skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'd much rather see Plurk issue a press release stating simply the matter has been resolved and they appreciate Microsoft's swift action.

Agree with everything except this last sentence. I reckon they could get a bigger win out of this. Maybe a partnership (I heard they're censored from mainland China, no?), some sort of licensing, or even a token settlement of a little bit of cash so that "Microsoft settled for an undisclosed amount." Going to war with someone who doesn't want it and apologized is a bad play, but they should at least see if they can get a little further with this. Since the China market is blocked to them, this could be a massive win if they get some sort of joint venture, partnership, or licensing going.
Clojure Funding Progress
Pillar management
Facebook group created: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=212933951463
For some insight into the politics of hybrids there is a huge row in the UK over the erdication of Ruddy Ducks (introduced from N. America) which are hybridizing with the remnant White-headed Duck population in Spain.

A lot of the issues are discussed in the following which although presented from one side of the argument do give an idea of how messy this can get:

http://uk400clubrarebirdalert.blogspot.com/2009/12/plea-for-...

http://uk400clubrarebirdalert.blogspot.com/2009/12/championi...
I'm skeptical that it's possible for six billion people to make fast and measurable changes in atmospheric composition and land use without endangering the hydrology of the planet, and creating hard-to-predict ripples on the food and water supply.

As such, I advocate policies that attempt to reduce the rate of these changes when possible, until those changes are quite well understood.

I don't worry about "Earth" at all. I worry about food and water security, as well as the enormous waste of resources that will occur if the hydrology of a continent undergoes rapid change and leaves cities, farms and other infrastructure placed inappropriately for the changed climate.

I view this as a conservative and skeptical position.

I find it confusing, and somewhat offensive, that I'm asked by those who advocate unfettered change to prove that their change is deadly, when in most other cases, the person advocating mass change is instead asked to prove that it's safe. It seems particularly problematic, because I'm not advocating a complete halt to the change, but rather a decrease in the derivative of the rate of change.
Miami has strong opposition inside the town's political factions (new Cubans, old Cubans, retirees, etc). As far as I can tell, SF has only "radical" and "more radical" groups.
Ditto. I hope there are some lectures in English.
Maoism is not marxism, not that China is practicing Maoism today anyway. There are models of collective ownership that pre-date Marx.
I didn't expect that something like this could ever happen... ok,it's China, but still unbelievable.
This was referenced in http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/12/16/good-work-with-bad-.... This brought to mind the discussion of IDE use amongst the programmers in Coders At Work.
Agree 100%. Often using threads are a false economy.
why do you mean by accessible? Wouldn't that still mean reference counting, i.e., it's not accessible if it has 0 references?
My favorite iPhone App 2009 - What is yours?
I spent the summer in San Francisco and used windAlert all the time to check the wind for kiteboarding.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/windalert/id317992025?mt=8

What is your app of the year?
Terrafugia "Flying Car" Makes First Flight
Long story short: causation without correlation is possible if you are unable to adjust for confounding.
First, I think it's important to note that as the original claimant here, the onus is on you to prove your claim, not on me to disprove it. If you think OCaml's "easy genericness" is "more flexible than C++ templates" then provide an example of the exercise of such flexibility.

Second, ease of translation between languages is not particularly relevant to flexibility. Insofar as it is relevant, things that are more flexible are typically more difficult, not easier, on account of that flexibility, at least in my experience.

Remember, your original claim was not about ease, but about flexibility. I doubt you attempted the subtle transition maliciously, and perhaps your original claim was where you misspoke, but I would never argue that C++ templates are easier than other forms of genericity, simply that they're more flexible.
What is Lean about the Lean Startup?
The problem doesn't exist solely in the mayor's office, so unfortunately Detroit is still horribly run. Bing's making a hell of an effort -- but so did Archer.

But that's neither here nor there. There are plenty of worse-run cities in America than San Francisco. Cities where more serious problems result from the mismanagement, corruption and dysfunction (crime, decay, ineffective city services, etc).
In a sense, this is good for the US economy, because it means that China is out of the game in terms of entrepreneurial activities on the web.
From a legal perspective, I'm not sure that it matters whether the work was done by a contractor or employee. Whoever asked for the work to be done and paid for it is ultimately responsible for ensuring that it was done within the law. Certainly MS would be able to turn around and sue the contractor, but that's a separate issue.
Excellent! I attended this talk in person and it was great to see him work. (I'm the "the guy from Boston" that Knuth referred to.) Picture with Knuth: http://twitpic.com/sqxku

My note-taking pages were absolutely loaded by the end of the talk. I'm glad I got to hear from him at least once in my life!
No modern web browser controls all of the code, since it must execute arbitrary JavaScript - which can block and crash.

Everyone doing something doesn't make them right. But when all major instances of an application are implemented differently than you think is best, perhaps you don't understand the problem as well as you think you do. Chrome, I think, is the best browser architecture, and it looks like IE and Firefox will adapt something similar. I think they use separate processes to manage tabs instead of threads, but it's still parallel.
I'm somewhat young, somewhat naive, and somewhat slow on the uptake. You're basically saying that Zynga is being used?
Steve may not be able to approve it (assuming he uses Safari).

When I go there, I get the following errors in the Safari console:

XHR finished loading: "http://www.dearstevejobs.com/service/ajax/AjaxAPI.php.
Unsafe JavaScript attempt to access frame with URL http://www.dearstevejobs.com/en from frame with URL http://www.facebook.com/extern/login_status.php?api_key=0124.... Domains, protocols and ports must match.
b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/z3C61/hash/7a40oc19.js:22XHR finished loading: "http://www.facebook.com/ajax/wallkit_get.php.
At least on Windows they are both multi-threaded. If you look in Task Manager then firefox.exe will have multiple threads (32 on my machine) and each chrome.exe process will have multiple threads (anywhere between 3 and 21 on the 15 tabs I have open).
Microsoft admits code theft for Chinese blog Juku
"The intrusion of politics into government ..." Yeah, I know they're not exactly the same thing, but that statement still made me laugh.
In what world are you living in that less competition is good?
Great! I like how safari looks but Apple's refusal to allow third party extensions has always soured me on the program and meant I never really seriously adopted it over FF. I just cannot live without ABP.

Chrome's a great browser and with the extensions has become the best browser on Windows IMO. Mac doesn't support extensions yet but they are presumably coming, and when they do it'll be the best browser on Mac, too, unless FF pulls something out of their hat ..
SVT.
Hope this will be one of those rules that is never really going to be implemented/enforced, but if some websites are really already unavailable, that doesn't bode well...
A paragraph or so down, he says "That is, there are functions of x and functions of y that are correlated." So, for your example, could we consider Abs value as a function?
Don't worry - San Francisco has a solution to all their problems, DC's limitless pot of stimulus gold:

Standing among racks of freshly dry-cleaned clothes in the Bayview, Mayor Gavin Newsom today touted San Francisco's early grab at federal stimulus dollars which have put 1,200 unemployed city residents to work - including sprucing up dirty clothes at Laundry Locker.

But there are, um, a couple of wrinkles that Newsom wants to iron out. The program, part of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, provides $5 billion nationally to fully subsidize the hiring of unemployed workers. But they must have at least one child under age 18, leaving out many jobless and childless San Franciscans. And the money is due to run out in September 2010, meaning the newly hired could soon be back in the unemployment line.

Newsom said he's headed to Washington, D.C. next week to lobby House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for an extension of the money and to include people without children. He said he wants to see 2,500 or even more San Franciscans hired, and that the majority of California's $1.8 billion pot is still sitting waiting to be grabbed by cities since so few are participating.

"This is limitless. It's just a matter of who draws down the money fastest," Newsom said. "We discovered a pot of gold in the stimulus money."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/cityinsider/detail?entry...
I doubt it. A company the size of Microsoft keeps a lot of attorneys on salary, and others on retainer. If Plurk pursues a lawsuit, then the smart thing for Microsoft would be to simply drive Plurk out of business in the courtroom, and then either buy them for nickels on the dollar, or release the product anyway as Plurk disintegrates.

If Plurk is hoping for a Microsoft-funded exit, this is probably not the way to go about it.
Unfortunately that's not practical, it's third party software and at least the last time we checked there wasn't a better alternative with the same functionality.
Meanwhile Godaddy opens Alipay (most popular one in China, kinda like Paypal) for the convenience of the Chinese.
> I think it's clear that no Communist nation has ever succeeded in being the bastion of democratic, personal freedom that it was ever intended to be.

Nuh-uh, no, you can't give him this sort of pass. He introduced the concept of "class struggle" and "class warfare" that took over so much of modern labor/monetary/commerce/market vocabulary, and specifically said that the transition to socialism/communism will take proletariat violence. The man has inspired as much harm and destruction as any person in history.

And he's not even right - his labor theory of value is so completely flawed it's hard to know where to start debunking. He had it in mind that there was a "socially necessary abstract labor-time" of every action - which take a very limited view based on a very limited period in history. Take for instance, Louis Pasteur, who invented pasteurization. How much socially necessary abstract labor-time was that worth? Ten million units of necessary abstract labor-time? How much was creating GMail worth? How much abstract labor time is Picasso's best work worth, compared to Matisse?

Publius Syrius said back in Roman times, "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it." - and so far, that's the only model we've found that does a decent job of handling contributions without going to totalitarianism. When you start letting third parties dictate value to people who want to buy and sell, you throw the world off equilibrium, you get black markets and create a new class of crime.

I'd implore you to please, please, please stop seeing Marx as a misguided would-be hero. Almost every bad person in history thought of themself that way. Marx's works were both incorrect from an academic standpoint, very emotionally appealing to certain kinds of people, and generally fostered violence and hostility between groups of people that do the best when they work together to create the best world together. Marx was no friend of humanity, and should be remembered as someone who had bad and violent ideas that led to millions of people oppressed and killed as part of the "proletariat revolution to overthrow the bourgeois". Marx brought this kind of thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_rouge

Please, please get educated and stop whimsically giving him a nod. The man's philosophies have led to more misery than just about anyone else in history.
I didn't read through this yet -- I hyperskimmed -- but it brings to mind an experience with varying quality in digital media reproduction that has stuck with me.

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to evaluate a low end Philips reference CD player (I believe it was termed; reference, as in high quality reproduction, but not at the extreme end of that product category where the cost of all the marketing bullet points really adds up) against varying competing models. The Philips really stood out. Same disk, same amp and speakers. But the Philips was much better at reproducing "the edge" of notes, and the slight scrape of the bow, etc. that the competing players muddied into an undifferentiated, overall note.

Whatever the recording medium, the quality of the circuitry translating the recorded signal back to its acoustic reproduction makes a telling difference.

I think the $10K, 20 kilogram turntables and whatnot are overkill, but digital recordings can suffer in part because many of the players, while "digitally perfect" nonetheless do a crappy, cheap job of generating the final analog output.

Unfortunately, there's so much hype and marketing, for me at least it is frustrating to determine how much is enough while avoiding the extremes of audiophile addiction. And then there is also the variation in perception of individual listeners.

And trying to evaluate a piece of equipment for yourself in most commercial retail settings is nigh impossible. Too noisy, and it also matters what amp and speakers the signal's feeding into -- not just in some overall measure of quality, but also with regard to the fitting together of the individual components.

Anyway, it's not just digital vs. analog. It's also how the signal's being handled.
I think Plurk should have stayed quiet for a few days and let Microsoft negotiate with them privately. Clearly one doesn't want to just let Microsoft off the hook, but there's a decent potential that Microsoft would be willing to pay private, non-disclosed reparations or even license the technology or buy the firm. Once the initial problem is fixed (and that has happened), one can quiet down a little and not create further hostility in the hopes that a good, mutually-beneficial outcome will happen.

Microsoft didn't fight and didn't try to use its market position once they found out what happened and, while that doesn't abdicate one of responsibility, it does mean that you can deal with them a bit more in good faith. Granted, that's easy for me to say - it wasn't my work that was ripped off and so I'm not as emotionally involved as the Plurk people who are probably (rightfully so) angry.
Ask and Ye Shall Receive
Noo... fork() gives you a separate address space, whereas threads would require that you share an address space with the parent.

vfork() and clone() can almost give you what you want, but Linux threading is using something different (NPTL) nowadays.
DIY Home Sleep Research With Cameras, Accelerometers, EEGs
Good for them! A great app, at the right time, on the ideal platform - exactly the kind of thing that should be a raging success. And now this awesome developer's got a whole bunch of money, who knows what great things he's got the resources to do ..
Oh absolutely. Miami's corruption is of the old school type with groups battling it out over who gets a piece of cake.

Actually there is some race factions in SF as well, mainly with the african american and chinese groups who seem to compete a bit for lucrative positions.

Ironically the lack of real difference of opinion in SF is what enhanced the failure of the city. An opposition no matter how corrupt has the incentive to call out the corruption of the other party. If all are on the same side there is no such incentive.
>> "No modern web browser controls all of the code, since it must execute arbitrary JavaScript - which can block and crash."

That's a silly argument. The following can't block or crash.

while(true) {
jsRuntime.executeInstruction();
// Other stuff.
}
FTC Sues Intel for Abuse of Monopoly Power
Summary:
Tenacity is important.
Others agree.
I know some tenacious people.
Yay for me.
I don't know anyone at Plurk, but from here it looks like a bit of posturing to see if they can elicit some sort of swift settlement from MSFT. They got a fast response from MSFT on the original claim. Maybe they want to see if momentum is on their side. Either way, an appology was made and the code was removed. IMO they should focus on moving forward and not waste time and energy chasing rainbows.
An English Octopus or an African Octopus?
This is a very misleading article. The restriction is only on .CN domain names and is in line with plenty of other domain types around the world, for example .co.jp.

Here's the original source:

http://business.globaltimes.cn/china-economy/2009-12/491515....
Software Development – Old School v. New School
Execute a single JavaScript instruction at a time? I doubt the performance of that would be acceptable. But if you're aware of any browsers doing that, I'd like to know.
s/even if/when/
Alexis Ohanian: How to make a splash in social media (video)
I don't know much about how SF is doing, but I find that highly doubtful.

San Francisco seems to be complaining about waste and bureaucracy. Those aren't healthy things.

But Detroit has been suffering massive crime, drug violence, depopulation, failing city services, depression-level unemployment, steadily falling revenue, skyrocketing illiteracy, public safety problems presented by the rotting infrastructure, plummeting graduation and has been flirting with bankruptcy for years.

Most of those problems were recognized problems decades ago, and have only worsened.
Another example where powers-that-have been are trying to stop inevitable future with restrictions and fines. The way it's done is noteworthy also: instead of targeting pornography on personal sites in particular they have banned any one person from having a personal site at all* . This is akin to chasing flies with a baseball bat.

*At lest independent sites that are not created through some service, a la Blogger, and which it would be labor-intense for the government to police one by one.

Edit: err, now I know how to italicize in HN
He's confused about how a credit bureau might know about his daughter in law?

Perhaps he co-signed on a card with his son. Now his SSN is linked to his son's. Maybe the son filed a change of address card when he moved out. Now the son gets married. Now his daughter-in-law is linked to him.

All of the major credit bureaus in the US have some kind of identity-verification spinoff that mines all the credit/mortgage/marriage/divorce/postal-address-change data out there, makes connections, and uses it for these kinds of questions. This is how you get those "Which one of these streets did you live on?" questions when resetting your password with a bank. I doubt they're mining Facebook for this kind of info.

I've found that the US Postal Service "Change of Address" card is the source of more privacy problems than any other source. They'll pimp that data out to anyone and everyone.
"The commission also alleges that Intel secretly redesigned key software, known as a compiler, that deliberately stunted the performance of competitors' CPU chips."

The EU finally drops its antitrust suit against Microsoft, but the FTC seems to want to waste more time and money.
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The aim is to remedy Microsoft's abuse

While I agree that this is, in fact, what's happening, I submit that this is the wrong approach.

The UE folks believe that they've identified a market failure in the web browser market, ostensibly resulting from MS's unique position as OS supplier.

Is the better approach to addressing this failure to (A) punish the entity that is benefiting; or (B) try to change the dynamic to alleviate the market failure?

Punishing Microsoft doesn't ensure that the market will continue to operate properly in the future.

It seems to me that if the goal is to fix a market failure, then the solution is to ensure that OS suppliers can't force browsers onto people. They would want to be sure that everyone gets to make a choice, regardless of the browser they currently use. In fact, I'd think that this should apply regardless of OS as well. That is, Linux distributions that bundle Firefox should be required to include a browser-chooser as well, so those Linux users can also make a choice.
Assuming U.S. law (or its equivalent) will apply here, the law is clear that Plurk can sue and recover damages for this misconduct, even with Microsoft's rapid action to deal with the issue. Even assuming the unlikely scenario that the contractor did it entirely without Microsoft's knowledge, Microsoft and the contractor would be jointly (and severally) liable, and Microsoft in turn would be able to cross-sue the contractor to get indemnification under the contract between them.

That said, there is such a thing as acting with class even when lawsuit remedies are available and the actions of the parties will undoubtedly be evaluated at that level as well.

This is the type of situation where a company like Microsoft would be highly unlikely to want to defend a lawsuit of this type if it had other reasonable choices and perhaps what is motivating Plurk is the temptation posed by the prospect of being able to push the legal issue in hopes of extracting some settlement money. Undoubtedly, in the background, some stiff demand letter has already been sent asking for some payout in the context of confidential settlement discussions. I actually don't blame Plurk for this - it is a reasonable thing to do in this context, even if their primary desire is not to drag this thing through the courts. How this will look to people is another issue, however, and such a strategy could easily backfire given that Microsoft has tried to deal with this swiftly and decisively and in a way that certainly appears reasonable given what happened.
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.

They're specifically talking about preserving things we like about its current state: things we are perfectly capable of utterly destroying; places we've demonstrated our ability to render inhospitable.

So you don't really refute the argument by pointing out that the Earth will endure, or that some degenerate mutant strain of humanity might be able to scratch a pre-civilization existence out of radioactive slag.
Over the last few days I have done my first deployment of an Apache/MySQL/Passenger/Rails system and it was a surprisingly painless process. The guys at Phusion have really done some great work with both Passenger and REE.
And also, consider that even if at the moment China has no significant web activities outside its borders, the internet population in China is bigger than the one in the US or Europe, and every move/law that leads to less freedom in the access to the network could damage a potential market.
Glad to be of service. Hmm... and since you seem to know your way around them, do you take orders?

(Another startup born on HN! ;-)
A company is responsible for its contractors and bears
legal liability in most jurisdictions for their actions.

I wasn't aware of this, and it doesn't make much sense to me. Can you point me to some example statutes?