skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The difference between NFC and barcodes or RFID is that the former uses induction between the tag and reader and the tag can modulate the signal it is returning. In short, two-way communication between tag and reader and not just one-way data delivery. The current Android spec is only half of a NFC solution but most of the rumors so far indicate that Apple is going the full distance and the new hardware will be able to act as both a tag and a reader. If this turns out to be true then there are a lot more possibilities that this will open up.
This is really slick. It's tempting to think of this as a potential route towards headless functional testing — probably no substitute for something as heavy as selenium but for light tasks and DOM-based inspection of returned payloads (and screenshots, baked in!) it seems like a plausible foundation.
If a data structure can be arbitrarily long, this implies some kind of a data structure involving a linked list to avoid wasting memory. Unfortunately, it really is a bare-bones linked list, which means that we don't know the length until we traverse it.

What would we have done if we knew the length? We could pick a random number between 1 and the length, and then traverse that many items to get to our random item. Since we don't know the length, it means the question is, how will you know where to stop?

Constant growth for storage means you start with a fixed number of slots (lets call this number X) and keep them through the process. You could put items into these X slots, such as one out of every ten that you pass. That would mean you could pick items by rolling a 10-sided dice that shows a 10, and put them into one of the slots.

A problem is that you would have to remove past randomly-selected numbers to make room for new ones, and you would be biased towards items that appear later in the series. This would not be random.

And what about a string one character long (in this case, we can pretend we had been given an array, a string, a queue, or whatever) ? What if, at the start, we always select the first item to be the random choice? That would mean that an abrupt stop would give us the correct answer for a length of one. Another interesting thing is that we can store item one into a single container, instead of needing X (where X is a constant) slots.

What about two? Well, we would compare the container with item two and decide that the random choice for the container should be either what it already contains (item one) or item two, with a 50/50 split. Great! So our algorithm works for a length of one as well as two.

This is starting to feel like we've established a base case (what happens when the list has only one item?). We may be on track to show that constantly looking at the next item and comparing it to the one in the container may just work. If so, we could have a proof by induction.

So if we were at item three where the whole list is only three items long, then a random generator would have picked it with a probability of 1/3. So if we're comparing item three to whatever is in the container, then if a 3-sided dice rolls a 1, we can set container to be item three. That works. But what about the other 2/3 chance, where it could be item one or two? In that 2/3 chance, we pick the container. The container contains only one item (the first or the second, whichever one won the first coin flip previously.) For this to be a valid idea, both item one and item two should have had a fair chance to be in the container currently with a 50/50 split, correct? And we know that it was.

So when we come to item four, we replace the container with item four with a probability of 1/4, or use the value in the container with probability of 3/4 (e.g. 1-1/4 = 3/4, or the rest of the time.) The point is that at each step, the container contains the random value of the previous n-1 number of items.
I think it's more along the lines of the Egyptian government is blocking twitter because they saw how social networking effected the same type of incident in Tunisia. They are scared.
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Ask HN: Are there any HN clones out there?
I found about forlue (http://forlue.com/) on another post, which seems to be an HN clone for designers. As I really like the style and design of HN, I was wondering if there were any other clones out there targeting different audiences.

I'd also like to hear people's thoughts on having someone copy a website's design (such as HN's). Is this legal? I know HN's source code is public, but I don't know the exact legal conditions that go along with it.
still ugly.
Don't make a $200 Billion mistake

http://www.cnbc.com/id/39710609/Warren_Buffett_Buying_Berksh...
Agreed. I'm strongly considering working on a second volume on machine learning algorithms.

I chose nature inspired for this book because that was the general area of my graduate research.
If anyone has ever paid you to be correct or insightful with your comments, then perhaps you should consider it.

Thanks to Jason for dealing so well with such snark.
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The probability that a given list item will be selected is not uniform.
Ok so this is interesting to me from a data distribution model. Twitter is accessible natively (from their own web page/applications) and via third party applications over their API. I imagine the connection flow goes like this:

you -> native twitter -> you

Or

you -> 3rd party app -> twitter -> you

From what it sounds like, that is the path because it is the link to twitter that is being severed[1] and ultimately you can neither make the request for data nor receive a response.

Now what if the 3rd party app proxied your requests like so:

you -> 3rd party app -> twitter -> 3rd party app -> you

That way the 3rd party app would need to be blocked. Which is obviously a much more difficult problem as there are more than one of them. The only downside would be more bandwidth consumption for the 3rd party app.

If 3rd party apps routed messages through their ip's wouldn't this instantly become a much more difficult problem for the blockers?

[1]I'm talking about lower level blocking here at the dns or ip level. This is moot if they are doing higher level packet inspection and blocking everything with certain words in it (non encrypted).
It probably looks better, as I remember Slashdot being really ugly, but the new design is still ugly. The Slashdot header font in particular is an eyesore, but very little on the site actually looks modern or pleasing.
Just bought a copy..thank you for making it available as a freely downloadable PDF :)
Show HN: My side Javascript/Perl side project, Virtual Flyer Board beta 2
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Ask HN: What would you do if you couldn't use a computer ever again?
For whatever reason, this has been on my mind over the past few days.

We are a crowd that believes in the promise of technology. I probably spend more than 10 hours a day in front of a computer monitor building things. And that's when I'm feeling social!

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE it.

But what would you do if something caused you to never be able / want to use a computer again in the same capacity that you do now? The reasons could be one of many: a disability, loss of interest, law enforcement, etc.

What would you do with your life?
Brilliant! "Just 250 lines of Qt and C++" shows how good Qt/WebKit are.
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Def some quirks back in the day (I think FF on Linux still doesn't even listen to the wmode param, iirc) but I think modern browsers deal with wmode better now.
Looks like Dell is really getting their money's worth for that ad. Do you think the salespeople put it in writing that Dell would get an Arrington "news" article featuring the video? Or was it just a "nudge nudge wink wink" kind of thing?
After listening to your feedback, I made some adjustments, and here are the results.

This project has been fun to do so far, especially the Javascript part of it. You can post flyers in text or graphics format (you can even use a PDF). My idea is to use it in my local small community.

If you have questions and comments, let me know. And thanks.

You're welcome to fiddle around with it. No login necessary.
Guys - Do you know if Obama Has Closed Guantanamo Yet?
That's easy: Liberation Mono -- hands down winner in my humble opinion

https://fedorahosted.org/liberation-fonts/
Name of post-killing moderator. Instead of just [dead] have [killed by flags] if post is auto-killed due to users flagging. or [killed by _username_] if killed by a user.

Fine if this is even just for high-karma users; but there has been some complaints about moderators going too far, and this would add some accountability.
I used to make a healthy living designing landing pages for affiliates. Several of my clients were making several million a year (all made a "healthy" living) and I was bringing in several hundred a day from just designing landing pages. I left because I couldn't handle that "gray area" people talk about, but I swear those are some of the most intelligent and hardest working people I've met. Shame many are missing that deep entrepreneurial spirit many here on HN have.
This doesn't directly answer your question, but I wish more design related topics would show up on Hacker News — benefits hackers who are looking to learn more about design, and it's a really good startup related topic anyways.
A company where I used to work got paranoid about its employees walking out the door with its precious intellectual property on those things, and installed something called 'Hibun' to prevent just that. From then on, anyone who "needed" to move data to a USB drive had to use one specially made for the Hibun system, and a "key" to permit transfer in a form that could only be read on another "authorized" computer.

That was... fun.
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Your job posting looks great - the problem might be Scottsdale and the size of the tech community there. It could be that all the entrepreneurial developers there are working on their own projects. Have you thought about reaching out to the Bay Area?
A couple of months ago I decided to use Python for my (undergraduate) dissertation project. I assumed that the newest version of the language is the one to go with. And everything was fine until a few days ago when I discovered finding a library to draw simple graphs that is compatible with Python 3 requires quite an effort.

Now I have to either take everything back to 2.7 or keep believing that I will finally manage to work it out with 3.

How is that going to kill the "momentum" I received and change my feelings about Python? It's not going to change them. I enjoyed every single moment of coding so far, even those very first ones where I kept inserting curly brackets everywhere. So, if it fits my needs, I am going to use it in future projects as well.

How is that going to change the industry's feelings about Python? Who knows? But I doubt the industry worries about "momentum". If you are using 2.7, keep using it until Python 3 is usable for your. If you are not using Python yet but you want to, do your research beforehand (something I falsely didn't do) and decide what's best.

Now, how long is it going to take for the major libraries/frameworks to be Python 3 compatible, nobody can tell. And it's funny as we are approaching the "3.2" version already.

But, honestly, who cares? Is a number more important than the language itself?
...this time I actually destroyed images by opening them up in a text editor and adding/removing text to their raw code.

Fuzzing used to create art!

(Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzz_testing)
To be fair, the price isn't just slightly lower - it is nearly an order of magnitude lower. Sending 500k messages a month with Amazon is $50, and with SendGrid it's $400.

If you send that level of email a month (which is easy to do if you send a weekly newsletter to a few hundred thousand users) you're now talking about saving yourself a few grand a year with Amazon.

Given the "switch" can be as simple as changing some SMTP settings, this is a big deal. I don't think the people who jump ship are necessarily hyper-price-sensitive customers. Amazon is just turning this service into a commodity.
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"Stretchy", not "sketchy". I'm not sure what that means either though.
Thanks, that sounds so well thought out and reinforces to me that there's a lot I need to learn.

But at the same time, I barely understand what you wrote :(
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This looks really great. Kudos to the designers and programmers.
I hate Google's multiple login behavior, so I just open an incognito window for my less frequently used accounts.
I agree completely. I didn't do sports in high school or college aside from some casual fencing, but I've started running in the last few months. I've been surprised at how much of a mental activity it really is.
Why PubSubHubbub at Etsy is awesome
I'm going to try this to do some web page scraping.
Are you allowing others to commit updates to git by adding programming examples, etc?

wikipedia would really benefit from the details/code too!
I thought the experiment and the write-up interesting, but to say there isn't anything wrong with the plan is tantamount to claiming that training for a marathon is a waste of time. There are dozens of ways you can get injured by running that much without preparing. If the author had merely sore legs for a few days (as he says in the comments), I'd say he was lucky.
Steve Nash will Quit the Phoenix Suns? | JBOMB Basketball Blog
Actually, most of the top affiliate marketers make money by arbitraging paid or organic traffic. Very few are creating sites that are much more than thin landing pages.
I think the main difference for me between this and Selenium would be that Selenium offers some macros to click an element, or simulate a drag and drop between two elements. If you added those in here--wouldn't be too much more, I don't think--you'd have a competitive testing framework, albeit Webkit-only.
they are seriously taking over the world
> one huge monolithic and interconnected application which really has to be rewritten all at once or not at all

I disagree. Any program can always be refactored and compartmentalized. It may be a slow process but it is possible to do a rewrite one chunk at a time.
100 points for grasping how Visual Studio's Configuration Manager works, or more likely... it does not.
Assuming you could get jQuery to run inside this it should be pretty straight forward to translate the Selenium IDE's Selenese commands into jQuery statements.

I'm going to have to give this a run tomorrow in the AM.
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the announcement blog post:
http://ariya.blogspot.com/2011/01/phantomjs-minimalistic-hea...
> This is just a post saying what they do, how they do it, and why
> they're good. It has nothing to do with Amazon SES at all.

The implied point I got from it is that all those things they do and are good at is what Amazon doesn't do. Somewhat like how Apple doesn't do a point-by-point comparison of the iPhone vs. Android -- they just let the iPhone features speak for themselves.
(Un)Fortunately for woot, the professional/slightly greyhat affiliates are not going to bother building campaigns that compete with Amazon and eBay for a piddling percent of sale commission .

The only affiliates they(and 99% of the other programs on CJ) will attract are the newbs who will put a link on their blog or maybe try to SEO an article they wrote.

No individual affiliate of theirs is going to make a lot of money, but maybe the aggregate total of millions of Woot's customers referring friends to Woot through Twitter, Facebook, etc will increase their traffic.

In other words, amateur affiliates make pennies, Woot wins. Especially if affiliates have to reach a minimum commission threshold before they get paid.
The first two applications that come to mind are automated testing and screen scraping, I'm a little surprised they didn't include examples of those. Looks interesting though.
> ...find that people who rate free apps tend to be the harshest of all, as there is zero cost to participate.

Judging from my own experience this is true for ad supported apps only. If the app has no ads, it tends to get fewer negative reviews if any at all. I guess people feel less duped when they realize the developer didn't get anything to himself at their expense.
> Project Xanadu went through a rewrite.

I thought Xanadu was vaporware?
Isn't anyone else curious about their figures before the Mac App Store?
What I really want is something that can cause the icon to change when I get new chat messages. I frequently find myself unable to hear the soft incoming message sound, because I'm listening to something louder, and it would be nice to have a visual indicator.
I illustrated the post with Python since it's my language of choice, but honestly, many of Python's benefits as a teaching language apply equally well to other modern languages.

If we can agree that experimentation is one of the most powerful ways to develop an understanding of a system, then by going with Java, you're consciously eschewing languages which support that goal by being:

1. Interpreted. It's hard to overstate the value of an interactive interpreter, which is in many respects akin to having a second instructor available for the students, on-demand. It can instantly answer questions about its environment, it makes exploration and experimentation trivial, and it's great when lecturing, as you can immediately explore any "what-if's" that your students raise.

2. More expressive. Aphyr demonstrated this pretty eloquently in another comment, but the less code that it takes to accomplish a task, the less code you have to understand before you're able to build something useful, and the easier it is to experiment as you go.

3. Multi-paradigm. If you're teaching someone programming, you want to be able to expose them to procedures, functions, objects, methods, recursion, etc. If you can do all of that in one language, you lower the mental barrier that your students must overcome before grasping each successive topic.

I believe that those facilities are great assets for both exposition by the teacher and exploration by the students, and I do not immediately see a compelling argument in Java's favor which sufficiently justifies foregoing the above pedagogic benefits. If the goal is to teach and create understanding, then surely the instructor should employ the tools that most readily support that objective.
Sure, why not! I'd love to see where this could go.

Funny you should mention wikipedia. I started out by writing a heap of entries in wikipedia and ended up not being satisfied. Typically bots or random people coming in and messing up my researched and distilled summaries. Also wikipedia is a general audience, I wanted to target researches like me and programmers like the kid I used to be.

The book gave me a more controlled environment, and a permissive license feels like I'm still giving back in a useful way.
Really? I hated my trident. It was dog slow. Now, I loved my tseng et4000. Fast, great mode-x and tweakmode support, easy to code for.
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> You can burn more files to a CD but that takes more than 30 seconds,

CDs are 700MB. You can get GB+ USB thumb drives for free.
Everyone is always amazed that I only know three bits of BASIC syntax... does it really do damage?
Postmark do not allow bulk email, such as newsletters, and hence are not a comparable product.
Font measurements are given in terms of the "em square", a notional square inside which each glyph sits (this is why the CSS "em" unit has "1em" equalling "the current font size"). A 12px font should have each glyph fit within the same 12×12px square. Exactly where the characters are drawn in that square, and at what relative size, is up to the designer - but usually they're drawn so that the em covers the distance from the bottom of lower-case descenders (j, p, q, y) to the top of ascenders (b, d, k, l).

Historically, in the days when a "font" meant "a set of metal blocks of uniform size with a glyph engraved on the end of each one", the "font size" was the height of each block of metal, which was an important thing to know when all the metal blocks used to set a page of type had to physically sit next to each other.
Cheers, I hope you enjoy it. Happy to answer any questions, just shoot me an email any time on jasonb _AT_ cleveralgorithms.com
Here's a large (35 inches) cutaway drawing of a Magnox reactor, which gives some visual scale to the monster that is a gas-cooled reactor:

(PDF) http://econtent.unm.edu/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/nucen...

(Note this isn't the AGR that Stross depicts, but its predecessor the Magnox). For size reference, the six boilers are 118 feet tall by 18 feet diameter (36m * 5.5m); the building is 170 feet high (52 m).
Assuming you include today's mobile phones and such as a computer...

I would be involved in art or photography. I'm far from being great (or even okay), but thats where I'd be.

For many of us, computers were a hobby before a job, so why not try to make other hobbies a job if we had no computers?
Take over the world.
You raise a great point. I'd really appreciate a little more input on the inboxing side of the deal though. We could say that SendGrid has that going for it, so I'm wondering if there's something we can do about that.
Teaching a robot to walk
The author describes at a high level (and provides links to more technical descriptions) what the software behind NASA's ATHLETE robot does to enable it to walk, and how this relates to the concept of consciousness.
I would really like to see a comparison between this and other options. (rhino, envjs, htmlunit).
Google to move into building designed by Frank Gehry in Venice Beach, CA
In most cases, the only reason an affiliate will send a viewer to a landing page is AdWords' strict rules about arbitrage, or some other rules set by the affiliate network. Google wants to provide its users with as good of content as they can manage, but they know affiliates are a large portion of their AdWords spenders. It's a delicate balance.

Many affiliates send users to landing pages or their own sites for their own tracking and data collecting purposes as well.
'The end of', '<insert app/device> killer' and '* considered harmful' articles need better headlines and frankly strikes me as similar to the placard wielding 'end is nigh' crusties.
Also note these other headless javascript testing frameworks:

Zombie.js: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2038663

HTMLUnit: http://htmlunit.sourceforge.net/

Celerity (JRuby wrapper around HTMLUnit): http://celerity.rubyforge.org/
While the pricing isn't comparable, neither is the service, assuming that they're being completely honest in their post.
In the context of the article, the use of "the end of" as a title was purposefully subversive.
The way I look at it, is if you didn't go to an Ivy League school, don't even bother thinking about getting a job at Google.