skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In short, yes. There's a good description of it here. http://clouddevelopertips.blogspot.com/2009/07/elastic-in-el...
Mockingbird, Cappuccino, and what really matters
"Bill was one of us"

No. He was never one of us. I think it is safe to assume folks here have high ethical standards, something he has repeatedly shown to lack. High ethical standards cost money, cost business and market share. It's not easy to keep them, but, I am sure most of us here do it regardless of the cost to the business, for not doing so has a much higher cost in out consciousness.

When you command a group, be it a company, a department or a bunch of kids, people will do what you want them to do and do whatever your behavior and apparent standards enable them to. If you are ruthless and have little regard for law or quality of your products, so will your team. If you are willing to break the law, they will do it for you. Many times out of loyalty.

As a leader, it is nothing but your duty to take full responsibility for the acts of your people for you are the one who enabled them.
Opera's UI is still pretty clunky (it's improved, but not enough), they've never built the enthusiastic community of Mozilla or have the brand recognition and products of companies like Google or Apple, and its USPs have gradually eroded over time with increased competition.

(And yes, I am using Opera 10 now)
http://www.bugmenot.com/view/nytimes.com

Or, just register. It takes like 30 seconds, the cookie never expires, and you don't even have to use a valid email.
Wherever Verizon feels like laying down fiber.
Maybe I misunderstand your comment, but Germany uses the long scale, last time I checked.
I remember jailbreaking my first iphone and installing a app, that did just that. The colors would fade in and out based on how loud you spoke.
@andrewljohnson, If I were you I would make a short video of your app in action and post it up on youtube. I am sure that will get more people interested..
It's "passing off" a slightly weaker part of trademark law. They are pretending to the public that their service is that of someone else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_off - written from the UK perspective, it's certainly part of EU TM law too, but I don't know enough about US TM law to comment properly on this.
In general I think these changes are better than nothing, except for the exceptions where they work out horribly.

http://use.perl.org/~Ovid/journal/39809 mentions the interesting example of a teacher who teaches Russian immigrants. No matter how well she teaches, she's got the huge disadvantage that her students start with no proficiency in English and so are guaranteed to do well. Pay for performance rules are a strong disincentive for taking on tough challenges like that.

Still the current system is so horribly broken that I am personally willing to put up with breakage like that.
I didn't know about the no-more-than-a-year guideline -- that's fascinating. Is the purpose of the rule to protect the worker from being perpetually denied benefits that he'd otherwise get as an employee? If so, that's too bad, because in this case the worker wants to remain a contractor!

And thanks for the advice on not being covered twice. I'll be careful about that if it comes up. If I were offered health coverage as part of my employee compensation, I hope I'd be able to negotiate it into extra cash instead.
Changes in ethnic/national origins of Forbes 400 richest Americans, 1987-2009
In addition to the throttling, Comcast still enforces bandwidth caps.

Two months ago, Comcast's fraud department left me a breathless voicemail asking to call them back urgently regarding an "important matter of security."

When I called back, I was told, "We have a bandwidth limit of 250 gigabytes a month. Our records show that in August, you used 710 gigabytes." They told me that if I exceeded 250gb again, they'd cut me off for a year.

Since then, I've started tracking my bandwidth to make sure I don't go over. If Comcast cuts me off, my only alternative is 5Mbps DSL through AT&T, and I wouldn't wish that upon anybody. So, Comcast has successfully used their monopoly position in my area to strong-arm me into lowering my bandwidth usage.

I really hope Verizon FIOS shakes things up soon. It's somewhat depressing that FIOS is available in the boonies of Indiana but not in most of the Silicon Valley.
Did I not understand it right or does it show 79 public repos on the left, and 83 on the right?
Everybody is running the photo of him in the Amazon doing field research, even though his field research was not especially strong. A few quotes from the article:

Why not admit it? I was fairly quick to discover that I was more a man for the study than for the field.

I hate traveling and explorers.

Quite admirable! After discovering he had no taste for what was seen as the defining activity in his discipline, he didn't spend his life pretending or trying to be a brilliant field researcher. Nor did he resign himself to mediocrity. He found a way to bring his talents to bear in a field where everybody assumed that different talents were required.
If you're a Java programmer and want to have a rude awakening, go download Jester. Jester is an automated mutation testing tool—it goes in and replaces “<=” with “<”, “&&” with “||”, “!” with whitespace. And then it re-runs the tests. And then you get to watch in horror as your tests still all pass, regardless of what the product code actually does.

I've always wanted to write a unit-test testing library which inverts all of the assertions to catch the false positives.
This sounds like it's a lot more sadistic (and useful) though.
Really? Microsoft has 90k people and has only managed to create a handful of good products (and that depends on your definition of good).
Why can't I just pay Comcast money and get a set exact pipe size that I can use?

Because the resulting pricing would be crazy high, like 512 kbps for $50/month and you really want bursty Internet service anyway because your usage is probably bursty.
How is paying for exclusive content any worse or different than first party games in general?

Do you have a source for that 'dumb down' claim? Because that practice would actually support your assertion.
There was an App Store Ranking Avalanche Just Now
Can you think of a clearer way for him to let his daughters know that bad grades are unacceptable in the Obama household?

In fact it makes me wonder how he motivated her to improve her grade to 95%....
Isn't the Apple iTunes/iPod lock-in much like the Nokia Media Manager (or whatever it's called this week)/Nokia Phone lock-in?

It's not like iTunes is the only media player you can use to sync your non-iPod players.

And, if you decided to buy DRM'ed music that was explicitly tied in to a specific player/platform/program/manufacturer, isn't it your fault?

Look... I am not telling you Apple is a nice company. It is not. I am not telling either that the fact there is one Apple makes it right for Microsoft to break the law. What I am saying is that there is not only one bad Apple (pun intended) in the basket.
The rankings show up the same in iTunes.

We made this page to keep track of our app's ranking in the Navigation category. Just now, all the apps got shifted around by a huge amount and weird apps are on top. Our app rose 30 places.

I see the weird ordering now on iTunes, but not on my iPhone. It also seems to affect other categories as well.
Wow, 710 gigs. That's probably more than all my usage since 2007. In Ontario, the highest cap available for less than $100 month is 95 gigs.
Also, "transition". There is no transition for Linux.

ARM netbooks? That said, part of why there's no 'transition' is that providing easy-to-use (for consumers) third-party application binaries is this side of impossible given the lack of stable APIs across distributions and releases.

I can't see any possible difference for the fatelf solution and the package manager and scripts solution for an end user. It's not about the ease of use, because there is no difference.

I can drag-install any third-party application I want to download, and I can expect it to work on any machine. The author doesn't have to wait to get it packaged by a distribution, set up a package repository, etc. I don't have to wait 3-12 months for the latest version.

I can drag it over to my PPC iMac, and it'll work there, too.

How is that not 'different'?
$1M+ to me means one million and more.
That's standard network industry terminology for the lowest priority quality of service queue. See here for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_Service#QoS_Priority...
Or here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk543/tk757/technologies_tec...
I almost want to tell myself to not be so upset by the capping looking at how terrible it is in Ontario compared to you.

But I refuse to be ok with the lesser of two evils.

This madness must stop.
Next year you two should have a party together.
No company is 'nice' or 'friendly'. They are always in it for themselves. Their best interests are not the same as their consumers or developers.

People need to stop anthropomorphizing these entities into friends and enemies.
Cable modem hacking author indicted on federal conspiracy, wire fraud
This sounds great, but for the fact that most of the things students are being reviewed on are meaningless bullshit. How are teachers being measured? By AP scores? Grades overall? Because as a still-fresh departure from grade school, I'm pretty sure 90% of the stuff I was tested on was bullshit. My teachers knew that and let me get away with poor grades so I could learn what I wanted to, and that's where I learned. If every teacher's now being taught that they should be pushing their students to get good grades, I predict we won't see much good come out of this initiative.
So, Comcast has successfully used their monopoly position in my area to strong-arm me into lowering my bandwidth usage.

Look, I hate Comcast as much as the next guy, but they appear to have competition in your area, even if the competitive product isn't as good. You have a choice, but refuse to exercise it.

The reason they can get away with this is because, like most other people, you won't cancel your service over it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not judging, and I would be paying Comcast too if they would let me, but it really doesn't seem they they are abusing a monopoly in this case.
Beginner’s Guide to Finding the Right Business Partner
Gah! And I just spent nearly a week writing my own iPhone analytics!
I knew the answer to about half of those without thinking. Now I feel smart.
I have to admit I didn't notice it was you replying to yourself :-)

still it never hurts to suck up; even by accident. ESP if it's true.
IMVU did not consistently write unit tests on day one. So why are we all rabid unit testing / test-driven development advocates now?

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/11/five-whys.html

Every time you ship a bug to customers, ask yourself "How will we prevent this bug from ever reaching customers again?" and "Why did we write this bug in the first place?"

Almost every time, unit or acceptance tests would have caught the bug initially or prevented the regression. That's not to say unit tests are the only solution.

Sometimes:

* you need better knowledge sharing between engineers

* you should spend more time refactoring your code

* your internal APIs are confusing and inherently cause bugs

Often a follow-up to a bug will involve changes to all of the above.

When you start an experimental project, don't focus on automated tests if you don't need to... I'm all for lazily pulling in the processes you need as you need them. :)

Whether you write unit tests or not is entirely context-sensitive. The author's points might make sense in some context, but they certainly don't apply to every team or even every engineer.

Maybe this guideline is helpful: "I just wrote a new component. What kind of test coverage do I need to allow a new engineer to refactor arbitrarily and still be convinced my code works?"
Google was such a massive success that any search startup with a chance of being a "Google killer", or even just a worthy competitor, seems to be finding investors.

If 1% share is a billion dollars in annual revenue, there's some real opportunity there.

I think everyone is investing in search by looking in their rear-view mirror. I doubt the real "Google killer" will be a "text box entry leading to a list of links" search engine of the same nature as Google.
Thanks for catching that, fixed.
I think Zoho is far more dangerous to Microsoft than Google in the long term.

Where Google and Microsoft are both sitting on two cash cows (Add words + Search) vs (Office + Window) and are bouncing around trying to diversify (XBox vs Wave etc) they are not really focused on killing off the competition. However, Zoho is trying to turn Office into it's cash cow and is focused on building a great long term product which means they are going to try and make an equal or better product for less money. Which is why I expect Zoho to build a stand alone office sweet long before Google goes there.
Because they are good at marketing
Hey jayair,

Cool service - I just tried it out on my account. I'm not really sure if I see a huge increase in relevance, although that might be because I follow a lot of random accounts vs. people I actually know. Feedback: I don't like that it's a blackbox and I can't scale/finetune things to adjust the filter. What gets filtered out should be transparent if you want people to rely on that service.
The search market is large and lucrative enough that, no matter how uphill a battle it appears to be for a new search engine to establish a hold in it, there's likely to be a continual trickle of contenders being funded.

That said, I would hope that blekko is attempting something that will distinguish itself from existing search engines.
One of Micrsoft's biggest mistakes!
> What MS Office does well, these online apps do passably at best. But what the online apps do well, MS Office doesn't do at all.

Microsoft Office is, arguably, the most successful software line in history. It has remained so despite all the naysayers, despite numerous free replacements with at least respectable basic functionality, despite its relative lack of improvement in features and/or usability in recent years, and despite the fact that the technologies to do all these on-line alternatives have been viable for several years now. Perhaps this tells us something about how much the competitive "advantages" of all these other products are actually worth.

> Like getting the same documents from anywhere you are

I had this really cool idea for that once. I called it a "file server".

> collaborating with people

I had this really cool idea for that once. I called it a "file server". (Or did you mean in real time? Because I haven't seen even a prototype for that so far that would be useful in practice.)

> making things publicly viewable with a click

I had this really cool idea for that once. I called it a "web server".

> building a web survey that feeds right into your private spreadsheet

I didn't have any cool ideas about that one, but about a million other people did, and they all made simple web sites to do it much better than any of the on-line office suites I've seen so far.

> The online apps just need polish to compete with MS Office.

Sure. And so do Notepad and Calc.

Sorry for the cynicism, but I think you are vastly overestimating the significance of these products in the market and their future potential. Even if the idea of an on-line office suite has merit -- and the jury is still very much out on that one -- the execution of the toys available so far isn't even on the same scale as products like MS Office, or various other respectable desktop applications.
I like that I don't need any plugins to run it.

I second that. Requiring a plugin is the only reason I don't use that other really cool mockup tool. Good luck to the team.
Breadcrumb navigation: best practices and examples
I'm not sure what to take away from this post.

Unit tests just saved my bacon when I accidentally introduced a serious bug in refactoring some network-related code.

The bug wouldn't have shown up outside of production in some very specific cases, but it would have had a serious customer impact.

Unit tests catch these things for me all the time. Every 5 minutes I spend writing tests easily saves me 30+ minutes I'd spend debugging when some code 6 levels down from the apparent point of failure caused the issue.
Yes, but they charge at $1.50/gig up to a maximum of $25 above those 95gb. My neighbours upstairs regularly pull >500gb in a month, pay the extra $25/mo, and move on with their lives.

Not a great solution, but better than being cut off :S
"it would actually take effort to support other devices"

It would be trivially easy to pop-up a message saying something like "You are using an unsupported device that looks similar to an iPod, but it's not. Some features may be missing or not work properly. iTunes is only exhaustively tested in combination with other Apple products. Be advised Apple will not support you in case of problems with this product or iTunes when connected to it"

And that would be the right thing to do.

I, personally, would add a "Please, don't complain to us if it blows up or eats your music collection. You are using this thing at your own risk", but that would be my own sense of humor.
Well historically copyright was created (Statute of Anne) to empower authors to retain rights of reproduction for a limited period so that they could profit from their work over and above any profits made by mere printers. Prior to that works remained hidden from the public domain or were bought by publishers outright who agreed amongst themselves not to interfere with one anothers monopoly right to reproduce the work - this was largely a technological restriction, there was [virtually, save transcription] no self-publication.

I still believe that encouraging people to create works by ensuring they have a limited monopoly on commercial exploitation in return for eventual expansion of the public domain is worthy and workable.

If you create a communist society then I can see how copyright is not needed, in the current climate of commerce where I am in Europe (at least) complete dissolution of copyright IMO is to the public detriment.

One simple example might be how to finance a proper dictionary, or indeed any academically rigorous reference work, without allowing the creators of the work the chance to profit from it? How would that work, in say a capitalist society, under your regime?
(I never understood the point of Octal)

Some early architectures had 9-bit bytes. Octal math works cleanly for those, much as hexadecimal math works cleanly for processors with 8-bit bytes.
It seemed that he just dumps it on the ground.
I was an amateur web developer back when I was hand-coding my proto-blog in Notepad back in '99. Ah, those were the days of Netscape 4 and IE 4 & 5. Pretty much gave it up when my blogging withered away in '04. So I bowed out before the Browser Reconquista began and have missed all the excitement of IE6 versus IE7&8 versus Gecko versus Webkit. I can't imagine how thrilling it is...
Better title...

Linux: still better for coding in C

[EDIT] To clarify, the article is specifically discussing issues with developing native programs on OSX which do not apply to developers in many other languages.
You learned how to jump through hoops and perform passable work on things which didn't necessarily interest you.

In other words, real world training.
CRF statistical models

Yeah, so, read ITILA, and do all problems up to 3, and attempt as many 4 as possible. You can skip the info. theory half and go straight to Bayesian stats and then neural nets - but you'll want to go back and learn the info theory too, eventually.

BTW, you're jumping into an enormous kettle of fish called "graphical models," which are very useful but endlessly varied upon and often needlessly overcomplicated.
I think what you really need is Zoubin:
http://videolectures.net/mlss07_ghahramani_grafm/

If that's a bit heavy, browse around the site for an easier introduction.

I get ... how they work, but the embedded probability stuff is mostly squiggles to me

Pardon me for saying so, but no, if you don't understand why each of those equations is what it is, then you don't understand how it works. That's kind of like saying "I get how the car works, but that bit in the front is just a giant hunk of metal to me."

If it looks like squiggles, you need to untangle it. It's like untying a giant knot. You need to find some end, some piece of thread you can tug on, and then slowly tease each equation apart until you get how the various pieces move. (What happens if Z is bigger/smaller than what it is? Why is it there at all? What is a "clique"? Why would I add up potential functions in a clique?)
Subversion Submitted to Become a Project at The Apache Software Foundation
OS X has a unified set of libraries to work with, Linux does not. This means the problem is much more complex. Creating a binary that simply runs on different distributions all on the same architecture is a fundamentally hard problem. Simply stacking together binaries for multiple architectures together doesn't result in a universal binary. At worst you have to stack together different binaries for different combinations of libraries and different architectures and if you assume even just the latest versions only of the top 5 distributions running on the top 5 supported architectures for Linux you may well end up with 25 different binaries that FatELF would glue together resulting in every program being a cool 2500% larger. This is unacceptable in terms of space and unacceptable in that it still isn't universal after all that as not all arches are supported and you only get the latest versions of the popular distros.

This is why I claim FatELF does not solve the hard problems with universal binaries. The only thing it might solve is someone could distribute a binary for a particular distro that could run on multiple architectures for that distro, but they can already do this with shell scripts and this is an uncommon case and most people would just rather download and store the one appropriate binary.

(This last is easy with a functional package management system. You should keep in mind that OS X does not have a functional complete package management scheme that allows users to discover, acquire and manage 3rd party packages. Not all Linux distros do either, but those that do are less in need of universal binaries. This is really a separate discussion though that gets to the heart of how software ought to be distributed. There are many blind spots in OS X's software strategy some of which Sparkle is making a half-baked (not sparkle's fault) attempt to fix.)[1]

At the end of the day you can't simply assume that the solution for OS X is the right one for Linux and you'd make a much bigger mistake assuming that the developers who rejected these patches weren't both entirely aware of OS X's excellent use of this technique and were doing this for anything but sound technical reasons. (I.E. It's not just NIH, they would happily adopt this if this was a reasonable solution to Linux's unique[2] challenges with binary compatibility across "Linux")

[1] There are many things wrong with this and most package management systems do not incorporate third party repos/packages as well as they should, which IMO is the larger problem here. Not that corporations should have to manage repos for every distro, but that becomes a separate mess.

[2] Perhaps read as special.

Aside #432: As you noticed my replies can often be anything but concise. I apologize if that makes things hard to follow.
"it could charge a price for Windows substantially above that which could be charged in a competitive market"

Weren't people complaining exactly about 7's pricing?