skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bugs/quirks:

* tried to check out the about section of your site, but the feed kept moving the footer down. Maybe lock the footer in place or put that info to the side of the feed.

* A few repeated/stuttered sections. I heard this a few times during reads, but there didn't seem to be any specific thing that caused it.

* Speech cuts off after :

Feature requests:

* Log in with twitter account. Then I can hear my friend updates.

* Customization options> voicing, announcements (says, wants it to be known, is excited... Sometimes they can get annoying)

* Pause button

* Literal reads (instead of says to @xxx, it could say ... says 'ar tee at xxxx, blah blah blah'

All in all I really like this site. It's beautifully done and is actually quite entertaining.
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People who have no technical understanding of jailbreaking should not be doing it.

The Age of The Amateur is upon us and there's no escaping it. From people looking up diagnoses of their ailments to a armchair mechanics who think they know better than a technician with 30 years in the trade, all because they "read it on the internet".
> Any reasonable person who takes your advice would be a fool if he bought from your competitor

This is almost certainly supposed to represent (the implication of) Joel's pitch, not edw's belief. I would definitely expect it to be read aloud in a sarcastic tone.
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By the time I finished it I thought it was the first chapter from Asimov's Nemesis and was very disappointed. Except I didn't remember it to be so well written...
Maybe you and I are using different local Google's but for me googling for "Bug Tracking Software" both with and without quotes brings up Fog Creek in the first 5 (as of Nov/3/09).
On .com atlassian is 2 bellow Fog Creek.
On .ca it brings up Fog Creek right after atlassian
On the other hand, the claim that the humanities are not "practical" has become virtually a tautology, because "practical" has become almost a synonym for "scientific". Nowadays, people don't seem to think that work on love or ethics or aesthetics has practical value. I am not sure why, since actual human lives are intimately concerned with these topics.
This post has more momentum and is getting more attention.

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/a0o98/obama_admini...
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Neat. I spent a few weeks working on something similar in jQuery, but gave up on it, because I wasn't really confident it could be done well enough to beat Balsamiq.
I guarantee for all of my clients that it will look exactly the same, or damn similar (minus font rendering) in IE6 all the way up to the newest versions of Chrome.

Once you sit there with IE6, IE8, FF, Safari, and Chrome for a while, you start to get niggles on what each browser will do.

For my current client, I've only had to do one IE6 specific hack (fieldset background colors/images).

That said, I'm not doing anything too fancy (but still use JQuery, Ajax, etc).

Unless we are explicitly leveraging new browser technology, from a design standpoint it could be construed as 'whiny-developer-syndrome' for people who refuse to design for IE. After the initial "WTF" curve with your base css laid out, it's actually not too difficult.
Thanks for the great feedback. I'm Looking into the bugs.

As for the feature requests, logging in to view your personal feed and the pause button are on our roadmap and should be added soon.

You make a good point about the lead-ins. We initially had a bunch of silly lead-ins, but we've been getting consistent feedback that we should just keep it simple. We've already trimmed down the lead-ins significantly. Sounds like we should keep trimming.
The current userbase will just be transfered to mint. This "end-of-life" is not the typical end-of-life where you are ending a product/service. The product is still there, they are just merging with mint.
Googalink
Enthusiasm is not a substitute for pragmatics; all the other contributors are just as enthusiastic, but they know their patches are not entitled to merger with the main tree willy nilly, without there being a very good reason.
Apologies - I was unclear and misleading. I meant to say "The Advertisements" for "Bug Tracking Software" don't show Fog Creek, but do show Atlassian.
Okay, this one reeks of Classic American Arrogance (as in on the part of the Government). You guys can enforce whatever stupid policy you want within your country, but what makes you think you can get all other countries to join with you???

I hardly think you will be able to convince 10 countries to sign that treaty.
> without really solving much

On a German Linux news site (prolinux.de), a commercial Linux game developer -- Ankh2, IIRC -- once commented that they could not get their game running on about 2-3% of their customers' Linux computers, despite their best efforts.

I dunno whether FatElf would have solved problems like this in the long run, but there are problems. You may not be affected but this doesn't mean others aren't.
Well it required quite a bit of internet support and hostile publicity for the case to move one bit. Which goes on to prove that the copyright laws by themselves weren't providing protection for Tempest.
Wow the 10 person software shop promotion is interesting... I'm currently starting a company and was looking for a good issue tracker.

Up until now I've been using fogbugz for other projects but the license is a bit steep when starting up...
As I read it this is no longer about Copyright any more; it is about certain government positioning themselves, their lawmakers and their major companies into a situation where they wish to control the internet.

This is a bad thing.

I am a supporter, generally, of the idea of copyright (it needs a review, sure) but this is just silly...
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Just in case people missed it in the other big thread on the copyright chapter: this is a much more detailed overview with some good links to other commentary too.
You have to expect it will be bad if they won't even say what is in it because doing so would "threaten national security".

They must think everyone is an idiot if they will believe that.
There is a big difference between Al Qaeda style resistance and collective resistance. Sure, Hamas and Al Qaeda exist but... they are losing and they will inevitably lose.

They can hold out for a long time with their low tech, but they still take losses at a 50:1 ratio.

You have AR-15s but do you have UAVs? Do you have tanks? Do you even have nukes, for that matter, that ancient 60 year old tech?

You can't win as a collective which means you can't win. Unless you can deploy an army that will actually DEFEAT the opposing army you are talking about Hamas-style resistance. The Palestinians are not winning. They are conquered. It's already over. They are bad people to take advice from.
The parent's correct though - 'binary' does not mean 'binary only. They have very distinct meanings, and reading the sentence as written is confusing.
This is only extreme because of the cost of EC2 - which is quite high.

If your doing this seriously (as in; it's part of your companies regular revenue stream) like we do then you role your own clusters (much much cheaper) and add CUDA/FPGA solutions.

This costs more up front but reduces the crack time and cost per crack phenomenally.
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cool! but please immediately implement a 'mute' button! :-)
You're wrong- treaties are not only law, but they trump the constitution. Your link involves a technicality in a particular treaty, not treaties in general.

"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land" is the usual money quote.
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Negotiation is about getting a good deal that both sides feel is of value to them.
The successor is Mint.
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Thanks for this.

I've been trying to come up with a good frame for an upcoming talk (about an open source programming project), and I think that putting it in terms of the scientific method is just the thing. That is, in making code, just like in making science or in any other kind of "hacking", it's essential to first and continually "get your hands on the machinery", figure out by fiddling how things work, stop worrying about breaking things, and just see what happens when you push something here or there (of course, that doesn't mean we should throw caution to the wind, but just that we should take some risks), and then after that, after the parts are understood, take a step back and build a little bit, and then dive back in.

One important part (to writing code, and therefore a subject for my talk) is figuring out how to layer abstractions one on the other, so that we can avoid duplication of effort, and can separate out logic into clearly understood parts, small enough to be effectively tinkered on, and independent enough so that each one doesn't break the others. But we can't let worrying about the purity of those abstractions, and analyzing them, ultimately get in the way of actually diving in to fiddle, and figuring out what smells, first hand.

"You don't always understand what you are doing; if you do, it probably means that you aren't really near the forefront of knowledge."
Exactly. The WebKit nightlies are usually more stable than a lot of the "production release" software I use.

And its development console is awesome.
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Str0ke (the guy who ran milw0rm) is dead?
I'm glad to hear all solutions has been found. Still, last time I checked researchers actually had a lot of influence on the evolution of the Internet.

Edit: What I'm really saying is that if there would have been an implemented, 'universal', solution that takes civil liberties into the digital world, then it would be much harder to take these liberties away. I really don't think most politicians understand neither technology nor the fact that they are in effect infringing civil liberties like anonymity protection, freedom of expression and secrecy of letters. Who's to blame for this? Probably no one and everyone, still sad to see though.
Wow, very cool that hot headed discussion could turn into what is, apparently, a well regarded theory.

On the other hand, Alvarez's method was really unbecoming of a scientist. I mean, he really shouldn't be "holding arguments in his pocket" to make someone feel foolish and drop an argument. He should take any and all criticism of his theory and use it as an opportunity to strengthen or drop it. Of course, he's also human... but still, that seemed more like a trick politicians use than scientists.
I just tried it. I created a box over the line/arrow. Hitting the back for the box, you can't select the arrow. Selecting the arrow and bringing it front, it works ok.

UX suggestion: allow me to use the mouse scroll to change the size of the hovered/selected element, maintaining the scale.
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This seems like speculation. Also, completely out-of-line with Obama's support of net neutrality and a poorly timed economic disaster.
Neat. Here's my iPhone app sales revenue charted using this:
http://blog.planetaryscale.com/2009/11/04/iphone-app-sales-h...
The UN Declaration of Human Rights is a horrible document. It convolutes Negative and Positive Rights, and this is just a ridiculous one. How does a right like this work? If I write a book do I get royalties and exclusive rights to it forever? If I discover a new scientific law should I get royalties for anything invention that uses it forever? It just doesn't make sense, the sooner we get rid of copyright and to a large extent patents the better the world will be.
Hihi,

Obviously a great product. One thing though - I wouldn't use this because of the nature of my business, I was hoping and praying that it was a downloadable tool....!!!!!

(My business: ideas generation, spitting things out quickly).

If you can download, or are going to make available for download. Please let me know : )

Thanks,

Geoff
Just checked my Karmic Koala server. It does have Linux 2.6.31, but maybe that's because I've been aggressive about updating it.
I wonder if this is truly a widespread issue. I've been using Karmic daily since the beta was released a few weeks ago, upgrading its packages to the official release, and I haven't encountered any issues yet. Has anyone here had any of the problems described in the article?
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Flash is the single major reason Apple spun off plugins as separate processes, just so Flash's poor performance wouldn't make Safari crash so much.
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Updated my Advent laptop from Jaunty a week ago, no significant issues. Can't say it's massively better than Jaunty in terms of features or performance though.
Are you using an old firefox version by any chance (<3.5.x)?
One thing that helps (a little) is to try their "Boolean" search support. Use all-caps AND and OR. Example: svn AND instructions AND command-line
I think it has more to do with one open source project in particular, the kernel, which has a lot of history. The one time I tried to get a patch in, it was very difficult and I ultimately let it be, despite people regularly saying they thought it was a sensible idea. Indeed, there was never any real technical opposition, just a sort of inertia to ignore stuff.
The threat is not that startups wouldn't be able to infringe copyright law. The threat is that startups would have to carry the burden of policing copyright law.

The cost of doing that may be prohibitive, and the vulnerability to frivolous claims by bigger competitors would mean that any startup dealing with user generated content would have to employ lawyers at all times.

If phone companies were liable for crimes coordinated over their networks, telephony would not exist.
As others have mentioned here the search returns fantastic results in some highly-specificed domains (e.g. "schema migration django" according to user iamwil). There may be an opportunity driving a wedge into a niche, establishing a beachhead, then expanding with what momentum it affords you?
A major nitpick with the whole line of reasoning (and basically much of the work in comparative politics).

We've (in political science) been trying to study democratization in a formal/quantitative way for at least the last 50 years, and every single explanation we come up with, however many variables we put into our regression, fails to informatively explain the data. We have too poor a grasp on the independent variables (what they are, how to measure them, etc.), too poor a collective definition of democracy ("I know it when I see it", essentially), and way way too little data to make definitive causal models. Running experiments to test our hypotheses would take decades, at least, so instead we mine through historical data looking for trends. As Feynman said, “To report a significant result and reject the null in favor of an alternative hypothesis is meaningless unless the alternative hypothesis has been stated before the data was obtained.”
If this is real, I'd go further it's the end of the Internet pure and simple.
Right, but how can one decide whether or not a connection is worth before actually meeting the person? Unless he has a crystal ball, he could be losing investment opportunities with this kind of attitude.

And it is not his money. He is being paid (well paid) to scout new deals. He is not wasting his time, he is just doing his job.
Most of the restrictions you might want to circumvent are put in place for legal reasons, not technical. Some data is not allowed to leave the state, some the building. Amazon servers are not on the list!

One tiny slip, one mishap, and all of the "being freakin' awesome at your job" in the world won't stop you from being a great big minus sign on your company's balance sheet with regards to hiring you.

If you happen to be an employee considering these methods in order to improve your own awesomeness by breaking the rules, consider why those restrictions where put there in the first place: "jackass,you are the problem"

Sorry for the rant, just an old IT guy here who's had one too many dealings with over-clever users who broke stuff big time by "knowing better" without knowing enough...
This is probably what you're talking about: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848370

If not, it's good anyway.
I've never seen the register being positive about anything new.
I totally disagree with a moratorium on anything that threatens liberty in the USA, especially when resulting discourse is among intellectual minds.
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I call bullshit on these conspiracy theories that Apple is blocking Flash because it would compete with the app store. You can make apps in JS that will run in Mobile Safari. Is that a "competing app delivery vector"? If so, then why would Apple allow it, if it's so worried about hanging on to it's app store business?

I find it a little dubious that Flash would even be competition for the app store. The whole reason the app store and the iTunes store are so successful is because it's incredibly easy and, much to the chagrin of some people on here, centralized. Joe Schmoe can easily download and install a new app on his shiny new iPhone pretty easily with the app store. He knows where to go for new apps. That won't necessarily be the case with Flash.

I bet there's more to the story than performance issues, but I'd imagine it has more to do with Adobe producing a crappy product than it does with any of this nonsense. Apple thrives on the user experience being good, end-to-end, and I'd imagine they'll outright reject anything that sullies that.
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Yes, free and open Internet we knew will cease to exist in near future, this is reality we Internet citizens have to face.
Thanks for posting this, wonderful article. I have been a big fan of Muller since I heard his Physics for Future President's podcasts -- great stuff.

- http://www.amazon.com/dp/142662459X
- http://www.physicsforfuturepresidents.com/

Did anyone check his homepage, he's got a fantastic sense of humor.

http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/welcome.html

Rich's graduate students Tim Culler and Alex Kim have been hard at work setting up their home pages, instead of working on their thesis research. Rich's other graduate student Matthew Kim has no home page, and will undoubtedly graduate first.
I've never seen the Register being positive about anything.
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It's too bad that Firebug keeps stagnating/backsliding, introducing bugs from version to version but not really improving the development experience much. (I have some friends who stick to Firefox 2 or even 1.5, because Firebug there works better in some ways than the more recent versions)

It's nice that the webkit inspector is picking up the slack, but it'd be even nicer if someone had the time/resources to sink serious development into firebug and keep both of these tools advancing.
You are correct: a single server indeed has a high risk of losing data for the reasons you describe. I was talking about replication: by making sure all data is replicated, for example, 4 times across 2 datacenters, you limit that risk a lot. There is a small timespan between writing data and all replicas picking it up, but if you make sure your servers aren't overloaded, this usually is very small.

Having said that, I agree that there is room for improvement, for example using WAL and sync points like you describe.
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Well, what if this new network has no notion of provider ?
I mean, would it work with a peer-to-peer network ?
Japan retreated from the gun (and the outside world) for several centuries. Without an outside world to break in, they might still be there.
An interesting point from the wikipedia articles: One version of the theory, that the nemesis star is a brown dwarf, should be testable in the next year or so. The WISE mission is launching in just over 33 days, and its year long mission will detect any brown dwarf stars within 2-3 parsecs of us, which is within the suggested range for nemesis.

http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/
Wormly is great not just for showing whether something's up, but what's been going on with it. I use it like a hosted Cacti for my host and MySQL performance measurement. Very nice.
I've experienced the flickering screen problem which is caused by a rapidly restarting X server (on nvidia-chipset graphics).

In earlier releases gdm seemed to throttle this after 5 attempts and present a text-mode dialog. By default now all is left to the xorg auto-discovery (no config file), so I assume that this fallback was no longer deemed necessary by the Ubuntu folks.

I resorted to booting the computer with a usb-stick, temporarily disabling /etc/init/gdm.conf (or however that upstart-thing now is called, I forgot), then installing the morally questionable :-) nvidia-binary drivers via envy. Works great so far (under bare metal and via VirtualBox as a guest hosted by Windows7).
I totally disagree; your analysis is flawed. The reason movements like Al Qaeda will lose is because their ideology doesn't have the right support. When you try to sidestep the right to freedom this country was founded upon you are picking a fight that extends into the core of the people, including the intellectuals that made all that high tech weaponry possible. Also, our all-volunteer military is made up of our people - our brothers, cousins, sisters etc.
they'd be right to think that.
>There is a big difference between Al Qaeda style resistance and collective resistance. Sure, Hamas and Al Qaeda exist but... they are losing and they will inevitably lose.

Isn't that what they said about the Viet Cong?
it has always been the case (utube takeoff, Meg Whitman & Co. would be happy to forget about the foundations of Skype [KaZaa] etc.)

...ever wondered how GOOG Books works?

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Proposed_US_ACTA_multi-lateral_int...
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upvoted for political realism rather than the kneejerk reactions that politicans have been taking advantage of for centuries.
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> My business: ideas generation, spitting things out quickly

How does that work? I mean, how do you make money from it?
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"I don't think I've ever read anything, ever, out of Atlassian that caught my attention"

In the old days Mike Cannon Brookes used to blog a lot. I think there is a good argument that Atlassian did more to save the Java platform (back in the dark 2001-2003 period) that any other company (including Sun).

They started javablogs.com, which back then was the real hub of open source java development. That encouraged Sun to start their blogging push, and that engagement was what protected Java against what seemed back then to be the inevitable rise of .NET. (Obviously the JBoss open source project and Apache/Jakarta had a lot of influence then too, but Atlassian was the most visible company during that period)
If that's true, why doesn't Apple make their own swf viewer? I mean, they're Apple, they have twenty billion dollars in the bank; they can afford to reimplement Flash Player.