skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know this fairy tale sounds good - coke invented santa and it's all a marketing ploy - but it's untrue.

http://www.christmascarnivals.com/father-christmas/father-ch...

"The figure of Father Christmas as a jolly and friendly old man, with a small stature but a big heart, emerged through the writings and paintings of the artists during the 1800s. Clement Moore was the first to describe our Father Christmas as the chubby old man, with rosy cheeks, wearing a furry overcoat and hat in his poem, which inspired Robert Weir to paint the first portrait of Santa Claus in 1837. He made Santa wear a short suit and a stocking hat as he puffs at his long clay pipe. Finally it was in 1863, that we get to see Santa more as a real person through the pictures drawn by Thomas Nast. This is the final Father Christmas figure that we now commonly see being used for Christmas accessories and ornaments."

And a picture from 1800s shows him as the 'cheery fat guy in the red suit'.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic-art/522799/67600/M...

So no, when I show my kids pictures of Santa Claus, it's absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Coke.
Having hands is a key attribute in successful basketball players.
Tata Sumo Grande MK II India: Price, Variants, Features & Photos
Cheques to be phased out in 2018 in the UK
8 Characters That Could Make Amazon.com Millions
Kindly elaborate why San Francisco has "backwards values". I bet you think it's an accident it's a tech innovation hub.
Nice guys. Congrats! Go Blue!
If someone tips off the BSA that you have a bunch of Office installs without licenses, and when the investigators come you say "Oh sorry, we'll uninstall the extra ones.". Is that "case closed"?
Parsing is deriving semantic (I.e. Higher meta level) meaning from basic data. Just because there is a more technical and focused definition of the term does not mean this definition is more correct (though admittedly it is more important in a technical forum). Consider such terms as "rational", "cache" and "cookie".
Why exactly did that get downvoted?

Is the No Electronic Theft Act that criminalized some non-commercial re-distribution not part of the public record?

Is the RIAAs attempt to get the justice department pursue file-sharers under the No Electronic Theft Act not a published fact?

Did the "Pirate Act" not seek to criminalize a broader group of non-commercial infringement?

Did the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007 not shift the burden of policing copyright from the copyright holder to colleges and universities under threat of withholding federal financial assistance for non-compliance?

Do the leaked ACTA documents not show yet-another attempted expansion for treating file-sharing as a criminal act?

Is the RIAAs legal strategy against peer-to-peer users not commonly known?

It's not like I'm spinning conspiracy theories here. There are stacks of information in the public record about the content industry's push to remove the distinctions between commercial and non-commercial and civil and criminal infringement.
This article seems confusing, they are using the browser specific implementations of CSS3 and passing it off as the standard naming (eg. box-shadow vs -webkit-box-shadow) without saying anything about it.
You are my hero, lionhearted. I could not agree with you more. My mother and the remnants of her family fled communist Russia in 1970. And when I say "fled" I really mean ran as fast and as far as they could. Marx preached violent struggle against those that had a different world view from his own. He should be demonized everywhere.
You would have terrible cache performance, since you would constantly bounce back and forth between the JavaScript VM and other browser code.
I didn't know jekyll had a server. If it does than it's not exactly static blogging anymore.
As far as i remember, the .it domain was also limited to businesses until 1999, what we see in China is something going in the opposite direction, sadly.
Rogue antivirus lurks behind Google Doodle searches
Perhaps the BSA could give MS the same deal as everyone else: shut them down for 4 days to inspect their systems for any evidence of pirated software, or fine them something like 2% of revenues.
Incarnate - Find and reuse your avatar
Another HN discussion about this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=998259
"It's OK to lose control."

+1 for that.
I love websockets, and have been waiting for them for a long time, however I am severely disappointed that there is no way to elevate permissions from the same origin "security" model, this is a huge limitation on the way towards purely client side javascript applications.

html5 introduced crossdomain requests for xhr because it already proved to restrictive, and flash introduced crossdomain.xml.

I wish w3c stopped pretending that in order to stop people from doing nasty stuff, you have to stop everyone else from doing anything (also looking at you, clipboard)
It seems the latest trend in application approval; Direct or Indirect ( in this case) letter to S. Jobs.

I wonder when he will fed up and change the whole process.
Several members of my wife's family were nabbed during China's rightist movement. They were tricked by Mao's urging for constructive criticism. When they offered opinions that they meant to be helpful, they were imprisoned, some for as long as twenty years.

Elsewhere on HN people have been criticized for what's been called a knee-jerk reaction to socialist ideas. But the history of socialism makes that reaction every bit as legitimate as the reaction to touching a hot stove.
Fotopedia and AWS
Blog spam that just links to this article: http://www.bryaneisenberg.com/2009/12/8-characters-that-coul...

I actually found it very confusing blog spam because I had no idea what they were talking about (they discuss the article as if the reader has alrady read it) and the link to the actual article comes at the end of a disembodied out of context quote from it.
So an individual is also prohibited from registering a .co.jp? It seams reasonable to me to restrict .gov.x or .edu.x, but .co.x?
not saying much for their app, when their site doesn't even seem to work properly.
You're right, of course.

And yet Marx himself was not, himself, a despot or murderer. He was probably a pretty nice guy. Your description is therefore similarly incomplete. He can be both things. History is complicated, and not well served by summary arguments.
This one is bittersweet, as we had the idea, the staff, and the time and money to implement it, but chose not to, because we substantially underestimated the size of the market.

Where by 'we' I mean 'I'. It's completely my fault that RedLaser was allowed to win this market. I killed the project.

It's nice to see that we were at least somewhat correct on the general goodness of the concept, though.

Congrats, and nice work, guys.
I'm aware of that, i just didn't expect them to care about domain registrations when they can persecute the individual site owners. But i guess that that way there will be less work for them to do.
You can find the Amazon CloudFront prices here: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/

For United States Edge Locations it is $0.17 per outbound GB for the first 10TB. So using between 0MB and 1024MB will cost you $0.17. Use 1025-2048MB and you will be charged $0.34.
Honestly I hope Chrome is the new IE. If it chips away at Safari or Firefox marketshare, that's no win for anyone- those are already damn good browsers.

Personally, thus far, I've yet to see anything in Chrome that would make me jump ship (and I've been trying it for a while). I can do serious development with Firefox and I can have minimalist browsing with Safari.
What happened if they refused to pay?
I also wonder what would have happened if you showed it as a tax deductible in further sign of protest.
I can't see how JSR argument is applicable here.

Java suffers from JSR approval hell just because it tries to stadardize everything. This is the requirement to perform well in the enterprise world, along with the programmers certification mechanism and inclusion of the top industry players in the standards approval.

If your language is just a hackers' toy (Clojure and Scala are exactly that) then why do you care about JSRs in the first place? The JSRs don't mention JVM usually, only the libraries or Java language extensions.
That is an approach to linear algebra that I dislike.

"Here is a magic formula for multiplying matrices. Here is what you can do with it. Here are some examples." Without any clue WHY you would want to!

The approach I like is to discuss what a linear function is, show how you can represent linear functions by matrices (given two finite dimensional vector spaces and bases for those vector spaces, there is a 1 to 1 correspondence between linear functions and matrices), then show how function composition turns into matrix multiplication. The common argument against this approach is that it demands too much from the students. However I disagree. To me it motivates the subject, results in fewer magic formulas, and it makes it easier later for people to see how to apply it in practice.

For instance take the associative law of matrix multiplication. It is straightforward that:

F o (G o H) (x) = F((G o H)(x)) = F(G(H(x)))
(F o G) o H (x) = (F o G) (H(x)) = F(G(H(x)))

So function composition is associative. Since matrix multiplication is a representation of function composition, it must be associative as well.

Now try to write out a direct proof that matrix multiplication is associative. It will be much longer, much harder, and at the end you'll have no clue how someone could have ever thought up this definition or noticed that THIS definition satisfied the associative law.
I don't know about .co.jp, but individuals can definitely register .co.uk domains. I know because I own one.
I find articles like this annoyingly premature. Sure, we're seeing the birth of a whole new way of communicating with the backend, which will only server to improve web apps in a positive manner.

At the same time though, support for WebSockets in major browsers is woefully little, with only Chrome currently supporting it in an active "release," and (I believe) support available in the Firefox trunk for a later version. This still doesn't account for Safari or Internet Explorer, the latter being the biggest impediment to adoption.

Additionally, I certainly don't think this is the beginning of the end for "AJAX" — not in the least. AJAX still has very strong grounds in pulling down data from the server that doesn't require some sort of long-running communication.

Yes, let's get excited, but a little bit of a sanity check should be done if you're ready to call AJAX "dead" (or "dying").
Year 2009 @ Google
Indexing Everything - just about everything.

[google goggles]
remember its less about the idea and the nitty gritty execution :)

sorry all the same.
I'd agree if you didn't use the word "entirely." I grew up in the south/west half of San Francisco, which is still, remarkably enough, populated largely by families who struggle, with eyes wide open, in the same way that most middle-class families do (their incomes would appear to be high, but the cost of living means that they're not all that different from someone making a third of that salary in a less expensive city).

I have two young children here, and I've started to watch the beginning of the exodus (there are many families with small children in SF, even the trendy parts... they generally start to leave when the first, and especially the second, hit school age. Space, schools, all that stuff).

Many of the people who stay in SF have extended family here. There are also the people who love it, but my wife and I have a new theory - the people who express unqualified love for SF will probably leave. Its the ones who mix it a grim recognition that, for whatever reason, they'll never get to check out of this place - those are the ones who will still be here in 30 years. Hell, my parents have been complaining about it since I was born.

You know, welcome to the hotel san francisco, if not hotel california.
They already offered WiFi in India at numerous locations. But all of it was paid.

I hope they free it up there also.
Right. Is there any way to turn it into an interesting discussion? For example, is tenacity something that can be learned?

Here's an interesting obvservation I've had about tenacity. My company has inspired a small niche in the conference industry. There is one other company that launched at the same time as us and six more that are copycats. One thing I've noticed is that the copycats are full of bluster but light on tenacity. I think having the original idea gives you extra backbone because you are tied to the change you want to see in the world. Copycats just see a business opportunity and start to doubt themselves when they hit rough patches.
Put biologically: tenacity is permissive for success.

More pertinently, has anyone ever been both a failure and labeled as tenacious? Tenacity seems like one of those words that we use to describe successful people, making the linkage almost embedded within the word and, therefore, uninteresting.
For some reason you get no security warning when installing chrome on vista or windows 7. I have done this in several windows 7 machines, no popups no nothing, just accept terms and click install and chrome is installed. Can anyone else verify this? I am using dev builds, if that makes any difference.
I disagree with your hyperbole. I live in Montrose (very 'in the loop') and generally vote Republican. Much of my family lives in Spring (a suburb outside the loop) and vote Democrat/Green.

Houston is generally a more conservative city than SF. Overall, I feel that Houston is generally well run.
Up to until a few years ago .fi domains could only be registered by a company or other organization matching the name of the domain.

I sort of liked that system. There were almost no vanity/"spam" domains in the TLD.
IT may or may not be in Plurk's best interests to litigate. Not my call. But I believe it is in everyone's best interests for Microsoft to have negative consequences.

The reason I advance is that we don't want large companies taking the following line of thought: "Instead of buying a smaller competitor or replicating their functionality from scratch in a clean room, let's just use an arms-length contractor to rip them off directly. If we get caught, we'll just apologise and settle quietly..."

I believe it is in everyone's best interests that companies be strongly discouraged from this kind of theft, to the point where they will be insanely scrupulous about code developed both in house and at arm's length.

The contrition after the fact certainly should limit further negative consequences, but does nothing to erase the initial crime.
> 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.

Totalitarian states have all kinds of justifications for being. Most often, it was nationalism and/or religion. Non religious ideologies like communism are a phenomenon of modern times. But note that the ideologies are largely incidental. It's just a psychological jamming mechanism to fool people into letting the totalitarian structure get into place.
Doug readily admits that JSLint is opinionated. For example, it considers omitting a curly brace on a single line conditional to be an error. It considers fall through switch statements an error. It even considers differing opinions on whitespace to be an error.

It's absolutely fine to have an automated tool to enforce style guidelines. But code which disagrees with that tool isn't necessarily bad. We have published style guidelines for our project, and they differ from Doug's. Those projects may very well have their own published guidelines.

Doug has never said that code which fails JSLint is obviously retarded, or written by fools. He's never publicly insulted individuals because he didn't agree with their design decisions, or written mailing list posts saying someone has "never written a competent
script in his life."

So, what's your point?
Why would you assume that US law will apply in a situation where a Chinese company lifts code from a Canadian company while contracting for a multinational company headquartered in the US but operating in China?
So Plurk should roll over and forget anything happened
just because Microsoft said they are very sorry?

That's exactly it.

You see such benevolence from big corporations in the
same situation almost never. Why should Plurk do any
differently?

What other people do is irrelevant. I suppose it could be something if you were talking about a patent troll, but you're talking about Microsoft.

Microsoft focuses on building software that corners markets. That's a legitimate mode of operation for a company.

MS did the right thing in their response to this issue. Plurk has suffered no damage, and indeed has won press. Plurk should now also do the right thing and get on with trying to build software, and avoid the martydom track.

And lastly, this is big business, not preschool - the
excuse "but a contractor did it, it's not my fault"
doesn't work.

But that's not what they said. They accepted responsibility for it.

It's also not in their Plurk's interest to go legal as it will be a distraction from building software.
Code is code. If you can explain that a bit more I'd be interested.

Obviously you wouldn't update the UI every time you execute a js instruction. That would be insane. I just put 1 js instruction in the loop to have the minimum unit, in case anything else needs to be updated very quickly at the same time - eg some animation etc
That is very cool. Rich asking directly for support is straight forward, and I like it. This reminds me of Zed's post on why he switched to using the AGPL license - also straight forward.

I have never really gotten into Clojure, but I did take Halloway's book "Programming Clojure" to the dentist this morning and I may give the language another look.
I am thinking of switching my purely Jekyll based blog to using Octopress which is a blogging framework based on Jekyll and has these features :

* A nice, easy to configure theme that focuses on readability.

* Built in support for Twitter, Delicious, Disqus Comments, Google Analytics, and Custom Search.

* Rake tasks that make development fast, and deploying easy.

Github repo : http://github.com/imathis/octopress
Ireland did something similar for a while. They would refuse registrations that were 'too general' (eg cars.co.ie) on the grounds that they should be reserved for people who were capable of handling them ie established businesses. There was no lobbying to do this, it was just the natural thing to do, in their eyes.

I think this Chinese effort is equally misguided, but I assume some of it has to do with trying to cut off domain tasters and spammers at the knees. Consider that China doesn't have anything like the same level of consumer protection/awareness as Western countries; I don't think it's necessarily an attack on entrepreneurs or free speech.
Nobody seems to mention this but you can have HTML5 WebSockets on legacy browsers today via Orbited, http://orbited.org/.
You seem to think that the only choice parents have is to either lie about Santa Claus or tell the complete and unyielding truth about everything to their children. It's really not that black and white.

Of course we all have to choose which lies and selective truths to tell other people, and ourselves for that matter, but the important question is which ones are you personally are comfortable with. Some of don't want to subject our children to that particular lie, and it doesn't mean we have to lighten up or watch more feel-good movies. It just means we have different parenting styles.
That's a good point. I think it highlights that we judge people by the number of successes, not the ratio of successes. Even tenacious people who are not very good tend to keep going long enough to have a few successes under their belt. I'm thinking specifically of a difficult person that I worked with who was terrible at their job but went on to get a company launched and a book published. They weren't the greatest in either case, but it's a good example of how tenacity changes the game. There's a big difference between being described as a Failed X vs. Published Author.
The only reason I switched from Firefox because its a memory hog, the longer you use it the slower it gets and eventually crashes - If it was once in a while I could live with that but it happens too frequently. Also installing extensions on Firefox can effect the browser performance, so the more extensions you use more often your browser will crash and slower it will get. Every time there is a extension upgrade you need to go through 2-3 steps and restart browser to install them.

With Chrome, I have 23 extensions installed at the moment, it performs as good as having no extension installed. I can't even imagine having 23 extensions on Firefox. All the extensions updates are done on the back ground, install it and forget about it. I had some browser crashes on the early chrome builds but since the last 8 months I didnt have a single browser crash and I am using dev channel.

IMO chrome is head over heels better than Firefox (this coming from a former Firefox fan boy) and you need to use it more than 5 minutes to really appreciate it.
Yes. I'm kicking myself for halting the execution, because I made order of magnitude errors in my projections.

If I'd simply had the idea (not the idea plus all resources required for successful execution), there'd be no twinge.
Lovejingles.com - viral jingles, an instant online success
OK, heaters it is I guess. I grew up in a wet climate and when we got snow it was too heavy to stick to anything but the ground. D'oh, for assuming snow was snow.
but they won't stop being a market; this law only makes it harder for Chinese people to create new web companies, which will make it easier for other countries to dominate the market.
How to get acquired - the Go Test It Story
The bigger question is how you decide which vertical to go after, and if it is a big enough opportunity.

Ideally, you want to address the biggest market possible, but you can't do that and have passionate early adopters at the same time. No having your cake and eating it too. Picking the right vertical and sticking to it in the beginning requires a fair bit of effort.
It's funny because I had a really refreshing experience with Pharo lately. A part of the workspace threw an exception and I was presented with the option to debug it. Hitting debug brings up a debugger with the full stack available and the source of the error. Within a few minutes I was able to track down the error, fix it and have the fix go live immediately. Compare this to what it would take to debug and fix an error in, say, Eclipse. The difficulty of checking out the Eclipse source, dealing with potentially confusing and convoluted source code, wrangling with a labyrinthine ant or Maven build process etc. makes it not worth your while to fix the problem.

Whatever the pros and cons of the image based system may be the immediacy and transparency of it is really enjoyable. It's a shame that the idea has been pretty much abandoned by all but a small contingent of developers.
Yep, that was among the first things that occurred to me when I read his reply; nobody in the former USSR, most certainly not Central Asia, let alone Turkmenistan, earnestly describes their government's spending as "wise."

But on the off-chance that the guy is an actual Turkmen in Turkmenistan, I figured it would be impolite to take up the issue here.
Theory: As the internet becomes a more developed medium of communication, word of mouth will approach being the only way of marketing a product. Quality will be the only way to deserve word of mouth.