skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm totally with you on that. I've really always hated "dark matter" and "dark energy", as far as I'm concerned it's a terrible violation of the scientific method.

We have two observations: 1) the rotational speed of galaxies appears to be too high for the calculated mass such that the galaxies should fly apart but don't -and- 2) the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating.

From these two observations, physicists have created theories for a new kind of mass and a new kind energy that has never been detected and don't fit any of our existing models. I'm not suggesting that it's impossible that these new forms exist, but it kinda seems like religion to me - we can't detect it in any way but are supposed to have "faith" that it's there because there's no other readily available explanation for something in the world around us. It's possible, but isn't it much more plausible that we're merely missing a much more reasonable explanation? Maybe some of the things we hold as constants aren't constants (such as the mass in each galaxy).

We shouldn't dismiss dark matter outright, but we also shouldn't treat it as the only, or even the most likely explanation.
Surfing?
Why Facebook sucks for dating -- the Wings/DateBuzz story
Aha! That makes a lot of sense. Thank you for clearing up!
I tend to set frequent checkpoints. For these really short contracts, I'd setup a chat every 2-4 days, always with one two days before the contract ends.

During these chats I'm just looking for progress and questions. Some people will only have questions as they try to explain what they've accomplished. Also, I know a contractor's hours spent on my project aren't going to be uniformly distributed during the period, so I don't make the judgement that they should have X done by a certain day in the contract.
Western capitalist society was built on the very idea that it is OK to want to make money and to innovate (it was a new idea at the time). To think otherwise places you either back before 1800 or in Sweden.

If you would like to learn more I recommend the book "Bourgeois Dignity: A Revolution in Rhetoric" by Deirdre McCloskey.
Learning Obj-C is looking more and more like a poor investment of time. If my repurposed web skills are good enough to build 80% of the apps people want why would I start from scratch with a completely new and native stack?
Thou Shalt Not Lie: git rebase, ammend, squash, and other lies
A few silly observations:

1. They bested Apple at their own game: it has no hardware buttons. Rubin even mentions that the single iPad button can get disorienting at times.

2. The thing costs $10,000! So much for the Apple tax. Let's start complaining about the Google tax!
10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs
I found that to be inferred elsewhere in the article as well. If true, it's a very interesting feature. Imagine being able to leave out the middleware web layer entirely and securely have direct access to data within the app!
I'm not Assange's biggest fan (r.e. how he controls Wikileaks) but some of the nonsense coming from the US establishment (and elsehwere) is appalling.

It probably even vindicates what Wikileaks stands for.

This is one of those cases where damage limitation is the sane and sensible response; they've lost those cables, we are going to see them. Deal with it. They need perspective; in the grand scheme of things it is highly unlikely to be "the end of the world". And if it uncovers corruption and naughtiness then all the better.

Hounding Assange and Wikileaks only ends up making them look guilty. Which is stupid, especially as there is nothing (so far) hugely corrupt or terrible in the leaks!
Assange is a hacker and WikiLeaks is a start-up though not in the usual money-making PG-esque business sense.

The site had - and I guess it still has - some non-trivial (at least at such scale of pressure and exposure) operational issues: DoS attacks, denials of DNS service, hosting refusals, bank-accounts freezings, institutional threatening reactions from the mightiest states in the world... ...and yet it's still on-line under different URLs and mirrors.

Isn't that a true hackers' achievement worthy for discussing here at length?

I'm not quite sure, of course, but maybe hundreds of future PhDs in the history and political sciences - getting their degrees in the very same elite universities whose alumni now rule in US & UK - will be indebted to this man and this project that shed light on all the data.

Just think about that.
To feel well and fully alive sometimes requires one to step out of the boundaries of comfort (and some would say sanity). I honestly believe that you don't appreciate your life as much as when you've been close to losing it.
Blocking Access to Wikileaks May Harm CRS, Analysts Say
Bitsliced TEA: primer for those who'll not confuse the algorithm w the tea bread
A VC: The Follow On Round Birthday Party
Database.com from Salesforce
>because no diplomat will write any memos or share information with one another

Not true. Honest and courageous diplomats will continue to tell the truth. Cowards need not apply.
Announcing Thunderbird Conversations
The Commonwealth Saga by Peter F. Hamilton.
I submitted it because I think for a product of Salesforce.com, design looks very much like a parked domain.
2.07pm: More financial problems for WikiLeaks: Visa says it has suspended all payments to WikiLeaks "pending further investigation".

Earlier MasterCard said: "MasterCard is taking action to ensure that WikiLeaks can no longer accept MasterCard-branded products."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2010/dec/07/wikileaks-us...
> As this is a product page and not a comparison matrix, why ...

Because you're wrong. It is a comparison matrix, and not a product page. http://www.google.com/phone lists many different android phones, by many different manufacturers, and offers comparisons.

The Nexus S product page is http://www.google.com/nexus
Alas, lag when scrolling/panning/rotating is still noticeable.
Yes, actually, people are desperate for the truth. The US Government has gotten away with lying to its citizens for far, far too long, and in the meantime is still committing atrocious acts of war against innocent people, daily.

So: yes. We do need Julian Assange, and more people like him, to stand up and fight these heinous powers being abused by dishonest criminals in the Pentagon, and the US Government.
Well, clearly this means moving to Germany makes you stupid. Being born in Germany clearly provides some kind of immunity.

Or am I drawing erroneous conclusions from the data?
Source control for office documents would be great, but git, svn, your favorite flavor goes here, are NOT suitable for general office workers. It's possible some type of shell or scripting interface could be slapped on, but it would need to be so thoroughly tested and bullet proof that you would probably be better to use a tool developed for that environment.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there exists enbug.org whose about page (http://enbug.org/AboutThisSite) says:

The meaning of enbug is the opposite of the word debug, namely, to add errors or defects into software or hardware.

That page was last edited on 2007-03-04.
Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Arrested in London
since deleted:

http://blog.jonolan.net/politics/green-lighting-assange/

google cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:e7JxvDK...

but that was after the edit

His parting words confirm it though:

" :lol: So much for ANY argument about Free Speech or whether Assange is Good or Evil.

Between having this post censored and the various death threats I’ve been reporting to the authorities and deleting, it’s very much proven that most of these ranters actually believe EXACTLY as I do, just not from a defending America point of view.

To all the Aussies out there – I totally approve of your attitude, though I do wish you’d read the comment thread before ranting. If you had, you’d have realized that I accepted that using Daniel was useless.

Think on this though – If the tables were turned, would you have responded any differently than I did. You responses and threats says you would have done as I did.

All,

This threaded has ended in a very odd Win-Win situation. The specifics of my idea were proven useless and finally removed by fiat (Your Win), but your responses – by and large – proved the lie of your underlying argument (My Win).

I’m also shocked that so many of you would lend me so much credence of perceived power and/or authority. I certainly never expected anyone other than my normal readers to engage in this thought experiment…

I really don’t know if that’s gratifying or sobering."

Unbelievable.
I agree. The article's headlines has a distinct anti-intellectual flair, and yet the article itself points out human flaws in research rather than a fundamental flaw in the scientific method.
Do you aim to change the definition of "ugly"? The site is good-looking and totally professional with some good features. Read rest of the comments to know more :)
And so it seems that trolls get their just deserts.
How Will SMBs consume technology in 2011?
Practice, practice, practice.

The same secret to everything else.
According to TFA:

* Sarah Palin says I should be "hunted down like Osama bin Laden", a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a "transnational threat" and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister's office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.
The question isn't whether it'd be great for people, I agree it would, but rather whether it is at all possible - I honestly think people wouldn't be able to do it beyond a simple level. It's hard to say that without sounding patronising, but I think it's unfortunately true!

However, I think there is a great deal of power available in allowing users to provide some simple level of control, i.e. via DSLs.
About 5,100 15-year-olds in Shanghai were chosen as a representative cross-section of students in that city.

Who did the "choosing" and what defines "representative."

We were all impressed with the Chinese Women's Gymnastics Team during the last olympics. Then it turned out many were barely of age to compete. And they were very careful about interacting with the cameras.

Were I the U.S. education chief, I'd be talking to the Fins and Hong Kong Chinese instead.
If the average person was as interested in exposing the dirty side of government and big business as Mr Assange we wouldn’t be in this position. He most decidedly isn’t average.
Is there a framework where you can use Prolog as a web development language? Server and/or client-side.
I can't answer for the parent poster, but one thing specifically irked me about Python and that was the variable scoping rules and the lack of forced declaration.

The result was that any misspelling of variables could result in extremely difficult to find bugs. This was a final straw that pushed me over the "I don't really care for the syntax of this language much" cliff.

Not a showstopper, but combined with a number of other small complaints, Python "rubbed me the wrong way" too. Yeah, significant whitespace alone isn't a problem. Lack of variable definition by itself isn't a big deal. Explicit "Self" as a parameter is kind of annoying but makes sense. The lame anonymous functions that don't have the full power of the language are ugly. Taken together those are enough to turn me off to the language.

BUT, Python has a few killer features like great libraries, flexible built in data structures, and an excellent foreign function interface. If I needed a scripting language for a native-code app it would be one of the top choices.

By the way, my experience with Python is a few years old, I don't know if anything's changed with the new version.

Edit to add: Other dynamic languages have various solutions to the variable declaration problem, usually involving a parser or compiler warning when you use an unbound variable. Python's syntax would have to change to make that possible, I think.
Wikileaks U.S. Embassy Cables Live Updates
I can't tell if this is sarcasm. The site looks like it was designed by a versatile programmer who knows what attributes a good-looking site should have, but can't reproduce it himself.
Wouldn't that be 4?
Kinected HealthIT?
This answer makes the most sense to me, though I dont understand it.

Some quantity x which is your trust in Tom, plus some quantity y which is the probability of the coin multiplied by some factor of increasing confidence
The features in JDK 7 and 8 are what we the Java developer community have been asking for. Heck, even RedHat held its nose and voted yes for the technical merits. Java is only getting beter and the JVM -- thanks to Clojure , Scala and JRuby -- has a vibrant community that is extending it beyond the limitations of Java.

But please don't let these facts get in the way of Java fear mongering. Good to see the Java haters' FUD factory is back in action. The old " java is too slow" campaign was losing its appeal. Good to see a fresh new FUD.
The End of Public Funded Research
Amazon Web Services Achieves Level 1 Payment Card Industry (PCI) Compliance
I keep reading that the sex was consensual and that it's the fact he didn't use protection that made it a crime. I don't really understand how this can be the case though, but it seems to be all over the place if you google it. Sweden must have a very strange law.
Everyone should be given the opportunity to create their own solutions, in the space that is currently called "programming".

Maybe this is a contrary point of view, but I think very little has been done to enable this for everybody. The op seems to think everybody should man up and learn one of the current generation of languages. I think the whole space of end user programming is mostly unexplored.
You would be surprised how many normal adults simply cannot reliably save a file in a known place, much less retrieve it. I'm not talking about dummies either. Try teaching some community education classes some time, it will give you a enhanced appreciation fornthose who design user interfaces for things like ATMs, pointnof sale systems and such.

Kids do do better than adults, but the are learning a particular set of interface conventions, and worse they are learning it as a language, rather than as a set of abstract principles. When the paradigm changes they often have just as much trouble as their parents.
This is the classical issue when you have only one big bomb: you may be able to scare people but you can only do so if they believe you are going to trigger it, but if you do so, you can on longer scare them.
post-statement ifs, ... used particularly often in Ruby. ... Ruby coming from Japan may be a factor.

I think Ruby borrowed them from Perl's Statement modifiers (http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsyn.html#Statement-Modifiers). I like them and use them when I want the focus to be on the body rather than the conditional.
San Francisco's charm lures high-tech workers
I want people on my team that want to make money, who know how to make money and won't get to a certain point and say, "well we made 100m let's all go sit on the beach!".
Money doesn't buy happiness, but it does buy options.
$10/month/100k records? That is outrageously expensive, even ignoring the transaction costs.
I'm not sure I get that first one. The reason, IMO of course, that the iPad rotates to any orientation is just for personal preferences. I only ever hold mine in one of two orientations (button at bottom, button at left) and thus I am never 'disoriented'.

Besides that, having at least one hardware button is really quite useful when (inevitably imperfect) apps go screwy. Also, non-standard placement of home button, anyone?

In short: I think, considering this is a prototype, you wont actually see very many tablets without hardware home-type-button. It may sound good in theory but I expect it would be really frustrating in real life.
I'm guessing they can see what fraction of their visitors also visiting their competitor's site.

I'm not sure what else they can gather but I'd imagine that if you can pick up on what "videos/pages/articles" those visitors are visiting, you can seed your own site with similar content to further entice them to use your site as a primary resource and decrease the chance they will visit the competition.
No sarcasm here. I really want to know that as a user what is driving you off that site?
How is representing an opinion being a troll? Fact is, I don't like the guy, I don't trust his intentions, and I think Wikileaks is a worldwide disaster.

I just don't understand why reasonable objections are so quickly criticized here.
Speaking of Kinect and health... am I the only one worried about the potential health impact of having bright pinpoints of infrared light beamed directly into our eyes for long periods of time? Just because we can't perceive the light doesn't mean it can't damage our eyes, right? Or am I wrong?
Indeed, we've recently seen how much Shanghai is not representative of China as a whole: http://blog.sokanu.com/200-countries-200-years-4-minutes
(skip to near the end of the video if you haven't seen it already)

If the US chose only students from say, California and New England, I'm sure we'd be competitive with China as well.
The site is very useful, thanks for sharing.
Oh, but everybody has values. Just not necessarily the same that those publicly announced.
Exiting times ahead.
How online bank account aggregation should work (hint: no scraping)
Xtreme Labs is hiring 50 engineers, though not sure if all of them will be in Toronto.

http://www.xtremelabs.com/
JSRs for Java 7 and Java 8 Approved
I contend this entire (and entirely interesting) article was written solely so the OP could use the word "bananageddon".

If so, well played, well played.
He's no different than Harvey Levine, though I'll admit, he plays to the crowd well.
Has an industry sprung up around climbing Everest? Yes.
Are all Everest climbers reckless thrill-seekers? No, no and No.
This is not the case, at least here where I live. When I contributed to Wikipedia, we had a special page collecting copyright violations found by us. The "old media" section was terribly long, we actually had threads on our mailing list where people rejoiced that someone had printed the author and license information, as if it was strange and unexpected. Usually under stolen pictures they just wrote nothing, or "Source: Internet", which was even worse.

Printed media was also less willing to print an apology and/or attribution than websites, even when we specifically asked them to do so.
> Climbing Mt. Everest has nothing to do with exploration

At an organizational level, you are correct. There are very few places left unexplored by the human race on this planet. However, on an individual level, if you have never been to the summit of Everest, then it is very much a personal exploration. Maps and guides reduce the required effort from superhuman to formidable, but I see a clear exploratory factor.

At a personal level -- answering the question "what have I explored" rather than "what has the human race explored" -- the chasm between having crossed the Hillary Step and merely having read a description of it is vast. You are exploring your own limits in a purely figurative sense, and this could be boiled down to "thrill-seeking", but you are also literally exploring the terrain and geography, figuring out how to hoist your own personal mass beyond each obstacle. It is this very personal sense of exploration that I think drives most non-professional mountaineers.

Also, even at a macro / organizational level, completely new routes are tried (explored!), and the route through the Khumbu Icefall changes every year.
Ooops.. did not check it back earlier. Thanks for the link though and the commands are definitely interesting. pv was totally new for me!
For what it's worth, LucidDB ( http://luciddb.org/ ) has a Salesforce foreign data wrapper for it. ( http://pub.eigenbase.org/wiki/FarragoMedSalesforcePlugin ) LucidDB's a column-store standards-focused SQL database, which makes it a lot faster for certain operations (and slower for others, like single row inserts).
Assange is 39, not 22 (though, admittedly, he does not look his age).

Assange explains why he is a figurehead in his Q&A session with CNN: http://articles.cnn.com/2010-12-03/world/wikileaks.assange.q...
Perhaps due to Bayesian Magic Pixie Dust?
I scoured the web and read a bit about the case. It seems that one of the "victims" isn't complaining, though the 2nd is.

I'm not going to play PI, but it seems to me that if a woman is that upset after sex, then something went wrong. Maybe he refused to spoon.
"Endangers peoples lives" ... if you came to this conclusion yourself, can you PLEASE share with the rest of us how did they do that?

"Freedom of information and expose MUST be for common man's good,"..... spoken as someone who's been brainwashed (pardon the use of that word) to be spoonfed information by those who control it. Who decides what's for "the common man's good" ? Why can't we see all the information and then decide for OURSELVES what's for our good?

"...and it destroys my reputation " .... just listen to yourself, man! Stop being scared of openness! Please, do us all a favor, go through the 1000+ cables and point us to 1 where someone's reputation is being destroyed.

WHY ARE PEOPLE SO SCARED OF WIKILEAKS??
How Social Connections Might Dictate Future Purchases With Bing
And if there's something you need you can extend PhoneGap with a plugin (Examples and existing functional plugins: https://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-plugins )
Maybe 3D glasses will take off as a fashion accessory when these little boxes start popping up all over the place and we experience mass vision impairment
188,324,887 transactions today powered by database.com technology

If you are going to show this, it should update when I press F5.
What is a Good Essay?
Good essays are essential for good marks. An essay to be considered good, it should adhere to all the rules of essays writing. Therefore, students are recommended to familiarize themselves with how to write an essay in order to submit a good essay.
Do posts appear on HN or Reddit first?
I've noticed a lot of articles appearing on both sites, often within minutes of each other. I want to subscribe to either a Reddit feed or a HN feed to minimize redundancies. I'd rather go with the site that breaks news first, so which would it be? Which site breaks news?
Which makes me wonder what is in the leaks that we haven't seen yet. After all if highly placed officials are getting their panties in a twist based on what we've seen so far then they are over-reacting to put it mildly.

Time will tell. Some of the responses from politicians are beyond the pale and what bugs me more is that nobody even thinks of calling them to account over this, or so much as distancing themselves from these remarks.
Same issue has always bugged me with ethics. Not that I lack ethics, but that all attempts to settle on a logical and meaningful set of ethics that apply to more then 1 person has seemed futile. The engineer in me is unhappy with this lack of standardization, but understands why it is impossible short of brainwashing the population. (Wait! that is a grand idea! runs to dust off the mind control ray)
I'm fairly certain that running from the law in this instance would do more harm than good to his cause.

If he's not guilty, then he's got nothing to hide. The sooner he clears his name here the quicker he can go back to doing his thing.

They would've found him anyway, so he's just complying with the inevitable.