skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are right, Dell used to give out restore disks that locked to Dell hardware. They'd even give an appropriate error on non-Dell hardware. I don't think anybody cared to subvert it since it as usually COTS software they just packaged up.
this guy is winning me over. keep doing what you do.
What about the noise in certain circles regarding safety? I've heard the wings tend to snap off if you pull higher G's... your thoughts?

I've always thought the Falco's were pretty nifty.
Very interesting, but nothing new. Plato's Republic says functionally the same thing - that an educated citizenry is essential for the proper function of the polis. Plato takes it to an extreme in the Republic, and people are still arguing whether or not he was serious about the extent to which he argues the point, but he definitely argued that education was essential.

And Aristotle says similar things in the Politics and Poetics. The citizens of Athens who participated at the Agora were literate, concerned men (unfortunately, only men).

The Roman Forum was open to any citizen, who bore the responsibility of educating himself before speaking.

Even modern political philosophers recognize that without an educated citizenry, democracy is impossible. Alexis de Toqueville in "Democracy in America" found the concern of the commoner for the welfare of the nation to be a key to the success of the American experiment of self-government under law.

Looking at how poorly educated our citizens are about the real issues of the day, it's no surprise that we are seeing problems in public policy. I'm not suggesting it's inevitable that the nation will collapse, in fact the article gives me hope we can turn it around. But it has to start with educating citizens about their basic responsibilities.

Of course, there are good and bad ways to do this. Heinlein had a model to ensure only concerned/educated citizens, and he presented it in Starship Troopers. So some thought should go into HOW we educate.
Just checked in ubuntu, those two commands will enable a horizontal split and a vertical split, respectively. Thats great, screen has been amazingly useful since the day I discovered it and have split windows working fully is just icing on the cake.
People will pay for surprise
True, though it seems flexibility in body design is mostly limited by fashion. Things like the Aptera (www.aptera.com) are road legal.

But I disagree it's apples to oranges. If the comparison is how to get from A to B with the highest fuel efficiency, why should cars be protected from their disadvantages? (Disregarding for a moment the chaos that would ensue if everyone driving had their own plane...)

The 100mpg figure seems to apply to cruise flight at 17500ft. Given that you have to climb up there before you enjoy that advantage, it would be interesting to know what the total trip mpg is for trips of different lengths. How far do you have to go before you beat the cars in fuel efficiency?
For my own personal use I think text based interfaces (with pipes) are superior, the higher level pluggable components in AppleScript/Automator seem more usable in general.

That said, there was an excellent article recently with the experiences of a trainer in getting people to use *nix, who found the minimalistic "command mode" more usable due to it's text oriented simplicity.
Nice. We built a mysql-backed queue with nearly identical properties but it's not especially efficient. It does 10+ jobs per second per worker, but with locking this starts to cause InnoDB concurrency problems. Not insurmountable, but moving to a Redis-backed approach seems like a great option when our current queue can no longer keep up. Really glad to have this approach proven by GitHub.
Slideshows using Flash are one of the worst ideas ever. To spare everyone else the pain:

/!\ Extended spoiler alert /!\

10 (Tied): Gary D. Cohn, Goldman Sachs, Jon Winkelried, Goldman Sachs

9: Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman Sachs

8: Sanford I. Weill, Citigroup

7: Sheldon G. Adelson, Las Vegas Sands

6: Robert I. Toll, Toll Brothers

5: Lawrence J. Lasser, Marsh & McLennan Companies

4: Milan Panic, Valeant Pharmaceuticals

3: Eugene M. Isenberg, Nabors Industries

2: Bob R. Simpson, XTO Energy
The Productive Programmer (book review)
But it makes it harder to have an image link to something else
> Now, we just need a Flash (the big desktop creation app) equivalent that spits out HTML5 code. Anyone working on that?

I was just discussing this exact idea with a friend yesterday (although it's something I personally wouldn't be interested in). If done correctly, you could backend to HTML5+JS+CSS and still emit SWF for legacy support. Would certainly be interesting.
Successful companies such as Oracle Corporation burden their marketing departments with overlapping products rather than stifle programmer initiative. For example, during most of the late 1990s there were at least three different Web servers that you could buy from Oracle, each one backed up by a document explaining why it was the one true path toward database-backed Web site glory.

Otherwise a good article, but what does this mean? That because Marketing often makes life difficult for developers, you should instead make life difficult for Marketing?

The average home cannot have a grand piano but almost any office can.

This as well. The article seems to be making good point after good point, then throws out curveballs like this.
"Duck It builds on the core idea of Duck Duck Go that search results improve when you get useful, readable content in addition to links."

I don't understand the difference between "Duck It" and "Duck Duck Go"
Was it Blast Media? This old SvN blog post from Dec 07 talks about how they used them on a free trial: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/741-ask-37signals-10-ways-to-...

another reference: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/307-what-do-you-want-to-know

How do I remember all this junk and not stuff that really matters?!
More, usually. Since they aren't as general-purpose as CPUs, they can be pretty small.
The majority of them aren't in banking...
You're right -- that's almost certainly the reason you don't see stuff like this happen.

Though, didn't Bank of America make that iPhone app a little while ago that allowed you to photograph a cheque in order to deposit it? They're obviously OK with sending financial data around. I guess maybe it was OK in that case because they were the ones that wrote the app?

In any case, you're right. Security is definitely the reason this kind of stuff hasn't been implemented. I still think that it's possible to write an open, secure interface to things. Email is the example I fall back on here. Like I mentioned above - sensitive information gets sent around in emails all the time, yet there are countless email clients and they're almost all secure (I say "almost all" to cover my ass if there's some that aren't). I think that if it can work for email, then maybe it can work in other domains.
Duck Duck Go is name of the search engine. Duck It is the name of the new search view (one of 4 avail from home page).
I believe Nvidia's Fermi will enter the market this year with 512 cores.
An easily changed option is not a big difference.

From what I can tell, screen has better handling of colors. tmux seems to mess up the <Esc>[90m; -like sequence for colors 8-15.

Also, I like the ability to highlight screen's current screen with colored parentheses.
As long as you stay within the design limits you will be fine. I built mine light as Van intended. My empty weight was 1029 lbs. More and more builders are putting a ton of "goodies" in the panel that I believe distract from the true sport nature of the Van's design. I never felt unsafe in mine doing sport aerobatics.

Falco's are very nice but will take forever to build. There is a reason Van's has a huge number of completions.
Should creating email accounts have an API? How would the captcha be presented? How about adding reviews of products?
>So tptacek, enlighten us, what's the principle hardware differences between a run-of-the-mill desktop Mac and a run-of-the-mill desktop dell?

I'm actually curious about this as well. I would have gone the fail route and said "some form of DRM in the EFI".
Yes. Enough with all the "young entrepreneurs"-slanted articles. People of all ages can and do start their own businesses.
GO STEVE GO!
Silverlight is pretty terrible

Compared to what? Silverlight uses a bit more CPU time when playing MP4 videos compared to Media Player or VLC but about the same as Google Chrome. It may be different on OS X. How does Silverlight's video performance on OS X compare to native Quicktime for example (which is relatively slow on Windows)?
Maybe. I think that if we get enough smart, awesome people working on it, it could be secure, safe and open all at the same time.
And if their companies succeed

I tend to suspect that this part is where many people start from before going to "bank execs are overpaid".
Photogallery – photos of Kareena Kapoor – Sandesh Gujarati Newspaper
As previously said, the financial incentive is simply not there. As much sense as it makes for you to have easy access to your information, there are too many businesses that rely on controlling that access.

On the other hand, tools to do this with almost any site already exist. RSS is common enough, and where it doesn't exist, screen scraping isn't that hard (and getting easier all the time). If I'm not mistaken, this is the exact problem that Yahoo pipes are trying to address.

Of course, sites that require a complicated login process (banking sites) are still out.
Bill Gates and Barack Obama about to start a global web portal for social change
Animated inkblot images keep unwanted bots at bay
Is it just me or did that look a lot like reading horoscopes?
My impression that this is not the conservatism of aviation engineering but rather the conservatism of aviation manufacturers. Whether this is due to product liability concerns (I just eyed through http://www.avweb.com/news/avlaw/181885-1.html) or something else, who knows. It definitely seems that all "technologically advanced" aircraft are in the experimental category.

I wonder if Burt Rutan can be subject to a product liability lawsuit for problems with a Vari-Ez et al?
That's a lot of text to get to ROC curves...I'd rewrite down to essentials and get to the curves ASAP.

Fundamentally, you have a threshold. Things above are classified as "positive" and below as "negative". At different threshold values, you get some number of correct positives (was actually positive) and false positives (was actually negative). That's what the ROC curve shows. You want the curve to be as close to the top-left (in this case) corner as possible.
Crabby people are better decision makers
I for one like this poll. That is all.
Cores don't matter; performance matters.
Leap seconds aren't implemented, they're announced:

The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) announces the insertion of a leap second whenever the difference between UTC and UT1 approaches 0.6 s, to keep the difference between UTC and UT1 from exceeding 0.9 s.

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

UT1 is the astronomical time. So far, there are 24 leap seconds.

Also, I got it wrong: Leap seconds aren't the difference between GMT and UTC, but between UTC and e.g. GPS or International Atomic Time.
Unfortunately, email is a terrible example. While it's possible to have a modicum of security in regards to receiving your e-mail, spoofing emails is trivially easy (unless you use cryptographic signing, which isn't well supported by the majority of clients afaik)
'For example, one could imagine a startup to help convince your parents that you made a reasonable career choice.'

that's a pretty cool idea. I wonder how it would work?
And then there is the problem of getting to an airfield first, unless you just happen to have one in your back yard.
I don't personally know because I'm just a peon with a qwerty keyboard, but I think there are some great developers and talented architects out there who could figure it out and make it happen.
The biggest difference as far as I'm concerned is that it has vertical screen splitting and xmonad / dwm-style automatic tiled layouts built in. I've also looked into the codebases for both, and if I were working on new features, I would far rather work on tmux's - it's much cleaner.
How Arts Training Improves Attention and Cognition
I actually made an account due to this thread after lurking for a while. I think elblanco raised some very interesting points from a business perspective that you didn't counter.

He was kind of a jerk about it. But two salient questions remain:

1) Why doesn't Apple have a netbook offering? "Because they don't" isn't really a good answer. That space is booming and still evolving right now. Apple could come in and define it for the entire marketplace.
2) Since Apple doesn't have one, why would they go through the trouble of shutting down atom based netbooks? Wouldn't this jeopardize future uses for an atom in a lower-end device like the Mac Mini?

I don't think you answered either question in your original comment:
"Whether or not this move is an intentional swipe at the Hackintosh trend, I'm rooting for Apple here:

(1) Just from a pure CS perspective, the Hackintoshers seem awfully smug, and I'd like to see them get knocked around by Apple for awhile. In a theoretic sense, it's far from established that Apple can't lock clones out. We have no idea what tricks they might come up with to reject non-Apple gear, and I for one really want to see what they are. When Microsoft did this to the Xbox and X360, we got some incredible systems research out of people like Bunny Huang and the MIT hackers.

(2) Just on general principles, if you don't have a monopoly and you aren't specially regulated, you clearly should be able to sell whatever combination of hardware and software you want to. Other people don't have the right to force you to sell some random configuration of your stuff. It's a really skeevy kind of Geek Exceptionalism that says "there's no GOOD reason why OS X shouldn't run on my Netbook, so you can't stop me"."

So I'm not sure what word anybody is supposed to take exactly.
First Look: Redfly Dumb Terminal for BlackBerry
Since iphone safari doesn't unload pages when you leave the app (Multitasking!), flash could've been spinning in the background all the time.
Charting time series as calendar heat maps in R
This post raises some important questions and has great links to places where other similar questions can be raised and discussed.

However I disagree with one thing: having a single price point is the single most expensive mistake you will ever make in your company. Where you make the mistake is in assuming that what you think is good for you (simplicity of single price point) is also good for your users. Don't do this - validate the assumption. For what it's worth, many others did and they found that having three distinct choices is optimal - less than that and you are leaving money on the table, more than that and you confuse people.
Maybe advertise in trade magazines? Adwords can get pretty targeted as well.
API is kind-of a misnomer in this case. API implies each service has its own set of rules, the data is open, but the access is different.

Everything should talk to one another, but a service's name or url should never have to appear in any code. That's the user's job to input.
Because deep inside you are interested in diciplines like PR. This stuff really matters; to you.
I've dealt with this quite a bit, and you're right- it's difficult to deal with the conceptual impedance mismatch between the concept of a time, and its discrete meaning in persistent storage.

I wrote a blog post about a month ago that talks about some issues surrounding the concept of "all-day" events which, by definition, are conceptually ambiguous.

http://onehub.com/past/2009/9/28/the_joy_of_calendars/

Ah, good times.
API for sending snail mail letters and postcards
I don't know how you're doing it, but you are vastly superior to Google for certain topical searches that are totally spammed up over there.

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=H1N1+flu&v=d

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=flu+vaccine&v=d
Don't captchas and open APIs fundamentally oppose each other?

The point of an API is to have a clear interface so that programs can be built on a service, and captchas exist to try to block bots from using services.
This is interesting but whitelists/blacklists worry me because newcomers will either see everything or nothing, both of which are pretty unfriendly.
Having a good API for everything would be almost as good as The Singularity (tm), but making a good and secure API is very hard and comes with a massive hidden cost.

1) An API can require even more planning to design than the application or service itself.

2) Mistakes made in the design or implementation of the API turn into liabilities you can't solve without breaking users of the API.

3) The cost of maintaining an API so that it and its documentation doesn't fall out of date with the app/service can be as high (and sometimes even higher) as the cost of maintaining the app itself.

4) It widens the attack surface.

And those are just the ones off the top of my head.
The printing press enabled more people to read, though still few could write. The net has enabled more people to write, though still few can program. A net where everything has an API is an extremely helpful step in creating a system which enables more people to program.
Ratpoison - http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/
That would be an easy API to implement, in psuedo-code:

do:
server->return any errors
client->display errors
client->ask user for account name
client->server->request account name x
while ( server->x is invalid account name )

<< Repeat above loop for password >>

do:
server->return new captcha
client->display captcha
client->take user input
client->server->send captcha text
while(server->captcha does not match)

server->return success message
There is a correlation between people going through the system and people actually getting an education. If the opposite were true - less people were going through the system - I'd be very worried.

The problem with "high quality" is that I don't know how to measure it. If we can't measure it, then it's difficult to have a meaningful discussion about whether one thing is better than the other. That is, we're restricted to a purely qualitative discussion that's not based on evidence. Graduation and enrollment statistics don't measure quality, but I think they are a coarse indicator of where we are.
A friend of mine had a Long-EZ. It is a very cool looking plane, fast, and very efficient. The only problem is that it only seats two and has no room for baggage. He had small baggage pods suspended below the wings, but they could only hold something the size of a small duffel bag. I don't think it would be very comfortable to take a long trip in it.
The issue with banking bonuses is not that they are large, it is that they are given without regard to whether or not the short term success that gives rise to the bonus will result in long term distress for the bank. These externalities are particularly salient the larger the financial institution. You see those 'massive resources that their institutions possess...' belong, generally speaking, to others. Teachers and police officers, grocers and elderly women.

When financial institutions stumble in a long term sense, it directly affects the future financial security of millions of people. Taxpayers are then liable for large sums of the, essentially, pilfered resources. Police are public employees, their pensions have to be paid when the time comes regardless of how badly their pension fund has been raided. Ditto for teachers. And so on and so forth.

We should start thinking of CEOs as individuals who have been tasked with stewarding some amount of wealth, rather than individuals tasked with the running of a company. This is because Apple represents USD216 Billion in wealth. This wealth needs to be well managed, or there will be repercussions in the future.

I don't know, that's just my two cents.
Experimental aircraft (all amateur-built planes are registered with the FAA as "experimental") fall under an entirely different set of laws and regulations specifically designed to avoid that sort of of problem.

That's not to say that experimental designers are completely immune lawsuits, but I've never heard of it happening, and doubt such a thing would survive long in court.

The net result is that home-built aircraft tend to have dramatically better performance numbers than comparable certified aircraft.
At the risk of sounding overly pedantic, I have a lot of trouble giving credence to an education-related blog article that averages roughly 1 spelling / grammar error per sentence in the first paragraph.
I've had scrolling problems with my two Apple Mighty Mice, too. The second was just bought for this reason. Then I saw someone explaining how to fix this. And it definitely works.
Place a sheet of paper on your desk, and rub the poor mouse's scroll ball rigorously on the paper in all directions. After that you'll get the feeling of a brand new one.
They shouldn't just have an API, they should use the same APIs where possible. Each site having it's own API is a major barrier.
I think Twitter is an example that owes its success to its API; it depends what your business plan is.

As more companies become Google-esque data hogs, APIs will probably be encouraged.
@access_denied - wow, that actually makes me feel better. One other thing I wanted to point out was that it's not as if this came naturally to these guys; they have worked really hard for a very long time to get where they are.
I don't know anyone who does it this way but an idea I like would be metered, like Amazon, but with a twist: a safety net and "grace amount" for users:

Customer signs up, gives a CC or other payment assurance, says "I am willing to pay up to $N/month for this."

Ideally, the customers actual metered usage comes out at $(N-K) and you bill that lesser amount.

Suppose on day 15, though, the customer has used up $N. Instead of suspending them, you float them for three days and alert them. If they ignore the alert, suspend them after 3 days or a max of $X overage. The customer can also respond to the alert by saying "please suspend for the month" in which case you eat the overage (< $X). Or the customer can raise their limit: "Ok, I'm willing to pay $(N+J)."

In other words, a kind of "meter with circuit breaker and graceful failure mode". As a customer, it makes me paranoid that I might, through unforseen causes, rack up way more in some metered charge than I thought just because I didn't check the meter myself for a few days. The above would fix that.

To avoid gaming, you might want to have rollover of overage charges towards the end of the billing period.

-t
More interesting to me is that he was able to realize significant improvements in fuel consumption with the same airframe and same basic engine by upgrading the ignition and fuel injection systems to something that probably wouldn't look out of place on a 20 year old civic.