skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked in banking IT for 4 years, and yes, the systems are awfully messy there.

However, I think it isn't fair to solely blame the banks for it. If there weren't mountains of regulations to comply with all over the place, the systems would be a lot simpler, clearer, and more transparent. The first place to start, to make banking IT more transparent, would be simplifying and aligning national and international regulations. Make one set of regulations for the whole world, and make it clear and simple.

Of course, that might not be a realistic aim. First of all, it would make the international banking system even more vulnerable to a single loophole in laws. Secondly, it probably wouldn't be possible to do this in a way that follows new developments in financial products closely enough. Thirdly, the simplification itself would result not in all the current systems being decommissioned (that might happen in 10 or 20 years at the earliest), but in all the current systems becoming legacy but still active systems while a whole new spate of systems is built.

Maybe the current compromise is the one that works best, despite its flaws.
Is this just visits directly to twitter.com? or does it reflect visits via twitter's api?
Rocket launch - Navtex warning here:

http://www.frisnit.com/cgi-bin/navtex/view.cgi?id=1159919...
I'm in Norway and not freaked out either, but I'm mildly entertained by the news coverage:

- The TV2 news' only comment from the locals, paraphrased as "What the fuck was that?" ("Ka i hælvete va det?")

- UFOologists claiming that "this defies physics as we know it".

- Russian Military Official A claiming that this was definitely a missile, while Russian Political Official B claiming that this was definitely not a missile.
You are right ... they should improve Firefox to make it more popular. I'm using Chrome right now, and while I miss many features from Firefox ... OMFG, it's so nice to use a fast browser.

But, one of the things I always hated about Microsoft is the way they compete with others that use their ecosystem of platforms and tools ... Mozilla is formed of ex-Netscape people and they remember quite well what that kind of competition can do.

Netscape was a good browser, and indeed they waited 3 years before they released 6.0 ... but god dammit, how can you compete with a browser that's bundled with everyone's operating system, and for free too.

When you have a parter that helps you bring in more revenue (like Mozilla) you try not to screw-up that relationship. If other competing browsers or Web/Web-enabled applications appear in the future, what will be their incentive to use Google's services ... if Google has a history of competing directly with you sooner or later?

It's the same thing over and over again ... groundhog day?
It could also be paid work, being paid for having a particular opinion is great work if you can get it.
Ah. Thank you. That... was rather foolish of me.
If memory serves me, Skeet works for Google--perhaps SO karma is his 20% project?
thanks, but i am not from India, and planning to incorporate US company anyways
This guy seriously used to be a lawyer?

Jack Thompson used to be a lawyer, too. Having the training guarantees neither intellect nor sanity.
Your last two paragraphs don't look so innocent to me.
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I think the problem is TC may have provided resources such as office space. At which point verbal contracts can become binding, which is why emails back and forth which support the verbal contract would be important. So, the real question becomes did TC provide such services and can they prove what the verbal contract was?
This event probably explains why he is not a lawyer anymore.
What I don't get is why would Bing be better at privacy. I could understand if he recommended one of the new search engines (e.g. D. D. Go) with better privacy policies and less tracking cookies.
He had a partnership with Fusion Garage

Doesn't sound like he did, actually.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=978295
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Diverting precious resources to assign someone to read and respond to 500 twitter feeds seems like the worst thing a startup could do. And it's a bad sign, of no product and all marketing.

It's probably just a sign of marketing, saying nothing one way or another about your product.
> Firefox revolutionized the "tabbed browsing" concept,
> ... Chrome kinda just stole all the great things about
> Firefox (things that have taken years to develop)

:s/Firefox/Opera
Wow ... in bubblemark I get ~60 FPS in Flash, ~90 FPSs in Flash (with cacheAsBitmap) and ~160 FPSs in DHTML (using Chrome). In Firefox 3.0.14 I'm getting 60 FPSs in DHTML, while the speed of Flash is the same.

Chrome's V8 engine is awesome. I never realized it.
As More Asian Developers Build for Facebook, Regional Usage Patterns Change
"By suspending judgment, by confining oneself to phenomena or objects as they appear, and by asserting nothing definite as to how they really are, one can escape the perplexities of life and attain an imperturbable peace of mind."

It's the "confining oneself to phenomena or objects as they appear" where the break from philosophy occurs.
From the scientific standpoint you ignore the concept of life after death and other "perplexities of life" because it's not knowable. A true scientist builds models on what phenomena he sees and lays no clams one what he can't. Now you might question how that works with a paleontologist, but confining oneself to phenomena means a he thinks it's reasonable to look for patterns based on what your eyes tell you because they are not deceiving you even if they are not a window to deep truth. A paleontologist does not argue with the fact god could have created the world ten seconds ago, rather he argues "excluding unknowable things" this is the patterns I see. But, a philosopher sees no lines of inquiry outside of his purview and still attacks the unknowable questions such as life after death or the invisible god who does nothing.

PS: A better example from that time would be how a water clock behaves after you leave the room, if it displayed the correct time when you get back may have gotten up and danced about the room before you got back and hidden that from you but if that's the case it's an unknowable truth best ignored for visible phenomena.
Any IT enterprise, whether a part of a larger entity or itself the entity, must strike a balance between what its clients demand and what it must do. Mozilla feels that it needs to push Ogg Vorbis and Theora into the mainstream, despite the fact that its clients could not give a rat's ass about that. They failed to write it directly into the standard so now they are using their market position for the questionable tactic. However, what they are doing is still better than what Microsoft had done when they were in Mozilla's position.

Also, isn't FF3.5 faster now than it ever was, even as Firebird or Phoenix?

As far as forking FF: good luck. The code is a bit of a mess and there's a huge amount of it. What organization will want to take this on? I think you would have better chances at cloning WebKit+V8.
Edit/clarification: @InclinedPlane This does not mean I have a "disrespect" of Google; it's more that I'm siding with the benefits of "separation of control," just like any good accounting information systems analyst would do.

Check out this musing from Aza Raskin (http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/identity-in-the-browser-fire...):

Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company.
Your friends are too important to be owned by any one company.
A Solution

The browser is your personal and trusted agent to the web. It’s the only actor on the Internet stage which both knows everything you do on the web, and never has to let that data leave the privacy of your desktop. Your browser knows you (or, at least, should).

So if Google goes into the Operating System realm, too, people will have real reason to worry; it'll be even easier for it (Google) to erase those lines between public and private data. And it all starts in the browser. If Microsoft didn't illustrate this, I don't know what did.

Maybe Firefox should counter-move and develop its own search engine.
I presume it's direct visits. But looking at the charts for seesmic and tweetdeck, if we assume the cumulative unique visitors to these two services in the past year all downloaded and use the service at least once a month, it adds maybe 5-10m users at a guess.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/seesmic.com+tweetdeck.com/
"But fundamentally, Facebook has always articulated its value proposition as a more efficient way to share information in a trusted way. Personal data shared by Facebook users is what makes the News Feed--the core of Facebook’s information distribution system--so compelling to hundreds of millions of people. In cases in which the News Feed is filled with content from random gaming friends, it’s quite possible that Facebook could see much lower retention rates from its core features over time, instead more heavily relying on games to drive engagement and growth. If that were to indeed be the case on a wide scale, that could present some tensions for Facebook’s core product design--and business--over time."

The rapid rate of growth of Facebook use in Taiwan, if correctly estimated, is quite astounding. I have many relatives there, and they mostly use Facebook in the "western" way, as communication among real-life friends. (Most of my practice in reading Chinese online recently comes from reading relatives' Facebook status messages on Facebook.) But if there is a new pattern of gamers having random "friends," that would indeed change the Facebook experience for many users.
Shocking ... and yet not so shocking, when you consider the other marketing activities pharma companies get into.

Viagra is probably the best example for heavy marketing of a drug (at least in the US): TV ads, NASCAR sponsorship, etc.
Even if it doesn't track the API, the plateau still reflects the declining amount of users signing up (those have to visit front page).
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The iPhone moves from the quad to the classroom
Actually, there's a pretty good chance that a good Javascript engine will beat Silverlight (if it doesn't already).

The CLR is not that great. For instance, it can't optimize call-sites of virtual methods ... the JVM does it, Chrome's V8 probably does it too.

And yes, you can use IronPython and IronRuby ... but in case you haven't checked them out ... those are awfully slow (mildly put) compared to the reference or the JVM implementations (go figure).

If you can optimize the call-sites of virtual methods (a problem which isn't solved by static-typing), there's nothing inherent in static typing that guarantees faster code, except the handling of primitives ... numbers mostly, because if numbers are boxed, math is slow. But when you're building a VM from scratch (like what Google is doing with the V8) you can workaround that too (see Lua for a shiny example). Well ... there are other things too, like making classes/interfaces dynamic, but this isn't such a big problem).

What I find interesting about V8 ... even if its designed only for Javascript, the type-system itself is dynamic enough to make V8 a good target for other dynamic languages. And a modified application server could compile something like ...

<script language="ruby">
document.find('div.item').each do |item|
item.append("<i>hello world</i>");
end
</script>

... to Javascript without much trouble.

And V8 probably has certain constructs that are executed faster, so you could have a Java to Javascript compiler (like GWT) that uses those static-types that you love to generate faster Javascript.

And with HTML5, you can have your cake and eat it too (assuming Microsoft plays along, or Firefox/Safari/Opera/Chrome become much more popular ... not so hard to imagine given IExplorer's flaws, the army of developers preferring modern browsers and UE's antitrust policies).
And once again I ask, how are you supposed to make an informed decision about health issues when there's a good chance the CDC is lying about the data:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=894903
Can we let this be the straw that breaks the camel's back in terms of NEVER POSTING TechCrunch articles?
The exhibits to the filing only needs to contain enough to establish cause for the complaints made.

There's no reason to attach everything you've got to an initial complaint, and a lot of good reason to wait until you see how the other side responds. If they want to settle, for example, the less you've had to disclose in public, the easier it might be.

So while they very well may not have had a contract, this confirms no such thing.

(Disclosure: I know Mike)
Smart Phones, eBook Readers, and the Same Old, Same Old
Don’t draw diagrams of wrong practices
It seems that every retelling of the great NS/MS browser war seems to be laden with historical revisionism.

First, bundling the browser with the OS was absolutely the right thing to do, there's no greater indication of this than that every single modern operating system comes with a bundled web browser. MS may have been guilty of a lot of other anti-competitive activity, but decrying the bundling of the browser with the OS is just silly and naive.

Second, people seem to misremember just how crappy Netscape was then. Netscape 4.x was a travesty, it was buggy, slow, and crash-prone. IE 4 really was a better browser at the time (honest). People complain about the problems of supporting IE6 today but supporting NS 4 was so much worse. Not only was it far less standards compliant than IE at the time (if you could imagine it) but simple things like using an external style sheet could cause the browser to crash reliably. We know now that much of these quality problems were due to AOL mismanagement and a completely unnecessary full rewrite of the browser core, nevertheless, such was the state of browsers at the time.

Fortuitously, MS woke up to the importance of the web, started putting real effort into IE development, bundled the browser with the OS, and used a few other dirty tricks at just the right time when Netscape was floundering. IE dominated the market shortly thereafter, but such a dramatic change in marketshare was possible only because Netscape was not a serious competitor at the time. Netscape development continued to flounder until eventually they just gave up and decided, like SCO, to pursue their futures in court rather than in the marketplace. They gained a partial victory in court but it was utterly meaningless as they had lost to such an astronomical degree in the market they had no hope at that point. They dumped the mess of code they had on the open source community which spent several years working on it before it was even remotely worthwhile, and they ran, eventually completely killing their entire brand (an impressive achievement).

Now we see, though, that quality browsers like FF, Chrome (and to a lesser extent Safari and Opera) can and do compete against a bundled browser like IE. IE is still losing marketshare while FF, Chrome, and others continue to build it, over time this will add up and IE may yet be dethroned in the near future despite all the purported insurmountable advantages of OS bundling. I suspect that these trends will only accelerate, as the tech-leaders of today shun IE as their personal browser and IE is very far behind in supporting not only the web standards of today (e.g. css 2) but the quickly approaching standards of tomorrow (css 3/html 5/ws/etc.) When you can make nice looking boxes with rounded corners and drop shadows that work for FF, Chrome, and Safari users with 5 seconds of work by adding 2 lines to a css definition then the cost/benefit differential for supporting different browsers starts to change dramatically, with IE very much not on the winning end of that equation.
Okay, wait a minute, they "hacked a fix" to the halting problem and the big story here is the new notation used?
I smiled when he tried to defend being labeled as techcrunch being just a blog.

The sad truth is while techcrunch does "other things", its main operation is being a weblog, as posted in its about section:

"TechCrunch was founded on June 11, 2005, as a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies. In addition to covering new companies, we profile existing companies that are making an impact (commercial and/or cultural) on the new web space.

TechCrunch has now grown into a network of technology focused sites offering a wide range of content and new media."

In its literal sense Techcrunch is anything but tech blog, more precisely is covers a subset of technology, which is mainly the business aspect of "online technology". A tech blog in it's truest sense would be Arstechnica or Engadget or even gizmodo. TC's tech writing depth goes as far as reporting "twitter being down for 30secs". Their writers couldn't tell their ass from their mouth if you were to ask them a simple question as to point out the underlying technical similarities between safari and chrome.

As much as I love hacker news, I am often troubled by some of our fascination towards techcrunch as a source for tech news. TC is often posted 4-5 times a day here on the front page.

Utter rubbish example #1:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/11/google-code-freeze/

example #2:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/10/playboy-iphone/

example #3:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/10/facebook-is-totally-dow...

Those are in last 24 hours...
Chrome's TOS states that Google retains the right to uninstall any extensions in the clients' computers.
The twitter feed of the person being caricatured, in which he responds to the media attention:

http://twitter.com/SimonEdhouse

I also enjoyed this previous installment of 27bslash6.com

http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html
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I believe that is insurance fraud and is criminally prosecutable. The insurance company involved, if not the local district attorney,would be interested in hearing this story.
Salesforce to tie in to Twitter, Facebook
Considering that twitter experienced something like 500% growth in 2009, it's probably for the best.
Point 6:
Much of the key intellectual property, including the board and much of the mechanicals, is owned by Pegatron, the manufacturing arm of Asus.

Point 7:
The entire blueprint of the device was created by me.

I don't exactly understand what he means by this. He created the blue print but someone else owns the IP? And what exactly is a blue print, in this case? Just saying what the device needs to do/look? Isn't that too easy to do?
I'm glad it was posted. It allows me to keep up with news (and this crunchpad mess is certainly newsworthy) without having to ever visit techcrunch, and read informed, unbiasedopinion here rather than the moderated thread on TC.
there are also a large group of people who only use twitter on their iphones/blackberrys, its probably hard to say anything from stats from compete.
A more nuanced view is available on the Effect Measure blog (http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2009/12/the_tamiflu_do...).
Let's not forget Orly Taitz either.
Cloudant.com Refresh: CouchDB in the Cloud
They are probably referring to one of those "probabilistic" algorithms, something that will get a right answer with only some (possibly high) probability.

These kinds of algorithms can be used in various static analysis techniques to, say, approximate the value of a variable at a given point in the program (this reduces to the halting problem).
Keep in mind that Wired writes only slightly above normal tech journalist standards, which is to say, not very high. Combine a journalist who either has never been exposed to the halting problem or only vaguely remembers it from an algorithms course ten years ago, with an audience that, in general, hates and fears math but thinks gadgets like computers are magical and gee-whiz cool, and you get explanations like this. That is, not a map to reality.
Is Ego An Unseen Adversary?
It doesn't appear to be a general-case fix (which makes sense, because that would be impossible), but a method for certifying a subset of algorithms against halting problems in finite time (while giving no information for all other algorithms). We have a number of those.
Crockford would then reply with: (inside his js file)

window.location = "http://www.meatspin.com"; //that'll teach em
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Riddled with grammatical errors, this piece makes me chuckle.
Brace yourself for the real-time Web
Distributed Replicated Block Device (http://www.drbd.org/) can be used in conjunction with something like Linux HA (http://www.linux-ha.org/) to create a systematic high availability clustering approach for stateful (and transactional) applications such as a database. Lots of sites use it (e.g. github.com IIRC) and up until now, you've had to run a patched kernel to take advantage of it.
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The author seems to be totally clueless. In addition to seeming to claim that this guy invented subset and union notation ("U, or union, makes a new relation or set out of the relations or sets that are passed to it"), he/she completely misunderstands the halting problem.

"Computers occasionally hang on one line of code and fail to move on to the next, and no one can reliably predict when that will happen."

Seriously, Wired?
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"Computers occasionally hang on one line of code and fail to move on to the next"

Only true in Windows, and nothing to do with the halting problem...
Why can't Byron Cook make his own TeX package? I'm sure someone at Microsoft can help him with that...
Mr. Arrington and nice folks at TC seem to be removing any HN related comments for some reason. Strange.