skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Coming up with a GUI replacement for Hello World
At first blush, it would be tough to overstate the importance of this ruling. I need to sit down with the actual decision to be sure, but this seems as though it could have wide impact on those who discover a gene and then feel entitled to profit from it. At the same time, it seems a gameable ruling. For example, if the Whitehead folks had performed a knockdown assay, and thus demonstrated a method of modulating that specific protein, would that have been sufficient for this court? If so, or if something similar would be allowed, then this ruling will have only a modest impact going forward. Anyways, IANAL (but I have discovered genes); I need to read the full decision before I ramble on anymore.
Well it can't be rejected for consistency because there's a bunch of browser apps already.
Absolutely, and I didn't say that switching VPS providers was a replacement for backups (the linode and slicehost boxes now trade rsyncs every night which include mysqldumps). My point was that I think if a similar thing happened now, that the fine folks at either provider would be more able to help me out.

Even still, I would much rather be able to just mv the dirs back to their proper location from a chroot than having to do a restore from scratch over the network.
I've been out there doing web apps and the like, and I always tried to get better and learn more. Eventually I picked up books with enough math in them to make me fear them, and that was when a sneaking itchy feeling I had about my math incompetence became a full force rash. It was clear it was going to hold me back from the developer I wanted to be.

I went back to school. Now I'm knee-deep in 400 level mathematics and while realizations of utility aren't daily, it is definitely a regular occurance where I see something and think, "ah, so there's a useful way to approach problem x." The other thing is even if some specific technique of MATH 4XX isn't useful, the thought process might be. I've noticed that my approach to problems has been tweaked in a mostly subtle but advantageous way.

Of course it's true. Most of the database fetch print store work wouldn't benefit from this work, but I don't want to do that anymore. Hopefully it proves to be worth the trouble professionally, even though personally it's definitely beneficial.
A moral framework: evolution defines morality
We are selling the source code of our startup (time-tracking on IM)
Tell HN: Penn Staters, get yourself listed on hndir
It's time for us to crawl out of the woodwork ... http://www.hndir.com/
First, fix the CSS support so it's in line with all the other major browsers.
The eye opener for me is the lack of end to end security. I generally avoid doing anything requiring https on my iPhone, but now I know to NEVER do anything that requires security on Opera Mini. Of course, this assumes that it actually gets approved...
Ordinary standards do not apply to Tesla
And who says they could?
What did the recruiter do wrongly.

The two biggest issues were (a) not understanding that a DPhil qualifies as "Master's degree or better", and not bothering to ask what it was; and (b) changing which job I was applying for three times without asking me.

When I turned up in Mt. View for my interview, I was greeted with "so, you're interested in a job doing X", to which the only response I could provide was "... I am?" My first interviewer did a heroic job of rearranging my interview schedule to make it more appropriate, but obviously there's a limit to how much you can fix on the interview day itself.
No, unfortunately that's not going to happen. Instead, he's going to become incapable of seeing any future of the internet other than "more Google".

This seems to happen to all their employees, with the exception of Brad Fitzpatrick.
Hacking on relationships between Django's auth.User
Not an expose but maybe some information beyond "they have sensible security".

Unless you have some reason to care about tbray personally, the post is basically useless.
If I were Apple, I'd hold up Opera's approval for a few weeks while implementing the thing in-house. A couple of months after Opera Mini's on the iPhone, Safari would have the same capability.
Modern Science on Self-Control, and How to Improve It
Anybody tried this with Groovy? It seems Gaelyk with Google Appengine would be easier to deploy.
> I think this is an old link.

It's new, here's the announcement in the SDK forum (dated yesterday):

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/ann.jspa?annI...
Pandora QuickMix of Sound Dimensions, Ratatat and Menahan Street Band, at very low volume.
Opera Mini requests web pages through the Opera Software company's servers, which process and compress them before relaying the pages back to the mobile phone. This compression process makes transfer time about two to three times faster, and the pre-processing smoothes compatibility with web pages not designed for mobile phones.

How is this not a massive privacy/security issue? You are trusting Opera to not look at your content, and as mentioned later on: Opera Mini has received some criticism because it does not offer true, end-to-end security when visiting encrypted sites such as paypal.com.[49] When visiting an encrypted web page, the Opera Software company's servers decrypt the page, then re-encrypt it themselves, breaking end-to-end security
I won't downvote, but I will disagree. Anyone programming in C++ needs to know C first. The same goes for ObjC (which in my opinion is superior to C++). Build on a solid foundation before jumping for the shiny looking brass ring of object and garbage collection.
* fast-broadband, from what I can tell, has been rolling out just fine without any government interference.*

Only in built-up areas with a high population density.
Why not? Just asking...

For example, in Slovakia the top two online news websites are profitable. One has also a print daily, the other one is online-only.
Well for a start it hands Apple an excuse to not approve them (i.e. by saying Opera was rude and uncooperative in it's submission or something).

Also if your later disgruntlement is going to be based around the fact Apple are being nasty (a fair complaint if they are refused for a random reason) then being a bit narky yourself doesn't help.

But most of all it makes this whole application process look a lot like them trying to force a confrontation...
10am? That means they were going at 9am? That seems really late compared to when I went to school and it started at 7:30am! I can see where later would cut down on absentees, but it seems to be at a cost of pushing after school activities later and taking away from family time.

I think the four-day school week is a better idea. I think it would help in terms of attendance and would cut costs:
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=four%20day%20school%...
But some of this terrifies me - "allowing users of government services to identify themselves simply and definitively" sounds like an ID card online.

What they're promising is a decent single sign on service like Google/Yahoo/MSN. It's a little bit silly to have so many Government logins for different services. Government Gateway was one example but it was way to clunky.
Yes just reading that; seems pretty sound/safe then.
This idea is called cognitive apprenticeship. A freind of mine will be getting her Ph.D. soon, based on research into this in the realm of physics education. Apparently over there it works very well. One of the big problems with teaching/learning in general is that "experts" (defined as those who know the subject matter well) don't know how to think like n00bs. Seriously -- once you know something fairly well it becomes "simple" because you've gone ahead and rewired your brain. It actually becomes difficult to understand why the n00b just doesn't get it.

Cognitive apprenticeship solves this much like you are describing. The basic idea is that the sophmores will be able to better help the freshmen than the teacher will, because the sophmores are better able to remember their own struggles than the teacher is. Basically, the sophmores are in a state where they understand it the "good way" and also still understand the "wrong way". This puts them in a pretty good position to help.
Red Hat, Novell: Reading the Stock Market Tea Leaves
I read 15 Bytes from /dev/urandom, use base64 on it and cut of the last two padding characters.

That's 2^120 possibilities - just guessing a valid id will require a lot of luck and a collision is very unlikely.
Check out Erich's comments at the end:

> I'm in favor of dropping Singleton. Its use is almost always a design smell.

YES.

> Factory Method would be generalized to Factory.

Yes.

> The new members are: Null Object, Type Object, Dependency Injection, and Extension Object/Interface

Somebody kill the term "Dependency Injection" - we have never needed an obfuscation of "late binding".
I hate to be that guy, but the headline should say fewer absences.
I suppose it also depends why you want to be a "good" developer and a "great" one.

To me, developing software is largely a means to get to a goal. I enjoy it, but only in the same way I enjoy cooking. I personally have no desire to "cook" in a factory for thousands of people. I only enjoy the creativity of creating meals, learning some cooking techniques, and of course eating it. The actual problem of 'how to create the meal' is not interesting in the same way when it scales up to thousands of orders.

In the same way, I personally have no desire to delve into creating search algorithms, complicated physics engines, or complex business logic. I would want to do the creative thinking to move those projects, but not the actual logic and development themselves.
Looks very interesting. Nice to see a compilation like this.
I'm a lawyer (and the author of the post), though I've never discovered any genes.

IMHO, although the court would likely have found a use of a knockdown assay to have been a sufficiently descriptive method of modulating the protein, that does not end the analysis. First, patent protection in such a situation would likely have been limited solely to the use of a knockdown assay to modulate the protein. Second -- no offense intended, of course -- but apparently the use of a knockdown assay is so obvious that it took some fellow on the Internet who read a blog post only a few minutes to think to do that. Such "obviousness" would likely cause even the limited patent to be invalidated.

Of course, there's still considerable room in the law, particularly patent law, to "game" things, but this ruling is at least a step in the right direction.
For sale: A million-dollar iPad address
This happened to me on my interviews as well.

I don't think it's incompetence per se. They just interview people all the time and try to apply the usual Google techniques of scaling (which involve acceptable failure rates). Recruiters are sometimes staff and sometimes not.

A good engineer would have caught the problem right away, but apart from your phone screen, no good engineer looked at your resume until maybe five minutes before you were in the building. This isn't carelessness as much as mental self-protection. People are super busy there and they still do a lot of interviewing.

The system works best if you are a generic Stanford grad with no fixed ideas about what you wanted to be doing. If you are even a little bit unusual the gears can suddenly seize up.
6 Tips for Building Relationships with Journalists
I know the CouchDB team said they were taking steps to make CouchDB officially usable as a distributed system. Is this it? Or has this chapter been around for a long time?
How to Erase Fear -- in Humans
It's definitely the case that once you have a hammer, you begin to see the nails.

A developer I know (a very good one, but without much of a math background) showed me a network routing problem he had. The problem: he was trying to organize a distributed system to process data and pass it to the end user. After spending a week or two doing it by hand, he wrote a python script which played around with parameters automatically (for a fixed topology).

(See http://www.sce.carleton.ca/faculty/chinneck/po/Chapter10.pdf... an example of the type of problem.)

I showed him how to set it up as an LP problem and use glpk to solve it, which imposed no restrictions on topology. He immediately resolved to learn LP. He told me that since then, he used LP to solve several problems he would not otherwise know how to solve (or at least would have solved mainly by fiddling/guess/check).
But people on chatroulette are broadcast to the whole world, just one person at a time.

I know that sounds cheeky, but chatroulette users are already taking chances with privacy, they're letting some random stranger view into their lives. Maybe they're not expecting a record of their interaction to be made, but even that isn't that good of an expectation considering chatroulette videos started showing up on YouTube almost as soon as chatroulette started.
Nope, nor is a cpio archive, both of which are available for download at that site.
I will second the vote for Mastering Algorithms in C. This book will bring you right into the details you want:
http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Algorithms-C-Kyle-Loudon/dp/...

Accelerated C++ was also mentioned and I just love this book. It brought me back to C++ after years of being away: http://www.acceleratedcpp.com/
The discoverability is much, much higher for free apps.

7% of visitors used the free filter, vs. less than 1% enabling the paid filter.

The evidence following the statement doesn't seem to support it. If 92% of the time having a price doesn't affect discoverability how can you possibly say free has "much, much higher" discoverability?

Not to mention this article commits the same fallacy that large media companies do when they talk about piracy. Every pirated copy does not represent a lost sale, same as here where every search filtered by free doesn't represent a lost sale opportunity. It could very well be that these people that filter by free would never pay for anything no matter how good it is.
i'm pretty sure school in the uk always started at (around) 9am. at least, i think it did in my comprehensive, many years ago.
FTA: "We didn’t have any cash, but we said, “How about if we give you an iPhone and pay your bills for a couple of months?” They’re amazing."

Really!? For some reason, the "Shenanigans Meter" in my head hit a 9.5 after reading this line. Does a tactic like this actually garner good results?
Famous people productivity methods
Many components of oscilloscope have to be physically close (because of delays, signal loss and interference) to input (ie. on same card) and in case of small 2-channel scope it can easily be third of whole scope (and more than third of price). Larger scopes tend to have replaceable cards for inputs, but such scopes are too large (and of course expensive) for most applications.
Sports Nutrition for Women – Part One
Well, having a few blog posts picked up by big news sources is hardly "getting famous". Most people in the world (hell, even most people in the start-up niche) have no idea who he is.

(note: same applies to me, despite being OMG-featured-in-TechCrunch... Fame ain't this)
The more we do this stuff to kids, the more the real world is going to kick their ass.
Statistics and probability (up to an undergraduate level) are necessary if you want to work in machine learning. Category theory is nice (but not necessary) if you want to understand the underpinnings of Haskell.

What I think really makes math generally useful, though, is that, at its root, mathematics is a formalization and generalization of problem solving. That is what formal systems and computability theory, for example, are actually about: how, in general, problems are solved.
The Immortality Institute forums have some great discussion on nootropics. This one for instance:

http://www.imminst.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=35751

This comment in particular I thought was very thought-provoking:

The MOST important tactic to prevent brain disorders: avoid fructose, and carb over-consumption. The brain degrades MUCH faster under the assault of a glucose-driven metabolism. It runs much cleaner -- metabolically speaking -- on fatty acids, which it can do up to approx 50% of its energy needs.

I'd be curious to hear of other places on the web where people are discussing nootropics as it a very interesting area to me.
Can you put the theme permalink in the generated theme files as a comment? Seems like it might be handy to have someday.
This is a very clever move, and I think Apple will either approve or reject the app asap.

If they reject it I guess it will be under 'security' concerns, and not duplication of iphone functionality, followed by two months of blog posts and tweets about how Apple is evil and how Opera Mini is insecure and a CPU-hog in the other hand
I think popping up a "Hello World" is an even more relevant first assignment in this magic world of IDEs and toolkits. The point of the program doing absolutely nothing interesting is that you are testing if your toolchain is configured properly and works- which is big.
http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/trains-elevators-an...
The whole point of Opera Mini as an app is for them to rearrange your content; complaining that they can see the content seems schizophrenic.
Venture risk
>Somebody kill the term "Dependency Injection" ...

Agree enough to take arms and post. Dependency Injection is really just a marketing term; programming via interfaces is mostly what the DI camp is after, and then selling tools/framework support to automagically "inject" implementations. In my opinion, esp. in the Java world, setter injection is code smell.
So hard to have a date: js calendars review. New jquery calendar-picker
Then don't. Def #6

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/less
that is the first thing I thought when I read this release.
Your location privacy is up for grabs
soon in an european counrty near you: the iphone browser ballot!

And in other news: opera should leave the iphone and fix the zillion bugs on the other platforms that lacks a decent native browser.

Posted from a nokia with Opera mini.
"This is probably the first very smart thing I have ever done in my life, he says"

Wow, talk about oversized expectations.

$1m a pop for mediocre, trademark infringing domain squatting?

If only it was so easy.
Growing big and growing profitable are entirely different things. If you get profitable without getting big you do gain the benefit of not being forced to scale on borrowed money. The goal of business isn't to be big, it's to make money.
BTW The paper was published a year ago, so this is hardly news. And the previous significant article was in Nature in 2004.
I've never understood people who use bright green on a black background or anything with that much contrast. It feels polluting to my eyes, like radioactive waste.
a quick search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=scientology takes you directly to the homepage of the church of scientology.

http://www.google.com/search?q=nazi 4th link is for the american nazi party.

those two subjects don't look to be censored.
A very handy question to ask yourself:

"How is that serving me?"

Today was yet another day I didn't start something from my list of ideas. I didn't have to put in hard work, got to relax, and will be able to avoid possible failure for one more day.

Of course, that doesn't stop me from slacking off, but at least I know the true reason why and can try to accept it: I'd rather be comfortable than have a chance at larger success.
Yup, it's based heavily on PHP's Propel http://propel.phpdb.org/.

I built it that way so that I could quickly port a PHP webapp backend into Javascript for use in a self-contained HTML5 version of the entire webapp.

If you want a straight JS ORM that takes into account JS's prototypical inheritance, and loose type system then Impel is not for you.

Regarding the license, it's basically the MIT license. Yes, you can use it. Yes, you can modify it. Yes, you can sell it. Just give a little bit of link love back.
Bill Gates, Toshiba in early talks on nuclear reactor
Pointers on C helped me really understand pointers like no other book was able to do.

http://www.amazon.com/Pointers-C-Kenneth-Reek/dp/0673999866/...
13 jquery calendars reviewed
+1 new cool component
> China’s biggest cellular communications company, China Mobile, was expected to cancel a deal that had placed Google’s search engine on its mobile Internet home page

> China’s second-largest mobile company, China Unicom, was said by analysts and others to have delayed or killed the imminent introduction of a cellphone based on Google’s Android platform.

> One major Internet portal, Tom.com, already had ceased using Google to power its search engine.

Now, I'm not sure of the business arrangements made, but it sounds to me that Chinese companies are repudiating contracts because of pressure by the Chinese government.

If true, this looks really bad on China for foreign investment. The government can, on a whim, cancel your contracts with Chinese companies, and steer public opinion using news agencies. Not to mention risk of your IP getting appropriated. That's not the kind of environment foreign companies like to work in.

The Chinese government is, I think, looking very childish right now.
Running JSLint as a Subversion Commit Hook with PHP and Rhino
But I think history shows that practical concerns, not idealism, is what drives web publishers to adopt new formats.

A bit off topic, but if you replace "practical" and "idealism" by their true meaning ("short term", and "long term" respectively), you quickly realize that this attitude is nearly universal: "Short term concerns, not long term ones, is what drives most people".
You didn't read the article, or the background research behind it, did you?

It's based on research into the natural sleep cycle of adolescent humans, and their cognitive abilities. Turns out that there are changes associated with puberty (who knew?) that make them wake up several hours later and stay awake longer than children; their cognitive abilities also peak later in the day. From age 18 onwards they revert towards the adult baseline.

Assuming you're an adult, do you think you'd work more efficiently if you were rousted out of bed at 5am to start work each morning, and forced to finish at 1pm?
Well, my point is that there are ways around it. Like WHERE id IS NOT NULL, or WHERE id=1 OR 1=1. It's not full-proof, it just protects you from writing out a query that is not complete.

It sort of sucks that in SQL you first say what action you want to perform and then say what you want to perform it on. I end up writing the WHERE part of every query first anyways.
Unable to disable Google SafeSearch when using simplified Chinese
I was curious to see what would happen when I searched for 'porn' on the default Google setup from here in Beijing and I found I had no results because SafeSearch was on. Then I was surprised to learn that I was unable to disable SafeSearch unless I switched languages. Traditional Chinese is able to disable SafeSearch.
I am working at a second largest IT company in India, in terms of revenue and I get zero-internet access from 9am to 5pm. During the rest of the hours, I get the so called 'restricted' internet access, where I cannot check web-mails, nor can I download any executables, and I don't have admin access to install anything. Even to install the network printer I need to raise a request to the computer division. I feel sad.
Is there a way to bypass Opera servers in Opera mini (in settings) even if it makes your web browsing experience a bit slower?
SaaS Provider RelayHealth Delivers Innovative Healthcare Applications with F5
From my C days, I second and third Harbison & Steele. I learned from K&R, but I learned better from H&S.

From this list (can't say how current they are),

http://www.c-faq.com/resources/sd19.html

I liked:

- K&R and H&S (if you have to choose, H&S)
- The Standard C Library, P.J.Plauger.
- C Traps and Pitfalls, Andrew Koenig.