skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Nook is now a computer running a full Android operating system, with a built-in, free cellular connection to the internet.

I think you'll find this is not true.

In particular, in the Nook FAQ:

Your nook can connect to B&N Fast & Free Wireless networks in the United States. These networks are cellular data networks that are widely available. In areas without B&N Fast & Free Wireless coverage, you can rely on Wi-Fi to access network services. … Your nook CANNOT connect to other cellular data networks in the United States. It cannot connect to any international cellular data networks, including those in Canada and Mexico. …

I'd say they have created their own private cellular enclave and are in control of what comes and goes.

Regardless of their technical filtering, you should read your license carefully. I don't have a copy, but phrases like there is no charge for you nook's wireless capabilities do not imply that you can implement your own features and use their cellular service free of charge.
Microsoft should be held accountable for this, but assuming the blog is correct, I'm assuming that the deliberate ripoff (described on plurk's blog) wasn't a high-level Redmond decision.It was probably a decision taken at the junior management levelin Microsoft, China.

It will be interesting to see Microsoft's response, but suspending the MSN club service is probably the best immediate response, if plurk's blog is correct.
I wish that were the case, but often it seems being controversial is a more direct path to popularity than thoughtfulness is.
No. The Apple v. MS and Lotus v. Borland "look and feel" results were about the interface, not implementation. If you steal code (or other copyrighted content) from someone, no amount of obfuscation will "make it OK" legally (though I guess it might make it impossible to detect).

But simply cloning a user interface is legal, at least in US case law.
Also I see your business partner saying that the chance of a fire in the datacenter is so small that he should also worry about meteors at that point. I think that event is not that rare tough, just recall the last one in Seattle...
This. The real value in creating a "business plan" is in the focusing of your business.

It isn't necessarily a good idea to go into business completely blind with no knowledge of who your potential customers and competitors are and what your revenue model is. Writing a business plan forces you to think through these key components.

The definition of a "business plan" should be flexible. I prefer to use three pages or less, single spaced. That's enough room to cover all the topics while keeping it brief.

There will be time to make revenue models and projections once you actually have some sales on which to base your calculations.
I'm not sure that's a safe assumption. It seems to me that everyone has a weak spot even if they think they're thinking about it thoroughly. We're only human after all.
12 talks from Ruby Manor
Yep. still pictures are a lot further than moving ones.
Are you saying you don't learn anything from thinking through how to write a big piece of code before you write it?

The vast majority of bugs I find after writing the code are trivial. Certainly, I learn something from writing it, but I find that if I just start writing without thinking about it first, especially for larger projects, I don't end up where I want to and have to scrap large pieces of it.

Writing helps you get the details straight, but thinking is essential for designing the big picture.
I don't know if I can lay all the blame on Microsoft for this.

The dev's knew what they were doing but I doubt the rip-off percolated very high up. As a SW manager I'm not sure how I'd know that this was ripped off wholesale if I wasn't very familiar with the ripped off site.

Don't get me wrong, this is bad. But expose it to MS and let them clean house. I don't doubt that they will.
I am happy to make my contribution to the Clojure fund.
I am curious though, whether this model also becomes applicable to the other Clojure libraries and how would that play out.
* hard to understand why anyone would be incentivized *

Ug. Needs a re-write in simple English. What it's trying to say probably isn't that complex, but it's very badly put.
No, I got the same settings that Calacanis did.

Looks like Facebook is either doing A/B testing or intentionally sending conservative settings to a small percentage of users to confuse discussions of this issue.
He does have a point (one which merits better than his -4 fate).

If your biggest asset is your UI, not only do you have to appreciate you have a tenuous competitive advantage but you should have a battle plan, both technical and legal, for when the theft invariably does happen.

They got lucky that it was a big operation like MS with a public reputation to maintain (laugh all you like) rather than some no-name. It's easy to put public pressure on the Apples, Google and MS' of the world.
When I was 29, I was penniless and in the military. I went to a travel agency decided to cheat about my age to get a discount in a plane ticket, so I could go home after many months.

I was advised to learn a fake birth date by heart, but I trusted too much my math ability and instead of 19, I actually implied that I was 17, so I paid an even cheaper ticket.

Looking younger has many advantages, but also some drawbacks. People tends not to take you seriously. Or maybe it's me.
Look I doubt anyone very high up at MS knows of this and when they do you might be able to get some scratch out of this.

They're really going to have 3 ways to deal with this.

1. pull down the existing site while they retool.
2. Pay you a licensing fee while the rewrite from scratch.
3. Do nothing and get a ton of bad press

See if you can get 1 or 2 and maybe make some money off the deal.
How Asia Makes The U.S. Look Like A Third World Country
I was with her until this comment:

And yet apparently we haven’t gotten past those 19th century stigmas.

Bad assumption. She's got an interesting story, but doesn't go anywhere interesting and seems to just blame it all on the vague idea of antique male chauvinism.
I've been curious how much position of curly braces in C derived languages affects open source popularity.

Nowadays it seems like placing the opening bracket on its own line is more popular. I have found people are unusually turned off by these choices. ie, if you prefer the bracket on its own line, code where it is at the end of the line really bothers you, and vice versa. I wonder how much this affects adoption of new projects.
According to statistics an average american has one breast and one testicle.

The chart mcormier cited is for w3schools.com There is nothing surprising that or pretty much any webdevs-oriented site has a low share of IE.

Browser stats for two websites can vary wildly depending on the site itself, and even country. For example Opera is very popular in Russia—27% (http://www.rankingru.com/en/rankings/web-browsers-groups.htm... ) and Ukraine where it tops the browsers chart:
http://www.ranking.com.ua/en/rankings/web-browsers-groups.ht... .
Related: http://my.opera.com/dstorey/blog/2009/03/16/a-look-at-deskto...
World’s most powerful desktop supercomputer (built for €6000)
I understand that. I too am an American hacker-entrepreneur with an aversion to bureaucracy. But I think this is the least bad of the potential solutions.

All we need is a few government sanctioned pg's, judging whether or not various projects are worthy of taxpayer dollars.
There's no reason that medically relevant phenotypes would be that much less complicated (and lets remember that mental health, is, in fact, medically relevant.)

Yes, there are a select few, rare, single nucleotide polymorphisms that are responsible for congenital genetic defects. But plenty of disease involves the interactions of thousands of genes, like cancer, and for those it's really just as meaningless.
Something about this strikes me as either shady, or engineered to make a point. I'm probably paranoid, of course.

Looking at the about page, "Men with Pens" was founded by the article's author. The sit is deliberately and heavily grounded in male stereotypes. Plus, looking at the bio for one of the other authors:
"Taylor Lindstrom, is a twenty-something copywriter and journalist from Boulder, CO. She’s the team’s rogue woman who wowed us until our desire for her talents exceeded our desire for a good ol’ boys club."

Maybe that's just a tongue-in-cheek reference to the founder's real gender. Perhaps the heavy masculinity of the Men With Pens site was designed to test/prove the theory. Not enough information to make a real decision.

It just seems that there's more to this than meets the eye. I'd love to see some statistics on the comparative success of her publishing names.
I am not sure how to take this - I get such varying age guesses. I am 31 and have been told that I don't look older than 21 (and that's usually the case - When clean shaven most people gauge me waay lower than 31).

On the flip side, there are times when I was 25-26 and girls I met would think I was in my 30's :(
I'm a little confused as to the actual problem being solved here.

For SSDs there is essentially no seek penalty, so random read and sequential read performance are essentially the same. Spinning hard drives, because of the seek penalty, have pretty poor random read performance but fairly good sequential read.

Surely, for a streaming application, it should be sequential read that is the key requirement?

You can predict with a very high degree of accuracy what piece of data you'll be requiring in the near future, at which point the seek can be scheduled well in advance.

This, of course, assumes your data is laid out in a sane fashion and you're not blindly jumping all over the disks.

Strikes me that last.fm could potentially do with looking at approaches like Facebook's Haystack where they put considerable time in to minimising the amount of IOPS required to pull an image off of the disk.
The more things change...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eliot
Setting up a 501(c)3 isn't a picnic either. That's why a lot of open source projects join an existing foundation instead of starting their own.
Writers who claim to be something they're not: It's been happening for years. See http://bit.ly/8cteG0
You'd be amazed how many smart people don't have a decent grounding in statistics, so any easy reference to explain this is nice.
small tip: DONT add video to email. Spam filters will kill it. Asap.
wow.

By the way, what do you mean by obfuscation?
Because this is really weird,
they even copied the variables. So was the code obfuscated or just trimmed of white space. You should consider using the google closure compiler with advanced optimizations, although you will have το do some extra work το get your javascript compile in advanced mode.
Virtual goods: "precisely what you'd expect to evolve on the iPhone"
I tend to be a little paranoid about backups, so I have a few different disks backing up my main, desktop, machine. But I also use one of my backups to sync data to my laptop, not quite a full "restore" due to a big size difference in the respective drives. But, generally speaking, the two machines are in sync and I can be sure that at least one of my backups works reasonably well.
Last.fm does progressive streaming, not HTTP downloads.

i.e. it reads 16KB of one track, sends it to one user, then 16KB of the next track, sends it to the next user, etc. Then after 1 second it goes through and does the whole thing again.

This is a massively seek-heavy operation.
> Truth be told, if just a name and perception of gender creates such different levels of respect and income for a person, it says a lot more about the world than it does about me.

People who succeeded and think that they own it all to their skill, persistence and diligence should read this.

Being lucky on some trivial things like name or gender may have affected your success more than you think.
Entrepreneurship: the cure for poverty
How's this: if you're starting a traditional business like house-painting or power generation then write a brief plan. Otherwise don't.
* that's not a very good way of reading fiction*

It's not a good way for you to read fiction. It is, however, how I enjoy books the most.
He should just fork it and start a MontySQL. Done.
Actually you have it backwards. Melanin is considered extremely important by the body, some people have high latent melanin levels but all people regardless of race are able to darken their skin color via tanning (exposure to the sun triggering melanin release). Darker skin protects you from being sun burned, which is harmful and can even be fatal (leading to heat exhaustion, heat stroke, etc.) The body considers melanin production so important that some of the natural checks and balances against cancer are inhibited in melanin generation cells, which is why skin cancer is fairly common compared to other types of cancer.
Yeah I've written one business plan in my life as a final project for my MBA.

The plan itself was pretty much useless, I've never used it (note it wasn't just a project, I killed two birds with one stone by writing a plan for a business I have actually started, and used it for my final).

But the act of going through the steps was an invaluable learning experience.
Search and the social graph
I'll be sending him my donation later on tonight and hopefully working on some commercial Clojure apps over the next few months - if any of them take off, he'll be seeing more donations from me. Clojure is a great language and Rich deserves the contributions.
The public cloud gets hacked through a VM
Guarantees in the case of error is an orthogonal issue. The same problem exists for error codes. In fact, I see exceptions as a formalization of an extremely rigorous approach to error codes, where in the case of a failure the error codes is immediately propagated to the callers after local cleanup.
I fat-fingered the destination directory in a script once and accidentally shrunk my entire photo archive to 128x128 thumbnails. Thankfully I did have backups of all but a handful.

I'm always amazed at the number of people who spend their time thinking about replication strategies without understanding that data can be accidentally deleted in production too. I guess backups look "easy", so it's not as sexy an area of architecture planning.
You forgot 4. Buy you out.
You must have missed the full-sized 104-key keyboard hanging off frame.
So why is Facebook trying to trick their users?

Simple: search results.

Facebook is trying to dupe hundreds of millions of users they’ve spent
years attracting into exposing their data for Facebook’s personal
gain: pageviews. Yes, Facebook is tricking us into exposing all our
items so that those personal items get indexed in search
engines–including Facebook’s–in order to drive more traffic to
Facebook.

I would say that Facebook doesn't really care about attracting traffic through natural SEO. It's not like people are going to sign up because they found a random Facebook profile when searching for something else. There are a lot of obvious benefits to FB if users are more open about its details, but it seems like the author of this article hasn't actually thought about what they actually are. Less politely, he's just a troll.

Facebook has had a couple of innovations in their history, like their
application layer and news feed (which is now gone), but for the past
couple of years they’ve given up on innovation and focused on stealing
ideas from Twitter and out-executing them, while not caring about user
rights.

How many ideas can you steal from Twitter? Focusing more on status updates is about it.
I was surprised because if it was tried in the UK, I'm pretty sure it would not work at all. Estate agents show pictures of houses they're selling/sold. Never a picture of their face.

So there seems to be something different in our culture there.
Agreed. But in my personal experience, most films with generous amounts of realistic-looking CG end up sacrificing what makes films really fun to watch: an engaging story, realistic portrayal and cinematography that brings you into the film instead of sitting in front of it. The visuals are worthless if you can't make people feel something other than "ooh... aah..." and i'm (hopefully incorrectly) assuming this movie - with its highly-anticipated technical wizardry - will follow in the footsteps of its predecessors.
How does this hypothesis explain pale skin coupled with dark hair, i.e. the typical Mediterranean phenotype.
Ah interesting. I hadn't considered this. I wonder why there aren't realtor firms in the US. I'm much more comfortable dealing with a well known firm than a single individual. I wonder how the fees compare. UK it's typically 1-3% of sale price.
It seems extremely plausible that whatever makes people look old also causes them to be old to some measurable degree.
"It's really only more difficult because people don't know how to do it"
So you see him too...
Something like this did happen at Google China a couple of years ago: they released a Chinese IME that contained a dictionary taken from Sohu. Sohu demanded a public apology, which Google issued a couple of days later, along with a version that did not contain the stolen list.

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Google_Apologizes_For_Poaching...
http://bit.ly/5zIVYl

Edit: for what it's worth, I personally agree with the theory that this was probably done by a local team that was under a lot of pressure but wasn't getting enough oversight.
Lots of tweets about funding Clojure: http://twitter.com/#search?q=clojure

It makes me happy :)
If that's what you were originally intending something like "Chrome is 7% of the [web developer] market" would be a little more accurate.

Anyway, I was just having some fun, 24ways is a side-project for Drew, so maybe drop him a note and let him know it looks off in Chrome and I'm sure he'll try and find the time to fix it.
works fine here :/
"Let’s stop asking people if they’re doing backups, and start asking if they’re doing restores."

No, because restores wouldn't have helped Jeff Atwood. You can backup a database onto the same server that hosts the database, and still successfully restore it later.

We should instead be talking about the concept of Continuity of Business. Decide how important it is for your data to continue to be available (constant availability vs. several days downtime vs. don't care if it disappears entirely?), then make a plan that gives you that availability.

What I'm describing isn't necessarily complicated. For example, I keep all my backup data (photos, music, etc) on a USB drive. Every morning it's rsynced to a hot spare. Every few weeks, I swap the spare with another one in a safe deposit box at the bank. (This means that we can recover from both immediate accidental deletions, and also ones that we don't catch for a few days, and disasters like theft or fire). I check every few days to make sure the drives are still working, and my wife knows how to switch the drives and has a key to the safe deposit box, just in case something happens to me.

Anyway, we feel that these are appropriate steps for protecting the data that we don't want to lose. But the important point is that everyone should make a plan that's appropriate for them.
As if I didn't lose enough sleep pondering backups already.
There was a post on Reddit a few weeks ago, where someone asked "What is something you have learned completely via the internet?".

One of the replies was from a guy (Iamnotthatotherguy) who spent 2 hours each night, 4 days a week, dedicated to learning math online. He referenced the MIT Open Courseware courses, and the Kahn Academy as his primary sources. He spent 2 years on this schedule, and no claims to know most of the mathematical areas quite well. I think his goal was statistical learning and AI, and it sounds like he got there.
Well, 4 years ago, there was not many users in the GNU/Linux escene like now, and all the people that was starting with tutorials and such, may find the recomendation of using the VIM editor, like always figure in this tutorials, i think this could be a valid hypothesis, to the new "wave/generation" of users.
I am looking forward to seeing FC reach Clojure-donation-profitable :)
"Systems programming language" is a loaded term, IMO. Many people have used C - probably the canonical systems programming language - inappropriately for applications where better languages would have been more suited. We've paid the price in insecurity, buffer overflows, memory errors, etc. many times over. I think you need to more clearly define what you mean by it.

You can't mean very low level programming, since that is a very small fraction of all programming - and probably not the best domain of a general purpose programming language.

As I mentioned in another comment in this thread, I see exceptions as exactly equivalent to a rigorous approach to error codes.

I also note with interest that you describe the form as "handle the error and pass up an error code". This reads to me as a contradiction in terms. While the error code is still propagating, the error has not been handled. Some intermediate cleanup has perhaps been done, but normal code execution has not yet resumed. Moreover, exceptions have mechanically checkable formalisms for these phases of error handling.
This was a very informative post. I have thought about this before, but was never able to get my facts lined up in this way. Thanks
Hmmm yes, you're right.

Even with knowledge of the accesses required in 1s time, you're still bounded by the speed of the movements of the heads.

That said. I wonder if there's any trickery you can do with pre-generating the interleaved data for a group of users.

As in:

1) Read the next 5 (or any amount really) tracks for each of the users in a group.

2) Interleave the 16KB blocks in the same pattern you'd be streaming.

Step 1 is just a whole set of sequential reads. Step 2 is one big sequential write. Then your streaming operation is a single sequential read.

Of course, there's a good chance the overhead on doing the above outweighs the gain.
I just re-read the article. If you really squint you might be able to assume that their code was scrambled in some way (if that's what "not compiled" means). Otherwise if you're trying to gain (well deserved) sympathy for something like this then the deobfuscation process is probably the most important part of the story. Did MS then rescramble the code? I'd want to know that as well.
I don't have details at hand to cite, but I recall encountering some recent news of research that may place in question equating a simple measure of sun exposure to elevated risk for skin cancer. (I didn't look at in depth, and my memory could be somewhat faulty.)

It may not be simple quantity of exposure, but rather severe sunburns that most elevate risk. If one is outside regularly and acclimatized, these severe burns are less likely to occur.

Perhaps someone else will have a more detailed comment on this.

Of course, one's pigmentation will also influence the likelihood of sunburn, although dark pigmentation does not entirely prevent burning.

EDIT: Just read InclinedPlane's comment, above, which mentions the same concern with sunburn.
You need more than math skills: http://www.hulu.com/watch/870/30-rock-twenty-nine#s-p31-sr-i...
Give me a break! (Hosting) companies will throw more references and specs at you than you know what to do with, and you have no choice but to take them for their word. The only thing you can do on your part is keep your own backups, independent of them.