skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Flights from central america to europe often have connecting flights in the US - and, unlike Canada and most of the rest of the world, the US requires people to pass through US Customs & Immigration to change airplanes.

In the rest of the world - you simply stay in the secure international area of the airport, and never have to deal with customs & immigration until you land in your destination.
Clojure is very interesting to me as a way to build and deploy services backed by machine learning. Interesting enough to make me learn LISP :)

In particular, two libraries are enormously useful:

http://github.com/bradford/infer
http://github.com/afeinberg/clomert

You can use Hadoop with infer to build your model, fill a Voldemort cluster from Hadoop directly, then also serve your model using infer. All with very little code. That is mucho win.
> Databases are protected under copyright law.

This depends on the jurisdiction. I believe the EU has a specific database copyright, while the US explicitly doesn't recognize one. A database may be copyrightable under normal copyright law in the US, but only if it's sufficiently creative (e.g. a database containing nothing but a mechanical listing of stock closing prices wouldn't be copyrightable).
Part of it is that watching a video takes the control of pace away from the consumer of that information. Whereas if you can read it, you can set the pace. Read it fast, read it slow, re-read important parts, highlight something and right-click google it, etc. Can't do all that with video.

Additionally, some people are aural learners, but others are visual. The latter generally have better synthesis and recall of things they read than things they hear. Such people likely prefer reading summaries than watching the video.
> "actionable"

Metrics you can get sued over?
Why the tech pundits are wrong about the new Digg
A quick review, after 5 minutes of playing with the new site, of why the new Digg will send the same amount of traffic to sites as the old Digg.
China is similar. I had to act like I was entering the country and leaving right after just for a transfer flight/layover. They're the only place that detected the belt buckle and cared about shaving razors.
Your consensus seems reasonable to me. It would be interesting to see how many links submitted are by the author. Not that there is anything wrong with that, just saying I would be curious to see.
The author completely devastates their core point when they say-

"Now I've told you why Android's use of a Java-like VM was demonstrably wrong (Apple demonstrated it) from the beginning"

What was demonstrated, the author claims, was that Android chose "Java" for security, where the iPhone demonstrates that native can be secure.

But...Android didn't choose Java for security. You have the full ability to use native code in your apps, courtesy of the NDK, and of course Android runs apps in an isolated process (using the inherent security functionality of Linux). Apps can't stomp on the system or walk outside of the lines and allowances granted them, Dalvik engine or not.

While you still need a Java main, you can build almost all of your app in the NDK if you really want to. But being pragmatic, 99% of most apps are comprised of a light veneer over the SDK (itself usually high-performance native), and in such cases native or not makes absolutely no practical difference. Where you need to go native for specific cases, go native.

So why, then, does Android use Dalvik? Probably because they intend for the platform to be usable on a heterogeneous array of platforms -- you can run Android on your PC, for instance, and upcoming smartphones may feature the Intel Moorsetown x86 mobile processor. By encouraging Dalvik, the platform, specifically the application portfolio, is freed from being tied to a specific processor architecture. The author tries to diffuse this obvious advantage by saying that such a change is "just a recompile away", but that is simply absurd -- when the first Moorestown phone comes out, off the bat it will be able to run the majority of market apps with no change at all, including those that used the NDK (as the Android norm is to conditionally load native modules, using a managed fallback if it isn't appropriate).

This is all ignoring that Android has a far more granular, and I would say robust, security system than the iPhone: recall that the iPhone is where someone got an app that ostensibly was a "flashlight" app, but in actuality was a tethering app, which absolutely demolishes any illusions that the review process is any sort of security check. But that isn't necessarily a part of the managed/unmanaged argument (because it has been shown that is a misdirection to begin with).
The ground station was where the operators were controlling (or not, as it happened) the drone from. It wasn't the place air traffic was being monitored or where reactions to a blip in restricted airspace would be determined.
There's probably a really powerful argument how they don't even need the sleep light since Macs have the sleep thing so nailed down that it just works.
Yelp Gets In To The Groupon Game Too
/hug statistics in World of Warcraft
I know this is a method mostly associated with advertisers, but there are legitimate uses for flash cookies.

I wanted to make life a little easier for people who just need to get something working reliably without worrying about cross-browser quirkiness. (I'm looking at you, Safari.)
In my experience, it doesn't make much of a difference. The younger 20-something guys will pull the cable on a server to get me to notice them (which I have to fix!). The older guys (40+) are more likely to try to wine me and dine me. Either way, we're all after the same thing.
No real scientiest talk like these press articles.
Economic models can only simulate a few variables. Unfortunately economic development depends on almost infinate number of variables.

I know: I know nothing :)
I think I am too.
That's already available, it's just not particularly convenient. For example, http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=retroafroman shows that you've submitted two stories ;)
That's quite similar actually. The thing you copyright is the aggregation effort, so a mechanical process does not add anything copyrightable.

But annotation and such do add value, as does the original collection of data.
Between Groupon, Living Social, others, and now Yelp (launching their Groupon-style deals in San Diego first), I'm starting to wonder if there's enough room in the market for a smaller app like mine (Locurious) to do daily deals as well. What do you guys think? Is it saturated or is there still room to grow?
Straw man alert !

I have multiple arguments on why I prefer virtual machines (like the JVM), and none of them is security ...

- portability between hardware architectures
- portability between operating systems (mostly)
- memory management that doesn't suck
- and yes, decent speed in return for a high-level programming language

Also, in time Java gained an extra advantage ... open-source libraries that are fucking top-notch, in some cases with no replacement in the "native" department.

Regarding Android versus iPhone ... that iPhone emulator doesn't run on anything else other than OS X, or does it?
when you have good reason to believe something about model-entities, you don't thereby have good reason to believe it about actual-entities, unless you also have good reason to believe that model-entities are relevantly similar to actual-entities. So the model itself is just a piece of a theory.
Imagine, then, what might happen if we doubled the size the base of people that could start/support an Apple or a Google

On the face of it: yes, it would lead to higher GDP. BUT you have to consider where that wealth to spread around came from in the first place. If I know that by becoming very wealthy I'm going to be taxed to kingdom come so my wealth can be "fairly distributed" then I don't have much of an incentive to become wealthy. Why would I, when I'd just end up back where I started?

Allow me the opportunity to become wealthy and let me retain control of my wealth and then I'm just limited by personal circumstance and ambition.
Great ... so you're gonna build a dozen binaries (or more) and upload all of them to the App Store?

That's rich.
Quit Datein' on the young man.
I whole heartedly agree that computational models have big pitfalls. I would argue that good theories are stated as simply and directly as possible, and that it's easy to make computer simulations (AKA computational models, AKA theories) that are not even close to simple.
Easier once she takes a look at the bill and sucks air through her teeth and says "so then, how do you make this computer free phone thing work?"
Uh,

On the one hand, it's simply false that you need a profitable counter-strategy to disprove the efficient market hypothesis.

On the other hand, Nichaulus Taleb, among others, did extremely well and was quite open about going against "efficient markets".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb

Uh, and a huge number of people knew housing was over-valued. If you don't know the turning point in a market, knowing the market isn't efficient doesn't tell your next move - if the markets keep being inefficient, you don't make anything. Taleb made money but far more people made far more money - by finding the bigger sucker.

Edit: Also, the particular mechanisms of the last crisis, where synthetic bonds exploded via their unrealistic assumptions and "fair value accounting" had to be suspended, were a rather specific shot against the EMH.
Family Guy Censored DVD on Sale
How Scribd's HTML5 conversion works ... even when it shouldn't
It is actually a problem on Macs: there are entire libraries of applications, that will never run on any new Mac. PPC/Classic is not supported, PPC/OSX may or may not run, depending on the app. Forget 68K/Classic.

(Yeah, I should have bought PC versions of Lucasfilm games, not the Mac ones.)
While its's tempting to pick minor nits in this post, the only appropriate answer is this: So what?

For server-side web applications, VMs (and the JVM in particular) already won. Sorry. They've made industrial strength GC, JIT and multi-threading features for the mass market.

As for phones, I really doubt whether Android's use of a VM will have anything to do with its success. There are many factors which will be much more important, like fragmentation.
True. But I can't always tell by someone's HN username if they are the author of a blog post that they have submitted.
The surprising moral force of disgust
via bagasch @ monochrom.at
I don't know what I was expecting (C I guess), but upon opening the project it blew me away that it was written entirely in assembly by hand.
The two legs of science are more accurately referred to as theory and observation. Experimentation is one way to gather observations, but it is not the only one. Astronomy involves a lot of observation of stars, which are some distance outside of the laboratory and definitely not in an experimenter-controlled environment.

I would classify numerical/computational models, along with mathematical and philosophical models, under "theory". Number-crunching and heavy data analysis is a way to categorize and present observations. None of these deserve to be treated as new and separate legs of science; they are merely subsets of the existing legs of theory and observation.
Teach computing, not Word
Creating a “TheFunded” for Angel Investors
This basically makes Chrome a machine-independent development platform, right?

They might actually pull off this web apps store idea.
How Obama's Stimulus Is Changing America
The Times They Are A-Changin'
Still, maybe they'd prefere sharing with you and getting a great other cofounder then facing your awesome app in 3 months :p
Thank you for having one of the few reasoned statements of why you like a mac I've seen in this post! It's a breath of fresh air!

You like it simply because you like it. You recognize some people may not like it, and may like other things. And that's ok. You think your Mac is fine for you, and does what you want to do the way you want to do them and it may or may not be the case for other people and find that to be and alright way for the world to be.

Enlightened.
I agree with you. I think HN focused blog post decrease the HN quality in general. There should be something like "Ask HN" but in this case for the blogs, something like "blog to HN", to warn the readers what kind of information they are reading.
If you've ever written cross-platform code, especially between little and big endian machines, or even worse, different 64-bit implementations, then you know that compilers can't even come close to solving everything for you.

Cross platform code needs lots of thought and hard work. THAT is why VM languages are nice.

As for JITs, yes, they're getting much faster and much better at recognizing code to optimize. Then again, so are static compilers. But both of these technologies are slowly merging together. JITs are getting ahead of time compilation, and static compilers are getting profile directed compilations.

You just have to ask yourself, is a 40% boost in performance worth hours, possibly weeks, of rewriting code for a different platform?
Upvoted for the PAIP mention - Any book that can totally shift your conception of what programs can do within the first three chapters has to be up there. I know plenty of CS students from university that currently work writing software (I did Maths) who still look at me like some sort of he-witch whenever I do or suggest something data-driven as a solution to a problem, but it's that book that did it for me - it's almost a shame that the only people of my age likely to have read it are the lone "I code out of interest" types that are always on the look-out for a good mind-bending.

(the greater shame, of course, is that these people are less likely to find a satisfying job in the area than their seemingly uninterested CS-grad friends (grumble grumble))
memory management that doesn't suck

You can have GC and AOT compilation, as the post says in a footnote.

decent speed in return for a high-level programming language

High-level languages can be AOT compiled.

Java gained an extra advantage ... open-source libraries that are fucking top-notch

So maybe Android should have used Java, but compiled it direct to ARM rather than burning users' cycles on an interpreter.
Google Buzz API adds Track and some improvements
MPEG LA Cuts Royalties Related to H.264 Streaming Permanently
Yeah something like "HN Blog: Erlang and the Use of Monads in Haskell", or at least "Author Post: ...".
There Is This Company (Nov 2009)
Why overthink this? Writing blog posts to HN, instead of trying to express tangential thoughts through link submission ("This new Apple app rejection shows their policies are the worst ever!") is something the site guidelines specifically ask you to do.

What I'm noticing is not that the submissions are becoming bait-ier, but that everything is immediately getting enough votes to get onto the RSS feed, no matter how flagrantly it violates the site guidelines. Whatever force is automatically providing 2-3 ambient votes to every crap posting here is the thing I'd actually be concerned about.
I did not know this site existed, and now I do. I predict that I will burn through these at a fast rate while my builds are running...

Thanks for more interesting reading material, HN!
Actually, the compiler would output a single duodecimal-fat binary. (Analogous to quad-fat binaries from the NeXT days.)
Slave to His Heroes
Unofficial but works: http://www.macwindows.com/OS9_on_Intel_Mac.html
When I have meetings with multiple NA-based people who are already spread out and already have to fly to one place.

We used to do Seattle, Chicago or NYC. Now we nearly always do Toronto, and occasionally Vancouver. No-one objects to my having set the location north of the border, and the Hong Kong attendee greatly prefers it too (for the same reason, though he has extra hassle at immigration).

Speaking of Toronto, there's a ridiculously good restaurant there. One worthy of saving up for months in advance... North 44. If you get the chance go.
Isn't that a huge obstacle to overcome to get clojure to become self-hosting? After all, the fact that it has access to java's libraries is a huge plus.
Ask HN: Do you believe we'll ever encounter aliens?
A topic of conversation that colleagues and I frequently revisit questions whether humankind will ever encounter what's typically referred to as "aliens", and if so ... the implications of such an encounter. We've generally concluded that if such an encounter were to occur, it could change almost every aspect of our lives (science,religion,technology, etc.). With that said, we have no consensus of belief as to whether it will ever happen nor an agreement of exactly how our society would be impacted.

I'm curious what the members of the Hacker News community believe .... both whether it will ever happen, and how it would affect the world we know.
"If somebody is saying something good about a pointing device on a non-Apple laptop, odds are good that they've never spent time with Apple's touchpad. It's that much better"

Personally, I despise the acceleration curve Apple uses when I'm using a mouse with my MBP. I went through all kinds of contortions to deal with it or change it. I tossed out my mighty mouse after a couple months due to crud build-up and returned the magic mouse because it was virtually impossible to use without hand cramps or having it slide across my desk.

The only thing I really think is special about the trackpad on my MBP is its size, but I've found that the pad on my Dell just seems to work better with higher accuracy and less padding around and the ergonomics "feel" better to me.

I'd pay extra money for them to un-suck their pointy interface devices and software. They're really that bad.

Why I can't I hook up something like an iPad to my Mac as an interface device? Mirror the screen on it so I have some direct eye-finger synergy? I'd pay for something like that, with a nice capacitive touch screen.
So then, you're presuming it hasn't already happened?
Universal Binaries have made multi-architecture deployment a solved problem since the NeXT days.
Deploying, Monitoring and Troubleshooting Rails on the JVM with JRuby [video]
Any updates on the security of NaCl? Every time that sort of thing has been tried, it has been a total failure from a security standpoint, and I haven't yet seen reason for NaCl to be any different.
With even worse reliability statistics!
WikiLeaks builds a legal shield in Sweden
Well, from looking at it, it's actually very predictable.

Once one arm crosses what I'll call the lower bound (at roughly 80+ degrees from the bar being parallel to the ground), the water empties so rapidly that the tube filling up is not nearly fast enough, so the pendulum tilts back to the other side.

There is also an "upper" bound on each side, which is during the filling phase. If the arm doesn't switch sides and "stops" roughly within, say, 15 degrees from parallel, the water will fill up to the point that it will become so heavy at that side that it will tip, satisfy the lower bound, and switch sides.

Otherwise the "current" side will oscillate between those two bounds until it breaches (usually) the upper bound.
I like to keep an eye on things like this and, yes, what I'm seeing leads me to believe you're right. But it's a part of a larger trend of people "targeting" and reworking content to do better on social sites generally - just getting the "right" title can make all the difference, especially on HN where titles rule.
In fact, Native Client started as a browser plugin for Firefox, so portions of it certainly could be integrated into other browsers. However, the developers have moved from the plugin to direct browser integration to overcome limitations in the plugin API. Presumably similar integration would be necessary in other browsers to achieve the same level of functionality.

http://groups.google.com/group/native-client-announce/browse...
Who needs goodwill when you have a monopoly on essential technology? (Hmm, I wonder why Oracle hasn't bought MPEG LA yet.)
Content targeted to HN can lead to well catered content and in-depth discussions with multiple posts on similar topics.

I think as long as the community doesn't just vote up articles because they pander, content targeted towards HN is a great thing.
A story can be satisfying because of its relevance. I think that is the case here. The topic is interesting to developers who want to understand how Apple approaches design, even though the story's structure might have some flaws.
I've always written my blog posts targeted to HN. Taking a few minutes to think about whether or not your audience will find something insightful or informative before writing and posting it seems like it would generally improve the quality of the front page.
So you're using ORM specific functionality in the controller? :)
My respect for how hard it is to convert from .pdf to HTML just went waaaay up. Scribd must have really thought displaying in HTML5 was worth a lot of trouble if they went to all this effort to be precise!
Funny, I think mobile phones are one of the few places where VMs actually make a whole lot of sense, given that you'll need to keep your applications compatible with whatever CPU happens to run generation 'X' of the phones out there, today, and more importantly, in the future.

Like this manufacturers are not restricted by backwards compatibility. All they have to do is guarantee that the VM will work as advertised and in a compatible way.

All the apps are then automatically available for the new processor platform.
I think there's more to it than that. For example, a model can tell you if something isn't true which is very significant. It can also make predictions that can then be tested.

These two alone are much more than a mere thought experiment.
Distracted vs. Enhanced Minds
Right on. I'm glad someone with more gravitas than me came and said it. I already did in a slightly cruder way: http://peterc.org/blog/2010/235-webkit-font-smoothing-antial...
I think you'll find that it varies according to how fast it's going when it gets to one of the bounds that you think you've observed. It's not as predicatable as you seem to think.
Bengal. If you count Texas and California, then Hawaii as well.

Of course, if you compare the British to other colonial powers, they also did a significant amount to preserve the local culture, even when assuming sovereign power from the local states.
I think posts written for HN are not generally a bad thing - I've written several blogs either with HN in mind or directly for consumption here - that is actually encouraged by the guidelines.

But you're right - people ''tailoring'' articles for HN could be a problem. I realised a while ago that the right title can get you on the main page, but I can't bring myself to play the system :) It's only a blog, not really worth it.
isn't a model a functional representation of a theory? I don't see how it is only a piece of a theory if the whole theory is represented in the model and is functional.
> Nor do we need more "I told the programmer we needed this thing he said was problematic and he did it" management just-so stories.

Why would that be? Is this a kind of story you disagree with for some reason? Are you arguing that it's a bad story because it's badly composed or because you don't like the theme?

This story wasn't written by the manager in question, so I also don't see how you can personify the author in the first person in your pseudo-quote.
Should we take it from your username and the comment about 68k assembly that you've played with the MC68332 a bit or is it just coincidence :-)
I...guess so.

But it successfully removes the reason that becomes painful and leaky, e.g., queries. The function names are short and readable, and the execution of the query is in the ORM where it belongs.
Importing data from Spreadsheets to App Engine [API]
YC of the 19/20th centuries