skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Maybe they'd like to have a rational conversation instead, one where their right of choice would be respected. Inability to have such a conversation leads to alienation, which makes them more likely to kill themselves."

This is the part that is important. The only time you get to have this conversation is if you fail and are assigned a psychiatrist. Even then no one else will talk to you about it as they assume that it was just something you were going through and should have got over it by now.

If you raise the topic people panic and assume the worst. So despite the fact that I can now, after nearly 40 years of this, monitor my own state of mind and actually see that I am getting depressed I still can't talk to anyone when I feel it coming on.

I have had depression since I was a teenager, it comes and goes, but each time it is a little harder to cope with, or maybe I'm just getting older. If it was some other physical ailment then I could talk about it, if I was bereaved I could talk about it. But as it's a mental health issue and I appear to be otherwise fine, I have no one I can talk to. But I'm damn good at covering it up! Simply because people don't even want to talk about the weather with someone who is depressed, so to have any conversation at all you have to lock it away.

It sucks not to be able to talk.
Big City Adventure: Vancouver Collector's Edition Game Download Free
Gain early access to Big City Adventure: Vancouver in this Collector's Edition special release, only offered to Game Club Members. As a bonus, Collector's Editions purchases counts toward three stamps on your Monthly Game Club Punch Card! Use your Hidden Object talent in Big City Adventure's newest destination, Vacouver! Experience all the exclusive Collector’s Edition extras including additional Hidden Object scenes. The Collector’s Edition includes:
You could just use F11? Is it possible to have F11 without the autohiding? Also on KDE, say, you could easily hide the title bar and borders too (which would approach the Chrome look).

My layout is like his before shot. I use the menubar entries often enough that I want them to be easily accessible - a single "Menu" entry that popped up the other menu items as an overlay menu would be great for me and would allow me to ditch the menubar. As for the status bar - I do like to be able to see the target for links by mousing over them, again this could be an overlay (I think Chrome does that too? perhaps Opera, can't recall).
I think it applies to Apple as a way to model their advantages when entering a new market; they tightly control the hardware, and run their own OS and applications.

They where newcomers to MP3 players, to cell phones, and now (I guess) to tablet computers.

EDIT: That's "I think" as in "I think that is the perceived relevance of this quote", not as endorsement.
It's not unprecedented. One example: http://www.hackersforcharity.org/259/paypal-shuts-us-down/ and http://www.hackersforcharity.org/265/paypal-makes-good/
Stone: Leonardo da Vinci's Resume
I find I actually do use both "g search terms" and the search box. When I'm sure I'll want to refine a search I use the search box, or if I know I'll want to search multiple SE. My most used keyword is probably w (wikipedia), then g, then d (dictionary.com).
would the script remove this story?
Because that wouldn’t address the root issue of Mozilla’s objection: that downstream projects that use Mozilla code won’t be able to without paying for an H.264 licence themselves.
article is more or less empty of any useful info, but the title is something..
It is does not solve Mozilla's problem with fees paid by authors and publishers. Do you want to pay license fees for videos you will put on your webpage? Thought so...

There is another advantage VLC has: it is academic project, sponsored by University. Even in US, you can use patented technologies for research without license.
Evolutionary Architecture
> Also, the AppStore means never having to worry about malware or viruses.

I've heard this idea over and over these past few days, and it really puzzles me. Do we really believe that the same App Store reviewers who are so incompetent that they can an e-reader because you could use it to read the Kama Sutra (or whatever your favourite ridiculous rejection of the day is) are, on the other hand, so competent that it is impossible to get malware by them? Or do we just believe that the iPhone/iPad/whatever is naturally resistant to malware, however cleverly written --in which case it doesn't matter what we install on it?
Pickling python objects and storing is an very old practice in Python world. Zope has been persisting objects in ZODB (a giant pickle jar with some transactional features) since 1998.
Replacing the Iron Triangle of Project Management?
I hadn't thought about the math OCR (nor 'fair use', obviously), since intro books tend to use very simple math. But your point with variable names seems especially difficult.. thanks!

For more verbose subjects like bio, or psych, or econ something like the software they use to check for plagiarism should work beautifully.
But they never controlled the whole economic chain? Also, doesn't every hardware manufacturer control their hardware? I just don't see what I am supposed to learn from that snippet.
Is fusion success in sight?
Yes, I agree with "unwind". They were newcomers to the markets they disrupted that's why it made me think of them.
Or just install vimperator.
Http://www.topshareware.com/GevaMobile-download-36736.htm
Survey of Executives Finds a Growing Fear of Cyberattacks
Has a single malware or virus made it passed them? Please provide sources for this if you have anything but a hunch.
Perils Of URL-Shortening: Major Garrett’s Inadvertent Link To Softcore Porn
They could probably get a good chunk of improvement out of Theora if they broke the spec, fixed a couple of things that either seemed sensible at the time or were just plain stupid and took advantage of what we've learned about codecs and assumptions about processors speeds and capabilities in the meantime.

They haven't done so yet because there's still room for improvements to be wrung out of the current spec and the longer they wait to do a non-backwards compatible spec break the better they'll be able to make it.

If Google releases one of the VP codecs then it's probably not going to be that much better than what xiph could have done if they weren't trying to keep compatability since they're based on the same core technology.
People use HMACs to derive keys from passwords? Idiots.
Khmer empire | Khmer culture
The Antique Discovery in the Prehistoric Period, Angkor Borei, the ancient Khmer architecture, Indian cultural flow, the outstanding architectural achievements of Phnom Da artistic style, The Plan of Khmer history and Khmer tradition Criteria of Khmer City.
Counsyl Brings Genetic Screening to the Masses
Doesn't this sort of thing put lie to the idea of patenting algorithms, as mathematics is unpatentable, types are theorems and programs are proofs?
Is a stick shift better than an automatic? No. Is an automatic better than a stick? No. This misses the point. A better question: Is a road full of drivers not distracted by the arcane inner workings of their vehicle safer? It’s likely.

I may stand alone on this issue, but I see this the exact opposite. In an automatic, being able to drive along with just a foot on the gas and hand on the wheel, I find that I actually pay less attention to driving and more attention to everything else: other cars, the radio, my passengers talking, billboards, buildings, etc. In a manual, I'm infinitely more aware of what my car is doing and what I'm doing to mesh that hunk of metal and plastic with the rest of traffic, and far less focused on all of life's distractions.
Automating a portion of the upgrade to Rails 3
> Can you just do the same thing with JSON, Yaml, or your favorite serialization method of choice that does not have catastrophic consequences if parsing gets subverted?

Sure. You can even extend the `json` module to serialize custom data types not defined in the JSON spec.
But then you can't use any of the other search plugins.
Cool and lovely Icons collection for designers, for great websites.
> H.264 is not proprietary

Yes it is. It is owned by a consortium, and that consortium wants money off me if I write and distribute software (my own software, that I have written, for fucks sake, not their software that they have written) that implements it.

> The terms are not onerous

The license terms are incompatible with free software. That makes them onerous.
This is really great start to porting existing Rails 2.x apps to Rails 3.

Similarly, a compatibility check for existing Rails plugins & gems would be ideal.
How many songs have they sold at a 30% cut from the music store again? I can't find anything right now to back this up, but my gut feeling is that they make a _lot_ of money from the software side, and they're going to keep pushing that because there's a lot more profit and (again, I suspect) lower costs.

If I find some numbers to back this up then I'll post them...

Edit: http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-Q3-2009-by-t... (Q3 2009) shows $958m from Music and $528m from software, services. This isn't as much as from hardware totalled, but those numbers and the iPhone numbers are the only ones with growth. They're going to keep growing as they put more hardware out which can buy music, videos, apps etc from their stores.
This will check through some things (e.g., look for old style generators) and point out known busted plugins, but I plan on doing more thorough checks when the plugin API is stabilized so I know exactly what's going away.
First of all, the "margin of error" theory comes from you and not the articles you told me to search out myself. And the hunting definitely adds some perspective to the ">4x increase" so it's worth mentioning. I'm surprised you didn't mention it to begin with.

I'm not looking to do battle here. In fact, I thought I was being humorous and polite. Moreover, I'm happy to see that the polar bear situation is not as dire as I thought. I've adjusted the thermostat in my apartment accordingly.
Actually, it is new thing in Windows 7, so Vista also does not have H.264 decoder.

What about turning it around? 100% has access to open decoder, and if 2% wants to use licensed codec, they can. Remember, Theora was suggested as baseline codec, not as only codec.
Yes, the Thusnelda improvements do seem to be paying dividends.
Anyone who knows tomh- knows that hes lisp hostile ;-)
Download Winamp 5.572 Full - FileHippo.com
Agreed. Vimperator has changed my life.
Ask HN: Who's going to PyCon?
It's in Atlanta this year, Feb. 17-25. http://us.pycon.org/2010/about/

Thought this might be a good opp. to do room-sharing if any other HN'ers are going solo.
I believe Apple is controlling the economic chain where the iPod, iPhone and iPad is concerned, even if it's through multiple companies.

Unless i've mis-understood the question?
Levitating magnet could make fusion faster and cheaper
Wow, great. Even if it doesn't fix everything correctly, it'll be nice to have a report card of what to fix manually.
Not controlled the whole economic chain, but knows and manages the costs of said chain. Switching over to Intel after Motorola proved itself unmanageable. Keeping OS development inhouse instead of buying from MS. These are managed costs.

Dell gets basically blackmailed by Wintel, Apple has an alternative for everything they buy.
Design patterns for, hm, web design
Killing an IPO market its more a healthy sign than a bad one.

IPOs were always a way for the finantial institutions to take profit from naive market investors. Historically IPOS have very bad results in average, and in the case they do get good results, they dont get to the average one-guy online investor but to institutions.

Finantial institutions involved in the IPO proceedings (getting your company fit to be a public company) can get up to 10% of your company : they dont invest money at all, they only help your accounting be public and legalities.

Of course, IPOs are widely advertised because the more people pay, the more money these institutions win. Of course, the institutions that used to do these are the ones that are in a terrible shape from the economic crisis.

Benjamins Grahams "Intelligent investor" says IPOS are "for suckers" :). The book that was written many decades ago even mentions these same financial institutions used to consider IPOs an unethical business because too many unskilled investors hoped too much of such operations.
Honestly, it would probably seem even more juvenile. I just re-read it a few months ago, and almost came away from it wondering what I'd ever seen in such a book.

Of course, this is decades removed from my 'damn the man' phase in life, but I found it wholly unrelatable, and even annoying in large parts of it.
There is a big difference between operating technology that is currently in use without being subject to patent proceedings and operating a technology one knows to be patented without a license.

Ignorance is a defence here, particularly for end-users, as this is only potentially tortuous infringement and not criminal. Even for a major corp, if they can't be shown to have been aware of the patent then they can avoid a far greater penalty.

You can be told to cease and desist on the basis of a submarine patent on Theora, for sure, but a compliant end-user losing money over this? Not a chance.

Incidentally patents only cover commercial activity (at least in Europe).
This is a blog post responding to another blog post. The first one recommended using HMAC in a place where it is totally appropriate to use HMAC. The response seems to miss that point.

To store passwords in a database the 'proper hash' to use is openbsd's bcrypt. http://www.openbsd.org/papers/bcrypt-paper.ps
MSI ready to launch iPad alternative
I'm not sure if this division makes sense. Are Android phones "Old World" or "New World"?

You're barking up the wrong tree.

a) It's not a real taxonomy. He's, in effect, making a prediction about the direction that computing is going -- towards prepackaged specific purposes away from general purpose. Think of it as a descriptive concept.

b) Even if it was a taxonomy, most of those are going to fail boundary conditions. Those things aren't mathematical sets. They're useful to talk about populations, and generally fail at boundary conditions. "North America" doesn't really exist because you can't decide if a particular Panamanian boulder is in it or not?

Classic nerd/techy mistake. Now cut it out!
Barefoot Running
It's valid if you want to understand what'll happen when you start getting random (lat,long) pairs thrown at you that you can't precompute.
See my reply to grimstat: It's not a real taxonomy!
Thanks, but as I understand it, the reason they ejected one of the apps was because they were possibly afraid of getting sued - which seems strange to me.
So it's ultimately the management of this process to enable better value creation right?
“But Rory, programming is my passion. I was willing to spend that long learning how to code.” No, I think back at them — programmers are not given the satisfaction of hearing my voice. No, you were willing to spend that long because you had obsessive-compulsive problems mixed with an antisocial attitude.

The fact that he's pretty clearly trolling in the passage above doesn't make it less worth reading, as it does discuss some interesting points about how people use and learn about computers.
I think you're missing the point of the article: the point is that New World people don't care about all that openness of their computer, just like most people don't care about the openness of their car.

From over ten years ago I remember making an argument for Free/Open Source software and using the "car with a welded hood" argument. The person just looked at me blankly and said, "I never want to look under the hood of my car. I take it to the garage and let them mess with it!"
Shorter version:

Brits: we have a controlled study showing no genetic correlation of g-spot reports, suggesting it may not exist.

Frenchies: we have a bunch of anecdotes suggesting it does exist, and anyone who disagrees is exhibiting "medical machismo".
Visualizing code as interactive, navigable 3D cities
Damning verdict on doctor who linked vaccine and autism
What I don't get is why do they have these indoors? Since they are houses, they might as well put them outdoors.
very cool. i wonder if you can make it thorough enough that startups using rails will start with it.
Parallel Algorithm Leads to Crypto Breakthrough
Except that Google does. Google has been buying up so called dark fiber all over the place thousands of miles, and while what they are doing with it is not public knowledge, at the least, they've got to be interconnecting data-centers and/or other infrastructure critical pieces on their own terms instead of AT&T's. Additionally, I'd be that they take advantage of peering agreements to minimize their per byte cost of traffic (though one can only speculate if this manages to hit the 30% cheaper quoted in the article).

Of course, this happened later in the company's early-timeline, rather than sooner, but to say that Google doesn't own any business critical infrastructure feels disingenuous.
My favorite title for a paper is "Dating events in the vicinity of a leap second: (pdf) http://tf.nist.gov/timefreq/general/pdf/1788.pdf. And for more interesting detail, see http://www.nist.gov/index.html searching for UT0 UT1 and UT2.

And for a bit of history, albeit somewhat painful, see http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html.
I am and I can't wait.

see also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1076401
> H.264 is not proprietary. ... To distribute, you are to acquire a license from the MPEG LA.

In what sense is this not proprietary?

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/proprietary

It seems to me that MPEG LA is the proprietor, and they are controlling access to their property.
Norwegian company manages to freeze down organic life - then revive it
Matt Groenings tv-show, Futurama, may be closer to reality than we think. Because a Norwegian company has successfully managed to freeze down a codfish at the state of a embryo to 130 degrees Celsius, and then melt it for it to become a full grown fish.

The company behind the research is Cryogenetics that specializes in conserving fish seamen by freezing it down.

company homepage - http://www.cryogenetics.no/

The reference is in Norwegian, http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/distrikt/hedmark_og_oppland/1.6968987
Ok, I understand the "parallel algorithm" bit... but where's the "crypto breakthrough"? Breaking 56-bit DES? That was old news over a decade ago.
>EU does not recognize software patents

This is entirely incorrect. Despite the wording of the EPC disallowing patenting of software "as such". That little couple of words on the end means that you can patent software - the old term was that it required a "technical contribution" or "technical effect" though there have been decisions on this since I was working in the field (particularly Aerotel/Macrosan in the UK).

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/p-policy-computer.htm is a reasonable and short summary.
For template tags, is doing it that way better than importing them in a base template which is included by the children templates?
I agree about the glass. Those terrariums remind me of the prison cells in Oz.
How long will it take to complete this Old World to New World shift? My guess? The end is near when you can bootstrap a new iPad application on an iPad. When you can comfortably do that without pining for a traditional desktop, the days of Old World computing are officially numbered.

The bad thing about the keyboard/mouse/screen workstation is that it is designed to efficiently soak up all of your attention, and the overhead of entering/leaving the active use mode makes this an all-absorbing proposition.

That is a big disadvantage of the workstation interface, versus the iPad, a Kindle, the morning Newspaper. Those can soak up your attention, but you can also set them down pretty quickly to get up and open the door. The mode switch isn't such a large overhead. So these interfaces blend in more harmoniously with everyday life.

But for programming, a workstation is great! In fact, for any activity requiring extended, deep concentration, a workstation is a very good proposition. For programming? I think it's pretty fantastic.

We have cars today that might as well have the hood welded shut, or at least with a lock open-able only by the garage. But we also have cars like the Ariel Atom, that are so focused on function, that they even lack body panels. We still have car modders and hippie enclaves with 3 Mercedes Diesel 240DLs in a garage shed out back.

Hacking is not going away.
The Most Important Word in Project Management
Again, VLC's distribution is not for academic purposes it is a commercial offering (yes, even though it is free).

In your last sentence you are right, you can but you can't pretend you are aiding others to do their own research as a cover for commercial activity as that would be contributory infringement.
Non-relational Django on App Engine (other DB backends planned)
HN: How can I contact Google?
Ok, so now I have my Internet product live with a growing user base - and thanks everybody at Hacker News I've got lots of info about handling online payments.

NEXT - I really need to contact Google - they have recently blogged about a new Google Reader feature that maybe be in a collision course with my own product... eek!

I believe (nievely) if Google knew about my technology we may be able to talk business... if they don't know about me - I'm afraid they will roll straight over me without knowing I was even there!

If anybody has had success contacting anybody in the 'product' division of Google - please could you share the trick with me!!! (I've gone round and round in circles sending email and trying to find 'Google Groups' that don't seem to exist).

(if you're interesting, the sites are: femtoo.com & cquery.com)

thanks, tom
trolls love walled gardens?
Summary: researchers are hopeful of achieving break-even in a controlled fusion reaction this year, based on extrapolations of small-scale experiments. But it's still a long way from an actually commercially-viable process, and there are other approaches that may be more successful -- or none at all.
I'm sure they don't want the negative press as they are trying to convince everyone to adopt their codec into HTML5. VLC's mirror servers could be shutdown but would they make money on a lawsuit? Do the VLC distributors have enough to make it worth while, not until they've managed to weasel into HTML5 implementations in all the top browsers - after that every video app using 264 will be a worthy target I'd have thought as the less apps not paying license fees the more sales of those that are.

It's going to be GIF all over again, oh joy.
"But in every single case, the newcomer also enjoys a tremendous cost advantage, usually about 30 percent."

This doesn't seem to fit Apple. Their products are more expensive than the competitors, e.g. iPlayer vs Zen, Mac vs PC. They market their products as being more stylist, easier to use, trendy...
The requirement to win this prize are very very high. The prize is relatively low. And to win the prize , you need to make plans open-source.

It doesn't make sense.

If you design this much better machine , it would make more sense to commercialize it.
s/though/through/
"green is just sensible irrespective of the actual facts."

I totally agree with this position. There are numerous benefits to developing better clean air/water standards.

The climate "work" has been on going for decades. The science supporting the theory of anthropogenic global warming is sound.

Their may be some "believers" when it comes to global warming that just take at face value. I'm more of an accepting skeptic. I was skeptical at first that we could 1) Change our climate 2) Predict climate change with any amount of reasonable certainty. Once you understand the science you can see why its obviously true.