skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rather disappointing Apple is going along with this trend, HD-ing resolutions of screens.
I mean it's great for watching movies, but most people will be word processing, e-mailing or surfing the web on iMacs, and that's when you'll miss those 120 vertical pixels.
(HD, 16:9 has 1080 vertical pixels, and 16:10 has 1200 vertical pixels.)
I have been using the multi-touch gestures on my macbook for years and believe that they are a usability improvement. I am excited to see them implemented on a mouse, but what I'm even more excited is a surface that's extremely easy to clean and has no moving parts. The Mighty Mouse's ball got gunky really quick and was very awkward to use. I'm sure Apple spent a lot of time getting the feel right and if I needed a new mouse, I probably wouldn't hesitate to get it.
My step dad bought a subscription to AVG Free for his WinXP Home machine. I would consider it blatantly predatorial to let people do that, even if they activate the one useless plugin that wasn't enabled before. People are going to spend the money.
Corporations don't sponsor religious festivals. Models are present at US events, I think the uproar is about the lap dancing, etc.. Not sure why you can't link the general attitude towards women in the technology space and the lack of women in the technology space. People (maybe not you) were uncomfortable with what was going on.

The .69/dollar claim is as old as time, cited all over the place. Has nothing to do with any external factor like hours, experience, etc.: it demonstrates that all other things being equal a woman is paid less for the same work.

Don't question my credibility when you don't understand the foundational facts.
When creating mail severs for testing purposes, we too have noticed that many of the IP addresses in the AWS pool are indeed on blaclists or private reputation lists. A smarthost is certainly recommended if you want mail from one of these IP addresses to make it past spam filters. In theory, once you've had the IP address for a while, you should be able to get it delisted and cleared up, but some of these lists and toosl will just block entire subnets that are known to frequently change hands. I think the only real solution would be for Amazon to set aside some IP space and call it premium, and only give it out to validated or longstanding customers, IMHO.

@MxToolbox
> perhaps you could put it into some non-volatile heat sink, but unless it's a really big heatsink, you wouldn't want to be anywhere near that thing when it went into resistor mode

Specific heat capacity of water ~= 4(KJ per Kg per Kelvin)

so, assuming we can safely take water from 20 degC to 90decC, we'd need 21MJ / 4KJ/K/degC / 70degC == 75Kg of water as a heatsink.

Or about the weight of one passenger.

Double or triple up for safety factors (avoid steam) and you're still OK. Have some insulation and drive some A/C to chill the water further and you're also OK.

So yes, dump it into a resistive load immersed in a tank of water?

(Edit, that said I do think that The Right Way to do transport+energy etc is for us to find our correct "limitless" source of energy (fusion or orbital solar, I guess) and turn that into synthetic hydrocarbons as a convenient, relatively safe, energy dense fuel. i.e. we don't build massive supergrids for pushing that power to people over wires. We pump the power into a CO2+H2O=>petrol converter which we then ship around the world using the existing infrastructure. We also don't need to retool the whole world's transport infrastructure. Obviously all carbon-neutral too. (Carbon -ve if you've got the spare power.))
I don't think google has the expertise in this area like Motorola does. Then again, Motorola hasn't done too well and is betting its future on android. I guess they could outsource all work to HTC, but what would this gain?
"The presently available materials on Red Ryder are unclear, but Toady definitely survives solely on donations [http://www.kwanzoo.com/social-trivia/tarn-adams-interview-pa...

Interesting. Thanks for the link.

"Randy Mulholland of the webcomic Something Positive quit his job when he received in a month donations that exceeded his yearly salary."

This is nice for now, but will this continue in the long-term? I know nothing is definite, even when you sell a product, but I just don't see pure donationware working in the long-term (without some other way of supplementing income).
Do you really need one? Just don't ever pay money to pitch.
That would be nice. Except that - again, for performance reasons - we often have to break the boundaries between modules. Most game engines are a tangled web, since many parts are talking to many other parts. (I think there are ways around that, and there will certainly be a post on it. But that's the way things work right now)

So it's not always that easy to just find a guilty party and blame them.
We only have a free (and self-correcting) market if there is perfect information.

Jason is helping the free market by giving it access to better information.
It's not really all that obscure if you link to it on a public website.
College tuition will continue to rocket upwards for the same reason as health care costs: demand-side subsidies. In this case: scholarships, financial aid, and low-interest loans.

Until these are removed, expect more of the same.

If, say, Bill Gates routinely handed out $10K to every person who has just bought a car, what do you think this would do to the prices of cars?
Um, doesn't having 50 different devices to convert X into electricity, then piping all of them to a storage device actually match the Unix philosophy perfectly?
> I can only imagine how uncomfortable women at these conferences (what few there are) must be.

Why? They might find it boring or uninteresting, but if it makes them feel 'uncomfortable' they have problems greater than the industry they are in.
The difference is that the API can change without visible API changes. If you add a virtual destructor to your class, I won't notice that by looking at the call site. I've just been burdened with additional overhead, without knowing about it.

And yes, large projects have large project issues. It is kind of telling that C++ needs an entire tome on large project issues, though... (Lakos, Large Scale C++ Software Design)
The answer isn't to stop charging (although that's a good start), the answer if for any of these forums to:

-list their prices
-list the % of pitching companies that go on to receive funding

This way you can justify a high price tag, should you choose to charge one
It does: http://gizmodo.com/5385841/apple-imac-hands-on?skyline=true&...
Ask HN: Inspire me, Boston
Hi HN,

I'm from Melbourne (Australia, not Florida) and soon I'll be heading to Boston. I have read a lot about the hacker culture there, and PG's 'Cities and Ambition' essay, so I'm keen to see what the big deal is about, and I reckon there are a few people from there here.

Where should I go? Where should I hang out and soak it up, what (or who) should I make sure I see? What inspires you about Boston?

Thanks!
Looking at the comparison chart with the line "More than a million titles available" and thinking about the leverage they have with publishers, I think B&N has already passed Amazon.
I think one notable difference is the ability to go to a local store and see the device in person - this is a huge advantage and one that may help them cover a lot of ground quickly.
> Independent of sexism, at what point does unprofessionalism become a problem?

At the point where it affects productivity.
How much of that money is going to fancy dorms, athletic facilities, and administrator salaries?

The problem is that the correlation between cost and quality of education has broken down. The government spends ever more money on education, with little net increase in the amount of educating because universities simply raise prices for the exact same product.

If the money is going to state schools where the government also gets a say in tuition costs, that's one thing. But government money going to private universities simply transfers public money into private endowments with little or no public accounting.
Not much, other than it was invented at Flickr. There was an on stage faceball match during a gap between presentations at the first Open Hack Day, as entertainment. Silly entertainment that didn't alienate anyone.
Yes, really careful... "Oh look, another shiny feature. Let's add it!" ;)

But kidding aside - the constraints imposed on C++ during its design (C backwards compatible) combined with a desire to have every feature under the sun available has led to an overly complex beast.

Don't tell me you looked at e.g. C++ lambda functions and thought that was "good design". It gets the job done, but that's the best you can say about it.
"Free wireless from Barnes & Noble via AT&T, the nation's fastest 3G network."

I absolutely love this trend in eBook readers.
No, my counterargument is to use the features of C++ when they help and not when they hurt. I claim that C++ doesn't hurt C programmers. It just brings out their deficiencies in different ways. For instance, embracing features you don't understand and then complaining about the consequences is stupid, and stupid people don't write good code in any language. You understand C++ well enough to know the pros and cons (or at least the cons) of various C++ language features, but you complain that your fellow programmers might not:

The issue is that in many instances, I own the caller, but not the callee. And the person owning the callee can unintentionally make my code perform worse by simply changing the API. Or adding a destructor.

This is just bad programming practice on their part. The performance cost of a destructor shouldn't be a surprise to the person who writes it. If someone is messing with the performance of types you use or removing functions(+) you call without consulting you and without themselves taking responsibility for calls to that functionality, then obscure features of C++ is just one of the many ways they're going to screw you on a regular basis. How would those programmers screw you in C? I don't know, but I know they would.

Nobody who knows C++ well enough to use it effectively would call it a "decent" language in the sense of "not obscene," but it is definitely "decent" in the sense of "adequate." It's easiest to define C++'s deficiencies with respect to other languages (for instance, memory management in C++ is much more intrusive in source code than in Java) but comparing it to C is way too simple. After all, the primary problem with C++ is that it doesn't remove any of C's dangers; it just gives you better ways of abstracting them away in some cases. The second problem with C++ is that it's extremely complicated and takes a long time to learn. And that's it. Every other supposed misfeature of C++ (relative to C) seems to stem from people hitting the second problem without realizing it. In your case, your coworkers should be more conservative about messing with things (such as defining expensive automatic type conversion functions) when they don't understand the consequences (such as those type conversions actually being invoked.)

(+) This is the most plausible explanation for different type conversions suddenly being invoked. It could also happen by adding a function that invokes a more expensive type conversion to a type that is more closely related to the type declared by the caller, thus making the new function a better match than the old one, but it's unlikely that a conversion between two types that are more closely related would actually be more expensive.
Hardly comes to the level of trivial political correctness. Let's take the American custom of bombing other countries. Would you feel justified objecting to that? Is it possible that you can see something as wrong, in your opinion, when its not happening in your immediate geographic area? Reading papers from the women's movement in Taiwan, this doesn't appear to be completely accepted out there either.

But the article doesn't even go there. There is no general condemnation of this activity in Taiwan, frankly we don't care that much. What's objected to are the actions of an American company in Taiwan.

Sorry, no agenda here, no axe to grind with Yahoo. Yahoo is an American company (like it or not), and takes ownership of anything it slaps its brand on abroad.
> WRT Women, I think the white knight stuff is hurting more than helping. They don't need our protection from the perils of sexism, they just need us not to be sexist and to know that they can handle it all by themselves.

This can't be repeated often enough. All the 'white knight' grandstanding is much more appalling and offensive any of the 'sexism' I have seen anywhere in the IT industry.
Adding methods to singular objects in Groovy
Yep, #1 happened to me the other day. We hit our Apache server limit of 256 and the site slowed to a crawl. I'm not really sure what was causing the load to be like 50-90, but requests were quite delayed waiting for an open process (keepalive was at 5 secs).

Indeed, my first idea was indeed to install nginx for images really quick. However, I have no experience with nginx. Thankfully, we had a spare server and I offloaded the images to there for now... Throwing more hardware at the problem usually works.
"We get so angry at large financial institutions, insurance companies, and other businesses that have all this money yet raise costs, premiums, and tack on fees."

This is because these are the same financial institutions, insurance companies, and other businesses where young people want to get jobs, because they have all the money. And they are only going to hire people going to the same fancy schools they went to.
Hi axod, on request from a commenter on my blog I've described how I captured packets and analyzed. I'm interested that you saw the DF flag for non-HTTP traffic. Can you tell me which OS and client or browser you used? I used Ubuntu 9.04 and curl, but have seen the same df/non-df behavior with a variety of other clients on the same OS.

Mark.
Yahoo is responsible for where and on what it slaps its brand, IMO. Yes, would have been good to have some Taiwanese stats (don't see any), so point taken.
> As opposed to the blatantly sexist, misogynistic viewpoint represented by the other pictures?

Uhu? What pictures are you talking about that represent "blatantly sexist [and] misogynistic viewpoint"? Because I have yet to see any.
It looks interesting, but I wonder if all that side to side finger movement will be a new source of repetitive stress?
I should have been more precise. I was referring to the solar panels at bus stops, not the regenerative breaking technologies.
demand-side subsidies

Yes, I think that is a major problem in the current patchwork system of financing postsecondary schooling. The people choosing what colleges to attend and what programs to major in are not the same people as the ones bearing the cost of those decisions.
While other women didn't give fuck, because they had more important things to worry about than a handful of lame pictures.
I spent a couple of years in college working on a learning content management system that had a large bank of randomized questions. Believe me, that's perfectly defeatable. I have existence proofs.

The question "RAND(1,100) + RAND(1,100) = ?" may represent 10,000 distinct questions, but the effort to answer them is only marginally greater than the effort you spent in writing it. Basically every CAPTCHA approach based on "I'll just have a bank of X" (questions, images, etc) will fail, because the spammers can classify faster than you can add to the set.

Note the "conventional" CAPTCHA, which has stood the test of time, doesn't have a "bank" of anything, it generates fresh stuff all the time. ReCAPTCHA has a bank, but it's structured to be way larger than any set of questions you will ever pull, and is also cleverly set up so that they still benefit a bit even if it is "broken".
Apple doesn't seem to notice unless you're using a widely-known toolset that they can easily detect, and even then, they miss quite a bit.

Not that this means it's a good idea to include an interpreter under the assumption that Apple won't notice -- if they do notice & care, you'll find you will no longer be able to update your app.

Apple has also demonstrated a history of caring about certain violations at the most inopportune times -- lots of camera applications broke when 3.0 was released, and Apple wouldn't let the authors release updates, since the only way to implement the required functionality was through undocumented API.
Unity Technologies Raises $5.5 Million From Sequoia Capital
_why C++ is becoming the language of choice in the HPC world._

And yet, the HPC world looks for a new language: http://www.cs.sandia.gov/Conferences/SOS10/presentations/Tue...

And a lot of the HPC world still writes FORTRAN or C. (I.e. BLAS, LAPACK, et.al.)

But then again, I don't spend that much time in the true HPC world. Maybe I'm missing a trend there. But from the outside, it looks like C++ is not quite what people wanted.
Capitalism flat-out can't function without a reasonably clear, consistent and fair application of the rule of law (a painfully and repeatedly demonstrated fact that neoliberal and libertarian fundamentalists tend to forget).
Flickr Down Again, Ongoing Server Issues
Google Analytics Intelligence
A lot of people were in the right place at the right time, but didn't do anything about it and let the opportunity slip away.

Ask yourself: why did Geocities not turn into Facebook?
If you don't have a middle-click, how do you open a link in a new tab? (honest question, I buy mice for this.)
> Well, my wife is also in technology (a developer, not games) and isn't fine with it. I'm glad you're OK with it, but there's nothing wrong with those that aren't.

Nothing wrong, you can organize your own conferences in whatever way you like.

But if you act morally outraged at what others do in the conferences they organize, don't expect much sympathy.
OK perhaps I'm confused...

Using firefox, on OSX, tcpdump.

HTTP request - flag set
HTTP response - flag not set

HTTPS request - flag set
HTTPS response - flag not set
We use Unity for our Blurst.com games. The $5.5 million strikes me as a low amount, but I also heard they were shopping a very small percent of the company to investors. I'm curious if they'll be able to use this money (and Sequoia's connections) to accelerate their growth as a "Flash but 3D" plugin. Technology wise they're definitely strong enough to pull it off, but I don't know if they'll be able to get by the plugin perception issue. The average person doesn't even view Flash as a plugin anymore; hopefully Unity can eventually get there...
_Most C + HLL proponents underestimate the logistics overhead of using multiple programming languages._

I'll concede that as a valid concern, especially for smaller projects where everybody touches many areas of the code. As projects grow, a separation becomes easier.

Add to that the fact that most games need scripting support anyways, and you'll see that the logistics overhead is at least not much different.
I prefer to use my multi-touch keyboard instead.
some good advice is to get the first two years at a community college that has a relationship / automatic credit transfer to the university your are headed to

Upvoted for general agreement and replying to note that this depends on what you are going to your university for. If going to the university is mainly for attending classes and obtaining a college diploma above a floor value of respectability, going to the least expensive college that offers courses toward your major can be a great idea. My childhood best friend, a smart boy from a working-class family, did two years of prerequisites to an electrical engineering degree at a local community college before transferring to the state university to finish his degree. He said he had more personal attention from his calculus and physics professors at the community college than he likely would have had at the university. He also met a start girl who is now his wife of thirty years at the community college. So all around that was a good idea for him.

But if the university offers sufficiently strong networking advantages, and connections with really influential people in your hoped-for occupation, it may be a good idea to go to the university from the beginning, even at greater out of pocket cost. There may be a rationale for choosing a top-however-many nationally known university over one's own state colleges and universities if that university's reputation has economic value for job-seekers, as perhaps it does.
I wonder how that screen works... surely it's off most of the time... otherwise you'd need a honking huge battery to keep it alive for 10 days.
This is another bubble.

What do you think the bursting of this bubble will look like?
Ning Launches Virtual Gifts, Allows Network Creators To Design Their Own
It's still more expensive than a $25,000 25mpg gas-powered sedan + 125,000 miles worth of gasoline @ $3/gal; but it's getting closer to practical.
What I hate about the previous mouse from Apple is having to lift your index finger in order to right click.

Some of my right-clicks were lost which is very frustrating.

I really hope they addressed the problem.

You might want to try one hands-on before you order it.
The skill comes with being able to digest and boil down what the users are saying. This is going back to the old Ford lesson, that if he'd listened he would have built a faster horse.

There is just going to be a lot of noise and out of that one must pick out recurring themes and look for patterns that tell you whether or not something needs to change.
a) According to T-mobile website it costs $130, not $50
b) How do you figure that $130 + $55/mo for two years is cheaper than $400?
This is also an issue of vendor lock-in. If a web site wants to move from one web analytics company to another, it has to redo the tags on every page. I can't comment on jshub's offering, but the general idea is a good one.
As the person who commissioned the book at Apress, I can give a little insight into how this came about. I had known Mark for a little while and had seen his (then unfinished) work with DiP. I knew about the license conditions, and spent a good few hours talking with Mark via IRC to convince him to sign up to Apress, let us advance him and essentially pay him to finish it.

I vaguely remember some terms that we agreed which made it favorable for Apress for the first few years, to give apress breathing room to recoup the investment we had made in Mark.

I took this to Gary and the rest of the editorial board, proposed why we should do it and how it could happen, and they agreed. I left not long after, but I understand Mark's book went on to several reprints and it seems new editions - all continuing to make for an excellent book.

I'm proud of bringing the book to Apress, and at the time we felt it was a really good match for a smaller pub to be able to do something a little non traditional and fun. I'm glad to see that it's made lots of people a good deal of money - and I'm sure that Apress don't want to lose the stream from one of their star performers. :)

It is hard though to keep making such unique deals as pubs grow- and, yes Joel - unless you are you, dictating terms isn't really something that most tech authors can do, as the secret is that only a very small percentage of tech books truly sell well. But all it takes is one committed editor who's willing to put their neck on the line for a good product-- and i think dip was one of those. :)