skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Top list of free ebook sites on the net
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
There is no evidence that Zynga is under investigation.

Recently, I was discussing the online gambling business with a former online gaming colleague of mine and he brought to my attention that Zynga was under investigation by federal and state authorities suspecting that Zynga's Facebook poker room was engaged in online gambling.

It seems a lot like this shadowy source was just some guy who forwarded a July TechCrunch article:

IS Zynga a Target for State Attorneys General? http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/27/is-zynga-a-target-for-s...

The single source of the TechCrunch article was an unpublished position paper, written by a former "federal prosecutor and senior Department of Justice official," that speculates Zynga could be investigated.
Just to add a couple facts to the context of IMDb being older than the browser...

According to http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/history/fbrowser.html the first web browser prototype was developed in late 1990/early 1991. Mosaic was released in March of 1993.
is it because he's browsing on a mac? microsoft don't show download links for software that won't work on your system.

I bet if you look at that page in IE6 there's a big ol' download button.
My CD shipment mail is a lot more boring, but includes the following, which I think is a little more useful:

You have also purchased a CD. We will attempt to ship this within the next business day. After that, it generally takes 2-4 days to arrive depending on where you live, if you are in the continental United States. If you are not, send an email to ... and we can give you a better estimate as to when it will arrive.
Twitter Creator Jack Dorsey’s iPhone Payment System
There seem to be a lot of people who think that arguments about what language to use are 100% fluff and that they can all be neatly settled by the cute "right tool for the job" platitude. The truth is that sometimes we're just not sure what the right tool for the job is and we might do ourselves a favor by being open to different arguments for different tools.
El Paso also plays home to Ft. Bliss, the second largest installation in the Army's arsenal. That, along with the border, keep things fairly stable.
Are they all physical machines? Or VM's? Surely you could virtualise all of these on 1-3 physical hosts?
Then that's your problem, if you can't understand it. A man is unhappy: he knows not why he is unhappy, what problem he has, nor how to solve it. Is it nonsense to say he is unhappy? A species is wandering around configuration-space; it knows not what the current fitness function is, nor what mutations would solve it best. Is it nonsense to say that the species will do better or worse?
And the middle one moves to the end of the line, grabbing half the clients. Now, the problem is the same but someone else is in the middle, who then must relocate himself, ad infinitum.
Interesting micro payments/subscriptions provider
Crunchbang
Data consistency could be maintained through stronger runtime input verification which in turn nulls everything you said.

I don't think that it would be a bad idea to have dynamically typed databases although it would put a little more strain on developing the actual application instead of having to spend time on making the database.
At last! I finally understand why everyone complains about IIS's security holes, and not Apache's - it's because no one uses Apache.
Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’, Part 2: With takedown of Nathan Myhrvold
I use OS X on the Mac Pro and Macbook Pro and deploy on Ubuntu servers here and remote.
I disagree. PHP is objectively worse than Ruby, Python or Perl in practically every regard with the exception of ease of deployment. A language that loses source compatibility in point releases, has no consistent syntax or conventions, crappy toolset, half-assed object orientation and worthless functional aspects, is neither expressive nor terse... I could go on and on.

I have yet to see a fraemwork built on PHP that can match Django or ROR in terms of features or ease of use, starting from the fact that the language makes development of adequate template parsers or ORMs much more difficult given the lack of metaprogramming facilities. Oh, and while having fewer features it's also slower than the other language's reference implementations.

The only advantage PHP has is the preponderance of available developers and libraries (and those libraries allow to shoot yourself in the foot much more easily than the alternative languages by virtue of being just plain worse. Wake me up when there's something comparable to SQLAlquemy or Beautiful Soup on PHP). They're actually very significant advantages, but speak more about its legacy and inertia rather than any technical advantages.
It's funny that some dude apparently getting all serious about minimalism must still have an image plastered across his desktop.

A "wallpaper" isn't essential to using a computer, folks.
I definitely agree with the 2 week challenge.

I developed in ASP.Net on Windows for years but got tired of having to code in Windows and do everything else in OSX. I picked up a copy of Agile Web Development with Rails and gave myself a "2 week challenge". It's been a few months and I haven't looked back. I can't imagine going back to .NET.
And include a singular<->plural mapping for column and table names.
I am moving towards native-language DBs for my programs(which are mostly desktop apps, not web sites, so they don't have the same performance needs). The relational model is fine and a real help in most cases. It's the "too much integration" part that gets me upset about databases.

http://buzhug.sourceforge.net/ has been really great for my Python work.
Not sure why some people expressed surprise with debian being so far behind. I would use Ubuntu for home use as well even though we use Debian for all things Linux + Server.
Full Text Search on Heroku
The minute I saw the Microsoft add-on in Firefox that I hadn't requested I disabled it. Same thing with Skype, Google bar, Yahoo bar, and any other add-on that slips through my obviously lacking scrutiny.

Wish they'd just stop. Then again I wish automatically updated things I want. I see your point.
Asm/C/Python/Lisp etc... coder looking for something new.
I need to have an at-home project now that I'm working on Python/Django at work. I'd like to learn something new, so I was thinking of checking out Java.

What's the most well respected web framework for deploying Java web apps? The only reason I'm not checking out ruby on rails is because of how similar the ORM and other parts are to Django.

Alternatively, does anyone think I should take a look at seaside/smalltalk? Can anyone explain why I should?

Haskell is something I'll consider if anyone can make a good argument for it. I'd need a web framework and database access library to go along with it though.

I'd consider factor/forth if I wasn't so accustomed to the stack paradigm via x86/asm. I'd be willing to hear any counter-arguments to this as well.

I'd be interested to hear of any (good) Lisp/Scheme web frameworks as well because when I was learning Lisp and Scheme I wasn't aware of any.
In fact, I've just come to realize to the benefits of user defined data types, especially for primary keys. You can treat tables as functions and dynamically discover the ways in which you can compose them (i.e. create queries).
Yeah, because VB6 is so much better than Python or C#. Strangely I have yet to see many complaints about C# or Java in relation to C++ or VB6, yet I'm sure as many if not more poeple have used VB6 and C++.

Some languages allow you to shoot yourself in the foot more easily. Some have just better conventions and toolsets. VB6's object model just plain sucks in comparison to C#. C++ bugs are much harder to catch than Java's, and Java gives you a better toolset to find them (not that I'm a Java fan, I acutally dislike the language quite a bit).

Bjarne's phrase is pretty cute. But let's be honest, technical merit has never been in a factor in a large majority of business decisions. If that were so people would drop the horrible abortion that's ABAP or COBOL for SAP applications, Sun would drop Telnet as a default dameon and use a better shell than sh as a default. But hey, it's the most popular commercial Unix, right?
It's true that a major facelift would be a good idea. They have been making minor redesigns over time, but nothing major.
Specialization would be my first guess. But then the problem is, how do you identify a niche that stays under Google's radar long enough to exploit any advantage? So, you just have to find a knowledge domain to specialize in that Google doesn't cover. And how hard is that?!?

You're right... how do you compete against this?
Same here, i use Arch fulltime on my laptop
IMHO the single most useful number here is 10 ms for a disk seek. Next is network time but that really depends on where the computers are that you're talking about.
People like to gamble, and with some modest controls it can be fun and healthy. Gambling is highly regulated because once upon a time it was associated with sleazy bookies and loansharks that caused a lot of collateral damage in society. But now it's mainly a question of regulatory capture. Las Vegas is hugely profitable because it has a near-monopoly on gambling in the the US, and they're "encouraging" the regulators to protect society from any of their upstart competitors. The right answer is to simply deregulate gambling. But obviously the incumbents, the regulators, and the senators from Nevada are going to fight against it.
Ethics of Subliminal Messaging: Carnegie Mellon's Gates Center
I'm curious to know, what are your views on the ethics of using subliminal messaging on students?

The reason I ask is that I'm currently a CS student at Carnegie Mellon University. As many of you may know, the Gates Center was built due to generous funding from Bill Gates. However, as I walked through the halls of the new building for the hundredth time, I realized something quite intriguing.

In certain areas of the building YOU CAN HEAR VOICES! No these are not ghosts. After some investigation, I found extremely small hidden speakers designed to project sound towards one location. However, they spoke so softly that the average person would not realize that there was even any noise.

However, at closer inspection, these speakers appear to say three phrases repeatedly (at least that I could make out): "Microsoft Server", "Dell", "Computer Science."

Seeing as how Bill Gates himself funded the building, and Dell provided the computers inside the building, this hardly seems like a coincidence that subliminal marketing is occurring within the Gates building itself.

Now I pose the question: does anyone else find a problem with the fact that students at Carnegie Mellon are subconsciously being enticed to buy from sponsors of their university?
See also:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1583597/asm-c-python-perl...

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9v3uf/asm_c_pyt...
Until recently, the fact that the worst Java-speaking engineer in the room got a 50% yearly pay raise and that annual turnovers among engineering staff were close to 50% rather sharply limited the desire of technically inclined founders to start companies and their ability to retain talent.

In the last three years, the company my day job works through has burned through, oh, call it 5 PLs on the team that I manage, and about 100 engineers. Fully staffed strength for that team is below 30.

This is a constant bugbear for us and annoys my company more than every other issue we've had with India save one. (The biggie, hopefully not applicable to startups.)
If you are interested in staying in the web dev area then either seaside w/ smalltalk, weblocks w/ lisp ( seaside for lisp, or HappStack w/ haskell would be rewarding as they are very different from the django/rails way of things.

Django, Rails, Catalyst etc are the end result of a long line in how to do web dev. Seaside/Weblocks/Happstack all break that mold and do something different. The last year of working with Seaside has made me question everything that I knew about web dev after doing it for 14 years. Even if you don't end up using any of the 3, it will have been worth your time.

A bit more, Seaside and Weblocks both offer something similar, given that, I think you should look into trying out Seaside on GLASS which would be a differentiator from Weblocks, although if you are really into Lisp ( I am ) that is a big point in its favor.

In general, I would break it down to:

Seaside or Weblocks on one side and Happstack on the other. If you want to learn, you can't go wrong with any of them.
Lack of a clear "leader" elsewhere does not mean the US is the "undisputed leader" as you claimed--so that's a bit of a straw man.

Again, it is a matter of definition. As far as I can tell, all of your examples who sell computers are selling computers manufactured in other countries, and the example of large computer consumers you give, which I'm not sure are relevant, are by and large using computers or outsourced parts manufactured elsewhere.
A truly great confirmation. I wish I could use something similar for myself.
I'm only interested in web app development because I want to work on a side business idea. I've done enough non-practical experimentation over the years, time to start implementing.

Difficult to monetize something that isn't a web app or otherwise requires web access these days.

The shared state model in smalltalk/seaside interests me because sharing state in Django is a huge pain sometimes.
Of course he forgot to mention what is currently the trendiest language to use, which is the one I'm writing. I haven't had this much fun with a computer since dos days.
I'm curious as well, but about your suggestion: what fun would that be?
A combination of the sentence fragment, and thinking it might have been IM speak as roryokane suggested. "2-click" instead of "2 click" would do a lot to clear that up.

I definitely didn't pick up what you meant, but now that its been explained it seems obvious. For maximum clarity, I would change it to:

"We only send email when your site goes down. Unsubscribe in 2 clicks."
If you are doing a CRUD style app, you aren't going to get as much from Seaside. If you shared state- required etc. Seaside/Weblocks will be a dream, you'll be amazed how quickly you get things done that took so long in the Djanjo/Catalyst/Rails style.

I love how Seaside has changed they way I think about web dev.
Get over it.

Almost everything that humans do inolves puffery. Makeup - puffery. That shine on your car - puffery. Nice clothes - puffery.

Which reminds me - political speech is not protected by the 1st amendment these days. That's the whole point of campaign finance laws.

It's also not protected on many college campuses - that's the whole point of campus speech codes.

Guess what the point of "hate speech" laws is?
GyP@BalaBit.COM: Make your servers tweet
Giant Ribbon Discovered at the Edge of the Solar System
SQLite is: http://www.sqlite.org/datatype3.html
Changing your wallpaper to some solid color isn’t minimalism.
This chain of reasoning:

we discover more oil => we burn more fossil fuels =>
=> global temperatures increase => poor people starve

is very tenuous. Discovering more oil is mainly bad for people that already own major oil reserves, and they lobby subtly for peak oil & carbon caps. More oil discoveries probably don't cause major increases in the amount consumed.

Burning fossil fuels may cause global warming, or may not, or it may be easy to fix by adding some dust to the upper atmosphere. Most people seem to accept it as an article of faith either way.

Global temperature increases may cause a reduction in food supply, or an increase. Certainly much of northern China will increase food production with a longer growing season. It probably increases ocean fish yields too. So it's very debatable as to the net effect.

Anyway, a claim depending on 3 somewhat dubious claims is extremely dubious. Maybe you believe each has a 75% chance of being true, but then all 3 have only a 42% chance of being true, so I'm assuming it's false.
OSX as my primary. Everything else (AMIs, VMs) is Ubuntu
> All software is faulty.

D. J. Bernstein would disagree probably... (yes - I know his soft is faulty too, but his code is a couple orders of magnitude better than 99.999% of other programmers' code and people needed years to find those bugs)
My main (headless) Linux boxes are Centos, I've been pretty happy with it.
What are some web apps that don't have a CRUD model to them?
I just talked to a guy who's building a data center with 13 MW power input. I assume that includes air conditioning, so if a typical machine + overhead is 130 watts that's 100,000 machines. It might take a while before they fill that even half way.
Bugs in things that radiation at people make headlines and people tend to remember them. It's called availability bias.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
I would have been surprised until a few months ago. I tried Ubuntu 3-4 years ago and uninstalled it the same day because GNOME was crashing, which I found ridiculous. I've tried it again because it has python2.6 packages and it's OK. However, I do still get the occasional kernel panic, and it's recently begun crashing on shutdown.
Like the Gracenote* CD database, there were some bad feelings about the commercialization of content created by unpaid volunteers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Movie_Database#As_a_su...

*When I went to look up info on the Gracenote/Freedb controversy, I found it had been scrubbed from Wikipedia. Hmmn.
So, to summarize:

1. The US government loans money to the banks at 0% interest

2. The banks buy treasuries at 2% interest

Why is the US government selling treasuries in the first place? In order to have money to bail out the banks' earlier losses.

Net-net: the banks are stealing money from US taxpayers.

Do I have this right?
even with a statically typed database, type matching errors storing data are only reported at runtime! (That is, our java compiler doesn’t check our MySQL schema.)

That isn't necessary the case: for example, PG'Ocaml allows Ocaml programs that access a PostgreSQL database to have their type consistency checked at compile-time.

http://developer.berlios.de/projects/pgocaml/
Cool idea. What's their specific target market? Frequent craigslisters? Drug dealers?

I'm a little wary of a point of sale system that could be so easily grabbed and stolen.
> I believe the problem is with ever advancing hardware. The new chips are much faster and would "overtake" an experiment that's been running.

There's no reason why this would have to be a problem. It should be possibly at any given iteration to take a snapshot of the population and transfer it over to new hardware. One could even consider experiments in which you periodically scaled the population up to utilize an order of magnitude more computing power (to increase diversity in a population that had converged to some local optimum) and then scaled it back down to some randomly selected subset once sufficient divergence had occurred.

Since computing resources can be purchased in small discrete units these days, this might even be a viable method to reduce overall search cost.
Well by CRUD, I really meant and should have said, simple CRUD. blogs, twitter etc where you basic interaction is short.

Things that can not simple CRUD:

multi step e-commerce order application,
games, anything that relies on your previous action to decide what happens now.

a blog doesnt care what I did before, neither does twitter or myspace or facebook. Do this thing, store result. 1 page to result usually. Simple CRUD.

If you do simple CRUD, you probably won't get a ton of value from Seaside/Weblocks. If you are doing applications where stateful is required/desired and RESTful is hard, both will be wonderful to work with.
One interesting way to secure the phone could be in a way that the app only work on a certain network (vpn). Authenticated against keys specific to the store. This way it couldn't work if someone tries to extract info from the phone. This is assuming all the data inside the app is encrypted in some form.
If you need any software that depends on relatively new libraries - forget about it. Centos is seriously behind with features. It could be useful for "standard server" though - stuff like http daemons, etc. will run just fine and will be quite stable.

Not for home usage though - I don't think you'd like to run on something with kernel v2.6.18-92.1.1.el5 ;) Yup - that's kernel from 2006 with ~100 custom patches applied. Forget about any new gfx drivers or wifi.
very cool stuff.
I've been using Ubuntu @ home and Debian for servers (and RHEL for day job), but I'm considering dumping Ubuntu. dontzap and stuff like that is crazysauce.
Extensive previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602981 .
p2p transactions in real life. split lunch, gas, kegs, house parties, street vendors, scalpers.
Where The Monetizable Clicks Are: Digg's New Ads
That was true about discussions for a while but they fixed it somewhat recently. Now, you can view discussions without being logged in but you have to log in to switch it from single post view to threaded/flat view mode.
On Zoho, I want to clarify that we always were a product company, with product development based out of India from the beginning. We never followed the traditional offshore consulting model, which we felt would make it difficult to build products (PG has written about the difficulty transitioning from consulting to products).

We started the company selling software to networking OEMs, 1996-present, I still do sales calls for this software, we are the leader in that niche (http://webnms.com ). From that we expanded to build software that manages corporate networks, 2004-present, we are doing quite well in that market (http://manageengine.com ). The latest evolution is Zoho, 2005 - present, it is our most well known division, so the company changed its name to Zoho Corp this year (http://zohocorp.com ).

In silicon valley these would have been 3 different companies, with the first 2 "exiting" (mostly by being acquired). We preferred to keep building.
SEO FAQ (or why you shouldn't hire an SEO "expert")
That's what got me onto this paper: doing an online literature search for ideas for "Son of Darts" after frying my brain solving a few cases by hand.
And if we all switched to this tomorrow, six months from now somebody would invent amazing new "static type storage", the advantages of which would include "saves you hours of coding those tiresome data-validation routines we all hate so much!"
A external hardware-based solution? In an age when banks are already allowing photographs of cheques be deposited?

A "mobile" payment solution has to work from software on out, while deploying existing hardware in devices: cameras, touch screens, radios.

No, I don't think this is A) viable, or B) something we'd see from someone like Jack Dorsey.

This is something we'd see from a credit card company looking to keep the old business model breathing.
Or even

com/google:http/80:path/to/the/file

However, it could just as conceivably be

http/80:com/google:path/to/the/file

because, imho, the protocol and port are not really part of the hierarchical structure (part of the url, but not necessarily part of the uri).
Remember when you could beam money to your friends using your Palm Pilot? That was awesome. /snark
I make my living doing Java web development, but I wouldnt use it for any personal project. Struts, Hibernate, String are all too heavyweight for a personal project with too much of a learning curve. I believe that productivity is much lower than with Django, Pylons, or Rails.
Unladen Swallow: Python on LLVM (VIdeo)