skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> a few years ago when it started using DRM

Are you referring to the DRM it also dropped at a later stage after they managed to convince the content suppliers ;)
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A tale of two stacks
Also, developers can have an impeccable track record, you could have checked all references they gave you and you can like them a lot personally (in my case, my employees are my best friends), but still how can you be sure you can trust them?

How can you be sure they are not looking for a quick way to be financially "successful" and maybe consider using your IP as a short path to achieve what they want?
Schmidt could have said

I want to live in a world where people have to make dry, quantified, lawyer-pleasing statements all the time just to make sure there is no speculation a lot less than I want to live in a world where Google may hold data about me which the US government can demand. :)
Panasonic to buy 50.2 pct stake in Sanyo for $4.6B
Dedicated Hacker News search engine: http://searchyc.com/ works much better than google for this site.
Building software that matters, part two
There is an interesting analogy to India too, which had a sclerotic, state-dominated economic system for 40+ years. India had far less of a dispora than China, but far more than Russia. And India's economic reforms have been half-hearted, and results have been in between China and Russia.
Cool ... now only if they fixed those tail-calls ...
Well I can say this: Europeans are doing pretty good, without
their own Silicon Valleys, because the produce (contrary to USA):
1. Cars - Germany, Sweden, France, Italy;
2. Food you can actually eat (german/belgian chocolate - compare to Hershey's);
3. Sun panels/sun energy: (Germany)
4. Toys (Lego almost completely produced in Europe);
...and so on.
Hi-tech research is often run by governments. Generally
better (egalitarian/well payed) job environments
decrease incentive to be entrepreneurial.
It would usually have to be even more specific than that.

i.e. they would probably have to specify what they were looking for as well as some specifics of why they think X user (IP or google username) relates to Y person in their investigation.

Were forgetting, I think, there is already wide provisions for law enforcement to get your email password.. no one ever gets het up about that in the same way but most of the big ISP's can be forced, with warrants, to hand over access to accounts :)
> I don't own any e-reader or plan to buy one anytime soon, My mac book does a good job...

That is basically what I thought (if you replace macbook with iPhone) for the past few years, up until I got a Kindle last week and then fell in love with it. While there is a lot of room for innovation still, I don't see Apple releasing an e-ink based device for a long, long, long time if ever. Apple could release a tablet in the next year, but presumably it will have a display like the iPhone's, and battery life to match. It'll probably be general purpose: good for almost everything, useful for people that need a color display, but it won't really match a Kindle or Nook specifically for reading text and not having to charge for a week at a time.

But of course, Amazon has an iPhone app already. They're working on desktop apps now. Presumably an Apple tablet will run 3rd party apps, in which case there will also be a Kindle app for the Apple tablet. Amazon sells books regardless in this situation, which is a win-win. The same goes to Barnes & Noble too. So will the next generation Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, or Apple tablet truly drive hardware innovation between all the competitors? Not so sure...(although I personally would like to see the keyboard on the Kindle replaced with a touchscreen).
What the hell? Why the fuck are you linking to The Sun?!? As a source of information there is no source that is less reputable.
> because we have been programmed by thousands or millions of years of evolution to need it.

Privacy seems a modern phenomena.

Your really going to have to cite studies to be honest...

> we are stuck in a situation where the vast majority of human beings DO need privacy and it is wrong to take it away from them.

Look at Facebook. There are lots of fairly complete options for privacy there. And yet most people don't even bother locking up their settings.

Given a choice, it seems, they aren't too worried.
Oh please, this is so obviously a laser beam (the blue light) projecting the patterns on the low cloud layer.
The response I'm accustomed to seeing, when people are introduced to these such things, is normally closer to horror.

What was your first reaction to seeing the Mandelbrot? Seeing this "geek world" induces a similar, though less severe, dread for me.
Social Media Statistics (infographic)
Social Media has invaded every aspect of your life. Almost everyone you have ever met has used it some way in their everyday life. Take a look at these stats.
Geeky may be a redundant word there - How many world-creating math equations are there that aren't geeky?
How to Obesity – Causes and Treatment Of Obesity | eHow.com
You're asking about UI designers and most people have provided links to Designers - two different beasts in my view.

I think stackoverflow if one of the best examples of brilliant UI I've seen recently - certainly one of the best I've seen on the web - but it probably wouldn't make my top list for beautiful design.
Selecting the Right Water Tanks
ws.onclose = function() { // websocket is closed. };

someone reformatted the code without checking...
Can I do Isometric graphics, and will it outperform Canvas?
Cap My iPhone? Try This Instead, AT&T
Creating a Custom RSS Feed with PHP and MySQL
http://twitter.com/seaofclouds is the man you're looking for. I worked with him at CNET for a while, great guy.
As much as I like Haskell and appreciate how it expands a programmer's view, it's one of the last languages I'd describe as "feeling smooth like python" ;)

I think Haskell is very good for robust, complex software, but not something you can pick up quickly like Python.
And it looks like the Post Office has already clarified that the PAF data (the stuff that lets you go quickly from a postcode to a customer's address) will remain closed:

http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/blog/2009/12/postcodes-to-be-f...
A rocket? Doesn't sound plausible. If it is in fact a rocket then someone should be able to replicate the spiral look over a deserted area in the middle of the US. I mean, just look at the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkx7myyAk4s

Did that look like a rocket's exhaust to you?

I'd want to see the thoughts of a fireworks expert in addition to a meterologist. This should be possible to recreate with fireworks.

EDIT: This NAVTEX record, ostensibly published prior to the event, makes the rocket story more plausible.

http://www.frisnit.com/cgi-bin/navtex/view.cgi?id=1159919...

ZCZC FA79
031230 UTC DEC 09
COASTAL WARNING ARKHANGELSK 94
SOUTHERN PART WHITE SEA
1.ROCKET LAUNCHING 2300 07 DEC TO 0600 08 DEC
09 DC 0200 TO 0900 10 DEC 0100 TO 0900
NAVIGATION PROHIBITED IN AREA
65-12.6N 036-37.0E 65-37.2N 036-26.0E
66-12.3N 037-19.0E 66-04.0N 037-47.0E
66-03.0N 038-38.0E 66-06.5N 038-55.0E
65-11.0N 037-28.0E 65-12.1N 036-49.5E
THEN COASTAL LINE 65-12.2N 036-47.6E
2. CANCEL THIS MESSAGE 101000 DEC=
NNNN
IBM brought Cognos last year (while SAP acquired Business Objects) so, that is just a promotion.
It's been a very long time ago since I first saw a mandelbrot but it must've been something like "cool / whatever" and only after learning more about it I started to appreciate it.

Seeing the Mandelbulb pages a couple of months ago through HN I was really in awe and also found it very inspiring since it pertains to some of my pet projects.

Is it possible for you to explain why it induces you with dread? I really can't understand that.
Until they start mining cows for oil, eating meat tends to promote killing creatures, using plastic doesn't.
I's say it's the kind of unconventional beauty you also see in Gaudi's architecture.
Carmageddon thought me to pay good attention whenever cars are nearby. I really started to pay better attention than I already did when crossing the roads.

Such an awesome game. I lived in a student's house with some of my friends and a LAN at the time this game came out. The hours we spent on the Sumo level. Brilliant!
Clearleft http://clearleft.com

Stuff they've done:

http://silverbackapp.com/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

http://www.tourdust.com/

http://www.scifi.co.uk/

http://clearleft.com/made/wwf/

http://clearleft.com/made/ratemyarea/
Isn't this basically de-conditioning, AKA Extinction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_(psychology) - what's new about this?
how is haskell the obvious choice? The parent poster talks about clojure & python -- 2 dynamically typed languages. It's going to be a world of difference moving to a statically typed one.
Sexy overlaps in CSS (signalong)
How about Ryan Singer at 37signals? Not only is he a great, functional designer but I think he's an awesome teacher, too.

http://37signals.com/papers/introtopatterns//index
A minor addition to #2, in which he says that you should only have one question:

If you communicate with someone who only bothers to skim your email (tech support and sales people rarely impress here), or with people with limited reading comprehension for any other reason:

State that one question three times throughout the email, each formulated in a different way but with the exact same meaning.
This 3D creation is impressive, but the original Mandelbrot set has far deeper impact on me [not parent poster]. Since I was a kid I've been fascinated by these forms; by the infinite intricacy, the simultaneous multilevel self-similarity -- it just sucks you in. It's beautiful but also at times I can feel it to be sickening and horrifying, like a poison. I can't help feeling there is some kind of essential life force in such constructions, in the spaces between order and randomness. It also reminds me of the ideas I've read behind William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell".
I never thought I'd feel compelled to write a poem on HN:

There is this incredibly slow machine,
analyzing everything relevant in these passing things...
arms moving and seeing.
Seeing and slightly clutching some very few things with beings.
Every instant, a thing goes dimmer,
until slowly few remain.
These are the harvest of this incredibly slow machine.

I see the Mandelbrot as a surface on a much larger surface, and that surface on an even larger surface (and so on). It is an infinity that I cannot begin to comprehend, and at the end of it all... the best phrase I can think of to describe "the whole" is: an incredible slow machine.

The Madelbrot is a virtualization and a sterilization -- it's a glimpse of something much grander, and that grander thing, that I called the incredible slow machine, permeates into reality and appears to determine the outcome of everything. Its arms stretch and grasp every little detail of every universe and we can see the evidence of its existence in the ferns as well as the galaxies.

A hugeness that seems indifferent to our presence.

Is it possible that our universe is much like the Mandelbrot set? That an infinite number of slight variations and radical variations of universes exist?

From the very bottom, the numbers are calculated and fed back into the equation. The result is that we're an extension of a fractal finger. On an arm of the machine. An arm on an arm on an arm on an arm....

----

Addendum: I'm still not satisfied with my answer for you, but I'm sure you can at least sense the unease some might feel. I can actually go on all day about this, and I would have to if I wanted to make any sense. So I have to stop myself because such energy needs to go into my writing.

These days I'm pretty immune to existential dread. There was a long stretch of my life where I could not stop poking at this stuff. And, frankly, I think I've emerged slightly insane. It's part of the reason I stopped studying math; it got too much for me, and I've shifted my focus onto writing.

Heh, but if you're a fan of GEB you know that you cant completely escape. That the strangeness still exists in writing.
Managing Online Projects in 5 Easy Steps
Especially the part where they say it all happens in ~30 years from now. Eh?
Value over replacement player
Released GWT 2.0 with Speed Tracer
Whenever I hear of the 5 Whys method, the first thing that I think of is...

Why 5? (no pun intended considering this thread is about wifi... oh dear).

But seriously, why 5 specifically? What if you need 6 to get to the root of the problem?
Simon Tatham: Distributed version control is usenet
Not sure what you mean by "those" things. In LES case the reason was the one I stated for a simple reason: LES did not have gimbaled engines and had to rely on aerodynamics to be stable. Launch Abort System for the new Orion spacecraft will have attitude control motor and thus no need for ballast. See http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/2008001... for more. I will quote just a bit:

Another key difference from the Apollo launch escape system is with regard to control. Apollo utilized a passive system that relied on ~1,000 lbm of ballast to keep the abort vehicle passively stable during the escape rocket burn<…>
Absolutely right. It would be much better if it sounded a lot more "personal" as opposed to some salesman telling us what's cool.
Aaron Sittig - http://www.facebook.com
Don't forget Rackspace too.
The problem is that the way we humans are living right now is NOT fit to adapt to significant changes in climate, and changing that would be even harder than curtailing our emissions. And it does not matter that there have historically been much greater differences in climate - we're living right now.

In the long run (centuries, millenia), yes, finding a way of living that can adapt to climate changes would be better. But that would require a significant smaller population density to have safety margins.
The ESPN piece by Rob Neyer, linked at the bottom, details some context:
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/hotstove06/columns/story?colum...

I find it interesting that new metrics still pop up for something over a century old ...
Hal Varian has been making the same point for a while now: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/technology/06stats.html?_r...
> Not sure what you mean by "those" things.

Model rockets, sorry.
You could read the article and find out - it's pretty clear.

Even though they'd all responded without fear at the end of the previous day's extinction training, the majority of the participants - those who'd had the 6-hour reminder before extinction, and those who'd had no reminder - showed a renewed fear response (as betrayed by their sweatiness), just as eventually tends to happen after extinction therapy in real life

But excitingly, this was not so for the participants who'd had the ten-minute reminder before the previous day's extinction trials! They were ice calm, unmoved by the coloured square.
The Arrogant VC: A View From the Trenches
Pywebsite.sqlitepickle. sqlite VS pickle
Not only that but it is demeaning.
Yes, he mentions a few Russians emigrated, which is an incredible understatement. And he does not reconcile this fact with his theory which assumes exactly the opposite.

Regarding your other argument you are giving the writer too much credit and putting words in his mouth. He does not mention comparative GDP.
The issue I'd have is whether this would carry over to real life fears. A square being associated with an electric shock simply seems like a learned response, not necessarily an actual fear - in this instances one knows the shock is not harmful.

The example of doing a presentation for friends is surely missing the mark - one can be fine giving the same presentation oto one group and scared silly giving it to another. How would this work for something less controllable like fear of heights, how does one expose oneself to a height that will not illicit a fear response?
Find free music with a python script
Yes. Find any of a number of old-school serial terminals, attach to the serial port on a PC running linux, voila!

http://vt100.net/
So the app needs to do a quick check and see if you have an addressbook file or at least allow you to upload one.
We've built a business partly around automatic analytics - our approach is to keep the headcount low and the value high.

I wonder if the demand for analysts is a symptom of business waking up to the possibilities, while automated analytics is not mature.
'Copenhagen' Hits #1 Most Googled Topic
I wonder if this is a good move by MOL Global. Most of the users on friendster do comes from South East Asia, but i see a lot of them converts to Facebook nowadays. Where does the revenue comes from anyway ? I doubt they can compete with other social media giants.
New Facebook Privacy and You
The type of risk that you propose to take has a fundamental issue for startups. As a startup, you can't do anything to make a platform itself ultra-popular. Say, you develop a new hip location-based service for Palm Web OS, but Palm Web OS never passes a few million users. You can do nada about it.

But what is worse, during that time, you don't learn much about your own service, because your biggest problem is to get any users for it. When you then decide to port it to more successful platforms, you still don't know what works, what gets people excited about your service etc.

In a contrast, on an ultra-popular platform, if your service goes unrecognized, you can do something about it and you can learn from your efforts. You try out different marketing techniques, maybe they don't work, but all the time you are learning and getting feedback of your effors.
Hi Paul, I am definitely not trying to turn HN into a PR Newswire! We've been cranking out new AWS features like crazy of late and the posting frequency has increased accordingly.

I was a long time lurker before I started to post, and did so only because my stories would show up here sooner or later anyway.

HN readers seem to find what I post useful, based on the number of comments they post and the number of times they up-vote it.

I find the comment threads on my posts to be of tremendous value and I always send them along to the appropriate team for their edification.
Amazon's design has undergone countless testing for each new UI aspect that gets added and there are case studies written on it. Some may find it confusing but it's more often than not there because it's increasing sales.
An Economy of One's Own (brief review of Tyler Cowen's new book)
The Unravelling of the Real 3D Mandelbrot Fractal
His point #2 is only have 3 sentences in TOTAL, and make the last one the one question you have for them.

Your comment is by no means a minor addition to #2, but more of a refutation.
imho not so great article, its still best to build all the things you use yourself. Third party scripts are a pain and take about the same time to check for errors, bugs and faults then writing some from scratch. I dont mean that you need to re-invent the wheel, but you can make a wheel that drives even better on your road..... instead of using a drupal to make your website....
The change in typing is not really much of a jump when you realise that Haskell's type inference means you don't have to declare too many type signatures up front. A lot of type signatures in Haskell code are not technically necessary and are usual there for documentation.

For example, this is perfectly valid Haskell code and doesn't mention a single type:

factorial n = if n > 0 then n * factorial (n-1) else 1

The bigger conceptual shift will be from Python's mainly procedural style to Haskell's (or Clojure's) very strong emphasis on a functional style.
The project is not just source code. I remember there even was article about that.
Microformats: Boon or Bane?
It's a rule of thumb: you typically need >= 5 whys to get down to a reasonably useful response.

From the article, you could stop at pretty much any point in the whole 'why does our video suck' chain:

"One problem in Austin was that we couldn't switch video fast enough. Why? Because we were using a cheap switch purchased at an office superstore."

At that point you could've said "Ok, let's not buy crappy switches in future", but you would have missed the better solution (don't do things half-assed at the last minute)
> Who will watch the watchers?

It would certainly be possible to have a situation where everybody is able to watch everybody else. Would that also be evil? Or is it just the asymmetry of access to information that is evil in your view?
The reason social media is so difficult for most organizations
Is it really impossible to create a law that makes it illegal to show unprotected sex in a film? I can't see any way in which such a law would require any particular employment regime. Sounds like posturing/obstruction to me.
At Twitter we're working on using Cassandra to store tweets
Medical Breakthroughs of 2009
Do you have figures for the number of surgeons who cut themselves during a procedure?
IMHO Top UI design http://thesixtyone.com, anyone knows the designer?
I blame the mail clients. Most don't have a "reply to list" feature, so respondents end up "group reply"ing in order to make sure the mailing list features in the list of To: addresses.

It's lazy, and I hate it, but it gets the job done for them.
10 Biggest Job Interview Blunders ?
It's a fractal post; it repeats itself endlessly.
We're not talking about silicon here - we're talking about software. There's no doubt that the complexity of silicon has increased by leaps and bounds in the decades since the 60s - but what about the code we write to drive them?

The complexity of code - not the compiled binary - the text you punch into the machine and what it semantically represents, has not really gotten that much more complicated over the years. We've introduced several new paradigms since the COBOL mainframes: object orientation, functional, to name a couple. It'd be hard to argue, though, that it follows Moore's Law. Not even close.

> They just cannot fail utterly without people being pissed.

This is an important point: people who expect flawless behaviour from software because other fields of engineering demonstrate it, IMHO, are misguided. Aircraft engineers work incredibly slowly because the consequences of fucking up is perhaps thousands of deaths, and billions in liabilities. Car engineers are the same on a lesser scale. There's no need to expect flawless, 100% perfect function when you don't need flawless, 100% perfect function.

We could spend 20 years developing the perfect toaster that will never, ever burn your toast. Or we can spend 2 months on something that will get it right 97% of the time, and just move on with our lives.
Also in case you are doing something that spreads virally, not supporting IE6 can change the viral loop from increasing to decreasing (you could lose 5% of invites/feed messages/emails/whatever depending on app).
I wholeheartedly second the Murakami book recommendation. It's really nice how he talks about being a hardworking writer in a very personal and unglamorous manner. The analogy he draws with running is also very thoughtful.
JSON versus XML: Your Choice Matters More Than You Think
Beware Canadian Otolaryngologists Bearing Coins