skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I very reluctantly conceded this point a few years ago, but in a slightly different way. I've been doing JavaScript-as-a-kludge-for-whatever-server-side-framework-I-happen-to-discover-the-limitations-of for a while. I'm discovering that the complexity of every browser's quirks means I'm going to have to do more than just "learn it". And therein lies the problem.

JavaScript isn't an awful language (all languages have their pluses and minuses and developers are so touchy on this subject, I don't even want to broach it). It's the sheer number of platforms (browser/hardware/OS combinations) that make JavaScript painful to learn properly. Every browser on every device must perform adequately. It's not a matter of supporting Windows or MacOS, it's every variant of RIM device, i* device, every browser on Windows Mobile taking into account the performance/memory footprint (to a lesser extent anymore), and devices with browser variants running on Android.

For the sake of my current set of projects -- requiring reasonable compatibility across platforms, but not a universally good user experience on all, learning jQuery became a necessity. Though I'd prefer to not be framework dependent, I've found that understanding how to use jQuery has also improved my understanding of the various quirky implementations of JavaScript in general.

I have no doubt that future projects will require a good user experience on most platforms. Does anyone have any suggestions regarding good, comprehensive resources in this area? The blog post mentions several online resources for folks wishing to learn/understand the language (some of which I haven't used before), but I'm wondering if there are particularly excellent tools beyond that (IDEs, good debuggers beyond Firebug) or anything else out there that can assist in identifying code that won't work, or won't work well in cross platform scenarios (for free or not).
> But Chrome is not a beautiful app

I guess it's totally subjective and therefore fairly meaningless, but I think Chrome is the most visually appealing of any browser right now. This is partly, I guess, because its primary virtue is minimalism, but the parts that are there are beautiful, I think.
Google, the GSA and the Competition
Huh. My sister is a med student. I'll forward this on to her :)
Same story from days ago, but with no comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1951171

Same story from one day ago, with nearly 50 comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1960295
My reaction was the opposite. Now I know why my Pac-Men were disproportionately killed by the red and pink ghosts, and learning that their "unpredictable" behavior is the result of simple but clever algorithms makes it even more impressive.
LivingSocial Gets $175 Million Amazon Investment
"Do the math" is a standard phrase for doing the sort of thing McCarthy advocates.

He also has a great "test" of sorts that he uses on classes involving the putative fate of a doctor who developed the ability to heal anyone by touching them, it's in a delightful book that profiles him and two other smart people.
You may want to clarify which version of php you are running. From phpinfo() it looks like 5.2.14.
Feature bloat alert!
Like I said, I've only gone up to GT5: Prologue, and not the actual GT5 release. But I found that I could take corners at ridiculous (for a simulation) speeds with street tires on and every available "assist" disabled in GT5: Prologue. It was incredibly forgiving for the so-called "Real Driving Simulator".

I would be happy to hear that GT5 has taken the training wheels off and amped up the realism of the driving model. But with GT5: Prologue, I could easily demonstrate poor driving that was forgiven by GT5: Prologue that would spin me out in the more stringently realistic Forza model.
Anyone think that the self-promotion done by Felisa Wolfe-Simon is a little strange?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJQkOs9_GE0

http://www.ironlisa.com/
Motorola to split into consumer (Android) and enterprise (Windows) companies
Errr, no, acre-feet is this domain the unit of measurement for water in the US. At least west of the Mississippi (west of the first line of states it gets quite dry and everything changes, including the system of law about water).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1951171 - Same story from days ago, no comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1960295 - Same story from one day ago, nearly 50 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1963859 - From an hour ago, no comments of value (yet).
You need to turn off system/file/net operations.http://www.phplint.com/cVD6OQC3qZ
Not to detract from the work he did (it's still not easy, and it's good work), but a lot of that could be programmatic---select all pixels that are near-black to extract the text, copy them to a separate layer, enlarge selection by 1.5 pixels, flood fill white, and then paste the original text on top of that. A certain amount of massaging is necessary, but it probably wouldn't be "hours" just for that.

Also, apparently Google has an API that lets you extract specific layers, e.g. just the text (he mentions using this in the article). Makes sense in retrospect, but it's cool to know anyway.
for me (ffox 3.5.15 on mac) it zooms the text but not the images, I would expect it to shrink/expand the images as well so you could see more at once.
We'll get there.
The Flow Of Money Through The Film Industry
Ask HN: How dirty is your keyboard?
My IT guy (I'll call him Deeter) walked in my office wanting to do an important security fix on my box. He jumped a foot in the air when he saw my keyboard. "Um, Wow, Dude," he said, hiding his hands behind his back. "That's a lot of crumbs. You must eat over your keyboard?" Yeah, it's true. I eat at my desk. Sorry. And yeah, my keyboard has some grime. And, well, perhaps a significant amount of crumbs. But not enough to make a rice cake. What's the prob? Is this really a sanitary issue? Anyway, Deeter refused to touch it. He left my office, suggesting I open a ticket and ask for an entirely new keyboard. . .
I'm disappointed, he didn't mention the kitchen sink too.
NASA announces arsenic-based life: 5 TEDTalks to watch for context
If you have to resort to forwarding an online blog to her then my money's on her not changing her mind
I would also consider fork bombs, and empty while loops.
One thing that's weird about instagram is that there are 0 reviews in the Apple app store. For an app with 2,778 ratings (as of Dec 2), you think there would be at least 1 review.

If anyone has an explanation for this, I would be glad to hear it.
I'm sorry, but being able to perform arithmetic does not equate to higher intelligence or mental capacity. As society begins to perform more calculations via computer, it will allow us to begin address more abstract and higher level mathematics, problems which would be near impossible to address had we been required to do the math with grease pencils.

Conrad Wolfram recently gave a wonder TED talk on the subject.
http://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_m...
Imagine how great this would be on a big multie touch screen
Depends on what you mean with the term artificial. We have artificial arsenate life forms in the same way we have artificial tame wolves.
Extremely. I think there is an entire pizza in my keyboard.
Not sure how I feel about this anecdote - the SO is unusually accommodating, and it may be tempting to interpret this story as inspiration not to worry about relationships when you're working on a startup. (Or any bursty, time-demanding job, really.)

I've done a couple of startups, and went back to school a few years ago. My husband is a game developer. So I think it's not unreasonable to claim some familiarity with these issues. =)

The key is communication - especially for men, who are not always inclined to talk about relationships unless something is obviously wrong. Remember, women initiate most divorces and most men have no idea it's coming! You need to touch base regularly and make sure that problems aren't building up.

Engineers, think of the Rule of Tens: It's ten times harder to fix a problem after it's become a pattern than when it's fresh, and a hundred times harder to fix if your partner is prepared to break up over it.

Also, be sure to set aside regular times to spend together, and do everything in your power to avoid being sucked back into work. Occasional lapses are okay, but you can't expect to be someone's highest priority when you put them at the bottom of your priorities.
A few takeaways from "Distrust" Experiment from Predictable Irrationality
Why We Removed the WikiLeaks Visualizations
Oh sorry, thanks.
I see you took the same link directly off of reddit, which made a very good argument on why you should have linked directly to his youtube page.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D2o8F2MOuI
Climbing The Value Creation Ladder - Startup Planning Methodology
We can do that for you... http://www.newscred.com.

I'm personally very interested in this as well. Feel free to email me - shafqat at newscred dot com if you want me to put you in touch with our engineer directly.
A brief introduction to closures, using JavaScript
but...but...but why?

"Sources said the Amazon investment put a very hefty valuation of over one billion dollars on LivingSocial."

That's funny. I just read another article that said that Groupon is getting 79% of that market's traffic and LivingSocial is only pulling like 7%.
Verizon LTE Blows Through Monthly Data Cap in 32 Minutes
Easy...

There's lots of people with IT degrees, and lots of people claiming to know how to program.

The number of those you'd actually want to hire is an order of magnitude smaller.
For a normal university, yes. Not for one of the foremost technical institutions in the entire world.
Not sure why, but I feel reticent to comment on an aggregated link. I think this might be an issue. Not sure why, but I want to know that someone had a stake in the submission.
10 Clever Ambient Ad Campaigns
Ah, how it brings back memories! I did suspect this level of sophistication.

It also remembered me of that talk about collaborative diffusion which used pacman as an sample application.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiobjects
Of course there are plenty of opportunities to help. However, telling the GF "learn to code so you can help him with his projects" can lead to wrong expectations.
great resources
Ask HN: Node.js+Redis free host?
Is there any free hosting platform supporting Node.js and Redis?
I don't know about you, but Android 2.2 is pretty beautiful. I had an iPhone for a while and personally feel the design of Android is significantly more natural to me. Best of all if you don't like how something behaves, you can usually swap it out.
Is the source code for this available, besides view source?
In 1869, was MIT a normal university, or one of the foremost technical institutions in the entire world?
Considering construction finished just 3 years before this exam was published, and the charter was formalized just 10 years before, I would say that MIT (known as Boston Tech from 1866-1916) was not among the foremost technical institutions. At the time.

From the wiki page, it seems like it was actually one of the first technical unis around: "a new form of higher education to address the challenges posed by rapid advances in science and technology in the mid-19th century that classic institutions were ill-prepared to deal with." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Massachusetts_In...)
I'm at the point of replacing my keyboard.
How Long Will Google's Magic Last?
Frameworks are nice. They are helpful. If anyone scoffs at you for using a framework while you’re learning, don’t listen to them.

I'd take this a step further. If you are doing heavy javascript development always use a framework like mootools or jquery. They remove over 95% of the browser compatibility issues that you will run into. (I personally like mootools)
Any chance of a screenshot (guessing copypasta won't work because there are images)? The site is down.
..based on their MS measurements. They can't accurately calculate for impurities that might be in the source medium, there's no negative control on that.
Thanks, man. Now I have some good resources to refer to when people doubt speciation or macroevolution.

Although this doesn't prove that all species came about through mutation and natural selection only, it does give examples of this happening. I didn't know it happened in plants.

And thanks for setting the record straight on what people believe regarding our common ancestor with neanderthals. Offhand, I thought it was a mere 50k years :P Are there any hominids that split from us more recently? Like 50k?
Much easier than the 8th grade examination from 1895 posted the other day. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959690
I adore both the usability and appearance of Chrome (icons, tabs, etc) -- Chrome is beautiful in this beholder's eyes.
Where in that article does it say that it's not an arsenic-based life form?

In fact, it says exactly the opposite. It goes into detail about why it shouldn't be the much of a surprise. (Not that I agree with him.)
It was a little off-putting to me when I was watching the press conference, but it's pretty understandable given where she is in her career. If you look at her CV, she just finished her post-doc work last year. This is most likely her first year on the job driving her own research agenda and getting your work published in Science and widely discussed in the mainstream press can only help your tenure prospects.
well you better be willing to wait. Coli double every thirty minutes. The LTEE experiment took ten years. Find an organism that can sexually reproduce every thirty hours, and your equivalent experiment would take six hundred years.
This whole thing is yet another symptom of the science reporting ecosystem. Continual attempts at big bang news stories by institutions and their PR companies as well as a science media that goes for attention grabbing headlines.

Is this interesting and significant news? Absolutely, but the way it has been reported devalues the actual science done and misrepresents the science (and science as a whole) to the wider public.

Science is rarely about big bang eureka moments, it is long hard years in a lab building on someone else's work with a team of brilliant coworkers.
An url shortener would benefit more from a naked domain than from SSL.

* Not that I am working on one, just that you never know the poster intentions.
I code like this. It wasn't always the case, but at some point I had the realization that everything I do can be undone, reset, restarted, or otherwise restored and no longer have any fear about digging in and utterly gutting a piece of code if I can imagine a way to make it better.

This philosophy now has a name - and I like it.
Wouldn't it be a bit of a security risk for browsers to let web sites specify what languages can run? Get rid of the downloadfrom attribute and select from a list of options acceptable to the browser. But then you have the challenge getting your favorite language accepted by all the browsers

Maybe the next standard should require support for an additional language. The competition would benefit everybody. Even if we just put all the language names in a hat and pick one, we'd be on a better path than we are now.
That's true, and I didn't necessarily mean that the gf could/would help code the actual project, but having a knowledge of the logic or syntax could be useful. Sometimes there's just a semicolon missing somewhere (etc.) and fresh eyes are needed to spot it, and a basic understanding of coding/that particular language could help in those situations.
My favourite bit:

When Thomas Massie was a child, he was fortunate enough that his parents bought a computer, and he desperately wanted to start making robots with it. However, he was smart enough to know that it was a bad idea to start sticking wires into the family computer that cost thousands of dollars. So, Thomas hatched a plan. He figured out that he could scotch-tape photo sensors to the computer screen and write programs that turned portions of the screen either on full brightness or full darkness. That way, he could write programs that controlled motors, without electrically connecting anything to the computer itself.
That's not really Python or Ruby in the browser, that's IronPython or IronRuby running in the Silverlight's CLR via the plugin. Yes your Silverlight app can get out to the DOM and vice versa, but it's not really what Silverlight was meant for.
the geometry section is much harder:

http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/exhibits/exam/geometry.htm...
Fed aid in financial crisis went beyond U.S. banks to industry, foreign firms
Although you can compile the syntax of Python or Ruby into JavaScript fairly easily, the semantics don't match up very well.

You can run <script type="text/coffeescript"> today. All of the interactive bits on CoffeeScript.org are implemented with it -- and here's an example of a site that uses it for something a little more creative (View Source):

http://thelincolnshirepoacher.com/
Ask HN: Keeping a research/work log
I see a lot of discussion about to-do lists, but less about keeping a record of your work.

Sometimes at the end of the day I will sit and write up a few short paragraphs summarising what I've done and what I've learned. - technical notes and general thoughts about my work and study. I want to start doing this more frequently, but I want a nice searchable format rather than scattered text files. I already carry around a small notepad to scribble down thoughts and work through problems on paper.

What methods do you use? My current best idea is to keep this all on a local installation of Wordpress.
You're missing the point—this is the single greatest discovery in exobicyclology since E.T.!
The moral standards of WikiLeaks critics
Is she looking for another job?
Important: Twitter OAuth changes
Heads up:

If the Twitter library you're using right now doesn't send oauth_verifier, you'll get a 401 error when trying to retrieve the access token. I spent a few minutes hunting this one down for our site.
Start interviewing at other companies
> Do we know if air marshals were on the flight? Sample size is too small to draw conclusions.

I assume that they weren't. If we can't afford to put air marshals on every flight, that's a weakness. (It may be a reasonable weakness given the cost, but it's still a weakness.)

Note that the deterrence argument of air marshals assumes that folks who are willing to die are unwilling to spend time in prison. That may be true, but I'd like to see some evidence. (The deterrence argument is how you get from "air marshals on x% of the flights protects more than x% of the flights".)

There are always other passengers on passenger flights.
CodeToGo-write and run code on your iOS device C, Java, Ryby, SQL + 40 more
"everything I do can be undone, reset, restarted, or otherwise restored"

This is so key.

Software companies in general need to emphasise this so that builds are easy, CI is a given and continuous deploys are a no-brainer.
anyone have a more recent copy? took me 15 min.
Amazon Says WikiLeaks Violated Terms of Service
As far as I know, Netflix does not handle the actual streaming of bits - it is done by CDNs like Akamai or Limelight.
I would argue that they've improved on it. At least here in Denver Living Social is consistently more useful (particularly for my wife and our friends). Were GroupOn has been going to a lot of non-local website deals recently, Living Social manages to stay relevant. The wife was telling me that they're apparently trying to branch out into things like Vacations as well, which would be really cool.
Definitely, terribly egocentric. I felt awkward as I was watching it, I thought scientists were the ones who were supposed to emphasize "us" v.s. "me". She did mention she worked with a team, but the "I"'s were more abundant than the "We"'s. I also caught a "myself and my team" instead of "my team and myself". She also talked a bit too much about herself.

I understand that she was the leading scientist and the one who had the idea, but still, I don't think you are supposed to act like that as a scientist, it makes you look bad. Besides, she also seemed to kind of take it personal that the chemist wasn't entirely convinced yet. Oh and she also looked a bit frustrated when the journalist asked over the phone line a question that made it look as though it was discovered by chance.
This was all laid out in Zbigniew Brzezinski's book "The Technetronic Era" back in the early 70s. They've been hard at work on all of this ever since. It's part of a clear detailed long-term vision and they've just been putting the finishing touches on it and everyone acts like it just happened all by itself.

http://www.amazon.com/Between-Two-Ages-Americas-Technetronic...

>"The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities." (This was an excellent prediction although it is slightly worse now.)

>'In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities effectively exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason." (Fox CNN and facebook?)

>"Today we are again witnessing the emergence of transnational elites ... [Whose] ties cut across national boundaries ...It is likely that before long the social elites of most of the more advanced countries will be highly internationalist or globalist in spirit and outlook ... The nation-state is gradually yielding its sovereignty... Further progress will require greater American sacrifices. More intensive efforts to shape a new world monetary structure will have to be undertaken, with some consequent risk to the present relatively favorable American position."
um, no it proves the exact opposite. There exist species which have not come about through mutation and natural selection, but rather by artificial selection.
Eh, not really a fan of this post. First, when I have to handle a 911 for our company, I cancel my plans and/or leave to fix it. I'd never hack from a restaurant table. My wife would rather me not be there than be hiding behind a laptop.

Plus, it shouldn't happen that often. If you're canceling plans and ignoring your SO on a frequent basis, then you're doing it wrong or you simply shouldn't be in a relationship.

"One of the best ways to combat this is to get involved yourself. Teach yourself to code ..."

This is totally unappealing to me unless you're already dating/married to a hacker/founder. Creating "artificial common ground" just so you can have more time with someone reeks of trouble to me.

(FYI, founder for 8+ years, married for 6, 4 kids)
Yeah, and my the first one isn't.
To be completely fair, the link downplays the news more than it really deserves imo. That a bacterium (even an extremophile) can even be coaxed into substituting arsenic for phosphorus in some of its basic biochemical processes is quite mind-boggling. I mean, how, by what mechanism is this achieved?

The paper would have been stronger with some attempt at elucidating such a mechanism, but I can understand wanting to rush something like that out (particularly when it will certainly garner interest from a big name journal) before getting scooped.
Hipmunk looks like simply a front-end for Orbitz.com.