skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The stem cell research ban was technically on embryonic stem cell research only (and from what I remember lines that already existed were 'exempt'), but that does not change the fact that researchers using any stemcells at all found their chances of getting funding drastically reduced.

There are afaik three sources of stem cells, adult ones, embryonic ones and stem cells taken from umbilical cord tissue.

The ban itself stemmed from a very bad mixing up of religion and politics.
OLPC slimline tablet PC
David and Goliath II: i4i Wins (Again) over Microsoft
eclipse default because I don't particularly care
Rumors. Speculation.
Well, they certainly provided a much needed stimulus to the local wall building industry.
Let me quote from the article here...

"Given all that could go wrong in this economy, they were doing well. Their business had just crossed cash flow breakeven, had grown past 50 employees, just raised a substantive follow-on round of financing and had recently hired a Chief Financial Officer. It was an impressive performance."

The relevant pieces of information here are:
1. (Marginally) Cash flow positive: Even though the company may still be underwater, they are not adding to debt anymore. For a young company this is a nice place to be. Nobody expects you to be generating lots of money, but you are moving in the right direction and there is no immediate need to cut cost in order to survive.
2. Grown past 50 employees. Again, this mean they are in the right track. The fact that they are adding headcount means they are not stagnating, but growing. Besides, if they are cash flow positive, it is sustainable growth, not the crazy pump and dump trick of the dot com era.
3. Just raised a substantive follow-on round. This means they were not in immediate financial distress. They have a healthy operation and investors give them more money to keep making the right strategic decisions. No need to go cannibal here.

The political declaration stuff is my personal interpretation of the incident. It says nowhere that the CFO implied or suggested that they should put those techies on their place. It is my personal belief that some key people may have feel that way, and that it was a blunder to risking that mis-communication to happen in the first place.

Organizational culture is a delicate thing to mess with. And if you analyze the profile of people in the startup community (risk tolerant, idealism, and yes... hubris), it is a no-brainer that your local ubergeek is not going to take it like the average cube drone would.
Hi,

Small tech company founder, still the guy who hires and manages the engineers. Just some background.

I used to think that Google's desire for graduate degrees was sort of elitist and not necessary. I've changed my mind, and here's why.

I work in a woodshop as a way to relax and have found an analogy for the education thing. I've come to believe that a well educated mind is sort of like a well organized shop; a self educated mind is like a messy shop.

There is no judgement intended, both neat and messy shops can produce excellent work, just as a self-educated person can produce just as good work as a formally educated person.

The difference is speed. At the risk of stretching the analogy, in a neat shop you can find tools quickly and make things quickly. A formally educated person uses the education to quickly make choices about how to solve problems whereas a self-educated person has to rederive a lot of those choices.

I've personally witnessed this in engineers that have worked for me and I'm moving towards wanting formally educated people. If you want to do well in the tech industry, I'd strongly urge you to get a formal education and cover the basics. If you have a CS degree and pointers bother you, you got a crappy degree. Ditto for basic language design, compiler design, OS design.

Just my two cents and you should probably ignore it because while I have a masters in CS, I also have a messy shop :)
Love is God
There are really not very many people losing their homes.

However, many people are choosing not to exercise out-of-the-money home purchase options. But this is more a problem for banks than for people, since the banks expected most of those options to be exercised.

The language "people losing their homes" is simply a propaganda term designed to encourage politicians to take money from renters and owners and give it to option (aka mortgage) holders.
What do you have in mind when you say "computer science theoretician" ? Do you mean someone who publishes in the ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing or do you mean something else?
With all due respect, I think this is a bunch of jibber jabber. Sure, I can agree that all blame cannot be solely rested on the students. However, this bit:

"21st century students just aren’t going to do that"

That's just hogwash. It is nothing more than an appeal to vanity. Furthermore, students should take some of the blame. When the issue is about asking for too many extensions, playing video games rather than studying, etc I'm sorry but it is just delusional to think that Billy gets high instead of writing an essay simply because he has not been inspired by Michele Pfeifer.

Those movies that the author here cites never really show the actual work the fictional students have to do. Maybe the author should have watched "Stand and Deliver." The idea that students have been "mentally maxed out" by all their little electronic toys is also completely laughable.

The "look at me now; I'm so successful because I write Ruby on Rails code and I left school because I was disenfranchised" is sort of juvenile, to just be honest.In most colleges, there is a great education to be had if you pursue it. In college, you should take some responsibility for your own education.
There are some great comments in that LWN article, and I encourage everyone here to read them.

For reference, here are a couple of relevant links to some similar package and configuration managers:

vesta: http://www.vestasys.org

store: http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~arnej/store/storedoc.html
The concept is simple (though i'm sure the implementation is wildly complex)

Those sound like famous last words :)
Enjoy a healthier lifestyle with more fruits and vegetables
The spammer was a coincidence. He posted all over.
Sometimes it IS certainly required, but many times there are extraneous switches tacked on, which follow standard HTML patterns.

Take this URL for example:
http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/12/1223Shockley-Bard...

The question mark is the demarcation point between the story URL and the "garbage". While some cases may exist, I don't recall recently seeing a URL of the format:
http://mydomain.com/foo/storyFetcherScript?storyID=TheOneAbo...

Even so, one possibility would be to compare URL's up to the first question mark, or other obvious demarcation characters, and if a dupe is found ask the submitter to verify their submission is unique. Like most other things at HN, I think that for the time being an honor system yes/no question is all that would really be needed to weed out 95% of the dupe submissions.
...and indie developers that can't compete with large app studios that dominate the top 25 (EA, Activision, Gameloft, etc.). Some indie titles make it to the top but only those ready for mass consumption. It'd be nice to see some variety.

Edit: I agree that there would be a fair amount of filth showing up there, but tons of filth hits the regular appstore already.
Up until the news broke, I didn't even know this functionality existed for Word. Doesn't InfoPath have the same functionality too, or is it slightly different? I see no mention of InfoPath in any of the articles.
I have to wonder, is there some minimum value add for a site to be considered a startup?

I mean, great, but this is just another Stack Exchange instance .. how long before that software is considered as basically a standard tool like WordPress? If it isn't already? Do we talk about some lightly-customised Wordpress blog "failing to launch"? Hell at least that might have original content.

Making available an instance of server software you didn't write, with some minimal twist, != startup, IMO.
The Mathematics Behind Stopping a Car
Mobile version of Firefox on Nokia N900
Some NYC technies started tracking their own usage
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Aj719DQEaqPNdG1ob2ZD...

I'd like to see that trend line updated.

Also, I'd argue that the number of tweets matters less than unique visitors. Why should twitter be different than other publishing channels where there are far more readers than publishers? Even something democratized like blogging works like that.

Also, rather than discussing if this is kinda bad or not so bad, perhaps the better question is, 'Why?'

Why is the site not growing as fast as it once was?
It should also help supplement the spam filtering. Taking a quick look at /noobstories, a bunch of these would die solely from this. Which should in turn make the /newest page somewhat better, which can only be a good thing.
It's amazing that you can understand so much of OOP and yet understand so little of OOP.

OOP is a way of structuring code and data to allow large numbers of people to be able to create and maintain solutions. The focus is on the structuring. Language features are not relevant in as much as they support or don't support that structuring.

If you don't understand what your goal is -- if you think languages are just various collections of features -- you won't know if you got there or not. The game was up with this author when he defined OOP by doing a simple intersection of feature-sets. Ugh.
Is this just an anti-microsoft rant?

I don't see your justification. OEMs update the software that they ship all of the time. Microsoft products (i.e. Office, Windows, etc...) are typically the things consumers want, not bonzai buddy or whatever other spyware they put on the machines. I don't see what the latter have to do with the former.

Pre-loading wanted software is a nice convenience, if you don't want that then order the machine with FreeDOS as your OS instead (I know at a minimum that Dell offers this).
For code and console I love pixel fonts, so:
Terminal 6px (included with all Windows)
Envy Code A 7px
http://damieng.com/creative/typography/envy-code-a

I can't stand blurry fonts for code (especially since, at small sizes, text looks a blotch of blur). So, if I want small fonts (such as 6pixels by 8pixels) it better be pixel crystal clear hand tweaked. A font can do anti-aliasing or LCD based sub-pixeling, but that is more towards book reading / open office, than coding.
already explained this, early users complained about our original look, so we kept throwing designs at them, until they settled on this one. We went through like 5 redesigns, and this is what they ended up liking, pretty much universally.

Maybe it's the fact that we are going for a non-techie audience, but they seem to like the "crappy" design. But yeah I agree with you, it's pretty bad, which is why we'll be redoing it a few months down the road.

Pretty much, just wanted to get it over with and launch, since if you keep perfecting your site, you'll never think it's good enough to launch. I'd rather launch and have a 20% churn rate because of a bad design than spend an extra 3 months in development. Waiting to make it perfect.

You can always change your design later, but you'll never get those 3 months back.

P.S. You think SO looks good?
This service is useful to track your stats
http://tweetstats.com/graphs/ikirigin

[i switch accounts from @tipjoy, so these should really be added together: http://tweetstats.com/graphs/tipjoy ]
it seems like smiling is one

Smiling is perhaps a bad example, since it contracts a muscle near the sensors. When someone is smiling, it's probably hard to detect anything else.
The influx of people interesting in fighting Scientology had little negative effect on the morals/behavior of the people hanging out on /b/. I think you're right that the community changed, but not for the worse in terms that non-/b/tards would recognize.

Actual /b/tards didn't like all the unsocialized newcomers arriving and parroting memes that they didn't understand ad nauseam. They also didn't like the moral crusading aspect of the newcomers. Neither of these behaviors is a negative change in the community from an outsider's perspective, but it was from an insider's perspective.

The Scientology campaign didn't change the (sometimes satirical) celebration of racism, porn, fascism, child porn, misogyny, and so on--all that pre-existed the influx of new people interested in fighting Scientology. If anything, the new people watered down the sociopathic culture of /b/.
Easily findable in many places, quite possibly not literally true as to its provenance, but still enlightening:

http://www.funny2.com/old.htm
Why songs get stuck in our heads
Quoth Alan Kay, taken from the article: OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them.

That's, in order, message passing, encapsulation and polymorphism. I think his primary goal was message passing and late binding; encapsulation is how to implement that. That doesn't mean encapsulation is more important.
Ioke P released
In the dark ages most people couldn't get credit at all, and you didn't get a second chance if you died from the plague.

Concerns about bad credit ratings are largely overblown. There are plenty of people who have filed bankruptcy and then within 2-3 years had brought their credit ratings back up enough to obtain mortgage loans at reasonable rates. Lenders need to lend in order to stay in business, and since so many consumers have had credit problems recently you can expect to see lending standards for credit scores loosened in the coming years.
The Geoengineering Gambit
I live in Chihuahua Mexico. Definitely the amount of rain has increased in the last 2 or 3 years here. This is great news of the local economy. I figure it is like a lottery. If you already have a bad weather, it is more like for it to become better. On the global scale we may loose, but in the local scale some regions will be better of and some will be worse.
Banks aren't foreclosing because then they need to write-off the losses. I know a guy who's been living in a house he stopped making payments on for 1.5 years. No sign they're going to kick him out anytime soon.
10 Social Media Tips Under 140 Characters
Freakonomics: Black-Market Breast Milk
All that means is that they were able to ensure that the vote got scheduled. By my count 41 Democrats nonetheless voted for it (after looking it up I see that it was 95-0, with 1 Republican and 4 Democrats not voting).

It's also worth noting that with a 60 vote (or votes with) Democratic majority cap and trade is getting exactly nowhere in the current Senate.
Maybe a good way to identify duplicates could be a comparison of word frequencies (or frequencies of 3 word sentences or something like that)? Perhaps that way one could eliminate the "layout" and identify the core text.

I would like to create a library for that, if I could find the time :-/ Maybe then sites like HN would have an easier time to include the functionality.

Not sure if counting frequencies would be enough to identify the duplicates that have been filtered through translation. Interesting stuff.
Inside The $1 Billion Business Of Christmas Trees
I was talking about whatever was linked with the post. yes, I think it was the one you mention.

When a user clicks a button to categorise an entry, the whole page reloads - this could be handled by ajax. And yeah the scans could and probably should be bigger.

Not that I want to sound like a jerk because I think you did a phenomenal job. Just suggestions for next time. But seriously you and the NYT are on the cutting edge of this shit and much respect is due.
I wholeheartedly agree with you on the grading aspect. Even in classes where professors or TAs effectively grade and comment the code, I think most students have a tendency to see the grade they received and ignore the professor's feedback. The program worked, they got the grade, onto the next assignment.

I had two classes this past quarter taught by a professor with a very different grading system. He used a program he wrote called the "code critic" to have us submit exercises into his grading queue. Only working code could be submitted and we could only have three assignments in the queue at once. He would then use his program to return the code with criticism added on any lines not to his liking and mark the assignment as "Not done," "Almost done," or "Done." If he didn't mark it done, we had to fix the code in response to criticism. These criticisms were very picky, even sometimes dealing with the naming of functions and variables.

At the end of the quarter we were graded on how many assignments we were completed, and how much we grew as programmers. If our assignments at the end of the quarter did not require any resubmissions, this was reflected in our grade.

I think this method was an extremely effective alternative to traditional grading. I learned more about programming and style in both C++ and Lisp in these two classes than I have in any other classes to date.
I forsee the day where JSON-related technologies become as complex as XML-related ones, and people start moving to the next simple thing.
The NYT, Huff Post, and others do LOTS of experiments with title and click through rate measurements. It is very likely that a submitted page will have a different title later.
Repost -

NEI has generously provided permission to share the drawings free-of-charge at a resolution consistent with print-out at roughly 11"x17", which is very usable "for educational purposes," e.g., in the classroom. NEI retains the rights to higher resolution images, and marketing thereof.

With this in mind I collected hard copies of the charts for 100+ reactors and have had them digitized. The University of New Mexico set up the website, and will be repository for the 40+ hard-copy charts I had in my personal collection.

The reactor diagrams are copyright Nuclear Engineering International magazine. High-resolution scans, and poster prints, are available for sale. For more information or a quotation contact wdal at neimagazine dot com.

BTW -- I, too, wish someone had done such drawings for Chernobyl, the Russian VVER, and a few other unique designs. Some of the reactor vendors have e-pictures of their current offerings.
More on the super secret Nexus One
I use Proggy Clean (Slashed Zero) 12pt from:
http://www.proggyfonts.com/
Hats off to another _road_ based company name :)
Aaron Koblin, of the flight patterns visualization fame (http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/index.html) has a few art projects based on MTurk. Bicycle Built for Two Thousand was a project where each worker was asked to sing a tiny part of a song, without knowing what the song was, then the complete song was reconstructed: http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com/
Emacs23 XFT default. They're very pretty as it is imho.
The geography of recession
Brilliant marketing, giving themselves five model revs before they hit the Nexus 6.

Oh, and keyboardless phones aren't "Droid killers".
Menu Marketing Tricks
I agree... Who here has a use for this and/or JSONSchema (which I didn't know existed until today)? Javascript is a dynamic language, so why add this type of stuff onto it to make it more friendly to static languages.

If you're storing things so complicated that it needs to be validated in JSON format, perhaps you should choose a different serialization format.
Actually, I have heard it argued that burying plastic is the best thing we can do for the environment. Our current environmental problems are caused in part by us digging up carbon and releasing it into the air. Putting some of it back in the ground removes it from circulation.

The article closes with a comment about the kid fixing the carbon emissions problem -- which is ironic, considering that his invention makes the problem somewhat worse.
iPhone app Gunman lets you have a shootout w/ friends via augmented reality
A peek behind the scenes at Hotmail
android's integration with Google Apps makes it attractive to businesses already using Google Apps.
Go try and find a randomized intervention where more vegetables improved health. Many have tried, all have failed.
This completely does not match my experience. When I first started programming, and even after a year or two in the industry, I used to write zero comments. Or maybe a line or two of comments every few thousands lines of code. Then, I started adding comments in places I thought required explanation and above function declarations. After I joined Google I was taught by smart people to add a comment every ten lines of code or so explaining what the next ten lines of code do.

I still don't write much comments when doing hobby programming at home (after all, the whole point of hobby is to indulge yourself), but there is no slightest doubt in my mind that abundance of comments is a good thing. I've never really seen code I considered overcommented. I see code which is severely undercommented all the time.
That's not the solution. It's not just developers having the problem - it's also consumers. As a consumer, after I buy the commercial titles and I'm done with them, how do I find other good apps?

Instead of whining about what Apple should do, developers can just create their own discovery mechanisms that help the users discover more apps they would like.
AES does something completely different though. AES wants to make an insignificant change to the input result in a disproportionate change in the output.

Any kind of scoring system where scoring ended up being essentially random like this would be useless. And any scoring system that's useful and open will tell you just how to increase your score.
Completely agree. I moved from an American university to a Dutch one. Grades in the Netherlands are out of 10 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_the_Netherl...); Nobody bothers to take more than a 6, most end up with a 5.5.

I get weird looks when I tell classmates I'm aiming for a 9 or a 10 (almost equivalent to an A or A+ in US universities)
Encapsulation generally refers to private data, but you could define classes that are just collections of methods, and you can define interfaces that are just collections of method signatures. An object which claims to support an interface can accept any of the messages defined by that interface, and another object can pass messages based on that.

A javascript example: in javascript, functions are objects, and can have methods.

function MyFunction(...) { ... };
MyFunction.method1 = function(...) {...};
MyFunction.method2 = function(...) {...};
MyFunction.method3 = function(...) {...};

Now, you can pass the messages 'method1', 'method2', or 'method3' to MyFunction. Message passing without encapsulation (as it's usually thought of.)

Of course, MyFunction has some default properties too, and you can define more:

MyFunction.data1 = ...;
MyFunction.data2 = ...;

That gives you traditional encapsulation, especially if you use somewhat more complex syntax to make the data private instead of public.
I can't wait to have a textual format that will describe Orderly
you are comparing a mp3 player with a tiny computer, would make much more sense to compare it to a large computer