skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does Microsoft take liability for any of their software?

The Windows XP EULA states "Except for any refund elected by Microsoft, YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED TO ANY DAMAGES, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, if the Software does not meet Microsoft's Limited Warranty, and, to the maximum extent allowed by applicable law, even if any remedy fails of its essential purpose."

It goes on to state that the only remedy offered is your money back. Mozilla also offers your money back, all $0 of it.
Thanks for detailed response.

1. Bimetallism (mixed gold/silver) caused significant issues due to the fact that they were setting the price of gold/silver. Setting prices never works.
2. The consequences of deflation IMHO are overblown -- eventually people will need purchase goods and stop saving/hoarding. Now of course these days with massive amount of debt everyone has deflation would be horrible. Massive inflation on the other hand, Zimbabwe today, or Weimer Germany (getting paid 3 times each day) are real threats and will rob the life savings of anyone who doesn't have the money invested or converted to real assets. Driving asset/speculation booms.

3 I agree legal tender laws have existed for a long time, but if you advocate competing currencies then legal tender laws will quickly chase the good money out of the system.

4. Anything back by a physical commodity that people want is not a fiat currency:
>>the government up and tells you that something is money, >>therefore it's worth more than it should be for any >>practical purpose.

The government doesn't have to tell you that something is money the market can decide on what it wants to use as a medium of exchange.

5. The US went off the gold standard in the 1970s and gold was still used for things besides money so I don't really see how that argument holds water.

Lastly
>> Given the choice, a currency that can be managed to prevent serious financial problems is preferable to a currency that can't.

Do you mean like how it's currently managed now? how it was managed in the great depression? Manipulation of the primary information mechanism in the world may be able to change people's behavior but only by misleading them, and only for a temporary amount of time.
The point is not that I can make the code slower by changing it. The point is that it can get slower by changes to the API, without any changes to functionality.Made by somebody else, unintentionally impacting me.

Let me ask you this: Have you ever worked on a large scale C++ project that didn't have performance issues? Or memory issues?
I don't believe anyone else is using that definition. The New York Times has what is a good example of a website.
It's almost always a bad idea to use anything other than a non-blocking/async server to handle static content.

I think it's simpler/easier (maybe faster) to serve content from a separate sub-domain (static.site.com or whatever). Using a reverse proxy works too, but unless you're caching dynamic content it's probably no benefit and it's less efficient.
Someone want to give the rest of us the Cliff's Notes on what this company did and what this person did for that company?
Yeah, until the next tech refresh for the iPhone. So then you have iPod Touch 1st and 2nd gen, iPhone 2G, iPhone 3G and 3GS. Bear in mind the 3GS has a more advanced graphics card, and then you need to bear in mind some of these have compass, camera, GPS, etc. That's not a small target by any means.

I seriously wonder what will happen when Apple upgrades the screen resolution to 800x400 or attempts to fit in new functionality such as multitasking without altering the current applications' VMs.
If Google's going to do this right, then they'll Open Source all the nifty stuff they put into this phone!

Strategically speaking, for Google to win, the Google Phone doesn't have to win. Android has to win. If the Google Phone only reaches the digerati and hipsters, but then heavily influences the rest of the Android market by pushing innovative things forward, then Google wins.
They paid back $12 billion in direct loans with the $13 billion in federal money that was funneled to them via the AIG bailout. Nice shell game.
This seems like an odd section of sysadmin mistakes - I would have thought there are some other ones being made more often.
Heh, the article has been pulled.
Yes, you can use C++ to do amazing things. In large-scale projects, that usually backfires, though, unless you contain the "magic", because interactions in C++ are harder to predict.

The problem with C++ is not that you have to know what you are doing - you also have to know what everybody else is doing.

And the "small sacrifice" of a bigger text segment is a big one in this particular domain. We only have 512M available, and a tremendous chunk of that is eaten up by graphics. An executable seriously exceeding ~20MB would spell trouble.

And I'd argue that AAA games are slightly more complex than a fart app ;)
What I was trying to say is that over the past four years email has replaced IM, Facebook and Twitter as the "leading edge" for my social interactions now, even though I'm not in the business world. They were popular, but they're now mostly on the periphery.
So I've been thinking about this as a business model recently.

What do you think would happen if you had a some sort of enterprise software that you charged whatever the company wanted to pay for, but you made it very clear that support and feature requests would be prioritized by the amount the company paid for it?

(For the purpose of this thought experiment, let's say the software was very well regarded and actually had a viable customer base.)

Do you think that the amount companies paid would near 0, or do you think you'd be able to find a good pricing level by doing this?
The default KeepAliveTimeout setting for Apache is 15 seconds, which is too long. Many of our large customers are setting KeepAliveTimeout to 2 seconds which frees up that apache worker to process new requests fairly quickly. You'd be surprised how many people never change this value from the default.
This is another bubble.
FTA:

However, sqlite should never be used in production. It is important to remember that sqlite is single flat file, which means any operation requires a global lock

I don't know jack about sqlite's locking architecture or scalability, but this statement is just silly. There are a conceptually infinite number of ways to make fine-grained locking work on a single file, both within a single process, a single host, or across a network. Maybe the author is thinking fcntl() locking is somehow the only option.

I guess the corrolary to this article has to be "Don't let your startup's sysadmins diagnose development-side issues."
Distance Is Not Dead: Social Interaction & Geographical Distance in Internet Era
I wonder whether the discounts that are factored into the net price include loans that must, of course, eventually be paid back, with interest. Anyone know?
I guess it all depends how you design it and what you are doing. I would have to agree with others, the out of request cycle image processing solutions are definitely the right way to go overall.
"What about Red Ryder, way back when, or Toady, of Dwarf Fortress, or the relative legions of successful webcomic artists that live on donations?"

I could be wrong, but those people probably have other sources of income.
Causes a human to wonder how these protective stellar bubbles' interactions with the galactic environment affect the development of (possible) life in star systems.
Interesting to note that the article Louis refers to has been pulled. I guess I'd pull that article too after it was pointed out how monumentally stupid the whole thing was...
People are annoyed because Goldman (and others) were lent a lot of money (at a time when credit was in short supply) at ridiculously favorable terms that you or I couldn't hope to get.

If I could borrow effectively unlimited money from the government at very low interest, I could make a killing too.

AIG also funneled a huge portion of its bailout to Goldman, and that money hasn't been paid back yet (and it doesn't look like it ever will).
Is there a big difference between S-IPS and E-IPS?
The real solution might be to have Captcha technology built right into the browser that can physically detect whether or not a human is interfacing with the form.
Given that games more or less have to implement their own OS, I hope I'm not completely crazy yet ;)

I am not talking about "business apps" (whatever that is). I'm talking about down-to-the-metal resource management, task scheduling, etc.

I could probably live with those issues in the higher logic layers (although I'd argue a scripting language would make you much more efficient there). But the underlying "OS" as well as computationally intensive tasks do not benefit from C++ that much, and it causes a lot of collateral damage.
Completely off-topic but: really!? Comic sans!?
That's interesting stuff. What's the source?

Also I apologize for my ignorance here but what's the distinction in this context between a university and a college? Is it still research vs. not-so-much?
Profiling tools are post-mortem, and often not able to be enabled in production. What about when the code is not yet running, and you're trying to reason about it as you write it? What about when the performance problem is workload dependent, and only emerges in production, and you need to reason inductively from the source code about what could be going wrong?
The author is worried about optimizing. He should know that in high-performance applications, you should just write the code then profile it. We all know that C++ is fast; the real question the author should be asking is whether C or C++ can more quickly express ideas/is more maintainable/etc.

This post about not knowing how a function is called is really splitting hairs, bordering on irrelevant imo -- sure, it can affect the time taken to call a function by ten times, but this is not a large performance hit at all for 95% of your code, and even less since most high performance items are on the GPU. If it ends up that it does affect performance in a critical area (found via profiling), the author even suggested how it can easily be fixed.

I don't see what the big deal is. If you're a game programmer, change your coding conventions so that you don't get into problems like this.
When I've tried that on larger GeoCities sites (say >100 documents), the servers seems to shut me down after a while :-(
KATO is an open source program of agents that contribute to the desires and needs of web users. We all know how time consuming building websites and apps can be. Due to our daily activities- work, school, ect, we can not devote a lot of our time to coding software to satisfy the need or needs of our user base. As a result, some programs get strached, and other aren't sucessful. That being said, KATO opensource can be used to reach your core audience in ways not yet imagined. With KATO, one can easily and quickly code up an agent( micro -programs), or group of agents to satisfy the needs of their end users.Currently, KATO opensource supports JAVA and PHP. Other languages will be added in the future. From a developer's standpoint, KATO is a proactive, and innovative way to interact with one's customers and end users.

Take a look at the following example: Mark is a developer who developed a piece of software that allows users to subscribe to multiple blogs and news website, and categorize them by topic. Instead of an devloping an entire website with a UI, system architecture, etc, Mark can use KATO which already has a UI, databases, backend, etc to quickly code up an agent or group of agents to satisfy his end users.

KATO equals a faster, and efficient way!

.
visit http://kato-agency.blogspot.com/ for more info
follow KATO on twitter: http://kato-agency.blogspot.com/
The fork+exec is efficient. The blog post compares things without units. Forks (principally page table copies w/copy-on-write in effect) are measured in microseconds and the exec is your standard binary startup time. While you don't want to put a synchronous fork/exec in the way of 5,000 reqs/sec, it will be a trivial part of your asynchronous imagemagick processing.

At scale, you might care about the imagemagick startup latency, but not the forking.
Don't just roll the dice: free eBook about software product pricing
This advice is remarkable only in its obviousness. Link-bait.
Google Responds to Searchable Voicemails
New twist: In the imac 27", the Mini DisplayPort is both an input and an output. You can plug your laptop into an iMac and use it as a display.

This probably adds $0 to the assembly cost, same connector, and depending on how the bits get to the LCD, it could be near $0 in silicon costs. This feature that will provide more life for the display after the poor computer inside becomes obsolete.
I would guess that Apple is getting ATI and NVIDIA to outbid each other for inclusion. Best way to get good prices.
I can dig it. The functionality is right there as soon as you arrive. Fun to compare movies I'm familiar with, but also kinda cool to see juxtapositions of movies I have seen with ones I haven't.

Suggestions? I dunno, maybe a big fat arrow to skip to the next pair instead of the text "skip it". For some reason it took me a little longer than it should have to locate that element.
How would this work? Spammers aren't going to use a web browser with this feature, so it would only bother real people.
Heh. The main style for the site was set up for my blog, which may be the one actual legitimate use of Comic sans. Then I got lazy and didn't bother separately styling the rest. :)
I understand the point, and I am saying it is a trivial one.

Calling func(x) in C may as well be causing x to be cloned or have some other nasty side effects that are not immediately obvious from looking at the code. Similarly how one should always keep in mind the existence of macros when reading C code, one should also keep in mind the existence of constructors and casting operators with C++. That's hardly the hidden cost.

It is easier to write messy or obscure code in C++, especially for a novice programmer. But this has less to do with the language per se and more with established coding practices within specific team. If there is a hidden cost to C++, it is the fact that it requires higher level of competence. Not that it has constructors.
I was wondering if it was more an issue with NVIDIA's problems of late.
U2 Live Concert on YouTube | TechJaws.com
"Next time you’re listening to a guru, ask yourself: How do I really know that they’re successful?"

An ironic item to include.
There are just as many holes. How does a browser detect whether a human is using it? Even if it could how would the site be made aware of this? Does the browser send some special information with the request? If so, can't it be reproduced by some script?
SQLite locking:
http://www.sqlite.org/lockingv3.html

"""
An EXCLUSIVE lock is needed in order to write to the database file. Only one EXCLUSIVE lock is allowed on the file and no other locks of any kind are allowed to coexist with an EXCLUSIVE lock. In order to maximize concurrency, SQLite works to minimize the amount of time that EXCLUSIVE locks are held.
"""

But compared to something like MySQL w/ InnoDB (or postgres, or Cassandra, or BerkeleyDB), which all have something closer to Row Level or Page Level locking, SQLite's concurrency for server side applications is a serious deficiency.

Yes, there are lots of ways to have fine grained locking, SQLite just doesn't do them.
I am surprised to see that so many programmers still like to reason and guess what the performance of their program is instead of profiling it...

And hearing C proposed as an alternative to C++ is mind boggling. I don't want to match malloc/free calls, strcat strings together or realloc pointers. I don't want to declare a bunch o function pointers in a struct and call it OOP. I don't want to use macros because C99 has poor adoption rate and C89 doesn't have inline.
I don't want to watch the compiler blissfully convert unrelated types to one another just because it can.
I don't want to pass types around as void* and lose any useful type information I might have had. I don't want to fumble with return codes.

And in C++ I don't have to. I can use Qt, the STL and Boost and be very productive. Telling me to program in C is not even funny.
I don't think there is going to be a lot of nifty stuff in the phone (if Google is in fact doing this). From Googles perspective, I think they want a phone that delivers the full Android experience without custom OEM 'user experience additions' and carrier application cruft (I'm looking at you T-Mobile).

I would be surprised if you see anything non-standard on a Google phone.
I really don’t know. E-IPS panels seem to be much cheaper which would suggest that they are worse. Not as bad as TN, but worse.
How Link Spammers Killed My Wife’s Web Site
Which would cause all of the energy to be dissipated as heat in an instant... 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, especially if the energy density/storage of these caps increases. Maybe put it into a heatsink that's within a big vacuum thermos... :-)

Regardless, it's definitely easier to deal with than a tank of hydrogen, but I'd say that tech is a non-starter anyway. If we can make electricity alone work via advances in charging time over batteries and energy density over existing caps, there's really no reason to transport energy around in an intermediary, let alone an extremely inefficient and volatile one like hydrogen. Power mains are a much better solution, relatively lossless by comparison to an intermediary transform.

On the other hand, for action movies of the future, hydrogen tanker trucks would provide great explosion fodder :-)
I guess the corrolary to this article has to be "Don't let your startup's sysadmins diagnose development-side issues."

You'll have to add "Make sure your developers can diagnose development-side issues" to the list as well. Most web app developers I have met do not know how to diagnose problems, or simply defer immediately to the sysadmins if there's no syntax errors or logs to refer to.
Personally for me, nothing has changed other than I'm paying several of hard-earned hundred dollars more out of my pocket, for nothing extra. In this case, I'm absolutely sure quality doesn't have a direct relationship with cost. Other students have it worse, especially freshmen. Admissions have plummeted, so less students get admitted, about 1000 or more G.E. classes were cut this semester, so longer graduation waits, professors were laid off, so less classes, and we have furlough days twice a month, which means professors must choose two days to stay home and not get paid. So we're paying more, yet receiving less education, which is nonsense.
I am not sure either if this is a good idea for Google. Part of the success of Android is that Google is an independent party (well, I guess). Jumping in the HW probably would scare other manufacturers to look for other platforms such as OpenMoko was.
Before advocating any countermeasures, you need to control for the self-selection of university vs. college students.
Can you provide further information? Why do you think this?
(Part 2) We Just Undid Three Months of Dev work. Here's What We Learned.
Actually, I believe that is a series of small applications integrated into a CMS...

Which would take me YEARS to build
I know this might sound whiney or bitter, but I think the vast majority of successful entrepreneurs were in the right place at the right time.

If they weren't, how else would they have been successful?
Think of it this way, if Microsoft came out with the Microsoft PC, how would you feel if you were Dell / HP? Opensource doesn't fix development direction by the project driver. You still need to get your stuff into the main branch to expect decent adoption or keep it separate and pay the delta cost.

More devices is cool, but application testing is going to be interesting. If your device is not as popular and has a different form factor / screen size from the dominant devices, then expect some level of non-support from developers.
For example, if you have two similar (by functionality) Android based devices, one from Motorola and another from Google, which one will you buy ? Obviously it will undercut Motorola's business because Motorola will not be able to sell Android phones due to availability of a better (more feature-rich, more open, not locked to a particualr carrier) device coming directly from Google.
I said looks like less of a wussy lineup. The Macbook has always had a much cheaper feel to it compared to the Pro. It doesn't look incredible now—I don't like how non-contrasted it is—but it looks better.
Some thermite?

A high powered air cannon?

A bath in liquid nitrogen followed by a toss in the air and an impact with a baseball bat on the way back down?
all the moral righteousness is pretty funny/sad at the same time. they're charging for access to their call center basically. I don't really see anything wrong with that.

the beauty of capitalism is that no one (even you smart geeks) gets to decide what the price of things are. you live and die by consumer demand.
A universal web tag, or universal web tagging standard?
I guess, but considering their high price, well built os, high build quality, you'd think they would add an extra $100 a put a proper processor to fit the image.
She does know that you need to profile, TYVM. But ideally, you pay at least cursory attention to performance even when you write the code. Writing code with complete disregard to performance, saying "oh, the profiler will find it" is not an acceptable choice.

You don't write sloppy code and argue that you can find bugs in the debugger, either, do you?

And no, most high-performance items are not on the GPU. Most games are already GPU-bound, so you want to take load off of it. (Also, with the arrival or LRB et al., the GPU/CPU distinction becomes moot)

If those issues were irrelevant, I wouldn't care about them. There's one thing I do care about: Shipping high quality games, developed as fast as possible. C++ hurts that goal.

And no, the 95%/5% rule does not hold true in game development. But don't trust me - read, for example, Tim Sweeny, the guy behind the Unreal engine. According to him, there are not hotspots. Another Unreal programmer: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1277#comment-14238

"Dan Vogel, was fond of pointing out that UE2 had a basically flat profile"

That is the big deal. In a flat profile, things like calling overhead matter everywhere.
MySpace Architecture Considered Expensive
A clear risk of any funding involving a control shift but especially so when dealing with second- or third-tier VCs who are in it only for the money and have no reputation to protect.

I have seen this happen as well with acquisitions in which the founders are assured that they will be able to earn out their main reward over time only to be terminated shortly after the closing.

Legal protections (usually, for founders only and not for other employees) are available in both cases to help limit the damage but a surprisingly large number of founders are willing to forego them when they are assured in ever so reassuring tones that they can "trust" the party that will have control. Unfortunately, trust doesn't work in most such cases.
I've found this single page to be an excellent reference on Ruby metaprogramming:

http://weare.buildingsky.net/2009/08/25/rubys-metaprogrammin...
The biggest dealbreaker for the Nook will be its eBook store. Will it be comparable to the Amazon eBook store? If not, I doubt the Nook will take off.
That isn't something I'd ever thought about until now.

Would it make sense to use drives from more than one company as they would very different failure characteristics?