skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ubiquity was awesome; I hope it makes a comeback soon.

It was/is headed in the right direction as far as the future of the "minimal" browser goes. Instead of telling the browser "where we want to go," (go to URL) we'll tell it "what we want to do" (book airline tix for location / map this address instantly) . . . more like command-line interface, but custom to the capabilities of the web.
IBM’s Watson Now A Second-Year Med Student
Would be awesome if Amazon could set up an alternative to the iTunes store. Not sure if that would even be possible. Amazon already has the Android store where you can purchase Android apps. Wonder if they can do it. Is any company currently selling iPhone apps outside of iTunes?
link to actual accelerator: http://www.growlab.ca/
Notes from "How to Run a Startup Like Genghis Khan"
App Engine pricing changes revisited.
I think we would be more productive if we focused our energy on educating the users instead of disobeying them.
The underlying issue there is 'civil forfeiture' in general. My view is that this practice is unconstitutional for any sort of property,

But property -- cars, domain names, cash, etc. -- is not human, and therefore is not protected by our Bill of Rights. Your domain name does not have the right to a trial, and so, when it is accused of being an accessory in a crime (e.g., the domain name was a person who set up the meeting between the customer and the purveyor of stolen IP), the government is within its authority to detain it and keep it locked up for as long as is deemed necessary.

(Not that I buy this bizarre logic, but that's the rationale for asset forfeiture.)
The main issue with this is there doesn't appear to be a definition of "geek" (aside from that Venn diagram). It's entirely based of respondent connotation of "geek".

In fact, the "Changing Definition of Geek" section makes this abundantly clear. It asks NOTHING about what the definition is. What it does ask is if it's positive/negative to be a geek and if it's a more common phenomena to be a geek now than in the past.

I think it would be better phrased: "Changing Connotation of Geek".
I also got a ScanSnap S1300 after a friend of mine wrote a similar article, "The Tools of the Estate" about how he went paperless after he became the Personal Representative of his Mom's estate: http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2011/01/30/tools-of-the-estate/

Also talks about adding in DEVONThink Pro into the mix for document management and auto-classification, which I'd also recommend (though it takes a bit to get used to).

I'm very happy with the paperless setup I've got running now.
Most local credit unions and some banks have free, periodic "Shred-a-thons" in your local area. You can pull up, dump your to-be-shreddeds into a bin and drive off (or, if you're like me, ask them to shred it right then and there).
A couple of years ago I wrote a direct-threaded .NET interpreter. This article made me go and have a look at the assembly that is being generated for the simple 'add' instruction case.

The .NET IL is stack-based which the interpreter runs directly, so it will never be as efficient as LuaJits register-based approach, but I was somewhat disappointed to see this as the output of the Windows VS2008 C compiler in release mode (enables all optimizations):

JIT_ADD_I32I32_start:
BINARY_OP(I32, I32, I32, +);
0041164D mov eax,dword ptr [pCurEvalStack]
00411650 sub eax,4
00411653 mov dword ptr [pCurEvalStack],eax
00411656 mov ecx,dword ptr [pCurEvalStack]
00411659 mov edx,dword ptr [ecx-4]
0041165C mov eax,dword ptr [pCurEvalStack]
0041165F add edx,dword ptr [eax]
00411661 mov ecx,dword ptr [pCurEvalStack]
00411664 mov dword ptr [ecx-4],edx
JIT_ADD_I32I32_end:
GO_NEXT();
00411667 mov edi,dword ptr [pCurOp]
0041166A add edi,4
0041166D mov dword ptr [pCurOp],edi
00411670 jmp dword ptr [edi-4]

The assembly after 'BINARY_OP(...)' is the integer add code. pCurEvalStack points to the top of the current evaluation stack. Binary ops are performed on the top two items on the stack, and pushing the result back onto the stack.

The assembly after 'GO_NEXT()' is the standard epilogue, which just dispatches the next instruction (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threaded_code#Direct_threading for description of direct-threading).

There are 3 seperate loads of the same memory address, which surely can be done better.

I'll probably have a go at altering the definition of the BINARY_OP(...) macro to see if I can persuade it to generate better code. I'm not keen to hand-write the assembly for this as it can compile to multiple processors.

The macro is currently defined as:

#define BINARY_OP(returnType, type1, type2, op) \
pCurEvalStack -= sizeof(type1) + sizeof(type2) - sizeof(returnType); \
*(returnType*)(pCurEvalStack - sizeof(returnType)) = \
*(type1*)(pCurEvalStack - sizeof(returnType)) op \
*(type2*)(pCurEvalStack - sizeof(returnType) + sizeof(type1))

...which can probably be improved, or at least specialised to give better results for binary ops where the operand and result types are all the same - e.g. integer addition.
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg eats only what he kills
Having a balanced life is better, I don't think many would disagree with that. He's saying that having a balanced life prevents you from being a geek, however.
No problem. We all have times like that.
How to Monitor Social Media in 10 Minutes a Day
> Did this story feature a theft?

It featured govt incompetence at a grand scale. No, not selling Yellowstone (or buying Yellowstone), but going bankrupt.

On the assumption that you think that Exxon did something wrong in your scenario, there are two cases - Exxon paid a "fair price" or it didn't.

In the "fair price" scenario, the problem is not Exxon. In fact, they're the good guys - presumably the US govt is better off making the sale, and no, Exxon has no obligation to subsidize govt incompetence.

In the "unfair price" scenario, Exxon can't buy a govt that isn't for sale.
Changing the relationship between corporation and consumer
From the article: "which is why over the next two weeks we’re rolling out a new people widget located on the right hand side of your messages."
The fact that you can retroactively opt out of it also makes it particularly odd, compared to previous media. If you change your mind about publishing a book, you can't unpublish existing copies, and chances are that some library will still have a copy that they continue to make available to the public (a handful of people in history have succeeded in suppressing already-published books, but it's hard). But if you decide you want to unpublish a webpage, you can actually get it excised from all the archives available to the public as well, erasing it from the historical record, even if it had been available for years and read by thousands--- because, unlike with books, typically none of those thousands of readers will have a copy that they can claim ownership to.
Inmates forced to farm gold online in Chinese prisons
Just details.
SELL it
Exactly how much it matters I can't say.

But I can say that it does matter.

Why?

Because for one thing a whois record with valid info is cached in various places and creates unique info which is repackaged on other websites that get slurped.

Next, we run a whois server for our registrar and it does get hit by google bot every single day.

Along the same lines the registrar you use for your domain also matters.

None of this means that you can't rank well with private registration.

But unless you've got a specific reason to have privacy on your records there is no question that it is an advantage (for seo and other reasons) to have your info public (not to mention if it's private you stand a greater chance of losing your domain name..)
From my limited clicks, it seems like both science and mathematics are even faster to get to in this method than philosophy.
Yeah, they're very interesting. I have to say though that I find the way they flick in and out of existence as the section header itself moves on and off screen a bit distracting. I'd have gone with something a bit more like iOS sticky scroll list dividers--on a lot of iPhone list widgets, if there's a header in the middle of a scrolllist, it sticks the top of the screen as you scroll past it (until you hit another one). Not sure how exactly you'd do this in a sidebar tho....
Would runtime optimization or profile based optimization help here?
Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?&docId=1000691231

It's almost time someone made a meta-store for managing assets across multiple stores. As a side note it appears the Amazon store is reportedly DRM laden [1]. I wonder if this is true for the Mac software as well.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...
Lift actually provides two ORMs, Mapper and Record with support for JPA.
Aircel iPhone 4 in India with Money Back Plans
It seems reasonable to me. What's the issue?
I don't agree with the author regarding Gates, but I'd like to see the Microsoft that fostered innovation and its engineers, again.

I'd like to see them truly embrace open standards and interoperability. They no longer have the monopoly which made these unnecessary.

A Microsoft that truly embraces (without "extending") & implements truly open standards is going to be a very potent beast.
A quick video intro to Sass & Compass
The RabbitMQ management plugin does provide an excellent command line interface. You download it along with its docs right from the management UI (/cli).

Btw, I'm using RabbitMQ, and I love it. My needs do not include high load or high availability though so I can't speak for that. So what's nice about it? AMQP (you automatically get lots of tools, docs, "expectations", etc), very friendly and active mailing lists, small & clean code base, small footprint, simple, active (more features are always being added).

What I don't like about RabbitMQ? While it's FLOSS inside out, its development isn't exactly a "community" work. For example, I can't report an issue, attach a patch, and receive a reviewer/committer feedback about it and possibly get it in. In fact, I can't even report an issue into their issue tracking system -- I just have the mailing list. That said, I believe they said they are going to fix that part "soon".
Do people here generally think that Bill has been much more valuable to society now that he's working at his Foundation? I think we need a visionary leader with his fiery passion and dogged persistence to tackle some of the biggest problems in the world: things like malaria, education, and energy.
Youth Is The Power Of Tomorrow: Rules for New Boss
Yes, you are right there is overhead involved. In our tests, however, the delays didn't end up being too high for users with up to 125 friends (even on mobile devices). Delays will be worse beyond that, but will have ways around it if it comes down to it. Will be a good problem to have :)
Microsoft board backs Ballmer over Einhorn
Great video for anyone new to Sass and or Compass.
As for streaming JSON parsers: https://github.com/lloyd/yajl

Around for four years. Stable. Language bindings for all major languages.
A tale of two apps by the same name in Mac App Store
OK - I've now seen a "solution" with 16 "pieces."

My head hurts.
The Internet of Elsewhere: Reorienting the Map of the Web
Thanks. That was superseded in my mind by "you can now see contextual information".
$80 Billion "Bank Subsidy" Program Uncovered, Loans At 0.01% Interest
Except with your set up, the OCR'ing software is independent from the scanning software, so presumably one can scan while OCR'ing. (See reply to my other comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2589018)
Google Apps to Snail Mail in 3 easy steps
I figured with Sass being part of the asset pipeline for Rails 3.1, it'd be a good time to turn this Barcamp talk into a video. I welcome any feedback you may have.
What are the terms for developers?
Racket on FLOSS Weekly [video]
Thanks! So what did you think? I would be really interested to hear what your kids thought of it.
It is no way a straw man argument. A straw man argument is when you invent or restate the other person original argument.

In the interview he specifically stated that he supported laws that protected people from being fired based on race but NOT homosexuality.

There are certainly legitimate reasons to not support laws protecting people from discrimination. If Card had been against them in GENERAL and I had cherry-picked his opposition to those laws protecting sexual orientation, THEN it may have construed a straw man argument. But I did no such thing. I did not misinterpret his position; he was not opposed to such laws in general, but ONLY those regarding sexual orientation.
Fed Gave Banks Crisis Gains on Secretive Loans Low as 0.01%
Definitely. And I'm surprised how many companies don't get this.

I recently had to decline a free beta account for a cool, pre-launch web service because the company behind it had no idea how much it was going to cost once it launched.
Thanks for the feedback. I've considered making the Taank It! page the homepage to help clarify things a little. The grey boxes in the image above should be photos of the featured bands with links to the profiles. I'll work on clarifying things.
Any particular reason for the down-vote?

I don't think Y Combinator can be replicated. PG's experience and his contribution to this community is unparalleled. I'm NOT against other incubators coming up - but just saying its highly unlikely they'll achieve the level of success Y Combinator has.
Dating a women after she's dated a superhero
Oh, good ol' days of the internets...

You know, your question got me thinking. I've been trying to imagine a open platform for social networking and I just...can't...conceive of one. Maybe my mind is too limited and uncreative, but I just feel like a open platform would defeat the purpose of social networking sites.

For example, LinkedIn - a social network for professionals. If LinkedIn became "open," its utility disappears. You would not be able to trust your "connections" because the network wouldn't be full of professionals. Closed platforms are a bit more trustworthy (and only a bit!). Facebook is probably as open as it gets.

That's my guess anyway.
You produce a scan, they say "that is a fake, here is our copy of what we sent."

You produce a paper copy, they can still say that.

Maybe it's harder to fake the paper version, maybe it's not.
Actually, a lot of phones have NFC technology in them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_field_communication#NFC-en...
Periodic Table of Videos takes home the AAAS SPORE Prize
Is Google eating Rapportive lunch? It very much looks like it, I agree with you.
/Only/ what he kills? That would be interesting.

This is not the E! of the tech world, flagged for bullshit.
I really don't think it's a zero sum trade and I think their contributions to society would be hard to compare. Microsoft although being a corporation, does facilitate a lot of communication and business processes and make a lot of things take less time than they once did. Also, I don't think the Foundation would be possible without MSFT's existence.
Anyone try generating a map of Wikipedia?
You'd think RIM would have fixed this fiasco by now...
It doesn't seem to be open source, so I'm not sure about the point of the comparison.
Hell yes to this. This lack of this functionality has been bugging me for a while. I finally wrote it down two and a half weeks ago:

> Every application should have an undo/redo stack related to view operations.

> The way I see it, applications currently focus on allowing users to undo operations performed on the model. I submit that applications need to provide a similar mechanism to undo operations that affect the application's view of the model.

> E.g., if you have a sidebar open and are deleting the items listed there, you can generally undo the deletion. But suppose you close the sidebar. Generally, you can't undo the sidebar close.

You're talking about window management changes, and what I've written about mentions only application-level changes, but the example I gave doesn't preclude desktop-level change management you talk about. After you've established keyboard shortcut scoping conventions <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2495838>, accomplishing this is straightforward, from a software design perspective.
http://www.getdoxie.com/store/faq_ajax.html (find the string "skin")

You might be able to get one without the hearts by emailing them after you order.
You mean they 're not? They scammed me? I like my scams to be original.

I wonder why i never see public service announcements about these, though. It's unbelievable that people still fall for them.
Remember Facebook with anything Book, I guess they did not invent book either. Big companies always have ways to come after small folks.
"If I favor the first, I'm more beholden to my corporate overlords.

If I favor the second, the country's spiral towards bankruptcy will speed up."

Didn't the "spiral towards bankruptcy" really put the pedal to the metal when Reagan doubled-down on nukes, pushed lower top-line tax rates, and doubled the national debt and deficit at once?

And, for the record, both parties are beholden to corporate overlords. Just a matter of degree. I fall in the "commerce with regulations and literally promote the general welfare" side of the fence, and so I fall in the democratic camp.
Frustratingly, I just changed the macro to this:

#define BINARY_OP(returnType, type1, type2, op) \
{ \
register PTR pRet = pCurEvalStack - sizeof(type1) - sizeof(type2); \
pCurEvalStack = pRet + sizeof(returnType); \
*(returnType*)pRet = *(type1*)pRet op *(type2*)(pRet + sizeof(type1)); \
}

And the assembly generated is this:

BINARY_OP(I32, I32, I32, +);
004117BA mov eax,dword ptr [pCurEvalStack]
004117BD sub eax,8
004117C0 mov dword ptr [pRet],eax
004117C6 mov ecx,dword ptr [pRet]
004117CC add ecx,4
004117CF mov dword ptr [pCurEvalStack],ecx
004117D2 mov edx,dword ptr [pRet]
004117D8 mov eax,dword ptr [edx]
004117DA mov ecx,dword ptr [pRet]
004117E0 add eax,dword ptr [ecx+4]
004117E3 mov edx,dword ptr [pRet]
004117E9 mov dword ptr [edx],eax

which is still unimaginably terrible. Why isn't it re-using values that have already been loaded into registers? Why isn't it using a register for pRet? I've even told it to! Although I think it's documented that the MS compiler ignores the 'register' keyword.

And this is with all optimisations turned on. How depressing.
Is Facebook Making Your Site Less Trustworthy?
I've done similar, but just want to reiterate:

>if you're like me, ask them to shred it right then and there
Primaries matter. They often have more than two who could conceivably win, so your vote has more than one bit of information.
I think there is a spelling mistake in the article:

"That worked very well for many years, but recently it hasn’t been the slam dunk it has been in the best."

Should this be, "it hasn’t been the slam dunk it has been in the past"?
>Separately and ironically, after bitching about "single-issue voters" and "litmus tests" involving abortion, it seems I'm now exhibiting the same traits with respect to the intarwebs.

Same here. The more I understand about our government, political, and financial/economic system, the fewer issues I think are really crucial. Most are wedge/noise/dog-whistle type stuff by comparison.
Well, if this is true...

I can't help but to feel like this is not a good PR move.
I really don't think 'the public' has any more say in this than they did about how cookies work. They're as clueless about how politics and laws work as they are about technical matters.

And web developers have every incentive to keep it that way.
I got the impression that he was angry because he kept on deflecting the conversation onto other countries. I commonly see that behaviour "in real life" from people that I would consider to be angry.
I m trying to imagine a serial killer killing goblins... That's why it's torture.
All I have to say for the title is that I did my best to not make it linkbait-y.
Anything that makes it easier, faster, or more convenient to transfer money is going to increase fraud. This is not hyperbole, it's simply a matter of degree.

The credit card networks make up for this by charging a sizeable fee on every transaction and passing the cost of reported fraudulent transactions back to the merchants, who presumably feel the convenience is worth the cost.

In this scheme though it's not clear who is going to bear the cost. Paypal had Ebay to basically force people to use it for their transactions.

Who is going to pay the fraud costs in these transactions? Do federal laws that limit liability for other card network transactions apply to email payments by bank? Are personal and business accounts treated the same way?

Do you have a problem giving your Paypal address out?

Yes I don't use PayPal, although its as much because I have heard of so many people not actually getting paid the money they were sent.

But this isn't really about you and me, we know how email and phishing scams work so we are not the biggest ones at risk.

How is this any different at all?

For one thing, Paypal currently does face huge costs due to fraud, so even if it's the same, it represents more of it.

There is now (and there almost always has been) so much fraud in banking it's treated as an expected statistical loss. Something like 0.5% of transactions is one statistic I've heard. Banking has been pushed online, and currently the highest-risk website transaction of all is setting up a new biller, address, account number, etc. in the online bill-pay. There's malware that will script this process for you.

So now the transaction destination is just an email address... hmm, what could possibly go wrong? :-)
Either way Microsoft is a well oiled machine that can survive without Gates (at least for the next 10yrs or so). The charity is not a mature enterprise that can run itself.
I actually thought NFC would solve Bluetooth's major problem: pairing. Right now pairing a device is a pain in the ass - an endless, meandering series of menu diving, waiting, syncing, and not knowing if you're doing the right thing.

Imagine being able to touch your Bluetooth headset to the back of your phone. Or touch your phone to the "sync" patch on a Bluetooth keyboard and have it just do it?
Until a user provides their pin, and you decrypt their private key. Then you have the private key, although you may choose not to remember it.

This doesn't solve the privacy issues such as with Facebook and other centralized servers, where you distrust the host as much as hackers or other users.

EDIT: You may want to read this:

http://wiki.appleseedproject.org/doku.php?id=future:encrypti...
> flaky wireless behavior eventually became dealbreakers for me

Speaking of which, I'm fairly sure that NetworkManager fails to select the strongest Access Point when many routers are broadcasting the same ESSID. It's a nightmare to try to use Ubuntu on my MBP at my University. It seemed better in 10.10, I didn't get a chance to try it in 11.04 but that was my biggest frustration.
Flip through http://cardobserver.com to get some ideas as to what is available in terms of original design. Most of entries has links to their designers and printers.
I think google might have just discovered another very large revenue stream.

Colour me gobsmacked but getting to be in the middle of the future of transactions sounds like a great thing. Getting to be in the middle, and on the advertising angle and the deals/coupon game all at once? Now I'm jealous.
Is 2011 the worst tornado season so far? Historical trends suggest...
GrowLab Launches Provides Startups With Up To 25K Seed Funding + 150K Follow-on
They loved it. I found it quite easy to use as a parent. The owlieboo games that were keyboard activated were an especially big hit. The design wasn't up to the standards of other flash game sites, but the age range filter was very nice.
I actually find this pretty interesting. It's certainly weird and surprising to see Zuckerberg do it when it will surely receive a lot of criticism. I say fair play.