skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a great 'operation ore' defence though.
If a web site was offering payment by Visa/Mastercard then I assumed it was all legal when I signed up to download the pictures - because MC/Visa vet their customers.

Note to foreigners: operation ore was a UK police sweep to arrest pedophiles solely on the evidence that their credit card numbers had been used on child porn sites in the US. The judge rejected claims that the credit cards could have been stolen because of the strenuous efforts credit card companies put into security.
Four software design mistakes that Diaspora needs to fix quickly

FTFY
I remember Google saying they thought everything was moving to the web. Even our operating systems of a computer. These moves that Google are making are not in line with what has been said.
interesting that the Nexus One and HTC Desire aren't fully supported, presumably due to their touchscreens
money is a tool. once you have it, great. what are you going to do with it? why are you obtaining it?
I think this is a situation where when you get a shiny new hammer everything looks like a nail. The article has some interesting ideas but are they the most economically viable?

The patient routing functions described in the article could more easily and cheaply be done using RFID tag technology. Basic data collection could be done by the patient walking across a scale in a doorway, and placing a hand in a (new) device that could take temperature, and blood pressure, as well as blood and sweat samples. This all needs to be connected to a network but it doesn't require more expensive visual recognition technology.

As for recognizing what a doctor is doing by watching I find that more wishful thinking than practical. Sure it would be cool but I don't see it being the most economically feasible given the complexities involved
"or in Sweden"

Really? Volvo, Ericsson, Saab, Husqvarna, IKEA, Skype, MySQL, just to name a few. It would have been hard to pick a worse example country to make your point.

Believing in a robust social safety net is orthogonal to wanting to make money and innovate.
On the other hand, medieval England wasn't one of the worst places.
Yes, normally it is. In this case the definition of 'rape' has apparently been stretched well beyond the breaking point, to where the victim will throw a party for the perp only to go to the police several days later after colluding with another victim. Let's just say that I find the charge sufficiently heavy that I would expect the bar for being charged with this crime to be considerably higher than what is seen so far.

And that's totally besides my views on wikileaks, Julian Assange or anything else.
> futile

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beck_Weathers
Android Froyo for NookColor tablet
I am 23 years old and today I watched a youtube video to learn the proper way to cut up an onion. I cook a lot with onions, maybe two or three times a week, and before today I didn't know how to dice an onion except to slice it into rings and then hack at it a lot. Seriously.

Is this evidence that I am fundamentally unable to cut an onion? No. After I watched the video I went and did it. It's just that in the past I knew enough to get the job done and so learning anything more on the topic didn't have a huge priority.
Really interesting. in Brazil we have some dozen completely different kind of bananas, so I really never thought about why they replanted the roots for a new tree.
If rewriting private history is a lie, is rewriting URLs also a lie? Should we all expose ugly /app.cgi?foo=bar?action=edit URLs because we shouldn't lie? Ss fiction a lie?

If all that is a "lie", I'll happily lie to outsiders to present them a nicer image, as long as no harm is done that way.
Because sometimes compiling to an intermediate VM has advantages over compiling to native code.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1977956
With iOS, screen shots can be used to hack this. (To take a screen shot, position the display, and momentarily and simultaneously click both buttons. The screen shots are loaded into the Photo library.)
Yup, that's the one I was talking about.
Isn't that what the trial is supposed to find out? I don't know a lot about the UK justice system, but I imagine they wouldn't issue a warrant without something to bring to the trial.
Seriously? Which domain squatting site has so much of information and a video which explains it's service! Just because it's 2010, does not mean that no one can have a dictionary word domain. They probably had lot of money to spend so they got it.

I am not hugely impressed by the artwork of the site but it is definitely not the worst site that I have seen
The layout of that block smells like Flickr-envy.
Of course one tries to do that, that's exactly what the question is aimed at. :) How could education happen but through their own understanding?

It's easy when one is already at the meeting when such things are to be discussed. But what often happens in real life, is that a sales guy (an intermediary!) comes, and asks, "hey I have this client, he needs this and this, can you guys give a quote by tomorrow?" :)

Don't tell me such a thing never happened in your praxis. :)
These tests are not as meaningful because it is not country vs country.
But countries vs citiy states.
Hong Kong, and Singapore are basically cities not countries.
If South Korea only tested Seoul instead of the whole country, they would have also looked better.
RTZ: Bright Idea
Chip and the gang come up with some pretty ingenious ideas this week to get their ESD (electrostatic discharge) testing done.
This is a silly mis-application of statistics. Risk in both scenarios is highly dependent on preparation and decision making.
Please consider the possibility that you haven't learned to post your negative reactions in a thoughtful way, rather than that the community is simply downvoting opinions they don't like.
An older story:

http://classes.yale.edu/fractals/mandelset/mandelmonk/mandel...

n.b. The OP picture looks more like a Julia Fractal.
From Stewart's concurrence:

[...]

Yet it is elementary that the successful conduct of international diplomacy and the maintenance of an effective national defense require both confidentiality and secrecy. Other nations can hardly deal with this Nation in an atmosphere of mutual trust unless they can be assured that their confidences will be kept. And, within our own executive departments, the development of considered and intelligent international policies would be impossible if those charged with their formulation could not communicate with each other freely, frankly, and in confidence. In the area of basic national defense, the frequent need for absolute secrecy is, of course, self-evident.

I think there can be but one answer to this dilemma, if dilemma it be. The responsibility must be where the power is. If the Constitution gives the Executive a large degree of unshared power in the conduct of foreign affairs and the maintenance of our national defense, then, under the Constitution, the Executive must have the largely unshared duty to determine and preserve the degree of internal security necessary to exercise that power successfully. It is an awesome responsibility, requiring judgment and wisdom of a high order. I should suppose that moral, political, and practical considerations would dictate that a very first principle of that wisdom would be an insistence upon avoiding secrecy for its own sake. For when everything is classified, then nothing is classified, and the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless, and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion. I should suppose, in short, that the hallmark of a truly effective internal security system would be the maximum possible disclosure, recognizing that secrecy can best be preserved only when credibility is truly maintained. But, be that as it may, it is clear to me that it is the constitutional duty of the Executive -- as a matter of sovereign prerogative, and not as a matter of law as the courts know law -- through the promulgation and enforcement of executive regulations, to protect the confidentiality necessary to carry out its responsibilities in the fields of international relations and national defense.

This is not to say that Congress and the courts have no role to play. Undoubtedly, Congress has the power to enact specific and appropriate criminal laws to protect government property and preserve government secrets. Congress has passed such laws, and several of them are of very colorable relevance to the apparent circumstances of these cases. And if a criminal prosecution is instituted, it will be the responsibility of the courts to decide the applicability of the criminal law under which the charge is brought. Moreover, if Congress should pass a specific law authorizing civil proceedings in this field, the courts would likewise have the duty to decide the constitutionality of such a law, as well as its applicability to the facts proved.
Although this article is a bit scary, the title is completely editorialized. Nowhere does it indicate that this is the "end of public research." The republicans are simply asking Americans to review publicly funded projects.
How to Analyze Wikileaks Data - R SPARQL
I don't know how bad it would really be for GPS manufacturers. Right now you can get a bunch of different applications for iOS that provide mapping and store all the data directly on the phone. Granted, they do cost money, and Google maps is free, but I don't know that having vector Google maps with caching would really be a huge blow to GPS manufacturers any more than the iOS apps already are.
> you can't even notice whether you're using a native or a well crafted HTML app.

That's completely untrue. It is immediately noticeable because of the lack of responsiveness, smoothness of transitions, and ugly layouts. Like I said, you can put together a bunch of hacks to try and imitate it, but you end up with something clunky and unprofessional. This wasn't as big a deal 10 years ago, but interface expectations on these devices (especially the tablets) are very high. Quality design is expected by a lot more customers in the hardware AND software. Interfacing with touch gestures needs to be instant and seamless.

Did you even look at the "Ali Quotes" app in the story? It's terrible. I've poked around the jQueryMobile already on my iPhone, the whole thing is, in a word, slow. Yes, I know it's new. It will be better in six months... after thousands of coding hours will be spent concocting ludicrous javascript and CSS hacks to duplicate something that's been done perfectly well on native client platforms for 3 years. It's a terrible waste of effort.

> There are also some heavy downsides in Xcode/Obj-C development, such as hunting down memory leaks and crashes

True, these are problems that have existed forever, and better dev tools help alleviate them. But don't forget these same problems are prevalent all over web apps too. Flash memory leaks are everywhere. Javascript suddenly consumes 100% of your CPU. Same problems, but no one care about fixing them because its just a webpage, just reload it. Well OK, but that's why even after 10 years people don't trust webapps.
Porting iPhone/iOS apps to Windows Phone
Windows Phone is all set to be the next major platform in the Mobile Space. While it will be second to Apple at least for several years to come, It’ll still garner market share from new smartphone users and competitors like Blackberry and Android.As successful developers, I strongly think it’s high time to start porting apps to Windows Phone. To developers like us, it’s another platform that comes with a whole new gold rush. Why not utilize it?
Damperli Kamyon 4
You have one person to blame for most of this: Palin, and her "fruit flies in France" spending. This might change a lot, or might not change how science is funded at all. But if the Republicans get the presidency, the house and senate, expect a lot of change, to the worse.
Possibly, leave the stories behind and stick to building out a scope of work that both you and your client can clearly understand.

It doesn't have to be crazy, and will most likely take less time than clearing up a rough metaphor to programming, which your client most likely has no interest in understanding.

Scopes can be very quickly done, be used in contracts/legal docs and keep both you on the same page.
I guess it's time for more millionaire gentlemen hacker yo set up projects to displace taxpayer funded research project.

Perhaps, we could set up a large research foundation funded ordinary people like you and me everyday. For example, if there are 20,000 people paying 5 bucks a month, that's 100,000. By the end of the year, that's 12 million.

Technologies are making it easier to reduce our administrative costs and allow volunteers to collaborate over the internet.
Grow up. It's source control, not marriage. Sometimes it makes sense to make bigger commits (there is lots of reasons to sometimes present the checkin in a manner other than 1000 little incremental fixes; its a naive techie who thinks otherwise) or fix those you have made. Get over it and relax; don't try to add morals to source control.
I would never use this app. Even just from the screenshots I see that it cannot manage to follow even the most basic of iOS UI principles. Most users might not notice so specifically, but they will notice how unnative it is -- and more than likely dislike that.
Develop a Repeatable Sales Model
Apart from crazy people like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich --- who claimed that Assange is an "active enemy of the American people", thus implying that everyone who donated money to Wikileaks has given material support to our enemies --- who is seriously claiming that Assange is a "traitor"? From my perspective, the theme that unites all the "formal" claims against Wikileaks is that they are all ludicrous. What crime could he have commited?

Manning is a different story. Someone upthread compared him to Ellsberg (it doesn't help that Ellsberg did, too). But Ellsburg's act was deliberate and carefully planned. Manning, on the other hand, is accused of scooping up vast buckets of documents off SIPRnet servers and then handing them off to complete strangers. Amnesty, the Soros Open Society Institute (to which WL applied for a grant), and the ICG all criticized Wikileaks --- the whole organization --- for not being careful enough in redacting documents. Yet we're to believe that a single private in the military could possibly have judged the impact of what he was handing to Wikileaks?

Adrian Lamo --- who I don't know from Adam, and whose story I've never followed --- took a vast helping of shit for exposing Manning. I don't know what his motives were and I don't care. But I will say that if Manning was even modestly competent with technology, Lamo may have saved his life by stopping him.
Title is blatant editorializing. Editors, please change it.

This is an attempt to crowdsource the process of finding wasteful spending within a government agency. I.e., instead of saying "hey, the NSF has too much money, lets cut the total budget", Congressman Smith wants to cut specific wasteful items from the NSF budget (presumably while preserving the useful ones).

I suspect this is an effort to head off claims like "the end of publicly funded research." If this project is successful, Smith can point out that he doesn't oppose publicly funded research, only items like "$750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players".

I also suspect that the main reason he is targeting the NSF is that it's an easy target. To find items to cut, anyone can just go to the NSF's website ( http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/reset.do?dispatch=2&FormR... ). As far as I know, bigger and more wasteful agencies (e.g., DOJ, DOE, Homeland Security) don't have similar websites.

[edit: to clarify, I'm not arguing it's a good idea. I'm just pointing out that it is nothing whatsoever like what the HN title suggests.]
I do this because it is the easiest and most fun job I've ever had. Money is nice, too, but it doesn't really motivate me that much. (And, strangely enough, the more I say that the more of it people throw at me.)

If I wanted money, I'd say "no" less often, or do what a lot of my classmates did and do management consulting. All the fun of being a salaryman, five to ten times the pay.
Edifice Complex
At this point, it's probably worth pointing out that a lot of the value of the NSF derives from its political independence.
Given that Assange wants to bring down secretive government, it's pretty obvious he wants to undermine diplomacy.
The three things I value in doing a startup rather than working for e.g. Microsoft or Google are, in no particular order:

1) Freedom to work on what I want, how I want. Would Google let me use CoffeeScript? I doubt it.

2) Variety - I get to touch all aspects of the business (business decisions, software-related stuff, customers, management) and also get to touch all aspects of the software cycle (spec, design, implementation/testing, deployment/server administration). I'm learning way more general, transferable skills than I would at Microsoft.

3) Potentially, lots of money. As you say, I don't want money for its own sake...I want it so that I can assign relatively higher priority to how interesting my next job is versus how well it pays, and to support my eventual family.
It's not meant to be accurate. In another comment someone claimed that 2% was "low" and I'm just pointing out that climbing Mt. Everest is one of the more risky things you can do. Obviously at an individual level it loses meaning, but people often use death rate statistics that don't apply individually to assess risk in a more general sense.
Is there an award number for airport body scanners? ;)
You would. GPLv2 provides an implicit patent grant. Oracle wouldn't be able to touch you.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1978507
cleverjake: You're being censored. All your comments are dead on arrival.
Haha Relevant: http://twitter.com/#!/wikileaks/status/11620256778821632
Excellent question. Please google the Pentagon Papers and educate yourself some more on the subject. If we followed your conclusion pretty much all the newspapers in the world that actually did their jobs would be in the docket tomorrow.

There has always been a tug-of-war between the press and the government about what is and what is not permitted and it is universally recognized that a free press is essential to the functioning of democracies.

The issue at stake here is a complicated one, whether or not wikileaks is part of the press, and even if it isn't whether it should be counted as such.

Governments the world over, from the worst to the best have figured out a loophole in the whole 'free press' business, which is to use 'access' as a coin with which to control the press. In a world where eyeballs govern the budgets of newspapers not having access directly affects a newspapers bottom line. WikiLeaks circumvents the access trick by simply not being susceptible to that kind of leverage and it is exactly because of that that I suspect that they are seen as 'dangerous' by those in power.
Easy, hit the potential client back with an outline of involved work.

If they seem determined to come to their own understanding, explain that it is similar to machinery and each portion of the machine needs to be crafted exactly to the machine's purpose.
Wait, you are accusing Google of copying the Gmail app from the IPad?

You know G in Gmail stands for Google right?
Interesting.. In what way does D seem like a severe step backwards to you? Is that assumption based on the library support or the language itself?
The Theory of Phlogiston was discredited via the scientific method. It was in the act of replication that it got challenged. Phlogiston is an example of a theory that eventually got rejected as new facts were discovered and experimental design was critiqued, despite having about 100 years of apparent success.

Phlogiston theory was, however, useful to chemists. When it met its limits, and a better theory came along, they of course dumped it.

Apparently, the issue isn't scientific method per se, but of selfish interests who intentionally compromise experimental design and scientific debate for their own fame, glory, and gold.

The good news is that the these half-truths and lies will get in the way of someone else's research and agenda, and that same someone else will likely make a big stink of it.
Lot of Salesforce haters here. A couple of counterpoints to reactions:

-Remember that Salesforce is targeting large enterprise deals. Sure they want to be developer friendly, but "in the cloud" is overused because there are so many legacy on-premise SAP/Oracle/etc systems.

-The costs should not be compared to AWS, but instead to AWS + the cost of a developer headcount. One of Salesforce's goals it seems is to make it so once implemented minor changes to structure and process are able to be done by business users.
No. Equark is accusing them of stealing the ideas from the Mail app from the iPad.
While interesting, this attack is old. A newer "variation" on this is with HTTP POST instead of headers.

http://www.darkreading.com/vulnerability-management/16790102...
http://www.owasp.org/images/4/43/Layer_7_DDOS.pdf
I think that to respect Nature you need to understand that it won't kill you 'just because' you get out of your safe house. Nature gives you a lot to take care of yourself. You need to learn to properly understand it's signs, that's where you can start respecting. Otherwise you have fear, but not respect. You can't imagine yourself sleeping under a rain, can't you?
Why don't you read the entire article first?

The testing in Shanghai was carried out by an international contractor, working with Chinese authorities, and overseen by the Australian Council for Educational Research, a nonprofit testing group, said Andreas Schleicher, who directs the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s international educational testing program.

Mark Schneider, a commissioner of the Department of Education’s research arm in the George W. Bush administration, who returned from an educational research visit to China on Friday, said he had been skeptical about some PISA results in the past. But Mr. Schneider said he considered the accuracy of these results to be unassailable.

“The technical side of this was well regulated, the sampling was O.K., and there was no evidence of cheating,” he said.
My friend's dad climbed k2. It's like rolling a tetrahedron.
> The judge rejected claims that the credit cards could have been stolen because of the strenuous efforts credit card companies put into security.

Man I would have liked to be an expert witness in that case.

That judge ought to be thrown off the bench for talking out of his honorable ass. Credit card fraud with stolen numbers is so rampant it's not even funny, we reject probably around 40% of the charges (and the users don't complain, right?).

Typically it is not the credit card companies (or the banks) that go to great lengths to protect the card holders but it is the IPSPs and the merchants that try to do the best they can, only to find out that they're holding the bag if a charge is ever contested because VISA, MC and other card companies/issuers do not do anything whatsoever.
Frustrating, sure. Something to be "angry" about? No.

Its a free service. With no advertising. When you use Tumblr you are consuming their resources which they are giving to you free of charge. Its not like they deliberately pulled the plug either. They can deal with the problem in their own way.

Honestly people need to get over this sense of entitlement to online services. We should feel blessed that Tumblr or Twitter or Facebook or HN exist, for free, in the first place.