skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't say there were NO instances of trained employees abusing trust. Obviously there are edge cases everywhere.

If I'm going traveling to some strange dangerous place, a trained employee is going to be safer than a random person off the street.

I expect you were downvoted because you decided to interpret my comments as "trained employees never do anything wrong", rather than what I actually said, "trained employees are safer for you than random people".
EU funds open source language Scala
I have been experimenting with Awesome tiling wm today, and it seems Awesome. What a day to switch from Xfce.
A lot of people in this thread are going off course due to the red herring about how much it costs to make an ebook. There are systems where cost is based on price to make but capitalism isn't one of them.

The real issue here is Agency pricing. Personally I don't understand why a company like Amazon wouldn't try to do something against them since it constrains what they can do with ebooks, an otherwise very flexible product. They could do things like selling a high end camera ebook at a loss provided the customer also buys that camera from them. With this pricing scheme they have no flexibility with ebook prices at all. They are essentially providing an online store for publishers to sell their products directly. Is 30% a fair price for such a service (personally I might try to get more because their store might be competing against mine)?
IBM Super Computer Beats Humans at Jeopardy
...and Enlightenment DR17 is the Duke Nukem of desktop environments. http://www.enlightenment.org/
I think the situation in Russia is similar to the US now. We had less than 10% females in computer science when I was at university in the early 2000s.
http://m.gizmodo.com/5733025/watch-ibms-jeopardy+playing-com... a video of the computer playing against 2 of the best Jeopardy players.
Kaggle Social Network Challenge (Inferring Friends) Won Using Deanonymization
Perhaps we should stop inventing better mousetraps, lest we "get careless" about maintaining properly cleaned homes. And maybe we should stop making hybrid cars, lest we "get careless" about only driving when necessary.

Give me a break.
A lot of them are pretty bad ideas once you think about them for more than a few minutes.

Mouse movements and clicks are easily emulated - just look at the mass of bots for online games. There's actually quite a large industry based around selling bots that can be used for goldfarming.

Keyboard events are similarly easy. It's very easy to write a function that separates keypresses with human-like pauses.

Also - many of these ideas have severe accessibility drawbacks. Touchscreens, for example, do not emit mouse move events like a mouse. Voice input will not act like a keyboard and may look like the user has pasted into the input box.
Okay thanks, so I can assume that hypothetically if I were to download text PDF books from certain places, then convert it to Kindle format, I would then be able to get first class reading experience? Are you happy with your Kindle 3 overall? I'm considering whether to get the one with 3G, but I don't know how good the webkit browser is, what do you think of it?
...it's refreshing to see that some still long for a simpler time when a pickaxe and patience was all you needed.

Was thinking the exact same thing.
I suspect that protectionism will delay the "robot revolution" long past the time when it's technologically feasible. Building codes will be changed in some way to require human labor, building material suppliers will be pressured to "run out of" the parts needed by robot builders, etc. It's been my experience that few people outside of tech actually like the idea of robots doing anything that a human could do.
The ipad is in its first version. It will improve and, presumably, sell better on the back of that.

The guy's lugging around a kindle, an ipad, and a laptop. Someone (Apple?) is going to make money consolidating all of that into a single device while attending properly to the associated user interface issues.
I know we're supposed to be all starry-eyed about "the wisdom of the crowds" and all that, but I have trouble to believe that a random bunch of Stack Overflowers are going to come up with anything truly interesting in a field that already has the serious attention of researchers at Google and Microsoft Research.
If you're serious: patio11 has lived in Japan for many years and I think it's safe to say that he has a good understanding of Japanese cultural norms.

If you're not serious: This joke is in extremely poor taste.
The awesome core identified in that book is borrowed from older, better designed, languages. They are new to you if you are from the C/C++/VB/Java world. But that doesn't make them new or original.

Incidentally you can find most of them in any decent scripting language, including Perl, Python, Ruby and Clojure.
http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/05/google-facebook-twitter-tec...
Watching this video, pretty much tells why Groupon is going so fast. This is the way one should treat his users.
My CS professor tries to use less mainstream languages for exactly this purpose–to put everyone on an even playing field. The first two months of labs in the course are taught entirely in Haskell. The lectures are about DFAs and NFAs.

I've graded and TA'd the course for two years, and I think his approach works extremely well. It lets you filter out the people who really get it from the people who are just pattern matching from previous experience.
That's probably a good checklist for corporate apologies in general.
Am I the only one who thought the tunneling from the title didn't refer to the actual digging of a tunnel, but some kind of an online attack aimed at a site called GameStop?
Yes, this is exactly the danger here and something Facebook has done to its users several times already.
Depending on which waveband you use, different vision tasks become a lot easier. It looks to me like all the sensing is done by the room, not the quadrotors, hence why its all room-mounted.
If I were to write a book, either technical or a novel, I would be tempted to hire a freelance copyrighter, editor and publicist, then list it on Amazon, Safari etc. myself.

You can find these people on Elance and similar sites, but there is an opportunity for a website that is a one-stop-shop to do all of this in one place (ie. find the various people, organize listing, sales etc.).

Anybody know if this already exists?
Government doesn't make anything easy. However VW is trying to be relicensed under Apache 2.
Top 3 Most Popular Baby and Toddler Toys for 2010
Nice site design. It's certainly unique and you stand apart from the crowd.

I just registered an account and I'm playing with it right now. I really, really like the getting started flow after the registration page. Just pick your programming language, then you're presented with the methods for installing the API wrappers, then you get your API key and help on making calls, handling errors, etc. I'm not left in the dark on how to proceed -- I'm shown what to do next.

The API wrapper for Python looks simple and easy to use. I could easily see myself using this for my next Web app.

For some reason on https://www.thesunnytrail.com/start, while logged-in, I am unable to click on the Stream, Overview, or Plans links below the logo. Also, there is no page title.

The settings page is dead-simple -- I like that.

Without being able to click on those other links that's all I could test so far. However, so far so good! Good luck, I think this has a lot of potential.

Edit: Played with the demo account. The dashboard looks good. I really like the stream feature. I think that's something I'd have open in a browser tab, going back to it every 10 minutes or so to refresh the page and see if anything has happened. It definitely appeals to the "stats update addict" in me.
Insofar as your observations are correct, they're a simple tautology: obviously CS has become a "boy thing" which girls avoid; one needn't look further than enrollment statistics to confirm that.

The question is rather, "Why is female enrollment in computer science dropping, while things like, say, organic chemistry graduate more women than men?"

Your argument implies two fatally flawed notions: That gender roles are static. Obviously they're not. 50 years ago women didn't become doctors, because that was man stuff. The other is that girls avoid the hard boy stuff because it's not very girly. But it's specifically in engineering, physics and CS that there's such a huge gap. It's for the most part not there in biology, chemistry and mathematics.
I was specific to not imply any level of the levels of complexity would ever go away. That's like saying assembly has gone away. It has for the vast majority, but not for those who actually code compilers or reverse engineer software. That group is extremely small compared to the rest, hopefully we can agree on that. I expect that eventually languages like C will be similar to the way cobol is now :)
Yeah Mr Kernighan is quite an extreme case of being the opposite of "Bow to me, worms". It felt like he would be more comfortable being invisible. He had his (open) cube diagonally behind mine and I did not know who he was. To add to my embarrassment I mispelled his name. Now its too late to edit.

A conversation with a co-intern over lunch during the first week:

Friend:"Hey, do you know who he is ?"

Me (busy gorging awesome food): "No. But he got himself locked out and I had to let him in a few days ago. He was so profusely apologetic and thankful... I probably wouldn't have remembered otherwise. Checkout these steaks"

Friend: "Take a look at his name tag on his cube sometime."

And yes, more often than not humility co-habits with expertise.

I have a moderate hearing impairment, so nothing was as inspiring and humility instilling as seeing T.V. Raman work.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/business/04blind.html
I am unconvinced that women have different perspectives in a way which my XML file mapping university courses to university departments cares about, or that checking for absence of the Y chromosome is more efficient for identifying the different perspectives on XML files versus just asking for one's perspective on XML files.

Additionally, it is highly likely that if we actually looked for different perspectives, optimizing for them honestly would routinely result in allocating scarce resources (like jobs) away from individual women. This is exactly what happened in university admissions: if you do something like e.g. give extra bonus points for foreign languages on the theory that it privileges children of immigrants over rich white kids at Andover, you'll find that rich white kids at Andover are quite capable of bending their considerable resources to the acquisition of foreign language skills if you give them sufficient incentive. (This is why universities desiring a particular racial balance in the United States achieve it through severe and pervasive racial discrimination.)
Are you serious? A better API would be if it were just a yes or no to send all my information? I couldn't possibly disagree more.

Newflash: I don't give a shit about how hard your job as a programmer is. If you don't like programming take up something else. I care about my security and not having to worry about what effect clicking "OK" is going to have. Plenty of apps ask you things that they don't need to function.
Its been noted before, but I like to keep in mind that PostgreSQL is pretty damn fast if you turn off write sync.
Watching this makes you wonder what stops all companies from responding this way when they screw up. Is it really something as cynical as the lawyers running the show? I don't get it. A heartfelt apology goes such a long way towards rebuilding customer trust, it's a shame that more people aren't willing to lay it on the line like this. Compare this response to Kevin Rose's handling of the Digg v4 disaster. We all know what happened in the latter case, but I wouldn't be surprised if this helps, rather than hurts Groupon.

Class act.
Startup Owners / Founders: When do you hire?
Isn't this just the people that searched for x.com? The traffic stats are here:

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=apple.com%2C+microsoft.c...

Spoiler, as opposed to searches microsoft.com continues to dominate apple.com in actual visits by some margin.

edit: it doesn't seem to return any traffic info for google.com, but the search results are explosive:

http://trends.google.com/trends?q=apple.com,+microsoft.com,+...
iPhone apps would apparently have this problem. Simple solution? If the app can't do some function because of a user setting it pops up an alert with a button pointing to the place to change the setting.... pretty simple.
Thanks for posting this! I can actually read it. If you compare it to the google translate it's almost funny. Goes to show while natural language processing is definitely improving humans still are significantly better.
I guess like most of those projects, GameJs grew as a library while I was coding games.

Still, I have only managed to finish small games and the biggest - roguelike RTS - is still in the making http://gamejs.org/apps/rtsimple/ (rough tech demo)

If you do game programming as a hobby, then the only predictable way to finish a game is during a competition. It is much easier to finish a game within 48 hours than with unlimited time.
MOV format converter, play and convert MOV files on Mac
Happiness proportional to income? One redditor's thoughts
Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Matt Cutts is an expert in search. B D Ruben is an expert in being found. Hence, Matt Cutts was able to find B D Ruben. No reason to expect it to work the other way around.

(For the avoidance of doubt: No, I am not serious. Yes, Ruben appears to be a dweeb. Yes, Matt Cutts is obviously very much smarter than he is.)
HN has a method to create polls. It isn't the transparent request for votes of having 3 comments which you are supposed to upvote.

Also categorizing people's backgrounds is often trickier than you would think. For instance what impression do you get from each of the following statements?

- I grew up in poverty.
- I have movie star sisters.
- My grandfather co-founded a successful civil engineering firm and died rich.
- I was kidnapped by a crazy man before I was 5.

Each statement contains a life story behind it. None of this complexity is captured in Welfare/Working/Professional.
I assumed it was an SSH tunnel, and wondered if game stop had ISOs on a server and burn-on-demand business.
Last year I attended a panel about women in tech on the fairly new CCC congress "SIGINT" in Cologne, which focusses more on society and politics. The panel itself was rather boring and not really insightful, but during the Q&A a young woman from Eastern Europe pointed out something interesting: she stated that in her country there's a 1:1 male/female ratio in all science fields at the universities, including computer science. I haven't checked the facts, but even if that is not entirely true, the difference to Western countries is astounding. She went on to say that the problem is entirely with culture, and all aspects of it, and that the numbers were just reflecting that.

The women on the panel, who were all Westerners, couldn't even comment on that. They were just plain speechless, and rightly so, because most of their arguments involving bullying boys, mother nature, and other standard points were pretty much refuted by the simple fact that there already exist places in the world where this topic is not even an issue. And it's not the ones you would usually relate to human progress.
I think pedrocr means that the baseline would be moved down, so that less cooling in total would be required, not that they reduce the amount of cooling used during usage dips.
Honestly I don't know enough about ITK to compare it to VW. VW's original developers just wanted to make a cool way of doing lazy image evaluation. This is its primary difference compared to OpenCV. VW leverages that ability to handle really large images (1+ GB) and to do multithreaded rasterization.

Saying VW was created because of "Not Invented Here" is a little harsh. It is mostly just a fun exercise of CRTP that grew into a supporting library. Is this the best library for you? That depends. In my opinion, VW's strength at the moment is cartographic applications.
full ack. The only way I can speed up my games is by doing less canvas calls, everything else is negligible. Although I A* often runs and a couple dozen simple state machine AIs for the actors.
https://github.com/bebraw/jswiki/wiki/List-of-JS-Game-Engine...

direct link to the now "official" github wiki page.
I definitely wouldn't, certainly not in the UK. If you're caught out, it's grounds for dismissal. And the vast majority of employers will seek your P45 and pay slips from your current job. However, it is perfectly reasonable to expect an uptick on moving: this is to compensate you for the risk and overheads of moving. Most employers will expect to have to pay you more.
5 Controversies Too Dumb To Be Outraged About
People love to be outraged; it’s a simple fact of life. Outrage makes us feel ...
I'm probably missing something, but wouldn't an IM client be equally sufficient? Typing on keyboards is faster than texting but still slower than talking and requires attendees to bring their laptops.
Clickable: http://www.thesunnytrail.com
Agreed.

I also liked that it was all done in one take and it wasn't given corporate PR-treatment, it was just a guy in front of his webcam. Also quite clever to do it at the office, when everyone has gone. Gives the impression of the hard-working shacho (which I'm sure he is, anyway).

It came across as a business owner who genuinely cares about customer experience.
I'll give you a break.
My point is: sometimes we are getting careless about our environment because we think technology will fix what we break.
But as I said this news is exciting.
You might be interested in this thread:

(Cassandra vs MongoDB vs CouchDB vs Redis vs Riak vs HBase comparison)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2052852
"Today, as dismayed as I was, I got an answer to my question: What happens when the media ignores a revolution? "

Ironic that Tunisia has a revolution, and Josh Shahryar can't help writing a piece complaining about the American media being irrelevant. Apparently the American media is the most important thing about it for this guy.
Some context for those who want a quick summary of what happened and why the apology.

- In Japan during the first few days of the new year, they traditionally cook meals called osechi-ryori to celebrate. But nowadays, people just buy premade meals on line and have them delivered.

-Groupon advertised with a company called Bird Cafe to have a special discount on the meals.

-Bird Cafe could not handle the amount of orders, and delivered late and with bad quality. When the meals arrived they were no where close to the advertised pictures. Pretty much it was like ordering a hot meal, and what was delivered was a microwaved frozen dinner.

Many customers were outraged and the blogs lit up in Japan about the mistake on Groupon's part.

The video is about apologizing for the mistake and talks about how to ensure such quality issues do not happen again. Mostly by making sure the companies they work with can handle the orders and uphold their product as advertised.
What was the deal with Nebraska?
>If we're all equal then it doesn't.

Equal in the sense of:

TotalSum(Woman) == TotalSum(Man)

not:

Woman == Man.
so.. if you don't have any knowledge on perl and you want to hire a perl programmer you first.. hire a perl programmer to help you ? won't that put you back on the step 1 ?
I found some numbers, albeit a little old:

Exemplar: Bulgaria

The participation rate for women in these fields is slightly higher than for men: 7.8 percent of the female college-age cohort obtained an NS&E degree in Bulgaria in 1992; 7.2 percent of males in this age group obtained such a degree in that same year.

In 1992, women obtained 57 percent of all university degrees. In addition, they obtained half of the engineering degrees, 70 percent of the natural science degrees, and 73 percent of the mathematics and computer science degrees. These percentages have not changed since 1975 (Stretenova, 1994).

http://anitaborg.org/files/womenhightechworld.pdf
Most of the solutions applied to even out gender imbalances are bad solutions, for several reasons, some of which you outline.

The prevalence of bad simplistic solutions should not suggest that it is not a problem worth addressing, however. Only that the problem is not trivially addressed, if at all deemed a problem.

I'm unconvinced that the problem, if it is one, can be effectively addressed at the college level. This is not a problem of admission, but one of interest. That interest needs to be encouraged, or at least not discouraged, far earlier.
I'm going to charitably assume you are neither trolling nor going for a boorish Reddit joke: Japan is a highly developed Western nation. In cultural studies, "Japanese people commit suicide to apologize" is one example of something that might be called a narrative. When you say it, it isn't just saying something, it is doing something. One purpose to which that narrative has been historically employed, both by some foreigners and some Japanese people, is to exaggerate the difference between Japanese people and everyone else. Another reason is there were, historically, a small handful of suicides which were extraordinarily public and so garnered disproportionate media attention. They are now several decades old, and are about as instructive regarding Japanese culture as school shootings are instructive about American culture. No morally responsible person would suggest that shooting up school is normative behavior in response to minor slights.

There are forms of apology which are distinctively Japanese. One is a videotaped press conference during which a speech very similar to that video would be delivered by the CEO. He would likely be accompanied by three or four people close to the matter. At a scripted moment during the speech (likely, several of them), all will simultaneously bow deeply. On the video you would hear audible clicking noises as every print photographer in the room simultaneously went for the photo opp, because Japanese papers run with photos of bows for apologies the same way American newspapers run with photos of handshakes for peace treaties.
I don't go to a school known for their CS program (we have a good one, just not a renowned one). Of roughly 30 or so freshman in the CS program, I know of about 20 or so who said they did not know how to program before they went to college.

So, your premise of "most of the class has been programming for years" is false in at least my case.
The last time someone had that much in a combination of muscle, patience, and stupidity, he built Burj Dubai.
The New Year osechi meal is like Thanksgiving or Christmas. People pay a lot of money to have a good meal. I saw photos of the results of this deal featured on TV news several times over the past few weeks which is pretty significant. They are advertising extremely heavily on the web and TV in Tokyo so it is really important for them to get in front of this and handle it properly.

Merchant protection is something that really needs to be done better.
The coverage on BBC Radio 4 this morning certainly made it sound like the outgoing regime was pretty corrupt and that the protesters had legitimate grievances. As I am about 90% asleep when listening to the news in the morning they couldn't have been very subtle about this message.
both parents were blue-collar workers