skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Matt King (op), myself, and the rest of our team at Instrument have been building out the site and backend infrastructure for this manufacturing process for the past five months.

It's been one heck of a ride...we're web guys and don't exactly have a lot of experience in building factories or making, um, real physical objects.

The frontend is powered by Interface (http://www.getinterface.com), with the backend order fulfillment / manufacturing infrastructure built in Rails running on top of Ruby 1.9 and Unicorn, all sitting behind Nginx. All asset processing on the backend is done using GraphicsMagick using a modded mini_magick, which is way faster and more efficient than ImageMagick.

We'd love to hear your feedback, thoughts, and criticisms!
Yahoo france on strike
for a report in french (and not techcrunch...)

http://www.miroirsocial.com/actualite/greve-a-yahoo-pour-protester-contre-la-fermeture-de-la-r-d-en-france
so, here it is a description in french (and not techcrunch...)

http://www.miroirsocial.com/actualite/greve-a-yahoo-pour-pro...

PS: hackernews insists on eating out the descriptions for my submits
I'm always frustrated when some bigshot "accepts responsibility" for some bad action and then faces no consequences, in some cases because of their words: "I 'accepted responsibility', what more do you want?" News flash: 'responsibility' is a word that has a meaning. If you were responsible for something bad, that means you get to pay the consequences for it.
Useless hyperbole from both you and the the Joel Kotkin. Just because people are conservative doesn't mean they believe violence is the answer to all problems.
Right, because RedLaser totally:

-Uses it's own special kind of barcode
-Doesn't let people compare prices locally
-Is simply a barcode-encoded URL

/sarcasm

Cuecat was a device that was about a decade too soon. We needed ubiquitous mobile computing (not just mobile phones, you see) before something like this could truly come into its own.
Science is constantly testing ideas, but until we get contrary evidence we tend to go with the model that fits the data. Right now we still haven't figured out why galaxies are accelerating faster than they should and we are actively exploring that, but there are plenty of phenomena that GR explains very well. You can't go around claiming that GR simply doesn't exist because the data is there, but you could argue that it needs revisions.

Climate change seems to still be a very binary argument. There are some people arguing about how much is man made, but there are still those arguing about whether it exists at all.

I think in that way it doesn't make a good comparison.
Dave Cutler and the Bill Gates award
It will probably be in all non-IE browsers soon enough, and then it becomes like border-radius. You get it if you have a real browser, otherwise some Flash fallback library will kick in.
CPUs (or cores in a CPU) have a pretty small instruction cache. On a Core2, I believe it's 32K cache per core. It's somewhat expensive (slow) to fetch instructions from RAM to L1, but once code is in L1, reading from it is immediate, or close to it. If you have a two-core machine where one core can do most of your js dispatch logic, and the other core can do the inner loop of your rendering logic, then you can have much better performance than constantly swapping out your logic on the cache of a single core.

I'm really not sure how useful it is to cache-optimise a browser. You need to be able to fit a significant amount of logic into 32K in order to take advantage of cache. When I used to do realtime image processing (AR), I could get an order of magnitude speedup by just getting my logic to fit into 32K; image processing code can literally go from 3fps to 30fps just by tightening code to the point where it can fit in L1 cache. I don't know if it's possible to fit significant amounts of rendering logic or js logic into 32K, but if it is, then dedicating a core to each of those functions could give a significant speedup.
I might be wrong on this but I will say it anyway.

The original idea for this came out of the Google App contest for Android. This was the idea that won the competition. So the idea was available for anyone to execute after that.

The red laser team might have come up with the idea independently or just learned about it from the Google Android contest. I am not sure if the contest or the app came out first. Someone here might know.
If I've already roasted/pulverized/drowned everyone, who's going to complain?
It will, but not anytime soon.
Because he had no power to be a despot - that's all.
The trackball may seem redundant if you're not used to it, but I miss it when I switch from my G1 to my iPod Touch. The iPod/iPhone gives me thumb fatigue whenever I have to scroll repeatedly to read a long web page. There are all sorts of uses where the trackball feels more ergonomic than the touch screen.
I agree. The optimal outcome would be for MS to license Plurk's code. Failing that, some kind of cash settlement...but a lawsuit would be stupid, both strategically and from a publicity standpoint. Plurk can't afford and probably doesn't want to spend years in court.
I guess my point wasn't that Olestra has no important side effects, but instead that it has very important side effects which are in plain view.
Love it. Awesome idea and prior to seeing this I hadn't even considered getting a case for my iPhone.

Very cool, great work.
Thomas Jefferson did almost exactly the same thing. As did Nelson Mandela.

There's a pretty big moral space between advocating the overthrow of a government and the behavior of a Stalin or Pol Pot. Marx belongs to the former category, not the latter. But because of events that happened decades after his death, he's remembered as something he wasn't. His crime was being wrong, not evil.
You seem to imply that if the situation was reversed, if someone had ripped off Microsoft's code and when caught they stopped the service and apologized, Microsoft wouldn't sue them up the wazoo. How realistic do you think is such statement?

And yes, it probably is in Plurk's best interest to either seek settlement or sue Microsoft over this - for one it will show that they wont tolerate being ripped off (otherwise what's stopping someone else doing it again tomorrow and when caught "sincerely" apologizing) and for two, for a small and relatively unknown company it makes perfect financial sense to do so, they will probably make more money this way than they'll be able to make in 10 years "building software".
In the FAQ this question should be towards the top

Why would I need continuous audio/video recording?
> A part of the workspace threw an exception

Did this happen with the standard workspace as it was distributed? This typical smalltalk experience might be acceptable you. There is a chance though that your customers won't find it similarly enjoyable.
I'd be interested in hearing more about how you went from idea to production, finding a manufacturer, etc. I think this is a big stumbling point for a lot of people in the same position as you were — interested in manufacturing a physical product, but only familiar with the web.
They offer it for free all over Australia already
My gut reaction to this question is the old saw about any writing: show, don't tell. You need the target audience of your resume to see why you'd be valuable to them. Instead of listing a bunch of buzzwords, explain relevant projects you worked on, including the relevant technologies. I always list skills first, then under my work experience I detail the projects that developed/took advantage of those skills.
Is there a picture of a real case in someone's hand? I want to see what they actually look like, but all I see are shiny renderings.

They look really good though.
Carlin makes that distinction, actually. The bit is about how "save the planet" is the wrong slogan and that the goal is really just to save humans.
Nice site! Cool to see you can grab an independent artist's design, or upload your own!
Not exactly a statistically significant number... When has a hundred corporate sponsors (hopefully soon) we'll revisit your theory.
Then you must have used them a really long time ago. The last time I did, I had no trouble decoding audio streams in one thread, pushing the raw audio samples into a Queue, pulled the raw audio samples out of the Queue in another thread and sent them to the audio device, and doing network IO in another thread. This code is at http://github.com/thwarted/thundaural (no longer maintained) and was written in 2004 and 2005 against perl 5.6 and perl 5.8. It's hardly a complex or large threaded application, nor an example of fantastic code, but I never experienced "crash and burn" or prohibitively long thread start up time.

I can't produce a significantly long start up time when perl copies a 240meg+ local state using http://gist.github.com/258016. Much larger, and the overhead pushes my 4gig machine into swap (so perl's not very efficient with its data overhead, it seems). It is slower than if the structure is shared (you can uncomment a line to compare) between the threads, which shows that perl is copying the state to the other interpreters, but this just says you need to use the same model with perl threads that you'd use when you do multiprocessing with fork if you're going to have long lived child processes that don't exec: spawn threads early before your heap balloons to avoid all that spawn-time copying (which is a good practice anyway, even when COW is used for fork). Every model has its trade offs, and it's good to know those trade offs going in, rather than treating the flavor of the day as a silver bullet.

And even if perl's implementation isn't stable/good, it doesn't mean the model of explicit sharing is a bad one. And it most definitely doesn't mean that using a separate interpreter in each thread with global sharing is bad at all.
Your expectation that more donations would come from well-funded regions relies on the assumption that well-funded companies are more likely to donate. The opposite may be true, since the founders of bootstrapped startups can make such decisions without concern about what their financers think about it. The first corporate sponsor on that list, Snowtide, is bootstrapped. I don't know about the others.

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/msg/63edf75cb78ae7e6

P.S.: Another corporate sponsor has been added, Relevance from NC, also east coast.
How to tell co-worker he has gross eating style?
I was thinking of an anonymous letter on the desk, so there's no confrontation. Bad idea?

Dear X,

I'd like to discuss a sensitive topic with you. I do not intend any disrespect. Instead, I mention it in a sincere desire to benefit you.

Different cultures have different norms when it comes to eating etiquette. In mainstream Canadian culture, it is generally considered to be quite rude and crude to make excessive noise while eating. This is especially true of wet lip-smacking noises, and slurping. I understand that in other cultures these gestures are in fact encouraged, and show an appreciation for the meal.

I recognize that you are someone who cares about his appearance. You are always well dressed, and well groomed. Be advised that you may be unintentionally undermining your image by eating in this way. Obviously, you are not intending to offend.

I'm writing this in a spirit of helpfulness, and truthfulness. It's an uncomfortable topic, but I hope that this information is useful to you. Often in these situations, others will never say anything, because they are too afraid of being rude. In that case, people never get feed-back they can use.

##
3 out of 4 corporate sponsors also have names that start with S. Does that mean anything? Probably not, the sample size is too small.

If we were talking about 75% of companies in a list of a hundred then maybe it would be more meaningful.
Sample size is too small to make any real conclusions.
The problem with that entertaining quip is that when people talk about protecting mother earth they don't actually believe we're going to kill it.

Sure, but then we aren't really talking about saving the earth at all - we're talking about saving ourselves and the things we happen to like, need, or find aesthetically pleasing. It's a purely selfish motivation which is why we like to anthropomorphize the planet itself and pretend we're concerned for something more than just ourselves. "Mother earth" couldn't care less about being saved because "she" is a big rock in space, which doesn't have feelings[1].

that some degenerate mutant strain of humanity might be able to scratch a pre-civilization existence

Hey now, we were just a degenerate mutant strain at one point too. There's no reason to think that some other mutation that survives our eventual extinction would not mature over a few million years to become a much more intelligent, peaceful and benign civilization.

1. I guess it's possible the earth does have feelings, but if so it doesn't seem likely it would care one way or the other about us.
Gamma Knife: a radical treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder patients
NPTL uses clone(2). fork(2) is implemented in terms of clone(2) also.
Men Think Their Dance Moves Improve With Age
The spec allows the server complete discretion to accept or reject cross-origin requests. Only the origin in the request (sent by the client) is defined in terms of the originating web page; it's left entirely up to the server to decide whether or not to allow requests from any given origin. The spec talks about the server being "willing" to respond to requests from different origins, and explicitly mentions that it may support multiple origins ("This is why the server has to send these strings: to confirm which origins and URLs the server is willing to service").

This is basically the same as the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing spec, another W3C spec supported by some current browsers:

http://www.w3.org/TR/access-control/

> "The first three lines in each case are hard-coded" (referring to the origin)

No, the three hard-coded lines of each handshake part come before the origin headers:

GET /demo HTTP/1.1
Upgrade: WebSocket
Connection: Upgrade
[...]

HTTP/1.1 101 Web Socket Protocol Handshake
Upgrade: WebSocket
Connection: Upgrade
[...]
Most of the other problems, the ones which I agree are not direct responsibilities of the mayor and council, have grown as symptoms of those failing city services.

If you can't get your street plowed or your trash picked up, you move. If your kid isn't safe walking to, or being in school, you move. If there are no jobs in the city, you move.

The more people move, the less revenue the city gets, the more blight it acquires, the less incentive businesses have to stay in the city. Then they move. The blight accelerates and exacerbates the problem of keeping those places from becoming havens for criminals, drug dealers and vandals.

Did you know there isn't a single grocery store chain in the city of Detroit? Yeah, the Eastern market and a few community gardens are stepping up to fill the void for their neighbors. But even with those, there remains a very real and serious protein problem that's only solved by leaving the city.

So, is the city directly responsible for things like the unemployment rate and drop-out rate? No. But year after year after year they've ignored these problems. Refused change. Literally shouted down people who have raised these issues at council meetings. Let their hatred, bigotry, sense of entitlement and corruption waylay any and every attempt to turn things around.

So, no. They're not directly responsible for kids dropping out. They are however responsible for having essentially ignored the problems in schools for the last few decades as the graduation rate has sunk to 25%. They are responsible for being so incredibly inept that the entire system was taken over by the State.

If I'm responsible for a division of programmers and our output is so consistently bad that higher-management needs to step in and address the problems - while it may not have been my personal responsibility to get code written, clearly I've not been doing a good job.
College Degrees More Expensive, Worth Less in Job Market
In U.K., cheques to be phased out by 2018
These things went from the hottest online commodity (selling on eBay, etc) to something that can't be given away. I think there's a conundrum — nobody is using Google Wave because there weren't enough people on it to begin with, but now people aren't interested in the invites because they hear nobody is finding a use for it.

This wasn't an issue with Gmail because it worked with all other email systems, whereas Wave is having to build its user base from the ground up.

I'm sure it's been discussed in numerous other threads, but is anyone genuinely using Wave for anything productive?
I don't really see what the point of this article was - the entire message is summed up in one phrase "Amazon has mastered ... making money in low-margin businesses."

There is really no additional analysis, explanation, or extrapolation beyond that statement. The key thing that inspired this was that Amazon "introduced spot pricing for servers" which is never actually explained for anyone that might not know what that even means.

I think there was a seed of a good article here, but it should really be more than just stating an idea and leaving everything else up to the reader to determine.
Freakonomics: Analyzing How Kids Talk to Santa
How Carriers and Phone Makers are Strangling Android
The origin header represents the origin of the script initiating the request. The location is the address of the server. These can be different. By acknowledging the origin of the request, the server explicitly grants access to that origin.

This is similar to the origin model for cross-origin XHRs (http://www.w3.org/TR/access-control/#access-control-allow-or...).
Private Grants: Inexpensive Capital, But Challenging Process
Wow, I'm not even trying to argue that he had a good philosophy, just that his ideas ended up being massive failures from what he originally intended.

People cannot be judged solely by the consequences of their actions, in any case; context is also important. We don't consider Robert J Oppenheimer or Albert Einstein mass murderers even though their work very directly contributed to the deaths of thousands of civilians. We do consider Osama bin Laden a mass murder though.

Maybe you ought to be a little less vindictive in your judgment of historical figures.
Comet is not dead because websockets is:

1. too obvious handshake fingerprints for a firewall to block

2. No passive mode

3. Not supported by every browser.
I gather it's because, as far as I can tell, Rich is from and lives on the east coast.
So Smalltalk is not dying because someone who sells Smalltalk IDE says so?

- Wait -

I am not trying to be anti-Smalltalk, but that seems analogous to Spolsky, who sells bug tracking software, downplaying TDD.

- Wait -

I am not trying to be anti-Spolsky, but that seems analogous to person X, who sells product Y, downplaying Z, in order to persuade people one way or another.

...So this must of been what my professor was talking about when she said it is important to take into account who is providing you with this information
I would be surprised if this happened. In the last year, Firefox added 3.51 points to its market share while Chrome added 2.82 (Net Applications).

Additionally, Firefox grew its users base by 40% in the last year--adding nearly 100 million users.
The only backward value apparent from this article is an extreme defecit in holding people accountable. One could argue that every other value must be phenomenal since it is still a thriving city despite this impairment.
What's the prob specifically? That the speed is different?
I also live in Montrose. A lot of Houston is well run. Public Transportation is a laggard, however. I spend half of my time in Minneapolis, and despite their using the same physical equipment, their public transit system is 5X better than Houston's.

I think the reason, is that in Minneapolis, it's considered a vital part of the city infrastructure. In Houston, it's a concession to the poor people.
I picked up Seaside and Magritte recently to build a demo. Seaside is a refreshing change from the Rails/Django/Pylons style frameworks. I found the abstractions Seaside provides (continuations and components) to be much more powerful than what the other frameworks gave me.

The downside is that it's a drastically different development process than I'm used to. Squeak and Pharo take a lot of effort to get used to.
MIT Algorithms - Cache oblivious algorithms
Be specific! :)
Well your argument isn't exactly strong either. What is "socially necessary abstract labor-time"? You didn't say why did you start debunking his confused theories from this point. Wikipedia says:

The simplest definition of socially necessary labour time is the amount of labour time performed by a worker of average skill and productivity, working with tools of the average productive potential, to produce a given commodity.

but none of the examples you gave actually are comodities. Somebody would have to pay for them - obviously that's possible but lets see how:

Pasteurization is an invention - the patent system is at least as flawed as Marx's theories

Creating GMail - software patents QED

Picasso - work of art, copyrights, again a very hot topic even now

Besides is it such a central point anyway?
Obviously his theories led to people dying. Then again without the threat of communism we would be probably still forced to work without unions, without social and health security and a million of other beneficial things.

How can you judge Marx's contribution to history only negatively as a "no friend of humanity" is beyond me.
You cannot see the world around you just in black and white!
Yeah, once you install this app you can't use the internet or the phone or the music playback or any of your other apps. It really freakin stinks!
Precisely. But with the minor complicating detail that the drawing is less done by little balls bouncing around inside a plastic casing and more - as 'mahmud' very elegantly put it to me in an offline exchange - a bunch of poseurs "throwing money like they earned it. 100% ghetto-fab fat-chain posturing."
On Microsoft's anti-Drupal ad
WebSockets:
1. Can use TLS
2. The client always initiates the connection
3. Can be use the same API with a shim or comet underneath
That's the subject of the next post on this topic, forthcoming.
You should keep this in context; Plurk is (one of) their prime competitor(s). Microsoft was almost certainly negligent in allowing this to come to market. The fault doesn't fall solely on the contractor.

In any case, my point is that Microsoft didn't do anything especially noble by apologizing and taking the site down in the face of blatant plagiarism. If it were noble, you'd be able to name some less noble but at least as self-interested actions Microsoft could have taken. I can't think of one.

Microsoft doing practically anything besides what this would have only hurt them more.
I guess I will answer my own question.

The app compareAnywhere won the Android ADC 1 Contest. Here is a link below:
http://code.google.com/android/adc/adc_gallery/app.html?id=8

That was in 2008!

You couldn't do bar code scanning on the iPhone until 3GS came out (I think I am right on this).

So this was an idea out there since 2008. The red laser team were the first one to execute it on the iPhone 3GS.

I also have high regard for the Google team for correctly accessing the value of this idea.
Restyle the web with Stylish | userstyles.org
You know why it doesn't work? Because programmers are still mainly using C or C-derived languages.