skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm confused; has anything actually changed?

There doesn't seem to be any new legal threats, just quotes from Icaza acknowledging that other people are scared of following his lead due to existing patent fears. I don't see any hint that Icaza thinks the threat is real, or threatens future development of Mono.
Sorry, but acting as if Microsoft is really interested in cross-platform anything, and then being surprised when they're not, is similar to snuggling with tigers (while your friends are very worried, asking you to get out of the lair), and then being shocked after the tiger starts to eat your legs.
Indirect Job Interview Questions & What They Really Reveal
Right there's no spin, just clear instructions on stifling free speech.
I expect that's more a function of the translation, or of how Chinese bureaucratic language works.
I’m sure most people support your sentiments, but self-conciously shoe horning Niemöller & Orwell into your arguments like that comes across a bit over the top.

Tone it down, less preaching more conversational. You’ll get a better response and promote better discussions.
Thank you. I knew I'd seen that thing before.
This viewpoint is a little developer-centric. Good design should enable users to do what they want to do as well as what you want them to do.

Certainly, what users want to do is influenced heavily by what you want them to do. Good design sets those expectations well.
The actual paper is here:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...

I'm not convinced about the Reuters article's framing of things in terms of relaxedness - the paper doesn't seem to make any mention of emotional state.

We don't fully understand what theta oscillations do, or why there are oscillations throughout the brain. We know they're more present during activities like navigation and learning, but there are other, slower oscillations that are usually more associated with meditation and states of relaxation than theta.

This is an important finding though, because it throws more light on how oscillations relate to learning.

Buzsaki's Rhythms of the Brain is a great though dense resource for learning about oscillations in the brain:

http://www.amazon.com/Rhythms-Brain-Gyorgy-Buzsaki/dp/019530...
Newser: French Cops Nail Man Who Hacked Obama Twitter
Yes, it makes me very worried for the US. If it develops really bad relations with a major creditor nation, things are going to get sticky here.
Exactly why I didn't want to start a game studio. Once I understood the economics of selling games, I figured it was better to make a platform or tools for game making than starting an actual studio.
I found the other set of instructions, regarding a truck overturning & magazine's public letter, interesting.

Anybody know the source and original Chinese text? The article only says it was "issued by the 'Ministry of Truth' on March 23, 2010"
Generating false color images on the Nexus One using only grayscale pixels
From what I can tell about Python, for example, adding underbars enforces privacy, JavaScript doesn't.

That's not true, an initial underscore is simply used as the convention to indicate that something is private:

>>> class Foo(object):
... def __init__(self):
... self._bar = 48
...
>>> a=Foo()
>>> a._bar
48
"One person there recently told me that they're very friendly to telecommuting -- but only within the US."

Just curious, but once you accept telecommuting what does it matter where someone is? quick in person meetings at a few hours notice?
Was everyone else hoping for a 1 Mhz system with 64k of ram or something? Of course it's not a Commodore 64. However, I find the design enticing, and I could totally picture my kids laying down on the floor in front of the TV with one of these in front of them.
Not to mention the author feels the need to put down Wikipedia for some reason: "wide but shallow knowledge gained from online sources is dominant; there seems also to be little discrimination between sources that employ review and editorial mechanisms, and those that are open to wide, unchecked contributions"
I interpret "go away" as meaning security agencies, guantanamo, water boarding, detained without trial, rendition to countries where a bit of the old ultra violence can happen with plausible deniability, that kind of thing.

Not "arested, tried and sentenced". If that's what you meant then that's different - but it doesn't address whether it's right and fair for that to happen, only that you think it should happen because the current legal system says it should.
Greasemonkey Script Authors have been threatened before and they will continue to be threatened until one of them actually takes the threats to court (and wins).

In the beginning of userscripts.org, I hosted the domain in Germany, which opened up a whole other can of worms since it was not yet clear whether the domain owner could be held responsible for user-posted content. A bunch of people and companies complained and sent legal threats until we finally decided to transfer the domain to the US, where the law was a little saner.

I would be interested in a legal analysis. To me, it seems logical that I can do whatever I want with data in my browser's memory. But the law might not agree with my hacker's intuition.
"This is clear if you only have this one function, but with a large js file I know I'd rather not be searching through the code for global variables. That's also why "Inner functions should follow the var statement", it's an easy way to keep track of scope."

And what about functions in the outer scope? Why should one be forced to place them in a particular order to use them in an inner scope? God forbid if you have this:

function first(){
//stuff
someVal = second()
//stuff
}
function second(){
//stuff
anotherVal = first()
//stuff
}

"No, it's private because it throws an error if you try to use it outside of the proper scope."

This is what I'm talking about:

function Point(x, y){
this._x = parseInt(x,10);
this._y = parseInt(y,10);
}
Point.prototype = {
get x() this._x,
set x(v) this._x = parseInt(v,10),
get y() this._y,
set y(v) this._y = parseInt(v,10)
}

You simply don't document the "private" properties. Pretending JavaScript is more robust than it is helps no one and wastes memory.

"That convention in other languages is for constants. Crockford points out that js doesn't have constants."

It's been supported since JavaScript 1.5.

"The purpose of all caps is to give a visual cue that they're global"

Hungarian notation works fine thank you.

"Crockford used to think the same. He tells the story of a user who suggested fall-through should be flagged by JSLint. Crockford gave him a detailed response explaining that there was nothing wrong with fall-through. The user agreed, and included a bug report for JSLint in his response. Crockford found the bug in JSLint and it was caused by... fall-through."

I don't see the relevance.

"if (a = b) {"

I've already pointed out that there is already a common, testable convention in place:

if((a = b)){

Use Mozilla's strict mode and you'll be able to see the difference.
Despite a lifelong fascination with the topic, I will not be tuning in.
This company is starting to sound like a broken record. They only have 4 or 5 main mantras that they constantly reiterate in 50 different ways. We get it. You're edgy. Keep working on your company instead of trying to convince the world how cool you are.

On the other hand, maybe I'm being too critical. They are probably just trying to do some cross-platform promotion of what's in their book. No shame in that.
Ask HN: Looking for an internship this summer at a Boston-area tech startup
I'm a college freshman looking for an internship this summer at a small Boston-area tech startup. I have extensive experience in PHP/MySQL/XHTML/CSS/JavaScript, but a purely technical job is not the sum total of what I'm looking for. I want to find a startup small enough that I can participate in the day-to-day process of generating ideas and plotting a way forward for the company. I'm constantly working on projects of my own, and there's nothing I enjoy more than brainstorming a new product on a whiteboard and then hacking it out all night. Here are some of my past projects:

http://www.eduset.com/

http://www.songite.com/

http://www.spinjay.com/

I also created and subsequently sold Songerize.com (now defunct), which was covered on Lifehacker, Mashable, and CNet.

My past work experience includes work at three Boston-area tech startups during high school, ranging in size from 3 people to 40+. Here's my LinkedIn profile:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/wjohnson191

If you think that your startup might be a good match for me, or if you know of a startup that I should get in touch with, let me know, either in the comments or at wjohnson [at] eduset.com.
I can't read the "original" text in Chinese, but it is also very short. However, it could be shortened on purpose, so that the leak would be harder to track.
I didn't mean to be insulting, it's just that I don't see how this particular instance of blurb-cum-comment page adds a lot of value. I'd have thought it would have been more helpful and polite to skip the intro and link to the full article straight away... but then again I'm new here, which is why I asked.

Does HN encourage this kind of redirection so that the blurb linked to may serve as an executive summary or tl;dr or whatever you want to call it? Does HN encourage this kind of redirection to elicit submissions from people with blogs to draw attention to?
I wouldn't exactly say "boooooring". For us sentimental people who still remember their C64 fondly, it has certain value. I just hope that the price tag does not exceed that value ;)
Sorry, but why is that chilling? The other way round seems like more potential trouble.
upd: thanks, dsplittgerber
Cool service, albeit it's for smaller uses. The limit is 25,000 requests a day. This sounds like alot, until you realize each point is a request. So, you want elevations for a 100 mile route drawn on a map? That's about 2-3000 points, so you only get 10-20 of such routes before hitting your daily limit.

Other issue is the accuracy: I am not sure the base DEM resolution they are using, but my guess is it's the standard 10meter spacing between points inside US and territories, and 30meters outside. 10meter grid spacing isn't bad at all, it's actually pretty good, but their algorithm for interpolating is non-existent. For any point not directly on a grid point, they just average the four surrounding elevations and return that. I have played with several interpolation schemes, and I have found either a bilinear or a cubic interpolation for interior points to be vastly superior to a nearest neighbor or averaging scheme. Differences can be easily up to 10 meters for a 10meter grid spacing.

I had been hoping they'd release this, but I'll stick to my home-brewed service with the 500gig NED at 10 meter resolution (1/3 arcsecond). No API limits :)
Access, Share, Download your computers (Win,Mac,Linux) files from iPhone
I don't understand the problem. Why can't you minimize the "People you follow" pane and just ignore it? Is it that shared items appear in the "All items" view? An easy solution is to just drop all your subscriptions into a single folder, and then view it through the subscriptions pane. Same content as all items except nothing shared.
The DLR is also the foundation for late binding in C# 4, which is a cornerstone of the new COM functionality.
It's pretty rare that you'd give full node admin permissions to typical business users or end users. "Create" and "edit" permissions are usually sufficient for most elevated roles, and that hides a lot of the admin-specific functions that show up on the forms, no?
If you guys go into that, I'd suggest leaving a path open for TikZ (text to embed pics in TeX, see here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1204172 , about use in a graph theory book).

Makes neat print-style pictures - for example this chart: http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/gajski-kuhn-y-chart/ , which is not a graph; but the ones in the book looked good.

P.S. http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/prims-algorithm/ illustrates the graph algorithm with overlays.
No Joel, is right. The Beanstalk goal mentioned in the linked article "Bring version control into the development process for those who don’t use it" is better served by Git, Mercurial, BZ. All of which make easier for two developers (a small sub-team) to share code without needing a server provisioned.
In terms of reading a complete body of code in one style or another, I agree.

What is annoying and distracting is having conflicting styles in the same single chunk of code. Sort of like how I would not want a book to randomly change line spacing, character spacing, etc. from paragraph to paragraph. I don't really care what the spacings are, and I certainly have no problem going from one book to another where these are totally different, but I do not want them flip-flopping around in the text of a single book.
Are you contending that Django cannot do much beyond CMS? I think the contrary here.
Au contraire, double underscore does make it "private". Trying to access a double underscore attribute directly will throw an AttributeError.

>>> class Foo(object):
... def __init__(self):
... self.__a = 42
... def look_here(self):
... print self.__a
...
>>> f = Foo()
>>> f.__a
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
AttributeError: 'Foo' object has no attribute '__a'
>>> f.look_here()
42
I already did, switched to Vienna
Bye Bye Flash: GitHub's Network Graph is now Canvas
Truer words were never spoken: "Since conquering CVS, Subversion has largely drifted..."

As an example, I'm disappointed it took them as long as it did to add merging, especially since it still doesn't seem as easy to use as svnmerge.
How Not To Sort By Average Rating
Yes, this is what civil engineers do, but it's a highly suboptimal alternative to real data, which is impossible to collect due to cost and the laws of physics.

If for $200 civil engineers could test a new bridge design against real, live traffic, with no risk of injury or loss of life... you bet your ass they'd be doing it. But that's not going to happen, because we can't will multiple bridges into existence for almost no money, nor can they occupy the same space :)

This is also why transit planning is often such a clusterfuck - the mathematical models behind urban growth, commute patterns, etc, are often poor predictors of what will actually happen. We've got road layout down to a pretty precise science, but that's about the limit of it. The impact of said roads and thoroughfares on the communities surrounding it, for example, are still poorly understood.

Roundabout way of saying it: I just don't think civil engineering and software engineering will ever truly be comparable. The amount of consequence-free testing, combined with the ability to iterate for extremely cheaply, will never be matched by a field that must build expensive physical objects.
What platform did you use IntelliJ IDEA on? I work with about 100 other (highly opinionated) developers that all use it, and I've never once heard someone complain about the font rendering.
One of the rare cases where "normal" people would benefit from knowing how to program? Should be easy to automate the hiding with a Greasemonkey script.

Not suggesting this as a solution to everyone, just saying...
The author of the article is hiding people's names in the people panel without actually changing the setting to ignore their shares.

The author needs to go into the sharing settings menu and click 'ignore' on the users he doesn't want to see content from.
I always find it interesting in hosting forums when people complain about the operation of an open source product they are using not doing something they want it to do and getting really mad at it. The performance sucks, or it has a bug, or whatever...

Well, you know... it's open source and it's free. You can fix it if you want. But no one does, they just complain.

And if they do fix it, they don't commit the changes to get them integrated, so they can't upgrade anymore. shrug
And if you turn on wrap-to-screen? If you've got line numbers and/or overflow indicators, wrapped text is easy to read.
Unless I'm mistaken a majority of Chinese actually support their government and matters such as this are viewed through the prism of nationalism.

One could argue it's because of the education/brain-washing but the facts remain.
Turns out "Give me liberty or give me death" was catchier than "Give me tea or give me death".
Their government wealth fund holds one of the largest USD reserves in the world, if not the largest. Theoretically, they could threaten to quickly unload it and send the USD tumbling if they don't get their way with some policy. Realistically, that won't happen, as the yuan is still pegged to the USD and the US is one of the largest importers of chinese stuff. It's not that far-fetched to think of some other worrying scenarios, though.
Cicket Liu on Wikipedia's "Object Lesson"
I do have both line numbers and overflow indicators on, but I still find wrapped text (especially if an identifier is broken into two) harder to read.
You mean the dynamic keyword? I didn't know that was the DLR, that's interesting.
I wonder if this was inspired by my Tweet Compressor project:

http://tweetcompressor.com/

It got a lot of attention on Reddit last week (20k visitors).
Adapting to accessibility
I believe this is different because the only thing holding up China's currency is American Bonds.
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WikiLeaks follow-up - "We are fine"
IE8, Safari 4, Firefox 3, iPhone fall on day 1 of Pwn2Own
Might also be useful for augmented reality apps, to the elevation of virtual objects right.
It's also worth pointing out unit tests as one of the stated reasons for switching to Django. Drupal's unit testing is essentially voluntary for the current major version (mandatory in the next), meaning it engenders lots of crap, some of which I've written.
"If they are going to spend that much time logging in just to leave a comment they are probably going to make sure the comment is worth the trouble."

I might have something valuable to say but I don't bother jumping through hoops, ever. I visit dozens of sites a day from hacker news and I'm not signing up for a dozen blogs a day. The cost is just way too high. Instead, I'll just comment here.

Admittedly, requiring people to sign up will stop people from posting truly contentless replies. But there some very intelligent well spoken people who just won't bother -- they have better things to do.
wait for the Chinese Communist Party apologists to turn up and argue that "China is not yet ready for democracy" and "The Communist party is doing this to help protect the Chinese people from evil Western imperialists" any moment now :-P .

More seriously, I think the coming years maybe the first time in the last century or so that an iron fisted autocracy becomes the dominant economic power in the world. Interesting times ahead.
Number Of Global Mobile Phone Subscribers By Region From 2000 to 2009
Thankfully Google has announced that it will be furthering the anti-censorship cause by hosting a Wikileaks server.
Acrobatic thieves avoid cameras, motion sensors, alarms in daring heist
Keep working on your company instead of trying to convince the world how cool you are.

That's part of how they work on their company. I've often used quotes from 37signals' blog posts and books when trying to get a concept across to a coworker, and that keeps them at the forefront of everyone's mind.
I don't think that's his point at all. He's saying that they are playing directly into Django's strengths and therefore Django should work very well for them.
Wonder if this would be accurate enough for a GPS -> bike route translator. Like say you want to see the altitude throughout your bike right from the gps you recorded.
via Schneier on Security blog - http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/03/acrobatic_thie...
Much as opposition to it by people in the US is viewed through the prism of nationalism.
I'd do this:

document.getElementsByClassName("externalLinkBig")[0].setAttribute(
"class", "externalLinkSmall"
);
> without needing a server provisioned.

or they could use beanstalk, i suppose?
Penny Arcade is a fascinating example of what I think of as a common pattern in creative industries... You get a creative who is amazingly talented and makes stuff that people just want; this person has no or rudimentary business skills. The creative partners with somebody else who understands the business and deeply believes in the creative. The parter provides the structure to make that creative successful.

The obvious example is Walt and Roy Disney. Walt would have been next to nothing if it wasn't for his brother. Roy was brilliant at figuring out how to pay for his brother's ideas. There are a few examples in the world of fashion, genius designers who are paired with a merchandising expert. With Penny Arcade, Jerry and Mike accidentally sold off the rights to their work for short money, and were generally stumbling along. Robert Khoo was just graduating from an MBA program. As I understand it, he walked in and said, "I love you guys. Now I'll handle the money." It's worked out amazingly, to everyone's enormous benefit.

In my head, there's some sort of way to scale all this. I wrote a semi-coherent post back in January on my blog, trying to explain it to myself. http://www.njl.us/2010/01/new-old-business-model.html

Basically, I think there is room for a media conglomerate that's about playing the Robert Khoo/Roy Disney roll for all sorts of talented creatives. Scale up a support system that lets folks develop their own little independent brand on the Internet, but then provides them with pipelines for merchandising, advertising sales, and all the administrative crap involved in actually running a real business.
I recently migrated over to Google Apps Gmail from my own personally managed, rock solid Postfix server.

I am comfortable with Gmail because, although I don't own the code, I still own my data.

See also: http://www.dataliberation.org/

---

Nothing is truly free as in beer. Free software doesn't cost me my money. Free software costs me my time. Gmail is cheaper in this regard.

I look at Gmail much the same way I look at my hosting provider: I don't own their infrastructure, data center or connectivity, but those are all sufficiently fungible that I can migrate away at any time.

---

The "new free" is all about owning and freeing your data. Owning your identity. As long as I own my domains, as long as I don't lock my data into a closed system with proprietary formats, I feel free.

Now, registrars and domains are what really make me nervous...
How a Hurricane Wavemaker Works (With Video)
I think you're moving too fast there. Where do we see that RMS was "right"? Miguel is only saying that the fear of legal action is what's stopping .NET from being accepted, not that there's actually anything to be afraid of.
I'm pretty sure he is still saying that. The article only acknowledges the fact that a lot of people think .NET is a legal minefield.
That quote seems to be accurate. What do you take issue with?
In recent months the quality of the posts on the SVN blog seems to have deteriorated quite dramatically.

I can remember times when I enjoyed almost every single blog post from the 37signals guys. This blog entry seems to have taken one of their mottos ('You can always do less') to new extremes.

Too much fluff for my taste recently.
This reminds me of the time Pakistan's AS accidentally blocked YouTube for the whole world. They accidentally published a very specific routing rule pointing YouTube's IP addressed to some machine in their network. This sucks even more than breaking DNS because you can't even get around it by hardcoding the IP.

http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/pakistan_hijacks_youtube...