skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From what it sounds like, using my arm as a sensor would have a similar resolution thermal imaging, with perhaps a faster scan rate.

I was intrigued that this came from an actual business and not a DIY hobbist, so looked into Tanagram and couldn't figure them out. A strange company... seems more design than actual engineering.

Isn't the better way to make something cheaper by inventing new components and then mass producing, vs. taking a stock, cheap, 8x1 thermopile array?
Agreed. Communication, early and often, is key. And like the blog appropriately notes: patience, respect and understanding.
Sorry, I said that wrong. I didn't mean a success for airport security but for the intelligence agencies who aren't infringing on basic freedoms and privacy of the general public (who in this case has good enough diplomatic ties with other intel agencies around the world to have this information passed to us).
Google Toying With Naming Social Product “Google +1″,Sergey Brin Gets Involved
The way it has been reported devalues the actual science done and misrepresents the science (and science as a whole) to the wider public.

I agree. One very unfortunate thing is that this article probably won't reach all the people who saw the first wave of articles and are now thinking that an alternate form of arsenic based life evolved and is still alive today. These people are the ones that receive the news via some chain email, and don't bother to research the rest of the facts or any of the follow up from the rest of the scientific community.

This is the problem of treating science like a tabloid. Recently there has been a rash of speculation and downright silly articles based on misunderstood scientific discoveries. While on the one hand they often cause the public to take a greater interest in different scientific subjects, in many cases they are blown out of proportion or misrepresented.
I suspect that this is only half the story. The other half has him being emotionally invested in the relationship, treating her like she's important, and doing all the other things that people in loving, healthy relationships do.

A well oiled relationship can accommodate disruptions and uncertainty, you just have to do the work necessary to make it "well oiled".

If your significant other won't tolerate these sort of things, then you should probably think hard about where your relationship stands.
> We as voters let this happen in not opposing the interests of the Military-Industrial-Financial complex with real votes on the issues..

It's not that simple - one thing people to fail to realize is that when you authorize extraordinary powers for your own favorite causes, they'll inevitably be used for other worse causes as well.

It's not military/industrial/financial - even things as simple as letting the government take a driver's license for not paying child support means that there's now a precedent for denying someone's right to mobility for punitive reasons unrelated to actually operating a car. People support this when it's to get those no-good child support dodgers, but then they're shocked when this is broadly expanded to other civil offenses where they wouldn't support it.

People are naive. They think, "Oh, the Democrats will reverse the Republican's terrible policies when they get in." No they won't. They'll co-opt the power for their causes, and vice-versa. It's not clear which party is responsible for starting the reckless deficit spending, but now they both do it. They both give employment and money to sectors that support them. (Republicans in military, Democrats in social causes)

But don't be fooled for a minute that the excessive powers the Republicans authorize for the first time won't be taken up by the Democrats. And the excessive powers the Democrats take up will be used by Republicans.

It's not any one sector. Excessive government powers anywhere leads to excessive government power everywhere.

(And note - the Democrats are the banner-leaders in censoring and spying on the internet - I don't think that's because the Democrats are worse, but rather because I don't think the Republicans understand the internet. So it's not exactly military/financial/industrial that's doing this one)
Both Livingsocial and Groupon have lots of work ahead. They cover a large demographic which they need to partition and customize.

If the deal I get in the morning isn't interesting to me, they failed. Ie: both services will regularly email deals about SPAs and hot stone masages, I would not expect many men to be interested by that deal.
Yes. What I meant: Even if we didn't have arsenate life forms, now we do.
This is the best article I've read on the subject so far, short of the actual scientific publication.

I like how the author dives deep enough to give a you a good understanding of what actually took place while not making it sound like a scientific journal.
Samuel T. Cohen, Neutron Bomb Inventor, Dies at 89
Resenting other people's possessions is worse.
US seizes filesharing domains – p2p advocates consider new distributed routing
you would think, but there's also:

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

It's true that the subtle loss of a hydroxyl group leads to all sorts of differences between RNA and DNA (RNA likes to be single-stranded more than DNA does) but there's TNAs (unfortunate acronyms) and PNAs (not to be confused with PNAS) and other things that basically work and look like DNA with fairly un-subtle changes.

Furthermore, Arsenic really isn't THAT much bigger than Phosphorus (vdw radius 1.85 vs 1.80; covalent radius 1.19 vs 1.06).
24 ways: My CSS Wish List
calc() would change my life.
"... In recent years, Mr. Cohen prominently warned of a black market substance called red mercury, supposedly capable of compressing fusion materials to detonate a nuclear device as small as a baseball — ideal for terrorists. ..."

I thought red mercury was fiction?
What If Every Element On The Periodic Table Came Into Contact Simultaneously?
So when Google uses A/B testing to improve their design, we should call it "web structure", not "web design"?

Human minds and evolution are both algorithms.
No clue, I don't know her personally. But speculating from what she writes about on her website regarding her interest in teaching, I would assume she is interested in a faculty position at some point in the future.

I really can't blame her for the self-promotion. I think this in some ways is the academic equivalent of the acquisition: she got the scoop on a really novel idea, she's well positioned to do future work in the area and be recognized as the global expert (catch the "more to come in the next 15-30 years!" in the press conference), and she's really excited about the work. I can only assume biogeochemistry is not having loads of money thrown at it these days so she's smart to take advantage of this opportunity to really make a name for herself.
Ways to Save Money in Business
There's an iOS/Android app (+ Arduino kit) just waiting to be created there...
Tableau Software removes WikiLeaks, users cry foul
That's strange, Japanese input worked for me. (Chrome / Japanese Win7)

Maybe they fixed it?
$500 million revenues - is that their commission or is it the total amount they intend to bring in (including commission and sales) - there's a huge difference between the two. Assuming $500 mill is their total sales and their commission is 50%, this brings their 'actual' revenues to $250 mill - not a tiny amount, but not nearly $500 mill as well.
Shareable: P2P's new politics, student living in egg, a lifehacking contest
Amazon invests $175 million in LivingSocial coupon site
The question what role aethstetics should play in design is very interesting.

A lossy audio compression algorithm relies on quirks of human hearing. Those who designed it used their precise understanding of how human hearing works. How would you go about designing a lossy audio compression algorithm without being allowed to learn anything about human hearing?

I believe it would be very much impossible. Humans have no intuitive understanding of the details of human hearing and there are an huge amount of possible ways of reducing the size of an audio file (like throwing away every second bit). There is no possible way you can A/B test all the possible ways and humans have no intuitive understanding of the details of hearing. You can’t intuitively decrease the search space. Aethstetics don’t help you, an understanding of how humans actually work is necessary.

Not everything is like lossy audio compression but I believe there are parallels. Aethstetics do sometimes help you decrease the search space and A/B tests get you the rest of the way but my suspicion is that a true understanding of how humans actually work would always be preferable.
Having worked for a bank, I'm shocked that they managed to build a product that offers no business value but requires actual technical expertise to implement.

Now that I think about it... it's probably an Excel spreadsheet...
I suspect Arun was referring not to the efficient use of "stuff" but rather the irrational desire to own/control stuff rather than simply make use of it in the supply chain. It would be absurd to hand launder one's everyday clothing instead of making use of a washing machine. However, it might not be rational to own one's own washing machine when a laundromat or laundry service (fluff n' fold, etc.) could be used instead. Many people irrationally desire to own stuff and might opt for a washer in their homes when it would actually increase their net happiness level to just go to the laundromat or pay someone to do the wash.
> What a city does with its capital is its citizens business (not "everyone's") and the mayor is accountable to them for same.

Has Portland managed to avoid the "city money goes to insiders" problem? If not, why won't this be more of the same?
Does this really happen? I've been involved in startups for the last 9 years (the last 4 as a technical founder). I can count on one hand the number of times I've pulled an all-nighter or even really worked through a weekend. Sure I work a bit more than the average person, but it's nothing like this.

I've had bugs popup on the weekend or during a vacation (and I do travel with my laptop everywhere I go). 99% of the time they fall into the 'we can live with that until Monday' category. My relationship with my wife and friends is simply too important to let something as trivial as a startup get in the way of it.

I just can't help but feel like we're continuing to romanticize this workaholic culture. That somehow to be a 'real' entrepreneur you have to turn your whole life over to it.

This is one place that I agree with the guys from 37 signals. You don't have to kill yourself to make a business go. You don't have to work 80 (or 120) hour weeks.

Starting a business is a marathon, and like all marathons it requires pacing. A large part of that is learning to separate the real emergencies from the perceived ones. Just because something isn't working, it doesn't mean that your business will fall over if it continues not to work for 48 hours. That sort of triage is really important if your going to maintain your sanity to get to the fourth year.

Just how I see it at least. My wife would certainly write a very different article than this one.
Ecilavia - WebGL-based Tatical RPG (Preview Video)
The English section is much harder.
I wonder why an internet connection is required to run the code ...
link to IIT joint entrance exam (JEE)
http://www.wiziq.com/tutorial/98820-IIT-JEE-Mathematics-Pape...
It's easy to say that I won't ever use tableau now, but it's a bit harder to not use AWS.

This whole rash of announcements have really put me in a bit of a moral quandary...
Gab Goldenberg at http://seoroi.com/ did a little bit of free link building work for me (because I helped him with some other stuff), and he did an excellent job.

I haven't heard from any of his clients, but he's active in the SEO community and often contributing new ideas. I've always been impressed by him. If I didn't do all of my own SEO work, I'd probably hire him.
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/ has talks going back to 1996.
Google AI Challenge: Languages Used by the Best Programmers
Mozilla's Aza Raskin on the marriage of Web and TV
actually, no. DNA/RNA are in fact, just about the simplest chemical choices that can perform replication. Ribose, for example is the lowest energy pentafuranose, which means in a random mix of sugars you'll find ribose in the highest concentration. The funny thing is that the KSS principle seems to hold in nature, we've tried in the lab to design alternatives to DNA/RNA, and none of them seem to work quite so well.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/284/5423/2118.short
when you say artificial selection, you mean selection by humans? Then yeah. Although humans are natural too.

I just mean selection by forces within nature and not an external factor
Boys, can I give you some friendly advice from a married man here? Don't send this story to your partner. You will send the message: compare yourself to this saintly blogger. It's a lose-lose. Best case: she simply barfs and laughs it off. Worst case? Never mind.

Instead arrange for her to accidentally stumble upon it. Better yet, if you can arrange to have her befriend the blogger in question without mentioning anything...

Barring that, pay the utmost attention to her whenever you are together.
The "tare" is the weight of the container holding the item being weighed, in this case presumably the weight of the wagon, which is why the question specifies that weight. If you ask Google "tare in bushels", your comment itself shows up as the top answer :-).
UGG Adirondack Tall
Would be cool to be able to draw lines and labels for columns, rows or squares to organize the post-its.
I've had the same exact thing happen to me, but I'm the startup founder and my girlfriend is a management consultant. She's been known to take her laptop out to bars.
The culture, lab organization, and incentives unfortunately are making this more common I think. The head of a lab these days acts much more like a manager/boss, and less like a researcher among colleagues, than they might have a few decades ago. The role of grad students has become more employee-like as well, and professors aren't always too scrupulous about how much credit they give them.

Not that there haven't always been egocentric scientists, but their counterpart, the humble scientist who's almost too humble in emphasizing the role of colleagues, students, luck, collaborators, etc., is an almost extinct species.

It's interesting to compare the abstracts of a typical modern science paper versus one from 100 years ago or so. The old ones often have this almost exaggerated humility, along the lines of: Dear Sirs, I beg your time to present some results of my investigations which, though admittedly focusing on only on the special case X, will, I hope, add in some small way to the excellent recent treatment given the subject by Professor So-and-so. Today that abstract would probably be written the other way around, emphasizing the enormous importance of special case X, pointing out that while Professor So-and-so did study this broad area, his results are seriously deficient in some respect, and then closing with a sentence or two about how ground-breaking this new treatment of the problem is.
There are points worth considering on both sides regarding file sharing and copyright.

However this censorship action is being taken in the name of 'homeland security'... I find this a very disturbing trend and wonder how this community feels about that.
If the other languages have the same constraints as JavaScript why would it be any less secure?

The real problem is getting the language deployed on a critical mass of browsers.

You can do it today by compiling to JavaScript. See: Objective-J, CoffeeScript, Gordon (Flash), GWT (Java), Pyjamas (Python), ParenScript (Lisp), HotRuby (Ruby), haXe, etc.

But of course JavaScript isn't exactly the best language to target, and it could be a lot faster if there were a secure low level VM we could target. Something like the JVM, LLVM, or NativeClient. Then the language runtime could simply be downloaded the first time a page requiring the language is loaded.
> I know many (as in, 10+) people who started a company and got utterly fucked for the next decade, maybe two, because of its failure

Really? That's odd.

Sounds like they didn't know what they were doing.

Did they by any chance spend a lot of money in a field they didn't know anything about and just hoped somehow it will magically work?

Yea, if you're non-technical and you think you can build a product by hiring 10 developers and 4 product managers at 100k/year each, of course you will get utterly fucked.
"I'd be astonished if the arsenophile(?) evolved there in that short a time span"

Why not?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Pit#Extremophiles

BTW, the ATP-AMP reaction is not a electrochemical reduction reaction, it's rather the mundane hydrolysis of a phosphodiester bond. We don't know what the energy potential of an arsenodiester bond is (although some speculation is that it carries a bit less energy).
In the title.
Answers: http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/exhibits/exam/algebra-answ...
It will be automated with a GUI to customize the server build,firewall rules and software installations etc.
However, beer is made with yeast, not bacteria. And from what I can tell, most reasonable forms of Islam interpret the beer thing as forbidding intoxication. I don't think any forbid bread (solid beer), for instance. Yogurt and pickles are also made with bacterial processes and I don't think they're forbidden in Islam.
Hi, my name is Brendan and I work for Sponge (www.getsponge.com) - We are a Q&A solution in a closed beta as well, but we have several deployed examples in the wild - you can email me at brendan@getsponge.com, I can show you and we can see if there is a fit for what you are looking for.
The drive themselves might be an extra 10 or 20% of the cost of the machine. They come with other factors as well. 5x the disks means more power draw and cooling. It probably also means you need a 2U chassis instead of pizza-box 1U, which means your datacenter rent doubles. (It may be possible to fit 10TB into a 1U. I've never tried it, but I suspect you'll have space / power / heat problems.)
Hm. Someday I hope to have an iPhone app, it might be nice to have a built in browser with a button that let you listen...
In many parts of the world (and USA) it's considered pretty disrespectful to take a phone call while seated at a restaurant.

Now 'furiously coding' at the restaurant (not a coffee shop) -- that I've never seen before, and I've lived in SF for a long time.
I think the parent was suggesting the intuition may have come from applying the other more obvious algorithm.
How artists fare in the new music industry (in relation to the old)
I can't really say for sure, simply because there was no "ok, well, my company is dead" moment -- the company is still going, I'm just not really doing anything. I guess the closest thing was my first day at Matasano, and I was mostly just excited at that point. I miss doing the full-time startup thing, but not so much that I'd jump at the opportunity to do it again right now. I'm sure that I'll get the itch in ~3 years, though.
I find Android a lot easier to use than iOS. What I've noticed when using an iOS device is that I often can't figure out how to do something. Then I research it and discover that it simply can't be done. Easy to learn, but unusable.

Android, on the other hand, trades discoverability for usability. I have heard that some Android users don't even know that they can pull down the notification bar. But once you learn to do that, it's a wonderfully usable system. (Same for long-press. What to do something with a thing you see? Press and hold. Works every time, but not something you would necessarily think to do.)

I think when people say "Android is unusable" they really mean, "Apple's icons are prettier", which is absolutely true. iOS devices look stunning on billboards and on TV. Android devices? Meh. (I blame the tastelessness of the carriers, though. A big fucking robot eyeball as the background? NASCAR and Sprint logos all over the place? Fuck off and die. AOSP is nice looking, though.)

(Want to see the biggest software disaster ever in the history of humanity? The Nook Color with Android. B&N's effort to cripple Android was so half-hearted that they unintentionally created the worst computing device ever made. Examples: you can select text and choose "copy", but they removed "paste" from the long-tap menu on text fields. You can copy, but not paste. They also made their own "buttons" that work like Android's; Back (which is an undiscoverable gesture, not a button), Menu, Home. But sometimes, you also get the normal Android buttons. So you have two menus (that work alike, but have different items), two back buttons (that work differently, sometimes), and so on. WHAT WERE THEY ON WHEN THEY DESIGNED THIS.

I'm going to be honest. I've never been so upset by anything ever. Using one of these things made me want to strangle the life out of everyone involved with the project and then go buy an iPad.

And oh yeah, the fucking screen flickers like a dying fluorescent light. HOW CAN YOU FAIL SO BADLY.

The one good thing is that they do not advertise that they are using Android.

But I digress.)
Watch them start banning ISPs then, or taxing their upstream links

Still, distributed DNS is great -- but we would then have to trust certificate authorities that grant certificates for a certain period of time. If the certificates never expired, then domain ownership would be forever. If they did expire, then the government could forbid a certificate issuing authority to reissue a certificate, but the effect would be much sower than banning dns.
Was kind of interested if PG's assertion about Java being for "average" programmers and Lisp (and some other languages) being for "good programmers..."

It seems like there is a trend that way - and C and Haskell are also for "good" programmers.
I really hate the way other sites have hidden calendars that pop-up. They all try to be too smart about it, and often ends up with me switching back and forth between mouse and keyboard. IMHO, some guy had a bad idea 10 years ago about how to do calendars, and everyone has been copying it since.

I think our version works really nicely if you know how it behaves. So, the challenge to us is to make its behavior more obvious.

Hipmunk's calendar has changed quite a bit since we launched, and I haven't heard much complaining lately. Maybe we just scared everyone away.
>A few years after that, all hope is lost.

I loved how you wrapped it up! humor at its best.

Another issue to consider, though, is specialization. 100 years ago, even 50 years ago, people could master all the breadth of their subjects (in math/sciences). Who is the current Gauss or Einstein? Hard to tell, possibly no one can now have that effect alone.

Even 20-30 years ago, when Woz singlehandedly invented the personal computer, it was very different. (he says he had it all in his head at once, really amazing). You can read a beautiful interview here: http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html
You can use Google's AdWords tool to look for keywords and how monthly searches they get.

You can also use Facebook's ad platform to see how many people fit specific targeting parameters.

These aren't perfect tools, but if you use them in conjunction with other tools you could find some pretty useful market size information.
Related:

They're trying (sort of): http://code.google.com/closure/library/

Here's a talk once about their process: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=697KX4Ciiws#t=02m40s

and a blog post: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/what-makes-design-goo...

P.S. Anyone know an easy Maps API trick for setting zoom level to display each of the U.S. states (which vary dramatically in size)?