skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for letting me know! I don't have access to any physical Android devices but I'll download the emulator after work and check it out.
Fair suck of the sav, Blizzard
When I first saw the iPad demo, I thought the wide black bezel looked too thick - like; why couldn't they shrink it down some?

I had a chance to play with a coworker's iPad today and I realized the bezel is that thick by design - it's where your fingers go when you're holding the device. It really is well designed.
So what is it that they have in place of mitochondiria?

A fascinating book "Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life" (http://www.amazon.com/Power-Sex-Suicide-Mitochondria-Meaning...) suggested that the multicellullar organisms on Earth evolved only once, when the symbiotic relationship between two types of bacteria was formed - one of them became "host", and the other became mitochondria and specialized for energy production.

The book suggests that the conditions for this to happen were very unusual and are unlikely to ever happen again. It does even suggest that this may mean that life in the Universe, more complicated that single-cell organisms, is very unlikely to evolve.

If eukaryotes evolved more than once, then there's some more hope for extraterrestrial life I suppose ...
"Next week" shouldn't be at the day level- break it only into thirds... early- middle- late
True, we need a Library of Congress unit for computational biology.
Absence of malware does not prove that the AppStore model is superior. It just proves that there is currently no known malware. It is much easier to disprove something (i.e. find malware on the AppStore; therefore the model is flawed) than it is to prove something (i.e. there is no malware on the AppStore; therefore the model is perfect).
/etc/inittab, /etc/init.d/ and now 'upstart'...

Don't forget daemontools.

Daemontools is nice because it works fine as a init.d replacement, and you can just run the individual programs when appropriate. I use it to start emacs, offlineimap, etc., when I log in for the first time.
Interesting story. Valfierno had a very effective PR and insight into the market. He would have made an effective head of PR or Sale.
This isn't on Linux, granted, but killall will ignore its arguments and kill ALL accessible processes on a number of other UNIX-like OSes (such as Solaris).
Juggling code
Uh, Debian? It's like Ubuntu but the packages don't break your system as often.
Quite the anti-Linux group of people here. I wonder how much data is silently corrupted every day by OS X's lack of an atomic rename syscall...
awesome.

maybe the best thing we can teach our kids is to not concern themselves with pleasing these people. that, and do our best to help them find answers to every question that they come up with.
The 10 Most Amazing Electronic Clothes Of the Century
A review of the story in question, for those who are curious:

http://www.thesatirist.com/books/HAPWORTH.html

I also tracked down a copy of the full text, but in the interests of some kind of vague respect for copyright I'll leave you to figure out how to obtain it for yourself.
What's the computational technique used for this?
Computer Science Loses to Math in New Hiring Formula
Here is the paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/107/13/5732.long
These sorts of mistakes seem to be common: forgetting that Moore's law means that memory settings need to be adjusted at least every other year. For some reason, one of the Smalltalk distributions still uses default GC settings from 1994! That's only about two orders of magnitude off! Everyone just knows to go and tweak those.
Could be fairly significant. One of the problems with biology is that we have a lot of data in terms of experimental tests, but we don't know all the data mean.

Only a relatively small amount of the 30,000 human genes are clearly understood. And when you THINK you understand what it does, these genes can sometimes surprise by having other unexpected effects.

What his method seems to do, is to help map out what genes are related to each other. There are cases in cancer for example where we may know that ONE gene gets hyper-activated when a type of cancer is around. If you can correlate the activity of this active gene with other previously unknown gene, you get a better understanding of what causes the disease. If you know what causes the disease, you can use a variety of techniques (drugs, designed proteins, or RNAi) to inhibit the Gene's effects and stop the disease.
Hmm? Could you care to explain your reasoning? Are you speaking of bug counts per lines of code? Or something else?

In my eyes, I'm glad that this bug report is in the wild. I'm glad microsoft employees are waving this around in our faces because look how many lives this bug report will save. Look how many people won't get bit by this bug now that they know about it. On the other hand, I can't explain how many times I've used Microsoft's installers, following the instructions to the T only to wind up with broken software or even yes, trashed filesystems.

Perhaps you're right. Maybe open source software is more buggy than our middle-management-driven alternatives. But at least we aren't afraid to warn people of its faults. I think the fact that we don't need to cover critical bugs like this up to keep profits high says something positive about this model of development.
To reflect how quickly they seem to pass.
Before clicking on this, I jokingly thought to myself "let me guess, this is yet another NoSQL is better than ___ article"
I'd consider the name killall to be both an explanation and a warning. But yeah - I made that mistake once on Solaris. That's why you should never have applications like that. Even shutdown needs some option for scheduling when it should work.
Morten Lund out of bankruptcy
does the beta label mean anything?
Free Download Nero 7,8,9 General Cleaning Tools
That is the most readable site layout I have ever seen.
Difficult because everyone speaks a different language ;)
Such analysis would be perfect as the paid part of freemium.
Speaking of which, when do we get to hear about your new project?
Andrew, get your site a favicon!
The mainstream ones sometimes get Science or Tech details glaringly wrong.
No, that's not where complaints go.

Bug reports should hold information that explains how to fix the bug or how to reproduce it. A complaint that says "me too! hurry up and fix it!" adds nothing useful and pollutes the rest of the helpful posts there.

Post your "me too!" comments on the Ubuntu forums. That's the place for them. Failing that, the "This bug affects me too [change]" button is more than willing to listen.
I doubt that the license cost of Windows factors much into ATM design.
> Are you speaking of bug counts per lines of code? Or something else?

I speak of incidents I've read about and incidents experienced myself. These are not statistics, but they satisfy me.

> I'm glad microsoft employees are waving this around in our faces

Where? Or is this the standard OSS "everyone who criticizes Linux is a secret Microsoft employee" line of thinking?

> Look how many people won't get bit by this bug now that they know about it

Falsely assuming that a significant number of those with the potential to be affected actually know about it . . .

> following the instructions to the T only to wind up with broken software or even yes, trashed filesystems.

Somehow most other people manage to do it without many problems.

> But at least we aren't afraid to warn people of its faults . . .

I believe Microsoft and Apple's KB systems are more complete and well organized than Ubuntu's bug-tracker.

> critical bugs like this

You may not need to cover them, but you're also the only ones who actually have them in significant number. I prefer an organization that cares enough to prevent the bugs from happening but does not disclose them to one where the bugs are disclosed then ignored with insults.
There is really no reason however to have a space launch platform be reusable. The whole idea behind it is that it was supposed to make things easier and cheaper, and it's done exactly the opposite.

I'm not missing the point at all. You, however have equated every innovation to be progress. Wise people realize that sometimes, despite our good intentions, innovations are sometimes negatives overall, and it's best to take a step back to take two more forward.

In fact, once you get by the "cool" factor of the shuttle, what you end up seeing is that is has in fact been a large step backwards. It has prevented the one nation that could actually dream of furthering space exploration from doing exactly that. The US basically uses the shuttle to do what the first Mercury flights did when we were all watching black and white tv's.

Think back to aviation. The wright brothers used a canard design on the Flyer. While ultimately proven to be safer and more fuel efficient, we needed to have a hundred years of non-canard aerospace development to realize everything between the Flyer and a Eurofighter. Fixating on canard designs may very well have held us in the balsa wood aircraft stage for 10-15 years.

Perhaps, one day, the innovation that is the shuttle will come full circle. That day is not tomorrow though, and no amount of emotional attachment to the idea stops it from being anything but a costly and inefficient nightmare.

(btw, both mainframes and PBC were smaller and more mobile right out of the gate, compared to the status quo.)
Things would've gone a bit harder for him if he'd been extradited to France, I suspect.

In Italy, he could play up the Ollie North angle ("I'm a patriot, dammit!")
HTML and CSS for sure (XHTML can't be properly handled by most server/browser combinations, although they fake it well).

For front-end interactions, Javascript is pretty much the only answer. jQuery is just a Javascript library, and AJAX is just a method to send/receive information without refreshing the entire page.

For "true" Web 2.0 functionality, you'll also need to know a server-side language. PHP is certainly one of the more popular ones (and among the easiest to get working), but there is also Java, Ruby, ColdFusion, .net (C#, ASP.net, VB.net,etc.), Perl, Python, LISP, ARC, etc.

Chances are you'll need to be able to store information, which pretty much requires a database. MySQL is easy to work with, but there's also PostgreSQL, SQL Server and Oracle (among others).

Personally, I currently use HTML 5, CSS, Javascript (with jQuery), PHP and MySQL most frequently.

As a designer, however, your biggest concern is almost certainly going to be the HTML/CSS side of things. A library like jQuery will handle 99% of your cross-browser Javascript issues, but getting a page to look right (though not necessarily identical) across browsers can be a challenge. You'll need to know not just the markup (HTML) and display (CSS) languages, but also how each of those are interpreted in the major browsers (IE 7+, Firefox 3+, Chrome 4+, Safari 3+ and Opera 9+). You'll need to know how to make your PNG graphics look the same in Windows and OSX (gamma differences, if I recall correctly).

Fortunately, all this information (and more, so much more) is at your fingertips. All you need is patience, time, and more patience :)

Good luck!
Oh, I was merely emphasizing ambition's point in a roundabout, non-serious way (I'm not suggesting that people don't give credit to Marco).

I don't agree that it's impossible to know if an idea is original or not. For instance, on one extreme, if 2 composers published a very similar concerto at about the same time, it would be assumed one of them plagiarized the other. On the other extreme, if you're working on an arithmetic problem and there's only one answer, then of course no one would be accused of plagiarism.
I still used Readability on it. I appreciate that it's not gaudy or hard, but I couldn't resize the text to the size where I like it (which is a large size); after two Ctrl+Wheel-Up increments, the tab stops responding and has to be killed in Chromium on Linux. Just used Readability because it doesn't have the same problems.
Are you saying that other Linux distributions are better? It used to be that Debian was more solid, but I don't think this is the case any more.
The consumer electronics industry?
Nautilus in gnome used to support resizing icons to show more of the file content. I never found it that useful (and this feature seems to have been removed).
An explanation of the strange dip in Java popularity in 2004:

Q: What happened to Java in April 2004? Did you change your methodology?

A: No, we did not change our methodology at that time. Google changed its methodology. They performed a general sweep action to get rid of all kinds of web sites that had been pushed up. As a consequence, there was a huge drop for languages such as Java and C++. In order to minimize such fluctuations in the future, we added two more search engines (MSN and Yahoo) a few months after this incident.

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....
.local is special
Laser engraving an iPad - neat process, like a printer
Madness.

cool, though.
Dan Ingalls (the original implementor of Smalltalk) built a weather station that showed the weather on a logarithmic graph. Very cool idea.

http://weather-dimensions.com/index.html
But the suit against HTC doesn't cover the multitouch patent.
I was refering to the visual styling. HP Slate might not be based on the iPad, but surely it draws on the iPhone/iPod and/or MBP, just as the HP Envy does. Not saying there's anything wrong with that, just that it seems to be a theme in HP's latest products.
I used to read this quite often, but it was so short that each sentence-length "story" was too short to contemplate, and there were no links to in-depth stories.

Clicking on your example though, I was very happily surprised to see that they have corrected all of these shortcomings! I'm not sure when it happened, but Harpers is definitely going back on my radar.

[edit] On second thought, it is still as myopically US and frivolous news oriented as ever, nevermind. I'll stick to the economist.
Although the plane looks a bit odd, the cabin looks like it could be a lot more spacious than the current cylindrical ones.
Clearly the solution is to disallow multitasking.

But seriously, I find it strange that so many people in the comments section are complaining about how much swap Firefox uses. Don't they have machines with more than 128M of RAM!? (My Firefox is using 131M of RAM right now.)
WikiLeaks releases classified US military video "Collateral Murder"
Webandrank search engine placement service
Well, even assuming that they're using top quality solid state storage, you're going from (at worst) hundreds of nanoseconds per retrieval to (at best) a hundred microseconds per (page) retrieval. Still very significant for some data access patterns.
It can be. It's just a bit harder to set up and definitely more error prone.
Even then - neither killall or shutdown is as serious as deleting the root partition. It's the difference between a reboot and a complete reinstall/restore from backup.
Oh, I see where you're coming from. Sorry, I didn't mean no flamin'. Let me clarify my points real quick, then I'll go back to my n00bishness with my 5 precious karma and my fiery tongue.

>> I'm glad microsoft employees are waving this around in our faces

>Where? Or is this the standard OSS "everyone who criticizes Linux is a secret Microsoft employee" line of thinking?

Oops, I forgot to mention my source. That was from the bug report itself, comment 18 -- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/55717... -- in which someone was alerted to the bug because a Microsoft employee poked some fun about it.

> > Look how many people won't get bit by this bug now that they know about it

> Falsely assuming that a significant number of those with the potential to be affected actually know about it . . .

I think most competent system administrators who would invoke such a script (it was not an automatic action, this bug is triggered by explicitly running a script that was introduced in the latest unreleased ubuntu version) probably read either reddit or digg or hackernews and would likely know about this very popular bug by now. Which is an advantage because now they won't be bitten by it.

> Somehow most other people manage to do it without many problems.

Guess I'm not one of them.

> I believe Microsoft and Apple's KB systems are more complete and well organized than Ubuntu's bug-tracker.

Perhaps you're right. You have more experience with them. I haven't even seen their bug trackers, and likely wouldn't have access to them unless I were a Microsoft or Apple employee. That's how most proprietary companies' bug trackers work.

> You may not need to cover them, but you're also the only ones who actually have them in significant number.

Funny, I thought all software was buggy? At least, the stuff I write sure is.

> I prefer an organization that cares enough to prevent the bugs from happening but does not disclose them to one where the bugs are disclosed then ignored with insults.

Fair enough. But to be honest, this is not an organization we're dealing with here. This is not a system we're criticizing here. This is the problem of one maintainer's silly response to a simple problem. No reason to blame the entire system for one maintainer's bad day.

No software is bug free. But I personally would rather either submit a patch (you can do that with open-source software) or poke a maintainer (a living breathing doorway into the code and the development process) than navigate through Apple corporation's or Microsoft corporation's complete and well-organized knowledge bases or bug tracking systems only to find out this programmer might not feel like fixing that bug and there's nothing more I could do.

Oh wait, I guess I contradicted myself there. Bah, you know what I meant; I'm still new to this 'arguing with people over the Internet' thing and you hacker newsies are quite an incredibly perceptive bunch.
Incredible wholesale custom t-shirts
Is chromium good? I just did ctrl+wheel up 10 times on that site in Firefox and had no problems.
I am personally saddened by the iPad being locked down because Apple does make really nice hardware and software systems. It's something I'd probably really like to own and use, but sadly being able to install third party software myself is a critical feature.

As many have pointed out, allowing third party software (i.e. not apple approved) does not make OS X into a malware infested unusable mess. Why anyone would assume it would turn an iPad into one, I do not know.

The iPad could be just as good for "the masses" as it is right now, plus make developers happy by allowing them to develop for free, with no threat of being rejected for overlapping with Apple's own market, or just for rubbing Apple the wrong way.
Huh? Not getting any link previews here.
Until they speed up the datastore by a factor of 10 the app engine just isn't a viable platform. They don't even use it internally for that very reason (this is coming from colleagues who work there.)
Penny's Computer Book, Inspector Gadget wallpaper for the iPad
Reminder to downvoters: downvoting on HN is not intended to be used to express disagreement.
Apart from being the tipping point - nudging me to start out on my own with its liberal free quotas, I should also thank Google App Engine for not supporting Java during the initial release and thus exposing me to Python.

Coming from corporate Java and RDBMS world, the non-RDBMS datastore (BigTable), Python and having to scale while being more resource conscious, have all been pleasant experiences.
On the article, if your mouse passes over a link (and you have JS enabled), it pops up a snapshot of what that page is, using http://www.snap.com/.

It appears to require you to have your mouse over the link for a little while (like a tenth of a second), so if you always move your mouse fast and never considered clicking a link, you wouldn't have seen it.

It's really annoying.
When the user experience is the branding, you don't need anything else.
To be honest, the majority of the passive-aggressive attitude that I see is coming from iPad supporters, not enthusiasts.

I say that I am disappointed in it because of the App Store and suddenly I'm the one being called a luddite, being accused of wanting to keep the poor masses down, and other silly things.

I think any technology enthusiast will tell you that they would love nothing more than to never have to do tech support for peoples computers. I assure you, that part of the iPad is universally loved.

The disappointment some of us feel is because we were hoping for a tool for us to use as well, and it's not really what we were hoping for.
Please don't down mod comments when they aren't trolling.

The parent comment is at -2 points at the time of writing, which is very unfair. Just argue the comment and leave it at that.
All I can say about that page is thanks Readability for actually making it readable/viewable! (What's going on with the massive images?)
How do you reconcile that statement with the fact that tons of developers do actually use it? Myself included. ;)
First of all, don't ever trust a popular science writeup from the school of the corresponding author. It is almost certainly meaningless hype.

Secondly, PNAS is a good journal, but not a great one. He was almost certainly rejected from the top tier. (Nature, Science)

As someone who works in this field, finding genes that are similar in some way to two disease related genes is not at all novel. This is the goal of literally hundreds of computational methods. It sounds like what he did was to build a decision tree from a set of training data - hardly an earth-shattering application.

Edit: Wow, after fully reading the paper I am stunned how commonplace this analysis is. This exact approach has been taken for analyzing microarray data for the last decade. This does not warrant in any way the breathless writeup it receives in the original post.

Under what hypothesis would one expect nature to follow boolean rules? This approach ignores any subtle relationships or multifactorial causes of gene expression changes. The more I read the more I am convinced that this is utter garbage.

What really makes me mad about this is that increasingly the way to get ahead in science is to overstate your results and then have friends of the corresponding author "review" the manuscript. If you'll notice, this was submitted by Irving L Weissman who, according to his website is "Director, Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine". It is very odd that it wasn't submitted by either the corresponding, nor the lead author. It is very clear that this article did not receive the scientific scrutiny that it should have.
Probably, but you'd be surprised. I don't know if I would say Charles Barkley was "naturally talented" at basketball--his body type was all wrong, especially since he played in the era before everyone bulked up--but he worked his ass off and became one of the greats.
Depends on what you want to do. Getting a beagleboard would be a no brainer to start out.

http://www.amazon.com/ARM-System-Developers-Guide-Architectu... is a good book, you might want to buy a copy.

Some handy things to know about ARM.. logical operations can be added on to ALU instructions for free -- lots of speed gains there...

If you have never done any embedded programming; expect things to take longer to write, and frustration levels can be pretty ugly.

If you get an ARM chip that doesn't have floating point, and you need to do something mathematically intensive, look into fixed point math. Make everything you can into a table (most ARM chips have enough memory so that you can trade space for speed)

Don't give up -- embedded requires tenacity.

Oh, and Codesourcery provides good pre-compiled toolchains, but you have to dig around on their website a bit to find them.