skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mark Pilgrim's chardet library is great for dealing with unknown uncodings - it uses statistical analysis to figure out the encoding, based on code back-ported from Firefox/Mozilla:

http://chardet.feedparser.org/
Students trick out Microsoft Kinect to perform surgery
A text-based language with a GUI designer tool = a text-based language plus a GUI designer tool. It doesn't = a visual language.

I guess MSFT did take a stab at something closer to an actual visual language in Visual Studio, in the form of the Workflow Foundation designer.
In this case, I believe there was no advertising, or at least any advertising revenue. It 'wasn't monetized.' I don't think anyone ignores it, particularly in the case of something that people wouldn't readily pay for.
It does matter if it doesn't address the claims of the case. Just because I copied your magazine article doesn't prove that I also copied your novel.
It can be very difficult watching someone fail a million different ways while they try to learn a new skill. ;)
PC doesn't necessarily imply Windows. You could get the same security benefits out of a PC running Linux.
The .Net community has a weird shade to it, absolutely.

That said, you're clearly speaking to your perception of what you see on tech-help boards -- and confusing that with the whole of the .Net ecosystem. .Net has vastly larger segment of 9-5/offshore/crap/whatever programmers than most other programming communities (aside from Java, being a similarly targeted platform). That doesn't mean that there aren't a bunch of DVCS-using, TDDing, PairProgramming, SE hipsters out there (or whatever you think is so awesome).

There's Mono (which kicks ass), NHibernate (which kicks ass), a plethora of cool projects on Github, C# is a killer language (compared to similarly rooted, C-like, imperative languages at least), F# has recently been promoted to a first class language on the platform, LINQ is unmatched in similar languages/platforms, .Net is pretty rock solid, and high performing. (edit: Oh, also, MVC, F# + MVC, Lightweight HTTP servers ala Sinatra)

Plus, the right tool for the right job. Let's not get all 'anyone who knows what's up would be using Ruby', etc.
From GPL2:

"If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't mean that you can copy small portions of GPLed code as you wish and use them in your projects; it means that the original copyright holder for those small portions can apply any license to them, which means that by default all rights are reserved by the original author of those portions.
Scientists create 10 billion qubits in silicon
Disagreed. I think everyone has the potential for creativity, it just gets scared out of us as we grow up. Teaching someone to paint or take well-structured photographs is pretty much trivial as long as they put in the effort. And once you give somebody a tool to adequately express the way they see the world, most can barely help but be creative.
I learn best by failing. Sometimes it takes failing over and over again until I learn one little thing. But eventually my repetitive failures lead to small successes.
You're an idiot if you're not using rvm by now.
Tell HN: I can't stick with a to-do list manager for more than 3 weeks.
I'm starting a new semester at college and my to-do list just got really long. I've tried using OmniFocus, Notes on my iPhone, paper planners, index cards, but I can't get anything to stick for longer than about three weeks. How do you organize your to-do lists, and if you have one you've stuck with for a long time how do you manage that? Is my inability to keep a to-do list more about my personality or about not finding the right system?
Plex http://plexapp.com is based on an earlier version of XBMC. They have it running on iPhone, iPad and someone hacked it onto the Apple TV and did a similar video a few months ago: http://www.vimeo.com/16479085

I'd put my money on plex as an easier way to manage content and stream it from a box elsewhere in the house.

(I have plex running on a 2009 Mac Mini and it works really well)
Curious though what the metrics they use to evaluate effectiveness against spam are. It could have just as much (or as little) spam indexed as it had 5 years ago, and in some comparisons that would be valid, but what if much of the spam had moved from being evenly distributed throughout results to being distributed in the top positions? Then, one could say spam was even lower than ever in total quantity, but it would be even worse in terms of user experience.

That said, I agree with Google, users' expectations have skyrocketed, and it is tough to keep pace with them.
I think this might have been the original swf the Reddit one is based on: http://www.qubit.devisland.net/ga/index.html

I found this one years ago and have been meaning to try copying it one day myself to learn about genetic algorithms.
That mirrors my experience. It's easy to release a project when there are no users. You just barf code out and deploy it. Once people start using it, or paying for it, you just have to be more careful.

A feature that you could whip out in an hour with an 90% chance of working bug-free now takes a day, because you need it to be 99%. It becomes easy to put things off "until you have time to do it right" - even small and easy things.

The way to combat this is to work on your environment. Build a solid staging environment. Automate some integration tests (http://fakeapp.com is awesome for this) for the must-have functionality. Work on your admin dashboard so you know the instant something goes wrong. In other words, build the tools that make your next deployment as worry free as is practical. For me, the friction and misery of the QA cycle slows down my releases until I get all this stuff right.

It's a head game. I know when to stop writing tests when I'd rather be working on the app.
Ask HN: Educational programming-related stuff to listen to?
I spend 1.5+h a day cycling to/from work. In my workplace there's no such thing as time to read around the subject or explore new stuff, and work+lunch+commute leaves me little time in a day for self-education (I have a family, so weekends are a precious time, too). I know I can listen to some programming podcasts, possibly some lectures (any recommendations? I'm a Java dev, I'd like to broaden my horizons a bit but obviously I won't understand much of in-depth talk in embedded programming or similar). More importantly, has anyone had success with any text-to-speech for technical literature? Alternatively, some recommended reads that are not strictly technical but nevertheless useful for our proffession?
No. Plex on the Apple TV 2 just plays a reencoded stream from a server app. Pretty badly. Not even the same league as XBMC…
Entanglement Game (HTML5)
gmail. Guess they go crazy with that. in which case: add a hypertext to my page.
Knowledge expands, yes. But our number of outstanding reasonable hypotheses also expands. It is not clear what the ratio will do.
Diaspora Anti Facebook Open Source Social Network Project
Metrics-shmetrics. Once I stop seeing StackOverflow clones listed above StackOverflow's original pages I will gladly believe that Google's search quality is "better than ever before."
Oh I know. However we both know the majority of people who use this one-liner won't read it.
Hydrogen/Nickel Cold Fusion Breakthrough
What's the point of philosophy?

(photographical question)
In case you don't know copyright infringement is part of the case (Exhibit J):

http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/11/copyright-part-of-or...

http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califor...
From a practical point of view, it is ~43 files out of how many? I think this means that someone got lazy and just copied a bunch of files. This is something that is worthy of a slap on the wrist at worst.

Unfortunately, I'm sure that now a few floors of lawyers are salivating at all the hours they're going to bill. In the end, the laywers will get a pile of money, oracle will gain some pocket change at google's expense, and the java community will be hurt the most.

Doesn't Oracle have better things to do? What do they gain from this?
thanks upvoters. just think, Americans never ever saw quotation or square marks in their documents or on the web, to the contrary to Russians and others (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake#Russian_and_other_Cyri...)

this is sortof deserved, though :)
Why does it only peg a couple of cores? I suspect Chromium is a pretty substantial build.
Am I the only one who was really hoping for some specifics about what they're doing and plan to do about content farm rankings? Without that, the article is virtually devoid of content other than "we're really not so bad!"

Edit: By specifics, I don't necessarily mean implementation details, just anything more informative and plan-of-action than acknowledging the problem.
IMHO, the Linux distros are doing it wrong. Just because you have a package management system, doesn't mean you have to use it for everything. I think hackers have seen the absolutely shitpile that most distro's make when they try to override things like CPAN, Ruby Gems, etc. They really need to go hands off on some of those things and let the secondary package manager do it's job

Just because you've got a hammer, doesn't mean every problem is a nail.
You can find extensive details regarding our thinking on Comet in our Comet slides from various conferences. http://www.slideshare.net/noloh/comet-by-pushing-server-data....

There's no way we can easily answer you with the "methods" we're using as we implement extensive original research. However, from a developer perspective it boils down to the developer specifying what they want to "Listen" to, and optionally how (streaming, short poll, long poll, etc) and NOLOH then takes care of the rest. For example, http://diffpaste.com/#/717/.

Philip Ross will be publishing an extensive white papers soon that goes into more academic depth if you're interested.
Why Aren't There More Open Data Startups?
keysnail https://github.com/mooz/keysnail/wiki

firemacs https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firemacs/

i'm an emacs user, but i still recommend pentadactyl. you don't need that many keyboard chords for browsing the porn.
I now prefer using chef-solo, which allows to tweak and add the remaining bits very quickly once you know how to use it!
Yet another sign that we are in the midst of a new tech bubble. Zippity doo dah! Bubbles are a lot of fun, except when apartment hunting in San Francisco. I can't wait for some social media startup in S.F to start throwing raves at their offices every week. You'll know there's only about a year left on the bubble when that starts happening.
Can you provide a query where that is still the case ? It hasn't happened for a few weeks for me, since stack overflow changed their title seo.
Re: #8 child/TateBleich

Also: I tried to delete a photo but couldn't.
Why can't all "tech" journalism be like this?
A modest proposal for 500 Y Combinators
I'm sure some of the best feedback to this piece a will occur here. Interested to hear people's thoughts.
Forget dates and times. Don't set dates to get something done.

That's what worked for me and that's why I love Workflowy, I can set the to-do on my way and rearrange the best way at anytime.

http://workflowy.com/
Thanks. I try to do all my write-ups like this because it also helps me better understand the subject.
Researchers Discover a Better Way to Build Ad-Hoc Networks
Is looking to fill the vacancy at Apple?
Since google wants to do everything with algorithms rather than hard coding (some of) the offenders, the minute they give you specifics the "fix" will be circumvented in some way.
Google has taken a lot of criticism on HN and elsewhere for an apparent perverse incentive, to direct searchers to content farms with adwords, instead of the original source (like StackOverflow or Amazon reviews).

I'm skeptical, because spammy-ad clickthrough rates are already low and trending lower, and I speculate google has great incentive to send people where they want to go lest their competitors get stronger.
Researchers turn USB cable into attack tool
I'd be interested in a further explanation of "Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines [...]".

Does that mean that Google manually decrease rankings of spammy sites that their algorithms haven't caught? Does this entail decreasing the rank of the entire domain, the IP? Does blacklisting ever happen?

I ask since Google have previously[1] said they don't wish to manually interfere with search results.

[1] "The second reason we have a principle against manually adjusting our results is that often a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our ranking algorithm" - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/introduction-to-googl...
I didn't mean to imply they are evil. It's just my only option is OFW or tethered. The tethered part doesn't bother me as much as the fact that I don't have a laptop anymore so ,short of dragging the entire desk across the flat, I can't jailbreak. And I really want to because there is a lot of great stuff that's being released.

I'm sure I'm not the only person in this predicament.
no, that's something i'm actually starting to get sick of with most native mac apps: it's mandatory to use modifier keys.

:(

single key has been my new favorite "minimalist" feature to use on the mac.
My understanding is that all SSL certificates work with SNI; it's necessary for the server and client software to support SNI. The awkward squad is IE+Chrome+Safari on Windows XP.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I am interested in contact/list management-type projects based on Python. Does anyone know of one?
I just said 'philosphical question' so I wouldn't get downvoted for sounding cynical.

Are you saying it is impossible to verbalize the 'point' of photography?

Regardless, sometimes photographs capture remarkable events or spectacular scenes, in which cases the point could be easily understood as 'seeing things you would have liked to have seen but didn't get the chance'

Now in this here collection, almost all the photos are just of strangers on the street. Something you can see everyday with your own eyes. So what is the point?
the "let" assignments have been deprecated, but i believe should still work nonetheless.
Cool, Artistic Book/Exhibit About the Lives of Marie and Pierre Curie
It matters for determining damages, as well as how difficult it will be to replace the infringing code.
'Flasher Detection' Algorithm Aims to Clean Up Video Chat
The demonstration (in italian)

http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/
Actually Engadget are sticklers for attribution, when reblogging an article they sometimes have two links; both {Via} and up the chain to {Source}

It is hard to see it if you are not used to the page design. I do find the pages heavy on engadget. (which always cause problems when demoed on mobiles tee hee)
Duke Nukem Forever Has a release Date: 3 May
I am a developer and ran linux for many years. Unfortunately my system died a year ago and i ended up going with a windows laptop due to cost. I can definitely say that windows is a pain to develop with for exactly the reason you mention. Many of the most popular tools today are built on unix and windows doesnt support many of them unless you use cygwin which i prefer not to. With Mac you get a nice interface and unix system underneath.

Also ive been getting into mobile development and being that im on windows i cant develop for iphone or ipad which is frustrating. If i had a Mac i could do everything.

Plus Mac does have a style to it that is more developer friendly and designer friendly. Its kind of like how Starbucks used to be or maybe still is. You got Starbucks because it had a vibe to it.
and (sorry for notes all over the place). I suggest having the pages default to private, viewable only by those invited.
If you want that sort of effect then you'll have to rely on DOM elements in some form.

Because the pseudo-elements aren't part of the DOM, you can't use jQuery to animate the rotation. At the moment, CSS animations and transitions can't be applied to CSS pseudo-elements either.
Facebook Quietly Launching Friendfeed-like Live Commenting
What's not mentioned (it's hard to sell) is, 50%+ of the reason Lift is so fabulous is, you're writing Scala. It's a mighty upgrade in quality of life, from either Ruby, Java or Python.

By corollary, what's being omitted is, the learning curve is steep. Scala isn't super-easy, and Lift dives fairly deep into the more complex stuff - implicits, currying, etc.

Nor is Lift itself all too well documented just yet. Yes, there's two books and a super-helpful community, but the experience is still in a different universe from the lavishly over-documented Spring MVC where you never really have to ask a question.
There is an inkling prediction market on how likely this will be proved correct by the end of 2011: http://home.inklingmarkets.com/markets/34366
Taiwan develops face-recognition vending machine
I didn't even watch it ... came here to see if someone had done a cliff notes written version.
Augmented reality? Mobile's next big thing
Heroku: Resolved Security Vulnerability
I remember the VRML hype, but I think it differs strongly from web 2.0 in that everyone agrees that web 2.0 is actually implemented in production lots of places (we just all disagree on what exactly it consists of).
And yet Mahalo is still tolerated, somehow.

E.g., this query -- "travel agent vermont" (which I got from this post complaining about Mahalo spamming the web and Google not enforcing its own qc standards http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2010/03/08/mahalo-com-m...) still returns a Mahalo result in the top 10.
It reminds me of the sculptor who said that he wasn't making the sculpture. "It's already in there. I'm just removing excess material."

Sometimes I feel that our brains are like that. That some of our abilities are inherent. They just have to be set free.
This is something that is worthy of a slap on the wrist at worst.

Given the breadth of the infringement (making it open source w/ OEMs shipping tens of millions of devices based on it), the damages could be substantial.

What does Oracle have to gain from this? Money of course.

Unless Google has a good response to this, one thing I guarantee will happen is the engineer who checked in these files is going to be looking for a new job.
I think this is very good advice! Drilling down is especially important for us and I like the idea of keeping the dashboard clear of information you wouldn't look at on a daily basis. The hardest thing for me is to look at something that is metrically failing and be willing to pull the plug, especially if I built it. Luckily I have heard this advice enough where I consciously question my motive for not pulling something.
where? the "command...." entries? those are basically javascript bookmarklets that are typically installed in your bookmarklets bar, but have now been assigned their own command. e.g., just type

:postToPinboard

when you want to bookmark the current page.
Google is damned about that bit either way.

The possibilities are that they did not perform proper due diligence on the code that they bought, which should have brought this to light (and a giant the size of google really should know how to do a code audit) (bad), the second possibility is that they did do proper due diligence, were aware of the provenance of this chunk of code and chose to ignore it (bad), the third is that the code got incorporated after the sale (bad).

There are no 'goods' here, the central question is if this is a part that is critical.

That said, I'm fairly sure that any large enough software project that has had contributions from large numbers of sources is subject to this kind of pollution, unless very strict measures are taken to avoid it.
Agreed, now if only someone could write the one line command to robustly install couchdb on ubuntu.
Very cool. It will be interesting to see how successful AppHarbor can be without first establishing a competitor to Azure Appfabric.The service bus and access control inherit in Appfabric makes cloud computing palatable for enterprise companies.
Thanks for those links. So from your perspective what matters more - the patent dispute on the virtual machine that all of Android runs on, or a copyright issue on 40-some code files?

I'm not even sure how core those files are to running Android - it looks like they could easily be replaced by Google with new code.
"With effort and smart marketing, ClusterShot could be a great little business."
i would love to see something done in Portugal, everything seems to washup in Spain.
Does email address obfuscation actually work?
According to our metrics we are great; pity-about-you, unless you can "Please tell us how we can do a better job."

I expected more. It reads like content farm.
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And the reporter is actually an ex-copyright and trademark attorney. So he does at least have rich domain knowledge in the law, and he has been following this case carefully.
Or downloading http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/external/sonivox.g... and reviewing the Java source therein. That makes the blog author's claim verifiable in terms of it exists.
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Relicensing is also not allowed when something doesn't ship with a license or doesn't explicitly allow relicensing.

Basically you can't do shit if it isn't explicitly allowed.
Maybe I'm a little mixed up, but OP and I must have very different definitions of "bootstrapping". I am really confused by 3 of his graphs.

Support for start-ups

1. Savings - 33%
2. Savings + Consulting - 41%
3. Consulting - 15%
4. Angel Investment - 5%
5. Friends & Family - 15%

Category 1 sounds like they're true bootstrappers. Categories 2 and 3 sound suspiciously like service businesses and side projects. Categories 4 and 5 are not bootstrapped.

I define a start-up as having about 6 different stages I define them as follows:

1. Early Stage Concept - 7%
2. Developing Prototype - 32%
3. Pitching - 13%
4. Finish Prototype - 15%
5. Start Selling - 29%
6. Scale Up - 8%

Why isn't "Start Selling" first? Better yet, why isn't "Find Out What People Want and Will Pay For" first? Why are so many people building stuff that may not even be wanted?

Why not:

1. Find Out What People Want
2. Show Them a Prototype
3. Collect Deposits
4. Build It
5. Find Other Instances of Those People and Convert Them

What is holding you back?

1. Prototype not ready - 28%
2. Prototype needs to change - 9%
3. Can't find customers - 9%
4. Not enough time (consulting) - 12%
5. Need cash injection to scale up - 37%

It sounds like most of the companies either (a) haven't sold anything or (b) haven't sold enough to keep bootstrapping. Are these start-ups or are these side projects?

I wonder how many of the 107 companies raised the same questions I did. That's something I'd really like to know.
Unless I am mistaken, willful infringement applies to patents, whereas this only proves willful copyright infringement. Are the willful infringement clauses for copyright as well?
Yes, unless you live in the US or similar and put it into the public domain.
Google should have done everything they could to buy Sun or at least buy the Java IP and Engineering team. Heck they could have bought them out fully and sold the uninteresting parts.

That would have been better for two reasons - Oracle is screwing up bad with the JCP and it's going to hurt Java - May be Google could have been a better steward. Secondly Google relies so much on Java not only for Android but also for many other things - it is almost idiotic not to buy the IP.

I guess they had their reasons to not pursue - I can't imagine what those were.