skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A common complaint is that Google is engineer-driven rather than design driven. Some very impressive counter-evidence in the article -- lots of nice design hacks.
I'm blown away by the user interface and visual design on this site. What a great way to make transcripts seem more lively, and attached to real people.
Congratulations to Rapportive, inDinero and Hipmunk
Calculating the piracy rate of your mobile app
Well good luck. I look forward to seeing how things go. My partner and I are also working on a startup using Drupal. We're in early stages though.
i really wish they had a fulltext indexer available.
Indeed. And I am not even American.

Sometime ago we turned from a species of brave explorers into one of coward couch potatoes.

When we finally give them our world, I hope the cockroaches have better luck.
That's not a goal. That's a fantasy world.

There will always be a tiny fraction of people that want to harm others. Whether it is because they have an agenda or are simply crazy (or likely both), they will always exist.

We have the choice of whether we want to sell our liberties and freedom for the illusion of safety from insignificant, yet inevitable, risks.
How many Frenchmen do you know named Ben?
"So...because, after years of fighting, iTunes finally stood up and removed the DRM, followed by a few retailers, we're supposed to look to the record labels as our saviors? For not treating us like criminals?"

People that pirate music are criminals. The music industry put protections in place only after music was freely downloaded (and not paid for).

"the average musician makes roughly $23 for every $1000 in music sold -- and that's only if they actually recoup, which is difficult to do, thanks to the way the record labels account for things. For those of you who share my math skills and don't want to reach for a calculator, that's barely 2%."

People that pirate don't see a difference. Either way, the artists is getting shafted. Please stop trying to make it look like piracy is somehow a crusade against the big, bad record labels.

"Uh huh. Nuanced arguments would probably be more appreciated from the group of folks you're talking to, who actually spend more money on music than those who do not "pirate". Funny definition of cheap you're working from..."

How are they possibly going to get an accurate answer on this? By asking?

There are plenty of services that allow you to preview music: Grooveshark, last.fm, Pandora to name a few. If you are really interested in buying music, you won't be torrenting it.

I really wish people would admit they are pirating because they just want something for free.

Pirates got what they wanted: Cheap, DRM free music. Yet, the piracy continues because the spoiled brats of the Internet aren't getting something else they feel they are entitled to.

It only goes to show you why you don't negociate with criminals.
Even more detailed link (release notes): https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/wiki/SdkReleaseNot...
Great Job - A month ago I had the thought of creating a similar cork board concept app myself, using html/js/css - today I open HN and I see your app - well done!
VADz Incorporated
It doesn't bode well for Android when John Carmack is concerned with support issues for the platform.
I don't buy music from iTunes because AAC isn't compatible with all my devices.

It is true as you say that other CODECs are "better" than MP3.
The author of the article is the one who rightly explains that the only thing that has made us safer since 9/11 is locking cockpit doors and the knowledge that passengers should not comply with terrorists. In fact, that last one was learned so quickly it disrupted the 4th plane of that very attack.

Everything else is security theater.
This is against the API rules of Facebook, remove it asap.
A bomb too small to cause harm and no way to detonate it properly. It worked.
When the death of a citizen benefits his heirs, should the citizen seek the death of his heirs?
I don't have an explanation for you. I'm not saying you didn't have 15 out of 17 interviews that couldn't program, but that certainly hasn't been my experience. Maybe it's the market, how desirable the opening is, salary/experience ranges or screening processes? It certainly doesn't sound like your recruiter is a winner (most of them aren't). For the record I'm talking mostly about SF bay hires, 100K+, 3-5 years+, sourced mostly from internal recommendations, placement agencies we had a good track record with, and self listed openings. AFAIK never bulk advertised ones.

If you have a 2/17 record with a placement agency you stop using them, right?
Yep was hoping someone had some direct exp, I can search pretty well too :)

Don't really like those guys and I don't think they are doing licensing with their new model.
The system should not be designed to prevent bombs in planes. This is focusing on the method you will use instead of the result you want.

The idea is to prevent planes from being hijacked or destroyed and passengers and crew to be harmed.

Besides, military planes routinely carry bombs and hardly experience any problem with them

And, to top that (as someone else said before) the only reason he was able to get into the plane was that his bomb was not a functional one - it would be very difficult to take down the plane with it.
This sounds reasonable. AFAIK the default readahead on Linux is 128KB, so you'll probably need to test and tune quite a bit to get it right. I had a paragraph roughly along those lines in an early draft, but decided it was too much detail. "Concurrent reads" is probably more accurate than plain "seek time".
I think this has more potential than chatroulette due to
its lack of anonymity.

The fact that users can be (at least partially) identified
by their facebook profiles, should prevent predatorial
behaviour.

I would include a three strike policy where your users
could denounce rude and abusive behaviour, and after 3
complaints, the accused could be banned from using the
application.
high resolution Mass spec is such a shitty technique and is completely non-quantitative. How do you know that arsenic isn't associated with, say, a protein that makes the DNA resistant to being taken apart chemically. I will believe this result when they stain the DNA and run samples of the DNA down a density gradient ultracentrifugation and show that arsenic content in the media correlates with increased density of DNA, as you would expect if the arsenic is replacing phosphorus. If you don't know what i'm talking about, it's this classical experiment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconservative_replication#Bi...

Here is my personal scientific experience speaking: If you see it everywhere, then it's likely to be an artefact. Clean up your technique, clean your instruments, and go back to an old school technique. Remember how the physicists who discovered CMB cleaned out the pigeon scat from their microwave horn telescope before they started to believe what they saw.
The Java Channel API documentation: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/channel/
Meet the American Hacker Behind Wikileaks
I believe that's what YC startup Opzi do, although they're still in closed beta.
That'd make sense, but "nanocomputer" already has a meaning: a nanotech computing device.
That is the really great part of the google brand.
You can always bet that things will get better over time.
I was thinking more along the lines of exception to the rule. I honestly have some trouble finding another product by Google which has this attention to detail (design-wise), maybe Chrome...
Not really...

I use iMacros for Firefox + Dropbox for all web logins

and Keepass + dropbox for all other passwords.

Both programs store the passwords AES encrypted, and are thus safe to use with dropbox
Ugh, looking into it.

Do you have JS disabled?
Yes! I've looked longingly at App Engine several times in the past but the 30 second limit was always a big fail. To me it's always been what separated App Engine from a platform for serving AdWords to a platform I could put a business intelligence app on.

Now if they could just put node on there!
I guess the average person assumes that a higher version number implies a 'better' (define your own interpretation) product. Seems Google is joining that particular use of version numbers as marketing. And to be honest, to some degree I can completely understand this. Imagine having to explain why Internet Explorer 6 is not a better product than Firefox 3....

As a developer I always find it hard versioning my work. Why do I consider it to be a 0.8 and not 1.0? Why would you consider it 1.0 and not 0.8? I try to stick to the following rule of thumb:

a.b.c

a) Major changes or multiple big new features
b) Medium changes, maybe one or twee new small features
c) Improvements

I'm curious as to what 'system' other people use to determine their software's version numbering.
Their implementation of the channel is interesting compared to say, socket.io. Its essentially a one-way-only pipe where data can flow out of the server, to a client. The server only sees it as a pipe, and never gets any data back through it, not even connects or disconnects.

Any server-bound data must be sent through a REST interface, and the corresponding state retrieved through memcache or a DB request. To track connections, the client must periodically send notifications to the server to keep it alive:
"If the application needs to keep track of which clients are connected, one solution is to set the socket’s onopen property to call a function designed to send a POST message to the server at some regular interval in order to notify the server of the client's state."
The frustrating thing about using an app like this, that lives in the cloud, is that I have to expose my Facebook profile to it to get its services. And who knows what kind of app it will become the future.

Essentially, I'd love to find Facebook friends that use Twitter but I never, ever use any Facebook apps, everything about them seems totally dodgy.
is beautiful in firefox but it looks like this in my default chromium: http://imgur.com/NVP1i.png
D:
That would be nice—and, yes, I can certainly do the network programming involved. The app is even built with an MVCish architecture that would let me just drop in the network player.
Someone should really start an "Americans Are not Chickens, Wimps and Wusses" campaign. Proclaiming loudly that Americans are not going to be manipulated into losing their freedom by politicians and fear of terror.
> not that he'd probably want/enjoy the job

Sometimes you do the job you want to do. On some other times, you do what needs to be done.

But that's a ridiculous issue, really. Bruce will never be offered the TSA.
It really is exceptional. Way better than just reading the logs.
GitHub needs a kickass designer — GitHub Jobs
I'd say that this design is quite engineer-driven. It seems, their design is 'just' applied knowledge about perception.
Baidu offers obsolete code sniplets
I do wonder what could be the cause of that? Is the browser market really that different.
Here's a list of which games currently support the Steam Cloud.
http://www.giantbomb.com/steam-cloud/92-4581/games/
Thanks for the price information - that is reasonable!
I'd argue that all design is "applied knowledge about perception"
The blank space around major cities is the most surprising idea to me.
>But, still most venom is focused on the least harmful religions because there is the least reprisal.

You have no evidence that's why they post more about Christianity. I have already presented several other explanations. To be explicit it could be because they don't want to feed biases against minority groups, they might want to target something which is a visible problem (evolution denial in the states), they might want to target the beliefs of people who have power to abuse (local officials), they might want to clean up their own house before they figure out how to deal with other countries and religions which they are less familiar with, etc.

Furthermore PZ Myers _has_ received death threats from Christians, so the idea that all Christians are just a bunch of friendly folks who would never hurt a fly, is absurd (though a lot of Christians do commonly make this argument). If you're making yourself a target, you expose yourself to every nutcase in the country.

> Compared to the Nazis and Communists the radical Islamists are a bunch of puppy dogs.

What do the Nazi's and Communists have to do with this?
How We Drink on a Startup Budget
No recruiter has ever worked, except when we supply a trivial programming task to be supplied with the CV.

+ SF bay hires

We're not in the bay area. We're really, really not in the bay area.

+ sourced mostly from internal recommendations

We have no internal recommendations - most people who work here don't know any other programmers.

+ placement agencies we had a good track record with

We have zero placement agencies with good records.

+ AFAIK never bulk advertised ones

We have to - we have no other source of applicants.

An obvious hypothesis is that if you want to employ programmers other than in the bay area, you're screwed.
Hah, no. I do know a couple of their senior engineers--who get the privilege of using .NET over MUMPS.
Get a Daily Dose of Green Space
"Applied knowledge about perception"

This is so general that it practically means nothing
This seems like a very good analogy to present when you come across non-technical people with pie-in-the-sky requests. They don't know how to go about building the features they dream of, and I have no idea how to go about answering any of the questions you list above.
If nothing else, we both realize that the programming isn't just trivial, and neither is the marketing.
Don't mean to get all religious on ya, but I wanted to ask here...

Is there any evidence of macro-evolution having ever taken place in recorded history? I'm asking this with no agenda, but curious. As far as I know, no new species have ever been produced, despite natural or unnatural selection.

So what makes us say that there is no other force or process that causes speciation? How are scientists so convinced that mutation and natural selection is all that is required, despite never having observed a single instance of speciation?

To be scientific, a theory has to make some potentially falsifiable, non-obvious predictions. Then we can test those predictions, and if our experiments confirm them then the theory survives. I totally agree that the hypothesis "natural selection occurs" has been proven in ample ways (ok, maybe the white->dark->white butterflies was a bad one, but bacteria and their resistance to antibiotics is proof enough). But to form a completely new species...

Species is defined as "as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring" according to Wikipedia. Two animals are of different species if none of their offspring have ever been observed to be fertile. At least, that's a good working definition.

It bothers me that scientists have been interbreeding literally thousands of generations of fruit flies and despite all selection pressures, artificial or not, were never able to produce a single new species. Sure, it's hard to try and mate every fruit fly with every other fruit fly, so maybe there were divergent species, but after a few generations, this should have revealed itself. If this is really the case, then how come we take it for granted that humans, homo erectus, neanderthals etc. were all divergent species that had a common ancestor something like 50,000 years ago? Am I way off? If you take the fruit fly lifetimes and human lifetimes, in those 50,000 years we had about as many generations as the fruit fly generations. And we got all this speciation supposedly, using nothing more than mutation and natural selection. But where is the proof?

I'm not necessary arguing that one of the religions is right and there is another force. But are scientists being biased here when they simply assume there isn't any other force? It's as if I was looking at cars from the 1920s all the way up until now, and I saw gradual change, and based on this I decided that there was no designer of these cars. I don't think that follows at all.

Just curious if someone knows links that can resolve this for me :)
WikiLeaks, Amazon and the new threat to Internet speech
Coping with North Korea: How do you solve a problem like Korea?
Stop trying to ruin the magic!
well, it isn't extraterrestrial life, but it's still pretty damn cool- so I'll take it!
Docs are here:

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/channel/

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/channel/
No matter how you slice it, they're selling you something that they already sold to someone else.
A conveyor belt will deliver him filet mignon at a rate of one per minute
Free Movies Online To Watch
Watch High Quality Unlimited Free Online Movie Streaming. Free Online Movie Watching is an online movies source where you can watch online free movies and download. There are also simple steps where you can easily watch and download movies and films.
At first I tried indexing all links (not just bitly ones) but the volume of results was too much to keep up with. I'm just using the plain old twitter search API.

And the project was for the Bitly API Contest, so I figured I'd just look at bitly links and leave it at that.
I've used a lot of sites, but I'm most fond of typeracer.com's racing system. Most sites peg me around the 130-140 WPM mark.

Good luck with the site!
How to tell if your entrepreneurial idea could lead to a journalism business
Better yet, buy refundable tickets and then cancel them until the airlines grow some.
I hadn't heard of Rapportive (http://rapportive.com/) before. Very impressive piece of work form a technical standpoint. It will be interesting to see how they monetize the product.
Yup, definitely.
OpenSSL Ciphersuite Downgrade Vulnerability Announcement
Do you have any basis for the claim the 760k years would not be enough time for such a feature to arise? After all, some surprisingly complicated things (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye) are believed to have evolved (more than once) over shorter periods.
Too bad it's not actually anonymous at all.

You can easily identify anyone by viewing the source of their FB pic. For example:

http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/hs444.snc4/48985_665523839_4409_q.jpg

profile ID is 665523839, which you can plug in to see all their details: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=665523839
What it's like to be the SO of a start-up founder.
I was working on a similar app but ran into issues getting enough of the twitter stream, what access to the Twitter API are you using (is this all from the gardenhose)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_exp...
I get around this by implementing the abstract version of my code first; I then implement the abstractions that I used in the abstract version of my code. So I'm not even worried about running code until I have a general idea of what I want it to be doing.

I obviously then rework stuff as I learn that my assumptions were totally wrong, but this way I've started from an incorrect conceptual model; rather than an incorrect full implementation. I think this makes it easier to manipulate.

edit:
And I guess the point of that is that according to XKCD, I start at sociology, and work my way down the stack until I get to whatever language/libraries (hopefully not Math) I'm actually programming in. Like some sort of crazy fractal.
To what extent do people stylize their emails?
But how is that a change? We already knew that to the point that we're looking at non-Earthlike planets. We're already looking for life on Titan and Europa, already looking on Mars to see if it had life. We're already talking about life on that tidally-locked mega-Earth that came up a couple of months ago, with otherwise-respectable scientists saying it's 100% likely [1]. We're already not convinced that life has to start exactly as Earth does.

If it's "different", what's the actual difference? What actually changed?

[1]: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/earth-like-exoplanet-p...
Riak Contrib. Contribute custom functions to Riak.
I love the "welcome" feature.
FTFY: ...so that the kids of billionaires get tax-free windfall income just like the kids of non-billionaires...
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
or you could save your games in a dropbox folder - works great for the couple of steam games I own
Public toilets in San Francisco go through a self-cleaning cycle but they don't always work as well in practice as in theory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBF-62UXn8Y
All Applications Are Not Created Equal
We lauched videolla.com in the beginning of month, so most of the month was spend on customer development, support and iterating product. We have some exciting results so far, paying customers, traffic is growing, partnerships, requests for features, etc. So things are going great so far.

BTW we are working on some kicking ass API to allow developers use premium licensed content in your apps, sites, games. So thing you can make your Guitar Hero with Lady GaGa music or something like watch Netflix movies with friends and Facetime. How cool is that, huh? Signup on our site if you want to stay in touch :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation#Artificial_speciatio...
Clearly, the bacteria aren't going to magically destroy the arsenic. But eat the arsenic, die and float to the surface of the well where they can be skimmed off? I'd say that's a simple goal for some genetic engineers to start gunning for.

It's also plausible they could metabolize it into some non-toxic form. (We've got a variety of biomolecules we've never seen before, some of which could be non-toxic.)
Yep, just using the plain old Twitter search API via tweepy, with a search term of 'http bit.ly'.
This might be implemented with the same feature as the lack of clusters: a label suppresses other labels around it, with bigger cities suppressing more. Would be easy to do with a greedy algorithm.
Live demo: http://dance-dance-robot.appspot.com/
IBM makes breakthrough in super-fast laser chips
Build Your Own Circular Log with MySQL
Love the interactive design, nicely done.
It's supposedly an industrial secret, but hearsay is that Abbott laboratories took the strain of bacteria that makes erythromycin and began serial UV-mutagenesis it to improve titers. It went from trace production to making 10-50 grams of drug per liter of media, which is quite amazing. As a result the bacteria has reconfigured its entire metabolism. Started out as a sessile, filamentous bacteria with a highly complex life cycle and now is a roughly spherical free-floating bacteria.

"Species is defined as "as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring" according to Wikipedia. Two animals are of different species if none of their offspring have ever been observed to be fertile. At least, that's a good working definition."

Just so you know: That is just about the worst definition for microbiologist. Bacteria don't grow by sexual reproduction, they reproduce by binary fission. They also share genes like crazy. I've seen a gene taken from a sargasso sea sample crop up in the database for a bacterium found in the deeps of the medeterranean ocean. There is speculation that a virus is responsible for spreading photosynthesis between several different, otherwise very distantly-related clades of bacteria.
ha me too
I was actually considering getting this for my son, since we are huge fans of Top Gear (UK) and would love to drive the Veyron around the TG test track. Of course, I'd have to get a PS3 first, but this and his luke warm reaction to my suggestion of getting it... well, that clinches the deal. No thanks.
Bigfoot integrates its fast-networking inside graphics cards