skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some small steps in the direction of a meta-object protocol: more fine-grained control over call dispatch in a multiply-inheriting class hierarchy.
Note that whether electrons are spherical or not is important to theoretical physics. Right now we do NOT want them to be perfect spheres. But, as you say, our ability to measure this is limited by our instruments.

Keep in mind that many important scientific theories had to wait a very long time until our instruments could reliably measure what was predicted. For example, theories that the earth rotated around the sun were theorized as far back as the 5th Century BC and maybe far before that. Actually proving the Earth rotated around the sun didn't happen until 1728 by measuring aberration in starlight. But what the ancients actually sought, proof by stellar parallax, was far beyond the capabilities of optical instruments until 1854. To be technical, it was actually empirical to believe the sun orbited the earth during this time. Ancients would say "if the earth orbits, I should see stars shift. I do not see stars shifting, therefore the earth does not orbit." Aristotle actually used this very argument!

I was listening to some of the researchers comment on this particular discovery and they are more hopeful about the technique than the findings. There is already talk about improving the resolution a couple of orders of magnitude.
In the USA, Facebook does indeed have the largest number of active users.

Outside the USA, there are serious competitors to Facebook, with larger user numbers than Facebook. Examples: Vkontakte.ru in Russia and Renren in China.

Therefore it's possible, because it has been done already.
Yes you should get a lawyer to help you understand it. However, try to get a recommendation from someone you trust and then give specific instructions to the lawyer. Tell the lawyer you want to have them review the contract with you in the room and explain what the various terms mean. This will help you learn about some of the topics and see if it is a lawyer with which you might want to build a relationship with for future business dealings. Spending a few hundred dollars on this type of activity will greatly benefit you in the long run.
Everyone has to start somewhere. And unfortunately a lot of design lists end up making the topic more unapproachable than it has to be, considering there are some fundamental skills that everyone can build on.
I love how the comments are powered by Facebook.
Mind Reading Company Valued at 200 Million in New Funding Round
>Right now we do NOT want them to be perfect spheres.

Two questions:

1) By "do not want" do you mean that it wouldn't be compatible with current models? Or something else?

2) Relatedly, what would be the implications if they were to turn out to be perfect spheres?
I hope they pick a new name before launch.

Not just because 1) it is a cliché -ly suffixed name, but because 2) "Alt" doesn't tell the user what it does and 3) automatically puts its existence in opposition to something (facebook in this case) instead of being bold and claiming it is/will be the de facto social networking site.
That is one well-designed blog. Very readable.
False dichotomy - good designers would read these books and put the concepts into practice by examining existing well-designed sites.
Another way to put this: everyone, including born suckers, migrate from Windows to Mac in droves.
Altly? I hope that's not the final name.

For those who's native language is not English, this would be a REALLY hard name to say.

P.S. The Altly.com home page has a Facebook Like Us button. Eh?
SEO: Don't Use Private Registration
OK, that was a little glib. MacDefender is a pretty clever exploit, I guess.
> I think 3D is a clear example of technology for its own sake

They said the same thing about color.
Ask HN: Can you recommend a mailbox forwarding/scanning service?
Something reliable that's not a PO Box, please. Thanks!
This is a particularly unnecessary title change.
The reason for using keywords is that there is no guarantee that the next class in the MRO after ColoredShape will be Shape. When the instance is a ColoredShape, it will be, but if ColoredShape is subclassed with a more complex inheritance structure, then something else could end up in between them in the MRO.

Thus, ColoredShape.__init__ can't simply pass on shapename to the super method, because that might not be the argument expected by the next __init__ method in the MRO. Instead, each method needs to gracefully accept arbitrary arguments and then pass on whatever it received (minus what it consumed).
Ah, naturally.

I keep waiting for Balsamiq to move their web product out of beta. I've seriously been waiting a long time! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161642
I think it is great that you provided a follow up to the post. Thanks for adding value to the community.
I really like the idea, but http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code:Add_a_Task is dissuading me from contributing. I'd much rather clone a Github repo and make a pull request to submit my version of something.
Schroedinger wrote that page.
> logs based analytics packages are inaccurate. a single ip could represent 1 person, or 10, or an entire nation behind a proxy or nat.

Cookie-based, javascript-based and/or image-based tracking mechanisms are also inaccurate, in different ways. You just pick the inaccuracy you're prepared to live with.

> feature detection is done in javascript, but sent only once, as long as you set... a cookie. i don't want to run and execute any more than i need to.

So you agree it's a valid alternative. Your preference that it only execute once doesn't absolve your responsibility for the privacy of your visitors to your website.

If indeed you believe it's in the best interests of the visitor to use a Google Analytics cookie, explain it to them and gain their informed consent.

> I'm unaware of any quality packages that would let you do thigns like tracking conversion goals without cookies, session or otherwise.

Well, you have time to research it. Perhaps there's a nice opportunity there for it. Some of it will be about brushing off and updating techniques in use before cookies became widespread reliable.

> and on sessions cookies. how doe we decide what's essential? is a csrf token essential? does this allow me to set the session cookie on first visit?

I am not a lawyer, you need to consult one if the answer to this isn't clear to you.

Ask yourself what is the purpose of a CSRF token. Ask yourself is this in the visitor's interests to have this present. If you explained it's purpose to the visitor, and the potential side-effects of both having and not-having this cookie set, would you feel like you needed a shower immediately after?

My opinion is that a CSRF token is fine when it's only used for the purpose it is intended. If you are unsure, you should consult a lawyer.

> would the cookie we use for caching be illegal?

Is caching a core part of the purpose/service/offering that you offer to customers? If not, but you feel it is necessary for a better quality of service from you, then figure out a way to explain it to your site visitors, and let them make a decision on whether they want to benefit from it's advantage. If they don't want it, then fine, they get a slightly slower experience.

> that all said. my previous post was a response to how this only hurts corporate interests,

Human beings and their privacy should come before artificial entities and their balance sheet.

> and that in reality it does affect society at large negatively.

I disagree. I think protecting the privacy of individuals is a positive thing. I like the idea of informed consent, particularly for things that breach my privacy without my knowledge. All you are being asked is to be upfront and seek the consent of your site visitors before sharing their information with a third party.
super() supports arguments which allow you to specify which class's implementation to lookup, which is an explicit way to resolve ambiguities. Although well-designed multiple-inheritance should try to avoid those ambiguities in the first place -- a class shouldn't inherit from multiple bases with conflicting implementations of a method.

I think in a case like the one you describe, where the direct ancestor's implementation is circumvented to access a different ancestor's implementation, it should be done by calling

super(Ancestor).someMethod()

That should improve understanding.
Tell that to all the blind kids with malaria he's working for now.
We believe the problem is actually Keep-Alives on Apache plus the cache. Keep-alives are now off. Cache on. Everything seems peachy.
Actually Erlang/OTP provides exactly the type of abstraction layer that's extremely useful for RabbitMQ's use case. It's specifically designed for consistent latency, predictable memory usage, and resilience under failure conditions. You know, basically the things that make an MQ worth using.

It was true that previously RabbitMQ could run out of memory and be unable to take more messages, but that changed in 2.0 and it will now swap messages to disk. Of course, then you pay the consequences of slow disks and can always run out of disk space, but nothing is invincible.
Hey, it was a joke, after his user name... doesn't matter
Genetic Basis For Prudent Spending Habits?
Digging Deeper into Lean Business Model Canvases
This is the weirdest thread I have read in a long while. Some guy gets jailed because he does not want to sell his business and you call him a thief?

And what did you make of the 1 in 3 prisoners are businessmen. Do you actually hate business per se? How are we to live if not by trading? Shall we all go back to farming and villages?

I am furthermore amazed that you are the most voted. Did you forget that the Russians were starving in 1989? Whatever public property they might have had, it did not produce. So the bottles of milk were, back then, left empty, there were cues in the line for bread.

You must have also forgotten that Russia went banckrupt. Ideology does that to you. But, you see, Russia had no money! If America goes to the point where it has no money at all, it too will sell the Washington Momentum and the public parks. They are public today, because of prosperity through trade, which allows them to afford such amenities.

Now, what do you do when you do not have food, but have assets? You sell them right? Because assets without food are of no use. Especially if these very assets are meant to create food but are not creating it. So how does, turning a bankrupt society, into what now appears to be with food on the table, amount to theft?

Oh, and have you spoken to your father? Has he told you about the public hangings? The hush hush neighbour informer, the gota go to the party rally.

We do not do things for no reason. Man needs incentives. For more than 5,000 years other system have, and probably will be tried, but they have vanished to the footnotes of history. Have you seen the great civilisations? They all were centres of trade. We are not and we shall never again be, farmers.

Now, try some philosophy. Information can be exciting, but dangerous too without some ability to absorb it by critically, practically, as well as theoretically, evaluating it.
Ah yes, I should have read not scanned "3. Distributed RPC". Thanks.
ZeroMQ = wire protocol and library for messaging, ActiveMQ = a message broker.
"Code Wars" Premieres Tonight at 9PM EST on CNBC
This is off-topic, but his blog is not only readable but has a very distinctive design/feel to it. It immediately reminded me of these two fantastic articles that have appeared on HN before.

ViM: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to-vim/

Candy Colors: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/03/candy-colored-terminal/
I disagree, that's extremely fragile. It might work for the particular class you are implementing. However, it might cause subclasses of that class to break, since those subclasses will have a different MRO than the current class, and you could end up skipping more of the MRO than you intended.
It's also bold, and kind of silly, to suggest Cappuccino is veering toward obsolescence Tom. The only real argument you've given is that Aristo looks dated (which isn't exactly a scientific claim). Also, it's pretty important to understand that you don't have to keep the view layer (AppKit). The Foundation framework of Cappuccino runs on the server, and I'd imagine with little effort could run in the browser as well.
I find it amusing that the logo looks like wave's. Actually, I'm pretty sure I've seen that exact logo design somewhere else (not Google related, however).
I certainly did describe a hard real-time system. It's nice to see that other people recognize the distinction.

Every time I see a post describing a "real time" system I always read into it hoping that what they are describing is a hard real time system, because they are neat, but they never are, probably because they are so difficult and expensive to build. Also I guess they aren't the most relevant type of system for the majority of people here, who are dealing (as you say) with customer-facing front ends.
With collectivization, the government, assuming that it represents the interests of its people, is also acting within its mandate. Our difference of opinion appears to be that you believe a government which collectivizes property to be automatically illegitimate, and one which privatizes formerly collectivized property to be automatically legitimate. You define the act of nationalizing property to be one which leads to loss of legitimacy.

There are excellent reasons to believe that most Soviet citizens opposed privatization. In that case, the Western "democracies" lie through their teeth when they claim that "the will of the people was done."
This is BIG. It means when you leave your house you need to bring:

* Your phone.

That's it.

Your phone is now your money, a dockable laptop, and your keys. This is incredible: like living in a futuristic comic book.
Does anyone know how valid digital copies of important documents are? Suppose you have a signed contract, or a bank statement, or a government document. When you need some document for legal purposes (say, to enforce a contract in court), will they be treated to be as valid as paper?

That was my main fear for tossing "important" documents.
Don't forget the one where I actually talked about designing the site, heh: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/making-my-site-sing/
(IANAL) I don't think there are any all-encompassing rule. The e-Sign act affects the legality of electronic signatures, and probably has an effect, but don't think there's a single law.

Financial institutions are able to scan everything, when I was at a CU, we used Fujitsu scanners (fi-6140 - amazing workhorse) and destroyed everything except original mortgage notes.

The only area I know of that's problematic is scanning and archiving documents under apostille. Apostilles are arcane, and their validity is related to the seal remaining intact. They're pretty: for example, I've seen docs from China with the apostille attached to documents using a ribbon and a wax seal. Try scanning that.
These voids are actually full of a crazy mess of virtual particles that exist within time/energy uncertainty. Empty space isn't really a meaningful concept when you're dealing with field theories.

When you study quantum field theory one of the first mind blowing things that you learn is that an electron at rest can be thought of as a superposition of an infinite number of somewhat classical scenarios. For instance, the electron can shoot of a virtual photon, which creates an electron/positron pair, which annhilate and create a new photon, which is then absorbed by the original electron. These processes can be arbitrarily complex; just imagine substituting in the whole process we just described for the electron that was pair produced- you can do that as many times as you want. These things are all ocurring at once. This leads to the necessity of renormalization and in turn a great joke. What is positive infinity plus negative infinity? If you ask a mathematician he'll tell you that it's undefined. If you ask a physicist he'll tell you it's the mass of the electron.
Yeah, that's a good method to detect "soft 404s". I wrote a Python library for DecentURL to do this some time ago: http://blog.brush.co.nz/2008/01/soft404s/ (Ironically, the original paper I got the idea from seems to be a dead link: http://www.tomkinshome.com/andrew/papers/decay/final/p444-ba...)
Yes, Storm is more intended for soft realtime problems.
It's absolutely incredible that it can take so much effort just to make it run. ActiveMQ seems shiny and interesting on the outside, but the prolific number of war stories took it off my list.

In brilliant contrast, RabbitMQ is it-just-works software. It's a piece of infrastructure that works so well it practically just fades into the background. I couldn't imagine having to worry about a service in which the chief goal is to help alleviate reliability concerns.
What do you do with all the papers you legally have to keep for seven years (or however many years where you are)?
In the "BareMetal is a 64-bit OS for x86-64 based computers" comment thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2587640) haberman linked to this email (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588170), and I thought it was interesting enough to garner its own submission.
They are using the imagery in the Navigation for Google Maps.
How is this different from a "traditional" CEP system like Esper?

(I mean on the actual processing front, rather than architecturally -- sounds like Storm is a bunch of building blocks instead of a unified system.)
Aside from wall of what was saying here, if you use JSON, you saved yourself from the attributes vs. elements discussions. Which is a net profit.
Sure, this would be a huge disadvantage. But that is no reason not to have a discussion about it. The HN community relys heavily on analytical services, and there is a bias against privacy advocates or anything that would bring change to how the web functions right now. The www does evolve, and some decisions from the past may have to be reverted.

Would such a change be difficult? Would it shift the burdon of analytics? Sure!

But be open minded: The real world is full of analytics, but for most of them you have to opt-in. When I go into a bank, I don't want the bank to know that I was rejected 10 times that same day somewhere else. I want a fair chance on my loan. I don't want my girlfriend to know that I browsed a webstore for some medication a week ago. Analytics provider could know all that. And they can reassure that they will not use that information, but the point here is to prevent the accumulation of it in the first place.

What would happen if someone would hack an analytics provider, and put all this stuff online? Type in an IP address, and I give you all I know about that IP adress. Nobody is doing it, because the data is anonymous, so it's hard to cash it in. But it certainly would destroy some lifes or marriages.

I believe the problem the legislator is trying to solve here it to prevent the crossreference that analytics- and ad-provider facilitate across different web-pages. And I believe this is a honorable goal.
How BBC will meet changes to UK cookie laws
This is what I used to get up to speed on integration patterns. The book that the site is based on is very very valuable as well.
Startup Mantra: Hire Fast, Fire Fast
Keep feeding the "social bubble". And still noone invests on free education...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtpeSpkK_JI&feature=playe...
Python's super() Considered Harmful
> How many sites have Google Analytics or something similar? I would argue that analytics are as essential to the operation of an online business as shopping carts.

I think you are overstating the case for Google Analytics in particular, as well as blurring the value of other non-intrusive methods.

Remember, this only affects UK companies dealing with UK visitors (or perhaps EU companies dealing with EU visitors). You still have complete control to stomp over all privacy concerns of US and other non UK (or non-EU) visitors. So you are not completely losing the value of Google Analytics, you just need an informed consent of a subset of your audience.
This seems to be nothing like Diaspora. Diaspora sought to free users from a single entity owning and controlling their personal data. Altly seems to seek to simply be another single entity with control of your personal data. I don't see how that's a good thing for users.

I also doubt it'll be much of a threat to facebook...if your only argument is that Coke has a Pepsi and Chevy has a Ford, you've got a pretty weak grasp of how markets work. New colas pretty much never succeed; Pepsi and Coke were strong regional brands that went national, and there has pretty much never been a credible threat to that market from a new company. New car manufacturers are practically impossible to build in the US (Tesla is the only new car manufacturer of note in decades, and it remains to be seen how well it will fare; Saturn doesn't count, as it's just a subsidiary of GM; AMC went under after a long struggle). Markets, in general, don't care if there's competition. Markets just insure that when a dominant player shows weaknesses, someone steps into the gap. That's happened with facebook; there are many social apps that tackle small bits of the problem (like Twitter). In order to succeed, a direct competitor to facebook needs to find a chink in facebooks armor and exploit it...not just assume that everyone will flock to an "alternative to facebook" because it is an "alternative to facebook".
The high-level difference is that anything Hadoop-based is oriented around "give me a job to run, I'll go crunch over the data, and spit the result back to you."

In "realtime" analysis, you tell the system "these are the queries I want you to run" and it continuously updates those with answers as data arrives.
Agreed. I particularly liked how the section heading showed up on the left only after you had scrolled to that point.
Thanks Steve. Well done.
A defense of Sony's Professional lines - it really seems like a different company. We recently upgraded to new Sony PMW-350's (video cameras), and couldn't be happier. For the price, they out-do anything else in the market.

(And no DRM either :)
Your phone will now also be an even more powerful device for tracking your activity. I'm surprised at how relaxed everyone is about that.
Next step: computers implanted into our bodies.
I think Facebook is highly used 1) in countries with the latin alphabet and 2) by people who have friends/contacts in countries with latin alphabets.

That's the market Alty seems to be after and that's a lot more difficult to conquer than making a facebook alternative for China or Russia.
I work on a similar system that was previously discussed on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2442977
What kinds of papers are we talking about?
Dribbble Launches Browsing by Colors
recursion

1. Recursive
2. Recursion

uh oh... found a loop

recursion -> recursive -> recursion.
MAVIS Unlocks Spoken Words
and, even if iphone5 has nfs, it's probably unlikely that apple would support google wallet instead of creating their own solution.
I went with the ScanSnap 300M and Evernote, and I'm pretty happy with it. Evernote automatically syncs your docs and does OCR server-side. I can do full text searches of all my scanned documents from any of my devices, including iPhone and the web site.

I'd love it even more if it were a completely standalone WiFi device that added scanned documents to my Evernote account. Does Doxie actually work completely standalone?