies like Microsoft or Apple that (mostly) have a consistent and focused product/marketing strategies.

The five ways outlined are:

Lack of vendor support - author mentiones SLED, but conveniently skips over the fact that Canonical also provides commercial support for its "arguably the most popular Linux desktop" desktop systems.

Lack of advertising/marketing - a bunch of video commercials (RH's Truth Happens, Novell's PC/Mac/Linux spoof), Ubuntu's CD shipping program and release jams/parties many of the distroes organise & support is not insignificant; it probably is pocket change to Microsoft's marketing machines, but the entire budgets of these companies are probably a pocket change to Microsoft's marketing machines.

Too much bad techie attitude - surprise, someone's a jerk on the internet - you can find l33t people in most online communities. More than average historically in linux communities, but the author does acknowledge there are good sources of online help nowadays (e.g. Ubuntu forums). Esp. the Ubuntu's code of conduct (and similar more or less formal codes in other communities) tries (and IMHO goes a long way to) minimise this problem.

Too much infigthing - goes on to recite a recent developer-oriented flamewar and concludes "no-one outside certain developer circles cares". So, why does the author care? Open development means not only is the source code open, all the joys and flames related to it are as well.

Not enough developer co-operation - again, if you compare the cooperation between different teams in a same company, and between teams in different independent (and possibly competing) companies or projects, the latter will not look as good. I agree with the basic premise, "not enough developer cooperation", because we can never have enough of that, but the arguments are just wrong. And, the given example - that fedora and ubuntu have different package systems - has nothing whatsoever to do with developer cooperation.

Two positive examples of cooperation:

1. KDE and GNOME using (or planning to use) same underlying technology: glib, webkit, telepathy, and the rest of the freedesktop.org stack, and actually co-hosting their main conferences last year.

2. All the distros working closely with their upstream projects (e.g. many of debian developers, ubuntu MOTUs and fedora developers actually are the upstream developers too).

(Note: I'm biased, as Linux has been my primary desktop for quite some time now and I'm actively involved in GNOME and freedesktop, but I've tried to look at this as impartially as possible. My biggest pet peeve is people really thinking about a "Linux desktop" is a single project).
Just curious - what did you expect?

And a name change isn't excluded, do you have any cool language name idea?