skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SCO wasn't suing over patents. It was a copyright thing over the Unix source code. MS has actually been comparatively benign with their patent behavior over the years. The FAT thing is the only example I can think of where they've used one agressively.

Regardless, if something is wrong it's wrong. Our goal here should be getting the patent system to stop sucking, not using it as a weapon of schadenfreude against companies we don't like.
Morgan Stanley's Mobile Internet Report
i both agree and disagree.

i disagree with the premise that years and years and billions of dollars have been spent, so it must be the best way. times are changing, people are changing. i've been trained to throw away every piece of junk mail, and so have most of my friends. junk mail is being actively read by a shrinking demographic. just because something has worked does not mean it will continue to do so, or that the statistics are representative. it might not be a good plan to hitch your line to a sinking ship.

i agree in the sense that there are some effective design patterns with respect to effective copywriting, and that some people are forgoing them for something else, perhaps something more aesthetically pleasing when aesthetics don't necessarily get the job done.
Best estimate, yes. But it's also the only public estimate.
Make Thunderbird 3 Your Ultimate Online/Offline Message Hub
I will bet 2:1 odds that Google will not sell the phone for $99 to people with old Google accounts. I'll put up USD$100 (against your $33), payment to be made by donation to the winner's favorite charity, proof by forwarding the email receipt. Reply to this comment or see my contact details on my user page to take up the offer and work out the details.

Edit: changed from 2:1 odds to 3:1 odds (edit 2: the original edit changed the other side's amount from $50 to $33, though as jfoutz pointed out I'm not thinking of ratios correctly, so I've changed the ratio back to 2:1 and left the $33 as $33).

Edit 3: thanks kw_ for taking the bet! For the record, the main reason I think I'll win is because the iPhone reportedly costs $179 to make[1], I'm assuming the cost of the Google Phone will be similar, and I don't see it making sense for Google to sell it at a loss. I choose the charity Village Outreach, because it is the top-rated charity at the charity-effectiveness-judging organization GiveWell[2].

[1]http://9to5mac.com/gigom-who-rich-iPhone-34040

[2]http://www.givewell.net/charities/top-charities
I'm not sure I understand your comparison. What is the difference between finding content I want to spend time consuming, and finding content another way (via some content filtering process), which has every intention of limiting the content to what you "want" to consume.

I agree. The problem is definitely a matter of related vs. unrelated content. My suggestion (or babble) was more so just pointing out how easily we could implement a "source content filtering" logic into an already existing interface.. If we felt that was the best way to go about it.
In other words, don't forget to actually make something. I don't think this will be much of a worry for such a technically-minded community as HN.
Your Pages Will Load Faster With Rails
Why?

By designing their reader the way Square has, it drastically minimizes cost and opens the design so it works with most smartphones and even many laptops.

I hope that screenshot isn't representative of their software, either... it looks horrendous.
> Your points about the vagaries of activism and its targets are valid and I agree. However, you're still asserting that an entire line of conversation is impossible or without meaning due to the presence of, as far as I can tell, a single word.

Accepting generic sexism as the problem to solve is what ends useful discussion. It doesn't matter what specific words are used. James didn't use that word at all in the section I identified, but the point remains the same.

And to be more precise, when I say "end useful discussion" mean that until the bad assumption is retracted, progress towards real understanding and, consequently, good solutions, will be difficult.

Incidentally, the main point of the original article was to out the author as a woman. But the complaints about sexism are fairly obvious. My criticism was restricted to that and not intended to completely invalidate the entire post.
Admittedly those languages excel at concurrency but i am more interested in trying out those languages on the GAE for the increase in Speed of Development., so the sequential bit is not very relevant to me.
Bitly needed to do a lot of work to build bitly pro. They already have beta users. So I think they were already following the obviously sound advice.

If they were built to flip, the announcement would be about the intention to make money.
Microsoft temporarily shuts down MSN China microblog after Plurk incident
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/12/plurk-accuses-microsoft-china-of-stealing-code.ars
The Top Data Center Stories of 2009
That is a pretty sweet library. I could totally see myself doing something like that someday - mostly because I love to hoard things I find interesting.

Some of those items are extremely unique or rare though and it does make me wonder how much of those kinds of things should end up in private collections versus being more available to the public to some degree. It seems like the risks of losing some of these artifacts would increase over time if they are held privately.

That's not to say that people shouldn't be allowed to own them privately... just something to think about.
I'm shaving my head for chemotherapy patients please donate
I've been meaning to cut my hair off for a while. After 5+ years the geek chic is getting kinda old.

So I'm shaving my hair off today and donating it to charity. The more money that's donated the shorter I'll cut my hair. So please donate for the kiddies HN. Also they'll be a video of me getting the chop for your amusement.

Horrible flash badge to track donations here:

http://www.networkforgood.org/pca/Badge.aspx?BadgeId=114274

Locks of Love here:

http://locksoflove.org
Long term, our government can either default on its debt (I doubt this will happen) or use massive inflation to reduce the effects of debt (this is what I think will happen).

I think that it is impossible to predict when this will occur and whether it will be rapid (hope not!) or gradual (my hope).

Both W. Bush and Obama spent way too much money on credit. If you as an individual are going to to buy a car for $20K and pay for it over a 5 year period, you should not say "this car cost me $20K," rather, it is really more accurate to say "this car is costing me about $28K with interest." It would be nice, but unexpected, if instead of the government saying "we are going to spend $500 billion on defense this year" they would be more honest and say "defense spending this year, including interest on the money spent, is estimated to be between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion."

Doesn't that sound a bit more honest?
This approach never works. It just creates lots of patronage jobs and production lines that are constantly in need of taxpayer handouts to stay alive.
My library has a Darwin bobblehead, a 4-bit relais computer, a rock from the top of Vesuvius, a small meteor, a 1kg pure tungsten cylinder and a magnesium one of the same size, some robot arms, a variety of Game&Watches, a Sterling engine and a steam engine, and a 1 cm scale cube. It all feels kind of inadequate now (on the other hand, that's enough crap already!).
MLB does put their games online, but it's a pay service. Similarly, you can buy a cable/satellite package to watch out of town NFL/NHL/NBA games but those are all fairly expensive packages.
Comic-Con, Fan Culture, and faithfulness in adaptations
Free classified ads in Jammu and Kashmir, India     
Free classified ads search engine in Jammu and Kashmir, India. A free, easy and fast way to find or to place ads in Jammu and Kashmir.
The entire premise is that junk mail is compelling and should be emulated. I wholeheartedly agree, but only if you're producing something junk-mail flavored. Membership drive for an online game is not the same thing as a call for papers for an academic conference, and one of them benefits from emulating junk-mail copy.

FWIW, I found the article refreshingly unique and "outside the box".
A clever way to get a free haircut, sh1m. :D
I believe the stated difference is that, contrary to e.g. the hermit crab, the octopus found the tool in one place, then took it somewhere else (to the other coconut half) in order to use it, exhibiting a planning capability beyond just taking advantage of the immediate surroundings.

It does seem a rather arbitrary criterion (trap door spiders seem to plan rather well too) but that is the reasoning they stated.
Introducing "Cloud Pipe"
It doesn't look like Apple stores are using this one. As you mentioned it has a barcode scanner too. The sales drone didn't know details about it though.

+1 for VeriFone building this.
This came up on the sage (FOSS alternative to Mathematica and freinds) mailing lists and I thought I'd post it here.

It always surprises me how difficult math on the Internet has turned out to be. Hopefully this can help...
Actually, the potential issue would be whether they are using profits from one monopoly (search) to undercut competition in another competitive market (mobile phones). A guest post at TechCrunch actually had a good overview of the ways Google might face antitrust action:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/01/what-an-antitrust-case-...
I was wondering about this. It seems to me that the 10% conversion rate for junk mail is based on selling to a credulous consumer. Hence the urgent tone. Most people (the other 90%?) toss the shit out because they know even if the copy sounds vaguely interesting, you're most likely not going to get something for nothing. Everything from the 4 (bright) color ad to the fake christmas card goes in the recycling immediately from the mailbox because you know you're going to be manipulated.

Are people more or less credulous on the web? I dunno, that has to depend on the category. In some ways, it's harder to avoid reading the copy -- but for experienced users there is a degree of resentment when you realize you've been "SEO"ed by an interesting sounding google link into a page of marketing bullshit.
No - as far as I understand it, the issue with IE wasn't that Microsoft used profits from Windows to give away IE, it's that they used a monopoly product (Windows) to give an unfair advantage to IE (out-of-the-box distribution not accessible to their competitors).
While this is a reasonable (and common) version numbering scheme, it does little to address dependency hell.

A trivial bug fix can be backwards incompatible with systems that have been built to rely on the bug.

The presence of new, unused features in a library can impact the runtime behavior of the library in important ways.

All changes of any kind must be considered to be potentially backwards incompatible for some consumers.

So the rules for deciding whether to increment a version number by 0.0.1, 0.1.0, or 1.0.0 don't hold up. A producer cannot predict the impact of a change to all consumers.
We are in the process of making all documentation available online. One step at a time.

There are two possible deployments

1) Use SirQL as JDBC driver

2) Install and set up SirQL Server

Sirql Server is standalone server, analogous to database server. It handles database connectivity, connection etc. Also when you use SirQL server all computation is done on the server. We are going to publish architectural and deployment diagrams soon.

We don't have distribution that you would download and use at the moment. That's another item we are currently working on.

Have a look at demos at http://sirql.dwavesys.com/apps/ . Each demo comes with SQL that is used.

We are also working on SirQL console, where you will be able to edit and run SQL.
I'm confused by some of these transliterations. For instance, they spell out "pxasik" and say it's pronounced "puh –(lip smack) askik." Where did that first [k] in the pronunciation come from? The author also types out that "x" to represent the "lip smack" and something he describes as a click (in "skwawng"). While I imagine the lip smack is the bilabial click, ʘ, he clearly distinguishes between the two, so I wonder what's with using "x" for both. Though, it might be through assimilation. Or maybe he's mistaking clicks for ejectives?

With that title, I was hoping for a more in depth linguistic overview for those of us with knowledge of phonetics.
There's a quote somewhere about every sufficiently complicated program, and every sufficiently developed language, eventually trying to badly replicate Lisp.
I wonder why the government hasn't actively gone after the "harvesters" in the U.S. If this report is correct, they seem to play a very active and important role in the global spam ecosystem.
This is mostly bad, but I can see three bits of good news in the mess:

1. Litigating against so many companies will take time. Likely the first patent will have expired long before the current cases have finished. I doubt they'll have too much more time to sue people, so it's not likely to affect companies any of us start.

2. The validity of the second 2004 patent that discusses AJAX and makes claims that would hurt most of the companies named has not as far as I can tell yet been tested in a court. It's possible that the plugin patent was valid, and the AJAX one is not. If so, the danger to us is much less.

3. The more big companies are hurt by patent trolling, the more effort they'll likely spend on trying to reform the system.

We'll see how it goes.
You think a card reader in a headphone jack is going to last long in a retail environment?
I don't know about wrong, per se, but Android phones are absolutely tied to your Google account. Doesn't have to be your MAIN Google account, of course, but still.
Ask HN: Review my startup - Find the top solar installers near you
Monitoring their content with a human-in-the-loop would take the outside of the conditions for DMCA safe harbor: http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi#QID129

This is a key condition for all service providers under DMCA -- if you have someone that is looking at the content, you are then liable for all the content on your network.

In essence, this $6/hr intern would cost justin.tv their ability to defend against suits via the DMCA. There would simply be no way for them to operate as a UGC business.
Having an intern look at our content would weaken our claims to protection under the DMCA.

Having an intern look at just some of our content would leave us wide open to legal action from anything that slipped through the net.

No intern would ever be able to review all of our content, because our users are uploading content at a rate that's 30% higher than Youtube's users.

So what you're actually proposing is: We should weaken our legal position, and then we should encourage legal action.

Like it or not, the current legal framework makes it a bad idea to have employees reviewing our content.
Thanks in advance for your feedback. -Jason
Eventually they might open it up for the public. I'm not sure why anyone cares if google uses a url shortener for their own services. To each their own.
It was discussed last night too.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=994957
Hardly a new concept, and one that many companies and projects have used for ages. I'm not criticizing this policy at all, but the impression of taking credit rubs me the wrong way. Yes, there's a couple sentences in the middle: "This is not a new or revolutionary idea. In fact, you probably do something close to this already." But, actually, I and many others have done _exactly_ this, not just close to it, for a long time.
Yes.

Additionally, this system dies horribly once you introduce branching.

Versioning is another problem I want to introduce to the Test Case Wiki. The test case wiki is an idea I've had for a public wiki for hairy problems with numerous, poor implementations. I.e. a page on implementing a library for handling times and dates. "Have you thought of the following corner cases?". Software Versioning belongs there too.
This isn't just specific to Rails.
-Use Far-Future Expires
-GZip Components
-Split Components Across Domains
> Can you show me some statistics to prove that this (junk mail) works?

Here are statistics that show that people respond to direct mail. This data is old (2003) but it's quite comprehensive.

http://www.the-dma.org/cgi/disppressrelease?article=519
Will Automation Lead to Economic Collapse?
Wow, you are really nitpicking here.

For the paradox, its assumed that value = price. Yes, in reality, thats not true, but thats not the point. If you don't like ties as an example, feel free to use the original envelope with money or think of some other item where value = price (or is directly proportional to it). In fact, as long as I can say each person might value the other person's tie more than his own, the paradox holds.
Sure, to the extent you want to access google services. But isn't that a given?

My desktop is tied to my google account to the same extent that I choose to use google search and email.
Apple approves video recording app for iPhone 2G and 3G
What if there's nothing deterministic in this universe? The notion of determinism deduced from God, Nature, or whatever is the key behind the concept of free will. Otherwise, how can we identify free will, which is essentially a fancy term for "non-determinism"? The concept of free will cannot stand by itself without the notion of determinism. In other words, if everything is truly random, then there's no room for both determinism and free will. However, I don't think the structured randomness described by quantum mechanics counts for the randomness that truly goes beyond both determinism and free will. It may be incomprehensible for any of internal observers of this universe.
Have A Merry Christmas With These Photoshop Tutorials
Given that it's presently possible to offload data processing to a number of cloud-based computing services, I'm not sure that we should be afraid of the computation cost. If you are willing to make some assumptions about independence (for example) you can do a lot of the computations in parallel. A more subtle issue would be how much the use of social net data would gain Amazon or Netflix over their current recommendation engines. I suspect it would be quite a lot, but that's just a guess.
That it does, and with Exchange (gasp) its amazing what you can do. Vendor agnosticism is a virtue. Remember that. :) I <3 exchange, but I'll agree its expensive.
I think it was David Ogilvy who said anyone who wanted to write advertising copy should spend a year working in direct response marketing. Same principle.
Ahh... fond memories. Bamboozle was an infuriating multiple choice "interactive" gameshow, a bit like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. There was even, for a while, a late night adult section called Teletext After Hours - I particularly remember a comic called Turner The Screw, about a profane prison guard. It really was quite innovative for a while (not to mention the BBC's Ceefax services with their downloadable computer programs), but inevitably turned into dross as they tried to monetize it with horoscopes and personal ads funded by premium rate telephone numbers.
It may not be guaranteed, but how many emails do you have dropped every day? If someone is missing an a day from some source, I'd think that its not a problem with the servers along the way but a problem with the source or destination.
As I said, contracting someone to write English copy, I would instinctively and likely purposely hire someone with an English sounding name based on name alone. A French name won't get you hired for writing in English, it might however get you hired to write in French even if your native tongue is English.
Wycats is a great guy and contributes a ton to the Ruby community, but I have to say...there's really not much here that's new or insightful.

Set your headers, gzip content, and split assets across domains, yes, but - "Your pages will load faster with Rails"? Somehow the headline doesn't seem appropriate.
> Hardly a new concept, and one that many companies and projects have used for ages.

Certainly. And I don't claim to take credit for any of these concepts (and explicitly say so). The whole point here is to give this idea a name and clear spec so that I can tell people my software uses Semantic Versioning instead of writing it all out every time. It's useful to me and my coworkers, so I decided to share it in case others find it useful as well.
Chartrand sounds pretty French to me.
They're reportedly unlocked, but still each require a $30/mo, 24 month T-Mobile data contract.

You'd have to make quite a bit on those parts to cover the subscription costs.
Can you elaborate on the kind of branching you're doing, and what your current favorite solution for that situation is?
You mean like a crash? Quite low probability on a first flight.

Otherwise there are hundreds of minor problems that are revealed during flight testing, after all that's the point of flight testing program.
They work well.
I'd say download Firebug, YSlow, and Google's PageSpeed and let that be your guide, as these suggestions are helpful, but just the tip of the iceberg.

A YSlow feature that is new (at least to me) is its JavaScript tab. It's not related to performance exactly, but it will run your JS through jslint, minify, beautify it (if it's in a gnarly style). Great stuff.
Stack Overflow rep is already used to determine when a user can do things like edit questions or moderate - why not use that to determine who might be a "serious" candidate? Just like you have metrics that must be met to moderate questions, why not add one that lets you add your CV for free? Maybe there are breakpoints where it gets cheaper so the only ones paying full price are people with little to no rep at all.

I really like the idea of the site learning who to trust over time - while I wouldn't say it's fully accurate it's working towards the idea at least. This is just another area where you can implement that idea.
How a TV Opened My Scalp Like a Banana Peel
An article on how kids are dying because of old CRT TVs falling onto them and the terrifying story about how a Magnavox set almost killed one.
Ask HN: I'll be visiting the SV soon. What are some of its must-see sights?
I'll be visiting the Silicon Valley soon. What are some of its must-see sights, in your opinion?
I easily could have made my comment shorter or split into two, were I expecting it to be pushed out to many people via SMS.
Perhaps you mean Ken Thompson?
We're not on 80 character terminals anymore. Harddrives are larger than 1.4mb. People need to read this stuff.

"It's shorter" isn't a reason, it's a legacy.
This is just an ad for the guy's hosting business.
A/B Testing of Landing Pages
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

It's a beautiful machine designed with very specific task in mind.

The only thing I dislike aesthetically is it's huge dihedral.
They are 'available' in the store:
<http://www.cherrypal.com/openstore/product_info.php?products...;

Though I don't think I'd trust it. If they can actually afford to sell them for $99 it is actually kind of a neat product just from a hacking point of view.. I could think of lots of little projects to build using one. $99 is about the same you'd pay for an Arduino + WiFi, and that doesn't include battery, display etc..
"technology, however good, is less important to good film-making than are other creative elements such as good story-telling"

Yes, well, I agree with that part. 110%. Possibly more.
I'm sorry but at 400Mhz/256MB I can't possibly use that as a computer. Firefox would barely load 3 tabs.
The Golden Age of Scrobbling