skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A demographic implosion of China is all but inevitable now. The 4-2-1 problem (one child must support 7 people: 2 retired parents and 4 retired grandparents) will strain the society to the breaking point. And it's too late to do anything about it.
Seattle? That was Port Angeles, about 3 hours away. The intended target was LAX.
Try out stuff

How common is that at Microsoft? My perception is that few Microsoft employees participate in projects not directly related to their work, even if it's Microsoft technology. Take for example F#. I haven't seen much from Microsoft employees other than from the F# team (who do a great job) and (paid) evangelists.
Google Phone: Google Confirms “Dogfooding” of New Phone
Personally, I'd love to see more stuff on life in non-startups. It's good to see both, and there's a lot of stuff about startups here (understandably), so getting some other posts to balance it would be great IMHO.

> (Most) Screw ups are OK

Red Whittaker once told me "people remember you for your successes, not for your failures." People remember Paul McCartney as a member of the Beatles, and maybe a little for Wings, but not for any of the crap he's put out. They remember a director's good movies, not the bombs (unless they're really spectacular, of course.)
The thing with cell phone plans that really bugs me is the fact that they are inflated to cover the costs of subsidizing the phones. I think selling the phones separately could lead to lower monthly costs since you're not paying for your plan AND the rest of the phone. Unfortunately consumers won't see any significant decrease with just one phone unless a lot of people buy it.
Patent Application from "Steven Jobs et al": Advertisement in Operating System
Provably safe at compile time

Is this true? I was under the impression that the Haskell standard didn't formally specify its type semantics. Do works like http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mpj/thih/ "count" (i.e., is it the canonical reason we presume Haskell's type system is provably sound)? Honest question.
For full description of the origination of the term 'cyber', check out Dark Hero of the Information Age about Norbert Weiner. Cybernetics means 'steersmanship'.
Fables of the Reconstruction
If it's Microsoft technology, people do try out things (it is hard to avoid it - dogfooding is a big part of MSFT culture. What they don't do as much is talk about it in public or share the code out (it typically lives on some internal site). Look at people trying out Silverlight or VS 2010 or .NET 4 for example.

When playing with non-Microsoft tech, people are much quieter. There are too many people who would love nothing more than to say "Look there - a Microsoft employee using an iPhone/Google/Linux/whatever" and cause a few headaches. The truth is that a lot of Microsoft employees are just plain geeks who like to try out things.
Are you suggesting that this is a ruse to lower the price of Overstock's shares? On a Saturday? By using an obscure blog?
It doesn't say they gave it to every Google employee just that it was given out at an al hands meeting. Given then you can't fit 20,000 people into one room this article seems like hyperbole.
This site (http://grml.org/zsh/zsh-lovers.html) contains loads of zsh tricks. Very useful.
She's Chinese, she is young and talented. Cut her some slack. http://www.weizhoudesign.com/about.html
Well, this is basically the essence of the political views of the Free Software movement, according to Mr. Stallman's essays and other statements. Many supporters don't get this, though.

Mr. Stallman repeatedly called proprietary software "unethical" and "immoral", words we usually use to describe theft, rape and murder. If you assume the premise to be true, forbidding proprietary software by law is a rational conclusion. Then, it's just a matter of political power.

From an interview with Mr. Stallman [1]:

"We have a paradoxical situation where one particular area of business [...] uses a particular business practice that's based on subjugating the public, based on dividing and conquering. Well, when there's a business practice that conflicts with an important value like freedom and community, prohibit it."

And further:

(Interviewer): "Should, should all software be free?"
(Mr. Stallman): "Yes."

From a different interview [2]:

"Non-free software is basically antisocial, it subjugates it users, and it should not exist."

[1] http://www.pigdog.org/interviews/stallman/interview_with_sta...
[2] http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/4795
Thank you all for the explanations. But, basically rbanffy is right ?
According to that email and what I read here, they want to split just because GNOME promoted proprietary software on their blog ?

But there's one thing I still don't get. Even if they split, what's the big deal ?
>Nothing is stopping you from programming really cool apps right now. (If it's a money issue, don't worry -- the iPhone was a commercial success but nobody is making a lot of money from really cool apps.)

I'm looking to do something with background processes + network effects (needs enough people using it to make it interesting). I've actually wanted to make apps like this for awhile, and then just realized that smart phones were the perfect vehicle to make it happen, provided a whole bunch of people have ones that enable background processes.

The iPhone would be ideal if it weren't sandboxed. So, I'll be making the alpha for the Android and hoping the platform takes off.

I guess I could make it for the Blackberries and etc, but does anybody buy apps for those?
The Zombie Game Experiment - News Update - Rocket Skates and 3D Zombies
re: completion. Also useful for developers - it will auto-complete svn and other vcs links with information from the remote hosts. (no more `svn ls ...`)
Samsung LN52B750 52 Inch 1080p 240 Hz LCD HDTV with Charcoal Grey Touch of Color
If it was totally common it wouldn't be a useful advice. :-)
I hope this could also be used when filming to have the mic directed at the target instead of the person holding the phone.
From the review martey linked (http://paulstamatiou.com/review-att-3g-microcell), it looks like the price is currently either a one time $150 payment or $50 + $20/month for unlimited calls while connected to the femtocell. That seems really reasonable to me, and I'd love to get one of them (in my apartment in SF, where I have extremely spotty reception from AT&T).
On Rogers in downtown Vancouver on an iPhone 3GS and I've never had a dropped call. Data is fast, no issues. It's AT&T, not the iPhone.
This article made me nod and shake my head. I agree that so many people incorrectly think you need an "awesome, completely original, patentable idea" to start a business when you don't. However I disagree that all endeavours that do not push the limits of science should ever be labelled "stupid". Selling bowling balls (an example in the article) might not be academic, but clearing a million dollars in profit annually requires plenty of business intelligence.
> So, after hours of research, I can dismiss Mr Eschenbach. But what am I supposed to do the next time I wake up and someone whose name I don't know has produced another plausible-seeming account of bias in the climate-change science? Am I supposed to invest another couple of hours in it? Do I have to waste the time of the readers of this blog with yet another long post on the subject? Why? Why do these people keep bugging us like this? Does the spirit of scientific scepticism really require that I remain forever open-minded to denialist humbug until it's shown to be wrong? At what point am I allowed to simply say, look, I've seen these kind of claims before, they always turns out to be wrong, and it's not worth my time to look into it?

> Well, here's my solution to this problem: this is why we have peer review. Average guys with websites can do a lot of amazing things. One thing they cannot do is reveal statistical manipulation in climate-change studies that require a PhD in a related field to understand. So for the time being, my response to any and all further "smoking gun" claims begins with: show me the peer-reviewed journal article demonstrating the error here. Otherwise, you're a crank and this is not a story.
Right, I created the account because it's not exactly popular to defend someone like Patrick Byrne (which proves my point since I was down-voted, even though I provided evidence of the kind of tactics that are used by certain short sellers... go figure)

I'm just saying that short sellers use tactics that are just as bad as what Byrne used here (I don't condone making a fake facebook profile, pretexting, etc).

But the fact is that in the Fairfax case, they engaged in a pretty complicated campaign aimed at driving down the stock. One of the method was to feed stories to journalists who specialize in "financial fraud".

Overstock already received $5M of settlement from Rocker Partners:
"Overstock.com (OSTK) this afternoon said that Rocker Partners, an investment firm now known as Cooper River Partners, will pay the company $5 million to settle long-standing litigation alleging that Rocker and others engaged in “libel, intentional interference with prospective economic advantage and violations of California’s unfair business practices act."
You are (and I were) talking to a sock puppet. It's all well explained in the linked article and a couple more linked form there. Fascinating stuff, really.
Excellent point. By definition, "terrorism" is a method that the US cannot really defend against without creating a police state.
I can't speak for mmastrac, but in general Rogers devices roam onto AT&T as their first choice. I've noticed similar lameness in AT&T's network while traveling...
Happened here in Vancouver, an elderly Canadian man crossing into the USA objected to a borer guard not calling him sir. The DHS pepper sprayed him an dragged him from the car.

Simple solution, don't visit America - don't buy American
I think delicious would be a better place to share articles about ZSH. Like: http://delicious.com/tag/zsh+tips .

But I'm interested in the point of view of people thinking that twitter would be a better place to share that kind of stuff.
I just need a better replacement for the default python shell. iPython has those nice extras, but I rarely use them ... so bpython is a much better choice for me now :)
My Droid just updated it's firmware to 2.1 a few days ago.
Remember there has never been a problem between Germany and any of it's neighbours or any problem with terrorism in Europe.

The USA lives under the constant threat of Canadian invasion, following their 1812 burning of the Whitehouse - it's natural for US security on the 'front line' to be nervous.
TFA mentions shared history across sessions as a ZSH feature, but it is available in bash as well. For those who're staying with bash, stick this in your .bashrc:

shopt -s histappend
export PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a'

The histappend option appends to history instead of overwriting. PROMPT_COMMAND is run before bash displays a prompt -- this will save each command right after you issue it, instead of when you exit the session.

Now that your history is about to get a lot larger, you'd probably want to override the defaults for HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE.

Somewhat OT, but since I mentioned PROMPT_COMMAND: One very useful piece of info to have in your prompt is the exit status of your last command. You can do that with

export PROMPT_COMMAND='ERRVAL=$?; history -a'

Then just include ${ERRVAL} in your PS1.
I suppose that would be one way to ship OS X for non-Apple PC's. (Disclosure: I used to work there, but definitely not on anything like ads for OS X.)
The vast majority of the US/Canadian border is unguarded and there are hundreds of roads the guy could have alternately taken.

Any sophisticated attacker would realize this and simply go a few miles out of the way to one of those logging roads.

I hardly think that your example offers evidence that border security enhances national security, only that it did in one isolated instance (with a very stupid terrorist).

Odds are if the terrorist failed to realize he could cross the border without being screened, he would have made some other mistake that would have foiled whatever his planned attack was.
It doesn't have to be. It just has to mean it's more likely that he was telling the truth than that the border guards were, and the border patrol doesn't exactly have an upstanding reputation.
> or any problem with terrorism in Europe.

IRA

Rote Armee Fraktion

Basque Separatists

Spain Train bombings

London subway bombing

...

> The USA lives under the constant threat of Canadian invasion, following their 1812 burning of the Whitehouse - it's natural for US security on the 'front line' to be nervous.

For a moment there I thought you were serious :)
Did you disprove anything of what I've posted?

Here's an article that also outlines similar tactics: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2342166220091123
"Is Technology Changing the Japanese Language?"

FTFY. Moralistic "them kids today" alarmism is generally unwarranted. Evolution doesn't have a direction - it is merely change; to assign value judgment to this change historically has turned out to be shortsighted.
Maybe they just want to prevent others from doing this. Or they could be preparing some location-based ads/offers for iPhone.
Tightening up your Facebook privacy
You may be right. It might even be a publicity stunt for Peter's new book (which I'd buy in a heartbeat)...

But in any case, your critique doesn't mean that the event isn't useful for helping people who haven't decided how they feel about the various post-911 excesses formulate a more nuanced opinion.
One more reason the patent system is royally screwed up.
So have I incidentally, but that didn't stop the Canadian guards from mistreating me on one unfortunate occasion.

There are a variety of issues here, but I think the core issue is that people should be very concerned when law-abiding, harmless citizens are exposed to unnecessary coercion based on the whims of border clerks.
I'm most interested in what border that was.
It's a well-known Youtube video.
15 minutes by rowing boat anywhere in lake Huron near the Sault border.

But this guy was trying to leave.

On top of that there is a much easier way to get a bomb in to the US, buy it in bits and pieces in the US, assemble it there. No point in taking it across the border.
Cheerfully waving everyone through is not the only alternative.
It depends on what brings you inner satisfaction. Is it the "stupid" idea (I personally wouldn't use the word stupid) that brings you $$$ or the smart idea that keeps you up all night trying to figure out a solution?
Google wants to sell books to Kindle too
I think you've just given me excellent reason to believe that you're already living in a police state.

If that sort of thing is 'routine' you've got a real problem.
As an alternative, I've been using a fast feed scanner to digitize my books. The obvious downside is that they need to be cut first.

I was inspired by this blog post: http://sealedabstract.com/?p=410
Syntax vs semantics:  What's the difference?
I would state that simplicity does not equate to stupid, maybe less exciting, but not stupid: "Simplicity is boring, complexity entertaining."

Wealth is measured relative to society. Whether you create wealth in devising an innovative yet complex new device that millions of people swarm over, or in selling bowling balls to masses of people - you're still creating wealth by producing value for many or for few that control a percentage of the value of the many.

Simple things are more straightforward to create - usually, only requiring footwork and a solid foundation (generally existing already).

Complex things are not straightforward to create - usually, requiring footwork and the innovation of a foundation upon which to rest.
Barclays' Bob Diamond: why no bank is too big to fail
This is the opening line in the abstract: "Among other disclosures, an operating system presents one or more advertisements to a user and disables one or more functions while the advertisement is being presented. At the end of the advertisement, the operating system again enables the function(s)."

To rephrase it: the operating system of a machine you paid good money for will disable your ability to use it while it force-feeds you ads.
EASK here...

There have been a few MMOGs that would have appealed to us E___'ers, SWG in its original form was basically a E___'ers wet dream, especially if they'd continued to expand the number of planets over time, rather than focusing on poor theme parks.

Neocron has a fair bit of E___ appeal too, as does Ryzom. Anarchy Online also has positive features for us (and was the first MMOG I paid a lot of attention to, so it's the one I keep going back to...), but lacks a lot of the deep crafting system that a lot of us E___ers desire.

There's a common thread to those games, they're all pretty much 'sandbox' MMOGs, games where you're not pushed into a specific chain of events, nor pushed into PvP as a necessity (god, I hate the vocal K___'ers, they insist on ruining every MMOG they touch).
Can someone explain exactly what's going on here between these guys? It all seems like a bunch of schizophrenic rambling.

I have no opinion on Overstock as an investment or business, but their market cap is around $300mm; I don't see how hedge funds could make enough shorting it for it to be worth committing fraud.
Isn't that jumping the gun a bit? It's really hard to predict what context this was designed for, but I very much doubt it will apply to the existing hardware/software model.
Can you use your existing bash configuration files with zsh? It looks like zsh isn't picking up my .profile file on my OS X box, or that it doesn't care about what it found there.

The bigger question is, what is the switching cost?
Many people say that Erich Schmidt quit the Apple Board of Directors because of iPhone/Android competition, but this application suggests another reason.

Google AdSense is great at monetizing high volume, low cost content. I work at a news aggregator and our eCPM is around $.50 from AdSense. I suspect this is typical. This puts a cap on how much it can cost for us to produce content: more than $.50 for 1000 page views means we're losing money. If you want to make more expensive content, it will be hard to make money using AdSense, because AdSense does not take into account the quality of your content.

It's hard to know what Apple is planning based on a patent application, but we do know one thing: nearly a decade's work has gone into iTunes. It is one of the biggest content distribution systems on the web. Compared to YouTube and Hulu, I would bet it's more profitable also. Whatever they are planning is probably related to extending the iTunes/App Store framework: they currently distribute songs, TV shows, movies, games, and apps. Ebooks, news, magazines and blogs seems like a plausible next step.
U.S. and Russia Open Talks on Limits to War in Cyberspace
I've used my iPhone in San Francisco, Houston, Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Santiago. AT&T in the US, other carriers in South America (my phone is unlocked and I have different sim cards). I can say that AT&T worked much better in Houston than in SF. Claro in some parts of South America is better than AT&T in SF too (it varies from city to city).
Obama's Nobel Lecture
Click&Clean 3.6.4.1 at Google Chrome Ext. gallery
A free or discounted ad based OS is reasonable for them to try. I would not want my OS to be ad supported but I am sure many people would be willing to use this to save a few bucks.
Shells are the web frameworks of 10 years ago. Good programmers will create them fairly easily, they're all pretty similar, most people learn one and get good with them. Also just like web frameworks, everyone's convinced that their shell is superior and that they couldn't get any work done if they used yours.
You're implying nobody has any real control over what their actions and thereby assigning killers and rocks about the same level moral culpability.

No, I'm just saying that the default state is to have neither control nor awareness of decision-making. Actual conscious decision-making is possible with effort and, to the extent that morality is a well-defined concept, it applies only to conscious minds.

guilting an insensitive 'jerk' will (likely) cause them to change their behavior to something more socially acceptable.

Not necessarily, if their reasons for behaving that way are unknown to them. More likely their mind will confabulate something sensible-sounding that fits their pre-existing world-view and (unless they already hold a positive disposition toward you) they'll just write you off as being a jerk, after all, you're attacking them for something they had a perfectly valid reason to do... they think.
Google to Start Selling Own Phone Next Year
if you really want to migrate to zsh, you should try this out:

http://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh
I've never really found "E" games based around developer-crafted content to be very interesting, because it's simply not sustainable. At best you get a universe that keeps you interested for a few weeks and at worst you just get thousands of copy-pasted fetch quests.

Anarchy Online and Earth and Beyond were mildly interesting, but that's about it.

I don't think PvP-as-a-necessity is inherently bad in a sandbox exploration game. If anything, it's good: other players will always be more interesting to compete against, whether by direct combat, economic competition, or diplomacy, than AI NPCs. IMO the only way to get a sustainable game that consistently produces interesting content is to rely on the players.

In my experience the primary aversion to PvP comes from games that weren't designed from the ground up to be about PvP, but had it forced into the system in a way that was simply not enjoyable or interesting.

EVE Online was "so close, yet so far" to this ideal, in that it got a lot of things very right but designed the economy too much around grind and spent the past few years focusing too heavily on strategic combat with capital ships instead of individual players.
Google should stay away from subsidized carrier agreements and there won't be much conflict. Samsung, LG, HTC, etc don't seem to have any interest in selling unsubsidized/unlocked phones on their own.
If it were $150 one-time I would buy one today. Sadly, they are not available in my area (from what the link you supplied says).
Official Firefox Addon Store?
Agreed. This recent story says a lot about the degree to which Canadian police are above the law: http://tr.im/Hs1M
This really shouldn't be necessary at all. In a well-designed application, the table schema should be completely known to the application at all times -- the existence of a table should never be in doubt. If for some reason this isn't the case, you'll be much better served by catching "table doesn't exist" errors when they occur rather than preemptively trying to create tables which already exist.
We'll probably see a lot more of things like this as eReaders keep getting more popular, and it won't be a whole lot longer before your local torrent sites are full of textbooks as well as the music and movies.
As a Chinese American and an only child because of this law, I find that this problem will present a lot of opportunities in the coming years. Too late to do anything about it? Stay tuned.

Edit: I almost forgot that I had been an only child for a long time due to this law (until my parents could get to the US, that is).
Probably. But you also have to consider the cross-cultural communication gap. You have to spend quite a bit of time in a culture before you can market effectively. No doubt most Americans are pretty lousy at marketing in India.
> From the border agent's perspective anyone can be a threat.

Yes, but in practice only in their minds. Seriously, if you stop someone going out of the country they most likely are not a threat to you.
I'm curious, what happened? I was once caught with Cubans. They broke them and sent me on my way.