skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Free Diabetic Menu Planner
You will not regret picking up a free recipe at this blog, check it out.
Absolutely nothing about what's planned, just that something is possibly going to happen. I wish tech news focused much less on rumors, and more on actual announcements.
What would be the implications for space junk in orbit? Is lots of dust-size stuff more dangerous (would spread over a wider volume, or is it just like having a normal satellite but only most of it is empty space)?
Could someone then explain why?
My guess is it simply takes a lot of time/money to get IP issues solved, which the mono guys don't have.. they would rather rebuild it than wait indefinitely for those things to be resolved.
Any one have any statistics on Mono or know companies that use it, always wondered about Mono usage. What are some use cases?
I agree with this. While you could certainly make the argument that Mono undercuts Microsoft by expanding .NET beyond Windows, I think the amount of developer goodwill it generates towards .NET probably compensates for that.
Google is magic.
What does "go faster" mean? I have little hope for Diaspora, it seems to be on kerfluffle after the next.
Apple typically covers a large product launch with a large product announcement. I'd expect an announcement at least a couple days before looping in the stores for two reasons:

1) That many employees will be difficult to keep quite. It is my understanding that typically retail employees find out about a product launch along with the general public.

2) Soft launching or just launching via retail stores wastes a significant opportunity for Apple to garner extended coverage in the press. Why limit yourself to just one big press hoopla when with an announcement AND a launch you get two.

All that said, BGR has nailed stuff in the past and Apple likes to keep people on their toes.
http://www.aadl.org/aadlgt
The homeless argument you put forth is one concocted by somebody who's clearly never spent time in any of those shelters. Those shelters are more than overrun with people abusing the system and floating from shelter to shelter in an effort to keep some workless lifestyle. They're not a part of society worth converting on; what IS worth looking into is providing better access to/(and/or) easier solutions for the people who cannot get into these shelters because they're already overrun by addicts and chronic shelter hoppers.

If there was more examination put forth on these issues than people just glazing over an article or two we might see more innovation in this space; if you ask me, that's something worthwhile.

Education as a topic doesn't necessarily need to be confined to the conventional schooling system, a model which is already proven to be fairly broken (and continually deteriorating).

Don't be so quick to think that the only venue for innovation on these topics is at the human potential level; you're absolutely right that people are indifferent to this - what I'm moreso surprised at is that you find that to be a reason to ignore/write-off these fields and their lack of innovation. Just because things have been done one way in the past doesn't mean it can't (or shouldn't) get turned on its head every once in awhile.
1st) Awesome Idea. I have no idea how many times I got in trouble as a kid for OD'ing on FF3 and 7. Now that I no longer play RPG's but do dig the gym, this is a great paralell.

2) Easy fix: Allow users to set which equipment they have when they first log on. Do it by classes: calisthenics only, bands and dumbbells, home gym, full gym etc etc. This way you can normalize the quests across different classes of equipment and eventually set up for competitions (random battle?!?! lol) between people with different classes of equipment but similar fitness levels according to whatever benchmarks you set.

All in all, looking forward to seeing how this turns out. Good luck!
Any system with known, fully-specified constraints is "math". That's the only definition of "math" that actually covers all the things mathematicians do. Algebra/calculus, set/group theory, logic (various forms), graph theory, and such are all undisputed branches of "mathematics". I defy anyone to come up with a definition of "mathematics" that includes things like the above, but does not include computing. (And no cheating: simply listing existing branches of mathematics is not persuasive.)

That said, this argument is a bit of a non-starter: software is mathematics, sure, but mathematics are not patentable by legislation (at least in the U.S.). Legislation is easy to change, and it likely will be when people finally accept the "mathematics = software" argument.
The problem is that we are on a slippery-slope either way you cut it.

Begin with field "Foo". Originally, a Foo-ist researched the creation of an improved Foo-er after twenty years of painstaking manual research and patented said device. All well and good and the situation "had nothing to do with computers" originally (hah!).

But then, someone else creates a "numerically controlled foo-ing maching" - an NCF. With an NCF hooked-up to a conventional PC, proper software and a careful look at the improved fooer, you can duplicate the twenty years of painstaking manual research. You've "stolen" the patent as fully as if you duplicated the original machine but your "theft" is entirely in terms of software. And it can very subtle: It might be algorithm is obvious but the constants used took twenty years of research to discover/optimize (I've done scientific programming where discovering the optimality of a simple number was our achievement for the week).

Note the "scare quote" here. I use steal/theft advisedly.

The situation of a numerically controlled machines basically cries out that you must either abolish all patents or make valiant effort to extend patents somehow to software. And while I like the idea of abolishing all patents, I also know that all existing patents together are a huge mass of value and abolish the patent system would entail a huge shock to the economic system and the professional/scientific world and thus a large number of power entities stand against either abolish patents and by extension abolishing software patents since by the arguments above, these amount to the same thing.
Make it predictable - don't surprise a user by making ui fancier than it needs to be. Buttons for psychological 'triggering' actions (submit a form, start a process, fire a missile) and links for navigation between sets of information, etc. Reeducating users on how standard widgets work differently in your app kills the mood.
You make a valid point.

We can reason about the 'relativeness' of disasters. There are the folks who are alive and homeless because their homes were destroyed by the water, and there are people who are alive and homeless because of the evacuation zone around the reactor.

Given the readings for radioactive nuclides outside the Fukushima plants [1], once they are fully engaged in the process of the cleanup, the plan is to allow everyone to return to their homes. Living and working in Fukushima Prefecture will be no more and no less hazardous than it was before the tsunami, and the houses and farms and infrastructure is generally intact and ready to move in.

For folks who lost their home in the tsunami, once the roads and infrastructure have been repaired, they can begin re-building their lives.

So when we think about the relative scale of the disaster to people we might assign a value 'x' to someone who is evacutated for a period of time, and then returns to their home and neighborhood as it was pre-evactuation. And a value 'y' to someone who evacuated and at some point will return to the land where they used to live and can start rebuilding their lives and community.

I can't speak for the people, I don't live there, but if I were told I was going to be a member of either group x or group y I would prefer to be in group 'x' as it would seem to me to be the 'lesser' of two disasters.

So at some level, everything is a disaster, but in this discussion I continue to feel that the tsunami/quake combo was the 'real' disaster and the ongoing work to stabilize the reactors which were damaged by that disaster as one of many responses to the disaster akin to people working to prevent cholera and other outbreaks and to restore basic services like drinking water and electricity. Those people who are involved in surveying damaged buildings, recovering downed power lines, clearing debris from water treatment plants are in some ways more at risk of a life threatening injury than the engineers working to get the Daichi plant stabilized and into clean-up mode.

[1] "Gamma Dose Rates in 47 Prefectures

Gamma dose rates are measured daily in all 47 prefectures. On 10 May the value of gamma dose rate reported for Fukushima prefecture was 1.7 µSv/h. In all other prefectures, reported gamma dose rates were below 0.1 µSv/h with a general decreasing trend."

http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/tsunamiupdate01.html
I believe that was not true of the Gamecube very early on (it became true later on as hardware production prices fell).
It still seems like a long way off, but I'm quite convinced that model rocketry's "sputnik moment" is coming.
...and what do you propose? Unfortunately for the PC games industry, the number of gamers willing to pay for games is not very high.

Companies like Epic have basically gone out on the record and said "we stopped supporting PC because of piracy." If you were a publisher, what would you do? There are precious few successes of games without DRM, and remember that all Steam games are also DRM'd.
"Teachers don't matter" - Study about interactive teaching methods
Apple, you are astonishingly good at building up consumer excitement. If I were ever to go into politics, I'd know where to look for campaign staff...
Ask HN: Best uptime monitor?
Looking around for uptime monitoring systems. What do you guys use? Thanks!
his former company was called ximian, which was started to do commercial gnome development. this new company is called xamarin to do commercial mono development. those are some pretty confusing names.
How many systems are you planning to monitor?

Are you looking for alerts? Performance graphs? Managed vs. In house?
> Microsoft, on the other hand, developed a great mobile OS in WP7, have been screwed (as I think everyone expected) by their network/manufacturer partners, and placed in the Android-like position they were trying to avoid.

Uh, Microsoft screwed themselves. It took them forever to roll out a new phone OS (during which time Android became a viable replacement), and what they eventually came out with wasn't as compelling as any of the competing offerings.

On the carrier side, don't forget the massive, long running HipTop server outage that screwed a bunch of T-Mobile customers, and the utter debacle that was the Kin (VZW's exorbitant pricing was retribution for the unbelievable delay and craptacular produduct that got delivered).
You would probably like the economist Tyler Cowen's books. There are several but in one (I forget which) he goes so far as to say you should walk out of movies after 10 minutes if you aren't enjoying it and walk into the middle of another. Any other strategy is a waste of precious time.

He writes a ton of book reviews on his blog (marginal-revolution.com), but half the time the review is "I probably won't be finishing this one."
Datameer building human-friendly interface for Hadoop.

But Hadoop is legacy and slow for analytics.

With $12M they should implement their own analytics engine...
Really sucks.

Something interesting is that the contributor agreement wasn't a copyright assignment but that you licensed your code to Novell and that you granted them the right to relicense it under any license they wanted.
What is Mathematical Proﬁciency (James Milgram, Stanford University)
Super Mario 3DS is Mixture of Super Mario Galaxy & Super Mario 64
And you get fined triple if you're looking for mines.
The Germans also had to fly all over France and the English Channel to get into British airspace, so they had limited fuel and fighting time.

As the war progressed, Britain imported fuel with better and better quality, and had increasing horsepower, wheras the Germans supplies were limited and worsening.

The RAF was structured so that pilots trained in the quiet northern zones, flew in the south for battle, then rotated through the quiet north for recouperation, the Germans flew their pilots into battle pretty much constantly, including new pilots.

The British had airfields without concrete runways, so the German attack plan of bombing airfields out of action was useless - levelling the ground meant the airfield was back in action in a few hours.

Briton had very high priority for aircraft repair, planes could arrive damaged, and be flying again the next day.

These are all things I recall hearing on a recent TV show about the air-war of the time. German aircraft had more ammunition, better ammunition, and there was a big difference in numbers of planes, but their strategy, situation and luck was worse in too many ways.
A new iPhone? Rumor had it that it hadn't gone into full scale production yet, but who knows how accurate that is.
It seems like camera parts and cases were already being leaked over the weekend.

Plus if it's really just a minor upgrade, to a 4S, instead of the iPhone 5, maybe a full scale formal announcement really isn't necessary. It can still run the current OS, until iOS 5 is formally announced in the next month.
Customer Service Lesson: Manage Initial Impressions
From "simian" and "tamarin" in keeping with the monkey (mono) theme, presumably.
I don't seem to be getting this issue on Chrome / OS X. What are you running on?
How to Get Your Startup Idea Funded by Venture Capitalists
Although Nokia sells over a billion phones a year, this proves that you can target a narrow sliver of a huge market with futuristic innovation and still gain the majority of the profit available in the whole market.

Apple even pointed this strategy out in the original 2007 MWSF keynote where the iPhone was announced. They showed their math, pointed out the global annual sales volume of phones was almost 1 billion devices. They then said 1% of that would be a great starting point because that's still ten million phones out the door and it's a good place to carve out a high value niche.
MacBook Air with Sandy Bridge?
Just 1 server.

Email (and SMS) alerts and graphs yup.
Submitted in the Google Docs form shown here because the underlying original document

ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/milgram-msri.pdf

is hosted as a .PDF with the ftp protocol specified, which HN appears to block. Submitted because of the author's interesting discussion of this problem from a state mathematics assessment test:

"Find the next term in the sequence 3, 8, 15, 24, . . . "

That's an interesting problem to try to solve before reading Milgram's analysis of the problem.
Heroku: "availability issues stemming from what we believe to be a DDoS attack"
It seems like a bunch of laws are trying to get around the "safe harbor" clause of the DMCA. This directly threatens Google, I'd think Google would be interested in either buying up the music and movie companies or, a much cheaper option, buying politicians. Perhaps that's the slippery slope to an Evil Google, but there don't seem to be many options for stopping the insanity. They may not pass the bill this time or next time but they keep bringing this stuff up, I can't help but think if they paperclip it to the right other giant-bill-everyone-is-in-favor-for it'll be bound to pass eventually.
No, not throwaway projects. Real projects. And if they are late or poorly implemented, well, they would have been that way had you hired the sap anyway. But now you can just quit paying him, and try again.
Not to mention that Mono can be used to push developers toward Windows and the official .NET Framework, and in fact has.
Does anybody know how they'll be funded over the next few years?
Not sure on how up-to-date this is:
http://www.mono-project.com/Companies_Using_Mono

I know one prominent company using Mono is Medtronic, who use it for their iOS app, and have been featured prominently by Apple.
Clicky: http://www.pingdom.com
So let's get this straight here.

You're saying that you advocate a good exit on a web startup, so you can poor that money into a product/tool/etc that might benefit mankind more? The money any typical exit makes will be around the same amount you'd get from a VC; sure, there's the rare cases like Musk/etc, but those are just that - rare cases. You may as well just go out and get VC funding for the ambitious venture.

On top of this, a large portion of startups in the valley will take ~1 million in funding (at least) for some mundane task, then just slowly wither and die, never to be heard from again. If you took 7 of these and combined their engineers and funding, you're telling me you couldn't produce something worthwhile in a venue that mattered?

Look, I get it - entertainment is a huge industry, this isn't changing. What I'm arguing against here (and yes, sick and tired of) is the perceived notion that Silicon Valley is a place that is "innovative" when 90% of the startups there are entertainment based. Like it or not, SV is seen as a bastion of innovation in regards to the USA... and we're producing services to go out and eat with random people.

If, as a country, we want to out-innovate China/whoever in the long run, we'd do pretty damn well to cut the crap and focus on actually pushing the world forward.
YouTube Launches Journalist Memorial Video Channel
Just think of it as a job creation measure - jail lots of people for unauthorized internet streaming, that way we'll build more private prisons and hire corrections officers to staff them.
It would also go a long way to assuage people that MS wasn't about to pull the rug out from under Mono with a patent suit. If MS was a shareholder in a company that commercializes Mono, it would be tougher (but not impossible) for them to sue.
My first thought is to run ASP.NET on a Linux server.

Also, some Gnome apps are written in C#: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)#Software_develo...
>If anything, Fukushima is an example of how little attention we should pay to the anti-nuclear movement, because an inevitable side effect of their cause is the prolonging of older reactor's lifespans, when much safer designs could be replacing them.

Unfortunately. if limitations are lifted or eased, we'd immediately get more of the same Fukushimas from the industry, and the anti-nuke movement is the only force keeping it from happening.
Can anyone explain the technical idea behind StackMob? Both the article and the marketing page are not exactly the informative type and the sentence "Heroku for mobile applications" doesn't make much sense.
> Thanks, Lindsey S.!

Lindsey S. from Apple's marketing department no doubt.
The article mentions angel funding to start.
Front page is broken for me by default font size on FF4 on Kubuntu 11.04 - http://imgur.com/9neX6 - zooming font down fixes it. It's literally just the button moving that breaks things.

Just FYI.
This has been submitted to HN quite a few times. Here's the last one I personally remember: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704931

You can Google for "http://www.merlinmann.com/better site:news.ycombinator.com" for past discussions and thoughts.
1. Remove stuff until it hurts (links, words, buttons, ...). Designing mobile first helps with that.

2. Don't make me think.
I use a few, usually I am working most with Kate via Quanta and Gedit.

Things I like about them
- they are fast - to load up and fast to do search/replace on large files.

- in the case of Gedit it works with the filesystem which works with FTP so I could do a quick edit on-line just by logging in and right-clicking a file - very convenient.

- Syntax Highlighting

- In the case of Kate also auto indent and in Quanta the autocomplete and highlighting open/close parenthesis, brace, bracket pairs.

What I would like to see is some editor that helps flag non-ISO-8859 characters.
Seems that the de facto approach is to backup-rm-symlink. My approach is to source from existing configs whenever possible. Specifically, instead of

mv ~/.bashrc ~/.bashrc.bak; ln -s $DOTFILES_PATH/.bashrc ~/.bashrc

I do a slightly more sophisticated version of:

echo "source $DOTFILES_PATH/.bashrc" >> ~/.bashrc

(The sophistication comes in checking if that line already exists.)

Here's my install script: https://github.com/shazow/dotfiles/blob/master/install.sh

I've found many benefits in this, such as easily having machine-specific configuration side by side with my unified dotfiles and no backup clutter. This works especially well for things like vim configs, too.

$ cat ~/.vimrc
source $DOTFILES_PATH/.vimrc
A Novel Approach to Bookselling
Has something happened since Apple implemented the no interpreters rule? Didn't Apple outlaw MonoTouch?
Nice method, but with a bash script you wouldn't have to manually add any new files to your Makefile. I use this one: https://gist.github.com/975295. Also handles forcibly linking a file if it exists already (with the -f flag).

Of course, you're just using it for one folder so it's not an issue for you ;)
iTampon? Logical follow up :-)
California Bill To Give Parents Access To Kids’ Facebook Pages
Luxury Hybrid Maker Fisker Automotive Raises Extra $100 Million
This is getting ridiculous. Under current U.S. law, felons cannot vote or carry guns; it isn't just a matter of a disproportionate prison sentence and fine.
It's awesome to see open source teams truly believe in what they do and stand up against, in lack of better name, "classic business model". First Jenkins CI, now Mono.

I wish you all the best guys...
My position on the matter is that patenting software or other mathematics should require full disclosure of the source for the system. If not expressible in a full-blown language, it's not patentable (e.g., one click).

Let's shorten the length for software patents. For the duration that it is valid, the patent office simply acts as a custodian of the code, ensuring that it works and certifying that it is novel. The patent office should maintain (or contract a company like GitHub to maintain) the repository of pending public domain source.

And once the patent expires, the source is released into the public domain, still under source control.

We can also strengthen prior art rejection of bad patents.

Finally, give enforcement more teeth, but narrow the scope to match more closely what is checked into the repository.

A system like this is more in the spirit of what a patent is: a temporary monopoly with a public-domain disclosure of the idea at the end of term.
EC2 Users Should be Cautious When Booting Ubuntu 10.04 AMIs
and it's still weird for weight lift...

i'd love to go to the workout with my cellphone and a pre-typed program for the day, and just fill in the repetitions and weight i actually did.

this way it's just another facebook for gym rats. no added value that updating my facebook didn't give already
thanks! We appreciate all the love!
How Chrome uses a Bloom filter as a quick malicious-site check
Sounds like my kind of fun-time party.
Giving the Mono guys $50 million seems like a no-brainer investment to me. This is particularly true since MonoTouch directly helps bring apps to WP7. It would also help their cloud efforts. The future is heterogeneous, and while Mono can already handle that there's too much FUD.
Newspaper Map: Find and Translate All Online Newspapers in the World
http://www.google.com/patents?q=online+payment&btnG=Sear... Pretty much all of these are idiotic.

See also: http://paulspontifications.blogspot.com/2011/04/patent-58931...

Software patents are stupid because you're trying to patent A WAY OF DOING SOMETHING and not A PRODUCT, even if said product is built from ways of doing something.

Example: I patent "A method for storing data on physical storage using blocks" and sue everyone. There are people who try to patent RAM and storage: http://www.google.com/patents?q=a+method+for+storing+data...

I'd wager that most of those are invalid patents / should be abolished.