skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A couple of years ago, the NYT site started doing stuff like this, and it was really getting in my way. I ran across a suggestion to use Adblock to block a specific Javascript file/inclusion from their site. Worked wonders.
I've spent a dozen years each in the Boston and Washington, D.C. areas, working at various startups in each, and I have lots of friends who've spent time in Silicon Valley. Here's what I've noticed:

In California non-competes are all but unenforceable (there are exceptions but they don't make much difference). It's hard to express just how much of a difference this makes (I've experienced the reverse in the above areas); go back to the beginning of the Silicon part when the Traitorous Eight left Shockley, followed by so many leaving Fairchild and e.g. founding Intel. I've read that the cross-fertilization between companies had a lot to do with the rapid developments in that field.

Silicon Valley is said to have a better attitude towards failure and the most savvy set of VCs on earth (OK, the latter is less important nowadays).

On the other hand, it's said to be rather ageist, not that that would be unique.

All in all, if I had been capable of dealing with the traffic I would have moved there, it sure looked and looks to be the best place for startups. The only place? Clearly not, and I suspect its advantages are somewhat less important nowadays. But I'm sure for a whole lot of fields it's still the place where a startup has the best chance of success.
my contract got terminated pretty much the moment I told my advisor I wanted to look for a position as assistant professor

That is outrageous. I've never heard a case of this happening, everyone I know has had supervisors that did their best to make their postdocs succeed. (It seems it's even in your self-interest as a faculty, since screwing up-and-coming people over isn't going to lead to many collaborative opportunities in the future.)

Some people are just 1st class assholes, I guess, and you find them in all disciplines.
I quote: "first mobile development environment hosted entirely in a browser, lowering the barrier for web developers to jump into mobile development."

How do you like that, web devs? Now that's a smashing way to begin a relationship!
Their founder has made some aggressive statements:

PageRank wrecked the web

Google is the cause of all of this.

and Google is going down with it.

(from http://www.skrenta.com/2007/12/pagerank_wrecked_the_web_3.ht...)

It'll be interesting to see whether or his product can back up that talk.
Well, I can't say much more really. Natural language semantics are tough, and I've clearly failed to communicate to you the idea that some phrases in other languages can't really be translated. They can sort-of be explained, sometimes, but even then I remain unconvinced that the true sense of the original can always be retained.

Personally, I've experienced it, and perhaps the fact that I can't explain it to you, who haven't experienced it, is more convincing than the attempts at explanations.
Crystallographer faked data
I'm a little confused by this comment. Electronic elements have been a mainstay of pop production for a quarter of a century.
I was reading over the first response, and the details of the (second, correct) n-private sum computation, and I noticed they're omitting a small but important detail. The protocol has you distribute various numbers, to various people, the sum of which is your salary, and claims that no one gains any information about your salary. If the numbers you distribute are all positive, then when you give someone the number X they gain the information that your salary is greater than X, so the claim is incorrect. This problem can be removed by allowing the numbers you distribute to be negative, because then you could distribute a number higher than your salary. The ability to distribute negative numbers is critical to the n-private property of the protocol.
The big winner was Sony, who profit from sales of either.
I do self-identify as a functional programmer, and when I have to write an OO solution to a problem, I often get it wrong. Less wrong when I'm working with a more common idiom (like a tree of widgets), more wrong when I'm striking out into the wild.

In my personal (non-work) work, I don't do objects at all. I just don't find that stateful solutions sit right with me.
I think the article misses a critical point; to make a universal remote, no copying of any copyrighted material takes place. To activate a garage door opener, no copying of any copyrighted material takes place. So... copyright law simply does not apply; no copying is happening!

(The reason that software EULAs are theoretically valid is because you are making a copy of the computer program when you click the icon; from disk into memory. Since this copying is theoretically illegal the EULA allows it if you agree to certain conditions. I say "theoretically" because the law does not say this anywhere, and no US federal court has ever upheld this. But when you use a remote control to activate your garage door, there is no copying happening, so this is completely irrelevant.)

So anyway, non-issue. You can say whatever you want in an instruction manual -- but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be laughed out of court in 30 seconds if you tried to enforce it. My advice is to not do businesses with slimy vendors like this, however.

It is also worth noting that anyone who has ever been near a math textbook can design an algorithm to make it impossible for burglars to execute replay attacks on the garage door. The manyfacturer is trying to solve a math problem with copyright law, which is dumb, plain and simple.
Entirely correct. The purpose of a phone screen is to rule out the cases where a candidate will come in, be scheduled for 6-8 hours of interviews and receive a "no" from every interviewer.

Recursive Fibonacci numbers are also a good way to work Memoization into the picture.
I don't know anything about the specifics of public advertising in the British newspaper market, but I will say that a substantial ad buy two days a week could be a significant subsidy to the paper as a whole. And how much you paid for the Saturday supplement is irrelevant: what matters is what the advertisers paid for that reprint.
So, the transition from future to past is a phase transition?
Where did I say I wanted every feature of Wordpress?

Where did I say I didn't mind writing my own platform?

In your rush to defend Wordpress you're assuming a bit too much.

"I've not seen one major security vulnerability that affected the current version"

But I'm not running the current version. In fact, I'm probably at least a few versions back, if not more.

"you won't find a better fit for your requirements"

My requirements are: something more secure than wordpress, something elegant, and less of a hassle to maintain.

You're telling me there's nothing like that out there? Pardon me if I'm a bit incredulous.
Is it correct to call this a "forking" server? When I hear "fork" I think multi-process, not multi-thread.
Of course, there are other specifics to the formal definition of Arrow's theorem. It's limited to situations where people express preference rankings -- as if on a ballot they fill out.

It's not meant to describe situations where their perfectly-weighted preferences can be measured -- as if by some mind-reading utility-function-extraction-and-summation process. (Can two persons' Utils be meaningfully compared or summed?)
Here is a download link from the bottom of the article pointing to the source paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.0808
I am surprized that more developers are not excited about webos. It frees developers from the App store hindrances. What's really needed is a web app to allow app developers to buy/sell/upgrade app licenses. (If the assumption is that not all app developers are interested in maintaining e-commerce infrastructure)

Also, from a users POV, I found the webos interface to be better than iphone or andriod. IMO, its more than an iterative step in interface design.
If you could magically extract everyone's scalar utility function, then it wouldn't be a voting system.

The requirement that you state is in the definition. It's just implicit in the word "voting" rather than explicitly stated. Arrow's Theorem does rely on an explicit definition of voting, which is that voters make discrete choices about their candidates subject to certain criteria. Some theorem (possibly part of Arrow's Theorem) says that it's not possible to eliminate the potential for strategic voting in a 3+ party system without negating other desirable qualities like those listed above.
"the culturally-significant-for-Brits Xmas Top 40"

You've just made an entire storyline from Love Actually make more sense to me.
Good point. So this is an indicator the the continuing decline of the old non-interactive media formats, like TV shows, and the rise of online social networks.
A friend of mine bought Emotiv SDK(the one with 16 electrodes) and mentioned that they are being extremely protective/restrictive on what you can do with the device (he also said it is very promising but the technology still needs a lot of work).

What I suspect is that the device, if it could reach real mass-production, would be very inexpensive to make, thus they are putting in all kind of pitfalls to prospective competitors.

Not that one can blame them for being so protective, but it could backfire in the long run, if a nimble competitor open sources most of the software and focuses on hardware or at the very least, makes developers job easier.
I've been reading through the oreilly book, Erlang Programming. Its good (like all Oreilly titles) though I'm only into chapter 6. I'd definitely suggest picking it up.
Facebook (PHP) is not very Copenhagen (Change to C++ to save planet)
I heartily disagree that people need to understand the voting system. Ideally, people should just be thinking about ranking the candidates. If the way that the votes are counted will affect the way they vote, that means that strategic voting is a prominent part of the system.

Granted, strategic voting is theoretically unavoidable without introducing other degeneracies. But on a quantitative scale, its effect and its frequency are smaller under some voting systems than others.
From page 17

In other words, the article didn't say anything, so you went to the actual paper instead.
Didn't you initiate the back-and-forth by commenting on a link to a Zed blog post that he's an "idiot"?
Measles: The Next Infection
Come on, man. From the OP:

I'd like some kind of virtual private server so I can have root access and customize it to my heart's content.

Which means if heroku is ruby only, as you said, and thus doesn't provide root access, then it doesn't fit the request.
The story I hear (again from the Chinese) is that Korean is a dialect/divergence from Chinese that lost much of the tonality. I've not studied it personally, but from my knowledge it wouldn't be surprising for a Chinese speaker to believe Korean (and Japanese) lack tonal structure.

Japanese on the other hand is considered more likely to be separate but high influenced due to word sharing from the many wars between China and Japan. this seems pretty plausible considering the sharing of the written language which is widely considered to be Chinese in origin.

It's all interesting because I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the ancient history is obscured by the three proud nations.
Great story. It was actually kind of interesting to see EC2 relegated to a small part of one paragraph -- sounds like it did its job as expected. What else can you tell us (or me at least :-) about this aspect of the project?
That takes care of JSMin, but what about JSLint?
Not saying any of this is necessarily a good idea, but to explore an interesting vein of ideas:

What if the front page weren't continuously updated, but only updated after fixed balloting periods (say, 6-12 hours long)? Voting would only happen when all stories for a period were in. Each voter would see a different randomized order-of-presentation.

Yes, it'd completely change the character of the site. No immediate upvote feedback for being first to submit a 'hot' story. Stories would be guaranteed to lag other 'breaking' news sites by some number of hours.

But these changes might be good things: reducing both the incentive to submit, and the rewards for constant reading, of frothy/gossipy linkbait.

A site seeking impressions over all else wouldn't want this approach -- but HN isn't ad-driven. 'Slow HN' might be a better HN.
Nobody runs WebOS.
I like everything they're doing; I just don't trust their capability to win enough market share to make developing on their platform meaningful. Plus, I don't own one so I wouldn't dogfood.
The article was better than the title would indicate.
Though the model may be accurate, the fly-through speed is impossible to comprehend, and compromises any feeling of scale or distance. You still have to read the captions and think. Anyone know of an animation that's a little more appreciable in that regard? I imagine it's terribly boring.

Edit: (8.8e26 meters) / (mach .8) = 1.02435103e17 years to traverse the known universe in a 767. Well that doesn't help.
Layman to layman: it's light that hasn't reached us yet. Light that left alpha centuri last week wont get into the cone of visibility for another 4 years. During the period of inflation after the big bang some parts of the universe got so far away so quickly the we will never see those parts.
IANAL, but this article makes it sound like it would not be illegal to buy one and then circumvent whatever DRM scheme they've likely implemented to capture the raw data and use it however you want.

Based on the article, they will have a hard time! Emotiv's product is amazing, but at this stage what they letting through to developers is breadcrumbs. I am not sure - based on lurking in the forums for a while - if the EEG technology is controlling the outcome or is mostly the gyroscope with little support perhaps from EEG technology.
Don't fall in love with code, it will eventually break your heart.
That is a really fantastic visualization. It's amazing how much IRV produces inconsistent results.
In my mind, scalability is the best problem a startup could ever have.

It means people demand your product so much that you need to concentrate on making more and more of your product. Definitely better than too little demand.
The original is still the best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cmlhfdxuY It's the Powers of 10 documentary made by Ray and Charles Eames.
"(Gambetta dryly notes that many of these strategies work in another environment with a stable population and forced attendance: school.)"

Indeed. I think economist David Friedman noted in one of his books that posting as a tough guy is a good social strategy in school just as it is in prison, but is often a poor social strategy in environments of free association.
> And of the two kext's you linked to, they both look to be dead in development, with more then a few major bugs each

I use both of those drivers daily on three different machines. I have yet to experience a single bug on my hardware. For bleeding-edge chipsets, YMMV.

As for speed of development, I generally install drivers (as opposed to userland software) once and forget about it unless there's a problem. Given that I have no problems, I'm quite satisfied.
How was I able to read it for free?
My vote goes to Mathematica, which is probably both the best and worst technology I've used this year. Oy!

A more one-sided review goes to Evernote :-)
Celestia (http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ ) is an interactive version of the known universe, similar to the video.

One thing I like about it is that it can show you how fast you're traveling, which really helps give a sense of scale.

It's the Total Perspective Vortex, for sure.
So there is some serious calculating going on to figure out how to use all these resources to deliver a sat minimizing fuel use. Impressive.
Feel free to contact me - robg at knowhi dot com

I didn't mean to question your interests. That seems like the big determining factor and one that only you can decide.

We're bootstrapping on the startup and that takes up a bunch of my time. But I'm in the process of pursuing grants. Between the NRSA and SBIRs along with foundations that seems like the best way to both continue my research and to get the venture going. But grants don't move quickly. Hence the need to get used to living like a grad student!
I'm quite taken aback by the name calling here.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

I hope you know what this is from. You did not reply directly to the argument of Zed's blog post, but called him an idiot before you wrote more than 3 words.

I've seen a lot of your posts here and I've liked a lot of what you've said. However, this doesn't just go against the guidelines of Hacker News, this goes against the guidelines of civil discourse.

You took a nice thread about _why and turned it into an attack on Zed. This comment is in no way about _why, and that's just sad.
Consider applying here:

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

They'll understand that the market is trouble, and Jeff Hawkens (and presumably many of his employees) have had one foot in both doors for a while.
The http package can't send delete, head, or put requests. Couchdb uses all of these methods, not just post and get.

I filed an issue a few weeks ago for this:
http://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=155
I'm in favor of anything relating to RATM. Brings me back, infact, I think I'll listen to some right now. :-)
Maybe they're doing a split test? When I clicked the link, it asked me to become a member.

I recently cleared my cache though, and tried the link again, and I'm able to see it now with no problem.
Ask HN: Why aren't links clickable in the text of a submission?
Is there a reason why links aren't clickable in the text of a submission while they are in comments? For almost every text submission I see that someone has to submit a comment with a "clickable link". I'm interested as to why this hasn't been fixed yet (if there actually is a reason.)
It's Copenhagen, or København, not Kopenhagen :(
Exploits of a Mom
There's not a lot to say really - it Just Worked. We used it for the last project as well. This time we had two instances, one running MySQL and Redis and the other running Django. Last time we started with one instance and then moved to two when it turned out I'd written a bunch of inefficient code (the ORDER BY RAND for example). This time we started with two, but I'd avoided the dumb mistakes I made first time round so scaling turned out not to be a problem. Now that most of the activity is over we'll scale down to just one instance.
Becoming a member for free isn't a paywall. You register once and then will stay logged in for a very long time until you forget there is even a registration at all. Your registration could have happened in the time it took to write your comment here.
Chat with the 17 year old hacker who hacked my blog
I'm not even sure if you're serious at this point, but the important distinction here is that the hypothetical library function you created to make this work in Java is (like the even shorter version proposed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1005199) not one that anyone ever would put in a library. Its only function is this one case. Whereas the Arc version is built by combining highly orthogonal components that can be recombined to solve completely different problems. Do you really not see the difference?
On the other hand, the stock photo on that page is a good example of somewhere the French don't make eye contact -- on the Metro.

I am told it has something to do with the fact that you don't have a choice in being there, so people want the illusion of privacy.
Does that mean networks move bits faster and hard drives spin faster for C++ than they do for PHP?
They set the 2047 as deadline, beacuase by 2037 they would have ground tested various weapons and aircrafts (eg. LM FB-22).

However several papers and articles I read time ago, reported that the DoD was searching for advanced methods (read AI-like) to recognize enemy vehicles (and personnel). Unfortunately I can't find the links.
I think you're confusing the boundary of the visible universe (the limit after which light cannot have reached us yet) and the unmapped volume the poster is talking about, which is inside this boundary. Alpha Centauri was emitting light just fine 4 years ago so of course it can be mapped.
On the other hand, while there are fewer WebOS devices out there, there's a massive shortage of Palm apps. You could make an extremely sound business porting successful iPhone apps to the Pre. You'd have huge mindshare if you launched there, first, too.

All in all, working on the development environment is a great play by palm.
I absolutely love xkcd. For other fans: How to use random xkcd comics as gnome wallpaper
http://grepchelo.com/random-xkcd-as-your-gnome-desktop-wallp...
You could just prune away everything except these:

- Retain competent people

- Fire incompetent people

- Get out of their way
Are these banners really better than advertising? (What revenue would half the pixels, devoted to tasteful ads instead of a pledge drive, yield?)
What this article fails to note is that writing C++ code to serve up web pages would be much less efficient from a human time perspective. You'd need many more developers working, and the average American emits 20 tons of CO2 per year. So if Facebook has 100 developers hacking PHP code, they'd probably need at least 200, or possibly 300 developers hacking C++ code. 100 developers is 2,000 tons of CO2 per year (at average rates). From an economic standpoint, it would make much more business sense to use carbon offsets. Not to mention that a 10x end-to-end efficiency improvement is AWFULLY optimistic. I'd say 2x or 3x at best.
Does anyone have some info on how we could get involved in bringing Try Ruby back up? (And without the bugs I experienced the last time I tried it)
You and me both, sexy cakes.
Accidentally the whole satellite?
There is slightly more to it than just centralized vs distributed. Consider the demographics. X-Factor viewers as a group are probably poorer, older and less educated* than Facebook users. The recent cold spell, the BBC speculates, meant fewer people who would have bought the X-factor single could get to a store to do so - even if a Facebooker wanted a physical CD, he or she would simply order it from Amazon and not care when it arrived, since the sale would be logged. At 79p for a single on iTunes, Facebook users could fix the UK charts every week without even noticing the expenditure in time or money. However what the X-factor has is people who really will loyally buy its single every year; the Facebook crowd has a very short attention span.

* I don't mean this in a disparaging way at all.
Fundraising drives don't raise questions about the impartiality of the content in the same way that ads might. However, even NPR has sponsors these days (but not ads per se). I think it'd be interesting to hear whether Wikipedia has considered that approach.