skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What Zuck has reported to have done would qualify as intellectual property theft in any industry, why not ours?

First, let me preface this that I am not a big believer in IP to start with: I'm especially opposed to software and business method patents.

When I worked at an EDA company as a contractor (doing random C++ hacking just to make things work, without really understanding them) I heard many interesting ideas on computational physics, computational geometry, graph theory and the like.

I floated some of my own, just out of curiosity and idle thinking. However, as I don't have the qualifications to implement any of them (I may know Boost and STL, but my physics knowledge has been swapped out of the page cache), making those ideas worthless to me -- just as the idea of a social network is worthless to the Winklevoss twins as they can't code.

If accidentally, someone else at the company went and implemented those ideas, I'd have no right to sue: I blindly spouted ideas that I had no insights into (in regards to feasibility and work involved) and if I'm right about them being viable, it's by accident.

In other words, suppose you work at Intel: your boss says, "it'd be nice if we had a more power efficient chip" without giving any idea as to how. You leave and implement such a chip. I doubt there'd be case for IP theft. If, on the other hand, you took the actual layouts for the chip, it's a different matter.
Burt Rutan: An Engineer's Critique of Global Warming 'Science'
If you want to understand the fundamentals, read the classic: http://web.archive.org/web/20080822101209/http://www.pphsg.o...
i'll also save you some time
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uZ33Z483yo
start watching at 4:30
user acct is free; hollow, single-use email addresses are free. you can either be silly or more informed, take your pick.
If appeal to precedent is a fallacy, we (the western world) really need to rethink our legal system.
A 4.3% return on the 5 year funds is quite low indeed.

I think the problem is that VCs aren't investing nearly enough in mobile social music local search review aggregators.
Is there a place I can go to find out more information like this?
When asked if they could have turned ConnectU into a site with hundreds of millions of users, like Mr. Zuckerberg did with Facebook, the twins replied in unison, “Absolutely.”
I'd love to take a peek, if you want to mail an invite to jashkenas at gmail.

Replacing Backbone.sync is totally legit -- and is indeed what having Backbone.sync in a single place is intended for. There are many good paths to data persistence: REST/CRUD, RPC, aggregated JSON, CouchDB or Mongo, LocalStorage, and so on. Backbone.sync is just the default implementation for the common case.

I think that one of the more exciting things about JS development these days, is how open and flexible the patterns still are.
> When asked if they could have turned ConnectU into a site with hundreds of millions of users, like Mr. Zuckerberg did with Facebook, the twins replied in unison, “Absolutely.”

Then why didn't they? Oh snap, maybe because they can't code?
Hewlett-Packard Unit Wins $2.5 Billion NASA Contract
Well, they also claim "Fragmentation on the device side is not a huge problem"[1]. They do say ecosystem fragmentation is a problem. The problem addressed in your link is more underpowered devices than fragmentation. Sure, Android's ability to be slapped on any hardware leads the problems of underpowered devices, but it isn't really fragmentation.

[1]:http://technmarketing.com/iphone/peter-vesterbacka-maker-of-...
Bill Gates stole MS-DOS? So far as I know, he bought DOS to license to IBM. There's a difference between being a skillful hacker and being a shrewd businessman. Claiming that someone isn't a skillful hacker doesn't mean they are completely without brains/skills/etc.

MySpace were 'lucky' in that people latched on to their horrible interface because it had features that they wanted (to put music, videos, media on their 'homepage'). People could have easily rejected the interface despite yearning for the features.

Zuckerberg isn't necessarily a thief, but he certainly should have covered his ass a lot better with contracts and such. Though, with the amount of money that's on the line, there would be people coming out of the woodwork no matter how airtight of a contract they had.

> It seems you can't be successful, especially in tech/web,

It's the "I thought of that too, so where's my money" syndrome. "I thought of The Clapper first! I should be the one making money!"
Fuck these jocks

So maybe I'm being a little oversensitive here, but attitudes like this toward athletes are total bullshit. I'm going to go out on an egotistical limb here and say that I'm a pretty fucking competent coder, but before I was I was a pretty decent Football player. Don't make this an "us vs. them" thing, because that's a false dichotomy if I've ever heard one.
HTML Lint
Not new technologies - but I got started with Django and jQuery. Delved deeper into numpy - loved all of them!
sallie mae = student loans. fannie mae and freddie mac are home mortgage only.
Nice writeup. A good survey of some key tools in the NoSQL space. Thanks!
Funny, I came here looking for the exact opposite post to upvote. Seems exceptionally low to me, given the obvious malicious intent and potential damages. But I'm mostly ignorant about the relevant law.
Plenty of people have challenged Friedman's economic theories. In fact, the Austrian school of economics is in no way unchallenged, and in many circles is not considered empirically sound. I'd rather not get into a big political or economic debate, but the idea that Friedman's views are an objective truth is simply not true.
The State of Web Design Trends: 2011 Annual Edition
Obama Signs TV Commercial Volume Law (CALM)
Is this significant? It doesn't even look to me like there are any new features.
No, you're not oversensitive here. I am. I regret putting that comment in. It's a visceral, emotional gut reaction. Nonetheless, I'll leave it there: editing it out would be Orwellian.

However, there's an interesting point: they spent their time perfecting their rowing skills to an olympic level, that's where their passion lays. It's difficult to be an olympic rower and a top notch hacker at the same time: it's one thing to dabble in both, it's another to master one.

I work out for at least an hour 5-6 days a week, but I'm not an athlete. The hours I have to spend to become proficient at programming don't leave time for equal amount of hours (10,000 according to Gladwell) to be spent on sport. Winklevii made their choices, Zuck made his.
Open Source Firewall/Routers That Don't Suck
I disagree with the notion of "No single point of failure" with HBase. While it's true that they got rid of the old hard SPOFs, if a data ("region") node fails, there's a decent chance you lost some data (there's a short period of time where data hasn't been replicated to HDFS and is ONLY only the master for that region) at least until you can bring that node back up (hope you've got reliable RAID/backups or it wasn't destroyed). HBase is a CP system.

There's also a region master re-election/recovery period that depends on the size of the database, network bandwidth, load, etc. It can be anywhere from 30 seconds to tens of minutes. An outage of a region node makes it's key range inaccessible. While that might not be a problem for some, especially in read-only situations, I can think of many applications where that would effectively translate into a total outage.
Architecture of own greeting card
With the development of internet, it is possible to communicate with every dear and near using very cheap rates and also in a very smooth way.You may be having at least one internet enabled device with you and the network is highly covered around the globe to help the people to easily communicate with greeting cards one another.
LevelUp's CEO Responds to Rovio's Remark About Paid Apps in the Android Market
Yes, and the Black Plague killing off 25% of the world population from time to time...
I see your point. Thanks for posting this code - I implemented the a* pathfinding algorithm in javascript, so I looked into some of these options also. I ended up using the basic 2d structure to store the grid, since it was the most straightforward and seemed somewhat equivalent to 1d.

For a demo of it (http://briangrinstead.com/files/astar/), I used divs to represent the grid on the page, but I think it would be awesome to use the canvas grid representation since I suspect it will have much better performance than thousands of divs on the page (switch it to 100x100 to see what I mean).
Another thing to consider is making adjustments to the price at various intervals. We have seen huge spikes in downloads when we move from $.99 to free and then back. I think the main factor in the download spikes comes from the app showing up on the automated lists of "bargin" apps. I am trying to get some more concrete evidence of this, so if anyone has more examples, I would love to hear about it.
It's a compatibility branch, only getting bugfixes. The v0.3 branch is where new development is happening.
> In fact, the Austrian school of economics is in no way unchallenged, and in many circles is not considered empirically sound.

Friedman isn't Austrian school (he was against the Gold standard and he suggested Income Tax withholding!). If you want a horrible analogy, think of Austrian school as Haskell, Chicago school as OCaml (Hayek being a link between the two, just as HM type inference is the link between ML and Haskell), Keynes as Smalltalk and more modern theories as something like Scala.
Well, it's a point release so that mostly means bug fixes.

The fix for the write() bug alone is worth upgrading. It silently - but decisively - corrupts data on OS X[1].

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/c...
Last day of the year and it is so depressing that I work in BigCo that does every thing mentioned above. :(
Not sure this matters much. Most places I've worked have considered local root exploits not worth patching. So if you have a user account, you have root.
And as Fannie Mae provided the inside-man with root access to all the main systems, it was apparently just as easy to destroy the backups.

Edit: also in reference to this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2054679
ESXi Backup Software
The rapid evolution and technological developments have led to the birth of personal computers, which offer enormous options to their customers. In modern times the use of computers is almost inevitable due to the fact that the PC has revolutionized the way in which individuals and businesses operate.
Stop Holding Yourself Back
Kindle for non-.txt files is pure scam. I can't read most pdf files I tried.

Want proof? Download the very 1st book recommended on the article. Look at the very first formula on a non dx kindle.you can't read it. Not even in landscape. Not even with zoom.

Now get apdf with two columns. Like the car manual I bought. you have to zoom to read. But you can't make one column fit in the screen. It's not lack of space. Theres lots of white space, but the pan will skip just more so that you can only ever read half of each column at a time. Just patetic... Btw that's how adobe treader for nokia symbian works. You get the idea.
Imagine this.  A thought experiment.
My mistake, confused Friedman with Rothbard. However, the concept of eschewing social pressure requirements in favor of the machinations of the market is something I have no interest in. Generally, I agree with Krugman's critique of Friedman's economics (although I consider myself to the left of Krugman).
The last thing I want for any electronic item I have is for it to be warmer.
That seems all too familiar. Thanks.
There's a paper about Spotify's internals which is quite interesting: http://www.nada.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/spotify-p2p10....
(another happy user here)
'Most sophisticated mobile virus' starts spreading on Android smartphones
I liked your analogies, but it's difficult to compare the flapping of birds' wings and the movement of our feet to the extreme complexities of the human brain. In the first two cases, humans have invented more effective ways of doing a task than the biological methods. These examples are elementary compared to the human brain, and they are most likely not to be the most effective ways of doing the tasks - they are only more effective then the current methods. Perhaps if we dissected the processes to a more rudimentary level, we could revise the systems and make them even more effective. However, with simple processes like these it is probably not economically worth it as Kasparov said.

As a result, when you apply these analogies to the human intuition and more complex processes, you are confronted with a dilemma. Our society is reaching a limit where our brute-force methods of recreating systems are no longer working. We are looking too much at the face value of these systems, and thus reaching problems with efficiency and further innovation. In my humble opinion, Kasparov is trying to say that the demands of the market have caused this behavior which benefits in short term, but limits us in the long run. Taking risks to work on a longer-term project of recreating systems at a more fundamental level is what keeps innovation going, and it's time we take it to a new level with respect to human intuition.
Personally, I like bug fix releases. It shows that the project is quite mature when there are fixes for several different platforms.

Disclaimer: I currently don't use Node.js but I cannot wait to try it out.

If there's any node devs here, kudos on the site! It looks even better usability-wise than jQuery's! I hope more dev aimed projects mimic it.
ESXi Backup Software
PC backup software will save you much time and headaches. But you can not be sure what type of software you need. Whether in your home, office or home, it is useful to have some type of backup of all your important files and documents.
Is there any reason you couldn't have just had Wordpress generate HTML that you then statically cached?
If he was part of the SA team for their production systems, it's likely he DID have root access to all of them, and that it was legitimate and had business justification. Even if he didn't have explicit root access, it's even more likely he had direct physical access, which is generally less carefully protected by IT policies and is usually all or nothing.

Granted, this isn't just run of the mill data, and Fannie Mae could have certainly had significantly better security policies in force, but I don't think they were below average for a corporation in their security policies.
"Peepli Live" ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1447508/ , available on Netflix Streaming) is a satire about the state of farmers in debt in India, and is worth a watch.
Yeah, but code is the easy part. You can just get a bunch of dudes in India and China to do it for you in one week for $20, right?
How to Convert MTS to AVI format
How to Convert MTS to AVI format
Read the step-by-step guide to learn how to convert MTS videos to AVI format.
You're right. It would be so much easier if Netscape had just stayed dead, and IE was the only web browser that I had to develop for.

Also:

* It would be so much easier choosing an ISP if AOL was the only ISP in America.

* It would be so much easier being a mechanic if the only automobiles were Fords, and they only made 2 models.

* It would be so much easier developing video games if people weren't allow to configure their own systems. Then I wouldn't have to worry about all sorts of machines with various levels of beefiness in the hardware department.

Whining about Android fragmentation while praising lack of choice with Apple as 'simplicity' just seems childish.
Use TinyUmbrella or Saurik's MITM server to save your device's SHSH hash for each new iOS version that comes out. Allows downgrading to any version you had installed previously
If root access to systems lets you destroy backups then they cannot rightly be considered backups.
I am just not quite buying the fact that indexing a 1d array will be slower than indexing an array of arrays

As it happens, I recently ran similar benchmarks (on sparse arrays represented using JS hashes) and got similar results: a hash of hashes performed much faster than a single hash with computed keys, even though the keys seemed trivial to compute. It was a disappointing outcome insofar as the data structure in question is performance-critical and I had hoped that flattening it would be an optimization. Another almost clever idea backfires. I wonder whether collision/balancing issues in the underlying hashtable implementation are responsible.

Admittedly, our sparse grid is a different beast than the OP's dense grid, except that these things are not so different in Javascript, whose arrays are weird specialized hashes anyway, and thus not so different when dense vs. sparse. (Though not the same, either: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1999637)
The results are completely unreadable on my copy of firefox. Grey on grey, had to highlight to see it.
Neat resource though.
Breaking news. js programmers discovers memory x cpu tradeoff

End of jackass mode.
...i was expecting more browser benchmark with the already proven methods.
If you'd be willing to take the time to dig something up on that I'd love to read it.

It seems surprising to me that potential damages would not be taken into account. By doing so, the accussed would essentially be rewarded based on chance - at least in this case.
Nope. There are plenty of backup records for all of the debts. Physical records of deeds, contracts, etc. And it's possible much of the data could have been restored through backups and data retrieval methods. What this would have caused would be delays and difficulties in handling existing mortgages but the biggest impact would have likely been an inability of people to apply for new mortgages using fanny mae, which is hardly a win for anybody.
I wonder when Cambridge starts to be blocked by the banks then ... :)
ESXi Backup Software
Creating a backup of data on a computer or electronic storage device is very important. Most equipment, including personal computers, has a good chance of an accident, which is the fact that the hard disk that stores the data. When a hard disk crash, all information is inevitably lost.
For an introduction, read the section on limiting DOM manipulation here: http://www.artzstudio.com/2009/04/jquery-performance-rules/#...

Here is the Gecko DOM reference:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/element (listing common manipulation methods)
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Gecko_DOM_Reference

Basically, if you catch yourself calling DOM functions in a loop (or in a function that gets called in a loop, like the grid_canvas example here), it should be done in memory and then manipulate the DOM outside of the loop.
I wanted to learn something new. That's probably the only reason I went with Jekyll. :)
He added malicious scripts to the bottom of a legitimate one? I have seen Wordpress hacks obfuscate themselves ten times as cleverly. For example, by eval()ing rot13(), gzipped, and base64()'d code included from a file with a legitimate-looking name.
Nice, but why wouldn't you use http://validator.w3.org/ ?
mostly just silly calibration cubes. a few space invaders and companion cubes to give to friends. today i (continued) work on a spindle to hold the big spool of plastic.

cnc is so much fun. I think i'm going to have to get a cnc mill. this is just to tempting. http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/guerrilla_cnc1.shtml

In the near term i'll probably just print some brackets and containers for stuff.
history does repeat itself!
I use a similar setup with urxvt and stumpwm. In stumpwm I have

;; Launch emacs
(defcommand emacs () ()
(run-or-raise
"urxvt -title emacs -e screen -U -dRR -S emacs -c ~/.screenrc.emacs"
'(:title "emacs" :instance "urxvt" :class "URxvt")))

which will launch emacs (or raise it if it was already launched).

Some of the thing you might want to consider when doing "emacs -nw"

- Make sure your TERM is exported appropriatly.
Otherwise you may end up with less colors (M-x list-colors-display).
Screen fiddles with TERM and emacs may end up supporting less colors.

- Copy/Paste between regular X apps and the emacs will not work.
You would need to use something like "xsel". See here [1]

- Some of the keys may not work as expected. This will be
apparent especially when using orgmode. You may want to
remap them appropriately

And also I suggest you use Emacs + Wanderlust setup for email (and put it in a screen session as well).

[1] http://hugoheden.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/copypaste-with-ema...
"social network"? isn't this just a facebook app?
Most definitely! If it's easy to use, implies it must be easy to implement.

Serious note: I think that it's beautiful that an untrained technical person thinks Amazon or Facebook could be built in a weekend. That's a testimony to the excellence of their respective UI teams. Perhaps if your consumer internet site doesn't look like it could be built in a weekend, it's too complex to use.
> I can't share them with friends

Friends? I still don't see a good way of sharing them with my wife without either physically giving her the Kindle or registering her with my Amazon credentials.

That's more than a minor annoyance. I like the device a lot, but mostly because I live in Italy and getting English language books is a Major Hassle and not that cheap, either. With the Kindle, it's both instantaneous, and cheap to boot. If I lived somewhere with a decent used books store, though, I don't think I would have bothered.
Funny, until you think… yep, it's a dick move.
Ask HN: What language to learn to get hired...
..by a startup? (For web development that is, so: PHP, Python, or Ruby.)

A while ago, I saw a graph that compared the different languages, but can't find it now.
Do you actually have any specifics about Android fragmentation causing a problem? If you do, ESR has been trying to find any specifics to back up the generic claims of fragmentation, and has said he has not found any reasonable evidence of such problems. Same question for all you apparent Apple fanboys who voted this comment up so much, any specifics? If you have any here's the thread where ESR's been requesting them - http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2835.
Sounds like a trojan, not a virus…
Ask HN: have you written Chess games? Do you play Chess?
Two questions in one post, but hacking and chess seem similar activities.

I would be surprised to learn that there is no correlation.

What is your experience? Personally I got some books from my father when I was a kid and I loved the game for some time but is almost 20 years now that I have not played.

Today an article about Kasparov appeared in HN

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2054039
Almost all of those methods use approximately the same amount of memory, though the performance varies drastically.

The key is that few people know what's actually going on underneath the JavaScript interpreter engine. In some cases it could be doing something really clever, and in other cases it could be doing something really stupid. Only ways to find out is to read the source, or benchmark. :P
Thanks! I really appreciate the encouragement. Several folks have reached out to me and the ball is moving forward. Feel free to keep my info for the future as well. Take good care!
We had a mortgage reduction bomb a while ago. It didn't work out well for very many people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80%...