skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems more like a non-decision as far as broad statements go. Only 4 justices fully signed the majority/plurality opinion, four signed Stevens's opinion (counting Stevens), and Scalia sort of indirectly signed onto both: he signed parts of the majority opinion, and the part of Breyer's opinion which aimed to lay out the common ground between the other two opinions.

The court definitely passed up an opportunity to totally axe business-method and/or software patents, but it seems it didn't really affirm them either, at least not in any sort of clear language. It seems that 5 of the members (Stevens, Breyer, Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Scalia) actually lean the opposite way, with a fairly strong presumption against business-method patents.
Well, there is one other method: set things up so that zombie banks can earn enough money to become solvent in a decade or so and then do the necessary liquidations.

I'd read this has happened several times before (Japan may be doing a form of it), we seem to be doing it now, it's the best practical outcome of the current Eurozone crisis, but it does really mess things up during the "recovery" period.
I am OK with experiments---or how do you think people came up with football in the first place?

Just make sure you fork the game, instead of changing the original.
sigh - why oh why can't they support Windows XP? 80% of the customers using our web application are still on Windows XP (some even on NT4...) and seing how conservative these companies are, I have my doubts that they'll ever upgrade.

Now if we could have a working IE without hardware acceleration that runs under XP, that would be wonderful.

I do have some hopes for Google Chrome Frame's MSI installer though - to support a barcode scanner, we already have to force our users to install Java, so there's at least some hope with GCF.

As it stands now, 20% of our development time is wasted on making stuff work on IE 5.5 (!) and 6
i so hope i can grab a ticket!
You do not understand the fallacy of argument from authority. I did not engage in this.

Mere assertions is not going help you there. You have to explain why I am wrong.
Does John Gruber have any experience in building hardware that would allow him to reasonably claim any such teardown report as bullshit? Or did he just do some simple math in his head and think to himself that Apple doesn't make that much money so it must be BS? Hardware costs are just one piece of the puzzle, manufacturing/IP/shipping/R&D/software/marketing are others.
Yes - in the knockout stages (same as World Cup, there's group stages, then second round, quarter finals, semis and the final).

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA_Champions_League#Format

If you have never seen it, I highly advise watching the Champions League as the standard is very high.
Wow a biophysics related article on HN. I can finally be an interesting commenter!

First and foremost, no one is writing off quantum mechanics. There are a lot of physical mechanisms that can't be well described by classical models: charge transport, some examples in protein folding, optical interactions, etc.

The issue is that current computational resources are limited. We can't even give a full MM (classical) simulation of a small virus without months of distributed computing efforts and thats with algorithms that scale like O(n^3).

Even DFT models that are pretty far from the theory we're looking at O(n^5). It'll be farther into the future before we can do more.

That said QM/MM simulations of macromolecules (DNA in particular) are extremely common though the goals may be quite different so I'm not entirely certain where the basis for the claim that CV entanglement is needed for stability at a physical level. They do such a simulation with 2 different factors for the VDW interaction and note that shrinking it by a factor 10 leads to stability issues. (Rather obvious claim in context)

The authors recognize entirely that this model is not going to be accurate. The question is, how inaccurate can you be before your results don't mean anything?

To me their work kinda straddles the line.
Issues with their simple model I see:
Lack of rotational degrees of freedom of the base-pairs,
Lack of a polarizing solution (water) !!! (Critical since the entire basis of this was the non-trivial mechanics of non-permanent dipole moments)

And of course the very obvious issues that arise from modeling DNA as just a plane of positive charge with a single electron orbital.

All they end up saying is that for that scaling factor at the very small value you don't get as much of an energy increase in the molecule that leads to instability in a "normal" QM/MM simulation. I'm certainly not convinced that this energy difference can be directly said to be because of entanglement and not just flaws in their model and certainly not willing to say that this small value represents anything physical.

There were a few more confusing things in the analysis but I admit I'm only glancing over the paper but I think the most we can take away from this is that there may be non-trivial effects of CV entanglement. Maybe that's all they really wanted.
Might be worth noting that if you look at a place where a person's income is a function of their productivity (i.e., smart, hard working people make more money on average) then you should expect some stickiness, because one's intelligence and work ethic surely is correlated with the same qualities in their parents (and that's regardless of whether you believe in genes or nurture).
He was on C-SPAN Book TV in 2007: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/200788-1 In true C-SPAN tradition the video has 21 views :).

If you don't have flash you can get the video with RTMPDump (http://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu):

rtmpdump -W http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/assets/swf/CSPANPlay... -s http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/assets/swf/CSPANPlay... -r rtmp://video.c-spanarchives.org:1935/fastplay/../trimmed/200/200788/200788-1_01.flv -o 200788-1_01.flv

rtmpdump -W http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/assets/swf/CSPANPlay... -s http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/assets/swf/CSPANPlay... -r rtmp://video.c-spanarchives.org:1935/fastplay/../trimmed/200/200788/200788-1_02.flv -o 200788-1_02.flv
7 lines of code, 3 minutes: Implement a programming language from scratch
America is saturated and inhabited by people who will live on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_income
Transitivity and How to Win When You’re an Underdog
NO: The Supreme Court Did Not Just Strike Down Sarbanes-Oxley
Acorn: Cropping Photoshop Out Of My Life
The majority really only had 4 strong votes on that point: Scalia also signed onto the separate Breyer opinion which held that, while the machine-or-transformation test isn't the sole test, it's still the main useful one.
Bummer. They managed to uphold Bilski without actually accomplishing anything. Well... without accomplishing much anyway. Maybe this decision will help every so slightly in terms of establishing more firmly that an "abstract idea" can't be patented, but I why wouldn't they have taken a firmer stand... especially one that would have effectively eliminated software and business method patents? <sigh />
I may be misunderstanding your suggestion, but this system would require Google to admit that there is spam in the store, no? And if there is spam (as we can clearly see) why not just remove it instead of asking the user to manually hide it?
7 is a very close approximation.

In 2006, the average world cup combined score was 2.3 goals: http://www.insidescience.org/current_affairs/best_team_not_g...

In 2006, the average NFL combined score was 20.7 points: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_average_score_for_one_...

20.7/2.3 = 9
Yes, but what's happening in soccer right now, is that the dealer saw a full house, but decided to only count it as a high-card 5.
There's a difference between not having riches, and being in poverty. There's even a huge difference between being poor, and being in poverty. Nobody needs riches, but everybody needs food, trees, clothes, shelter, medicine, and books. Poor people can often have these things - but people in poverty struggle even for those basics.

I don't agree with the author of the posted essay but nevertheless.
"Another golden oldie that got dropped is cursor: hand, the MS proprietary alternative to cursor: pointer"

I hate that no matter what it's called. For God's sake, don't use the hyperlink cursor for buttons!
He sells wine: http://winelibrary.com/
The email feature is great though a file uploader on the main page wouldn't be missed. ;)
Around page 28-29, you'll find the Court's opinion on Sarbanes-Oxley and its future. In short, it appears they strike down a provision that allows the executive branch to remove a member from the board of directors, leaving the rest of the law intact. Apologies in advance, and please correct me - I'm neither a lawyer or an expert on Sarbox. [Edit: See comment below by kgrin]

This seems to be the most relevant portion of the decision (viewable in full here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/33661051/Supreme-Court-Ruling-on-S...). From pages 28-29, with citations removed for readability:

---

"We reject such a broad holding. Instead, we agree with the Government that the unconstitutional tenure provisions are severable from the remain­ der of the statute. “Generally speaking, when confronting a constitutional flaw in a statute, we try to limit the solution to the problem,” severing any “problematic portions while leaving the remainder intact.”

"Because “[t]he unconstitutionality of a part of an Act does not necessarily defeat or affect the validity of its remaining provisions,” ... the “normal rule” is “that partial, rather than facial, invalidation is the required course”.

Under the traditional default rule, removal is incident to the power of appointment. Concluding that the removal restrictions are invalid leaves the Board removable by the Commission at will, and leaves the President separated from Board members by only a single level of good-cause tenure. The Commission is then fully responsible for the Board’s actions, which are no less subject than the Commission’s own functions to Presidential oversight.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act remains “‘fully operative as a law’” with these tenure restrictions excised. We therefore must sustain its remaining provisions “[u]nless it is evident that the Legislature would not have enacted those provisions inde­pendently of that which is [invalid].” Ibid.

---
Gensim has LSI and SVD clustering for data, and is in Python. http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/gensim/

There is also SVM Lite, which can do much of the same things with potentially less work from you. I've not used it, so I don't know how well it works. http://svmlight.joachims.org/
The guy is good but he needs to tone down his rabid fans and sockpuppets:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3BNS1SYRL9X80/ref=cm_cr_rdp_pe...

Some poor lady reviewed his book and gave it 2-stars, the review laid dormant for months and one day, out of nowhere, 70 people gave it an "unhelpful" mark. That defies all logic and statistics and hints at massive coordination. When she edited her review to acknowledge the astroturfing, they came out in droves and started calling her names. Gary himself was civil, but the guy has a knack for getting all critics to talk to him on the phone so he can "fix" any misunderstandings.

Read it for yourself. It left a bad taste in my mouth anyway.
Ad-blocking Hosts File
Tesla CEO Elon Musk To Sell Nearly One Million Personal Shares At IPO
Getting any traction yet?
Removing goalkeepers wouldn't have the kind of effect you think it would, I feel. I can see two possible dynamics:

* The game would turn into a boring series of attempted long-distance lobs. You'd probably have to reduce the goal size significantly to prevent scoring from anywhere on the pitch.

* Teams with very good defenses actually have goalkeepers that don't see a lot of action. This change would promote even stronger defense, with a more negative outlook, and still result in low-scoring games - possibly even lower scoring than is currently the case. The goalkeeper is key to what gives back-line players the confidence and permission to move forward and help with attacks.
Well, that gets into the question of "to whom to you extend the franchise to"?

Cut that back (yes, I know, beyond hard), maybe limit it to a new class of Taxpayers, and things could change real fast.

Of course the Social Justice types would be ... unhappy.

Used to be in many states you had to own some land (one guy owned a doghouse sized plot of land to make a point) or pay a poll tax to vote. The latter's corruption by the Southern segregationists makes that right out for the time being, but ... well, republics tend to last only as long as they have the moral fiber to not vote themselves the treasury. We're obviously way beyond that point, but the game will run out at some point. And with so much of our debt in bonds (1 year or less maturity) is could have very quickly. Probably would already be happening if not for the Eurozone crisis.
Good job Microsoft!

MS needs all the moral support and encouragement it can get. Really, we should treat MS like a recovering addict who declines a free hit and goes to bed early. They're doing their best and they're improving.

Well done!
Out of a quarter million[1]? Drops in the bucket. The article here is showing piracy apps with 250k downloads in the top apps list. A quick look at their top free multimedia list shows several ringtone clones, clearly implying many below that.

[1]: think I recall seeing that number recently, though I don't remember where. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.
That was part of the study. Researchers observed more irrational actions compared to say rural china or vietnam. Having that feeling that things wont change will cause you to give up and do what is deemed irrational.
360 HEALTH: How to Tighten Sagging Older Skin
A few years ago, these James Bond magazines for kids came out, and i bought a bunch of them. I seem to remember them using this idea in the magazine to hide "secret" messages, which you could only decrypt if you had the transparent key that came with the magazine. Pretty awesome stuff.
"Adaptive control involves modifying the control law used by a controller to cope with the fact that the parameters of the system being controlled are slowly time-varying or uncertain"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_control
To expand on the content in the article:

In the early days of our startup, we did some telecom consulting as a means to supplement income (a.k.a., make some money to pay employees/bills). We worked with smaller carriers who, despite their efforts, could never reach the level of reliability of the RBOCs (Regional Bell Operating Companies) who had practically unlimited budgets and infrastructure that dwarfs anything a small firm could even conceive. Despite the fact that the smaller carrier delivered service that was sub-par compared to the RBOCs, the customer seemed happier. What gives?

The answer is pretty simple. With the smaller firm, it was possible to have your IT managers dial an engineer directly. When you call their office, you don't get an IVR; you get a human. The RBOCs have a policy of depersonalizing the customer experience. This is intentional, and is directly related to cost-cutting measures. Voice and data service has been commoditized, and any time your service is pushed in to the commodity space, cost-cutting is your only opportunity to increase profits. ATT/Verizon/Qwest/Etc are masters at this, and it is the cause of huge amounts of customer dissatisfaction.

The question is, how does this apply to you? When communicating with your customers (on your website, through your blog, or even on the phone), remember that often what separates the companies we hate from the ones we love is the personal connection. Don't be afraid to admit when you've done something wrong. Pay close attention to how often you have to do this, however. Recognize the areas where you or your team are incompetent and find talented people to fill the gap. Eventually, even the closest of connections to your customer will be frayed and severed by incompetence.
That is one thing I don't understand about this whole fiasco.

He advocates spending and stimulus to get out of the this. He says "And both the United States and Europe are well on their way toward Japan-style deflationary traps".

But didn't Japan spend a shitload of money during the 90ies (making their debt 200% of GDP)? Don't they now sit with that debt, a declining population and still no growth?

I'm not an economic expert and maybe I just have a biased for government/personal austerity and saving.
Yes, scanR may be more sophisticated in their image processing technology, but their system is just not as easy to use (the last time I checked it out).

My suggestion to you is to keep running with your idea of making your service dead simple to use. I love the idea of just sending it to an email address -- reminds me of posterous, but for image processing.
Except if you were French during the '90s, they had a tradition of the opposing team scoring first, and then the French team would rally and play way better. Well, not anymore, unfortunately.
The website of the world's first-ever web server
I'll read this later, but do note that he's been aptly described as "never the calmest man in the room" ^_^. (I like him a lot but you have to apply a certain filter while reading most of his financial stuff.)
301 then it if this applies to you. It's still the same solution.
Amen. Since when do we accept arguments just because they sound nice? Hasn't a whole lot of work gone into avoiding this black hole of rationality?

Hey, maybe supposedly being able see Russia from her house really DOES give Ms. Palin foreign policy experience.

If a theory sounds promising, then go gather some data. If it still looks good after careful scrutiny, then go write your book.
What VoIP client do you use?
I guess this is some kind of modern cultural issue. I think, people have no "native" editor. They began to develop language X in IDE Y in their university. Now they shall develop language Z.

Someone like you goes "well, so what? I got trusty vi here. It might not be the ideal tool for the job, but it will work until I find something better". Others will go: Oh. I cannot use Y here. So, I need to finde another tool to develop Z. And since I have always used IDEs, this MUST be an IDE of course.

I'm unsure if I like this or not.
Caja project
Both :) I'd love the option to pass configuration through the subject or message body, but configuring defaults in an account would save typing them in every time. Options like automatic crop, deskew, and perspective correction would be essential.

I'm not sure what libs you're using for image processing, but OpenCV has a lot of this type of functionality.

http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/
SharePoint is a great intranet and collaboration product, but it's not a document management system. However, you can extend SharePoint with Laserfiche document management. Check it out on our site www.aisww.com or read more on our document management blog: blog.aisww.com
I don't disagree, but that's not the point. There are two things being debated. One is that the errors by the officials are unaccaptable and they must introduce technology to reduce them. I'm not discussing that. The other is that somehow the game is flawed because there aren't enough goals, and hence chance plays a large part. I'm arguing that such claims are misguided.

In some sense the two are not entirely orthogonal because a single error by an official that leads to, or prevents, a goal has an enormous effect on the game. Nevertheless, there are two issues, I'm talking about one, and you are talking about the other.

I'm discussing the point raised in the original submission. You aren't, except insofar as they are not entirely unrelated, as I remark above.
I don't see that in the article. Where does it say it won't run on XP?

edit: says it here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/17/ie9_no_windows_xp/

wow, that stinks!
Must all jobs create long term value and serve a basic human need? The negation of ((not A) and (not B)) aka !((!A) and (!B)) = A or B.

A) Jobs which meet a basic human need are more stable than jobs that fill a want. They also come back vary quickly vs jobs that fill wants.

B) Jobs that invest in the future are somewhat more stable than jobs that fill wants and they come back quickly as the economy improves.

C) Jobs that fill wants are the least stable because people need to feel that their future is very secure before they spend much in this category.

Government spending to prop up A or B can be cost effective, but to prop up C tends to be extremely costly. In some ways money is less useful than confidence. Consider the state of mind someone needs to be in to spend a weekend at a spa, get married in Hawaii, or buy an Accura vs. a Honda.

For example, if we have an excess of farmers that would be cleared up in the market as those not making enough income to continue being farmers would pack up and leave the occupation or try to get loans to maintain their employment long enough to weather the current conditions. The only time I see problems in employment is when an entity steps in to maintain a job when the market is already dismissing it

I was expressly commenting on farm subsidies. There is an idea that giving welfare to people is worse than giving it to industries however from an economic standpoint there is little difference when the output of said job does not create long term value.
Bcat—pipe to browser utility
For the presentation of Chapter 13 bankruptcy
If anyone has stats on angel funds and fundings, please let me know. I'd love to firm up the assumptions in the main equation. I'm looking for:

1) Number of "seed" funds & average size of fund

2) % ownership a seed investor likes to have at exit & time to exit

Thanks!
For those curious souls looking for a deeper dive on the early days of Paypal, check out the fantastic Robert Cringely interview with Max Levchin on NerdTV (See episode #2 near the bottom) http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/shows/
As an Opera fan boy, this article hurts my soul a little.

But good job for Microsoft (finally), perhaps it will motivate my boys in Norway to step it up.

Now if they would just couple it with an aggressive upgrade program, we'd really be in business. Lack of XP support certainly doesn't help.
why oh why can't they support Windows XP?

Why should they? New features and updates only available to newer operating systems, drive upgrades! Makes perfect sense to me, especially considering XP support won't be around forever.

As it stands now, 20% of our development time is wasted on making stuff work on IE 5.5 (!) and 6

I'm not following... If it's a waste of time, why are you doing it? Drop support for those browsers in that case. Unless, of course, customers using those browsers make up a significant percentage of use, it doesn't sound like much of a waste to me.
> he second quintile of American income is still very, very poor

My brother lived a middle-class lifestyle in Michigan on $25k/year. There's plenty of frugal people living in the sticks who do just fine.
Software has no value? Crap, I need a new career.
It's not a company's board of directors - it's the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, a regulatory body established by Sarbanes-Oxley "to oversee the auditors of public companies in order to protect the interests of investors..."

In short, it's a pretty inconsequential ruling relative to the meat of the law.
> if you just work really long days, money comes.

Uhm... It's not that simple at all. If you work for some big company in a cubical, working really long days probably wont help you at all. Do you mean working for yourself long days? That isn't guaranteed either. Perhaps you just mean entry level-ish hourly jobs?